[split] Artorius and the spread of the Sarmatians

[Gil]

On of the most intriguing facts, for me, is the correlation between the scythian tribes (and the sarmatians) and the myth of Gaelic origin; according to the Lebor Gabála Érenn, Fénius Farsaid, King of Scythia, was the creator of the Ogham and father of Gaedel Glas which, along with Scota, travelled to Iberia from which their descendants later colonised Ireland.
Interesting that their travels, mythological as they are, fit with the dispersal of R1b from the scythian plains to Western Europe.

Arthur itself and the whole Arthurian Cycle is, for me, a mix of brythonic/gaelic folklore which was later adapted by christian writers to present a "less barbaric" view of older traditions.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Milesian

This may hark back to the pagan idea of the king having to mate with the land (the female deity/queen), and his union with the queen land bringing fertility to the land. Queen Maeve (Meabh) for example had several kings as her lovers and in this we see the same pagan religious connotations.

That's interesting. Can you tell us more stories about female deities?

I wonder if the ancients considered them goddesses or something not as divine so to speak.

[Señor Malo]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

That's interesting. Can you tell us more stories about female deities?

I wonder if the ancients considered them goddesses or something not as divine so to speak.

In fact I'm not sure and my opinion is probably influenced by Gimbutas theories (many of her detractors blame her theories of being influenciated by her maxist-ultrafeminist ideology) But I think the female deities where whorshipped by the "old europeans" this is to say the local civilisations prior to the arrival of the IE who on their side, they worshipped male deities above all.
The cult to female deities would thus had been sweeped out with the arrival of the IE but in might have survived in many "refuges areas" and eventually adopted by latter invaders (might have been the case of the Celts arriving in the western coast of Europe and in the Britannias, eventually also, the romans adopting the "Magna Mater" cult)

[Milesian]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

That's interesting. Can you tell us more stories about female deities?

I wonder if the ancients considered them goddesses or something not as divine so to speak.

The names of female deities seem to be intimately linked with the land, more so than the names of male gods. Ireland itself is named after the goddess, Eriu.
Many of the nations provincial towns and capitals also took their names from goddesses - Tara (Tea), Teltown (Tailtiu), Emhain Macha (Macha). It is reasonable to suppose that most deities of the land were female.

Eriu, like Sulis in Britain, appears to have been a solar diety.
Her husband was the Tuatha De Danaan god, Mac Grene ( lit. "Son of the Sun")
But every mortal king of Ireland was also her husband for as long as he reigned.
We can perhaps specualte that the king was the physical emodiment of a divine concept, acting as an intermedia=tary between the goddess and the land. Behind every successful harvest, behind every natural act of procreation within his kingdom, lay a deep mystical union - a kind of marriage between the mundane and the eternal.

In Britain, and to some extent Gaul also, there seems to be evidence of matrilinear inheritence. There were certainly British and Gallic queens of status and importance. One of the best known and most powerful Celtic queens aside from Boudica was the legendary/mythical Queen Maeve who plays a central role in the Ulster Cycle of Gaelic legends. Her power is such that she leads the whole of Ireland into war over her desire to be shown more wealthy than her husband, and she enlists men from all over Ireland to recaputure the Brown Bull of Cooley from it's owner in Ulster.

There were at least as many goddesses as gods, and they were by no means subservient to their male counterparts, as they oft were in the Roman or Greek pantheons. Indeed, Celtic war deities were predominantly female rather than male. Bandbh, the war goddess (whose name means "Fury") and the Morrigan ("Great Queen") both appear as crows and ravens in the Irish myths, and there appears to have been a wide conception of the spirit of war being female in the Celtic world. I would guess that the Irish goddess Badbh Catha is almost certainly the same as Cathubodua, the raven-goddess worshipped in Gaul.
In Welsh folklore there is Cyhiraeth (Hound of Longing) - a goddess of streams, marshes and lonely places whose blood-freezing wails predict death, especially death in battle. This concept of a wailing deity / spirit predicating death either on battlefield or elsewhere would have been very familiar to the Gaels too.
Similarly, in the tales of Blathnat (Little Flower),and her Brythonic counterpart Blodeuwedd (Flower) we find an goddess just as capable of intrigue and murder as her male lover.

We know from the classical writers that women in Celtic society could inherit, could own property and business, could divorce their husbands, and could even rule as monarch in their own right. In the accounts of the Roman conquest of Gaul, we read that Celtic women were as likely to be brandishing spears and swords on the battlefield as their menfolk were.
It seems that in both the spiritual world of the gods, and in the everyday mundane world, women were not seen as weak of subservient by any means.
On the contrary, they were considered rather dangerous creatures.
In that, the Celts were probably very observant l(

[Milesian]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

That's interesting. Can you tell us more stories about female deities?

I wonder if the ancients considered them goddesses or something not as divine so to speak.

What seems to be the case with Celtic deities is that they seem more human-like than the deities of other pagan religions. They were not aloof, living in the sky or at the top of a mountain. They lived on the land, they went into battle, and they could be injured just like mortals. Further, they could be injured by mortals. In the Tain Bo Cuilagne, the Morrigan appears as a beautiful girl who says that she is the daughter of King Buan (riding a red horse - a sign that she is other-worldy), and wants Cu Chullain to be her beloved, but she is spurned by the hero Cú Chullain and promises to hinder him in the future.
Cú Chullain details what he will do to thwart her.
Later, she makes good her threats but is injured by our hero each time.
She finally has to disguise herself as an old hag so that Cú Chullain heals her, unaware of her true identity.

[Hagogoth]

But does Haplo G group mean? I cannot understand that for example
in the Netherlands 4% of our DNA came from the Sarmatians.
They did never enter our country and Scandinavia.

Erik

[damjan]

Originally Posted by Gil

in "YHRD - Semino, 2000"


Map of Europe Showing Approximate Percentages of Haplogroup G by Location




Source: YHRD database

awsome data!!!! a destructive blow to serbians. their chechen-alb theorie can work for sardania maybe.

[Menydh]

How is a 1% of G haplogroup in Albania or anywhere else is a destructive blow to Serbians?

By the way, if you are an Albanian Orthodox, shouldn't you pray to God that Serbians invade Albania and deal with all the Muslims there?

[Llywarch Hen]

Originally Posted by Milesian

What seems to be the case with Celtic deities is that they seem more human-like than the deities of other pagan religions. They were not aloof, living in the sky or at the top of a mountain. They lived on the land, they went into battle, and they could be injured just like mortals. Further, they could be injured by mortals.

I fear this has more to do with the great efforts made by the later Christian literati to euhemerise the old Gods and thus extinguish any remaining power their memory may have held over the people.

Originally Posted by Gil

On of the most intriguing facts, for me, is the correlation between the scythian tribes (and the sarmatians) and the myth of Gaelic origin; according to the Lebor Gabála Érenn, Fénius Farsaid, King of Scythia, was the creator of the Ogham and father of Gaedel Glas which, along with Scota, travelled to Iberia from which their descendants later colonised Ireland.

Again, we are dealing here with the 'learned' historical gloss put on the old traditions by a later Christian scholarly class desperate to link Irish mythology and oral history with the more prestigious Classical tradition. This is the same sort of thing that posits Britannia as named after a 'Brutus the Trojan' and Odin and the AEsir as Trojan refugees from the Sea of Azov.


My authority for both statements above is T.F. O'Rahilly - Early Irish History and Mythology 1947, which I bought last time I went to Dublin in one of those nice bookshops just to the south of Trinity College.

Very interesting critique he makes of the Lebor Gabala, too. I recommend it to anyone interested in Irish history and origins.

Interesting that their travels, mythological as they are, fit with the dispersal of R1b from the scythian plains to Western Europe.

Coincidence. When you live at the far western end of a great landmass, you shouldn't be surprised at legends concerning people common from the east, nor by the actuality of such migrations!

Arthur itself and the whole Arthurian Cycle is, for me, a mix of brythonic/gaelic folklore which was later adapted by christian writers to present a "less barbaric" view of older traditions.

That seems most probable, yes. With a fair amount of garbled history too.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Gil

There are two historical instances when sarmatians came to Iberia.

The first one was in the first century AD, when a large detachment of sarmatian warriors were dispatched to the Peninsula to serve as scouts/light cavalry.

The second one was around 400 AD.
In the Iberian peninsula the Alans (a sarmatian tribe) settled in Lusitania and the East/South provinces, "Alani Lusitaniam et Carthaginiensem provincias". They became known in retrospect for their massive hunting and fighting dogs, which they apparently introduced to Europe. A giant breed of dog still called Alano survives in the Basque Country.

I've checked other sources and indeed the Sarmatian Alans entered Hispania but not as auxiliary troops of the Goths but of the Vandals. They were given lands in Lusitania and the region around Carthago Nova (Cartagena, Murcia).

Later on, when the Vandals and the Alans were defeated by the Goths, many crossed into N. Africa but others were assimilated. I wonder if the independence of the territory of Murcia from the Goths (and its dependence from Byzantium) until Leovigildo is related to the presence of Alans there.

[damjan]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

How is a 1% of G haplogroup in Albania or anywhere else is a destructive blow to Serbians?

if you read their chechen-alb theories, than this is a major blow. it shows such theory is baseless froms a scientific approach.

By the way, if you are an Albanian Orthodox, shouldn't you pray to God that Serbians invade Albania and deal with all the Muslims there?

one can always dream.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by damjan

if you read their chechen-alb theories, than this is a major blow. it shows such theory is baseless froms a scientific approach.

Excuse the language but unless you explain yourself a 1% only sounds like a blow..job! And not even a major one..

one can always dream.

Sure. One can always dream that a 1% is a major blow.

[Galaico]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

Excuse the language but unless you explain yourself a 1% only sounds like a blow..job! And not even a major one..
Sure. One can always dream that a 1% is a major blow.

Some Serbian nationalist theories say that Albanians are not real Europeans, but tribes from the Caucasus that arrived to the Balkans at the beginning of the Middle Ages. It is true that there was a Caucasic kingdom called Albania, but there was also another one called Iberia, just coincidences IMO.

I think that Damjan compares the low percentage of G found in Albania (1%) with the high level of G found in the Caucasus (11%-74%), to refute the theory of the Caucasic origin of the Albanians.

[Menydh]

If Albanians belong or not to Europe, it is a matter that should be considered not on grounds of genetics but on grounds of culture.

They are Islamic. Their identity and their culture is Islamic. In other words, the identity and the culture which represents the most immediate danger to Europe at the moment.

With over a 70% native Muslim population, considering Albania as part of Europe would be yet another major blow --and this time for real-- to Europe. In fact the admittance of Islam as a religion of Europe. The other blow is the millions of Muslims from Northern Africa, Middle East and Asia who are flooding Europe. Turkey is another would-be blow.

Let us also not forget that Kosovo, in only two generations (1929-1980), the Albanian population has passed from being just 15% to being 80%. While the Serb population has dropped from 60% to only 18%.

Albanians coming to forums saying -"oh! but I am a Christian Albanian! How can you leave us out? And, hey! Albanian Muslims don't even go to the mosque, they are soooooo little religious..."- are the spearhead for those 2.5 million (and growing) Albanian Muslims. Some of which, despite being "oh, soooo little religious", have been recruited for the so-called White Al Qaeda.

Another argument that I recall having read is that they would be even less islamic if they were a part of Europe. It takes much good faith not to call that blackmail.

[Galaico]

Yes, I agree. I've always considered European muslims as traitors and anti-European, so I don't consider them part of the European folk, from the Spanish Muladíes/Moros, to the Slavic Bosniaks and Illyrian Albanians.

Genetically they might be Europeans, but that's all, they can't be considered as such.