Great Scythia and the Middle East
The ancient civilizations of the Middle East - Egypt, Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria and others, are still given too much importance. Perhaps only Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome have received (and are receiving) no less attention. As a result, people get a distorted picture stories humanity, when other regions of the planet remain in the minds of "unknown lands". It is clear that the Near East was highly cultured in antiquity. It must also be remembered that its current population has almost nothing to do with the ancient peoples who lived there and left such a rich heritage. However, to attribute to this region all the main achievements of mankind is not worth it.
By the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, a sufficient amount of information had been accumulated, since this region was subjected to the most careful study by the scientific community, to conclude that the civilizations of the Middle East in the past have the strongest “gaps” in cultural continuity. And to understand that creative impulses for the restoration of collapsed states (at a new level) and the construction of new formations were received from outside.
In particular, the culture of agriculture in the Middle East was not local, but came from outside in 8 thousand BC. e. The "gap" in cultures is huge, it was a real revolution. The semi-wild clans have just been engaged in gathering and hunting, and suddenly cities (proto-cities) with a population of several thousand people appear, whose inhabitants have the skills to cultivate up to 14 types of cereals and livestock breeding technologies. These cities include present-day Jericho in Palestine and Chatal Uyuk (Chatal Huyuk) in southern Anatolia. So, according to the British archaeologist James Mellart, the Neolithic cultures of Anatolia marked the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry, as well as the cult of the Mother Goddess - the basis of our civilization (Mellart J. The most ancient civilizations of the Middle East). Scientists called this event the "Neolithic Revolution" - there was a transition of human communities from a primitive economy of hunters and gatherers to a productive economy based on agriculture and animal husbandry.
Another gap that the Near Eastern cultures experienced was noted in 5 BC. e. Many old settlements - proto-cities perished, and for almost a thousand years the region sank to a more primitive level of development. At the end of 4 thousand BC. e. people of a different anthropological type than before are penetrating the region and bringing with them the technologies of the “Bronze Age”. The era of the famous civilizations of the Ancient World is already beginning, which, according to the majority, laid the foundations of modern human civilization.
The Sumerians in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates were not the first inhabitants. They themselves believed that they came to this place from the "island of Dilmun." There is no way to find out what kind of island it was. The scientific world has generated several versions on this score. However, it is obvious that this was a southern "island", the Sumerians were people with clearly expressed Negroid features. But not all Sumerians were "southerners". The upper castes of the Sumerian city-states belonged to the "Nordic" (Indo-European) type. In the Sumerian royal burial grounds, people are found clearly of a different race than the bulk of the population. Apparently, we are witnessing a situation that has been preserved in India: the Sumerian aristocracy, the high priesthood and the bulk of the population correlated with each other, like the highest and lowest castes-varnas in India of the Aryan period. In addition, similarities were found between the objects of the material culture of Sumer and the steppes of Southern Russia. In particular, images of wagons found in the royal tombs of 3 thousand BC. e. similar to the chariots of the southern Russian steppes. Moreover, in the southern Russian steppes, these chariots appeared 2 thousand years earlier, which rejects the hypothesis that the “northern barbarians” borrowed the advanced experience of the “southerners”. E. Tseren in his work "Bible Hills" reports another interesting fact: a striking similarity was found between the tombs of the kings in Ur and some cemeteries in Greece, the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula and in southern Russia. Similar forms of construction - vaulted and domed tombs - were characteristic of Greece and South Russia.
Thus, we find in Sumer traces of the influence of northern civilization - the Aryan (Indo-European) racial type of aristocracy, Aryan chariots, building techniques. Another example of the influence of the northern tradition is the sled. The Sumerians did not go to them (there was no snow), but they sent their rulers on their last journey. It was a national tradition of the Sumerian culture - in the sleigh of the kings of Ur decorated with gold and silver, lapis lazuli, with images of the heads of lions and bulls, they sent the kings of Ur on their last journey. It is interesting that this custom was preserved in Rus' (the direct successor of the Aryan, Scythian-Sarmatian civilization) until the Middle Ages. Grand Duke Vladimir Monomakh (1053-1125), feeling the approach of death, writes in his "Instruction": "Sitting already on a sleigh ...", in the sense of "preparing for death." And here is what the Czech researcher Lubor Niederle reports in Slavic Antiquities: “In Russian sources, according to which this custom is the only one known to us, there are several reports that the bodies of the deceased princes Vladimir, Boris, Gleb, Yaroslav, Mikhail, Svyatopolk (X - XII centuries), whether they were buried in winter or summer, they were brought to the burial place on a sleigh. In addition, people who were expecting their imminent death prepared sledges for their burial, and the old Russian expression "to sit on a sleigh" meant the same as "to be before death." This tradition continued for a long time in Russia and its south. This custom was also noted in other Slavic regions - in the Carpathians, in Slovakia, Poland and Serbia.
It is interesting that we also find sledges in ancient Egypt (as well as bronze swords of the northern type, dating back to the early history of Egypt). On the eastern side of the burial chamber of the Egyptian ruler Tutankhamun, a funeral procession is shown. The body of the pharaoh lies in a sarcophagus on a stretcher with images of lions; and the sarcophagus itself stands in the ark, which people drag on sledges to the tomb. As you know, snow in Egypt is an anomaly. They could not invent such an object as a sleigh in Egypt on their own. This item, which is of such importance for the burial of the king, was brought from outside. Moreover, representatives of the upper classes, the aristocracy. This is how the continuity develops between the civilization of the North (Aryans - Scythians and Rus-Slavs) and Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt.
In the steppes of southern Russia, already in the middle of the III millennium BC. e. there was a developed arable, and, moreover, irrigated agriculture (at that time, the Sumerians still preferred hoe agriculture). Zehren's Biblical Hills poses the question: "Didn't the Sumerians learn the art of building canals and turning swampy lowlands into fertile land on the vast plains that stretch from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea?" The same question can be raised in relation to another ancient civilization of the Middle East - Egypt. Egyptian civilization was based economically precisely on artificial irrigation. The valley of the great river Nile in 5 thousand BC. e. represented literally "empty space". Rare families of hunters and fishermen roamed in the local swampy lowlands. However, by the end of this millennium there is a sharp qualitative breakthrough in the spiritual and material culture of this region. The rapid development of irrigation agriculture begins. And after a thousand and a half years in the Nile Valley, we already see the civilization that we are shown in many works of art and documentary works, with huge pyramids and temples. Usually such a heyday is preceded by centuries and millennia of prehistory, which create the basis for civilization. We do not observe this, there is no “preface”. From miserable few fishermen and a magnificent civilization, it is only a “step” in historical terms. Not in vain, against this background, a lot of “researchers” appeared who enthusiastically unearth “traces” of alien influence, a different mind.
In the first architectural monumental buildings of Egypt, for example, in the temple at the tomb of Djoser (considered the first pyramid in Ancient Egypt), an imitation of stone wooden pillars and a vaulted roof was found (in fact, this is the prototype of the Greek hall and the Christian basilica, which will appear in the West only after 3 thousand years). The prototype for this temple, in ancient Egypt before Djoser, there are simply no such buildings, they are the so-called. "pillar houses", a favorite type of dwelling in the expanses of continental Eurasia. This type of dwelling has been known since ancient times of the Yamnaya culture of South Russia - this is an archaeological culture of the late Copper Age - early Bronze Age (3600-2300 BC), it occupied the territory from the Southern Urals in the east to the Dniester in the west, from the North Caucasus in the south to the Middle Volga region in the north. With the dwellings of the cultures of the Middle East, where they do not know winter, these houses have nothing in common. Therefore, it is not surprising that buildings of this type appear in Egypt only at the "beginning" of its history, and then disappear.
There is every reason to believe that the civilizations of Sumer and Egypt received an "energy push" from the North, from the southern Russian steppes, through the Caucasus (most often the east, along the coast of the Caspian Sea) and Asia Minor. Migration of this type was recorded at a later time - the movement of the Cimmerians and Scythians to the Middle East, they could have been earlier. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain the emergence of the traditions of spiritual and material culture, which are typical of the civilization of the North, in the Middle East. They appeared with groups of settlers who brought their cultural traditions, advanced technologies at that time.
Obviously, the impact was not one-sided. The southerners quickly mastered advanced technologies, in the south they flourished, took on pretentious forms and tried to influence the northern civilization (primarily military). The campaign of the Persian ruler Darius in 512 BC. e. against Great Scythia was far from the first invasion from the South. There is evidence that even Ancient Egypt waged wars with Scythia. A number of ancient authors report on the wars that Pharaoh Sesostris waged with the Scythians. Several Egyptian pharaohs Senusrets are known under this name - there were three of them, their reign belongs to the Middle Kingdom, when Egypt reached the peak of its power. Sources report that the outcome of the wars was so successful for Egypt that the pharaoh's army invaded the Northern Black Sea region.
The Scythian element in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine in the 2nd millennium BC. e.
Sources report that in the 17-16 centuries. BC e. Egypt and Mesopotamia were captured by a certain people who had a cavalry army. In Babylon they were called "Kassites", in Assyria - "Mitannians", in Egypt - "Hyksos". Sources do not report the origin of these peoples. One thing is clear - they came to the Middle East from outside, becoming another wave of immigrants. To understand the origin of these "mysterious" horsemen, it is enough to remember that at that time only the Indo-Europeans (Aryans), who lived in the vastness of Great Scythia, had developed horse-drawn transport.
The Indo-European origin of these warriors can be understood by a number of other signs. In particular, in the agreements of the state of Mitanni (it was founded by "horsemen" in the territory of Northern Mesopotamia and adjacent regions) with the Hittite kingdom (another state of the Indo-Europeans, in Asia Minor), dating back to the 14th century BC. e., the names of the gods of the Aryan pantheon are mentioned: Mitra, Indra, Varuna, Nasatya. Varuna is the god-father, creator and omnipotent; Mithra - the god-son, the god of the day and the sun; Indra - thunderer, conqueror of evil; the name Nasatya is associated with the cult of the divine twin horsemen, charioteers Ashvins (symbolizing dawn and sunset). The Kassite riders, who in 1595. BC e. established control over Babylon and ruled it in the XVI-XII centuries. BC. (in the XV century BC, the Kassites subjugate southern Mesopotamia), the sun god Surios was known - the Vedic Surya.
Some researchers of this period in the history of the region, for example T. Barrow, came to the conclusion that the language of the Mitanni population was the same as that of the Indo-Aryans. However, it is not customary to develop this topic, because this is a question related to Big Politics, the struggle that is going on for the planet. Western historians really do not want to admit the fact that the ancestral home of the Aryans (Indo-Europeans) is located in Russia. Both Indian and Western Asian Aryans came to the South from their ancestral home, the steppe and forest-steppe zone of Southern Russia. Migration impulses occurred at different times and went in different ways - through Central Asia, through the Caucasus, the coast of the Caspian Sea, through the Balkan Peninsula.
A new major migration of Indo-Europeans to the Middle East took place at the end of the XNUMXth and beginning of the XNUMXth centuries. BC e. This time, some sources speak directly about the Scythians. According to Egyptian sources, the country was attacked by the so-called. "peoples of the sea". So the Egyptians called in the XIV-XII centuries. BC e. previously unknown (or little known) to them northern peoples who lived beyond the Mediterranean Sea. Among the "peoples of the sea" were tribes: Sherdans (Shardans), Tirsenes, Tursha, Philistines, Chakkal, Danuns, Phrygians, Shakalesh, Achaeans, Garamants, Luki and Tevkry. The name "Shardans" is also mentioned in Russian sources, they say that the brothers Skif and Zardan went to war on the "Egyptian land". These shardans created the city of Sardis (the future capital of the Lydian kingdom) on the western coast of Asia Minor; part came to Italy, populating the island of Sardinia (its name is from their name).
Southern sources also connect the invasion of the "peoples of the sea" with Scythia. Some ancient authors talk about the wars of the Egyptian pharaoh Vesoz (a collective name like pharaoh Sesostris) with the Scythian ruler Tanai (perhaps this is a fictitious name or nickname associated with the Tanais River - Don). The Egyptians were the first to strike, the Scythians repelled it and answered. As a result of these wars, the city of Tanis (Tanais) was founded in the Nile Delta. However, Egypt resisted, calling on the help of neighboring tribes of Libyans and Ethiopians.
The affairs of the "peoples of the sea" were more successful in Palestine, the Philistines (Pelasgians) were entrenched there. They occupied the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gata, Gaza and founded Ekron. They possessed more advanced technologies (in particular, the technology for the production of iron weapons and agricultural tools) than the local Canaanites. The Philistines formed a coalition of 5 cities and were more interested in maritime affairs than in continental ones. At the same time, the Philistines were a powerful military force that slowed down the invasion of the nomadic Semites (ancestors of the Jews and Arabs), who at that time were at a very low stage of development. The Philistines more than once defeated the Semites, preserving a high culture in the region. According to Tseren, the Philistines belonged to the steppe people who penetrated from the deep regions of the Balkan Peninsula, Central and Eastern Europe to the Illyrian and Greek coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, and from there through Asia Minor and by sea, the islands, including Crete, moved to the coast of Egypt and Palestine.
To be continued ...
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