Česlovas Gedgaudas


Česlovas Gedgaudas was a Lithuanian diplomat, translator, polyglot, and bioelectronics specialist. He is most known for his pseudohistorical book Searching for Our Past, in which he theorized that the Balts once inhabited most of Europe, among other theories.

Life

Gedgaudas was born to the noble house of Gedgaudai. His father,, was an artillery commander who participated in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence.
Gedgaudas attended and graduated from the Institute of Political Science at the University of Paris. He later worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania and the Lithuanian delegation in Rome. From 1945 to 1952, he lived in Paris, working as a translator at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France. During these years, he expanded his knowledge of Indo-European languages at the Sorbonne. He was writing his doctoral thesis on comparative linguistics, but it was never finished.
Later in his life, Gedgaudas moved to the United States, living in Chicago and California. It is claimed that Gedgaudas knew 14 languages, nine of them being old classical languages.

''Searching for Our Past''

Gedgaudas' most famous work is the book Searching for Our Past, first published in 1972 in Mexico City, and then republished in Lithuania in 1994 and 2018. In it, Gedgaudas talks about his theory that the Balts, or Lithuanians, inhabited a large part of Europe, and that the Goths, Vandals and Veneti were actually a Baltic people. To prove his theory, he compared a set of words and place names in different languages. It is considered a pseudohistoric work, and the linguist Zigmas Zinkevičius classifies Gedgaudas, Jurate Rosales and Aleksandras Račkus as being in the same school of thought.
Based on the studies of Theodor Mommsen and Alfred Gutschmit, Gedgaudas developed a chronology of the expansion of the Goths. He dated the first great Goth expedition as happening in the year 1490 B.C., during the reign of Bueric. The Gothic conquest of Scythia would have begun in 1324 B.C. with King Pilimer. Their arrival in India, under King Thanauso, would have occurred some time after 1290 B.C.
Gedgaudas proposes that the word Aisčiai, with which the Balts call themselves, was a cognate of the Lithuanian verb eiti, which means "go, walk", and of Greek Aistos and Slavic Aisr, ancient names for storks which are migratory birds. He attributed the Godo to the Baltic word Gaudas, "the subject that catches", from the word Gaudo, "catch", which could mean "the one who catches the beef", a cattleman, or "the one who catches a slave", a warrior. He derived Vandal from Vanduoliai, or "inhabitants of a place with water".
Gedgaudas accepted the authenticity of the works of the historian Hinnibaldus on the Franks in the 5th century, who said that the Trojan War happened in 1179 B.C. Gedgaudas, upon seeing in the names of Frankish kings an indication of their closeness to the Baltic peoples, identified the Franks with the Cimmerians.
Gedgaudas suggested that the alphabet used by Romuva priests, since lost, was a runic alphabet, making this conclusion from the Lithuanian word Rantyti, Ranto, meaning "to record" and "to speak" in Latvian. He defended the theory that the Hyperborean gods in Greco-Roman mythology had Baltic origins.