Saturday 21 August 2004

Pic of the day: An American settler wandering off to expand the empire, screenshot from Civilization III.

More Völkerwanderung

I thought the examples in yesterday's entry would be enough, but ... Thinking back, I realize that there are probably people who think the Americans should be evicted. From America. Thinking rationally about Americans may be easier than about Africans, but not for all and not by much. So let me briefly list some other people who have come to their current territories in historical times.

The Magyars (Hungarians) came to Hungary approximately 1500 years ago, a little more by their own reckoning and a little less by some others, though they were certainly there around the year 900.

The Arabs came to wherever they are now except the Arabian peninsula mostly after the religion of Islam united them, although there have been scattered Arab tribes in Israel, Egypt and Syria longer than that.

Israel, of course, was founded very recently, but according to their own history they conquered the country once before in historical times. Some historians claim that this only applies to a small part of the people, that most of Israel evolved from the local inhabitants as there is a continuous culture from Canaanite times onward. It remains certain however that the Canaanites spoke a Indo-European language, while Hebrew is distinctly Semitic, so there has definitely been some change.

The English descend mostly from immigrants speaking a Germanic language. The locals before them spoke Celtic, as they still do in Wales. The British are more closely related to the Dutch and the Danes.

The Danes themselves migrated from Sweden a while before the Viking age. Actually they used to live on both sides of the sea; the "mark" in Denmark is an old word meaning border, Denmark was the borderland of the Danes.

***

Speaking of which ... the Scandinavian countries all proudly sport a history going back more than 1000 years, but my native Norway was a Danish province for around 400 of those years, then part of Sweden for almost another century. Finland was also frequently a Swedish province, and when not, a Russian one.

To this day, Russia holds parts of what was once Finland. Sweden holds parts that belonged to Denmark, and to Norway. Denmark and the UK both have islands that used to be Norwegian. On the other hand, Norway has annexed the land of the aboriginal Sami people, who may well have lived there since the depth of the ice age. Or perhaps not ... the climate is not very conductive to archeology.

Speaking of countries holding parts of other countries, it will surprise very few that the USA has several states conquered from what is now Mexico, but was then itself a Spanish colony. In all fairness, the Aztecs who used to live there arrived in the year 1248 themselves ...

In short, people live here and there, but not necessarily where they used to live. Some of them get very upset about that, while others think it is OK. Anyway, it is steadily more accepted that all humans came from Africa; but I certainly don't propose that we all go back there.