The ancient Goths were an ethnically diverse group

An artist’s impression of what Visigothic warriors might have looked like in the 5th century

Creative Assembly (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The Goths were a multi-ethnic society, according to a study of DNA from Gothic graves. The people buried there had ancestors from as far away as Scandinavia, present-day Turkey and North Africa.

The findings contradict one long-held notion about the Goths: that they were a Scandinavian people who moved south into the eastern Mediterranean. “If the Gothic identity was primarily a biological lineage coming from Scandinavia, we wouldn’t see it,” he says Svetoslav Stamov in the National History Museum in Bulgaria.

The Goths lived in Eastern Europe at least as early as the 3rd century AD and remained there for centuries. The Goths often lived near the borders of the Roman Empire, sometimes fighting for the empire and sometimes against it. One group of Goths, the Visigoths, sacked the city of Rome in AD 410, helping to overthrow the Western Roman Empire.

However, the Goths are one of the least understood groups in history. Much of our information about them comes from Roman sources, which may not be reliable. Roman writers often used labels such as “Goths”, “Celts” and “Scythians” to describe neighboring groups about which they knew little.

To learn more about who the Goths were, Stamov and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 38 people from two sites in Bulgaria. Both are said to be identifiable as Gothic by distinctive beadwork and jewelry, burial practices, and skull arrangements.

Near the palace called Aul Khan Omurtag was a necropolis which appears to have been part of a Gothic episcopal see dating from about 350 to 489 AD. The site has been tentatively associated with an early Gothic Christian bishop named Wulfila or Ulfilas.

They also took samples from an older site, the Aquae Calidae necropolis, from about 320 to 375. It was a Roman healing center and bath house, not a cemetery, but several bodies were buried there. “One of the specimens had an artificial deformation of the skull, which is not typical for the Roman period and speaks of a different culture,” says Stamov.

The people from the two locations were significantly genetically different, but both groups showed a mix of ancestry. The peoples came from populations as far away as Scandinavia, the Caucasus, the Levant, Anatolia (modern Turkey), East Asia (modern Mongolia), Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa. “It’s an extremely diverse community,” Stamov says.

A key factor may have been the importance of Arianism, an early version of Christianity. “It’s very enjoyable for everyone,” says a team member Todor Chobanov at the Institute of Balkan Studies and the Center for Tracology in Sofia, Bulgaria. “Anyone can be an Arian Christian.”

The ideas that the Goths were “complex and diverse” and that “people did not have a personal relationship between ancestry and ethnic identity” are good, he says James Harland at the University of Bonn in Germany. But he says the team didn’t sequence enough genomes to have a good sample. They also argue that a person’s ethnicity cannot be reliably deduced from their artifacts, so the presence of apparently Gothic artifacts does not mean that the people in the graves were indeed Goths.

Harland says the Roman Empire may have been a key factor in shaping the Goths’ identity, as the nations variously worked with and against the empire. “It’s the process of joining the empire that creates these groups as coherent units,” he says.

“The various Gothic tribes lived for several centuries on the borders of the Roman Empire and were gradually influenced by the Roman Empire in many ways, including the style of their clothing. [and] their ceramics,” says Chobanov.