Tencteri

The Tencteri were a Germanic people during the first centuries BC and AD, who lived east of the Rhine delta. They were first reported by Roman sources during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar in 55 BC. He attacked a very large group of Tencteri and Usipetes near the Rhine delta, while they were on the move with women, children and the elderly, having left their homelands east of the delta under pressure from the Suebi. Caesar reported that large numbers were killed, but survivors managed to cross the Rhine and seek refuge with the Sugambri.

By the third century AD there is no more mention of the Tencteri, and it is possible they were merged into other populations such as the Franks, who are mentioned for the first time in that period.

In December 2015, archaeologists believed they found remains of the Tencteri and Usipetes slaughtered by Caesar in The Netherlands.

Name and language

The name was spelled as "Tencteri" in the report of Caesar, which is the first historical mention of them, and this is also how Tacitus spelled the name.

In Plutarch's Greek they are called the Tenteritē. In the second century Claudius Ptolemy seems to refer to them as the Tenkeroi.

While the Tencteri and their neighbours were referred to by the Romans as Germanic rather than Gauls, the recorded tribal and personal names of the region include many which are most reasonably explained as Celtic.

The ethnic name Tencteri could be either interpreted as the Celtic *Tenkteroi, or else as the Germanic *Þenhteraz, in both cases from the Indo-European root *tenk- ('to become solid, firm, immobile') extended by the suffix -tero-.