<!--QuoteBegin-Hauma Hamiddha+Jan 24 2007, 05:51 AM-->QUOTE(Hauma Hamiddha @ Jan 24 2007, 05:51 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Husky- I am pleased to note that you are trudging the right path with respect to our closeness to other pagan religions (despite being misguided regarding the the common origin and heritage of Indo-Europeans). Studying that hymn to Zeus is important for all <i>Hindus</i> as part of grasping our larger tradition. Only then will our uniqueness in the modern world be reinforced and the need to preserve it realized - for it represent an integral aspect of human existence that is threatened with extinction by Abrahamistic mental diseases. Thank you for reminding me of it for I once wrote something about it and lost it. Now I need to revisit it.
[right][snapback]63452[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->(1) In my mind I refer to the <i>Abrahamic heresies</i>: christoislamism, communism, fascism, racism, false secularism, false egalitarianism. As well as other frauds, including those Orwell brought to my attention with 1984.
(2) My sister used to translate the Greek and Latin religious poetry and prose for me: I was willing to listen and it helped her practise for her exams. Ever since then, having learnt about the Greco-Roman Gods, I've always had a fond place in my heart for them.
(3) <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->misguided regarding the the common origin and heritage of Indo-Europeans<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Were I misguided, I'm still less so than the 2 centuries of IE 'scholarship' driven by mostly wishful-thinking and racist-christian-colonial western self-conceit. For all that time, the Brits have imagined themselves to be these Oryans, these Indo-Europoids. Meanwhile, as Viren had posted, it has emerged that the British gene pool is 95% Basque-related - that is, their Basqueness makes them particularly not IE (genetically). I'm inferring the 95% from the following:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The Brits therefore are people of whom we can be quite certain that they are speaking languages others have taught them sometime in history: turns out <i>they</i> are the borrowers. And by extension, the gene pool of the British settlers in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand is therefore also mostly Basque.
Ultimately it's a sad joke on them: imagining the Oryans were their ancestors, they made idols out of the Indo-Europeans - and the Brits only have themselves to blame to now be so disappointed.
Only Herr Commandant Witzel and the like can now still brag about the 'superior' 'Indo-Europeans' without slighting all of his own ancestors. And even then, Herr Witzel's native Germania is not a 'pure' IE 'race' either, at least not going by the significant percentage of non-IE words in their language. (And as Dhu wrote somewhere on the AIT-related threads, much of Greek vocabulary is also pre-IE; although I don't know if Greeks are that much interested in being grouped with IEs. The Hellenes don't appear to be.)
If I were European, I would give up on the IE dream, it had never given rise to any unifying European ancestry or linguistic origin, and now it has lost more of the west than before to genetically-proven <i>non</i>-IE origins.
(4) I have never contended that Samskritam did not have a close linguistic kinship with Avestan (Iranian), nor have I ever denied that the ancient Persians and Parthians were related to the Indians of the Northwest (themselves related to the rest of the Indian population) - this has always been apparent even for me.
It is rather obvious that the Iranian tribes emerged from India; it's anything but a mystery. However, the Indians and Iranians are not what they mean when the western scholars fantasize about the Indo-Europeans/Oryans. They are referring to some human subspecies of Caucasian, European: an imagined Super-Civilisator. Where is their evidence? Just to claim a part in the cake of the Parthian Empire, Microsoft Encarta has to say the Parthians are descended from the Scythians - the C-Asian Iranian-speaking people who roamed the regions a stone's throw above Afghanistan. And yet these amazing Scythians, (whom the IE scholars like to imagine are Caucasian even though they are specifically Iranian-speaking and quite a few seem Turkic or Mongolian by ethnicity) did nothing in C-Asia that is comparable to the Parthian achievements in Afghan-Iran territory, an empire which expanded into Mesopotamia. Does this mean the magic lies <i>in the lands</i> of India, Afghanistan, Iran (and Greece and Rome) rather than in the flattering-fantasy of an IE <i>people</i>?
(5) Also, no part of the IE dream has yet materialised: from IE linguistics derives PIE, from which derives the supposition of an IE people, which has led to speculations (and they are only that: eager speculations by often-racist or eurocentrist scholars) on a unifying Oryan religion/myths, society, culture, innovations, bla-bla-bla. Never was impressed. All they have is conjecture, they have nothing (except what what they gained by appropriating Greece and Rome) to show for it. Greece and Rome were never part of an idea of 'Europe' during their existence: the idea of a Europe emerged when the lands all became christian. Greece and Rome were part of a continuum stretching horizontally eastwards (competing with Persia and Parthia, trading with India) rather than northward from the Mediterranean. Rome conquered upto Britian and Germania in the north and that was merely expansion. Eventually Roman culture would have been diffused and perhaps the northern people would all have been welcomed as 'Romans' a few centuries onwards - who knows?; but it was all still in the preliminary stages when the whole thing collapsed. Rome also went southwards, into North-Africa. Only the march of islam prevented these countries from joining what is now 'Europe'.
Where's the historic 'Europe'? Europe is a by-product of christianity. (And foolishly, it leaves out Russia - probably because it is Orthodox and the Catholic Church could not stand it. On the other hand, excising Greece, for being Orthodox, would be like cutting out the heart of Europe.)
The whole IE thing still stretches my belief far beyond the capabilities of my generally-boundless imagination; and so I now refuse to even try accomodating it anymore. As for the sooper-dooper idea the IE studies has presented of a related mythology or religion: Zeus, Indra and Thor are all indeed Thunder Gods, it is true, but there are Thunder, Solar, Rain and other natural Gods outside of the 'IE' world too. There are many such cases of similarities between 'IE' Gods that turn out to not be unique only to 'IE', nor derived from IE. The basic Sky-father, Earth-mother 'motif' is there among North American native Americans (and Koreans, it seems), even though confused IE reconstructionists like to brag how it's a unifying religious notion particular to IE people. Grief, it's only one of the simplest (but still true) understandings of the Divine.
Regardless, even Bruce Lincoln whose <i>specific</i> area of study appears to have been IE myth and religion, does not recognise the category any more. Rajesh_g's post 114 in an IF thread excerpts from Arvidsson's <i>Aryan Idols</i>:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In the 1990s, Lincoln continued to critically study the history of Indo-European scholarship, which resulted in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (2000; a work that would have been very important to the ideas in my study had it been published before the Swedish edition). His studies of Indo-European mythology have now made him question the very belief in an objective historiography, and he sees the scientific search for knowledge as a site for political power struggles. The work of cultural studies is, according to Lincoln, "myth plus footnotes". In one of his latest articles, Lincoln has also chosen to modify the classification system of the history of religions. The myths that he earlier studied as "Indo-European" are now presented as "Eurasian" or as "Indo-European" (in quotation marks). With that, the category of {Indo-European} religion that saw the light with Oriental Jones' discovery in 1786 is eliminated.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->And good riddance, too. At least Lincoln and Arvidsson appear to be people who asked the questions that nearly no one else in IE scholarship are even thinking of. And their investigation to uncover these answers lead them to declaring the 'Indo-Europeans' themselves to be just convenient theorising.
I'm willing to be wrong. Often am. But I don't trust IE scholars to 'prove' it. Their proofs are either not reliable or incomplete or contestable: 'voila, the PIE'. They are themselves unreliable (unless they are self-reflecting like Arviddson and Lincoln - in which case they often turn their views on IE around significantly).
I'm through taking their word for it. They'll have to work doubly hard to present their case again, and I fear only an indisputable picture of history is going to convince me to reconsider.
So far, nearly all the scholars that want to say something about 'factual' Indo-Europeans are motivated by a racist dream of IEs (even if some of them are not racist themselves, the dream itself is), building on two centuries of eurocentrist and theologically duplicitous (christian-missionary) 'scholarly' foundations. Last people I'd trust. Not even as far as I could toss 'em.
(6) <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Thank you for reminding me of it for I once wrote something about it and lost it. Now I need to revisit it.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->If you find it, please consider posting it at IF.
[right][snapback]63452[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->(1) In my mind I refer to the <i>Abrahamic heresies</i>: christoislamism, communism, fascism, racism, false secularism, false egalitarianism. As well as other frauds, including those Orwell brought to my attention with 1984.
(2) My sister used to translate the Greek and Latin religious poetry and prose for me: I was willing to listen and it helped her practise for her exams. Ever since then, having learnt about the Greco-Roman Gods, I've always had a fond place in my heart for them.
(3) <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->misguided regarding the the common origin and heritage of Indo-Europeans<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Were I misguided, I'm still less so than the 2 centuries of IE 'scholarship' driven by mostly wishful-thinking and racist-christian-colonial western self-conceit. For all that time, the Brits have imagined themselves to be these Oryans, these Indo-Europoids. Meanwhile, as Viren had posted, it has emerged that the British gene pool is 95% Basque-related - that is, their Basqueness makes them particularly not IE (genetically). I'm inferring the 95% from the following:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The Brits therefore are people of whom we can be quite certain that they are speaking languages others have taught them sometime in history: turns out <i>they</i> are the borrowers. And by extension, the gene pool of the British settlers in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand is therefore also mostly Basque.
Ultimately it's a sad joke on them: imagining the Oryans were their ancestors, they made idols out of the Indo-Europeans - and the Brits only have themselves to blame to now be so disappointed.
Only Herr Commandant Witzel and the like can now still brag about the 'superior' 'Indo-Europeans' without slighting all of his own ancestors. And even then, Herr Witzel's native Germania is not a 'pure' IE 'race' either, at least not going by the significant percentage of non-IE words in their language. (And as Dhu wrote somewhere on the AIT-related threads, much of Greek vocabulary is also pre-IE; although I don't know if Greeks are that much interested in being grouped with IEs. The Hellenes don't appear to be.)
If I were European, I would give up on the IE dream, it had never given rise to any unifying European ancestry or linguistic origin, and now it has lost more of the west than before to genetically-proven <i>non</i>-IE origins.
(4) I have never contended that Samskritam did not have a close linguistic kinship with Avestan (Iranian), nor have I ever denied that the ancient Persians and Parthians were related to the Indians of the Northwest (themselves related to the rest of the Indian population) - this has always been apparent even for me.
It is rather obvious that the Iranian tribes emerged from India; it's anything but a mystery. However, the Indians and Iranians are not what they mean when the western scholars fantasize about the Indo-Europeans/Oryans. They are referring to some human subspecies of Caucasian, European: an imagined Super-Civilisator. Where is their evidence? Just to claim a part in the cake of the Parthian Empire, Microsoft Encarta has to say the Parthians are descended from the Scythians - the C-Asian Iranian-speaking people who roamed the regions a stone's throw above Afghanistan. And yet these amazing Scythians, (whom the IE scholars like to imagine are Caucasian even though they are specifically Iranian-speaking and quite a few seem Turkic or Mongolian by ethnicity) did nothing in C-Asia that is comparable to the Parthian achievements in Afghan-Iran territory, an empire which expanded into Mesopotamia. Does this mean the magic lies <i>in the lands</i> of India, Afghanistan, Iran (and Greece and Rome) rather than in the flattering-fantasy of an IE <i>people</i>?
(5) Also, no part of the IE dream has yet materialised: from IE linguistics derives PIE, from which derives the supposition of an IE people, which has led to speculations (and they are only that: eager speculations by often-racist or eurocentrist scholars) on a unifying Oryan religion/myths, society, culture, innovations, bla-bla-bla. Never was impressed. All they have is conjecture, they have nothing (except what what they gained by appropriating Greece and Rome) to show for it. Greece and Rome were never part of an idea of 'Europe' during their existence: the idea of a Europe emerged when the lands all became christian. Greece and Rome were part of a continuum stretching horizontally eastwards (competing with Persia and Parthia, trading with India) rather than northward from the Mediterranean. Rome conquered upto Britian and Germania in the north and that was merely expansion. Eventually Roman culture would have been diffused and perhaps the northern people would all have been welcomed as 'Romans' a few centuries onwards - who knows?; but it was all still in the preliminary stages when the whole thing collapsed. Rome also went southwards, into North-Africa. Only the march of islam prevented these countries from joining what is now 'Europe'.
Where's the historic 'Europe'? Europe is a by-product of christianity. (And foolishly, it leaves out Russia - probably because it is Orthodox and the Catholic Church could not stand it. On the other hand, excising Greece, for being Orthodox, would be like cutting out the heart of Europe.)
The whole IE thing still stretches my belief far beyond the capabilities of my generally-boundless imagination; and so I now refuse to even try accomodating it anymore. As for the sooper-dooper idea the IE studies has presented of a related mythology or religion: Zeus, Indra and Thor are all indeed Thunder Gods, it is true, but there are Thunder, Solar, Rain and other natural Gods outside of the 'IE' world too. There are many such cases of similarities between 'IE' Gods that turn out to not be unique only to 'IE', nor derived from IE. The basic Sky-father, Earth-mother 'motif' is there among North American native Americans (and Koreans, it seems), even though confused IE reconstructionists like to brag how it's a unifying religious notion particular to IE people. Grief, it's only one of the simplest (but still true) understandings of the Divine.
Regardless, even Bruce Lincoln whose <i>specific</i> area of study appears to have been IE myth and religion, does not recognise the category any more. Rajesh_g's post 114 in an IF thread excerpts from Arvidsson's <i>Aryan Idols</i>:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In the 1990s, Lincoln continued to critically study the history of Indo-European scholarship, which resulted in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (2000; a work that would have been very important to the ideas in my study had it been published before the Swedish edition). His studies of Indo-European mythology have now made him question the very belief in an objective historiography, and he sees the scientific search for knowledge as a site for political power struggles. The work of cultural studies is, according to Lincoln, "myth plus footnotes". In one of his latest articles, Lincoln has also chosen to modify the classification system of the history of religions. The myths that he earlier studied as "Indo-European" are now presented as "Eurasian" or as "Indo-European" (in quotation marks). With that, the category of {Indo-European} religion that saw the light with Oriental Jones' discovery in 1786 is eliminated.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->And good riddance, too. At least Lincoln and Arvidsson appear to be people who asked the questions that nearly no one else in IE scholarship are even thinking of. And their investigation to uncover these answers lead them to declaring the 'Indo-Europeans' themselves to be just convenient theorising.
I'm willing to be wrong. Often am. But I don't trust IE scholars to 'prove' it. Their proofs are either not reliable or incomplete or contestable: 'voila, the PIE'. They are themselves unreliable (unless they are self-reflecting like Arviddson and Lincoln - in which case they often turn their views on IE around significantly).
I'm through taking their word for it. They'll have to work doubly hard to present their case again, and I fear only an indisputable picture of history is going to convince me to reconsider.
So far, nearly all the scholars that want to say something about 'factual' Indo-Europeans are motivated by a racist dream of IEs (even if some of them are not racist themselves, the dream itself is), building on two centuries of eurocentrist and theologically duplicitous (christian-missionary) 'scholarly' foundations. Last people I'd trust. Not even as far as I could toss 'em.
(6) <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Thank you for reminding me of it for I once wrote something about it and lost it. Now I need to revisit it.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->If you find it, please consider posting it at IF.