chatti
appearance: c.
dispersal: c.
ascendancy: west germans[1]
something interesting is the khatti/chatti possibility.....tacitus singles these people out first and implies that they were older than everyone else. the khatti were said to be the people that lived in modern day turkey before the anatolian invasion and gave their name to the hittites.
certainly, the early farming invasion came directly from anatolia and went westwards almost linearly. could the khatti be an ancient remnant of the old european/anatolian/sumerians? could this explain the diana worship? could it explain the legends that the franks were from the east? could it explain the arcadian/bear recurrences?
hrmmmn.
the franks certainly do not descend directly from the khatti, and their aristocracy was not khattian. the franks were not a single tribe nor even a group of related tribes, they were a large confederation of people that were eager to finally have gained freedom from the romans and, while being originally led by the germans that overthrew them, were populated and eventually probably even run mostly by celts......and, also, perhaps, by a very old remnant of an early farming expansion.
[1]: the role of migration in the history of the eurasian steppe, andrew bell-fialkoff, 2000
[2]: the germanic invasions, lucien musset, 1965
page last updated june 1, 2005