Re: Brithenig

At 14:33 04.4.2000 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> > Constantinople does eventually fall to the
> > Turks, but instead of turning the Hagia Sophia into a Mosque they install a
> > sapling of the Adur Bursen-Mihr there!
>
>What would that be?  I am not familiar with Turkish religion from the
>*jahiliyyah* "period of ignorance".
The Adur Bursen-Mihr was (and There it still is) one of the three most holy
fires of Sassanian Persia.  (The word I was after was "scion", BTW, not
"sapling"!)  Since Persia There wasn't converted to Islam it remained
Zoroastrian.  In the middle of the 9th century CE Shah Jazdegird V went to
war against the Uighur empire in Central Asia, nominally because he
considered their Manichaean religion as heretic Zoroastrianism.  The
eventual outcome was a number of variously Zoroastrian or
Nestorian-Christian Turkic states in Central Asia.  The impact of the
Mongol conquest was somewhat greater There than Here, in that a somewhat
greater area of Central Asia, plus Siberia, became Mongol-speaking and
Buddhist.  The western Mongols who beset Russia were mostly Nestorians
There, but that didn't mean that their relations with the Orthodox Russians
was any better -- rather the contrary!   Another difference between Here
and There is that the Khazars preserve their ethnic identity and Judaic
religion to this day.  Several Algonquian tribes of Eastern Vinlandia also
were converted to Judaism by Sephardim who emigrated -- voluntarily -- from
Spain in the 13th century CE.  Like the Khazars of the Old World they found
themselves pressed by Arabs and Islamized Arawaks pressing north from the
Caribbean while converting the tribes of what Here is South-Western US, and
the likewise imperialist Iroquois who had been Christianized by the Norse,
English and Basque.  The Basque language still has a sizable presence in
Vinlandia, though most of the speakers are not of Old World descent.




/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto:bpj@...>bpj@netg.se
<mailto:melroch@...>melroch@my-deja.com
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