Global Warming - “Fall of Man” and Birth of Mediterranean (Primordial Southern Italian) Culture
Global Warming - “Fall of Man” and Birth of Mediterranean (Primordial Southern Italian) Culture
(January 27, 2013)
Top: What north Africa probably looked like during Ice Age. Bottom: Today
After the northern Italian Piedmontese conquest of southern Italy and Sicily (aka Risorgimento), the obvious disparities between the Italian North and South were often explained by prevailing racial theories of the time; positing a racial difference between the two regions (e.g. Lombroso, Ferri, Niceforo, Sergi, etc.). Such theories have since been largely rejected by social scientist; but some politicians still resort to them (e.g. Northern League). More interesting and cogent hypotheses to explain the very real north/south cultural differences are environmental theories; the first of which, according to classical scholar A. J. Toynbee, was documented in a fifth century B.C. Hippocratean School treatise: “Influence of Atmosphere, Water, and Situation.” In short, environmental theories explain cultural differences by associating culture with the different physical and social environments in which the culture evolves. Thus, the people south of Rome are culturally determined by millennia of post-Ice Age Mediterranean geographic/ecological/social environment. Whereas; the culture of northern Italy is the product of centuries of post-Roman Empire continental Eurasian influences. This idea of an environmentally determined cultural divide was express recent by Carmelo Buschera, who belongs to a Sicilian pro-independence movement: “We see the Mediterranean area as our world, not Italy. It is Italy that wants to impose itself on Sicily.” Accordingly, unlike northern Italy, the primordial cultural history of the people south of Rome, and by extension southern-Italian Americans, begins with the Mediterranean environment and societies at the onset of the great Global Warming period ending the Ice Age, and the beginning of husbandry and urban civilizations.
Global Warming and “The Fall of Man” (Book of Genesis)
Up to the time of Heinrich Schliemann’s archeological discovery of the ancient city of Troy, it was generally thought that Troy was just a ‘mythical’ city in the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey; an imaginary creation of Homeric poets. More generally, all myths were largely thought of as – just that – myths (i.e. fictions created by poets). After Schliemann’s discovery and other archeological and geological discoveries, such as evidence of great floods giving rise to the Noah’s Ark like flood myths, historians began to look at myths as possible oral traditions rooted in actual historic events.
It is in that ‘spirit’ (i.e. the historic basis of mythology) that the Book of Genesis story of the Fall of Man may be related to the origins of Mediterranean civilization; the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates River Civilizations.
(Note: this of course treats Genesis as a ‘secular’ myth, rather than the sacred doctrine presupposed in Judeo-Christian religious traditions.)
Specifically, the great classical scholar and world history A. J. Toynbee wrote:
“After the close of ‘the Ice Age’, our Afrasian area began to experience a profound physical change in the direction of desiccation; and simultaneously two or more civilizations arose in an area which had previously been occupied solely by primitive societies of the Paleolithic order. Our archaeologists encourage us to look upon the desiccation of Afrasia as a challenge to which the geneses of these civilizations were responses. (A Study of History Vol. I p.304 emp.+)
Toynbee goes on to quote extensively the highly renowned archeologist V. G. Childe.
“ ‘ While Northern Europe was covered in ice as far as the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Artic high pressure deflected southwards the Atlantic rainstorms. The cyclones [jet stream] that today traverse Central Europe then passed over the Mediterranean basin and the north Sahara…The parched Sahara enjoyed a regular rainfall…We should expect in North Africa parklands and savannahs, such as flourish today north of the Mediterranean…While the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the reindeer were browsing in France and Southern England, North Africa was supporting a fauna that is found today on the Zambesi in Rhodesia [Zimbabwe]
The pleasant grasslands of North Africa was naturally thickly populated by Man…
Subsequently, when the ice covering Europe retreated the “climate changed” (Toynbee’s words 1934), the environment changed and the way of life changed in Afrasia. Toynbee:
“Faced with the gradual desiccation resulting from the re-shift northward of the Atlantic cyclone belt [jet stream] as the European glaciers contracted… the hunting/gathering populations [of Africa and Arabia] responded to the challenge of desiccation by changing their habitat and their way of life from food-gathers into cultivators …created the Egyptian and Sumeric civilizations out of the primitive societies of the vanishing Afrasians grasslands. (Study v. I, p. 304-5 emp.+)
Toynbee sees in these facts of history the basis for “the story of the Fall of Man in the book of Genesis”(Study v. I, p. 304, n. 2)
“In the story, the application of the myth to the geneses of civilizations is direct. The picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a reminiscence of the state to which Primitive Man attained in ‘the food-gathering phase of economy…The Fall…the expulsion from the Garden into an unfriendly world and Man must eat bread in the sweat of his face…
The equation of civilization with agriculture, and progress with toil…
Their sons who impersonate two nascent civilizations: Able the keeper of sheep and Cain the tiller of the ground…Cain as the father of civilization…builds a city and his descendants Jubal and Tubal-Cain fathers of harp and organ, and artificer in brass and iron…. (Study v. I, p. 290 emp.+)
Further, I would note an aspect of Geneses, Toynbee did not mention about the correlation of the myth of the Fall and the response of Man to the climate change: Adam and Eve were sent “East of Eden”. (“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden…” Gen. 3:24).
Like Adam and Eve, the migration of people from Africa and Arabia after the post-ice age savanna desiccation was in the direction East into the Nile and East into the Tigris-Euphrates river valleys.
Birth of Mediterranean History and Culture
Circa the forth millennium BC the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations began to flourish, forming by the second millennium a geographic continuum know as the Fertile Crescent with an eastern Mediterranean sea board running from the Nile delta to present day southeast Turkey. They were followed by other Mediterranean societies such as the Hittites, Minoan, Persians, Greeks, etc. {note: societies such as Persia are not Mediterranean per se, in that they were not 'on' the Mediterranean Sea. However, they dynamically interacted with the Mediterranean world and affected its culture - think Greeks and Persians}
As each society came into being, flourished and receded, those preceding influenced those following. For example, Greek philosophers and mathematicians recorded their trips to and influences of Egypt (e.g. Thales, Protagoras, Plato, etc.).
By this dynamic interaction between the various societies of the Mediterranean world one may say the Mediterranean culture as a whole evolved, for it is difficult to find one Mediterranean society that was not influenced by another: “The universe in a grain of sand” – as it were.
However, it is also possible to divide the whole of Mediterranean history into the perennial clash between two ethnic groups various labeled as:
European and Asia (Herodotus),
Aryan and Semitic (ninetieth century classical scholars),
Western and Middle Eastern (contemporary parlance).
{Note: in ninetieth century scholarly literature the terms Aryan and Semitic were generally used as linguistic classifications, which in turn implied geographic origin (e.g. E. A. Freeman’s brilliant The History of Sicily- From the Earliest Times). The terms did not connote the ugly racial implications associated with Nazis and other racists. Below they are used in the Freeman et al sense of the words; i.e. both Aryan and Semitic people are of the same race albeit different linguistic characteristics implying different geographic origins and cultures. Put simply: different ethnic groups. Or, if different races, it is not relevant becasue race is not, so far as known, to be a cultural determinant}
While the origins of Mediterranean culture were Middle Eastern (Nile and Tigris –Euphrates river valleys), circa forth millennium BC, people from the Eurasian Continent migrated into the Mediterranean Basis at least as early as the second millennium BC. The Greeks are a quintessential example of ‘Aryan’ people migrating into the Mediterranean basin from Eurasia and clashing with the ‘Semitic’ people of the ‘middle-east’.
For the near four thousand years (down to the present), the results of the dynamic between these two ethnic groups and the many various societies that evolved from the respective groups is what may be called Mediterranean Culture; i.e. the Mediterranean culture is the resulting culture produced by the interaction of the Eurasian and Middle Eastern people.
Southern Italian Culture vs. Northern Italian
A quintessential example of the perennial clash between Eurasia Mediterranean people with those from the Middle East can be found in the history of Sicily beginning circa 750 BC when the Aryan Greeks and Semitic Phoenicians confronted one another in Sicily. This Sicilian conflict continued on and off until 146 BC when Aryan Romans destroyed the Semitic/Phoenician city of Carthage.
Sicily got a respite from this conflict while Rome brought the next phase of the Aryan/Semitic clash to the Middle East (Egypt, Syria, etc.). However, after the fall of Rome, the Semitic Arabs once again clashed in Sicily with the Aryan Byzantine Greeks.
Meanwhile northern Italy was largely spared this Mediterranean Aryan/Semitic conflict. Significantly, when Semitic Hannibal invaded Italy he crossed the Alps into northern Italy and went straight to the south of Rome where he fought the Romans for approximately fifteen years.
At the end of the Roman Empire, northern Italy, which played no significant part in the more than two thousand year Aryan Semitic Mediterranean conflict, was absorbed into the largely Germanic culture in the form of the Carolingian and then Holy Roman Empires. It was physically separated from the Mediterranean South by the Papal State. It was physically, economically, and culturally aliened with Germanic Europe.
In sum
The history and culture of the people south of Rome is the product of a cultural evolution beginning with the global warming ending ice age that gave rise to the Nile and Tigus-Euphrates River civilizations. In the course of that history two ethnic groups, one originating in Eurasia and the other the Middle East, and the many varied societies produced by those groups produced a common Mediterranean culture. A culture shared at best tangentially with northern Italy.
It is that six thousand year cultural world that people like Carmelo Buschera are referring to when they say:
“We see the Mediterranean area as our world, not Italy.”
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The stuff about environment is interesting, but your ethnic history is a little outdated. Greeks and Romans were not "Aryans" from "Eurasia". Like all Europeans, their ancestors were mostly farmers and metallurgists from the Middle East. Only hunter-gatherers were from Eurasia and they were mostly absorbed by the later migrants, except in parts of Northern Europe.
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Also, you contradict yourself. If there was a "perennial clash" between the "Aryans" and "Semites", how did they ever unite to produce a "common Mediterranean culture"? The answer is they obviously didn't, as shown by the region's political, social, religious and culinary divisions, as well as the low levels of "Semitic" ancestry in Italy:
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http://italianthro.blogspot.com/2010/09/no-such-thing-as-mediterranean-cuisine.html
http://italianthro.blogspot.com/2011/10/moors-expelled-from-sicily-and-south.html
Aryans etc
“Greeks and Romans were not "Aryans" from "Eurasia". Like all Europeans, their ancestors were mostly farmers and metallurgists from the Middle East.”
Regarding the Greeks consider the following: “This new ethnic immigration in Europe constitutes the so-called Neolithic invasion, the most expansive invasion known to history…it is know that these people came to Europe from the central lands of Asia…after staying for some hundreds of years near the Caspian Sea and the Lower Ural mountains, continued slowly their migration westwards, along the northern shores of the black Sea; then attracted towards south by a sweeter climate and a more abundant vegetation…From the summits, valleys and plains of the Carpathians, countless new pastoral tribes continuously crossed the great river of the ancient world, and flowed in compact and organized groups over the entire Balkan Peninsula…This is the great southern current, or Carpatho- Mycenic current which, coming from Central Asia, had formed its first European country at the Carpathians, where it had put in place the first moral basis of the new civilization, which later developed so strongly in Greece and on the shores of Asia Minor. Prehistoric Dica by Nicolae Densusianu 1913 http://www.pelasgians.org/website1/02_01.htm)....
Regarding the Romans, their origins are still a mystery. Indeed, on this blog I have developed Toynbee’s theory that they were Sicilian colonist. But, so far as I can determine, Latin is an Indo-European language i.e. Latin people are European (aka in Aryan in 19th century scholarship)...You suggest that Clash implies no common culture. Clashing societies interact and affect one another. In Sicily the Arab remnants of Arab vs. Greek clashing in the first millennium is obvious in language, architecture, food and song. Sicily is not Italy. While there may be as you say “low levels of Semitic ancestry in Italy”, in Sicily the cultural levels are very high.
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Like I said...OUTDATED! Why are you quoting a folklorist from 1913 when archeological, anthropological and genetic evidence since then has proven that the Neolithic invasion of Europe was from the Middle East, NOT from Central Asia? Here are just a couple of recent examples:
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http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006747
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6080/466.abstract
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Indo-European does not equal "Aryan from Central Asia" either. There are many theories about where IEs originated and no consensus. Most likely, those languages were spread by metallurgists from the Middle East during the bronze age:
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http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/bronze-age-indo-european-invasion-of.html
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-physico-anthropological-study-of.html
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"Semitic" cultural levels in Sicily are not "very high". Despite many invasions over several centuries, Sicilians have remained Greco-Roman, Christian and Indo-European-speaking, just like all other Italians. I would call that very low.
agricultue and migrations
Nicolae Densusianu is anything but a folklorist as evidenced by the large numbers of archeologically discovered tools pictured in the article. Also, I said nothing about the spread of agricultural technology. Only the migration paths taken into the Med. from Eurasia. I do not question that agriculture originated in the Middle East. This is consistent with the origins of River Civilizations after the Ice Age and Genesis for that matter (Abel son of Adam and Eve) and the interesting links you provided (thank you). But, because agriculture originated in the Middle East does not imply that there was no migration into the Med. from Eurasia. Indeed, as I understand it, the migrants were a nomadic people who upon entering the Med. world adopted sedentary ways of faming and animal husbandry.
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Nicolae Densusianu was indeed a folklorist and ethnologist (but not an archeologist) who was criticized for letting Romanian nationalism taint his theories, especially about the founding of Rome:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Densusianu
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The studies I posted are NOT about "the spread of agricultural technology". They're anthropological and genetic studies about the migration of PEOPLE from the Middle East to Europe during the Neolithic.
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There's no reliable evidence of any significant Eurasian migration into the Mediterranean since hunter-gatherers in the Upper Paleolithic. If you have some post it now, otherwise stop talking nonsense.
origins of N. Med people
The Densusianu article contains a wealth of archeological evidence, which you do not address and dismiss with the most obvious of logical fallacies - argumentum ad hominem and the authority of Wikipedia. Moving on, A. J. Toynbee (a renown classical scholar and linguist) discussed at very great length the migrations from the Steppes into the Mediterranean. For example, he writes: “The present Indo-European linguistic map becomes intelligible if we assume that the languages of this family were originally propagated by Nomads who were tenants of the Eurasian Steppe…This explanation of the present Indo-European linguistic map is confirmed by the research of our modern Western archaeologists…”(A Study of History vol. III p392-393)… Finally, in the evidence department, are you saying that all the people who populated the north rim of the Mediterranean Sea up to the time of the Roman Empire (Greeks, Oscans, Umbrian, Latin, Illyrian, Goths, Franks, etc.) migrated from the Middle East? There were no (none) migrations of nomadic (non framing) people from Central Asia into Western Europe and N. Med.? Is that the conclusion that should be inferred from anatomical data such as “Craniometric Data”, and microbiological data such as “mtDNA”, “genome”, etc.? If so, let me say: I’m educated in history and the social sciences. I cannot address biological evidence. It is interesting and cannot be ignored. However, the whole historiography of the ancient Med. based on generations (centuries) of scholarly research of documentary, archeological, linguistic, anthropological, ethnographic, folklore, etc. evidence cannot be rejected based on scant biological evidence. The biological evidence must be reconciled with the material social scientific evidence. But, thank you again for those articles, I do find them interesting and I will keep my mind and eyes open for similar data henceforth.
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Biology is a hard science. It trumps the "social sciences", especially all that outdated stuff you're posting. If skulls and genes show migrations from the Middle East instead of Eurasia, then that's what happened. Period. The crazy folklore of some biased Romanian nationalist from 1913 is irrelevant.
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As for Toynbee, the Eurasian Steppe theory for the spread of Indo-European languages is just ONE out of MANY theories. And here's what J. P. Mallory, an archeologist and IE scholar, said about it in 2010:
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"The presence of steppe tribes in the Carpathian Basin is well established but other than an occasional exception such as the Jamnaja-like burial at Bleckendorf in eastern Germany, clear evidence of steppe expansions any further west of the Tisza remains elusive. Unless the steppe hypothesis can demonstrate that a steppe culture crossed the Tisza line, it is incapable of providing an attractive solution to the Indo-Europeans of central, northern and western Europe. [...] If the steppe hypothesis fails to make a case for identifying these central, north and west European cultures as descendents (socially, linguistically) of the Pontic-Caspian cultures, then it fails to resolve the Indo-European homeland problem. [...] Clearly, supporters of the steppe hypothesis have much to do if they want to integrate the proposed linguistic phase of Indo-European into the archaeological record of steppe expansions."
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So basically, there's no evidence for it. As I've already shown with craniometry and DNA, Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers from Eurasia in the Upper Paleolithic/Mesolithic and then by farmers and metallurgists from the Middle East in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. All those ethnic groups you mentioned are descended from different mixes of those populations, with more Eurasian in Northeastern Europe and more Middle Eastern everywhere else, especially in Southeastern Europe.