In article <MPG.10c7c280c1759f4598a082@news.demon.co.uk>,
dweller@ramtops.demon.co.uk (Doug Weller) wrote:
> Folks in soc.culture.nordic and soc.culture.scottish, followups are set to
> sci.archaeology, but I thought you might be interested in the idea that
> you're really Scythian:
> > In article <73j6js$oa0$1@news.enterprise.net>, on Thu, 26 Nov 98 09:22:01 > GMT, solos@enterprise.net said...
> [SNIP] > > > >> > > On the question of Scotland and Scythia I would add the following. As far as
> > the ancient world was concerned, Scythia was a very large area of the world
> > stretching from southern Russia and the Caspian Sea through to Easterna and
> > most of Northern Europe. The Scythians were a large family of nations with
> > various groupings within, including people like the Sarmatians of Hungary and
> > the Goths of Poland and Scandinavia. The name Scot is derived from the
> > Latin Scythae.
> > > the Coranians or Coritanni. ... they too were Scythians and possibly even Goths.

> > In Anglo-Saxon times, when they referred
> > to Scythia they generally meant Denmark.
> > You will notice that in all these migrations there is no mention of anyone
> > called "Celts". That is because these people lived in Central France and never
> > crossed the Channel. So-called Celtic Britain is a figment of the Victorian
> > imagination.
> > We should in any case be talking about Celtic culture and Celtic speaking
> peoples. Pictish is almost certainly Celtic (although a few linguists
> have claimed a pre-IndoEuropean element. I can't find my Cambridge
> Encyclopedia of Language, but wasn't Scythian an Iranian language?
> > Doug

Hey Doug - - - long time no fuss ....

With my -=Scythian WebRing=- going, it's hard for me to pass this one up.
Sure, the Scythians of classical times spoke an Iranian language close to
Farsi. But I don't do ancient languages much, it's a study too time-consuming
for my tastes.

I posit a close connection between the Scythians and the Celts on the
basis of mortuary practices common to both, on the same basis, and
using many of the same markers, that I earlier used to identify the
Scythians as a relict proto-Indo-European culture. Burial customs are
a very conservative cultural trait in general. Particularly, unique types
of burial customs may be taken to indicate the survival of some religious
complex, or even a specific religion. I used the style of brazier common
to the proto-Indo-Europeans and Scythian burials, as historically
documented in Herodotus, to infer that the proto-Indo-Europeans and
the much later Scythians also shared the substance-mediated marijuana
worship which used that brazier as a ritual object. I don't have evidence
of a Celtic connection with that particular artifact, but hemp was certainly
cultivated in early Britain as elsewhere in Europe and Asia, in many cases
predating cereal agriculture. It's silly to say they didn't inhale.

Saying the British Isles had no Celts is quibbling. Romans aren't very
reliable sources about other people's history and customs, in the first
place. Doug is perfectly correct to use the term in the broader context
in which it is generally understood. The word Yankees may have first
meant New Yorkers, but now is understood to refer to inhabitants of
New England in distinction to New Yorkers, so today New Yorkers are
not Yankees. Of course, here in the South we use the term in a broader
sense to refer to the enemy North, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and
Indiana, and inhabitants of other polar regions. Thus the term Scythians
refers to the Pazorik of the Altai, but not exclusively those people.
Ancient peoples could see broad generalities of culture as well as we,
and quite properly used inclusive labels for peoples who belonged
together.

The observation that the Celts and the Scythians had a lot in common
is astute, even excluding languages. It is meaningful in relation to
religious preferences, which can be discerned in broad patterns of
artifact associations, though specific type artifacts such as the
marijuana smoking brazier are a rare bonanza. However, I think we
have not been looking early enough to establish a definitive connection.
The fact that some people were called Celts after a certain time, and
other people were called Scythians after a certain time, doesn't mean
these people didn't have ancestors, ideological as well as genetic and
linguistic. What we can say for sure is that these ancestors knew each
other. That seems a modest enough statement, though not without
significance.

Being too exclusive in our categories risks arbitrary exclusion of
related material, which can lead to excluding meaning. In the end,
meaning is what the quest for knowledge is all about.

Religiously,
Johnny Thunderbird
Ode to the Scythians
http://www.oocities.org/~jthunderbird/scythian.html