The people who in the fourth century after Christ called themselves _Gut-thiuda_, _i.e._ Goth-people, had been for many centuries the most easterly branch of the Germanic race. {29}Down at least to the second century B.C. their tribes occupied the regions bordering on the Vistula and the Dniester, extending from the Bay of Dantzig to the Black Sea. At the north-western end of the line they were in the time of Tacitus known as Guthones; those at the other end were called Bastarnæ by Polybius and Strabo, and recognised as _Germans_. The latter people were the first of their race to become acquainted with civilisation. The amber-trade was already in the time of Herodotus a vigorous traffic, carried on between the Baltic and the Greek settlements on the Euxine. It passed through the lands of the Guthones and the Bastarnæ, and led undoubtedly to the growth of the form of notation called Runes. The Runic alphabet, inscriptions in which are numerous in Scandinavia, was evidently deformed from the Greek, and must have originated about the Dniester some five or six centuries before Christ. As time went on, that alphabet naturally drifted further and further north; the Goths and Germans, nearest to the Greeks, having, of course, less need of it according as their knowledge increased. From the shores of the Baltic it was carried into Scandinavia, and became the earliest form of writing in Northern Europe. Mr. George Stephens claims for the oldest of the extant Norse Runes an antiquity exceeding that of our era, but a more moderate Scandinavian writer sets the earliest date at about A.D. 300. In any case, it must be allowed that some form of writing was obtained by Gothic tribes from Greek traders before the time of Christ, and that it afterwards found a home in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The name of _Runes_ is equivalent to that of ciphers or riddles or mysteries, and we may infer that its real origin was in the cutting of strokes to express numbers. Runic letters never reached the pen-and-ink stage of other alphabets, and their records are hardly more than inscriptions upon tombstones. For that and similar purposes they continued to be occasionally employed, both in England and Scandinavia, long after the {30}use of Roman or modified Roman letters had been established in all countries. The singular variations in form and number and value between runes of different dates and different places, are easily accounted for by the circumstance that there can have been no continuous practise of such inscriptions in any country in which Christianity had already established a simpler script.