King Tut

I've got two topics to blog about today, and both are so completely unrelated, that they'll have to be two separate posts, I think.

The first is actually related to my last post and has to do with Indo-European languages.  When I first started reading about Indo-European linguistics, archaeology and the study of the Indo-Europeans generally, I came up against a curious phenomena.  Prior to World War II, and in certain crowds afterwards, there was an awful lot of speculation about the "Aryans" and how they spread all over the place, and they were generally credited with doing all kinds of things, and founding civilizations everywhere.  Following WW2, the prevailing opinion of the experts shifted to assuming "dat's raciss" and all of that was mostly disavowed.  The Aryans—now no longer sporting that name—were assumed to have been a mostly destructive and backwards Dark Age force if and when they replaced other populations (such as Old Europe), most of the most far-flung and more speculative of their supposed exploits were disavowed, and in place of invading hordes of bronze wielding steppe warriors who first domesticated the horse, were a good candidate for the invention of the wheel, and were almost certainly the inventors of the chariot, the just-so story switched to one in which the Near East was the cradle of all civilizational advances, and local processes and local genetics even were used to explain the spread of the languages.  The entire "story" of the Indo-Europeans was rewritten.

I could still find occasional references to some of the old style scholarship, such as Indo-Europeans in Ancient Egypt, or that the Sumerians were white, blond, blue-eyed Nordics, etc. but I usually found myself in weirdo bizarre places like Stormfront when I did, and it became easy to see that kind of thing as ethnic hubris that was out of favor with modern scholarship and not to be taken seriously.

Surprisingly, however, as time and science has advanced, many of the old scholarly ideas have come back into vogue as indisputable.  Indo-Europeans did do a lot more than they were given credit for.  Genetic analysis suggest that there were indeed mass folk migrations out of the steppe, as Yamnaya genetic markers were spread all the way from Europe to China.  In fact, Western China was almost completely settled by "Europeans"—tall, blond and red-haired, blue and green eyed Yamnaya people who would have looked perfectly at home in Celtic Austria—long before any people with Mongoloid physical features came into the area.  These people were still known to the literate Chinese many millenia later and even people who emerged as speakers of different languages seem to bear their genetic markers—Genghis Khan himself was described as a redhead with green eyes, as was his (unrelated) Turkic successor Timur.

David Anthony has proven beyond much scholarly doubt that the Indo-Europeans did invent the chariot at least, if not the wheel (he seems curiously reluctant to even admit the possibility) and domesticated the horse.  I've also had to come around, after reading historical account after historical account after historical account (plus the art) of the ancient Greek and Romans to believing that the aristocratic and patrician castes (respectively) of each do not physically resemble that of the modern population, but rather have the physical appearance of northern Europeans—almost certainly one inherited from the Yamnaya ancestors.  Although this still has not permeated mainstream scholarship, which is surprisingly incurious about the question, the most likely scenario is that the Yamnaya-descent ancient Greeks and Romans were physically distinct from the autochthonous population, over which they established themselves as a superstrate.  While today's population of Greece and Italy have certainly the languages and much of the cultural inheritance of this superstrate, it's clear that the actual superstrate group was eventually genetically swamped.  There are even contemporary accounts among the Romans bemoaning exactly this event; that the Romans themselves were become physically indistinct from their slaves, and that the barbarians to the North maintained a higher degree of racial fidelity to the prior Roman state.  This is a shocking thing to read, even though it's not exactly a secret, to one who's grown up in the white-washed politically correct, post WW2 "dat's raciss" narrative of Indo-European studies.

The most recent discovery (although its a bit belated; it actually was first published about five years ago) that really surprised me was that the old notion of Indo-Europeans being an important formative element of Egyptian society has been revived.  Mainstream science has largely ignored this fact, because it contradicts their narrative and therefore they have no idea what to make of it, but the results, assuming that they're accurate, are what they are.

There was long ago proposed an Indo-European element in ancient Egypt.  Some linguists made the case that there were some numerals which were cognates between Egyptian and some Indo-European language, and the Egyptian god Ptah was often compared with the Proto-Indo-European creator deity which is spelled technically as *Dyēus Ph₂tēr and more normally pronouncably written as Dyeus Pitar (cognates include Indic Dyaus Pitar, Roman Iu Piter (or Jupiter as it was later spelled) and Greek Zeu Pater—later simply Zeus, and others.)  But this was one of those crazy ideas that nobody—including me—took seriously.

And then, of course, DNA analysis of King Tut shows him to be a carrier of the R1b1a2 lineage—a lineage strongly associated with the spread of the Yamnaya population of the Pontic-Caspian steppes.  Today, that lineage is almost completely absent from Egypt and is strongly correlated to Western and Northern Europe.  It's almost impossible to imagine how that kind of DNA could have been present in Egypt without some kind of Indo-European connection.

Of course, that doesn't mean that there needs to be an Indo-European superstrate in Egypt, either.  King Tut's grandfather and great-grandfather were both married to (among other wives) royal daughters of the Mitanni kingdom, for instance, who were ruled by what is believed to be an Indo-Aryan aristocracy superstrate over an ethnically Hurrian populace.  This could well be the source of the R1b1a2 genetics, although established genealogies do not suggest that these Mitanni wives were the mothers of anyone in the royal line.  Tutankhamen's widow—his young half-sister—wrote to Suppiluliama, the King of the Hittites asking for a son as a husband.  Although I don't know off-hand of any prior linkages between the Egyptian and Hittite dynasties, that could also potentially be a source of the genetics.

Either way, the implications, even if muted, are still astounding.  As I said, it suggests that the Indo-Europeans were, in many ways, the builders of much of the ancient world.  Even the Semitic and Egyptian Near East and far away China of the late Xia or early Shang dynasties were heavily impacted by them.  Given that the modern world is largely the result of cultures that developed within the Hajnal Line, this has some serious implications—and ones that are unhappy ones for equalitarians or anti-white racists who want to diminish the legacy of white civilizations, or breed out and destroy the impact of white society today.  Not that this validates the morons at Stormfront in any way, but... it certainly is suggestive of something.