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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New York Times
March 28, 2010 Who’s White? By LINDA GORDON
quote: THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE
By Nell Irvin Painter
Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95
Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.
Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their “barbaric” northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.
“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. In some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse, to bleach oneself, is used to mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social and cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin heard my explanations of critical race theory as a denial of observable physical differences.
I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned historian recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.
The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the 18th-century German scholars who invented racial “science.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by imagining them white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct) suspicion that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble, had originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a scale that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest degree of perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement of the human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the different races arose from separate divine creations and were designed with a range of quality.
The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-scientific term for a race known as “white.”
Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, absorbed Blumenbach’s influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They adopted the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and unalloyed descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.
The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of theoretical shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable. When hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior human beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless, eugenic “science” became authoritative from the late 19th century through the 1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states authorizing forced sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against their will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights campaign succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While blacks and American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence testing added many immigrants and others of “inferior stock,” predominantly Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.
In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence” probably did more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite. Researchers gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found that the average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. That experiment in mass testing failed owing to the Army’s insistence that even the lowest ranked usually became model soldiers. But I.Q. testing achieved success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests allowed calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the English at the top, Poles on the bottom. Returning to head measurements, other researchers computed with new categories the proportion of different “blood” in people of different races: Belgians were 60 percent Nordic (the superior European race) and 40 percent Alpine, while the Irish were 30 percent Nordic and 70 percent Mediterranean (the inferior European race). Sometimes politics produced immediate changes in these supposedly objective findings: World War I caused the downgrading of Germans from heavily Nordic to heavily Alpine.
Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the adoration of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale blue-eyed blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of what was second-class about the rest of us. Among the painfully comic absurdities that racial science produced was the “beauty map” constructed by Francis Galton around the turn of the 20th century: he classified people as good, medium or bad; he categorized those he saw by using pushpins and thus demonstrated that London ranked highest and Aberdeen lowest in average beauty.
Rankings of intelligence and beauty supported escalating anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in early-20th-century America. Both prejudices racialized non-Protestant groups. But Painter misses some crucial regional differences. While Jews and Italians were nonwhite in the East, they had long been white in San Francisco, where the racial “inferiors” were the Chinese. Although the United States census categorized Mexican-Americans as white through 1930, census enumerators in the Southwest, working from a different racial understanding, ignored those instructions and marked them “M” for Mexican.
In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a sign of racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.
But I cannot fault Nell Painter’s choices — omissions to keep a book widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.
Linda Gordon is a professor of history at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.”
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Thanks for posting this review. I saw the author on The Today Show. She was very funny, never directly answering any specific questions on book details, or much about white history. She laughed and giggled a lot and answered with obscure meanings. Very smart, and this is very good research.
Not the same interview MK was speaking about, but nonetheless interesting, as Colbert seemed to shut Painter down every time she tried to speak.
But anyway, I wonder if Me-no-brain a.k.a Meninarmer a.k.a MelaninKing lol, thinks he's the only melanin king in the world. He seems to have magical melanin I guess.
Or perhaps we all do have the ability with our melanin but haven't mastered it yet...tell us how it works MK.
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LOL, that's the same interview I saw. Her research is not on melanin, but tracing the beginning of European Racial theory. I don't think it would have been very wise of her to provide too much detail on the show. As Colbert possibly realised, it could have generated a lot of negative response like the one above. The way she responded will likely lead to selling more copies.
I plan on picking it up. Has many details I've always wondered about.
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Like much else concerning history, modern Western Europeans have attempted to make "white" and "white history" the exclusive domain of Western Europe and Britain. In this sense Western Europe becomes the exclusive domain of "whites" and the epitome of it, while the Eastern part of the European family is conveniently left out and ignored all together. This blatant nonsensical history is a product of Euro-Germanic nationalism of the 19th century where Western Europe becomes the center and epitome of "white culture" in Europe.
But the facts are far different. Actually the home and origin of much "white culture" is the Western Eurasian steppes and Southern Russia. And it is from this area, after the great migration initiated by the invasions of central Asian hordes that lay the foundation of the "Germanic white" nation. Aryans do not come from Germany. Aryan is an ancient IndoIranian term which started in Northern Iran and was part of the tradition of the nomadic steppe culture going into Northern India. It is among these people that some of the traditions of horsemanship, knights and armor originate among Europeans. It is this tradition along with those of central Asia that formed the basis of the various Turkic cultures that flourished in Southern Europe and Russia in the Medieval period. These traditions along with ancient Persian, Assyrian and other traditions combined with Asian, African and other cultures during the Islamic period formed the basis of Medieval culture in Europe. An list of these cultures include Klipchaks, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hussar, Cossack, Kurgan and so forth.
But the reason for this amnesia goes primarily back to the fake east/west dichotomy that arose in Europe due to the historic confrontations between Greece, Rome and Persia. Persia, its people and Culture were seen as "the East" even though many Persians were as white as the Greeks and Romans and Persian culture was tremendously influential in Rome. Eastern migrations and influence have always been important to the development of culture in Western Europe, but again using this fake dichotomy, the West has sought to minimize them.
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Doug this is not what the book is about. No group designated "white people", let alone "white man" existed in history until fairly recently.
In fact the concept: white man was invented in America, as a ideology to unite various European groups against the African slaves and hostile Indians.
.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Like much else concerning history, modern Western Europeans have attempted to make "white" and "white history" the exclusive domain of Western Europe and Britain. In this sense Western Europe becomes the exclusive domain of "whites" and the epitome of it, while the Eastern part of the European family is conveniently left out and ignored all together. This blatant nonsensical history is a product of Euro-Germanic nationalism of the 19th century where Western Europe becomes the center and epitome of "white culture" in Europe.
But the facts are far different. Actually the home and origin of much "white culture" is the Western Eurasian steppes and Southern Russia. And it is from this area, after the great migration initiated by the invasions of central Asian hordes that lay the foundation of the "Germanic white" nation. Aryans do not come from Germany. Aryan is an ancient IndoIranian term which started in Northern Iran and was part of the tradition of the nomadic steppe culture going into Northern India. It is among these people that some of the traditions of horsemanship, knights and armor originate among Europeans. It is this tradition along with those of central Asia that formed the basis of the various Turkic cultures that flourished in Southern Europe and Russia in the Medieval period. These traditions along with ancient Persian, Assyrian and other traditions combined with Asian, African and other cultures during the Islamic period formed the basis of Medieval culture in Europe. An list of these cultures include Klipchaks, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hussar, Cossack, Kurgan and so forth.
But the reason for this amnesia goes primarily back to the fake east/west dichotomy that arose in Europe due to the historic confrontations between Greece, Rome and Persia. Persia, its people and Culture were seen as "the East" even though many Persians were as white as the Greeks and Romans and Persian culture was tremendously influential in Rome. Eastern migrations and influence have always been important to the development of culture in Western Europe, but again using this fake dichotomy, the West has sought to minimize them.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: Doug this is not what the book is about. No group designated "white people", let alone "white man" existed in history until fairly recently.
In fact the concept: white man was invented in America, as a ideology to unite various European groups against the African slaves and hostile Indians.
.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Like much else concerning history, modern Western Europeans have attempted to make "white" and "white history" the exclusive domain of Western Europe and Britain. In this sense Western Europe becomes the exclusive domain of "whites" and the epitome of it, while the Eastern part of the European family is conveniently left out and ignored all together. This blatant nonsensical history is a product of Euro-Germanic nationalism of the 19th century where Western Europe becomes the center and epitome of "white culture" in Europe.
But the facts are far different. Actually the home and origin of much "white culture" is the Western Eurasian steppes and Southern Russia. And it is from this area, after the great migration initiated by the invasions of central Asian hordes that lay the foundation of the "Germanic white" nation. Aryans do not come from Germany. Aryan is an ancient IndoIranian term which started in Northern Iran and was part of the tradition of the nomadic steppe culture going into Northern India. It is among these people that some of the traditions of horsemanship, knights and armor originate among Europeans. It is this tradition along with those of central Asia that formed the basis of the various Turkic cultures that flourished in Southern Europe and Russia in the Medieval period. These traditions along with ancient Persian, Assyrian and other traditions combined with Asian, African and other cultures during the Islamic period formed the basis of Medieval culture in Europe. An list of these cultures include Klipchaks, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hussar, Cossack, Kurgan and so forth.
But the reason for this amnesia goes primarily back to the fake east/west dichotomy that arose in Europe due to the historic confrontations between Greece, Rome and Persia. Persia, its people and Culture were seen as "the East" even though many Persians were as white as the Greeks and Romans and Persian culture was tremendously influential in Rome. Eastern migrations and influence have always been important to the development of culture in Western Europe, but again using this fake dichotomy, the West has sought to minimize them.
I agree that the term "white man" as you call it is a concoction. But the point I was making is that part of this concoction was based on a distortion of history that put Western Europe at the pinnacle of "white" history. And from this concoction and distortion of east versus west, comes the concoction of race in America that created the "white man" referenced in this book. In fact, the book actually points out that all whites were not equal in the eyes of ancient Europeans and that distinctions were made on many levels.
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But the facts are far different. Actually the home and origin of much "white culture" is the Western Eurasian steppes and Southern Russia. And it is from this area, after the great migration initiated by the invasions of central Asian hordes that lay the foundation of the "Germanic white" nation.
Are you saying "Germanic folks" trace their ultimate ancestry in central Asia? If so, what genealogical specifics [paternally and maternally] would point to this?
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posted
I love Dr. Nell Painter, and excellent modern day historian; a provocative no holds barred type persona, yet she maintains her cool in the face of adversary. The first book I read from her was the Biography of Sojourner Truth, which the critics attacked because she portrayed her more humble than we are typically taught.
But I agree with the NY Times critique above "In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo. " as people rarely speak about how Western Europeans shift their focus of superiority based on these 'superficial' labels they have assigned to themselves.
Posts: 747 | From: Atlanta, GA USA | Registered: May 2004
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But the facts are far different. Actually the home and origin of much "white culture" is the Western Eurasian steppes and Southern Russia. And it is from this area, after the great migration initiated by the invasions of central Asian hordes that lay the foundation of the "Germanic white" nation.
Are you saying "Germanic folks" trace their ultimate ancestry in central Asia? If so, what genealogical specifics [paternally and maternally] would point to this?
No I am saying that the invasions of central Asians into the Western Steppes and Eastern Europe drove the migrations of IndoEuropean and Indo Aryan populations into Western Europe. These people became part of the Great Migrations. But many lump them all under the term Germanic when that is technically not correct as there were parts of many various ethnic groups involved in this movement. Much of what many consider as Western European cultural traditions actually come from this Eastern Indo Aryan, Indo European base. And it is from this base that the idea of the Great "Aryan" noble derives, but has absolutely nothing to do with "Germanic" Nordic people, as those people referred to as Germanic "barbarians" were people from Gutland or Gothland in Southern Sweden and the Northern (Nordic) lands of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, etc. During the Medieval Period much of Eastern Europe was caught up in the movement of nomads from Central Asia who eventually dominated much of what we now call the Near East and was partly the reason so many indigenous Indo Aryan types and traditions moved West partly as a result of this upheaval.
quote: The analysis of barbarian identity and how it was created and expressed during the Migration Age has elicited deep discussion among scholars. The so-called Primordialistic paradigm enjoyed prominence during the 19th century. Scholars subscribing to this mode of thinking, such as the German linguist Johann Gottfried Herder, viewed tribes to have been reasonably coherent biological (that is racial) entities. Herder employed the term Volk to refer to discrete ethnic groups. He believed that Volk were an organic whole with a core identity and unique spirit which was expressed in art, literature and language. These were seen to be intrinsic characteristics which were timeless and remained unaffected by external influences, even conquest. Language in particular was perceived to be the most important expression of ethnicity. They argued that groups sharing the same, or similar, language possessed a common identity and ancestry. The Romantic ideal that there had once been a single German, Celtic or Slavic people who originated from a common homeland and once spoke a common tongue helped provide a conceptual framework for the political movements of the 18th and 19th centuries (such as German nationalism and Pan-Slavism).
Beginning in the 1960s, a reinterpretation of archaeological and historic evidence prompted many scholars to propose new models for explaining the construction of barbarian identity. Scholars such as Goffart and Todd argue that no sense of shared identity was perceived by the various Germani. A similar reasoning has been proposed for Celtic and Slavic groups. The argument is that the primordialist mode of thinking was encouraged by a prima facie interpretation of Graeco-Roman sources which grouped together many tribes under such labels as Germani, Keltoi or Sclavenoi, perceiving them to represent distinct peoples. Instead, modernists argue that that the uniqueness perceived by specific groups was primarily based on common political and economic interests rather than biological or racial distinctions. Even the role of language in constructing and maintaining group identity was ephemeral, given that large-scale language shifts have been common in history[11]. Essentially, they adhere to the idea of "imagined communities"; that the barbarian polities in Late Antiquity should be viewed as social constructs, rather than timeless and changeless lines of blood kin. The process of forming tribal units was termed ethnogenesis, a term coined by Soviet scholar Julian Bromley. The so-called "Austrian school", led by Reinhard Wenskus, popularized this idea which influenced numerous current medievalists such as Herwig Wolfram, Walter Pohl and Patrick Geary. They argue that the stimulus for forming tribal polities was perpetuated by a small nucleus of people, called the Traditionskern ('kernel of tradition') who were a military or aristocratic elite. This core group formed a standard to set up much larger units, gathering adherents by employing amalgamative metaphors such as kinship and aboriginal commonality, and claiming that they perpetuated an ancient, divinely sanctioned lineage. Any capable soldier would be able to partake in group identity without the requirement of being born into the "tribe". "A victorious campaign confirmed [the leaders] right to rule and drew [to] them an ever-growing people who accepted and shared in their identity". In time, these heterogeneous armies grew into a new people and could even come to possess "a strong belief in a common biological origin". Halsall argues that no objectively definable criterion can be consistently used to distinguish ethnic groups from one another, whether it is language, social customs, geographic habitation, religion or even common origin. "The only common factor in defining ethnicity is belief: in the reality of your group and the difference to others".
...This book argues that the core of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends derives originally from a region known in antiquity as Scythia, that is, the western portion of the great "sea of grass" that stretches from the Altai Mountains to the Hungarian Plain (see map 1). We must therefore take a closer look at several of the ethnic groups that originated in this vast steppe region. Almost all of them spoke languages belonging to what linguists call the Northeast Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian substock of the Indo-European language family; most scholars now think that the linguistic differences among these several groups were minimal and that they not only shared a closely related set of dialects but also a common culture.
quote: C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor's From Scythia to Camelot
by
Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania
The story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table is perhaps the best known legend in the world: witness the widespread infatuation with Camelot some thirty years ago. When I was a student at Dartmouth College about the same time, I was inducted into an old honor society called Casque and Gauntlet. In a most solemn ceremony, each member of the society was bestowed the name of one of the figures in the legend and thenceforth we steeped ourselves in the lore of that merry band of knights (we thought we were being very English). Casque and Gauntlet continues at Dartmouth and there are similar societies on other campuses. As another indication of how much alive the legend is in our own time, I recently saw reported in several major newspapers wire service accounts of the announcements by a lay religious order in Italy and an amateur historian in England that they each possessed the Holy Grail!
Given our intimate familiarity with this hoary tale, it is remarkable how mistaken is our understanding of its origins. Common wisdom considers the legend of King Arthur to be English to the core, while scholarly tomes analyze its presumed Celtic roots. To the average person, it would seem preposterous to assert that the Arthurian cycle is fundamentally Scythian. In the first place, only the tiniest fraction of the population will ever have heard of the Scyths. This only goes to show what a herculean task of reeducation is required in order to comprehend the true outlines of our own history. This splendid revisionist work by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor makes an excellent beginning in that compelling endeavor. One can only hope that its impact will be enormous.
Hundreds of books have been written about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table but, in my estimation, this is far and away the most important to date. Indeed, not only is this the most important book ever written about the legends surrounding King Arthur and his knights, it is also quite simply one of the most significant scholarly works on any subject in the humanities written during this century. My reasons for this glowing approbation will emerge in the following paragraphs.
As we have seen, the current passionate belief is that, to the public, nothing could be more quintessentially "English" (or, for the academic community, "Celtic") than the story of Camelot and the Holy Grail. Yet the authors of this magnificent book prove irrefutably that the very heart of this beloved cycle of legends, not to mention many of its telling details, derives from ancient Iranian peoples whose original home was the Eurasian steppes.
"Scythian" is a vague, catchall term for the Iranian-speaking peoples who ranged across the Eurasian steppes during the first millennium B.C.E. We do not know the specific names of all the tribes involved, but it is a scholarly convention to refer to them collectively and loosely as "Scythian." The best known among them were those who lived around the Pontic Steppes in Classical Antiquity. They were celebrated for their hoards of exquisitely carved golden art in the animal style, their superb horsemanship, their elaborate armor and excellent metal weaponry, their skill as archers, their bravery and strength, and their nomadism. The brethren of the Scyths of Classical Antiquity (who roamed over the steppes northeast of the Black Sea and southwest of the Urals) were stretched out all across Central Asia to the borders of China. The Pontic-Uralian Scyths were succeeded in late classical times by similar Iranian groups such as the Sarmatians and, somewhat later still, by the Alans.
In striving to locate the precise sources of the obviously Iranian components of the Arthurian legends, Littleton and Malcor rightly focus their attention on the lore of the Sarmatians, in particular the Iazyges tribe, and their kinsmen, the Alans. From archeological, artistic, historical, and linguistic evidence, we know that these northern Iranian peoples had a European appearance and that they were often blond-haired and blue-eyed. Temperamentally and culturally as well, they seem to have resembled Europeans in many respects. This is not entirely unexpected for Indo-European peoples who hailed from the western reaches of the Eurasian steppes. Certainly, they were very different from the Iranian peoples who moved south (the Persians and the Medes) and mixed with the indigenous peoples there. They had even fewer affinities with the later steppe nomads who came from the east and who spoke entirely different languages (the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols).
The last surviving remnants of these ancient northern Iranian peoples are the Ossetians. The Ossetians are now living in the Caucasus Mountains, whence they were pushed by Mongols and other nomads from the east. Though threatened politically, militarily, and culturally from many directions, they still maintain their surprisingly archaic Iranian language and with it a body of oral narrative referred to as the Nart sagas. The Nart sagas constitute the best repository of the ancient western Scythian narratives that were transported to Britain and Gaul from the Pontic-Uralian steppes by peoples such as the Sarmatians and the Alans during the declining days of the Roman Empire. The Nart sagas contain parallels with Arthurian legend so numerous and so uncannily close that it is impossible they are unrelated.
The authors begin their argument with the archeological underpinnings that reach back into the second millennium B.C.E. They then move on to records of classical writers such as Herodotus and Ammianus Marcellinus. Through such sources, they follow the movements of various groups of northern Iranians as they spread out from the North Caucasus and the Pontic-Uralian Steppes. Moving outward, these groups impinged on surrounding areas, including the Mediterranean littoral and Europe. In the course of their wanderings, they came into contact, and eventually conflict, with the Romans. A key battle is that in which the Sarmatians were defeated by the forces of Marcus Aurelius. This was the so-called Marcomannian War of 175 C.E., after which 5,500 Iazyges were forcibly sent to Britain as armored auxiliary cavalry, primarily to bolster the defenses along Hadrian's Wall. It was this large infusion of Sarmatians that brought the first layers of the Arthurian cycle to Britain. The overwhelming majority of these fine warriors never returned to their homeland, but remained in veterans' settlements such as the one at Bremetennacum Veteranorum, a major Roman cavalry post near the modern town of Ribchester in Lancashire.
The next major northern Iranian inputs to Arthurian tradition arrive with the Alans. There is no doubt that the Alans were Iranians. Indeed, their name is probably a phonological transformation of the name "Iran" itself, which is in turn a variation of "Aryan". (It is worth noting that the major dialect of the Ossetians, Iron, is yet another permutation of the same word which means essentially "noble".) The authors provide an extremely detailed study of the historical sources concerning the Alans in Europe. This diligent spadework should convince all but the most obdurate xenophobe that not all of European history and culture was locally self-generated. It should also serve as a desperately needed model for practitioners of cultural history in other parts of the world.
As I have posted before, much of what we call "Medieval Culture" actually originated in Persia, Mesopotamia, The Steppes, Central Asia, Africa, Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. But it is from the steppes and Northern Iran where much of the horse culture and warfare traditions originate as seen in many parts of the world. In fact Aryan is a concept that originates among populations ranging from Iran to the Steppes and into India. And many of these traditions were transmitted to the West via the migrations of Indo Persian peoples both as part of the Great Migrations, but also as part of the Armies of Islam and as part of the cultural sphere of the Byzantine Empire. It is not something that originates with Nordic "Germanics". Much of this distortion comes not only from the German Nationalist movements of the 18th and 19th century but the east/west divide that occurred in Greece and Rome via wars with Persia and followed in the Crusading Era. All of which placed an emphasis on the "Germanic" Nordic kingdoms that eventually became what we now call the states of Western Europe. But at that time there was no "Germany" to speak of as opposed to various warlords allied with Christianity under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire. Because of this power split between the Holy Roman West and the Eastern Roman, Islamic and Pagan East, the roots of much of the cultural traits became lost.
And no I am not saying all these traditions came from white Aryans, but rather that their traditions and those of others lay the foundations for the Medieval "West".
quote: The earliest epigraphically-attested reference to the word ariya occurs in the 6th century BCE Behistun inscription, which describes itself to have been composed "in ariya [language or script]". As is also the case for all other Old Iranian language usage, the ariya of the inscription does not signify anything but "Iranian".
This is partly what Miss Painter seems to be getting at in her book, which I just bought by the way.
Chivalry, Jousting and Man to Man combat:
quote: The most detailed description of wrestling used in actual warfare comes from the historian Procopius, writing of the Roman (Eastern Roman, or Byzantine)-Persian war in the 6th Century A.D. The following is his remarkable account of two duels between a Roman wrestling teacher and two Persian professional soldiers (Procopius, History of the Wars I.XIII.29):
"But one Persian, a young man, riding up very close to the Roman army, began to challenge all of them, calling for whoever wished to do battle with him. And no one of the whole army dared face the danger, except a certain Andreas, one of the personal attendants of Bouzes, not a soldier nor one who had ever practised at all the business of war, but a trainer of youths in charge of a certain wrestling school in Byzantium. Through this it came about that he was following the army, for he cared for the person of Bouzes in the bath; his birthplace was Byzantium. This man alone had the courage, without being ordered by Bouzes or anyone else, to go out of his own accord to meet the man in single combat. And he caught the barbarian while still considering how he should deliver his attack, and hit him with his spear on the right breast. And the Persian did not bear the blow delivered by a man of such exceptional strength, and fell from his horse to the earth. Then Andreas with a small knife slew him like a sacrificial animal as he lay on his back, and a mighty shout was raised both from the city wall and from the Roman army. But the Persians were deeply vexed at the outcome and sent forth another horseman for the same purpose, a manly fellow and well favoured as to bodily size, but not a youth, for some of the hair on his head already shewed grey. This horseman came up along the hostile army, and, brandishing vehemently the whip with which he was accustomed to strike his horse, he summoned to battle whoever among the Romans was willing. And when no one went out against him, Andreas, without attracting the notice of anyone, once more came forth, although he had been forbidden to do so by Hermogenes. So both rushed madly upon each other with their spears, and the weapons, driven against their corselets, were turned aside with mighty force, and the horses, striking together their heads, fell themselves and threw off their riders. And both the two men, falling very close to each other, made great haste to rise to their feet, but the Persian was not able to do this easily because his size was against him, while Andreas, anticipating him (for his practice in the wrestling school gave him this advantage), smote him as he was rising on his knee, and as he fell again to the ground dispatched him. Then a roar went up from the wall and from the Roman army as great, if not greater, than before; and the Persians broke their phalanx and withdrew to Ammodios, while the Romans, raising the pæan, went inside the fortifications; for already it was growing dark. Thus both armies passed that night."
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Ha! Ha! Ha! Can't make up their minds where white people came from.
These guys are always flip flopping.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
quote:Originally posted by The Explorer: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M:
But the facts are far different. Actually the home and origin of much "white culture" is the Western Eurasian steppes and Southern Russia. And it is from this area, after the great migration initiated by the invasions of central Asian hordes that lay the foundation of the "Germanic white" nation.
Are you saying "Germanic folks" trace their ultimate ancestry in central Asia? If so, what genealogical specifics [paternally and maternally] would point to this?
No I am saying that the invasions of central Asians into the Western Steppes and Eastern Europe drove the migrations of IndoEuropean and Indo Aryan populations into Western Europe. These people became part of the Great Migrations. But many lump them all under the term Germanic when that is technically not correct as there were parts of many various ethnic groups involved in this movement. Much of what many consider as Western European cultural traditions actually come from this Eastern Indo Aryan, Indo European base. And it is from this base that the idea of the Great "Aryan" noble derives, but has absolutely nothing to do with "Germanic" Nordic people, as those people referred to as Germanic "barbarians" were people from Gutland or Gothland in Southern Sweden and the Northern (Nordic) lands of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, etc. During the Medieval Period much of Eastern Europe was caught up in the movement of nomads from Central Asia who eventually dominated much of what we now call the Near East and was partly the reason so many indigenous Indo Aryan types and traditions moved West partly as a result of this upheaval.
quote:
Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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xyyman - In fairness you have to give a little slack there. In antiquity, Asia was a very complicated place, with ALL the types of Humanity; Blacks, Whites, Mongols, all vying for advantage and supremacy.
To complicate things even more for us today, we now know that there is no "Uniquely White" haplogroup - though there may be a subgroup, which makes it difficult to trace Whites genetically.
But with all that has been revealed recently, perhaps Whites will now abandon their efforts at bamboozling the notion of being Europeans, and put some energy into tracing their REAL roots in Asia.
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quote:Originally posted by MelaninKing: LOL, that's the same interview I saw. Her research is not on melanin, but tracing the beginning of European Racial theory. I don't think it would have been very wise of her to provide too much detail on the show. As Colbert possibly realised, it could have generated a lot of negative response like the one above. The way she responded will likely lead to selling more copies.
I plan on picking it up. Has many details I've always wondered about.
@ Mike. Again. . here is where the proof is in the pudding. There isn't a uniquely major white haplo.
What about Hg-I? We know that Hg-R isn't uniquely white. Because even Black Africans carry the down stream R1b*.
The more I understand this genetics thing the more I realize that lineage only tells "part" of the story.
I think the genetic haplo-typing is the key. And this should with female skeletons from pre-history and early history. Using modern day population does not tell the whole story.
And "they" have the haplotype database that will tell the story already.
==== Quote: To complicate things even more for us today, we now know that there is no "Uniquely White" haplogroup - though there may be a subgroup, which makes it difficult to trace Whites genetically.
But with all that has been revealed recently, perhaps Whites will now abandon their efforts at bamboozling the notion of being Europeans, and put some energy into tracing their REAL roots in Asia.
===
Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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Precisely. 
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