Ambisontes Erotic

The Ambisontes were a Celtic people who lived in the upper Salzach valley of the eastern Alps, in what is now the Pinzgau district of Salzburg, Austria. They lived there from the late Iron Age into Roman times, and over time they merged into the Latin-speaking people of the Roman province of Noricum and later into the Bavarian settlers whose descendants still live in the valley. As far as the record shows, a river is what defined them. Their name puts the Celtic prefix ambi-, meaning "on both sides of," in front of a river name that is usually linked to the Salzach. That makes them the people of both banks. The Ambidravi, who lived along the Drava river, got their name the same way. The valley is a long east-west trench below the Hohe Tauern, the highest mountains in Austria, and high passes lead south from it over the main ridge. The Ambisontes spoke a Celtic language, probably close to what other peoples of Noricum spoke, but nothing of it survives except names. Nothing is known about their own gods. Elsewhere in Noricum, inscriptions from the Roman era honor the local goddess Noreia and the Celtic god Belenus. A small bronze Hercules turned up at the Hochtor pass when the Grossglockner road was built, which suggests that travelers left offerings at the crossings above the valley.

Before the Romans came, the Ambisontes fell within the reach of the kingdom of Noricum, a Celtic state whose iron Roman buyers prized. Rome took control of Noricum around 16 to 15 BC. The Ambisontes are named among the Alpine peoples on the Tropaeum Alpium, the victory monument built in honor of Augustus at La Turbie, above Monaco, around 7 to 6 BC. Pliny the Elder copied that list. In the second century AD, the geographer Ptolemy still listed them among the peoples of Noricum, next to the Alauni, the Sevaces and the Ambidravi. After that, the tribal name disappears from the record. The Salzach valley looked downstream to the Roman town of Iuvavum, now Salzburg, and Latin took hold. After Roman rule ended, Bavarian settlement in the early Middle Ages made the region German-speaking. The Ambisontes most likely live on in that mixed ancestry, not as any separate later people. Their clearest legacy is a place name. Early medieval Salzburg records call the valley Bisontio, a name widely read as an echo of the tribe, and it survives today as Pinzgau.