Kent

Kent

Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

is a county

County

A county is a jurisdiction of local government in certain modern nations. Historically in mainland Europe, the original French term, comté, and its equivalents in other languages denoted a jurisdiction under the sovereignty of a count A county is a jurisdiction of local government in certain...

 in South East England

South East England

South East England is one of the nine official regions of England, designated in 1994 and adopted for statistical purposes in 1999. It consists of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey and West Sussex...

 with a long history of human occupation.
Kent has been occupied since the Lower Palaeolithic as finds from the quarries at Swanscombe

Swanscombe

Swanscombe is a small town, part of the Borough of Dartford on the north Kent coast in England. It is part of the civil parish of Swanscombe and Greenhithe.-Prehistory:...

 attest. During the Neolithic

Neolithic

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

 the Medway megaliths

Medway megaliths

The Medway megaliths or Medway tombs are names given to a group of Neolithic chambered long barrows and other megaliths located in the lower valley of the River Medway in the English county of Kent...

 were built and there is a rich sequence of Bronze Age

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...

 occupation indicated by finds and features such as the Ringlemere gold cup.
The name Kent probably means 'rim' or 'border' (compare the dictionary words cant in English, Kant in German, etc), regarding the eastern part of the modern county as a 'border land' or 'coastal district.' Historical linguists believe that the proto-Indo-European root *kanthos could not pass into a Germanic language with its initial K sound intact, so the word must have passed via an intermediate language, either Celtic or Latin.