You’d have to explain how the sons got off the boat speaking Semitic (presumably) and ended up speaking Indo-European.
Linguists have speculated about a connection between the two groups but their arguments never convinced very many.
Well said.
Scythians came out of Central Asia. Lots of people did. They spoke an IndoEuropean language. Lots of people did. And they did not give “rise to the Germanic tribes”. The Germanic tribes of Roman times were the Franks, who took over the old Celtic territory of Roman Gaul etc, and their distant relatives we know as the Germans crowded in from behind them. Yes, they’ve fought wars for centuries — do you get along with all of your relatives? ;’) ;’)
Some of the Scythians’ closest ancient relatives were the Alans, who arrived around the same time as the Huns, i.e., late- and post-Roman times, and they dwindled down into the Ossetic population. The Alans probably were just the latter-day descendants of the Scythians, and the Huns roared in and kicked their asses. Putin’s Soviet Union, oops, I mean Russia pretends to be really concerned about the Ossetians and invaded Georgia to carve off a piece of Georgian territory as a buffer, enclave, and puppet regime/client state to host some of the length of a pipeline.
The Scythian heyday was right near the end of the Assyrian Empire, and they helped midwife that transformation. Hundreds of years later the Roman author Ovid was exiled to the Roman frontier area north of the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus (never piss off the emperor) and lived among the Scythians, who were no longer very fearsome. He joked (or lamented) that he no longer dreamed in Latin, but in Scythian.
The Scythians’ other close relatives were the Sarmatians; during the Roman cooling (natural climate change) they entered from the steppe, collided with Rome, and were systematically flanked into an enclave from which they couldn’t just ride out — the Romans may have learned from the Persian failure to round up the Scythians, centuries earlier — and their cavalry was pressed into the Roman army’s auxiliary military system and moved to, for example, Britain. The women and children were auctioned off into slavery all over the empire.
Their apparent complete disappearance continues to baffle historians, DNA mavens, and Noachian flood fans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythian_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetic_language
History of the Vandals (mentions the Alans as non-Germanic descendants of the Scythians and as allies of the Vandals)
http://www.roman-empire.net/articles/article-016.html
an okay map:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mnKZiPn6zak/Tcm3-78XCJI/AAAAAAAABBQ/4lmjlVaXHdc/s1600/scythia.png
The three wives of the sons got off the boat speaking different “mother tongues” which they taught to their children.
P.S. The DNA evidence bears this out as well, based on an article I seem to recall.
