Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
OK, so we need to prepare.Digit wrote:In the 'original' Arthurian stories, as told in the Mabinogion, the period is described as a time of great unrest and social upheavel. It speaks of cold wet summers when crops fail and the people are reduced to eating the dead.
The descriptions of the weather suggests that the time period was the 6th C when, IIRC, Iceland was experiencing a major period of vulcanism.
I don't want to assign everything to mythology. It's just that, unlike you, I can tell the difference between history and mythology. Lucius Artorius appears to be real. Arthur was certainly mythical. And I never said anything about size. But this was the name of the family who were famed for their equestrian skills in a military context. They were called the Artorii. If there was only one of them, there would have been no family called the Artorii.Minimalist wrote:Your making an assumption that it was a big family, Ish. We have evidence of one guy who, BTW (in case you missed it) was a real live military commander in Britain. Now, I know you'd prefer to assign everything to mythology but it does seem that this guy was real.
According to whom? The Roman historians? The Celts are still with us and occupying the lands to the west to which they retreated under the Romans, and they're still not fully "Romanized" 1500 years later, (even Henry VIIIth couldn't bring their church to heel) so I damned sure they weren't then!No one would have given a rat's ass what the Celts wanted. The Britons were fully Romanized and when the legions left they were apparently quite sad to see them go.
The Celtic myths are cosmological and anyway knows what myths are how to read them, knows this. It's plain to see.Alas, it's what we've got to work with until we get better data...Minimalist wrote:Ancient numbers, particularly when given by the other side, are notoriously unreliable.
Which is not the same as a kneejerk reflex outright rejection.Minimalist wrote:A little critical thinking is in order.
Yep, the 'Roman Special Forces' that Arthur commanded consisted of warriors from many far-flung lands in the Roman empire. Some of those commandos later became knight's of Arthur's fabled Round Table. I'm sure the Roman army must have had ethnic units, like the British have/had the Ghurkas.John1 wrote:try this on for size then, a dna remnant of Roman cavalry auxillaries in our midst.....
http://www.jogg.info/32/bird.pdf
So a goodly percentile of the British really are couscous, spaghetti, and humus eaters!John1 wrote:The distribution in figure 6 implies a hard core in the area around Chester (Deva) which was the base of Legio XX Valeria Victrix for 200 years, they also were with Paulinus in North Africa before the Boudiccan campaign. The XX also recruited in North Africa (several Centurians) but used Illyian cavalry auxillary troopers hence the Haplogroup E and V13 predominance. 200 years of XX veterans settling in the area?
