VASILE GAJA
THE DACIAN LANGUAGE: WHERE HAS IT VANISHED?
SECOND EDITION
Translation from Romanian by Dorin-Mugur POPOVICI
PUBLISHED BY A.F.
GAJA VASILE
2008
DTP and proofreading: Anca Gaja (for the Romanian version)
ISBN 978-973-0-05843-7 (for the Romanian version)
Copyright © 2008 by Vasile Gaja. All rights reserved.
To order this book, please contact:
A.F. GAJA VASILE
Email: vasile.gaja@gmail.com
INTRODUCTION
Dear reader, since you have opened this book,
do not hurry to shut it, but please listen to what I have to say, because a
great concern has made me write it. Therefore, be my confessor and witness to
many of my puzzles which I have collected in these pages, for you will see they
are painfully numerous and great.
You and I both had our teachers who taught us
at the time that a certain brook originated from a certain mountain and flowed
into a different brook, that river water never flows up, but always down, that
valences are crucial to chemistry just like gravitation to physics, and many,
many others, just like at school. At times, we used to disagree, because we did
not fully understand them back then, we regarded them as useless and got
irritated that we had to learn about them as our teachers wanted us to. Nevertheless,
we had great respect for them, even though they were sometimes more exacting,
some of them we even venerated and I am convinced that, just like me, you
yourself feel nostalgic about them and those times. What I mean is that we did
not think even for one moment to question the truths they were teaching us about,
because we saw them as possessing extensive knowledge and a high level of competence
– at least, this is true for me.
This went on for a long time, but in the
meantime we have grown up, have learned of various controversies which have
arisen even among them, and I would like to give an example which seems
conclusive enough to me: some scholars used to say, bringing a lot of
arguments, of course, that “Stones cannot fall from the sky”1;
others, also scholars and also backed by tons of arguments, were saying the
opposite, that they can fall, so the average person no longer knew what to
think.
Eventually, we understood from all these
controversies that science also had its limits, which are inevitable due to its
eternal childhood, or its eternal youth. We understood there were errors generated
by fate or a certain stage, inherent ones which, as such, did not affect
anyone’s reputation and were excused by default.
However, I am dissatisfied with the attitude
of certain professors who, sheltered by the reputation given to them by
undeniable titles, from the elevation of their academic desks, feed us “false
truths” and who, in my humble opinion, do not even have the excuse of the
errors mentioned earlier. I hate being forced to say this, especially as I must
say it in general, because I do not know who should I say it to, so I apologize
for the inevitable impoliteness.
As I am sure you have guessed from the title,
this book is about Romania ’s
history; this is where, I am embarrassed to say, I have found the rotten core
in the nice-looking apple; therefore, please read carefully and impartially and
make your own judgment in the end.
How these “false truths” have entered the
Romanian history I cannot tell, but you know how the saying goes: “The thief
only commits one sin, the victim commits a thousand”, in other words my
imagination is swarming with so many faulty variants that I am afraid I could
make a mistake, so it is best if I leave them unspoken. Moreover, since I am
not a historian, I am not entitled to answer such questions, let the experts do
it, it is their job, society raises and takes care of them for this very reason;
my role as a trainee, just like all trainees, is to ask questions, not answer
them. Except they pretend they do not understand them or ignore them placidly.
Well, because I condemn the “error”, I
declare myself confused and I am a bit naughty, allow me, dear reader, to tell
you what is on my mind, namely to suggest to you a manner in which, I believe, such
errors find their way into history.
Let us assume that two kings have insulted
each other gravely, through their mindful ambassadors of course, and then engaged
in a fight. This fight is just one way of writing the history, in fact they did
not even take the gloves off, it would have been foolish of them to start a
fist-fight when they had entire nations at their disposal.
So, once the insult has been made the “property
of the entire nation”, the nation wants to wash away the kings’ shame with
blood; with its own blood, of course, because the kings’ blood must not be
wasted, as it is sacred; and so, the subjects, not at all elegantly, butchered each
other and died smiling, saluting the flag, for the glory of their Majesties and
for the statues of their generals. Then the bodies were counted and, in front
of a delirious crowd of sycophants, poets and historians, each side declared
itself the winner.
Of course, the statement contains at least
one lie and, had the triumph of victory been limited only to local
celebrations, be they grand, the lie, namely the evil, would have stayed local,
within a limited circle; only as it was not just any event but a special one, a
noble battle, it had to be stuck into the back of history, just like a nail to
hang chronology on. Obviously, each side asked the poets to praise the glorious
deeds and the scribes to include them in chronicles, for the descendants to
take pride in them; as the scribe and the poet were only human, with their own
needs, they complied, obeyed the order and trumpeted it to the world, changing
it from a local lie into a global one.
Maybe some of them had a different opinion,
not necessarily against, but as different opinions were subversive, you had to
leave them at home, and as they were fascinated with the concept of survival, they
did leave them at home. So this is how the lie of the moment generated the small
fake.
The small fake was small only in the beginning,
but, just like a snowball rolling downhill, it took on new layers and ended up
as a very large fake. The result? By always creating works which fabricate the
truth, everything will eventually be fabricated, even the needs of entire
peoples; their natural needs will be based on fakes, so that the solution,
taking on the crooked shape of a lie, can even be contrary to the real needs.
Of course, my little theory is rudimentary
and somewhat amusing, but it does not matter, that is it does not matter that not
the “insult” was the reason behind the confrontation, but the conquest of land,
water and tax-payers; the smeared model only wishes to suggest the mechanism
which builds the fake, to point out the nest which breeds the evil.
The evil, for either way, the conclusion is
the same: the history we are learning is doubtful, it is written by scribes.
Consequences? The most serious is that the
neighboring peoples, having opposite chronicles, will build false ideals and
joys, in fact opposite, will cause trouble and hostility, in fact will generate
inevitable future conflicts. This is how evil is created, this is how we,
run-of-the-mill mortals, are learning about a history which shapes us according
to a mix of exaggerated vanities that block us in a falsely tense world which
leads to drifting.
Therefore, captive, polarized by the
conflicts generated by these “hostile chronicles”, humankind will no longer be
guided by collective common sense, but by other follies, and we can see and
experience the result.
However, the issue is extremely complicated
and I do not wish to untangle these strings, I only wanted to show them to
smooth my path. I will stop here and once again assure you I regret being
forced to “point”, but one must underline very strongly that the scribes’
responsibilities are huge, that the “truths” fabricated according to trendy airs
violate history, in fact they force it to be subject to a long string of
calamities.
I used earlier the word king, but only as a
symbol, I could have said voivode, tribal chief, president, rajah, caliph, pope
or something else, because chronicles were written on their behalf and
protected by them, so none of them can be exempt from responsibility, I repeat,
none of them. Some of them have extenuating circumstances: being illiterate, they
could not read the testament of their predecessors or write the one meant for
their descendants; often, the king, the master of the household, the generals,
the scribes and all the advisers, was in fact their prisoner and his golden
courtyard was nothing but a very comfortable cage.
I can add more substance to the above excuse
by saying there were cases when some of these luxury prisoners even tried to get
out of the overwhelming comfort of the cage, but their august straying was “pointed
out” persuasively enough, that they were not doing the right thing and should
not try again. And if they insisted… even today we see presidents being shot
because they have taken their role as leaders too seriously.
A lot can be said about this, but my goal is
a different one; in these few words, I am just trying to say that between
actual history and the written one can be a big difference, that the scribes
and the others “made the history” and we, being at the discretion of their
works, pay for it constantly, in every way.
As I said, the works were written for the
pleasure of kings and the limited circle of those who knew how to read and write
and it stayed that way for a long time, but time has passed and the realities
have occasionally escaped premeditation. Others have also learned to read, people
saw that many writings were obsolete, and so certain chronicles became lost
through accidents. Others lie in all kinds of secret archives, while others
have simply been destroyed outright.
Concrete proof exists, something of the magnitude
of such deeds we can trace in the fate of old manuscripts2: “the
pagan writings”, fallen into the hands of Christian monks, were scraped off the
leather of the manuscripts and replaced by the ones of the true faith. The
Arabs did the same with the scrolls from the Egyptian libraries3, because
they too were more in the true faith than the pagan Egyptians; however, they
were more direct: did not scrape them off, but simply burned them, libraries included.
Why? Who knows why? Who knows how people
think, up there, of the general interests of humankind? We, the common nouns of
this world, know very little of the “sacred secrets”, but we do know that vice
is sweet, the vice of power is the sweetest, strongest, most treacherous, and
also the most dangerous, that is why I take the liberty of using the “critical
finger” pointed towards the said teachers who disregard these evils, they are
the recipients of my rebukes.
To the other plodding writers, who sacrifice
a lot, enslaved by the passion to honestly
search for and present the facts, I would give the “marble” and “bronze”.
Unfortunately, these are taken, are still used by history fakers and the great
champions of victims.
Still, after all this, I believe we can
comprehend the seriousness of the situation, the importance of the issue
generated by false chronicles, we can see the history we are learning, we can
see the truths for which we get angry, butcher one another, shoot each other
with bullets, guns and missiles, burn one another with radiation, for what and
for who we do all this.
Well, because, being human beings, I believe
it is no longer natural or appropriate to teach our children to slaughter each
other, that it is pointless to work in three shifts in order to manufacture
weapons so we can kill one another.
Therefore, in order to be convinced we have a
reason to hit ourselves hard on the head, I suggest we review our common
history and reevaluate the said motivations from the past.
I
believe we must review our certainties.
Of course, for this we will have to turn to
the same official histories, although they have diminished our faith in them, however
we must not deny entirely the official data, ignore the past phenomena and
events, be they doubtful, we must take them into account, but with the reserve
of the person who first tests how deep the water is before jumping in. Consequently,
I suggest we pass through the filter of common sense, given to us all by Mother
Nature, the known and accepted data, phenomena and events, put them in the
natural, logical order and see what we get from this veridical compilation. We
will see in due time what course of action must be taken.
NOTES
1 In the 19th
century, the Sorbonne Academy in Paris
concluded that “Stones cannot fall from the sky”; it was explicable and
excusable, no one knew anything about meteorites.
2 Caliph Omar
destroyed on purpose the library manuscripts when he conquered Egypt , and Pope
Gregory IV ordered that all “Eternal Gospels” be burned – these are two
examples from two great religions. The cases of monks erasing the old texts
from the parchments are numerous and they did it not only due to the scarcity of
parchment, but also with a view to destroying the texts.
3 See 2.
CHAPTER I
THE
ROMANIAN LANGUAGE
And now let us tackle
the main topic. The history textbooks of Romanian pupils contain the following
statements: The Romanians come from the
Dacians and the Romans and They
speak a Latin language1. So, the Romanian history is founded on
this categorical statement which offers to universal history and, implicitly,
to the Romanian pupil two certainties, two foundations: one is the Dacian origin of the Romanian people and
the other is its Roman origin.
Due to the task assumed
in the title, let us analyze together these certainties, referring especially
to the language, and what do we notice? That, indeed, the Roman foundation does
exist, it is obvious to everybody, as it is demonstrated by the abundance of
the Latin element in the Romanian language. Regarding the other foundation,
however, there is a different story, the certainty here is quite muddled,
because, if you also wish to see the legacy of the Dacians, you notice that, apart from the above-mentioned statement,
you do not get much.
You start looking also
in other books and find some scattered Dacian
traces, controversial as well, otherwise nothing, as if this Dacian legacy, certain due to the statement,
had vanished.
In conclusion, in the official history
painstakingly collected by some scholars, it is written that the Romanians come
also from the Dacians, but when
trying to present some substance from the Dacian
legacy, after the ubiquitous words barză,
mânz and viezure [(T.N.)
Romanian: stork, colt, badger], the demonstration stops for lack of proof.
In this strange situation, besides other confusions,
comes the natural question: why does the official history keep mixing the Dacians in this matter if their traces
cannot be found? If they do not have a sufficiently proven presence in this
accepted history, why are they still here and, especially, what can the “world
history” and the Romanian pupil understand from this strange thing in their
book? So here we have a nonsensical element, in fact an absurd one, in the
Romanian history, we talk about some Dacians
who should exist, but do not, and nobody knows or would tell where they are.
This very big, let us call it, peculiarity,
which triggered many others, as we are about to see, vexed and stirred me from
the tranquility of an ordinary school boy. It made me write this book, imposed
this torture on top of my daily routine and made me set off in search of those Dacians, the ancestors of the Romanian
people, who existed and not quite.
As we all know, until the 17th
century, the historians knew that “De la
Râm ne tragem”2, according to a Romanian chronicler, which means
the Romanians come from Rome; so, those words showed that the Latin particularity
of the inhabitants of the Romanian Principalities had been noticed and accepted
unanimously. Being, however, surrounded by other peoples, mainly Slavic, the
Romanians appeared as a “Latin island” in their midst and this called for an
explanation. Therefore, the chronicler’s statement appeared as an answer to the
island issue and suggested the hypothesis that this island must have separated
somehow, at some point, from the “Latin continent”.
Of course, this hypothesis was acceptable,
because it was the only explanation for the existence of that “Latin island” in
the “Slavic sea”, and at the level of historical information at the time it was
the only credible explanation. The relatively natural consequence was that this
hypothesis, according to which the Latin affiliation is some kind of trace of
the “Latin continent”, has become a landmark and has channeled the search.
Unfortunately, the orientation has become a
single one, as the Dacian traces
were overlooked, single and, in time, compulsory; so that, according to the
hypothesis, the Romanians could only be the descendants of the Romans. It was
admitted that several other “signs” existed, but, as they did not exactly match,
they could be mistaken for something else, interpreted as something else and
could lead to doubts.
Therefore, not many traces existed, but what ruined
any attempt to make any reference to the Dacians
was that in the Romanian language only a few words like barză and viezure could
be identified, which could come from the language of the Dacians.
Being so, the scholars reduced to nil the contribution
of the Dacians to the Romanians’ ancestry:
“the Dacians may have existed at some
point, but, as they can no longer be found, it means they disappeared a long
time ago”.
Perhaps due to the lack of information, the
conclusion could seem natural, the apparent absence of Dacian traces somewhat justified the hypothesis, and had it been
only an academic dispute it would not have been a catastrophe. Unfortunately,
however, it was not just that, for instead of looking also beyond that
comfortable hypothesis, they justified it, progressing from a harmless opinion
to conviction. That is how the flawed theory was born and made its way into
history.
Of course, once accepted, the theory became a
foundation for new hypotheses, with its inevitable consequences which, mixed
with all kinds of other speculations matching the personality of the issuer,
led to the peculiarity found in the Romanian pupils’ textbooks. And now, let us
tackle them in turn.
Once the THEORY OF THE DACIANS’ DISAPPEARANCE
has been accepted, it inevitably had to be explained, so the following was
said: “The Dacians were the
ancestors of the Romanians, but were exterminated almost entirely by the
Romans, the other ancestors of the Romanians, during the wars for the conquest
of Dacia ”3.
Remarkable solution, only it does not
actually work, for if the Dacians
were exterminated by the very Romans, it means that their heredity, language
and so on were also lost together with them; well, in this case, how can the
Romanians be related to a heredity which has been absent for two thousand
years? Perhaps through Adam, but through him everybody is related to everybody,
isn’t it?
Of course, the “round clarity” of this
argument vexed and still vexes many people, but no matter how crazy the
roundness may seem, it must be accepted as, besides barză, viezure and several other mysterious elements without
origin, as it is claimed, almost no trace has been found from the Dacians. For if this one were not
accepted, they would have to accept another one, even crazier, namely that the Dacians never existed. But this would
make the experts contradict themselves, as all of them agree on the presence in
antiquity of the Dacians on Romania ’s territory.
So what were they to do? They pretended not
to see the nonsense, allowed the theory to roam freely throughout Romania’s
history, while the mention of the Dacians
in the Romanian history appears as a strange concession made to I don’t know
who.
There were other researchers who were not satisfied
with this comfortable theory, doubted it and kept searching; their situation,
however, was quite adverse: they were in the Romanian Principalities which were
relatively weak and had not had time to set up their own archives, namely
history gathered in documents, as most of the time they were occupied or
dominated by foreign kingdoms and empires. There were, of course, archives
containing the desired proof, but they belonged to the said kingdoms and
empires and they used them in their own interest, therefore the acute lack of
information represented the crack through which various peculiarities of a
different nature found their way inside along with the harmless shortsightedness.
But again, the serious part is that this shallowness,
this “scribe history” is easily
accepted by both the foreign and Romanian historiography and serenely
administered in children’s textbooks, just like drugs on the corner. Thus, it is
ignored that errors can turn into conflicts, that is precisely what we have
been witnessing in the Balkans lately, “Europe ’s
powder keg”.
I said earlier that not all experts were
fascinated by the said theory and perhaps the most significant was Nicolae Densuşianu
who, in his work Dacia Preistorică,
presented so much ignored proof that you are left wondering and staring
vacantly ahead. As the suspect lack of interest of the publishers prevented and
still prevents the mass availability of this great work, being almost entirely
unknown, I will not refer to it, but instead to B. P. Hasdeu who is (still)
available occasionally to the general public. So, in his work Perit-au Dacii?4 [Have the
Dacians perished?], he expresses his doubt.
We must admit that this matter is not at all
a simple one, but the “Distinguished Professors” must clarify it, because we,
the pupils, are the consumers and have a right to reject any counterfeit,
doubtful products, even if they are included in textbooks; this right does not
apply only when we are purchasing radishes. So, because the vice exists and is
known, because there are answers but they are overlooked, or the allergy to
them has yet to find its cure, in my capacity as a citizen of the third
millennium I feel obliged to challenge the counterfeit product which is not
only pitiful and silly, but also dangerous, as we can see on the territory of
the former Yugoslavia.
Therefore, if the official experts do not
care to lift the shadow, I invite you, dear reader, to an attempt to fill in
the blanks, based only on known and acknowledged events; but, as I said, also
based on the logic of common sense, not only because they are the result of
some calculations. So, I invite you to start off with the assumption that the Dacians never existed.
An absurd hypothesis, of course, but you will
see how blind fate keeps trying to make it authentic and connect it to the
great theory of disappearances, how forces, cosmic, of course, keep trying to
erase the Dacians’ traces from
history. Here are just a few examples.
Trajan’s
Commentaries5, a work by Trajan on the war against the Dacians, similar to Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Caesar,
is completely lost. Can you imagine the importance of such a work for the
history of Romania ,
of the Balkans, for history in general?
Another work, the Getica6, with a figurative content as suggested by its
title, written by Trajan’s physician, is also completely lost. Criton also was
in Dacia
However, there are other things as well which
say something else: how the “cruel fate”, with suspect consistency and very
carefully, deleted only certain chapters from the works of some historians; so,
from the works of Appian7, Arrian8 and Ammianus Marcellus9
are missing, guess what, precisely those chapters which tackled issues related
to Dacia. Remarkably accurate gesture for a blind fate, wouldn’t you agree?
Yet, the cruel fate could not erase all of them,
it did as best it could; could not destroy Trajan’s
Column, an account of the wars between the Dacians and the Romans chiseled in stone, located on Roman soil, or
the Adamclisi Monument, erected also because of the Dacians, but located on Romanian soil. Although the latter is in a
much poorer state, both still exist and their presence bears witness to the
existence of the Dacians.
I will add just one thing, that after the
victory over the Dacians, Trajan called
himself Dacicus Maximus10, not Patagonius Maximus or otherwise, so
the name, just like the monuments, proves what needed no further proof.
There is absolutely no doubt that the Dacians existed, the little amount of
evidence being just a preamble to those strange hypotheses by which an attempt
is made to explain and justify an absurdity; I will discuss them later.
We are also being offered a theory involving
a disappearance in stages11. So, it is said that most Dacians died in the battles against the
Romans and that also then many of them allegedly committed suicide. A massive
deportation of the Dacians followed,
accompanied by a symmetrical importation of other peoples to fill the gaps. And
which through consequences, through compulsory and inevitable mixed marriages de-nationalized
the few who escaped. Let us take a closer look at these assumptions and see
what will be left of them.
“In the year 106 the Romans conquered Dacia ”. This statement
is only partly true, because the Romans conquered only part of Dacia , namely Banat, Oltenia (Lesser Wallachia), Muntenia
(Greater Wallachia) and Southern Transylvania .
Northern Transylvania, Maramureş, but especially the vast Moldavia were never ruled by the
Romans, in other words not all of Dacia was conquered by the Romans in 106…12
Therefore, not all the Dacians were
under Roman rule, some of them were free, and being so, how could the Romans
influence all the Dacians? This truth is so logical, that you wonder how
it can be ignored and its natural consequences are not explicitly presented.
It was, indeed, mentioned by some historians
as early as the 17th century13 and, remarkably even,
especially by foreign historians, it was heard by and, therefore, known also to
the Romanian historians, but the latter, with their “wisdom”, overlooked it as
if it were a detail void of meaning. Therefore, this reality called, after 106,
for the obligatory distinction between two
Dacias
Suddenly, this conclusion offers a different
perspective on the reality of the time, overthrows all those “certainties” in
the Romanian textbooks and, most importantly, vaporizes all of a sudden the
disappearance theory. From now on, one can no longer say “almost all Dacians died during the wars against
the Romans”, because not all of them faced the Romans, and the vices generated by
this statement are obvious! So, not only all the Dacians did not perish, but nearly half of them did not see any
Romans even in the distance! And from now on, we will take this reality into
consideration.
Still, let us insist on this disappearance. Therefore,
in 106 all the Dacian population was
aged between “0” and a certain maximum. If we also apply to it what we know
about populations in general, we can infer that the women accounted for almost
55% and the men approximately 45%.
We also know that men, no matter how brave,
cannot be ready for battle at any age; so, in those days, when buttons had not
been invented yet and physical force was the main weapon, it was somewhat
sufficient only in the case of men aged, let’s say, between 20 and 40.
Therefore, an approximate calculation tells us that, of the population
representing 100%, the men ready for battle could account for about 20-25%.
Now, assuming the absurd hypothesis that the Romans killed in the wars the
entire 20%, or that at the end all combatants bravely committed suicide during
the battle, it still means that, after the war, the population of Dacia had
remained somewhere around 80%.
You do not have to be a historian or
mathematician to be able to approximate such a calculation!
Of course, we cannot know the size of Dacia ’s population, but
we do know it represented a major presence in that area, we are told this by
the very experts and we have to believe them, because before the lost war of
106 several proven confrontations had taken place, some lost and others won by
the Dacians.
So, if we take into account that it took
several wars, which span almost 30 years (in fact almost 100), sometimes won by
the Romans, for them to win once more in 106 and occupy only half of Dacia, this
sends a clear message about Dacia’s importance. The succession of compulsory victories
until the final one does not indicate at all a weak enemy, on the contrary, it indicates
a well-organized and powerful state, and, what is more important to us, which has
a very large population capable of such response.
If we add the prolonged pomp of the
celebrations held in Rome after the victory, paid for with the loot from Dacia
(it is said that the celebrations lasted 123 days)14, we are given
proof not only of the value attached by the Romans to this victory, but also of
the huge amount of riches brought from Dacia, as this loot helped pay for the
celebrations, am I right? And what is interesting is that the treasure reached Rome after the “modest”
Romans, starting with the dignitaries, generals until the last soldier, received
their due payment.
We can guess the size of that fortune and of
the population who had put it together; but what we cannot understand is why
the official history does not ask itself such questions, or if it does
occasionally, why it does not search for answers to them.
But let us continue. So, the Romans did not
exterminate all the Dacians during
the war, because they fought only about 25% of them, even if the combatants
came from all over Dacia, therefore, from now on, I will divide my analysis of
Dacia in two: one regarding the conquered, occupied Dacia and the other
regarding the free Dacia, and I will start off with my analysis of the
conquered Dacia.
In order for the Romans to continue the
extermination of the Dacians after
the war was over, they had to focus on the occupied Dacia , which was the only accessible, and
for this they should have set up special abattoirs in order to finalize the
extermination, with work organized in three or perhaps four, five or more
shifts.
I believe, however, that if we did not occupy
our minds with the counting of shifts, a commonsensical question would arise: why exterminate the whole lot? Did they
have any interest in that? Or do we consider the Romans to be more idiotic than
they were? We did not know them to be like that.
As it was the case in other contexts as well,
those who conquer a territory do so out of hunger, the need for space and so on.
Only that, once he declares himself the conqueror and settles, the hungry
person exterminates the local seniors to become himself a senior, and, as a
senior, he can no longer work. Therefore, in order for his seniority to
flourish, he needed someone to work for him, feed him, serve him and these
people, with the invention of seniority, became their servants: serfs, slaves
and, in this case, the Dacians.
Here
is a sufficient reason for the history of seniority that the new seniors,
irrespective of the people they belong to, would be lenient with the losers, that
is why the Roman legionaries, gathered from all over the empire, now turned
seniors, were in great need of men for work, women around the house, and they,
of course, were the Dacian men and
women. So the total extermination scenario becomes absurd, not to mention the
impossibility of putting it into practice, an absurdity which can be understood
by absolutely anybody; so here is how the commonsensical arguments are
replacing the absurd suppositions.
The logical consequence is that the occupied
part of Dacia
also remains populated after the war by at least 80% of the inhabitants, therefore
a sufficiently large population to preserve its traditions and leave its mark
on history.
However, for the “disappearance of the Dacians” it would not have been enough,
so other methods of extermination were also explored; therefore, another crazy
thing was suggested, namely the relocation of the defeated Dacians15.
After we have seen how large was the Dacian population after the war, this
relocation appears to be of fantastic proportions; had it been so, it would
have been necessary to move somewhere else the immense number of Dacians and bring here the population
extracted from there in order to fill the empty territory of Dacia
But mind you, the people brought over had to
speak Latin, an absolutely compulsory quality, because otherwise this
inevitable Romanian people would not have come into being. But to replace the Dacians only with the Roman army would
have been impossible, because, on the one hand, not all of them spoke Latin,
and on the other, how numerous had to be that army to populate even that half
of Dacia ? Rome would have been left
with no soldiers…
Let’s accept, however, this exchange and assume
it took place, for example, with the Iberian Peninsula16 from where,
they say, many Roman colonists came, the same place emperor Trajan came from. In
that case, we should have heard of the inevitable region of Dacia
in Iberia ,
or at least of many speakers of the Dacian
language among the Hispanics. We have not heard of such a thing, and if the
Hispanics are speaking a Latin language just like the Romanians, the reasons
are different and we will find out about them along the way.
So, the deportation hypothesis cannot be
taken seriously either, our common sense gets in the way once again. Then, even
if certain people transfers did occur from one place to another, one could not
empty Dacia
of Dacian men, so much the less of Dacian women, for the latter had to
marry the Romans for the mosaic to become complete.
Therefore, the Dacians continued to exist, with the male part obviously diminished
by the war, but with the female part nearly intact.
So, after we have seen how the Dacians were exterminated and deported,
let’s also see how they were Romanized. Again, I am referring to those in the
occupied Dacia .
In 106, the Dacian-speaking population ranged from the newborn baby, ready to
learn the language from its mother, to the last grandparent. Fifty years on,
probably, all the people who came into direct contact with the war vanished,
but they had been the most affected and the most tenacious. Therefore, it was
absolutely inevitable that, among the teachings passed on to their children and
grandchildren, the main one would be the great anger and pain caused by the
disastrous defeat; the nostalgia for the lost freedom must have been etched in
everybody’s mind.
Is it so hard to imagine what feelings were
passed on by the Dacians to their descendants?
Moreover, on top of the “contemporary” flood
of anti-Roman hatred, an older one must be added: the tradition of anti-Roman
feelings had deep roots in the Dacian conscience,
they had taken hold of it a long time before, had taken shape during Julius
Caesar’s time if not earlier, when the first plans to conquer Dacia were sensed;
it was obvious that king Burebista’s efforts to strengthen the Dacian Kingdom were
his response to this threat.
And, just like us, why should they not
believe that the glorious reign of Burebista was cut short by the Romans, why
not believe that the suspect death of the great king was connected to Roman machinations.
Therefore, all this could not be forgotten so easily; now, when the country has
been robbed, when the king, the symbol of their freedom and dignity, has been
beheaded and scorned, when all of them have become slaves, what could the Dacians think of the Roman victor? Is
it hard to imagine what kind of feelings the Dacians passed on to their descendants?
With the permission of all those who tasted
the sweetness of “Vae victis”17, I dare to believe that the Dacians wished the Roman killer all the
worst, especially as he had become the master who humiliated them on a daily
basis. Therefore, is it hard to understand what the Dacians felt for the Roman conquerors?
No, not at all! Those feelings could not
represent a foundation for quick harmony, the then victims, i.e. the Dacians, could not forget or forgive. How
could they forget and forgive when their daily existence was under the
victor-loser, master-slave sign? That state polarized the phenomenon exactly in
reverse, soaking it in the poison of hatred.
Besides, the said feeling is familiar to many
contemporaries from the civilized 21st century: can the Romanians,
Greeks, Albanians, Chechens, Kurds and very many others have reasons to like the
former and current neighboring empires? I say we move on.
Therefore, in the context of such relations,
the “compulsory” Romanization could not be accomplished within 170 years; the
period was too short for the opposites master-slave to move towards a center of
harmony, many more generations should have passed for them to unite, for the
two ethnic groups to become one. What could have been achieved during this
interval? Most likely, the Dacians
learned a few things from the language of the legionaries, a motley Latin, rather
some kind of military jargon, as reality did not offer more.
Let us now focus on an important element which
was taking shape and would have somewhat facilitated the integration process: I
am talking about the hybrid origin of the children born to Roman fathers and Dacian mothers. They, in turn having
their own children, added to the number of parents/children of dual origin. Of
course such a thing existed, but they were in the towns with Roman clerks and around
the camps or garrisons where Roman soldiers were stationed, not in villages
where they were in much smaller numbers.
These hybrids, however, were born with a
handicap called privilege. I call it a handicap, because the said privileges
did not integrate them at all into the Dacian
population, on the contrary, they were the perfect reason for discrimination,
and the short time of Roman protection was not sufficient, let alone favorable.
This is why I say that these Daco-Roman grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
who could not be very many anyway, moved together with the Romans to the south,
here they did not feel they had a favorable future, so they could not represent
that mass of people needed to form the future Romanian people.
Coming next to the possible mixed families,
let us also talk about this extremely important segment of the population,
namely the women. My previous calculation showed a large percentage of Dacian women, their numbers had
remained relatively intact compared to the number of men.
We know that women are much more conservative
than men, inflexible keepers of traditions and rules. Their specific biological
and social responsibilities, such as giving birth, raising children and so on,
which belong entirely to them, make them real pillars of social stability. Then,
these pillars were made of Dacian
material, for all the women were Dacian.
A few elite mistresses or prostitutes brought along with the conquest may have
existed, but they are not to be taken into account, as they did not “give
birth” very often and, anyway, they were very few in number compared to the large
mass of Dacian women.
What must be taken into consideration,
however, is a very important aspect, namely that every language is a mother
tongue, not a father tongue, children learn how to speak from their mothers,
not their fathers, and in our case all children learned the Dacian mother tongue as their mothers
were Dacian, even though some of the
fathers were Roman. And even if the fathers insisted on their offspring learning
Latin very well, it was inevitably “polluted” by the mothers who did not speak
it very well, not to mention the language mix spoken in the neighborhood.
Let’s assume we have found a possible intermediate
language between Romanian and its ancestors, the Dacian language and the Roman language; a rational stand makes us
admit, however, that during the cohabitation such a hybrid language could have
appeared, but according to the described reality it had to contain many Dacian elements.
So, if we assume that the Romanians are
speaking today that rudimentary language, that Daco-Roman mix, it should also
include numerous Dacian18
traces; dictionaries, however, say there are almost no such traces, save for barză, mânz, viezure.
What are we to believe then, that this
hypothetical hybrid language is also lost? In this case, the “Distinguished
Professors” should tell us that the Romans killed also these Daco-Roman people,
or newly-born Romanians, who were speaking the Daco-Roman language, or newly-born
Romanian language. But why would they kill them, when the war had been over for
170 years? So we can never find them?
Let’s say we can no longer find them, because
the Romans also took along their hybrid offspring when they sought refuge south
of the Danube, but, inevitably, their rather young language, brooded, hatched
and matured in only 170 years, had to continue to exist so we can find it
today. We cannot find it, because the Romanian language contains no Dacian traces. And again, where is the clean
Dacian language which remained?
Let’s make another concession and assume that not all hybrids left in 271 and,
for some mysterious reasons, they painstakingly took out from that hybrid
language all the Dacian components
and kept for their Romanian great-grandchildren only the Latin components.
Still, how many hybrid children could there
be? Could they be so many as to make a difference? I think they had been
crammed for a long time in that percentage of nearly 20% populated by Dacian war widows, which is why they
could not be numerous, even if the mixed families had been encouraged through
privileges to bear many children.
Then, they could not be too many also for
another reason: in rural areas, where the vast majority of the Dacian population lived, life went on
undisturbed, the Dacian male
peasants, the husbands of the Dacian
women, also peasants, were making babies, because the village tradition was
that families would have many children; the large family was even an objective
for the villagers, it represented at least affluence and security, and
tradition survived in Romania until the Communist period.
As we can see, mixed families could not win this
kind of competition either, because multiplying a random “n” by the number
containing 20% of the population is one thing, but multiplying the same “n” by
80% is another matter. Therefore, the Roman procreation also did not represent
a danger to the Dacians, the 170 years
were not enough for it as well.
These are the methods by which a Dacian population, numerous as we have
seen, may have been Romanized in 170 years. It is up to you, dear reader, to
judge how real all this can be.
After everything I have said, it would be
interesting to formulate the following question: when did that resulting
population, the later so-called Latin Romanians, start considering themselves
descendants of the Romans? Could the Dacians
from the following one hundred-something years call ancestors the persons who
had enslaved them and destroyed their country? Could those abandoned under the
hooves of the invading hordes in 271 call ancestors the fleeing Romans? I do
not think so.
Let us consider a more special aspect: the
difference in value between the Latin and the Dacian languages, namely the offer of the Latin language, its
capacity to quench the thirst for new things of the Dacian language. Well, this is relative as well.
Let’s assume that Latin was richer at the
time of the encounter; but this richness would have been a supply without
demand, because something crucial must be mentioned in this matter. The
language of a people is the warehouse, the treasury where they keep, in the
currency of words, the wealth of their experiences which shows the development
stage of the people who speak that language. Therefore, in those times, the
dynamic of encoding ideas into words, of their materialization into objects was
much more reduced than now, because the volume and speed of depositing new
words in the language depend on the speed at which objects are invented, and
this dynamic was much more limited in those times and almost the same
everywhere.
The dynamic may have been greater in Rome
than in Dacia, still, apart from “catapult” and other practical words, Latin
could not contain many fascinating words, as they were not useful to the
Dacians, who were a backward people, weren’t they? I am saying this, because
poetry, architecture, philosophy and so on existed, but in glamorous Rome , not here among the “savage
Getae”, according to great Ovid19, who had arrived among the diminished
Dacians. (Speaking of Ovid and his
“savage Getae”: where do they come from, dear experts, have they not been
killed, deported or de-nationalized like the other Dacians?)
Therefore, allegedly, there were no people on
whom to cast their sparks full of culture and, as we have seen, they did not
even have the time to unpack, because in 271, when the Romans left Dacia , who was left to
preserve the high culture?
Let’s assume, however, the existence of
necessary linguistic novelty which could have disturb the “limited” peace of
the Dacian language and which was
adopted. Perhaps other new elements, less necessary, were also adopted by some loan
translation supporters in order to be modern.
All right. And? The new elements brought by
the richer Latin language would have been premature, so they could not be
dangerous; the few neologisms which brought along their usefulness and name and
which did enter the Dacian language
could only scratch it here and there, so to speak, not kill it!
Arriving at this point, let’s summarize: in
order to get the present-day Latin Romanians, observing the “Romanian
historical absurdity”, we should accept that, after nearly 170 years of Roman
occupation, every soul in the occupied Dacia ,
namely the 80% who remained, adopted completely, out of love or admiration for
their oppressors, their traditions and language. Moreover, in order to not find
any trace of them, those 80% of the Dacians
would have had not only to adopt the language and traditions of the conquerors,
but also forget their own, that is erase from memory everything they had from
their ancestors. Is such a thing possible? I leave the experts to declare this.
We have so far talked about the occupied Dacia and, as we can see, the inconceivable prevails, but
if it does in occupied Dacia , need we mention
the situation in the free Dacia ?
What about the population in the rest of Dacia
who were not even visited by the Romans, let alone conquered? Because,
accepting, however, the absurdities, that by whatever means the Romans did
manage to persuade, to force the conquered Dacians
to learn their language and abandon theirs, I would really like to know how did
the Romans manage to persuade the Moldavian and Transylvanian Dacians to speak their language?
From now on, the debate becomes hilarious,
but let us finish it and ask ourselves: Why would the Moldavian Dacians and the Transylvanian Dacians learn Latin? Out of a
mysterious type of snobbery, or because they were fascinated by that delicious,
sweet-as-honey language, just to be trendy in town? Never mind, let’s say it
was so, but if I dare to go on and say that the Moldavian, Transylvanian and
other Dacians, driven by a suicidal
impulse unknown to Maramureş people to this day, learned Latin just for kicks and
then forgot their own language just to… No! I do not have the courage to say such
a thing, an Oaş Country inhabitant may hear me…
Let’s be serious! If, even for occupied Dacia , forgetting the Dacian language is an obviously absurd hypothesis, in the case of free
Dacia this
issue cannot even be uttered. For instance, is it worth asking myself what would
be if the moon fell in my backyard?
Dear reader, this seems to me to be the
issue, the puzzle and the revolt, namely the driving force behind these pages.
Again, I do not claim to present new historical elements, I only bring the old
ones to light, known and acknowledged, and with the help of common sense I try
to give them a natural meaning. Therefore, at the end of this chapter, I will
ask again the master’s question: Have the
Dacians perished?, and, if not, I will ask another one: Has the Dacian language perished?
I believe the readers have convinced
themselves that the theory of the disappearance of the Dacians and the Dacian
language is more than just a fantasy, it is something I cannot afford to
define, words would be too harsh. Therefore, the Dacians have not perished, nor has their language, and the Roman element
we define as a Latin one has contributed much more less to the formation of the
Romanian people and its language. The fact that, according to these
conclusions, the inevitable Romanian people CANNOT be born, is a different
story, and I will approach next exactly this “different story” and try to
demonstrate that the relations between the Dacians
and the Romans were entirely different, anyway more complex than fate led us to
believe.
NOTES
1 The first
acquaintance who read my manuscript pointed out I had not mentioned what
textbooks I was referring to and that I may be wrong in referring to them like
that. I took his suggestion into consideration and started inspecting the Romanian
history textbooks published in the year 2000. I found certain new elements
which I will not discuss, still, more explicit or not, the foundation has
stayed the same since the authors according to whom the Romanians are the
descendants of the Dacians and the
Romans, and the Romanian language is derived from Latin. This theory imposed
the condition of the Dacians’
extinction in their battle against the Romans. So, since this foundation
hundreds of years old is still to be found in textbooks, is the textbook author
guilty of having observed it? He may have not believed in it as well, but one
should not start the process of correcting this error with, let’s say, the 8th
grade textbooks, but at the level of university departments and academies, so
in this book I will not make any objections to any teacher in particular who has
written a textbook, good or bad, but to the “Distinguished Professors” who
oversee the textbooks in general and the morality of a nation.
2 Grigore Ureche, Letopiseţul Moldovei.
3 Scrieri istorice, chapter “Perit-au
Dacii?”, by B. P. Hasdeu, Editura Albatros, Lyceum Collection, 1973.
4 Idem.
5 Istoria României în date, coordinated by
Constantin C. Giurăscu, Editura Enciclopedică Română, Bucharest , 1972.
6 Idem.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Fr. I. Sulzer, Istoria Daciei Transalpine, R. Roesler, Studii Române, Engel, Miklosici in
Dimitrie Onciul, Studii de istorie.
12 Atlas pentru Istoria României, coordinated
by Ştefan Pascu, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, Bucharest , 1983.
13 Thunmann, Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der
östlichen europäischen Völker, Leipzig ,
1774, quoted by Dimitrie Onciul in Studii
de istorie.
14 Istoria României în date, coordinated by
Constantin C. Giurăscu, Editura Enciclopedică Română, Bucharest , 1972.
15 See note 11.
16 The birthplace
of Trajan. It is said that many of the emperor’s trusted acquaintances
originated there.
17 Vae victis = Woe
to the defeated (Lat.), exclamation of Julius Caesar regarding those defeated
in war.
18 Bogdan
Petriceicu Hasdeu, Scrieri istorice,
Frunză verde, etc.
19 Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, poetry by
Ovid written in Tomis (Constanţa, Romania ), where he was banished by
order of emperor Augustus.
CHAPTER II
THE
WORLD OF THE THRACIANS
I mentioned in the previous chapter the “Romanian
historical absurdity”, namely: the Dacians
and their language could not disappear from their territory, but we can no
longer find them there; instead, we find the Romanians who should not be there.
It is obvious something is not right, that the explanations for both the
disappearance of the Dacians and the
appearance of the Romanians are wrong, that the path started from false premises
and that new ones must be found.
When I read about the extermination of the Dacians by the Romans, I was vexed by
that absurd statement, the vice being accessible quite easily. I went on, but
remained sensitive to the information related to this issue, so that reading
here and there other works besides textbooks, I found facts, events which combined
harmoniously with the matter at hand and told a different story, and I was baffled
that they had not been taken into consideration.
Therefore, I found in prestigious works such
as The Histories by Herodotus, Livy
and others, and also in the works of equally prestigious authors such as Homer and
Virgil, information referring directly to the obscure matter. Then I thought of
Romanian traditions, their legends which, although they seemed completely
unrelated to the local events, seemed however to originate in them. Finding all
this and arranging it within the logic imposed by its meaning, I obtained a bigger
picture which showed me something else and made me believe I was on the path
which led to some certainties.
Then, comparing these new directions to the
abnormal theories found in textbooks, I was extremely surprised, as I had, in
fact, “discovered the wheel”. I was greatly surprised because there was nothing
hidden, mysterious, everything was so obvious and I did not understand why the
information which was so readily available and would have clarified everything
was pushed into obscurity. Were Herodotus and Livy not credible? Were their
works just fantasies unworthy of the experts’ granite criteria? Were they too
old and could no longer be taken seriously? Maybe, although I have my doubts.
Indeed, poetry and legends can be suspected
of fantasy, but the statements of Herodotus, for example, even regarded with
some reserve, cannot be considered fantasies, in fact Herodotus is regarded as
the father of history not only due to the period he lived in, so his words
cannot be treated as ordinary words. Then?
Then I told myself I must leave everything
aside and start from two certainties: first, the Romans spoke Latin, and
second, the Dacians spoke the Dacian language, allow me to call it
that. The problem was that, within these two undeniable realities, the third
certainty could not find a reasonable place, which had to be that of the
Romanian language.
In other words, on the same undeniable
territory, two diverse sets intersected – Romans and Dacians – and, implicitly, two languages: Latin and Dacian; no one denies that the Romanian
people came from this mix, what is denied is that the Romanian language resulted
from the mix of the two languages.
These two outcomes are inseparable, one
conditions the other, therefore, if one of these two inevitable realities is
considered false, the reasoning which challenges it is unsound.
After all, where is the falsity? The Romans’
language is too well known as being Latin, no error here. The Romanian language
is still spoken today and, with all the mixes, is also considered a Latin
language. Therefore, something could happen to the Dacian language.
In order to find that something, I said to
myself I must start from the beginning, and the beginning was imposed to me by
one of the oldest possible sources, namely Herodotus. So, I will start from the
father of history on whose writings we must rely, if we are not considering him
just another scribbler.
Herodotus1 says: “After the Indians, the Thracian people is the
largest of all the peoples”2.
Well, dear readers, this very sentence
stirred me; I asked myself how come it had not been read by any serious
historian, because, had its message been read, many suppositions would not have
existed and we would have learned differently the history of Europe and,
implicitly, of Romania.
Or perhaps that is precisely why “no one read
it”, I told myself on second thought. But if that is the case, I am surprised
how come that tablet did not break, the manuscript did not catch fire from a flash
of lightning, or at least how come that text was not erased. Who cared if it was
one manuscript less compared to all the others? Or maybe fate counted on our shallowness…
I cannot say if this story has a certain
meaning or not, what I do know is that when I read it my perspective suddenly
became clear, I understood that in that sentence, apparently anonymous, but so
clear and categorical, were the premises of many answers, the cure for puzzles,
and that through it many of our enigmas can find a reasonable explanation.
So, in the 5th century BC,
Herodotus says that the Thracian people was the largest after that of the
Indians and, mind you, he says this in the present tense, namely it was larger
then, in his time.
I do not know how well Herodotus knew the
Indian people who were located many thousand kilometers from where he was,
especially as he does not mention anything about the Chinese, quite numerous
themselves, but he was clearly impressed with their numbers. So, I do not know
how well acquainted he was with the Indians, but he must have known much better
the Thracians among whom he lived. Therefore, in order to compare the
Thracians, his next-door neighbors, to the “fabulous” Indian people, he must
have been impressed with the multitude of Thracians as well, and this
impression could not be wrong, thanks to the proximity.
Therefore, with all the possible obscure
elements in his great work, the proximity, cohabitation with the Thracians
represent arguments which reduce a lot the number of possible errors related to
the multitude of Thracians, hence his great reputation.
Speaking, however, of some obscure elements
encountered, I think they are generated rather by our inability to comprehend
some very old phenomena which have reached us through re-writings, translations
and so on, processes which have altered them. Then, these obscure elements are
of course possible, but when interpreting the phenomena, not when it comes to
the phenomenon itself, and the concrete message of the above statement is not a
nuance.
But let’s say the Indian people were not the
largest in the world, as he thought, but this would not be relevant, what is
important is that he placed the Thracians, whom he knew very well, second in
the world, which leads to the crucial conclusion that: in that area – the Balkans and the surroundings – the largest people
were the Thracians.
This finding calls for a moment of amazement,
here we have a big surprise; here is how, all of a sudden, our knowledge of the
Thracians, some relatives of the Dacians
scattered in the Balkans, is shattered and an avalanche of consequences is
triggered, the biggest of which being that, in the century of Herodotus, the
Thracians were the largest people in the Balkan Peninsula.
Must you be a great expert to arrive at this
conclusion? I do not believe so, but let’s take is as such.
The situation, however, could not have set in
overnight, it had to have a history, but Herodotus does not mention anything
about a possible invasion of the Thracians, or about any people who were displaced
or exterminated by them. The arrival of such a multitude of people could not be
ignored, I even think it would have supplemented the historian’s works with one
more volume; so, as it was not mentioned, it means they had been in that region
for a long time and were extremely numerous, which calls for a fresh assessment
of proportions and a redistribution of the Thracians in geographical terms.
From now on, however, this great people can
no longer fit in the tiny areas which history has “assigned” to them, namely
some parts of the Balkan Peninsula , we now
have an element for comparison and we could imagine that area. It is true, we
do not know how many Indians existed then or how many Thracians, but if the
Indians needed the Hindustan Peninsula to be what they were and to become what
they are now, the Thracians too had to have a proportional area in order to
“fill the statement” made by Herodotus.
Besides, let us think for a moment; in those
times, people’s food sources were mainly spontaneous picking, hunting, sheep
grazing and rudimentary agriculture. So, if nowadays, when numerous plants are cultivated
per square meter and animals raised per cubic meter, the possibilities of feeding
the populations are increasing, without necessarily more space becoming
available for them, the situation was different in those times. With the then
tools, a person needed a much larger area to satisfy their hunger on a daily
basis, they had to look for edible fruit and roots elsewhere, not where they
had found them the day before, had to search for game in virgin areas, to graze
their sheep following the lush vegetation, not where they had gone grazing the
day before, etc., and all this before harvest time.
Therefore, the then areas had to be larger
than those today, per capita, but were about the same both for the Indian and
the Thracian persons, because the technical level in the 5th century
BC was similar in the two areas and all of them needed about the same
territories for sustenance.
And now, pay attention! Suppose we transfer
the size of the Hindustan Peninsula , plentiful territory for the Indians, to
this part of Europe , what do we see? That those
pieces from the Balkan Peninsula which we have populated with Thracians occupy
the surfaces of Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Poland,
Romania, Ukraine, Hungary and the peoples of former Yugoslavia put together.
In other words, the sustenance surface for a
number of Thracians, similar to that of Indians, had to have approximately the
surface of south-east Europe . Amazing, isn’t
it?
And this is not all; Herodotus also says that
the Thracians also existed on the southern shore of the Black Sea, namely on
the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea . So, if we
add now to the “Thracian Balkan space” the western part of Asia Minor, Phrygia
as it was also called, we come closer to the “similar Hindustan Peninsula
Well, if I wondered somewhat decently at the
large number of Thracians as I was taken by surprise, now, after having “assigned”
to them the necessary space, I no longer know what my surprise looks like.
What I do know, however, is that this
conclusion shatters everything we know. This consequence, which says that the
Thracian Balkan Peninsula has around 2.1 million sq km, that is the size of the
Hindustan Peninsula ,
that it stretches for approximately half the Europe
and is full of Thracians, is something entirely different; it requires a
different world atlas and a completely different history.
What do you think, dear readers, of the resulting
consequences from the said “obscure” sentence? This is how we discover that the
“insignificant” Thracians were at home from the mountains of Italy to the Caucasus
and who knows how far to the north!
What is important to us, however, namely to the
narrow topic of this book, is that the Dacians,
a branch of the Thracians, must also be included in the set. And here is how certain
answers regarding the obscure Dacia
and the lost Dacians begin to be
revealed, which offer different coordinates and perspectives.
For the time being, let us limit our research
to the Thracians and continue to follow these “fresh Europeans”.
Herodotus also says: “The Thracians have many names, each by the region they live in, but
they all have similar customs in everything”3.
Precisely what has been missing, “the
Thracians have many names”. This is only natural, it is natural that, in the
vastness of this area, there would exist no end of Thracian family names,
tribes and unions of tribes, we can even find the names in the official
history, but as they are outside the Thracian coordinates, something different
can be inferred.
Therefore, a crucial truth is revealed: the
Thracians, who have many names and similar customs, are the origin of many
European countries.
We can add something else: I am certain that
Herodotus did not rely solely on the similar customs when he called Thracians
the multitude of individuals, or on anatomical studies or blood tests;
undeniably, the essential criterion which “made” all of them Thracians and
implicitly separated them from the rest was their language.
At last, here is how the path opened by the
famous sentence has led us naturally to the right place, here we have a Europe with a multitude of Thracians who also speak the
same language, theirs.
I did not draw this conclusion, Herodotus
did; he offered it to us, I just presented it more explicitly.
Next, another quote from Herodotus: “No one can say clearly what people inhabit the
territory which lies to the north of this country, because beyond the Istros an
endless wasteland seems to stretch. I have managed to learn only about the
inhabitants on the other bank of Istros, called Sigyans… Their borders stretch almost
to the Adriatic Heneti”4.
So, beyond
the Istros lie the Sigyans (Sighişoara, sighii, Sibiu ,
sibieni?!), that stretch to the Heneti in north-east Italy , namely the Venetians. It is
the area to the north of these Sigyans that I will be talking about next, what
is important is that the area inhabited by them overlaps with that of the found
Thracians.
No vexation there: Apollonius of Rhodes says that the Sigyans are “Scythians mixed with
Thracians”5. Moreover, Strabo says there is one more population
bearing this name in the Caucasus6. Vasile Pârvan tells the same
about the Sigyans, the inhabitants to the north of the Danube7. Is
the conclusion about a Thracian Europe from the Caucasus to beyond the Alps still speculative?
It means that the Dacians, being in the middle of a Thracian area, were a Thracian
branch, which means they spoke the Thracian language as well, didn’t they?
So, here is where the mysterious Dacians were, as well as their
mysterious lost language!
Next comes the big revelation: if the
Thracian language was then spoken from the Caucasus to the Italian Peninsula
After all we have seen so far, this should be
the case, it cannot be otherwise, and to us this is the most important
conclusion arising from Herodotus’ statement: the Latin language spoken by the
Romans of Trajan and the language spoken by the Dacians of Decebalus were derived from the “Thracian language of
Herodotus”!
The conclusion is that the Dacians and the Romans were
speaking almost the same language!
Distinguished professors, academicians,
modern scribes and others, had you “carefully read” Herodotus’ sentence, you
would have drawn this inevitable conclusion and would not have been forced to exterminate
the Dacians and lose their language
in order to get to the inevitable Romanian people! Moreover, this way you would
have also had arguments to say that the Romanians come also from the Dacians, not only from the Romans, that,
at home, they are on Dacian
territory and the relocation, migration, re-migration or other artifices would
not have been necessary.
Let us catch our breath for a while. Bizarre overlooking,
isn’t it? However, as I was faced with this conclusion for the first time, I
admit I was a bit scared; at first, I thought I had lost my marbles and had to
“pull over” and hit the sack. Yet, the conclusions were true, I could not deny
them, for if Herodotus’ statement had been false, I am convinced someone would
have pointed out the absurdity in a footnote on the respective page. However,
the “correction” did not occur, hence I infer the statement is not false, just
overlooked.
Next, I will quote another statement by Herodotus
which I do not wish to skip, because, treated superficially, it may generate
controversies and I do not want to avoid such parts.
“The
Thracians say that the territories which lie beyond the Istros [the Danube ] are full of
bees and because of them it is impossible to go further into the territory. In
my opinion, those who speak like this are saying unnatural things”8.
Here we have a statement which seems to contradict what we said earlier, but it
is only an illusion; if we take a closer look at it, not only it does not
contradict our conclusions, but also offers proof of the historian’s
objectivity.
In other words, certain Thracians allegedly
told him that the territories beyond the Istros are inhabited by bees, implying
that they are inhabited solely by
bees. As we can see, he himself doubts this statement, his common sense warns
him that this could be nonsense. We, however, can back Herodotus’ doubts with
arguments, namely: the Peloponnese was also
called the land of bees and was not at all uninhabited; rather it was heavily
populated and, as it is known, even by numerous Thracian peoples. Then, why
also call the Peloponnese the land of bees?
Could it be because the Thracians, its inhabitants, were beekeepers? Could it
be that such a “Peloponnese” also existed to the north of the Danube
where other Thracians kept many bees, hence the confusion?
I will only add that the later Dacians, as well as the Romanians,
their still later descendants, were and are important beekeepers; then why would
their ancestors, the “Thracians of Herodotus”, not be beekeepers themselves? A
healthy logic would not even allow the existence somewhere, anywhere, of a
“kingdom of bees”, this is impossible. So it was a confusion, something noticed
even by Herodotus, and, to his credit, he does not avoid it, but presents it
out of duty, because he encountered it.
There is another important aspect related to
these bees:
“The
Thracians say that the territories which lie beyond the Istros are full of bees
[…] are saying unnatural things, because these creatures cannot stand the cold;
I believe that the territories under the Ursa cannot be inhabited due to the
cold”9.
We get the idea about the bees, but here we
have something new: what is important is that Herodotus pushes this “beyond the
Istros” to under the Ursa, namely around the Polar Circle. He may have not
known the distance from the Danube to the
pole, but he does not say either that these vast areas are inhabited by other
people than those he calls Sigyans. That is he does not believe they could be
inhabited by bees, but does not say either that they belong to others.
We could infer that he did not know so well what
lay beyond the trans-Danubian and trans-Carpathian Thracians, those bearing
various names and singularized earlier by the term Sigyans, but in his century
most definitely Europe was no longer empty, not even in those regions. Then what
are we to understand, that certain names existed there which someone like
Herodotus had not heard of, or that those names were precisely the ones mentioned
earlier? The conclusion could be forced, yet I believe that the territory
occupied by those Sigyans-Thracians stretched from the Danube
a long way to the north.
Equipped with these new elements, let us try
to summarize a picture of the then reality. We can now say that in the 5th
century BC a large portion of Europe was occupied by some Thracians, who were
also found in Italy and Dacia , and that they
spoke the same mother tongue. I could also say that in the 5th
century BC the name of Latin language had been used, for the Italic variant of
the original Thracian, and that the name of Dacian language existed for the Balkan variant of the same
language.
I said earlier that, on the territory of
Italy, also lived some Thracians, in case
that, at the time, some other peoples were there as well; the presence of
others in the Italian Peninsula was possible, without contradicting the words
of Herodotus, as those territories were located towards the edge of the
Thracian region. For Dacia ,
however, the emphasis also was not
necessary, because the Dacians were
situated right in the center of this area.
Of course, these new conclusions will
contradict the classic teachings and trigger confusion and heated remarks. And
how else can it be, if the contemporary “reality”, decoded with the help of so
many “classic elements”, discovers 25 centuries after Herodotus, in the
Hindustan Peninsula, nearly one billion Indians, whereas in Europe there are no
Thracians left, not a single one.
One remark could go like this: “Thracians may
have existed in Herodotus’ times, but can’t you see there aren’t any nowadays!”
Indeed, this argument, which rises like a wall and obstructs the runner, stifles
any perspective and dialogue, and overwhelms and justifies the irritation. Because,
to be honest, where are the Thracians?
Indeed, where are they? And here we are
again, out of the frying pan into the fire; after we thought that we have found
the “few” Dacians and have located them
in the Thracian vastness, we see that this vastness does not exist as well.
So, in my opinion, we have here again a
superficial way of judging things.
Do they really not exist? Is it possible that
we do not want to see them? The explanation is as follows: you do remember that
the disappearance of the Dacians was
necessary to historians in order to explain the exclusively Latin origin of the
Romanian language. However, erasing them from history was not enough; the
disappearance of the Dacians, an
important branch of the Thracians, triggered the need to also alter their
history. How was this “need” met? Very simple, the most convenient method was
used: the European history was divided in two, saying it starts with Greece and
Rome, while the previous, Thracian one was pushed into a kind of prehistory,
leaving it only to the dealt with by the archeologists’ shovels. So, the
“Distinguished Professors”, the authors of these histories, distort the origin of
a large portion of Europe ’s population, its
language and, implicitly, a crucial part of world history.
I do not know why they did it, but from now
on this is obvious and we can see how they all turn a blind eye, falsely indifferent
to their daily bread.
Therefore, the disappearance of the Thracians
was also necessary for the history fabricated by incompetence or, perhaps, for
other reasons; however, it is certain it is not real, because, after all, we
are not aware of any causes or cataclysms which would impose the disappearance.
So, they were made to disappear in order to validate some sort of “circular argumentation”:
the Thracians no longer exist, because the map no longer includes Thrace , and, since Thrace is no longer on the map, no
Thracians are left as well! One way or another, it can be said serenely that,
just like the Dacians, the Thracians
have vanished from history and geography.
Here we are again faced with the same
impossible phenomenon of massive disappearances of peoples; however, we now
have the benefit of training: if the Dacians,
who were fewer, could not disappear, how could the immense number of Thracians
disappear, how, in the name of heaven, can so many people vanish? Have entire
peoples vanished just because their names no longer exist on the map?
In my opinion, a people means much more than
just a name; it means a large number of individuals who preserve their culture
and language, and all this does not vanish so easily. So, the theory of
Thracians’ disappearance is just as superficial, absurd and serious as that of Dacians’ disappearance. Serious because
the errors it contains are not the kind you find in the list of errata, which
can be eliminated with a few apologies, they are history errors and, if we are
honest with ourselves, they are even the sources of the conflicts mentioned
earlier. To ignore them equals to generate premeditated hotbeds of conflict.
All right, still, where are the “vanished”
Thracians? And because I have somewhat exceeded my role of a mere baffled
person, namely I also have opinions of my own, allow me to continue, assuming
now the role of an individual who offers his opinions; the role of layman offers
me a certain degree of freedom to do some “alchemy” with events and dates without
affecting my professional reputation. So, being a layman, I can afford to offer
serenely all kinds of scenarios, even one about how the Thracians
“disappeared”.
It is true that the “Distinguished
Professors” have access to the satisfaction of considering me a fantasy-prone
person, but they have the obligation to provide professional arguments in
support of their positive or negative statements, not simply to utter, like an
amateur, yes or no.
Therefore, let us kick off with the shocking
finding that, after approximately 25 centuries, the Indian people has reached
one billion individuals, whereas the Thracian people has vanished. We are faced
with an issue which should have generated certain reflections and questions anyway:
how come two peoples of the same age and almost equal in number, which 25-30
centuries ago were shaping their destinies where fate had placed them, end up one
of them immense and the other gone?
When we think that they have been moved by
the same Earth, wetted by the same rains and dried by the same sun, this
reality should surprise and automatically spark questions: what happened, has
one of them evolved naturally and the other unnaturally?
In other words, is it possible that, in the
same cosmic conditions, a multitude of people would prosper and grow to become
immense and the other would vanish?
I do not wish to enter a thicket of causes
which explain one another; I will look at this matter from an angle which I
believe will help us see it in a different light, and I will start with the
remark of a Frenchman, whose name unfortunately escapes me, who I thank for the
synthetic statement.
“History is a matter of geography,” he said,
namely each people owns a part of geography on which it builds its history, and
if its geography is elastic and variable for various reasons, its history will
automatically be like that as well.
So, we have returned to those situations where
geographies were altered and the scribes were also altering history as their
masters dictated.
The conclusion is that, if each people kept
its geography, it would also keep its history.
The problem is that it is not possible, because
someone braver appears and hacks a slice off his neighbor’s geography. What do
you think will happen next to the history of that slice, will it stay the same?
I assure you it will not, for together with the slice of geography, a slice of
history will go too.
So, the brave newcomers will try to modify
the history of the grabbed slice, moreover, wishing to justify their conquest,
they will be forced to alter the history of the entire region, and so the new
context will be included by the “conscientious” scribes in the textbooks, this
is how the young descendants of the heroes will learn it, and eventually the
number of histories will equal that of neighbors and grabbed slices.
Well, within these doctored pages we will be
able to find the lost Thracians.
Let us think for a moment: we are familiar
with the cases of certain peoples which we consider to be extinct, such as the Sumerians,
and others which are now threatened with extinction, such as the Kurds, Ainu
and maybe others. All the rest are between these opposites, and I will refer
here to migratory peoples which roamed across Europe
and which are extinct. Where are they, have they really become extinct, here one
day, gone the next?
We cannot take this opinion for granted,
reality contradicts us; in fact, all these extinct peoples, just like the huge
number of Thracians, are part of the world, so if all the peoples we can no
longer find on the map had “vanished into thin air”, the Earth’s population
would have had to decrease, not increase. As we can see, this is not true, so
they must be somewhere, for they have contributed to the nearly seven billion
people in existence today. Therefore, nowadays, the disappeared are still where
they used to be, but the flexibility of geography has given them new identities
and new histories. In our case, allow me to tell you a few imaginary little
stories to illustrate the said disappearances.
We know that people die due to illness or
accidents; in the case of peoples, namely large numbers of people, the
situation is a little more complex, it takes appropriate aggressors: the
viruses of an epidemic, the “viruses” armed with bows that carry their
geography under a tent, or others armed only with quills, ink and paper, or papyrus,
clay, marble, bronze and the like, namely those scribes I referred to earlier.
Now, after we have understood their role, we
realize they are in fact the most dangerous, they set the boundaries, the
number of dead and living people, what must and must not be said, that is they
conceive and impose “reality”, and, once decided, it freezes in history and
that’s it. People die, generations come and go, but everyone reads the fragile
tablet which lasts, which keeps being written and re-written and so on. But let’s
go back to our story.
A few local people, let’s say Dacians, are out in the field hoeing. Suddenly,
a group of horsemen appears armed only with spears and bows, and no hoes. They
do not know how to hoe, or do not like to hoe, in fact they are not there for
the hoeing; if they liked this activity, they would stay at home, hoe their
vastness and be healthy as a horse. But they do not like it, that is why they
are starved, skinny and furious, that is brave; they know how to fight and
conquer, in fact to plunder (forgive my indelicacy, but because I consider
myself a descendant of those with hoes, not with spears, I have decided to play
the part of the irritated person).
At first, they kill everyone who opposes
them, then capture as many as they can from the rest, especially young men and
women who are fit for work, take everything they can and go back where they
came from, pushing from behind the loot, the animals and the people. I have
imagined here briefly an invasion, more or less an ambush; the old peoples,
namely the settled ones that hoed the land and gathered the crops in barns,
experienced quite a lot of these invasions.
Anyway, these “visits” occurred repeatedly
depending on the force of the riposte, less frequently when the riposte was strong
or more frequently if the riposte was weak, and if the riposte was almost
absent, when they came back they did the same, but stayed. After a while, the
carts filled with their women and children came, and they all settled where it
was better and nicer.
Of course, in this case, they destroyed everything
they did not understand, and as they did not understand much, they did not
respect much, and meanwhile they chiseled their ideals inside their tents. In
fact, they were hungry and were leaving their homes in search of food and thick
grass for their animals, they did not value the buildings or other people’s
order which made them feel inferior, because their primitive nature could still
not comprehend it; they were happy when they were full, made babies and sang
songs of praise for their heroes.
Why were they hungry, why did they leave
their homes? For primitive people, no space is enough, because they do not know
how to cultivate it, so the savage hunger generated by their growing numbers drives
them in search of new spaces, mainly the ones cultivated by those who know how
to hoe. There is also the fascination with superiority, that luster others have
and they do not; if it shines nicely, they must have it, and if they cannot
have it, it must be destroyed, out of a bizarre mix of envy and inferiority
complex, that fear which arises when faced with their own uselessness. So, we
must link this “cramming” to the absence of an agricultural occupation, because
the vast space they came from was anything but crammed, it would have been more
than enough for them had it been cultivated properly.
We must not believe, however, that all these
newcomers came necessarily from far away, migrated en masse and left uninhabited
their old places; maybe they all participated in the battles held in the new
territories, but only until they annihilated the local people’s counter-attack.
After the “Pax”, many of they went back, partly because there were insufficient
places for so many seniors, and partly because some of them were already
seniors where they came from; perhaps the places they had incorporated during
the previous stage.
I think this migrating method must also be
taken seriously; I do not think that the image of large populations which
migrate taking everything but the kitchen sink and settle in the new
territories is real, suggesting they left their place of origin completely
vacant; the example of the Mongols who, in just a few years, burned Asia and
Europe leaving nothing behind is not obligatory.
The migration of the Huns, for instance, is graphic:
they moved en masse to a certain extent, but needed around 600-700 years to
cover nearly 10,000 km until they reached the Catalaunian Plains where they met
their Waterloo .
Others, however, such as the Germanic and
Slavic peoples, were not necessarily coming from somewhere or going somewhere in
particular, they had settled in their territories during the “Golden Age” when
the spaces had been occupied by the common family. In time, however, the
families grew bigger and started pushing their boundaries outwards, but because
everything was already occupied, they came into conflict with their neighbors
who were also forced to expand.
It is true that between those settlements
there were huge tracts of empty land, but they were only apparently empty, they
were the “fields” where they grazed their animals and hunted, and the ownership
over them was very well established.
So migration must not always be regarded as a
massive moving process, but also as a diffusion, perhaps not always peaceful,
of certain individuals among the others, without being professional warriors
like the others, but simply “crammed”.
Speaking of migration, I believe we could
call the same another phenomenon as well: if archeologists discover ornaments crafted
with a technique known elsewhere, if they find weapons or tools which should
not be in that place, namely they cannot explain their presence there, we must
not think right away that the populations that “would have had the right to
possess them” came and lost them where they were found. I believe we could also
speak of a migration of objects, customs, processing techniques, and even
leading elites, as we have seen, which does not necessarily imply the migration
of an entire population, but could lead to the “migration” of boundaries.
What I mean is that, at first, the most
savage and primitive would invade others especially because they were hungry,
because some would organize themselves and prosper ahead of others and eventually
become a temptation. But the process went on: many of the hungry people lost their
habit of producing their own food and left that activity to their neighbors,
while they specialized mainly in incursions; always coming to all-inclusive services,
they had the time to prepare their incursion professionals, thus protecting the
group of warriors. But those with the hoe and the order learned to defend
themselves, build enclosures, and so armored protection, explosives and well-trained
spies came into being.
In fact, this is how humankind’s “Bronze Age”
was invented, the incursion-prone people combined copper with tin and made
weapons (almost every time, archeologists found weapons and ornaments, and very
few hoes), military academies were founded, namely training schools for
professional, official thieves and killers, then the “Iron Age” was invented,
and after the language was perfected a bit more, the civilizing wars were
invented.
It is worth noticing that these movements
took place less aggressively in the old days, when the players still knew they
were related and the language differences were smaller, and much more bloodily
later on.
Coming back, we could say that, after the
battle, the victors settled and monopolized all the privileges, took over the
lands, animals and generally all the properties which usually belonged to local
elites, which is why the latter were exterminated first. Later, what was left
of the old elites went poor, if they did not become corrupt, but if they did, so
much the better, groveling helped more effectively to change the old organism.
Therefore, through this kind of arrangements we can explain the phenomenon in
question, the migration leading to pseudo-change in peoples, changes in boundaries
and, implicitly, in names.
The mass of people, nevertheless, benefit
from clemency, because, as we have seen, interests change following the
conquest; the people are spared because, from now on, very many hoes are
necessary in order to satisfy the hunger of this army of new nobles, so most of
the people will survive. But although the masses are the great repository of
traditions, still, if the old elites disappear, the possibility that the masses
will act uniformly goes with them, so, in time, the old traditions will change
hands.
As a result, under these circumstances, the
Thracian, Dacian, population,
flooded for the time being by the newcomers, did not vanish, strictly speaking:
it turned into a minority, when it formed a group, or lost its identity when it
dispersed inside the other mass. However, the Thracian, Dacian, individuals and their language did not vanish; scattered
among the others, their traditions and language altered, but in turn they did
the same to their invaders. Therefore, in the new context, new customs and traditions
will take shape, and eventually the new organism will include a mix of
languages and other elements.
But what is most important is that, from now
on, the new organism, the new community will appear on the maps bearing the
name of the conqueror.
There are plenty of examples of such
countries and minorities; after World War I, great kingdoms and empires were
reduced by history to what they were, namely the size of the peoples whose names
they were bearing, and the countless “ethnic minorities” became countries, some
of them returning to their former names; it is precisely in this complex
phenomenon that we find the explanation we are looking for.
So this is how we learn that the Thracians did
not disappear as individuals, only their Thracian identity vanished, that they
are now part of the peoples who invaded their vast territory, have different
names, perhaps even the names of the old Thracian tribes Herodotus was talking
about, and have mingled with the others over and over again until have all become
the same.
Now, after so many centuries and immigrants
have passed, it would be impossible to determine how much German, Slavic,
Turkish or other kind of blood runs in the veins of the Europeans, the former
Thracians.
In fact, this book does not intend to do such
things, on the contrary, it is aimed at preventing precisely the invention of
this type of assertions. Heaven forbid, people nowadays are so intelligent that
they could establish those origins based on blood tests. But our debate was
necessary not to find the amount of blood, but to see where that huge number of
Thracians are; we have finally found them.
I admitted right from the start that my
little literary-historical theories will turn out to be dodgy at a closer
inspection, but if the specialists can invent absurdities, I am also entitled
to invent literature. After all, someone must point out that, cutting off slice
by slice from the huge Thracian space, it ended up with a different geography which
led to a different history.
As regards the Thracian language, the issue
is the same; it has dispersed into the languages of the new inhabitants, and I
think it is imperative that the specialists should make an effort to clarify its
situation. It would be interesting to read a book titled, for example, The Migration of the Thracian Language
or The Structure of European Languages.
Of course there are researchers concerned
with such matters, the question “What was the language of Paradise ?”
has been asked by many10. The
Lost Common Language11, The
Language without Vowels12, etc. are titles which prove this
interest, but these researchers seem to me to be somewhat attracted to the
Thracian phenomenon. The Romanians, however, who live in this space and speak
one of the closest derivatives of the Thracian language, have the obligation to
look into this phenomenon with the interest typical of an owner.
I hope I am not mistaken, such books may
exist, but, as I have taken a layman’s path which is too short, I may not have
found them; yet, be it short as it is, during my walks through the “temples” I
could have found them, had their number been the appropriate one. And, anyway,
the “Distinguished Professors” should have presented them to all departments
and pupils.
*
Now, I would like to discuss something very important
concerning the Thracian language: it is said that the European languages derive
from the language of certain Indo-European tribes that once also populated part
of Europe .
I do not wish to deny this statement, but I
find it to be a mere statement, as nothing else is added to support it. Of
course, taking into account the common linguistic basis of the European
languages, I am certain that, at some point, it must have belonged to an
immense community that lived in Europe, but why call them Indo-Europeans, whom we know nothing of, and not Thracians, according to Herodotus? Why
ignore the words of great Herodotus and replace them with the recent inventions
of some obscure fellow?
The size of the Thracian people and the space
they occupied recommend them for this role, the number and the place being
precisely the necessary elements.
Do the linguists and historians think this
hypothesis is absurd? As they wish, but doubt must be backed by arguments, not
by burying your head in the sand.
I conclude this chapter with these important
findings: I have found the Dacians,
I have found the Thracians and also the language in which the Dacians and the Romans understood each
other. Taking, however, into consideration that all these conclusions originate
only in the words of Herodotus, people could say it is not enough for a matter
with such implications.
I accept the criticism, I will look into
other sources as well and, as you will see, I will find plenty of evidence.
NOTES
1 Herodotus, The Histories, Editura Ştiinţifică,
1984, translation and notes by Felicia Vanş Ştef and Sadelina Piatkowski.
2 Idem, Book V, chap.
III.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., Book V,
chap. IX.
5 Argonautica IV,
320.
6 Strabo, quoted work,
chap. 250.
7 V. Pârvan,
quoted work, pp. 35-36, 231.
8 Herodotus, The Histories, chap. X.
9 Herodotus, The Histories.
10 St. Augustine (354-430)
believes it was Hebrew, Theodoret of Cyrus (393-466?) claims it was Syrian, and
others with different suggestions. Quoted by Maurice Olender in The Languages of Paradise, Editura
Nemira, translated from French by Ion Doru Brana.
11 Iafetica, N. J. Marr, Cultures et sociétés de l’Est, 1987.
12 The Chinese
Jews think that Moses wrote the sacred texts without vowels, because, up there
in the mountains, he was in a hurry.
CHAPTER III
THE
LANGUAGE OF THE THRACIANS
So, from the famous sentence of Herodotus I
inferred the extraordinary conclusions which established new directions for
ancient Europe . However, all this confused me;
I did not know what to think, was I wrong somewhere and did not realize?
Although the discrepancies in the official historiography were so blatant and
the new findings from Herodotus solved so well the problem of Dacians and
Romanians, I was still confused, because I suddenly found myself alone among
specialists; a tense situation, I can assure you. I did not know what to
believe and, taken over by the syndrome of the victim, I suspected everyone of
everything; right about then I began to think that, behind the vanished
documents and other similar strange things, there is a very well structured “hazy
mass”. However, I did not insist on the mystery, because I found it too tangled
and I was certain that, if the words of Herodotus were true, it was impossible
not to find something in the works of other authors as well.
However, the matter was extremely delicate,
the events I was referring to had taken place ages before, beyond the
boundaries of solid history, therefore I had to look for possible answers in a
different manner, not in the known histories, but before them, in a vague heap
of intuitions rather than facts.
Then I thought of folklore, legends, the collective
memories which could contain certain elements from the logic of which some
arguments could be extracted; my thoughts turned to the multitude of ancient Greek
narrators, particularly Homer1. The Iliad, the Odyssey and
other works dealt with legends born right in the space and time in question, so,
I told myself, heroes that have “a lot to say” in the matter in hand were
featured in them. And even if Homer was not perfectly contemporary with the events
depicted in the legends, he is a titan of world culture and, just like
Herodotus, was “infinitely” closer to the events than us, therefore a
prestigious witness.
Of course, he was a poet, which may vex certain
stiff-necked people, but was he just a poet? In his time, history had not been
born, facts were still combined with legends, and with the discernment of good
faith, the folklore and the myths could become and even became part of history.
The example of Schliemann, who took legends seriously, is illuminating and
encouraged me. Do you know the story?
Heinrich Schliemann2, a stubborn
German, heard from legends about the fortress of Troy
and started to locate it on the map, and after a while shouted “Eureka !”, he had found it.
The experts had also heard of Troy , but remained
skeptical not only about Schliemann’s localization but even about Troy ’s existence; they
saw in the mysterious fortress some kind of dragon castle from folk tales.
But the stubborn German was not discouraged
by their doubts, he went where he thought Troy
was located and started digging. And because no specialist was around to take
his shovel, he kept digging until he found, guess what? Exactly, Troy3.
He could be wrong, of course, but he was not.
You see the potential of some legends? Coming
from ancient times, they bring something else along with tales or poetry; as we
can see, these versified songs are precisely a primitive form of history; before
the written word, the rhythm and rhyme of oral poems saved the events from
oblivion, making them easier to remember through their music.
I considered Homer a useful witness, because,
as I said, the great poet lived “around that time”, his date of birth is placed
between the 10th and 8th centuries BC and, fortunately
for us, at approximately two or four hundred years from the events which
generated the two poems.
I have mentioned this for the skeptics and I
tell them that the facts depicted in the poems were “fresh” not only for him
but especially for the “bibliography” he used as a source.
What I mean is that, although the written
word had been discovered, I still believe that many sources from which he
gathered the material for his works had been his ordinary contemporaries who
told each other about various events. His sources were also some sort of
professionals, namely those bards (aoidoi)
who versified the events, recited them and sang about them during celebrations,
carrying them from place to place, learning about them from one another and passing
them on orally to their descendants. This is how legends circulated along with
their wandering bearers for hundreds of years across the Balkan world until
they reached Homer. The big difference is that Homer, after he refined them
once again with his great gift, also made them eternal through writing.
I insist on this aspect as I think it is
extremely important: of course, many folk bards added beauty to them, according
to his or her imagination, and wrapped the facts in various figures of speech,
still facts remained facts, they could not alter them. They could tell in many
ways about someone’s death, how the plain was on fire, or how the earth shook
and Troy’s walls collapsed; certain secondary aspects could be ignored and, in
time, even forgotten, but not the facts, they were known very well to everyone,
so they could not be altered or concealed. Therefore, even if Homer was not there
when the presented facts happened, we must not be skeptical about them; in
those times, this is how events circulated.
The proof of this is even Schliemann, he
showed us that Homer’s epic poems offer not only literary satisfaction, but
also an extremely valuable source of history, almost the only written one of
those times, even if it is in verse. It is so valuable due to the multitude of
details, real life scenes, customs and so on that it almost relocates us, the
readers of today, to a period of time three thousand years ago. How many
serious histories have succeed in “infiltrating” us among our ancestors?
Well, because it is Troy I want to talk about, let me say first a
few things about it. It was founded by the descendants of Dardanus4
who was a son of Zeus and Electra; he was considered either a god or a mortal,
but always a Thracian. Dardanus left the Italian
Peninsula from a region inhabited by
Thracians, according to Herodotus, went through Balkan Thrace, crossed the Thracian Sea
or the Phrygian Sea ,
as the Aegean Sea was called back then, through a strait and landed on the
coast of Phrygia5 . The strait may
have had a name back then, but he called it the Dardanelles ,
from his name, and it has stayed like that to this day. Then he stopped on the
western coast of Asia Minor, in a region called the TRoad, and enclosed a country where, later on, the fortress of TRoy
was built. I emphasized the root TR of certain names in order to point out
their connection to the root of Thracian [in Romanian: TRac].
Darnanus’ wife was Batea, daughter of Teucer who
came from Crete , and they had a son,
Erichthonius. Batea would be the mortal component of the Trojans, the
descendants of the god Dardanus. Erichthonius had a son, Tros, who actually
built the fortress, hence the name Troy .
Tros had a son, Ilus, and for the sake of his son he also called the fortress Ilion , hence the
Iliad. Ilus had a son, Laomedon, who was the father of Priam, the king of Troy during the war
depicted in the Iliad. Priam’s wife
was Hecuba, the daughter of Dymas, king of the Phrygians, also a Thracian
population from the south shore of the Black Sea .
Legend has it that these were the founders of
Troy and its
“first” inhabitants; in these few words, I have sketched a history of the fortress,
forced by the subsequent needs. One more thing should be added to this brief
history of the founding of Troy ,
namely that, according to the codes back then, the gods also attended such
major events. And indeed, it is said that the walls of the fortress were built
with the direct contribution of Poseidon and Apollo, by order of Zeus, Dardanus’
natural father.
So, Dardanus came from the Italian Peninsula
to Asia Minor , founded a country, the city and
then the fortress. The legend does not say who he found there, but an answer is
offered by the fact that almost entire Asia Minor was called the Troad back
then, the Aegean Sea was called the Thracian
Sea
Anyway, according to archeologists, it is certain
that, upon the arrival of the Dardan Thracians, the land of future Troy was not empty, but populated
by the descendants of the inhabitants of the other VI pre-Troy layers
discovered by archeologists, according to Schliemann. The identity of these
populations from the pre-Troy layers is not important, to us what is important
is that, at the time of the Trojan War, we can consider all of them to be
relatively united in the Dardan Thracians.
Therefore, the Iliad6, in particular, and the Odyssey7 are some of the most ancient works about the
region and give an account of a certain Trojan War, events which took place in
the middle of the Thracian world, precisely what I am looking for; this is
where we start dealing with the subject matter.
The analysts and historians say that this war
took place around the 12th century BC and is an episode of the
confrontation between the Greeks who had just arrived in the Balkans and the
indigenous Thracians. According to them, Homer
the Greek presents in these poems a short moment from the lengthy
confrontation between the two races, and the epic poems, written by the Greek
genius, are some kind of odes dedicated to Greek heroes by Homer, a Greek
himself.
Here is the first discrepancy. But before
going further into the text of the epic poems and various arguments, we should clarify
the meaning of the word “race”. In Micul
Dicţionar Enciclopedic issued by Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucharest , 1978, the word
does not exist. The same goes for Micul
Dicţionar Filosofic issued by Editura Politică, Bucharest , 1973. I found it in Le Petit Larousse issued by Larousse
Publishing House, Paris, 1993, which says, among other things, that “race”
means a group or groups of populations which share the same origins, which lead
to common traditions, and, what is of particular interest to us, have a common language.
Of course, nowadays, in the Balkan
Peninsula , we can find the Greek race, in a region that was once
called Balkan Thrace, which calls for the conclusion that the areas of these
two races crossed at some point and, according to experts, this took place around
the 12th century BC.
Before giving my opinion, I will try to see
if in the 12th century BC, when the Trojan War is supposed to have taken
place, the populations which “crossed” there were really those two races, as
they say, or it is something else.
From histories, one could infer that, at the
time of the Trojan War, these races had been in contact for a short period,
however, according to Le Petit Larousse,
if they were different races, apart
from traditions, deities and other things, they definitely had to speak
different languages8. But, during the war, I did not notice these
compulsory differences, on the contrary, that is why I take the liberty of
having a different opinion.
Why? I have already told you: because I am
dissatisfied with the quality of the historical products I am being offered.
Why do I think I can have a different
opinion? I think it is the chance given to a self-taught person, the privilege
of the layman which allows me to do so: I was not polished, i.e. forced to
learn the comments of a certain teacher, which had been passed on from one
master to another and which, through continuous reiterations, can take on a
harmful rigidity. The manner of learning in order to be appreciated by the
master fixes the student within a compulsory framework which can sometimes be
outside the core.
Therefore, not being the student of anyone in
particular, I did not benefit from that rigid framework and, free from the leveling
vigilance of standards, I can afford to take certain liberties which help me to
“see the forest” more easily.
In fact, in our case, the different opinion
is not mine, but of illustrious Herodotus, Homer and others, I only gather
their statements, bring them forward and let them say what they have to say, I
do not impose on them the framework which has been shaped along the way; that
is why I take the liberty of having a different opinion.
At the same time, I do not want people to
believe that I disregard the work of the experts who work really hard to find some
answers. I just wish to say that some “specialists”, entering the limiting
tunnel of specialization, could become too much interested in the color of Hannibal ’s sandals, thus
overlooking the importance of the dust they tread on.
And, after all, my book is not intended for
specialists, linguists, historians, archeologists and so on, so I cannot offend
anyone, I write literature which is meant for those who do not turn to the
treatises which are difficult to read due to the specialized terms, who are
more comfortable with textbooks, namely the average reader to whom I suggest
that the world could be different from what they know from textbooks and whom I
urge to read other books as well.
Coming back, I consider this superficial
theory of inter-ethnic conflict to be a mere invention meant to justify the
existence of the victorious Greek race and the disappearance of the Thracian
race. What vexes me is that, in this theory, conclusions support each other,
change their place in the logic, being alternately causes and effects,
contradict Herodotus’ histories and no one notices the alteration. Here is an
ingratitude, to say the least: the statement about the multitude of Thracians
from the histories of their great “father” is not only ignored by disciples,
but also contradicted. Then, the science of these historians is based on what?
Personally, I choose to believe in Herodotus and
I will try to prove that Homer offers even evidence in support of his words.
Without denying the existence of premises which
would point to a separation of populations, it seems premature to me to claim
that back then, in the 13th century BC, two races already existed in
the Balkans, the statement that it is an inter-ethnic war is too precise, as
the period of the conflict is too obscure for such precision. In the Balkan
space, too many unknowns existed back then for such certainties, and in support
of my disagreement I bring a reality which, again, I find to be treated
superficially. To this end, I will briefly review the history of the Balkans.
In short, the Greeks’ ancestors are
considered to be the Aeolians, the Dorians and the Ionians, all coming from the
north of the peninsula, as well as great influences from the south. It is said
that they settled gradually in the Balkan Peninsula ,
without denying, however, that the area was occupied by the Pelasgians9
and the Thracians or that the Pelasgians were related to the Thracians.
According to this picture, around the 12th century BC, three
different peoples invaded two similar peoples, the Pelasgians and the
Thracians, and began to exterminate them.
First of all, I believe that a crucial
element has been neglected, a milestone for all world histories, namely: the
further we go back in time, the closer we get to that certainty, that
“primordial family”, so to speak, from which the subsequent generations,
families and races separated. But the elements shared by these families were
the traditions which they had built together and the language, also acquired together,
elements which were preserved to a large extent in all subsequent families. Therefore,
acknowledging such primordial families, it is natural to accept them as a
starting point.
It means that, due to the historical “moment”
or rather its age, all these newcomers from the north, as well as the local
Pelasgians-Thracians, could be considered branches from the trunk of the
original family, and that they still preserved the language, traditions, mythology
and so on from the common fundamental heritage. But almost forty centuries ago,
the time when, history tells us, the said races met in the Balkans, the
community of the mentioned elements was perfectly valid. In other words, the
said trunk must have been much greener, if not downright green, its branches
were still feeding on the sap from the trunk, namely the common heritage.
So, in that case, the hypothesis of an
inter-ethnic conflict which differentiated them does not apply, it is too
categorical; thus, we can no longer say that, at the time of the war, they met,
but that, possibly, they met again.
Only that, in this case, we should ask
ourselves something else: where could the Aeolians and the others have been and
for how long, so that, when they met, they became different races?
Of course, it is a long history, they had
plenty of time, so my question is in fact a rhetorical exclamation of
amazement; they could roam anywhere, no matter for how long, still I doubt the
diversity of races and languages in the Balkans of the time; of course, it is a
long history, but if it is fractured by glaciations, it becomes very short or
appears to be made up of several shorter histories.
Anyway, arguments which contradict the existence
of “multi-races” in the Balkans of those days do exist, and now let us approach
the works of the great poet Homer.
I feel guilty again, because I again show
irreverence for almost sacred values, namely his poems. In fact, I do not
interfere with the art of these poems, I am only interested in the facts presented
by him, I am not arguing about his masterly art, but the history arising from
his poems, that is to say I do not wish to affect the literary monument in any
way.
In fact, I am convinced that the monument is
too great to “notice” me, I think it is equally insensitive to the contemporary
additions of lyricism, so being certain I am harmless, possessing, however, the
layman’s privilege, allow me to give a somewhat different account of the
totally non-lyrical part of the poems.
A gang of robbers, who had committed robberies
before, agreed to commit another one. They would commit it to stay in shape, to
collect extra women, gold, copper, weapons and other goods, and also for the
sake of adventure, virtues which have always been typical of men.
Not all of them agreed at first, for example
Achilles put on a skirt and hid among girls when his friends went looking for
him: he had special reasons not to go. Ulysses also hid, for different reasons,
but eventually, after much effort, the group assembled and took off. Revenge
was the pretext, namely to avenge a similar robbery committed against them.
So, Menelaus, a member of the gang, had been disgracefully
humiliated by Paris who had taken his wife and her wealth, which was driving
him up the wall. I should add that Paris was
Trojan and that, after “capturing” beautiful Helen, he took her home to Troy .
Well, legend has it that this particular
humiliation stirred the instinct of justice in our boys. Therefore, the group
headed to Troy
to bring back Helen, the stolen goods and some interest. The recovery method:
by force, namely war.
This is the structure of the literary
monument which has reached us several thousand years after the conflict, these
are the reasons behind it: a mix of jealousy, hurt pride, desire for revenge
and a great wish to rob.
So, these were the driving forces behind the
war; from what you have read, have you noticed anything suggesting inter-ethnic
hatred? Any example which would confirm the inter-ethnic conflict?
Then, remember Achilles; he said that “his
share of honesty had been taken from him” when Agamemnon took Briseis from him.
So the girl, something obtained by robbery, his share of the loot, was his
share of honesty. Therefore, these traditions, these honest mutual robberies
were habitual 3-4 thousand years ago, namely this is how people thought they
could get things in an honest manner.
Skipping the moral aspects, I am asking
again: do you see in this example, apart from the robbery, any ethnic reason?
Does the text say anything about Briseis being Thracian and Achilles being
Greek? Let us move on.
Call it a handicap, but again my opinion
differs from that of certain commentators of the epic poem; because I do not admire
that world and some of its heroes, but I cannot, for I do not see why. For
instance, I do not share at all the commentators’ admiration for “great
Achilles”, the apparent hero of the Iliad and a Greek, according to the
inter-ethnic conflict theory. What else was he than a bandit, murderer and
slave monger? The fact that, each time his name was uttered, the label “fortress
destroyer” was added revealed his habit, not his race. What else had Agamemnon
done when he had kidnapped Chryseis? Was Chryseis a Thracian and Agamemnon a
Greek?
And after all, what else had the much defamed
Paris done? Did
he not do the same as the others? Had he not captured with his own weapons a
woman and other goods? Is there any mention that Helen was Thracian and Paris the Thracian wanted
to save her from being a slave to the Greeks?
In other words: can anyone, in good faith,
say that one side was comprised of Greeks and the other of Thracians? Is this
difference evident somewhere? Please excuse me if I am wrong, but I did not see
it.
It is also said that the Iliad is an ode dedicated by Homer the Greek to the Greek heroes
Achilles, Ulysses and others. If this was the case, we should see some radiant
and valiant Greeks who, placed next to the incapable Trojans, would stir feelings
of pride for the former and contempt for the latter; but can someone, in good
faith, say they have found in one team the good heroes and in the other the bad
heroes?
Again, I only saw some pretty primitive
individuals ready to kill; if we were to compare the size of the vices, of the
bad things done, it would rather be the reverse, which can be seen in Homer, he
too is slightly sympathetic towards the Trojans and their cause, which an
author of Greek odes would not do.
Of course it is far-fetched to compare the
morality of the people back then with our high precepts nowadays, it is not my
intention to do so, I just wanted to say that the labels of “great” attached to
some and the opposite to others are the subsequent
attempts, which are bad because they modify, to differentiate some of them
from the others, suggesting the idea of ode and then the idea of inter-ethnic
conflict.
And again, what kind of inter-ethnic conflict
was it, when we saw that brave warriors from everywhere took part in the siege
of Troy, especially if they were in the mood for robbery; and, despite all the
initial little whims, they all were, with no ethnic distinction.
Because, had they been different races, some
of them should have been called Achilles, Diomedes, etc. and the others, say, Buru , Muru, or something like that. In the poem, however,
we see something completely different: we see Echion10, an Achaean
warrior who shared the name with a Trojan11 warrior, one Agelaus12
who was Trojan and another one who was Achaean13 and many, many
others. For example, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra was called
Laodice and she shared the name with one of the daughters of Priam and Hecuba.
And one more, even better: Achilles was also
called Peleides, because his father’s name was Peleus. In this case, the
situation is even more mind-boggling: the root pel came from Pelasgian
and of course it had that particular meaning, because the Pelasgians were
related to the Thracians. Therefore, Achilles, whose father was Thracian, was
fighting the Trojans who were Thracians?
In fact, I think that Achilles’ name [in Romanian:
Ahile] did not have the root ah by chance, it surely came from the
Achaeans [in Romanian: ahei], and so
Achilles the Achaean-Pelasgian-Thraco-Greek killed Patroclus the Thraco-Trojan.
Were they of different races? What were the races?
In the poem, we encounter frequently the name
Argives for the enemies of Troy , which came from
Argos . But that
was a region in the Balkans, not the vast north-Pontic territory where it is
said that the three waves which made up the Greek race originated. So, which
Greeks were fighting which Thracians?
*
I said that had they been different races,
they should have had, besides different traditions, language and many others,
different gods with specific stands on that particular war. As we have read, their
participation was covered extensively, even with specific, biased stands, but
how different they were…
However, the legends and then the epics were
structured gradually after the war, had enough time to become enriched,
absorbing in those hundreds of years before Homer symbols, folk observations
and wise remarks, integrating the war and other things into higher motivations,
as the folk authors tried to explain the human vices by the mysterious will of
the gods.
So, one of the “godlike” reasons behind the
war was allegedly the jealousy of Hera, Zeus’ legitimate wife, of Electra, the
mother of Dardanus, namely one of the countless mistresses of Zeus, thus
explaining Hera’s hatred of Electra’s race and Dardanus, the patriarch of the
Trojans, and, symmetrically, her liking for the Argive side.
Fine, but Electra was not the only mistress
of Zeus (he had filled the world with illegitimate children), another one, even
more famous than Electra, was Alcmene, the mother of great Heracles, it is
true, he himself greatly persecuted by Hera. But being Alcmene’s son, was
Heracles of a different race? Out of the question, he was even a great hero of
the Greeks. Then why was Dardanus of a different race and Heracles was not?
Does someone wish to suggest that each of Zeus’
mistresses generated a different race? Very nice method, indeed, there is
somewhere else a similar attempt which explains the birth of the languages (I
will come back to this attempt later), but although they are full of poetry, these
methods cannot be real and taken seriously.
There was one other method by which an
explanation was attempted for the deities’ interference with the genesis of the
war: Achilles’ father, Peleus, an ordinary mortal from the multitude of people
whose names started with PEL, marries Thetis, Achilles’ mother, a Nereid from
the multitude of Nereus’ daughters. So, not just any wedding, but one arranged
by the gods; they had decided that goddess Thetis would marry the mortal
Peleus, according to their intricate plans.
At their wedding, just like at other weddings
and everywhere else where drinks are served, a brawl started: Eris, the goddess
of discord, was vexed by the monotonous calmness of the party and wanted to
spice it up a bit. She looked around and saw the three fair goddesses Hera,
Athena and Aphrodite standing aside rather bored. Further, there was an
extremely handsome man, but looking somewhat goofy… The context seemed very
much to her liking, the combination was perfect: she took a golden apple inscribed
with the words “For the most beautiful one” and gave it to the handsome man;
pointing to the three beautiful women, she told him to give it to the woman of
his choice. The handsome man was Paris .
And Paris ,
instead of swallowing the apple, throwing it away or disappearing with it,
chose to give it to Aphrodite. In my opinion, the result would have been the
same regardless of the recipient, but his heart of a man who is a servant to
women was honest: Aphrodite was the fairest. Hence the famous reaction of the
other two.
What followed? We know from experience that
when three women are fighting they cannot stand any unbiased people near them;
the same case was back then: all the other deities had to reveal their
likeness, namely to become involved. So, Aphrodite, who was in love with Priam,
Paris ’ father, gathered his partisans and took
the side of Paris
the Trojan, whereas the other two women, together with the rest, instigated the
Argives against the Trojans.
Well, here is another reason for the war, the
revenge of the goddesses meant to heal their hurt prides.
Another legend tells us that the incident
involving the apple took place at a sheep farm, under different circumstances,
but this is not important, what matters is that this petty affront allegedly
triggered the Trojan War.
We would be wrong if we took seriously the
attempts to involve in this scandal the deities, that perform universal functions.
What we do notice, however, is that in those days the gods were attributed with
human behavior and criteria, and this is why people thought the gods took
sides, which makes you stare into space and nod. That is Hera’s jealousy
combined with the reactions of the other two women, this town gossip, had to
justify the death of so many people and the destruction of an entire city?
Unfortunately, yes; in those days, people thought
that the deities’ interference with their business was something natural which
occurred on a daily basis and believed sincerely and resignedly in their will.
The deities had to be part of the phenomenon and suitable places had to be
found in the conflict structure for them, eventually even becoming the main
culprits, because they ruled the world, right? And so, this conflict generated
by a desire to rob was wrapped up in “divine orders”, thus making the gods responsible
for their vices. In other words, it was not their lust for robbery that brought
them to Troy ,
but the desire for revenge of those goddesses, but, as I mentioned earlier, the
legends were structured according to the conflict and the folk authors strived
to explain the human bad habits by the mysterious will of the gods.
Everything is explicable and to some extent
acceptable, but nowadays we can look at the phenomenon in a somewhat more
detached manner, closer to the truth, especially if we take into consideration
the way in which people believed they could win the favor of the gods, beings
that were beyond nature and time.
Because in the primitive religions the deities
seemed to be big fans of kitchen aromas, it seemed easy to please them if you barbecued
your steak under their noses. And the mortals did precisely this: burned the
famous hecatombs, reminded them of other past sacrifices and places of worship dedicated
to them, and so they secured their favors.
It is obvious that this type of commerce concealed
complicity in disasters, but this commerce had taken root in the mentality of
those days, through imaginary combinations of phenomena, in such a way that the
poor mortals believed that the gods demanded sacrifices in order to protect
them from evil and help them in their business, any kind of business. That is
why we find the gods gathered in Troy , this is
how, by combining the desire for revenge of the goddesses, seasoned with
barbecue smoke, Troy
was destroyed. Quite an entanglement!
Let’s go back briefly to the wedding, where
something strange must be noticed. What was Paris doing, a Thracian, at the wedding of
Peleus, a Greek? He was a Trojan, the son of Priam, and Peleus and Thetis were
Achilles’ parents, therefore his sworn enemies. Were they not enemy families at
the time of the wedding?
This aspect is hard to include in the picture
of an inter-ethnic conflict; the presence of Paris , of one race, at the wedding of Peleus,
of a different race, has no logic. They were groups of populations which were fighting
over land and water, that is almost sworn enemies. One invites their relatives
and friends to their wedding, not their enemies, but in this case it was quite
the opposite.
Of course, relatives can be enemies too, but
this enmity comes later, replacing the natural primary family harmony.
Inter-ethnic friendships also exist, but in their case it is the opposite way round:
they will come later, replacing the natural, inevitable hatred from the first
contact when each side’s motto was “it is either them or us”. So relatives hate
each other later and races befriend later, therefore Peleus-Paris could not could
not be friends at the wedding and enemies afterwards, unless they were
relatives.
Then it is more natural to say that the Priam
“family”, although involved in some arguments with the Peleus “family”, are
still attending the wedding, because relatives are relatives. Relatives are
bound to attend each other’s weddings, even if they do not get along well; such
events were a good opportunity to discuss family strategies, etc. So here we
have an aspect, in fact the most important, which clarifies the whole story.
Let us assume, however, that two or more
races were clashing at Troy ,
as our histories suggest. The question would be how did these people understand
each other? Being different races, they should have spoken different languages,
and then we should have encountered several translators during the fight,
right?14
However, Homer does not mention anything about
this; during that fight which he depicts so graphically and in which so many
populations were involved, the poet did not make any reference to an
interpreter15, on the contrary: he offers us constantly dialogs
between combatants, multiplied as appropriate with a special savor, exchanges
of remarks which suggest fluidity, not at all a staccato conversation which
needed an intermediary.
We can imagine the two sides, quite close to
be able to hear each other, from which the combatants are exchanging
“pleasantries”; it is hard to imagine these words being exchanged via an
interpreter.
However, if we admit s/he did exist, quite a
handful would have been necessary for all of them, therefore impossible for the
great poet not to mention them at least using a comparison, a metaphor. But in
this fight, the comparisons which represent the great asset of this poem never
crossed paths with an interpreter.
Only the mention is missing or were the
interpreters absent as well? Intrigued by this absence, I insisted on finding
something relevant in the two poems and look what I have found:
“In the
big city of Priam
This is something crucial: to support the
Trojans came other peoples as well, but pay attention, some of them with different languages. The following must
definitely be mentioned: those with different languages were not the Trojans, the different race the Greeks
were fighting, but their helpers who
had come from somewhere and who, apart from different languages, had different
faces.
Therefore, ONLY THOSE HELPERS were speaking
other languages, forcing the poet to emphasize them as a curious and rare
element.
But the mention stops here; Homer does not
tell us their names or where they came from, but the existence in Troy, around the
12th century BC, of speakers of a different language than the local
one, who had come from somewhere and had different faces, is a vital piece of
information for historians and linguists concerning Homo sapiens’ trajectories
in space and time.
Another mention, also related to the language
spoken:
“…In Lemnos , at the Sintians of wild speech…”17.
Well, these two mentions almost eliminate the
problem: the Trojans were speaking the same language as the Argives and the
Sintians, of wild speech, were Thracians; they were the old inhabitants of the
island of Lemnos and were probably speaking a Thracian language let’s say more
archaic, more local; Homer does not say that the Sintians had a foreign tongue, only that they were of wild speech.
A question should be asked, en passant: how
did Homer the Greek or his older
source notice this nuance from the language of the Sintians? Only the experts
can sense language nuances. Was by any chance Homer the Greek familiar with the
Thracian language? Could the source that was singing the praises of Greek valor
speak the Thracian language?
We have in our possession two major elements:
the archaic Greek authors mention in Troy
some foreigners, who spoke a different language than the main combatants and
came from somewhere, and some Thracians of wild, not foreign speech. These
mentions, in a way the only observations on language from the two epic poems,
prove that the absence of mentions regarding any interpreters is not an
omission, but something natural. If there is something you can mention, you do
so, if not, you say nothing.
Well, now, after all we have just said, can
there still be any doubt that the Trojans and the “Argive Greeks” spoke the
same language?
In fact, on a relatively limited territory
like the Balkans and Asia Minor , the theater
of war, it would also be absurd that so many languages would be spoken in that
century and that everybody would speak all of them. That is the Trojans, being
Thracian, spoke the Thracian language, the other Achaeans spoke the Achaean
language, the Pelasgians spoke the Pelasgian language, the Hypomolgians spoke
the Hypomolgian language and everyone spoke all of them? The Amazons’ language
had to be spoken as well, because the Amazons too fought in the war on Troy ’s side. The same
goes for the Karpathian language [in Romanian: carpatosiana], because the inhabitants of the Karpathos
island [in Romanian: Carpatos] also
participated on the Danaans’ side.
I am exaggerating, of course, but the absence
of translators is real; being useless, it becomes clear that the protagonists
understood one another in the same language, all we have to do is find out in
which.
It is no longer difficult to say which: as a
few hundred years later Herodotus says that those territories were full of
Thracians, the conclusion is that it is the language which, no doubt, belonged
to that multitude of Thracians, let’s call it the Thracian language.
In fact, all my arguments so far have tried
to show several aspects: that the two sides were not at all made up of
different races, that in the 12th century BC almost all participants
in the Trojan War spoke the same language! That the conflict in question was
nothing else than a fight between two neighbors slightly irritated due to the
“cramming”, a totally banal reason for the “institution” of robbery, that in
Troy the sides involved in the conflict were merely branches of the same family
which competed for hegemony through countless clashes. As a result, the
families were not essentially different, but were more or less rich, powerful,
numerous, were arguing over space and supremacy, because the continual increase
in the number of brothers was in competition with the continual increase in the
number of cousins, who in turn had many brothers, of second cousins, of third
cousins and so on.
Nevertheless, we cannot yet call these fights
inter-ethnic wars, even if they were bloody and often resulted in a lot of dead
people; the separation of races, with today’s meaning, was far from even being
inferred back then in the Balkans. So, in my opinion, the thesis of
inter-ethnic conflicts is a nicely sculpted stone slab covering a living
person, not a dead body.
So here we have the accounts of the two
titans of world culture which intersect, reveal each other and can be better understood
as complementing stories. This is how two highly prestigious authors show where
the Thracian language is, where the Dacian
language is and clarify implicitly the presence of the Romanian language on its
current territory. As of now, any challenges become increasingly groundless and
go beyond the realm of good intentions.
*
Encouraged by all these acquisitions and
enriched by the experience of the Trojan War, allow me a few reflections
intended as clarifications. As we have seen, the robbery incursions into cities
were an old habit, as was capturing women; nevertheless, let’s ask ourselves
what differentiated then the girl Briseis “of Achilles”, the girl Chryseis “of
Agamemnon”, or other numerous victims of the same habit, from Helen “of Paris”?
Therefore, what differentiated Helen and Troy
from the other kidnapped women and destroyed cities, why some made history,
through epics, and others did not? What else were all of them apart from war-captured
women and plundered cities?
So the question is why do we know so much
about Helen and Troy
and almost nothing about thousands of other enslaved women and many other
ruined cities?
I should mention I am referring to the couple
Helen-Troy, because the same shy Helen generated another war: the Athenian
Theseus kidnapped her, took her to Athens
and her brothers, Castor and Pollux, had to fight for her with the Athenians.
Nevertheless, this war was not depicted in any epic.
So what differentiated the war of the Iliad from similar wars, what stirred
the contemporaries so that the enduring memories would call for the creation of
this artistic monument?
I hope I have convinced my readers that this
war was not an inter-ethnic one capable of affecting a large part of Europe,
but a banal argument between brothers combined with equally banal kidnappings,
therefore this event had no substance to inspire such a monument in history (it
was noticed that the gulf outside Troy is so small that so many ships could not
have fitted in there, if we judge by their numbers today, after 3,000 years).
This exception is not justified even by the
fact that Helen was the daughter of Zeus, as we know, the great Zeus had filled
the world with sons and daughters who had a major contribution to the multitude
of conflicts. So, once again, what happened in Troy that was so special and plucked it from
the obscurity of other cases?
Hoping to clarify things, I suggest we take a
different look at this war and the gods’ participation in this conflict singled
out by fate and made eternal by contemporaries. So let’s try to relive it as
they did. Let us read a few fragments.
“Stench
of brimstone…”18 A graphic start, I would say. “…With a roar, the Trojans rush into the ford!
The thunder of the waves is tremendous… Not knowing where to go, in murky
waters, the shouting Trojans swim tossed about by the waves”19.
Do you recognize the so-called war scenes
from Troy in
which the Trojans are facing enemy gods, namely the elements, rather than human
enemies? Scenes in which Hera is directly involved by creating a dense fog;
also, the river Xanthos which tosses the combatants about in its waves.
“…Achilles
jumps in the waves. But the river fights back, stirs its whirling waves which keep
rising… Achilles is hit; his foot slips! (the river) Grabs hold firmly of the elm tree and uproots
it, it pulls the river bank with it; and tumbles into the water. Large branches
have stopped the furious waters. They have collapsed across the river, making a
bridge over the Scamander. And with the help of a tree, the hero escaped the
eddies with great difficulty… shaking with fear. But the cruel god… is right
behind him… following him, with a terrible roar, are the waters of Xanthos… the
water whips him each time… then, Achilles moans… Alas, Zeus, my father, no god
would end my misery… The waters have not appeased. Scamander keeps rising the
mighty wave... It calls upon the Simoeis
river
So the Greeks’ allied rivers, commanded by
Hera, attempted to kill Achilles, a Greek. Well, this is how the gods of water
clashed with the people in those days.
Next come the gods of fire:
“Then, Hera
shouted for fear Achilles would be swallowed by the violent river… Get up, lame
man (Hephaestus), my dear son!...
Come, quick, light the spark of mighty flames… Notus… and Zephyrus will bring
the fire… which wraps the river in flames. Thus spake Hera; and the god
Hephaestus makes fire with god-like powers. First, he sets fire to the vast
plain, the silver
river
So far, the fight has been between gods and
men, from now on it is all between gods:
“Suddenly,
raging fury rises among the gods… Hates clash. The endless land roars all
around and in the heavens the trumpets sound… Ares heads for Athena… Athena
goes after Aphrodite… strikes her in the chest… Artemis takes on Athena… She
hits her with the bow close to her ear”22 and so on.
It was a fierce and dramatic clash of gods,
in fact of the elements. Still, I have encountered a similar conflict in
another epic, haven’t I?
“I looked out at the weather and
it was terrible…
A black cloud came from the horizon.
It thundered within where Adad, lord of the
storm was riding,…
Nergal pulled out the dams of the nether
waters,
Ninurta the war-lord threw down the dykes,…
Even the gods were terrified at the flood,
They fled to the highest heaven, the firmament
of Ann,
They crouched against the walls, cowering like
curs.
[…] Let all the gods gather round the
sacrifice, except Enlil,
He shall not approach this offering, for
without reflection he brought the flood”23.
Do you have any idea where this fragment of verse
comes from and what cataclysm it depicts? This is the description of the Flood
from the oldest known written text, the Epic
of Gilgamesh.
I do not mean to say that the Iliad depicts a Balkan deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh describes a
Mesopotamian one. For now, I do not dare say even that both depict the same
flood, I just want to say that the resemblance between the two accounts is too strong
to be ignored.
It is true that in the Iliad the confrontation between the gods is somewhat in the
background, while the fight between the heroes is in the foreground, but this
seems to me a case of reality turned upside down: after all, if Troy saw some telluric
events of that magnitude, they were not triggered by the war between some
“ants”, but had their own reasons; the “war of the ants”, namely the Trojan War,
could have taken place at the same time purely by coincidence. So, if that was
the case, it means that the protagonist was the conflict between the gods, the
outbreak of the elements, not the “war of the ants”, between the “Greek race”
and the “Thracian race”.
We now have a new picture, a different way of
looking at the Trojan War.
But looked at in this way, we should admit
that the initial message of the Iliad
was the one about the cataclysm, not the Trojan conflict, they could be simultaneous
or just a little bit contemporary. Time, however, has made them one and the
events have been altered through countless updates. So, the translations done
in each century, from Greek into other languages, overlapped them thus
modifying their initial meanings.
In fact, the differences between the two
works are interesting and conclusive: the Iliad
has been translated over and over again, whereas the Epic of Gilgamesh has stayed almost intact. Let us compare the
confrontation of the elements in both epics.
Zeus (the natural and supreme order of
nature) becomes angry, sends flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, loses
his temper and the balance is upset; Athena (reason) attacks Aphrodite (love);
Poseidon, Xanthos and Scamander (floods), Zephyrus and Notus (winds and
hurricanes), they all get angry, and upset and destroy the natural order of
things. Then, Hephaestus, the god of fire in general and of subterranean fire
(volcanoes), joins in, erupts, causes earthquakes, everything builds up into a
cataclysm. Are we wrong to see all this in the epic? Anyway the picture is far
from banal.
We could say that the narrators invented
graphic scenes in order to complement the picture of the fights and make them
more realistic, made use of the symbols of the elements, just like in folk creations,
in order to show how fierce the war had been.
Comparing, however, the phenomena with those
depicted in the Epic of Gilgamesh,
which gave an account of the Flood, we realize they do not seem to be imagined
scenes, but descriptions of real facts, so that although formally they are very
different, essentially the difference is not so big.
In fact, archeologists even discovered a
layer of ashes somewhat older than the “layer of Troy ”, which proves that some large-scale event
took place there. It is true that ashes are linked to fire, not water, and fire
can also be caused by aggressors, yet ashes could prove a relatively rapid
succession of phenomena.
The matter is very old and extremely hazy,
still the resemblance between the two descriptions is too striking to overlook
and we would be wrong if we did; but if we admit that the confrontation between
the gods in Troy is comparable to that of the Mesopotamian gods, as the poem
shows, we will also have to admit the resemblance between the two causes and the
two scales of destruction.
In my opinion, this is the very aspect which
differentiates the couple Helen-Troy from other countless similar victims, it
explains the fact that they have been preserved. Such a resemblance between two
descriptions, one text that has stayed intact for a few thousand years in the
desert sands and the other, a refined story which has become a “little Balkan
war”, fuels my opinion. And, if I am not mistaken, these are the only
descriptions “closer to the source” of cataclysms which took place in the
recent prehistoric past.
Again, I do not want to say that the two
epics depict the same event; the Flood occurred somewhere, sometime, while the
Trojan cataclysm occurred “there” and “the other day”, but the resemblance is
striking and a book on this resemblance would be fascinating. Let’s not forget about
the legend of a “Balkan Atlantis” and other “local” cataclysms.
Coming back, this is how, all of a sudden,
the ordinary war takes on naturally a new dimension and becomes a vivid memory
as an exceptional divine sign. It is true, people have experienced so far serious
natural phenomena and started wars, but now they have overlapped, so that the
brutal interference of the gods in this war is so “obvious”, their will so
concrete that you cannot but pay attention (it would seem that Jericho too
benefited from such a “high-placed attention”)24.
I think some people will treat with reserve
this new natural manner of gods’ participation in the “Troy
phenomenon” and this is because we are no longer used to seeing the divine
manifestation in everything that surrounds us; if we were to describe the events
which occurred back then, they would look something like this:
“The earthquake started and the disaster was
in full swing; the hill at the turn of the river started to slide downwards and
fell into the river, the river overflowed its banks sweeping everything in its
way, trees, homes, people, everything. Then the earthquake destroyed the walls
of people’s homes and a huge fire started, it spread, waters flooded
everything, terror and death everywhere”. If we were told this, we would live
the fear and believe, but reading about Hephaestus who shook the earth and
Scamander that took the house we no longer feel the victims’ fears; suppose we
abandon the image of Hephaestus with hands and legs and replace it with the jolts
of an earthquake, known to all of us, we would definitely “feel” the whole
picture differently.
In fact, the very behavior of the heroes is a
confirmation, remembering the poem we see again something that does not fit,
namely the undecided, paradoxical behavior of the protagonists. Under the new
circumstances, it is obvious that the phenomenon and its size came as a
surprise to the aggressors as well, only now the affliction and horror which
can be seen of their faces become natural and sincere. The affliction of Priam
and Achilles when they hugged and wept for their dead, friends, sons and
servants was unnatural between a victor and the person he had defeated, between
enemies engaged in mortal combat, but it is appropriate between relatives taken
by surprise by a cataclysm, it is natural when the dead were the cousins of
both. So it is clear that the initially aggressive petty plans, if any, had
been exceeded by the cataclysm brought about by the gods, which impressed everyone
equally.
There is something else in support of this
possible course of events: when Schliemann started excavating, he found, maybe
not that easily, the so-called “Priam’s Treasure”, which should surprise us.
Had he found some broken glass, a few odd slippers and some charred bones, it
would have been natural; it would also have been natural if Priam’s Treasure
had been found anywhere else, but not among the ruins of Troy!
No, because Priam’s Treasure could no longer
have been found there after the “Greek” robbers had been there specially to get
it. Therefore, Schliemann searched more thoroughly, somewhat pressed by the
Turkish authorities who were monitoring him, and found the treasure, whereas
the conquering Greeks, who had had plenty of centuries after the event, had found
nothing?!
It is hard to believe. After all, Schliemann
would have given up serenely had he found nothing, as he did not really know
what he was looking for, but the “Greeks” of Achilles would have not; from what
we know, they knew full well what they were looking for, they had come to Troy and died there for
gold, copper and the rest. And so, what happened, they came, destroyed, set
fire and left, leaving everything to Schliemann?!
It cannot be; on the one hand, this is no way
to conquer the “land and water” of other races, and on the other, this would
indicate that the events took place simultaneously and, because they were
scared, everyone fled.
This makes me say something else regarding
the discovery of treasures in conquered cities: their presence at our disposal
does not have any logic, the invaders take care precisely of this, they look
thoroughly for the treasures they come for and adorn their wives with the gold ornaments,
and they will wear it by inheritance until the next conquerors; the latter will
melt and alter the gold of the ancient ornaments for their wives, to this day.
So, when we find such treasures, we should ask ourselves if the ashes they are
covered in comes not from the fire caused by the conquerors, but from a
cataclysm, which is precisely why the survivors fled leaving everything behind.
Well, I notice that, as I keep “improving”
the poem’s messages, I come into conflict not only with the commentators, but
also with its owners, the “Greeks”, because, as it is a “Greek ode”, it belongs
to the “Greek” heritage, not to the heritage of the Thracians who had to
disappear.
The affiliation is apparent; I do not discuss
for one moment the origin of the Greeks from the three waves of immigrants to
the peninsula or their participation in the war in the then composition, what
seems forced is their pretense to being the sole owners of the epic, as if it
were not an issue related to pre-Greek Achaeans, Ionians…, Pelasgians, all of
them Thracians, the indigenous people; as if the Greeks came from somewhere and
the indigenous people stood at attention at the water’s edge, like the waves of
the Red Sea, cheering them, and once the triumphal corridor was over, they
would find ahead an Edenic land suitable to be filled with legends. So again,
we have here a simplistic manner of explaining how some populations, who come
from somewhere, kill, destroy everything, settle, start from scratch and reach
the highest levels of culture and civilization using ashes; such scenarios did
not work for the relations between the Romans and the Dacians and could not work here either.
Therefore, from what we have discussed so
far, we can see that it was not the Greeks who “produced” this work, but that
mix of varieties of Thracians in the Balkans, and that the legend of Troy and of the things
related to it is a Balkan, Thracian creation.
The Greek exclusiveness is somewhat right; in
its current form, we can no longer say that the epic is Thracian, its Thracian
nature has diminished with time due to many Greek additions, however we cannot
call it Greek either based solely on these additions. They have been acquired
through the multitude of increasingly Greek copiers, and the epic has fatally
undergone this infusion which is especially obvious in the Odyssey. They have all become Greek, just like the original
language in which the epic was written has become increasingly Greek, together
with the increasingly Greek space and its increasingly Greek inhabitants. Therefore,
the legend has survived in Greek just because this language offered it the best
protection, but we should not confuse the bank with the money: true, the bank
is Greek, but the money was Thracian..
So Troy was not attacked by the invading
Greeks, it was rather a case of relatives competing for supremacy and place
who, frightened by the cataclysm caused by the gods, left everything behind and
fled everywhere. I also believe that a long time had to pass until the next “layer
of Troy” for the cataclysm to be forgotten, for people to forget the “curse of
Troy” and for the layer of settled dust to be thick enough, so that the new
inhabitants, who no longer knew anything about the treasure or the legend, would
not find Priam’s traces by accident.
In conclusion, the epic belongs to all
descendants of the Thracians.
But the Greeks have no reason to be angry for
this redistribution, the Greek genius has produced so many values, its prestige
is so high, that taking from others what is not yours would not be beneficial
to this genuine prestige.
In order to clarify my point of view, I will
try to approach this issue differently: so far, I have tried to prove that in
the south of Europe , between 2000 and 1500 BC,
there were not two races, just families from the same Thracian race, and that
through their traditions and language they were related to the original family.
Using concrete examples to supplement the picture, I will now try to emphasize
what the differences between the real races look like, and for this I will
return to the deluge, because, if I extracted essential similarities from the
Mesopotamian epic, interesting differences can be found in it as well. Here are
excerpts from both legends:
“When the great gods
decided to release the flood,
There were: Anu, lord
of the firmament, their father,
And warrior Enlil,
their counselor,
Ninurta, the helper…”25
These were the Mesopotamian deities who
decided to cause the deluge. Now, let’s see what course of action took those
who sabotaged it, namely those who saved life on Earth.
“Reed-house,
reed-house!
Wall, O wall, hearken
reed-house, wall reflect!
O man of Shuruppak,
son of Ubara-Tutu,
Tear down your house,
I say, and build a boat!”26
The person warned was Utnapishtim, the hero
of the Mesopotamian deluge, like Noah, but much older.
“I looked out at the weather and
it was terrible…
A black cloud came from the horizon.
It thundered within where Adad, lord of the
storm was riding,…
Nergal pulled out the dams of the nether
waters,
Ninurta the war-lord threw down the dykes,…
Even the gods were terrified at the flood,
They fled to the highest heaven, the firmament
of Ann,
They crouched against the walls, cowering like
curs.
[…] Let all the gods gather round the
sacrifice, except Enlil,
He shall not approach this offering, for
without reflection he brought the flood”27
So, this is the Mesopotamian flood, the
oldest known version, from which I have taken a few representative passages.
Here is the account of the flood from the so-called Greek mythology:
“Today
I must exterminate humankind…
The wound has no cure,
and so that evil does not touch what is good,
It must be cut off with
iron…”
says Zeus and urges the other deities:
“There
is no time, use your full strength,
Destroy any dam, flow
unhindered,…
The god hits the
ground with his trident and the earth shakes,
And the waters begin
to flow from that blow.
Animals, food, trees
and people they carry with them,
Houses with their
altars and holy ornaments…”28
Here we have the depiction of the same
phenomenon from two texts separated by a great distance in time and space; one
of them is from the library of Ashurbanipal29, an Assyrian king from
the 7th century BC, the other is from the writings of the Roman poet
Ovid30.
The fact that we find the legend of the
deluge in various forms all over the world could have two explanations, which I
present without any comment: the first one is that the phenomenon occurred when
the entire humankind was smaller and occupied a small area which could be
affected by plausible flooding, after which the legend reached the surrounding
space together with the groups that left to “fill the Earth”. Therefore, the differences
in form, more or less significant, are a result of the journey through
consecutive generations and distances, namely meridians, parallels, climate,
etc.
The second one is that the flood was
“universal”, and the particular form in which it exists somewhere is the result
of the particular manner in which it appeared in that place.
I do not wish to discuss here the phenomenon,
I just want to say that the difference between the two accounts is obvious and
shows the distance in time and space, but there are similarities as well.
We see that both Zeus and Enlil exterminate
all the people because they “had become evil”, so the essence is common, but
the difference between the obscure, mysterious Enlil and the complex Zeus
represents precisely the difference between the image of the god in the Mesopotamians’
conscience, nearly five thousand years ago, and the image of the same god in
the Europeans’ conscience, hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
Another aspect: both the European Deucalion31
and Utnapishtim32, his Mesopotamian counterpart, do the same deed:
they save and restore the human species. But how different are Ubara-Tutu33,
Utnapishtim’s father, and Prometheus, Deucalion’s father: apart from being the
fathers of their sons, they have nothing else in common. Moreover, the
multitude of attributes which form the structure of Prometheus make him so
different that it is very difficult to find him a Mesopotamian equivalent, his
attributes are distributed to several others.
And one last example: in both cases, the
first generation of people is born from the blood drops of a sacrificed deity:
both Uranus from the Balkans and Kingu34 from Mesopotamia
generate the same phenomenon; the resemblance between them, however, ends here.
Therefore, here we have similarities and
discrepancies between the gods from the two areas and historical stages, which
correspond to the populations that have them, in their case we can talk about
other customs and languages, and they even indicate ethnic differences.
But if the difference in time and space can
alter a myth (maybe the same at first), it can even create new myths which are
hugely different, belonging, of course, to different races, and I would like to
mention here a myth which proves the particularities I mentioned earlier and
which tries to explain the formation, diversification and, possibly, migration
of the languages, the subject of this book.
“In those days, everyone spoke one
tongue and one idiom…
Then they spoke to one another:
- Let us make bricks and burn them with fire!
And they used bricks instead of stone and pitch
instead of lime.
And they said again:
- Let us build a city with a tower with its top
in the heavens!...
Then God came down to see the city and the
tower that the people were building.
And God said:
- They are one people and have one tongue, and
nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do. Come, let us go
down and confound their speech so they no longer understand each other.
And so God scattered them upon the face of the
Earth and they left off building the city, which was called Babel, because God
there confounded the language of all the Earth”35.
These excerpts are taken from the Old Testament and allow me to say a few
words about them: so, the people, wishing to save themselves in case another
deluge would come, started building a tower that would reach the heavens. But
God, vexed by their audacity, punished them by ruining their construction. What
is interesting to us is not the punishment as such, remarkable as well, but the
manner in which it was performed: so, the text says that in order to hinder
this attempt and prevent other similar ideas, God fragmented their unity by a
confusion of tongues and, as a result, according to the Bible, they no longer understood each other. So this is how the writers of the biblical texts thought the languages
had appeared and this is how they thought God was thinking.
Of course the existence of several languages
was obvious, and their appearance, in the view of the ancient people, could only
have a divine source: when divine will was a “concrete binding element” in
which people included everything, even themselves, it was natural for them to
think that everything originated from that divinity.
Here is another attempt to explain a
phenomenon with universal effects, not the deluge, but the diversification of
languages, also through divine implications. I do not know how and if other
mythologies have tried to explain it, I only found it in the Old Testament and it is sufficient for
my purpose.
However, mention should be made that the Tower of Babel
It does not say where did those Jews and
Assyrians come from, so they too had to be invented right away, in other words,
the nations and their names had to be invented first and after that…
Of course it is a legend; if we were to
believe it, like the ancient people who created it, we would have to admit that,
back then, the Albanian, Bulgarian or Romanian languages were revealed to some
Mesopotamian people and that they, having become suddenly Albanians, Bulgarians
or Romanians, migrated to their current places.
I could be accused of treating the legends
preferentially: if they “are on my side”, they are good, if not, they are not.
True, but the modest aspirations of this book allow me to say only en passant
that neither nations nor languages can be invented; yet, I have risked bringing
up this myth due to its uniqueness, because it tries to explain the phenomenon
of the spoken languages, also covered by my book, and also because European
mythology does not include the episode of the separation of languages.
Therefore, these are the differences between
the European and Mesopotamian regions: now, when we know the differences
between the Mesopotamian and Balkan deities, can we still talk about the
difference between the Trojan and Argive gods? After all this, can we still say
that the populations in the “Trojan conflict” were different races?
At the end of the investigation of the two
epics, we see that Homer backed with arguments what Herodotus said, so the
conclusion is the following: at the time of the Trojan War, in a vast European
region, but especially in the Balkan and Asia Minor areas, a single race
existed whose people spoke the same language, namely the Thracian language.
Well, I do hope that Herodotus, Homer and the
others brought here as evidence have convinced the “Distinguished Professors”
that the Thracians could not simply vanish from the Balkans as a result of that
war and that the local history is different.
*
I have discussed about the Iliad and the Odyssey also because the end of the Trojan War called for more
subtle, but very important conclusions. As I said, I think at least an
earthquake took place in Troy, as we can see from the “gods’ involvement”,
possibly right in the middle of a human conflict which we will call the Trojan
War; and it is my belief that this very earthquake ended the war. Then, I
believe that the unfortunate coincidence took on complex meanings for the
contemporary participants, they saw it both as fire and destruction, and as a
punishment.
Therefore, although they all experienced the
fire and the water, the disaster for Troy
and the Trojans also showed the difference between the victors and the
defeated, namely the gods’ anger towards the Thraco-Trojans, and also suggested
some directions for the future. At least, this is what we should infer from the
words of the victorious narrators.
Being so, what followed was natural: some
were satisfied with the divine preference and regarded themselves as children
loved by the gods, and the others felt crushed by the gods’ anger and collapse
in despair and chaos. Because, fatally, the will of the gods was received with
joy, pain or resignation, as appropriate, but not with indifference. Consequently,
how must the Thraco-Trojans have felt when the gods’ hostility manifested
itself before them with such clarity and force, destroying and burning their
city? Those gods were their creators, i.e. their mother and father, so what
could have matched their despair when they realized their parents wanted them
dead? What could a child have felt, in antiquity, when he understood that, of
all brothers, he was to be sacrificed?
What about the Argives? Of course they also
took seriously the punishment of the Trojans; even though they experienced it
together, they did not have the same level of destruction, for they must have
lived in tents. So, despite their fear, the impression that they were not the object
of punishment made them feel relieved: they were safe, they were the good guys.
I think that those different feelings were
responsible for their idea that they were different and maybe this explains the
Greeks’ later conviction that the Thracian heritage belongs entirely to them.
This could also explain the feeling of deep humility with which the Trojans
scattered. As they considered they had been disowned by their parents and were
no longer entitled to anything, they left Troy
with such feelings, noticed in the pathetic laments of Aeneas before Dido, the
Carthaginian queen.
Do you have any doubt? Had it not been so,
why did the proud Roman poet Virgil emphasize them, more than one thousand
years later when Rome had become the glory of and most powerful nation in the
world, in his poem the Aeneid,
written to flatter a conceited people and an even more conceited Roman emperor,
Augustus? Why would Virgil stress humility, the divine punishment, when he
should have concealed this not so glorious behavior of his ancestor, Aeneas? I
will come back to this point, let’s stick to our path for now.
*
I will now quote again this fragment: “In the big city of Priam there are many helpers who have come from many places
I suppose this mention would not have been
necessary just because some of them were shorter, taller, fairer or darker, but
it would have been compulsory if they had been completely different than the
rest of the people who were in Troy
at the time. So, as they had a different language and different faces, we could say they were of a different race.
Does this conclusion lead us to a certain
extent to the word “Indo-European” which was imposed on the historians by the
common elements in the language and culture of the European and Hindustani
peoples? Let me say a few words about this word.
The word “Indo-European” defines in fact a
phenomenon, a concept, not the name of a people, because people have not heard
of king X of the Indo-Europeans, their capital city or their borders. We can
say there are many Europeans who share language and culture elements with many
Indians, which is why we say they have a common Indo-European origin. It is
obvious, however, that they are not the same people, they are multitudes, the
European multitude and the Hindustani multitude – the Dravidians, who,
following prolonged and profound contacts, have exchanged the said elements.
Being so, it means that the European
component, the Thracians, the most numerous in Europe, mixed somehow, at some
point, with the Hindustani component, the Dravidians, and the result was the
“Indians”, the most numerous in the world. For if it was not the Thracians,
then who was it? Is there another population equally numerous capable of
filling Europe with linguistic and
mythological roots?
So, we meet in Troy a different race that
came to help the Thraco-Trojans; could it be that there and then an event
occurred from the long-lasting Aryan relations, namely Euro-Indian? Could they
have been the Mongoloids? Who knows? However, we have a date and a place where
the European white race met an Asian one, both in a relationship with
obligations.
NOTES
1 Homer supposedly
lived between the 10th and 8th centuries BC and wrote the
epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey and other works. Legend depicts
him as a blind old man who wandered from city to city reciting his poetry. Mic Dicţionar Enciclopedic, second
revised and enlarged edition, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucharest , 1978.
2 Heinrich
Schliemann, German archeologist who lived between 1822 and 1890. Self-taught.
He organized at his expense excavations in Troy ,
Mycenae and Tiryns , making sensational discoveries. Mic Dicţionar Enciclopedic, second
revised and enlarged edition, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucharest , 1978.
3 Troy ,
the legendary city discovered by Schliemann on the site of the present-day
Turkish town of Hisarlik .
Of the nine layers of culture discovered, “Priam’s layer” is the seventh. Istoria lumii în date, coordinated by Acad.
Prof. Andrei Oţetea, Editura Enciclopedică Română, Bucharest , 1972.
4 “Brave Dardanians, Hesperia is the country where
your race originated. It will welcome you to her bosom on your return… It is a
country nicknamed by the Greeks Hesperia, it was once inhabited by the Oenotrians,
the descendants nicknamed it Italy
5 The cities on
the coast of Asia Minor were founded mostly by
the Thracians, later called Thraco-Phrygians. Even Troy was founded by Dardanus, a Thracian leader.
Jean Naudon, Histoire Universelle,
Paris, Pléiade, I p. 94, 1956.
6 The Iliad, Homer, translated by Sanda
Diamandescu and Radu Hâncu. B.P.T. Collection, Editura Minerva, Bucharest , 1981.
7 The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Eugen
Lovinescu, B.P.T. Collection, Editura Pentru Literatură, 1963.
8 In ancient Greece ,
the connections between camps were established by heralds (kerix angelos) and old
people (presbeis) who were elected by popular assembly. They also carried
messages in the form of two written tablets waxed to each other (di-plomata),
hence the word diplomacy. Istoria Diplomaţiei, translated from
Russian under the scientific coordination of Acad. P. Constantinescu – Iaşi , Editura Ştiinţifică, Bucharest , 1962. As we can see, the heralds
were not present only occasionally, and in our case, Stentor the herald could
not have managed so many requests.
9 The Pelasgians –
“Hippothoos leads the Pelasgians with
mighty spears…”, the Iliad,
Homer, Book II, p. 40; a population from the Pelasgian Argos at war with the
Trojans; “The oldest inhabitants of Greece”, Aeneid, Virgil, Book I; “The Pelasgians, the first inhabitants of Latium”,
Aeneid, Book VIII.
10 The Iliad, Homer, Book XV.
11 Idem.
12 Ibid., Book
VIII.
13 Ibid., Book XI.
14 Ibid., Book II.
15 In Rome , the function of
emissary was a very complicated issue; it was discussed in the Senate and each
time a special decision was reached by edict. “Has
anyone heard that emissaries were ever elected in Rome Cicero ’s time, in Rome ,
translators were both a necessity and a dignity.
16 Ibid., Book II.
17 The Odyssey, Homer, Book VIII.
18 The Iliad, Homer, Book VIII.
19 Idem, Book XXI.
20 Ibid., Book
XXI.
21 Ibid., Book
XXI.
22 Ibid., Book XXI.
23 Ibid.
24 The Old Testament, Joshua, chapter VI.
25 The Epic of Gilgamesh, 11th
tablet.
26 Idem.
27 Ibid.
28 Ovid, the Metamorphoses.
29 Ashurbanipal,
669-626 BC, was an Assyrian king who founded a large library with over 20,000
clay tablets engraved with cuneiform script, very important writings, among
which the Epic of Gilgamesh.
30 Publius Ovidius
Naso, 43 BC – 17 AD, banished by Emperor Augustus to Tomis (possibly
present-day Constanţa, Romania) for obscure reasons. He wrote poems and other
types of works, among which Epistulae ex
Ponto, where he seems to complain about the “barbaric Getae”. On closer
inspection, it may not be so, but this is a different matter which is not the
object of this book.
31 In Greek
(Balkan) mythology, Deucalion is the man who survives the deluge, thus becoming
the patriarch of humankind.
32 Utnapishtim,
the survivor of the deluge in Mesopotamian mythology, a myth found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gândirea Asiro-Babiloniană în Texte, translated by Atanasie Negoiţă,
Biblioteca Orientalis, Editura Ştiinţifică, 1975. In Oriental mythology, he is
another patriarch of humankind, together with Adam from the Judeo-Christian
mythology.
33 Ubara-Tutu, Utnapishtim’s
father.
34 Kingu, a
character in Mesopotamian mythology who was killed in the conflict between gods
for the creation of humankind. The first people were born from his blood.
35 The Bible,
the Old Testament, Genesis.
CHAPTER
IV
THE LATIN LANGUAGE
Therefore the
war had ended, the city of Troy
collapsed in flames and ruins; terror, hysteria, wails and death. Everyone is
frightened by the terrible punishment meted out by the gods, and, terrified,
they scatter; the people of Argos take to the
boats to leave the land that has been damned, the other allies leave too, not
looking back upon the smoking ruins of great Troy , damned from now on.
It was even
left by the Trojans! The terrible punishment the gods gave them, their parents,
left them hopeless, with no horizon, they run everywhere, as far as they can
get from these terrible places, where they will never be allowed to return.
But let us
turn away from the sorrow, the tableau of desperation, and let us see the one
of optimism. Now all of them regret something, but it is too late, so let us
leave Achilles and Priam, ultimate enemies, to consume their regrets in their
embrace (thus is the damnation of man, to regret after having committed the
deed), and go forth with humanity.
“Death is the
condition of life!” says the frigid slogan of fate, and humanity has always
conceded to this command, ever making room for life, namely producing as much
death as possible. It is true, unbending fate has not lied this time either;
out of the collapse and death of Troy
a new life was born, one that would amaze the world, changing it from its very
foundations. So far this extraordinary world is only a tiny spring, a small
group of people that wander nowhere, terrorized by the disaster of their former
home.
Legend has it
that the tiny spring, which later gave birth to that enormous river that was
the majestic Roman Empire, has its source in these ruins; Roman historians, not
to mention poets, consider credible the legends that place the birth of the
history of Rome in the ruins of Troy, they note in their works that that group
of wanderers, the seed of the future empire, a group who were weeping for their
cruel fate, was made up of Anchises – the father of Aeneas, Aeneas Julius (or
Ascanius) – his son, as well as his crew, friends and other desperate people
who flee death. So, Aeneas pulls his people out from burning Troy , leaving behind the smoking ruins, and
descends south, as far as he can get.
In the hurry
of leaving, when the screams of women are no longer in the human register, when
instinct pushes one to save one's life, you run where you see a shimmer of
hope, you run without thinking of anything, and it is believed that Aeneas'
group did so; however, let's take a closer look at the event, as subsequent
events are worth paying more attention to.
Some may
consider the story of Aeneas a mere pretty story, but prestigious people have
granted it a real substratum, and as Troy existed, as its traces have been
uncovered, why should we doubt that it was left by fugitive groups led by various
people of various names? Why doubt that one group went on the path described by
legend and that its leader was named Aeneas?
We have proof
that it was believed so: Virgil, the famous Roman poet, based some of his work
on this legend, and also Titus Livius, a historian, note the phenomenon as a
possible real fact. Therefore, it is an admitted fact that a group led by
Aeneas fled as they were, with what they were wearing, as the saying goes, but
that, in their haste, they did take with them the Penates, similar to what we
cannot forget in similar cases: the documents of the house, our papers, proof
of your identity to the world, identities that could not be forgotten.
Truly, that
was the case in such circumstances, only this is different: it seems to me that
the importance of other “wealth” that the Trojans could never have forgotten or
forsaken, no matter what the haste, has been ignored, especially by modern
people. It included the traditions, the myths and other things, which, I cannot
emphasize enough, could not be forgotten because they were stored in the
language, so that the language, the principal wealth of the group,
was not forgotten home, but accompanied the Trojans to Italy
Now, after
underlining these things, let us go on this exodus with Aeneas' group, and I will
be making appeal with regard to this exodus to the two guides I have already
spoken of: Virgil2, with his epic Aeneid3, whose title says it all, and Titus Livius, with
his work Ab Urbe Condita (From the
founding of the City)4. These two great works are the beginning of
the grand phenomenon: I consider them the most recommended, as their authors
studied its history specifically, both lived in Augustus' century, therefore at
the beginning of the Christian era. At any rate, mere twelve centuries from the
disaster of Troy ,
not like us, who are some thirty two centuries in time.
To begin
with, as the poet said, Aeneas and the rest went south, and, reaching a proper
place with some friendly locals, built some ships (20, or so it seems), then
went to the Hesperides, which, according to legend, was the aim of the
mysterious command of destiny, for them the promised land; then they crossed
the sea and landed somewhere in the Balkans.
Here, a
peculiar phenomenon occurs: there is an imaginary conflict between Aeneas'
people and a Thracian population in the area, which the historian Titus Livius
makes no mention of, and no one else does either, so that an aside for
precision's sake is called for.
It may be
observed that the historian, but mostly the poet, have their writings be a sort
of ode meant to satisfy Roman pride in general, and that of emperor Augustus in
particular. At the same time, they try to legitimize some subsequent deeds of
the Romans, as was done by all the prophets, meaning they interpolated in the legends
some fake deeds of the Romans which were later claimed to grant them the sacred
aura of prophesized destiny. Thus the poet had Aeneas “introduce fraudulently”
in the consciousness of the Roman people divine motivations for subsequent
events, which in fact had no divine element in them whatsoever. This is
precisely what happens in Aeneas' Balkan stopover, and the same is to happen at
Carthage , there
are interpolations of “reality” having a role of legitimizing the later wars on
the Thracians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians and so on.
So, Aeneas'
group reaches the continent in some areas inhabited by the Thracians, in other
words relatives; as a result, we were to expect the common behavior among
relatives, like pull in at your cousin's, tend to your horses, have a great
meal, have a good sleep, and off you go. As you have read in this poem, here it
was different: they met that Polydorus5, a made up character, and
things went how they went. Scared by his behavior, the poet says, as well as by
the grimness of the place, the group moves on and reaches Sicily .
Here it is
different, to their joy, and they meet Acestes6, a neighbor in their
city, and other Trojans who had fled Troy
before the war broke out, for obscure reasons, and have settled here.
Here is the
first significant fact of the sequence that follows: in order to found a city,
one must have fairly large communities, it cannot be otherwise; this means that
the Trojan Acestes who had founded the city of Segestia, had come there with
numerous friends from the Thraco-Trojan world, it was only them that the city
could be founded with, not with the locals, who were definitely bothered,
otherwise they would have simply pulverized them.
It might have
been different: they could have met the locals, who accepted them relatively
easily, and in any case the harmony, the prosperity they saw did not exactly
betray local conflicts, and neither did Acestes mention any such thing. Either
way, we can see that Aeneas found a relatively important group of people,
integrated into the cohesive element of the Trojan language, within which they
understood each other.
Would it be a
hasty deduction? We will see further on, for the time being, let’s just say we
have discovered a “Trojan island”, a community that spoke its home Thracian,
the one from Troy, and that we have in Italy a cargo of Thracian language and
traditions, a pre-Aeneas one.
Finally, the
newcomers lived for a while with Acestes' Sicels, but the “obligation of fate”
or the lack of room put them out to sea once more. After their well-known
adventures they reached Carthage ,
frozen stiff, hungry and with tears in their eyes. You have read their
adventures there and what temptations wanted to fix them into place, but they,
obligated by future glory, held on and moved forward.
Here, after
they “sowed” the future Punic wars, by behaving in a way that is not exactly
praiseworthy, they left, and after more adventure, they reached the much
sought-after and much promised Hesperides, meaning Italy .
Both the poet
and the historian drew, as you can see, a lot of information from legends, and
they state that the place they set anchor in was called Latium , the king of the place,
Latinus, her daughter was called Lavinia, and the inhabitants Laurents. In the
end, Latinus, impressed by Aeneas' illustrious origin, just like Acestes,
concedes to have them settle on his land. Moreover, he gives him his daughter
in marriage after giving him “half his kingdom”.
Doesn't that
seem a bit strange to you? Since the world's been turning I have never heard of
someone giving everything willingly to some invaders who came to their land,
eating their crops and cattle, and then wanting to settle on their lands. Why
then did Latinus make that gesture? It could only be explained if Latinus held
in great esteem Aeneas' illustrious origin, his divine origin was very precious
on Latin lands, so that he laid everything at his feet; may it be that this was
a meeting of some friends, some relatives? But let's not get ahead of
ourselves; what is interesting, remarkable is that here too they are received
with the same friendship as in Sicily
by Acestes.
Finally,
harmony rules with no hiccups, the marriage is celebrated and the future seems
bright. It is true that there is then a battle with a neighbor, Turnus7
was his name, but the motive of the fight is very particular: Lavinia, daughter
of Latinus, had been promised, and now Aeneas came to claim her; he was not
against the Trojan foreigners,
he was not even against Aeneas as a foreigner, his reaction was merely the
natural reaction of a pride wounded in matters of love.
However,
everything is settled conveniently and the stakes of the future are hammered
into the ground: the name of the people that is born out of the fusion of the
Trojans with the Laurents would be Latin, from the locals, this is how
we find them in histories, their language will be... Well, no mention anywhere,
not even in whispers, about the language in which the two communities, so
beautifully set in brotherhood, will understand each other. Was the matter so
unimportant as to be forgotten?
I think the
official language had to be selected, established, and the decision set into
stone for eternity; however, they did not whisper a single word about that. We
know that later it kept being called Latin, but then, in the 12th,
11th or 10th century BC when this was happening, we do
not know in what language the two masses of people decided to talk to each
other: Laurent, Latin, Trojan or...?
Recalling the
reception they had in Sicily , seeing the way
in which they harmoniously merged into Latium , could we not believe that
Latinus' Laurents spoke the same language? Only so could one explain the
harmony, as well as the silence with regard to setting a language, therefore
any negotiations between the Aeneas family and the Latinus family with regard
to language were pointless, as it was one and the same. The fact that they did
not do so is precisely the proof that there was nothing to negotiate, to set in
stone.
For us, the
people in the 20th century AD, it is a wonder that old Homer does
not say anything about the language in which the combatants in the Trojan war
understood each other; it is also a wonder for us that the younger Virgil and
Titus Livius, so many centuries after him, do not say anything about that; we,
20 centuries away from the “youngsters”, imagine them living in a world marked
by borders, ethnicity, national languages, just as we see around us. But what
if it was not exactly like this, and this separation of languages was far from
“having reached from Babel
to those lands”? If not even 20 centuries ago the younger Virgil and others did
not feel the need to mention anything about the language spoken there, would it
be so hard to admit that there was not anything to specify yet? We have some
experience in that, we know that unfortunately, the obvious escapes mentioning,
no one mentions, for instance, that in the morning, when light comes, night
departs; why would they do that? Everyone knows it.
Let us
proceed. Legends speak about an interesting history of the place, which says
that it had been populated at one time by Pelasgians, a Balkan population, and
that the Pelasgians had inhabited those places before the coming of the Lydian
Etruscans8, brought by a king of theirs named Tarchon.
We notice that
the Etruscans were also called Lydians because they had come at one point from Lydia , which was also located somewhere in Asia Minor .
More to the
north, legends say, were supposed to be the Enotrians9, another
people of Pelasgian origin that had come centuries before from somewhere in the
Balkans, and, more importantly, the name of their leader was Italicos, hence
the name of the peninsula. According to them, we could say that these
populations were also related by the their Balkan origin.
We also know
that the south of Italy
was also called Greater Greece; what could that name be based on, if not on the
massive Greek presence in the area? However, in the beginning these were not
Greeks, but Pelasgians, Etruscans, Enotrians, Trojans, then later Danai, Achaeans,
Argives, Dorian. These other waves could be the ones that followed the “Trojan
cataclysm”, a cataclysm that had not been exactly local, or others who, after
returning home, had found their families occupied, like Agamemnon. None of them
were yet Greeks, the name that integrated them being a subsequent synthesis,
but all of them, by their common origin, spoke a Balkan language, meaning
Thracian.
Therefore,
now, after my very personal count, we found two “transports” of Thracian
language to Italy from Troy : the Sicels of
Acestes and the Trojans of Aeneas. I only referred tangentially to the other
“Italian locals”, Pelasgians, Etruscans, etc. who had also come from the
Balkan-Phrygian area. But adding to them the “Greek South” and seeing how many
gathered there, should we not ask ourselves how far to the north this
Balkan-origin south extended? Or where that north began?
Because there
was another wave, a branch of the refugees from Troy , who settled precisely in that north.
Antenor10, another famous Trojan, leader of “Enetians” or
“Henetians” or “Venetians”, Paphlagonian inhabitants from the southern shore of
the Black Sea , who took part in the war on the
side of the Trojans, also fled the gods' wrath. They went through the same
Balkan Thrace as Aeneas, but without his adventures, they held to the north of
the peninsula, passed through the lands of the Illyrians, and settled to the
north-west of the Adriatic Sea . They named the
place where they settled precisely Troy , and the
city founded by them was called Venetia , so
that is how the “pre-Latin” north looked like.
But even here
there is a possible oddity, because I do not know who first pronounced the word
“Venetians”, the locals, who could not have been missing from those places, or
the newcomers, the Venetians? I say that because the word “Venetian” seems to
me to come from the Latin venio (to come) and seems to have expressed
then, as it does now, the same meaning of newly-arrived.
Well, if the
Venetians brought it, it could be said that in the lands south of the Black Sea , from where the Paphlagonians-Venetians came,
there was this word, with the same meaning as in Classical Latin. Except that I
do not know what that word was doing in those lands, as it could have existed
then only thousands of kilometers away, somewhere in the south of Italy, used
by the Laurents that spoke the Latin language. Did locals in the north of the Adriatic not have it, themselves several hundred
kilometers away from the Latins in the south, when they called the newcomers
“Venetians”, meaning were they speaking Latin as well?
One other
observation about these Paphlagonians: we do not know how many took part in the
Trojan war, or how many reached what was to be Venice , but, like in Segestia, to found a
city, you need a minimum of people; therefore, by doing so, it means there were
enough of them.
Question: all
these had been only participants in the Trojan war, or did they take with them
people from Paphlagonia when they left towards the future Venice ? But why would they have left Paphlagonia,
was it too crowded or were they also affected by the Trojan earthquake, or
cataclysm? I am inclined to believe that the exodus also involved the other
people from back home, it would be the explanation for several waves of Balkan
refugees, and implicitly an indication of the reach of the Trojan cataclysm.
But that is a
different question; as far as we are concerned, the answer is at hand, they all
spoke the same language, in fact, all of them being the inhabitants of the wide
space of “Herodotus' Thracians” and their language, respectively.
Now here is
another interesting fact: could the origin of the names Remus and Romulus11,
the founders of Rome ,
be unimportant? I cannot believe their choice was just by chance, their
historical importance does not bear that, and if we notice the similarity with
Orhomenos, the name of a city from ancient Arcadia , another in Beotia and others which
contain this rhomen, romen, we no longer believe in chance.
However, they
were “Greek” cities, and I do not see why the first Romans-Trojans would
baptize their city with the name used by Greeks, deadly enemies. Of course
there were Trojan warriors called Ormenos, but it would be hard to believe they
opted for the name of those insignificant Trojan soldiers, allowing the
confusion with their enemies.
The
conclusion that must be drawn is that the names Remus, Romulus, Orhomenos and
others were neither Greek, nor Trojan, but Thracian, with very important
significance, since they had to be granted eternity.
Anyhow, it
seems to me redundant to iterate even more “transports”, first of all because I
do not know all of them, and anyway their numbers would only strengthen my
conclusion: the presence in the Balkan peninsula of so many immigrants from
Asia Minor and the Balkans cannot be denied; the Laurents and other inhabitants
of Italy were the descendants of Pelasgians, Etruscans, themselves with a
“lost” language like the Thracians and the Dacians who they themselves,
at some unknown time, wandered, moved and settled both in Italy, the Balkans
and Phrygia.
And now, to
the picture above, we can connect the logic of other events, which until now
have evolved chaotically: let us recall Dardanus, who came from Troy even to Italy ,
and I propose we look more closely at this essential character, whom several
mysteries from the south of Europe orbit. We
have seen the Pelasgians who left the Balkans and settled in Italy , also the Etruscans and so forth, and
after the war another move by the Trojans, Paphlagonians and others, also
towards Italy .
Dardanus went
the opposite way, from Italy
to the Balkans and Phrygia, where he founded Troy ;
we do not know why he left Italy ,
but according to logic he could not have founded the future city by himself, he
had to be the leader of a numerous group in order to be able to do it. At the
same time, it seems absurd that Italy ,
from where he left with the compulsory group, would have been left empty.
Could it not
be that this whole to-and-fro of everyone took place within the Thracian genta
and language of which we are speaking? Could it not be that Dardanus was
“taking a stroll” within his own genta? For who was Dardanus?
Let us
recall: he was the son of Zeus, generator of Homo Sapiens, and of Electra,
daughter of Poseidon, i.e. Zeus' niece, therefore totally divine lineage. We do
not know how divine he was in reality, but he obviously is, or he becomes the
generator of the Trojan-Thracian people, meaning a great patriarch for them,
the ancestor of everyone in the area.
It is true
that sources on him are scarce; the Greek ones, coming from the Argos conquerors, scorn him because he condemned Troy , and the Roman ones
do not pay too much attention to him either, possibly for the same reason, so
we get to know him after he is put through the still of Greco-Roman
antipathies. We can say, however, that Dardanus was the great patriarch of the
Thracians, and that, based on how he was moving through “Herodotus' Thracian
area”, this was his feud. This hypothesis also justifies the great prestige he
holds in the Italo-Balkan-Phrygian space where we find his traces (such as
Dardania-Kosovo, Dardanelles , etc.). Here we
have also the substance of Aeneas’ reputation, before whom Latinus, Acestes and
even Turnus respectfully bowed, Aeneas being not only the son of Aphrodite-Venera,
but also the descendant of Dardanus, therefore Aeneas was the grand heir
apparent.
There would
be much more to say about this, because there are authors who bring proof in
support of Herodotus, but I will stop here, the picture assembled from the facts
I have exposed seems to me to be sufficiently convincing; it is true that there
are authors who state otherwise, but I have avoided them, because what they say
does not fit into the natural course of the general phenomenon. At the time of
which I speak, the original family was much younger, much more unitary, had the
same traditions, the same language, and, as we can see, the same mythology.
Speaking of
mythology, I would complete the picture with the later behavior of the Romans:
do we recall Aeneas' lamentations in front of Dido when he first met her, and
before the appearance of his mother, Aphrodite, which lent him hope and
courage? I explained to myself this humble posture as a result of the
punishment meted out by the gods at Troy .
Virgil, too, who wrote the Aeneid
more than a thousand years after the events at Troy , notes the humility as something to be
remembered, not something to be forgotten.
Could it be
that the feeling preserved by the Romans was precisely this frustration, this
punishment meted out by the gods at Troy ?
Could it be that the Romans identified with the symptoms of a child rejected by
his or her parents? This would be an easier explanation why the Roman
historiography, instead of identifying its prestige with the old ancestor, the
god Dardanus, who rejected them, in their opinion, prefers the humble, defeated
Aeneas, and adopts for the language and people the name of this tiny Latinus.
Much of the later behavior of the Romans could be explained by this feeling.
For instance,
adopting the gods of all their defeated foes may not have been just political
calculation, but also the position of the person who no longer has too much
“preference for their parents”.
Then, what
could be the explanation for their tough and scornful behavior towards the
Greeks, whose culture they still admired? Was it not the behavior of the
brother rejected by his parents in favor of the parents' favorite brothers?
(Cain killed Abel, and Joseph was sold by his brothers precisely because of
these mixed feelings). Now, after Rome
had become the glory of the world, displaying this feeling could be a kind of
reproach against the “parent gods”, to show them their mistake.
Related to
that, it is also said that the Romans copied the Greek culture; the Romans
might not have been of the same opinion. Maybe they believed they were taking
back what was theirs, and that admiration for Greek culture might not have been
for what we believe was the Greek culture, but for what they believed to be
their culture which had been taken from them; from their point of view, they
did not copy anything, but continued their own culture.
It is known
that the first democracies emerged in Greece ,
but let us recall that Rome ,
even though it started off as a kingdom, continued as a republic, until it
became an empire. Here is yet another display of common spirit, very surprising
for those autocratic times.
Of course,
these may be mere assumptions, but the fact remains that the Romans, wherever
they returned, in spite of all the evils they brought, also brought
civilization, that wherever they went they left behind at least one long-lived
road. This behavior was of course generated by political and economic calculations,
but it was also a manifestation of pride, the substance of that possible
reproach.
Therefore we
could say that the Romans went east for reasons others than those for which the
Mongols headed west, and we see that the space “organized” by them is, with
some indulgence, the very “Thrace of Herodotus”.
In
conclusion, I end this chapter and admit that maybe not all the facts and
events I have exposed here took place exactly as I have presented them here,
but it seems to me that they assemble easier if the neglected Dardanus is the
patriarch of the Thracians, and the locals in “Herodotus' space” are the
Thracians. At the same time, as I have said, going back gradually we inevitably
get closer to that unanimously admitted presumption of that original common
trunk, the common European family, and thus some obscure events, hard to place
in time, start to make sense, becoming plausible antecedents of the present.
Of course, it
is not I, the amateur, who can establish the actual truth, others should do it,
but they have to take into accounts these realities, supporting them if they
are natural, combating them if they are wrong, but with arguments, not with
statements dripping with pretentiousness.
NOTES
1 Aeneas, son of goddess Aphrodite and the mortal Anchises
2 Publius Vergilius Maro, 70-19 BC, protégé of Emperor
Augustus, author, among other things, of the Roman epic The Aeneid (Mic Dicţionar Enciclopedic, second revised and
enlarged edition, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucharest, 1978)
3 The Aeneid,
translated by Eugen Lovinescu, notes by Eugen Cizek, Editura Tineretului, 1964.
4 Titus Livius, 69 BC-17 AD, author, among other
things, of Ab Urbe Condita. Chronological table by Paul Popescu
Găleşanu, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucharest
5 Polydorus, The Aeneid, Virgil, Book III –
Homer claims that Polydorus was killed by Achilles, The Iliad, Book XX.
6 Segestia, city built by Acestes, The Aeneid,
Virgil, Book I.
7 The ancestors of Turnus were the King of Argos
8 The founding in the west of Asia Minor of the Lydian
state, Istoria lumii în date, coordinated by Acad. Prof. Andrei Oţetea,
Editura Enciclopedică Română, Bucharest, 1972.
9 Enotrians, a legendary pre-Hellenic population which
came to Arcadia in central Italy
10 “Antenor heading a group of Henetians could pass
unhindered through the gulf of Illyria […], found the city of Patavium and
built a shelter for the Teucrians” (the Trojans were also referred to as
Teucrians, after the name of the father of Dardanus' wife, the Cretan Teucros)
– The Aeneid, Virgil, Book I. Another place was baptized Troy , and the city that was founded was Venice
11 Remus and Romulus
12 Constantine the Great was born in Nasau (Niš)
in Serbia , about 300 km from
Byzantium , 50
km from Calafat, an area then populated by Thracians.
CHAPTER
V
THE
DACO-ROMANIAN LANGUAGE
After this
long digression, Dacia – the Balkans – Troy – Rome , let us get
back to Dacia ,
right at the time of the Roman conquest. After approximately fifteen centuries,
the descendants of the old Trojans, creators of the fabulous Roman
Empire , returned to the Balkans, the place that they were sent away
from by the gods. Thus, through repeated expansions, in the year 106 they
reached the old Danube , passed it and met
their cousins, the Dacians.
In other words, after almost fifteen centuries, the Latin language, a daughter
of Thracian, meets once again the Dacian language, its good sister.
Of the
Romanian Historical Absurdity which killed Dacians, pulverized languages
and other bizarre things we have spoken before, coming back now to the Romanian
people, whose existence is in contradiction with its own history textbooks, I
can add some common sense arguments, to prove once again the absurdity of those
theories about disappearance.
I say that
because, as we have seen then in Troy, where the relatives understood each
other very well in the Thracian language framework, and now, in Dacia, upon
meeting again, the same thing happened: and here we find the same
“inexplicable” lack of translators as in Troy; just like Homer did not find it
necessary to “stylize” in his entire work any translator for the “ethnicities”
confronting each other in Troy, neither did Apollodorus, the master of
sculpting detail, bother to carve on his column any of them.
Or at least
one translator was necessary to some talks between the refined Latins and the
barbarian Dacians, if they truly spoke different languages, some
interpreters were absolutely indispensable.
I will not
reiterate the arguments, just like they did not need translators in Troy , they did not need
them here, now, however, we are out of the thickets of ambiguities and absurd
assumptions, from now on we know what the reality is and we know more about the
roots of the Romanian people and its language.
In order to
get to the Romanians of today, we have to see a very obscure period that lasted
from the departure of the Romans from Dacia
until the Romanian late Middle Ages. I will try to fill in this period with
some guesses, because the period is missing almost completely from Romania’s
history; aside from some legends of foundation [in Romanian, “descălecare”,
“dismounting”, old term used by Romanian chroniclers to describe how early
feudal lords took under dominion the historical provinces of Romania], of some
obscure knyazes, of a “Ramunc”1 and of some “Torna, torna,
fratre”2, nothing to provide an anchor, as if on these lands was
nothing but the mud of the flood.
This “filling
in” is extremely necessary, precisely because in these invented “white spots”
we find many of the historical vices and the mechanisms that have given birth
to those theories that were so vitiated; seeking here we will also find the Dacians
that have disappeared from history, and maybe something about the supposed
selectivity regarding disappearances. Of these, however, we will speak later,
now I am trying to imagine some reference points in the Roman departure from
Dacia, to fill in the “gaps” left by them with existing life, restoring the
natural bridge between the Dacian antiquity and Romanian
contemporaneity.
As we know,
in the year 271 the Roman emperor Aurelian withdraws his army and
administration from the occupied territory
of Dacia
It is fairly
strange, this withdrawal without a fight from a territory occupied with great
effort, we find in history a few events, mute in appearance, that show
something else. Events that may be the causes of this “peaceful withdrawal”. In
this way we find out, from those same histories, that many Roman emperors after
Trajan enriched their names with additions such as “Dacicus” or “Carpicus”3.
Such
additions show that those generals or emperors had glorious fights with those
“additions”, defeated them, and, more precisely, it shows that those Roman
emperors defeated a few more times either the Dacians or Carpians that
were “pulverized”, in various ways, earlier, by their predecessor Trajan.
Therefore, those battles could not have been fought with Dacians that
had been killed, had killed themselves, had been deported, assimilated or
whatever else, but with existing ones, and as they really took place, those
emperors themselves became witnesses that the Dacians did not disappear,
that they were the adversaries, not some populations arrived from I don't know
where.
In
conclusion, this betrays the identity of the aggressors, but not only that:
aside from the persistence of the attacks, we could also say that the Dacians
were sufficiently numerous for the victories against them to be an occasion
for pride for the brave Roman emperors.
Now we could
take into account something else as well, we could admit that the Dacians
that kept attacking from the north and east the new borders of the empire were
accompanied by other peoples as well, with different names, but those emperors
tell us that the mass of the fighters were free Dacians, it was with
their names that those particular emperors ennobled themselves and that it was
pressure from the free Dacians that caused the act of 271 to happen!
In the end,
the Romans left Dacia, but that should not be taken to mean just anything,
because, as we saw, if the Dacian population from villages survived and
stayed on, it can even be said that only the Roman army and administration
left, not the entire population. If some historians created the “void”, even
though “the testimony of emperors Dacicus and Carpicus” and others exits, it
has to be supposed that they were forced into this endeavor by who knows what
plans that had a vested interest in cramming into the “white spots” some
peoples arrived from everywhere, not the local Dacians. That is their
responsibility, however, and we will be moving on.
Moving away
from these laughable opinions of the “Dacian void”, however, the
consequences of the Roman departure from Dacia
have to be evaluated more closely, because they constituted an extremely
serious fracture in the history of the Daco-Romanian people, a tragic
turn in its existence. For if the occupation of Dacia in 106 was a disaster,
its being left by the Roman administration under the conditions in which it
occurred was an even greater disaster, these two events being the greatest
disaster in the history of the Daco-Romanians; the consequences of these
social cataclysms can still be felt to this day.
In the year
106, Dacia
was looted, its state structures destroyed by the war, the social structure
changed with pillars of a different origin, the important positions in
administration were taken over by the conquerors, while dignitary positions
were given to those who were selected through the inevitable test of fidelity.
All this considering the fact that they were perpetuated for 170 years, they
affected deeply the Dacian state. However, the Romans, interested in
administering the conquered territories, with their well-known practical
spirit, replaced, fixed and remade all that was not in their best interest, and
all that did not run smoothly was against their best interest. In other words,
even if the Romans destroyed some of the local traditions and culture, their
civilization was not an ordinary one, so that this “other” civilization,
although it superimposed a new hierarchy, a new aristocracy, imposed rules and
offered security for 170 years.
Then all of a
sudden the Romans left, taking with them the administration, therefore the very
organization that coordinated its existence. And, under these circumstances,
who had enough authority to control the inevitable disorder, which in turn
absorbed disorder, who could rule and fill the void of authority thus created?
Had anyone in the old administration enough courage to stay behind, knowing the
disaster that was to come? Could there have stayed behind those “former Dacians”,
perverted by Roman structure, faithful to it, educated to obedience and “freed”
of the virtues of a “land” Dacian?
I don't
really think so, many of them, especially the city dwellers, who got rich
through obedience and treason, had no reason to stay; they quite surely hoisted
their wealth onto their backs and left. I think some of the shepherds in the
plains also left under the pressure of events, they knew the way anyway from
their old sheep migration routes, and so, pushing their flocks, for the time
being also left.
Who also left
were those people around cities, market towns, castra, etc., the
descendants of the people that were impoverished by the war, even if they had
no reason to love the Romans; having however a lost past and an uncertain
future, they, who “stroked the Romans to get the bonus”, had become a kind of
clients of the excess wealth in that arrogant Roman comfort. As a result, this
market rabble, neither peasant nor city dweller, with their cosmopolitan sheen,
looking down on the Dacian peasants and with inferiority complexes
towards the Romans, left too: they had no special reason either to leave, or to
stay, but they had to follow the kitchen they were tied to.
As a result,
I take the liberty of believing that they were the material for maneuver later
on for the “Distinguished Professors”4, they were the “great mass”
out of which they made up the great migration that supposedly emptied Dacia of Dacians,
also fashioning the symmetrical phenomenon, “the great migration”, meaning the
often moved colonists that came from the south of the Danube who are supposed
to have repopulated the Romanian Countries.
Of course,
some of them left and came back, but they did not mean all of Dacia , for the simple
reason that peasants cannot be confused with city rabble, villages were full
only of Dacian peasants, who ritualized the hard and ancient work of the
land. This work is not too attractive, and the work to income ratio makes it
even less so, not to mention that the peasants have always had to carry on
their backs everyone else. As a result, even if in the villages there were the
disinherited Dacian peasants, they were on their ancestral lands, with
their ancestral customs, local rules that did not really interfere with Roman
rules, so the peasants, who generally do not really come from somewhere, were
undoubtedly Dacian, they stayed in place, especially now, when the land
that had once been stolen could be taken back.
If they did
fear the foreign invaders that accompanied their brothers, then these authentic
people of the land buried their belongings in well-known holes in the ground,
hid in the mountains and forests to let the invasion pass, leaving fresh water
to their heart's content for them and their horses; they came back to their fields
whenever they could, sowed and reaped and hid again, “after the times”, and
thus they survived.
However, the
departure south, though insignificant for Dacia's looting, contributed to the Daco-Romanian
disaster, because those that had departed represented the administration,
authorities that everywhere coordinate the social mechanism and the human hive,
and without it activities disintegrate, are disordered, in counter step or they
do not get done at all. So imagine a country left without a trace of authority
and you will see the Dacia
left to anyone's mercy, now at the mercy of “liberator invaders”, which
constituted a real disaster. It was also bad because it enabled and masked the
falsity in history.
It seems,
however, a natural question: did the Dacian peasants have any reason to
hide when their brothers came to liberate them? I think so, considering that
the brothers who were liberating them did not come alone, as we have supposed:
populations of Mongol, Slavic, German peoples, fascinated, among other things,
by Rome's light, and the prospect of proportional looting, but also for other
reasons, they were pushing their edges towards the west and north, with
persevering pressure on the intermediate borders of the free Dacians.
Now, when the structures of the Dacian state were fractured and put up
little resistance, intrusions became easy; for a couple of centuries, it even
became tradition, in the hope of liberating Dacia, for the Dacians to
ally themselves with them against the Romans, the traditional enemies.
Therefore, having this hope they tied alliances with these restless “guests”,
which were inevitable anyway. That is probably when the following saying was
invented: “befriend the devil until you cross the lake”.
So, if in 271
there was a confrontation or not between the Romans, on the one hand, and the Dacians,
Carpians and other allies on the other, I don't know, but after this date the
free Dacians together with their allies definitely came into Dacia , with the Dacians
acting to moderate the excesses of the others.
In the
villages there was a large Dacian population, since, as we said, working
the land was not attractive, the newcomers were not falling over themselves to
grab the hoes, so the situation was simpler.
In cities,
however, consequences were more severe: cities, in fact small market towns,
were generally populated by those who supplied services to the administration,
and who, being tied umbilically, did not part with it, therefore cities,
relatively emptied, offered a greater temptation. Of course the “allies” wanted
to enjoy the wealth of Rome ,
but they also liked the Dacian market cities which, even though small,
offered perfect opportunities for them, who only had a tent and the sky above.
And then, the
Dacians, as many of them as were companions, had no reason to occupy
them, because they had their households and their families at home, in Moldavia
and Maramureş, let's say, and the possibly local Dacians, participants
to the “march”, were almost all rural, incompatible with city life, even if
only for the reason that families and the sources of subsistence were rural. In
this way, after reaching the objective of
“the old borders”, the “victorious” Dacians left for their homes, leaving the cities to be
occupied by those “friends” who, more often than not, had no homes or families.
It was
inevitable that this “arrangement” led to the apparition of the new city
dwellers, the administration to manage the chaos left behind; however, the
newcomers were not the Romans of yore, with their discipline and organization,
it was a ragtag world, rather nomadic, so that their order was founded in
something else; I wouldn't want to call them primitive, however, the difference
between their discipline and effectiveness and those of the Romans was great,
as great as the size of the “white spots” they left behind.
They were
also far from the Dacian discipline, Dacia used to have very well
grounded traditions, and would have been saved by them if they had had time to
restore the still living structures in their people, but they didn't, and this
almost total disorder left behind the Romans, over which that of the new
invasion was superimposed, pulverized the old traditions.
Then the
intruders did not leave, and even worse, others kept coming, so that the former
Dacian cities filled with allogeneic people; the claim made by some
Romanian citizens of different ethnicity who say that they are the authors of
some cities in Romania is only partially true, they contributed only to the development
of cities, not to their founding; when their ancestors “dismounted”,
then, at some point, they tied their horses to the existing buildings, even
if they had porches. As a result, it should be stressed that the cities
developed on the hearth of the old Dacian dwellings.
Now it has to
be underlined how another evil was springing up, born out of the differences
between the newcomers and the Dacian locals: being of different kins,
with different customs, with different languages, the newcomers took distance
from the “peasant foreigners”, as the Dacians did from the city
dwellers. If we add to this the aggravating fact that the foreign city
dwellers, becoming the leaders, had to be supported, we understand that the
relationship between them was vitiated right from the start, that is how the
insult “you peasant!” must have come about. Becoming a general insult, it was
used voluptuously by our city dwellers of any extraction until very recently.
Maybe the
rather peaceful character of the infiltration imposed at the beginning a more
moderate relationship, corresponding to the situation of guarantors of
security, maybe in the beginning they did not even have evil thoughts, after
all they were allies, they had helped them, so they considered themselves
entitled to compensation. That is why they told the peasants: “Don't be afraid,
plow, sow, and when you reap we'll come and take the part that we deserve”. And
for a long time they did just that.
However, as
others kept coming, of different kins, but with the same interests, their
numbers kept increasing, and the peasants who fed them fared worse and worse.
Maybe in the meantime the number of peasants also grew, maybe even the people
who had been city dwellers for longer time, those “friends” of yore, became
peasants, their senior place being taken by other, newer aliens, hungrier, and
not as peaceful. As a result, in time, the city dwellers were no longer the
“allies” of yore, now they were real conquerors; they confiscated the lands and
enslaved the peasants, becoming their leaders, the cultured classes, the
scribes, because they had just learned how to write, and started writing
histories.
And so when I
was saying that Dacia being left by the Romans was a disaster, I was referring
to the disorganization left, the mixing of foreigners into cities by massive
and continuous infiltration, but also to the consequences that derive from all
this.
One of the
consequences would be that the newcomers, being of different kins, were
organized in families: concerned more with the security and prosperity of the
piece they took over, they were insensitive to the Dacian ensemble, Dacia 's problems. On
these pieces they had taken over they became small kings, voivodes, knyazes,
princes, crumbling old Dacia .
In this way of life Dacia
“lost” its unity, the name of the country, of the language was lost, no
perennial deeds were done, which in fact
meant the great evils.
That state of
facts lasted for a long time in Dacia
after the Romans, without anything being written in the
chancelleries-cabins-tents, so that the period of the Daco-Romanian
Middle Ages was characterized by fragmented administrations, during which those
prankish “white spots” started gaining ground.
Getting here,
one other question needs to be asked: when and why did the Dacians start
calling themselves Romanians? Because, once again: since the Romans were not
their ancestors, and especially after all that happened in the war and after,
could the Dacians consider the Romans their ancestors? No, it is
unbelievable. Then, when and under what circumstances did Romanians start
believing it, saying that the Romans were their ancestors?
Asking
experts for explanations is pointless, their answer is well known, it lies in
those embarrassing disappearances, so I won't insist, the question is, however,
fundamental, it needs be asked because the answer to it can be even the “iron
grass”5 which will undo all mysteries. Being so imperiously
important, I will risk a hypothesis, as my prestige as a student with
unanswered questions allows.
First of all,
I believe that the root “rom, ram” is much older than that supposedly
generated by Romulus, Rome respectively, and that it came from a legendary
population, “relatively from that area”, which had the name Rams; it could be
something pre-Thracian, it could be a group from those “many Thracian peoples”,
as Herodotus says, and we saw that there were throughout the ancient Balkans
cities and individuals with names which could, by linguistic permutation, could
derive from this root, such as Romenion, Orhomenos and others. In fact, we find
this root in the so-called Indo-European area in important names: the Egyptian
sun-god was called Ra, many Pharaohs were Ram-ses, the Hindu god hero was
called Rama, then Aromanians, Armenians, Armâni, Aramei and
others, added to the others, they say something.
Of course
that there is no connection between cal [Romanian: horse], calculator
[Romanian: calculator] and Caledonia , however,
it is exactly this type of disputable connections that have born the
Indo-European idea.
That being
the case, it means that Romulus and Rome took the root from the Rams, and that
the Dacians also had it from them, therefore the name Romanian would not
be falling out of thin air, and in any case not from Rome, being a local one.
I admit, the
argument is thin, but I am adding to it another of my “stories”, maybe put
together they become credible: I suppose that the Dacian-Romanian
metamorphosis was the result of a confusion made by the newcomers, non-Dacian,
relating to the spoken language. They, speaking other languages, could not
perceive the subtle differences between the Western Thracian language,
Roman-Latin and the Eastern Thracian language, the Dacian language; for
them the language spoken by the Romans and the Dacians seemed the same,
so that they called the Dacian language Roman as well, the
language that was then in fashion; the similarity, being real, the confusion
could be excused, and did not bother anyone. As a result, the Dacians
were not scandalized, they “accepted” the new name which was circulating anyway
and which, resonating with that “ram”, became Romanian, rumună, and it
has remained so to this day.
Later the Dacian
identity became more and more obscure, and the Roman character more and more
prestigious, so that the confusion with the Roman affiliation which, it is
true, had become very precious, could have been done with a degree of
intentionality, not only out of lack of information.
That is how
it came about that the Dacian language became the Romanian language,
which, up to a point, was tonic for Daco-Romanians.
However, once
that step was made, the next became obligatory: if their language was Roman, it
follows that its speakers were Roman, right? Here it did not work anymore: they
were not Romans, they all knew it very well, even though 200 years had passed
since the conquest of that part of Dacia ;
they were not Romans, they had even been at war with the Romans, whom they had
just kicked out.
They were not
Romans, but neither were they Dacians, since they called themselves that
more and more seldom; after the appearance of the multitude of names derived
from the small “countries”, the names Dacian and the Dacian language
became rather abstract. Spread all over their old territory, mixed with the
newcomers and their claims, the small social organizations took on the name of
their new boss, giving them his identity, so the new necessities imposed the
new names, the substitution occurring slowly in any case. Later, these nuclei
got bigger, united, becoming the Moldavians, the Wallachians, the Maramureş
people, the Transylvanians, the Banat people,
and so forth, so they no longer referred to themselves as Dacians.
However, the language was common to all, it integrated them and confirmed their
common identity, but it was not Roman-Latin, it was Dacian, which had
come down through direct affiliation from the Thracian-Ram..., meaning the
primordial population we call Indo-European.
These are
“thin stories”, now listen to the arguments: when the Roman army and
administration, meaning the elites, the aristocracy, left, with them must have
left their servants, first because there were inventory objects, part of a
Roman noble's wealth, and they could not do without them in their new
residences. These servants, even if they were Dacians, they had to speak
the master’s language, the Roman language. As a result, besides the other
speakers of the Roman language who had no interest in confronting the new
realities on the horizon, most Roman language speakers left, and conquered Dacia was emptied of
them.
Well, if we
go by the book and admit that the Dacians had stopped existing for a
long time now, it means that 271 Dacia
got filled by “barbarians”, which should have continued to speak the
“barbarian” language.
Therefore the
question begs asking: how come the Romanian people would end up speaking Latin?
Where did they get it? Where did they learn it? The Free Dacians and the other
peoples could not speak it, they could not know the Roman-Latin language,
because they only fought the Romans who were full of Latin, and did not live
with them.
As a result,
at least part of the future Romanian people, the descendants of those
barbarians, could not speak Latin over the entire territory of Dacia
The logical
answer is that the language spoken within the old borders was the Dacian language,
preserved by the Dacian peasantry, possibly with small borrowings from
the language of the “allies”, but, as we can see today, they are insignificant.
So it is
possible that making the compromise for the language, this one could have
imposed the next one, so that the possible confusion, together with the rules
of phonetics, changed the name of the language and the people, thus the Dacian
Language became the Romanian Language, the Dacian People became the Romanian People,
Dacia becoming Romania. Maybe there are some doubts, but otherwise I cannot see
how the Romanian language spreads even to the places where no Roman has set
foot, therefore the doubts are outside the register of common sense.
Let us see,
however, how these “errors” could insinuate themselves, how could they give
birth to those white spots in the history of Romania ,
Europe , and implicitly of humanity.
We saw what
were the real movements of the Dacians, except that, in the attempt to
make something else out of them, they were used parasitically, exaggerated,
amalgamated in order to come to the aberrant theory, that of universal
circulation, of disappearances, its real purpose being to grant the occupants moral
comfort, not just physical, which they already have, so that the newcomers,
trying to gain legality in the back yard of the Dacians, of the
Romanians, imagined those scenarios.
Being only on
paper, the operation was simple: the number of Dacian victims during the
confrontations with the Romans started growing disproportionately, as the
intention was to be believed they were swallowed by the Dacian lands
after being emptied by the Romans by massacres, deportation, etc. In the end
they had to convince people from all over the world, as well as the small
readers of textbooks, that the lands occupied by them were empty, and that
they, the peaceful occupiers, fought only weeds before becoming noble,
prosperous, but especially to convince themselves that they are legitimate
owners.
So far so
good, who could have counted the victims of old confrontations, there were,
however, on these lands some slaves or thralls, who worked to keep them in
their nobility and for a long time the situation did not really concern them.
They had solid convictions in this regard: “the world is made of noblemen and
for noblemen, the thralls of the land do not count”, so, according to that
mentality, since the lands had been abandoned by the nobles, meaning their
official owners, that was equivalent to the land being abandoned by the
population. Therefore, being noble, and having no one to contradict them, they
automatically became the owners of those lands, and, according to the norms of
the time, that is how it was.
However, on
the outside there were a multitude of “foreign” people swarming, with another
language and with different customs, who did not really agree with this
business, and in time their presence and then their opinion became more and
more bothersome. In time mentalities changed, noblemen were no longer only what
they believed they were, justice started looking differently at their “rights”,
therefore the presence of these non-nobles, meaning peasants, had to be
explained. Thus the scenarios needed to be enriched, so that after they killed,
“suicided” and deported the Dacians to the south of the Danube , those slaves had to be brought over from
somewhere. Those they also brought from the south of the Danube ,
believing any trace of them had been lost after a few centuries, insinuating
that in fact these were the foreigners. This social engineering trick wanted
not only to grant legitimacy to the property of the “nobles”, but also to take
away the legitimacy of the others, they wanted to become themselves the owners,
and the Daco-Romanians the aliens.
One thing,
however, escaped notice: the southern Balkans emptied of inhabitants needed
explanations, the necessary number of invaders left everything barren behind
them, barrenness that had to be filled with population from somewhere. No
problem, as I have said, the “monumental events” occurred only on paper, only
that maneuver was not exactly sterile, it got into the textbooks giving birth
to the quarrelsome way in which they are supported, and those events became
historical concoctions.
No wonder, we
are people, we know ourselves and we know what we are capable of doing for a
piece of land, so it is no wonder that those fabrications were attempted; what
is a wonder, even suspect, is the great “credulity” of those that take them
seriously.
The dream of
the “noble” was unraveled by reality anyway, as there were too few of them,
they could not preserve their language, traditions, not even their original
facial features, the result being a mixture of races. The re-coagulation of the
numerous Dacian elements prevailed, leading to the future great unions,
forming Romania , in fact Dacia , more precisely
Daco-Romania – the same reality by another name.
I imagine
this phenomenon sort of like this: the old
Dacian traditions are relatively ruined, the Dacian population is segmented, “tied
to the land” poor, so the quality of Dacian and Dacia become somehow without a message and
slowly extinguish themselves in the promiscuity that had been created. However,
the villages, made up primarily of Dacian
peasants, laying in out-of-the-way places, in valleys, near waters,
preserved the fundamental traditions, the old customs, but, because of
promiscuity, became less and less Dacian and more and more Romanian.
Then time
passed, the family of a certain Stan multiplied, becoming the Stăneşti family,
that of Ion becoming that of the Ioneşti, and so forth. Their families lent
their names to the villages, then the cities became Stăneşti, Ioneşti,
Bucureşti. As a singular was necessary to define a member of such a family, by
necessity appeared Stănescu, Ionescu, indicating that one belongs to a given
family, village, place, becoming the equivalent of a nobility title for
descendants: instead of a Ion von, van, ot, de, or any other way, a Stănescu
was a descendant of the Stăneşti, and so on and so forth.
And the
family land “pooled together”, in peaceful times the lands of the Stăneşti
pooled together with that of the Ioneşti, forming the communities that were
also called “countries”, Ţara Bârsei [Romanian: Bârsa country], for instance, which through their
very names (ţară, ţărână, pământ)
[Romanian: country, soil, land, territory], underlined their origin and
unity: the arable lands, the country belonged to the bârsani (I used the
name Bârsa country because I have never heard of a country of the Stăneşti, for
instance, but there must have been one, because it falls within the logic). And
finally, these “small” countries were more real, they had names with
circulation, and in time they replaced some of the old Dacian names.
However,
Moldavia, Banat, Transylvania, Wallachia and all the Romanian provinces
resulted from the union of these small “countries” were separate, and were
evolving under a separate administration, most often run by the conqueror.
However, the language spoken everywhere was Daco-Romanian, because the Daco-Romanians
were the bulk of the population, so that, even separated, they were held
together by the glue of their language.
There are
exceptions, of course, many edges were ripped away from the neighbors, I am
referring to those slices that I was speaking about in the beginning, which
came under the domination of other peoples and other languages, of which I will
be speaking shortly. Now, however, with permission from the “nobles” and “Distinguished
Professors”, let us look more closely at the south of the Danube
emptied of the Romanian aliens, responsible for all evils.
I will start
with a phrase spoken by deputy Anastase Stolojan a hundred something years ago:
“You can travel with the Romanian language throughout the Balkans”6.
What he
wanted to say was that the Balkan Peninsula
was full of people who knew the Romanian language, and that knowing that
language you can cross it quite easily, and the remark was not referring to
ancient history or to the even more obscure medieval history, but to recent
history. Therefore, here is a large number of Romanian speakers, a large pool
in the south we were speaking of.
Well then,
this reality calls for at least two questions, of which one would be: how did
we get left here, north of the Danube, with so many speakers of Romanian after
the place was left deserted by the refugees the “Distinguished Professors” talk
about? The second one would be: how come there are so many Romanian speakers
south of the Danube ? Could deputy Anastase
Stolojan have been wrong, and his statement only the impression of a tourist
who did not pay attention? Let's see.
Everyone has
heard the name “ţânţar” [Romanian: mosquito] given to some inhabitants
of the Balkans, but not everyone knows this has nothing to do with that
pestering insect; the expression is just a funny confusion, the corrupted form
of “sân” turned into “ţân”, to which was added the ending “ţar”,
hence the thing with the insect. In fact the expression is Sânţar, two
Slavic words put together which would translate as “son of the emperor”.
And all of a
sudden another perspective opening up: here we see, just like in the case of
the Dacians, that things happened in the same way: when the ancient
Slavs came and noticed the similarity between the language of the locals and
that of the Romans, they understood that these were the descendants of the
Roman Empire (Western or Eastern, because when the Slavs arrived in the Balkan
peninsula, in both they were speaking Latin), only that here the truth was
different.
So,
irrespective of the fact that their language was not derived from Latin either,
but also from the extended family of the Thracians, namely Thracian, we can see
once again the confusion which led to Aromanians, Armâni, Macedonians,
etc. becoming “sân and ţari”, in fact the speakers of the old Thraco-Dacian
language spoken in that area as well.
Here is proof
that deputy Anastase Stolojan was right: south of the Danube you could travel
back then with Romanian, as he said, because spoken there were derivatives of
the original Thracian language, even called dialects of Romanian, in fact
dialects of the Dacian language.
We have to
emphasize that the newcomers, by the confusions they made, showed the common
origin of the north Danubian Dacians and those south of the Danube , which is precisely what they would have wanted to
hide.
This reality
is also supported by one other fact: Bulgaria , a country with a Mongol
name and with a Slavic official language, recently declared itself Francophone.
Interesting, right? So the citizens of modern Bulgaria , Slavs, Bulgars and the
others noticed that their language is part of the Francophone family, and that
it has Latinophone tendencies. In that case, it is logical to believe that this
real Latinophilia was determined by the speech of the numerous sânţari and
not by the Bulgar or Slavic elements in the spoken language.
Don't be
shocked by this observation, it does not belong to me, I only put it into its
logic: in fact it lies at the basis of the theories of migration-remigration,
being supported by those theories, because, isn’t that so, since the density of
sânţari south of the Danube could repopulate Romania, it is natural for
their numbers to have been very large.
In fact, the
very multitude of the sânţari allowed for the migration theory to appear,
had it not been for that multitude south of the Danube ,
those theories would not have appeared.
The fact that
there were and still are many non-Bulgarians can also be proved through another
argument, which is not taken into account at all: Bulgarians, for instance, are
a Mongolian people, but they lost their original Mongol features; when we see
in their descendants of today classical European features, we can ask whose
they got and to whom they gave theirs, meaning that they got lost en masse since
they appear as such beautiful Europeans (may Asian people forgive my statement,
it is know that beauty is a subjective characteristic, with local value).
Of course
that this Europeanization of theirs was contributed to by the Slavs, who are
not Mongolian at all, but it was not their language that could have revealed
Francophony, but again it was the multitude of sânţari that we spoke
about.
In passing, I
can say that this observation is also valid for the other descendants of the
Mongolians, such as Hungarians, Turks and others; for instance, with whom did
the Hungarians make this disadvantageous and perfidious exchange of physiognomy
which altered their sacred originality, how did they become such beautiful
Europeans? Who are their other numerous ancestors?
In the end, I
do not want to upset anyone too much, however, I will attempt a possible
explanation. We know that the Huns, Hungarians, Magyars, populations of the
same origin, passed through/stopped over among the Slavs, Dacians and
others until they reached Pannonia, and the “droit du seigneur” of nobles could
not be denied. What could also not be denied was the right of the slaves, Dacians
and others, to be young and attractive, so that, while the brave noble
young people were busy breaking the bones of Westerners, noble ladies were
getting bored alone with the slaves, who were close by. And it is a known fact
that love in proximity is too natural not to overcome all the adversities of
life, and the result can be seen: neither the gentlemen, nor the ladies have
any longer in their silhouettes that contour of their favorite horse, a sign
they have not been riding for some thousands of years, not just a few hundred.
Not to
mention the Turks, themselves a Mongol people. I can say about them that they
were less subtle and infinitely less delicate than I am now in expressing this:
they simply claimed from the “allied” people several hundred boys and girls for
precise uses. As we can see they also contributed a lot to the process we
discussed, therefore how many of these “non-existent” Thracians and Dacians
would have been necessary for Europeanizing the Bulgarians, Hungarians and the
Turks?
So if Janos,
Yusuf seem so close to Ion, and Ilona, Ilknur with Ioana, it means they should
talk and sing about their European ancestors.
Let us get
back for a little while to the Romanian speakers from the south: I cannot say that
the Bulgarians are Romanian speakers, I do state without reservation that the
minorities, those sânţari, are the glue that determined the Francophony
of the Bulgarians, sânţari who, as we have seen, have nothing to do with
the Latin language, and, obviously, the French language.
In fact, all
of Romania 's
neighbors have Romanian speaking minorities, and, no matter what they are
called where they are, Vlachs or otherwise, they are Dacian speaking, because
some of them speak the Daco-Romanian language without having ever been a
part of the Romanian United Principalities. I do not want to bother anyone by
making this statement, but the situation being real, it has to be said. That
our neighbors also have minorities in Romania is true, except their
presence here has the explanations that we have seen.
Therefore, it
has to be emphasized, however, that the sânţari were not the descendants
of Rome, but of the old Thracians with local names right in the middle of
Thrace, so that the Balkan Peninsula did not simply fill up with north-Danube Dacians
who migrated, or did Romania get repopulated with sânţari, who,
speaking a Latinized Bulgarian, would have taught the Romanians the Latin
language. But this natural conclusion becomes an argument and imposes other
outlines to the known history of Romania .
We recall
that the brothers Asan founded a Bulgaro-Vlach empire7 around the
year 1000. The Bulgarian co-participants in that empire had to accept this
hierarchy because the Vlachs, meaning those sânţari, were numerous
enough so that they would force them into it, into accepting as leaders of the
empire the Asans, who were Vlachs, not Bulgarians, as it would have been normal
in the middle of a great Bulgarian multitude.
It was not
like that, but from this reality emerges something else very important, the
true relationship between the inhabitants south and north of the Danube, a
relationship that was noticed and proven by Hasdeu8: the fact that
all the Lords of the Romanian countries after the Asans added that particle to
their name, “IO”, from Ioniţă Asan, means, as the magister proved, that the
Asan empire somehow reached north of the Danube, that the Lords of what were to
be the Romanian Countries took on the IO particle by recognizing their
affiliation with the Asans, because it had become tradition.
In that case,
the north and the south of the Danube should be seen as a relative unit up to a
much later date than it is believed, and some priorities should be revisited:
after the breakdown of Dacia in 106, the first attempt to reunite came from
south of the Danube and was made by the Asans; what their kin Michael
the Brave did after hundreds of years was the second.
In the end,
we can see that all this argumentation redraws the Thracian map intuited from
Herodotus, and the reality in this perimeter is supported by others as well,
much later. At the risk of being marginalized, there were people of culture9
who took very seriously Herodotus' Thracian space and said that Thrace was that center of European civilization,
and that the language of the Thracians filled the spaces of Europe .
Moreover, they considered that the center of this perimeter was Carpathian Dacia itself.
From the
things I have told here, I think there is no doubt regarding Thrace, also, it
is very possible that Dacia was the sacred center of that perimeter; the
natural fortress that is central Transylvania offers ideal conditions for
lasting resistance. This very large natural fortress could not be taken,
surrounded, starved out or have its water cut off, or have its walls battered
down, the “special” walls of this fortress being impervious to such attacks. As
a result, it could be defended with relatively small forces, it had everything
that was needed, the place offered ideal conditions of development and security
to that presumptive nucleus, which encourages me to think that the Romans got
into the fortress of Transylvania by treason,
while the Huns and the others got into it as allies in the beginning.
Therefore the
hypothesis of the “Dacian Sacred Center ”
is very likely, even if the south-Danube Balkan Peninsula, itself a fortress,
surrounded by water this time, gave birth to Greece
and Rome , the
ties between these two areas are organic, and good faith can no longer separate
them.
“Where there
is smoke, there is fire”, they say! Well, let us not hide the spark, so let's
speak in more detail about population movements on the banks of the Danube . In truth, in this north and south Danubian Dacian
space there were concrete cases of movements by populations which would
lend some substance to the theories that have been launched, but they were a
sort of temporary refuge, a sort of to-and-fro within the same kin, movements
within the greater Dacian perimeter, a sort of seasonal migration, and
nothing else.
Speaking of
that, we can say something important: we know that starting in the 11th
century, the Balkans were threatened by the Turkish invasion (which in fact
crystallized in the Asan phenomenon) and after the victories of the Turks,
especially after the fall of Constantinople, the prospects for south Danube
populations became dire indeed.
Retreat in
front of invasion was always a solution, but it is beneficial only if the enemy
eventually leaves, but if they settle with intent to stay in the long term,
like the Turks, the situation changes. At the same time, a mass migration, to
use a word dear to some historians10, becomes absurd related to a
population which is at home, has sedentary, agrarian traditions, the peasants
never went for good anywhere, they were also “under the times”. Therefore, as I
said, the migration of the entire south Danube
population to the north is complete nonsense.
In fact, we
do not even see the traces of such movements, history has not preserved
anything of the sort: if they had invaded en masse a territory held by Magyars,
Poles, Serbians, Ukrainians and others, as the suggestion goes, we should have
heard about the “massacre of so and so...”, the “battles of so and so...”,
about the “wrath of the Macedonian-Aromanian invaders” who, “with unimaginable
cruelty, would have exterminated the peaceful locals, carrying with them the
Macedonian-Aromanian language beyond the Bug, where it lasts to this day”.
Except that
the “history of the Distinguished Professors” says nothing of such things, of
such collapses in the area; it tells about the fall of Constantinople to the
Turks in 1453, about other clashes they had with the locals, but that’s it,
because the smoke spread with such industriousness is simply a little mark made
by a poor little piece of a spark.
As a result,
just like in the old times, when for fear of the “barbarians” the Romans
descended in the Balkans accompanied only by a small portion of the city
population, now something similar happened: some “Bulgars” went up north to
defend their wealth from the Turkish invasion and settled among the Romanian
villages, accepting the hard life among “strangers”.
Except that,
compared to the large mass of peasants that stayed in place, tied to their
lands, the refugees were only a few select wealthy ones, the ones with mobile
wealth, they crossed the Danube, but they could not contribute massively to
populating with Romanian speakers the “barren lands” we are speaking of, they
could not be that huge number of immigrants necessary for such a purpose. And,
as I have said before, they would have had to leave another “barren land”
behind.
Being of good
faith, I admit that these riches could be an explanation for the political
strengthening of the Romanian structures during those times, I think it must
have been something of that sort, except they were only successful precisely
because they found in local traditions the substance of that “IO”; the cultural
traditions of the newcomers (language, and so forth) got added to the local
ones because they resonated together. If the locals had been, say, Swedish, the
union phenomenon of later would have been called the union of the Swedish
principalities, isn't that so? That is, if they had come to terms with the sânţari
arrived from the south.
However, the
phenomenon was called the Foundation of the Romanian Principalities, which says
it all.
It was also
said that these migrations made the “foundings”, the “descălecări”;
where they “dismounted” and where they tied their horses we have seen, so that
these “dismountings” are simply nice legends, good for literature. The Founding
of the Romanian Principalities were not the acts of some “heroes”, but very
lengthy processes coagulated into the mass of the people.
We could add
to the count of immigrants the Phanariot rulers who came with their entourages,
scribes and chancellery scriveners, who came in the times we know, and became
by the force of circumstances the cultured and pseudo-cultured classes called
to rule. The phenomenon shows actually the absurdity of the “barren lands”: it
is enough to recall the reaction of the Romanian aristocracy, the old boyars,
to these imports of divan mongers, as well as the reaction of the
peasant population to the “acrimony” of Greek tax collectors. This fact
deepened the vitiated nature of the relationship between the villages populated
by Daco-Romanian peasants and the cities populated by allogeneic people.
As a result, reality shows us that here we had a population that could react,
and if those few “imports of population” had not been looked for with a
magnifying glass, they would not have even been noticed.
And now let
us look at it in a different way: here is a small example, but rich in “news”
about the old Dacian names that were preserved: my grandparents'
village, somewhere in Transylvania , on the Târnava
Mică river, is called Odriheiu. That would be nothing, except it resembles
shockingly the name of that old Thracian population, the Odrysians.
Somewhere
near Odriheiu village is also a place called Ormeniş; so why wouldn't we notice
the similarity with Ormenion, a city in Thessalia, as well as with the name
Ormenos, that of many Trojan warriors, and, continuing the verbal debauchery,
why should I not say Ormeni, Armenians, Aromanians, Armâni, etc. (do we
recall those?)
What I want
to emphasize here is the fact that the two places could not “cross by
themselves” those gaps, they would have been lost along with the Dacians,
those lost in the air and in the world, thus the fact that they are still here
in Romania
shows that someone had to bring them over here to us.
I will risk
another one: you have heard of Agnita, no doubt, a place in Ardeal [popular
Romanian term for Transylvania]; a regular name, apparently, but extraordinary
in reality, because it has in it the root “Agni”, a name which, to the so-called
Indo-European people, was the god of fire; could it be that the god had here,
at some point, a sanctuary on the territory of Romania, Dacia, Thrace? For the
time being let us notice a suspect superimposition of the places inhabited by
the Thracians and those inhabited by the mysterious “Indo-Europeans”.
Now, however,
I want to say something else: it is said that these primitive communities which
wandered here and there in search of food were building their shelters near a
source of water. The interest for water is undeniable, it is a vital element
for the community, and it has been even seen that incipient ancient
civilizations had near them a spring, a river, and so forth.
But was not
fire an equally important element for these communities? Its warmth, its effect
on wild animals, and others, were not they attractive? It is true that its
great benefits were to come later, but the few that were known were enough to
make it wanted, sought after, mastered and even defended. As a result, it was
not only water that was a desired natural resource, as it might seem, but also
fire, and it was welcome when it could be found as peacefully as water in
springs and rivers, etc.
It was
supposed that fire was discovered at first in forests which caught fire from lighting,
in some volcano's lava spills, and so forth, but, truly, these we cannot call
sources, since they are not exactly accessible, they were places you fled “as
if you would a fire”, so I was not referring to them.
There was,
however, a peaceful fire, which could be seen up close, studied, and maybe
used, and this was to be found in gas pockets that broke to the surface, and
lit at some point by lighting, gave birth to eternal fires. And after getting
to know it and its benefits, why not seek this other gift of nature when one
wanted to settle down? The neighborhood with such a friend was too valuable to
be ignored.
And, as we
know, the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were near water, of course,
but also sitting on valuable hydrocarbon resources. Could that have been a
coincidence?
It is true
that mythologies do not mention it as a friend, as opposed to the swarm of
water nymphs, but fire we do not find in similar forms, but such living fires
did exist for sure, they still do, and man definitely understood their
usefulness. So what else do mythologies say about fire?
In Balkan
mythology we have a Prometheus, the one who gave fire as a gift to humans. In
passing being said, he gave something that did not belong to him, he had stolen
it from Hephaestos, who in turn had it in keeping for the great Zeus, his only
master. I am underlining this in order to see that Hephaestus, not to mention
Prometheus, were not the masters of fire and, what is interesting, they not
only did not have it, but also they did not know how, could not or did not have
the right to make it; its only master was Zeus, he made it with his lightning
bolts. In other words, fire was made only in heaven.
So the legend
says that Prometheus stole fire from Hephaestus, who was a god of underground
fires, of volcanoes, meaning also that he would have stolen it from his smithy.
You notice? He did not steal it from some forest fire, in which case the victim
would have been some forest god, not Hephaestus. So it is told that Prometheus stole
an ember, put it inside a green plant, and gave it to humans. Mind you, he
stole it while Hephaestus was asleep, so if Hephaestus was sleeping, it
indicates a peaceful Hephaestus, overcome by sleep, not a furious one, as
suggested by an erupting volcano.
Now,
considering that those living fires that came out of the ground also came from
the underground realm, could we not say that it was from them that Prometheus
“stole” fire, when indeed Hephaestus was asleep?
You may
accept or not this descent of the legend into practical considerations, I
continue by placing my message right on Romanian territory. Thus Agnita, a name
whose relationship with Agni you cannot ignore, is placed right in the middle
of Transylvania , right over a large natural
gas deposit. In addition, willy-nilly, we have to admit that the name Ardeal
has in its composition the phenomenon arde [Romanian: to burn], which
would link the region to the presence of fire.
Then I ask
again: can these coincidences be random? Or is it that there was around here an
ancient perpetual fire which, along with the abundance of water, created an
ancient civilization? Could Ardeal be something like this? Possibly, but then,
once again, there is the nagging question: how come this primitive name did not
get lost in those “barren lands”? Who carried the name to us?
And further:
so Prometheus gave people fire as a gift; taught them how to transport it, use
it, etc., but did not teach them how to make it. Maybe he did not
have the right to, and his generosity did not overcome that interdiction. In
that case, people had to take great care of it, guarding it was very important,
which led to the appearance of some specific functions: Vestals11,
meaning vests in temples, neveste [Romanian: wives] at home, and so forth.
However,
people eventually learned how to make fire, and I believe that one of the
greatest inventions of the Antiquity is the amnar12 [Romanian: flint]; that
liberated them from Zeus, cut their umbilical cord which tied them to the
community fire, conquering thus the first step towards freedom.
As a result,
Homo Sapiens gave the name amnar to one of its first invented tools, and
for sure the word is older than the words Thracian, Dacian, Latin or
Sumerian. The tool is extremely old, but its name has an extraordinary
longevity: supposing its emergence at the beginning of the age of carved stone
(some one million years ago, according to archeologists), when it was noticed
that striking two stones together produces sparks, it is still used to this day
in some places.
For those who
did not see it, I will describe it in a few words, because I have seen it used
by my grandfather: in fact it was not a single object, but three: a piece of
steel 50/30/7 mm, a piece of flint (a hard stone), and tinder. The tinder was a
puff of brown fluff collected from a parasitic fungus that grows on trees,
which, with a little processing, became relatively flammable. This is how you
lit it: you put the fluff of tinder on the piece of flint holding it with your
left thumb, and you would strike the piece of steel held in your right hand
against the flint near the tinder. Sparks
flew from the flint, they got into the tinder, where they would create a small
amount of embers; this he put at the end of his cigarette, puffed on it
vigorously, and this is how he would light his “tobbacky”. If he put the lit
tinder in dry grass and blew on it properly, a flame would ignite.
Here we have
fire produced by man's hand.
There are
other procedures across the world, but these do not make the object of this
work; let us see what dictionaries say about this ancestor of the lighter.
The most
interesting commentaries we find in Etimologicum Magnum Romaniae by
Hasdeu, and, to our luck, at the letter “A” we find the word. The magister's
explanations stretch across 5 A5 pages, and I recommend them to the reader
eager for details, I will copy only the part of interest to us:
“AMÂNAR OR AMNAR FOR SPARKING AND HONING. IT
IS A STEEL WHICH, STRUCK OVER THE TINDER ON THE FLINT ,
MAKES SPARKS
AND LIGHTS IT, OR WHICH BY RUBBING SHARPENS A POCKET KNIFE, A KNIFE, A WEAPON.
IN THE FIRST CASE IT IS SAID: STRIKING THE AMNAR;
IN THE SECOND: STRIKING ON THE
AMNAR”; enough for the time being.
We have said
that since man started carving flint to the invention of the match, this is how
he lit fires, which means that the carved stone together with the carver
“invented” the flint. The carver, who, in any case, was not unknown in the
community, noticed the sparks caused upon striking and drew the proper
conclusions: he associated the phenomenon with tinder, and thus made fire.
It must have
been a sensational act for the community, it must have been very impressed with
the person who knew how to hone stones so well, and now made fire too; and as
not everyone had access to such wonders, it had to be valued properly, because,
in the good tradition, without delay, a god helped him. So that the inventor of
the flint, whose name we will never know, from now on becomes a sort of divine
offspring, why not, descended directly from Agni, the god of fire.
As the word amnar
is today found in the language of the descendants of the Daco-Romanian
Thracian, in Latin, and of course with other descendants, and as the connection
between Agni and amnar cannot be contested, they are no doubt related
through fire. And as that genius fire maker also had to be related to Agni, to
be a sort of offspring of his, it was logical for him to be called in a way
which is derivative from Agni: Agnar, let's say fire maker.
In time,
however, the man who invented the procedure disappeared, his name became an
attribute of the others who continued his work, the sacred character got lost
through multiplication, so that his followers were called agnars, becoming
common nouns.
We do notice,
however, that the expressions agn-AR and amn-AR only have in common the ending,
which tells us that both prefixes “know how to do something”, just like in
Romanian, pietr-AR [stone mason] or cojoc-AR [maker of overcoats and vests from
sheep hide with the wool turned inwards]: one knows how to make AGN and is an
Agnar, the other makes AMN and is an amnar. Considering that they have in
common the element of fire, the similarity has to be explained in another way
too, and here I will once again invoke Hasdeu.
“OUR
LEXICOGRAPHERS have known so far THE FORM AMNAR ONLY MEANING “BRIQUET”,
SO THAT ALL IN TURN DID NOT HESITATE TO DRAW THE WORD FROM A LATIN PROTOTYPE, “IGNIARIUM”,
AN INSTRUMENT FOR FIRE. UNFAILINGLY, THE LATIN -GN- COMES TO US AS -MN- AS
IN LEMN [Romanian: wood] – LIGNUM […]”
So Hasdeu
does not ignore that lemn exists in Romanian just as lignum does
in Latin, but makes them relatives pulled in the wake of the “wave” of Latin
descent. However, he himself a master of phonetic rules, refuses, a few words
later, to admit the likelihood of these transformations, and this time, in
his doubt, he was right.
Because,
having a common origin in the Dacian language as well, wood once used to
be lign, except that the Romanian language started being written only
around the 15th century, when linguistic processes had changed it,
so it was written directly as lemn, not lignum, which had been written
and left like that since I don't know what century before Christ.
As far as I'm
concerned, I will not try to explain this evolution through the rules of
linguistics, which are alien to me, but I will try to imagine the road it took
until its final form, through my capacity of perceiving and understanding what
is natural. As a result, Agnar was the man who once produced fire, but
in time this wonder, through its relative simplicity and the abundance of
materials that could produce it, became somewhat a mass thing. So the ancient
individual Agnar became a symbol, after his disappearance, and the name of his
occupation was taken by more and more agnars.
Over time,
only the tools, the stones took the name, eliminating the person, so that the
merit of lighting fire got restricted to the flint and tinder worn by everyone
in their şărpar13.
Then, after steel was discovered, the rare and precious object, it
definitively took the name on for itself, becoming the main element as compared
to the ordinary stones.
Could these
objects however be called agnare? I don't think so. They were simply associated
with the name of Agnar, and when he disappeared they could only be amnare, because
they were handled by laymen’s hands, so to say.
As for the
compatibility between fire and wood, of which Hasdeu was speaking, I believe
this is an overlooking of the relationship between them; fire and wood are not
only not exclusive, but they are linked by the process of fire, because fire,
way back then, could only be maintained with wood, it being the only
combustible substance back in antiquity. As a result, being a sort of food for
the soul, it became an inseparable component of the fire process, that is why
it has the ign in its name.
Now, deducing
that the object derives from the process of carving stone, we supposed its age
to be over one million years, that means that it was used by the pre-Dacians,
by the Thracians, as well as by their descendants up to this day. Through this
I wanted to reveal the fact that ever since back then, the people who inhabited
these lands used this object, that they used it without interruption brought it
to us both as a name and an object.
As a result,
if we had taken it from the Latins, it would not have been amnar, but igniarium-ar,
manuale-ar, manuarium-ar, or
acciarino-ar, as the Italians call it today (I emphasized the
suffix -ar, which they should have had obligatorily in Romanian); but,
as we can see, it is not so today, but it is found in the same places where
once the god “walked” and it bears the name of the place, not that of the
neighbors.
Well then,
these examples stand testimony as to how far back the Thraco-Daco-Romanian
inhabitants go, as well as to the continuity they have in these parts, we see
who preserved the name of the archaic villages, who preserved the name of the
ancient Agnita, as well as that of the immemorial amnar, that the people
living here nowadays have been here since Agni still “walked” among the people.
As a result, we see that these “living” vestiges could have been brought around
in the last few centuries, for the newcomers never knew them, it is only now
that they “nationalize” them through translations.
*
I hope I have
been convincing with regard to the “white spots” in history, now I will try a
discussion about the “white spots” in the Romanian language, because through
the striving of some professionals of language we find them here too.
According to
the disappearance theories, together with the Dacians there should have
disappeared the language spoken by them, there should also have disappeared the
language spoken by the Daco-Roman hybrids, since it had a lot of Dacian
linguistic elements, and as a rule there had to disappear the language of the
“barbarian” invaders, the Maramureş and Moldavia people, which could not have
been Latin.
So be it!
Let's say it was so; in this case the “Romanian aliens” that came from the
south, the ones supposed to have populated Romania with the Latin language and
Latin speakers, had to bring their language with them, only that is not how it
works either: the Romanians who came from the south had to have been mute, or
to have had a totally rudimentary language, because that is what Dicţionarul
Limbii Române Moderne says, their cultural barn, put together by the very
'Distinguished Experts'.
Do not smile,
that is the reality, it seems amusing, but it is embarrassing, just peruse it
and you will see that the Romanians were only a people without a language, as
if the “Spontaneous Generation” occurred once again around here, on our lands.
As a result,
that particular dictionary says that the Romanians speak a Latin language and a
lot of fragments pulled from most of the neighboring languages, as a
consequence it is full of acquisitions, called borrowings, meant to fill the
“white spot” in the Romanian language. Whether it is so or not I will let you
check yourselves, I simply tell you how to do it and I will only give you two
examples, one because it is the first word in the dictionary, the other as
entertainment.
The first
word in the dictionary is aba, and it defines a kind of wool fabric that
the Romanian peasants, archaic sheep herders, used to make thick clothing out
of, since about the time when it got cold on this parallel.
Well, that
word, according to the dictionary, is stolen (I don't get it, why borrowed,
were they going to give it back?) by the Romanians from the Turkish language.
It is true that the fabric is also called pănură, a word known as being
Latin, but in this form it is considered to be a regional term, maybe because
of its supposed small area of use it was necessary to resort to the rich
Turkish language, for general use.
So it is
clear: Romanian peasants put on the “Latin pănură” where they knew of it, and the others waited out in the
cold for the Turks to arrive.
The other
example: when I was a child, I was traipsing around my grandmother when she was
milking the cow, because I liked to drink the foam formed in the recipient in
which my grandmother put what she had milked from the cow; my grandmother joked
saying “ceaşi bălaie în pârnaie”, and her words were as if she imitated
the noise made by the milk that issued from the cow's udder in that
vessel, which she called şiştar [shish’tar].
In my
opinion, the words above, ceaşi, issue, şiştar are related
by the sound “ş” [sh], therefore undoubtedly
they are the product of onomatopoeia, the sound “şşş”, produced by a
stream that issues, that ţâşneşte [spurts] forth, and it is natural to believe that all the words in
this group would have gained their connection within the same language.
I do agree
that other languages have such families, only that there they may sound a bit
different; for instance, the “dialog” with a closed door in Romanian sounds cioc,
cioc [tchok, tchok], in English it is “knock, knock”. Romanians,
however, also call cioc the beak of birds, that which makes this noise,
and as both sound cleanly Romanian, it is natural to believe that both were born
in the Romanian language.
That is how
it would be logical, only that in that above-mentioned dictionary it is said
that şiştar [milk jug] comes from Slavic, şipot [pipe which taps
water from a spring] from Bulgarian, cişmea [water fountain] from Turkish,
ceaşcă [teacup] from
Russian, and şuvoi [gush of water] from Hungarian. It is true, the word ţâşnitoare
[water fountain], to which all of them are related, has not been found
an origin for, or it is not listed in the dictionary, which would encourage us
to believe it is from Latin, or, God forbid, put it next to barză, mânz and
viezure. Well, no! For the dictionary, they are never related.
You don't
believe me? Zău14,
look them up in the dictionary and you will see; anyway, the conclusion the
dictionary seems to push us into is that the Romanians waited for the Slavs,
Bulgars, Turks and Magyars to be able to urinate.
I apologize
for the above conclusion, not exactly elegant, but, as I have said, these are
not the only examples, and if I were to continue, I would have to transcribe
here much more than half that dictionary. If you do not believe me, I will let
you check, and if it were to be so, please ask the “Distinguished Professors”
to illuminate you. Until we find out the answers from them, I will continue by
bringing you further proof that the Romanian language is much older than the
“coming of the borrowings”.
Look at
neighborhoods in some Italian cities, founded a few thousand years ago, and
American cities, built a few decades ago. That they are different there can be
no question, what we are interested in are the causes that imposed these
differences.
I would say
that the “Italians” were “born by themselves”, while the “Americans” were
built: all those narrow and winding streets in Italian cities were born once
out of individual needs, people went there to the spring, the sheep farm, and
the houses they built near the paths that became unpaved streets and which
stayed just as narrow, as they had nowhere to expand because of the crush.
With the American
ones it was different: the land was empty, so they took some string, they drew
the city, and New York
came out, let's say, with streets perpendicular to each other forming perfect
squares. Of course they improved, streets superimposed without New York losing
originality, Rome, however, could not have done that, it could not have been
systematized according to the American model, because it would no longer have
been Rome; systematization according to modern rules would have destroyed it.
And this is how
the traditions of cities, which mean age, impose that the streets be winding.
It is the same with languages; some have a simple, ordered grammar, while
others have a lot of particular rules, a lot of synonyms, to learn such a
language means learning a grammar almost as huge.
Well, it is
well known that the Romanian language is “hard”, that it is brimming with
particular cases, that it has a lot of rules and exceptions to them (almost to
the point when they are no longer rules), and all these “windings” are like the
winding of streets, they have also been imposed by some long-held traditions.
*
I will now go
to other realities, which have not been taken into consideration at all, also
having to do with their age and continuity.
That the
Romanian language at present, with all these few subsequent acquisitions, is
the evolved form of the Dacian language no longer presents any doubts
for those of good faith, maybe it is only in the details that things did not
occur the way I have described them above, but only in the details, because I
do not see, as I said before, how else it could be explained that speakers of
the Romans' language exist in places where the Romans never set foot? How else
could we explain the existence of the Daco-Romanian language in Maramureş
if it had not been derivative of the Daco-Thracian language, how come
the same Daco-Romanian language is spoken in the extreme east of
Moldavia if it did not have the same origin? Here is an extremely challenging
element, and, as I said, not to be ignored.
All Romanians
know those names from the traditional name pool of Moldavia , such as Aelenei, Amariei,
Asaftei, etc.
The names are
strange in their particularity, they seem to have come from ancient matriarchy;
we should ask ourselves, how can we explain this originality here and now? May
it be that around here, in Moldavia ,
survived a community that coordinated itself by matriarchal rules? This is what
we should believe, since children took the mother's name, as the procedure goes
in case the father is unknown, not the father's or the grandfather's.
This means
that in these communities the children took the mother's name not because the
father was unknown, and not because it was an accidental birth, they took it
because the father's ancestry was not important, only that of the mother, so
that only the maternal ancestry of the children was noted.
As a result,
to eliminate confusions, they took on the mother's Christian name, showing
their affiliation, descent, with the particle “a”; therefore they are named Ion
of-mother-Elena, or Gheorghe of-mother-Maria, in short Ion Aelenei, Gheorghe
Amariei or Nică al lui Ştefan Apetrei. So the fact resulted from precise
reasons: the children were called like that because that is what the mothers
who gave birth to them wanted.
The fathers,
of course, existed, since the children existed, but, as we can see, they had no
social importance, no influence, and no right over the children; in other words
they were fathers, but not husbands, and everyone must have accepted the
situation. Interesting, right?
So in
Moldavia, names like Aelenei, Amariei and others exist, a particularity to
which can also be associated something else specific to Moldavia: those who
know Moldavian women in the least could not have failed to notice their
particularly categorical, authoritarian way of being; the Moldavian woman is a
nice, delicate woman, full of gracefulness and understanding, but when things
come to a head she changes radically, she is on fire and nothing can stand in
her way.
There are
even a few legends to this extent, one even quite funny. It is said that the
Moldavians went to war and, where they went, they defeated the Turks, the
Tartars or whoever, but when they came back they got beaten up by the Moldavian
women, who said: “Why did it take you so long?!”
There is yet
another legend, in the same orbit, but with another significance. It is said
that a Moldavian mother does not open the front door of her house to her son,
wounded in war, because he is defeated, and not the winner. The legend says
that the mother was called Oltea, and her son was called Ştefan Bogdan, and
that, being wounded and defeated in the war with the Turks, he wanted to take
shelter from his enemies in his own house, but he was not allowed inside: “Come
back a victor, or else...” is the mother supposed to have told this Ştefan,
otherwise known as Stephen the Great, for he was the Ruler of Moldavia (Mama lui Ştefan cel Mare by Dimitrie
Bolintineanu).
Here is why I
wanted to bring to attention this legend; do you recall another legend which
says that north of the Black Sea there was
supposed to have been a world of Amazons?
Well, as you
know, legend has it that the Amazons were very authoritarian women, who were
supposed to have kicked out men from their “country” and good riddance. Maybe
they allowed them to visit once in a while, but only when they wanted to, and
then hit the road.
The legend
goes that they took part in the Trojan war on the side of Troy, and that their
queen, Penthesilea, was killed by Achilles (The
Aeneid, Virgil, Book XI,
“The Amazons of Thrace who ride the shores of Thermodon”).
I wonder now
what the rush was for this “legend with Amazons”, this Penthesilea, to fight
alongside the Thraco-Trojans if she had nothing in common with them? Could it
not be that the Moldavian Penthesilea and the others helped their fathers,
brothers, husbands and sons who were among the Trojans?
Well, if we
think that, according to Herodotus, the Thracian multitudes were living in this
wide area, the hypothesis gains likelihood, and the Amazons' participation in
the conflict becomes logical, thus the legend would come down a bit from the
void, and we would also understand something of the feminist exclusivism of
Amazons.
Something, of
course, not everything, because we do not know how exclusive they were, what we
are able to know is that an exclusively feminine community cannot last, and
neither can one that is exclusively masculine15. If, however, for
mysterious reasons, there are such things, there must have been the
complementary one, because otherwise they would have disappeared along with the
legend. As a result, they both have to exist, close to each other, each
contributing specifically to fulfillment and continuity, therefore in one there
are the mothers, “wives”, sisters and daughters, and in the other the
“husbands”, brothers and sons.
As for the
legends about the cut breast and the killed sons, I think these are ramblings
of a male extraction, on these stories women have not issued a pronouncement yet.
What is important is that the Amazon legend harmonizes with realities in
contemporary Moldavia , they
logically relate with those “matriarchal” names, it legitimizes the
determination of Moldavian women, and proves the long and continuous unity in
widespread Moldavia
from the “Thraco-Daco-Romanian” barrenness.
*
The fact that
the Daco-Romanians and their language have a long unity and continuity
on the Romanian territory can also be proven by certain very important
differences between them and the surrounding peoples, which show precisely that
their past is different from that of the others, proof of which is provided by
the very ones that question their continuity.
For instance,
neighbors call the Romanians mămăligari [Romanian: eaters of mămăligă,
polenta, or cornbread, sometimes used as a mild insult], with a note of
scorn both for them and that particular food; seeing how that scorn appeared,
we will also understand their attitude, so let us make a short history of mămăligă.
You recall
that the breakdown of Dacia
and the Romans being chased away allowed the arrival on this territory of some
populations more or less allied, populations which have continued to come to
this day and which kept liberating us, from the Romans, from the Turks, and so
forth. The ones who came earlier told the peasants not to be afraid, because
they would not harm them; they were saying: “Go out, plow, sow, we only come at
harvest time to take what is rightfully ours”.
Why it was
rightfully theirs is another question, let us just say that they kept their
word, and each autumn they came with their sack to the harvest. And they kept
coming, and coming, more and more of them, until one day something very
unpleasant happened to them.
Because after
each visit/harvest the peasants were left with their bags empty, and since they
no longer had wheat to make bread, in order not to starve to death they had to
eat millet instead of the wheat that got taken away. However, one cannot make
bread out of millet, but another kind of food, totally unappealing to the
harvest “partners”, so that they started sowing more millet instead of the
wheat which had become sort of useless to them.
According to
B. P. Hasdeu, the dish made out of millet was called mămăligă, so that the Daco-Romanian
peasants started eating it as a staple; and this is how the golden mămăligă
became a strategic food for the Daco-Romanian peasants when they were at
everyone's mercy, this is how it saved them from death by starvation, and by
tradition it became a basic food for them.
The
consequence, however, was very unpleasant for the “allies”, because from millet
and later corn you can only make mămăligă, a good and nutritious food
otherwise, but exasperatingly uncomfortable for them: first because the
mămăligă had to be made somewhat individually, which meant that the valiant
warrior had to have hanging from his pommel, together with his bow and spear, a
cauldron with a wooden mixer, which made his equipment unaesthetic.
Then, bread
was edible in several stages of campaigns, while the mămăligă not so much: it
can be eaten the next day, but not in two days’ time, because it turns sour, so
that the taxers rediscovered the comfort of hunger.
And we have
reached the conclusion: the fact that all the Romanians' neighbors look down on
it only goes to show the difference between the wanderer who sought his glory
in the dust of the road and the Daco-Romanian sedentary peasant, for
thousands of years tied to his sowing field. This is how the Romanians became
obnoxious mămăligari.
How deep the
affront was is proven by the persistence of this sentiment in their traditions:
even though hundreds of years have passed since then, even though some of them
have come to consume mămăligă, even though no one forced them to do so, the
scorn for mămăligă and mămăligari
remains to this day.
That the
others scorn it is their own business, but the Romanians should erect a
monument for this national mother of theirs, even institute its own day,
a national holiday, a sort of Thanksgiving Day, because it saved them from
death by starvation.
This would be
one difference, but I will tell you about one more, this time having to do with
morals: it is about the ballad Mioriţa, the symbol of Romanian morality.
As we know,
ballads are traditional creations, folklore products that in fact symbolize the
virtues of their creators. The ballad Mioriţa is precisely something
like that, and it exists everywhere where there are Romanians; the fact that it
has at least a thousand versions, that it is told, declaimed and sung
everywhere in the Daco-Romanian language says something.
Of this,
however, we have spoken, now I am saying that while the Daco-Romanians
value the message sent by the ballad, the others scorn it: they consider that
the passive, powerless attitude of the Mioriţa shepherd is a vice typical of
Romanian mămăligari. “The
mămăligă does not explode”, they say, meaning that the Romanians, like the
shepherd in the ballad, are cowards, with an inferiority complex, marked by
subordinate mentalities, and so forth.
What is
hilarious is that these opinions are proffered precisely by those who consider
themselves “victims of Romanian ferocity”, missing the contrary message; for
how can you reconcile the ferocity of the south-Danube invaders who are
supposed to have exterminated them on the huge territory to make room for the
Romanians today? And how can you explain the fact that after they exterminated
the “peaceful locals”, they declared themselves the slaves of those peaceful
locals that were exterminated?
Slaves to no
one, of course, but it seems they “did it”, since we find them slaves until
last century, slaves on the lands of no one knows who, arrived here no one
knows when, from a place no one knows. Let’s let Clio wander unhindered and
move even further.
Here then are
the differences in mentality between some and others; in fact explicable,
because the customs acquired by some after a long cohabitation with worshiped
plants, with fetish animals, with which they pull ritually food for all from
the body of Gea look one way, and the mentalities of those whose supreme virtue
is enslaving the locals and capturing their food look another way. The
difference between the Daco-Romanian peasants was that they had been
concerned for thousands of years to understand the laws of nature, its rhythms,
to understand the rules of agriculture, while the others aimed to enslave them,
starve them and keep them obedient.
Of course
there are explanations, since the Daco-Romanian peasants were already
Christian in the first centuries, while the others were Christianized by their
kings only starting around the year 1000. But not because of some inner
impulse, but through circumstantial negotiations, to be able to get the Pope's
precious blessing, meaning to turn the leader into a king and the primitive mob
into a monarchy by simply kissing a holy hand.
Of their
peoples what can I say, when even nowadays they paint on their flags their
patron stains to help them get into other people's homes better, when their
priests bless their knives and machine guns, how can they understand the
profound humanism of Christian morals? Therefore, how can they understand the
structural humanism of the shepherd, the discretion of the sacrifice,
discretion necessary to stop the development of evil? Do they understand why
the shepherd's mother was not supposed to have known of his death, lest a
possible “Vitorian”16 revenge should upset the universe's moral
balance?
So the Mioriţa
shepherd is the symbol of the one who sacrifices himself for his peers, it is
the sacred sacrifice, it is the pure crystal of the humanism that forms the
basis of Christian morals, meaning the very Christic Message conveyed by the Bible.
Except that in the Bible the message comes through from an elaborate
work, the work of scholars, in Mioriţa we find it in a traditional
belief, until you ask who inspired who.
In
conclusion, the profound humanism transmitted by the Mioriţa cannot
crystallize as it does in a population which exterminates others to get its
food, “land and water”, of course in their case Christian morals are
inefficient.
In fact, the
perversion, the alteration of real humanism wants to legitimize the “march
west” of the hungry, left some time ago to occupy the lands of the western
European whiteskins, and, for the “honor of humanity”, “the march” continues to
this day, and not just in one place, but in several; here I will only refer to
the one related to the Daco-Romanians.
For instance,
in the year 1944 another slice of Romania 's territory was cut, which
went to be digested by the generous Soviet Empire under the absurd name of the
Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The fact that it recently became
independent under the name Republic
of Moldova Romania ,
a western one, and it is not known when the forcible separation of this people
will end.
Speaking of
language: the emergence of a new people, Moldovan, has to be accompanied by the
appearance of a national language, right? The Moldovan Language. It is true
that the entire political world knows, absolutely all of it, that the “Moldovan
people” are in fact the Daco-Romanian people and that they speak Daco-Romanian,
but what importance does that have? The Republic of Moldova
Except that
the state-making machine has just started, because there are more applicants,
so far two: one is the “important” region inhabited by ethnic Turks (and it is
unknown how they managed to survive among the bloodthirsty Romania), who want
to declare an independent state name Gagauzia, and another, which is about a
slingshot wide, which also wants to be independent and be called Transnistria,
because it is beyond the river Dniester.
Judging by
the current course of events, it is not out of the question for their
aspirations to come true, they can set national languages, I am convinced that
some “Distinguished Professors”, especially trained for such issues, will sort
it out, they will find in history some proper reasons for those languages.
We can
anticipate them: full of pretentiousness, they will say that the “Transnistrian
language” is old, since the time of the Viişoara Homo Sapiens, that the name trans
was mumbled for the first time when the Dniester
got crossed. Then, it can be said that the name and sounds went into the
Turkish language, because they were close, they passed through the Assyrian
language, although it has not yet been established when, they being slightly
further away, went in and came out through Egyptian, and the Latins got it from
there. That is where the Hungarians got it, and through there it came into
Romanian, when the whole business with Transylvania
occurred. Or maybe they will put it another way.
I would
conclude with a remark: “In history the only objective truth is C14”.
The statement
may seem far-fetched, even malicious, however, since history is ideology,
doctrine, since some historians are called political historians, some
poets and writers are political poets and writers, all hired to fashion
historical events, so that the resulting mosaic becomes an ethnic, linguistic,
military, national ideal, why could not we believe that some scientists could
be political scientists? Now, after we went through the entire
succession of events, after their information potential was revealed, which,
without a doubt, was minimized, ignored or even hijacked, we can say that the
opinion is not really exaggerated.
Finally, we
have reached the end; I do not know if I have managed to present my confusions
in my tiny work, I would have liked to stir the interest of the reader for the
impossible Romanians, the impossible Romanian language and the impossible
history of Romania .
I would like to believe that I have convinced the reader that Romania's history
is different, that the spaces beyond the Istros were never barren, but
populated with communities which shared names with those from Homer's and
Herodotus' area; that those places had old names, mentioned by Homer and
Herodotus dozens of centuries ago in the Balkans and Asia Minor. That the local
Thraco-Daco-Romanians did not migrate, neither did they immigrate, emigrate,
that they are where they have always been and that they speak their millenary
language. I would be equally pleased if the reader, intrigued by what I have
said, would look at some of the works listed in the footnotes. Anyway, I thank
them for following me so far.
As for the
“Distinguished Professors”, I have only this to tell them:
My dear
venerable teachers, who taught me that glory without honesty is a shame, why do
you leave so many gaps in the knowledge of your students? Or, even worse: why
do you allow certain malicious people to fill these gaps with absurdities? I am
sorry, but your students will never be grateful for that.
NOTES
1 Ramunc, a character from the Nibelung legend,
inhabitant of Medieval Dacia.
2 “Torna, torna, fratre”: it is said that these were
the first words spoken in the Romanian language.
3 Emperor Maximinus Thrax (235-238) took on the title
of Dacicus Maximus and Sarmaticus Maximus, Emperor Philip the
Arab (244-249) took on the title of Carpicus Maximus, Emperor Gallenius
took on the title Dacicus Maximus, etc. (Istoria României în date).
4 Franz Iosef Sulzer, Mihail Roller, Robert Roesler and
other contemporary writers of history.
5 In folklore, iron grass is a mysterious plant which
helps unlock any lock.
6 These words were spoken in the Romanian Parliament in
October 1883.
7 The Asan Empire was founded in 1185 (Istoria
României în date)
8 B. P. Hasdeu, Scrieri Istorice, IΩ gospodar
şi voievod.
9 Adrian Bucurescu, Dacia secretă, Augustin
Deac, Istoria adevărului istoric, Nicolae Densuşianu, in many works,
Marija Gimbutas, Civilizaţie şi cultură, Eugen Lozovan, Dacia sacră,
Vasile Pârvan, Getica, Napoleon Săvescu, Noi nu suntem urmaşii Romei,
and many more valuable writers. I do not dare judge here all the statements and
negations in these writings, but I appreciate the coordinates from their works
which have helped me get to where I am.
10 See note 4.
11 In Roman mythology, the Vestals were virgin
priestesses of the goddess Vesta, protector of fires in temples.
12 Etimologicum Magnum Romaniae, B. P. Hasdeu.
13 The şărpar was a strip of leather about 20 cm wide
which, folded in two, made a belt about 10 cm wide which people wore as a kind
of “pocket” on its entire length, where people put various objects: the tobacco
pouch, flint, the sharpening stone for the scythe, etc.
14 As you can notice, the word “zău” is still used to
this day, as a vow in which is invoked the name of the old god, not of God [in
Romanian, “zeu” means god or deity]
15 There are also legends about communities that were
all-male in the Balkan peninsula , but it is
believed that they were relatively small groups of men with androgynous
inclinations.
16 This refers to the novel Baltagul [The Hatchet] by Mihail
Sadoveanu. The wish for revenge marks the life of the novel's protagonist,
Vitoria Lipan, who doggedly chases the killer (Calistrat Bogza) of her husband
(Nechifor Lipan) to avenge his death.
17 Leonida Lari, a Daco-Romanian female poet
from Bessarabia .
THE
END
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
Notes 6
CHAPTER I The
Romanian language 7
Notes 16
CHAPTER II The
world of the Thracians 18
Notes 29
CHAPTER III The
language of the Thracians 30
Notes 50
CHAPTER IV The Latin language 53
Notes 60
CHAPTER V The
Daco-Romanian language 61
Notes 84
Published books by Vasile Gaja
Unde s-au scurs apele
Potopului? (volume 2 of The Dacian language: Where has it vanished?)
Marea Conspiraţie din 2189 (SF parody novel)
Cam pe când sfârşitul lumii, volume
I: Fizis
Upcoming books by Vasile Gaja
Cam pe când sfârşitul lumii, volume
II: Bios
Cam pe când sfârşitul lumii, volume
III: Socio
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