kbs2244 wrote:
Trade drives city locations. Even Tomboccctou and Katmandu.
Like Atlanta, Timbuktu – slap-bang in the middle of the world's biggest sand box – is on a major crossing of thousands years old (camel) caravan trails.
For trade.
God knows the only reason to go to such a place is to make a buck.
But apart from 'reasons' for trade, you also need means for trade! Trade means cargo. Cargo means transportation problems far bigger than just people travelling.
How are you going to get your cargo a hundred miles upstream, or along the coast, without robust cargo sailing boats? Mere dinghies won't do the job of cargo hauling.
Did 'they' have "robust cargo sailing boats" in the late pleistocene or early holocene?
Sofar, there's no indication they did.
Reasoning back the other way RS, if the trade routes existed thousands of years ago then there must have been goods to trade, so even if we can't work how to move the goods they must have.
If the flow isn't too great poling up river will do the job, this is one instant where I think rafts would be a help, they are normally shallow draft vessels.
First people deny a thing, then they belittle it, then they say it was known all along! Von Humboldt
Digit wrote:
If the flow isn't too great poling up river will do the job, this is one instant where I think rafts would be a help, they are normally shallow draft vessels.
To pull cargo, in boats or on rafts, upstream, big, strong pulling animals are required. Like oxen, horses, or camels.
Did late-pleistocene or early holocene man husband large domesticated animals like that?
Again, sofar there is no indication they did.
So, afaic long-distance trade did not develop until the middle of the holocene.
When you say “cargo” it bring up the concept of tons of stuff.
But trade goods can be pretty small and light.
Besides, most of the heavy stuff would be going downstream. Timber, ore, bulk grain, etc. You would just float it downstream.
The upstream stuff would be smaller and lighter manufactured goods. A pair of strong legs, or a donkey, even sheep would do well as a “cargo” carrier.
(I have read that even today, the traditional salt south and gold north trade going through Katmandu is carried on the backs of sheep. Less than 10 lbs per animal. The trails are so bad that not even a donkey can walk them. Men, sheep, or goats. And sheep are more docile then goats.)
And Timbuktu is really on the edge of the sandbox. The camels cannot go further south because their foot pads begin to rot when walking on the damp earth south of the Niger River. It and Gao were points where one kind of transportation transferred to another. Camel to human backs.
In effect, they were inland ports.
The first thing that "trade" implies is that you have something that someone wants and they have something that you want. On a small scale, occasional trade between HG groups that happen to bump into each other, this seems simple enough.
What R/S is talking about are high-level institutionalized trade routes and it just seems that this would take a long time to develop. For that matter the state bureaucracy that would develop because of an agricultural lifestyle would have to expand to handle matters of international trade. None of this can be done overnight but must be seen as an ongoing process of growing agrarianism, commerce and state power.
None of which answers the initial question of WHY did they start marching down that road in the first place?
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Oops! Thought it was a typo for 'pulling'.
Yes, poling could work (done it often). But, on rivers, only one way: downstream. Upstream poling is nigh impossible.
I will bow to your personal experience RS.
I have never been there.
I am strictly an armchair tourist of that part of the world.
Maybe it was the camel drivers that were uncomfortable south of the river?
wrote:The Aryans were *NOT* conquerers, but *assimilators*. They adopted useful bits of culture wherever they found it, and then delivered it to other regions. Thus we all know what a Karoke machine is.
It makes the Aryans look as if they invented everything. But largely because they were matriarchic, they didnt have the usual "not invented here" attitude twards new cultural traits.
.
What do you mean by Aryans? Who were they? Where was their homeland? What was their language? Where are they now?
Kind of sneaky, isn’t it.
They have “assimilated” and don’t exist anymore.
It is kind of like the Mafia. They have learned it is better to blend in.
Ever since hitler, "Aryan" has been a bad word. Nobody want to be "Aryan" but skinheads.
"There is no such thing as the Mafia. It is a Hollywood dream."
The term 'Aryan' was coopted by the Nazis, but some of us are trying to take it back, if for no other reason, than until the time of the Nazis, historians often used the word... to refer to a somewhat mythic people, who spoke what is now also called "Proto-Indo-European.
'Aryan' is a somewhat less cumbersome term. The Fins & Basques speak a non Aryan language, but all the rest of European languages descend from Aryan.
Sykes, "The Seven Daughters of Eve" shows that Europe has only 7 mtDNA lines, but other sources show that there are over 60 Y chromosome lines, some also found in Semetic areas. So, the 'Aryans' are not the sons of any patriarchs like Abraham, but the descendants of seven sisters. Who have adopted others into the family. Or so the Iranians and some Indians believe.
The earliest trace of the Aryan language was found in an obscure Turkish valley, where the locals still use the original Aryan words for grains, fields, & livestock. This fits well with the pottery style found in Chalcolithic SE Europe where Aryan civilization really got going 7000 years ago. But it is in the Anatolian cities like Chatal Hoyuk were the original syncretic process began 10,000 years ago.
DNA reveals that wheat, that iconic Aryan crop, descended from einkorn still growing in the Taurus mtns. The first pottery, 8000 years old,.was found in Eastern Turkey. The frescos of the Anatolian cities show us oxen dragging the first plows.
The first dozen cities, on the closed drainage basin on the Anatolian plateau, were abandoned near the end of the 7th mil BCE. A few others were founded, but the bulk of the culture moved North to where the land was more fertile and the rain more reliable.
Gimbutas, Mallory, and many others have long had debates about where the original homeland of the Aryans was. One reason it was never found, was that nobody thot to look on the bottom of the Black Sea.
The Aryan vocabulary includes lotsa words for fresh water craft, lakes, swamps, creeks, rivers, fish, technology etc, but no words for the salt water ecosystem, so everyone ruled out the Black Sea area. But now we know the basin had fresh water in the era of Aryan unity.
But even then, Aryan was not a race, but a hybrid. Hodder reports caucasoid, alpine, and semetic skulls have been found at Chatal Hoyuk and the other 8th mil cities. But like the Aryans today, the technological innovation sucked energetic people out of other tribes.
They spread agriculture up the Danube, Bug, Dneipr rivers, and established trading posts, one of which was found outside Paris from 5000 BCE. It wasnt their race that marked them out, it was matriarchy amidst the usual array of primitive patriarchic hunting tribes in all directions.
They were not easy targets. In an era when the hunting tribe was limited to 50 warriors, they organized cities with thousands. And while the hunters needed 25 square miles of territory for each hunter, the Aryans only needed 3 square miles for a whole agrarian village of 50-150, with strings of villages every 3km up & down both banks of the rivers. The tels are still there.
The Aryans didnt look any different from the warrior tribes, but they were, in large part because of matriarchic rule, far more able to organize. when you have male leaders, you tend to get too many chiefs, and not enuf Indians. which is going on in Iraq right now.
But then, as now, young women heard about, or visited while trading, and saw the power of women in the community, and the smarter, more energetic women left mysogenistic tribes for what they saw as a better way to live. The 5000 year old graveyard at Varna Bulgaria proves the point. The men lived into their late 30's, the women into their middle 40's, a longevity not seen again until the late 19th century.
But 6000 years ago, was when the Aryans began affecting other cultures because of the domestication of the horse. In some ways, a perfect storm. When the horse came into SE Europe, so did Anthrax, and the whole region was abandoned for generations. But going out on the horse were, as Mallory put it , the "gracile" Cucuteni women, who averaged 50kg in an era when the horses were only137cm at the withers.
Being a big strong warrior no longer mattered. The women could ride a horse faster than he could run, and he was too heavy for the horse. Aryan culture moved onto the Steppes, going all the way to China, where we know them as the Tocharians.
then as now, the Steppes had droughts that drove the Aryans south looking for anything green. But when they came down into India or Persia, what they ran into were 'civilizations' of serfs & slaves run by goon squads and kings. 100,000 Aryan nomads shows up, and just like Atilla, the slave class sees a chance for new management, and there's a revolution.
All brought to them by women who could care less. But historians, having to pander to the sensibilities of the warrior class that took over after the Aryans went back to the Steppe, had to characterize them as a mighty army.
But being mobile, they became merchants, opening up trade routes, and the Aryan language was the lingua franco of business just as English is now, and used among populations that know of it, but dont speak it.
So- the Aryans go back a long ways, but you can never nail them down to any particular place very long, or say just who they were. They were always getting energetic people added to their gene pool from whatever race. Any boy who did not want to be a slave for the rest of his life could steal enuf food and run after a camel train as it passed thru town. All he hadda do was stay ahead of a goon squad sent after him. 5 days was ordinarily sufficient to the purpose, and no matter what his race, he became an 'Aryan'.
Any god watching me hasta be bored, and needs to get a life.
Gimbutas, Mallory, and many others have long had debates about where the original homeland of the Aryans was. One reason it was never found, was that nobody thot to look on the bottom of the Black Sea.
The Aryan vocabulary includes lotsa words for fresh water craft, lakes, swamps, creeks, rivers, fish, technology etc, but no words for the salt water ecosystem, so everyone ruled out the Black Sea area. But now we know the basin had fresh water in the era of Aryan unity.
So did Bradbourne Lakes, just down the road from me....maybe that was the Aryan homeland then? Goodness! I shall get someone to drag them immediately!
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there is no Aryan language. I think you are referring to the PIE (Proto-Indo-European ) language that was invented (by working backwards from languages that had Sanskrit as their basis) by 19th century Indologists in the pay of the British Raj who wished to prove that the Vedas was written by Europeans (i.e them!).
Daybrown, you obviously have a taste for bad fiction, so let me give you some, based on fact:
The British/German translators found the word "arya" in the one of the Indian Vedic books, the most ancient scripture in the world. In the Vedas, the word 'arya' means, in Sanskrit "noble" but it means it in spiritual terms, that someone is noble or pure in heart, not that someone is an aristocrat. But of course, the British/German translators didn't understand that, so they thought "Hmmm...noble...that means us. We're noble....I mean, these brown guys obviously aren't...they're all running around with bones through their noses, worshipping strange gods and burning their wives, whereas we know how to conduct ourselves with all due decorum at a garden party and we've got the True and Only God on our side. And anyway, how could any of these primitive heathens come up with such sublime poetry? So these Aryans must have been white like us...of course, they were damned fine Europeans or Scandinavians or Russians or even Turks (who never have been sure whether they're European or not, have they?)."
It may not have happened exactly like that ....but I don't think it's far off and I believe it's more plausible than your "Five days to be an Aryan" third rate, straight-to-video movie.
And, as time went on, their story fell apart - as there was no archaeological evidence for an Aryan race that spoke a PIE language. And the only linguistic "evidence" (if you can call it that) has been cobbled together by those who had (and still do have) a vested interest, mainly at Harvard (not mentioning any names - at this stage anyway!). I notice you mention, in an earlier post, that there wasn't an Aryan invasion of India, just a sort of infiltration - and you're just repeating, word-for-word, the Harvard mafia's fallback position that they've been forced to retreat to in the light of no evidence for any Aryans whatsoever, invading or otherwise.
daybrown wrote:
The Aryans didnt look any different from the warrior tribes, but they were, in large part because of matriarchic rule, far more able to organize. when you have male leaders, you tend to get too many chiefs, and not enuf Indians. which is going on in Iraq right now.
You might also have noticed that the pictures at Catal Hoyuk are of black/brown people.
I'm guessing when you, or the authors of whatever that dreadful stuff is that you're reading say 'Aryans', they just mean 'people' or 'various tribes and races who came together in the only fertile dry bit of the world after the Ice Age'. So why call them 'Aryans'? There is no evidence for any Aryans. It was just a misundertanding of the British imperialists. Sorry...
