Posted on 12/04/2002 9:37:26 PM PST by kattracks
Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.
Its economic disasters have afflicted virtually every industry. In its Communist version, it killed far more innocent civilians in peacetime than Hitler killed in his death camps during World War II.
Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.
Many of the intelligentsia remain convinced that if only there had been better leaders -- people like themselves, for example -- it would all have worked out fine, according to plan.
A remarkable new book makes the history of socialism come alive. Its title is "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism." Its author, Joshua Muravchik, is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading think tank in Washington. It is hard to find a book on the history of socialism that is either readable or accurate, so it is especially remarkable to find one that is both. The story told in "Heaven on Earth" is so dramatic and compelling that the author finds no need to gild the lily with rhetoric or hype. It is a great read.
This history of socialism begins more than two centuries ago, at the time of the French Revolution, with the radical conspirator Babeuf, who wanted to carry the revolutionary ideas of the times even farther, to a communist society.
It ends with current British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who brought the Labour Party back to power by dropping the core of its socialist agenda and putting distance between himself and previous Labour Party governments, whose socialist policies had so backfired that the party lost four consecutive national elections.
In between, there are stories of small communal societies, such as that founded in the 19th century by Robert Owen, the man who coined the word "socialism," as well as stories of huge nations like China and the empire that was known as the Soviet Union.
In all these very different societies around the world, the story of socialism has been a story of high hopes and bitter disappointments. Attempts to redistribute wealth repeatedly led to the redistribution of poverty.
Attempts to free ordinary people from oppression repeatedly led to what Mikhail Gorbachev frankly called "servility" to new despots. How and why are spelled out with both facts and brilliant insights expressed in plain words.
Human nature has been at the heart of the failures of socialism to produce the results it sought, even when socialist leaders were idealists like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania or Pandit Nehru in India.
Nowhere have people been willing to work as well for the common good as they do for their own benefit. Perhaps in some other galaxy there are creatures who would, but the track record of socialism among human beings on earth shows that this is not the place.
Worst of all, the concentration of political power necessary to try to reduce economic inequalities has allowed tyrants like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to impose their notions and caprices on millions of others -- draining them economically or slaughtering them en masse or exploiting them sexually.
Mao Zedong, for example, had harems of young girls -- and occasionally boys -- for his pleasure in various parts of China.
There is no point blaming the tragedies of socialism on the flaws or corruption of particular leaders. Any system which allows some people to exercise unbridled power over other people is an open invitation to abuse, whether that system is called slavery or socialism or something else.
Socialism has long sought to create a heaven on earth but an even older philosophy pointed out that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Assyria was the name of a long vanished empire in Pliny's day also. So according to your thought processes, it should be hard to imagine what Pliny was talking about. Read about the fall of Nineveh and you'll see that many people fled the city and even attempted to re-establish another capitol but were unsuccessful. Nineveh was done forever, but the House of Asshur survived and fled north. They would've fled to the farthest reaches of their empire to escape the Babylonians and Pliny confirms that there were Assyrians North of the Black Sea in the first century. If they weren't already established in Germany at the fall of Nineveh being that they controlled the former Hatti Empire, they at least went west later with the "German" tribes as was confirmed in 409 AD.
If you're going to describe the origin of the Germans, you'd better go back before World War II. I'm also saying that you have to go back to before 409 AD, since the Germans were described by Caesar in some detail after his Gallic Wars in 58-50 BC. The casual observer would be surprised that you don't understand this. I'm getting used to it, but OTOH wonder why I put up with it.
I don't know why you keep bringing up Varus. What is the importance of this? Did Roman history end with the defeat of Varus? It must be the only thing relating to Rome and the "German" tribes you've ever read about.
Varus's Legions got wiped out by somebody the Romans were calling Germans, not Assyrians. This was in Anno Domini number nine. Hello?
So it's your contention that the Romans had no idea who it was that was defeating them? The Romans didn't know their enemy?
It is my contention that they did. Most accounts mention Alaric and his very Germanic Goths. Later on some Asian Huns wandered through, but that's decades in the future. Your mystery guest, when you spring him/her, will be the first evidence you've produced to support your position since Pliny the Elder mentioned some Assyrians in the Black Sea region before his death in the Vesuvius eruption, AD 79.
Proof the the cult status of your atheism. You must discredit the work of scholars for your atheist obsession to stand. A man spends a lifetime in the study of languages and peoples in the 4th and 5th centuries and you say "he doesn't know what he was talking about" before you even know who he is.
This man is nameless. Show me where Gibbon refers to him, or anybody else. Show me where Assyrians are in Germany in 409 AD. More importantly, show me where Germans are identified as Assyrians and vice-versa.
This person spent a lifetime studying this very thing. He, like Pliny, was very detailed. He lived at the time of Rome's defeats to the "German" tribes. He knows who they were. What you're suggesting is equivilant to us not knowing who owned Louisiana or Alaska before we bought it from the French and Russians respectively.
A Search of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the string "Assyrian". Gibbon seems to have missed the presence of Assyrians in Europe, sacking Rome. Odd, that. Isn't it what his book is supposed to be about?
Your whole post here is just self-contradictory fantasy scenario. Forcible collectivization wrecked the Ukraine for years, between the initial devastation of the takeover and the lasting legacy of collectivist inefficiency. You can't make enough sense about why you disagree for me to even worry about whatever you're saying. The Ukraine is very productive farmland. It's like the North American midwest farm belt. If you're a farmer, you like it. If you're the Hun armies, you're looking for someplace with cities to sack even if there's lots of nice grassland to graze your animals out here on the steppes.
If you're genuinely curious about why the Ukrainian Holocaust produced starvation and why the Soviet Union became an almost permanent wheat importer, educate yourself. Buy some books or browse the web for some real history.
Your version of the Hittites and Hatti is pure cult nonsense. The Hittites were a major player in the Ancient Near East, but never made it to Germany that most people know about. Indeed, there was a Hatti people in Asia Minor before the arrival of the Hittites. Their language is wildly unrelated to German or Assyrian and has not been classified. Further links on Ancient Hattian:
Because of the small number and poor preservation of documents containing Hattian elements, this language still remains a mystery. Despite some Hattian-Hittite bilingual texts, the Hattian word complexes--the language itself is of agglutinative character and modified by prefixes, infixes, and suffixes--are still difficult to analyze, and the meaning of most Hattian words has not yet been determined. Consequently, a dictionary or glossary of Hattian is presently not available. Therefore, this list would be of help to future lexicographic studies. All known Hattian words in transliteration and in alphabetical order are included; this work seeks to offer a general view of the structure of Hattian words (and words complexes) and to point out the origin of those Hattian (loan) words that have survived in Hittite documents. Besides numerous Hattian elements in ancient Anatolian onomastic and toponomy, a large number of the cultic names/terms (titles of priests, names of sacral buildings, pottery, breads, etc.) were borrowed from Hattian language. These appear especially in the Old Hittite documents. However, some of them are incorrectly considered as Hittite and etymologized in the philological studies and even in the current etymological dictionaries as elements of Indo-European vocabulary.Not German, not Assyrian. Not yet classifiable.
So you're saying that Pliny didn't know what he was talking about either since his writing came more than 600 years after the fall of Nineveh? That's like saying we didn't know where Columbus came from.
Varus's Legions got wiped out by somebody the Romans were calling Germans, not Assyrians. This was in Anno Domini number nine. Hello?
"German" simply meant "war man". It didn't denote ethnicity.
It is my contention that they did. Most accounts mention Alaric and his very Germanic Goths. Later on some Asian Huns wandered through, but that's decades in the future. Your mystery guest, when you spring him/her, will be the first evidence you've produced to support your position since Pliny the Elder mentioned some Assyrians in the Black Sea region before his death in the Vesuvius eruption, AD 79.
Part of Jerome's letter #CXXIII:
I shall now say a few words of our present miseries. A few of us have hitherto survived them, but this is due not to anything we have done ourselves but to the mercy of the Lord. Savage tribes in countless numbers have overrun all parts of Gaul. The whole country between the Alps and the Pyrenees, between the Rhine and the Ocean, has been laid waste by hordes of Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepids, Herules, Saxons, Burgundians, Allemanni and--alas! for the commonweal!--even Pannonians. For "Assur also is joined with them."(1) The once noble city of Moguntiacum(2) has been captured and destroyed. In its church many thousands have been massacred. The people of Vangium(3) after standing a long siege have been extirpated. The powerful city of Rheims, the Ambiani, the Altrebatae,(4) the Belgians on the skirts of the world, Tournay, Spires, and Strasburg have fallen to Germany: while the provinces of Aquitaine and of the Nine Nations, of Lyons and of Narbonne are with the exception of a few cities one universal scene of desolation. And those which the sword spares without, famine ravages within. I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse which has been kept from failing hitherto by the merits of its reverend bishop Exuperius.(5) Even the Spains are on the brink of ruin and tremble daily as they recall the invasion of the Cymry; and, while others suffer misfortunes once in actual fact, they suffer them continually in anticipation.
17. I say nothing of other places that I may not seem to despair of God's mercy. All that is ours now from the Pontic Sea to the Julian Alps in days gone by once ceased to be ours. For thirty years the barbarians burst the barrier of the Danube and fought in the heart of the Roman Empire. Long use dried our tears. For all but a few old people had been born either in captivity or during a blockade, and consequently they did not miss a liberty which they had never known. Yet who will hereafter credit the fact or what histories will seriously discuss it, that Rome has to fight within her own borders not for glory but for bare life; and that she does not even fight but buys the right to exist by giving gold and sacrificing all her substance? This humiliation has been brought upon her not by the fault of her Emperors(6) who are both most religious men, but by the crime of a half-barbarian traitor(7) who with our money has armed our foes against us.(8) Of old the Roman Empire was branded with eternal shame because after ravaging the country and routing the Romans at the Allia, Brennus with his Gauls entered, Rome itself.(9) Nor could this ancient stain be wiped out until Gaul, the birth-place of the Gauls, and Gaulish Greece,(1) wherein they had settled after triumphing over East and West, were subjugated to her sway. Even Hannibal(2) who swept like a devastating storm from Spain into Italy, although he came within sight of the city, did not dare to lay siege to it. Even Pyrrhus(3) was so completely bound by the spell of the Roman name that destroying everything that came in his way, he yet withdrew from its vicinity and, victor though he was, did not presume to gaze upon what he had learned to be a city of kings. Yet in return for such insults--not to say such haughty pride--as theirs which ended thus happily for Rome, one(4) banished from all the world found death at last by poison in Bithynia; while the other(5) returning to his native land was slain in his own dominions. The countries of both became tributary to the Roman people. But now, even if complete success attends our arms, we can wrest nothing from our vanquished foes but what we have already lost to them. The poet Lucan describing the power of the city in a glowing passage says:(6)
If Rome be weak, where shall we look for strength? we may vary his words and say:
If Rome be lost, where shall we look for help? or quote the language of Virgil:
Had I a hundred tongues and throat of bronze
The woes of captives I could not relate
Or ev'n recount the names of all the slain.(7)
Jerome translated the Old Testament to Latin and called the Assyrians and the sons of Asshur "Assur" in his biblical translations. Notice that he differentiates the Assyrians from the many other tribes that were causing misery to Rome.
This man is nameless. Show me where Gibbon refers to him, or anybody else. Show me where Assyrians are in Germany in 409 AD. More importantly, show me where Germans are identified as Assyrians and vice-versa.
Are you saying that Jerome didn't exist? LOL
A Search of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the string "Assyrian". Gibbon seems to have missed the presence of Assyrians in Europe, sacking Rome. Odd, that. Isn't it what his book is supposed to be about?
Pliny and Jerome didn't miss them. They were there at the time, they saw, they recorded.
Furthermore, "Assur also is joined with them" is in Psalm 83. It's a Biblical literary reference to everyone turning against you. Sheesh!
Your whole point is bogus.
I'm starting to think that you can't show that there was a significant drop-off of grain production from the Ukraine from 1913 to 1938. Why don't you just show me the numbers and put this issue to rest? Could it be that you're making claims that have no basis in historical accuracy and you're just spouting off indiscriminantly? Could be.
It's like the North American midwest farm belt. If you're a farmer, you like it. If you're the Hun armies, you're looking for someplace with cities to sack even if there's lots of nice grassland to graze your animals out here on the steppes.
So are you agreeing that if there were Assyrians in the Ukraine that they would've moved west becauses they were more warlike than farmerlike?
If you're genuinely curious about why the Ukrainian Holocaust produced starvation and why the Soviet Union became an almost permanent wheat importer, educate yourself. Buy some books or browse the web for some real history.
You've made an extraordinary claim. It's up to you to show the numbers. Communism lowers the standard of living for the people, but does it cause a specific fertile area like the Ukraine to lose significant grain production? I think that the communist authorities would've made sure that seeds were planted and the harvest was reaped. Show me that this didn't take place.
So even though they overtook the Hatti, they would not have tried to overrun the Hatti's trading empire? They weren't interested in booty?
Indeed, there was a Hatti people in Asia Minor before the arrival of the Hittites. Their language is wildly unrelated to German or Assyrian and has not been classified. Further links on Ancient Hattian:
The Hatti spoke Indo-European. The Hittites spoke Indo-European. Is it your contention that when the Assyrians overtook the the Hittite Empire that they made them speak Semetic?
Because of the small number and poor preservation of documents containing Hattian elements, this language still remains a mystery. Despite some Hattian-Hittite bilingual texts, the Hattian word complexes--the language itself is of agglutinative character and modified by prefixes, infixes, and suffixes--are still difficult to analyze, and the meaning of most Hattian words has not yet been determined. Consequently, a dictionary or glossary of Hattian is presently not available. Therefore, this list would be of help to future lexicographic studies. All known Hattian words in transliteration and in alphabetical order are included; this work seeks to offer a general view of the structure of Hattian words (and words complexes) and to point out the origin of those Hattian (loan) words that have survived in Hittite documents. Besides numerous Hattian elements in ancient Anatolian onomastic and toponomy, a large number of the cultic names/terms (titles of priests, names of sacral buildings, pottery, breads, etc.) were borrowed from Hattian language. These appear especially in the Old Hittite documents. However, some of them are incorrectly considered as Hittite and etymologized in the philological studies and even in the current etymological dictionaries as elements of Indo-European vocabulary. Not German, not Assyrian. Not yet classifiable.
Not yet classifyable? So this language philology that you rely upon so much is so far in it's infancy that it doesn't even know what the major players were speaking in the cradle of civilization? LOL The Encyclopedia Britannica has no problem classifying it:
Hittite language
...most important of the extinct Indo-European languages of Anatolia; it was closely related to Luwian, Lydian, Lycian, and Palaic. Hittite is known primarily from the approximately 25,000 cuneiform ...
Oooh, what a thorn in the side of your language theories. An Indo-European people in close contact with the Empire that took the Israelites captive. Do you think the Assyrians, Hatti, and Hittites picked anything up from each other those hundreds of years, or did they not speak to each other? LOL
So what were Pliny's Assyrians speaking?
Got ant quotes? You made me translate Pliny's Latin, can't you at least cut and paste something that would prove that there was a significant grain production drop-off from 1913 to 1938?
No it isn't.
How would you like someone to relieve you of the burden of all your posessions? Would you appreciate the favor?
That's Socialism.
People have to get over this Trotskyite notion that Socialism would work if it was just done right. It will never work because it's nothing but a lie. The whole of Socialism is a pseudo-philosophy meant to justify wanton theft and murder.
Socialism is theft.
More bait and switch? From the last link: "Despite some Hattian-Hittite bilingual texts ..."
What did the words "bilingual text" mean to you when you read them? Did you not just protest to me that the Hittites and Hatti were not the same people? I had indeed misremembered that point earlier, thank you. But now you don't get it.
Pliny's Assyrians were probably speaking the Syrian Aramaic dialect, which took over from ancient Akkadian at some point much earlier in Assyria. You haven't been reading too many of the links posted in this discussion, have you? My side's or your own.
More self-discrediting behavior.
Does the word "famine" mean anything to you? What's the matter now? Afraid to click?
BTW, if you scan down the page you can find a rebuttal from a dyed-in-the-wool communist that any failure of the communist system occurred. You might want to coopt it, but you have to go find it for yourself.
So we're back to claiming that the Assyrians were happy staying in the Ukraine and would not have explored the territories of the peoples they conquered in the hundreds of years they had rule over them. Cranial and lingusitics studies from here reveal this:
The Germanic peoples who participated in the Völkerwanderung were divided into two groups, both on the basis of language and on that of chronology; the East Germans, including the Goths, Vandals, Gepidi, and Burgundians, expanded early in the Christian era and moved well beyond modern Germanic borders, and hence do not concern us here. The West Germans, including the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and the Germans proper, were later to spread and were less theatrical, but produced more lasting results. It was the Germans proper in particular, the Franks, the Chatti, whose descendants are the Hessians, the Bajuvars or Bavarians, the Alemanni, and the Thuringians, who settled most of modern Germany. Those Franks who did not push on to Belgium and France occupied southwestern Germany, the Chatti settled in the modern Hesse, the Alemanni went to Switzerland and Austria, the Bajuvars to Bavaria, the Thuringians to Thuringia and Bohemia. The Germanic settlement of Austria was a complicated process, involving Alemanni, Bajuvars, Lombards (who were West Germans), and Goths, as well as some Huns and Slavs.
Confirmation of migrations in the Iron age that was not the Chatti ("brachycephal" meaning round headed):
In the early Iron Age Hallstatt Nordics spread into southern Germany; in Württemburg, Bavaria, and the Bavarian Palatinate are many Nordic skulls in association with the brachycephalic crania of the earlier inhabitants. Throughout the Hallstatt Iron Age, however, the highland zone of southern Germany, despite Nordic infusions, clung to its brachycephalic population, although on the plains farther north, pure long heads held complete sway. In the Hallstatt cemeteries of Switzerland, the majority of the crania are brachycephalic, while in Austria, a Hallstatt Nordic nucleus, the mountain regions kept, even at the height of the Hallstatt efflorescence, a strong basic population of Dinaric brachycephals.
This map shows that the Alpine Chatti were the same race as the Assyrians, (Nineveh being on the upper Tigris) and different from the other "Germanic" tribes.
This paragraph shows that there was a band of the same German community that stretched from the Ukraine to France that went along southern Germany in Germany and that they mostly wiped out the long-headed "Germanic" tribes from northern Germany being racially identical to the long-headed inhabitants of Northwestern Europe, Britain, and America.:
The movement of the Saxons southeastward into the present Saxony and onward to the Sudetenlands was a later phenomenon than the Völkerwanderung, but really an extension of it. The same is true of the eastward expansion of Germans beyond Germanic borderlands, which began about the twelfth century. The Drang nach Osten is an ethnic movement of some antiquity, caused by vital demographic forces, and not a modern political affair. The linguistic map of central and eastern Europe is spattered with patches which designate German villages and whole German sections, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Jugoslavia, Rumania, and the Ukraine, and reaching as far as the Volga German colony on the border of Asia. Place names such as Leipzig, Wisrais, and Neu Danzig give ample evidence that these colonies had their origins in different parts of Germany. These German exiles remain unabsorbed in their new countries, and their fidelity to German speech and German culture presents a difficult political problem.42 In view of the history of Germany, it is not surprising that the modern German people should be divided regionally on a racial basis. Since the only part of the Reich which is old Germanic country is the extreme north-west, one should expect to find early Germanic racial types in the numercal ascendancy in that region alone, but their occurrence as individuals is to be expected everywhere, and is so found. The tremendous slaughtering of Saxons by the Franks, the devastating wars which took place in Gerrmany during the Middle Ages, the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War, the campaigns of the Swedes and of Napoleon, the contant drainage of German manpower as mercenaries in armies far afield, have, when added together, formed a selective force of great magnitude. In many campaigns whole villages have been destroyed, whole populations massacred and replaced. Germany, especially the German plains, has suffered much from war, and this suffering has given the older elements in the population, those socially least affected by war in the sense of survival, till opportunity to reëmerge, an opportunity of which they have availed themselves. The temporary ascendancy of North German Nordics in most of Germany during the centuries which followed the settlement of the West Germanic tribes was not of long duration.
Modern German and modern English is bi-lingual but both European.
Pliny's Assyrians were probably speaking the Syrian Aramaic dialect, which took over from ancient Akkadian at some point much earlier in Assyria. You haven't been reading too many of the links posted in this discussion, have you? My side's or your own. More self-discrediting behavior.
But what about your claim on relic words? You're whole theory rests on that there could be no people descended from a semitic people in Europe because you see all the relic words and phrase-matches as coincidence. If the Assyrians can live north of the Black Sea, why can't the other Semites?
You claim that there was a great fall in grain production from the Ukraine between 1913 and 1938. Show me. I want to see quotes and numbers. I've done enough research for you already.
You may have the last word, and I don't care what you say in it.
Again, you're atheistic cult requires you to dismiss scholarly studies.
...and at any rate does not identify European "Alpines" (whatever they are) with "Assyrians." (Neither Persians nor Galatians are Assyrians.) Nothing in either text or map supports the identification that you claim.
The Chatti and the Assyrians are linked by the same cranial structure. The Assyrians controlled the Chatti territory for hundreds of years. To say they would not have explored and colonized their domain in all that time goes against all that is known about empire-building.
You may have the last word, and I don't care what you say in it.
OK. This from the same site:
Fortunately, we are not limited to literary references. The Scythians themselves, under the influence of powerful Greek colonies on the north shore of the Black Sea, and particularly in the Crimea, produced a dis tinctive style of realistic art in gold repoussée. These tepresentations in-clude a number of portraits of Scythians in very realistic and life-like poses. They show a well-defined type of heavily bearded, long-haired men with prominent, often convex, noses. The browridges are moderately heavy, the eyes deep set. These faces are strikingly reminiscent of types common among northwest Europeans today, in strong contrast to those shown in the art of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Hittites, which are definitely Near Eastern. The face, therefore, is definitely Nordic, while the body build looks often thick-set and very muscular, but this may be due to the clothing, which includes baggy trousers and jackets with full sleeves. The pointed caps which they wear and the long hair make it impossible to form a useful opinion of their head form, but this is unnecessary, since we may soon discover it from reference to the cranial material. Persian representations of Saka show exactly the same type, depicted by the followers of an entirely different school of art, and hence this type cannot have been an unfounded convention.
There is, in the anthropometric literature, sufficient data to permit the reconstruction of the Scytho-Sarmatian cranial type or types. The most extensive group, and that which may be used as a basic series, is Donici's collection of seventy-seven Scythian crania from kurgans of Bessarabia, which was one of the favored Scythian pasture lands during the height of their domination.57 (See Appendix I, cot 37.) The fifty-seven male crania of this series are not homogeneous, but fall into two types, a long-headed and a round-headed, with the former greatly in the majority.
The means of these Scythian skulls show them to be low mesocephals of moderate cranial dimensions, but with a low vault height. The cranial means are, in fact, almost identical with those of the Keltic series from France and the British Isles. They resemble the Aunjetitz and Hallstatt skulls only as much as the Keltic series mentioned resemble these latter. They are, furthermore, metrically identical with the previously studied skulls from the Minussinsk region of southern Siberia, which may have been contemporaneous with them.
One of the peculiarities of the Scythian skulls is a low mesene upper facial index, lower than that of the Kelts or of the Minussinsk people. Donici has shown, however, that this low upper facial index is mostly associated with the brachycephalic element in the group, and the same is true of many of the chamaeconch and mesorrhine skulls. When the brachycephalic element is eliminated, therefore, one finds these skulls to be narrower faced, and narrower nosed, and to fit more nearly into a central European Nordic category. Other series of Scythian crania from southern Russia and from the Caucasus show the same general characteristics as that of Donici's type series, but are in most cases purely dolichocephalic, which leads one to suppose that the brachycephalic element in the Rumanian skulls may have been at least partly of local origin.58
So the Scythians were racially identical with the Cimmerians and nearly identical with the ancient British Celts clear across Europe, all long-heads. That's to be expected if the Phoenician and Danite ships allowed the tribes to colonize parts of Europe before the captivities.
It is tempting to find the origin of the Scythians in the previous population of the southern Russian plain. A series of Bronze Age crania from the lower Volga region is identical, at least in indices, with the later Scythian group, and so is that from the Ukrainian Urnfields. Three skulls of so-called "Cimmerians" likewise show no important deviation.66
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
