The paper focuses on the name of the barbarian warlord that appears in the Slavic and (recently discovered) Armenian versions of the Life of St. Stephen of Sougdaia as Бравлинъ and Պրաւլիս /Praulis/, respectively. These forms seem to point to Πραῦλις or Μπραῦλις in the lost Greek Vorlage. None of the previous attempts at constructing an etymology of the name—Slavic бран(ъ)ливъ (Russian copies of the Life), Swedish Bråvalla (G. Vernadsky, N. Belyaev, and O. Pritsak), Indo-Aryan *pravlīn(а)- (O. Trubachev), Spanish Braulio (V. Vasilievsky), or Gothic *Bra(h)vila (N. Ganina)—may be considered satisfactory. Having revisited the historical and linguistic arguments, we suggest that the name given to the barbarian prince humbled by the miracle of St. Stephen in the Greek text of the Life represented, in fact, good Greek: Πραΰλιος or Πραῦλις (from πραΰς ‘mild, humble’); furthermore, we suggest that the positional voicing of Π- > Μπ- [b] in Late Middle Greek might account for the initial Б-/Պ- (West Armenian [b]) of the attested forms.
For more than a millennium there have been reports testifying to the presence of Goths in the Crimea. However, until a few years ago, the only evidence of a Gothic or Germanic idiom spoken in the peninsula stems from the list of words recorded between 1560 and 1562 by Ogier de Busbecq. Significant new evidence, however, has become available through the recent discovery of five Gothic graffiti scratched on two reused fragments of a cornice belonging to the early Byzantine basilica at Mangup-Qale in the Crimea. The graffiti, datable to between about 850 and the end of the 10th century, exhibit words in Gothic known from Wulfila’s Bible translation, the script used being an archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet and the only specimen of this alphabet attested outside Pannonia and Italy. There would seem to be evidence for assuming that, among educated Crimean Goths, Gothic served as a spoken vernacular in a triglossic situation along with a purely literary type of Gothic and with Greek in the second half of the 9th century.
The newly found Gothic inscriptions from Crimea reopened the question of the Christian identity of the Crimean Goths in its interrelation with the Greek-Byzantine environment. The Mangup graffito I.1 and the Late Medieval inscription from Bakhchysarai both contain the acronymised formula ‘(Saviour) God Jesus’ which we think was a purposeful declaration of the Gothic community’s Orthodox Nicene allegiance. The expanded variant of Ps. 76:15 in the graffito of Mangup proves its liturgical character and the involvement of the Crimean Goths with Byzantine liturgical processes. The alternative counting of weekdays which from the 11th century onwards is epigraphically attesed in the Gothic eparchy in Crimea may have its origin in the Gothic church calendar of the 4th–5th century and have influenced neighbouring peoples of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
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