Scotching the Scotch : from the east or from the west? (British History)

[Mick Harper]

[DPCrisp]

Is it agreed that Scythians = Scandinavians?

Scyth = Scut = Scot is a shorter route and seems a pretty compelling equation.

I reckon the Picts were really Scandinavians (or the other way around): the Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland speak with strong Norwegian and Icelandic accents!; at least some Pictish inscriptions have been shown to be Norse; and Tacitus said they were Germanic types.

This might mean the Irish were Germanic/Scandinavian - which we knew already because Mick told us that in THOBR - but which Irish? The notion of "Celt" is an ever-present obfuscater. It's no wonder that the Picts should be confused with (Insular) Celts - who seem to have a Phoenician origin.

At the heart of the Salt thread is the idea, contrary to what's quoted here, that the (continental) Celts were really none other than the Saxons.

[Jaq White]

I agree, Dan, that the connection with "Scot" and Scythian" is more plausible.

With regard to the often stated Phoenician element of Irish descent, we should note that the ancient Greeks once held that Phoenicia was founded by one Phoenix, whose brother Cadmus had invented the alphabet.

"The early Irish recalled the time when they lived under a king named . . . Phenius, who devoted himself especially to the study of languages, and composed an alphabet and the elements of grammar. It is clear that at the very least, the early Irish chroniclers were passing on an account, albeit garbled in places, of authentic historical events and personages, and of the equally historic descent of their own race from Phoenician and Scythian stock."

'As the Milesians were the last of the ancient colonists . . . only their genealogies, with a few exceptions, have been preserved. The genealogical tree begins, therefore, with the brothers Eber and Eremon, the two surviving leaders of the expedition, whose ancestors are traced back to Magog, the son of Japhet. "

[DPCrisp]

[Ishmael]

I don't buy it. I think this is just something invented because the writers noticed a superficial linguistic similarity between words and needed to establish for themselves an ancient pedigree to earn respect for their independence movement.

It is totally ridiculous to imagine that the inhabitants of Northern England emigrated there from the Black Sea! Were there no people living in Scotland before that?

The Scots have always been exactly where they are right now. Because what is, is what was, except when it wasn't.

Just because some Scot, at some time, with the political motive to do so, assigned his ancestors a disjointed origin is no excuse for us to make the same mistake.

[Mick Harper]

You're misquoting the First Law which is "What is is what was unless there's evidence to the contrary." Now the Arbroath Declaration IS evidence. Not proof, not even very good evidence, but it is evidence. People don't claim to be from Scythia just for the hell of it. The signatories probably believed it and (since Scythia is not a normal Creation Myth hangout) it is worthy of at least a passing nod.

But anyway you cannot confound it simply by sitting on your haunches saying "The Scots were always in Scotland." For a start, Scotland was covered by ice-sheets barely ten thousand years ago, so even Applied Epistemology would probably acknowledge that the human population is relatively recent. That it must have come from somewhere else.

Actually if you did apply Applied Epistemological principles you would probably say "Well, the hoi polloi are probably from somewhere nearby because the lower orders don't shift around very much; but the nobs are almost certainly from somewhere more distant because nobs do shift around a lot."

[Hatty]

The Scottish clan system according to wiki is of Celtic/Norse origin but there's an uncanny resemblance to the kinship structure of the Scythian nomads/tribes (Herodotus, who wrote the first detailed description of the Scythians, distinguished two categories: a nomadic group in the north and an agricultural group in the south).

{It would be interesting to know when cattle branding was introduced to Europe, it was practised by nomadic herders who shared grazing on the steppes - the Scythian tamgas, or branding, are probably the only 'writing' they used}

There may be a connection between the cairn burial sites and the kurgans, the individual royal and collective clan Scythian tombs.

[Ra]

Mick wrote:

Though interestingly the Scottish nobs at the time of the Arbroath Declaration were rather proud of being a) Normans and b) Templars.

Sure, but nobs claiming to be one thing or another can not be seen as evidence of them actually having been Normans, but rather a wish to embellish their own origins. A good example is the modern Finnish people, half of which "originate" from the Vikings and the other half from the Russian emperors! Whereas we most probably are Scythian halfbreeds. Or related to the Picts, even.

The Scottish nobs claiming to be Templars is naturally another issue altogether, since not tied to origins.

[Mick Harper]

You are right about the Finns, Ra, a nation of parvenus of the worst sort. But not, I think, about Scottish lords. They all know each others' pedigrees back to the Ark (though possibly not Scythia) so anyone claiming Norman ancestry fraudulently would be laughed out of court.

However, there is a mystery both to the Normans and the Templars (and especially the links between the Normans and the Templars) in Scotland. The Normans did not conquer Scotland (as they did England, Ireland, Calabria, Sicily, Greece, Antioch etc etc) and yet they still managed somehow to end up owning most of it (and providing the various Royal families).

But the Templars slipped in somehow too. Oddly, the Templars tended to come from everywhere around Normandy but not Normandy itself. That's a puzzler. If true.

[DPCrisp]

I don't know the details, but there are indications of a connection between Black Sea Scythia and the Scandinavians... whence the Normans. Something to do with Cimmerians, too.

Note the megalithic 'trail' between the Baltic and Black Seas.

[Ishmael]

Mick Harper wrote:

You're misquoting the First Law which is "What is is what was unless there's evidence to the contrary." Now the Arbroath Declaration IS evidence. Not proof, not even very good evidence, but it is evidence. People don't claim to be from Scythia just for the hell of it. The signatories probably believed it and (since Scythia is not a normal Creation Myth hangout) it is worthy of at least a passing nod.

I would state rather that "What is, is what was, except when it wasn't" requires the "wasn't" to be supported not by just "evidence" but by "overwhelming evidence." This single notation justifies further investigation but cannot, of itself, negate the inherent presumption of the first rule.

The Romans not only believed they descended from Troy but also located Troy in Turkey. That belief is not enough for us to conclude they spoke the truth. I rather believe the Romans were just Italians and came from the same place as the rest of the Italians.

[DPCrisp]

[Mick Harper]

Ishmael raises issues that go the heart of our re-writing of history. Let's start with the End of the Ice Age. As you say, AE principles demand that this process be accompanied by the minimum response, which is a gradual northward shift of people.

However this does not permit us to straightforwardly shift English-speakers from the Channel area to fill Scotland because "What is" (or at least what demonstratively was) is Celtic-speakers in the farthest north of Scotland. However you are permitted (since the Celtic-speakers form a westerly rather than a northerly arc of settlement) to assume they are a later maritime incursion (if you wish, I am just saying it wouldn't break AE principles).

But now we come to the hiatus between guvnors and governed. The basic problem is that the literature ALWAYS deals with the top brass and the literature is what is ALWAYS used for the reconstruction of history. So when, for instance, the Romans say they are Trojans from Turkey, historians dismiss this as simple window-dressing and we dismiss it as breaking the Romans-are-Italians rule.

But these are both, in my view, incorrect assumptions. If we take the Normans as exemplars (because their history IS very well known) then we have a bunch of dudes ruling southern Italy, speaking Italian (and Latin) and claiming to come from the English Channel! How is that so different from the Romans? If we didn't know any better would we now be saying of the Normans, "Tsk, a typical Origins Myth...obviously they're just a bunch of Eye-talians made good."

But onwards to Jerry-and-his-handcarts. Again, let's take another German invasion of Italy about which we have good evidence--Charles V's expedition of the 1520's. What do we see? Well. there are thirty, forty, fifty thousand soldiers accompanied by hundreds of thousands of camp followers with handcarts. That's the way armies travelled. (And actually it's not that different from the German invasion of Italy in 1943.)

But one big difference between Ancient and Modern is that the Ancients had come to stay. So their handcarts contained even more in the way of women-and-children. But even so they are still an army. Not the totality of a Volk on the move. They are the elite (in this case the military elite) not the hoi polloi.

[Mick Harper]

Re-reading this last part I am not sure the difference is not rather starker. If we take the British Army in Wellington's time fighting in the Peninsular War and "look at it" through Roman eyes, what would we see? We would see a relatively small (forty thousand would denote this to be the main army of a major military power) number of formed, uniformed, soldiers. Then we would see, let's say, half that number of 'technical support' troops, carrying along bridging equipment, siege guns, what have you. Then we would see perhaps twice that number of 'camp followers', mainly women.

Now, how is that different from the 'Visigothic nation' on the move?

[Jaq White]

The decidedly pagan Irish traced their origins back to the biblical patriarch, Magog, the son of Japheth. This is in direct contrast to the claims of the Britons and other European nations, whose genealogies were traced back to Javan, another son of Japheth. Now, Magog. . . was considered, with Ashchenaz, the father of the Scythian peoples, and the early Irish chroniclers were most emphatic in their insistence that the Irish were of Scythian stock. And there is good etymological evidence for this.

The Irish were long referred to as Scots even before some of them migrated to the country that today bears their name, and as Brewer tells us: