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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: What are Scythians?
Message-ID: <hubey.785762308@pegasus.montclair.edu>
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References: <rsavageCyt0CM.5L7@netcom.com> <3aen6l$g6b@pilot.njin.net> <sarimaCzJ9tp.n4C@netcom.com> <CzJsFu.9I4@inter.nl.net> <sarimaCzr97q.4oI@netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 11:18:28 GMT
Lines: 149

sarima@netcom.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:

>In article <CzJsFu.9I4@inter.nl.net>,
>Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@inter.NL.net> wrote:
>>In article <sarimaCzJ9tp.n4C@netcom.com>,
>>
>>It's always very hard to derive linguistic facts from pottery
>>or building styles.  Troy II suggests a connection with the
>>Balkans (Ezero culture), appr. 3000/2700 BC.

>True, but the megalon building style is restricted to
>IE speaking peoples in historical times, so I find it fairly
>indicative.

In this field, you can always convince yourself to believe 
what you want [you referring to anyone]. About the only thing
one needs is to hear something repeated often enough to be
convinced.  If one stretches this out far enough, one can
make arguments that those columns for which the greeks are
famous came from Egypt.  

There is always continuity.  When the Russians overthrew the
Tartar/Mongols, nothing really changed. They still kept wearing
the same kinds of clothes, the same rituals, the same
architecture. Some Russian nobility even changed their surnames
and picked up Tartar/Mongol names. It wasn't until Peter the
Great that they started to even barely pass for European--
culture-wise that is. 

EVen now most people tend to be conservative. The simple
reason [especially in the past] for doing things the same
way for a long time [thus producing a continuity] is the
same reason that we live the way we do; we don't know any
other or any better way. But if a small technological
innovation is useful it spreads. I don't see any reason for
the certitude with which many of the people in this area
come to identify languages with broken pots.

Some of the stuff I read in this field is so shoddy it amazes
me. Some greek-looking stuff is found in Spain and France and
voila!! Greeks colonized it at one time. Some Egyptian/Phonecian
stuff is found around Greece and aha.... trade with the middle
east.


>I suspect that the Greeks picked up some apsects of the culture,
>perhaps including the megaron structure.  Certainly there have
>been persistant suggestions that Greek contains an old layer
>of borrowing from some unspecified IE dialect, to explain some
>anomolous reflexes of PIE words.  In my model this would be
>Proto-Anatolian.

>I would place the PIE origin in the Sredny Stog culture, some
>600 or more years earlier.  And, as I said above, I place the
>Proto-Anatolian/Proto-Hellenic split rather before the Early
>Helladic III, though maybe not that much before the beginning
>of the Ezero culture.

There are some simple things that never seem to be answered
but certainly not for lack of people who ask:

1) What is this "Have Horse, Will Travel" scenario about?

Even today, whole nations or even families don't just pack
up and move to other countries and lands so easily. What could
have driven these people accross thousands of miles of barren
steppes, deserts, mountains, especially if having already domesticated
the horse, and others like cattle, they were in no danger of 
starvation? Why pack up from this wonderfully hospitable place
where this culture was developed, and horses tamed and the
move all the way to India across deserts, especially if they
did not even know where they were going? What could have driven
them to such desperation?

2) If anything it was in Central Asia that there were reasons for
leaving. It suffered through periodic desiccation. It had rivers
that dried up. The sedentary civilization there slowly became 
nomadic.  It was reported in science news recently that a large
river ran down the arabian peninsula {5,000 BC or BP?}. That could
easily explain why the semites came out and spread east {sumeria}
and west {mediterranean coast}.  But is there any record of egyptians
going on the warpath all the way to, say Nigeria or MOrrocco, or to
Central ASia? No. The worst was the war with the Hittites and it was
probably defensive.  

3) The caucasians did not spread northwards in all likelihood. If
the past 1,000 years or so is typical, if anything, the powerful
tribes invaded the steppes north of the Caucasus and drove their
inhabitants to take refuge in the mountains, which drove the others
even further up the mountains. The same game of musical chairs
was played out in Central Asia in historical times, when the
weaker tribes were pushed out by the stronger ones, and they
wound up popping up in Europe, like the HUns, Bulgars, AVars, etc.
Genghis Khanids were an exception.

4) So if there were no such reasons, then was there perhaps some
religious zeal of saving the world?  Did they like the Arabs
find some new religion and decide to save everyone or to conquer
every place on earth?

5) Suppose something like this did happen. Why would so many
people succumb so easily?  Russians were lorded over and welded
into a nation by Vikings but did not learn to speak Swedish?
The Vikings assimilated. The southern Slavs, were lorded over
and welded into a strong nation by the Bulghars [turks] but
the turks became assimilated.  what kinds of power did these
PIE's have that they changed whole continents? The closest
anyone ever came to it was in the Americas. But then, the
Europeans arrived with fire arms,cannons, horses, writing and
the renaissance and basically had to contend with stone age
people. Did the PIE's have this kind of advantage over all the
peoples in all those lands?




Simply put, I don't believe that there was any such homeland
since there were not PIE peoples; no urheimat, at least not
close in any sense of the way it is in use now. If there ever
was such a people, only in the sense that there were lots of
people who seemed to be speaking a language which might be
considered to be related to the IE languages of today [and
by related I don't mean the usual asexual tree] the best
location is central asia. From there they could have spread towards
Korea, maybe Japan, south to India where they could have come
in contact with Burmese/Malay type peoples, and west towards
Iran and Europe.  I think what passes for PIE is

1) Middle East/Semitic -- prefixing type stuff
2) pre IE European--consonant clustering
3) some kind of an agglutinating language like
Dravidian/Uralic/Altaic [all of which are around Central Asia]

I also don't believe that it's possible to pin point any time
period and not even a place for the alleged urheimat.

PS. If the people making up theories did not have blatant
vested interests in it, it might be taken more seriously.
i.e. Gimbutas--she's probably Lithuanian or Latvian
     Gamkrelidze - Georgian--naturally he makes contact with Kartvelian
     Most Slavic/Russian scholars seem to love the Kurgans.
     Asian/Indians lean toward the reverse scenario.

Anything this blatantly political can't be scientific.

--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
