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Archiver > HERBARZ > 2001-05 > 0988996343


From: "Daniel MacGregor" <>
Subject: Re: Celestial Horse statue in Lodz
Date: Fri, 04 May 2001 12:12:23 -0500


This is going over old ground but, what the heck.

We know "tamgas" were used by the Sarmatian tribes who inhabited the Black
Sea steppes just south of the original Slavic homeland until the westward
movement of the Huns, about the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.

We know some of the Sarmatians, the Alans, travel west with the Goths and
Vandals. Archaeological evidence of a Sarmatian presence exists in France
and Spain.

Arnold Toynbee, in "Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his world," makes note
of the Iranian origins of the Serbs and Croats. At least one Yugoslav
historian I have read includes the Slovenes among these Slavicized Iranians.

Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, in his magnum opus on human genetics, places the
otherwise linguistically distantly related Poles and Hungarians on the same
branch of the human family tree, with the Russians (and I assume he includes
the Ukrainians and Belarussians in their number) as the next-of-kin of the
Poles and Hungarians. The genetic ancestry all three have in common is most
likely to be either Slavic or Sarmatian or both.

Less likely, but by no means ruled out, would be a common Hunnic ancestry,
remembering the Huns renamed themselves Bulgars, and that the Danubian and
Onogur Bulgars played roles in the establishment of the Bulgarian and
Hungarian/Magyar states.

Although I have (unfortunately) not kept earlier Emails on the subject, my
impressions of earlier exchanges of the subject is that the Poles (and
through them, the Lithuanians) happened to pick up on "tamgas" long after
the Sarmatians would have passed from human memory, and that their having
done this is a "fortuitous happenstance," as a more wordy generation would
have had it.

Given the absence of written records in any of the East Central European
countries before about 1000 A.D., or even oral records, like the sagas of
the Vikings, wouldn't the following make sense:

1) that in the course of the Hunnic intrusion into Europe, fugitive
Sarmatian horsemen made contact with Slavic tribes, among them the ancestors
of the Poles,

2) that, like the later Vikings in Russia, these horsemen became Slavicized,

3) that, by virtue of their horsemanship, they were able to constitute
themselves as the Slavic "ruling elite," so that

4) when it came time to adopt heraldry, the szlachta simply placed these
"tamgas" on their shields because they were something they and their
ancestors had been using all along?

(Admittedly, such a theory would be strengthened if it had been a common
heraldic practice to the Magyars and Russians in addition to the Poles.)

Daniel MacGregor

>From: "Leon Stevens" <>
>To:
>Subject: Re: Celestial Horse statue in Lodz
>Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 11:01:42 -0400
>
>Most Polish-Lithuanian charges originated in abstract property markings
>("tamgas"), which fact lends our heraldry its unique character. Many
>became pictographic, partly pictographic, or replaced by unrelated
>pictographs.


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