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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Aryan settlements found in Siberia
2010-10-06
[Iran Press TV] Archaeologists have unearthed ancient settlements in southern Siberia, which they believe were built by the original Aryan race about 4,000 years ago.

Some 20 of the spiral-shaped settlements were found in a remote area bordering Kazakhstan and date back to the beginning of Western civilization in Europe.

Experts say the Bronze-age structures might have been built by Aryans shortly after the Great Pyramid was constructed some 4,000 years ago.

"Potentially, this could rival ancient Greece in the age of the heroes," Daily Mail quoted TV historian Bettany Hughes as saying.
Good lord, are they still fussing over their non-conquest of Greece in the 5th century BCE? Persia was a world power for more than a millenium, surely that should suffice.
"Because I have written a lot about the Bronze Age world, there always seemed to be this huge missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle," she added.

Remains of the ancient city were first explored around 20 years ago and studies showed that it would have housed between 1,000 and 200 people.

The language spoken by the Aryan people has been identified as the ancestor of some modern European tongues. Some English words, for instance, such as brother, oxen and guest have been traced back to the Aryans.

"We are all told that there is this kind of mother tongue, proto-Indo-European, from which all the languages we know emerge," Hughes said.
Not all of them, Historian Hughes. There are also the proto-languages of the Pacific Islands, sub-Saharan Africa, east Asia, and the Americas, plus some minor ones that don't seem related to anything else. One hopes the Iran PressTV reporter misquoted, one really does.
"I was very excited to hear on the archaeological grapevine that in exactly the period I am an expert in, this whole new Bronze Age civilization had been discovered on the steppe of southern Siberia."
Posted by:Fred

#14  They just announced finding a new language at the base of the Himalayas in an isolated village.

Orly
also
hai hai
Posted by: Goldies Every Damn Where   2010-10-06 17:47  

#13   The last time I checked, Slavs have been speaking Indo-European languages since way way back,

Isolated pockets of original inhabitants or migrating tribes, Snowy Thing. The language of the Roma gypsies is, I think, related to the Indian languages, not European ones, for exactly that reason. They just announced finding a new language at the base of the Himalayas in an isolated village.
Posted by: trailing wife   2010-10-06 17:20  

#12  And yes, I know Borgboy was being sarcastic. I just felt the need to vent.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2010-10-06 15:47  

#11  The last time I checked, Slavs have been speaking Indo-European languages since way way back, and occupy a region fairly close to the estimated origin point of the Indo-European expansion.

We have to go with the real meaning of words instead of "mythical ancestral group who's related to us but not the next-door neighbors we've been putting into forced-labor camps."

(The Germans used to have problems in that regard; the Japanese still do; they're busy looking for the mystical ancestral tribe that practiced celibacy as its armies marched through Manchuria and down the Korean penninsula.)
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2010-10-06 15:44  

#10  So the Kaiser's "drang nach osten" indeed had historical roots? As for 'you know who', a zillion slavs stood in the way of uniting the Siberian Aryans with the fatherland. Also, now we know why he made the Japanese honorary Aryans. //sarcasm off
Posted by: borgboy   2010-10-06 14:27  

#9  The one during the Bronze Age, Pstanley? Between the fall of Troy and the rise of Homer? ;-)


Yeah. Or perhaps lost before that, even. One Jerry Pournelle's favorite sayings is that the thing about dark ages isn't that we forget how to do things... it's that we forget it was ever done in the first place.
Posted by: Pstanley   2010-10-06 13:17  

#8  This knowledge was lost during the first Dark Age.

The one during the Bronze Age, Pstanley? Between the fall of Troy and the rise of Homer? ;-)

According to Wikipedia, Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish stem from proto-Uralic.
Posted by: trailing wife   2010-10-06 13:01  

#7  Hungarian is in the same language group as Finnish and Estonian, and some places out in Siberia. It seems that the Indo-European speaking peoples came north and west, dividing them.

I thought I read a while back that they finally found a language in the same family as Basque, in a valley in the Caucasus. It seems that Basque is an ancient tongue. All abstract concepts are loan words.

I've also read a hypothesis that Ainu is related to Basque, which seems completely outlandish but then again maybe not. What with Kennewick Man, the Spirit Cave mummy and red-haired mummies found in New Zealand, there is evidence of a global, European sea-faring culture in the late Neolithic. This knowledge was lost during the first Dark Age.
Posted by: Pstanley   2010-10-06 12:41  

#6  Actually, the proto-Phoenicians are the Sea Peoples which may or may not have been linguistically or ethnically related to the true Phoenicians. That is whom many scientists think the Basque language is related to.
Posted by: Shieldwolf   2010-10-06 12:36  

#5  One of the titles of the Shah was "Light and Protector of the Aryans". Also, Basque seems to be related somewhat to Phoenician; enough so that there is now a theory that the Basque are an early "lost tribe" of proto-Phoenicians.
Posted by: Shieldwolf   2010-10-06 11:58  

#4  Good lord, are they still fussing over their non-conquest of Greece in the 5th century BCE? Persia was a world power for more than a millenium, surely that should suffice.

Whose non-conquest of Greece? I thought a lot of population replacement had gone on in Persia/Iran/Whatever between then and now.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2010-10-06 09:27  

#3  tw, IIRC a couple of those isolated languages are Basque and Hungarian - kind of odd, considering how unisolated the places are.
Posted by: Glenmore   2010-10-06 07:43  

#2  In 1935 the Shah changed the name to Iran. It seems to mean 'land of the aryans'.

Persia came from the Pars who were the dominant tribe.
Posted by: lord garth   2010-10-06 06:40  

#1  It's all so... Nazi.
Posted by: Secret Master   2010-10-06 00:54  

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