xssve
Posts: 3589
Joined: 10/10/2009 Status: offline
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quote:
Might be surprising but it may be that the Irish aren't Celtic after all. Its not said very openly by archaeologists but no evidence was found for the assumed Celtic invasion of Ireland. In fact one typically finds more Celtic artefacts in one of the many Celtic grave yards in Europe than has been found in the entire country. The association with the Celts may be cultural instead. There were a lot of trading routes into mainland Europe during the Iron Age so their culture and religion may have spread a distance across the water... Well, pretty much all Celts on that island, other than the Picts about whom we know less than the Celts, at least until Caesar showed up, the Normans invaded, the Saxons invaded, etc., etc. No telling, there were a lot of different tribes of Celts, and I'm not sure it was really a nationality, more of a culture, and quite likely, the result of even earlier unrecorded invasions, emigrations, etc., it was on both sides of the channel, so it wasn't an isolated culture. It's kind of surprising, we tend to think of bronze age and earlier cultures as provincial, but they really got around, there was a Jewish community in Ireland at the time of Jesus. The whole thing of people staying in one place all the time is actually a more modern phenomena, an economic thing that happened over the last 500 or so years of feudal statism, earlier peoples were a lot more nomadic - the Swiss are like that, they're like a mix of a dozen different nationalities, probably even a few descendents of Hannibal's army. I mean we're an Indo-European culture, The Black Irish are actually the descendents of the survivors of he Spanish Armada, The Spanish are the descendents of the Visigoths, which is where they ended up after sacking Rome, and they trace their migrations back to Iran originally - so are they Irish or Iranian? You see the problem with ethnography there, there is no such thing as a "pure" race, most of out differences are cultural, not genetic. The whole idea of this division between European culture and the rest of the world is a patently political construct, if anything, Europe is the worlds original melting pot, most of our culture is borrowed from cultures from all around he Mediterranean. I mean, we didn't invent civilization, technically, it was the Iraqis.
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