--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote:
> Pls don't resent anything,
Dear St George, I'm sorry for my choice of words and appreciate very
much your lengty and fascinating posting. About which I'll try to be
brief (famous last words):
> According to T. Peisker, "The Asiatic Background." in: The Cambridge
> Medieval History. Volume I:
That is interesting, but what on earth can be the relevance of a text
on that subject written eighty years ago? Nobody reads that stuff any
more except for historical reasons. Much more is known about almost
any angle of nearly all problems he touches on, plus such subjects as
cultural anthropology etc.
> ... nomadism is possible both in high mountains
> and in low steppes.
Yes, and both for the same reason: agriculture cannot be practiced in
such regions (for various reasons), but that disadvantage can be
undone to some extent by sheep, which have the ability to feed in
different places and convert their food into biomass humans can live
on. The consequence is that society has to be organized in such a way
to make possible the movements of the sheep, because otherwise you're
dead. A big difference between mountains and the steppe is that the
latter offers better possibilities for long-range communication, so
that suitably talented and ruthless individuals can put together
enormous empires.
> ... I suppose any community can switch to other types of subsistence
> whenever the community is constrained to do it (I'm sure any
philosopher
> or IT specialist or surgeon can become a good shepherd and nomad
> (ie, a good... cowboy) if this need be. :)).
I agree, but note the word "constrained". And I'm sure I would make a
pretty lousy cowboy.
[On mountain pastoralism.]
> If it gives you good profits, why not?
Because it has rarely given good profits. So it is primarily a
survival strategy. The constant movement of people from the mountains
into the valleys is as eloquent as anything. I've heard TV interviews
with Hercegovinian pastoralists. They hated it. I've read the first
volume of Milovan Djilas's memoires ("Land without justice",
beautiful book). His family was by no means poor, they ate from
plates and were in a sense even prominent, but they were always
hungry all the same. Of course these are twentieth-century reactions.
> And breeding sheep is not
> a monopolly of the Alps region, you can encounter it towards the
> coasts of the Baltic and Northern seas (at least in Germany, but I
> suppose in Holland, too).
Yes of course, we have the famous Texel sheep, which if I'm correctly
informed can't even deliver their young unaided. They wouldn't have
lasted long in the middle ages. (But it's the reverse: in most
mountains breeding sheep is the only option.)
[Then on using wrong kinds of evidence.]
> I underline that one must differentiate: scholar
> work vs propaganda work. Scholar work actually has always taken
into
> consideration all these aspects. OTOH, every implied party has had
its
> own pieces of smoke screens, exaggerations and myths.
I agree, but that does not make contributing to that stuff more
palatable.
> Good western
> libraries are fulla books on Hungarian protochronism: not only
> amateurs, but also professionals have taken care of a theory that
says
> Magyars are *direct* descendants of the Sumerians! For decades now
> there have been published Magyar-Sumerian dictionaries and
grammars.
You shouldn't think for a moment that anybody takes that stuff
seriously. Hungarian is a regular member of the Uralic family of
languages and its past is as well understood as can be expected given
the circumstances. Talk about Sumerian is unanymously regarded as
lunatic fringe stuff. Are there any serious Hungarian scholars who
endorse that Sumerian crap? I would be surprised.
Similarly with, say Serbian. Of course there are poorly informed or
otherwise deranged Serbian linguists who talk nonsense. But I've
known quite few normal serious scholars who are Serbian patriots and
whose Serbian patriotism can be pretty off-putting for a foreigner,
but who do not regard that as a sufficient reason for deliberately
falsifying whatever the results of their research may be. Earlier in
this discussion I mentioned the case of Pavle Ivic who quietly
operates with a non-Serbian gap between Serbian and Bulgarian-
Macedonian.
I suspect that he would not allow himself to do that if he were a
Romanian or Albanian. Because my impression of Romanian and Albanian
historical linguistics is that not only the amateurs but also the
most knowledgeable professionals have been hijacked by national myths
that cannot be substantiated by regular means and hence have to be
sustained by hook or by crook. Put differently: in the case of
Albanian and Romanian it is my impression that even the most serious
scholars are put in a position comparable with that of the cranks who
write Hungarian-Sumerian comparative dictionaries. And find that
natural given the circumstances.
> (I was amazed months
> ago to hear in a German TV documentary dedicated to
Vikings/Warangians
> that,
> in the 50s, Soviet researchers dealing with these topics were
> prosecuted by the
> political police and even jailed for supporting scientific things
> pertaining to the
> Scandinavian contribution to the history of the Kievan Rus.
That was normal. Andrej Amalrik was removed from the university for
writing some quite innocuous stuff about the Scandinavian presence.
And there was much else. E.g. you weren't allowed to say or think
that the Igor tale is an eignteenth-century forgery (which, by the
way, it isn't). The text of the national poet Pushkin was touched up
to enhance the impression that he was associated with the Decabrists.
Etcetera.
But all that has changed and nowadays anything can be published.
Willem