Posted on 03/12/2012 3:50:08 PM PDT by mojito
Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant roaming about for pasture. They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were the other to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.
As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these nomads were looked down on the other often is as an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town.
But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past.
These excavations dispel notions that nomadic societies were less developed than many sedentary ones. Grave goods from as early as the eighth century B.C. show that these people were prospering through a mobile pastoral strategy, maintaining networks of cultural exchange (not always peacefully) with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping.
They were nomadic herding people.
They were later displaced by even more fierce warrior elites who were dependent on herdsmen AND agriculturalists!
According to natural selection,such a broad and diverse gene pool makes for healthier and smarter offspring even if the young are not raised around city-state scholars.
Brilliant if unschooled people were thus common among the nomadic tribes—sometimes—like Genghis Khan—they applied their gifts unfortunately.
I read one time that the word Scotch comes from the word Scyth. Don’t know if that is true, but if it is, it explains a few things.
What's not to like?
Ireland was earlier called Scota. It was renamed Ireland after Ire, one of the three brothers who invaded in the 8th century BC.
BTW, that's according to Galician histories in Northern Spain. The English have a different take on the matter but who are they? They lived in a great big old sinking bog-land in Europe at the time!
you're right, what's not to like?
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GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks mojito and muawiyah. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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BTW, that's according to Galician histories in Northern Spain. The English have a different take on the matter but who are they? They lived in a great big old sinking bog-land in Europe at the time!
The people you refer to make up less than 5% of the gene pool.
A very interesting read, if its your thing.
So, there are the proto-English ~ living in the Swamps in 700 BC ~ beating each other over the head, swinging bronze swords, drowning victims ~ all the good stuff.
1200 years later they were a bit more advanced ~ then King Ad gave away the farm ~ OUR FARM ~ not his own farm, but ours.
Within about 100 years they too were Christianized and were much less nasty. In fact, they took over leadership of THE CHURCH and managed to spread their own language(s) into a dominant position that wasn't challenged until 1066!
Once the cultural conquest was made all the bitter clingers who demanded their own rites in their own versions of latin were readily turned into what became Englishmen. The real Britons lived on in Ireland, Alba, Brittany, Manx, etc.
True enough the genes are only little removed from each other, but there are always two different versions of the history! Ours and theirs. Ours is better ~ and much more entertaining really.
Rotsaruck straightening them out next weekend.
Sure makes genealogy tough.
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