Kent
Kent is a county in South East England, and one of the home counties.
Districts in Kent
- Sevenoaks
- Dartford
- Gravesham
- Tonbridge and Malling
- Medway (Unitary)
- Maidstone
- Tunbridge Wells
- Swale
- Ashford
- Canterbury
- Shepway
- Thanet
- Dover
Kent Kingdom
Kent Kingdom was a Kingdom of Jats in England. The Kingdom of Kent was founded by Jutes in southeast England, one of the seven traditional kingdoms of the so-called Anglo-Saxon heptarchy.
It is interesting to note further that some ethnologists have regarded this fine people as of kin to ancient Getae and to the Goths of Europe by whom not only Jutland but parts of the south-east of England and Spain were overrun and to some extent peopled. It is therefore possible that, yeomen of Kent and Hampshire have blood relation in the natives. of Bharatpur and the Panjab.[1]
Its origins are completely obscure, since by its geographical position it received some of the first waves of the invasion by the Germanic tribes, at a time from which almost no historical information has survived. The name "Kent" predates the Jutish invaders, and relates to the much earlier Celtic Cantiaci tribe whose homeland it was.
During the British rule over India, colonizers and scholars noticed to their astonishment that many Jat people had apparently English family names or very similar. Certainly the proud Jats would have never adopted British surnames for their own ancestral clans, and they did not result from intermarriage either. Other foreign powers ruled over the Indus Valley before and for longer periods than England, yet no Jat clan names corresponding to the previous rulers have been found. Besides this, no other Indian people had such names except Jats.
This peculiarity led scholars to research about these Jat-British homonyms: those names in England may be traced back to a Jut origin, mainly Kentish; among the Jats, they exist since the distant past. This appears to be more than a coincidence; Jats and Juts are the same people.
This assertion finds confirmation in historic records, for example, the Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus, who called all Sarmatian peoples "Alani", wrote: "Alani once were known as the Massagetae. The Alani mount to the eastward, divided into populous and extensive nations; these reach as far as Asia and, as I have heard, stretch all the way to the river Ganges, which flows through the territories of India".
British scholars and also officers compared the Jats' warrior character with that of the Kentish men as well as their traditional laws, for instance, the double heritage part for the youngest son, still practised among Indian Jats. An accurate research about this people which takes account of all the relevant characteristics of their ethnicity reveals that they are among the purest Sarmatic tribes existing today.
The Jats undoubtedly descend from the easternmost branch of the Sarmatian people, the Yazyg of Central Asia, that curiously have the same name of the westernmost branch in the Danubian region: Jász, Jat, Jut.
Jutes were Yazyg
The Yazyg warriors, introduced as Roman soldiers, are not the only Sarmatian component of the British ethnogenesis. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon peoples that settled in Great Britain and established the foundation of the English nation, consisted also of a third element: the Jutes (or Juts).
There are several reasons to assert that the Jutes were Yazyg - not only by the similarity between the terms Jasi, Jata, etc. and Jut, Jute, which may have only a very relative value, but also because of the Juts' life style and traditions.
Before their arrival in England, the Juts and the Angles were neighbours in the continent: they inhabited respectively in Jutland and Slesvig. Yet, that was not their original homeland; the Juts came from the south and conquered the peninsula that was called Jutland after them. By the end of the fourth century c.e., Sarmatic groups began to move westwards: Alans driven from the Danubian Basin by the Huns, Juts expelled from Jutland by the Danes. Alan tribes settled in the Gaul and some of them went further to Spain and North-Africa, while the Juts crossed the Channel and founded the kingdom of Kent in AD 450.
The Juts, along with the Angles, Saxons and Frisians sailed across the North Sea to raid and eventually invade England from the late fourth century onwards. According to the Venerable Bede, they ended up settling in Kent, Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight. There are a number of toponyms that attest to the presence of the Juts in the area, such as Ytene, which Florence of Worcester states was the contemporary English name for the New Forest.
While it is a commonplace to detect their influences in Kent (e.g., the practice of partible inheritance known as gavelkind), the Juts in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight vanished, leaving only the slightest of traces. One recent scholar, Robin Bush, has argued that the Juts of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight became victims of a policy of ethnic cleansing by the West Saxons, although this has been the subject of debate amongst academics.
The Jut settlement in Sutheastern England was led by Hengist and Horsa, who became the kings of Kent - the double kingship is a typical feature of the Scytho-Sarmatic peoples. Besides this, the Kentish people were well-known by their warlike character, and they organized their army in a Yazyg/Alan style. Their property succession laws and family rules and those of the Alans were alike, as well as their agriculture techniques and other traditional customs.
A further support to the hypothesis that the Juts were Sarmatians is given by the fact that many Kentish family names are identical to clan names of Scytho-Sarmatic origin found in Jats in India.
Are the people of Kent Jats from Jutland
Hukum Singh Panwar writes that The theory of The Scythic origin of the Jats[2], though considered "fanciful", yet. "cast a mighty magic upon several generations of scholars lla," So much so, that when, after the annexation of Panjab, Maharaja Dalip Singh was deported to England, his friend, Col. Sleeman, a former political officer-wrote to the Maharaja that he (Dalip Singh), being a Jat, was going to live among his own people in Kent who are also Jats from Jutland12. That the people of Kent are Jats from Jutland is also asserted by Tod when he says that "The Jut brothers Hengist and Horsa, led a colony from Jutland and founded the Kingdom of Kent (Canthi 'a coaste' in Sanskrit as Kontha in Gothic and Kantha in Jatu dialects). The laws they there introduced, more especially the still prevailing one of gavel kind (were alone the sons share equally the ancestral property like the Jats of Haryana & Panjab), are purely Scythic13". Does not the customary law of the British and Indian Jats remind us of its primary enforcement by their fore-most alleged forefather, Yayati (infra) who divided his kingdom equally among his five supposed sons? Stamped with the hall-mark of approval of the most eminent British scholars and their Indian followers, the theory rapidly gained popularity throughout the. country, especially with the Jats; and the principle of the similarity of the sound of the names of people, though separated by time and space, seems to have been accepted by all, including Waddell, as valid ground for determining a common origin of these people, Waddell, in addition, suports it on archaeological and numismatical grounds.
External links
- http://www.imninalu.net/Eurasians.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kent
- Kingdom of Jats in England