I've linked to this article before, but I'll do so again. I quite like it, even where I can spot some gaffes about its history: the Achaeans did not overthrow the Myceneans; the Achaeans were the Myceneans (the Mycenean nation was known, for instance, to the Hittites as Ahhiyawa). Also, the Dorian invasion did not prompt the settlement of Ionia by Greeks, because numerous Mycenean Greek settlements in what was later called Ionia were already present before the Bronze Age Collapse. And referring to either the Greeks or the Romans as Northern European or Nordics can only mean "of a similar physical phenotype to what is today only native to Northern Europe" rather than that they were literally from northern Europe. This gets to its most ridiculous when Sims says that Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic is "recognizably Germanic" as were his eyes, which makes no literal sense whatsoever. There were no recognizably Germanic Italians until after the various tribes of Goths, Lombards and other Germanic tribes conquered the Italian peninsula, settled it, and adopted the recognizably Italic language of the natives rather than continuing to speak their recognizably Germanic language. The Greeks and Romans were the descendants of the Kurgan cultures which developed on the Pontic-Caspian steppes, after making their way through (or possibly around) the Black Sea and the Balkans (and to the Italian peninsula in the case of the Romans.) The Germanic and Celtic people are as well, but where the Greeks and Romans ended up with admixture with Mediterranean southern European populations that were not Indo-European, the Celts and Germanic peoples had admixture with peoples already in the north of Europe, although obviously they were of a different physical type and lower population density, so the result is not the same. Neither group exactly resembles the original Yamnaya phenotypes, because there is no such thing as a pure Yamnaya population left today.
http://www.unz.com/article/what-race-were-the-greeks-and-romans/
But those mistakes notwithstanding, the article gathers a rather remarkable collection of quotes from the ancients about their actual physical type, and it flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of the Greeks and Romans having been the same phenotypically as are today's Greeks or Italians. And that is possibly its real value rather than the somewhat sloppy claims of origin which it contains.
Well, that and the conclusion, part of which I'll quote in a moment. First, keep in mind that there are two models of the bringing of a new culture and language to an area that was formerly of another. North America, Australia and New Zealand represent one. Taiwan is another example of this same model. In the former three, Anglo-British colonizers came in sufficient numbers that they maintained their cultural, linguistic and genetic heritage; the contribution of American Indians to the genetic picture of America is on average about 1.3% per person at most. We're more Neanderthal genetically than we are Indian. In Taiwan, the aboriginal peoples known to early Portuguese and Dutch sailors and colonists are only about 2% of the population today, which is overwhelming Han Chinese, and which has arrived in just the last few hundred years. There are other examples through history, but in general, this model seems to be less common than the other, in which those bringing a new culture, language and genetic phenotype come in relatively small numbers and superimpose themselves over another population. While they may change the language and many aspects of the culture when they do so, they clearly are not, as in the former example, a transplanted example of their mother culture evolving separately; they are a hybrid of some kind at best. An example of this would be Algeria. Despite the fact that French is its official language, nobody seriously thinks that the Algerians are the same as the French. Even Emmanuel Micron doesn't believe that, although he may profess that he does at times.
This seems to have been the tragedy of the original Greek and Roman ruling classes; they were simply outnumbered by the native pre-Greek and pre-Romans. While they certainly imposed their language and much of their culture over the area, there was considerable cultural backwash as well, and even more genetic backwash to the point where nobody who is a native of Greece is likely to resemble the Greek heroes of legend anymore like Menelaus or Achilles. If someone does from Italy, it's almost certainly the indicator of much more recent and intrusive Germanic Lombard phenotypes rather than ancient Roman ones. I find myself fascinated with the idea of the "lost" phenotypes of the Greeks, the Romans, the Thracians, etc. mentioned in this article.
And if this was a dramatic loss among the Greeks and Romans, it's even more dramatic further east. The Indo-Iranians were also described as blond or red-haired with blue, green and gray eyes and white skin. If anything, they may have been even moreso than the ancestors of the Greeks or Romans, because while they are largely made of up derived cultures that developed in situ from Yamnaya roots, their early admixture was not by passing through a membrane of EEF Balkan farmers but rather by expansion north into the forest steppe Baltic zone where their admixture was with even more Nordic phenotypes than the Yamnaya were originally. These admixtured cultures, such as Abashevo or Fatyanovo cultures blended with later Bronze Age cultures such as Srubna, Catacomb, or Poltavka which later emerged as Sintashta and Andronovo.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-poltavka-outlier.html
I wonder sometimes what might have happened had these peoples managed to maintain their phenotype and a culture that wasn't significantly backwashed by genetics and culture from the locals over whom they superimposed themselves. Today we see the Russians or the Lithuanians as significantly different from us, for the most part, but we also feel a sense of kinship with them that we do not feel with the Bengals or Tajiks. Some of that is the visual cues; Russians look more like Americans than Bengals or Tajiks, of course, but the early ancestors of the Bengals and Tajiks would have looked much like the Russians themselves during the Bronze Age. And it might have been even more dramatic had we seen the Luwians, the Hittites, and the Mitanni as early expressions of our culture and our people, albeit we're not directly descended from them, of course. What if the Western half of China were still white as it was during the Middle Ages, where Wusun, Yuezhi and Silk Road Tarim Basin peoples looked like they could have been Austrian Celts in terms of their physical appearance and even their clothing?
Why is it that our ruling elite so fear and loathe the idea of white nations and work so hard to destroy them? Naturally, as a white person myself, I'd have preferred to see white Central Asia, as we had throughout much of the Bronze Age and Iron Age and even into Classical Antiquity and the Medieval periods (and which we got again to some degree through the spread of the Russians, although even they have retreated significantly from countries like Kazakhstan, where they used to be the majority, for instance). I'd prefer to have seen a whit(er) southern Europe. I think it's tragic that the white nations that were once in those locales were swamped and disappeared; not without leaving some legacy behind, but at the same time very different than they were when they were formulated in the first place.
Of course, that also makes ridiculous the notion of white nationalism. There's not enough nationalism in the concept of whiteness, because "white" isn't a nation, and nobody really seriously thinks that it is. At best, we see ourselves as related "cousin" nations that maybe should have better relationships than we do because of our relatedness, but nobody in the world thinks that a Russian is the same as an American just because both are white.
Anyway, the promised quote:
What became of the Nordic Greeks and Romans? Their numbers were reduced and thinned through war, imperialism, immigration, and slavery. Protracted internecine war was devastating. The Hellenes lost relatively few men in their two wars with the Persian Empire (490, 480-479 BC), but they were decimated by the ruinous series of inter-Hellenic wars that followed. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) pitted Athens and her subject Ionian cities against the Spartan Dorian confederacy. That was followed by 35 years of intermittent warfare between Sparta and Thebes (396-362 BC), which pitted Nordics against Nordics. These wars so weakened the Greek republics that they fell under Macedonian rule about 20 years later (338 BC), bringing to an end the classical age of Greece.
Money was, as always, a racial solvent. Theognis, a noble poet from the Dorian city of Megara wrote in the sixth century BC: "The noblest man will marry the lowest daughter of a base family, if only she brings in money. And a lady will share her bed with a foul rich man, preferring gold to pedigree. Money is all. Good breeds with bad and race is lost."
The Roman experience was similarly tragic. All of her later historians agreed that the terrible losses inflicted by Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) were minor compared to the horrendous losses Rome inflicted on herself during the nearly 100 years of civil war that followed the murder of the reforming Tribune Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC.
Immigration was the inevitable backwash of imperialism as slaves, adventurers, and traders swarmed into Rome. Over time, slaves were freed, foreigners gave birth to natives, non-Romans gained citizenship, and legal and social sanctions against intermarriage fell away. By the early empire, all that was left of the original Roman stock were a few patrician families.
The historian Appian lamented that "the city masses are now thoroughly mixed with foreign blood, the freed slave has the same rights as a native-born citizen, and those who are still slaves look no different from their masters." Scipio Aemilianus (185–129 BC), a statesman and general of the famed clan of the Aemilii, called these heterogeneous subjects "step-children of Rome."
One hundred and fifty years later, Horace (65–8 BC) wrote in Book III of the Odes: "Our grandfathers sired feeble children; theirs were weaker still — ourselves; and now our curse must be to breed even more degenerate heirs."
The last Roman writers therefore came to see their own people as both morally and physically degenerate. The subtext of Tacitus’ (56-117 AD) ethnological treatise Germania is a longing for the northern vigor and purity the Romans had lost. He saw the Gauls and Germans as superior to the Romans in morals and physique, and Roman women shared this admiration. Blond hair became the rage, and German and Gaulic slave women were shorn of their blond or reddish-brown hair to make wigs for wealthy women. By the time of Tertullian (160-225 AD), so many Roman women were dying their hair that he complained, "they are even ashamed of their country, sorry that they were not born in Germany or Gaul." In the early second century AD, the satirist Juvenal complained of the dwindling stock of "the bluest patrician blood," which is a figurative phrase for the nobility, whose veins appear blue through their light skin.
Viewed in a historical context, it is almost as if today’s northern Europeans have set out perfectly to imitate the ways in which the Greeks and Romans destroyed themselves. In both Europe and America, patriotic young men slaughtered each other in terrible fratricidal wars. In North America, the descendants of slaves are the majority in many great cities. Both continents have paid for imperial ambitions with mass immigration of aliens. Will we be able to resist the forces that brought down the ancients?Also; see what happened to the Nephite nation. Those who bear Nephite ancestry were completely culturally assimilated into their enemy Lamanite nations.
It could happen to us. The Promised Land is only the Promised Land for those who are righteous and stand up for their values and their freedoms. We saw that over and over again in the Book of Mormon, and we saw that over and over again in founding of America.
UPDATE: In any case, maybe I'm being a little too harsh. I particularly miss the steppe peoples, like the Scythians, who I'd like to have seen continue. Then again, maybe they did; the Scythians and Sarmatians are generally considered to have been linguistically absorbed into the early Slavic expansions, but that may well have been primarily (or even almost only) a linguistic assimilation, and we can look at guys like the 19th century Cossacks as the Scythians; maybe a bit evolved after successive waves of Goths, Huns, Turks, Mongols and Slavs have washed over them, but still essentially the same people.
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