europe

"“The same conclusion of the existence of foreigners is also indicated by the use of many exotic and prestigious objects, often made of silver. This metal was not readily available in EBA Thrace. We can also note that tin-bronzes may have arrived into this region via Anatolia rather than Europe […] and it is difficult to imagine how such a quantity and quality, and the imaginations and customs behind these, can be transferred to Europe without having individuals or groups of people carrying them, and the infrastructure to organise their transport and wider distribution” “There can be no doubt that the driving force behind this influx of goods and people is enhanced exchange and organised trade, and it is in no way an accident that concurrently the largest exchange network the world had seen up until then arrived at its peak. This network was centred in southern Mesopotamia, a region that had been fully urbanised for at least a millennium, and it stretched from as far away as western India on one side to southeast Europe on the other, and it also incorporated large parts of Central Asia”"

"While the first half of the 3rd millennium BC in Thrace is characterised by a (comparatively) moderate level of social and economic complexity and the ideological dominance of pastoral tribes of a north-Pontic origin, there is a real explosion in complexity in the period between 2400 and 2000 BC and the region becomes increasingly included within a much wider network that is now dominated by frequent and highly visible exchange and trade, and new forms of prestige and status expression."

"My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire."

"A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had."

"About Perth, there was a countrie Sae waste, that wonder wes to see; For intill well-great space thereby, Wes nother house left, nor herb'ry. Of deer there was then sic foison That they wold near come to the town. Sae great default was near that stead That many were in hunger dead. A carle they said was near ther by, That wold set settis commonly, Children and women for to slay, And swains that he might over-ta: And ate them all that he get might: Chrysten Cleek till name be hight. That sa'ry life continued he, While waste but folk was the countrie."

"Excavations in the Chancelade quarries, where it will be remembered a landslip occurred last October burying a number of workmen, have been earned on ever since for the purpose of unearthing the bodies. For many days after the slip was believed to have been smothered, the workers smoke was seen to issue from the ruins. Soldiers and quarrymen, directed by a party of engineers, worked day and night in hopes of taking the men out alive. Ever since the work has proceeded, but of late the endeavors were not so vigorously plied. The diggers have now reached the actual spot where the men were engaged at the time of the accident, and on penetrating into a gallery cut in the stone the explorers discovered the body of a young man lying on the ground. Photographs taken of the position show that a dreadful state of affairs must have come about when the men uncrushed found themselves entombed. It appears undoubted that some of the men tried to prolong their lives by killing and eating their companions in misfortune. A few solitary arms and limbs have been picked up in their prison, and everything points to the fact that cannibalism was resorted to. The young man whose body was unmutilated seems to have survived the others, and to have died of hunger."

"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."

"Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: "In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children." ... People ate their own relatives – often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet... Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh."

"Such suffering from hunger grew up around these cities that the Christians, in the face of the scarcity about which you have heard, did not fear to eat – wicked to say, much less to do – the bodies, cooked in fire, not only of the Saracens or Turks they had killed, but also of the dogs that they had caught."

"The fact is that in Europe, faced with the choice between human rights and gas, many politicians pick gas."

"Although the Brahmans of India belong to the same family, the Aryan or Indo-European family, which civilized the whole of Europe, the two great branches of that primitive race were kept asunder for centuries after their first separation. The mainstream of the Aryan nations has always flowed towards the northwest. No historian can tell us by what impulse those adventurous Nomads were driven on through Asia towards the isles and shores of Europe. The first start of this world-wide migration belongs to a period far beyond the reach of documentary history; to times when the soil of Europe had not been trodden by either Celts, Germans, Slavonians, Romans, or Greeks."

"It is presumptuous to say the least to claim that the migratory routes traveled by the Indo-Europeans from their original Homeland have now been clearly traced."

"The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles’ migration of the tribes themselves."

"What does this prove? That proto-Indo-Iranian broke away before proto-Anatolian, since the latter family has the PIE term for lion and wine while the former did not? Or does it prove my Leophobic Secondary Pontic Steppe-Anatolian Sequential Dispersion theory, according to which, Anatolian speakers broke away from PIE due to the sheer monotonous boredom of the Steppes and moved through the Balkans to Anatolia, where they encountered lions (note that Luwian includes the root for ‘lion’). When the rump of PIE subsequently broke up because even the excitement of a slow moving, non-steerable cart was no match for the tedium of the Steppes, the non-drinking, killjoy proto-Indo-Iranians went east into the deserts of Central Asia and only lightened up after they discovered soma, while the remainder of PIE went on vacation to Anatolia to visit their long-lost relatives who introduced them to lions, albeit with this proving such a traumatic experience that they immediately fled to Europe and never went back. You may consider the above to be unsubstantiated ‘just-so’ balderdash, and you would be welcome to think so, but I would point out that it is no more simple-minded than the following: “they might have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the Western Pontic steppes to south-eastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail hard to find”, which constitutes Anthony’s own double hand-waving non-explanation of how Greek spread from the ‘wrong’ side of the Pontic Steppes to Greece. Once you adopt his ‘se non è vero è ben trovato’ standard of empirical evidence based on duff linguistic archaeology you can argue for just about anything."

"Europeans today are a mixture of three very different ancestral populations: hunter-gatherers, first farmers, and a population with eastern affinities that was not yet present in Europe at the time of the first farmers. It was unclear when and how this eastern component arrived in Europe... ‘When we first looked at the new data, it was a Eureka moment’ ... ‘The eastern ancestry was present in every single sample starting at around 4,500 years ago, and absent in every single one before that time.’"

"The archaeological correlates become some sort of labels or tags that one may employ in order to trace the supposed Indo-European populations. But, in fact, very little of the illustrative archaeological material actually exhibits specific Indo-European or Indo-Iranian traits; a question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?"

"In the current state of knowledge, none of the hypotheses forwarded can be seriously demonstrated... There is in fact no evidence for the gradual progression of an entire material culture from the shores of the Black Sea to those of the Atlantic or the Ganges—unless, of course, we drastically force the data."

"The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south."

"The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens."

"Our knowledge of these migrations [that broke PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about them."

"But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic infusion of Yamna [= Pontic] cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe."

"We do not find any evidence for the diffusion of the entire material culture of the steppes to those regions where historically attested Indo-European languages were spoken"

"Indo-European: a term borrowed from comparative linguistics and most usually used to designate the blond North-European race (Homo europaeus), but which may provoke confusion since in most of these regions, originally settled by the North-Europeans, race and language have not overlapped for some time due to the bastardization (Bastardierung) of the Northern European speakers of Indo-European languages."

"We should not be misled by this into thinking that these scholars were anti-racist. They did not have to rely on a theory of race as such, for they had their own global theory that was fully able to inferiorize the languages (and by implication the cultures) of the other purely on linguistic grounds. Max Müller's linguistic taxonomy was a Hegelian hierarchy in which . . . cultural geography [becomes] the same as world history."

"To be sure, neither Jones nor anyone else was wrong to perceive strong and systematic similarities among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the rest. The question is what one makes of these similarities, and one steps onto a slippery slope whenever analysis moves from the descriptive to the historic plane of linguistics. In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken. For all of this, need it be said, there is no sound evidentiary warrant."

"Among the Western scholars who take part today in the debates on the Indo-Europeans, I know some whose erudition is not enough to compensate for the falsity of mind and others whose outdated erudition serves to perpetuate theses the lightness or impossibility of which they have been shown a hundred times."

"These prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were, to use the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think with," rather than because they were meaningful historical actors."

"The scholarship about the Indo-Europeans, their culture, and their religion has been an attempt to create new categories of thought, new identities, and thereby a future different from the one that seemed to be prescribed."

"Skepticism in scholarly circles grew rapidly after 1880. The obvious impossibility of actually locating the Aryan homeland; the increasing complexity of the problem with every addition to our knowledge of prehistoric cultures; the even more remote possibility of ever learning anything conclusive regarding the traits of the mythical "original Aryans"; the increasing realization that all the historical peoples were much mixed in blood and that the role of a particular race in a great melange of races, though easy to exaggerate, is impossible to determine, the ridiculous and humiliating spectacle of eminent scholars subordinating their interests in truth to the inflation of racial and national pride—all these and many other reasons led scholars to declare either that the Aryan doctrine was a figment of the professional imagination or that it was incapable of clarification because the crucial evidence was lost, apparently forever."

"The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future."

"The difficulties besetting the larger IE issue are due, I think, to the fact that linguists continue to arrogate to themselves the competence of these other disciplines. Just as experts from other sciences do not intervene in linguistics, so linguists should not tell historians, archaeologists et al what to do or how to do it just because the latter’s finds are at variance with linguistic wishes."

"Indo-European research has, in many ways, been an attempt to write the origin narrative of the bourgeois class — a narrative that, by talking about how things originally were, has sanctioned a certain kind of behavior, idealized a certain type of person, and affirmed certain feelings. Certainly, there have been some scholars who have not identified themselves with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but they are few."

"The westward expansion of the Kurgan culture has been mapped with some degree of accuracy: “If an archaeologist is set the problem of examining the archaeological record for a cultural horizon that is both suitably early and of reasonable uniformity to postulate as the common prehistoric ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy, then the history of research indicates that the candidate will normally be the Corded Ware culture. At about 3200-2300 BC this Corded Ware horizon is sufficiently early to predate the emergence of any of the specific proto-languages. In addition, it is universally accepted as the common component if not the very basis of the later Bronze Age cultures that are specifically identified with the different proto-languages. Furthermore, its geographical distribution from Holland and Switzerland on the west across northern and central Europe to the upper Volga and middle Dniepr encompasses all those areas which [have been] assigned as the “homelands” of these European proto-languages.”"

"[T]here is no direct evidence for the culture of the Indo-Europeans, with the result that researchers have used their imagination to a very high degree. It is only with the help of methodologically problematic linguistic and archaeological theories that they have been able to chisel an Indo-European culture into being."

"It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific outlook, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology."

"'Germanism' arose amidst the peculiar political condition of nineteenth century Germany. . . . it has become the political shibboleth of the occidental nations."

"And East and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, To broaden into boundless day."

"India seen as a mirror image of the West appears otherworldly, fatalistic, non-egalitarian. It is as though we would be less ourselves, less this-worldly, masterful, egalitarian and individualistic if Indians were less what they are."

"… The deepest opposition [between the West and India] rests on the fact that the fundamental evidence of the West, whether Christian or atheist, is death, whatever meaning the West gives to it, whereas India’s fundamental evidence is the infinite of life in the infinite of time: “Who could kill immortality?”"

"...that the gods determined that the place where a man who makes a sacrifice is to be found is the east. Such a man, the text says directly, is in the east, but verse 4 says that in the west is a miser who lets nothing come of it and a rich man who gives no gifts. ... "In the west are the ill-wishers whose horses are badly harnessed; in the east are those who are here for giving, who give a variety of gifts," i.e. the misers who have given bad horses are to be in the extreme west, the region of the sunset, thus of darkness and therefore of raksas, while the generous are to be in the east, the region of the sunrise, thus in the eternal light, which is what 10, 107,2 says. So 7,6,3 is to be translated quite literally: "He (Agni), the Eastern One, has made those who do not make sacrifices into Westerners," i.e. he, the bright one, has plunged them into deep darkness."

"The dharmic traditions do not transmit knowledge, values and experience by cultivating a collective and absolute historical identity in the Judeo-Christian sense. Instead, the aspirant is free to start afresh and tap into his potential for discovering the ultimate reality in the here and now. .... The Abrahamic traditions tend to focus outward; the dharmic ones, inward. The difference between observing historical mandates and discovering the structures of consciousness is stark. ... The history-centric worldview results in synthetic unity, not integral unity."

"The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries what are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving."

"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.""

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!"

"Whoever has done or willed too much, let him drink from this deep cup a long draught of life and youth … Everything is narrow in the West—Greece is small and I stifle; Judea is dry and I pant. Let me look a toward lofty Asia, the profound East for a little while. There lies my great poem. [The Ramayana] as vast as the Indian Ocean, blessed, gilded with the sun, the book of divine harmony wherein is no dissonance. A serene peace reigns there, and in the midst of conflict an infinite sweetness, a boundless fraternity, which spreads over all living things, an ocean without bottom or bound, of love, of pity, of clemency."

"Simply because scientific thought realized a spectacular breakthrough in the West, people speak of "rational Western" and "non-rational Eastern", as if great strides in scientific thought (even in material sciences) had not been made in India and China, as if the sobre scientific approach was not far more developed in Eastern spiritual methods, and as if the dominant religion of the West were not intrinsically irrational in its basic assumptions."

"The West inclines to exclusivism, the East to syncretism. The view that salvation is only possible within the visible Church – a view expressly rejected by the Catholic Church – has been sustained by missionaries and eminent theologians even today; such blindness for the spiritual riches of the East, for its mystical depth and intuition of the transparence of the cosmos to higher Realities, such blindness always implies a blindness for some basic aspects of Christianity itself. The East is tempted by the opposite extreme, syncretism; it consists in wrongly equating biblical values with Eastern religious categories. Such universalism is undoubtedly more tolerant, less violent than Western Exclusivism, but equally blind to the specific inner visage of Christianity and other biblical spiritualities."

"Following such fractured leadership, Europe’s oldest dividing line, roughly east and west of the Elbe/Danube, is re-emerging. The nations to its east are drifting away from the liberal values entrenched in half a century of union, and are moving in the direction of nationalism and autocracy. Relations with Putin’s Russia have reverted to the belligerence and rhetoric of the cold war. It seems Europe never learns."

"Characteristic of the Semitic religions are features such as a historically attested teacher or prophet, a sacred book, a geographically identifiable location for its beginnings, an ecclesiastical infrastructure and the conversion of large numbers of people to the religion-all characteristics which are largely irrelevant to the various manifestations of Hinduism until recent times. Thus instead of emphasizing the fact that the religious experience of Indian civilization and of religious sects which are bunched together under the label of ‘Hindu’ are distinctively different from that of the Semitic, attempts are being made to find parallels with the Semitic religions as if these parallels are necessary to the future of Hinduism. (…)"

"People are fed up with the criminality and the taxes they have to pay, which are the result of the islamisation of The Netherlands."