Author Topic: Turanian diffusion  (Read 4155 times)

rp

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2202
    • View Profile
Re: Turanian diffusion
« Reply #90 on: January 17, 2024, 09:54:16 pm »
« Last Edit: January 17, 2024, 11:17:27 pm by rp »

antihellenistic

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
    • View Profile
Re: How the Greeks Colonized the Mediterranean
« Reply #91 on: March 11, 2024, 12:27:04 am »
Learning Deep about the Barbarism of Western Civilization

Quote
McNeill and the Indo-European Roots of the West’s Warrior Ethos

There are some instances in which McNeill slows down his lively narrative in The Rise of the West (1963) to reflect on the unique characteristics of the West (539, 545, 569. 598). On one of these occasions he asserts in definite terms that no other civilization “ever approached” the “restless instability” of the West (539). To what source did he attribute this restiveness? McNeill poses this question only once, and he does so in the context of his effort to understand why Europeans went on to explore and conquer the world after 1500. He thus writes of Europe’s “deep-rooted pugnacity and recklessness,” adding that the roots of this pugnacity – “the incredible courage, daring, and brutality of Cortez and Pizarro” – lay in the “Bronze Age barbarian” past. What Bronze barbarian past?

The barbarian inheritance – both from the remote Bronze Age invasions of the second millennium BC and from the more immediate Germanic, Scandinavian, and steppe invasion from the first millennium AD. – made European society more thoroughly warlike than any other civilized society of the globe, excepting the Japanese (539).

(570). When we dig further back into this historical account, we find the following revealing observations. First, that the bronze-wielding barbarians who came into Europe “by about 1700 BC” spoke Indo-European languages. Second, that these Indo-European speakers were a “warrior culture” which came from the steppes and reached the “westernmost confines of Europe,” where they established themselves “as an aristocracy” of conquerors over and against the “peaceful megalith-builders of the Atlantic coast” (103). He writes:

The spread of these warrior cultures brought a great revolution to European life. In place of peaceful villagers and remote hunters and fishers, Europe was now dominated by warlike barbarians, familiar with bronze metallurgy. In this linguistic sense, Europe was Europeanized, since the speech of the warrior peoples eventually supplanted the earlier languages of the Continent. In a profounder sense, too, the warrior ethos of the Bronze Age gave European society a distinctive and enduring bias. Europeans came to be warlike, valuing individual prowess more highly than any other civilized people….[T]he style of life befitting warrior herdsmen of the western steppe have remained a basic part of the European inheritance down to the present day (103–04, my italics).

McNeill notes a few more characteristics about the steppe peoples. Most significantly they domesticated horses about 3000 BC, first using them for food, and later, during the second millennium, harnessing them to light, two-wheel chariots for warfare. He also notes that their pastoral way of life “involved a social tradition combining intense admiration for individual prowess with a political organization under authoritative tribal chieftains” (105). But this is as far as he goes in tracing the unique cultural restlessness of the West. He would not address this topic again. In fact, as we saw in chapter one, his current position is that we should do away with the very idea of a civilization that can be identified as “Western.”

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 338, 339

antihellenistic

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
    • View Profile
Re: Turanian diffusion
« Reply #92 on: March 11, 2024, 01:34:00 am »
Ancient Westerners (Indo-Europeans) favoured Turanian Diets

Quote
Indo-Europeans were a “new type” of warlike society in the sense that “some men,” not just the king, were free to strive for personal recognition. They were, moreover, horse-riders in possession of a more dynamic economy which included ox-drawn wheeled wagons, cattle rearing, and ploughs, combined with a healthier diet of meat, bone marrow, and dairy products, all of which gave Indo-Europeans a more robust physical anthropology. Th ese economic conditions, combined with their aristocratic temperament, were decisive in the initial restlessness of Indo-Europeans.

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 347

antihellenistic

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
    • View Profile
Re: Turanian diffusion
« Reply #93 on: March 26, 2024, 04:16:02 am »
Learning Deep about the Barbarism of Western Civilization Part 2

Quote
Another crucial environmental feature of Europe’s unique relationship to the world’s highway is that the Pontic steppe actually forms part of what is known as the “great European plain” which stretches without interruption for over 2,400 miles from the Urals to the Atlantic; and since the Ural mountains are no real barriers, this plain is therefore connected to the entire extension of the steppe that stretches to China.14 Overall the peoples who settled on the plains were not well protected by natural limits; they had to learn to be aggressive, stay aggressive, or be threatened by the constant movement and migration of nomadic tribes (Davies: 47–54).

...

The economy reflected in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary includes Neolithic farming but not as a primary component; in the Volga-Ural steppe, and also in the western steppe, there are reasons to exclude agriculture as the main component, as contrasted to the importance of stockbreeding (Mallory: 217). One already encounters, in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, words associated not only with the original Neolithic Revolution but with what Andrew Sherratt has termed the “Secondary Products Revolution” (Sherratt 1981). According to Sherrat, this revolution occurred during 3500–3000 and refers to the efficient exploitation of the “secondary products” of domestic animals, dairy products (butter, milk, and cheese), textiles (wool), as well as the harnessing of animals to wheeled vehicles, the use of yokes and ploughs, and the domestication and riding of horses. Sherratt believes that this “secondary revolution” resulted from diffusions from the Near East. For their part, M. Zvelebil and K. Zvelebil (1990) see a strong link between the dispersal of Indo-Europeans during 4800–2500 BC and the arrival and consolidation of the “Secondary Products Revolution.” Anthony accepts the idea (74) that there was a “Secondary Products Revolution,” but rejects Sherratt’s thesis that it originated in the Near East. He argues that dairying, horse domestication, and horse riding first appeared in the steppes, and that wool sheep and wagons were diff used conjointly across the Near East and Europe between 3500–3000 BC.

...

By putting more emphasis on hybridization, Mallory softens Gimbutas’s vision of a purely warlike pastoral people imposing its culture and causing the “collapse” of what she believes was a more sophisticated Neolithic-Copper Age culture of formerly settled farmers of Balkan origin. Nevertheless, Mallory is clear that “what was sporadically attested prior to 3000 BC swelled during the third millennium to provide unequivocal evidence for a movement of population from the Pontic-Steppe into the Balkans” (239). Kurgan burials now show up in Romania, Bulgaria, and former Yugoslavia and provide us with substantial evidence for the introduction of the domestic horse, larger woolly sheep, and possibly wheeled vehicles. Although Mallory does not frame these claims in terms of an Indo-European expansion, Drews has noted that, by the end of the third millennium, the people of the Tripolye Culture, forming the eastern fringe of the Balkan- Danube farming cultures (long in close contact with the world of the nomadic steppe herders) had turned from hoe agriculture to stockraising. He has also observed that, in the period between 2000 and 1700 BC, about one-fifth of the animal bones found in Tripolye Culture sites are horse bones, “a fairly high figure for a region outside the open steppe” (Drews: 80).

Some contemporary scholars enjoy making sarcastic remarks against the old notion of a “massive violent spread of Indo-European storm-troopers.” What really happened was far more significant in its consequences: not a single invasion but a continuous, long-term intrusion by a highly mobile and warlike people.15 The Indo-Europeanization of the Balkans was thus a persistent process of arrivals of new migrants from the Pontic-Caspian region in such a way that the Balkans would then work as a “staging area” for further intrusions into Anatolia, Greece, and north-western Europe. It was on occasion a straight military takeover but also a gradual intrusive movement led not by plain farmers but by riders on horses supported by a flexible (and healthier) pastoral economy. The fact that this economy was more nutritious explains why the “physical anthropology of the deceased [in the new Kurgan-style burial mounds] speaks of a population that was more robust-appearing with males averaging up to 10 centimeters taller than the native Eneolithic [Balkan] population” (Mallory: 240).

Anthony’s recent research findings (225–59) reinforce the general view I have adopted here regarding the intrusive nature of the arrival of Indo-European speakers into the Balkans starting about 4200 BC. He starts with the Sredni Stog culture which began in the Pontic-Steppes around 4400 and which lasted until about 3400. He notes that this culture is the “earliest” one to have been linked with Kurgan burials or single mound graves, which emphasized the achievements of individuals. Kelekna thinks that the Sredni Stog was the first society to exploit horses on a “regular basis” (2009: 32). An Indo-European culture which emerged from this one was the Suvorovo-Novo culture of about 4200- 3900, which was the first one to migrate from the Dnieper steppes into the northern edges of the Danube Delta. According to Anthony, the movements of these peoples were not only into Europe but also eastwards. He thus detects, from about 3800 BC onwards, a migration into the north Caucasus, which he associates with “ostentatious chiefs” displaying gold-covered clothing and great quantities of bronze weapons in their burials. This movement has come to be identified archeologically as the Maikop culture, dated to about 3700-3500 BC. It is believed that this culture existed as a conduit between the steppes and the urban cultures of the Near East, with wagons entering into the steppes through it, and horses moving out into the south from it.

...

It should be noted here that the Proto-Indo-European lexicon was rich with words for domesticated animals in addition to the horse: cow, ox, bull, sheep, ram, lamb, goat, dog, as well as words for ducks and pigs. There are also words for coagulated or sour milk, butter, and curds (Fortson: 37). Diakonoff believes (1990: 57) that the Indo-European economy, as it was located in the Balkans and the Danube basin (which he thinks was the original homeland of the Indo- Europeans) “must have been an economy based on high grade agriculture and animal breeding, which supplied milk and meat food for the population in relative plenty.” By contrast, he reminds us that “the mass of Sumerians and Akkadians had no meat or milk in their daily diet.” Anthony writes that pastoralism at large “produced plenty of food – the average nomad probably ate better than the average agricultural peasant in medieval China or Europe” (460).

...

Though I will return to this question again later, I shall now briefly clarify that the communities of Old Europe were already “ranked” societies in which, as I mentioned in chapter one, the successful self-interested strategies pursued by aggrandizing individuals brought about differentials in household wealth. The Yamnaya horizon and the Corded Ware, on the other hand, were chief-like societies with a higher degree of differentiation between commoner and elite populations. It is worth contrasting the mobility of the Indo-Europeans with what Sherratt sees as the “constrained” and “small-scale of activity” of the farming communities of Old Europe, whose “efforts were often narrowly focused on fixed points within the world which they had created” (200). The extension of the Corded Ware complex brought “wider networks of social interaction” and greater opportunities to “independent segments of society” for the exchange of goods and livestock. Indeed, older Proto-Indo-European languages typically drew a distinction between movable and immovable wealth; in several languages “moveable wealth” became specifically the word for livestock (Fortson: 19). Mallory thinks that the success of Indo-European languages over the numerically superior languages of Old Europeans was possibly due to the greater vitality and potential for growth of the pastoral economy. He envisions a scenario in which the native population became bilingual, speaking the Indo-European language in the market place or at ceremonial centers in order to obtain better access to goods, status, ritual, and security. The paths to social and material success, and the transmission of this success to future generations, lay in the pastoral way of life and the technology and nutrients associated with the “secondary products revolution” (259). Similarly, Anthony emphasizes the institution of patron/client relations promoted by aristocratic Indo-European speakers promoted within their expanding territories. Chieftains were strong believers in the sanctity of verbal contracts bound by oaths. These contracts permitted Indo-European speakers to incorporate outsiders (who came to assimilate Indo-European dialects) as clients who enjoyed rights of protection in exchange for their services. Anthony also emphasizes the creation of mutual obligations of “hospitality” between “guests” and “hosts” as another way of incorporating outsiders into the Indo-European speaking and pastoral network (303, 341–42).

Diakonoff disagrees with the notion that there was a “collision” or a “clash” between the Indo-Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and Old Europe. He prefers the quieter, less shocking term “language contacts” (1990: 53). There is no doubt that Gimbutas’s vision of the Indo-Europeanization of Old Europe in terms of three massive waves of invasions by violent and patriarchal peoples is faulty insofar as it ignores demographic and economic processes of gradual infiltration and displacement.16 The successful spread of Indo-European languages cannot be disassociated from the “secondary products revolution” and the mobility of a pastoral life. But it would be just as simplistic (and naïve) to presume that horse-riding warriors were akin to modern-day language teachers.

The spread of Indo-Europeans further westwards is associated with the “Bell-Beaker” handless drinking cups between 2800–1800 BC, which is said to stand “for a whole new way of life” in the areas where this culture appeared, from Scotland to Sicily (Sherratt: 2001b: 250). This Bell-Beaker phenomenon was really an innovative continuation into other parts of Europe of the Corded Ware transformation which had began in Europe after 3000 BC and which had brought about a “breakdown of traditional” native ways of life and the “emergence of more mobile ways of life.” There are strong similarities between early Bell-Beakers and the Corded Ware culture. The following words from Sherratt are worth citing at length:

Like the Corded Ware vessels, these pots [Bell-Beakers] were also typically placed in single male burials, often accompanied by weaponry and covered by a circular mound. They thus represent a diaspora of continental north-west European practices among largely alien populations, carrying the aggressive, individualizing ideology of this area to new parts of Europe. Whereas Corded Ware beakers were usually buried with stone battleaxes, Bell-Beakers are generally found with other weapons: daggers, and archery equipment such as triangular barbed-flint arrowheads and wrist guards of fine stone…This martial image was perhaps completed by leather jerkins and later by woven fabrics, held by a belt with an ornamental stone bone ring to secure it…Early Bell- Beakers display the cords and thongs that distinguished their Corded Ware predecessors; perhaps the later zone ornament, too, is significant, for the Greek word zone means a belt, and the elite of Greek warriors are still evzones, ‘the well-belted ones’, while black belts still symbolize prowess in the martial arts. The imagery of third-millennium Europe was replete with such symbols, and Bell-Beaker graves expressed the warrior values appropriate to a more mobile and opportunistic way of life (2001b: 252).

The Corded Ware culture, which had been expanding during the earlier 3rd millennium in central and northern Europe, makes a “relatively sudden appearance” on the western edge of Europe in the new but familiar form of Bell-Beakers later during the 3rd and 2nd millennium. This expansion – typified in the spread of a culture of drinking, feasting, and horses – is equally disruptive of the native archaic societies as were the prior expansions by Indo-Europeans. Sherratt also observes a “profound change in attitudes” suggested by more colorful woolen clothing replacing the older garments of skin and linen, new finery and jewelry, new dress fashions, weapons with decorative elements, extra “ostentation on the part of particular individuals” (2001b: 254–56, my italics). Meanwhile, later forms of Corded Ware continued to spread on the North European Plain and Scandinavia, while the Bell-Beakers continued to spread during the 2nd millennium, sometimes through gradual diffusion and adaptation and sometimes through “prolonged struggle” with older cultures – into Ireland, Brittany, the Alpine region, Languedoc, Spain, Portugal, Corsica, Sicily and Sardinia.

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 354, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362

antihellenistic

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
    • View Profile
Re: Turanian diffusion
« Reply #94 on: March 27, 2024, 10:29:15 am »
Learning Deep about the Barbarism of Western Civilization Part 3

Ancient Mycenean culture, the root of Western Colonialism and Materialism


Quote
Riding and scouting on horseback would have enhanced considerably the exploitation of the steppes and increased the efficiency of surprised attacks and retreats in raiding. Cunliff e notes that horse-riding probably increased the overall speed of movement by about ten times. Gimbutas estimates that a horse could carry a rider 20–30 miles in one day; that is, about 4–5 times the distance travelled on foot (1997: 356; see also Cunliff e 2008: 158). Gat draws a threefold distinction among i) non- Indo-European pastoralists/herders who did not domesticate horses, ii) early Indo-European “proto-horse pastoralists” who rode horses, and thereby enhanced their “strategic mobility,” and iii) Celtic-Germanic-Roman peoples who mounted horses for warfare (2006: 189–230)

In light of these facts, including the points presented earlier on the pastoral way of life of the Indo-European migrants, one can safely assume that, starting in the 5th millennium, and through the 4th millennium, the Indo-Europeans initiated a most dynamic way of life driven by the invention of wheeled vehicles, the secondary products revolution, horseback riding, large-scale herding, and aggressive raiding. Moreover, the Indo-European peoples may have held a longer term advantage in the use of chariots than Drews has estimated. Anthony believes that the “earliest” chariots probably emerged in the steppes before 2000 BC, and that they were employed in the Near East about 1800 BC, that is, about 200 plus years after they had been invented in the steppes, rather than immediately as Drew argues. Anthony draws a clear distinction between i) “true” chariots with two spoked wheels pulled by horses controlled with bits, guided by a “standing warrior,” and ii) heavy solid wheeled battle-carts or battle-wagons pulled by asses or onagers controlled with lip- or nose-rings, guided by a seated driver. The heavy battle-wagons were a Near Eastern invention, but not the chariots, which most likely arrived into the Near East from the steppes through Central Asia (402–03).

There is no denying, however, that Drews puts together a superb case envisioning the arrival of the Mycenaeans as a conquest by a class of chariot-warriors (“big men, taller and broader” than the typical native inhabitants) rather than a migration of impoverished pastoralists who had been evicted from their original homeland and were seeking new lands “in which to make an honest living” (158, 181).19 Drew thinks that the Mycenaeans came to control an indigenous population that was “perhaps ten times as large as their own” but which was less civilized than the far larger majorities the Indo-Europeans encountered in the Near East. While the Mycenaean minority “did not ethnically transform the land,” it superimposed its language and culture, and thus it “Indo-Europeanized Greece” (195–99). The consensus is that the Mycenaeans were a highly warlike people. Lord William Taylor writes “of the dominant accent placed upon war by the Mycenaeans. It would almost seem as if they loved strife for its own sake” (1999: 135). M.I. Finley tells us that when they came into Greece around 1600 BC “something happened on the Greek mainland which gave a radically new turn to developments there…Mycenae suddenly became a centre of wealth and power, and of a warrior civilization, without an equal in this region” (Finley 1970: 47).20

Louise Schofi eld also observes that before 1600 BC “the mainland of Greece was a cultural backwater […] Th e men were about 5 ft 2 in-5 ft 6 in tall.” But aft er 1600 the archeological records suddenly portray a “military aristocracy” made up of men who “had an average height of 5 ft 7 in…were robustly built, strong and muscular, with large hands and feet.” The archeological remains of this Mycenaean culture “give the impression of a fierce and warlike people who gloried in battle and in the hunt” (2007: 28–35, 118). Most scholars agree that the Mycenaeans came by conquest, creating communities consisting of heavily fortified palaces. Their palaces were centers of food collection, storage and distribution, ruled by kings who relied on “a class of aristocrats,” or “table companions” (Chadwick 2005: 72). Archeologists are always impressed by their well-prepared shaft graves, which buried the top men together with their swords, daggers, spearheads, arrowheads, and blades, and which show that the aristocracy enjoyed remarkable wealth, and that they venerated military prowess. Th ese types of shaft graves were without precedent at Mycenae or anywhere else in Greece. They are seen as in line with the Kurgan graves original to the Pontic-Steppes (Wardle 2001).

Indo-Europeanists generally tend to argue that Proto-Indo-European speakers were compelled to migrate by “external factors,” ecological or demographic pressures. Diakonoff , for example, thinks that Proto-Indo-European peoples migrated in response to “overpopulation” pressures in their original homeland (which in his view consisted of “isolated, poorly connected mountainous valleys” located in the Armenian plateau and Transcaucasia). This scarcity pushed them out in search of new lands. Drews, for his part, highlights the technology associated with chariots as the “essential” factor behind the Indo-European conquests. In one sentence he adds that “the takeovers were motivated… by the desire for power and wealth” (198). But this is a point that, for him, “need hardly be said” since all imperial takeovers are ipso facto about power and riches.

Anthony is more careful in the way he addresses the “causes of migration” by distinguishing “push” from “pull” factors. “Push” factors are generally those that compel a people to leave their homes (demographic pressures, war, disease, crop failure, or high brideprices). Anthony agrees that most current explanations of migrations tend to stress “push” factors. He thinks that “pushes alone” are not enough and that “pull” factors also play a role, by which he means essentially the pulling attractions of the destination (110–111). But all in all, Anthony follows a common line of thinking according to which Indo-European migrations were practical solutions to questions of survival and economic ambition.

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 365, 366, 367

Recall :


antihellenistic

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
    • View Profile
Re: Turanian diffusion
« Reply #95 on: March 27, 2024, 05:51:12 pm »
"Whiteness" led to the Turanism Western Worldview






antihellenistic

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
    • View Profile
Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
« Reply #96 on: March 27, 2024, 11:39:40 pm »
How Western Liberal Mentality which resulting Barbarism, got Formed

Quote
In the realm of culture and history, where all differences are relative rather than absolute, differences of quantity, scale, or intensity may be substantially important. John Keegan, in his general study, A History of Warfare, is quite definitive in his assessment that the pastoral peoples of the steppes, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, were a “new sort of people” in being “warriors for war’s sake, for the loot it brought, the risks, the thrill, the animal satisfactions of triumph.” But Keegan is another historian who remains silent on the Indo-Europeans, and believes that the Scythians were the “first steppe people” (1994: 188– 89, 180). Still, if we agree that the Indo-European were a people of the steppes, the first horseback riders and inventors of chariots, we can make the inference that they were the first peoples from the steppes to engage in warfare for the sake of the joys, the risks, and the prestige it brought.

Yet, at the same time, we should avoid the converse error of delinking the martial temperament of the IE peoples from their pastoral way of life. Keegan is aware of this, and in response to the question “why should…pastoralists…have been more warlike than their hunting ancestors or agricultural neighbors,” he answers that young pastoralists had to “learn to kill, and to select for killing” their domesticated animals. “It was flock management, as much as slaughter and butchery, which made the pastoralists so cold-bloodedly adept at confronting the sedentary agriculturalists” (160–61). This answer, however, is limited. In the first instance, Keegan is viewing warfare for its own sake in downbeat terms, and, in the second, he is abstracting one datum – killing young, nimble animals – from a whole way of life. The Indo-European economic lifestyle included fierce competition for grazing rights for specific areas, constant alertness in the defense of one’s portable wealth, and an expansionist disposition in a world in which competing herdsmen were motivated to seek new pastures as well as tempted to take the movable wealth (cattle) of their neighbors. This life required not just the skills of a butcher but a life span of horsemanship and arms (conflict, raids, violence) which brought to the fore certain mental dispositions including aggressiveness and individualism, in the sense that each individual, in this male-oriented atmosphere, needed to become as much a warrior as a herds-man.

Indo-Europeans were also uniquely ruled by a class of free aristocrats. In very broad terms, I define as “aristocratic” a state in which the ruler, the king, or the commander-in-chief is not an autocrat who treats the upper classes as unequal servants but is a “peer” who exists in a spirit of equality as one more warrior of noble birth. This is not to say that leaders did not enjoy extra powers and advantages, or that leaders were not tempted to act in tyrannical ways. It is to say that in aristocratic cultures, for all the intense rivalries between families and individuals seeking their own renown, there was a strong ethos of aristocratic egalitarianism against despotic rule.

Let me pull together a number of traits I have found in the literature which, in their combination, point to a life of aristocratic equality, vigorous, free, and joyful activity. First, all Indo-European cultures from the “earliest” times in the 5th millennium have seen the presence of warriors who sought to demonstrate their standing and wealth, by dressing in “ostentatious” ways; for example, with long or multiple belts and necklaces of copper beads, copper rings, copper spiral bracelets, gold fittings in their spears and javelins – with variations of styles depending on place and time but all demonstrative of an “individualizing ideology” (Anthony: 160, 237, 251, 259–63).28 Second, the Indo-European warriors “were interred as personalities showing off the equipment of life and their personal position in a final coup de theatre, rather than joining a more anonymous community of ancestors” (Sherratt 2001a: 192). Kurgan burials commemorated the deaths of special males; the stone circles and mounds, and the emphasis on “prestige weapons and insignia,” were intended to isolate and self-aggrandize the achievements of warriors (Anthony: 245).29 Third, they developed a distinctive tradition of feasting and drinking, in which “individual hospitality rather than great communal ceremonies” dominated the occasions. These feasts – backed by a “prestige goods economy” – were “cheerful” events of gift-giving and gift-taking, performance of poetry praising individual deeds, and animal sacrifices (2001b: 253; Anthony: 343, 391). These feats served as a great opportunity for warriors with higher status and wealth, in this world of constant small-scale raids and persistent inter-tribal conflicts, to acquire the greatest number of clients. They were also an opportunity for the less powerful or younger warriors to attach themselves to patrons who offered opportunities for loot and glory. The more followers the patron could recruit, the greater the expectation of success to be gained by all. Fourth, as Gimbutas clearly articulated, and as Anthony (93) has further noted, this was a culture in which “all [the] most important deities lived in the sky.” While Gimbutas described these sky gods in negative terms as the gods of a belligerent people, one may see them as the gods of an energetic, life-affirming people whose gods were personified as celestial heroes and chieftains. The sky-gods of the Indo-Europeans reflected – to use the words of Dawson (2002) – their “intensely masculine and warlike ethics, their mobility.” If the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia demanded unquestioned submission to their will, passive acceptance; and if the female deities of Old Europe – to borrow the language of Camille Paglia (1991) – represented the “earth’s bowels,” and embodied the “chthonian drama of an endless round, cycle upon cycle,” the sky-gods of Indo-Europeans furnished a vital, action-oriented, and linear picture of the world.30 Finally, I would highlight the purely aristocratic manner by which Indo-Europeans organized themselves into war-bands (koiros, brotherhood). The nature of this association might be better understood if we were to start by describing Indo-European society as different levels of social organization. The lowest level, and the smallest unit of society, consisted of families residing in farmsteads and small hamlets, practicing mixed farming with livestock representing the predominant form of wealth. The next tier consisted of a clan of about five families with a common ancestor. The third level consisted of several clans – or a tribe – sharing the same.31 Those members of the tribe who owned livestock were considered to be free in the eyes of the tribe, with the right to bear arms and participate in the tribal assembly. Although the scale of complexity of Indo-European societies changed considerably with the passage of time, and the Celtic tribal confederations that were in close contact with Caesar’s Rome during the 1st century BC, for example, were characterized by a high concentration of both economic and political power, these confederations were still ruled by a class of free aristocrats. In classic Celtic society, real power within and outside the tribal assembly was wielded by the most powerful members of the nobility, as measured by the size of their clientage and their ability to bestow patronage. Patronage could be extended to members of other tribes as well as to free individuals who were lower in status and were thus tempted to surrender some of their independence in favor of protection and patronage.

Now, in addition to these relations of clientage, Indo-European nobles were grouped into war-bands. These bands were freely constituted associations of men operating independently from tribal or kinship ties. They could be initiated by any powerful individual on the merits of his martial abilities. The relation between the chief and his followers was personal and contractual: the followers would volunteer to be bound to the leader by oaths of loyalty wherein they would promise to assist him while the leader would promise to reward them from successful raids. The sovereignty of each member was thus recognized even though there was a recognized leader, “the first among equals.” These “groups of comrades,” to use Indo-European vocabulary, were singularly dedicated to predatory behavior and to “wolf-like” living by hunting and raiding, and to the performance of superior, even superhuman deeds.32 The members were generally young, unmarried men, thirsting for adventure. The followers were sworn not to survive a war-leader who was slain in battle, just as the leader was expected to show in all circumstances a personal example of courage and warskills.

It is worth adding in this context Heiko Steuer’s observation that the so-called “folk [mass] movements” of Celts, Germans, and Scandinavians (during the 1st millennium AD) were actually initiated by warbands – which could number up to 2000 to 3000 men. These movements, he writes, were “not the migrations of tribes with the whole family… but rather campaigns of warrior bands whose wars only much later led to the occupation of land” (2006: 228). This is the way he describes, for example, the movements of Alamans, Franks and Saxons into the Roman Empire – as raids led by bands, followed by “folk” movements.

However, in contrast to Steuer, who emphasizes the need on the part of warlords to ensure a steady supply of resources for their entourage, I would accentuate the search for prestige and immortality. Young men born into noble families were not only driven by economic needs and the spirit of adventure, but also by a deep-seated psychological need for honor and recognition – a need nurtured not by nature as such but by a cultural setting in which one’s noble status was maintained in and through the risking of one’s life (berserker style) in a battle to the death for pure prestige. This competition for fame amongst war-band members (partially outside the ties of kinship) could not but have had an individualizing effect upon the warriors. Hence, although band members (“friend-companions”, or “partners”33) belonged to a cohesive and loyal group of like-minded individuals, they were not swallowed up anonymously within the group.34

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 371 - 377