What if the Persians would have conquered Arabia? [Vanity]

me ^ | 3/14/07 | me

[Antoninus]

Thanks I am going to buy it and read it.

One caveat--the Persians come off pretty badly in this book, which is written from a Roman point-of-view--Belisarius being a great Roman general.

[muawiyah]

The term "true Arab" refers to people from the core of the Arabian peninsula. It does not mean "real Arab". Many Arabicized peoples are easily mistaken for "true Arabs".

It's a rather specialized term useful in Middle Eastern studies.

Not all non-Jewish semitic language speakers are Arabs.

[Antoninus]

Most everyone tells me I look Italian as is common among most Iranians. As far as the blondes blue eyes. Two of my cousins have blue eyes with light brown to blonde hair and one of my cousins is wider than a ghost with bright green eyes all of them from Iran. It is quite common especially in the north.

The Romans lost a lot of battles ot the Persians, and the Persians took a lot of Roman cities by storm in the 6th and 7th centuries--including Antioch the Great in 541 AD. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of formerly Roman citizens were taken prisoner and marched back to Persia, some to be slaves, others to be free people living in cities built specifically to house them. While it's impossible to say how much of an impact they had on the Persian gene pool as a whole, one must assume that they had some impact.

[Antoninus]

The term "true Arab" refers to people from the core of the Arabian peninsula.

That's true. But I never heard that the Lakhmids and Ghassanids were anything but "true Arabs", even if they weren't currently residing in Arabia. It was my understanding that they were Arabs who had moved out of Arabia into the desert wastes between the Roman Empire and Persia.

Not all non-Jewish semitic language speakers are Arabs.

That's true. But if you have a group that migrated from the Arabian peninsula at some point (I'm not sure of this point, though), spoke Arabic, worshiped the same divinties as the Arabs of Arabia, and followed the same nomadic lifestyle, is it possible to say that they weren't "true Arabs?"

[freedom44]

On another note Iranians are Aryans decedents of the original tribe of Aria who were light haired and white. Iran literally means "the land of the aryans"

[muawiyah]

Yeah, because they weren't living there.

[Antoninus]

Yeah, because they weren't living there.

That seems to be little more than a semantic difference, though. Like saying the Greeks in Sicily weren't really Greeks because they weren't living in Greece.

[muawiyah]

The Greeks in Sicily eventually found themselves in hot water ~ although modern Sicilian is more properly a Greek dialect than Italian, that dates from a later time.

However, a "True Arab", to maintain his status, has to be able to differentiate himself culturally and geographically from the others. That does make them different than the Greeks who thought of themselves as "culture bearers to the world", which is not a view shared by the True Arabs.

[Ptarmigan]

Interesting that Saddam is Mongolian descent. I have seen photos under the certain lighting and he does tend to look Asiatic to me, rather than Arab.

[Ptarmigan]

Sometimes when I see Iraqis, some of them look European to me. I remember seeing some with faired skin and even freckles. I can tell the difference between Persian and Arabs too. Persians have lighter skin and some larger eyes, sometimes almond shape. Arab is more of a cultural designation. Arabs likely came from present day Yemen. I've seen Arabs with dark skin to really faired skin. I remember seeing Arabs with red and even blonde hair and blue eyes. I see this a lot especially among Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, Palestinians, Algerians, and Iraqis.

[muawiyah]

A very small group conquered a very large group way back when. They imposed their language but not their genes