Нас - тьмы, и тьмы, и тьмы (WE are MYRIADS, MYRIADS)

Scythian Art

Scythians: Underestimated Civilisation.

Скифы:  недооцениваемая цивилизация

Gli Sciti: una civiltà misconosciuta
Les Scythes: une civilisation sus-évaluée

Die Skythen: eine unterschaetzte Zivilisation

 

The “Russian” melting pot described in the former paragraph has always fascinated intellectuals. First of all, it has been the inspiring motive of the Spring Festival of Diaghilev, on the music of Stravinsky, subtitled as “Dances of Heathen Russia”. This ballet constitutes a milestone in the history of European ballets, and the most famous presentation of Pre-Slavonic Russia, which also “presented”, so to say, Russia to Paris, opening up the knowledge, by European public, of the current Russian cultural movements.

Another famous topic on ancient Russia in European culture  is the image of the Scythians, a people, likely of Iranian origin, which inhabited Russia at the times of Greeks and Romans. Scythians are referred to by all Greek and Roman authors. Already at that time, Scythia disoriented geographers, because it did not fit well inside the “classical” tripartition of Continents: Europe / Asia / Africa”. Therefore, they started to subdivide it in two parts: “Scythia before Imaus” and “Scythia beyond Imaus”, which corresponded, roughly speaking, to European Russia and to Siberia respectively . and traveled from Crimea to Kiev and Novgorod.

Herodotus conveys to us a very positive picture of Scythians, notwithstanding their renown as a wild people, living in the inhospitable steppes of the North. In his “Histories”, he describes with many details the Scythians’ homeland, history and civilisation. Under a general point of view, Herodotus is strongly sympathetic to Scythians, since they, albeit being a wild nomadic population of Persian origin, were very similar, culturally, to Greeks, because of their warlike spirit ant their love for liberty. The German baron and revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots chose his nickname from a character of Herodotus’ stories,the one of  a Scythian prince which had reneged his fatherland in order to choose the Athenian citizenship, and for this reason was sentenced to death (what ironically happened also to Cloots during the French Revolution, because Robespierre denied that “a German Baron may not be a French Revolutionary”).

Similarly to Greeks, Scythians lived on the borderland of the huge Persian Empire, and even shared, with Persian, some ethnic characteristics, such as linguistic ones. According to somebody, they came even from Persia. They bore even the risk, at a certain time, to be subdued by Persians. In fact, at the same time when, during the Persian Wars, Ionia, the North of Greece and the Greek coasts of the Black Sea were part of the Persian Empire, also the South-Western part of Scythia, including Moldova and the Southern parts of Ukraine, constituted Persian Provinces. According to Herodotus, Scythians tried even to invade Persia (like what the Greek Alexander the Great would have done a few centuries later).

During the Romantic and Post-Romantic Periods, a strong interest for Scythians and for the connected peoples arose in Russia’s cultural circles.

Also Ivanov-Razumnik and Blok would have baptized their cultural movement: “Skify” (the “Scythians”).

Recent Chinese researches are showing that Scythians had a higher cultural impact than the one we are used to attribute to them. According to those researches, Scythian civilization, stretching from Berlin up to Syberia, Manchuria and Shaansi, was characterize by a very tight unitarian character, and had given rise to highly sophisticated settlements. As an example, the Chinese and Xin Jiang settlements, present since the 10 Century BCE, showed examples of a civilization very similar to the Mycenean and to the ancient Greek, even anticipating them by some centuries.

The city of CheShi, near Turfan, which existed already in the 10^th Century BCE, shows striking similarities with Myceanean acropolis. It was the center of the long lastingh wars between the Han Dynasty and the Hun at the times of the Roman Empire (“the Seven CheShi Wars”).

VEDAS ARCTIC HOMELAND

Defrost

Was (and will be again) Arctic a friendly environment? 

Была ли ( и будут ли) Арктика  гостеприимная среда?

L'Arctique fut-elle jadis (et sera-t-elle un jour)un milieu amical pour l'homme? 
L'Artico è stato un giorno (e tornerà ad essere) un ambiente ospitale?

War Arktikum ein Menschenfreundliches Milieu (und wird es wieder dies sein?)

According to the most ancient historic documents of the Aryan peoples, the Hindu Veda and the Persian Avesta (Bundahishn), the original fatherland of all Aryans was on the Arctic Circle, which, at that time, was not covered by ice. When (following to the sins of humankind) Gods displaced the North Pole and condemned the Arctic to permanent frost, the Aryans migrated southwards, with a trip which ended in today’s Persia and India.By the way, the Pole is shifting again. We are puzzled by the meaning that we may give to this new shift.

Similar to this Aryan legend is the one of the Hyperboraei, a perfect people which ancient Greek historians and poets reported to have inhabited the Arctic Circle. Some present-day Russian traditionalists pretend that the right of Russia to be considered as the bulwark of the most ancient traditions derives from their descent from these Hyperboreans. Present-days de-frosting of the Arctic Circle, as well as the current displacement of the North Pole, and the connected historical, geological and palaeontologic researches, have shown that the Arctic myth of the Vedas and of Avesta have a scientific ground.

XX Century’s archeologists, including Marija Gimbutas, Ivanov and Gamkrelidze, have also focused their attention on the remnants of an ancient civilisation, the “People of Kurgans”, which was characterized by the fact of burying its princes under artificial hills (“Kurgans”), built in the middle of the steppes. Such civilization had its center in Russia, where most “Kurgans” are, but some of them may be found also in Japan, in Georgia, in Lithuania, Poland and Germany. According to Marija Gimbutas, the Peoples of Kurgans were Aryan warriors, which, having domesticated the horse, had acquired an overwhelming military superiority over their foes, thank to which they were able to expand, from their original Russian territories, into a much broader area, including Europe, where they entered, among other, the Balkan Peninsula, previously settled by the Danube Civilization, devoted to the cult of Mother Goddess.

The encounter of the “military” civilization of Kurgans and the civilizations of the South is  echoed in several characters of Greek tragedies, such as The Amazons, Phædra, Ariadne, Cassandra, Calypso, Cyrce, Iphigenia, and, especially, Europe. The Myth of Europe comes, thus, on the foreground of the encounter of the two largest proto-historical civilizations of Eastern Europe.

Most recent searches in the Kurgans show that the picture given of them by Marija Gimbutas may result only partially true.On the other hand, the finding of  chariots in Chinese burials of the first Dynasties seems to show that Kurgans civilization was not limited to the “Aryan” area.

The Cult of Mother Goddess will have a resonance on several aspects and movements over the whole cultural history of Europe, up to the ideas of a primitive Slavonic communism, linked to the social forms of zadruga, mir and obšćina, with the corresponding debates in European political thinking.

At later stages, other steppes populations which should have settled in Europe, lived, for a certain period, in Russia, such as the Huns, the Goths, the Bulgarians, the Avars and the Magyars.

THE GREAT MOTHER

The Mother Goddess

Russia as the common Mother of all Europeans 
Россия как общая Мать всех европейцев 
La Russie, Mère commune de tous les Européens.
La Russia:madre comune degli Europei
Russland, gemeinsame Mutter aller Europaeer. 

 We will try to show that the first, and fundamental, link existing between Russia and the whole of Europe is the fact that almost all of Europe’s present-days inhabitants (probably with the sole excepition of the Basques), have an origin stemming from “the Kurgans” (hence, from present days Russia).

This does not imply just an historical or  linguistic  heritage, but also several traditional commonalities (such as archaic Indo-European institutions, referred to by Benveniste and Dumézil,  as well as traditional connections between peoples and territories, such as the ones of Greeks with Odessa, of Poles with the Back see, of Swedes with the Baltic Coasts, of Eastern Jews with the “Pale of Settlement”, a.s.o.).

The image which is most commonly associated to Russia is the one of a “Mat’” (“Mother”): “Mat’ Rossija” (“Mother Russia”), “Mat’ Rodina” (“Motherland”).

“Mat’ Rodina” is shown in the highest monument in the World, called “Rodina Mat’ zovet” (“Motherland Calls ”). It represents a gigantic Mother Goddess raising a long sword over the battlefield of Volgograd (Stalingrad). It is the plastic transfiguration of a famous political poster of the Red Army, containing the same phrase: “Rodina Mat’ zovet”. Such poster was diffused in Soviet Russia in 1941 during the German invasion, for prompting volunteering into the Red Army and urging partisans to resist occupation. The statue itself was created for celebrating the Soviet victory over the German invaders, in the precise point where the decisive battle took place. This statue is deliberately similar to the Statue of Liberty of New York, but much higher. The sculpture at the moment of creation became the highest in the world.

The reference to Russia as to a “Mother” is not casual. Russia is a huge territory, stretching from Europe to America, and including one half of Asia, where the legendary original fatherlands of most peoples of the world are located: Aryans, but also Turks, Ugro-Finns, Cartvelians, but, probably, also North American Indians and Chinese. Especially, the territory of Russia is the most likely cradle of most of the peoples of Europe, both Aryans and not.

From another point of view, the cult of the Mother Goddess is one of the oldest in the world, and many elements hint at the fact that also ancient Slavs were worshippers of the Goddess. The cult devoted to the Mother Goddess by the most ancient peoples of Eastern Europe has been thoroughly studied by the Lithuanian scholar Marija Gimbutas. The Moscow Linguistic School has studied the unbelievable melting pot subsisting in the territories of Russia and, still more, of the former Soviet Union, during prehistoric times, when the most ancient languages materialized.

In particular, the studies of Illich Svitych have shown that most of the languages presently existing in the world derive from a very ancient, common language, called Nostratic, from which Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, Turk, Hugro-Finnic, Kartvelian and (probably) Dravidic derive.

Russia, the largest country of the World (“Strana ogramnaya”) and as “Euro-Asiatic Space” (“Evraziatijskoe Prostranstvo”) constitutes, so to say, the “Mother Land” of all Europeans.