Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part VII

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VIII

So I located the Neanderthals in the Circassian steppe because I knew I would have to locate the refugees of the Great Flood here eventually too, as irony dictates that the source of the Neanderthals who invaded them would eventually be the place they were forced to flee to. The Circassian steppe is as likely as any other place nearby to have hosted the Neanderthals, and as likely as any other place nearby to have hosted the refugees of the Great Flood. I cite all this chiefly on irony, although the ancestral claim on Mt. Ararat implicit in the Genesis account suggests that they lived nearby too, and the Circassian steppe is nearby. But we do have evidence that the people I believe the refugees became lived on the Circassian steppe, on the eastern shore of the infilled Black Sea, and this out-on-a-limb interpretation is the only one that feels as ironic and therefore as dialectical as history really is. But I'll finish this essay by finishing this thought.

Between the generation of Ziusudra and that of Shem, Ham, and Japheth were likely thousands of years. If Moses thought wandering in the desert for forty years sucked, well, he could've been one of Noah's real kids. These refugees would have been on the absolute margins of society. The steppes, like America's Great Plains, can grow all manner of crops with enough water. Back then, just about any good source of water would have been settled already by people willing to fight to defend it. So they would have wandered towards the more desolate areas, able to grow grains related to grass on the steppe, and little else. They would have had better luck with animal husbandry, feeding sheep, goats, and cattle on the abundant pasturage.

But such a cultural reorientation from a settled mercantile society would have taken time to work out. New cultural forms had to be invented, tested to see if they were desirable, and then disseminated. Millennia would have passed between the refugees' flight and their eventual reemergence on the world stage. But what allowed them to reemerge?

This is the second time I return to the association between Neanderthals and my fellow autistic people, because of a particular gift we've been noted to possess: an affinity with animals. If anyone in the ancient world was to befriend and domesticate the horse, it would surely be the autistic-led tribes forced by the hostility of their neighbors to live among the horses on the steppe. All other aspects of the emerging culture of these people are demonstrated to have derived from their neighbors: they invented neither houses, nor irrigation nor farming (although they only grew grain in their makeshift homeland), nor animal husbandry, nor the wheel (pottery wheels were old news), nor the worship of a pantheon (and whatever monotheism may be read backwards into the story of Ziusudra, by now most of his descendants were definitely polytheistic). But the proto-Indo-Europeans were definitely for certain the first people to domesticate horses, and half the world now speaks a language descended from theirs as a result.

Yup. Come out on this limb with me; the view can't be beat.

Theorizing about the proto-Indo-Europeans is fraught with complications when one considers who else has done it, and that the proto-Indo-Europeans' name for themselves was "Aryans." I'm not even the first Chamberlain to do so; a scoundrel named Houston Stuart Chamberlain once accurately, if propagandistically, described these Aryans as the glorious ancestors of the Germanic peoples, and Hitler ran with this theory heedless that the Baltic, Slavic, and Roma people he sent to the camps were equally descended from these Aryans. (Jewish people weren't, except for some Ashkenazi and Sephardic converts to Judaism, but clearly that doesn't justify the Shoah.) My evil twin may have been right to detect the spirit of settler-colonialism in both the ancient Aryans and the Germany of the Kaiser his sick theories enamored, but his sin was to glorify it and demand its modern emulation.

Because I abhor fascism and settler-colonialism, I will wear out my keyboard typing "proto-Indo-European" where "Aryan" might otherwise do, because I don't want this essay in quoted snippets to gather the wrong sorts of fans. But we do need to dwell on this word for at least a moment for honest scholarly purposes. To get an idea of the vastness of proto-Indo-European conquest, reflect that both "Ireland" and "Iran" are cognate with "Aryan." The modern language closest to proto-Indo-European is Lithuanian. There are several known extinct branches of proto-Indo-European, including the Hittite that King Priam of Troy would have been fluent in, as well as the Tocharian of the Tarim Basin in modern China. The language isolates of proto-Indo-European include those two, as well as Greek and some Caucasian languages, suggesting its epicenter was between those isolates, again, on the Circassian steppe. Its major linguistic subfamilies are Italo-Celtic (Julius Caesar had more in common with those Gauls than he thought); Balto-Slavic (same with Aleksandr Nevsky); and Indo-Iranian (ditto Nader Shah). Germanic is its own subfamily of proto-Indo-European. "Regnum" is Latin for "kingdom;" in Old English it's "rice," in Norwegian it's "rik," in Sanskrit it's "raj." Through the words the proto-Indo-European languages have in common, we can learn something about the people who first spoke it, and it reveals the aspects of their culture already mentioned. It also reveals when their language started to break apart; Diamond explains that the most advanced technology they had a word for was "wheel," suggesting they separated not long after the invention of chariots, around 3300 BC, or roughly 2500-4500 years after the Great Flood of the Black Sea (Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, 237-8).

Besides the linguistic analysis, we can also analyze their gods. The Romans perceived that their gods were basically the same as the Greeks', but with different names. They also thought the same about the Celtic gods, and to a lesser degree the Egyptian gods too. They were less correct about the gods of the Nile, who had a separate genesis, but the rest were derived from the same proto-Indo-European pantheon. Zeus is Jupiter, but he's also the Norse Thor and the Slavic Torun. The Celtic Lugh is the Norse Loki. Not every deity has a linguistically-similar equivalent in every other pantheon; many were likely kings deified long after the proto-Indo-European expansion. Cities taking their name from a god are often just named after a deified founder; I suspect this to be the case with Athens, named for the Greek goddess Athena. The Greek god of YOLO, Dionysus, is probably another such deified king: he was a "newcomer to the Olympian pantheon" who "made a triumphant tour across Asia Minor," according to Cleopatra's latest biographer, Stacy Schiff, who was analyzing why Mark Antony would have taken on Dionysus' role for his own propaganda (Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life, 176).

Sometimes there are too many such cities for this to be true, and the cult of that god must just have been incredibly widespread in prehistory. In these cases, the god in question is likely from the original proto-Indo-European pantheon. This is the case for London (Londinium) and Lyon (Lugdunum), which are both named for the Celtic trickster god Lugh.

Speaking of gods, let us return again to Ziusudra, in the guise of the founder of Zoroastrianism. The religious text and liturgy of the Zoroastrian faith is the Gathas, a collection of liturgical songs purportedly written by Ziusudra. If they weren't, they were written by people a lot closer in time to him than we are, and will still satisfy our purposes here. The Gathas tells of Ziusudra's life, spanning locations in the northeast of Iran and nearby parts of Central Asia. It describes the life of the people around him as pastoral, to the point that a scholar of ancient Persian, E.G. Browne, considered the Gathas "childish" (Tareporewala, The Divine Songs of Zarathustra, x). Well, you know who else was extremely pastoral? The horse-riding proto-Indo-Europeans. You know who else lived in the northeast of Iran and nearby parts of Central Asia? The proto-Indo-Europeans.

These are the primary methods we have to reconstruct the prehistory of the proto-Indo-Europeans. Because they had horses and their enemies did not, they conquered everything steppe-adjacent, from the Tarim Basin to the plains of Hungary. Their conquests rolled further into the forests of Europe and the mountains of Asia Minor, but only after those particular branches of proto-Indo-Europeans had adapted their crops and methods of warfare for those locales. Hittite, spoken in ancient Asia Minor, is the most distantly-related branch of proto-Indo-European (Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, 240-2). This suggests that the invaders didn't take the place without a fight, and their language blended with that of the defenders. The Italo-Celtic branch is probably coextensive with the pre-Roman Urnfield culture, spreading out across Europe's forests as far away as Britain, yet incapable of vanquishing the mountainous Basques, whose tongue is the only surviving indigenous language of Europe to this very day.

Finish with the conclusion, Part VIII