Great Political Leaders

Corrections/retractions

I don't know where I first posted these statements, but since we all seem to hang out on the same boards, anyone who read them will probably also read this.

Regarding the burning of the library at Alexandria. Recent articles in the Washington Post about the looting of the museum in Baghdad made parallel references to the destruction of the library of the Ancient Egyptians. The writers said that the question of who was responsible for the burning has not been settled. I had originally reviewed at least a dozen respectable university websites, and they all agreed that it was done by the army of Caliph Omar of Baghdad in the early years of Islam. Perhaps the current reporters are simply being politically correct and giving the benefit of the doubt to Muslims. Perhaps after living in the home of Caliph Omar they have been swayed by their hosts' version of history. Or perhaps they have truly uncovered some sources that several great universities missed. In any case, in all fairness I am compelled to admit that controversy exists about the facts in this case.

Regarding Sufism in Chechnya. The same newspaper expanded the recent history of the Chechens. According to these sources, as the USSR was imploding, Muslims from Arab countries began migrating into Chechnya, using their financial resources to gain political power and urging the populace to break away from Russia. (The sources did not specify whether the immigrants were Shia or Sunni.) Their goal was assumed to be for Chechnya to unite with a nearby already-independent Muslim nation such as Azerbaijan.

This would explain why an originally Sufi people would suddenly be killing Russians in contradiction of Sufism's pacifist doctrine. They have been converted to an older branch of Islam that does not rule out violence as a way to settle disputes.

I am still displeased that none of the sources I have read have discussed the ethnic background of the Chechens. Or the Azeris or the Kurds, for that matter. Many of the peoples in that area, such as the Georgians, seem to be the sole remnants of truly ancient ethnic groups with origins far back into the Stone Age (long before the diaspora of the highly successful Indo-European tribes from the same region ca. 10,000 BCE) who have no discernable relation to each other or to any other living populations.

At any rate, it is my duty to uphold the standards of scholarship of SciForums and bring these articles to your attention.

Peace.

 

They didn’t have cars, or even horses, in those days. Migrations were painfully slow. I’m not up on my climate history but it’s possible that some part of the westward migration may have been across glaciers. My principle source for the dating of the migration is linguistics. For the languages to have diverged as much as they already had by the era of Latin and Sanskrit generally requires ten thousand years. But it doesn't say anything about the speed of geographical divergence. Two separate peoples could evolve on opposite sides of a mountain range, less than a thousand miles apart.

Look how long it took us to figure out the migrations to the New World, which were easier to analyze because there were no older species of humans such as Neanderthals in the Americas to leave their own archeological evidence. It was less than 25 years ago that the three-wave theory coalesced – Amerind, Na-dene and Eskimo-Aleut – and there’s still a lot of controversy over the the dates and details of the Na-dene trek.

Europe is harder to deal with because there were Neanderthal tribes already living there when the first Homo sapiens arrived. And the Indo-Europeans were not the first Homo sapiens to set foot in Europe. The Basque people are clearly the last survivors of a much earlier colonization. Last I heard the Etruscans may also fall into that category, unless that debate has finally been put to rest.

The first Indo-European tribes that we know of to inhabit Europe were Celtic. The Bohumil after whom Bohemia was named even after it was peopled by Slavs; the Gauls of what is now southern France; the people whose name is long forgotten but who brought bagpipes to Iberia; and of course the Britons and Gaels of the British Isles. These are just the people we know about because the Greeks and/or Romans, with their written language, left us records of their encounters with them.

You have to remember that even though civilization sprang up at four points in Asia and North Africa as far back as six or eight thousand years B.C.E., it spread slowly and was often beaten back by bad luck or barbarians. The first waves of Indo-European migrants that spread out in every direction from the Caucasus were Mesolithic people, not even Neolithic, i.e., nomadic hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads, rather than builders of permanent fishing, herding, or farming villages. They didn’t leave much “history” for us to find. People with no written language don’t leave a lot of clues for us to figure out who they were and how they lived, and people who don’t stay in one place for more than a few months don’t leave behind statues and aqueducts.

We know a lot about the ancient history of the Mideast, Egypt, India and China, because they had cities and written languages. Until cities started popping up in Europe, its history was limited to the oral legends that were passed on by its Celtic and Germanic tribes to the Greek and Roman scribes.

I just did a Google search that yielded more than a thousand hits, and picked ten or twelve with names I recognized. Sorry, I didn’t keep a log because they all said the same thing. I defer to your greater expertise and obviously superior ability to recognize a respectable university.

 

Homeland of the original Indo-Europeans

Here's an article from Scientific American that summarizes many of the recent linguistic studies.

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6507/chronicle120.html

My casual identification of the Caucasus as the homeland of the original Indo-Europeans was imprecise. The article identifies a much larger area called "Transcaucasian," which spreads from eastern Anatolia, around the Black Sea, to the Caucasus.

It also appears that the people whom we by convention call Indo-Europeans actually spent quite a few millennia moving around within Asia before any of them finally entered either Europe or the Indian subcontinent, sometime between 3,000 and 1,000 B.C.E. (I think the date is better established than that but I haven't dug deep enough into the research.) It seems to me that the long-extinct Tocharian tribe was living clear over in western China before its relatives reached the lands for which they were eventually named.

You might want to track down some of these sources and draw your own conclusions. As the authors admit, the linguistic research has yet to be correlated with other disciplines, most notably DNA mapping.

One fascinating possibility is that the Indo-Europeans will be linked to other ethnic groups. In the past hundred years or so Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchurian have been grouped into one language family, and it is often suggested that Japanese and Korean will ultimately join them. It's possible that the Indo-Europeans will similarly be found to have kin.