Barbarians

(Greek barbaroi, Latin barbari), an onomatopoeic word used by the ancient Greeks and later by the Romans to designate all strangers who spoke in languages incomprehensible to them and who were alien to their culture. At the beginning of the Common Era, the name “barbarians” was applied with particular frequency to the Germanic peoples. (In modern history, the invasions by Germanic and other tribes during the first centuries A.D. have come to be called the barbarian conquests; the kingdoms founded by the barbarians on the territory of the Roman Empire are known as the barbarian kingdoms, and the written record of the common law of the Germanic tribes is known as barbarian law.) The barbarian conquests played a major role in the elimination of the slave-owning system and in the formation of feudal relations in the Roman Empire.

In the figurative sense, the term “barbarians” designates ignorant, crude, cruel people, destroyers of cultural values.