An Excerpt From the “Memoirs of Hadrian” by Marguerite Yourcenar

Repost from the old site.

For this post I am going to post a bit from a delightful book I just came across called The Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, a French novelist. It was translated from French to English in the 1950′s and 60′s by her lesbian live-in partner, Grace Frick. The English translation was published in 1963. Frick’s translation was widely praised.

This is a psychological and historical novel, not an actual memoir, and perhaps that is why it sounds so contemporary. This choice novel, a best seller in France 50 years ago, is just as contemporary as if it had been written yesterday. A film adaptation by John Boorman is due to start shooting in Italy in Spring 2006.

No matter how long ago they lived, the Romans were so much more like us than we ever want to believe. The fictional voice of Hadrian, the third of the five so-called “good Roman emperors”, so eloquent, learned and wise, could be that of a high-ranking military or political official in 2006.

I will intersperse this bit of treasure with my comments, which will be in bold. My comments will often try to relate this ancient events to contemporary events, to show how history lives within all of us, as we are all products of the past and molders of the future, and how thereby the past, present and future tend to merge via human agency, culture, genetics and tradition.

We are where we are and we do what we do in part because of history, whether we like it or not. And what we are and do now creates the future, whether we like that or not.

Hence, as Kurt Vonnegut notes in one of his books, referring to a obscure science fiction short story (I think, The Music of the Spheres by Stuart J. Byrne, but I may be wrong), the past, present and future are all simultaneously occurring right at this very moment.

But I digress…

This section refers to the Simon Bar Kokhba Rebellion (otherwise known as either the Second or Third Roman-Jewish War) amongst the Jews which took place in the Roman colonial province of Judaea (now Israel or Palestine) from 132-135 AD. There is also a passing reference to Jewish heroine Esther and the Jewish holiday of Purim, the celebration of which just passed us by.

Since this blog frequently discusses Israel, Jews, Palestine and the conflict in that region, and a recent post discussed Purim, I figure this excerpt has contemporary relevance, if only to replay the skipping record called “History repeats itself”.

Perhaps the word Judaean is more appropriate than the word Jewish in this context, since the Jewish religion at that time was quite different, in my opinion, despite what Zionist propaganda tells us, from modern rabbinical Judaism. Hence, I will use Judaean instead of Jew when describing this war. This is also a dig at Jewish primordialist volkisch Zionism, which I oppose).

Judaea was still majority-Judaean at this time, even after the failed First Judaean Revolt and the destruction of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem around 65 years prior that left around 950,000 Judaeans dead and many others sold into slavery.

Though this blog supports most anti-colonial rebellions as a general rule, it is interesting to see the Bar Kokhba Revolt through the eyes of a secular Roman. Hadrian felt the Judaeans were fanatics, and clearly they were.

Many Romans also felt that the Christians of that time were also fanatics, and in fact many of them were also. In the Romans’ eyes, all the Romans asked was for the Christians to swear allegiance to Rome and pay their Roman taxes, and the Christians refused to do either, especially the swearing allegiance part. Instead, they preferred to kill themselves.

The Romans thought these suicides were the acts of an insane religious fanatical death cult, in the same way that many of us nowadays feel that Muslim suicide bombers are part of a crazy fanatical religious death cult.

Many Romans were secular, believe it or not, especially the educated ones. They had their Roman gods, of course, but many Romans, especially the ruling classes, didn’t really believe in their own gods very much.

In 130, Hadrian visited the devastated city of Jerusalem, which had still not been rebuilt after the Romans laid it to ruins some 70 years prior. Hadrian felt sorry for the Judaeans and promised to rebuild the city.

But the Judaeans became angry when word got out that Hadrian was going to rebuild the city as a pagan metropolis instead of a Judaean holy city and that he was going to rebuild the Judaeans’ Second Temple as a pagan temple to the Roman god Jupiter. The new city was to be named Aelina Capitolina. The Judaeans regarded the excavation of the Temple to rebuild it as a pagan monument as a religious transgression.

In 131, Hadrian added insult to injury by banning circumcision, which the Judaeans practiced as an essential part of their religion. Hadrian viewed circumcision as primitive, barbaric, body mutilation.

The Jewish wise man Akiva convinced the Judaean religious leadership of the Sanhedrin to rebel against the Romans. A military hero named Simon Bar Kokhba was chosen to be the leader. The name means sun of a star in Aramaic. It is interesting that the Judaeans at that time were speaking Aramaic, not the Hebrew of primordialist Zionist fantasy.

Simon Bar Kokhba was also designated the Judaean Messiah. This designation deeply offended many Christians (who were still mostly converted Jews at this time) since they felt that Christ was the real Messiah. Consequently the Christians would not support the rebellion.

In 132, the rebellion began, and the Judaeans had learned from the two previous rebellions and fought well. The Romans were routed, and for 2 1/2 years a Judaean state called The Era of the Redemption of Israel was formed. Bar Kokhba designated himself Nasi Israel, or ruler of Israel.

The crazy, endless procession of animal sacrifice at the Judaean Temple was restarted, which, in my opinion, is an example of one of the most primitive forms of ethnoreligious barbarism known to mankind (Sorry, Jewish readers!).

From morning to evening, the line of Judaeans with animals to sacrifice would snake away from the Temple and the blood of the slaughtered beasts ran red like a river away from the building!

The Romans gathered up a huge army and fought for three years. In 135, Bar Kokhba was driven to a redoubt at Betar. The fortress of Betar was then overwhelmed and the Judaeans were defeated. 580,000 Judaeans lay dead.

Much later, the name Betar was adopted in the 1920′s by a Jewish proto-fascist organization in the Jabotinskyist tradition. In my opinion, the recrudescence of the Betar decades later became the Kach or Kahane Movement, although the original Betar Movement apparently still exists at a much reduced level, since I visited their website not long ago.

However, just to demonstrate the proto-fascist roots of the Israeli Likud party, let us note that current and former Israeli Likud leaders such as former Prime Ministers Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and former Defense Minister Moshe Arens are all former members of Betar.

The fact that the US media fawned and fawns over such crypto-fascist characters is profoundly disturbing and makes one question the extent to which our media believes in democracy, if such folks are regarded as role models.

Hadrian tried to wipe out the Judaean religion, which he felt was the source of repeated rebellions. He banned the Judaean calendar and Torah Law and had many Judaean scholars executed. He built Roman statues on the ruins of the Temple and burned the Judaeans’ sacred scroll.

Jewish scholarship moved to Babylonia (Iraq) where the Babylonian Talmud was written hundred of years later, from 400-700, laying the foundation for modern rabbinical Judaism. Judaism started to reject radicalism and messianism and became more cautious and conservative. This can be seen in the Talmud’s reference to Bar Kokhba as Ben-Kusiba, which means false prophet.

As the final insult, he renamed Judaea to Syria Palaestina, after the Judaeans’ ancient, now-extinct enemies, the Philistines. This is one silly reason that Jewish Zionists find the geographical term Palestine so infuriating and illegitimate. Do Zionists really get livid about events 1,870 years ago? Zionists do.

It is interesting that hysterical, racist Jewish Zionist promoters of settler-colonialism in Palestine may be entirely wrong about the name Palestine coming from the Roman renaming of Jerusalem as Syria Palaestina, even if ultimately the dispute is just more Zionist verbal subterfuge and sophistry.

For instance, in the 1100′s BC, Egyptians refer to the inhabitants of Palestine as “Peleset” or “sea-people” because around this time, there was a lot of settlement going on in Palestine via Mediterranean seafaring trade merchants. The Akkadian language from the same period refers to the Southern Syrian region as Palashtu.

In fact, most Egyptian and Akkadian references to the region, even during the Judaean period, refer to it as Peleset (Egyptian also refers to it as Deyen, probably a reference to Danaos of myth) or Palashtu, and less commonly as Israel.

Judaeans only started showing up in Palestine en masse around 900 BC. But according to crazy Zionist ethnonationalist volkisch liars, only the Jews have always been there! Go figure!

Following Hadrian’s order, Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, turned into a Roman pagan city, and Judaeans were forbidden from entering the city. Most modern Jews regard the uprising as a horrible tragedy, and certainly many Judaeans lost their lives.

But at the time, Bar Kokhba was widely regarded as a religious fanatic akin to the way many of us see Osama bin Laden or Pat Robertson, even by many of his own people. As you can see in the text, most Jews outside of Judaea were not much interested in the rebellion, which they tended to view as fanatical and not in their interests.

This text shows another side to the Bar Kokhba rebellion, cleansed of its Zionist primordialist whitewashing, exemplified by Jabotinsky’s proto-fascist Betar above and David Ben-Gurion (the father of Israel) taking his name from one of Bar Kokhba’s generals.

This text comes to me via a friend who got it from a mailing list he is on. He reports that a “cultured Arab” typed the text below out from the novel and sent it to the list. We thank this Arab, whoever he may be, for this bit of manna from heaven.

Now – On to the Romans and the Israelites!

Memoirs of Hadrian

By Marguerite Yourcenar

Translated from the French, New York,1954-1963

Excerpts from pages 233-249 for the years 132-135 AD:

…Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups.

[RL: The construction referred to is Hadrian's rebuilding Jerusalem as Aelina Capitolina, a Roman pagan city with a Roman pagan temple built in place of the destroyed Judaean temple. The violent opposition described is that of Judaeans who regarded the construction as a sin.]

A certain number of errors has been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomenters of trouble for their own advantage.

The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts),

[RL: Note that Hadrian regarded the Judaeans as uncivilized, backwards, fanatical barbarians, a view shared by many Romans.]

…mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel.

The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and ram’s horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine (Easther) who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king…

…of Persia (Iran), and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy (a feast of Purim).

[RL: Note the Roman view of Purim as a barbaric spectacle of bloodthirsty revenge, a view that, unfortunately, I share. Are the Jews to celebrate this blood-soaked festival, which promotes the notion that Jews and non-Jews are locked in eternal conflict until the end of time, forever? If so, what are the chances of reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews? Zero?]

Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel’s traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch).

[RL: Note that the Romans put circumcision on a par with castration! I certainly do not agree, being circumcised myself. I regard anti-circumcision activists as ill-advised kooks, and the whole movement has a wide streak of anti-Semitism running through it.

If you are interested in the subject, just search Google and discover all sorts of web pages devoted to the "horrors of circumcision".]

He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind.

I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria (Egypt) and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves.

I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel. As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so.

In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods.

The most primitive Dacians (Bulgarians) know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hands, and whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother of Apollo.

No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars.

[RL: Here Hadrian hints at an age-old clue to the riddle of anti-Semitism - the chauvinism of the Jews. How did the Jews persevere as a minority for 2000 years amidst frequent oppression? It's the racism, stupid!

How about by preaching racist hatred against all non-Jews, banning most contact with Gentiles other than for business, and even building ghettos for themselves to keep their people from mingling with Gentiles?

How about by saying prayers throughout the day, every day, cursing the Gentiles in every way and wishing for their destruction, and instituting vicious penalties for Jewish women who had sex with Gentile men (like having their noses chopped off)?

Note that as late as 1800, any observant European Jew would refuse to eat or even have tea with any Gentile as a matter of custom. While this sort of behavior is a smart ethnocentric way of ensuring continuity of your race as a minority, it didn't exactly help the Jews to win friends and influence people, and to the extent it yet exists, it still doesn't.

Jewish separation and chauvinism is and was one of the major contributors to anti-Semitism, despite dishonest denials by Jewish scholars who specialize in and propagandize the mystification of anti-Semitism.]

I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.

[RL: Note here that Hadrian comes across as some sort of a Second Century universalist and multiculturalist!]

The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens…

…but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day or night…

[RL: Note again the ferocious condemnation by the Judaeans of those Judaeans who had extensive contact with Gentiles and the refusal of the Judaeans to assimilate to larger society in the tiniest way by studying Greek, which they regarded as a sin.]

…since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus.

[RL: Wow! Talk about fanaticism! No wonder the Romans were appalled by the Judaeans. The guy let his Judaean son die rather than have a "contaminated" and "unclean" Gentile doctor profane him by operating on his body!]

While here in Tibur means were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem. An adventurer born of the very dregs of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kokhba, Son of the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt.

I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head. Yet I am disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not gained without at least some crude skill.

The Jews of the moderate party were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and imposture; I believe rather that this untrained mind was of the type which was taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand with fanaticism.

He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel.

The aged Akiba, in a foolish state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem, holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the temple, said to be defiled from the time that uncircumcised visitors had crossed its threshold.

[RL: Note again the Judaean association of Gentiles with uncleanness, contamination and profaneness. Gypsies also have this view of non-Gypsies, and similarly, they have also played the role of European minority from the East locked into endless conflict with non-Gypsies, as the European Jews from the East were locked into endless conflict with Gentiles].

Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty years were distributed to the rebels by agents of the Son of the Star; they also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective (and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a period of years).

Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty that recalled the worst memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina were set burning like a torch.

The first detachments of the Twenty-Second Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end.

Two legions, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce the troops already stationed in Judea; some months later, Julius Severus took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the mountainous regions of Northern Britain…

[RL: This is a reference to the last holdouts of the Celtic Empire, (in this case, Scotland) which once stretched across Europe from one end to the other, already at this time largely destroyed and scattered by Roman conquest.

The most recalcitrant of the Celts were in the far western edges of Europe, in the least habitable and most difficult-to-pacify areas, where to this day, the last holdouts of the Celtic languages Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh fight for survival and the Cornish and Manx languages rise from the dead.]

…and brought with him some small contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult terrain.

Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in open country, retained the techniques of street fighting.

Simon, a great man in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons posted on mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities. Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition.

The peasants, fired by Simon’s enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out.

Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities (which) now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin. In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judea….

In the spring of the third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an eagle’s nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not surrender.

Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter, on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed to the bone by centuries of folly and fury.

The summer was hot and unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share….

In my dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula that is regulation for the opening of official communications: THE EMPEROR AND THE ARMY ARE WELL. The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary.

[RL: The leaders of Roman military campaigns, by tradition, began their missives and return speeches to the Roman Senate with the phrase, "The army and I are well." In this case, Hadrian left out this characteristic phrase. The fact that he did not say it is attested widely by historians, making it one of the most famous aspects of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.]

At night, after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from Publius Marcellius or from Rufus, whose receptive tasks were to wipe up outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and try to think.

There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making; but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in Alexandria, impatient in Rome.

[RL: Hadrian traveled widely.]

I had not known how to find words that would have prevented, or at least retarded, this outburst of fury in a nation; I had not known in time how to be either supple enough or sufficiently firm.

Surely we had no reason to be unduly disturbed, and still less need to despair, the blunder and the reversal had occurred only in our relations with Israel; everywhere else at this critical hour we were reaping the reward of sixteen years of generosity in the Orient.

Simon had supposed that he could count on a revolt in the Arab world similar to the uprising that had darkened the last years of Trajan’s reign; even more, he had ventured to bank on Parthian (Persian) aid.

He was mistaken, and that error in calculation was causing him slow death in the besieged citadel of Bethar: the Arab tribes were drawing apart from the Jewish communities; the Parthians remained faithful to the treaties.

The synagogues of the great Syrian cities proved undecided or lukewarm, the most ardent among them contenting themselves with sending money in secret to the Zealots; the Jewish population in Alexandria, though naturally so turbulent, remained calm; the abscess in Jewish affairs remained local, confined within the arid region which extends from Jordan to the sea; this ailing finger could safely be cauterized, or amputated.

And nevertheless, in a sense, the evil days which had immediately preceded my reign seemed to begin over again….The evening courier had just informed me that we had reestablished ourselves on the heap of tumbled stones which I called Aelia Capitolina and which the Jews still called Jerusalem; we had burned the Ascalon, and had been forced to mass executions of rebels in Gaza.

[RL: The Ascalon was the Judaeans' sacred scroll.]

If sixteen years of rule by a prince so pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the chances for peace in the world looked dim ahead. I raised myself on my elbow, uneasy on the narrow camp bed.

To be sure, there were some Jews who had escaped the Zealot contagion: even in Jerusalem the Pharisees spat on the ground before Akiba, treating that fanatic like an old fool who threw to the wind the solid advantages of the Roman peace, and shouting to him that grass would grow from his mouth before Israel’s victory would be seen on this earth.

But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at all cost who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from Simon’s demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers), and upon their farms in Galilee.

I thought of the deserters from his camp who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory, servile, but always managing to turn their back to the image of my Genius.

Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he too, however, thought essentially only of Israel.

Joshua Ben-Kisma, who preached appeasement, was but more timid, or more hypocritical (than) Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counselor in Jewish affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to engage in combat.

[RL: We see here the ancient complaint against the Jews of "dual loyalty", which obviously is and was often based on verifiable fact (much more so in the past than today).

The Jews have been ferociously ethnocentric for centuries, to the point of seeing non-Jews as agents of contagion and contamination, and even banning Jews from the tiniest non-business relations with Gentiles.

That this mindset would make most Jews (at least until around 1800 or so, and in some places and/or during certain times afterwards) more loyal to the tribe than to whatever despised state they were minority residents in at the time seems as clear as air.]

Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not prevent that race from answering us…

I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon’s citadel, vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range of moonlight.

I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep.

The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, will concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the (camp’s) esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebels executed the evening before.

I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn.

End of the excerpt.

The Roman Empire and Globalization

Pax Romana = McWorld.

Let us check in with the great Simone Weil, the French Jewish writer and convert to Christianity who starved herself to death in Vichy France in 1943, possibly to protest the regime:

If we consider the long centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed the barbarian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Mediterranean basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State.

Well, sure. Just think about it. Not only was Roman McWorld a Cuisinart of cultures, it also seemed to destroy quality itself. There are echoes in our present era. Pax Romana = McWorld = globalization = “Made in China” World O’Crap. Over to Weil’s biographer, Simone Pétrement:

The Roman peace was soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished, together with political liberty and diversity, the creative inspiration that produces great art, great literary works, science, and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms of human life were reborn.

More Nordicist and White Nationalist Insanity

We have a Nordicist in our comments section, posting on the thread about racial decline in Egypt.

According to most of these guys, race-mixing, in and of itself and independent of the stocks being mixed, causing automatic degeneration of any populations subjected to such mixing. This is obvious nonsense. In a region where a lesser stock exists, mixing via invasion or migration with a better stock with improve the overall quality of the stock. Race mixing can go either way depending on the stocks being mixed.

Ask any animal or plant breeder if mixing stocks causing automatic and immediate degeneration of the stocks involved. All animal husbandry and agriculture is based on “race-mixing” of various stocks to produce this or that breed.

Examples are given of “mongrelized” stocks such as in North Africa, the Arab World, Central Asia and South Asia. First of all, there’s not a lot of evidence that these stocks are any more mongrelized than anybody else, and there’s no evidence that race mixing caused any kind of stock decline over the years. Hell, it may well have improved matters. As I said, mixing can go one one way or the other. Were North Africans, Arabs and Central and South Asians really so superior before they got racially mixed? The evidence for this is about zero.

This commenter also pointed out some other White nationalist and Nordicist lies.

One is the age-old lie that ancient Greeks and Romans were Nordic Whites and that the declines of these empires occurred slowly over time as they got mixed with more and more “niggerish” (mixed with Black, Arab and Berber) genes. There’s little to no evidence for this. The ancient Romans were just Italians. The present day Italians are descendants of the Romans. The ancient Greeks were just Greeks. Present day Greeks are the descendants of the ancients.

Whether or not racial decline occurred in Egypt or not is up for grabs. Ancient Egypt was about 9% Black genetically. Modern Egyptians are about 20% Black. Between the time of ancient Egypt and modern Egypt, the Black % has about doubled. There are zero anthropologists who suggest that race mixing caused the decline of Egyptian Empire.

Further, ancient Egyptians were not really European Whites. They were Arabids and Berberids, the same “niggerish” stocks that supposedly caused the collapse of Rome and Greece!

The Egyptian Empire started in 3150 BC and lasted until 60 BC. Decline began to set in around 600 BC or so, about 80% of the way through the history of the empire. It progressed during the time of Alexander in 300 BC and by the time the Romans conquered, the Empire was on its last legs.

The same commenter says that North America used to be populated by Whites called Solutreans 20,000 YBP. There is zero evidence that these “Whites” in Europe ever made it to North America, and anyway, no one knows if Europeans of 20,000 YBP looked like Whites. Europeans of 30,000 YBP looked more like the Amerindians of the Washington State coast than any other race.

Supposedly, Asiatics in the form of Amerindians came across the Bering Strait and genocided the Whites of North America. This theory has interesting implications. It implies that North America is White land, not Indian land, and that Indians are not the natives and that they have no right to be here, completely the obverse of the standard narrative of Indians as natives and Whites as invaders and usurpers.

This commenter also holds that the ancient Polynesians were Whites called “the Lapita people.” Later on, the Polynesians “sea-niggers” showed up and genocided the ancient Whites. This theory appears to be utter nonsense. The Lapita came from Taiwan and were some of the greatest mariners who ever lived. They became the Filipinos, Indonesians, Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians.

The story of the racial decline of Portugal has been discussed previously on this site. First of all, we need to realize that most WN’s are Nordicists who think that Southern Europeans are non-Whites because they are Whites who have mixed with “niggerish” types like Blacks, Berbers and Arabs.

The notion is that Portugal was once a great White country = Nordic country. This follows from the north of Portugal, Lusitania, having Celtic roots. Over time, the niggerish genes moved in, and Portugal declined.

But the timeline is all messed up. The Black genes probably came in during the Roman Empire and not later. The Arab and Berber genes came in during the Arab conquest of Iberia, but this was before Portugal was a great power, not after. After Portugal became a great power, there were few to no Berber, Arab or Black genes added to the stock. The decline of Portugal followed logically from the decline of all colonial European powers, and race had nothing to do with it.

Aztlan and Zionism: Dueling Idiocies

Repost from the old site.

In this post, we will take a look at two nationalisms, Zionism, the movement to (re)create the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine, and Aztlan, the Mexican and Chicano movement that says that part of the Western US is actually part of Mexico, and more importantly, was the homeland of the Aztec people.

As with most forms of ultra-nationalism, both movements are exercises in lying and nonsense. And both are similar in other ways, too.

Both propose that, because the area in question (Western US, Palestine) was the ancient homeland of the people some 2,000-5,000 years ago, that they have a right to move en mass into the region and even to annex it or possibly make their state there (the Aztlan movement is divided on whether Aztlan should be annexed to Mexico or whether it should be its own state).

Both are based on some highly questionable claims of ownership. There is serious question whether or not Aztlan (an area covering part of the Western US – map here) is actually the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, as this article claims, supposedly with authoritative sources.

Let us examine the article, by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez, a writing team that somehow got UPI to syndicate their ultra-radical Chicano nationalist nonsense for many years.

The authors found a map in the National Archives in Washington from 1847 with a notation near the Four Corners Area in the US referring to The Ancient Homeland of the Aztecs.

This scribbling on a map somewhere by God knows who purportedly “proves incontrovertibly” that all Mexicans and all Central Americans have a right to move to the USA tomorrow, because the US Four Corners is their “ancient homeland”.

The authors also note a tradition of the US Pueblo, Hopi, and Lakota (!?) Indian tribes that Nahuatl speakers were their former relatives. There are major problems with this. How would these tribes describe these “Nahuatl” speaking people, since back then, there is no way that they called their language or themselves by that name?

Since they called themselves and their language something else, how did these tribes know that they were “Nahuatl”-speakers? And why the Lakota? They are located far from this fake homeland, way up in South Dakota.

Further, as one who worked with an Indian tribe on a government grant doing linguistic and anthropological field work, I assure you that Indian legends and oral history need to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, to say the least!

The authors quote Cecelio Orozco, an education professor at my alma mater, California State University Fresno as saying this lines up with his research also putting the Aztec homeland in southern Utah. Professor Orozco has published two books of apparent pseudoarcheology on this subject.

Here is how Orozco discovered this homeland (try not to laugh when reading this):

Orozco said he came upon the site through a process called “archeo-astronomy.” He saw a photograph of four rivers in Utah in 1980, and based on previous research, recognized a mathematical formula in the photo that led him to believe that this was the place of origin of the Mexicas’ ancestors. Subsequent trips and research has confirmed his thesis… 

After reading this fascinating article on archaeoastronomy, I still do not see how that science relates to a photograph of four rivers in Utah. Does anyone have any idea how a photograph of four rivers anywhere on Earth contains some hidden mathematical formula?

He also found a painting on a wall in Utah from 500 BC that he says he claims corresponds to the the codec containing the Aztec calendar. Those of us familiar with the field realize that finds all over the world look like other finds, or resemble other peoples, or bear this or that passing resemblance to whatever. None of that usually proves anything; much more work needs to be done.

According to the article, because Aztecs have a homeland in Utah dating back 2500 BC, Mexicans and Central Americans are no longer foreigners or aliens or even immigrants in the US, but they are simply in their homeland.

By that lunatic thinking, all White Americans get emigrate back to Europe and live there, since that was our homeland at some point in the past. The Europeans have no right to stop us, and we can even call it Euroamland or whatever and carve out our own damn country out of several European countries, make English the official language and even sideline the several non-English European tongues spoken there.

Then we can demand to be united with the US across the sea or just up and make our own country, dissolving several European countries in the process.

It is this sort of nonsense that makes me wonder just how smart your average Mexican Reconquista type really is. On reflection, they are obviously bright people, it is just that ultranationalism, or even often just nationalism, damages people’s brains and makes them incapable of rational thought. It does this across the board to any ethnic group – there is no reason to single out Mexicans or Chicanos.

Let us examine some of the other insane suppositions of the Aztlan crowd. We have already delved into this a bit on this on an earlier post.

First of all, the Aztecs (Mexicas) had only taken over the Mexico City area about 200 years previous to the Spanish Conquest. The empire reached its peak only about 40 years before Cortes landed. Further, the Mexicas only lived in the area around Mexico City! That’s it. All of the rest of Mexico was not Mexica territory and the tribes (even those colonized by Mexicas) who lived there cannot be said to be Mexicas!

As an analogy, let us consider the Roman Empire. Its headquarters were in Rome. The rest of the empire were just colonies, conquered areas paying tribute to Rome. Can we say that everyone in the Roman Empire was a “Roman” or an “Italian”? By the same logic, do those residing in Rome today have a right to claim all of the former Roman Empire as their land?

This is what would happen if we applied “Aztlan”-logic to that situation. Do you see how stupid this Aztlan nonsense-lie is? The Aztecs did conquer quite a bit of land in the center of Mexico (map here), killing lots of folks and enslaving others.

As noted below, the homeland of the Nahua, according to prominent Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma was probably somewhere around Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán* . From this area, 2,000 years ago, various waves of Nahua speakers radiated out through Mexico and even Central America. This is why we have 28 living Aztec (or Nahuatl) languages today.

By the way, Wikipedia is wrong that these languages are almost dead. Most are quite vigorously used, and there are 1.5 million speakers of all Nahuatl languages.

27 of these 28 tribes are not, and were not, Mexicas, anymore than everyone speaking a Romance language today is a “Roman”. Follow?

A somewhat more rational take on the Aztlan lie can be found on the Reconquista site here. Apparently real anthropologists put the Aztec homeland somewhere around Nayarit on the west coast of Mexico. That’s a lot more reasonable, but it’s probably not true either. This comes from Mexican anthropologist Alfredo Chavero’s theory in 1887. Moctezuma’s locale is probably better.

The piece also argues that since Nahuatl is an Uto-Aztecan language and many Uto-Aztecans either lived in or traveled through “Aztlan”, that there is something to the Aztlan notion in that sense. Fair enough.

In fact, the homeland of the Uto-Aztecans in my opinion is in southern Arizona or northern Mexico. But all Native Americans traveled through Siberia on their way to the Americas. Does everyone with Indian blood in the Americas get to go back to Russia and take over the place because their ancestors strolled through it sometime in the past 20,000 years?

Looking at the linguistic contacts of pre-Nahuatl would be a good way of trying to find an Aztec homeland. We can see that they had contacts with languages spoken around Veracruz, on the east coast of Mexico. As you can see, the situation is complicated.

The authors in the first article make an even more ludicrous point. First, as usual, they conflate the “Aztecs” a single tribe called the Mexica, amongst Mexico’s over 200 tribes, that only lived around Mexico City, with all Mexicans.

According to idiot Chicano nationalists, all Mexicans with Indian blood are Mexica or part Mexica! That’s nuts. As noted, there were tribes all over the land, and the Mexica were only one of 200 or so. It’s as if one said that every Italian comes from Rome.

Next, they say that all of the tribes related to the Mexicas were “Mexicas” because they spoke Nahuatl languages. They certainly were not! It’s nonsense. Are all speakers of Indo-European languages the one and same group because they all came out the Indo-European homeland in Southern Ukraine 8,000 years ago?

Even worse, these fools claim that all Central Americans were Aztecs and get to go invade the USA because it’s home sweet home.

Ridiculous. There is only one tribe, the Pipil in El Salvador, that still speaks a Nahuatl language, and there are only 20 speakers left. There were a few other Nahuatl languages in Honduras, Panama and Guatemala, but these are long since extinct. They were not “Aztecs” anymore than English-speakers in the US are “Germans”.

However, the Pipil did come from the area around Mexico City around 1000 years ago; they were related to Olmecs, but also to the Nahuatl. In general, they were an Olmec grouping. Anyway, at that time, there were no such thing as Mexicas or Aztecs – that group came later. Another group of Pipil had come to Central America 5000 years ago and came under the influence of the Maya.

This is around the time when Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself was born in the southwest US. Both of these groups, by 1000 AD, became the Pipil, who came under even more Maya influence.

The Pipil are almost extinct culturally and linguistically today, an end result of the Matanza, when 10,000-30,000 Indians were slaughtered in only a few weeks in El Salvador in 1932, while US warships patrolled off the coast in case the victims of the genocide tried to fight back.

After that, most Salvadoran Indians took off their Indian clothes and quit speaking Indian languages, especially since Pipil was outlawed. They also intermarried heavily with non-Indians, so that to this day, only 1% of El Salvador’s population are Indians. The area of the Matanza became one of the most conservative, pro-government parts of El Salvador, little effected by the Civil War from 1980-1993.

The leader of the rebellion that set off the Matanza was Farabundo Marti, head of the Salvadoran Communist Party. The rebels that fought in the Civil War later on took their name, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, from him.

The cult surrounding Zionism is much the same as the Aztlan nonsense. True, Jews ruled the area long ago, but only for a brief time, similar to the Aztecs. Further, similar conflations are made about the Judean Empire and the Aztlan Empire, Judean language and religion and actual Jews and Jewish religion and the relevance of ancient Judean religion to the Jewish religion today.

Also similar is the outrageous notion that some group has a right to go back to its ancient homeland of 2000-5000 years ago, settle there at will, and even make a state there. Some of the radical Atzlanistas, similar to Zionists, also suggest throwing out the natives (in the case of the Aztlanistas the Whites, who came starting 400 years ago) since they are “invaders squatting on the true homeland”.

In this same nonsensical way, Zionists project their own invasion of Palestine and squatting on Palestinian land off onto the victim. The Arabs, who came 1450 years ago, are the “invaders”, who have been squatting on “Jewish land” since then. Never mind that the Jews left 2000 years ago. They owned Palestine in their hearts in the intervening 1900 years, and Zionism claims that that trumps a property deed!

Zionism’s proponents are Jews, the smartest folks on Earth, who ought to know better. But ultra-nationalism can easily make a fool of the finest man.

See Joachim Martillo’s site, Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel, for more. In particular, his superb Issues and Questions In the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism (90 pp.!), is a piece which deserves much wider reading. Martillo has some tendency towards fanaticism (but this also drives him to produce), can be an ideologue, and is sometimes guilty of trying to make facts fit theory as opposed to otherwise.

However, these (especially making the facts fit theory) are chronic problems with most all social scientists, as Kevin MacDonald has observed.

At the least, the brilliant Martillo should be more widely read, if only to subject his interesting theories to the critical light of peer review to separate wheat from chaff. And the 90 page link above is just sublime, in particular in the way that it takes apart the primordial nonsense of Zionism in the same way we attacked the similar primordialism of the Atzlanistas in this post.

*Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988) 38.

In Praise of Julius Caesar

But, for Caesar, the all-accomplished statesman, the splendid orator, the man of elegant habits and polished taste, the patron of the fine arts in a degree transcending all example of his own or the previous age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries, except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an illiterate person–to class such a man with the race of furious destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread is to err not by an individual trait, but by the whole genus.

The Attilas and the Tamerlanes, who rejoice in avowing themselves the scourges of God, and the special instruments of his wrath, have no one feature of affinity to the polished and humane Caesar, and would as little have comprehended his character as he could have respected theirs.

Even Cato, the unworthy hero of Lucan, might have suggested to him a little more truth in this instance, by a celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, said he, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation…

Thomas De Quincey, De Bello Gallico, and Other Commentaries of Julius Caesar

The English author De Quincey, who wrote from is not very well know, which is too bad. Most who know of him at all are familiar with Confessions of an Opium Eater, but just about anything he ever wrote is worth reading. Look at that majestic prose above. Sure it’s languid and loping in getting to the point, but so what? So is Henry James. If you can’t hack it, go back to your bodice-ripper or thriller.

As a pure stylist, De Quincey has to be one of the finest writers of the past 200 years. I can’t get enough of this prose. Check out those 50-100 word sentences! Damn. You have to catch your breath while you read them.

Nice comments about Caesar too. Sure he was a conquering imperialist bastard, but he was one of the classiest, most refined and educated ones that ever lived. After him, who else?

Excellent Shot Across the Bow at the Nordicists

This is a great comment from an earlier piece I wrote, The Racial Makeup of Hispanics. It has attracted many an idiotic comment, especially from ignorant Hispanics. However, this comment was a nice one. It was written by a Spaniard in response to a stupid comment by a Nordicist claiming that ancient Greece and Rome were Nordic and that Mediterranean types were inferior non-Whites.

Spain a bastardized race? Britain is by far more bastardized.

Tacitus, a Roman historian made a clear description of how the Romans, Greeks, Celts, Germanics and Middle Eastern Scythians were.

First of all, Roman historical documents describe Carthaginian port towns as far as in Ireland. Carthaginian traders were originally from Phoenicia. These documents from around 300 B.C. clearly describe the phenotype differences of the Romans from other Barbaric tribes.

The Roman description of themselves is clearly the same as modern day Spanish person, Roman nose profiles resemble a Spanish nose profile. Romans describe themselves as having pale, easily tanned skin, dark hair and mostly having amber, light brown and more commonly hazel eyes.

The Celts, contrary to common ignorant beliefs, were described in 300 B.C. as having pale skin that could tan, dark hair and to a large degree, blue eyes.

Many Hibernians (Irish), however, were describe as having brown skin and dark eyes. Others as White with dark eyes and large noses. Ireland was then inhabited by a majority of Basques, some Celtic tribes and many Carthaginian traders.

The Germanic tribes were described as tall, blond and and light blue eyed, and reddish white skin.

Scythians originated in what today is Kazakhstan and were describe by Tacitus as tall, grey eyed and red haired.

These historical descriptions explain why Italians, Spaniards, Southern French, Portuguese, and to some degree Romanians look alike. Romans were never a Nordic race, nor did they ever have blue eyes. The Mediterranean people are not a result of a bastardized race.

The Roman Empire extended its influence to Britain, and many Roman Nobles moved in what is today known as Wales. As an obvious result, a great % of Welsh people have hazel eyes, Roman nose profiles and Mediterranean skin, perhaps paler due to the fact that Britain is located in a Northern region. Some might even still look Basque. The only reason Carthaginian or Semite phenotypes became uncommon is because of a constant absorption by other ethnicities.

Greeks thought that blue eyes were a sign of cowardice and uncivilized people.

Romans viewed Celtic, Germanic and other tribes, except Greeks, as inferior to them. Before the Roman conquest, technologically and culturally speaking, they were right; they possessed a poor writing system, did not have massive constructions and lacked a truly organized state. Germanic tribesmen rarely possessed any metal armor and fought naked. For Romans, Celtic or Nordic features were barbaric.

Ignorant people think mestizo people look like Indians or Arabs. I’ve been to Mexico and have some friends who are blond, blue eyed and both their parents look Indian; some others have green, hazel and grey eyes with white reddish skin, and some are even red haired with swarthy parents.

I’ve seen mixed people in Sweden (a great % of population) who come from Sami parents (who came from Siberian Mongoloid tribes) and are light blond haired and light blue eyed. The same in Finland and even in Greenland. This mix happened thousands of years before the Viking invasion, so DNA tests prove that English people have Sami blood to a certain extent too – they just lack the phenotype.

Ignorant people think mixed races among European and non-European have to look non-White, which is really stupid.

Hungarians are also a mixed of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Magyar and Mongols. Many Russians absorbed Sami, Ugric and Mongoloid people for centuries. And Jews have also been mixing for almost a thousand years with some Europeans. If Jewish people hadn’t preserved their religion, they would be considered European. In Germany many blond Nordic looking folks were accepted in the Army even when their parents were Jewish.

The final point is that when mestizo populations are constantly absorbed by another group, over the centuries they become part of the culture that absorbed them. That is also the main reason why our languages constantly change; all Germanic languages used to be one but got mixed and changed. Same with Romance, Slavic and probably every single language in the world.

Some very nice comments here. First of all, my prejudices. I regard Nordicists as splitters who are trying to divide out great White race. Further, I like Med Whites a lot, and I surely consider at least all of the Meds in Europe as fully, 100% White, whatever their petty genetics may look like. If you look White and act White, you’re White. Real simple. As far as Extended Mediterraneans in North Africa, the Middle East, etc., it’s a much more mixed bag, but I think there are a lot of White Berbers and White Arabs too. It probably mostly boils down to individual phenotype.

This comment makes clear that Meds and Spaniards are not some bastardized race, instead, they are simply the Meds, an ancient White people who are the direct ancestors of some of the greatest Whites that ever lived, the Romans and the Greeks.

Furthermore, the commenter notes that the British are quite mixed, with many Med types and Med features, especially among the Welsh. There is substantial Phoenician and Semitic (Middle Eastern Arab) blood in both the Irish and the British. Going back 2,300 years, the Irish were a dark haired and dark eyed people with heavy inputs from the dark Basques and Phoenicians and Celts.

Even the Celts, romanticized as uber-Nordics, are proven here to be have been dark haired with skin that tanned easily. They were very different from the Germanic types. Further, it is important to note a huge Celtic component in the Spaniards and Portuguese, especially in the north of Spain, in Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country, Argaon and Catalonia. There is substantial Celtic input in northern Portugal in the Lusitania region.

Celts are considered to be uber-Nordics, but the Spaniards are heavily Celtic, so are the Spaniards Nordics or what? The whole Nord vs. Med debate starts to get absurd because there has been so much Nordic-Med mixing over the millenia.

I laughed when I read that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought that Germanic Nordic types and features were inferior and barbarian phenotypes and peoples. How the world has changed, but it goes to show that all this crap is pretty subjective and there’s not a lot of “science” going on in the intra-European fights.

Surely the Hungarians are part Asiatic. You can sometimes see it in their eyes. Definitely, Russians are part Asiatic, mostly Siberian, as are Swedes and Finns, who have considerable Sami in them.

And of course Hispanic mestizos look like everything under the sun. One or both parents can be quite dark and indigenous looking, while one or more of the kids can be quite light, and vice versa. In the Caribbean, it works the same way, but the mix is Black and White. A genetic approach to Whiteness is nonsensical when denying Whiteness to someone who looks and acts White.

More On Who Were the Ancient Romans

A new comment on the previous post offers the best explanation yet.

The statues and paintings do not look like Meds or anyone else it seems. Their facial appearance was not as attractive as Meds or modern Italians (who are an extreme mixture of everything).

They were a bit shorter than the German/Celts but were much more muscular. The few bones (ancient original Romans used cremation) showed heavy muscularity, much greater even than Moderns.

My premise is that the Roman style of fighting served the infantry well, and their battles were of brute strength. Their sword the Gladius used was not as good as the Celtic sword in many ways. The Celtic sword has been shown superior in computer tests. However, the Roman style was to fight in a compact manner and use their superior physical strength it seems.

They were even outnumbered by great margins it just about all battles. This fact seems to not to carry much weight, but in hand to hand combat it does. How the Romans won these battles was in part organization, but the endgame was really genetics.

Where they came from is anybody’s guess. They do not appear to be like anyone but Romans.

Of course in the later stages they were just a mix, sort of like modern day Italians.

Well, sure. It’s all starting to make sense now. Along with the earlier post, We Are Not Our Ancestors , it’s all starting to come together. The Romans, like many other ancient peoples of Europe and probably of other places, were part of a race or ethnic group that no longer exists.

This is why the Meds and Nordicists have been fighting so long about whether the statues and paintings are Meds or Nords. The reason it’s controversial and hard to figure out in the first place (hence the debate) is that the Romans were neither!

They were not Nordics or Germans, nor were they Italians or Meds. They were an extinct race, vanished from the Earth. It’s nice the way some unknown commenter comes along and so neatly ties together loose ends.

I found it very interesting that the Romans were outnumbered in almost all their battles but won most of them anyway. The commenters theory sounds better than any others out there. Most combat was indeed hand to hand back in those days. What a terrifying way to fight a war!. Can you imagine having to go hand to hand with a deadly enemy in a kill or be killed battle? I’d rather take my chances in modern way any day.

As a side note, I am really getting tired of all of these races and ethnic groups claiming the achievements of ancient folks as their own. In many cases, the great ancients do not seem like the ancestors of those puffing their chests.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Early Descendants: Proto-Languages and Homelands

The Indo-European languages include most of the languages of Europe, Iran and Northern India. For instance, English, Gaelic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Kurdish are some of the better-known IE languages of Europe and the Near East.

In Iran, the major language, Farsi, is IE, as is the major language Pashto in Afghanistan. In India and Pakistan, the huge languages Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are all IE.

They go back to a proto-language called Proto Indo-European, or PIE. In that the languages are all related, the truth is that the peoples are all related to for the greatest part. So Northern Indians, Pashtuns, Iranians, Kurds and Armenians are all closely related to Europeans since they all sprung in part from a common source, in the famous words of Sir William Jones, who discovered the IE languages in the late 1700′s.

Going back 6,500 years, we can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European quite well. One of the best resources is Julius Pokorny‘s Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (or Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch).

Originally written in German, this incredible 2,500 page masterwork has been translated largely, but not completely, into English. One of my favorite pastimes is wading through this monster. I have a downloadable copy on the blog here (huge file).

The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is the subject of much debate, but the modern consensus centers around putting the homeland at 6500 years before present (YBP) around Southern Russia. I have narrowed it to southern Russia, southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Kazakhstan north of the Caucasus. This is more or less the region in between the Black and Caspian Seas.

An arid region called the Kuma-Manych Depression is in the middle of this region and seems to be a major center of PIE culture. I could not find a map of the Depression, but it separates the North Caucasus from the Russian Plain.

There were also settlements in southeastern Ukraine near the Sea of Azov, about 50 miles north of the Caspian Sea in southwestern Kazakhstan and up around the Lower Volga Region near Samara. A good word for this general region is the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

The homeland of the Proto Indo Europeans, as of 6,500 YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.

From there, it’s not really known how or when the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread out, but they show up in Europe some time later. A good map of their migrations or conquests is here.

The PIE people had several advantages over their neighbors. They were already into the Bronze Age for one, and not only that, but there were horses running around Southern Russia. The PIE had managed to domesticate the horse. That’s quite an advantage, but the PIE people did one better.

They even invented a wheel. Then they logically put the two together and made horse-drawn chariots. With these chariots, the PIE people apparently conquered much of Europe and later parts of Southwest Asia and South Asia.

The people in Europe at this time were pre-PIE folks. We know little about their culture, but the master of PIE culture, the celebrated professor Marija Gimbutas (A woman!) calls it “Old Europe.” Old Europe is very little known or understood. A probable surviving language from Old Europe is Basque. Another, long extinct, is Etruscan.

The very early people of the British Isles, whose descendants are now known as the Black Irish, populated the Isles between 9000-11000 YBP. They had dark hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. Genetically, they seem to resemble the Basques and may have come on boats from Spain.

The Basques themselves and related peoples may have come from the Caucasus long, long ago. Although Basque is said to have no living relatives, I believe it is related to Caucasian languages like Chechen and Ingush. Throughout Europe one finds folks called Black this and Black that.

I had a girlfriend who called herself a Black Swede and later on, a girlfriend named Linda of Polish heritage. Both had very dark, curly hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. As a guess, these types of Europeans may be the remains of Old Europe.

We don’t know much about what PIE people looked like, but it is thought that they had long (and possibly thin) noses. From Pokorny:

Nasals are the most important element of Proto-Indo Europeans since they indicate the homeland of Aryans in a cold, snowy territory. The prolongation of their nose must have taken place during thousands of years of habitat in the frosty climate.

The long nose served Indo Europeans to warm the air while breathing which eventually caused the presence of nasal sounds (Pokorny, p.90).

This type of long and thin nose is still found in Greeks, Armenians, Iranians and North Indians at the least. Hence it is possible that these peoples are one of the better examples of what the PIE people looked like.

Gimbutas is also the founder of the Kurgan Hypothesis, which is currently the best PIE theory out there. Gimbutas (photo) sort of lost it towards the end when she got into “Goddess worship” and whatnot, but it’s clear that this Lithuanian archeologist was one of the great scholars of our time.

Some time after 6500 YBP, PIE began to break up, but no one knows quite how this occurred. At any rate, by 4200 YBP, a split had occurred in PIE and a separate language had broken off, Indo-Iranian. There are maps out there of the Indo-Iranian homeland, but I don’t like them all that much so I made my own. My best guess was to place it in the far north of Kazakhstan and just over the border into Russia.

From there, after 3500 YBP, the Indo-Aryans moved out and migrated into Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India and Iran. Many people in these regions today speak Indo-Iranian languages descended from these people. These folks are thought to be the source of the famous Aryan Invasion of India at around this time.

A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern Kazakhstan around 3500 YBP. This is where the Iranians, Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.

As I noted, the process whereby these languages split off, other than the Indo-Aryan split, is little known. However, assuming this tree diagram is correct, maybe it can shed some light on the matter.

A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family. Click to enlarge.

Unfortunately, this chart is hard to read, so I will try to decipher it. The first thing to note is the Anatolian split in the tree, apparently the first split. There are problems with the date for PIE. A glottochronological study recently gave a date of about 8500 YBP for PIE, considerably earlier than the usual date of around 6500 YBP.

Promoters of something called the Anatolian Hypothesis have used this to suggest than an earlier language called Proto-Indo-Hittite was spoken in Anatolia 8500 years ago.

The Anatolian languages split off, and the PIE speakers moved to the Pontic Steppe. The movement of Proto-Indo-Hittite speakers out of Anatolia to the Pontic Steppe to form the PIE people may be related to the Black Sea Deluge Theory which has recently been proven correct.

The Black Sea expanded dramatically according to this theory as, around 7600 YBP, a waterfall 200 times the size of Niagara Falls (!) poured through the Bosporus Straits, transforming the pre-Black Sea freshwater lake into the present-day brackish (part-salt water, part-fresh water) Black Sea. Soon after this event, PIE culture appears in the Pontic Steppe.

This is a very controversial proposal called the Indo-Hittite Theory, but I have long supported it. The late Joseph Greenberg, one of the greatest historical linguists that ever lived, also supported it.

This theory holds that Indo-European has two branches, Indo-European proper and the Hittite branch. The Hittite branch is related to the other branch only in a binary fashion. There is good evidence for this.

The Anatolian languages, all of which are now extinct, are very strange and seem distant from the rest. The appear archaic and have retained many forms which seem to not be present on the rest of IE. My guess is these are archaic forms.

Anatolian lacks grammatical gender – masculine:feminine, an IE innovation spread through the family. Instead, it has an archaic noun class system called animate:inanimate. This is reminiscent of ancient Niger-Congo languages in Africa. In addition, the Anatolian vowel system is reduced (fewer vowels) and the case system is simpler.

Many basic IE vocabulary terms are simply missing in Anatolian. All of this debris tends to add up to the hypothesis of an ancient branch of the language family.

Tocharian is visible on the diagram as Italo-Celtic-Tocharian. This branch is extremely strange, since Tocharian was spoken way over in Asia near East Turkestan and Kyrgyzstan, and Celtic and Italic are spoken in the heart of Europe. This is the area where the mummies with blond hair and blue eyes have been found. Tocharian may have split as early as 6000 YBP.

The Tocharian language is also very ancient and strange and is only distantly related to the rest of IE. If anything, it seems to look somewhat like Anatolian.

A very ancient branch of IE also split off around this time. Known as Balkan or Paleo-Balkan, it may also have split off 6000 YBP. There were two major branches, Thracian and Illyro-Venetic. Thracian is extinct, and all that remains of Illyro-Venetic is Albanian, a very ancient IE tongue that is only distantly related to the rest of IE. Proto-Illyrian and Thracian split around 4200 YBP.

Here is a map of the Illyrian tribes before the Roman conquest. It is from this milieu that the Albanians emerged. The Albanian language is quite strange within IE and seems to have very ancient roots dating back to Proto-Paleo-Balkan from 6000 YBP.

Another very early split you can see in the chart is something called Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic. The Armeno-Hellenic branch probably split off 6000 YBP. The fact that Armenians and Greeks today still possibly retain a PIE appearance is also suggested by this early split. Only the Greek languages and Armenian remain of this family, as most of the family is extinct.

Proto-Hellenic may have split off around 5000 YBP, and Proto-Armenian may have split around 4500 YBP. The proto-Hellenics seem to have been related to the Indo-Iranians. This may be why a number of North Indians look like Greeks, Turks or Armenians.

Armenian and Hellenic are also strange IE branches that are only distantly related to the rest of IE.

The Italo-Celtic branch broke off as early as 5000 YBP.  Proto-Celtic split about 2800 YBP; the homeland is in Northern Austria. The Hallstatt Culture is associated with them. The Proto-Italics are dated to around 3500 YBP in Italy. Before that, the Italo-Celtic Homeland is thought to have been in southern and central Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The fact that Italics (Italians and related languages) and Celts share common roots shows how insane and stupid Nordicism is, as Nordicists say that Italians south of the Po are ‘non-Whites.’ It turns out that those greasy dagos and those blond and blue guys in dresses blowing pipes in the Highlands are the same folks after all, as they share common genetic roots in Austria 3500 YBP.

Proto-Germanic also dates far back, with pre-Proto-Germanic possibly being spoken 3800 YBP in northern Germany, Denmark and Southern Scandinavia ( map). The homeland of the pre-proto-Germanics is in Southern Sweden and Jutland. They may have settled this area as early as 5000 YBP. These speakers may have been speaking something called Balto-Slavo-Germanic, a group you can see on the tree above.

Proto-Germanic proper probably dates from the Jasdorf Culture. The homeland of the proto-Germanics was in northern Germany, around Schleswig-Holstein south into the Lower Elbe region in what is now Saxony-Anhalt and the Hanover area.

It also extended along the Baltic coast of Germany to about the Polish border, down into Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. The original center of the homeland was in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony.

Balto-Slavic is also a very ancient branch of IE. Lithuanian is an ancient IE language that is very conservative and has retained many ancient IE reflexes that have been lost in the rest of IE. Proto-Balto-Slavic probably split around 4000 YBP. Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic split apart about 3400 YBP. Map of the Balto-Slavic homeland. This homeland encompassed Western Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Poland.

Proto-Slavic, dating from 3400 YBP, seems to have its homeland in Northern and Western Ukraine and in Southern Belarus.

The proto-Baltic homeland dating from the same time frame is about the southern border region of Belarus around the Pinsk Marshes.

The rest of the splits, of Slavic, Italic, Celtic, Indian, Iranian and Germanic into their branches, are pretty well-documented, and all occur within the past 1500-3000 years.

Let us move to some interesting dilemmas about the Indo-Europeans. One is the distribution of R1a associated with the Indo-Europeans.

The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

The highest levels of this haplogroup are found in Eastern Europe in a narrow band from the Black Sea in the Ukraine through Poland to the Baltic Sea and in Northern India and areas to the northwest around the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, but that does not mean that these two groups are particularly closely related. Northern Indians are most closely related to Iranians and relatively distantly to Eastern Europeans.

The truth is that this haplogroup is only a signature of a split from around the Aryan-Greco homeland in the Pontic Steppe region discussed above. This left high levels of R1a in Eastern Europe and in north India. High levels in North India are not particularly notable but exist only due to a founder effect. Actually, the highest levels are not found in North India but in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and north Afghanistan.

The high levels found in North India have led some to assume incorrectly that the homeland of the R1a people was in that area, but this is not the case.

A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region between the Caspian and Black Seas.

R1b levels are highest in Spain and the Western British Isles. The launching point for the R1b seems to have been the Maykop Culture of 5500 YBP. From there, they spread all over Europe.

The Maykop Culture was an early PIE split that existed between the Taman Peninsula just east of the Crimea east to the Dagestan border in the area that includes part of Southern Russia east of the Crimea, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Chechnya in the Caucasus.

The center of the culture was around Maykop in Adygea (Circassia). The region is now inhabited by peoples of the Caucasus and is heavily Muslim.

An explanation:

The Proto-Indo-Europeans belonged both R1a and R1b. Their homeland was in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, in what is known as the Kurgan culture (7000-2200 BCE).

The presence of R1b in modern times between the Black Sea and the Caucasus hints at the Maykop culture (3500-2500 BCE) as their most plausible homeland, while the Eurasian steppes to the north were R1a territory. [...]

A comparison with the Indo-Iranian invasion of South Asia shows that 40% of the male lineages of northern India are R1a, but only 20% of the female lineages could be of Indo-European origin (H, J, K, T, U).

The impact of the Indo-Europeans was more severe in Europe because European society 4,000 years ago was less developed in terms of agriculture, technology (no bronze weapons) and population density than that of the Indus Valley civilization.

This is particularly true of the native Western European cultures where farming arrived much later than in the Balkans or central Europe. Greece was the most advanced of European societies and was the least affected in terms of haplogroup replacement.

Native European Y-DNA haplogroups (I1, I2a, I2b) also survived better in regions that were more difficult to reach or less hospitable, like Scandinavia, Brittany, Sardinia or the Dinaric Alps[...]

The eastern branch of the R1a steppe people was the Andronovo culture (2300-1000 BCE), around modern Kazakhstan, which correspond to the Indo-Iranian branch of languages. Their migration to the south have resulted in high R1a frequencies in southern Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent.

The highest frequency of R1a (about 65%) is reached in a cluster around Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan. In India, 15 to 45% of the population is R1a, depending on the region and caste. Over 70% of the Brahmins (highest caste in Hinduism) belong to R1a1, due to a founder effect.

References

Pokorny, Julius. 1959, 2007. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Published on the Internet: Indo-European Language Revival Association.

Who Were The Ancient Romans?

This is an interesting question mostly because it would be academic and noncontroversial except that Nordicists have chosen to shove their hateful snouts into the matter and create a bunch of lies.

The proto-Italics, later to become the Romans in part, came from Austria 2900 YBP. No quite knows who Austrians were at that point racially, as Germanics don’t show up in Austria until late in the Roman Empire near the Fall.

A sector of the Nordicists have created a lie to disinherit the Italians of their claim to the Roman Empire. According to this lie, the ruling class of the Romans were pure Germanics, and the rabble/refuse were just a bunch of racially degenerated dagos. They enlist all sorts of nonsensical evidence in favor of this supposition, including looking at statues and paintings and whatnot.

The Nordicist notion stems from their incredulity that a bunch of no good wops could have created one of the greatest empires known to mankind.

It’s interesting that many Nazi racialist authors did not subscribe to the standard Nordicist lie of today. The Nazis were quite clear that the Italians of today were the descendants of the Romans. In fact, Nazi racial hierarchy placed Meds only slightly below Nordics on the racial scale. Both were seen as highly superior races, but the Nordics were seen as a bit better, as supremacists always have to put themselves on top.

Nazi theory held that both Meds and Nords had a lot of good and bad racial tendencies, and held that Meds were superior to Nords in many ways. In particular, the Meds were seen as one of the most, if not the most, creative race in modern times, or possibly ever.

The Nordicist distortion of today stems from the UK and the US. The US was settled by Northern Europeans and the Southern Europeans, including Italians, who immigrated starting 130 years ago were seen as highly inferior on a racial basis. Science has not born this claim out, but it remains a part of US founding stock culture, and it was a motivating factor being the restrictive 1925 Immigration Act.

I don’t know the UK racially very well, but I suspect that they have always looked down on the Continent in general, and probably the Southern Europeans in particular. Not when it comes to partying in Mallorca though I guess.

Anyway, the truth is that modern Nordicists have so distorted even Nazi Nordicism that most modern Nordicists would have probably been booted out of the Nazi Party at the time. I am not trying to romanticize the Nazis here, but in terms of racial science, they were correct in some ways. Contrary to popular nonsense, Nazis did not hold Jews to be inferior. Nazi racialism quite correctly recognized the superiority of the Jews. Instead, they just held that the Jews were evil.

The Nazis employed racialist academics who followed the army on their gruesome deeds. Over by the Caucasus, these academics undertook deep scientific studies that concluded that certain Jewish groups in that area were not racially Jewish, but instead were culturally Jewish. The Nazis were not as insane as everyone says, and they held by the findings of their scientists and saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews on that basis.

The pro-Meds have been battling the Nordicists about this for nearly a century now, and I support the Meds’ side of the argument. From Roman sources we get reports describing Romans in quite the same way as the peoples of Abruzzo to the Po would be described today. Germanics were described as blond, blue and very different looking than Romans.

The only difference between the Romans and the Abruzzo to Po Italians of today is that the people in this region are actually more Germanized today than they were under the Romans! To the South, there have been some changes, including a large injection of Arab, Phoenician, Spanish, Corsican, French (Norman), Greek and Albanian genes. This is most marked in Sicily.

One lie is that the Abruzzo to Po Italians have lots of Black blood in them. To the South, yes, there is some Black blood, but it is minimal. It is most prominent in Sicily at around 5%. From Abruzzo the Po, the % of Black blood is about the same as in Germany, if not less, at around 1.5%.

Academics have stayed out of the debate only to say that the ancient Romans were the same people as modern day Italians.

A similar lie was spread about Greece on the same basis. How could these dumbass Southern European inferiors have produced one of the greatest societies in history? It’s obviously not possible, so some mysterious Germanics must have infiltrated that rocky land to surreptitiously ruled over those swarthy inferiors. Once again, statues and whatnot are enlisted in support of this, and Nordicists study art and statues with magnifying glasses claiming to see secret Master Race features in Greek art.

The Meds have gone at them again in this argument, and once again, I side with the Meds.

The Nordicist argument is curious. If Romans and Greeks were secret Master Race types, then obviously the central Italians and Greeks, as largely racially unchanged folks, are their descendants anyway. The argument becomes circular. The Nords try to say that the Central Italians and Greeks underwent some massive racial degeneration after the Falls, but there is no evidence for this.

As with Southern Italians, there seems to be some Black blood in the Greeks, but only about 5%. It appears to have gone in mostly during Ancient Greece, so the argument for racial degeneration doesn’t make sense. The Ancient Greeks were a little bit Black too.

Some Nordicists make a truly insane argument about Ancient Egypt which is almost as insane as the Afrocentric crap about Black Athena.

According to this, some Master Race White types created Egypt, then Egypt underwent racial degeneration with an infusion of Black blood and collapsed into the Hellish Cairo of today, trash dumps everywhere, mangy stray dogs in the streets, and rats about as big as the dogs scurrying through the open air markets.

Garbage in Naples. Descendants of the great Romans? Afraid so. How so? A historian might say that down through time, shit happens.

Not only that, but nothing works, and in order to get hooked up to the non-working system, you have to wait in line forever and pay off a bunch of lazy pricks.

Academics once again stay out of this one, except to say that they think there was continuity between Ancient and modern Egyptians. I saw one piece in the Journal of Physical Anthropology that compared genes of ancient Egyptians with those of modern Egyptians. Amazingly, racially, they were about the same at 91% Caucasian and 9% Black.

The truth is somewhat interesting. While the Afrocentrist notion must be discarded, it’s certainly true that at least historically, a bit of Black blood mixed with mostly White stock has produced some of the greatest societies the world has ever seen. At 90-95% Med Caucasian and 5-10% Ethiopic Black, a mixing bowl for the greatest civilizations man produced was created.

It’s difficult to come up with a theory to explain why this stock did so well, but possibly mixing a bit of one stock to a lot of another produces an excellent genetic set. Anyway, this is how animal and plant breeders have been operating for centuries. It would be surprising if humans were different.

Nice Map of the Roman Empire

Great map of the Roman Empire at its height with original Roman names of all of the provinces.

This is a very interesting map. In case you can’t read it very well, a better copy is here. I had no idea that the Romans conquered so far. They conquered “the known world” as it was said at the time. That wasn’t really true, as even the Romans admitted that they did not conquer the Germanic tribes in Germania Magna, Sarmatia, Aethiopia, Iberia, Arabia Felix, Caledonia, Hibernia, etc.

These names are instructive, as these are the places that the Romans did not conquer.

Hibernia was Ireland; to this day, Irish English, which can be very hard to understand, is called Hibernian English. Caledonia for Scotland makes no sense to me, but there is a province in the Solomon Islands in Melanesia called New Caledonia, FWIW.  Iberia for the Caucasus makes no sense either, as Iberia usually means the Spanish Peninsula nowadays.

All of Africa outside North Africa is simply referred to as Aethiopia. Arabia Felix is the Arabian Peninsula. Germania Major (Greater Germany) is the area of the fiercest German tribes; perhaps they were just too much hassle to conquer. Sarmatia is Russia; this means nothing to me.

Now for the provinces. Egypt is Aegyptus. Libya is Creta et Cyrene, apparently a combination province of Crete (Creta) and Cyrene (Libya). Israel/Palestine is Judea. Syria, Lebanon, etc. is Syria. This notion of Greater Syria lives on with Pan-Syrianists such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Iraq is Mesopotamia. Armenia is Armenia, but much larger than today. Bulgaria is Thracia. The regions of Western Turkey are familiar to me, but mean nothing anymore. Romania is Dacia.

The name of Dacia is important. Nordicists claim that some mysterious Northern European superior folks came down to Italy, conquered inferior greasy dagos, and became the ancient White Romans. Like most Nordicist crap, it’s a lie. The Romans, true, did not come from Italy. Instead they came from Dacia.

No one really knows who the Dacians were, but I doubt they were Germans. They probably looked dark like the Romanians of today. This group has also had some Scythian-type Ossetian/Iranian inputs 1600 years ago or so. So the Romans were Southern Europeans.

Italy was Italia, and Sicily was Sicilia. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, etc. were Dalmatia. This name lives on in the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia. Sardinia and Corsica retain their Roman names. Portugal is Lusitania, and Portuguese speaking nations today are called Lusophone regions. North Africa,  for some reason, is Mauritania – is this a reference to “Moors?” Western France was Aquitania – think Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Southern France was Norbonensis; there is a city called Narbonne in the region today. The Balearic Islands were called Baleares. Northern Greece was Macedonia. A region called Belgica covered northeastern France – think Belgium. The part of Germany known today as the Rhineland was conquered and referred as Germania Inferior and Superior.

The area in and around Switzerland and Southern Germany was referred to as Raetia. The branch of the Romance Language family that today contains Romansch is referred to as Rhaetian. The Southern Germans and Swiss have a large dose of “Roman” in them, and their languages have a Romance influence. I recently met a Bavarian man who looked for all the world like a Frenchman.

England and Wales are Brittania. This name lives in on the British nationalist phrase, “Rule Brittania.”

I left off a number of place names that mean nothing to me. There are also some cities there, but the names are very hard to read. Londonium is London. Salamanca is a now a region in Spain. Roma is Rome, and Syracuse is in Sicily. Carthaga is in Tunisia. Alexandria yet exists in Egypt. Caesarea was a city in northern Israel, now abandoned on the sand dunes. Thessalonika in Northern Greece still exists, as does Antiochia in Turkey (Antioch).

The legend of this map, as you can see, is in German. The shaded area of the Roman Empire is the Romanisches Reich, a nice touch.

Romanisches Reich it was.