Re: Scythian-Skudra-Sogdian-Saka

>Date:         Wed, 23 Aug 2000 00:16:01 GMT
>Sender: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>From: Leo Caesius <leo_caesius@...>
>Subject:      Scythian-Skudra-Sogdian-Saka
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
[snip]

>I can't help but bring up an interesting theory which tries to explain
>Ashkenaz as an Old Iranian ethnic name.  I'm actually surprised that BP
>hasn't heard this one before.
>
>Oswald Szemerényi is the author of this one.
I've been taught to be wary of him...

[snip]

>He then suggests that Aškuzai, which might be rendered in Hebrew
>characters as ’škwz, might easily be corrupted to ’šknz (as nun and waw
>are very similar in many variants of the Hebrew script) and subsequently
>vocalized as Ashkenaz.  [snip]

>The rest of the article is dedicated to proving that the Scythians of the
>Greeks were the same as the Aškuzai of the Assyrians and the Sakas found
>in the Old Persian inscriptions.
I knew of the Scythians/Açkuzai/Sakas connexion, and hold it true, but the
further connexion with _Açkenaz_ was new to me!

>As I was familiar with Szemerényi's
>theories, my first images of Steg's "Greater Ashkenaz" were of an
>irredentist Neo-Scythia, a Wagnerian fantasy inhabited by hordes of
>blond-haired, blue-eyed Jews on horseback (something like Khazaria, had
>it survived to this day).
>
>What would be the limits of Greater Ashkenaz, if it were pinned to a map?
>Would it stretch from Cologne in the West to Birobidzhan in the East?
>With its own daughter colonies in the Catskills, of course.
In Lucus (my con-timeline -- if you know the cognates of this Latin
word you'll see the pun in the name-choice!) the Khazars did persist
into modern times.  For their present location in Lucus you must
however know that the main point of divergence between Here and There
is that the Arabs lost the battle at Mahavend in 642 CE.  The Arabic
expansion was diverted westward, Egypt and Coptic culture playing the
role in Arab-Islamic history which Persia holds Here.  They held
Syria for some time but soon lost North Syria (more or less modern
Syria+Lebanon Here) to Byzantium and South Syria to the Persians.
    Thus the main connexion between Arabia and Islamic Egypt was over
the Red Sea, thus also creating a south and south-east drive; in Lucus most
of coastal Africa except the Christian empire of Ethiopia and Nubia was
early Islamicized, as was Indonesia.  OTOH the South Asian divide There is
between Zoroastrian Hindustan and Brahmanic Bharat, there being more Muslim
influence along the east coast and in Bengal. More importantly the Arabic
westward drive didn't stop at the Atlantic coast: they learnt of the
existence of islands in the ocean and so Tarik -- Here conqueror of Spain
-- discovered the New World in the Khazaria became a Jewish buffer-state
between Christian Byzantium and Persia -- Later Russia when Constantinople
was taken by Zoroastrian Turks, altho in Lucus there remains to this day a
Basileus tôn Romeôn in Syracusa and a Despotes tôn Tzakoniôn in Peloponnesos.
    There as Here the Sephardic Jews were driven out of Spain in 1492, but
for partly different reasons: the Khalif in Kairo and the Christian
potentates both regarded the Jewish people as friendly disposed to their
common Persian enemies, who had been holding Jerusalem and Judaea for
centuries.  Eastward flight being harder to achieve the Iberian Jews took
ship westward to Almarevica (as the continent Tarik discovered was Hispano-
Latinized), establishing a Great Sepharad in south-east Vinlandia (Here:
North America).  Once there they converted the Cherokee, Chickasaw,
Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations, making these known to Lucus
history as The Five Judaic Tribes.
    In the Vorspiel to the Great Nordic War Tsar Peter the Great feared on
good grounds that the Khazar Khaghan would rather side with his enemies (as
Mazepa in fact did Here).  His strategem: granting the Khazars safe-passage
through Siberia to Almarevica in order to join the prosperous Jewish
nations there.  Since the buffer-state rôle of Khazaria had become an
uneasy one in later centuries the offer was accepted by Davyd, son of
the Khaghan Yakav, and the greater part of the people, who were still
semi-nomadic rather than settled in cities and villages.  Leaving the
aged Khaghan and one fifth of the people behind they set out east,
two years later reaching the Pacific coast, where they were received
by Dutch ships hired by Jewish merchants of Amsterdam with Great
Sephardian money.
    They eventually landed in what is Here Oregon and trekked inland
guided by Judaic Tribes people who had come with the ships via
Amsterdam.  As fate would have it they found the northern Plains Indigenes
engaged in a war with more southerly tribes who had become Muslim under the
influence of the Sunni sultanate of Meyshiku.  The steppe warriors threw
their lot in the balance, eventually resulting in the conversion of some
portions of their new allied nations.  Themselves they took up residence in
the southern Plains area, from where they had driven away the
"ghazi`s".  Khazarian Judaism was perhaps more easily integrated with
Plains culture than the Spanish-derived variety would have been, just as
Judaism and their own Turkic culture had once been integrated into each
other; e.g. such things as the Sun Dance remained, reinterpreted as to its
religious content.  About the Lucus Khazars there is a saying among their
co-religionists: "We will stand naked before the Lord, but the Khazars will
at least have their horses with them", since the sacrifice of a horse at a
man's burial had been integrated into their Judaism.
    Alas there was a Trail of Tears in Lucus too: Christian expansionism
lead to a war between 1860-65 CE which ended with the conquest of Great
Sepharad, its population moving to "the Khazar side if the
Mississippi".  But that's another story.


/BP 8^)>
--
  B.Philip Jonsson mailto:bpX@netg.se mailto:melrochX@mail.com (delete X)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Truth, Sir, is a cow which will give [skeptics] no more milk,
and so they are gone to milk the bull."
                                    -- Sam. Johnson (no rel. ;)