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Memories of the Riesengebirge, painting by Caspar David Friedrich, before 1835

The Corconti or Korkontoi were a Germanic people in the Geography of Ptolemy (2.10). They were in the vicinity of Asciburgius Mountain somewhere near the sources of the Vistula. Asciburgius gives away their location, as it is on the edge of the Krkonoše range in Czech, the Karkonosze in Polish.

It is clear that the people were named after the terrain, but the identity of those people is not entirely clear. Ptolemy considered them Germanic. Some have hypothesized that they were Marcomanni, as those people were in the region. So also were the Quadi; moreover, Ptolemy also lists the Quadi and Marcomanni. We know the latter were newcomers in the first century AD, but the residents of mountains are usually hold-outs from an earlier culture. Mountains are easier to defend and the people living in them are more isolated.

And finally, the Germanics did not adopt the name of Krkonoše. They chose instead Sudeten, or Riesengebirge, "Giant Mountains", because that is what Krkonoše means. The name is not Germanic, but neither is it Slavic or Celtic; or at least, no strong derivations in those languages have been found. Very likely, it is not Indo-European at all, but is Pre-Indo-European. One might connect it to the hypothetical Urbian root, *K-K-, "to swell, inflate; big, huge", from which Sorin Paliga derives German Gigantes. Possibly Sumerian kur-kur, "mountains", is related. Such derivations at this point are weak and speculative.

One does want to ask, who were the ancestors of the Corconti? Were they included in Greater Germany because the Germanics held it or because they spoke Germanic? If they did speak Germanic, how long had they spoken it? Questions such as these may someday have an answer. Meanwhile, there is something of a rivalry between the Slavs and the Germans about who occupied the mountains in antiquity. In the absence of solid evidence, the contention is likely to continue. This creates an interesting question of why there are Czech descendants of these mountains with the name Krkonoška but none with a German language variation?