Hegemony...

[daybrown]

Until the rise of the Mongols, and then Islam, Central Asia was a very diverse place. But the greed of hegemony raised prices so much that Europeans sought, and found, a sea route around it, and thus the Silk Road, which had existed for millenia, was abandoned.

The greed of male rulers had killed the cash cow. But if we look at the situation before the Mongols, what we see is that the Silk Road is actually several routes from the Black Sea to the Jade Gate, where the Northern route thru southern Siberia, the Central route along the south edge of the Tien Shen mtns, and the southern route along the north edge of the Himalays, all converge on the Jade Gate.

From there West, its all independent city states until you reach the hegemony of the Roman, Persian, or Byzantine empires. Banditry was bad for business, but so was war. There's been a lot of it in the west end of the Silk Road, but the East went thru the Taklamakhan desert, and it had a reputation of swollowing up armies. Some of the springs mite, at any one time, have enuf water for a caravan, but not an army.

Sometimes too, there'd be flash floods, a new channel would be cut, and the river would move over. This happened to Niya & Loulan. The Chinese found a graveyard in the West end of the desert this year, but I've not yet read if they found the city yet.

But satellite radar suggests this kind of thing has been going on since the end of the ice age. But at Niya, Loulan, Kucha, Urumchi, and the other Eastern cities in the desert, much more of the daily life of the ancients, as well as the documents they wrote, have been preserved.

There's no mention of warfare among them. Nor is there any evidence in the ruins up until the Mongol invasions. For *thousands* of years, sets of independent city states existed trading peacefully with each other. Satellite radar revealed one in the Kara Kum last year from the compressed soils of the trade routes that led to it before the Pyramids were built.

Nobody knew it was there. It didnt *have* a city wall. If we go further west, and back in time another thousand years, we can find Tripolye on the Dneipr. Not so much a city as an industrial zone with pottery, tanning, slaughterhouses, weaving or whatever at various nearby specialist villages and what looks a lot like a main shopping area. No city wall.

And if we go back a thousand years before Tripolye, down to the Danube, we can see the hundreds of village tells and dozens of market towns that dated back before the 6th mil, all without leaving signs of defensive works.

Walls have been found at a few points along the periphery of the Danubians, & a copper mine in Southern Germany. But you can dig down, as Goodison and Morris did, in a virgin tel, in "Ancient Goddesses" to look for a general layer of burnt rubble such as is always left after a place has been sacked... and it aint there.

Hodder digs down thru 1500 years of occupation at Chatal Hoyuk, and he dont find any evdience of warfare or revolution either.

Castledon looks at Knossus and Akrotiri, and notes the same thing. No defensive works, no evidence of warfare until the Mycenaean invasion.

So- from the Anatolian cities to Kucha, nearly 8000 years later, what do they all have in common that avoids warfare? Matriarchy. You can trace the writing & fabric technology of Kucha all the way back to Europe and the era of the original Aryan agrarians.

EW Barber, The Mummies of Urumchi, points out how the Tocharians, who we know spoke an Aryan language, wrote in a Sanskrit font, and did that even with goose quill on Birchbark (dig it- these people live in a desert. I dunno where they get goose feathers and birchbark) but used wool with DNA from European sheep. wove it in twill, which the Chinese never did, dyed it in plaid, which the Chinese never did, and Barber even shows us a sample that is classic *tartan*.

Its reasonable to assume that the matriarchic system the Tocharians had, was not invented on the spot, but brought with by their Amazon heritage, which had got it from Tripolye, which had inherited it from the Danubians, and all the way back to the Anatolian revolution 8000 years ago.

So- the Aryans had cultural hegemony, but it was NOT military. It was mercantile. and just like today, women offered a lower cost of management. All these cities traded, and were in competition with each other. You could not tax the shit out of people cause the competent craftsmen voted with their feet by moving to the next town. The sheer vastness of the Steppe made it too easy for people to slip away from repression.

women were better at using the velvet glove. And when you look into the sexual practices, you see fuzzy cunts had a lot to do with it. And if a man wanted to get laid, it helped if he knew the Aryan language. Just like English today, no matter where you went, an Aryan language was used in business and brothels.

[Beagle]

DB, I made mention of city walls in an earlier post, before I read this. Surprising if true, as I thought most early urban centers were "walled".

Thanks for the names of these cities, some of which I haven't heard before. I'll read more about them.

[Ishtar]

women were better at using the velvet glove. And when you look into the sexual practices, you see fuzzy cunts had a lot to do with it. And if a man wanted to get laid, it helped if he knew the Aryan language. Just like English today, no matter where you went, an Aryan language was used in business and brothels.

Hi Daybreak

It takes more than a fuzzy cunt to establish a successful matriarchy. How it worked was like this:

The head of a tribe, it was true, was a woman...but it was actually her brother who held the power.

Who she mated with was not so important, so long as he was a healthy specimen and alpha male, as it was important to bring a variety of genes into the pool. But it was definitely a case of "have him scrubbed and brought to my tent", after which proceedings, the guy was usually dismissed.

By the way, that god whose job it is to watch over you? He said to tell you that you're quite right, he is bored out of his gourd and so would you please get a life.

[Rokcet Scientist]

women were better at using the velvet glove. And when you look into the sexual practices, you see fuzzy cunts had a lot to do with it.

Sorry to interrupt, but, pray, what is a "fuzzy cunt"? That's a colloquialism – maybe 'slang' to you – I don't immediately recognize.
Or you must mean French women?

And if a man wanted to get laid, it helped if he knew the Aryan language. Just like English today, no matter where you went, an Aryan language was used in business and brothels.

An impressive display of a level of intimate knowledge of business and brothels in central Asia, many millennia ago, that I could never even hope to equal of today's business and brothels!

Chapeau!

[kbs2244]

D B, you do seem to have an obsession.
But at the same time, you seem to have a deceit, if unconventional, knowledge and concept of history.
That makes you posts, at the least, entertaining and they often have enough in them to provoke more research.
But, if you are not married, you ought to check out the local roadhouse next Sat night. You may learn that the world hasn't changed all that much. And most of the beer I have drunk in the Ozarks didn't have too much sugar in it.