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Archiver > HERBARZ > 2001-03 > 0984758577


From: "Leon Stevens" <>
Subject: Re: Gear at Grunwald
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:02:57 -0500


Religious terminology and terms of rulership do not indicate hegemony. Certainly Christianity in the Roman world and Judaism among the Kazars didn't come to predominate through any hegemony. There is no evidence of any cultural Gothic hegemony over the Slavs. The Goths established an early colony at the mouth of the Vistula, then migrated south, to reach the Black Sea Coast at about 250 AD. No sooner had the Bible been translated into their language, than they became extinct. Nor was there any Frankish hegemony in Great Moravia. After all, Saints Cyril and Methodius translated the Bible into SLAVONIC so that the Moravian king could read it. Loan words were borrowed from medieval High and Middle High German. In all Slavic languages, the term for "Germans" is "Niemcy" ("mutes") because the Slavs believed that Germanic tribes were incapable of speech, and merely made meaningless vocalizations. This doesn't sound like Germanic cultural hegemony to me. As for all the a!
ncient tribes and migrations, historians identify and describe these variously according to their personal agenda and/or their degree of faith in questionable Greek and Roman writings. The fluid and unstable nature of Asian tribes, their frequent movements and collisions, led to a fairly homogenous Asian nomadic culture, so that even today archaeologists quarrel over the identities of people discovered in burial pits and mounds, or the identities of the owners of objects found scattered throughout the steppes. What is relevant to the nature of early Polish armor and weaponry, is the form and function of Asian arms, and not necessarily the exact identities of the numerous Asian ethnic groups which engulfed and penetrated Slavdom.

>>> <> 03/15/01 08:32AM >>>
Yes, but th borrowings belong to a period when Sarmatians and Slavs
were neighbours and by their nature - lordship and religion - are
taken by some to an iranian hegemony. There were also strong germanic
and baltic influences on early proto-slavic; there was of course no
Polish language at this early stage.
Gothic and Hunnic hegemonies would come after the expulsion of the
iranian Scythians and Sarmatians from the steppe and forest-steppe
zones.
Far from assuming a vacuum until the "Germans arrived on the scene"
one would have to ignore these later major cultures moving through and
living on top of any presumed slavic "urheimat":. Not only that but
one would have to ignore the fact that, from their earliest days, the
slavs were neighbours of their germanic indo-european cousins.
Pomeranian slavs raided Scandinavia from until their christianisation
and "vikings" settled at the mouth of the Vistula and among the slavs
of the future Russia. In the Carolingian period, the empire of Great
Moravia, founded by the Frank, Samo extended over southern Poland.
Waldemar Great of Denmark conquered and annexed to Denmark for a while
the slav south coast of the Baltic.
Slavic and Iranian are both held to belong to the so-called satem
group of indo-european languages. That is, those that softemn the
first consonant - most typically in the word for a hundred. This
division, into Centum and Satem groups is no longer fashionable -
though not of course wrong for that reason. If the association is
significant, it belongs to a period of indo-european unity, perhaps
3,000 years b.c..
I can recommend, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, by J.P. Mallory
(ISBN 0-500-27616-1) to anyone interested in the fascinating subject
of indo-european philology.
Regards,
John (Rohde).
On Tue, 13 Mar 2001 11:23:41 -0500, you wrote:


The Polish language itself contains borrowings from Indo-Iranian
languages, such as "Bog," "Pan," and other terms, and pre-Christian
Slavic religious images show Indo-Iranian influence extending to what
is now eastern Germany. Polish heraldic charges closely resemble
those of ancient Sarmatian and of other eastern peoples. Why should
we assume that there was a vacuum of arms and other aspects of Eastern
culture until Germans arrived on the scene?


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