h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I thought we'd better move the conversation out of the Virgo thread.

Like the Anglo-saxons, the Celts were invaders. Their homeland was in the area of europe which is now the south Russian steppe.

See http://www.ibiblio.org/gaelic/celts.html
and http://www.celtica.wales.com/hanesfa/celtiaid/index.english.html

Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

So, are you identifying them with the Cimmerians? The shared homeland may have been around the Baltic as well I understand and may have been occupied eight thousand years ago according to linguists. That gave 80 centuries for the current distribution of related languages to develop.

In the same period, we are supposed to believe that New World people developed 300 to 500 mutually unintelligable languages from an initial root from Siberia. Something seems amiss, don't you agree?

So then, who are the aboriginal northern Europeans? Sami, no doubt and possibly Basque. The Boreal still holds many small indigenous tribes, commonly thought of as Siberian, and like their New World counterparts, largely ignored or marginalized.

The Celts on the otherhand seem of to have gotten a good deal of attention from the architects of history. How do they relate to Germans, a term the Romans (Tacitus) apparently applied to either people?

The reason I ask is because these are the displaced people that for the most part colonized North America with rather disasterous results for some people. Understanding the motivations of such pirates might help us comprehend not only the historical context but the contemporary one as well.

That the former lords of the Great European Plain and the forests should now be marginalized in a modern nationstate venue largely of Germanic (Holy Roman Empire) origin seems to relate to the causes for migration to the Western Hemisphere and other areas of the world under the aegis of colonialism.

That the reverse didn't happen, (ie - colonization of Euroasia by indians) suggests a fundamental difference in cultural, political, or economic expectations maybe. If that's true, it might be valuable to analyze the difference to determine how best to mitigate the current environmental and political crises that vex the world at large.

Phew! Big qustion.
The Keltoi (barbarian tribes) were, I believe, a great deal older than 8,000 years. See this site for the Aryan Myth
http://www.geocities.com/narenp/history/info/frawley.htm

Alji

Maybe so, but your citation doesn't say that. What it does assert is that the invasions came from India. If we fill in the blanks in your argument, we conclude that these invasions generally trended from east to west, originating in the subcontinent, and presumably terminating in the Balkans and in the British Isles sometime prior to 1000 BCE?

Maybe a more pertinent point is that if the etymology of the term Celt or Kelt is correct, then it doesn't necessarily apply to any specific language group or tribal confederation. So we conclude we don't know who these people were from the accounts provided by Classical historians.

On the otherhand, the Greeks already had a word for barbarians, which was essentially the same word we use, so why would they have another one? Maybe "keltoi" meant something more specific than "barbaroi"?

We still can't distinguish between indo-european or aryan language groups based on Classical writings either from the Romans, Greeks, or Vedics. All we really know is that there is an apparent affinity between modern or near-modern language groups we classify as Celtic. We also classify Germanic language groups in similar fashion, but separately from the Celtic. Is this a natural division or arbitrary? How does it relate to the classification of Greek or Latin? Does any of this relate to cultural affinities?

Be that as it may, if people are dispossessed of land and resources on account of their language or culture, does this not make them prime candidates for emmigration?

By the way, this isn't the first time I've seen the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory discounted. It's been questioned in the Balkans as well where the tradition of the Dorians invading the Mycenaean civilization has been disputed on archeological grounds. So if none of these invasions actually took place but the previously asserted target civilizations of these non-events in fact collapsed, how do we explain that? Given that we don't actually know who we're talking about, it seems rather vain to assume we can explain any of this, don't you think?

By the way, do you have any sources that use the original celtic tongues, rather than Latin or Greek accounts? I understand at least some Celts had a written language called Ogham that was used primarily for divination, but I'm wondering if the Romans, like the Spaniards in Mexico and Guatemala, destroyed native written accounts as part of their conquest of the Galli and British.

Clearly the Celtic culture, particularly in Wales and Ireland, is rich in literary traditions. The subsequent embracing of Latin learning tends to suggest a prior tradition of documented learning that may have been carried over into the new "official" language. If so, we should look at that tradition, as much as can be recovered, for the answers rather than simply recapitulating the accounts of the Classical authors. In that way, we may come to learn if the "Indo" in "Indo-European" ought to be given preference or not.

I still don't see that the origin of the chariot has any significance whatever. You might as well assert that the bow was invented in the river valleys of India or some other locality and you would be equally wrong because its invention cannot be associated with any specific linguistic or cultural group and so very likely its independent invention occurred at various places and times. The same should apply to the chariot. That the chariot has previously been associated with the aforementioned Aryan Invasion Theory doesn't change things. In fact it might further discredit that theory.

It's possible the Nazis weren't the first to distort ostensibly Aryan traditions for contemporary political purposes after all. This might suggest that there really never were any Aryans, that they were and continue to be the figments of the tyrannical European imagination.

The Welsh word arian means money and silver. The Sanskrit aryan means noble.
The Druids used Greek letters. Ogham insriptions are mainly a simple means of writing using groups of lines for letters e.g. ||| /// ||
scratched either side of a long line or the corner of a stone block.

I've got to have a cup of tea and think about this.

Alji

Hope you dont mind me butting in, but I think that there is a fairly major point that you're missing. It is traditional to think of history as distinct groups occupying distinct areas of land, but this is based of a false assumption. The Celts, as the first example, may well have started off as one group, but as they enter recorded history, had brought the products of intermingling - an example above is a knowledge of greek.
Around Coburg (where I have just had my entry accepted for - A825644 - read it, its great) there is a Celtic hill fort used from 4000 bc until roman times, by which time it had become a sizeable town. So they didn't all leave for Wales and Ireland, they became integrated with what was around them. They are also recorded as smelting iron and salt, with advanced tecniques, as trading items. Items were found at Cadbury castle, another hill fort, abandoned 300 ad, that originated from India, so we can suppose that there was regular exchange of goods, ideas and languages well before recorded history.
Equally, the Celts were invaders, but didn't displace the people who were here before (Recent DNA tests prove this), instead they brought a language, culture and traditions that the existing folk watched, decided that they were an improvement on what they had, and adopted. Romans, Christians, vikings, you name it, there was blood shed (which made the headlines !), but the general rule is assimilation.

The Celts had a similar storytelling tradition to the greeks, Homer wasn't written down for hundreds of years after he first wrote, or orated. Bards and Druids were attributed with phenominal memories, and were required to learn family trees, laws, folklore etc. It is known that wealthy families sent representitives of their families to Anglesey, to attend the Druidic there, from mainland Europe. Handing knowledge on in this way ensured that the culture was 'living' ie evolving, rather than stagnating. Pre-christian cultures were wary of writing thing down for fear that it then became immuteable.
I like this idea, look at the example of a system of law.
Laws are usually only made, banning things. Over a perion of time more and more things get banned and the system gets more unwieldy.
consecutive law makers have an ever smaller range of things that they can influence, thus the laws passed get more and more trivial. In the end almost nothing is allowed, and only lawyers with years of training can understand the muddle.
Its a bit extreme, but it illustrates the point. Most of the earliest writings have been inventories - lists of things - they could have written stories - the tools existed, but wouldn't see the point in it. A pre-history way of coping with the information overload..

Ackalon, this may interest you
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/history/renderplain.pl?file=/history/ancient/prehistory/peoples_01.shtml

Rita, I don't think we have to go back into prehistory to discover the truth about the treatment of native Americans by the European Invaders. It has more to do with religion and the belief that America was the Land of Milk and Honey. The native Americans were not even seen as human so killing them off was no big deal. Black slaves were were also justified by the Bible.


Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

Excuse me, Alji, and with all due respect, but I think very much we do need to go back into prehistory.

America wasn't a land of milk and honey until Columbus blundered into it trying to find a way to Southeast Asia. Once America was located in this fashion, the British spent a good deal of time and effort trying to find a Northwest Passage through it to the same place as Columbus was trying to get to.

The question then is what were either Columbus or the British doing trying to sail halfway around the world? That's the real point people seem to miss.

Geologically speaking, Europe is one of the richest continents on earth in terms of mineral resources and glacially created soils. Why then did her people become so desperate that they had to cross 3000 miles of open water to find "a land of milk and honey" or more correctly pepper and nutmeg, since that's what they were looking for in first place?

Why was long distance trade so crucial to sustaining Europeans that they established at huge cost colonies all over the world, colonies that rarely if ever could support themselves?

I'm sorry I don't recall the other person's name who has contributed to this discussion heroically, but I think that person has missed some things as well.

Assimilation isn't the rule. It's imposed by rulers.

When two or more language groups meet under more or less benign circumstances such as in furtherance of trade, the language that developes among the groups is called by linguists a pidgun or creole. It's a simplied combination of the languages involved.

For example, I suspect the people of Yorkshire rarely characterize their dialect as a pidgun of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon but that's exactly what it derives from. If you strip English of the veneer provided by several thousand Greek or Latin derivatives in the lexicon, you have a tongue that is basically a form of Low German. That this is the case can be readily discerned by reading Chaucer.

So where's the pidgun Celtic? Would it be Lowland Scots? Maybe we should all have a cup of tea, the greener the better, and consider that one.

Whatever else you can say about the Celts, they seem to have had a very clear and stubborn perception of themselves as a separate people with aboriginal claims to the lands they inhabited. In this respect they were very similar to many American indian people. I don't expect admirers of Anglo-French culture to comprehend this in the least, which is the point I think that was made with the Welsh Not article.

Which brings me back to the original point which was desperation. Whatever we may or may not think about assimilation, the fact remains that a huge number of Scots emmigrated to the New World after they were fenced out of their commons and the Irish did the same thing when they were given the choice of becoming Protestants or starving.

Therefore, I respectfully submit that this whole process ultimately derives from people trying to force other people to assimilate for the implicit purpose of depriving them of their land and resources. Along the lines of the religion theme, the joke goes, "When you got here you had the Book and we had the land. Now you have the land and we have the Book." And that's pretty much how things go in Imperialismland.

How far back into prehistory this goes is anybody's guess but by the time we have history per se, it seems to have become highly developed in certain areas of the world and we begin to see the foundations of colonialism laid among archaic Greek settlements with their "excess populations", et cetera, spreading into Greater Greece, aka southern Italy and Sicily.

Sicily is an excellent example of a venerable venue of colonization with all the attendent problems. It's been colonized for something like 2500 years and might even represent a microcosm of the contemporary First, Second and Third worlds all in one when considered in combination with the rest of Italy.

Scholars commonly assert that Rome derived its "high" culture from the Greeks of Magna Graeci so where do you suppose the Germans of northern Europe got their "high" culture from? And just how well were the resident Celts "assimilated" into this?

Well, the short answer is the Bretons, Welsh, Scots and Irish weren't assimilated, and saw little if anything by observation or otherwise that would persuade them to become Roman or Norman-French. But the latter groups saw a good deal to assimilate from the traditions of Greek and near Eastern conquest and seem to have also acquired a craving for the luxury goods of the China and Southeast Asia as well as the Malabar coast of the Indian subcontinent.

That and driving the Saracens from the Levant seems to have preoccupied them for centuries and once the Spaniards ran out of Moors to convert or slaughter they naturally looked for other potential victims and, thanks to Christopher C., along came a whole hemisphere of land and indians for the taking.

Of course the indians didn't workout as slaves so the Spaniards were forced to import Africans to work the land they stole. The British eventually took over the carrying trade in that "commodity" along with molasses and textiles among other things.

Eventually Britain persuaded herself that slavery was morally reprehensible, or so we're told, and terminated the trade but her colonies were a little slow on the uptake. In the meantime, wherever the English or subjects of the English crown settled, they invariably encroached on the inhabitants, autocthlonous or otherwise.

There's a nice little tribe of people inhabiting the coast of Belize whose ancestors were shipwrecked on some islands off the coast of Venezuela in the 17th century. They are former African slaves who intermarried with Caribs and were subsequently driven out by the British when they assumed control to the former Spanish Main. Thus they find themselves battling the governments of Belize and Honduras for the right to live on and control the coast where they came after being ejected by the British nearly 300 years ago. That coast is now being eyed by contemporary imperialists as a nice place for hotels and resorts.

So again we just have to ask, what's going on?

We maybe can understand the desperation of the Celts in Britain, desperation so acute that they seem to have enlisted in the British army in droves and actively assisted the British in conquering enough land so that the sun never set on it. What we don't understand at this point is why the British and other European upperclasses needed to conquer all of the known world in the first place. Could it be their cravings outstripped their fiefdoms?

Time for another cup of piping hot green tea I suspect.

Time for some reading,

A history of Britain's population;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/history/renderplain.pl?file=/history/ancient/prehistory/peoples_01.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/games/population/index.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/genes/population/g_past.shtml

Did Columbus blunder into it or did he know it was there?

http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/bristol_ex.html

See The Voyage of St. Brendan on the same site.

>Why was long distance trade so crucial to sustaining Europeans that they established at huge cost colonies all over the world, colonies that rarely if ever could support themselves? Greed! There was no huge cost, the proffit was huge.

As for going half way round the world, they didn't know the world was that big.

Do you realy think that all they were looking for was pepper and nutmeg?



Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

I really could profit from learning how to spell! BTW Lowland Scots is a dialect of English.

Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

Yes, I knew Lowland Scots was a dialect of English, but is it a pidgun? That was the ironical nature of my comment.

Regarding the issue of invasion debunking, I think we can probably associate invasions with changes in ruling classes, however they arise. That Celts don't exist is quite a different matter.

If the notion of Celtic culture is a fabrication of the 18th century, we maybe should ask why? The answer is found in the same article. The British ruling class was establishing Great Britain, aka the union of England, Ireland and Scotland and there was resistance, from the likes of Bonny Prince Charlie as well as the Irish. Seeking a common cause in that resistance was just as essential as the union was for the Hanovers.

So is the British Crown a fabrication of the 18th century as well? Or did it have an actual existence prior to that time in one form or another?

Maybe from this you can see how these historical arguments get convoluted by the political or social spin.

But back to the invasion theory.

Does a change in language not indicate an invasion?

Well, let's look at a well documented example. Was there a Norman invasion or was it just a slight adjustment in the Anglo-Saxon ruling house? William did claim to be related to that house did he not?

When did the British ruling class stop using Anglo-French? It seems to have resulted from the outcome of the War of Roses, correct? The Tudors didn't use Anglo-French. Were the Tudors invaders? No, they weren't but they weren't Plantagenets either. They were apparently Marchers, lords from the Welsh border, as were many of the participants on the English side of the Hundred Years War. That war wasn't an invasion either if we assert that Henry II's claim was valid, but I'm sure the French would disagree.

So, what this means is that we did have invasions and counter invasions over a period of about a century that eventually resulted in a change of the official language of the English Realm. That commoners continued to speak the common tongues is irrelevant insofar as the point is that the official language wasn't a Celtic tongue. And that's maybe the bone of contention that eventually surfaces in the previously mentioned 18th century.

The ruling classes won't admit that Celts ever existed if the existence of Celts might aid the rivals of those ruling classes. Scotland was ruled by Norman-French marcher lords in the time of Edward III. Robert The Bruce had a Norman-French name.

The Stuarts derive from this dynasty but are more closely associated with the indigenous Scots. Were there indigenous Scots? Of course there were and some were members of the Scots ruling class, but not many. The Stuarts also sought support from the French Crown and got it. Charles II was a dependent of the French king. That's why he could operate without funding from Parliament for most of his reign.

So, are there really no Celts in the world? Why don't you ask them? Ask the Celts if they exist and have existed in the past earlier than than 1700.

We can quibble over terminology, similar to what is a native american? I don't know. I think it's a census term that has the effect of reducing native people to the status of other hyphenated Americans and hence immigrants. That would be convenient for the ruling classes would it not? Extinguish all native land claims by extinguishing the natives, either literally or by virtue of an alteration in terminology.

Now, we need to talk about Columbus, et al. Did he know or suspect? Well who knows? If he heard about the Bristol rumors, he knew there might be land to the west, that Asia might extend further east than anyone had previously imagined.

Did he not know how big the earth was? I think he knew as did most educated people since the time of Eratosthenes but the precise extent of landmasses wasn't known because people couldn't reliably calculate longitude. So, yes, he did blunder into America simply because it wasn't Asia but was more or less where he imagined Asia should be.

>>Greed! There was no huge cost, the proffit was huge. <<

For who was the profit huge? Not for colonists certainly. They sold commonities, raw materials to the mother country rulers and imported finished goods. Even with the relative benefits of slave labor, the balance of payments was awesomely out of balance almost from day one. Tribute was heavy on the Spaniards, so heavy they repeatedly cheated on their taxes.

The English had a similar taxation problem that eventually erupted into an armed revolution.

Pepper and nutmeg were among other things the luxury items that European rulers craved for which blue glass beads weren't acceptable to the Chinese and other far eastern potentates. Gold and to a lesser extent silver had been demanded since Roman times so that by the time of the Spanish Reconquista, Europeans was essentially bankrupt of hard currency acceptable to their trading partners in the far east.

That, fortunately, changed when Pizarro found tons of gold in Peru. The effect in Europe was awesome. Inflation went wild. Spain went on a spending spree in the Netherlands acquiring industrial goods that she should have been manufacturering locally. As a result, she lagged behind the rest of Europe for centuries after the gold and silver were exhausted, not having invested in an industrial infrastructure like the Dutch and English did. That may or may not be related to the expulsion of the Jews.

At approximately the same time, the termination of two great wars or periods of extended warfare dumped a great deal of rapacious manpower on the regimes in Spain and England. These guys needed to be employed or exported. It seems employment opportunities were limited so the export option was taken. And they demonstrated some pretty good swordplay as Bernal Diaz would say. But few of them profited. The riches ended up in the coffers of the Spanish kings or the Dutch industrialists or the English "privateers". The former soldiers of the Cross got land, peons, and debts.

In North America, the landed aristocracy that developed also was heavily indebted. They couldn't have functioned at all without slavery, which is why they could call it a morally reprehensible institution and still keep slaves. Expediency triumphant over Christian Charity.

So where were the huge profits? You can see them inlaid in cathedrals and palaces and in the modern inventory of technically advanced weapons systems. The debts remain and get ever bigger and ever deferred to future generations.

Meanwhile, the indigenous people, to who the debts are originally owed, get marginalized or mortificated or assimulated until somebody decides they never existed.

Like the American Indians (or do you prefere Native Americans) the Celts were diverse before they got to Britain. Yes the Celts did exist but they range from short and dark to tall and fair with every hair colour in between. My cousins children all have red hair like my grandmother but my first son had black hair and my second son started life with fair hair and was brown by the age of four.

The Norman French were Norsemen so they were well established in England before the conquest. The Saxons were German and the language used was Anglo-Saxon.

The Tudors were Welsh (they changed the spelling from Tewdwr) from Anglesey. They were not Marchers though they were related by marriage.
His father Owain took his grandfather's name (Tewdwr ap Goronwy) not Maredudd, his father's name.

The Scots were Irish. The indigenous people were the Picts.

History is a nightmare. Take for example the ownership of land in this country. A survey could only find a third of the owners.

As for profit. Potatoes, sugar, slaves etc. The city of Bristol was built on the profit from the slave trade.



Alji (Join The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

I don't recall American indians, (not native american because I think you're either native or american but not both,) ever going to England, at least not in sufficient numbers to be accounted as anything more than a few isolated curiosities, whatever Disney Productions may have implied in the sequel to Pocahontas.

I also suspect the Celts were a good deal less diverse than indians. The variations you cite probably don't register on our diversity meter. One of our terms for Africans is "black white men", which I understand is supposed to be nonsensical to whites but makes perfect sense to me.

So are you saying that two thirds of the land in Wales is held by absentee landlords? That wouldn't surprise me in the least. Most of the land in America is owned by the Federal government or the banks. Some might assert that the two entities are in fact the same thing.

Profits are funny things. They don't seem to exist unless a lot of people assume the costs. Take for example the current situation with respect to coffee. Four immense multinational corporations dominate the distribution and sales of coffee around the world. They pay on average 24 cents per pound for the beans and resell them at 3.60 USD per pound. That's a hefty profit, which I doubt is being shared with anybody outside the corporate officers and stockholders.

That means that the producers, consumers and the governments that make it possible for these corporations to operate at a profit see nothing but the costs of such operation. Consequently, we could think of profit as merely a form of transfer payment, tribute or welfare.

Whether Bristol was built on the profits of slavers or not, it probably never had to pay the costs, but somebody, besides the slaves did. This might account for the sorry state of economic affairs in former European colonies all over the world. As I said, the debts just keep accumulating and keep getting deferred to future generations, but what happens when deferrence can no longer be supported? What do you suppose happens to the profits then?

Hint: Enron, a microcosmic instance of a macrocosmic process.

Money is a figment of the imagination anyway. More can always be created.
In fact, a belief system is nearer the truth.

Agreed. A belief system that supports the notion of money that you can create out of thin air and into which it can just easily be made to disappear is very convenient if you're into domination of your fellow human beings. In terms of magic tricks, it ranks right up there with speaking for God and changing wine into blood to emphasize people's debts to the ruling classes incurred by their naturally sinful or base natures. There follows then the notion of nobility and one's obligations to support it.

You got it. Well done
Most people just seem to think I have a screw loose when I tell them that.

Excuse me butting in as well. I've read the thread through. I haven't the expertise to comment on the ethno-geographical details and I would definitely need more time to read it, if I were thinking of commenting.

I agree wholeheartedly with the last bits of the thread, though! (as would acgBen, whose article on Money and the Power of Belief - A827381 I had the honour to recommend.

An excellent article it is too. Thanks for directing my attention to it.

Yes, a very interesting article, albeit a little naive about the scope of human technology I think.

>a little naive about the scope of human technology. Would you like to explain what you mean?

Alji ,{Guru},(Join The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)