Posted on 07/09/2016 3:17:30 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...As he and his team began to slice into the mound, located 30 miles east of Stavropol... It took nearly a month of digging to reach the bottom. There, Belinski ran into a layer of thick clay that, at first glance, looked like a natural feature of the landscape, not the result of human activity. He uncovered a stone box, a foot or so deep, containing a few finger and rib bones from a teenager... Nested one inside the other in the box were two gold vessels of unsurpassed workmanship. Beneath these lay three gold armbands, a heavy ring, and three smaller bell-shaped gold cups...
Although the Scythians were united by their nomadic, horse-centered lifestyle, historians and archaeologists do not think they were ever a single political entity. Based on regional differences in their art, artifacts, and burial practices, scholars posit that they were, rather, a collection of tribes who spoke related languages and had a broadly shared artistic and material culture. They had no written language... modern scholars have had to rely heavily on the accounts of ancient historians to interpret the archaeological evidence...
The historians' accounts are rarely complimentary. The ancient Greeks dismissed their neighbors to the west as "mare milkers" and drunks, and the Scythians' nomadic lifestyle must have seemed strange and threatening in contrast to their own settled urban one. And the Greeks weren't the only ancient power the steppe nomads encountered -- and sometimes clashed with. The Scythians periodically crossed the Caucasus Mountains to terrorize the mighty Assyrians and Medes to the south. There is even textual evidence from Persian and Egyptian sources that they vanquished Assyria, pushed west into modern-day Syria, plundered Palestine, and made it as far south as Egypt's borders, where a cowed pharaoh paid them to back off...
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
He didn’t kill most of them, he set up a marker “here Alexander stopped”, and they spent six months building ships to take a bunch of the army, and camp followers, back to Mesopotamia by sea. Once the ships were ready, he led the rest of the army along the Indus; they parted ways when the ships reached the Indian Ocean and sailed west. Most of the army left on the land marched back via a populated route, Big Al split off with some of his best and favorites and reconn’ed a really nasty piece of desert, where they all almost died of thirst. Eventually they reached Babylon, which is where he took ill and died.
The Afghans who claim descent (well, I think there’s more than one group that does, and there are probably literally tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people throughout the old Persian/Alexandrian empire and successor Hellenistic kingdoms who are descended from members of that army and don’t know it) are the Black Pagans of Hindu Kush, the Kalash:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2025399/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2344909/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3050795/posts
I don’t really understand the answer that this article wants to give about the the relationship between the Mycenaean and the Scythians.
They seem to suggest that there was no dark age.
But what jumps out at me is that more likely they were all one people until the sea peoples destroyed the Mycenaeans and flattened their cities.
The Ionic Greeks were a different people than the Mycenaeans. The Ionic Greeks were descended from the Sea Peoples. That’s why they have no memory of the Mycenaeans or their language except Homer.
The “sea peoples” were themselves for all practical purposes invented to try to explain the imaginary dark age, so, no, they don’t have descendants, they didn’t wipe out the Mycenaeans, etc. For such a significant and large and devastating group, they left no dynasties, no tombs, no graveyards, no graves, no towns, no geographic traces, no characteristic weapons, no characteristic pottery, no coins, no nothin’.
He marched his battle weary troops through the Gedrosian Desert after a few revolts and a good bit of them died of heat exhaustion and thirst.
A lot of ancient historians chronicle that death march. This is what I was referring to. He marched his army through the Gedrosian Desert and killed a good many of them through heat exhaustion and thirst.
Have you ever read the theories on what happened to Marcus Licinius Crassus’s 10,000 surrendered after Carrhae?
There’s a theory that they were sent to Western China as slaves. Lots of Western Chinese have blond hair/light eyes. Makes for interesting speculation.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/romans-china-lost-legions-carrhae.html
And yet we have the example of the dark ages in Europe.
Recent archaelogy has it that all of the towns along the coasts of southern france italy and greece were flattened in the 600’s AD. what came afterwards were walled towns further inland — suggesting that what destroyed the coastal towns came from the sea. no trace was left of the destroyers.
It has fallen out of European memory just what happened in the 600’s.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.