Scythian Culture

[deci belle]

Anybody familiar with these people (aside from google searches and Nat'l Geographic?

[Apech]

Do you mean Scythian? ... not that I know anything about them ... but I think they lived in what is not Iran ... horses, nomads that kind of thing.

[deci belle]

[Apech]

Hi,

 

I meant what is 'now Iran' ... not 'not Iran' BTW ... rubbish typing as usual.

 

Something in the back of mind says gold jewelry ... or was that the Thracians ... ??? I'm going to have to google ... got any links about those graves?

[deci belle]

No Apech, I sorry— What little I've found is from reading Nat'l Geo, then the museum exhibit— and a bit of a History Channel program I stumbled on a few days ago. I've been so inspired by the thought of this culture that I've wanted to name a band Steppe Sisters for years~ which I'd just mentioned that fact on another thread!!

 

But I'm going to look too …I've never been much of a web-searcher though… now only if I4L got hot on this~ heehee!!

 

(ed note: added part about the band name)

Edited November 14, 2011 by deci belle

[doc benway]

The Scythians lived in what is now the area referred to as Tuva.

Present day Tuvans, however, are not descendants of the Scythians.

I do know that there have been some impressive finds of gold in the tombs of the Scythian kings.

That's about all I know.

I'm a fan of Tuvan music, that's how I've heard of this.

[deci belle]

Yes, there are currently some hot Tuvan acts!! I heard an interview on the radio in the last couple years.

 

I've just started searching "Scythian thought".

 

I'm reading this now:

Scythian and Spartan Analogies in Herodotos’ Representation

Rites of initiation and Kinship Groups by George Hinge

 

The transsexual diviners called Enarees (Hdt. 1.105.4, 4.67.2) or Anarieis (Hipp., Aer. 22.1) are not a separate class, but isolated gifted individuals.

 

Thus, Aristotle ascribes the effeminacy disease of the Enarees to the Scythian kings (Arist., Eth.Nic. 7.8, 1150b)

 

"The common origin of the Indo-European languages is an undeniable fact, and language is not only about vocabulary and grammar, but also about formulating the world. In the Indo-European grammar of thought, the tripartite structure was but a brick, which eventually led to analogous structures in similar daughter cultures. The Greeks and the Scythians have inherited and developed an analogous mythic-ideological grammar. The Scythian myths and rites in the Histories of Herodotos originate from Scythian sources, but the actual realisation of the single myth has been formulated on the basis of the syntax of Greek mythology."

 

My link

 

In this document, the Hungarian author (by virtue of which it is evident he has had to cut through a lot of cultural detritus in an attempt to focus his research) shows that Scythian and Sumerian language is related.

 

I love this~

 

Rudolf Dud�s wrote:

The Amazon genetic research has proven that the Amazons were from Central Asia, and even a direct descendant has been found of an Amazon queen found in a kurgan burial among the Turks in Mongolia, by a female American archeologist. This was quite a huge discovery, but was quickly covered up afterwards, and she lost her monetary support for further work.

 

George Hinge's piece mentioned records of Scythian males going out to live in the proximity of Amazon encampments and eventually pairing off with them.

 

I guess this is where I didn't know I was headed— haha!!

My link

 

 

However in this case, the myth of the Amazons does have some historical basis. At the end of the 19th century, Russian archaeologists began to excavate the graves of ancient women warriors in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Hundreds of these graves of warrior women are all affiliated with the various Scythian tribes; especially the Saka, Sarmatian, Sauromatian, and Pazyryk cultures, extending from Transylvania in the west (where the Scythians had gold mines beginning in the 600s BC) to Mongolia in the east. The Scythians were an Indo-Iranian people (near cousins to the ancient Celts and Germans to their west), fierce warriors of the Russian steppes who mainly led a nomadic, autonomous lifestyle. They buried their dead in elaborate underground tombs (often encoffined in entire tree trunks), with lavish grave goods of gold and silver jewelry, food, horses (often dressed in felt antlers as stags), armor and weaponry, eating utensils, ritual paraphernalia, and sometimes pounds of marijuana to smoke for eternity.

 

My link

 

Cathryn Platine writes:

Looking at timelines and migrations what literally jumps out at you, if you are looking, is that Mother Goddess spread from ancient Anatolia and the banks of the Caspian Sea throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean and all the way to India all in the same period of time as the ending of the ancient neo-lithic cultures of Anatolia. When this mass migration started, we then started seeing the appearance of walled cities as conflicts arose between those migrating and those already in the areas. It is the period between 10,000 BCE and 4000 BCE that was the model for the "peaceful matriarchal civilizations" of the modern Dianics......except it wasn't a matriarchy and the conflicts didn't start because of the introduction of patriarchal thought. It was simply a matter of people competing for increasingly less resources as a result of weather forced migration.

 

ed note: just adding stuff that I like— but if I don't stop right now, I'm going to become I4L's evil twin!!

Edited November 15, 2011 by deci belle

[Birch]

http://www.secrethistoryoftheworld.com/

 

if I recall, it mentions all the above and more^TM

Especially for I4L, and also because it is pretty interesting

 

[deci belle]

Yay!❤ Thanks, -K-!!

[Dainin]

Hi deci belle,

 

You might want to check out the work of Allen Pittman, who has been working on recreating and combining historical Eastern and Western martial and health systems for quite some time.

 

Allen Pittman: Physical Training Traditions

 

 

The Scythian Way:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwNeCcquxTo

[deci belle]

Eh …I kinda shy away from zoze sings Dainin, but I doo doo that other high mountain old school Scythian thing, you know… climb up icy, rocky, snowy slopes and turn around and slide back down (if there is enough of the fluffy stuff in between the steep and not fluffy stuff. I don't know what they called it then but now it's called alpinism! heehee!!

 

Back to the salt mines… this is a very good source!

Eurasian Warrior Women and Priestesses; Petroglyphic, Funerary, and Textual Evidence for Women of High Status by Jeannine Davis-Kimball

Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads

 

My link

 

Back to Bactria: The Tillya Tepe Warrior-Priestesses

The manifestation of the powerful Mistress of Animals,[66] the female riding sidesaddle on a feline, returns to Bactria richly emblazoned in gold, and now in association with several nomadic Yüeh chih warrior priestesses. This came about following a series of historical events.

 

In western China, the powerful nomadic Hsiung-nu confederacy had maintained such severe military pressure in central China that the Chinese were forced to construct the Great Wall. Turning their interests elsewhere, the Hsiung nu advanced upon the five tribes of the Yüeh-chih confederacy, who were nomadizing in pastures adjacent to the Silk Roads in western China. The Yüeh-chih in turn retreated arriving in Bactria (northern Afghanistan) along the Oxus River ca. 135 BCE where they subjugated the local inhabitants. About a century later (ca. 35 BCE) the confederacy came under the domination of a single chieftain, who founded the widespread Kushan Empire that fostered the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia.[67] The early images of Kushan Buddhism reveal the nomadic influence in this religion: Bodhisattvas and deities wear the accouterments of the nomadic costume as worn by priestesses and Enareis, i.e., long skirts, large headdresses, and great strands of beads or torques. (Figure 13)[68]

 

In northern Afghanistan during the seasons of 1978-79, Viktor Sarinidi of the Soviet Institute of Archaeology, in conjunction with archaeologists from Afghanistan, excavated at Tillya Tepe (Gold Mound) located along the Amu Darya (known as the Oxus River in ancient times). Tillya Tepe had seen numerous cultures and people pass through since the initial construction more than 3000 years ago. Its lowest layer had been a fire temple with a columned hall and fortified towers, most likely associated with Zoroastrianism. Constructed before 1000 BCE, it continued in use until it was laid waste, then magnificently rebuilt in the middle of the first millennium BCE. Not long afterward a fire demolished the structure so that when Alexander the Great marched through ca. 328 BCE, he found only ruins.[69] A couple of centuries later when the Yüeh-chih confederacy controlled this territory—and it may well have been the consolidating chieftain that gave Tillya Tepe its new role—it became the final resting place for the most prestigious of Yüeh-chih religious leaders.[70]

 

Shamanism and Mythology

Beginning in the Bronze Age and continuing through the Early Iron Age, Sarmatian and Saka nomads came into contact, interacted, and developed symbiotic relationships with semi-sedentary tribes in the forest-steppes to the north, such as the Hansi-Mansi.[93] Practicing exogamy, interracial marriages resulted between the Asiatics, Mongolians, and Caucasoids. Still today, some Kazaks (roughly an admixture of 33% Caucasoid and 67% Mongoloid)[94] have blonde or red hair, freckly skin, and light colored eyes. Many Mongols of the Oriat tribe, who live in the western Mongolian Uvs aimag, have blue or green eyes and yellowish brown hair.[95] As social and religious customs are transmitted especially through the female, it may be possible to extrapolate from recorded historical sources additional insight into the religious and cultic modes of Early Nomads as they affected the women of the tribes.

 

Buryat Mongols have preserved a much more pristine version of ancient Mongolian mythology in their folklore while the orally transmitted Western Buryats epics conserve valuable information about the pre-Lamaist Mongolian religion.[100] Mongolian mythology, as found among the Western Buryats, is matriarchal. The creator of the earth is female, and her daughters are the ancestress of all of the deities of the Mongolian pantheon. The culture hero of the Buryats, Bukhe Beligte, is significant in his function not because of his being the son of the syncretistic god Hormasta, but rather for being the son of the sun goddess Naran Gookhon. In many Buryat epics the heroes are women, the most prominent of them being the decidedly Amazon-like Alma Mergen, daughter of the ruler of the water spirits, who is both a warrior woman as well as a shaman.[101] Thus she is the precursor of warrior-priestesses.

 

From "the Ancient Eurasians" section of a large, complex site called http://www.imninalu.net/

 

My link

 

In fact, the most cherished British myth is not British at all, and is not Anglo-Saxon either: the Legend of the Knights of the Round Table, is Sarmatian. The probable origin of this myth in Britain is to be found in a Yazyg contingent that the Romans distributed in Northumbria to guard the frontier from Pict invaders. Their general was called Artorius, who may be identified with the legendary king Arthur. All the other elements of the legend are Sarmatic, and belong to similar myths among Hungarians, Ossetians and other peoples that keep the ancient Sarmatian traditions in their own cultural heritage. Herodotus mentions the sword worship in connection with the Scythians; the magic atmosphere surrounding the "sword in the stone" is found in the ancient Anatolian traditions as well as among the Huns and Magyars, and the name Excalibur is related to the Sarmatian iron forgers; also the name of king Pendragon, the lady of the lake, magicians and sorcerers, the chalice hovering in the air and all the main elements of the Arthurian legend belong to the Sarmatian mythology. It was after the introduction of Christianity in Great Britain that the legend was adopted and adapted according to the patterns of Medieval British society as their own myth of origins.

 

In Summary

Concerning the peoples here defined as Eurasians, they have left a genetic legacy in most of present-day European nations, though hardly a cultural or linguistic heritage - with the exception of Hungary. Archaeological findings, external written records and some toponyms are the main or sometimes the only witnesses of their presence. As well as Scythians and Sarmatians, the largest number of them have been Slavicized (Bulgars, Croatians, etc.), others have been Germanized (like the Juts), Romanized (peoples settled in present-day Romania), or were assimilated within the Hungarian nationality. In the Caucasus area, tribes of the same peoples have evolved into a more defined Iranic identity (Ossetians) or else a Turkic ethnicity.

Therefore, it is still difficult to define which was their original culture and language; different schools propose controversial theories in opposition to each other: the Iranic on one side and the Turkic on the other. As it has been said in the introduction of this chapter, they have been gathered under conventional definitions in different periods of history, and since Turks appeared long after they existed, the Iranic background is more plausible. Notwithstanding, an accurate research credits the Mesopotamian-Anatolian origin for most of these peoples, and perhaps Iranic for some of them.

 

(ed note: more links, etc)

Edited November 16, 2011 by deci belle

[taooneusa]

The Universal White Brotherhood

 

The pre-existing groups like Sarmoung and Great White Brotherhood retained a ... Kelts and Iberian/Basque and Berbers are part of the Phoenician ''Brotherhood''

 

on wiki

The Sarmoung Brotherhood was an alleged esoteric Sufi brotherhood based in Asia. The reputed existence of the brotherhood was brought to light in the writings of George Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher. Some contemporary Sufi-related sources also claim to have made contact with the group although the earliest and primary source is Gurdjieff himself, leading some scholarship to conclude the group was merely a fictional teaching device

 

Gurdjeif is Historically linked by his book "Beelzebubs Tales" mention of a bone (scroll) inscription that re-lit human evolutionary potential after it's finding in a dessert.

 

This symbol has been adopted by the Romans and the nazis in its linear Form, as a sign of brute force and modern barbarity. The Emperor Augusto took the emblem from the Pyrenees to Rome as a symbol of false triumph over the Basque troops. The Emperor Constantino christianized the symbol identifying it with the Cross of Calvary. The nazis misused it to promote there totalitarian party.

 

Mr. Mujica believes that the Lauburu symbolizes mankind, made up of four elements: Form, Life, Sensibility and Conscience.

 

• Form: symbolizes a passive quality and serves as a vessel for the other three; philosophically they are called Maria, Mari, Maya and Miriam. It is Mother Nature in a solid Form. Form serves as a tool.
• Life: symbolizes strength or the spirit that we possess, also known as Iehova.
• Sensibility: symbolizes Christ and in our evolutionary state it symbolizes love and human equilibrium. Sensibility guides us towards strength which acts through wishes and the conscience tells the individual how one should behave to achieve those wishes or emotions.
• Conscience: symbolizes the Father.

The four basic human elements relate to the four scientific elements: solid, liquid, gas and radiant. Having outlined these two types of elements, Mr. Mujica suggests that the Lauburu is a symbolic expression of these elements.

Edited November 16, 2011 by taooneusa

[deci belle]

[deci belle]

[taooneusa]

what are you looking for in Scythian culture?

I assumed since this is a taoist site and your title includes

China it must have something to do with alchemy/internal development?

 

the place where is all began?

 

When I write "all began" I am referring to this age, not the beginnings of the

prior five.

 

.what

 

 

Edited November 16, 2011 by taooneusa

[taooneusa]

..

Edited November 16, 2011 by taooneusa

[deci belle]

taooneusa said:

Posted Today, 12:02 AM

what are you looking for in Scythian culture?

I assumed since this is a taoist site and your title includes

China it must have something to do with alchemy/internal development?

 

No taoone~ just interested in the dawns of proto-taoist realities, because I love the most ancient elements I can get my paws on!! heehee!!❤ I've had my fill of Complete Reality taoism. It's not hard to find or hard to do. Swallowing the gold pill and managing endless transformations in ordinary affairs is my day-job.

 

Maybe I should admit that I actually have an academic degree from the University of California. I quit my major in Dance and studied under a former Berkeley machinist who studied under Mao Tse Tung's tutor. My program was called Comparative Cultures. My degree is in Social Science, not the Humanities.

 

"Scythians" are an interesting conglomerate trending over a period of thousands of years. The "golden age" of Scythians was after they had been absorbed by yet another nomadic group. The name was coined by the famous Greek cronicler, so the name just seems to pop up everywhere— as you have also illustrated.! People (long-dead Semitologists) and their spawn have latched onto it ever since. Even if the real Scythians were accountable in terms of a place and time, they didn't start there and certainly didn't end there. What is represented in a name is Itself an intangible potential in conventional reality. As in Complete Reality, there cannot be said to be a definite origination. I have no desire to find a thing to hang on to. I'm interested in just finding out likely stories about their possible incipient sources.

 

So that's why I can't be complacent about where it supposedly started~ I say, ok— but where and who did they come from? I'm just interested in the mystery of it all, so I don't have or need anything tangible to "lock onto". The first thing that came out of my old university Professor's mouth was "History is a likely story". I don't have anything invested in the view that X started here and Y is the result. Reality isn't linear. Academicians have an occupation. They have to argue for a living, and subsequent careerist academicians stand on each other's coat-tails for money and reputation and security. I don't have to believe, I only travel the path returning to beginningless incipience— everything is the same for me in this regard. When one knows the flavor of incipience, one rests in perpetuity.

 

If you take an arbitrary distance, and divide it— and keep dividing it, you'll never get to the end. And since my livelyhood doesn't depend on defending academic or even sensational views, I don't take up the notion of what is the other side of "here"— much less what's in between. Since it is endless divisions on one hand and beginningless incipience on the other, I just follow my curiosity back in time, deducing the most likely story as I go. I'm not even saying that it had to have started in Africa, but it seems likely. Like I said before, it seems any claims as to where it started, might be dependent more on when than who. The culture of Nomadism is an immense convoluted human phenomena beyond the ages of sedentary agriculture and habitation. It is still being practiced, at least in terms of seasonal survival— but some of the cultural aspects are being preserved as well.

 

So why am I interested in the proto-shamanic cultures that inhabited the vast areas north of the greatest mountain chain on this planet all the way to Siberia? Even the Alchemic classics state that the celestial court is in the Kun-lun Mountains to the west. Taoism owes its incipience to these shamanic roots. Because it's a mystery. It's bleak and desolate— how can anyone ever find out? The answer is never— and that's romantic!!❤

 

(ed note: typo in the 2nd paragraph and wrote Sinologist instead of Semitologist in the 3rd)

Edited November 17, 2011 by deci belle

[deci belle]

[al.]

[deci belle]

Oh, thank you so much, al!!❤

[三江源]

.

Edited March 23, 2015 by 三江源