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    The Race of Genesis 10
    By William R. Finck Jr. ? 2006
    We are only going to travel the history of this planet once. There are no second chances. One history, one Bible, one trek from the garden of Eden to the gathering of the Wheat. If we find not the foundations of our race in Genesis chapter 10, then our history ? our Bible ? is absolutely unreliable and we are mired in futility, with no purpose for living and no record of our origins, and no hope of a future. I often begin oral explanations of Genesis chapter 10 by quoting Epictetus, borrowed from the opening pages of Thayer?s Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament: arche paideuseos he ton onomaton episkepsis or ?the beginning of learning is the investigation of names?, and how I must agree with Epictetus!

    The chronology of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Bible may be much more reliable than the Masoretic Text, and according to many (i.e. Adam Rutherford) from that source the date of the flood of Noah may be fixed around 3245 B.C. I would purport that Genesis chapter 10 is a snapshot, a profile of those tribes of which our race ? the family of Noah ? first blossomed into in the first few centuries after the Deluge. I would think that, five thousand years ago, one would find no ?Aryan? or ?Caucasian? civilization outside of these Genesis chapter 10 people, and that all of these people are indeed ?Aryan? or ?Caucasian?. Of course it cannot be discounted, that during the nearly 1800 years before the deluge, some Adamite groups or individuals may have wandered off, departing from the land of the flood and in that manner escaping destruction, yet any of these have no definite history which is known to us today.

    It is certainly no mistake that, as it may be made evident here, so many of the tribes listed in Genesis 10 are found with names so similar to those gleaned from the earliest secular records of our race. Although it is frustrating that some of the Genesis chapter 10 people seem to have vanished at an early time, too early to be identified in secular records uncovered thus far ? that I have been able to access ? surely enough of these peoples may be identified that one may see the truth of these words concerning Genesis chapter 10 fully demonstrated.

    Acts 17:26: ?And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;? (KJV).

    Deut. 32:8-9: Deut. 32:8-9: ?When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For Yahweh?s portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His inheritance.? (KJV)

    Scripture must always be understood within the context of other scripture, and so Acts 17:26 must be viewed through the filter provided at Deut. 32:8. Even most Bible cross-references relate these two verses. Here it should become evident that whenever the Bible discusses ?the nations? it intends only those nations descended from Noah, listed in Genesis chapter 10, and originally all of those nations were of the same race. An example of ?the times before appointed? in relation to the Genesis chapter 10 nations is found at Jer. 46:17, where the implication is that Egypt was finished as a nation, and although in Roman times the Greeks in Egypt maintained a high level of civilization for several centuries, history surely proves Jeremiah correct concerning the Egyptians themselves. Another example lies in Daniel chapter 2, and the vision of a succession of world empires given there, along with the parallel vision described in Daniel chapter 7.

    Since these nations, as we shall see, were dispersed into a wide geographical area, reading Deut. 32:8 along with II Sam. 7:10 indicates that a good deal of land was reserved uninhabited by Yahweh to be eventually used by the children of Israel. It is also clear that this land is outside of Palaestine. Ancient history and archaeology reveal that the Israelites eventually settled much of Europe. Before one can understand the importance of the promise of preservation (often translated ?salvation?) for Israel, uttered in many places in the Old Testament, one must understand the history and fate of the rest of these nations of Adam which are listed in Genesis chapter 10.

    The Japhethites: Gen. 10:2-5

    Gomer (Gen. 10:2). Difficult to document, the historian Josephus made the mistake of associating Gomer with the Kelts, an error probably derived from an early Greek name for them, kimmeroi, and many of his copyists have followed this mistake, which is based solely upon this phonetic similarity. That the Kelts actually sprung from a portion of the children of Israel deported by the Assyrians (see Missing Links Discovered in Assyrian Tablets by E. Raymond Capt) is evident from many factors, including their late (7th century B.C.) appearance in history, their location today, and their role in history in fulfillment of many of the prophecies concerning Israel: a topic beyond the scope of this discussion. Simply note that the ?Galatians? of Paul?s epistle are Kelts, and Paul certainly was writing to Israelites. By contrast, in Ezekiel chapter 38, Gomer is allied with those who are in opposition to the children of Israel, which makes it easy to accept A. Koestler?s statements concerning Togarmah, outlined below. Some commentators feel that Hosea?s taking of a wife named Gomer (Hos. 1:3) is an indication that Gomer was one of the tribes that the Israelites were dispersed among after their deportation by the Assyrians. This hypothesis is quite credible, though I have not been able to positively identify any tribe of the secular records with Gomer.

    The sons of Gomer (Gen. 10:3). Arthur Koestler, a jew who writes from a jewish perspective, claims that Togarmah is the common ancestor of the Uigur, Dursu, Avars, Huns, Basilii, Tarniakh, Khazars (see Cush below), Zagora, Bulgars and Sabir, on p. 72 of his book The Thirteenth Tribe. Along with Gomer, Togarmah is allied against the children of Israel in the last days, at Ezek. 38:6, where he is placed in the far north, and surely among the Asiatic hordes of the former Soviet Union. Riphath, or Diphath, is unmentioned elsewhere in the Bible, except for a copy of Genesis chapter 10 found at I Chronicles chapter 1. Ashkenaz, however, is more easily identified. Mentioned at Jer. 51:27 along with Ararat and Minni (both part of modern Armenia), Ashkenaz is there shown to be not far from the ancient land of the Khazars, once a great empire, and of which modern Kazakhstan is a remnant. In the first millennium many of the Edomites and other Canaanites who had adopted Judaism migrated to Khazaria, and the Khazars, beginning with their king, had converted to Judaism. The jews being absorbed into the general population, these people adopted the name Ashkenaz, or ?Ashkenazi jews?, for Ashkenaz was recognized as an ancestor of the original Caucasian population of the area.

    Magog, Tubal and Meshech (Gen. 10:2). Over 1500 years before the Germanic Rus conquered the land which bears their name today, Ezekiel wrote of Rhos (LXX) or Rush (A.V.) being the leader (?prince?) of Gog, Meshech and Tubal (Ezekiel chapter 38). This is by no means a coincidence, but rather a clear manifestation of the Divine inspiration of the prophet.

    In light of the relationship which the Rus were to have with Magog, Meshech and Tubal, which Ezekiel chapter 38 illustrates, Herodotus mentions two tribes among those under Persian dominion, the Moschi and the Tibareni (3.94, 7.78), in a convenient geographic location that without stretching the imagination we may associate these ancient Japhethites with the dwellers around the Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk. Strabo discussed the Moschi and the Tibareni in his eleventh book, and relates that land formerly held by the Moschi, whom he placed just south of Colchis in the Caucasus mountains, was encroached upon by the Colchians, Armenians and Iberians (11.2.18). Of course the Iberians are Hebrews, a part of the Scythians who stayed put, rather than moving northward through the Caucasus with their fellows, and Armenia can be shown to be a Hebrew word meaning ?mountain parts?.

    Whoever Magog may have been in prehistoric times, we can be certain that his descendants are found among those gigantic (?Gog?) mixed masses of Caucasian ? Mongol ? Chinese ? whatever blood who are found inhabiting much of Asiatic Russia today. Mongolia and Tibet, homes of anciently mixed races with a clear Adamic cultural influence may be guessed. Professor L. A. Waddell, who wrote in the first quarter of the 20th century, produced several books which illustrated the Aryan origin of cultures in India and in Tibet.

    Madai (Gen. 10:2) is identifiable with the Medes, which is evident simply by checking both terms in Strong?s Concordance. The Greeks wrote ?Mede? as Madai, the Greek eta in English being either an ?a?, or an ??? or ?e?. Herodotus wrote that ?These Medes were anciently called by all people Arians? (7.62), although it is more likely that the term ?Aryan? was rather used by Israelites who once sojourned in Media (with which Dr. George Moore agrees in his The Lost Tribes and the Saxons of the East and the Saxons of the West?), since the term Ar-ya appears to mean ?Mountain of Yahweh? in Hebrew (i.e. Dan. 2:45), and that the Greeks had Israelite tribes in Media confused with actual Medes. Regardless, the Medes fulfilling a destiny in history which the prophets had already assigned to Madai (i.e. Isaiah chapter 21; Jer. 25:25 and 51:11 and 28; Daniel chapter 8), there should be no doubt of this identification.

    There are good indications that the Medes are found in the Slavs of today. The Slavs may be traced to a people that the Romans and Greeks called Sauromatae (Sarmatians). Diodorus Siculus, discussing certain Sakae (Scythian) Kings, states that ?It was by these kings that many of the conquered [by the Scythians] peoples were removed to other homes, and two of these became very great colonies: the one was composed of Assyrians and was removed to the land between Paphlagonia and Pontus [modern day Turkey along the southern shore of the Black Sea], and the other was drawn from Media and planted along the Tana?s [a river north of the Caucasus mountains which empties into the Black Sea from the northeast], its people receiving the name Sauromatae. Many years later this people became powerful and ravaged a large part of Scythia...? (Diodorus Siculus 2.43.5-7). And with this, we having so many Slavs among us today, we have the realization of the fulfillment of Gen. 9:27, which will be discussed below.

    Javan (Gen. 10:2) is also identified by Strong in his Concordance with the Ionian Greeks, as the Septuagint translators also seemed to do, rendering the Hebrew word (3120) as 3TL"< (Iouan). This is not out of fancy, for on the Behistun Rock (and other Eastern inscriptions) these Greeks are called ?Yavana?, and Sir Henry Rawlinson wrote ?Ionians? there in his famous translation of that inscription. Other Persian inscriptions assure this same connection (see G. Moore?s The Lost Tribes? and E. R. Capt?s Missing Links?). These Ionians once inhabited the coasts of Anatolia [modern Turkey] and many of its islands, that land called Ionia generally, and also were the founders and principal inhabitants of Athens.

    The sons of Javan (Gen. 10:4). Of the sons of Javan, all are identified with the sea trade with Tyre in Ezekiel chapter 27: Elishah at 27:7, Tarshish at 27:12, Kittim (or Chittim) at 27:6 and in the Septuagint, Dodanim which is a mistake by the Hebrew copyists for Rodanim (as Strong?s attests), at 27:15 (where the A.V. has ?Dedan?), or ?Rhodians? (Rodioi) in the LXX. Elishah and Kittim are both identified with Cyprus, with several varying spellings of these names found in ancient inscriptions. Kittim is the word for Cyprus throughout the Hebrew prophets. Rodanim are the Greeks of Rhodes, as identified in the LXX. Tarshish is a region of southern Spain known as Tartessus. The Ionians (or Javan) are connected with Tyrian sea trade also at Ezek. 27:13 and 19, mentioned with Dan: for a portion of that tribe also settled Greece at an early time, and were known as Danaans.

    The ?ships of Tarshish? are mentioned in Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, and several of the prophets. Although a separate and quite lengthy topic, it can be convincingly demonstrated that the Phoenicians of Tyre and elsewhere were the Israelites ? called Phoenicians by the Greeks ? right from the pages of the Bible, with much evidence also added by secular historians. Carthage was a Phoenician colony of Tyre, and the Carthaginians eventually controlled the land we call Spain today, then called Iberia, ?Hebrew? or ?Eber? land, just as the land south of the Caucasus mountains, where the deported Israelites first settled and became known as Scythians, was also called Iberia, even in Roman times.

    Diodorus Siculus (25.10.1 ff.) discusses wars between the Carthaginian Hamilcar Barca and the ?Iberians and Tartessians? in the third century B.C. Herodotus (4.152) is writing about a period much earlier than his own, even pre-dating the Trojan War, and speaking of Tartessus in southern Spain says, ?This trading town was in those days a virgin port, unfrequented by the merchants?. The Trojan War was 200 years before King Solomon?s ships, so Herodotus surely seems to have been accurate, and his calling Tartessus a ?trading town? illuminates the Scriptural record. In their Greek-English lexicon, Liddell & Scott readily identify Tart?ssos as ?the Tarshish of Scripture?.

    Tiras (Gen. 10:2) is in Strong?s Hebrew spelling ?Thiyrac?. Mentioned nowhere else in the Bible (except in the copy of Genesis chapter 10 found at I Chronicles chapter 1), many writers have made perfect etymological and ethnographical sense in connecting these people to the Thracians north of Greece. In later history the land of Thrace is instead occupied by Greeks, as Makedonians and Thessalians, and Strabo is confused as to whether one tribe in the area, the Treres, are Kimmerian (Kelts) or Thracian (13.1.8, 14.1.40). The Thracians were not considered Greeks but rather barbarians (Strabo 7.7.1), and had colonies in Asia (Strabo 12.3-4), and also with the Eneti settled the area around Venice (Strabo 12.3.25). The Phrygians of Anatolia are said to be Thracians (Strabo 7.3.2, 7.25, and 10.3.16).

    Modern anthropologists, archaeologists and historians often discuss the ?sea peoples?, whom they usually claim were Caucasians who came from the Aegean area and invaded the Mediterranean. The true origin of the ?sea peoples? are as the Japhethites of Genesis chapter 10, who were spread along the waterways from the Caspian and Black Seas to as far west as Spain, and at a very early time. Contrast Gen. 10:5 with 10:20 and 10:31, where the Japhethites were specifically assigned the ?isles? or ?coastlands?, but not the Hamites or Shemites, though the Hamitic Philistines also plied the waves, and only after a considerable time were these peoples rivaled at sea by the Israelite Phoenicians.

    There is a certain prophecy, at Gen. 9:27, which reads, ?God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant?. Without discussing the part concerning Canaan, this will be discussed briefly here.

    It is evident that Yahweh surely did enlarge Japheth, for these tribes were spread out over a great area along the southern coasts and eastern borderlands of Europe. Although a separate and lengthy topic, once it is realized that not only the Phoenicians of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos (et al.), northern Africa, the Greek and Italian islands, Spain and Britain, but also the Keltic and Germanic peoples, and the Trojans and Illyrians and Parthians, among others, were all descendants of the Shemitic Israelites, and most of whom had moved into Europe, along with other Shemites such as the Lydians (see Lud below), only then may the oracle at Gen. 9:27 (and most other prophecies in the Bible) be manifest and appreciated.

    Aside from the peoples of Meshech and Tubal having been conquered by, and living among the Germanic Rus (and we see here that the Slavic tongue prevailed in Russia), and the colony of Medes moved by the Israelite Scythians to the Tana?s, which later became known as Sarmatians, and later than that as Slavs, these things already discussed above, the other Japhethites moved all along the Mediterranean coasts and into Europe.

    The Getae and the Daci are described by Strabo as being akin to the Thracians (Tiras) and having the same tongue (7.3.10, 13), these inhabiting a great part of both sides of the lower Danube. Although Strabo considered everything north of the Danube as Germany (2.5.30, 7.1.1 et al.) this particular area is historically Slavic. The Greek Ionians also made many settlements. The Ionians of Phocaea in Asia Minor were called by Herodotus ?the first of the Greeks who performed long voyages? (1.163), and these alone founded Massalia (Marseilles) on the coast of France, Maenaca in Iberia, Elea in Italy (Strabo 4.1.4, 3.4.2, and 6.1.1) among many others. Italy was also settled by the Trojans, and especially Rome (Strabo 6.1.12 and 14), the Ionians of Asia Minor (Strabo 6.1.14, 6.2.2), the Athenians who were also Ionians, and the Achaeans who were Danaans (Strabo 6.1.10, 11, 13, and 15).

    With so many Slavs, along with the races of Southern France and Italy, among us today, Japheth certainly is dwelling in the tents of Shem unto this day.

    The Hamites: Gen. 10:6-20

    Cush (Gen. 10:6). Before beginning a discussion of Cush (or Kush), it is quite important to acquire an understanding of the word ?Ethiopian?, as the Greeks called the Cushites, as the word Kush is often translated in our Bibles, and as we call the people found inhabiting the land of Kush in Africa today. Our ?Ethiopian? comes from the Greek word Aithiops which properly means ?shining face?, ?glowing face? or ?sunburnt face?, and was certainly not used by the earliest Greek writers to describe the dark races. There are several words used to describe ?black?, ?swart?, ?dark? etc. in Greek which are often applied to people, among them being melas, kelainos, pelas, and phaios. Other words meaning ?dark? but apparently not applied to people are skotos, knephas, gnophos, dnophos, zophos and zopheros.

    A word akin to Aithiops is aithos, which the large 9th edition of Liddell & Scott defines as ?burnt...II. shining...red-brown...?. The 1996 Revised Supplement to this edition inserts after burnt ?perhaps black- or dark-complexioned?, and emends shining to bronze-coloured. The black I must reject. Red-brown describes a sun-tanned Caucasian, and not a dark-skinned negro who only gets blacker in the sun.

    Other words related to Aithiops: aithon ?fiery, burning?of metal, flashing, glittering...?; aitho ?to light up, kindle...?; aithra ?clear sky, fair weather?; aithops, the closest, ?fiery-looking, of metal, flashing; of wine, sparkling? but according to Liddell & Scott (the source for these definitions), someone in the Greek Anthologies, a late and wide collection of Greek inscriptions and miscellaneous writings mostly from well into the first millennium A.D., either translated or used aithops as ?swart, dark? however this is clearly contrary to the true spirit of the word?s meaning. Applied to Kush, a White man, or his White descendants, it could only mean ?sun-burnt? as in bright red or brassy-colored, which is something which happens only to Caucasians in the outdoors, and is exactly what one may expect Kushites in Ethiopia to look like!

    Moses fled Egypt, as recorded in Exodus chapter 2, and met with a tribe of the Midianites, descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Gen. 25:1-2) from whom he took a wife. These Midianites lived in the land of Kush, as can be discerned from Numbers chapter 12. Abraham had originally sent his sons by Keturah ?eastward, unto the east country? (Gen. 25:6) and surely this ?east country? is that called Kush (Ethiopia in the A.V.) at Gen. 2:13. For Nimrod, the Kushite, founded the first Adamic empire (Gen. 10:8-12) which evidently spread far and wide, beyond Mesopotamia to where we have the Hindu-Kush mountains of today. The river of Gen. 2:13 may even be the Indus, if not some other lost river, for it is evident that the events which caused the Deluge of Noah may have changed the geography of the area. Moses certainly did not go to Ethiopia in Africa for his wife, and there are no Midianites ever spoken of there.

    In Hesiod?s Theogony, probably written in the 8th century B.C., Memnon, legendary King of the Ethiopians, was the son of Eos, or ?Light?. In the Aethiopis by Arctinus of Miletus, written as a sequel to Homer?s Iliad, Memnon the Ethiopian aided the Trojans in their war against the Greeks, only to be slain by Achilles. Herodotus mentions the ?Ethiopians of Asia? (3.94), and although he also describes black and wooly-haired ?Ethiopians? (3.101, 7.70), I will refer to Diodorus Siculus for a more complete picture below. Herodotus calls Susa, the famed capital city (along with Persepolis and also the Median city Ecbatana) of the Persian Empire the ?city of Memnon? (5.53-54), since the Greeks believed that Memnon had founded that city (Strabo 15.3.2).

    Diodorus Siculus, relating the tradition concerning Memnon, has Ethiopia in Asia sending aid to the Trojans, including Assyrians and ?men of Susiana? (2.22.1-5, 4.75.4), although Diodorus also records the claims of the Ethiopians of Africa, that that place was the home of Memnon. Among others, Apollodorus records the myth that Perseus, legendary founder of the Persians, married Andromeda, daughter of the Ethiopian King Cepheus and his wife Cassiepea, after rescuing her from a sea monster, an event said to have taken place at Joppa in Palaestine (Apollodorus 2.4.3, Josephus, Wars, 3.9.3 (3:420)). So the Greeks have many witnesses of an ?Ethiopia? in Asia, in lands and cities known to be inhabited by Caucasians, and with people taking part in some of the first events recorded by the Caucasian poets of Europe, and the Hebrews have a Kush in a land which may surely be supposed to be the same as the Greek, yet the Hebrew record is not much earlier than the events the Greeks were recording (i.e. Exodus and death of Moses, c. 1450 B.C.; Trojan War, c. 1185 B.C.), and as a third witness, we have a Kush (the Hindu-Kush mountains) on our modern maps not much further east than where the Greek and Hebrew records tell us that the ancient district was situated.

    In his book The Lost Tribes?, Dr. Moore presents the viable theory that names similar to Kush and found in southern Russia are derivative peoples of this Biblical patriarch: Kosa, Khoza, Khazars and Cossacks.

    Now to turn to the Kush, or Ethiopia, of Africa. In the first eleven chapters of his third book, Diodorus Siculus draws from much earlier historians (as he always did) to describe the various peoples of African Ethiopia, and it is evident that those tribes contrast with one another quite starkly. The first Ethiopians he discusses are endowed with what we may consider a well-developed form of ?western civilization?, for he states ?they say that they were the first to be taught to honor the gods and to hold sacrifices and processions and festivals?, they quote Homer in reference to themselves (Iliad 1:423-424), they recount the unsuccessful invasions into their country by Cambyses and Semiramis, and they claim that the Egyptians were originally Ethiopian colonists, led by Osiris. The two types of their writing (like Egypt), popular or demotic and sacred or hieroglyphic, are described, and it is said that the sacred is common among these Ethiopians. Their priests were much like the Egyptian. They believed that their kings gained sovereignty by Divine Providence, their laws and punishments were from custom, and they practiced the same flight of refuge which the Greeks did, which was similar to the Hebrew Levitical cities of refuge. An Ethiopian king under Ptolemy was educated in Greece and studied Philosophy, and aside from a few odd customs, there is no reason to believe that these Ethiopians, whose physical characteristics were not mentioned, were anything but civilized, and not much different than the rest of ?western? society.

    In stark contrast to those cultured Ethiopians first discussed, beginning at 3.8.1 Diodorus says: ?But there are also a great many other tribes of the Ethiopians [and here it is apparent that, like ?Phoenicia? and other labels, ?Ethiopia? has become merely a geographical designation, rather than an ethnographical one], some of them dwelling in the land lying on both banks of the Nile and on the islands in the river, others inhabiting the neighboring country of Arabia [between the Nile and the Red Sea], and others residing in the interior of Libya [the rest of Africa - Sudan here]. The majority of them, and especially those who dwell along the river, "<u>are black in color and have flat noses and wooly hair</u>." Here it is evident that Diodorus is describing the Nubians and other wandering black tribes of the region. He continues: ?As for their spirit they are entirely savage and display the nature of a wild beast...and are as far removed as possible from human kindness to one another...and cultivating none of the practices of civilized life...they present a striking contrast when considered in the light of our own customs.?

    So surely it is apparent here, that if we do not have a White culture in Ethiopia in an era not long before Diodorus? own, we certainly have at least the remnants of one. Ezekiel chapter 30 lists Ethiopia among ?all the mingled people?, and all of this fits very well with the picture of a once Caucasian but now adulterated Kush in that region.

    Of the sons of Cush (Gen. 10:7), Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sabtechah, and the sons of Raamah, Sheba and Dedan, not much will be said here. Some of these names appear again among the sons of Joktan listed at Gen. 10:26-30, in both the MT and the LXX, and this has caused confusion and speculation in attempts to identify these tribes, and even later in the Bible confusion seems to exist (compare I Chr. 1:9 and 32). Strabo wrote of Berenic?, ?a Sabaean city?, together with Sabae ?a good sized city?, which were on the African side of the Red Sea (16.4.10).

    Surely Mitsrayim, or Mizraim (Gen. 10:6) is the Old Testament Hebrew for Egypt everywhere. Egypt, or Aegyptus, is the term used throughout Greek literature, and the Egypt at that time was only the area around the Nile delta, and the Nile valley along both banks as far as Elephantine. The early Greeks seem to have written little about Egypt outside of Thebes and Heliopolis, until the time of Herodotus. There is much to be said about early Egypt that is beyond the scope of this discussion, but warrants at least a mention. First, early Egypt actually consisted of several disparate cultures, some alien in nature, which were adverse to one another and eventually amalgamated, which was surely not a good idea. The pharaonic civilization in Egypt appeared rather suddenly, not long after 3000 B.C., consistent with Septuagint chronology. The archaeology of those early dynasties reveals clearly a people of high civilization and Aryan characteristics. Statues of the pharaohs reveal men who would not be out of place in Dublin or Hamburg. There were actually two groups in early Egypt, centuries apart, remembered as ?Hyksos?. The first group little is known about, a noble Adamic race, probably Shemites and maybe even Hebrews, who built the Great Pyramid. The second were Kenites who invaded and occupied the Delta shortly before Joseph was sold into Egypt. During the time of Joseph, the Pharaohs at Thebes were of the House of Shem, as was the priesthood of On (Heliopolis or Beth-Shemesh). It was these Egyptians at Thebes whom Joseph was sold to as a slave. ?Beth-Shemesh? is a double-entendre: it can mean either ?House of the Sun? or ?House of the people of Shem? in palaeo-Hebrew.

    Of the Sons of Mizraim (Gen. 10:13): Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, Pathrusim, Casluhim, Philistim, and Caphtorim, these are tribal and not individuals? names. The Anamim are likely the ?Anami? mentioned in an 8th century B.C. cuneiform inscription. Naphtuhim is apparently an Egyptian word which means ?people of the delta?, and Pathrusim ?people of the southern land?.

    The Philistim, or Philistines, had dwelt in the land of Caphtor before their own migration to Palestine, and Caphtor was very probably in Egypt. See Amos 9:7; Deut. 2:23; and Jer. 47:4. Certainly the Philistines were Adamic (Zech. 9:6) and some had surely migrated west with the children of Israel (Isa. 11:14). Goliath was not actually a Philistine, but rather a mercenary in their army, one of the sons of Repha the Canaanite giant, for which see I Chr. 20:4-6 where ?the giant? is in Hebrew ha-raphah, the source of the Rephaim (i.e. Gen. 14:5 and 15:20; II Sam. 5:18 and 22 and 23:13 et al.). There also should be noted an obscure entry in Herodotus, at 2.128: ?Hence they [the Egyptians] commonly call the pyramids after Philition, a shepherd who at that time fed his flocks about the place.? Some suppose that this may be a memory of the ancient Philistines in Egypt, and the first ?shepherd kings?, connected to the building of the Great Pyramid.

    The Ludim are confused by the translators for the Lydians, the Shemitic Lud of Anatolia, and ?Lydian(s)? at Jer. 46:9 and Ezek. 30:5 should be ?Ludim? instead, and these descendants of Ham, and not Shem. The Ludim of Ham are also mentioned at Ezek. 27:10.

    Phut (Gen. 10:6) was associated with Libya, though it is difficult to discern exactly why (see Nah. 3:9), and in the A.V. and the Septuagint it was translated as such at Ezek. 30:5 and 38:5, and Jer. 46:9 (26:9 in the LXX). The Lubim (and so ?Libya?) and Sukkiim (II Chr. 12:3) may have been pre-Adamic (aboriginal) people, or they may have been Adamites who simply came to be called by a different name. Phut is listed among ?all the mingled people? at Ezek. 30:5.

    Diodorus Siculus (20.55) writes of Libyans dwelling on Africa?s northern coast, in cities, and friendly to Carthage, but then also of the nomadic ?Libyans? of the interior, hostile to Carthage. He does not, however, describe Libyan or Carthaginian physically. For perspective, Virgil, a Latin poet contemporary with Diodorus, called Dido the legendary queen of Carthage, who is mentioned by Josephus and was a historical figure, both blonde and beautiful in his Aeneid. Now of course Virgil never met Dido, who lived 800 years before the poet?s time, but this does indicate Virgil?s idea of what the ideal Phoenician woman may look like.

    Hesiod, probably a contemporary of Isaiah, writing in his Catalogues of Women (fragment 40A) mentions both the ?boundless black-skins and the Libyans? but says that from Epaphus, a son of Chronos, ?sprang the dark Libyans and high-souled Ethiopians?, but also the ?under-ground folk and feeble pygmies?. It is also apparent that by this time Libya also was little more than a geographical label and signified all of Africa except Egypt and Ethiopia. Surely the more reliable early source may be the poet Aeschylus, a contemporary of Nehemiah, who in his Suppliant Maidens at lines 277-290, lists a group of races and compares the likeness of their women to those of the (?Greek?) Danaans, among those mentioned being Libyans, Egyptians and Amazons, very likely indicating some degree of homogeneity among these peoples. Aeschylus was relating a parody of events which transpired a thousand years before his own time, the migration of Dan from Egypt to Greece.

    In this age we have long had a mixed race, the Berbers, as evidence of a former White civilization in this region, although the settlements of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, the later Germanic invasion of Carthage, and then the rise of Mohammedism and the subsequent arab conquest of northern Africa, all did much to further confound an already mingled African world.

    Canaan (Gen.10:6), Ham?s youngest son, was cursed by Noah (Gen. 9:25-27). The reason why Canaan, and not Ham himself or his other sons, was cursed should be apparent by reading Lev. 20:11; for Canaan was the result of Ham?s illicit behavior, warranting his special mention at Gen. 9:18. And so Canaan?s descendants are later found mixed in with the race of Cain (Gen. 4:16-26 and 15:19-21; Deut. 7:1-2) who was also cursed (Gen. 4:10-15) and several races with no Biblical genealogy, indicating that they are of non-Adamic origin. Some of the ?-ites? here in Gen. 10:16-18 also may well be of non-Adamic stock, races that the Canaanites mixed with rather than races which sprung from Canaan.

    The ?Hivites? seem to be rather the ?Horites?, the word ?Hivite? being a scribal error in all of its occurrences, evident by comparing Gen. 36:2, 20, and 30, and also the Septuagint at Gen. 34:2 and Josh. 9:7. The Horites, Hurrians to modern anthropologists and archaeologists, are apparently an oriental race which invaded Mesopotamia at an early time. Some Horites dwelt at ?Mount Hor?, to which the Edomites, the descendants of Esau who was also cursed (Mal. 1:2-3), had joined themselves. Mount Hor was later called Mount Seir, and is today known as Petra, in Jordan. See Genesis chapter 36.

    Heth was a progenitor of the people later known as the Hittites, but possibly a pre-Adamic tribe whom Heth had settled with, and therefore named for him by the rest of the Adamic race. The name Sidon is found in the city in Canaan of the same name, and its environs. Seven hundred years before the Greeks first wrote of ?Phoenicians?, the Canaanites of Tyre and Sidon and the rest of the coast were driven out by the children of Israel, who then inhabited those cities. The ?Phoenicians? were indeed Israel.

    These descendants of Canaan may be traced through both the Bible and through history to the people that are called ?jews? today, although many are also among the ?arabs?, and the olive-skinned peoples of the Mediterranean and the Near East. See: Matt. 23:35; Luke 11:51; John 8:33-47; Rom. 9:1-13; Rev. 2:9; and 3:9; Josephus? Antiquities 13.9.1 (13:254-258); 13.15.8 (13:395-397); 15.7.9-10 (15:253-266); and Wars 2.8.2 (2:119-121); 2.20.4 (2:566-568); and 4.4.4 (4:270-273) for a beginning of the study required to understand this circumstance.

    In closing this discussion of the descendants of Ham, it may be said that with Nimrod we certainly have mention of both the first Adamic tyrant, a man who would rule over his kin outside of the laws of Yahweh, and also the first multi-cultural ?empire?, since the cities mentioned at Gen. 10:10 had long existed and were already populated with peoples of other races. There is much evidence that the beginnings of ?western? civilization appeared rather suddenly here in Mesopotamia, by which the Genesis chapter 11 account has much creditability, once it is realized that this represents the beginnings of the White race, and certainly not all races.

    The Shemites (Gen. 10:21-31)

    That the Persians sprung from Elam (Gen. 10:22) should be evident by the prophets alone, for everywhere that we find Elam in the Bible, we find the Persians fulfilling their role in history, i.e. Isaiah chapters 13 and 21, and the consistent mention of Elam with Madai, or the Medes, at Jer. 25:25; Dan. 5:28 and 6:8-15, and even at Acts 2:9. In his 16th book Strabo discusses the geography of the Parthian Empire, of which Persia was at that time a part. Susiana was the district along the Tigris, adjacent to the Persian Gulf and opposite Babylon. Persis bordered Susiana to the east, and also held most of the Eastern Shore of the Gulf. Elymais (+8L:"4l) is north of Susiana, and Media north of Elymais. It is not hard to see the name Elam in Elymais, which the Assyrians in their records called Elamtu. Along with Madai (Gen. 10:4), Elam formed the Medo-Persian empire of historic times, the two arms of the image of Daniel chapter 2.

    Asshur (Gen.10:22), from whom sprung the nation of the Assyrians, often called Asshur by the prophets, had a long and tumultuous history before their own rise to empire and first invasions of Palaestine c. 745 B.C., for many centuries overshadowed by (or under the yoke of) the Hittites, the Horite (Hurrian) Mitanni Kingdom, or the Babylonians. It is evident from many of their own inscriptions that the Assyrians absorbed much Hittite blood: for the ?jewish? hooked nose is common in their portraits, yet there must have been many true Assyrians living at the time of the prophet Jonah, who urged them to repent, both ?man (Strong?s #120, adam) and beast? (Jon. 3:8).

    That Lud (Gen. 10:22) is Lydia in western Anatolia (modern Turkey) is supported by Isa. 66:19, which is the only other mention of the Shemitic Lud in the Bible. All other mentions of Lud, or by error of the translators ?Lydian(s)?, in the Old Testament are actually the Ludim, sons of Mizraim in Egypt. Most of the translators and commentators confuse these two Luds. Isa. 66:19 was surely fulfilled concerning Lud when the Kimmerians (Kelts), descendants of the Israelites whom the Assyrians deported, invaded Anatolia, destroying much of Phrygia and invading Lydia and Ionia before crossing over into Thrace in Europe in the 7th century B.C. (see, for instance, Archaeology, A.I.A., January-February 2002, p. 44). Four centuries later, at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C., Keltic tribes returned to Anatolia, invaded Greece, and settled in the province later known as Galatia, visited by Paul of Tarsus and to whom he wrote the epistle of that name. Sharon Turner, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, p. 40, discusses Keltic activity in Lydia and the rest of Asia Minor.

    The Etruscans, also called Tyrrhenians, who for several centuries held Itrurea in Italy and parts of the coasts and islands in the western Mediterranean, are discussed at length by Diodorus Siculus (primarily at 5.40 ff.) although he states nothing concerning their origins. However Herodotus (1.94), Strabo (5.2.2) and Tacitus (Annals of Rome, 4.52 ff.) all state that the Etruscans were originally Lydians. Archaeologists doubt the Etruscan-Lydian connection simply because no Etruscan inscriptions have been found in Anatolia. Such inscriptions have, however, been found on islands off the coast of Anatolia.

    Everywhere in the Old Testament that the words Syria or Syrian appear, Aram (Gen. 10:22) is the Hebrew word from which they are derived. It is apparent that the Greek words Suria (Syria) and Turos (Tyre) may have, at various times, both been derived from the same Hebrew word, Tsor (Strong?s #s 6864 and 6865), the ancient name for Tyre. There does seem to be confusion concerning the name ?Syria? in ancient times, or possibly the Greeks purposely used the term to describe a wider area than just Aram. Herodotus counts Palestine as part of Syria (7.89 i), and calls the Judaeans who fought against Necho at Megiddo ?Syrians? (2.159, II Chr. 35:20). He also calls ?Syrians? certain Cappadocians ?who dwell about the rivers Therm?don and Parthenius? (2.104). Strabo explains that the Cappadocians ?have to the present time been called ?White Syrians?, as though some Syrians were black? (16.1.2), and so we may deduce that all the Syrians known to Strabo were White so far as he was concerned. Many writers, including Strabo, mistook the Assyrians for Syrians (16.1.3), certainly due to the similarity of the names in Greek. Originally Aram was centered in Damascus. The Greeks spoke of a Cinyras (Iliad, 11.20) who conquered Cyprus and had Paphos for a capital, yet most commentators (i.e. Rawlinson?s notes in his Herodotus at 2.182 and 7.195) have Paphos as an early Phoenician colony. Josephus, in his Antiquities at 9.14.2 (9:283-287) has Cyprus (the ?Citteans?) as subjects of Tyre just prior to the Assyrian invasions of Israel. Ezek. 27:6 has the Israelite tribe of Asher in Cyprus, and Tyre was in Asher?s territory. The language of Aram, Aramaic, became the dominant language of trade in the Near East until it was supplanted by Greek after the time of Alexander. Jacob took wives of ?Laban the Syrian?, although Laban was a Hebrew by race, a descendant of one of Abraham?s brothers.

    Arphaxad (Gen. 10:22), the ancestor of the Hebrews, has no land surviving into the historic period which I have been able to identify, not wanting to rule out surviving inscriptions which I have not yet seen. Abraham, though sojourning in Chaldaea when he appears in the Genesis record, obviously had Haran in far northern Syria for a homeland, a town which shared its name with both a brother and a grandfather of Abraham. This land was also once called Paddan-Aram, but may have been the land of Arphaxad. Not long after Abraham left Haran, the area was overrun by the Hurrians and Hittites, and was part of the Mitanni Kingdom.

    The name Eber (Gen. 10:24) comes from a word meaning ?across? or ?the opposite side? (Strong?s #s 5676 and 5677). The usage is similar to the Greek words peran and peratos. The phrase ta perata tes oikoumenes, or ?the opposite ends of the inhabited world? was used by Paul at Rom. 10:18. Similarly, Tacitus used the phrase ?ends of the earth? in the Agricola, chapters 12, 24, and 33 to describe the location of Ireland and Britain. Homer used a similar phrase in the Odyssey to describe the other end of the Mediterranean, that part about Spain. It is at the ?other side? of the ?inhabited world? that we find so many ancient names like that of Eber, the first Hebrew: Iberia (Spain), the Ebro River (in Spain), Hibernia (Ireland), and the Hebrides (islands off the coast of Scotland). Much later, some of the lands occupied by the deported Israelites, the Scythians, held similar names, such as Iberia south of the Caucasus Mountains, and the Hebrus River in Illyria (Diodorus Siculus, 19.67.6).

    The sons of Eber were Peleg and Joktan (Gen. 10:25). Some writers, such as Perry Edward Powell (Father Abraham?s Children) associate the Pelasgian Greeks with Peleg. At first I denied the association, since ?Pelasgian? seems to be a compound of the Greek words [/I]pelas[/I] (?near?) and (ges or ge (?land?) and so, as they were to the Ionians, ?neighbors?, just as the Spartans simply called the Greeks about Sparta perioikoi or ?neighbors?. Yet Strabo says ?...the Pelasgi were by the Attic people called ?Pelargi? [which means ?Storks?], the compilers add, because they were wanderers and, like birds, resorted to those places wither chance led them? (5.2.4). Elsewhere Strabo cites Greek writers who claimed that the Pelasgians came from Thessaly (9.5.22), and there a people whom Strabo calls Pelagonians are found (9.5.11), so there may be some merit to Powell?s assertion. The Pelasgians are said to have ?spread throughout the whole of Greece? in ancient times (Strabo 5.2.4), and when the Danaans came from Egypt, they were also called by that name (Strabo 8.6.9). The peaceful reception of the Danaans in Greece may well be explained, if those inhabitants of Greece before the arrival of Dan were also Hebrews.

    Joktan (Gen. 10:25) means, ?he will be made little? (Strong?s #3355), and so his name is a prophecy by itself, and his race was surely absorbed by indigenous populations called ?arabs? by us (and themselves) today. While several of Joktan?s descendants? names may be identified, some tentatively, with places in Arabia, two stand out and merit discussion here.

    Sheba (Gen. 10:28) was a mountainous area of what is now Yemen. See (?Excavating the Land of Sheba?, Archaeology Odyssey, November-December 2001, p. 44). The Queen of Sheba (I Kings chapter 10) who visited Solomon was called the Queen of the South by Yahshua (Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:31) and she was, for all of the circumstances of her mention, surely of the Adamic Race. Strabo mentions ?Sabaeans? with Nabataean arabs at 16.4.19-21.

    Ophir (Gen. 10:29) was surely somewhere on the eastern coast of Africa, South of Ethiopia. This is evident from the account of goods obtained from Ophir, given in I Kings chapters 9 and 10, and from the fact that the place was reached from a port on the Red Sea (Ezion-geber in the A.V.), and yet also from the name Ophir itself. For Ophir is certainly the same name as the Latin Afer, which preceeded Africa as the Roman name for the continent. Although the Greeks knew not the names Ophir or Afer, at least in their writings, for they had the continent divided into but three districts, Egypt, Ethiopia and Libya, they did have a word, aphros which meant ?foam?. Other similar Greek words are aphron, ?without sense...crazed, frantic...silly, foolish? and aphrosun?, ?folly, thoughtlessness, senselessness?. While many may see the similarity of these words as coincidences, I am not so sure I believe in such coincidences, that they are coincidences at all.

    While searching for the root of our English word black, I came across the Hebrew words balaq (Strong?s #1110), ?to annihilate?, balag (#1082) ?to break off? or ?to invade (with destruction)? and the Greek word blax, genitive form blakos which means ?slack in mind and body, stupid, a dolt?. Are these also coincidences?

    Whatever happened to Ophir, we certainly have no record of, and especially since the Romans never wandered into Africa beyond Ethiopia, although they surely knew of the land there (Strabo 16.4.14).

    So we have the Shemites, and the Hebrews, and here it should be evident that these terms have today been misappropriated by people to whom they do not belong.

    There were, by the Septuagint chronology, nearly 1800 years between the time of the Deluge and the writing of the Pentateuch, and about 800 more to the time of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and to the advent of written records among the Greeks. All throughout this time the various tribes of Adamites sought new and better land throughout the known world and points beyond, naming new places and adopting those names. With so few written records, how difficult it is to determine their movements! Homer, the earliest Greek writer known to us, and whom Strabo considered ex arches (?from the beginning?) for the validity of his records, and ?the first geographer? (1.1.11), was but a contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah, rather late in the history of Israel!

    What the Greeks looked like

    That the Greeks (and the Italians) were in ancient times fully homogenous with the Caucasians of northern Europe as most of them appear today, and certainly not with the current olive-skinned inhabitants of those regions (along with most of southern Europe) is fully evident everywhere in their art and literature.

    Among Homer?s oft repeated epithets were ?Hera with the snow-white arms? and ?grey-eyed Athena?. Achilles is described as having ?red-gold hair? (Iliad near 23:160). When Menelaos was shot with an arrow, removal of his clothing for treatment revealed the ?ivory white? flesh of his thigh. In the Odyssey Menelaos is called the ?red-haired captain? (4:17-85). Describing Odysseus Homer tells of him with crisping hair in curls ?but all red-golden? (6:159-232). Hesiod in his Catalog of Women sings of ?golden-haired Menelaos? (1.67). The Homeric Hymn To Demeter tells of ?golden-haired? Demeter (1.302). Selen? is ?white armed? and ?bright-tressed? (To Selen? lines 17-18). Polyneices is described as ?golden-haired? in The Thebaid (p. 2) of the Epic Cycle, and the Trojan Ganymedes is ?golden-haired? also, according to the Homeric Hymn To Aphrodit?. These descriptions, and many others like them, survived throughout all Greek and Roman literature well into the Christian era.

    The archaeological record fully supports these descriptions. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of murals and mosaics from Greco-Roman territories display tall, fair, usually (but not always) sun-tanned men, and tall, fair, lily-white women. Greek men, like Phoenicians, Romans, and Hebrews (i.e. John 21:17; Josephus? Antiquities 12.5.1 (12:241)) were typically naked while working outdoors, while women spent far less time outside, always fully clothed. Josephus also attests that Judaeans and Greeks were indistinguishable, except that Judaeans were circumcised (Antiquities 12.5.1 (12:241)). Of course the Biblical record also agrees with this, i.e. David (I Sam. 16:12 and 17:42), Solomon (Cant. 5:9-16), and also Lam. 4:7, and of Noah in I Enoch 105:2-4 (Lawrence?s verse division).

    Although there are certainly ?arab? or ?olive-skinned? types found among the archaeological records, in the Roman era and in lands controlled by Rome: even in Italy itself, these are but a minority and not at all representative of the originators of Mediterranean or near eastern civilization, nor of the general populations, until long after the fall of Rome and the Islamic conquests. The artwork of the Byzantine culture in the east reflects a predominantly White society which survived until the conquest of its territories, first by arabs and then later by the Turks.

    ?Salvation? and Israel

    The word ?salvation? appears often in the Old Testament in promises to Israel, and it is actually intended to mean preservation or safety (see Strong?s Hebrew #s 3444, 3468, and 8668). Israel was promised to be preserved in this world, not merely in some spiritual afterworld. But preserved from what? The answer to that lies first in the prophets, and the foretold destruction of the nations surrounding Israel in Palestine, and in Psalm 2, which foretold that Israel would conquer the other nations (Genesis chapter 10 nations), and then in prophecies such as those found at Daniel chapter 8 and Revelation chapter 9, and the plagues described there, which destroy much of the Adamic world unto this day.

    Egypt and Ethiopia had been overrun by black Nubians in the 8th century B.C. Assyria, already a nation bastardized with Horite and Hittite blood, was destroyed by the Scythian Israelites at the end of the 7th century, during which the Israelite Kimmerians overran all of Anatolia. In the 6th century B.C. the entire Near East was conquered by Persia, then in the 4th century by the Greeks, and in the 3rd by the Parthians, and in the 1st by Rome, which competed with Parthia for territory. All during this time the Scythian and Keltic Israelites, along with the Japhethite tribes who also escaped to the north, were multiplying and spreading themselves throughout Europe and also many parts of Asia. By the time of Christ, however, Israelites had conquered and come to inhabit all of the known world, as the Romans in the west, the Parthians in the east, and the Germanic Scythians in the north. And also by this time, except perhaps for the Ionian Greeks at Athens, who were under Roman rule, and the Sarmatians (or Slavs) and related tribes of northern Europe, all Japhethites, none of the other Genesis chapter 10 nations had even a legitimate claim to being a nation, if they were to be found at all. All are now lost to history.

    Since the fall of Rome, most of the formerly White Roman world has been lost. Africa and Mesopotamia, Spain and Sicily were all overrun by arabs, destroying the Adamic blood of those regions. After the arab conquests arose the Turks from the east, who overran Parthia, Anatolia (Turkey today), Greece and the Balkans. While the Turks were destroying the Adamic blood of Greece and the Byzantine Empire, the Mongols invaded Russia, conquering much of southern Russia, the Ukraine and modern Romania. While the Russians managed to defeat and drive out the Mongols in the 15th century, the Turks held Greece into the 19th, and most Greeks today should be considered Turks, or arabs. Muslim tribes still inhabit the Balkans. All of the western Mongol areas adopted the Islamic religion early in the second millennium.

    And so not only have all of the regions of the former Genesis chapter 10 Adamic nations been overrun and destroyed by the alien invasions, but also many of the children of Israel were also lost in these invasions. Today the White race in Europe is again being invaded by arabs and Turks, and now ?legally?!


    Abbreviations

    A.I.A. Archaeological Institute of America.

    A.V. The Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

    LXX The Septuagint, the early (c. 280 B.C.) translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.

    MT The Masoretic Text, the Hebrew Scriptures as they were compiled and edited by the jews in the late first millennium A.D. The King James Old Testament, and most others, are based on this text.
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  • #2
    Classical Records of the Dorian &amp; Danaan Israelite-Greeks

    Classical Records of the Dorian & Danaan Israelite-Greeks
    By: William Finck ? 2006
    The Corinthians were Dorian Greeks. The Dorians were a tribe said to have invaded Greece, by all ancient accounts, a short time after the Trojan wars. The Greeks who inhabited all of the Peloponnese before the Dorian invasion, as well as areas of the mainland, were called everywhere ?Danaans? (Danai) and ?Achaians? by Homer. Modern historians assert that the Dorians came ?from the north?, and point to the Dorian Tetrapolis, four cities (Erineus, Boeum, Pindus and Cytinium, for which see Strabo 9.4.10) which lie west of Phocis and north of Delphi on the Greek mainland, as evidence of this. These historians also claim that all Aryans came ?from the north? into the ancient world at one time or another, yet they are consistently in error. Homer is given much credit by Strabo for his knowledge and accuracy in describing the peoples of the oikoumene and the regions where they lived, and the poet is constantly cited by the geographer. Homer described all of the people of Greece, and the peoples and places known to the Greeks in the period which he wrote about. Yet Homer makes no mention of the cities of the Tetrapolis, of Dorians in Greece, or anywhere in the north. The Dorians, who invaded Greece by sea (hardly necessary if they came from the north) and pushed the Danaans out of the Peloponnese, and who also later founded their mainland cities, are only mentioned by Homer as being on Crete (in his Odyssey, Book 19).
    It is my contention that the Dorians actually came from Dor in Palestine, a city on the coast of the land of Manasseh, and where many ancient ?Greek? artifacts have been found by archaeologists, for which see Biblical Archaeology Review, July-August 2001, p. 17, and November-December, 2002, ?Gorgon Excavated At Dor?, p. 50. These artifacts show a ?Greek? presence at Dor as late as the seventh century B.C., and are certainly much earlier than the Hellenistic period. The seventh century B.C. is the time of the last recorded Assyrian activity in Israel (see Ezra 4:2, Esar-Haddon reigned from 681 B.C.), and the last deportations of Israelites which happened about 676 B.C. (see The Assyrian Invasions And Deportations of Israel by J. Llewellyn Thomas). For evidence that Israelite priests were indeed present at Dor see Biblical Archaeology Review, May-June 2001, p. 21 and the article there. If the Dorians migrated from Palestine, rather than from the north, Crete is a logical place to begin settling, enroute to the west. Further evidence that the Dorians were Israelites is found in Josephus, in his record of a letter written by a Spartan (or Lacedemonian, and they were also Dorian Greeks) king to Jerusalem about 160 B.C., which is found in Antiquities 12.4.10 (12:226-227):
    ?Areus, King of the Lacedemonians, To Onias, Sendeth Greeting. We have met with a certain writing, whereby we have discovered that both the Judaeans and the Lacedemonians are of one stock, and are derived from the kindred of Abraham. It is but just, therefore, that you, who are our brethren, should send to us about any of your concern as you please. We will also do the same thing, and esteem your concerns as our own, and will look upon our concerns as in common with yours. Demotoles, who brings you this letter, will bring your answer back to us. This letter is foursquare; and the seal is an eagle, with a dragon in his claws.? That this account of the letter, and its contents, is factual is verified by the reply to it recorded by Josephus at Antiq. 13.5.8 (13:163-170), by Jonathan the high priest.
    The reply to this letter was long delayed, due to the Maccabean wars and problems amongst the Judaeans which are described by Josephus. Since it is also documented in 1st Maccabees chapter 12 in the Apocrypha, here the version from Brenton?s Septuagint is supplied: ?Jonathan the high priest, and the elders of the nation, and the priests, and the other people of the Judaeans, unto the Lacedemonians their brethren send greeting: There were letters sent in times past unto Onias the high priest from Darius, who reigned then among you, to signify that ye are our brethren, as the copy here underwritten doth specify. At which time Onias entreated the ambassador that was sent honourably, and received the letters, wherein declaration was made of the league and friendship. Therefore we also, albeit we need none of these things, for that we have the holy books of scripture in our hands to comfort us, have nevertheless attempted to send unto you for the renewing of brotherhood and friendship, lest we should become strangers unto you altogether: for there is a long time passed since ye sent unto us. We therefore at all times without ceasing, both in our feasts, and other convenient days, do remember you in the sacrifices which we offer, and in our prayers, as reason is, and as it becometh us to think upon our brethren: and we are right glad of your honor. As for ourselves, we have had great troubles and wars on every side, forsomuch as the kings that are round about us have fought against us. Howbeit we would not be troublesome unto you, nor to others of our confederates and friends, in these wars: for we have help from heaven that succoureth us, so as we are delivered from our enemies, and our enemies are brought under foot. For this cause we chose Numenius the son of Antiochus, and Antipater the son of Jason, and sent them unto the Romans, to renew the amity that we had with them, and the former league. We commanded them also to go unto you, and to salute you, and to deliver you our letters concerning the renewing of our brotherhood. Wherefore now ye shall do well to give us an answer thereto. And this is the copy of the letters which Oniares sent. Areus king of the Lacedemonians to Onias the high priest, greeting: It is found in writing, that the Lacedemonians and Judaeans are brethren, and that they are of the stock of Abraham: now therefore, since this is come to our knowledge, ye shall do well to write unto us of your prosperity. We do write back again to you, that your cattle and goods are our?s, and our?s are your?s. We do command therefore our ambassadors to make report unto you on this wise.? (1st Maccabees 12:6-23)
    Now many may object to identifying the later Corinthians of Paul?s time as Dorians, because the city was destroyed and later rebuilt by the Romans. And this is true, for in 146 B.C. the Roman consul Leucius Mummius captured Corinth and razed it by fire, selling the surviving populace into slavery, as was customary for the Romans to do. Giving the account, Strabo tells us that afterwards ?the Sicyonians obtained most of the Corinthian country? (8.6.23). That the Sicyonians, those of the neighboring district, were also Dorians is evident in many places besides Diodorus Siculus at 7.9.1 (?Fragments of Book VII? in the Loeb Library edition) where he states: ?it remains for us to speak of Corinth and of Sicyon, and of the manner in which the territories of these cities were settled by the Dorians.? Sicyon, a sort of sister city of Corinth, was its equal in the arts, where Strabo says of Corinth: ?for both here and in Sicyon the arts of painting and modelling and all such arts of the craftsman flourished most? (8.6.23). So in this manner did the territory of Corinth retain a Dorian composition of its population, but that is not the entire story.
    Strabo speaks of the rebuilding of Corinth as such was ordered by Caesar, which began about 44 B.C., and states that ?it was restored again, because of its favorable position, by the deified Caesar, who colonised it with people that belonged for the most part to the freedmen class? (8.6.23). Yet Diodorus Siculus (in ?Fragments of Book XXXII? in the Loeb Library edition) is recorded as telling us further: ?Gaius Iulius Caesar (who for his great deeds was entitled divus), when he inspected the site of Corinth, was so moved by compassion and the thirst for fame that he set about restoring it with great energy. It is therefore just that this man and his high standard of conduct should receive our full approval and that we should by our history accord him enduring praise for his generosity. For whereas his forefathers had harshly used the city, he by his clemency made amends for their unrelenting severity, preferring to forgive rather than to punish? (32.27.3).
    Now the only way that Caesar?s deeds could justly be called a restoring, clemency, or forgiveness, as they are here, would be that the ?freedmen? which he let repopulate the rebuilt Corinth were descendants of those Corinthians enslaved in its destruction 102 years earlier. This is in keeping with Roman custom, as is evident at Acts 6:9, where we see Judaean ?freedmen? living in the homeland of their ancestors, whom must have been taken captive in the Roman conquest of Judaea by Pompey some generations earlier. The settling of anyone but Dorians in a rebuilt Corinth could not have been termed clemency or forgiveness, but rather would have been seen as an insult to the Sicyonians, the Lacedemonians, and the rest of the Dorians of the Peloponnese. Yet an examination of the Roman custom along with Diodorus? words surely implies that when Strabo attests that the restored Corinthians were ?for the most part? of the ?freedmen class?, he surely meant those freedmen descended from the original Corinthian stock taken captive.
    Furthermore, Paul at 1 Corinthians 10:1 tells the Corinthians ?Now I do not wish you to be ignorant, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all had passed through the sea?, therefore telling the Corinthians that their ancestors had been in the Israelite Exodus out of Egypt.
    The Greeks of Thebes were identified as Phoenicians, and the Greek ?gods? Heracles (Hesiod?s Theogony, 530) and Dionysus (Diodorus Siculus, 1.23.2-8; 3.64.3 and 3.66.3) were both said to be born there. Cadmus the Phoenician was said to have founded Thebes, and also to have been the grandfather of Dionysus (Diodorus Siculus 4.2.1, 4.2.2-3 et al.), and to have come from the city of Thebes in Egypt (1.23.4). These Phoenicians of Thebes were often associated with the Danaans. Euripides? Phoenician Women, a 5th century play, was written about the women of Thebes and events said to have taken place long before the Trojan War, which Aeschylus also wrote about in Seven Against Thebes, the succession battle between the sons of Oedipus for the throne of Thebes, in which Polynices enlists the help of the Danaans against his brother Eteocles.
    Diodorus Siculus, quoting from the earlier historian Hecataeus of Abdera, who gave a strange account of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt from an Egyptian viewpoint, says ?the aliens were driven from the country, and the most outstanding and active among them banded together and, as some say, were cast ashore in Greece and certain other regions; their leaders were notable men, chief among them being Danaus and Cadmus. But the greater number were driven into what is now called Judaea ... The colony was headed by a man called Moses, outstanding both for his wisdom and for his courage.?
    Cadmus, called ?the Phoenician? throughout Classical Greek literature, was the legendary founder of Thebes. Danaus, ?the Egyptian? as he also is usually called, was the legendary leader of the Danaans (Danai) who came to Greece from Egypt, who could only have been a portion of the Israelite tribe of Dan (cf. Judges 5:17, Ezek. 27:19). This event was parodied in later Classical literature as the flight of the ?daughters of Danaus? from the ?sons of Aegyptus?, an example being the play by Aeschylus, Suppliant Maidens. The point here is to show that the Danaans came to Greece directly from Egypt, and so were never ?under the cloud? in the Exodus, having left Egypt in a different manner.
    The Romans descended from the Trojans (for which see Strabo 5.3.2, 13.1.27 et al., Diodorus Siculus 7.4.1-4, 7.5, Virgil?s Aeneid and many other sources), and neither could their fathers have been ?under the cloud? because Darda, the son of Mahol of the tribe of Judah-Zerah (1 Kings 4:31; 1 Chron. 2:6) by all accounts must have lived long before the Exodus. Darda was the legendary founder of Troy, and Homer consistently refers to the Trojans as Dardans. Chalcol (1 Kings 4:31, or Calcol at 1 Chron. 2:6) must be the Calchas of Greek legend who founded Pamphylia (i.e. Herodotus 7.91, Strabo 14.4.3), called Chalcad in the Septuagint in Kings, but Kalchal in Chronicles. The names of these Greek legends being found in the Bible belonging to Israelites, compared to Solomon in wisdom and who therefore must have been great men, are surely beyond coincidence. Zerah went to Egypt without his famous sons, who are not mentioned elsewhere in the Biblical accounts (Gen. 46:12), and Troy was so called in Hittite records which existed two centuries before the Exodus. So then, the Zerah-Judah Trojans, ancestors of the Romans, must have parted from the Israelites long before that time, possibly even before Jacob went to Egypt.
    Later ?Phoenician? colonists in the Mediterranean were the Israelites of the northern tribes who sailed from Tyre and Sidon. These settled not in Greece nor in Italy, but in Cyprus, Cilicia, Miletus, Carthage, Iberia and other points further west. Among the other Greek tribes, the Pelasgians were in Greece before the Danaans, the Aeolians are but a division of the Danaans, and the Ionians are descendants of Japheth. There are no other candidate tribes but the Dorians in Italy or Greece who could have been ?under the cloud?, as Paul states of the Corinthians? ancestors at 1 Cor. 10:1. Paul must have been addressing, at least for the most part, Dorian Greeks.
    One outstanding feature of Paul?s letters to the Corinthians are his frequent admonishments to them not to commit fornication (porneia, illicit sex including, but not limited to, prostitution and race-mixing), which are found at 1 Cor. 5, 6, 7, 10, and 2 Cor. 12. The Corinthians of old were famous for their fornicating, to the extent that a verb was coined, korinthiazomai, which meant to practise fornication, as used by Aristophanes and others. The city was also famous for its temple of Aphrodite and the courtesans, slaves which worked as temple prostitutes pornai, which belonged to the temple.
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    • #3
      Classical Records of Trojan-Roman-Judah

      Classical Records of Trojan-Roman-Judah
      By: William Finck ? 2006
      In our Bible, at 1st Kings 4:31, the wisdom of Solomon was said to exceed that of several other men: ?For he was wiser than all men; than Ethan the Ezrahite (Zerahite), and Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol: and his fame was in all nations round about.? Yet the only other place in the Bible that these apparently great men are found is at 1st Chron. 2:6, where we learn that Ethan, Heman, Chalcol, Darda, and Zimri were all sons of Zerah, the son of Judah.
      At Genesis 46:12 we learn that when Jacob went to Egypt, Zerah went along also, but no sons accompanied him. While he may have had a wife, or wives, with him (46:26), and Pharez had his own two sons with him, Zerah went to Egypt without children. Much later, during the Exodus, we see that descendants of Zerah were with the Israelites (Num. 26:20). Yet while the records of the census in the desert mention the tribes of the sons of Pharez (Num. 26:21), Zerah?s sons, who must have been notable men, are not mentioned individually.
      Is it merely a coincidence that these names of Zerah?s sons, while appearing nowhere else in the Bible, do turn up in Classical Greek records? These men with whom Solomon was compared must have been great, and so why shouldn?t we, not finding them in Hebrew records, look to the records of the ?nations round about? for the deeds of these men? Of course we should, being told so many times elsewhere that Abraham?s offspring would become many nations. Where is the affirmation of the promise, and the foundation of our Christian Faith, if we find it not in history?
      In Greek literature, Dardanos is the founder of the settlement in northwest Anatolia which became known as Troy. Its principle city was known by two names, Ilios (or Ilium) after Ilos, and Troy after Tros, both said to be descendants of Dardanos (cf. Strabo, Geography, 13.1.25). Homer confidently gives a genealogy from Dardanos down through Ilos and Tros and several other generations unto Priam, king of Troy when the city was destroyed by the Greeks. The larger district around Troy became known as the Troad, and the Greeks claimed that the walls of the city were built by the sea god Poseidon (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 4.42.1-3).
      Throughout Homer and later Greek literature the Trojans are called Dardans (or Dardanians), after Dardanos, but sometimes Homer mentions Trojans and Dardans together, distinguishing the Dardans of Troy from those who dwelt elsewhere. We are told that the Lycians are Dardans (i.e. Strabo 10.2.10 where the geographer cites Homer), and that Dardans are also found among the Illyrians (Strabo 7.5.1, 6, 7). From Homer?s Iliad, Book 2, it is clear that Dardans dwelt in other towns throughout the Troad.
      Both Herodotus (7.91), and Strabo who quotes him (14.4.3) tell us that Pamphylia, the district on the southern coast of Anatolia, was a colony founded by Kalchas, who was a Trojan. Kalchas was also considered to be a wise man and a prophet by the Greeks (Strabo 14.1.27).
      If Dardanos is not Darda, and if Kalchas is not Chalcol (in the LXX Chalcad at 1 Kings 4:31, but Kalchal at 1 Chron. 2:6), then why does the Bible mention these men, as if they were men of renown, without telling us who they were? And where did Dardanos the Trojan come from when he founded the colony which became Troy?
      Now some may object and claim that the Trojans were but Phrygians, as the Greek tragic poets such as Euripides and Aeschylus called them. Yet Homer never called them such, and neither did other earlier writers. Homer did name Phrygians and Thracians among those who aided in Troy?s defense (Iliad, Book 2), and Strabo notes this error by the tragic poets (12.8.7). Rather, the geographer tells us of the territories held by the Phrygians before the Trojan War, and that they weren?t in the Troad, and that the Phrygians were a division of the Thracians (7.3.2-3; 10.3.16; 12.4.5; 12.8.4; 14.5.29). While the Adamic-Israelite-Trojans may have had intercourse with, even may have intermarried with, the Adamic-Japhethite-Thracians (Tiras, Gen. 10:2), not being able to avoid that prophecy found at Genesis 9:27, the Trojans surely were not Phrygians.
      Here it is necessary to discuss some of the other nations of the eastern Mediterranean, starting with the Cretan, or ?Minoan? civilization. There is a clear connection between Crete and the Troad when place names are compared. Strabo makes this comparison in his Geography at 10.3.20, where he cites in common not only the name of the famous Mount Ida, also a mountain in Crete, but also names such as Dicte, Pytna, Hippocorona and Samonium.
      The Cabiri, or Cabeiri, were ?gods? worshipped among the Pelasgi in Samothrace (called Samos by Homer and ?in earlier times? ? Strabo, 7.49), an island off the coast of the Troad, as discussed by Herodotus (2.51, 3. 37). George Rawlinson notes in his translation of Herodotus at 3.37 that ?The Cabiri were Pelasgic gods?, to which E. H. Blakely, editor of the Everyman?s Library edition published by Knopf, adds: ?[The word is connected with the Semitic keb?r = great. ? E. H. B.]?. Dardanos was later credited with (or blamed for) bringing the worship of the Cabiri from Samos to Troy, where they were identified with the Idaean Dactyli of Crete (Strabo, 7.49, 50).
      In his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides, writing of the earliest times, states that by the Carians and the Phoenicians ?were the greatest part of the islands inhabited? (1.8). Herodotus says that the Carians were originally called Leleges and dwelt in the islands, from which they were later driven by Ionians and Dorians to settle on the mainland (1.171), although varying accounts are also supplied by the historian. At 1.171 Herodotus also states that the Carians are related to the Lydians (the Shemitic Lud of Gen. 10:22 and Isa. 66:19). While Strabo says that the Lycians are Dardans (10.2.10), Herodotus says that they too came from Crete, a colony led by Sarpedon the brother of Minos (1.173), but claims that they were named after an Athenian (7.92). Yet Strabo gives a differing account of Sarpedon, related below.
      While Strabo connects the Cilicians to both the Trojans (13.1.49, 58; 13.3.1) and to Syria (13.4.6), and also to cities in Pamphylia (14.4.1) whom he calls ?Trojan Cilicians?, Herodotus states of the Cilicians that they ?bore anciently the name of Hypachaeans, but took their present title from Cilix, the son of Agenor, a Phoenician? (7. 91). Rawlinson adds a footnote here: ?The Cilicians were undoubtedly a kindred race to the Phoenicians?. It must be noted that Homer called the Danaans ?Achaeans?, and here we see the Cilicians called ?Hypachaeans? in early times. Cadmus ?the Phoenician?, legendary founder of the Thebes in Greece, was also called a son of Agenor, and was said to be the brother-in-law of Dardanos (Diodorus Siculus, 5.48.5).
      Strabo states that ?the Leleges and the Cilicians were so closely related to the Trojans? (13.3.1), and that the Cilicians were settled in the Troad before they colonized Cilicia (13.4.6), and that Homer puts Cilicians in the Troad along with the Dardans (14.5. 21). Of the Pamphylians, whom we have seen are related to the Trojans, Strabo states ?But the Pamphylians, who share much in the traits of the Cilician stock of people, do not wholly abstain from the business of piracy? (12.7.2), for which the Phoenicians in early times were also renowned. The Carians dwelt in and around Miletus, of which Strabo says: ?Not only the Carians, who in earlier times were islanders, but also the Leleges, as they say, became mainlanders with the aid of the Cretans, who founded, among other places, Miletus, having taken Sarpedon from the Cretan Miletus as founder; and they settled the Termilae in the country which is now called Lycia; and they say that these settlers were brought to Crete by Sarpedon, a brother of Minos ...? Herodotus called the ?Greek? philosopher Thales of Miletus ?a man ... of Phoenician descent? (1.170). Strabo debates the identification of the Leleges with the Carians, but explains that they inhabited the same territory together, and also that Leleges inhabited a part of the Troad, from which they were driven after Troy?s fall (7.7.2). Carians, including men of Miletus, and Lycians are mentioned by Homer among Troy?s defenders (Iliad, Book 2).
      The Minoans themselves were said to have spread west to Sicily (Diodorus Siculus 4.79.1-7, Strabo 6.3.2), and Cretans founded Bottia?s in Macedon (Diodorus 7.16.1, Strabo 7.11) and Brentesium in Italy (Strabo 6.3.6), among other places. Strabo says that ?In earlier times Knossos was called Caeratus, bearing the same name as the river which flows past it.? Caer, or Car, is from a Hebrew word meaning ?city? (i.e. ?Carthage? is from the Hebrew for ?new city?). Another river on Crete, the Iardanos, has a name much like the river of Palestine, the LXX spelling for which is Iordanos.
      So in the earliest accounts we find, while those accounts contain some variations, that the Trojans, Leleges, Carians, Cilicians, and Phoenicians are all related, and also all have some connection to ancient Crete, a land famous for its bull-worship cult (cf. Exodus 32; 1 Kings 12:28; 2 Kings 10:29; 17:16; Apollodorus, Library, 3.2.1). Much later, during the Trojan Wars, Homer places the Dorians on Crete (Odyssey, Book 19), some time before they invaded Greece. Crete is where a great number of Linear B inscriptions have been found, which represents an early Greek dialect, and which is related to an early Cyprian dialect, for which see the Preface to the Revised Supplement (1996) of the 9th edition of the Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon. It is quite apparent that Crete, and also to some degree Cyprus which was once subject to the Phoenicians of Tyre (cf. Josephus, Antiquities 9:14: 2 and Ezek. 27:6), were stopping points, or staging areas, where in early times the tribes of Palestine settled before moving on into Anatolia, Greece, and points further west.
      Once it is realized that the ancient Phoenicians were the northern tribes of Israel, which the Bible and especially the LXX version reveals (see my pamphlet Galilee of the Gentiles? for an introduction to this), and that the Trojans, related to the Phoenicians as explained in the Greek records, had descended from Judah through Zerah, the profound realities of Biblical prophecy begin to materialize.
      ?The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until shiloh come ...? (Gen. 49:10). Yet this statement was made perhaps 700 to 750 years before David, the first Judahite king in Israel, received the sceptre there for the Pharez line of Judah.
      Strabo says of the Trojans that they ?waxed so strong from a small beginning that they became Kings of Kings? (12.8.7), and describes the Trojan royal dynasties which ruled over all the related peoples, including the Carians, Lycians, Mysians, Leleges and Cilicians (13.1.7). Even in the defeat of Troy, the Trojans were considered a noble race and Trojan princes true royalty. So it is evident that the Zerah line of Judah had kings much earlier than the Pharez line.
      Virgil?s Aeneid tells a story of how the Trojan prince Aeneas, after Troy?s fall, led a large colony of Trojans to what is now Italy, founding a settlement called Alba Longa. These people later became known by the name of that settlement?s most famous city, Rome. While Virgil?s poem contains an anachronistic sub-plot, a romance between Aeneas and Dido of Carthage (who actually lived over 300 years after Troy?s fall, for which see Josephus? Against Apion), a romance which Virgil ended in enmity and probably contrived for political reasons, the general story of Aeneas? migration was well accepted in antiquity. Since according to Homer the Lydians were allies of Troy (Iliad Book 2), and the Etruscans of Italy claimed to be a colony of Lydians (Strabo 5.2.2, Herodotus 1.94, Tacitus? Annals of Rome 4.52 ff.), such a migration is quite plausible, Alba Longa having been just south of Tuscany in Italy.
      Strabo tells us that the migration of Aeneas is ?a traditional fact?, along with the diaspora of other Trojans (3.2. 13), and discusses such at length in several places in his Geography (6.1.12, 14; 13.1.52, 53 et al.). He also relates the descent of Julius Caesar from Aeneas, as did Virgil, and how Alexander the Great also claimed descent from Trojan princes, though he inferred that Alexander?s claim is not as well supported (13.1.27). Although much of Diodorus Siculus? Book 7 is lost, chapter 5 (in the Loeb Library edition) was preserved in Eusebius? Chronicle, where Eusebius repeated Diodorus? account of the Trojan migration and settlement in Italy under Aeneas, and the descent of the family of Julius Caesar from that Trojan prince. Eusebius certainly accepted the account by Diodorus, who he says ?gathered in summary form all libraries into one and the same clearinghouse of knowledge? (Diodorus Siculus, ?Fragments of Book VII?, Loeb Library, 7.5). The Romans legitimized their rule over the oikoumene by their descent from the noble Trojans, claims recognized even in the Middle Ages.
      In Medieval times the Trojan princes were considered to be legitimate, rightful rulers, and noble men sought to connect themselves to the houses of those princes in order to legitimize their own positions. So in the reign of the Merovingian kings: ?Frankish pride in their own achievement bore fruit in Dagobert?s reign in the emergence of the tradition that the Franks were descended from the Trojan royal family, and were thus equal to the Romans? (The Oxford History Of Medieval Europe, pp. 88-89). Yet while Roman claims had the full support of history, such Frankish claims do not. More credible are the claims concerning the kings of the Britons, and Virgil relates that they too were a colony from the Trojans of Italy, though the Greek historians do not state as much. Diodorus Siculus does tell us of the British that ?they use chariots ... even as tradition tells us the old Greek heroes did in the Trojan War? (5.21.5), and Strabo says ?for the purposes of war they use chariots for the most part, just as some of the Celti do? (4.5.2). This was learned when Caesar invaded Britain, which both Diodorus and Strabo are referring to.
      Many ignorant skeptics claim that Troy didn?t exist at all, pointing to the want of remains found at Hissarlik, the likely site of ancient Troy. Yet they too ignore the classical writers. In Euripides? play Helen, which portrays events in the aftermath of the Trojan war, the following dialogue takes place between the title character and the Greek hero Teucer: ?Helen: Did you really go to the renowned city of Ilium, stranger? Teucer: Yes: I helped sack it but came to grief myself. Helen: What, has it already been destroyed by fire? Teucer: Yes: you cannot even see for sure the footprint of its walls.? (Euripides, Helen 105-108, Loeb Library, David Kovacs? translation. The grief Teucer refers to is the loss of his brother Ajax.) Strabo calls the Troad ?left in ruins and in desolation? even in his own time (13.1.1), and that of Troy ?no trace of the ancient city survives; and naturally so, for while the cities all around it were sacked, but not completely destroyed, yet that city was so utterly demolished that all the stones were taken from it to rebuild the others? (13.1.38), and later quotes Lycurgus of Athens, a 4th century B.C. orator (specifically his Against Leocrates, 62) who said of Troy that ?it was rased to the ground by the Greeks, and is uninhabited? (13.1.41). Why do modern ?scholars? complain that so little has been found at Troy, when we have a clear indication by the classical writers that there should be nothing left to find? The destruction of Troy was so real to the Greeks that writers such as Thucydides and Diodorus Siculus (i.e. 14.2.4, 19.1.10, 20.2.3) dated the events in their histories in terms of the numbers of years from Troy?s fall, which would be 1184 B.C. on our calendars.
      While the story of the noble Trojans may surely be continued from the records of the Romans, showing their connection to the Britons, and the settlement of the Milesians in Ireland, along with a closer examination of the Trojan diaspora in Greek records, it is not intended to do so here. It is only hoped that one realizes, that from the earliest dispersions of the children of Israel, that the sceptre certainly did not depart from Judah, and that while the coasts of Europe were first settled by Japhethites (Ionians, Rhodians, Thracians etc.), the children of Israel surely did inherit the oikoumene (?world?), as the Bible promised. And this is only a small part of the story!
      The verity of these ancient historical accounts may be ascertained with an inspection of both Old Testament prophecy and New Testament testimony. Dan. 9:25 dates the coming of ?Messiah the Prince? for us, which is Yahshua Christ. Dan. 9:26 tells us that after the crucifixion, the ?people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city? (A.V.). The methods of the translators, in both the A.V. and the Greek of the LXX, show that from the earliest times men insisted that the ?Prince? of v. 25 and the ?prince? of v. 26 were two different persons, yet the Hebrew word is the same (#5057), and there is no grammatical compulsion for assuming that these are two different princes! Rather, it is evident that the translators themselves couldn?t conceive of how the Christ could have some other people from outside who would destroy Jerusalem, the ?holy city? which they imagined to be inhabited by His people. Yet in reality, as is surely attested to in history and in the Bible, the true Israelite people of Yahweh were spread across the oikoumene (inhabited world), and most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem left behind in 70 A.D. were of the Canaanite-Edomite Adversary: today?s jews.
      The Romans, being descended from the Israelite tribe of Zerah-Judah, surely were the ?people of the Prince? of Dan. 9:26, who Paul wrote would ?crush Satan? under their feet (Rom. 16:20), i.e. destroy the Canaanite-Edomites of Jerusalem. Paul knew the Romans were Israel, and told them as much throughout his epistle to them. This is especially apparent at Rom. 1:21-26, which could only be spoken of Israelites, the only nation who knew Yahweh (i.e. Amos 3:2; Mic. 4:5). He also told them at Rom. 2:14-15, where ?Gentiles? should be ?nations?, and the statement is a direct reference to Psa. 33:12-15; 40:8; Isa. 51:7; Jer. 31:31-33; Ezek. 11:19-20; 36:26-27, which can be spoken of no one but Israel. Paul further indicated that the Romans were Israelites at Rom. 2:22-29 (cf. Deut. 10:16; Jer. 4:4); 4:1, 12, 13-18; 5:6,10-11; 7:1-6 (cf. Jer. 3:1, 8; Hos. 2:2); 8:14-17 (cf. Deut. 14:1); 9:1-13, 21-29 and elsewhere. Paul was not, as the ?church? supposes, redefining Israel, styled today as ?replacement theology?, for Paul was addressing Israelites, not the ?church?!
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      • #4
        Classical &amp; Biblical Records Identifying the Phoenicians

        Classical & Biblical Records Identifying the Phoenicians
        ? 2006 William R. Finck Jr.
        Archaeology as we know it today is a rather young science, which has developed under the burden of many assumptions concerning history which are commonly held, but not necessarily correct. It is also a very inexact science, where various interpretations may be disputed concerning each new discovery. Yet archaeology is not history, archaeologists are not historians, and their field came into its present form only after outgrowing the lesser position it once held as part of the anthropology department in the typical university.

        While many archaeologists have a good understanding of the history of the region which they study, such is not at all true of the Near East. Especially in Palestine, the history of the region has been distorted not only due to the incorrect identification of the ancient inhabitants, but also due to its politicization resulting from ?zionism? and the arab-jewish conflict of recent decades. The jews have controlled the archaeology of the region very tightly, especially since the 1960?s. Typically, whatever archaeological discovery which suits the jewish view of ancient Israel is labeled as Israelite, while anything which does not appear to be jewish is considered to be Canaanite, Hittite, or Philistine, et al. An example of this is found in a review of Dan II. A Chronicle of the Excavations and the Late Bronze Age ?Mycenaean? Tomb in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology, 67:3 (2004), p. 176, where it is evident that the authors of this study of the findings at Tel Dan in Palestine are quite oblivious to the fact that the Mycenaean (Danae) Greeks and the Israelite tribe of Dan were indeed one and the same people. It would not suit the jews to discover that this branch of the ?Indo-European?, Aryan Greeks were indeed Hebrews, although on occasion such a discussion has not been avoided. Of course, all of the archaeologists mentioned in connection with the study are jews.

        Today?s archaeologists, and many ?scholars? in other fields, consider the Philistines and the Hittites ? and some even include the tribe of Dan also ? to have been ?Indo-European? interlopers in the land of Canaan, and this is done in spite of the fact that the Hebrew Bible places Philistines in Canaan before the Israelites existed as a nation (Genesis chapters 21 and 26), and also attests that the Hittites are a branch of the Canaanite race (i.e. Gen 10:15). These same ?scholars? also often label the Canaanites as a branch of the Shemites, yet the Bible attests that both the Philistines and the Canaanites descended from the Hamites (Gen. 10:6-29). Additionally, the ancient Israelites are commonly believed to have been jews, who are therefore considered to be Shemites. The mixed-race non-Adamic arabs are also errantly considered to be Shemites. In actuality, the Hebrew Bible itself shows that the original Shemites were White people, in the few places where notice is made of racial characteristics (i.e. 1 Sam. 16:12; 17:42; Song of Sol. 5:9-16; Lam. 4:7). It is the separate field of linguistics which is probably most responsible for many of today?s errant viewpoints. Language should not be used as a primary means of identifying race, as we in America today should certainly be aware!

        So while the jews have abused both archaeology and language studies in order to maintain the false claims made concerning their own identity, the actual historical records, including the Hebrew Bible, are dismissed as error or propaganda, or both, or even as a concocted fiction (as the school of ?Biblical Minimalists? often asserts), in various and parallel attempts to rewrite history in a manner which suits the various jewish factions. To this writer, there is no topic in which such practices are more evident, from the earliest applications of the field of archaeology, than in the discussions concerning one of ancient Europe?s most illustrious people: those whom the Greeks called Phoenicians. Here we shall examine the identity of this great people, from the Bible and from supporting historical sources.

        Because the same races of people did not always occupy any particular city, but entire cities or countries often completely changed hands (as is especially evident in the Bible), when discussing any region it is necessary to establish chronological parameters. Before the Israelite Exodus, historical documents show that Egypt exerted authority over the lands of the Levant. In early Egyptian documents, such as inscriptions of the Pharaohs Ahmose I and Thutmose III, and The Story of Si-nuhe which dates to the days of Isaac, a place called ?the lands of the Fenkhu?, apparently on the northern Levant, was mentioned (see Ancient Near Eastern Texts, James B. Pritchard, ed., Princeton Univ. Press, 1969 [hereinafter ANET] pp. 21, 234 and 241). While many point to this and conjecture that these are the people later called Phoenicians by the Greeks, the connection is very tenuous, and any similarity in the names is a mere coincidence. The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica under ?Phoenicia? also disclaims the derivation of Phoenicia from the Egyptian word, which it says ?was apparently used of Asiatic barbarians in general?. Rather, Phoenician in Greek has a meaning and a definitely discernible etymology. Yet in the Hebrew Old Testament and other documents of the post-Exodus period, there are no people mentioned having any of these names, Phoenician or Fenkhu.

        While it is clear that many of the inhabitants of the Levant and the ?Phoenician? coast were called Canaanite in ancient Egyptian records (i.e. ANET p. 246) and their own (the Amarna letters), in the Hebrew records and in those of other nations both before and after the Israelite occupation of Palestine (ca. 1400-586 B.C.), Phoenicia is a Greek term of which our first records are in Homer, who in the 7th century B.C. wrote of events ? particularly the Trojan War ? which took place just after 1200 B.C. The Classical Greek writers who followed Homer wrote of the Phoenicians almost as if they were a people passed on. While there were still people in Phoenicia who were excellent ship-builders and sailors, they were well past the apex of their culture. And while Phoenician colonies in the west thrived, notably in Carthage and Iberia, the ?golden age? of the Phoenicians clearly eclipsed with the demise of Biblical Israel. The Classical writers never mentioned Israel, so far as I have found, but called the people of the region Phoenicians or Syrians. Tyre and Syria both came into Greek from the same Hebrew word Tsor (6865). The Phoenicians of the Greek writers of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. were already said to have colonized nearly all of the Mediterranean, the coasts of northern Africa, the Iberian (Hebrew) peninsula, the British isles (the Cassiterides or Tin Islands), large parts of Anatolia, the isles of the Aegean, and even parts of Greece itself, at a time well before their own, for which the historical citations are quite numerous. They also credited the Phoenicians with the spread throughout the Mediterranean of all sorts of crafts and skills, in addition to the use of letters and writing. All of this occurred, more or less, in the centuries just before the Trojan War continuing throughout a ?dark age? in Greek history: those centuries which followed the Dorian conquest of Greece from about 1150 B.C., a period of which very little is known. All of the surviving Greek historical writings date from only the 5th century B.C. It is this coinciding period of Israelite occupation of Palestine which we are interested in here, considering the ?golden age? of Phoenicia and the spread of a more advanced culture throughout the Mediterranean. For this reason alone, it is of the utmost importance that Biblical scholars properly identify the ?Phoenicians?.

        Speaking briefly of geography, Phoenicia to the Greeks was more than just the small swath of coast in the northern Levant depicted on many Bible maps today. That demarcation is from later Roman times and closely represents the Roman-era administrative region. For example, Strabo (ca. 63 B.C. - 25 A.D.), an authority on the topic, in his Geography described Phoenicia as practically the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, from the northern parts and the coast of modern Syria all the way south to the edges of the Nile river, including even Gaza and the coast of the Sinai (16.2.21, 33). This alone should call into question the description of the Phoenicians as merely Canaanites, for in Biblical times it is clear that both Philistines and Israelites occupied those coasts.

        While the Greek Septuagint (LXX) is superior to the jewish Masoretic Text of the Old Testament in many respects, it is not without errors in translation which affect even this topic. In the LXX, the Hebrew word for Canaanite was sometimes errantly translated as Phoenician, which reflects the composition of the area and the geographical labeling in use when the LXX was translated from Hebrew, during the Hellenistic period following the conquests of Alexander, but which is not historically accurate in the context of the much earlier Israelite period of occupation in Canaan. After the deportations of the Israelites by the Assyrians and Babylonians in the 8th to 6th centuries B.C., most of the people who remained in the area which became known as Phoenicia were Canaanites, along with others of Israel?s ancient enemies. Along with the new peoples brought into the region by its conquerors (i.e. Ezra 4:9-10), these Canaanites, Hittites and others occupied nearly all the land once belonging to Israel (i.e. Ezra 9:2), including the lands of Asher (later ?Phoenicia?), Ephraim and Manasseh (later Samaria), and much of Judaea, but not Jerusalem nor most of Galilee. Where ?In historical times the Phoenicians called themselves Canaanites and their land Canaan?, as the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica reads citing surviving fragments of the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus, the Biblical student should expect Hecataeus, who wrote in the very late 6th and early 5th centuries B.C., to have found Canaanites in Phoenicia, most of the Israelites having been removed years earlier. The Greeks continued to call these non-Israelite peoples ?Phoenicians?, but only because they dwelt in the land which they called ?Phoenicia?. Hence where Mark (7:26) calls a certain woman ?Syro-Phoenician?, Matthew (15:22) more accurately identifies that same woman as a Canaanite. Yet the Israelite historical books in the LXX are more reliable than their counterparts in the Masoretic Text (and so the A.V.) in many respects, and as much is realized by comparing them to the writings of Josephus or to their counterparts among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

        The preeminent ?Phoenician? cities were Tyre and Sidon. Homer, the earliest and most famous of Greek poets, never even mentioned Tyre, but often Sidon (Strabo, 16.2.22). That these cities existed before the Israelite occupation of Canaan is clear in the Biblical record. Byblos, the Gebal of Ezek. 27:9 in the A.V., another famous Phoenician city, also existed in the remotest times, and is mentioned in The Story of Si-nuhe and other ancient documents (ANET pp. 19 ff., 228 et al.). While Canaanites occupied these cities in antiquity (see for example, the Amarna letters, i.e. ANET p. 484), that does not mean that they did so during the later Israelite Judges and Kingdom periods.

        Upon the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelites, the entire land was divided amongst the twelve tribes (Josh. 11:23), as described in Joshua chapters 13 through 21. While many of today?s ?scholars? deny it (most likely because they haven?t found many jews in their archaeological diggings), the Biblical record shows with certainty that the various Israelite tribes did for some time occupy the lands which they were given, even if from that time forward they were often identified by geographical location, the district or town which they inhabited, more often than by the name of their tribe (hence Ruth the ?Moabite?, David the ?Ephrathite?, Jephthah the ?Gileadite? et al.). Strabo, speaking of Moses and the Israelite conquest of Canaan (and the terms which he uses are later geographic labels), says that under Moses? successors the Israelites ?seized the property of others and subdued much of Syria and Phoenicia? (16.2.37), exactly as they were commanded to do (i.e. Deut. 11:8, 23-24), even if Strabo thought meanly of it ? obviously not understanding the circumstances (like most ?scholars? of today).

        Yet not all of each Israelite tribe remained in the lands given them, and neither were they truly expected to (i.e. 2 Sam 7:10). For instance, Zebulun was prophesied to ?dwell on the coast, and he shall be by a haven of ships, and shall extend to Sidon? (Gen. 49:13, LXX). While the territory in Israel proper allotted to Zebulun does not border Sidon, nor any sea (Josh. 19:10-16), Isa. 9:1 surely indicates that Zebulun indeed fulfilled this prophecy (for which see my earlier essay on this topic, Galilee of the Gentiles?). Dan is also found at sea, as the prophetess Deborah tells us at Judges 5:17, where she also said that Asher dwells on the seashore and inlets of the coast. Asher?s territory included both Tyre and Sidon (Josh. 19:24-31), the core territory of historical ?Phoenicia? on any map. Why do even Bible students doubt that the Asherites inhabited their own lands?

        Joshua 11:8; 13:4, 6 and 19:28-29 all make it clear that the children of Israel were very active in, and inhabited, the land of ?Phoenicia? encompassing Tyre and points north, and Judges chapters 1 and 3 show that the Israelites at this early period were dwelling among Canaanites whom they failed to remove from the land, enslaving them instead. Tyre is not mentioned among the list of cities in Judges 1 where Canaanites were said to have remained. Tyre, which soon after became the foremost ?Phoenician? city, and the city out of which came the Phoenician colonies of the west, was indeed an Israelite city during this period. Strabo says: ?Now although the poets have referred more repeatedly to Sidon than to Tyre (Homer does not even mention Tyre), yet the colonies sent into Lybia [i.e. Carthage] and Iberia, as far even as outside the Pillars, hymn rather the praises of Tyre? (16.2.22).

        Actually there were two cities called Tyre, the older mainland city (Ushu in Assyrian records), and the island city a short distance off the coast. In the A.V. Josh. 19:29 says ?the strong city Tyre? (where the LXX has only ?and the Tyrians?) is a part of Asher?s territory. The LXX , speaking of the inheritance of Naphtali, also gives to that tribe at Josh. 19:35: ?... the walled cities of the Tyrians? along with Tyre itself. While the land of Naphtali was not near the coast, these cities were listed among Naphtali?s inheritance. Since there were two cities named Tyre, palaeo-Tyre and the island city not distinguished in the Bible, there may not be a conflict here. Isaiah 9:1 indicates that along with Zebulun, Naphtali was also a sea-going tribe. (?Galilee? in this verse should rather have been translated ?the region?, comparing Strong?s #?s 1551 and 1552 and noting that the words are identical in palaeo-Hebrew, the vowel points being an invention of the later Masoretes.) It may well be that Naphtali inherited, or took for themselves, the island Tyre, which is technically outside of Israel proper, by which reason it may also be that Tyre had its own king, who later controlled parts of the mainland (cf. 1 Kings 9:10-14). Discussing Hiram the artificer, who was from Tyre (cf. 1 Kings 7:13 ff.), Josephus the historian states that ?he was by birth of the tribe of Naphtali, on the mother?s side (for she was of that tribe); but his father was Ur, of the stock of the Israelites?, whose tribe was evidently not known to the historian (Antiq. 8.3.4), yet here it is seen that there were people of Naphtali in Tyre. Later kings of Tyre also ruled Sidon (Antiq. 8.13.1), surely helping to fulfill Gen. 49:13.

        As time progressed, the Israelites strengthened in their possession of the land of Canaan, as the Biblical records suggest, and Canaanites remained their slaves (cf. Antiq. 8.6.3). When David had his census of Israel, Tyre and Sidon were among the places where it was conducted, and here both of these cities are distinguished from ?the cities of the Hivites, and of the Canaanites?, and so they must have been Israelite cities (2 Sam 24:6-7), which Yahshua Christ also attests at Matt. 11:21-22 & Luke 10:13-14. The lamentation of Tyre by Ezekiel (ch. 27) shows that it was an Israelite city. At 27:6 we see the tribe of Asher (?Ashurites?, #843) in Cyprus (?Chittim?), an island of famous Phoenician colonies which was subject to Tyre before the Assyrian conquest (Antiq. 9.14.2). At 27:12 we see that the tribes of Dan (Danaan Greeks) and Javan (Japhethite Ionian Greeks) brought trade to Tyre. The LXX adds a line to 27:18 not found in the A.V.: ?... and wool from Miletus; and they brought wine into thy market?. Miletus was an ancient Carian-Phoenician settlement in southwest Anatolia. Thales of Miletus, an early famous ?Greek? philosopher, was said to be ?of Phoenician descent? (Herodotus 1:170).

        Concerning the prophecies which forecast the destruction of Israel and the Assyrian deportations, we find two mentions of Tyre which are wanting in the A.V. At Amos 3:11 where the A.V. states ?An adversary there shall be even round about the land? the LXX has a less ambiguous ?O Tyre, thy land shall be made desolate round about thee?, the rest of the verse agreeing except that the LXX has ?countries? where the A.V. has ?palaces?. Micah 7:12 in the LXX reads: ?And thy cities shall be leveled, and parted among the Assyrians; and thy strong cities shall be parted from Tyre to the river, and from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain.?

        Surely Tyre was an Israelite city, and the historian Josephus acknowledges as much again in his Against Apion (1:22), where he quotes a Greek writer Theophrastus and his writings concerning laws: ?the laws of the Tyrians forbid men to swear foreign oaths?, and Josephus tells us that he was speaking of Israelites, and then goes on to cite Herodotus (from Histories 2:104), who stated that the Phoenicians and the ?Syrians of Palestine? (which is what Herodotus called the Judaeans - cf. 2:159, 3:5 and 7:89) were circumcised, and Josephus points out that ?there are no inhabitants of Palestine that are circumcised excepting the Judaeans [meaning Israelites]; and therefore it must be his knowledge of them that enabled him to speak so much concerning them?. That the Tyrians had such laws, and brought them to their colonies, is evident in a statement of Strabo?s in his Geography at 3.1.6: ?The Turdetanians are ranked as the wisest of the Iberians; and they make use of an alphabet, and possess records of their ancient history, poems and laws written in verse that are six thousand years old, as they assert?, and a footnote in the Loeb Library edition states that ?Some think the text should be emended to read ?six thousand verses in length?.? In either case, it is apparent that these Iberians, ?Phoenician? Hebrews, surely had copies of the Scriptures.

        Many of the Greek gods and heroes were admitted to be Phoenician, including Heracles (who was said to have saved Andromeda from a sea monster at Joppa in Palestine), Dionysus, Cadmus ?the Phoenician? (called ?the Tyrian? by Herodotus, 2:49), Semele, the Cabiri, Oedipus, Phoenix, and many others. From Phoenix were descended the Greek heroes Minos, Sarpedon, Rhadamanthys, Phineus, Adonis, and his daughter Europa. That Minos was indeed considered to be a Greek see Josephus, Against Apion 2:17. Phoenicia is a very important part of many of the earliest Greek myths, along with much of the Greek language. Citing all of this would be impossible here. One may begin with the poems of Homer, Hesiod and Euripides. Wherever such Phoenicians are described by the Greek writers, they were absolutely a White, fair-haired, fair-skinned people. Even the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid described the Carthaginian queen Dido, a Phoenician, as being blonde and beautiful. While such may not have represented the norm, it certainly was the ideal expressed consistently throughout the poets.

        The ?Phoenicians? made many settlements in Greece at an early time, nearly as early as the conquest of Canaan itself, namely in Boeotia and Thessaly, in addition to the islands. The largest was named Thebes. Cadmus ?the Phoenician? and Danaus ?the Egyptian? were even said to have left for Greece from Egypt at the same time that Moses led the Israelites in the Exodus (Diodorus Siculus 40.3.1-3), a myth which certainly holds elements of truth. There is evidence both circumstantial and linguistic (from the Egyptian names for them) that the ?Sea Peoples? who invaded Egypt in the late 13th century were actually a group of confederate Israelite and Philistine tribes (for which see www.crystalinks.com/philistia.html). The Phoenicians were obviously an important component in early Greek development, even if the Classical Greek writers, whose perspectives were most often Athenian (Ionian), didn?t always admit as much themselves.

        Both the 9th and 11th editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in the article ?Phoenicia?, explain that the word is properly derived from phoinos, as any Greek scholar should find plainly evident. Liddell & Scott define phoinos as ?blood-red?. I must assert that term is therefore a Greek translation of the Hebrew adam (Strong?s #?s 119-122), which the Israelites consistently used to describe themselves throughout their own books written during this same period!

        The 9th edition of Britannica also states that ?... in spite of their purely Semitic language, the Phoenicians were a distinct race from the Hebrews?, and this is only true under the false assumptions that the Hebrews were jews, and the Phoenicians were Canaanites. It continues: ?... their political organization and colonizing habits ... find no analogies among the Semites?, and the 11th edition notes their ?strangely un-Semetic love for the sea?, statements also true only under another false assumption: that by ?Semites? the jews and arabs are meant, both of whom are actually mixed-race Canaanites. The Biblical and historical records clearly show that the ?scholars? are wrong, and that the Phoenicians were White, and Israelites!

        William Finck
        http://christogenea.org/
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        "Stain clear water with mud and thou shalt never find sweet drink" - Aeschylus, Eumenides, 694-695

        http://christogenea.org
        http://williamfinck.net

        Comment


        • #5
          Galilee of the Gentiles?

          Galilee of the Gentiles?
          By: William Finck ? 2006
          This phrase ?Galilee of the Gentiles? appears at Matt. 4:15, and is a quote of Isa. 9:1 (where the A.V. has ?Galilee of the Nations?). Matt. 4:14 infers that Isaiah?s prophecy would be fulfilled when Yahshua left Nazareth (Matt. 4:13) for ?Galilee of the Gentiles.? But was that alone the fulfillment of Isaiah?s prophecy? And Matt. 4:16, which quotes Psalm 23:4? Certainly NOT! Rather it was only the commencement of the fulfillment of the prophecy, which would take quite some time to fulfill.
          Matthew next describes the calling of the apostles by Yahshua (4:18 ff.), 11 of which were of the tribe of Benjamin. Discussion of the twelfth, Judas Ish Kerioth, is beyond the scope of our purpose here. Many of Benjamin and Levi settled in Galilee after the return from Babylon, which is evident from the Scriptures. Saul of Tarsus, called much later, was also of Benjamin (Rom. 11:1). When the ancient Kingdom of Israel was divided after Solomon?s death, Benjamin was left with the Tribe of Judah for this very purpose (1 Kings 11:9-13, 36). The apostles of this tribe were fulfilling their duties as the lightbearers to Israel.
          Galilee did not originally belong to Benjamin, however. When the land was divided originally, towns in the territory of Naphtali were said to be in ?Galilee?, i.e. Josh. 20:7. Would Isaiah say that the region of Galilee in Palestine was of (belonging to) ?gentiles?, or even non-Israel ?nations?, knowing that the land belonged to Israel? Such is highly unlikely. Reading Isaiah 9:1, however, there is still much more to ?Galilee of the Nations? than this.
          How could Zebulun and Naphtali be afflicted by ?... way of the sea beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the Nations?? That truly does not describe the sea of Galilee at all, and there is no discussion in the Old Testament describing any shipping traffic by Zebulun or Naphtali in that small sea. Even in the time of Christ, the sea of Galilee was plied by little more than small fishing craft. So what else may this statement mean?
          The word ?beyond? in Isaiah 9:1, the Hebrew ?eber (Strong?s #5676), may also mean ?opposite?, among other things. It is the word from which the names Eber and Hebrew are derived. In the A.V. the word is represented by a wide range of meanings, ?from, over, passage, quarter, other side, this side, straight?, etc. according to Strong?s, and many of them quite proper in the contexts in which the word appears. The word is, for instance. ?over? in the phrase ?over against? at Exod. 25:37, which the Thomas Nelson King James Study Bible I have footnotes ?in front of?, and is ?this side? at Num. 22:1; 32:19 and 32. So use of the word at Isa. 9:1 does not necessitate that the ?sea? or the ?way of the sea? referred to there is east of the Jordan River, or is the sea of Galilee, which is actually the source of the river and not ?beyond? it at all.
          The word ?Galilee? (Strong?s #1551) is derived from the Hebrew word geliylah (#1552) which means ?a circuit or region.? In Hebrew the proper noun and the noun which it is derived from are spelled with the same characters, but with slightly different vowel points. In the Palaeo-Hebrew of Isaiah?s time, without vowels or modern Hebrew vowel points, and in all upper-case letters as was the custom, these two words are indistinguishable. It is evident that they could easily be confused.
          The ?sea of Galilee? was never called such in the Old Testament Kingdom period. The name ?Galilee? appears only at Josh. 20:7; 21:32; 1 Kings 9:11; 2 Kings 15:29; 1 Chron. 6:76 and Isa. 9:1. ?Galilee? was instead only the name of an undefined region in northern Israel, at least part of which lied in the land of Naphtali. The ?sea of Galilee? is always called the ?sea of Chinnereth? (or Chinneroth, Strong?s #3672), mentioned at Num. 34:11; Deut. 3:17; Josh. 11:2; 12:3; 13:27 and 19:35. Additionally, it is quite clear from Scripture that half of the coastline of the Sea of Galilee was adjoined by land belonging to the Tribe of Naphtali, with the balance adjoined by the lands of the Geshurites and Maachathites (Deut. 3:14; Joshua 13:7-13). Geshur was considered a part of the land of Aram, or Syria. The Aramaeans were Semites and related to the Israelites. The Maachathites were apparently also related to the Israelites (Gen. 22:24) though they remained a distinct kingdom (1 Chron. 19:6-7).
          Genesis 49:13 states that Zebulun would dwell among ships bordering Sidon, ?... at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for a haven of ships; and his border shall be unto Zidon.? Zebulun?s inherited land was neither near Sidon, nor was it near any sea (Josh. 19:10-16)! Yet it should surely be manifest by this point, that ?Galilee of the Gentiles? need not indicate the ?Sea of Galilee? at all. In fact, ?Galilee of the Gentiles?, or even ?Galilee of the Nations?, makes no sense at all.
          However, if one is knowledgeable concerning Israel?s early migrations into Europe, then reading Isaiah 9:1 ?... and afterward did more grievously afflict them by the way of the sea opposite Jordan, in the region of the Nations? makes perfectly good sense! And where did the lightbearers of Benjamin go after the Passion, upon leaving Palestine? To the people who walked in darkness ? in Europe and Asia Minor.
          Most so-called ?scholars?, and especially the ?Jews?, would have us believe that the sea-faring Phoenicians of Tyre, Sidon and elsewhere were a people distinct from the Israelites, and were Canaanites at that. If that were so, then when the Phoenicians settled what are today Spain and Portugal, they should have called the place ?Sidonia? or ?Canaania? and not Iberia (Eber-land, i.e. ?Hebrew-land?). An examination of Scripture, and especially the Septuagint, reveals that the people whom the Greeks called ?Phoenicians? (and the word does not appear at all until it appears in Homer, who was probably a contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah) were certainly Israelites. Yet even the Septuagint in its translation sometimes confused Canaanites with the ?Phoenicians?, somewhat true in 280 B.C. when the edition was translated. For long after all of the Israelites who were deported by the Assyrians were gone, the Greeks continued to call the land ?Phoenicia?, and the Canaanites who remained to inhabit it, along with whatever remnant of Israelites remained, they continued to call ?Phoenicians.?
          Joshua 11:8 in the A.V. states: ?And Yahweh delivered them [the Canaanite army] into the hand of Israel, who smote them, and chased them unto great Zidon, and unto Misrephoth-maim, and unto the valley of Mizpeh eastward; and they smote them, until they left none remaining.? At Joshua 13:6 we read: ?All the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon unto Misrephoth-maim and all the Sidonians, them will I drive out from before the children of Israel: only divide thou it by lot unto the Israelites for an inheritance, as I have commanded thee.? The name ?Sidon?, or ?Zidon? at times, described both a city on the coast of Palestine, and the region around it. It also described the Canaanite descendants of Sidon (Gen. 10:15) who inhabited it.
          Later we find that although the Israelites surely did inhabit this region, they failed to drive off all the Canaanite and other tribes: ?Now these are the nations which Yahweh left, to prove Israel by them, even as many of Israel as had not known all the wars of Canaan ... Namely, five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites that dwelt in mount Lebanon, from Baal-hermon unto the entering in of Hamath.? (Jdgs. 3:1-3). The region and city of Sidon became a part of the territory of the tribe of Asher, as described at Joshua 19:24-31, and we are informed also at Jdgs. 1:31 that Canaanites continued to dwell in the city. But Tyre, which quickly became the prominent ?Phoenician? city, was also in the territory of Asher ? or at least the mainland city was, since there is not yet mention of the island off the coast ? and note that there is no mention anywhere of Canaanites remaining in Tyre.
          The Septuagint (LXX) says at Joshua 19:28-29, of Asher?s inheritance: ?And Elbon, and Raah, and Ememaon, and Canthan to great Sidon. And the borders shall turn back to Rama, and to the fountain of Masphassat, and the Tyrians ...?. But a little further on, describing Naphtali?s inheritance at 19:35: ?And the walled cities of the Tyrians, Tyre, and Omathadaketh, and Kenereth ...?, quite different than the version found in the A.V. Although not within Naphtali?s territory, did Naphtali inherit Tyre, on the coast of the territory of Asher? Or did this refer to the island off the coast? Such can not be told with the data I have presently. Reading the accounts given at 1 Kings 9:11-13 and 2 Chron. 8:2, it is evident that Naphtali did not inhabit all of the territory in Galilee which they inherited, for Solomon had to repopulate many of those cities in his time.
          That Asher inhabited the coasts of the Mediterranean, and not the ?Canaanites?, can be discerned in the A.V. at Judges 5:17: ?Asher continued on the seashore, and abode in his breaches?, where ?breaches? is the Hebrew miphrats (#4464) and may be translated ?havens? or ?inlets?, the word meaning ?a break (in the shore), i.e. a haven? (Strong?s). In the Egyptian records of the 18th dynasty, which predates the Israelite conquest of Canaan, Tyre is called ?T?aru the haven?, and it is said of the island off the coast ?water is carried to it in barks, it is richer in fish than in sands? (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edition, p 817).
          And so the Israelite presence in Tyre and Sidon, at about the same time that the so-called ?Phoenicians? began their rise to supremacy over the seas, is absolutely undeniable. At 2 Sam. 24:2-7, for instance, King David sends Joab to number the tribes of Israel. Tyre and Sidon were among the places to which Joab journeyed. Elsewhere on the seacoast, Elijah visited the widow of Zarephath, and neither was that noble woman a Canaanite.
          Amos 3:11, part of a prophecy against Israel, where the A.V. states ?An adversary there shall be even round about the land ...? the LXX has ?O Tyre, thy land shall be made desolate round about thee ...?. Micah 7:12, in another prophecy directed at Israel, reads in the LXX ?And thy cities shall be leveled, and parted among the Assyrians; and thy strong cities shall be parted from Tyre to the river, and from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain.? And so the prophets also testify that the Israelites inhabited Tyre, yet these citations are wanting in the A.V.
          It is only well after the deportations of the Israelites that Greek writers tell us of ?Canaanites? in Phoenicia, yet the Israelites were long removed from the land. The inhabitants of the island city of Tyre, however, never were deported by the Assyrians or the Babylonians, although the mainland portion of Tyre was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezek. 26). After the beginning of the Persian period, the Tyrians were subject to Persia and had spread themselves back to the mainland. The island city was destroyed for good by Alexander the Great circa 330 B.C. Yet it is evident that many of the Israelites did remain in the area and maintained their identity for quite some time, as we have Anna the prophetess, of the Tribe of Asher, in Jerusalem during the birth of Christ (Luke 2:36).
          Much more can be said, drawn not only from Scripture but from history and archaeology, to demonstrate that the Israelites were one and the same with the Phoenicians of history, who were the people who settled not only much of the North African coasts and Spain, but also the British Isles, the northern coasts of Europe, the coasts of Anatolia (Turkey today), and also made up much of the original ?Greek? and ?Roman? populations, all of these having their roots in both Israelite, other Semite, and the Japhethite tribes of Genesis 10. Yet hopefully enough has been said to illuminate the true meaning of the expression ?Galilee of the Gentiles?, actually ?the region of the Nations?, found at Isaiah 9:1 and Matt. 4:15.
          Note: Two other places contain the phrase ?Galilee of the Nations?, in English versions. Joel 3:4 in the LXX (the A.V. has here ?all the coasts of Palestine?) and 1 Macc. 5:15 in both the LXX and the A.V. Apocryphae. However in the LXX Greek in both places the phrase reads Galilaias allophul?n or literally ?Galilee of the other tribes?, ?the region of the other tribes.? The LXX translators long ago making the same error of ?Galilee? for ?galilee? which I hope to have illustrated above. Now, in context, these verses may also be better understood.
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          • #6
            Herodotus, Scythians, Persians &amp; Prophecy

            Herodotus, Scythians, Persians & Prophecy
            ? 2006 William R. Finck Jr.
            The purpose of this expos? is to show how, if one is not familiar with secular history (of which much is found in the Greek Classics), one will not fully understand Scripture. The Judaean nation comprised mostly of ?bad figs? (today called ?Jews?) was not dispersed until 70 A.D., as prophesied at Jer. 24:8-10, 26:6, 29: 17-19 et al., affirmed by Christ Himself at Luke 21:24. While James at 1:1 speaks of the ?twelve tribes which are scattered abroad?, and James died before 70 A.D., as Josephus attests, James was not addressing the so-called ?Jews? dispersed in 70 A.D., and neither could the ?Jews? already spread abroad claim descent from tribes other than three only, Judah, Benjamin and Levi, and only a tiny fraction of those resettled Judaea on their return from Babylon.

            Except for his long description of Egypt in Book 2, and his other forays into the past, Herodotus gave the history of Persia covering the reign of five kings: Cyrus (1. 46), Cambyses (2. 1), Pseudo-Smerdis (3. 67), Darius (3. 88), and Xerxes (7. 5). These kings are the same exact kings which Daniel our prophet speaks of in Daniel 11:1-2.

            Where at Daniel 11:1 in the A.V. reads ?Darius the Mede? (a satrap at Babylon), the LXX has 11:1 thusly: ?And I in the first year of Cyrus stood to strengthen and confirm him.? But regardless, the record is clear that Cyrus was king of Persia as Daniel wrote these last chapters. 11:2 continues: ?... there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia ...? (So we have Cambyses, Pseudo-Smerdis, and Darius who actually began the war with the Greeks, defeated at the battle of Marathon), ?... and the fourth shall be far richer than all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia.? And Xerxes, Daniel?s fourth king, not only invaded Greece, leveling Athens itself, but also incited the Phoenicians of Carthage (with their Iberian brethren and others ? Herodotus 7. 165) to attack the Greeks of Sicily at the same time. Where Xerxes is defeated, Herodotus ? having fulfilled his testimony of this war ? ends his Histories.

            On the fate of the ?ten? tribes: II Esdras 13:39-45, and Josephus? Antiquities 8:11:1, 10:9:7 and 11:5:2, not only do the Arians and Parthians beyond Babylon meet the description of being ?beyond the Euphrates?, but so do the Armenians, Iberians, Sacae, Massagetae, and all the Scythians who ventured up through the Black and Caspian coasts and the Caucasus, looking at the river?s course.

            Hosea at 12:9 says of the Israelites being deported by the Assyrians: ?And I Yahweh thy God from the land of Egypt will yet make thee to dwell in tabernacles (tents), as in the days of the solemn feasts.? And not only do we have descriptions of the Scythians living in such a fashion by Herodotus (4. 46), but their very name, ?Scythian?, may certainly be derived from the Hebrew word for ?tabernacle? or ?tent?, succoth. Strabo tells us that over 400 years later, the Scythians and Scythian Germans were still living in this fashion (7. 1. 3, 11. 2. 1)! It makes no sense, that the people who rapidly became ? and still are ? the world?s greatest engineers, would for so long dwell without house nor city: except the prophet said that they would.

            Herodotus at 4.61 describes the Scythians? use of animal bones for firewood, where Rawlinson in his notes in his edition compares Ezekiel 24:5. More strikingly, Herodotus says that the Scythians ?never use swine for any purpose?, nor do they breed them (4. 63), although it is evident that this had changed by Strabo?s time (4. 4. 3), and Herodotus describes a Scythian mode of divination from bundles of rods, or sticks, to which may be compared (as Rawlinson again noticed) Hosea 4:12. (& Tacitus, Germania, 10).

            Strabo (11. 3. 6, 11. 4. 7) discusses some customs among the Iberians and Albanians of the Caucasus which we find much like many in our Old Testament, and Herodotus even describes sacrifice procedures among the Magi and Persians much like the Levitical (1. 132). In many instances from Gaul to India, the priesthoods are said to belong to a particular tribe, such as the Magi (Herodotus 1. 101, 140), a practice also to be found at times among the Greeks (i.e., the Arcadians at Strabo 8. 3. 25). As the Persians would not sacrifice without a Magus (Herodotus 1. 132), the Kelts would not without a Druid (Strabo 8. 3. 25). Also found among the Greeks, swine were considered impure (Strabo 12. 8. 9) and were only accepted for sacrifice at certain temples of Aphrodite (Strabo 9. 5. 17).

            From a map drawn from the accounts of Diodorus Siculus, found in volume 2 of Harvard?s Loeb Library edition of his Library of History we see several branches of the Scythians, notably the Sakae and Massagetae, the Sogdians and the Tocharians, dwelling about the Iaxartes river, north of the sources of the Indus. Their location here is evident also from the accounts of Herodotus and Strabo. The Massagetae and the Sakae were among the last of the Scythian tribes to have entered into Europe, as traced across the continent by Sharon Turner in his History of the Anglo-Saxons.

            When this early home of these Scythian tribes is noticed, and we realize that the ?rivers of Ethiopia? in the Bible are in Hebrew the ?rivers of Kush?, and that the eastern, or Hindu-Kush, only then Zephaniah may be understood, at 3:10 where he writes ?From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia [Kush] my suppliants, the daughter of my dispersed, shall bring my offering? and he can only be talking about the Massagetae, Sakae, and their Kin! ? the dispersed of Israel! It was to these tribes that the Kingdom of Yahweh would come (Micah 4:8, Dan, 2:44, Matt. 21:43), and the further from Mesopotamia the dispersed traveled, the stronger and more lasting a nation they became (Micah 4:7, Isaiah 41).

            Herodotus? description of a barren northern Europe (5. 9-10, et al.) and the evidence of Scythian, or German and Keltic migration westward to inhabit it, calls to mind Deut. 32:8: ?When the most High divided to the (Genesis 10) nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the (Adamic) people according to the number of the children of Israel.? Yet the Thracians claimed that ?the country beyond the Ister (the Lower Danube) is possessed by bees (Rawlinson footnotes ?mosquitoes?), on account of which it is impossible to penetrate farther.? (Herodotus 5. 10). Yet I suspect there are reasons, besides mosquitoes, that the Thracians were so prevented. [Note Exodus 23:28, and Wisdom of Sal. 12:8 in the Apocrypha.]

            Isaiah 10:5-16 foretells the destruction of Assyria. 10:17-18, 10:20-27 and 11:16 fully assure that Israelites will be actively involved in that destruction. Isaiah 14:24-27 mentions this destruction again. Herodotus relates that the Medes were already at war with the Assyrians, when the Scythians invaded Media during the reign of the Median King Cyaxares (625-585 B.C., according to Herodotus? chronology). The Scythians prevented the Medes from destroying Nineveh, and themselves ?became masters of Asia?, a position they held for 28 years. While Herodotus states that Cyaxares conquered Nineveh himself, after becoming free of the Scythians, this is impossible since Nineveh was destroyed before 612 B.C., and Herodotus is likely repeating later Median propaganda. Strabo tells us rather that ?In ancient times Greater Armenia ruled the whole of Asia, after it broke up the empire of the Syrians?, where he is obviously confusing Syrians with Assyrians (and he mentions ?Greater Media? later in the paragraph). Greater Armenia, that first Scythian land, according to Diodorus Siculus (refer to Watchman?s Letter #72, p. 1, Diodorus Siculus 2. 43), with the witness of Herodotus, albeit indirectly, show that Isaiah was correct, the Israelites ? and surely with Medes alongside them ? destroyed Nineveh, and the Assyrian Empire. (Herodotus 1. 102-106, Strabo 11. 13. 5).

            Isaiah 13 foretells the destruction of Babylon. 13:4 states that ?the kingdoms of the nations? will perform such destruction. 13:17 indicates that the Medes are one of these nations. 13:3 indicates that the children of Israel are also. 13:12 is surely an allusion to Cyrus, king of Persia, who led the takeover of Babylon (see Isa. 44:28). Isaiah 14:3-23 is a parable foretelling Babylon?s destruction. Note Isaiah?s statement concerning Cyrus at 45:1: ?Thus saith Yahweh to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, and I will loose the loin of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut.? And Herodotus said of the Babylonians: ?A battle was fought at a short distance from the city, in which the Babylonians were defeated by the Persian king, whereupon they withdrew within their defences. Here they shut themselves up, and made light of his siege, having laid a store of provisions for many years in preparation against this attack; for when they saw Cyrus conquering nation after nation, they were convinced that he would never stop, and that their turn would come at last.? (1. 190). After a short time as Herodotus describes (1. 191) the Persians easily gained access to the city, by redirecting the Euphrates river which ran under its walls, dividing the city in two; something the Babylonians did not foresee, and a project they took notice of too late.

            Isaiah 21 is a parable involving Elam (Persia) and Media in the destruction of Babylon. Jeremiah 50 and 51 also prophesy the fall of Babylon. Jeremiah 50:3-4 surely indicate that the Israelites will participate with the Persian conquest of Babylon, as do 50:9, 50:20-28, 33-34 and 41-42. Jeremiah also indicates this at 51:27, where from history we know that people related to the Scythians (Israelites) inhabited the mountains of Ararat, Armenia. Ashkenaz is a Japhethite tribe (Gen. 10:3). Jeremiah 51:31 describes the Persian system of post discussed by Herodotus at 8. 98, a sort of Persian ?pony express.? While we can?t tell from Herodotus whether the Sakae, Scythians, or other Israelites were with the Persians when they took Babylon, surely Persian records themselves indicate such. Herodotus does describe the Persian forces in great detail as they were less than 60 years later under Xerxes, during his great invasion of Greece. At 7. 64 he mentions the ?The Sacae, or Scyths? along with the Bactrians. At 7. 66 he mentions the Arians, Parthians, Sogdians, the Caspians at 7. 67, and several times relates some custom or implement of these people to the Medes. At 7. 62 he says ?These Medes were called anciently by all people Arians? yet Herodotus is certainly again confusing the Medes with Israelites who were settled in Media by the Assyrians. For the word ?Arya? is certainly Hebrew for ?Mountain of Yahweh? (note Daniel 2:44-45). The Scythians were said by Herodotus three times (1. 215, 4. 5, 7. 64) to have the FV("D4l as a favorite weapon, and only the Scyths are mentioned by him with this weapon (once as Massagetae), which Rawlinson translates ?battle axe? (compare Jeremiah 51:20). Sharon Turner is his History of the Anglo-Saxons states that the battle axe was the preferred weapon of the Saxon at least until the Norman Conquest (vol. 1, page 82; vol. 2, pages 58, 75 & 76).

            At 7. 64, Herodotus also states that the Sacae, the Scyths, were ?clad in trousers, and had on their heads tall stiff caps rising to a point.? A similar pointed cap, not so stiff, may be seen on the head of a Germanic chieftain, pictured on a cup and shown paying homage to Augustus, on page 43 of the May-June 2001 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. The same type of hat worn by the Germanic chieftain can be seen on page 52 of the November-December 2002 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review on the head of a figure excavated at Dor in Israel. On page 49 of the same issue, this same hat is seen in the famous inscription of the Israelite King Jehu on the Black Obelisk of Assyria. A Scythian head dress indeed!

            By now I would hope it is evident that Herodotus, supported to a greater extent by later historians, was an excellent and most valuable witness to the dispersion of the Israelites and then their fulfillment of so many prophecies concerning them as we have here seen from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Micah and Zephaniah, and even evidenced in Daniel, another story entirely. It should now be evident that the Israelites of the Old Testament are not the same people being touted as ?Jews? today.
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            • #7
              Classical Records Of The Origins Of The Scythians, Parthians &amp; Related Tribes

              Classical Records Of The Origins Of The Scythians, Parthians & Related Tribes
              By: William Finck ? 2006
              In the preface to Josephus? Wars, the historian explains that he originally wrote the book in ?the language of our country?, i.e. Hebrew or perhaps Aramaic, and sent it to the ?Upper Barbarians?, among whom he then names as ?the Parthians ... Babylonians ... remotest Arabians ... and those of our nation beyond Euphrates, with the Adiabeni.?
              Except for the Parthians, Josephus? designations here are geographical, where it is clear from the pages of his Antiquities that many of the Israelites of the Babylonian deportation still dwelt around Babylonia in his time (15.3.1), and this would include the ?remotest? part of Arabia adjacent to Babylonia (cf. Acts 2:11; 1 Pet. 5:13). Also, Josephus attests that many Israelites of the Assyrian deportations were ?beyond Euphrates until now?, where they were ?an immense multitude, and not to be estimated by numbers? (11.5.2). Adiabene is that part of Assyria which, according to Strabo in his Geography, is not in Mesopotamia but which consists of the plains beyond the Tigris bordering Babylonia to the south and Armenia to the north (16.1.1, 19). Media borders Adiabene on the east.
              Herodotus listed Parthians among those who fought under the Persians in Xerxes? famous invasion of Greece, and like the Arians and Sogdians, says that they were equipped like the Bactrians ?in all respects? (7.66). The Parthians had a district immediately east of Media, southeast of the Caspian Sea, which they obtained by force. Strabo says of Parthia that in the Persian and Macedonian periods ?in addition to its smallness, it is thickly wooded and mountainous, and also poverty-stricken?, and that at that time its people paid their tribute along with the Hyrcanians to the west (11.9.1). Strabo then says that ?Arsaces, a Scythian, with some of the D?ae ... invaded Parthia and conquered it. Now at the outset Arsaces was weak, being continually at war with those who had been deprived by him of their territory, both he himself and his successors, but later they grew so strong, always taking neighboring territory, through successes in warfare, that finally they established themselves as lords of the whole of the country inside the Euphrates ...? (11.9.2). Elsewhere Strabo tells us that the D?ae, along with the Massagetae and Sacae, are Scythians (11.8.2). So we see that the Parthians of the Parthian empire were Scythians, and Josephus surely indicates to us that they were Israelites.
              In the second century B.C. the Parthians arose over the entire eastern world, ruling over much of the old Persian Empire, a position they held for about four hundred years. All of their kings, according to Strabo, were given the surname ?Arsaces? (15.1.36), which seems to come from the words ar and Saka, apparently meaning ?highest of the Saka?. While the Euphrates was generally the border between the Parthian and Roman empires, often the two clashed along it, and the Parthians were at various times involved in the affairs of Syria and Judaea (Josephus, Wars 1.13.1 ff.; Antiq. 14.13.1 ff.) and also contended with the Romans for Armenia, where Rome prevailed (Antiq. 18.4.4).
              While the Assyrians resettled various groups of deported Israelites along the northern frontiers of their empire (i.e. 2 Kings 17:6), in addition to much of Judah and Benjamin (2 Kings 18:19), and our Biblical records here are far from complete due to the circumstances of the time, the Assyrian records themselves tell us that these tribes began migrating to the north nearly as soon as they were settled, for which see Missing Links Discovered In Assyrian Tablets by E. Raymond Capt, and also the Apocalypse of Ezra, or 2 Esdras in the King James Apocrypha, 13:39-50. One branch of these Israelites, the Kimmerians, ravaged much of Anatolia and destroyed ancient Phrygia before crossing into Europe and settling north of Thrace and around the Black Sea, who later migrated westward where they became known as the Kelts. Here we shall discuss the larger portions, the Scythians, who stayed behind in Asia for some centuries before many of their own descendants began crossing into Europe as the ?Germanic? speaking tribes. In my previous pamphlet concerning these people, Herodotus, Scythians, Persians & Prophecy, it was shown that the Scythians fulfilled the roles which the Hebrew prophets had forecast concerning the children of Israel. This discussion is meant to complement that one.
              In his Library of History at 2.43.1-5, Diodorus Siculus says of the Scythians: ?But now, in turn, we shall discuss the Scythians who inhabit the country bordering upon India. This people originally possessed little territory, but later, as they gradually increased in power, they seized much territory by reason of their deeds of might and their bravery and advanced their nation to great leadership and renown. At first, then, they dwelt on the Araxes River, altogether few in number and despised because of their lack of renown; but since one of their early kings was warlike and of unusual skill as a general they acquired territory, in the mountains as far as the Caucasus, and in the steppes along the ocean and Lake Maeotis (the sea of Azov today) and the rest of that country as far as the Tana?s River ... But some time later the descendants of these kings ... subdued much of the territory beyond the Tana?s River as far as Thrace ... for this people increased to great strength and had notable kings; one whom gave his name to the Sacae, another to the Massagetae, another to the Arimaspi, and several other tribes received their names in like manner ...? (Loeb Library edition).
              So while Diodorus described the naming of the various related Scythian tribes fancifully, he surely is accurate in the description of the origins and growth of these people, and corroborates Herodotus concerning their relationship and locations. The Araxes river was the ancient boundary between Media and Armenia. Herodotus, describing the Persian King Cyrus? expedition against the Massagetae, describes the Caspian Sea, the Araxes river which empties into it from the west, and the Caucasus Mountains which bind the Caspian there, and places Cyrus? expedition in this very place. Herodotus describes the Massagetae: ?In their dress and mode of living [they] resemble the Scythians?, and, as he says later that the Scythians carry, ?their favorite weapon is the battle-axe? (Histories 1.201, 215). Later Herodotus describes the Persian King Darius? expedition against the Scythians, where to get there Darius crossed the Bosphoros, and then going through Thrace crossed the Danube to attack them (4.97). He also described how these Scythians had migrated into Europe from Asia (4.11, 48), as Diodorus tells us, and he says that the Scythians of the east who were once subject to the Persians, the Scythians of the Caucasus mountains, and the Scythians of Europe were all related (7.64).
              Herodotus says of the Scythians that ?the Persians called them Sacae, since that is the name which they give to all Scythians? (7.64). Strabo says only that the Sacae are of Scythian stock (7.3.9), but elsewhere that the D?ae, Massagetae, and Sacae are Scythians, and that the inhabitants of Bactriana and Sogdiana (districts which border upon India), if not Scythians themselves, are ruled over by Scythians, and also that the Asii, Tocharians, and Sacarauli (found east of the Caspian near to Tibet) appear to be Scythians (11.8.2). Note the occurrence of the ?saka? sound in so many names related to the Scythian tribes, such as Arsaces, Massagetae, Sacarauli, and also Sacasene as we shall see below.
              There was no ?Armenia? in the time of the Assyrian deportations of the Israelites. It is apparent that the name may have evolved from a Hebrew phrase meaning ?mountain regions?, for which see Strong?s Hebrew lexicon #?s 2022, 4480 and 4482. In earlier times the land was partly occupied by the Urartu, who seem to be related to the Medes, and the upper portions by the Moschi and Tibareni, as attested to by Strabo and others. These tribes are evidently the Meshech and Tubal of Genesis 10:2.
              Speaking of the time around the fall of Assyria, Herodotus tells us that the Scythians conquered all of Asia (1.104), of which Strabo relates that ?In ancient times Greater Armenia ruled the whole of Asia? (11.13. 5). Yet both men are correct, where we have seen from Diodorus Siculus the Scythian origins along the Araxes river in part of what later became known as Armenia, and their presence there in Persian times as Herodotus describes Cyrus? expedition against the Massagetae there. Strabo tells us that Sacasene, a district in Armenia, was so named for the Sacae who dwelt there (11.8.4).
              While this entire eastern world, once predominately Caucasian (Adamic, or White), has been overrun and mongrelized by Arabs, Edomite-jews, Turks and Mongols over the past 1500 or so years, the Armenians seem to never have forgotten their Israelite background, and an Armenian quarter was maintained in Jerusalem even in the 20th century. The Armenians, the original White Armenians, accepted Christianity even before Constantine, and this was noted by them in later accounts.
              In Strabo?s time, sandwiched between Armenia to the south and the Caucasus Mountains to the north were three small districts occupying much of the land known today as Georgia: Colchis which bordered the Black Sea, Iberia which was landlocked, and Albania which bordered the Caspian Sea. The eastern portion of Albania (not to be confused with the later Albania in the Balkans) contained a region called Caspiana.
              Colchis was an ancient district, certainly first settled by some of the Japhethite tribes, known to the Greeks at the earliest times, and by their myths even before the Trojan War. Jason and the Argonauts, a story which supposedly took place a couple of generations before the Trojan War, sailed through the Black Sea to Colchis in search of the golden fleece. Here Jason met Medea, daughter of the king, who ran off with him after helping him steal the fleece from her father, and then married him in Greece, as the myth generally goes.
              Herodotus tells us that the Colchians practiced circumcision, however there appears the odd statement that the Colchians were black and wooly-headed (2.104), a statement which his most famous translator, George Rawlinson, disputed in a footnote. Herodotus claimed that the Colchians were related to the Egyptians, from whence they received their circumcision custom, and also called the Egyptians black and wooly-headed. Since Egypt was overrun and ruled for nearly a century by Nubians, from about 750-661 B.C., Herodotus, writing about 200 years later, may well have seen some Egyptians of this sort, yet such could not be said of the Colchians. It may be conjectured that Herodotus, if the statement is not an interpolation, only imagined that the Colchians should look like certain ?Egyptians?, if they were indeed related. As Rawlinson states in his footnote, the paintings, monuments and mummies show the original Egyptians to be neither black nor wooly-headed. While not mentioning this particular statement of Herodotus?, Strabo scoffed at ?some writers, wishing to show forth a kinship between the Colchians and the Egyptians? (11.2.17). Euripides, a contemporary of Herodotus and just as acquainted with the region as the historian was, in his account of Jason?s voyage in his play Medea, described the title character?s ?snow-white neck?, a description much more agreeable to the historical and archaeological records. It is possible that the Colchians, if the area was inhabited by deported Israelites in Herodotus? time, did practice circumcision, a custom which began among them before the sojourn in Egypt. Yet here the testimony found in Herodotus appears to be tainted, and if not by a later hand, his statements concerning the Colchians appear to be one of his graver errors, while most of his other testimonies are worthy of great respect.
              Bordering Colchis to the east was Iberia. Strabo calls the Iberians of the Caucasus ?both neighbors and kinsmen? of the Scythians and Sarmatians, and ?they assemble many tens of thousands, both from their own people and from the Scythians and Sarmatians, whenever anything alarming occurs? (11.3. 3). Strabo also says that ?the greater part of Iberia is so well built up in respect to cities and farmsteads that their roofs are tiled, and their houses as well as their market-places and other public buildings are constructed with architectural skill? (11.3.1).
              Anciently there were two lands named Iberia, and such is certainly no coincidence: the one the peninsula later known as Spain and settled by Hebrew-Israelite-Phoenicians, and the other this one here in the Caucasus mountains, settled by Hebrew-Israelite-Scythians. In the Hebrew language, ?Hebrews? would be ?Iberi?, or as Strong?s has it, Ibriy (#5680). Strabo, unsure why Iberia was called such, imagined that both lands were so called from gold mines said to be in each country (11.2.19). Even that would require both peoples, so far apart, to have a common word related to gold mines, which is not the case in any of the regions? languages, and so Strabo?s conjecture here must be dismissed.
              East of Iberia and reaching to the Caspian Sea was Albania, of which the eastern part, Caspiana, sat at the mouth of that same Araxes river where the Scythians are placed at the earliest times. Herodotus mentions the Caspians at 7.67, and in company with the Bactrians in Xerxes? Persian army at 7.86. In Strabo we have seen the relationship of the Bactrians and Scythians mentioned above (11.8.2). Caspiana must be, as Dr. George Moore agrees in his The Lost Tribes And The Saxons Of The East And The Saxons Of the West, that same district mentioned at Ezra 8:17, Casiphia, to which Ezra sent for Levites to come to Jerusalem after the rebuilding of the Temple. Moore wrote as much in the 1870?s, when his book was first published.
              So while we see that the ancient historians surely made some mistakes in certain places, or offered fanciful conjectures where the truth of a matter was obscured by time or language, we have a consistent pattern of testimony among many ancient accounts that the Parthian, Scythian, and other ?Indo-European? tribes shared a common origin in and around the regions of ancient Media, Armenia and northern Assyria, and from there soon spread themselves east as far as the borders of India and Tibet, and west to Thrace and the Danube river. And we can tell their descent from the Israelites not only because they first appear in places where the Bible tells us that the Israelites were brought to by the Assyrians, and not only because they fulfilled the many prophecies which were foretold of the Israelites, but also from the testimonies such as those of Ezra (Ezra 8:17; 2 Esdras 13:39 ff.), Josephus (Antiq. 11.5.2), and Paul (Col. 3:11), who certainly wrote to no one but the ?lost? Israelites. There was no ?immense multitude?, as Josephus and Ezra call them, of ?Jews? beyond the Euphrates in the time of either Josephus (say, 70 A.D.), or Ezra (say, 450 B.C.), or the contemporary historians who described those entire regions surely would have noted them (Herodotus about 450 B.C., Diodorus about 50 B.C., Strabo before 25 A.D.). But there was indeed an immense multitude of Scythians in those regions, under the many names that we see the various Scythian tribes had adopted, such as Parthians, Iberians, Massagetae, etc. And these were strong enough not only to withstand the subjugations attempted by the Persians, but that a portion of them came to subjugate Persia, and to keep Rome from bringing its empire north of the Danube or east of the Euphrates.
              Josephus? concern that the Parthians receive an account of the events which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, since they and the other ?Upper Barbarians? were of his nation (in the ethnic, and not in the geographical sense), should certainly seal our assurance of the certainty of these testimonies. The Scythians, who eventually migrated westward as the Saxons and other Germanic tribes, surely were the children of Israel.
              While other so-called ?Indo-European?, ?Caucasian? or ?Aryan? tribes were in Europe long before the Kelts and Scythians, it is clear that these also may be traced to Mesopotamia, having come at various times through Palestine, Anatolia, or even Egypt at a much earlier time, and settling the coasts of Europe from Greece all the way around to the British isles and Denmark, and also the Danube, Tiber, Po, Rhone, Seine and other river valleys. The tribes of Japheth and the Lydian Shemites were in western Anatolia and southern Europe for nearly two thousand years before the Israelite exodus, a period which we have virtually no historical and scant archaeological evidence to tell us about. Our historical accounts begin to develop only after the Israelite exodus from Egypt and their settlement of Palestine, Phoenicia, Troy and Greece, and apparently the Greek records weren?t recorded in writing until some time after that, in the 8th century B.C., about the same time that the Assyrians began deporting the Israelites from the Levant!
              Yet all of the ancient records concerning our origin (?our? meaning the White Europeans of today) are ignored or scoffed at by modern anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. There is a book which I have read, but which I can?t recommend, which reflects quite well the debate concerning Indo-European origins among today?s academics: In Search of the Indo-Europeans by one J. P. Mallory, published in the late 1980?s. In it Mallory discusses the many prominent modern theories concerning Indo-European origins and the possible locations of some supposed common, prehistoric Indo-European homeland. Yet none of the theories presented are anywhere near the truth, because none of the theorists even consider Mesopotamia, never mind the ancient land of Israel! Mallory even spends a few pages dismissing any link to the Hebrews, and using the Indo-European and Hebrew words for the numbers one through ten in comparison to somehow prove his point, seven being the only one remotely similar. Yet I can find Hebrew cognates for at least 600 basic English words, and also many in Greek and Latin! But that is well beyond our purpose here.
              No academic today could possibly approach the truth without risking his or her career, and who among them would have such nerve or such gumption to challenge the false accounts of history being presented to us by the jews? In earlier times, we were called ?Caucasians? because anthropologists knew of our sojourn through the Caucasus mountains. Today our historical accounts are denied, and our academics spend their resources in pursuit of something which does not exist, only to avoid one burning question: If we Germanic, Keltic, Scandinavian and related Whites are the Biblical Israelites, then who are these people calling themselves ?Jews? today?
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              • #8
                Classical Records and German Origins, Part One

                Classical Records and German Origins, Part One
                By: William Finck ? 2007
                The nations of the Near East often made their monumental inscriptions and other records in multiple languages. This is to our benefit today since such a practice has greatly assisted our understanding of the various ancient languages of the region. With the rise of Classical Greece came Greek historical and geographical inquiry which, as is apparent from their own records, began in the late 7th century B.C. The Greek writers were first acquainted with their neighbors to the east in the form of the Assyrian empire, which had fallen by 612 B.C., and then even more so with the Persian empire, whose power was consolidated under Cyrus II by 540 B.C. While there were earlier Greek historians and writers of epics historical in nature, along with the many other poets whose works have survived, the first serious prose historian whose work has survived to us is Herodotus, who wrote about 100 years after the death of Cyrus. It may be evident, therefore, that the earliest written Greek accounts concerning the east were influenced by the Assyrians, and later by the Persians and Medes.
                A people whom the Greeks called Kimmerians invaded Anatolia from the east (see, for example, the article ?King Midas: From Myth to Reality? by G. Kenneth Sams, Archaeology Odyssey, Nov. - Dec. 2001), in or just before the time of Homer, as attested to by Strabo, who relates that ?The writers of chronicles make it plain that Homer knew the Cimmerians, in that they fix the date of the invasion of the Cimmerians either a short time before Homer, or else in Homer?s own time? (Geography 1.2.9). Dating Homer, there is found a note in the Loeb Classical Library edition Greek Iambic Poetry, p. 35, at Archilochus, 5, where it is related that, as also discussed by Tatian in his Address to the Greeks, 31, Homer was a contemporary of Archilochus, the Iambic Poet who flourished in the 23rd Olympiad (688-685 B.C.) ?... at the time of Gyges the Lydian, 500 years after the Trojan War.? Strabo relates that, having destroyed the nation of the Phrygians of which the famous Midas was king, the Kimmerians ?overran the whole country from the Bosporus to Ionia? and ?marched as far as Lydia and Ionia and captured Sardes? (Geography 1.1.10; 1.3.21). After withdrawing from Anatolia (where surely they had begun the fulfillment of the prophecy found at Isaiah 66:19, since the Ionians are the Javan and the Lydians the Shemitic Lud of the Old Testament), the Kimmerians are found inhabiting the regions north and west of the Black Sea, north of Thrace. The ?Cimmerian Bosporus?, the modern Crimea, retains its name from them (see Strabo, 11.2.5). Homer, knowing of these people, later included a mention of them in his Odyssey, yet the events which that epic is based upon are from a much earlier period (the Trojan War ended around 1185 B.C.), and placing the Kimmerians in that era, as the Tragic poets also do, is anachronistic, and an error on Homer?s part which later writers followed.
                Subsequent waves of nomadic tribes from Asia became familiar to the Greeks, and these were generally called by the name Scythians. Herodotus tells us that Sakae is the name which the Persians ?give to all Scythians?, yet later the Greeks retain the name Sakae, also often written Sakans by English translators, for only some of the Scythians, and distinguish others by names such as Massagetae, Arimaspi, D?ae, Asii, Tocharians, Sacarauli, et al. (cf. Herodotus, The Histories, 4:11, 48; 7:64; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 2.43.1-5; Strabo, Geography, 7.3.9 and 11.8.2). While Herodotus and later writers distinguished Kimmerians and Scythians (but Homer never mentioned either Scythians or Sakae), note that they all wrote long after the Greeks became acquainted with the Kimmerians, and after the Persians came to power in the east, the Assyrians and their Akkadian language having faded into obscurity.
                Yet the Persians themselves did not distinguish the Kimmerians from the Scythians, for in the multi-lingual inscriptions which they left to posterity, it is evident that these peoples were one and the same. For instance, in an Akkadian inscription of the Persian king Xerxes, there are mentioned ?the Amyrgian Cimmerians? and ?the Cimmerians (wearing) pointed caps?. A note accompanying the translation of this inscription which appears in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, edited by James B. Pritchard, Princeton University Press [hereinafter ANET], p. 316, tells us that in the Persian and Elamite versions of this same text these ?Cimmerians? are called ?Sakans?. The Akkadian language was the lingua franca of the Near East during the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian empires (ANET, pp. 103, 198), before it was supplanted by Aramaic in the time of the Persian empire. Surely the Greeks of Homer?s time must have been familiar with it. The obvious conclusion here is that Kimmerian is from the Akkadian word for those people whom the Persians called Sakae, and whom the Greeks called Scythians, and that all of these names identify the same group of people, although they had divided into various sub-tribes. The first of these people to come into Europe, in Assyrian times, the Greeks called by the Akkadian name. Later, in Persian times, the Greeks called subsequent waves of these people (or perhaps even descendants of those first tribes) ? as well as those who remained in Asia ? by the Persian name Sakae, or by the name Scythian. The Greeks may have learned the name Scythian from the people themselves, since one possible etymology for the word, from the Hebrew word succoth or tent, is quite plausible and well describes the Scythian mode of life, while also being consistent with classical accounts of Scythian origins. This would also explain how the word Scythian appears in a fragment which is attributed to Hesiod, who was regarded by later Greeks to have been a contemporary of Homer. Yet whether the work in question was Hesiod?s, and the dating of Hesiod himself, are both problematical.
                Again, noting the names on this particular Akkadian inscription of the Persians, ?the Amyrgian Cimmerians? and ?the Cimmerians (wearing) pointed caps?, to this we must compare the language used by Herodotus, who discussing certain of the nations allied with Persia in Xerxes? invasion of Greece, wrote of the ?Amyrgian Scythians? and said that ?The Sacae, or Scyths, were clad in trousers, and had on their heads tall stiff caps rising to a point? (The Histories, 7.64). In a footnote at this passage in his edition of Herodotus, George Rawlinson noted that: ?According to Hellanicus, the word ?Amyrgian? was strictly a geographical title, Amyrgium being the name of the plain in which these Scythians dwelt.? Indeed the Cimmerians were but an early migration of the Scythians, or Sakae, into Europe.
                While Homer never mentioned Scythians, Strabo offers a protracted argument that he knew about them, since he used the epithets ?Hippemolgi? (mare-milkers), ?Galactophagi? (milk-fed) and ?Abii? (those without a living or having a simple lifestyle), for which see his Geography 7.3.2, 6, 7 and 9. In places he cites the use of these epithets for Scythians by both Aeschylus and Hesiod (in an otherwise lost fragment) to make his point. Yet Strabo also admits that Homer may have been referencing Thracians, who were said by others to have also led a lifestyle which beckoned such epithets (cf. Geography 7.3.2, 3, 4), where he cites Poseidonius. While Strabo wavers in this matter, and seems to want to believe that Homer indeed knew of the Scythians, he also seems to concede that in the environment of the more rugged north such a lifestyle, where men live off of their flocks rather than from agriculture, is quite natural (Geography 7.3.8, 9; 7.4.6). Yet while Homer may surely have meant other northern tribes by his use of such epithets, such as the Thracians or other Slavs, and later poets simply transferred the epithets to the Scythians, the argument is rather irrelevant. Once it is realized that the Kimmerians were simply Scythians by their Akkadian name, something that later Greeks did not explain and probably did not realize, it is sure that Homer did know the Scythians: that first wave of Kimmerians from Asia who destroyed Phrygia, threatened all of Lydia and Ionia, and then crossed into Europe to inhabit the lands north of Thrace. Seeing then that the Kimmerians and Sakae, or Scythians, are one and the same in eastern inscriptions, and that the Greeks employed at the first the Akkadian name for these people, and only later the Persian name (names well documented in eastern inscriptions before these people were known in the west), the fact that the Scythians originated in Asia, as Diodorus Siculus relates (Library of History, 2.43.1-5), is certainly validated.
                Writing of a period some time before his own, Herodotus says that the Kimmerians were dispossessed of their Eastern European lands by the Scythians, and relates a tale wherein the Kimmerians had fled into Asia (meaning Anatolia, or Asia Minor, where Phrygia, Lydia and Ionia were located) to escape them, at which point the Scythians, in pursuit, missed them and poured into Media (The Histories, 4:12). Herodotus takes this story from the earlier poet Aristeas, and like his forebear, is evidently seeking to account for the appearance of these peoples in the Greek world, Anatolia and the Near East. Strabo tells us that ?Aristeas was a Proconnesian ? the author of the Arimaspian Epic, as it is called ? a charlatan if there ever was one? (Geography, 13.1.16), and does us a service since the account given by Herodotus is impossible. Diodorus Siculus gives us a much more credible account of Scythian origins. He relates their humble beginnings along the Araxes river in northern Media, explaining the origins of the various Scythian tribes from this common source, and their spread northward and to both the east as far as India and the west as far as the region of Europe north of Greece and Thrace (Library of History, 2.43.1-5). These migrations can be corroborated in many other sources, both historical and archaeological. Diodorus? account is fully cohesive with accounts from the east, such as the ancient Assyrian tablets uncovered by archaeologists in the 19th century, and the testimony of Flavius Josephus in his Wars and Antiquities (for which see my earlier essay related to this subject, Classical Records of the Origins of the Scythians, Parthians & Related Tribes). Contrary to the tale of Herodotus? cited above, from other sources (notably Strabo, Geography 1.3.21) we learn that Scythians, led by a certain king Madys, had driven the Kimmerians (none of the Greek writers realized that the Kimmerians were Scythians) out of Anatolia some time after Phrygia had been destroyed. The presence of a town named Sagalassus in northern Pisidia may well be evidence of Scythians in the region. The ?saga?, or ?saka?, sound occurs frequently in names associated with Scythians, such as Arsaces, Massagetae, Sacarauli, Sacasene, et al. Strabo, in his Geography mentions both Sagalassus and its people, the Sagalasseis, several times. Rather than the Scythians chasing the Kimmerians into Anatolia from the north, as Herodotus alleged, it is much more evident, and may be said with certainty, that Scythians ? among them the Kimmerians ? had migrated through Anatolia from the east.
                Writing of his own time, Herodotus mentions Celtica, yet seeming not to know it by the exact location (i.e., from the Pyrenees to the Rhine) which later writers describe, he is somewhat inaccurate. Herodotus states: ?This latter river [the Ister, or Danube] has its source in the country of the Celts near the city Pyr?n?, and runs through the middle of Europe, dividing it into two portions. The Celts live beyond the pillars of Heracles, and border on the Cynesians, who dwell at the extreme west of Europe. Thus the Ister flows through the whole of Europe before it finally empties itself into the Euxine [Black Sea] at Istria, one of the colonies of the Milesians? (The Histories, 2:33). Of course, the Danube runs through most of Europe, but doesn?t have its sources nearly as far west as Iberia. Also by ?the city Pyr?n?? the Pyrenees mountains may instead have been meant, something being misconstrued in communication. Yet from this we see that Herodotus knew of Kelts dwelling in the west, near the sources of the Danube (which would actually be just north of modern Switzerland) and in Iberia. Later in his history (4:49) Herodotus calls the Cynesians ?Cyn?tes? instead, and Rawlinson notes that nothing else is known of these people.
                The Germanic tribes dwelling north of the Danube were originally called by the later Greek writers by the name Galatae. Strabo, who lived circa 63 B.C. to 25 A.D., says that ?... the Germans, who, though they vary slightly from the Celtic stock in that they are wilder, taller, and have yellower hair, are in all other respects similar, for build, habits, and modes of life they are such as I have said the Celti are. And I also think that it was for this reason that the Romans assigned to them the name ?Germani,? as though they wished to indicate thereby that they were ?genuine? Galatae, for in the language of the Romans ?germani? means ?genuine?? (Geography 7.1.2). The Loeb Classical Library edition of Strabo, translated by H.L. Jones, offers the following footnote at this passage: ?So also Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Pliny and the ancient writers in general regarded the Germans as Celts (Gauls). Dr. Richard Braungart has recently published a large work in two volumes in which he ably defends his thesis that the Boii, Vindelici, Rhaeti, Norici, Taurisci, and other tribes, as shown by their agricultural implements and contrivances, were originally, not Celts, but Germans, and in all probability, the ancestors of all Germans (Sudgermanen, Heidelberg, 1914).? And while I certainly have disagreements with Braungart, the fact that Germans were to the Greeks Galatae (Latin: Gauls) is clear. Diodorus Siculus describes the Galatae who dwell beyond (east of) the Rhine as tall and blond with very white skin, and says that they drank beer made from barley and the water in which they washed their honeycombs, which seems to describe an ancient form of mead (Library of History 5.26.2; 5.28.1). These Galatae used chariots, and wore what seems to be a type of tartan (5.29.1; 5.30.1).
                Yet the name Kelt seems not to have originally belonged to the Galatae. Describing the inhabitants of what is now southern France, in the region of modern Narbonne, Strabo says of these people that ?... the men of former times named [them] ?Celtae?; and it was from the Celtae, I think, that the Galatae as a whole were by the Greeks called ?Celti? ? on account of the fame of the Celtae, or it may also be that the Massiliotes, as well as other Greek neighbors, contributed to this result, on account of their proximity? (Geography 4.1.14). With this the earlier Diodorus Siculus, whose writing brings us to about 36 B.C. (since he describes the transition of Tauromenium in Sicily to a Roman colony) agrees, stating: ?And now it will be useful to draw a distinction which is unknown to many: The peoples who dwell in the interior above Massalia, those on the slopes of the Alps, and those on this side the Pyrenees mountains are called Celts, whereas the peoples who are established above this land of Celtica in the parts which stretch to the north, both along the ocean and along the Hercynian Mountain, and all the peoples who come after these, as far as Scythia, are known as Gauls [Greek: Galatae]; the Romans, however, include all these nations together under a single name, calling them one and all Gauls [Greek: Galatae]? (Library of History, 5.32.1). So it is evident that Kelts and Galatae were at one time distinct. Herodotus knew of the Kelts, but did not use the term Galatae, yet at an early time the terms became synonymous to the Greeks and Romans. Polybius, who wrote up to about 146 B.C., over a hundred years before Diodorus Siculus, was already using the terms Kelts and Galatae synonymously, even in the same paragraph (i.e. The Histories, 2.17.3-5; 2.33.1-5). Throughout his own writings even Diodorus uses the two terms interchangeably, and also often in the same paragraphs (i.e. 14.113-117), while on other occasions he distinguishes between them (i.e. 25.13.1). Diodorus never used the term German, but called the tribes that dwelt east of the Rhine ? some of which he mentioned by their individual names ? Galatae also, where he tells of Julius Caesar?s conquests there (Library of History, 5.25.4).
                Massalia (or often Massilia, the modern Marseilles) was an early Ionian (Phocian, Ionians from Phocis) Greek settlement in Keltica and in proximity to the Kelts. Massalia is mentioned by Herodotus (i.e. The Histories, 5:9) and was founded circa 600 B.C. It is most likely that Herodotus learned about the Kelts only from these Phocian Greeks, who had founded Massalia and other western colonies with much resistance from the rival Phoenicians and Etruscans (c.f. The Encyclopedia of World History, 6th ed. Houghton - Mifflin Co., 2001, pp. 60-62). While I cannot presently determine with confidence whether Kelts were already inhabiting the southern parts of France when the Phocians founded their colonies ? and it appears that they may not have been ? they certainly were there by Herodotus? time (circa 440 B.C.), and so the Greeks and Romans surely must have been familiar with the Kelts around Marseilles well before the Galatae invaded Italy. Yet where the Galatae first appeared in northern Italy late in the 5th century B.C., Livy, the Roman historian, in his account calls them a ?strange race, new settlers? (History of Rome, 5.17.6-10). A short time later, after conquering the Etruscans, these Galatae nearly destroyed Rome, circa 390 B.C. Yet, as Strabo attests that the Romans do, the Kelts about Massilia, like those who invaded Rome, are called ?Gauls? by Livy as he relates the much earlier founding of that city (5.34.8). If the Romans were familiar with the Kelts around Massalia when that city was founded, and the Galatae were Kelts, how could Livy consider the Galatae who appeared in northern Italy 200 years later a ?strange race?? And while Herodotus mentioned the Kelts, Kimmerians and Scythians of Europe, he never used the term Galatae, and may well have been ignorant of it. According to the 9th edition of the Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon, the term Galatae does not appear until the 4th century B.C., where it is found in a fragment attributed to Aristotle. So with all of this, we see some confusion in the application of the names Kelt and Gaul, or Galatae, from the earliest times.
                There is one possible solution to the paradox concerning the application of these names as described by the early historians, which I shall take liberty to propose here. The Phoenicians were of the same origins as the German tribes, for which see my earlier essays Classical And Biblical Records Identifying the Phoenicians; Herodotus, Scythians, Persians & Prophecy; and Classical Records Of The Origins Of The Scythians, Parthians & Related Tribes, along with subsequent portions of this current essay which shall endeavor to establish that German origins are found with the Kimmerians and Scythians. The Phoenicians, as described by the Greek tragic poets and others, such as the Roman Virgil, were fair and blond, and they settled the coasts and river valleys of Western Europe for several centuries before the arrival of the Greeks in that region. So it is plausible that with these people lies the origin of the original Celtae, and that these are people often identified as ?proto-Celts? by modern archaeologists, at least on many of the occasions where ?proto-Celts? are identified, and that once becoming known to the Greeks and Romans, the other tribes appearing to the north were also called by the same name, having been imagined to be related, as in truth they actually were. A Phoenician presence on the coasts as well as the interiors of Iberia and Britain, where they mined metals such as tin and silver, can be established as having existed long before the Greeks and Romans began writing of Celti, Galatae, and Gauls. Perhaps coincidentally, the smaller island northwest of Malta, south of Sicily, which was colonized by the Phoenicians, Diodorus Siculus calls Gaulos (the modern Gozo) in his Library of History at 5.12.4. While this hypothesis may be conjectural, it does agree with the testimonies of Strabo regarding the names Celtae and Celti, and of Diodorus regarding Celts and Galatae, cited above. What all of this has to do with the Kimmerians and the Scythians shall hopefully become evident in the parts of this essay which follow.
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                • #9
                  Classical Records and German Origins, Part Two

                  Classical Records and German Origins, Part Two
                  By: William Finck ? 2007
                  In preparation for writing his histories, Herodotus had traveled widely, actually visiting many of the places which he wrote about. One of the places that he visited was Istria, a Milesian colony on the Danube river which bordered upon the Scythians (cf. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 19.73.2), where he undoubtedly gained much of his knowledge of the Scythians and of the Ister (which is the Danube) and the region through which the river runs. Describing the Danube, Herodotus calls it ?one of the great Scythian rivers?, considering the land north of the Danube to be Scythia, and mentions that there are five notable ?Scythian? rivers which empty into the Danube from the north (The Histories, 4.48,51). The historian spoke of the land north of the Danube, later known to the Romans as Germany, thusly: ?As regards the region lying north of this country [Thrace] no one can say with any certainty what men inhabit it. It appears that you no sooner cross the Ister than you enter on an interminable wilderness. [Rawlinson notes here: ?Hungary and Austria?, later political divisions of the land the Greeks came to know as Galatia, the Romans Germany.] The only people of whom I can hear as dwelling beyond the Ister are the race named Sigynnae, who wear, they say, a dress like the Medes, and have horses which are covered entirely with a coat of shaggy hair, five fingers in length. They [the horses] are a small breed, flat-nosed, and not strong enough to bear men on their backs; but when yoked to chariots, they are among the swiftest known, which is the reason why the people of that country use chariots. Their borders reach down almost to the Eneti upon the Adriatic Sea [i.e. including perhaps the modern Carinthia in western Austria], and they call themselves colonists of the Medes; but how they can be colonists of the Medes I for my part cannot imagine. Still nothing is impossible in the long lapse of ages. Sigynnae is the name which the Ligurians who dwell above Massilia give to traders, while among the Cyprians the word means spears. According to the account which the Thracians give, the country beyond the Ister is possessed by bees, on account of which it is impossible to penetrate farther. But in this they seem to me to say what has no likelihood: for it is certain that those creatures are very impatient of cold. I rather believe that it is on account of the cold that the regions which lie under the Bear [the northern regions, ?the Bear? referring to the constellation] are without inhabitants. Such then are the accounts given of this country, the sea-coast [of the Black sea] whereof Megabazus was now employed in subjecting to the Persians? (The Histories, 5:9-10). So it is apparent that central Europe, a few centuries later populated by so many Germans that Rome could not subdue it, was quite sparsely inhabited in the time of Herodotus, and those few who did dwell there are said to have come from Media. It has been made evident here already (in Part One of this essay) that both Kimmerians and Scythians, being one and the same people, originated in and around northern Media. Herodotus? account of the small horses found north of the Danube is corroborated by archaeology. For instance, the horses of the Urnfield Culture (see, for example, the Internet site Wikipedia and the article ?Urnfield Culture?) are found to be a mere 1.25 meters tall at the shoulders, on average.
                  In The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, in volume 3 of the Micropaedia, there is an article entitled ?Cimmerian? which follows many of the mistakes which Herodotus and others also followed concerning the origin of the Kimmerians, and insisting that they should be distinguished from the Scythians the article states that ?Ancient writers sometimes confused them with the Scythians?, yet it has been shown here that the Kimmerians were indeed Scythians, by their Akkadian (Assyrian) name. The article ends by stating of certain archaeological remains that ?... perhaps ... the western branch of the Cimmerians, who, under fresh Scythian pressure, eventually invaded the Hungarian plain and survived there until about 500 B.C.? While it is true that, as the article also relates, the Kimmerians are no longer mentioned in contemporary historical accounts after they departed from Anatolia, this is more likely due to confusion over names rather than to their disappearance. The period from 600-500 B.C. is the era generally proposed by archaeologists for the spread of the so-called Keltic La Tene culture throughout Western Europe. 500 B.C. is also only about 100 years before the spread of the Galatae into the Ligurian and Etruscan lands of the Alps and northern Italy.
                  Some time after Herodotus, but by the time of Aristotle about a century later, as attested to by the lexicographers in the 9th edition of the Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon, the word Galatae began to be used. It shall be fully illustrated as this essay progresses, that before the time of the historian Polybius the word Galatae began to be used of those tribes which appeared north of the Alps in the west, and north of Greece and Thrace in the east, in lands which Herodotus had earlier called Scythia. Scythia, along with Scythian were thereafter used only of the Scythian tribes of Asia, in the lands north of the Caucasus and east of the Tana?s river. Yet the origin of the word Galatae has not, so far as I have seen, been sufficiently explained by the ancient Greeks (Diodorus Siculus only repeats a myth concerning Heracles and a supposed son named Galates, from whom they were fabled to have sprung), and it may be conjectured that the Scythians of the north, having previously been called by the Greeks ?Galactophagi? (milk-fed) and ?Hippemolg?? (mare-milkers), may have eventually been called Galatae from gala, the Greek word for milk. The Latin word rendered Gaul in English is actually Galli, and may have come to them from the Greek, yet perhaps coincidentally, gaulus is Latin for bucket.
                  After informing us of the distinction between Kelts and Galatae (quoted in Part One of this essay), Diodorus Siculus tells of the Galatae that ?... some men say that it was they who in ancient times overran all Asia and were called Cimmerians, time having slightly corrupted the word into the name of Cimbrians, as they are now called ...? and goes on to relate how tribes of these Galatae once captured Rome, as Livy and others also relate had happened (about 390 B.C.), and how they later plundered the temple of Delphi in Greece (in 279 B.C.). Afterwards, certain tribes of them invading Anatolia were defeated by Attalus I of Pergamos, and negotiated to settle the land which became known as Galatia in Anatolia. These Galatians ?became mixed with the Greeks? and so were called ?Greco-Gauls?, and it is these Galatians for whom Paul wrote his epistle. Diodorus then adds of the Galatae: ?... and who, as their last accomplishment, have destroyed many large Roman armies?, referring to the Roman wars with the Cimbri (Library of History, 5.32.4-5). In the Loeb Classical Library edition of Diodorus, translated by C. H. Oldfather, a footnote at this passage reads: ?Much has been written to show that the Germanic tribe of the Cimbrians who threatened Italy shortly before 100 B.C. were belated Cimmerians who first entered Asia Minor in the seventh century B.C.? The Cimbri, after several astounding victories, were defeated by the Romans about 101 B.C. Strabo also tells us that they were the Kimmerians, and later calls them Germans, who with another kindred tribe, the Sugambri, were ?best known? of the Germanic tribes (Geography, 7.2.2, 4). As the Germanic (Galatae, Kimmerian, or Scythian) tribes grew and divided, and the Greeks and Romans became more intimately knowledgeable of them, they were referred to less generally, by more specific tribal names. For instance, Strabo later enumerates the tribes of ?those Galatae who settled in Phrygia? (Geography, 12.1.1) as ?... the Trocmi and the Tolistobogii, [which] are named after their leaders, whereas the third, the Tectosages, is named after the tribe in Celtica.? The Tectosages (Tektosagas in Greek, and notice the presence of the -saga syllable present in so many names related to Scythian tribes, as mentioned in Part One of this essay) had also occupied a district near the Pyrenees mountains, and are said to be a division of the Volcae (Geography, 4.1.12-13; 12.5.1). Of the Trocmi, Strabo says that this tribe, settled near Pontus and Cappadocia, was ?the most powerful of the parts occupied by the Galatians? (12.5.2).
                  Herodotus was somewhat correct in stating that the Kimmerians were pushed out of their eastern European lands by the Scythians. As he himself later explains, in his own time the inhabitants of the land north and west of the Black Sea and north of Thrace were Scythians, and he called the lands north of the Danube Scythia (The Histories, 4:48, 97). Yet this is not when the Kimmerians had destroyed Phrygia. They had already done that around 700 B.C. while they were enroute to Europe (as explained in Part One of this essay). Rather, this tradition helps to document the beginnings of a new westward push by the ?Caucasian? or ?Indo-European? tribes of Asia into Europe, of which those Scythians ? first called Kimmerians, but later Galatae and Kelts by the Greeks ? were the vanguard, and which would continue through the 5th century A.D. Of course, other ?Indo-European? tribes, such as the Greeks and Romans, had long occupied southern Europe, and (as shall be discussed later) certain of the Slavic branch of the race had already occupied portions of central and northern Europe, as did colonists from the Greeks. Upon passing into Europe, the Kimmerians would not only settle the Crimea and the region north of Thrace, but would follow the Danube river into Celtica and the Alps, leaving many settlements behind along the way. Spreading along the Alps from the Adriatic to Massalia (now Marseilles) the Kimmerians then branched out into what are now Italy, France, and Iberia, diffusing the so-called La Tene culture of the archaeological record, becoming known to the Greeks of the west as Galatae, and to the Romans as Gauls. Strabo tells us that all of the Cisalpine Kelts (those on the Roman side of the Alps) had migrated from Transalpine land (Geography 4.4.1). As we have already seen, the Greeks attest that the Galatae were indeed the Kimmerians.
                  It should not be a wonder that the Kimmerians could destroy Phrygia, cross into Thrace, and be found in what today is France a mere 100 years later, or before 500 B.C. The entire course of the Danube is not quite 1800 miles, and from the sources of that river to the Pyrenees there are about 500 miles more. The lands west of the Rhine and south of the Alps are much more inviting to settlement than those to the north and east, and even up to the time of Julius Caesar the Germanic tribes were forcing their way into them. For instance, in The Gallic War Caesar complains that ?In a few years all the natives [those who were already settled in Gaul, west of the Rhine] will have been driven forth from the borders of Gaul, and all the Germans will have crossed the Rhine; for there can be no comparison between the Gallic and German territory ...? (1:31), bearing in mind that the distinction between Gaul and German here is a late Roman one. Strabo said of the Germans and Galatae (which he distinguishes although he tells us that the Germans are Galatae, at Geography, 7.1.2), ?that they migrate with ease ... they do not till the soil or even store up food, but live in small huts that are merely temporary structures; and they live for the most part off their flocks, as the Nomads do, so that, in imitation of the Nomads, they load their household belongings on their wagons and with their beasts turn whithersoever they think best?, then he proceeds to explain that other German tribes to the north are even more indigent, among them the Cherusci, Chatti, Cimbri, and others (Geography 7.1.3). This description of the Germanic tribes is much like that of Herodotus? where he describes their Scythian forebears (The Histories, 1:216; 4:46). The distance from Boston to San Francisco by modern highway is very nearly 3000 miles, much farther than the distance from the Black Sea to the Pyrenees, and only 43 years after the west was opened to Anglo-America with the Louisiana Purchase there were already enough Americans settled in California that they could begin to wrest control of that territory from Mexico in the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846. All the lands of the American interior were also well-settled in a short time. The American pioneers of the west had at least as much resistance from the hostile Indian tribes, and no great technological advantage (with the exception of the black-powder rifle) over their Kimmerian ancestors in the settlement of northern and western Europe.
                  Moving through the Danube valley, the Kimmerians, or Galatae, had left many settlements along the way, where they encountered other White tribes who had long inhabited those regions. Foremost among these were the Thracians, the Illyrians, the Milesians (who had many colonies on the Danube and on the shores of the Black Sea), other Greeks; and then in the Alps the Etruscans, Ligurians, and other tribes, such as the Rhaetians, whom Livy attests were descended from the Etruscans (History of Rome, 5.33.7-11). The Phrygians in Anatolia were themselves a colony of the Thracians (Strabo Geography, 7.3.2; 7.25; 10.3.16), who are of the Slavic, or Japhethite, branch of the White Adamic race (Tiras, or Thiyrac in Strong?s Hebrew dictionary; Genesis 10: 2). The Illyrians were apparently of the stock of the Trojans, and Strabo tells us that in his time there was still a tribe of the Illyrians called Dardans (Geography, 7.5.6-7), the name by which Homer called the Trojans. The Milesians were descended from the Carian-Phoenician founders of Miletus in Anatolia (i.e. Strabo, Geography, 12.8.5), although they were Hellenized and the city considered a part of Ionia. Thales of Miletus, the city?s most famous inhabitant and one of the earliest of the famous Greek philosophers, was said by Herodotus to be ?of Phoenician descent? (The Histories, 1:170). Milesians were also, along with the Danaans, among the earliest inhabitants of Ireland. The Etruscans were professed to be of the stock of the Lydians of Anatolia, and so they were Shemites (cf. Herodotus, The Histories, 1:94; Strabo, Geography 5.2.2; Genesis 10:22; Isaiah 66:19). These tribes are responsible for the earlier Tumulus, Urnfield, Hallstatt, Piliny, Lusatian, and other Bronze and early Iron Age cultures of central Europe, as identified by archaeologists. The Vistula river cultures, among them the Trzciniec, which preceeded the Lusatian in that area, and also the Piliny culture of what is now Hungry and Slovakia, along with others of the region, have been shown by archaeologists to be related to the Tumulus culture. The Phrygians of Anatolia left behind numerous such Tumulus burials.
                  And so along the lower Danube river there are found many tribes of the Galatae. Strabo mentions ?both the Illyrian and Thracian tribes, and all the tribes of the Celtic or other peoples that are mingled with these, as far as Greece, [which] are to the south of the Ister? (Geography, 7.1.1). Among them are the ?Scordisci Galatae? of the Balkans, intermingled with the Illyrian and Thracian tribes (Geography, 7.2.2; 7.5.2; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 34/35.30A); the Teuristae; the Taurisci and Norici (Geography, 4.6.9, 12; 7.2.2); the Trerans or Treres who are in turn identified as Kimmerian and Thracian (Geography, 1.3.21; 13.1.8; 14.1. 40), where Strabo cites Callinus, an Elegaic Poet of the mid-7th century B.C., who said the Treres were Kimmerians (cf. Greek Elegaic Poetry, Loeb Classical Library, p. 15, Callinus, I); the Iapodes who are said to be a mixture of Kelts and Illyrians (Geography, 7.5.2); and the Boii, whom Strabo also says were mingled with Thracians (7.3.2). The Kimmerians being Scythians, and as Josephus, the Biblical, and the ancient Assyrian records demonstrate, therefore being descended from those many thousands of Israelites who were deported and resettled by the Assyrian empire, here is surely evidence of the fulfillment of prophecies such as those found at Genesis 9:27 and Isaiah 66:19, along with many others concerning the Old Testament Israelites. This also fully concurs with Strabo?s assessment, quoted in Part One of this essay, that those Galatae north of the Danube and east of the Rhine were called Germani because they were the genuine Galatae (Geography, 7.1.2), as those who advanced south of the Danube and west of the Rhine had mingled with earlier settlers of those regions. It is these Thracian, Illyrian, and Milesian tribes (and especially the latter two, since they had descended from Israelite tribes who had at a very early time migrated from Palestine by sea, and were therefore closely related to the Kimmerian Scythians), who along with those Phoenicians and Danaans who had at a much earlier time colonized the coasts of northern and western Europe by sea, who are all often identified as ?proto-Kelts? by archaeologists and anthropologists, and who together with the Kimmerian Scythian Galatae, and even later Scythian Sakans (Saxons), who migrated from Asia into Europe, eventually formed the White nations of Europe as we know them today. Substantiation for the above assertions concerning the Trojan Illyrians, Milesians, Phoenicians, Danaans, Scythians et al., may be found in my earlier essays on these subjects: Classical Records Of Trojan-Roman-Judah; Classical And Biblical Records Identifying The Phoenicians; Classical Records Of the Danaan & Dorian Israelite Greeks; and Classical Records Of The Scythians, Parthians & Related Tribes.
                  Long after the initial dispersion of the Kimmerians, Galatae are found raiding the countries to the south, from their homes in Germanic lands north of the Danube, well into the second century B.C. From 279-276 B.C. they destroyed a Macedonian army, raided Macedonia and sacked Delphi (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 22.3, 4, 9). From just before this time until about 210 B.C. the Galatae ruled all of Thrace. It was also during this time that tribes of the Galatae crossed back into Anatolia, and after suffering a defeat at the hands of the king of Pergamos, settled the land which became known as Galatia, already discussed above. Yet by 168 B.C., Galatae from north of the Danube were being hired by the Macedonians as mercenaries in their wars against the Romans (Library of History, 30.19; 31.12-14). The Cimbri, in their later wars against the Romans, fought with them at both Noreia (the modern Neumarkt in the duchy of Styria in Austria), and at Arausio (the modern Orange) in Gaul (cf. Strabo, Geography, 5.1.8; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 34/35.37.1; 36.1; and 37.1.5 where the Cimbri, ?giantlike in appearance and unexcelled in feats of strength? were said to number 400,000 at one battle, although Plutarch?s account says 300,000. The footnotes to these passages in the Loeb Classical Library editions are cited here). The eventual establishment of Roman frontiers along the Rhine and the Danube checked the encroachment of the Germanic tribes upon the more fruitful lands of the south and west for several centuries. The appearance of so many Galatae in lands said to be German, without any recorded conflict among the peoples there ? except where later incited by Rome ? would certainly be odd, unless the Galatae were indeed German (Strabo, Geography, 7.1.2) and they were all kinsmen (4.4.2), which they certainly were.
                  Throughout The Germania the Roman historian Tacitus attempts to distinguish Germans from Gauls based upon language and lifestyle, yet these differences may easily be accounted for by other reasons. In the rugged north, unfriendly to agriculture, tribes would by necessity adopt a lifestyle quite different than that of the tribes which inhabit the more arable, more temperate areas in the west and south of Europe. As for language, centuries of separation during a gradual sojourn from Asia, and the differing influences of various neighboring tribes through commerce, politics, intermingling, etc., or lack thereof, surely may account for the many dialects which developed amongst the Germanic peoples. This may also account for differences in religious beliefs found among these tribes, although their most basic beliefs seem to have at least been somewhat consistent. One does not have to investigate at length to see great evidence of these same things in modern times. Tacitus goes so far as to postulate that Gauls, who he purports are a race distinct from the Germans, had once migrated east into Germany (The Germania, 28). Yet this is contrary to the testimony of the earlier historians (i.e. Strabo, Diodorus Siculus), and also to the archaeological record. The Hallstatt culture, although errantly attributed by many exclusively to the Kelts, is certainly earlier and preponderates further east than the La Tene culture. Surely the testimonies of the earlier historians are correct, and the Galatae, the people formerly known as the Kimmerians of the east and later also called Kelts, spread all through Europe as far as modern Portugal, yet were later divided into Gauls and Germans by the Romans and their conquests. The next parts of this essay shall discuss later, post-Kimmerian, waves of the Scythians into Europe, going back again to the 6th century B.C.
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                  • #10
                    Classical Records and German Origins, Part Three

                    Classical Records and German Origins, Part Three
                    By: William Finck ? 2007
                    Before further discussing the Scythian migration into Europe it is fitting to discuss the tribe called the Getae. The accounts concerning this people are not entirely clear. Strabo says at one point: ?Now the Greeks used to suppose that the Getae were Thracians? (Geography, 7.3.2), and tells us that the Getae and the related Daci spoke the Thracian tongue (7.3. 10, 13), yet offers no other explanation of their origins. He again distinguishes them in an instance where he mentions ?the country of the Thracians and of those of their number who are Getae? (7.3.4), but also says: ?And see the statement of Menander about them, which, as one may reasonably suppose, was not invented by him but taken from history: ?All the Thracians, and most of all we Getae (for I too boast that I am of this stock) are not very continent?? (7.3.4). As expected from Strabo?s statements, Herodotus believed the Getae to be Thracians, calling them ?the noblest as well as the most just of all the Thracian tribes? (The Histories, 4.93).
                    Discussing the religion of the Getae, it certainly seems to have an Israelite origin, though Strabo repeats a tale (Geography, 7.3.5) similar to one recorded by Herodotus (The Histories, 4:94-96). Both writers gave accounts which claim that the Getae derived their religion from Pythagoras, who indeed seems to have studied and derived a good part of his own philosophy from the Hebrew scriptures. Nevertheless, such a tale may have been invented by some other writer, earlier than either Herodotus or Strabo, in order to account for similarities in the beliefs of the Getae with those of the famous Pythagoras. Herodotus states first that a certain Zalmoxis is the god of the Getae, but also gives another account, which he relates even though he rejects it, that Zalmoxis was merely a slave of Pythagoras from whom the Thracians acquired their religion, and this is close to the version of the story related by Strabo. The knowledge which this Zalmoxis (Zamolxis in Strabo) imparts to the Getae is said by Strabo to have come from Egypt. Also mentioned in these accounts are the beliefs of the Getae in the immortality of the soul, and their monotheism, along with other ideas which have parallels in the Israelite religion. In a discussion concerning lawgivers, Diodorus Siculus also mentions Zalmoxis, ?among the people known as the Getae who represent themselves to be immortal? (Library of History, 1.94.2), but says nothing else of him or of the religion of the Getae. Discussing the Galatae, however, he compares their beliefs in immortality and metempsychosis to the similar philosophy of Pythagoras (5.28.6), things also related of the Kelts by both Strabo (Geography, 4.4.4) and Julius Caesar (The Gallic War, 6:14).
                    Thucydides, the Athenian general and historian, writing circa 420 B.C. in The History of the Peloponnesian War, describing an earlier war between Thrace and the Macedonians, lists the nations levied for this war which were under the dominion of the Thracian King Sitalces, among them ?The Getes [Getae] and the people of those parts [north of Thrace, who] are borderers upon the Scythians and furnished as the Scythians are, all archers on horseback ... He [Sitalces] also drew forth many of those Scythians that inhabit the mountains and are free states ... and are called Dii, the greatest part of which are on the mountain Rhodope ...? (2:95-96). As for these Dii, Strabo, writing about 400 years later, says that the Daci of his time, who he labels a division of the Getae, ?were called Da? in early times?, but refused to connect them to the ?Scythians who are called ?Daae,? for they live far away in the neighborhood of Hyrcania? (Geography, 7.3.12). Yet Thucydides does identify the Dii, who were certainly Strabo?s Da?, as Scythians. Elsewhere, Strabo had no problem explaining the relations between remote groups of Galatae, such as those Tectosages of both Celtica and Anatolia.
                    So it seems that while the Getae may indeed have been a division of the Thracians, they may rather have been Scythians who fell under Thracian dominion at an early time, yet such cannot be stated with any certainty. Diodorus Siculus used the terms Thracians and Getae interchangeably, such as where he describes the defeat and capture, and subsequent release, of Lysimachus, the Macedonian King who invaded the land of the Getae about 292 B.C. (Library of History, 21.12.1-6). But Strabo, realizing that the origins of the Getae were not entirely clear, states that ?as for the Getae, then, their early history must be left untold? (Geography, 7.3.11). Yet neither did Strabo consider the Getae or Daci to be German, as he distinguishes these when discussing the struggle against the Romans (7.3.13). It must be conjectured here, that if the Getae were indeed Thracians, and not Scythians, the attainment of their religion, described by the Greeks in a manner which makes it seem so much like the Hebrew, may have come from the Israelites in a different manner. For it is evident that many centuries before any of the writers cited here, the early Thracians had much intercourse with the Phoenicians and Trojans, both of whom can be shown to have been of the stock of the Israelites.
                    Speaking of a time much nearer his own, Strabo tells us that the land of the Getae adjoins that of the Suevi (Suebi), who are to their west (Geography,). Surely Strabo is counting the Germanic tribes of the Marcomanni and Quadi as Suebi, as Tacitus did (The Germania, 42, 43), and Strabo also mentions these tribes individually (Geography, 7.1.3; and 7.3.1 where Strabo tells us that the Quadi had a common border with the Getae). The Marcomanni had displaced the Boii, who dwelt north of the Danube in Bohemia, which retains its name from the Boii, by 8 B.C., by which time also the Quadi had come to inhabit the districts in and around Moravia to the east. The land of the Marcomanni was roughly equivalent to what is in modern times the Czech Republic and part of northern Austria, and that of the Quadi to what is now Slovakia (anciently Moravia) and part of Hungary. The land of the Getae, as described by Strabo, would occupy much of modern Romania and eastern Hungary, and was known to the Romans as Dacia. Strabo then says that the Getae ?not only laid waste the country of the Celti who were intermingled with the Thracians and the Illyrians, but actually caused the complete disappearance of the Boii who were under the rule of Critasirus, and also of the Taurisci? (Geography, 7.3.1, 11; 7.5. 2). These Boii here had at this time dwelt south of the Danube, northeast of the Adriatic Sea. By the time of Tacitus, as he describes in The Germania (43), there are no Getae dwelling north of the Danube, for he makes no mention of them. Rather, he places in their lands two tribes of the Suebi, the Marsigni and Buri, a tribe which he says is Keltic, the Cotini, and a tribe which he described as Pannonian, the Osi. (Tacitus? distinction between German and Keltic shall be discussed at length in a latter part of this essay.) Pannonia, roughly equivalent to the northern, inland part of modern Croatia (and Illyria was roughly equivalent to the coastal portion of modern Croatia), seems to have been occupied in ancient times by a mixture of Keltic, Illyrian, and Thracian tribes (Strabo, Geography, 7.5.3, 4, 10); the provinces of Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia and Rhaetia south of the Danube were created by Augustus Caesar early in the first century. The Osi may well have been Getae, since Tacitus distinguishes them and the Cotini by language alone. Yet it is evident that at least most of the Getae were forced south by the encroachment of more powerful German tribes from the north and east. Leaving the account of the Getae here, it is now expedient to return to the earliest accounts of the Scythians and their migrations into northern Europe.
                    Diodorus Siculus informs us that the Scythians originated along the Araxes river in northern Media, and spreading out towards the north came to occupy all the lands from the Caucasus mountains in the south to the Tana?s river (the modern Don) and to the east as far as India. Then he relates that crossing the Tana?s, the Scythians brought their western borders to Thrace (Library of History, 2.43.1-4; 3.55.10). The Tana?s river was regarded as the border between Europe and Asia (i.e. Strabo, Geography, 2.5.26, 31). Elsewhere, discussing amber, Diodorus says that ?Directly opposite the part of Scythia which lies above Galatia there is an island out in the open sea which is called Basilea (?king?). On this island the waves of the sea cast up great quantities of what is known as amber, which is to be seen nowhere else in the inhabited world? (Library of History, 5.23.1). By ?Galatia? here Diodorus means the lands of the Galatae in Europe. A footnote in the Loeb Classical Library edition identifies this island as Heligoland, citing ?... Cary in Cary and Warmington, The Ancient Explorers, 38?, which would put the western border of ?Scythia? in the north at least as far west as the mouth of the Elbe. Yet Tacitus, in The Germania (45), speaking of the Germanic tribe of the Aestii, says: ?They are the only people who collect amber ? glaesum is their own word for it [surely the Old English glaes, our glass] ? in the shallows or even on the beach.? The Aestii are described as occupying the Baltic shores, and so we see that Diodorus? ?Scythia? extended, if not as far west as the Elbe, then at least nearly as far, beyond the Vistula, and well into historically Germanic territory. Tacitus called the Baltic ?the Suebian Sea?, after the Germanic tribe known by that name. Later, Diodorus Siculus describes the land of the Galatae as ?lying as it does for the most part under the Bears, [it] has a wintry climate and is exceedingly cold?, and proceeds to describe deep snowfalls and frozen rivers. The phrase ?under the Bears? refers to the constellations, and places this land in the extreme north of Germany, as Diodorus also describes the Rhine and the Danube in this chapter (Library of History, 5.25.1 ff.).
                    Writing long before Diodorus, Herodotus says of the amber trade: ?I do not allow that there is any river, to which the barbarians give the name of Eridanus, emptying itself into the northern sea, whence (as the tale goes) amber is procured? (The Histories, 3:115). In his edition at this passage George Rawlinson says in a footnote: ?Here Herodotus is over-cautious, and rejects as fable what we can see to be truth. The amber district upon the northern sea is the coast of the Baltic about the Gulf of Dantzig, and the mouths of the Vistula and Niemen, which is still one of the best amber regions in the world. The very name, Eridanus, lingers there in the Rhodaune, the small stream which washes the west side of the town of Dantzig. The word Eridanus (= Rhodanus) seems to have been applied by the early inhabitants of Europe, especially to great and strong-running rivers.? Part of Herodotus? protest against the account is that ?in the first place the name Eridanus is manifestly not a barbarian word at all, but a Greek name?, and such is true, for the name even appears for rivers in Greece and Italy (i.e. Strabo Geography, 5.1.9; 9.1.19; Hesiod, Theogony 337-345; Batrachomuomachia, 20). The Latin name for the Rhone river was Rhodanus, equivalent to the Greek Eridanus. The existence of such a name in Dantzig, where Rome never ruled, may reveal an early Greek hand in the Baltic amber trade. Both Milesians and Thracians had colonies upon and north of the Danube, as history and archaeology reveal, before the Scythian presence in Europe, and both must have exploited the surrounding regions for such resources. Recalling the island which Diodorus called ?Basilea?, Herodotus mentions a tribe of Scythians who migrated into Europe called the ?Royal Scythians? to whom other Scythian tribes were subject (The Histories, 4:6, 7, 11, 20, 56, 57, 59), and Strabo also mentions a tribe of Scythians called ?Basileians?, or ?Royals?, in northeast Europe (Geography, 7.3.17).
                    While Herodotus does not give an account of Scythian origins which corroborates Diodorus Siculus, his historic narratives concerning the Scythians surely do support Diodorus? account. Reading Herodotus, the Persian King Cyrus fails in an attempt to conquer the Scythians after Cyrus crossed the Araxus river north of Media, and the Scythians whom Cyrus engages here are identified as Massagetae (The Histories, 1:201-216), whom Diodorus explains are a division of the Scythians (Library of History, 2.43.5). A couple of generations later, as the Persian King Darius was preparing for an invasion of Greece (conducted later by his son Xerxes), he first endeavored to conquer Macedonia and Thrace, where he succeeded, and then the Scythians to the north of Thrace, for which he crossed the Danube, and though returning safely, he failed to subject the Scythians of Europe (The Histories, 4:93; 97 ff.; 5:17 ff.). Strabo also discusses Darius? expedition against the Scythians north of Thrace (Geography, 7.3.8), and explains that these people whom Darius had campaigned against were indeed Sakae, ?of Scythian stock?, who ?used to live in wheat-producing Asia?, quoting Choerilus of Samos, an epic poet who flourished towards the end of the 5th century B.C. (7.3.9). It was the ?Desert of the Getae? which was said to be the place from which Darius was forced to retreat (7.3.14). Diodorus Siculus tells us of the later Greek wars against the Scythians of Europe, first under Philip of Macedon, ?when he had conquered in war Illyrians, Paeonians, Thracians, Scythians, and all the peoples in the vicinity of these? (Library of History, 16.1.5), and later by Lysimachus, who ruled Macedon, being one of the successors of Philip?s son Alexander the Great (19. 73.1-5). Diodorus placed these Scythians west of the Black Sea. Polybius also mentions the passing of Darius through Thrace to attack the Scythians of Europe (The Histories, 4.43.2). Elsewhere, however, Polybius does not mention Scythians in Europe, but only Galatae, whom he still considered a threat to the Greeks in his own time, likely as he wrote, about 146 B.C. (2.35.9).
                    Herodotus, describing the Ister (the Danube river), says: ?Counting from the west it is the first of the Scythian rivers?, and names five ?genuine Scythian? rivers which empty into it from the north, beginning with the Pyretus in the east, ?called by the Scythians Porata?, surely the modern Prut (The Histories, 4:48). While it cannot be ascertained exactly which five rivers Herodotus had in mind, since not all of their names are recognizable today, in the National Geographic Atlas of the World, Eighth Edition, plate 55, a ?Physical Map of Europe?, there are eight named rivers shown which feed the Danube from the north, six in modern Romania (the land described by later writers as that of the Getae and Daci, discussed above) which are from east to west the Prut, Siret, Ialomita, Arges, Olt and Jiu, and two in modern Hungary, the Timas and Tisza. Yet where Herodotus counts the Danube as a Scythian river ?from the west?, he must have meant that portion of the river which flows from north to south, dissecting modern Hungary today. Without doubt, this brings Herodotus? perception of Scythia as far west as modern Austria. While it is unknown why Herodotus named only five of the lower Danube?s tributaries from the north, and not eight, surely he seems to have known the course of the Danube and the rivers which fed into it as far as Austria. He described the tributaries which feed it from the south as far west as the ?country above the Umbrians?, or in northern Italy (4:49). From this region, two rivers, the Sava and the Drava (as they are now known) flow out of the Alps and into the Danube. Herodotus called the Danube itself ?one of the great Scythian rivers? (4:51).
                    The Scythian land around the northern coast of the Black Sea was first held by those Scythians whom the Greeks called Kimmerians (as explained in Part One of this essay), hence the name Crimea, and later (as has also been demonstrated), Galatae. Pushing west, the Scythians also migrated south of the Danube at an early time, and took lands there from the Thracians which later became known as ?Little Scythia?, adjacent to the Black Sea. Strabo says that the Scythians also pushed the Getae entirely south of the Danube (Geography 7.3.13; 7.4.5; and 7.65, where the Scythians are said to have ?often crossed the Danube?). Herodotus distinguished the region of the Scythians south of the Danube from ?Old Scythia? north of the Danube (The Histories, 4:99). Many modern commentators assume that the ancient Getae were the Goths who had much later invaded Rome (in the 5th century A.D.). However, such is not possible since the later Gothic invasions are well recorded and it is well known that the Goths did not cross the Danube until the 3rd century A.D. It is possible, however, that if the Getae were originally Kimmerians or later Scythians who had merged with the Thracians (as Strabo attests happened often), rather than being Thracians originally, that the names are indeed related, describing different divisions of the same people. However, such cannot be determined with certainty.
                    Seeing the descriptions of ?Scythia? in Europe provided here, it is shown to extend along both the banks of the Danube and the shores of the Baltic (which Tacitus called the Suebian Sea, after the Germanic tribes of that name). There is also a quote of Ephorus, a 4th century B.C. historian who wrote a treatise, On Europe, provided by Strabo, where Ephorus said that the Kelts dwelt in ?the part on the west?, and the Scythians in ?the part from which the north wind blows? (Geography, 1.2.28). With Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus, we have seen that ?Scythia? was perceived as extending well into Central Europe. The Scythians were a northern people at this time, and not merely an Asian people, but we have also seen the testimony that these people of the north had originated in Asia. Yet of the people north of the Danube, Diodorus and Polybius, when speaking of their own times, mention Galatae and not Scythians. So with Strabo in his own descriptions of northern Europe, and his use of the terms Galatae and German for these same people inhabiting this same land, it is evident that the geographer is straddling the earlier Greek terminology, such as that used by Diodorus, and then the Roman. For the Romans of Strabo?s time were in control of much of the inhabited world, and as Strabo was writing, the Romans were making continual failed attempts to conquer the German people north of the Danube and east of the Rhine. So Strabo quotes the most ancient writers, where the people of the north were known as Scythians, and then writing of his own time, he is calling them Galatae and Germans. One must not forget, however, that while Strabo often distinguishes between Galatae and Germans, he has fully described those Galatae south of and along the Danube as having mixed themselves with the Illyrian, Thracian, and other tribes, while he considers the Germans to be the genuine Galatae. Diodorus Siculus ? even though he wrote during the time of Julius Caesar (who used the term German) and revered him greatly ? did not use the term German but only Galatae, (interchangeably with Kelt) to describe these people, as Polybius did before him. The term German in Strabo should always be interpreted to mean genuine Galatae, as he himself explained of the origin of the term among the Romans (Geography, 7.1.2), and says that the Galatae and Germans, while they are distinguished, are kin (4.4.2).
                    Strabo tells us that the Rhine divides Celtica and Germany (Geography, 2.5.28, 30). Speaking of the Galatae of Celtica, Diodorus Siculus describes them as being ?tall of body, with rippling muscles, and white of skin, and their hair is blond?, and goes on to relate how they made their hair even blonder by washing it in lime-water (Library of History, 5.28.1). Strabo says of the Germans that they are ?taller, and have yellower hair? than the Galatae of Celtica (Geography, 7.1.2). Diodorus Siculus apparently places the borders of Scythia at the Elbe (Library of History, 5.23.1; 5.32.1-3), yet Strabo tells us that the Elbe (which he calls ?Albis?) divides Germany into two parts (Geography, 1.2.1). Herodotus, as we have seen, calls the lands of Central Europe north of the Danube Scythia. By all of these descriptions, the eastern portion of Strabo?s Germany is clearly the European Scythia of the earlier writers: Ephorus, Herodotus, and Diodorus. As we shall see in subsequent parts of this essay, the Germany of Tacitus extends all the way to the Black Sea.
                    Strabo tells us of the earlier writers: ?Now all the peoples towards the north were by the ancient Greek historians given the general name ?Scythians? or ?Celto-scythians?; but the writers of still earlier times, making distinctions between them, called those who lived above the Euxine [Black Sea] and the Ister [Danube] and the Adriatic ?Hyperboreans,? ?Sauromatians,? and ?Arimaspians,? and they called those who lived across the Caspian Sea in part ?Sacians? [Sakae, or Sakans, all the same in Greek] and in part ?Massagetans,? but they were unable to give any accurate account of them, although they reported a war between Cyrus and the Massagetans? (Geography, 11.6.2), and here Strabo is being critical of Ctesias, Herodotus, and Hellanicus, among others, although his criticism is surely harsher than Herodotus deserves. Strabo himself here confuses ?Hyperboreans? by listing them along with historical peoples, since he himself explains elsewhere that the name is a general description meaning ?most northerly peoples?, and is not the name of any specific tribe (1.3. 22).Yet after rebuking Herodotus for doubting whether there actually were ?Hyperboreans? (referring to The Histories 4:13, 32-36), Strabo himself later calls them ?mythical?, revealing his own confusion on the matter (Geography, 7.3.1). Yet hopefully the links between Kelts, Galatae, Germans, Kimmerians and Scythians, through the different stages of history, are becoming quite apparent here.
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                    • #11
                      Classical Records and German Origins, Part Four

                      Classical Records and German Origins, Part Four
                      By: William Finck ? 2007

                      Proceeding from where we left off in Part Three of this essay, and Strabo?s discussion of the usage by earlier writers of the terms ?... ?Scythians? or ?Celtoscythians? ... ?Hyperboreans,? ?Sauromatians,? and ... ?Arimaspians,? and ... ?Sacians? and ... ?Massagetans??, we have seen that Hyperborean was merely a descriptive term. Now it is appropriate to commence by discussing the others, the Sarmatians and Arimaspians, and then the Scythians of Asia, before returning to a discussion of Europe. The Sarmatians, as Diodorus Siculus tells us, were a people taken from the Medes, and so they are Japhethite Slavs, related to the Thracians (Madai and Tiras, Gen. 10:2). Said to have been settled along the Tana?s river by the Scythians, Diodorus also later tells us that some writers reckoned them as Scythians (Library of History, 2.43.6-7; 4. 45.4). Strabo was among those writers who did so, where he said ?On the right, as one sails into the Caspian Sea, are those Scythians, or Sarmatians, who live in the country contiguous to Europe between the Tana?s River and this sea; the greater part of them are nomads, of whom I have already spoken? (Geography, 11.6.2), and indeed Strabo had said earlier that the Sarmatians, ?these too being Scythians?, dwelt near the Caspian Sea (11.2.1). Tacitus distinguished the Sarmatians from the Germans, and specifically by physical appearance (The Germania, 46), and by his time the Sarmatians had also migrated to the west of the Tana?s, surely contributing to the westward movement of the Scythians into Europe. The Arimaspians are mentioned by Diodorus Siculus as a branch of the Scythians (Library of History, 2.43.5), yet little else is found concerning Scythians with this name. Strabo only tells us of them that, according to Aristeas, they are a one-eyed people. Strabo later called Aristeas, who wrote an epic about the Arimaspians, ?a charlatan if ever there was one? (Geography, 1.2.10; 13.1.16).
                      However obscure the Arimaspians are, much more is known of those Scythians of Asia: ?... the eastern Scythians, also nomads, who extend as far as the Eastern Sea and India ... and they called those who lived across the Caspian Sea in part ?Sacians? [Sakae, or Sakans] and in part ?Massagetans,? but they were unable to give any accurate account of them, although they reported a war between Cyrus and the Massagetans? (Geography, 11.6.2). Here Strabo refers to accounts such as the one related by Herodotus (The Histories, 1:201-216), who tells us of Cyrus? campaign against these Scythians, which took place north of Media and the Araxes river (the modern Aras), in modern Armenia and Azerbaijan. Early in his Geography, Strabo states: ?Indeed, the spread of the empires of the Romans and of the Parthians has presented to geographers of to-day a considerable addition to our empirical knowledge of geography, just as did the campaign of Alexander to geographers of earlier times, as Eratosthenes points out ... the Parthians have increased our knowledge in regard to Hyrcania and Bactriana, and in regard to the Scythians who live north of Hyrcania and Bactriana, all of which countries were but imperfectly known to the earlier geographers? (1.2.1). Yet Strabo, writing a geography, is often much more interested in a knowledge of the land and its features and resources than he is in the people, although he was also a historian, and Herodotus? comments concerning the people of these regions generally concur with Strabo.
                      While Herodotus did repeat some fantastic tales concerning the various tribes of the Scythians (i.e. The Histories, 4:100-117), much of the information he had is of historical value, once it is separated from the myths. For instance, he describes one tribe, the Budini (cf. 4:21-22), and says that they ?are a large and powerful nation: they have all deep blue eyes, and bright red hair?, and live near the Borysthenes, the modern Dnieper river (4:108). Also of great value is his enumeration of men from various Scythian tribes among the Persian army of Xerxes which invaded Greece circa 480 B.C., and which is corroborated by Persian inscriptions, where it is evident that many of the Scythian tribes and nations of the east were at that time subject to the Persians (7:64-67). Discussing the army of Xerxes, Herodotus often used the term Sakae, or Sakans, in place of Scythians (i.e. 7:96, 184; 8:113; 9:113). That Scythians were subject to the Persians is also evident in the list of the satrapies of the Persian empire which Herodotus provided (3:90-94). The ?Bactrian tribes? are listed as the twelfth Persian satrapy, and ?Sacans and Caspians? together in the fifteenth, with ?Parthians, Chorasmians, Sogdians and Arians? making up the sixteenth satrapy. By this it may be evident, the Scythians of Europe also being identified as Sakae (i.e. Strabo, Geography, 7.3.9), that these tribes didn?t simply migrate, but had multiplied and spread out.
                      Some of the tales which Herodotus repeated concerning various Scythian tribes are found in other Greek writers. For instance, Herodotus mentions a tribe called the Androphagi, or Man-eaters (The Histories, 4:106), and Strabo relates tales of cannibalism among certain Scythians (Geography, 7.3.6, 7, 9), repeating earlier writers. Elsewhere Herodotus says of the Tauri, the name which the Greeks gave to the Scythians of the Crimea and neighboring Black Sea coasts (Strabo Geography, 7.4.5), that they sacrifice the shipwrecked and other foreigners found in their territory (The Histories, 4:103). For this the Tauri were the subjects of a play by Euripides, in which they appear quite anachronistically at the time of the Trojan War, being parodied in his Iphigeneia Among The Taurians as sacrificers of those unfortunate enough to have fallen upon their shores. Herodotus also described other tribes of Scythians who had settled in one place and were engaged in husbandry, i.e. the ?Scythian Husbandmen? who dwelt about the Borysthenes (4:17, 18, 52, 54), and those of the Budini who had mixed with certain Greeks and inhabited a city called Gel?nus (4:108, 109). Yet many others of the Scythian tribes of Asia, such as the Caspians, Bactrians, Sogdians, etc., certainly also must have been settled, due to the nature of their circumstances, being under the Persian yoke. Such would require the payment of tribute to Persia, money and goods from trade and husbandry and agriculture.
                      Diodorus Siculus relates that the ?Scythians known as the Sacae? dwell to the north of India (Library of History, 2.35.1). Very close to this region bodies of Caucasians with reddish hair and clad in tartan-like garments have recently been found. Called the ?Tarim Mummies?, they date to within a few centuries before the start of the Christian era, the same time that the Classical Greek historians cited here were writing. See, for instance, ?Tracking the Tarim Mummies?, Archaeology, Archaeological Institute of America, March-April 2001, p. 76. Diodorus tells us that these Scythians originated along the Araxes River, northwest of Media (2.43.1-5). Strabo informs us that the ?Scythians north of Hyrcania and in Bactriana? (which corresponds roughly with present-day Tajikistan) are known to the west from the Parthians (Geography, 1.2.1), and in his eleventh book he discussed them at length. There he states: ?Now the greater part of the Scythians, beginning at the Caspian Sea, are called D?ae, but those who are situated more to the east than these are named Massagetae and Sacae, whereas all the rest are given the general name of Scythians? (11.8.2). Later he says that the D?ae are not considered Scythians by all, and indeed Herodotus thought they were a Persian tribe (Daans in Rawlinson?s translation; The Histories, 1:125). In Part Three of this essay they are associated with the Da? (Strabo), or Dii (Thucydides) of Europe, an identification which Strabo refused to make. Strabo tells us that some of the D?ae are called Aparni (Geography, 11.7.1), and has these among the number of the Scythians led by Arsaces who established themselves as the Parthians (11.9.2), who were indeed Scythians (11.8.2). Strabo also describes a tribe called the Siginni who dwelt in the mountains near the Caspian Sea, and who ?imitate the Persians in all their customs, except that they use ponies that are small and shaggy, which, though unable to carry a horseman, are yoked together in a four-horse team? (11.11.8), and this description matches perfectly those Sigynnae of Herodotus, who dwelt north of the Danube and were ?colonists of the Medes? (see Part Two of this essay), and therefore these two groups must have been originally from the same tribe, some having migrated westward at an early time. Note that often among the Greeks, ?Mede? stood for either Persian or Mede, especially among the Tragic Poets contemporary with Herodotus.
                      With Alexander the Great, the Greeks had conquered all of the old Persian empire as far as Bactriana, which bordered upon India and was inhabited by Scythians, and Strabo explains that each of the Scythian tribes had a name of its own, though they were generally known as Scythians, and that ?They are all for the most part nomads?, where it is evident that Scythian identifies a race, and is not merely a synonym for nomad. Of Bactria, Strabo then says ?But the best known of the nomads are those who took away Bactriana from the Greeks, I mean the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari, and Sacarauli, who originally came from the country on the other side of the Iaxartes River [the modern Syr Darya] that adjoins that of the Sacae and the Sogdiani and was occupied by the Sacae? (11.8.2). The ?Tarim Mummies? have been thought by many archaeologists to be of Tocharian or related stock. Even tribes east of Sogdiana, where the Tarim Basin is located, are identified as Scythian, Strabo says, ?from their identity in kind? (11.11.6). Of the Sacae and Massagetae, the largest Scythian tribes of the east, ?who lived across [east of] the Caspian Sea? (11.6.2), Strabo says they are one ?tribe?, or nation (Greek ethnos), and he names several divisions among them (11.8.8).
                      Strabo errantly supposed that the Sakae of Sacasene, a district of Armenia which had its name from the Sakae, had migrated there from Asia, as if the Scythians had originated in the far east (Geography, 11.8.4). Rather, from Diodorus Siculus we see that the Scythians originated near Sacasene, which is not far from the Araxes river (Library of History, 2.43.1-5; cf. Strabo, Geography, 11.14. 3-4 for these locations). Diodorus? version of Scythian origins is better corroborated by the general historical record, that Strabo himself helps to attest. While Herodotus tells us that the Scythians ruled all of Asia for a time following the fall of Assyria (The Histories, 1.104), Strabo rather anachronistically identifies this same period by saying that ?Greater Armenia ruled the whole of Asia? (Geography, 11. 13.5), meaning the Scythians, or Sakae. This is the same area where Cyrus, not 100 years after the fall of Assyria, crossed the Araxes river into what later became known as Armenia to attack those Scythians called the Massagetae (11.8.6; Herodotus, The Histories, 1:201-216). Strabo tells us that the Parthians were a division of the Scythians (11. 9.2). The attestation of Josephus, that the Parthians and other tribes of the ?Upper Barbarians? were of his own nation (in the ethnic sense), and for that reason he wrote his Wars of the Judaeans for these people, as he says in the Preface to that book, agrees with Diodorus Siculus who gives the origin of these people near northern Media, and also with the Biblical accounts of the Assyrian deportations of the Israelites and to where they had been removed centuries earlier (i.e. 2 Kings 17:6). This connection between the Scythians, Kimmerians, and the Israelites is also evident in the Assyrian inscriptions uncovered by archaeologists, such as those deciphered by D.D. Luckenbill in his Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, cited by E. Raymond Capt in his much more recent and available Missing Links Discovered in Assyrian Tablets.
                      It is fully evident, given all that Strabo and Diodorus Siculus have to say about the Scythians, that they were a common race, and Diodorus tells us that they came from a single origin (Library of History, 2.43.1-5). Strabo supports this statement of Diodorus?, not where he agrees with their point of origin, but where he tells us that the Scythians of the east are indeed Scythians because of ?their identity in kind? (Geography, 11.11.6), where he tells us the Sakae and Massagetae are ?one tribe? (11.8. 8), and where he states that the Iberians above the Caucasus mountains are ?both neighbors and kinsmen? of the Scythians, although here he includes also the Sarmatians, whom he supposes to be Scythians (11.3.3). With the testimony of Josephus mentioned above, we see that the Scythians were the ancient Israelites ? Hebrews ? of the Assyrian deportations. In Hebrew, the word Hebrew is Ibriy (Strong?s Hebrew dictionary #5680). Once it is realized that the Phoenicians, who settled the Iberian peninsula in western Europe, were Israelites (for which see my essay Classical And Biblical Records Identifying The Phoenicians) ? hence the name Iberia ? then it is also evident that this Iberia in the Caucasus mountains near the Black Sea received its name in like manner, because Hebrews resided there, being the Scythians, or Sakae.
                      Herodotus? description of the Scythian tribe of the Budini, cited above, with their bright red hair and blue eyes, surely portrays the ideal model of Keltic appearance that is commonly perceived today. Indeed, centuries later Tacitus wrote of the Caledonians in Britain: ?The reddish hair and large limbs of the Caledonians proclaim a German origin? (The Agricola, 11). Aside from the tartanclad Tarim mummies found in what is now northwestern China, there are many other archaeological finds in Asia which help to support the Classical historians cited here in their accounts of the Scythians. For instance, the so-called Pazyryk culture describes the archaeological findings of the elaborate barrow-graves of a people who once inhabited the Altay Mountains of western Mongolia. Said to be similar to the Scythian tombs of what is now the Ukraine, descriptions of these tombs are also much like Herodotus reported of the burials of Scythian chieftains (The Histories, 4:71-72), although some of Herodotus? account is evidently exaggerated, since while horses and concubines, described as ?sacrificed?, have been found in such graves, nowhere yet have as many as fifty horses, or fifty concubines, been found buried in this manner all at one time, as Herodotus reported. The Pazyryk tombs, which are dated to the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. (the very time of Herodotus), contain a race of Caucasian people, heavily tattooed and with blond hair, who would certainly not be out of place in Germany or Scandinavia today. Found among these burials are pile carpets, elaborate chariots, gold and gold-gilt objects of art, embroidered woven fabrics, carved leather goods, and many other crafts. Similar barrow burials have been found in Tuva, a Russian district north of Mongolia, in modern Kazakhstan (notably the interestingly-named Issyk barrow), and elsewhere in addition to the many Scythian barrows found in the west, such as those of the Ukraine.
                      Of course, there are many archaeological findings associated with ?Indo-Europeans? (Caucasian, or White people) in and around the Eurasian Steppes which predate the Scythians, and many historians and archaeologists errantly assume that the Steppes, or some area to the east, west or north (anywhere but the lands of the Bible), must have been the original home of all Indo-Europeans. There sometimes seems to be as many theories of Indo-European origins as there are scholars holding advanced degrees in disciplines related to the subject. Yet all roads of our cultural and historical consciousness lead back to the world portrayed by the Bible: to Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Once both ?political correctness? and the lies of the jews concerning the Shemetic race are swept aside, and Biblical history is examined from a racially correct perspective, the conclusion that White culture and history began in and around Mesopotamia is not difficult to reach. It can certainly be demonstrated from the Bible, apocryphal Hebrew literature, the Hebrew language itself, and many other ancient historical works, that the original Shemites (not today?s race-mixed jews and arabs) were White. They are the primary ancestors of most of today?s White Europeans. Following the more accurate (although imperfect) Septuagint chronology of the Bible, the Adamic race appeared on earth at least ? but not too much more than ? 7,500 years ago, yet other Caucasoid races most likely had been here before that, and modern civilization (that of the Genesis chapter 10 nations) began following a great (but localized) deluge which took place perhaps 5200 or so years ago. From that time, White Adamic civilization spread for over 2500 years up to the deportations of the Israelites by Assyria and the subsequent appearance of the Scythians in history (741-676 B.C.). Outside of the few records which we have from Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, scarcely anything exists to tell us of those 2500 years. The ancient Greeks began writing about 700 B.C., the time of Homer. It cannot be assumed that, over 2500 years, all of the other branches of the Adamic race remained confined to the world of the Bible: the Mediterranean and the near East. As the historic records and inscriptions tell us, the lands of Asshur, Madai, Elam (Assyria, Media and Persia) and the surrounding related nations were quite often in a state of war, or ruled over by tyrants. Surely over the centuries many of the tribes of the people migrated to regions north, east and west, and not only to escape war or tyranny, but also in search of fertile land, precious minerals, or other natural resources. And so there are many archaeological discoveries in and around the Steppes which predate the Scythians, among which are the Andronovo, Catacomb, Tumulus, Timber-grave, Corded Ware, Urnfield and many other Indo-European cultures of eastern Europe and western Asia, many of which have features linking them to earlier cultures of Mesopotamia or the adjoining regions (Anatolia, Syro-Palestine, or Iran). This has been demonstrated by at least one professional archaeologist, S.A. Grigoryev of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in his book Ancient Indo-Europeans. An attempt of historical reconstruction.
                      In a separate online article, ?The Sintashta Culture And Some Questions Of Indo-European Origins?, Grigoryev makes the following comments (forgiving his imperfect English): ?Origins of Indo-Europeans is one of the most significant problems of history, archaeology and linguistics. This problem has already been discussed for 200 years after the kinship of Indo-European languages was demonstrated ... Linguists T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov basing analyses of Indo-European languages have localised the Indo-European homeland in Near East and described migrations of separate groups ... My study of Eurasian cultures allows me to say that Indo-European homeland was really in Near East ... V.I. Sarianidi have demonstrated that the appearance of Iranians in Central Asia and Eastern Iran and forming of Bactria-Margiana archaeological complex had been caused by migration from Syro-Anatolian region ... Another important problem of Indo-European study is a migration of ancient Europeans. T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov consider that their languages differentiated already in Near East. These people (Celts, Germans, Slavs, Balts) moved to Europe through Iran and Central Asia around Caspian See. As a result of combined migrations, an area of the second intimacy of these dialects formed somewhere to the North of Caspian See. This linguistic reconstruction corresponded to archaeological evidence ... The Indo-European homeland was placed on the territory of Kurdistan. The most early complexes which we can connect with Proto-Indoeuropeans are such objects as Tel Magzalia, Tel Sotto, Hassuna, dating from the VIII to the early V milleniums [B.C.]. The first Indo-Europeans migrated to the Balkan peninsula after and together with other anatolian peoples at about the end of the VI millenium. The Anatolian tribes were formed here on this base. But most part of Indo-European migrations began later ? at about the early IV millenium ... At the end of the Bronze Age Kimmerians migrated westwards to Northern Pontic area. Scithian migration through Iran, Near East and the Caucasus took place at the beginning of the Iron Age. At last, various streams of Indo-Europeans (Tokharians, Europeans and Iranians) influenced forming and development of Chinese civilisation.?
                      I can?t entirely agree with Grigoryev, who improperly labels early migrations of Caucasians into Europe as ?Celts? and ?Germans? and who ? perhaps in deference to all those who have followed Homer ? distinguishes Kimmerians from Scythians and errantly labels earlier northern groups as ?Kimmerian?, when in fact the Kimmerians were Scythians and did not reach Europe until the end of the 8th century B.C., things which have been discussed at length in Part One of this essay. Elsewhere Grigoryev further supports the historic record as it is presented in these essays, where he states that ?Cultures of Scithian and Sarmatian world were not forming on the basis of Late Bronze Age cultures placed from Dnieper River to the Altai?, and further discussing early Steppe cultures adds: ?The forming of these cultures [from the 18th century B.C.] reflected an Iranization of Steppe Zone. Although the appearance of Scithian and Sarmatian tribes was not connected with these cultures.? So, in support of Diodorus Siculus? testimony concerning these peoples, Scythians and Sarmatians appear in the Steppe from Iran (ancient Media and Persia) after the Bronze Age, in the early Iron Age, which is usually said to begin with the 8th century B.C., the same century during which the Israelites were deported by Assyria.
                      Kurdistan is a region which includes parts of modern Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia. It includes the original homeland of the patriarch Abraham in Haran, the Padan-Aram area mentioned in the book of Genesis, ancient Media, and parts of Assyria and Persia. Babylonia, which is Sumer and Akkad, lies just to the south. While Grigoryev?s conclusions were reached through studies of archaeology, linguistics, and some history, it should be evident that this one archaeological model for the spread of ?Indo-Europeans? agrees very closely with the proper Biblical perspective and the testimony of the Classical historians concerning the origin of the White Adamic peoples of Europe and Asia. In the next part of this essay we shall return our attention to the Scythians of Europe.
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                      • #12
                        Classical Records and German Origins, Part Five

                        Classical Records and German Origins, Part Five
                        By: William Finck ? 2007
                        It has already been established here, in Part Three of this essay, that the Scythia of Diodorus Siculus extended west to the amber district of the Baltic, and perhaps even to the Elbe, as described by that historian. Likewise, Herodotus accounted the Danube and its tributaries from the north as ?Scythian? rivers. Strabo also often discussed the Scythians, or Sakae, north of the Danube and west of the Black Sea. Yet Strabo wrote in much later times than Herodotus, and perhaps 30 to 50 years later than Diodorus. While Diodorus did not use the term German, he was certainly familiar with the writings of Julius Caesar, and Caesar used the term. Yet Diodorus used only the terms Kelts and Galatae, and used them interchangeably, when referring to both the people of Celtica and the lands north of the Danube, while we learn from Strabo that the Romans made a distinction between them, which certainly was an arbitrary one, calling those of Celtica Gauls and those east of the Rhine Germans. Strabo wrote in Greek, and cited many earlier Greek writers, and it is evident that most often his perspective was that of a Greek, and usually in agreement with the earlier writers whom he cites. Yet where Strabo writes of the northern Europe of his own time, it is in an era when Rome had been fighting many battles against the northern tribes, in an attempt to establish ? and even expand ? its northern borders and its control over the inhabited earth, or oikoumen?, and in these places Strabo?s perspective is clearly a Roman one.
                        Keeping this in mind, Strabo writes of northern Europe: ?Now the parts that are beyond the Rhenus and Celtica are to the north of the Ister [Danube]; these are the territories of the Galatic and the Germanic [genuine Galatae, as he explains in the subsequent paragraph] tribes, extending as far as the Bastarnians and the Tyregetans and the River Borysthenes [the Dnieper]. And the territories of all the tribes between this river and the Tana?s [the Don] and the mouth of Lake Maeotis [the Sea of Azov] extend up into the interior as far as the ocean [the Baltic] and are washed by the Pontic [Black] Sea? (Geography, 7.1.1). The Tyregetans were those Getae who lived along the Tyras river, the modern Dniester. The Bastarnians, found inhabiting the region called elsewhere ?Little Scythia?, on the western shores of the Black Sea, who are said by Strabo to be a Germanic tribe (7.3.17), shall be discussed further below. What is most striking here is an absence of any mention of Scythians. Rather, we find mention of ?Germanic tribes? occupying the territory where we found mention of Scythians, or Sakae, for nearly 500 years up to Strabo?s writing of his statement here. Of the Scythians in Europe the historian Thucydides, writing towards the end of the 5th century B.C., had written: ?For there is no nation, not to say of Europe but neither of Asia, that are comparable to this, or that as long as they agree, are able, one nation to one, to stand against the Scythians? (History of the Peloponnesian War, 2:97). The only logical conclusion is that by Strabo?s time the Romans had created yet another distinction: the Scythians of Europe, whom the Greeks had called Galatae, were being called Germans. As Strabo had often explained that many of the Scythians were nomadic, dwelling in wagons (i.e. Geography, 11.2.1), and living off of their flocks were ?eaters of cheese made of mare?s milk?, where he quotes Aeschylus (7.3. 7, and see 7.3.9), Strabo likewise related of the Germans: ?It is a common characteristic of all the peoples in this part of the world [here in the Loeb Classical Library edition a footnote reminds the reader that Strabo means the Germans and Galatae] that they migrate with ease ... they do not till the soil or even store food, but live in small huts that are merely temporary structures; and they live for the most part off their flocks, as the Nomads do, so that, in imitation of the Nomads, they load their household belongings on their wagons and with their beasts turn whithersoever they think best? (7.1.3). Strabo wrote this while discussing many of the Germanic tribes, such as the Suevi (or Suebi), later described by Tacitus in The Germania. Here it is clear that Strabo has described these Germans in the exact same manner as he had described the Scythians, and they are found occupying the same lands that were said in many places elsewhere to have been occupied by Scythians. For instance, while Strabo described the displacement of those Getae north of the Danube by Scythians (7.3.13, et al.), Tacitus mentions no Getae north of the Danube, nor any Scythians, but names German tribes occupying those lands. It is quite evident, that with all of these things considered, the Germans are indeed the Scythians, and only the names have changed.
                        It could not have been an accident, that in his description of those inhabiting northern Europe in his seventh book, Strabo neglected to mention the Scythians. In his second book he had given a statement similar to the one repeated above: ?This river [the Danube] flows from the west towards the east and the Euxine [Black] Sea; it leaves on its left the whole of Germany (which begins at the Rhine), all the country of the Getans, and the country of the Tyregetans, Bastarnians, and Sarmatians as far as the river Tana?s [the modern Don] and Lake Maeotis [the Sea of Azov]; and it leaves on its right the whole of Thrace, Illyria, and, lastly and finally, Greece? (Geography, 2.5.30). Here again we see that there are no Scythians mentioned in Europe, although Strabo gave much testimony elsewhere, from older writers, confirming their prominence there. The only explanation is that here they are being called Germans, who are indeed the Scythians of the earlier writers, and here Strabo portrays Germany as extending from the Rhine to the Black Sea, north of the Danube, except for the region held by the Getae, since he tells us that the Bastarnians are German (7.3.17). Strabo tells us elsewhere that the Getae share a border with the Germanic Suevi (7.1.3), yet indicates that the Getae were driven south of the Danube by the Scythians (i.e. 7.3.13), and Tacitus names several tribes inhabiting that region, but no Scythians. Rather, Tacitus tells us that east of the Quadi (a division of the Suevi called Coadui, or in some mss. Coldui, by Strabo) dwell the Germanic Marsigni and Buri, not Suevi but both ?exactly like the Suebi in language and mode of life?, and the Cotini and the Osi who both pay tribute to the Suebi and to the Sarmatians. Using language as his determinant, Tacitus distinguishes the Cotini and Osi from the Germans, and says that the Cotini are Kelts, which shall be further discussed below, and that the Osi are Pannonian (The Germania, 43). It is possible, yet difficult to ascertain, that the Osi were a remnant of the Getae, whom Tacitus does not mention, who managed to remain north of the Danube. As discussed in Part Three of this essay, Pannonia was a Roman district south of the Danube, apparently inhabited by a mixture of Keltic, Illyrian and Thracian tribes.
                        Before continuing a discussion of Germany as it was perceived by Strabo and Tacitus, it is appropriate to discuss the Galatae and Scythians as they were mentioned by the historian Polybius. Polybius lived from about 208-126 B.C., and the main part of the history which he wrote covers the years 264-146 B.C. His is an excellent work concerning the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, and the exploits of Hannibal and Scipio, but he also described wars of the period among the Greek states to the east, and the causes for and the beginnings of the Roman empire, for which he was an apologist. Many who write about the Kelts cite Polybius endeavoring to show that either the Kelts had dominion throughout all of northern Europe at one time, or that they originated in the east, or both. Like the later Diodorus Siculus, Polybius also used the terms Galatae and Kelts interchangeably (i.e. The Histories, 2.30.7-9), and he never used the term German, calling all the people of the north Galatae. Concerning the origins of peoples, the founding of cities, and related things, Polybius did not write, and he explains his reasons for abstaining from such at length in his ninth book (9.1-2).
                        Polybius directly mentioned the Scythians in Europe only once, where of a certain point along the coast near Byzantium he writes: ?It is here, they say, that Darius bridged the straits when he crossed to attack the Scythians? (4.43.2). Yet Polybius mentioned the Galatae often, both those north of Greece who had conquered Thrace and invaded Anatolia, and those further west. While Polybius? mentions of the Galatae, or Kelts, say nothing of detriment to that which is being presented here, neither are they of great assistance. Yet in general they support one major contention made here: that those people of Europe originally said to be Scythians (for instance by Ephorus, whom Strabo quotes at length) were the same people later called Galatae by the Greeks, and then divided into Germans and Gauls by the Romans, since in the era of Herodotus and Thucydides only Scythians were known in the north ? and neither Herodotus nor Thucydides knew the term Galatae ? and only Kelts were known in the west. Yet later the people of the north were called Galatae, and no longer are Scythians mentioned there, unless older writers are being followed. Both Galatae and Scythians are described by Strabo in the exact same manner, where Strabo is certainly discussing the same people in two different eras, by two different names: the first from earlier writers, and the latter in his own time.
                        Polybius also makes statements which show that the archaeological Hallstatt culture should not be so readily associated with the Galatae. For he says of the Galatae that ?their lives were very simple, and they had no knowledge whatever of any art or science?, and that their possessions were scarce so that they could ?shift where they chose? (2.17.10), much as Strabo had described them. He also described at length their highly inferior arms, and how easily their swords bent after a single hard blow (2.30.7-9; 2.33.3). None of this accords with the more advanced metallurgy and the fine arts of the Hallstatt culture, which likely belonged to Thracians, Milesians, other Phoenicians, and other earlier settlers of the Danube River valley and western Europe ? the ?proto-Kelts?.
                        In the times of Strabo and Tacitus a Germanic tribe called the Bastarnae dwelt on the Danube near the Black Sea, in the same region which Strabo and others called ?Little Scythia? elsewhere. Polybius mentions these people, who were the reason for a mission of the Dardanians (an Illyrian tribe) to the Roman Senate in 177-176 B.C.: ?A mission from the Dardanians now arrived, telling of the Bastarnae, their numbers, the huge size and the valour of their warriors, and also pointing out that Perseus and the Galatians [of Anatolia] were in league with this tribe. They said they were much more afraid of him than of the Bastarnae, and they begged for aid. Envoys from Thessaly also arrived confirming the statement of the Dardanians, and begging for help? (The Histories, 25.6.2-4). These Bastarnae are not said by any of these writers to have migrated from anywhere, nor to have been conquerors of the Scythians or Galatae who inhabited this region, and so it seems plausible that Bastarnae is only a name for the Scythian tribe which long inhabited the area, of which the Greeks and Romans only later acquired a more intimate knowledge. Strabo was uncertain about the Bastarnae, and says ?but what is beyond Germany and what beyond the countries which are next after Germany ? whether one should say the Bastarnae, as most writers suspect, or say that others lie in between ... it is not easy to say ... or whether any part is uninhabitable by reason of the cold or other cause, or whether even a different race of people, succeeding the Germans, is situated between the sea and the eastern Germans [here it is absolutely evident that the word German stands for Scythian] ... for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus ...? (Geography, 7.2.4). By ?know? Strabo must mean that he didn?t know them first-hand, and so was not able to describe them completely, since both Diodorus Siculus some years before, and Tacitus some years after, confirm his statements concerning the Sarmatians, the Bastarnae, and the Germans ? once one accepts as fact that Strabo and later writers used ?German? to describe the people that Diodorus and earlier writers called Scythian, and then Galatae, which shall hopefully be further established in a discussion of the Peucetians.
                        Diodorus Siculus mentions the Peucetians (Peuketioi) where he says that Agathocles, king of Sicily, supplied ?both the Iapygians and the Peucetians ... with pirate ships, receiving in return a share of their booty? (Library of History, 21.4.1), Sicily being at war with Carthage, Macedon, and the ?barbarians of Italy? about 295 B.C. (21.2.2). Strabo tells us that certain of the Bastarnians lived on Peuce (peuk? means pine in Greek), an island in the Danube, and were therefore called Peucini (Peukinoi), which must be Diodorus? Peucetians, the name and location being identical. Strabo names other tribes of the Bastarnae, the Atmoni and Sidoni, and the Roxolani who ?roam the plains between the Tana?s and the Borysthenes [the Don and Dnieper rivers], and here is more evidence that the Germanic Bastarnae are of the European Scythians. The Roxolani, Strabo tells us, are known from their wars with Mithridates Eupator, king of Pontus, 120-63 B.C.? (Geography, 7.3.15, 17). Elsewhere where Diodorus Siculus discusses Macedonian and Thracian relations with their neighbors during this period, he mentions only Scythians in this region, and no Bastarnae (i.e. Library of History, 16.1.5; 19.73.1-5). It should be manifest here, that Bastarnae is a name for the Scythian, later called German, tribes in this same area. The people did not change, only the names did, once the perspective changed from Greek to Roman: German was a strictly Roman term.
                        Although in one place Strabo does seem to distinguish the Bastarnae from the Scythians, where he says that the Thracians had suffered the encroachment of ?Scythians and Bastarnians and Sauromatians? from north of the Danube (Geography, 7.3.13), this does not mean that Strabo counted them as a distinct people. Rather, Strabo is referencing an extended period of time, and in the earliest migrations of the Scythians into Thrace, no particular tribe was distinguished among them, where the Bastarnae are named only much later, yet are clearly the same people as those Scythians inhabiting the same area throughout the centuries up until Strabo?s time. Strabo also distinguishes the Bastarnae for another reason, where he says that ?they also being, one might say, of Germanic stock? (7.3.17), and it is learned from Tacitus, who says that ?The Peucini, however, who are sometimes called Bastarnae, are like Germans in their language, manner of life, and mode of settlement and habitation [but] ... Mixed marriages are giving them something of the repulsive appearance of the Sarmatians [Sauromatae] ...? and so Tacitus says ?I do not know whether to class the tribes of the Peucini [Bastarnae], Venedi [Slavic Wends], and Fenni [Finns] with the Germans or with the Sarmatians? (The Germania, 46). So it is evident that on the heels of the Germans, who were the westward-migrating Scythians, were the Slavic tribes pushing into western Europe, and intermingling with them along the way.
                        In The Germania, Tacitus gives an account of how the Germans came to be so called, stating that ?The name Germania, however, is said to have been only recently applied to the country. The first people to cross the Rhine and appropriate Gallic territory, though they are known nowadays as Tungri, were at that time called Germani; and what was at first the name of this one tribe, not of the entire race, gradually came into general use in the wider sense. It was first applied to the whole people by the conquerors of the Gauls, to frighten them; later, all the Germans adopted it and called themselves by the new name? (?2). Yet the Germans did not use the name German of themselves, it is strictly the Roman term for them. Latin becoming the language of learning in the Middle Ages, the name prevailed. Neither Diodorus Siculus nor Strabo, who both knew more of the tribes of Celtica west of the Rhine and south of the Alps than they did of Germany, ever mentioned such a story, nor did they ever mention any individual tribe named Germani. Neither did Caesar in The Gallic War, where he used the name Germani of those tribes east of the Rhine, corroborate any part of Tacitus? story concerning this name, and so it is certainly implausible. Therefore it must be a coincidence that there was apparently a tribe of this name, Germanians in Rawlinson?s edition, mentioned by Herodotus as being among the Persians (The Histories, 1:125), and there is nothing from the time of Herodotus to that of Caesar by which to connect the name of this tribe to the west. Diodorus Siculus and all of the other earlier writers calling all of the tribes of the north Galatae, the account of Strabo is much more credible: that the Germans were called so by the Romans because they were esteemed to be genuine Galatae, i.e. those not mixed with Thracians or Greeks or Etruscans or any of the other previous inhabitants of the European coasts, germanus being the Latin for genuine.
                        Like Strabo, Tacitus tells us that Germany stretched from the Rhine in the west to the east as far as the Bastarnae whom he calls Peucini, although by this time the Venedi and the Sarmatians, Slavic tribes, had also advanced into those parts of Europe west of the Dniester and north of the Danube (The Germania, 46). The Venedi are the later Wends of eastern Germany, who occupied the area around Brandenburg southwest of Berlin. As we have seen, Tacitus would not account the Sarmatians as Germans (and Diodorus Siculus tells us that they derived from the Medes, not the Scythians), yet he wasn?t as certain concerning the Venedi, Fenni (Finns) and Peucini (Bastarnae), only for rather arbitrary reasons. For instance, he spoke of the Bastarnae mingling with the Sarmatians, and he said of the Venedi that they ?have adopted many Sarmatian habits; for their plundering forays take them over all the wooded and mountainous highlands that lie between the Peucini and the Fenni. Nevertheless, they are on the whole to be classed as Germans; for they have settled homes, carry shields, and are fond of travelling ? and travelling fast ? on foot, differing in all these respects from the Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback? (The Germania, 46). Living in wagons and on horseback was the manner by which Strabo?s Germans and Scythians had lived (Geography, 7.1.3; 11.2.1), and it seems that Tacitus? classification depends only upon whether or not these once-nomadic tribes had yet settled into a given area, quite arbitrary indeed. The Venedi may only have been later classified as Slavs because of their language, nevertheless, there were wars between the Saxons and the Wends down through the time of Otto I, who defeated and ended the menaces to Germans from both the Magyars and the Wends by 955 A.D. (The Encyclopedia of World History).
                        Yet Tacitus never mentioned any Scythians in Europe, although his Germany stretched, like that of Strabo, from the Rhine to the Black Sea. If the Scythians of the west are not the Germans, then in a very short time, and after so many centuries of being so well entrenched in Europe, those Scythians whom Thucydides said were so powerful had simply vanished into thin air, and the Germans ? coming from nowhere ? consumed the entire northern continent without any evidence of cataclysm or struggle. Rather, as demonstrated throughout all parts of this essay, the Germans are indeed the Scythians, and the Saxons (Sachsens) of the west are the Sakans (Sakae) of the east, and descended from those Sakans whom Darius the Persian could not defeat (i.e. Strabo, Geography, 7.3.9).
                        In The Germania, Tacitus conjectures that at one time the tribes of Gaul migrated east into Germany, because the Gauls had been more powerful than the Germans (?28). By this Tacitus attempts to account for the presence of tribes which he considered Gallic in regions east of the Rhine, such as the Boii and the Cotini (?43). Of the Cotini, Tacitus distinguishes them from the Germans by language, saying that ?The Cotini and the Osi are not Germans: that is proved by their languages, Celtic in one case, Pannonian in the other ...? Yet language is no determinant of race, and there were many dialects among the tribes of both Germany and Gaul. Speaking elsewhere of language, Tacitus classified the Aestii along the Baltic shore as Germans, but tells us that their language was ?more like the British? although they had ?the same customs and fashions as the Suebi? (?45), and the British spoke Celtic dialects much like those of Gaul, as he himself stated elsewhere (Agricola, 11). Today?s Estonians speak a language classified as Finno-Ugric, and not even Indo-European. Tacitus does not mention the language of the Fenni (Finns), and was unsure whether to classify them as Germans, cited above. Speaking of the Treviri and Nervii, tribes of Gaul, Tacitus seems to doubt the ?German descent to which they claim?, where he describes the German tribes which had migrated west of the Rhine (?28). But here Tacitus fails to address their language or any other significant reason to doubt their claim, stating only that ?Such a glorious origin, they feel, should prevent their being thought to resemble the unwarlike Gauls?. Here Tacitus? distinction between Gaul and German crumbles, being revealed as both arbitrary and prejudiced. Writing nearly 100 years earlier, Strabo tells us that ?The whole race which is now called both ?Gallic? and ?Galatic? is war-mad, and both high-spirited and quick for battle, although otherwise simple and not ill-mannered?, going on to describe their strength and large physiques, among other things, while also explaining that they are with the Germans ?kinsmen to one another? (Geography, 4.4.2). Strabo also attests that both the Treviri and Nervi are indeed German (4.3.4). It is clear that Tacitus? distinction between Germans (whom Strabo considered genuine Galatae) and Gauls (Galatae) afforded him a way by which to display his contempt for those tribes who had been conquered by Rome, and who had adopted the civilization of their conquerors, a contempt which Tacitus also showed for the Britons who did likewise (The Agricola, 21). Elsewhere, Tacitus himself acknowledged that the Gauls had become unwarlike only under Roman subjection (?11). Yet among Whites the cultural or political state of a tribe or nation is certainly a less reliable determinant of race than is language, and Tacitus? distinctions in these areas are therefore demonstrated to be wholly unreliable, made for political reasons and not for the sake of true historical or anthropological inquiry. The Greek writers tell us that the Galatae and the Germans are one and the same race, and the eastern inscriptions tell us as much concerning their ancestors: Kimmerians, Sakans and Scythians.
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                          Classical Records and German Origins, Part Six

                          Classical Records and German Origins, Part Six: Who Are the English?
                          By: William Finck ? 2008
                          While it has been the purpose of this series of essays to demonstrate that the Germanic peoples indeed descended from the Scythians of Asia, who were also called Kimmerians and Sakans, and that they in turn had descended from the peoples of the Bible, notably those Israelites who had been deported by the Assyrians, here in this installment a short digression shall be made. Quite unfortunately, in the prelude to events in more recent history, certain propagandists among the English people succeeded in labeling the Germans as Huns, and in convincing the masses that the English themselves are a people of distinct origin. Of course such is not true, and here we shall digress in order to discuss the origins of the English, and Anglo-German kinship.
                          The pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain, while not the topic of this discussion, shall be mentioned here only briefly. In The Encyclopedia of World History, 6th edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., on page 180 we find: ?The prehistoric inhabitants of Britain (called Celts on the basis of their language) were apparently a fusion of Mediterranean, Alpine and Nordic strains that included a dark Iberian and a light-haired stock. Archaeological evidence points to contacts with the Iberian Peninsula (2500 B.C.E.) and Egypt (1300 B.C.E.) ... The true Celts are represented by two stocks: Goidels (Gaels), surviving in northern Ireland and high Scotland, and Cymri and Brythons (Britons), still represented in Wales. The Brythons were close kin to the Gauls, particularly the Belgi.? First, note that from the Belgi we have the modern name Belgium, and that the Cymri ? distinguished from the Britons ? have a name identical to the Cimmerii (Kimmerians), which cannot be overlooked. Yet much of the information provided here appears to have come from the Roman annalist, Tacitus.
                          In his Agricola, written about his father-in-law who was a governor of Roman Britain, in ?11 Tacitus wrote: ?Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants, is open to question: one must remember that we are dealing with barbarians. But their physical characteristics vary, and the variation is suggestive. The reddish hair and large limbs of the Caledonians proclaim a German origin; the swarthy faces of the Silures, the tendency of their hair to curl, and the fact that Spain lies opposite, all lead one to believe that Spaniards crossed in ancient times and occupied that part of the country. The peoples nearest to the Gauls likewise resemble them ...? [Penguin Classics ed.] Of course Tacitus was not properly a historian, for he was not educated in the classical histories and was apparently ignorant of, or perhaps simply ignored, the accounts of both the Phoenicians and Trojans in Britain, although it is not probable that all of the early Britons are derived from these alone. Rather Tacitus was a chronicler of his own times, and both the Agricola and his account of the tribes of Germany, the Germania, have been esteemed as works of great value for many centuries.
                          The Greek geographer Strabo, who lived a few generations before Tacitus, gave his own description of the German tribes as they were known to him, although he did not have nearly as much information as the Roman had almost a century later. Yet Strabo apparently described many German tribes accurately, since Tacitus? later account is very much in agreement with the geographer, although much more detailed. While Strabo?s account of the Germans won?t be discussed here at length, one statement is important to our discussion: ?Now as for the tribe of the Suevi [or Suebi], it is the largest, for it extends from the Rhenus [Rhine] to the Albis [Elbe]; and a part of them even dwell on the far side of the Albis? (Geography, 7.1.3, Loeb Classical Library ed., brackets mine). In the same paragraph, Strabo lists among the tribes of the Suebi the Coldui (or Coadui, the Quadi of Tacitus) and Marcomanni, both who inhabited Bohemia, and the Langobardi (the Lombards) who some centuries later came to inhabit northern Italy, and also several other tribes mentioned by Tacitus. The name of the Suebi existed until recent times in the name Swabia, a large duchy in southwest Germany which included parts of modern day France and Switzerland, and the modern German state of Baden-Wurttemberg.
                          Tacitus, throughout the Germania, refers to the Baltic ocean as the ?Suebian Sea?. He begins his description of the Suebi, found at ??s 38-46, thusly: ?We must now speak of the Suebi, who do not, like the Chatti or the Tencteri, constitute a single nation. They occupy more than half of Germany, and are divided into a number of separate tribes under different names, though all are called by the generic title of ?Suebi?.? In his ensuing description of these tribes, he makes special mention of the Semnones and the Langobardi, whom he notes for their bravery, and then he says: ?After them come the Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii [the Angles], Varini, Eudoses, Suarines, and Nuitones, all of them safe behind ramparts of rivers and woods. There is nothing noteworthy about these tribes individually ...?. Tacitus then goes on to list the rest of the tribes of Suebia: the Hermunduri, Naristi, Marcomanii, Quadi, the Marsigni and Buri who are both ?exactly like the Suebi in language and mode of life?, the Lugii who are ?divided into a number of smaller units?, the Gothones (Goths), whose ?rule is somewhat more autocratic than in the other German states?, the Rugii and Lemovii, both ?bordering on the [Suebian] sea?, the Suiones ?right out in the sea? (from where the name Sweden may well have come), the Aestii, and finally the Sitones. Of the Aestii (where we see the name of the Estonians), Tacitus says that they ?have the same customs and fashions as the Suebi, but a language more like the British?, and that they ?are the only people who collect amber ? glaesium is their own word for it?, where we see that these are the Scythians of the amber district along the Baltic, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus and earlier writers. Beyond these, Tacitus attests to the presence of the Peucini (also called Bastarnae), Venedi (the Slavic Wends) and the Fenni (Finns), all of whom he was not sure whether to class as Germans or Sarmatians (or Slavs). As we have seen in the first five parts of this essay, all of these Germans are the very same peoples whom the early Greek writers called Kimmerians, and later Scythians or Sakans, and then Galatae, while Romans called them all Gauls, and later divided them into Gauls and Germans. While it is absent from Tacitus, later we shall see that the term Sakans persisted, as Bede and other late writers call these same people by the general name of Saxons: certainly the same people whom Tacitus and Strabo labeled as Suebi. Here it must also be noticed that in the account of the Suebi given by Tacitus, the Anglii (or Angles), are but a minor tribe among the rest of the Germanic tribes, and certainly considered to be Germans, and being labeled as Suebi they are indeed closely related to the other tribes of the German interior.
                          The strength of Rome checked Germanic expansion into the lands of the empire for as long as such strength endured, and Tacitus records the various Germanic tribes who lived along the Rhine and Danube, which of those were friendly to Rome, and which had already crossed west of the Rhine by his time, as he distinguishes Germans from Gauls and doubts the Germanic origin of some of the tribes of Gaul (the lands of modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the portion of Germany west of the Rhine) even when they claimed such origin (i.e. Germania ?28). Yet from the time that Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, for over 300 years until the 3rd century A.D., the Germanic tribes were for the most part held at the frontiers of the empire. Not that there was ever any peace, for Rome conducted campaigns in Germany many times, and many times the German tribes raided parts of the empire. From the 3rd century, however, the Germanic tribes were too strong for the empire to contain, while they themselves were also being pressured from the east. Rome had already begun an internal decline from the peak of her strength, and so the empire began to lose the more distant provinces first, and by the 5th century, was overrun by Goths, Vandals, Alans, Alamanni, Burgundians, Franks, Saxons, Suebi and Huns. The Goths are Tacitus? Gothones (Ger. 43), whom he counted among the Suebi. The Vandals Tacitus? Vandilii (Ger. 2), also mentioned by Strabo as Vindelici (4.3.3; 4.6.8, 9). The Alans are called by the 6th century Greek historian Procopius a Gothic nation (History of the Wars, 3.3.1, 5.1.3) and allies of those Vandals with whom they invaded Spain (3.3.1). The Alamanni and Burgundians are mentioned by Procopius along with the Suebi and other German tribes (5.12.11). The terms Frank and Saxon do not describe any single German tribe, but rather they generally describe particular groups of tribes, as Tacitus had also used the term Suebi. Procopius mentions ?the Germans, who are now called Franks? (3.3.1) quite often. It is evident from Bede that many tribes which Tacitus called Suebi were Saxons, a term which Tacitus did not use, since Bede counts the Angles as Saxons, frequently using the term ?Angles or Saxons? (i.e. E.H. 1.15). Many of the Goths, Alans, Vandals, and others who invaded the empire were already Christians, although of the Arian sect, as Propocius often relates, and being so they must have received their Christianity from the east, and not from the Greeks or Romans ? who were adverse to Arianism. It shall be shown in a later part of this essay that the Huns did indeed descend from the same Scythian stock from which the other German tribes had come, except that they had ventured further east than most of the others, and had come into Europe relatively late.
                          While much more may be said concerning the movements of Germanic tribes during the final centuries of the Roman empire, here we shall focus on Britain, turning to the British church historian Bede, who wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in the 8th century A.D. Bede wrote of the ?Franks and Saxons? looting and pillaging the British sea-coast as early as the reign of the emperor Diocletian, towards the end of the 3rd century (E.H. 1.6). After Rome lost control of Britain, first by a revolt of her own soldiers, for a short time the nation was ruled by various military tyrants. Later, the British came under the constant siege of the Scots (and Bede called all of the Irish by that name) and the Picts (E.H. 1.6-15; Bede also says that the Picts had come ?from Scythia?, E.H. 1.1). Rome no longer being in any position to aid the Britons, who had made numerous appeals for help, finally a British King, in the reign of the emperor Marcian (which Bede dates as beginning in ?the 449th year of the incarnation of our Lord?), invited the ?English or Saxons? (?Anglorum sive Saxonum gens? in Bede?s Latin) into Britain. Bede says of the Saxons that: ?... being sent for of the said king into Britain, landed there in three long ships, and by the same king?s commandment is appointed to abide in the east part of the island, as to defend the country like friends, but indeed, as it proved afterward, as minded to conquer it as enemies? (E.H. 1.15, LCL ed.) Bede goes on to describe how these first Saxons in Britain, after defeating certain enemies of the Britons in a battle, and noticing the cowardice of the Britons themselves, sent word back to Germany and were soon joined by many more of their kinsmen. Bede then explains: ?Now the strangers had come from three of the more mighty nations in Germany, that is, the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes. Of the Jutes came the people of Kent and the settlers in Wight, that is the folk that hold the Isle of Wight, and they which in the province of the West Saxons are called unto this day the nation of the Jutes, right over against the Isle of Wight. Of the Saxons, that is of that region which is now called of the Old Saxons [modern Saxony], descended the East Saxons, the South Saxons and the West Saxons [of those parts of England now known as Essex, Sussex and Wessex]. Further, of the Angles, that is of that country which is called Angeln [modern Schleswig-Holstein] and from that time to this is said to stand deserted between the provinces of the Jutes [Jutland, the part of Denmark on the mainland] and the Saxons [Saxony], descendeth the East Angles, the Uplandish Angles, the Mercians and all the progeny of the Northumbrians, that is, of that people that inhabiteth the north side of the flood of Humber, and the other nations of the Angles.? Bede goes on to relate the story of the Saxon kings Hengist and Horsa, and mentions their descent from ?Woden [Oden], of whose issue the royal house of many provinces had their original? (E.H. 1:15, all brackets mine).
                          Later in his history Bede discusses a certain English preacher, Egbert, who made missionary journeys to the continent, and Bede says that he ?... by preaching of the Gospel to bring the word of God to some of those nations which had not yet heard it: and many such countries he knew to be in Germany, of whom the English [Angli] or Saxons, which now inhabit Britain, are well known to have had beginning and offspring; whereby it is that to this day they are corruptly called Garmans by the Britons that are their neighbours. Such now are the Frisons [the Frisians; Frisii in Tacitus, Ger. 34, 35], Rugins [Rugii, Ger. 43], Danes, Huns, Old Saxons, and Boructuars [Bructeri, Ger. 33] ...? (E.H. 5.9), where it is evident that not only does Bede count the Angles themselves as Saxons, stating ?English or Saxons?, but he refers to the Saxons of Germany as ?Old Saxons?. Also, the Britons knew these new inhabitants of Britain as Germans, but called them ?Garmans? instead. Bede?s Saxons must be those same tribes who, along with the Angli, Tacitus had described as Suebi, and while a district in Germany which was once inhabited by Angli evidently remained vacant for some time after their move to Britain, as Bede has told us, indeed not all of the Angli on the continent moved to Britain, as we shall see shortly from Procopius. That Saxon is a general name for a group of German tribes is also evident with Bede, since while he calls them by this name generally, aside from the Angli he also refers to other individual tribes among those who settled in Britain, namely the Gewissas or West Saxons (E.H. 2.5; 3.7; 4.15), the Grywas (E.H. 3.20; 4.6, 19), the Hwiccas (E.H. 2.2; 4.13, 23), and the Meanwaras (E.H. 4.13).
                          Procopius had mentioned little of Britain, but understandably since it was not within the scope of his intended subject. Yet being the personal secretary of Belisarius, the great Byzantine general who won many battles against the Germanic tribes during the reign of Justinian, he had the opportunity to witness and record many things, which indeed he did, in his History of the Wars (of the Byzantine Romans against the Persians, Goths of Italy and Vandals in Africa) and Anecdota (or Secret History, a scathing criticism of the emperor Justinian and his wife). On those occasions where he does mention Britain, he supports the account given by Bede. He describes how the Roman soldiers of Britain first revolted from the empire (about 407 A.D.), and how Britain was never recovered by Rome, ?but it remained from that time on under tyrants? (Hist. 3.2.31, 38). At one point Belisarius, negotiating with the Goths who invaded Italy, offered to ?permit the Goths to have the whole of Britain? in return for giving up Sicily (Hist. 6.6.28), even though the empire did not even possess Britain at the time. Procopius does not mention the Saxon invasions of Britain, but referring to his own time says only that it is inhabited by barbarians (Anec. 19.13).
                          Procopius described an ?island?, Thule, ?exceedingly large ... more than ten times greater than Britain. And it lies far distant from it toward the north. On this island the land is for the most part barren, but in the inhabited country thirteen very numerous nations are settled; and there are kings over each nation? (Hist. 6.15.4-5). Naming some of the tribes of Thule, Procopius relates fantastic stories about some of them, as the Greek writers always heard and recorded such tales about the peoples who lived on the fringes of their own world. Yet Procopius also spoke of the Eruli, a tribe which had apparently adopted the Arian form of Christianity (Hist. 4.14.12), from which many had fought for the Romans and whom Procopius must have been quite familiar with, and describes how a great number of this tribe (after losing a fight with the Lombards) had left Germany to settle in Thule (Hist. 6.15.1. ff.). While there is much speculation concerning Thule, from the time of Pytheas who seems to have been the first to record the name as that of a place in the northern ocean, here Procopius certainly seems to be describing Norway. Later, in the 8th through the 11th centuries, parts of Britain were invaded and settled by Norsemen and Danes.
                          Procopius describes another island which he calls Brittia ? but which is certainly not Britain ? and which is ?towards the rear of Gaul, that side namely which faces the ocean, being, that is, to the north of both Spain and Britain? (Hist. 8.20.5), and he seems to be describing Denmark, which from the sea may certainly be perceived as an island. He then says: ?The island of Brittia is inhabited by three very numerous nations, each one having a king over it. And the names of these nations are Angili, Frissones, and Brittones, the last being named from the island itself. And so great appears to be the population of these nations that every year they emigrate thence in large companies with their women and children and go to the land of the Franks [which at the time included large portions of both modern France and Germany]. And the Franks allow them to settle in the part of their land which appears to be more deserted, and by this means they say they are winning over the island. Thus it actually happened that not long ago the king of the Franks, in sending some of his intimates on an embassy to the Emperor Justinian in Byzantium, sent with them some of the Angili, thus seeking to establish his claim that this island was ruled by him. Such then are the facts relating to the island that is called Brittia? (Hist. 8.20.6-10, brackets mine). Now while this may seem to be a quite obfuscated account of some of the movements of the Germanic tribes which took place in the north at the time, the Frissones must be the Frisons of Bede, the Frisii of Tacitus? Germania, (34, 35), and the Angili must be Tacitus? and Bede?s Anglii, the Angles. While the Frisii have the country which is named for them Friesland, now a district in the north of the Netherlands, there is certainly much evidence of Angles who did not move to Britain ? as we see here from Procopius ? but rather remained in Germany. Indeed, the German surnames Engler, Englert and Engles, among others, are all surnames of the Angles in Germany, who also gave their name to places such as Engelberg in Switzerland, Engelsberg of which there are two such towns in Bavaria, Engelskirchen northeast of Cologne in Westphalia, Engelhartszell in Austria, Engel?y in Norway, and Ingelheim in the Rhineland, along with many other like placenames.
                          Bede used ?Saxony? as a name for Saxon Britain (in his Lives of the Abbots, 19). Yet the ?Old? Saxony which he often referred to is today found in the modern German states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Yet it may be determined from this and previous portions of this essay, that the German tribes of Saxony are indeed akin to and of like origin with their neighbors, those of the German regions of Bavaria, Swabia, the Rhineland, Franconia, Hesse and Thuringia, along with the other portions of central and southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the south, the German regions in Italy (primarily Lombardy and the Tyrol), and also with those Germans of Pomerania, Brandenberg and the former states of Prussia to the east. Likewise, the Scandinavian peoples, the Picts of Scotland and other tribes of the original Britons, and the Germanic people of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands are all kin to both Anglo-Saxons and Germans. While the Slavic peoples pressed upon the German tribes from the east, and there are Slavs found among the Germans of today, through the practice of slavery, the mercantile trade, and by other means, people of Slavic lineage also exist among the English. And while the English in the early 1900?s slandered the Germans with the name of ?Huns?, it is not at all true that the Germans are Huns, although both groups certainly descended from the Scythians. Rather, the English themselves are Germans indeed, and no amount of propaganda ? which in actuality emanates from the devious minds of the internationalist financial community in order to control nations for their own purposes ? can ever separate the Englishman from the German blood which shall ever flow through his veins. Those Englishmen who deny their own heritage and origin are indeed guilty of hating their own brethren! For among the Saxon Chronicles of the ancient English kings are found many of the same ancient Germanic poems, such as the Voluspa, which are known to have been sung among Norsemen, Englishmen and Germans alike in the most ancient times.
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