The Greek God Zeus from Classical Antiquity, found at Crete. In this bronze plate you can see Zeus with Asian appearance holding what seems to be a reptile (likely a crocodile) over his head, there is a animal (likely a lion) near his feet and on each side there are two angel like figures with wings and drums.
Ancient Indo-Greeks
Ancient Greek Minoan Snake Goddess Face Crete, Kossos, Bronze age. Exhibited in Boston.
Ancient Indo-Greek-Romans of the Roman Empire
The Western and the younger Eastern Roman Empire were definitivly not the same, even if the names are confusing them as such in the history.
In the article by Tenney Frank (scroll down) you can see how the history of Europe was skewed and constructed around racist assumptions, likely this tradition started with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Tenney Franks (1916) writes for instance the following:
questions of Roman history .... It has at
least convinced me that Juvenal and Tacitus were not exaggerating.
It is probable that when these men wrote a very small percentage of
the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed
Italian descent. By far the larger part - perhaps ninety per cent -
had Oriental blood in their veins".
Read the chapter "Oriental Cults in the West", page 158. Pictures from Roman Antiquity are from The Cambridge ancient history (1923) by Bury et al. 1923.
The Western Roman Empire was built on Indo-Greek-Roman traditions. They had many Gods, not one dictating God. One of the main factors for the fall of The Western Roman Empire was the spread of Christianity from Judea creating an inward pressure within the Western Empire. Christianity met resistance in western Europe, but flourished in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.
Red: Western Roman Empire. Violet: Eastern Roman Empire (later Byzantine). Map by Nihad Hamzic, 2007, Wikimedia Commons. Greece became later part of the Eastern Roman Empire.
As illustrated in this map the Vandals that became part of the Eastern Roman Empire attacked the Western Roman Empire from Carthage in Tunisia in the late 5th Century CE.
Christian migrations to western Europe started with the Vandals from the Eastern Roman Empire (later called Byzantine) and after the fall of the Western Empire.
Christianization: Persecution of Paulicians by Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire) in 843 CE. The picture is from 12th - 13th Century
The eastern Roman Empire survived about 1000 years longer than the western part. However the mass migrations by agriculturists to western Europe from the Eastern part of the Roman Empire came after the spread of Islam and in particular after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire in 1299. The Ottoman empire lasted from 1299 to 1923: Expansion of the Ottoman Empire from 1300 - 1923.
Here are a few old photos of people from the Middle Eastern Area: Middle Eastern people 1, Middle Eastern people 2, and Middle Eastern people 3.
Old photos of the Steppe People: Steppe people 1, Steppe people 2, Steppe people 3 and Steppe people 4.
Old photos of People of Turkey: Turk people 1, Turkey people 2, Turkey people 3, Turkey people 4, Turkey 5, Turkey people 6 and Turkey people 7.
If you wonder about the origin about relatively old Nordic languages for instance “Gammelnorsk”, I suggest that this language came to Norway with these medieval agricultural migrations from the areas around the Black Sea and Eastern Europe. I will in a future blog support this suggestion with the migration of some place names to the Nordic. For instance the placename "Turk" are found in southern Norway, southern Sweden and southern Finland.
The Christians are like the Muslims sons of Abram or Abraham, with this myth they did justify their perspective - that they have the right to take the land of others: Abraham
At least one of these ancient lands (e.g. Hittites) became a part of the Eastern Roman Empire. The authorization God was supposed to have given Abraham - the right to expropriate foreign lands - has since then been tremendously exceeded by the "sons of Abraham".
The early Christians were agriculturists in the Eastern Roman Empire, an empire that included the Middle East. In order to understand and explain the Racist history of Europe one will need to dig into this old history and keep in mind when history was beeing written and by whom (i.e. about 1500 CE and later).
In the following article you can see an example on how historians have been constructing the racial antagonism of Europe.
American Historical Review, Volume XXI, July 1916, number 4, page 689 - 708. "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire" by Professor Tenney Frank.
From page 705 to 708:
"This Orientalizing of Rome's populace has a more important
bearing than is usually accorded it upon the larger question of why
the spirit and acts of imperial Rome are totally different from those
of the republic, if indeed racial characteristics are not wholly a
myth. There is to-day a healthy activity in the study of the econoiuic
factors—unscientific finance, fiscal agriculture, inadequate
support of industry and commerce, etc.—that contributed to Rome's
decline. But what lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such
causes of Rome's disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent,
the fact that the people who built Rome had given way to a
different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of
foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political
stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual diminution of the
stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities.
It would be wholly unfair to pass judgment upon the native qualities
of the Orientals without a further study, or to accept the selfcomplacent
slurs of the Romans, who, ignoring certain imaginative
and artistic qualities, chose only to see in them unprincipled and
servile egoists. We may even admit that had the new races had
time to amalgamate and attain a political consciousness, a more brilliant
and versatile civilization might have come to birth.
That,however, is not the question. It is apparent that at least the pohtical
and moral qualities which counted most in the building of the Italian
federation, the army organization, the provincial administrative system
of the republic, were the qualities most needed in holding the
empire together. And however brilliant the endowment of the new
citizens, these qualities they lacked. The Trimalchios of the empire
were often shrewd and daring business men, but their first and obvious
task apparently was to climb by the ladder of quick profits to
a social position in which their children with Romanized names could
comfortably proceed to forget their forebears. The possession of
wealth did not, as in the republic, suggest certain duties toward the
commonwealth. Narcissus and Pallas might be sagacious politicians,
but they were not expected to be statesmen concerned with
the continuity of the mos majorum. And when, on reading Tacitus,
we are amazed at the new servility of Scipios and Messalas, we must
recall that these scattered inheritors of the old aristocratic ideals
liail at their back only an alien rabble of ex-slaves, to whom they
would have appealed in vain for a return to ancestral ideas of law
and order. They had little choice between servility and suicide, and
not a few chose the latter.
It would be illuminating by way of illustration of this change to
study the spread of the mystery religions. Cumont seems to think
that these cults won many converts among all classes in the West.
Toutain, skeptical on this point, assigns not a little of the new religious
activity to the rather formal influence of the court at Rome.
Dobschiitz, a more orthodox churchman, seems to see in the spread
of these cults the pervasion of a new and deeper religious spirit,
which, in some mystical way, was preparing the old world for Christianity.
But is not the success of the cults in great measure an
expression of the religious feelings of the new people themselves?
And if it is, may it not be that Occidentals who are actually of
Oriental extraction, men of more emotional nature, are simply finding
in these cults the satisfaction that, after long deprivation, their
temperaments naturally required? When a senator, dignified by
the name of M. Aurelius Victor, is found among the votaries of
Mithras in the later empire, it may well be that he is the greatgrandson
of some child kidnapped in Parthia and sold on the block
at Rome. Toutain has proved, I think, that in the northern and
western provinces the only Oriental cult that took root at all among
the real natives was that of Magna Mater, and this goddess, whose
cult was directed by the urban priestly board, had had the advantage
of centuries of a rather accidental recognition by the Roman state.
In the western provinces, the Syrian and Egyptian gods were worshipped
chiefly by people who seem not to be native to the soil.
The Mithraic worshippers in these provinces were, for the most part,
soldiers recruited or formerly stationed in the East, and Orientals
who, by way of commerce or the slave-market, had come to live in
the West. From the centres where such people lived .the cult
spread but very slowly.
It would hardly be worth while to attempt any conclusion for
the city of Rome, since, as we have seen, the whole stock there had
so changed that fair comparisons would be well-nigh unattainable ;
but the Po valley, that is Cisalpine Gaul, which preserved its Occidental
aspect better than any other part of Italy, might yield usable
data. For this region nearly one hundred devotees of Oriental gods
are recorded in the fifth volume of CIL., and, as soldiers and Roman
officers are not numerous there, the worshippers may be assumed to
represent a normal average for the community. Among them I find
only twelve who are actually recorded as slaves or freedmen, but
upon examination of the names, more than four-fifths seem, after
all, to belong to foreign stock. Nearly half have Greek names.
Several are scv'iri Aitgustalcs, and, therefore, probably libcrti ; and
names like Publicius, Verna, Veronius (at Verona), tell the same
tale. Finally, there are several imperial gentile names—Claudius,
Flavins, Ulpius, Aelius, etc.—which, when found among such people,,
suggest that the Roman nomenclature is a recent acquisition. There
is a residue of only some twelve names the antecedents of which remain
undefined. This seems to me to be a fairly typical situation,
and not without significance. In short, the mystery cults permeated
the city, Italy, and the western provinces only to such an extent as
the city and Italy and the provinces were permeated by the stock
that had created those religions.
At Rome, Magna Mater was introduced for political reasons
during the Punic War, when the city was still Italian. The rites
proved to be shocking to the unemotional westerner, who worshipped
the staid patrician called Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and w^ere locked
in behind a wall. As the urban populace began to change, however,
new rites clamored for admittance, for, as a senator in Nero's days
says,^' " Nationes in familiis habemus, quibus diversi ritus, externa
sacra." And as the populace enforced their demands upon the emperor
for paueiii ct circcnscs, so they also secured recognition for
their externa sacra. One after another of the emperors gained
popularity with the rabble by erecting a shrine to some foreign Baal,
or a statue to Isis in his chapel, in much the same way that our cities
are lining their park drives with tributes to Garibaldi, Pulaski, and
who knows what -vitch. Finally, in the third and fourth centuries,
when even the aristocracy at Rome was almost completely foreign,
these Eastern cults, rather than those of old Rome, became the centres
of "patrician" opposition to Christianity. In other words, the
western invasion of the mystery cults is hardly a miraculous conversion
of the even-tempered, practical-minded Indo-European to an
orgiastic emotionalism, foreign to his nature. These religions came
with their peoples, and in so far as they gained new converts, they
attracted for the most part people of Oriental extraction who had
temporarily fallen away from native ways in the western world.
Christianity, which contained enough Oriental mysticism to appeal
to the vast herd of Easterners in the West, and enough Hellenic
sanity to captivate the rationalistic Westerner, found, even if one
reckons only with social forces, the most congenial soil for growth
in the conglomeration of Eurojieans, Asiatics, and Africans that
filled the western Roman Empire in the second century.
This is but one illustration. But it is offered in the hope that a
more thorough study of the race question may be made in conjunction
with economic and political questions before any attempt is
made finally to estimate the factors at work in the change of temper
of imperial Rome.
Tenney Frank.
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