Before the end of this period, not only Gothaland and Svealand, but also the coast of Norrland, as far north as the province of Medelpad, were inhabited. As a whole, the first part of the Later Iron Age forms a transition between the Earlier Iron Age and the Viking Age, the archæological finds of which we must leave aside to take up the threads of the earliest history. The Viking Age is exceedingly rich in stones with inscriptions in the later runes, some of these inscriptions being quite lengthy, and containing strophes of alliterative verse in Old Swedish. Before entering into an account of early Swedish history, let us gather what information the classical writers of history have to give in regard to the countries of the North, or rather whatever of such information that has been preserved to our day. The Scandinavian countries are for the first time mentioned by the historians of antiquity in an account of a journey which Pyteas from Massilia (the present Marseille) made through Northern Europe, about 300 B.C. He visited Britain, and there heard of a great country, Thule, situated six days’ journey to the north, and verging on the Arctic Sea. The inhabitants in Thule were an agricultural people who gathered their harvest into big houses for threshing, on account of the very few sunny days and the plentiful rain in their regions. From corn and honey they prepared a beverage (probably the mead). By Thule is no doubt meant the Scandinavian peninsula, or rather the western coast of it. Pyteas also tells of the land of amber, or the southern shores of the Baltic, where the _guttones_ are dwelling. As the northern and southern shores of the Baltic from the very earliest period seem to have been inhabited by the same race which has shared the same development and civilization, there is every reason to recognize the name _guttones_ as identical with the one given to the inhabitants of the Swedish Gothaland and Island of Gothland. Several centuries pass without any notice of Scandinavia in the classical literature. In the still preserved manuscripts of the geographical work by Pomponius Mela, written in the middle of the first century A.D., is found a reference to Codania, a large and fertile island inhabited by Teutons. Codania is likely some scribe’s misspelling of Scandinavia