Thoune

Geschichte

Thun is a town and a municipality in the administrative district of Thun in the canton of Bern in Switzerland with about 43,783 inhabitants, as of 31 December 2013.It is located where the Aare flows out of Lake Thun, 30km south of Bern.Besides tourism, machine and precision instrument engineering, the largest garrison in the country, the food industry, armaments and publishing are of economic importance to Thun.The official language of Thun is German, but the main spoken language is the local variant of the Alemannic Swiss German dialect.HistoryThe area of what is now Thun was inhabited since the Neolithic age (mid-3rd millennium BC). During the early Bronze Age there were a number of settlements along the lake shore and the Aare. A site at Renzenbühl had a local chief or nobleman's grave which contained one of the richest collections of early Bronze Age artifacts in Europe. Another site at Wiler contained approximately 1,500 maritime snail shells which were harvested from the Mediterranean and traded over the Alps.The name of the town derives from the Celtic term Dunum, meaning "fortified town". It fell to Rome in 58 BC, when Roman legions conquered almost all of Switzerland, and it soon became one of the main centers of Roman administration in the region.