Posted on 02/23/2004 8:55:51 AM PST by blam
Yes; and the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 also mentions a number of nations on the trade route between the Red Sea and India. Josephus comments on this in Book I Chapter 6 of his Antiquities of the Jews, where he mentions, "Shem, the third son of Noah, had five sons, who inhabited the land that began at Euphrates, and reached to the Indian Ocean." Also, Herodotus mentions this interesting fact about the Phoenicians in the opening sentences of Book I of his History:
According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians. . .had formerly dwelt on the shores the Erythraean Sea [Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf], having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria. They landed at many places on the coast, and among the rest at Argos, which was then pre-eminent above all the states included now under the common name of Hellas [Greece].
Poor souls really t'd off some feminazis.
Hannos men decided to kill them and take but their skin to Carthage.
They obviously knew how to put these NOW/NAG initiates in their place.
Could you please point out those similarities? My knowledge on South American tribes is pretty sketchy, but what you've said sounds very very interesting.
I was thinking of North and Central American tribes moreso than South, though that might also make for interesting comparison. I'm afraid I don't have my notes on this handy, so I will need to look up some things to get the details accurate, but off the top of my head for the sake of discussion, it seems like the similarities I noticed were in things like dress/fashion, warfare customs (incl. dress/fashion related to warfare customs like warpaint--I believe warpaint was one of the first things I noticed that got me thinking about this subject), burial customs, and certain religious elements. I'm trying to find a good link right now that sums up some of this stuff. This link isn't precisely on that subject, but it includes some relevant information:
http://www.tattooheaven.com/CentAsia.html
Ancient Tatooed People of Central Asia
TATTOOED MUMMIES OF CENTRAL ASIA
Mummies have been found in Central Asia! Though these curious Caucasian mummies in the deserts of western China were first discovered by Western archaeologists in the early 20th century, they were considered anomalies---perhaps just ancient travelers or immigrants. Over the past thirty years Chinese archeologists have unearthed hundreds more of these mummified Caucasoids (as well as abundant skeletal remains amounting to thousands of ancient individuals) in the Tarim basin of Central Asia. The Tarim is in the huge Taklamakan desert in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, formerly known as eastern Turkestan.
Today the ancient Chinese texts which speak of legendary tall people with red hair and green eyes (formerly denigrated as mere "myths") are being reinterpreted. They are not just imaginary tales as has been assumed until recently, but they tell of the very real Tocharian-branch Indo-European people, relatives of the Celts and Scythians, who possibly controlled the Silk Road during Middle and Egyptian New Kingdom times, and down to the Classical Greek era. They certainly would have been involved in the transmission of technology and culture between East and West at a very early date.
The time span of the Central Asian Caucasoids is from 2500 BC to 400 B.C. The location is within a few hundred miles of the Altai "Scythian" burials which date from approximately 500-300 BC. There is definitly some connection here. There is also a connection between the Taklamakan people and the Crimean Scyths, the Celts and the Picts. They likely influenced the "indigenous" tattooing of the tribal peoples of India, and possibly are antecedent to the Jomon culture of Japan (ancestors of the tattooed Ainu). There is credible evidence that some of the tattooing tribes of northern Asia migrated eastward to become certain tribes in the Americas as well.
[SNIP]
Compare that with this:
http://www.tylwythteg.com/pict1.html
But in interpreting these comments, it must be understood that the classical "anthropological" tradition involved a great deal of repeating and interpreting the claims of earlier writers, and extremely little direct observation and eye-witness report. An example of the pseudo-history repeated by Bede claims a Scythian origin for the Picts, but this seems no more than an attempt to connect them with another people described in classical writings as "Picti". Other pseudo-histories carefully list wanderings and emigrations of "the Picts" that would connect them with every place or ethnic name resembling "pict" (such as the Pictones of Gaul, whose name became modern Poictou) and every mention of skin-painting or tattooing. A great deal of the material repeated by Isidore and Bede and similar writers is demonstrably false. Other parts can be corroborated by archaeological methods. But any use of this sort of material must involve several large grains of salt. Of all the early writers that mention "painting", only Caesar seems to have been an eye-witness, and his observations would have been concerned with the inhabitants of southern Britain, the Celtic peoples that he explicitly calls "Britanni".
That's just one example I happen to have handy. I will need to collect my notes on some others. Here's one other I happen to have at hand which is on a slightly different aspect of this. I was relating this to some of the discussion of ancient American runes in Barry Fell's work:
http://www.crystalinks.com/runes.html
[SNIP]
When Bisop Wulfila made his translation of the Bible into fourth century Gothic, he rendered St. Mark's "the mystery of the kingdom of God" using "runa" for "mystery.
Eight centuries earlier, when Greek historian Herodotus traveled around the Black Sea, he encountered descendants of Scythian tribesmen who crawled under blankets, smoked themselves into a stupor, and cast marked sticks in the air and "read" them when they fell. These sticks were used as Rune sticks.
There is no firm agreeement among scholars as to where and when runic writing first made its appearance in Western Europe. Before Germanic peoples possessed any form of script, they used pictorial symbols that they scratched onto rocks.
[SNIP]
By 100 AD the Runes were already becoming widely known on the European Continent. They were carried from place to place by traders, adventurers, and warriors, and eventually by Anglo-Saxon missionaries.
[SNIP]
So the Phonecians made it all the way to the SF Bay Area...
But I think that was with Dido. Everyone knew she was easy.
And as a result, because Dido was so easy to catch, within two centuries of the Phoenicians landing in the New World, the Dido became extinct. Today the Dido is only seen in museums, and bad music videos.
The Phoenicians were also able to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Not their local bulk cruisers, mind you, I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now.
Naw, only made it to Arizona where to this day the city of Phoenix they founded still stands ;-)
Was America A Phoenician Colony?
Also, read Barry Fell's book, America BC.
Also, read Barry Fell's book, America BC.
Thanks--interesting link, esp. the part about the coins which I hadn't heard before. I think I remember Heyerdahl also talking about some of the plants common to the Old and New World which may have been indicative of trade. On Fell, I read Fell's book a while back and remember that his Egyptian/Carthaginian/Iberian epigraph, mentioned on the link you give, was one of the things that got me started thinking about this--that and the cultural parallels I mentioned in my other post. Unfortunately I don't own a copy of the book so I've forgotten some of the details he gives--I seem to remember him also talking about Celtic runes, which was one of the reasons I was considering the possibility of a Phoenician-Scythian-Celt connection.
The Curse Of The Red-Headed Mummy
I notice in the article you posted a reference to the Picts being related to the Scythians. I actually believe they are closer related to the Xiongnu
Oetzi the Iceman also has tattoos...they are made at well known acupuncture points.
This is a statue unearthed from an Olmec Ruin (1200-300BC) in Mexico.
Does this fit Keithtoo's description of Phoenicians he made in post #18?
"I have a friend from Lebanon - who by the way insists he is NOT Arab - he is Phoenician."
"He says, that whenever you see a man from the Mediterranean region, whether from Lebanon, or Greece, or Italy, or France, Spain, Egypt etc. If he is short, pudgy and bald, "he is one of us", says my friend."
The information about the Xiongnu is also interesting. I don't know much about them, but Scythian influence seems to have spread east into Iran and Russia as well as west into Europe, so the possibility of the Scythians as a common point of diffusion between the Celts/Picts and Xiongnu might be explored. Here are a couple links discussing hypotheses about Scythian influence in Iran and Russia:
ETHNIC ROOTS of the TATAR PEOPLE
On a related note, I'll also mention that the Norse epic writer Snorri Sturluson records a tradition tracing the origins of the German/Frankish/Norse tribes to the Black Sea, where the Scythians originated.
On Oetzi, I'm trying to find a link which mentions exactly where his tatoos are--do you happen to have that information? I know something about acupuncture, so I'm curious at which points the tattoos were made and what that might entail about their significance.
Does this fit Keithtoo's description of Phoenicians he made in post #18?
I'd say it fits the description of "short, pudgy, and bald" :) It also looks like the figure is seated in a Yoga/Chi Kung type of posture.
Also, I've read that the copper axe found with him moved the copper age back by 1,000 years.
Many Olmec statues have this pose.
If you're interseted in the red-headed mummies and that whole steppe culture, here's the book to read: The Tarim Mummies
Another good one is: The Mummies Of Urumchi
Catching up on your last few posts here:
Thanks for the info on those two mummy books! Looks very interesting--I definitely want to read those. I see the Barber books argues for a relationship with the Celts, which would be very relevant to what we're discussing.
Thanks also for the link on Otzi's tattoos. That gives me some idea of where the tattoos were. I've done some research on the history of Chinese medicine recently and my take on it is that certain elements of acupuncture could arise independently in different cultures by virtue of physiological commonality (for instance you can discover a lot of pressure points by self-observation of common bodily functions), but the specifically Chinese acupunctural theory and method seems to have been influenced by East-West cultural exchange between Greece and India (i.e. the Greek theory of the four bodily humors, which has parallels in Indian and Chinese theory) around the time of Alexander the Great and perhaps earlier; however (if I remember right) I believe there are archaeological finds in China indicating acupunctural practices which predate the rise of the classical Chinese acupunctural method, so there may well have been an earlier tradition perhaps sharing a common ancestor with Otzi's--perhaps derived from steppe shamanism's medical practices, I would venture to guess. I guess to tell whether a given case reflects specifically Chinese influence/kinship it would be necessary to isolate some elements specifically characteristic of the Chinese method and compare a given case with those. Likewise on yoga--certain postures could probably arise independently, but it depends on the specifics. I'd have to do more research to reach a firm opinion on whether those Olmec statues are specifically Yoga-like enough to constitute an argument for contact with India. I have a friend who's a Tibetan Buddhist monk, I'll forward him the picture and see what he thinks of it.
I hadn't heard the thing about Otzi's copper axe pushing back the Copper Age, which is also interesting. This reminds me that there are some problems with radiocarbon dating in that area/period due to the Thera eruption (some stuff on this at the bottom of http://devlab.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/chrono.html : "A major debate has been raging since 1987 over the absolute date of the great volcanic explosion of the island of Thera/Santorini early in the Late Bronze Age. As a result, absolute dates within the first two-thirds of the second millennium B.C. (ca. 2000-1350 B.C.) are presently in an unusually active state of flux.").
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