Nehustan
Well-Known Member
There is without doubt much that has be written about the 'Aryan' peoples of Europe. It is commonly thought that the inhabitants of Northern Europe migrated from the Asia, and thus they are termed as part of the Indo-European family, with lingusitics tracing Germanic languages as derivitive of sanskrit. There is however a school which traces the Celtic languages and thus Proto-Celtic specifically 'Insular Celtic' as not being linked to Indo-European, and it has been mooted as closer to the languages of North Africa and the Levant, with rather than Celtic culture descending south through Iberia (i.e. Galicia), migrating North through Iberia. If one ignores the Adam story for a moment and considers the palaeoanthropological evidence for an african origin for H. sapiens and the subsequent migration, it is more likely that the original inhabitants of Northern Europe came from North Africa than via Southern Asia. C19th popular literature, tho' not strictly academic anthropology, speaks of root races e.g. Madame Blavatsky's book The Secret Doctrine, in which the root race from which Aryans descend is known as the Hyperborean. Hyperboreas is in itself an intereresting term, it is a Greek word meaning 'beyond the north', Hyperborei. Greek literature speaks of lands 'beyond the north' often also referring to 'the happy isles'. When one looks at Tacitus' work 'Germania et Agricolae' it is oft accompanied by Ptolemy's map of the British Isles, the Ocean referred to in the modern era as 'The Atlantic' being described as 'Oceanus Hyperboreas'. It may then be argued that the Celtic people did not migrate from India, and that in fact the migration or at least cultural diffusion may have been predominately in the reverse direction.