The Sintashta chariot

Whilst we're talking about the Aryans in the taiga, I find that David Anthony's classic book is online now. Fatyanovo concerns page 15. Their land is there associated with the mediaeval Muscovy, as noted here. Abashevo shifts southeast along the Volga away from the Baltic toward Crimea, still bridging watersheds so - no real difference. Today I want to know what Hitler should have known: what use is the wheel up there.

We're all told about the Scythians' excellent horsemen and chariots. But we're dealing here with exactly the route Charles XII of Sweden took into the Russian heartland. The ground is covered in snow for a good part of the year and then mud, later on; and forested throughout. Anthony brings the chariot only in "late Abashevo" and suggests an import from early Sintashta. It is at Sintashta, across the Urals, that the chariot ... begin<s> to make sense.

Throughout all this time the Ukraine was still Indo-European having already ejected the ancestors to the Tochari toward the far northeast. Perhaps the Ukraine invented the chariot; perhaps the Tocharians' ancestors at Sintashta invented it, and it then got stolen by, among others, the invading Aryans from Abashevo.

The proto-Hungarians would, alongside moribund Afanasievo, have stayed north.

The orientalising of an Arab Kingdom

I don't talk much about Edward Said over here. Frankly in the period of my interests, which is the Syrian Late Antiquity, I don't have to. I see the Umayyads in the continuum of Eastern Christianity, and not all that East at that. It may however be fair to apply the Orientalist thesis to the Arab Mind itself, as the conquerors encountered their own Orient: Iran.

The 'Abbasid Revolution is cited as a temporal "watershed". At first, though, I doubt it had much effect. If you look into what the Khurasani revolution believed, it's heresy, top to bottom; it had no hope of achieving traxion west of the Euphrates. Caliph al-Saffah and then al-Mansur constituted a coup and then a reaction against the revolution. Their ideology was the same Umayyad / Shi'a Islam - just not run by the Umayyad or 'Alid families. From that perspective, you'll understand certain factors of the new regime's first decades: the renewed focus on the Byzantine frontier, the interference with Madinese fiqh, the flogging of Imam Malik. The 'Abbasids did move court to Iraq - but the fiqh in Iraq by then was hardly Aryan, and Basra was still a major city and effectively a Hijazi Arab colony. Ma'mar bin Rashid in the 140s / 760s represents, in snapshot, direct continuity with the Zubayrids eight decades earlier. Sufyan Thawri, staying in Basra until the 150s / 770s, maintained there the Umayyad tradition.

I think Harun al-Rashid in the late second / early ninth century is when we really start to see Iranian royal theory trickling back into Iraq. Here are Ibn al-Muqaffa's translation of the late Sasanian histor(ies), and the Letter of Tansar. The "Kalila" story from India.

Although I have a bias given I'm looking at the muhaddiths and Muslim jurists like Sufyan and Ma'mar. These trended reactionary and often despised Oriental flourish by name. Which is why I use them, because again I care about the earlier Umayyad era, for which they're among my windows. For the 'Abbasid era and Iranian shu'ubiya, they're tangential... like the Talmud on contemporary Sasanian life and on Christian belief.

CoVID-19000BC

Svante Päabo, our greatest Neander expert, has found with Hugo Zeberg that the Neanders did not suffer from CoVID-19. That's because modern populations with those genes contribute disproportionately to the 5% CFR.

Those Neander-legacy genes went Under Selection in Europe, in Borneo, and especially in northeast Asia. (I don't think we're told about America/Parias. Razib points out Africa is a different story.) Under Selection means, something killed off the breeders with the vulnerable genes and spared those with the resistant genes. These Neander genes didn't Undergo the Selection in India.

First, CoVID-2019AD is more like CoVID-19000BC.

Second, this bug hit populations which clustered together, for warmth (hunter-gatherers) and/or for security (Neolithic villagers). India was and is warm enough that people could live apart from each other, until the mass urbanisations of the Indian Middle Ages. India developed a whole purity / taboo society - evolving into caste - which assuredly protected the populace from diseases, longer. Some of these taboos might have developed in the south (AASI) first.

For those interested, the gene is rs10490770. Razib explains how to find it for yourself.

Fatyanovans were Scythian

Today we learnt about the founding of Old Muscovy north of Ukraine and east of the Baltics, in the form of the Fatyanovo[–Balanovo] culture. h/t hbdchick.

Fatyanovo was a farm culture like the Cucuteni Balkans, but they were different people. The old Balkan farmers were like Anatolians and Syrians. Fatyanovo were "corded ware" - the Battle Axe culture. So, already we knew they were IndoEuropean in language. The genetics show this dramatically: before Fatyanovo, the people there had the hunter-gatherer genetic and now they were Yamnaya.

Aryan, even: the males are R1a-M417 more exactly R1a2-Z93. This is now a North India marker.

The Milk Curtain

h/t HBDChick: Yoko Satta and Naoyuki Takahata, the C to T mutation at rs4988235.

The two say this SNP flipped long ago, probably in Ukraine, which date they don't constrain well (21000 - 3000 BC). The new gene underwent Hard Sweeps in the Late Bronze Age, 1600 BCish. They note an earlier G to A at rs182549, which "hitchhiked" along with the milkmaids.

The move to milk strengthened the steppe, keeping other populations from challenging them similarly to Vikings versus the Skraelings. But didn't make them all-powerful: for one thing, proximity to livestock exposed them to diseases, here looking at the smallpox family. Conversely, as the steppe moved more to milk, it didn't need the large towns as seen in Iraq or, for that matter, the Neolithic Balkans; I imagine the cowboys just needed market-camps, which could be seasonal. This meant that those large rat-infested towns died out... and that the steppe populations, themselves, might be more vulnerable to plague on the rare event some visited what towns were left. So the steppe and the farm didn't encroach on each other.

Something changed over the sixteenth century BC, to change the Balkan / northern Mediterranean diet. Thera?

Extractiones de Talmud

Translations are fascinating in their own right, especially hostile translations. In that light, let's look at the mid-13th century AD Extractiones de Talmud, in Latin of course. The Extractiones were, I think, used for King Louis' trial against the text, AD 1240.

The base text - Isaac Lamperlanés tells us - translated some basics, laying them out in the order of the Talmud itself. Around this time - AD 1239 - one Nicholas Donin was compiling his 35 articles, attacking the great book theme-by-theme. So the Extractiones got rearranged to bolster Donin's case; with additional material added in. That thematic edition, all agree, followed the trial. I am less sure about the original.

The thematic edition, in turn, got epitomised. Two copies of that survive, one from the middle 1300s AD on parchment (expensive!) the other on paper. The copyists, Isaac Lamperlanés must report, did a rotten job and the original wasn't all that great either.

In an irony, it appears that very little of any Latin version made an impact on later Christian / Jewish disputation. Lamperlanés notes that most Catholics who went against the Talmud did so by retranslating the relevant parts of existent Hebrew Talmuds extant in Italy and the Rheinland. Lamperlanés will allow Thibaud de Sézanne as the only exception, here using the thematic full Latin edition. The new "Latin Talmud" publishers would add the Barcelona Disputation of AD 1263. Nobody used the epitome.

Those publishers aren't restraining themselves to the Extractiones. They promise, also, to use Ramon Martí. He may have used the "official" Latin but he mainly based himself on the Aramaic - which he reproduces - along with his own translations.

In another irony, it may well be that "the Latin Talmud" in all its forms is of more use to Jews these days. It is a very early witness to the Talmud text among mediaeval European Jewry.

[Obvious title here]

Over the centuries of Maya urbanity, the reservoirs became toxic. The researchers say it was the cinnabar in the red paints. I'm sure the Maya were aware of boiling but that process doesn't transmute mercury into beef stew. Apparently the Blue-Green Algae was also here and cannot be boiled off (I actually didn't know this).

It likely wouldn't have taken the Maya nobility all that long to figure out the source of the local mad hatters, and to say [the obvious]. On conditions of siege, however, people were going to drink this water anyway for lack of options. Also there's use of it for irrigation, or for flushing waste downstream for that NEXT city to deal with.

This phenomenon of a toxic capital parallels the experience of Rome, which is awful in summers. Their emperors moved to Milan or just... their army camps. With the lowland Maya, we are aware of later ahauob being figureheads in front of noble oligarchs, or being replaced by foreigners. Before the cities were simply abandoned.

The southern highlands did better, having better access to water - which also meant they could thrive without lowland-Maya civilisational complexity. The north did okay too, perhaps because they used a different model to store water, and also they had cenotes to flush away the waste.