The Italian Genome-Fiorito et al 2015

[Drac II]

LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!

The inscriptions we are talking about are from later times, and have many names that are typical not of Greeks but of Hellenized Near Easterners. This matches very well with ancient authors like Juvenal who scoff and denounce the "Greeks" at Rome as fakes, Near Easterners pretending to be "Greek". Juvenal did not even like the Greeks to begin with, so he can't be accused of somehow wanting to protect "real" Greek identity. But even an anti-Greek bigot like him recognized that most of these "Greeks" were actually people from places like Syria.

The Nordictist charlatans' claims about Romans being super-blond and what have you are obviously baloney, of course. But this is not about their strange claims. We are talking about things that have been part of legitimate scholarship on Roman history for a long time, and which unfortunately these Nordicists have picked up to try to back up their own weird claims about the original Romans being more Nordic than Thor himself before Rome was influenced by all these foreign peoples.

[Vukodav]

Bla bla bla. Where are the countless Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic inscriptions in Italy? Only the 1% richest minority of near easterners was Greek speaking and you are telling me that they only left Greek inscriptions. By the way my name is Joseph, an Hellenized Levantine name. Does it make me a Palestinian? Are tens of millions of North Europeans with names like Luke, Thomas, Sam, Paul, John.... Jordanians and Beduins in denial?

[Drac II]

Bla bla bla. Where are the countless Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic inscriptions in Italy? Only the 1% richest minority of near easterners was Greek speaking and you are telling me that they only left Greek inscriptions. By the way my name is Joseph, an Hellenized Levantine name. Does it make me a Palestinian? Are tens of millions of North Europeans with names like Luke, Thomas, Sam, Paul, John.... Jordanians and Beduins in denial?

You are comparing modern naming practices with those of 2000 years ago, quite before the spread of Christianity all over the planet.

Greek names, language and customs were very common among many Near Easterners. In Syria itself there's plenty of inscriptions in Greek.

[Vukodav]

But only the richest 1% of Easterners was Greek Speaking. So where are the inscriptions in Armenian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic,... in Italy? Answer the question and stop with the circles.

[Drac II]

But only the richest 1% of Easterners was Greek Speaking. So where are the inscriptions in Armenian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic,... in Italy? Answer the question and stop with the circles.

Where do you keep getting this idea that only 1% of Easterners knew Greek, or had Greek names? Regarding Syria in particular, in entire regions of it Greek names predominated. Even in many rural areas of Syria Greek language was used:

"Inscriptions and texts show the predominance of Greek throughout the region. Greek was not confined to the cities, as inscriptions, papyrus and parchments from rural settings show."

https://books.google.com/books?id=YJ...ion%22&f=false

Page 284.

A pretty common language in Syria at the time, besides the other ones also present in the area.

[Angela]

The problem is that in reality you can't "correct" the majority of what I say and back up with actual sources, but simply deny it. Contrary to what you claim, it is not for lack of trying on your part.

The fact that Rome was the center of the empire and therefore the largest consumer of labor should already have told you where the majority of the slaves and free citizens were going. For example, I don't see many historians finding a great deal of funerary inscriptions with names of Hellenized foreigners in other parts of the empire other than Italy. Sure, you can find some, like for example evidence of North African and Near Eastern foreigners in Roman Britain, but this is because the conquest of that place happened rather late, at a time when the Roman armies were largely composed of non-Romans. Even quite a few Roman emperors at this time were foreigners themselves. So it should not be surprising to find some evidence of foreigners elsewhere in the empire as well, but as another user commented here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...ically-diverse

That actually should give you an idea how many more of them there must have been in a place like Rome, the center of the empire itself. Furthermore, we also have the statements of ancient writers like Martial, Petronius, Juvenal, etc. from which is easy to gather how common were such foreigners in Rome, and also from what areas of the empire they predominantly came from. And it sure is not Gaul or Germania that they point to.

As for your "sent only to southern Italy", that is, again, your very own claim, not mine. Remember, you are the one wanting to confine any "recent" genetic influx to southern Italy, preferably mostly Sicily (the mainland is "too close for comfort".) Don't try to attribute your agendas to me. I have always said that the majority of the slaves and immigrants had Rome as their destination, which is what the historical evidence points to.

But there are DNA studies that do make the inference that Italians have "recent" DNA from around Etruscan/Roman/medieval times, like the paper that is the subject of this thread. Of course, you waste little time to dismiss them. Very different from whenever a study tries to make the same inference about Iberians. Then we must all remain very open minded and strongly believe that those mighty "Moors" were quite capable of leaving a lasting genetic impression, never mind the fact that historians estimate their numbers as being very low, and that, unlike all those pagan and early Christian slaves and immigrants in Roman Italy, there was an actual long-lasting war waged by those who remained Christian to expel them and their coreligionists. The double-standard is rather blatant. We have to believe that a relatively small group of elitist military/religious invaders, who for the most part were eventually expelled, had a considerable impact on the much larger native population of an entire peninsula, but a larger number of slaves and immigrants in another peninsula somehow miraculously barely left a trace. Angela, if you really buy that, I got a real nifty bridge to sell you.

You keep accusing others of what you yourself do. Not nice, Angela. You might be fooling some people with this claim that you don't really care if Italians have "recent" African or Eastern DNA, and that you are not worried about such things, and accusing others of being "racist" (I wonder why you don't accuse Maciamo of being so as well, since some have already accused him of such a thing when he has made statements on the subject), while you yourself are supposedly totally different, but your posts since back in the day suggest otherwise. They show a preoccupation with the subject. And no, the fact that you go around Googling for articles on other subject matter and making posts on other topics is not fooling me or anyone else who is well acquainted with you. No, you are not me, for sure. The difference between you and me is that I do not try to hide the fact that this topic interest me very much. But you do.

Angela, please, don't try to feign ignorance. You know very well what "difference" it makes. For a long time Nordicist charlatans have been accusing southern Europeans of being "tainted" with "recent blood" from Africa and the Middle East, while they paint rosy pictures of themselves, being "pure" and having truly prehistoric and ancient blood-lines, the "real whites", and blah, blah, blah. And in the case of Italy the number 1 argument they use is the fact that the Romans imported large numbers of slaves from outside Europe and that many free citizens from places like Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc. also migrated there. They did not "invent" this. They picked it up from real scholars on the subject (their writings are full of references to actual scholars like Mommsen, Tenney Frank, La Piana, Duff, etc.) but of course they give it their own "spin", claiming that the North Africans and Middle Easterners of those times were no longer "white" but "mixed race" or just plain "non-white" (this part is mostly their own invention, they did not get this idea from actual scholars and historians.) One only has to examine writings like those of Arthur Kemp to plainly see this typical Nordicist strategy. So it has become very important for Italians who care about such things to try to deny it. Unfortunately, instead of attacking the Nordicist spin on the whole thing, they have tried to deny the work of actual scholars and claim that no such things happened, or that all slaves and foreigners died off, and what have you.

I think it is time for you to embrace all those things you conveniently want others to accept, Angela, instead of claiming to be a descendant of "Celt-Ligurians", like some other Nordicists do.

Why argue about Spaniards and Poles when you can invest your time more profitably arguing about whether Italians are practically as blue eyed and blond as Orcadians because "predictions" based on some alleles seem to suggest so, or something just as important and consequential.

Look what was at the bottom of my pile of posts. It's like finding a lump of coal in the bottom of a Christmas stocking. :) What a very disappointing effort, Drac. Thousands of letters, but no scholarship, no reasoned, logical, and data based points to refute the arguments of others, including a professor of Roman history-only an attempt to project your repugnant agenda and lack of intellectual integrity onto me. How very typical of you. For your information, I didn't even know that racist anthrofora existed until a few years ago when I followed a link in a posting on a respectable genealogy site. If you want to do battle with Italian Nordicists over whether Spaniards or Italians are less "northern", they are here, to my shame and disappointment, as should be obvious, but leave me out of it.

You can deny all you wish, you can try to besmirch me with innuendo, but I am confident that my knowledge of the subject matter and the logic and quality of my argumentation are apparent to the readers of this Board, as is the lack of respect for your own output.

Your day is over. No one takes you seriously any more.

As for my heritage, given where my family has lived for at least six hundred years, I would say I am indeed probably descended from Celt-Ligures since both my parents come from areas where they lived, but probably equally, of course, from the Roman citizens of Luni. Then you have to add in the Etruscans, my "favorites" if I can be said to have any, who had settlements across the Magra, perhaps some stray Greek merchants or even residents of Luni, perhaps indeed a slave or two who might have been manumitted, although our area, especially my father's was far too poor and mountainous for slaves to be very feasible, and yes, to some Indo-Europeans who came into the Po Valley. Before all of that, of course, there would be a lot of ancestry from Neolithic farmers and the smaller input from whatever WHG might have survived. There might be a stray Lombard in there too, given the number of Lombard castles in the area and a surname that appears often in my family tree, but the total impact would be minute, which would be more than fine with me. The Lombard lords and nobles of my area (and the Franks who sometimes succeeded them) were bloodsucking oppressors one and all and I have no desire to claim ancestry from any of them. Given the nearness to the coast, I might have had a stray ancestress who didn't run quite fast enough when the Saracens came raiding, but I don't see it in my dna. The strangest thing I see is a steppe mtDna, but unlike most men, I don't define myself by a uniparental marker. It's a very small part of my total make-up. I actually don't think those mtDna clades are as "fit" as something like "H" for example, so if anything I would have preferred to get another one.

If all these calculators are correct, what I do see is that I am overwhelmingly Southern European in ancestry, which is what I expected and hoped, and indisputably Italian, which is also what I expected and hoped. Would that you felt the same way about all your ancestors...there would perhaps be less misinformation coming from your postings, and you would perhaps be a happier and less angry person.

[Angela]

I am a GSI in Roman History at a major university in CA. Hopefully some day soon I will get tenure, so those impressed with credentials can call me a full professor. In the meantime, I will have to tell you that I have eaten, breathed, drank, and probably defecated Roman history for the last 25 years.

I know which wars Rome fought against whom, and when. I've read entire books on the Roman Slave trade, and the life of average Romans, including slaves. (I still recommend Jerome Carcopino's, if anyone is looking.)

I can tell you that Angela is correct. Slaves came from all over. And went all over. If you purport to see a "Roman Era Slave DNA Signature" for Italy or South Italy, you would have to explain why such a signature is absent for much of France (Roman for ~700 years), Catalonia (Roman for ~700 years), and indeed even England (Roman for ~400 years). Do you believe slaves worked the vast plantations in those regions?

Indeed, why aren't all of these regions one gigantic melting pop, and yet incredibly homogenous at the same time, due to seven centuries of the importation of Roman-era slaves?

Angela is correct in asking: do you seriously believe that there was a sorting process somehow, where slaves of a certain ancestry went to certain regions? That, Sir, has no basis in reality, history, or common sense.

Angela is also correct in stating that large numbers of slaves went to mines, galley ships, and places like brothels, where the life expectancy was short, the treatment harsh, and the likelihood of having children small. Household slaves were often castrated.

The average manumitted slave was often well beyond childbearing age, since manumission overwhelmingly occurred only upon the death of the household paterfamilias and his surviving wife.

Aside from certain very wealthy freedmen hitting it big, manumitted slaves were often poor, and did not have the resources to raise large families.

Do I doubt that some genes made their way into the gene pool of modern Italians from Roman-era slaves? Sure. But you would expect such genes to be concentrated in the places where slave-supported industries were the largest. And they're not.

For example: the Romans used Egypt as a breadbasket for about 400 years. The Romans fought wars against the Germanic tribes continuously during that same period. German slaves were very common in Rome. Read the Ode to Bissula, or even Pope Gregory's famous comments. By your metric, there should be a visible signature of German slave genes in Egypt.

Let's go even further. Sardinia provides ample examples of extremely rare uniparental markers that can be used to detect Sardinian ancestry with ease. For a long time, Sardinian slaves were the most common in Rome. "Cheaper than a Sardinian slave" was the saying in the city. Yet are these Sardinian markers present in Rome? No. The similar mainland clades show a TMRCA several millennia before the Roman period.

It's a pleasure to have someone on the Board with specialized scholarly knowledge in this field and I'm sure other expertise as well. As you can see, a great deal of disinformation or just superficial information gets posted here on certain topics.

[Drac II]

Look what was at the bottom of my pile of posts. It's like finding a lump of coal in the bottom of a Christmas stocking. :) What a very disappointing effort, Drac. Thousands of letters, but no scholarship, no reasoned, logical, and data based points to refute the arguments of others, including a professor of Roman history-only an attempt to project your repugnant agenda and lack of intellectual integrity onto me. How very typical of you. For your information, I didn't even know that racist anthrofora existed until a few years ago when I followed a link in a posting on a respectable genealogy site. If you want to do battle with Italian Nordicists over whether Spaniards or Italians are less "northern", they are here, to my shame and disappointment, as should be obvious, but leave me out of it.

You can deny all you wish, you can try to besmirch me with innuendo, but I am confident that my knowledge of the subject matter and the logic and quality of my argumentation are apparent to the readers of this Board, as is the lack of respect for your own output.

Your day is over. No one takes you seriously any more.

As for my heritage, given where my family has lived for at least six hundred years, I would say I am indeed probably descended from Celt-Ligures since both my parents come from areas where they lived, but probably equally, of course, from the Roman citizens of Luni. Then you have to add in the Etruscans, my "favorites" if I can be said to have any, who had settlements across the Magra, perhaps some stray Greek merchants or even residents of Luni, perhaps indeed a slave or two who might have been manumitted, although our area, especially my father's was far too poor and mountainous for slaves to be very feasible, and yes, to some Indo-Europeans who came into the Po Valley. Before all of that, of course, there would be a lot of ancestry from Neolithic farmers and the smaller input from whatever WHG might have survived. There might be a stray Lombard in there too, given the number of Lombard castles in the area and a surname that appears often in my family tree, but the total impact would be minute, which would be more than fine with me. The Lombard lords and nobles of my area (and the Franks who sometimes succeeded them) were bloodsucking oppressors one and all and I have no desire to claim ancestry from any of them. Given the nearness to the coast, I might have had a stray ancestress who didn't run quite fast enough when the Saracens came raiding, but I don't see it in my dna. The strangest thing I see is a steppe mtDna, but unlike most men, I don't define myself by a uniparental marker. It's a very small part of my total make-up. I actually don't think those mtDna clades are as "fit" as something like "H" for example, so if anything I would have preferred to get another one.

If all these calculators are correct, what I do see is that I am overwhelmingly Southern European in ancestry, which is what I expected and hoped, and indisputably Italian, which is also what I expected and hoped. Would that you felt the same way about all your ancestors...there would perhaps be less misinformation coming from your postings, and you would perhaps be a happier and less angry person.

As I suspected, hardly much of a reply. The usual gratuitous diatribes and denials.


You admitted it yourself, you know well what Nordicist agendas are from at least a few years ago.


No scholarship, no backing up your statements with those of actual historians, denials, suspicious agendas, etc. That sounds pretty much like your posts on this subject. I am the one who more than a few times has actually cited sources to back up what I say. Been doing it around here for quite a while.


A "professor of Roman history"? Hmmm... yeah, sure. Like I said before, if you really believe that, I've got this real nifty bridge to sell you.


I wish I could say the same about "your day", but you never had one to begin with. I never took you seriously when it came to this topic. Your posts on this subject were always pretty easy to "read between the lines". And I see nothing nowadays to change this conclusion either.


Just pointing out what you do and then you strangely claim that it is others that do it to you.


Lack of respect for my output? The only ones doing so are you and some of those other "anthrofora... Italian Nordicists" you referred to in your post. No one else. Who do you think, for example, gave negative points to my post above showing "Joey" that his gratuitous assertion that hardly anyone among people like Syrians knew Greek or had Greek names is quite mistaken by showing him an actual academic source stating how common it actually was? I notice, however, that you seem to rejoice at the fact that posts backed-up by actual sources are the ones getting attacked and given negative votes. Why am I not surprised? No wonder that many of the old users simply ended up quitting these forums. In fact, I know well why some of them left, since they actually sent me PMs on the subject.

[Drac II]

It's a pleasure to have someone on the Board with specialized scholarly knowledge in this field and I'm sure other expertise as well. As you can see, a great deal of disinformation or just superficial information gets posted here on certain topics.

I am glad you like our "Roman history professor" new visitor so much, but you should actually bother to check out the very source he recommended before getting too excited by his quite uninformed posts on this topic. For example, here are some of Carcopino's thoughts on the subject that you dislike so much and try to deny or downplay at any cost:

https://archive.org/stream/dailylife...ge/n7/mode/2up

"Whether by personal favour, by emancipation, or by mass naturalisations extended at one stroke either to a class of demobilised auxiliaries or to a municipality suddenly converted into an honorary colony, a new flood of peregrini acquired citizenship. Never had the cosmopolitan character of the Urbs been so distinctly marked. The Roman proper was submerged on every social plane, not only by the influx of Italian immigrants but by the multitude of provincials bringing with them from every corner of the universe their speech, their manners, their customs, and their superstitions. Juvenal inveighs against the mud-laden torrent pouring from Orontes into the Tiber. But the Syrians, whom he so greatly despised, hastened at the first possible moment to assume the guise of Roman civilians; even those who most loudly advertised their xenophobia were themselves more or less newcomers to Rome, seeking to defend their adopted home against fresh incursions....


In the Senate House senators from Gaul, from Spain, from Africa, from Asia, sat side by side; the Roman emperors, Roman citizens but newly naturalised, came from towns or villages beyond the mountains and the seas. Trajan and Hadrian were born in Spanish Italica in Baetica. Their successor, Antoninus Pius, sprang from bourgeois Stock in Nemausus (modern Nimes) in Gallia Narbonensis; and the end of the second century was to see the empire divided between Caesar Clodius Albinus of Hadrumetum (Tunis) and Septimius Severus of Leptis Magna (Tripoli.) The biography of Septimius Severus records that even after he had ascended the throne he never succeeded in ridding his speech of the Semitic accent which he had inherited from his Punic ancestors. Thus the Rome of the Antonines was a meeting place where the Romans of Rome encountered those inferior peoples against whom their laws seemed to have erected solid ethnic barriers, or -to be more accurate- Rome was a meting pot in which, despite her laws, the peoples were continually being subjected to new processes of assimilation. It was, if you will, a Babel but a Babel where, for better or for worse, all comers learned to speak and think in Latin."

Pages 55 & 56.


"Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves, who in the second century raised their standard of living to the level of the ingenui. Legislation had grown more and more humane and had progressively lightened their chains and favoured their emancipation. The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from showing cruelty towards the servi... With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable."

Page 56.

"Indeed, a Greek who lived at Rome in the middle of the second century was struck by the levelling which had taken place between slaves and freemen, which to his amazement extended even to their clothes. Appian of Alexandria, writing under Antoninus Pius, remarks that even in externals the slave is in no way distinguished from his master, and unless his master donned the toga praetexta of the magistrate, the two were dressed alike. Appian supplements this by recording a thing which astonished him even more: after a slave had regained his liberty he lived on terms of absolute equality with the Roman citizen. Rome, alone of all cities of antiquity, has the honour of having redeemed her outcasts by opening her doors to them. It is true that the freed slave remained bound to his former master, now his patronus, sometimes by services due or by pecuniary indebtedness, and always by the duties implied by an almost filial respect (obsequium). But once his emancipation or manumissio had been duly pronounced, whether by a fictitious statement of claim before the praetor (per vindictam) or by the inscription of his name on the censors register (censu) at the solemn sacrifice of the lustrum, or more commonly in virtue of a testamentary clause (testamento) , the slave obtained by the grace of his master, living or dead, the name and status of a Roman citizen. His descendants of the third generation were entitled to exercise the full political rights of citizenship and nothing further distinguished them from ingenui."

Page 59.

"Ultimately all the emperors, out of love for their own freed slaves or those of their friends, took pains to obliterate the last trace of their servile origin, either by utilising the legal fiction of the natalium restitutio or by slipping onto their finger the gold ring which might open the way to the equestrian status. Hence in the period we are studying, the slaves who benefited by the ever-increasing numbers of manumissions were placed on a footing of complete equality with other Roman citizens, enabled to secure positions and fortunes and to purchase droves of slaves in their turn, as we see Trimalchio doing."

Pages 59 & 60.

"The numerous colleges devoted to these heterogeneous gods at Rome not only co-existed without friction but collaborated in their recruiting campaigns. There was in fact more affinity and mutual understanding between these diverse religions than rivalry. One and all were served by priests jealously segregated from the crowd of the profane; their doctrine was based on revelation, and their prestige on the singularity of their costume and manner of life. One and all imposed preliminary initiation on their followers and periodical recourse to a more or less ascetic regimen; each, after its own fashion, indulged in the same astrological and henotheistic speculations and held out to believers the same messages of hope. Romans who had not been seduced by these exotic cults suspected and hated them. Juvenal, for instance, who could not repress his wrath to see the Orontes pour her muddy floods of superstition into the Tiber, hit out with might and main against them all, without distinction."

Page 130.

"Juvenal's savage and inexhaustible anger need not surprise us. He expresses with all the force of his genius the natural reaction of the "ancient Roman," hater alike of novelty and of the foreigner, to whom emotion and enthusiasm were a degradation, and who would gladly have disciplined the outpourings of faith by such ordinances as governed a civil or military parade. At this distance of time his prejudices necessarily appear to us gravely unjust, first, because he traced to the oriental religions alone superstitions whose origin goes back to prehistoric times long before Rome was invaded by the Orient, and in whose development oriental religion had no part;"

Page 131.


There's more of these interesting comments and observations in the book, a bit too many and too long to quote here in full, but you folks can get the point from the above (anyone can peruse them for themselves if they so wish.) Ironically, many of them blatantly contradict the totally gratuitous statements of the very person who recommended the work of this historian.

In conclusion, good recommendation. This academical source, which I very much doubt the person who recommended it has actually read, in fact once again supports what I've been saying all along and certainly not Angela. Nothing "new" here. I will simply add Carcopino's work to the long list of academical and scholarly sources that for the last 200 years have been pointing out pretty much the same things after thorough examination of the historical evidence.

[Hauteville]

The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia

[Drac II]

The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia

You are talking about much older events, not what was going on in later Roman times, which is what all these historians like Carcopino (yes, very "Germanic" surname) are talking about. The Hellenized slaves and "peregrini" of Roman times were predominantly Near Easterners. Juvenal denounced them as fakes, people from places like Syria who had adopted Greek customs and language, and this guy did not even like the "real" Greeks either, among other things he is well known for his anti-Greek bigotry, so he had no motivation whatsoever to try to defend them and their identity in the first place. Still, he distinguished them from Hellenized Near Easterners.

[Vukodav]

We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming.

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.



Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.

[Angela]

LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!

Some actual scholarship to your point:
https://books.google.com/books?id=gl...&lpg=PA169&dqq

"On the other hand, many popular slave names can be called "wish names" and seem to express the hope of the owner for what the slave might be like: Hilaris ("Happy"), Fidus ("Trusty")..."

Then there is the preponderance of Greek names. Was this an indication that all slaves in Rome, or Roman Italy as a whole came from the Hellenistic east? Hardly, although of course there were some, particularly during the Republican era and the early Empire.

However, what then of the million Gauls who were enslaved, or the Iberians, from those in Iberia itself to those who fought for the Carthaginians and were therefore captured during the Punic Wars, or the Britons, Germans, Dacians etc. Where are names of that ethnicity in the record? They are in tiny percentages when they appear at all.

The answer is that, as scholars in this field maintain, " Greek names for slaves marked slaves as an aspect of luxury and the good life, like fine furniture and art...the preponderance of Greek figures [in naming] again suggests an association of domestic slavery with civilization, luxury and culture."

What this means as a practical matter is that we can tell nothing about the origin of slaves from their names.

[Drac II]

We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming.

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.



Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.

When you finally understand what all these historians are saying, and that they are not pulling things out of their hats just for the heck of it, then perhaps you will start understanding that you hardly have to find "Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy" to know that there were many people from that area. The fact most of these people bore Hellenized names is, as has been explained to death already, because Greek was an extremely common language in the Near East at this time in history. Greek, and even Latin itself, had even been spreading into some parts of Arabia, so let alone in places like Syria:

"In regions such as Palmyrene, the Hauran and Arabia, Greek was not the only language of inscriptions, and in such places Latin names are not uncommon, perhaps the result of contact with Roman soldiers instead of Hellenizing city-dwellers. In highly Hellenized regions such as the north, the coast and the Decapolis it is hardly surprising to find Greek names predominating."

Same book quoted in post #155, same page.

Lucian, for example, was of Syrian origin, and he wrote his works in Greek. You wouldn't be able to tell from such a name and the language he wrote in.

So it is hardly surprising at all if most "Orientals" at Rome in these times in fact had Hellenized names.

The slaves and immigrants that were coming to Rome were from many of those "Roman colonies", so I am not sure what are you trying to prove here by showing something everyone knows already, and no one is questioning either.

I was quoting a historian that was recommended by another user who said several things which are in fact contradicted by his own source.

You also seem to be here 24/7.

[Angela]

With all due respect to the poster Moore, the French historian Jerome Carcopino wrote his book in 1940. Scholarship has moved beyond basing its conclusions on gossip or anecdote, particularly literary ones. It is a book I would most emphatically NOT recommend to serious students of this particular subject.

Anyone who has actually studied this material in an academic setting knows that opinions differ, and that hard evidence is difficult to find. It comes down to interpretation of scarce data, and some issues, as many in archaeology and ancient history, will only be settled by the analysis of ancient dna.

However, in the interim one could do much worse than to turn to Walter Scheidel of Stanford University and his "The Roman Slave Supply".
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdf...del/050704.pdf



“Ideally, slave totals would be tallied up from local or sectoral counts. In the absence of such data, I have tried to construct a probabilistic model that seeks to simulate this process by aggregating individual estimates for the likely demand for slaves in different sectors of the Italian economy (Scheidel 2005a). Needless to say, this method necessarily entails huge margins of error and cannot provide more than a rough notion of final outcomes under certain starting assumptions about the scale of domestic service or agricultural inputs. For this reason, my estimate of around 600,000 non-farming slaves in late Republican and early imperial Italy cannot be more than a highly tenuous conjecture. It may be somewhat less hazardous to assess levels of rural slavery, given that slave numbers can be linked to specific labor requirements. Rural slave numbers assume a pivotal role in any reconstruction of servile demography: in an ‘organic’ economy, for the share of slaves in the overall population to have been very large (e.g., along the lines of New World slave societies), the majority of slaves would need to have been employed in the countryside. However, in view of constraints on the expansion of cash crop farming and other areas of rural employment, this is very unlikely to have been the case in Roman Italy.”


"In my model,the most probable range of outcomes is consonant with a cumulative total of between one and one and a half million slaves in Italy at the peak of this labor regime, equivalent to some 15-25% of the total population. In the most general terms, there can be little doubt that despite their potentially vital contribution to agricultural production, slaves were disproportionately concentrated in the cities (Jongman 2003). "



This latter point was raised by Razib Khan, indicating, as is usually the case, that he has done extensive reading on the subjects upon which he ventures an opinion. As he also pointed out, in any invasion, including the final ones that brought about the fall of the Empire, the urban populations, and, unfortunately for them, the slaves of the urban populations, were the most likely to meet unfortunate ends.


Now, what about the rest of the empire? According to the author, there was better record keeping in Egypt, which gives a rough estimate of 5-10% of the population being enslaved. The lower number makes perfect sense in that the fields of Egypt had existed for millennia, and had been extensively cultivated by native Egyptians or people taken in slavery by the Egyptians, and there was no necessity for massive new numbers of slaves to be introduced. This is borne out by the fact that in Egypt there were more urban slaves than rural slaves. As long as the grain shipments came in, the Romans may have decided in large measure to leave well enough alone except for some resupply where necessary and when the price was sufficiently low because of recent conquests.


What of Asia Minor, or Gaul, or Iberia, or Britain? As the author points out, “estimate of overall slave numbers would critically depend on conditions in areas that yield hardly any pertinent information. Existing proposals – of 10% or 17-20% for the entire Empire – are necessarily mere guesses.”

What is the author’s conclusion? “What remains is the impression that large concentrations of slaves in the hands of elites outside Italy were by no means considered implausible. “ For those unfamiliar with the process of Romanization, those elites would not necessarily have been “Roman” or better yet “Italic” elites. The co-opting of local elites was an important part of Romanization.


In actuality, all of these figures are guesses, but some are more grounded in fact. So, we see a substantial number of slaves in the Italic peninsula, although not the inflated numbers proposed by some scholars in the past, and slavery in other parts of the Empire as well, although probably not at Italian levels. I don't think the evidence supports anything more precise than that.

[Sile]

The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia

http://www.crystalinks.com/romeslavery.html

with slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves. Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners' whims.

40 percent of the population ...............you do realise that the populace of ancient Rome was always larger than modern Rome.

[Sile]

We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming.

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.



Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.

Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal

[Vukodav]

http://www.crystalinks.com/romeslavery.htmlwith slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves. Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners' whims. 40 percent of the population ...............you do realise that the populace of ancient Rome was always larger than modern Rome.

None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?

[Angela]

Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal

Either you haven't looked at the map, or you don't know where the Alps are located.

Also, who's talking about Portugal or Sardinia? The discussion, such as it is, is about Drac's quest to prove that all of the Anatolian Neolithic and CHG ancestry in Italians comes from slaves during the Roman era, and not from slaves from all over the known world at the time, but specifically from slaves from the Near East and North Africa, thereby somehow making his country's own similar levels of the same total ancestry somehow "better" or more worthy. At least, that's as much sense as I can make of his arguments. The fact that no matter when they entered Europe they are the same alleles seems to have escaped him.

I'm also unsure of the point of your post. Is it that there weren't Roman settlements in the part of the Alps closest to the Veneto? It appears that there were some, but I don't see that it matters. It won't make people of the Veneto, even the far northern Veneto, any less southern European if that is the goal, at least if the published calculator results at 23andme from the various calculators are any indication.

Ed. As to the effect of the Roman settlements and their effect on the local genetics, I would have said the same. However, if the recent Busby et al study is to be believed, there was a significant impact of Italic peoples not only in Iberia, but even all the way up in Britain. We'll see if further studies bear that out. It will also be crucial for the general discussion to get ancient dna from the Etruscans, and early Republican era Romans, Samnites etc. and compare them to the genomes of the Romans at the time of the Germanic invasions. I'm ready, as always, to accept whatever the genetics studies done by top tier labs might show.

[Vukodav]

Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal

Those are only the official colonies built by the Roman state. Most Romans settled in indigenous cities.

[Drac II]

Carcopino's work is perfectly fine, the fact that it was written in 1940 hardly prevents it from being so; scholarship on this subject goes to much before that. It is not based on "gossip or anecdote" but on actual historical sources (end-notes provide all the references he used), and many of the things he says are supported by other historians.

Fair enough, the points raised in Scheidel's paper are perfectly valid, and calculations about numbers of slaves vary among historians.

However, the argument that some dilettantes try to conjure up that most slaves died of famines, diseases and wars because they concentrated in the cities, and therefore we must dismiss them as having had any relevancy for demographic matters, is dubious at best because it rests on one assumption and two important omissions:

1- It assumes that the population of the cities remained static, even for centuries, and that all people there, including their slaves, did not eventually move around and settle in other places

2- It omits the important fact of manumission, a very common practice among the Romans

3- It also omits to take into account the large number of free foreigners, who were never slaves

Furthermore, this argument can be easily and conveniently also applied to other times as well, like the Middle Ages, where wars, famines and diseases would also decimate cities.

[Sile]

None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?

the two areas in question is slaves and colonies ..........and some here have an agenda to assume my aim is something other than what I state.
I state

Rome had many slaves in ancient times and the bulk was always near Rome the city...............if the numbers do not please you , bad luck............my agenda on this in regards to genetic legacy for Rome, well it is minimal.........the percent of male slaves that left offspring in Rome is very minimal, while female slaves left a greater legacy on the genetic makeup of the Romans.

In regards to colonies.......the term means a minimal of actual Romans comprised of the percentage of the populace............the genetic legacy of these Roman colonies is minimal. A colony would not represent IMO more than 10% of Romans over the local populace. How many Romans do you think there where?
To even become a Roman was a minimum wait of 25 years..............most citizens did not even have a chance for their Roman citizenship application because they died before hand.

[Drac II]

None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?

False, I quote from historians from all over the 19th to 21st century span of time. It is not like opinions on this subject have changed too much among the majority of historians in all this time. On many points most of them still agree with their predecessors.

You have already seen how common Hellenized names were among Near Easterners, and not from a "19th century source" (which they also knew about already) but straight from a 21st century one.

Keep thinking it is only Juvenal. He is just one of the ancient writers to make comments on the topics of slaves and foreigners which allow historians get a good idea of what was going on at the time.

[Drac II]

By the way, the point of all this is not to disparage Italians, in fact there is nothing "bad" about any of the things being said about this part of Italy's history, but actually to show Angela's convenient double-standards and semi-hidden agendas, as explained in a previous post in this thread. Her point all throughout being that we must remain very open minded about anything that is published about "Moors" and their supposed impact on medieval Iberia and Sicily, despite the fact that historians specializing on the subject have estimated the numbers of these foreign Muslim invaders to be rather low, but at the same time we must conveniently and paradoxically dismiss anything that even remotely suggests anything that could have to do with the quite larger numbers of slaves and free foreigners in Roman Italy, who hardly must have left anything but a trace of influence. For those of you who have a hard time "reading between the lines" or paying attention to details, just look for example at how very quickly she tried to dismiss the admixture estimates of this study that point to Roman times in the case of North and Central Italy; any study that even as much as suggests this is summarily dismissed or found full of faults, while just about any fishy paper making claims about "Moors" in Iberia or Sicily is very possible and we all must remain very open minded. She knows very well what this is all about, she's been trying to pull this for quite a while, but of course as usual she pretends she doesn't really know what it's all about.

[Sile]

False, I quote from historians from all over the 19th to 21st century span of time. It is not like opinions on this subject have changed too much among the majority of historians in all this time. On many points most of them still agree with their predecessors.

You have already seen how common Hellenized names were among Near Easterners, and not from a "19th century source" (which they also knew about already) but straight from a 21st century one.

Keep thinking it is only Juvenal. He is just one of the ancient writers to make comments on the topics of slaves and foreigners which allow historians get a good idea of what was going on at the time.

what is a near - easterners ?

Linguists state Hattian and Hurrian was adapted and used by the Hittites ~1700BC , it is nothing except only indo-european. It is clearly stated as not being from the semitic language tree.
With this knowledge, then the hatti and hurrians are also clearly a non-semitic people mostly likely from the southern Caucasus area.
There are over 50 volumes of hittite script which have been studied in respect to language.

Are south -caucasus people near -easterners?

I doubt with this hittite knowledge , the percent of Anatolia being near-easterner is very remote