It dates back to 6th century BC, more than 2,500 years ago.
Who were Cimmerians?
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It dates back to 6th century BC, more than 2,500 years ago.
halfalp
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I think more realistically than mixing, the Indo-Iranians elite would never impact that much the physionomy of early Iranians and Indians. Fair features are mainly found in very mountaneous area ( Kurdistan, Pamir, Karakoram, Hindu Kush ). Were the low demography density would help to maintain those fair features. I think both ancient and modern Iranians ( by the time where they were already Indo-Europeanized ), the ratio of blond hairs might have been something like 1/30, still noticeable in big cities, but not in the overall population. This ratio might even be bigger in India with a 1/60 ( i just randomly made those numbers dont take them as facts ).
Archetype0ne
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Heads up: I went completely off topic into color theory in this post, simply based on the color of the art which I found beautiful... so bare with me. Sorry to the Cimmerians and to the uninterested readers.
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Colour-Blue-in-Antiquity
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/artist-paints/classical-colour-palette.htm
"Blue was a latecomer among colours used in art and decoration, as well as language and literature.[25] Reds, blacks, browns, and ochres are found in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period, but not blue. Blue was also not used for dyeing fabric until long after red, ochre, pink and purple. This is probably due to the perennial difficulty of making good blue dyes and pigments.[26] The earliest known blue dyes were made from plants – woad in Europe, indigo in Asia and Africa, while blue pigments were made from minerals, usually either lapis lazulior azurite." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#In_the_ancient_world)
That blue pigment... was one of the most expensive / rare up until 15-16th century (IIRC), and had to be mined.
Whoever the people that made that art.
a) They had mining technology, ie meaning that they probably had some connection to the caucasus/caspian bronze age. Far fetch but speculate with me for a second.
b) They were traveling extensively, and most likely trading with other people, since that particular blue pigment was rarer than gold at the time, and highly sought after.
Other cool "advanced looking" art:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1600_Himmelsscheibe_von_Nebra_sky_disk_anagoria.jpg
1600 BC / Nebra / Germany
"The style in which the disk is executed was unlike any artistic style then known from the period, with the result that the object was initially suspected of being a forgery, but it is now widely accepted as authentic.The Nebra sky disk features the oldest concrete depiction of the cosmos yet known from anywhere in the world. In June 2013 it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and termed "one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century."[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk
PS Random Thought: Investigate if Ancient Languages even had a word for blue... or why today some languages do not even make the distinction blue / green linguistically.
(http://thechromologist.com/no-word-blue-mystery-historys-missing-colour/)
^ Very nice read.
"[FONT="]The origins of this theory come from the work of William Gladstone, who before he became Prime Minister of Britain was a scholar reading Homer’s [/FONT]The Odyssey[FONT="]. A simple exercise in counting the references to colours in the work threw up some surprises. Black appeared around 200 times, white 100, but elsewhere colours were either barely mentioned or seemed slightly odd. Sheep were violet, honey was green. And most mysteriously of all, the sea is described as “wine-dark.” Evocative, certainly, but why not blue?"
[/FONT]"[FONT="]Further study of numerous ancient Greek texts revealed no reference to the colour blue at all. Following on from this discovery Lazarus Geiger decided to expand colour research across a number of ancient languages, studying Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Not only did he find no reference to blue in these texts either, but he noticed wider patterns around how colour language has developed, common to all languages."
[/FONT]"[FONT="]He found that across all languages the first colour words to emerge were for black and white, closely followed by red (the colour of blood, he theorised). Red is followed by yellow and green, with blue and green remaining indistinguishable in language until a much later point. The first ancient culture to develop a word for blue on its own was in Egypt – surely no coincidence that this was also first place that produced a blue dye."
[/FONT]
"[FONT="]In some modern languages the blind-spot over blue remains, with blue and green being confusingly interchangeable in Japan, where traffic lights turn ‘blue’. However a fascinating experiment with the Himba tribe in Namibia suggests that having no word for a colour may indeed limit our ability to see it. The Himba have no word for blue, and no distinction between green and blue. Researcher Jules Davidoff devised a test where members of the tribe were asked to pick the odd one out of a circle of coloured squares. In one set of green boxes a single blue one was very hard for them to identify. However a set of green squares with one subtly different green square was easily spotted. The Himba have many words for green…"
[/FONT]
[FONT="]
([/FONT]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language)
[FONT="]
[/FONT]Useless Trivia:
(AL)(verdhë) is (EN)(yellow) and (AL)(gjelbert) is (EN)(green). In Italian however... (IT)(verde) is (EN)(green) while (IT)(giallo) is (EN)(yellow) / Just some trivia I always found peculiar.
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Colour-Blue-in-Antiquity
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/artist-paints/classical-colour-palette.htm
"Blue was a latecomer among colours used in art and decoration, as well as language and literature.[25] Reds, blacks, browns, and ochres are found in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period, but not blue. Blue was also not used for dyeing fabric until long after red, ochre, pink and purple. This is probably due to the perennial difficulty of making good blue dyes and pigments.[26] The earliest known blue dyes were made from plants – woad in Europe, indigo in Asia and Africa, while blue pigments were made from minerals, usually either lapis lazulior azurite." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#In_the_ancient_world)
That blue pigment... was one of the most expensive / rare up until 15-16th century (IIRC), and had to be mined.
Whoever the people that made that art.
a) They had mining technology, ie meaning that they probably had some connection to the caucasus/caspian bronze age. Far fetch but speculate with me for a second.
b) They were traveling extensively, and most likely trading with other people, since that particular blue pigment was rarer than gold at the time, and highly sought after.
Other cool "advanced looking" art:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1600_Himmelsscheibe_von_Nebra_sky_disk_anagoria.jpg
1600 BC / Nebra / Germany
| Description | English: The Nebra Sky disk; Mittelberg near Nebra (Germany), ca. 1600 BC.; Special exhibition "Beyond the Horizon - Space and Knowledge in the Old World cultures" at the Pergamon Museum (22.06 -. 30.09.2012) |
"The style in which the disk is executed was unlike any artistic style then known from the period, with the result that the object was initially suspected of being a forgery, but it is now widely accepted as authentic.The Nebra sky disk features the oldest concrete depiction of the cosmos yet known from anywhere in the world. In June 2013 it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and termed "one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century."[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk
PS Random Thought: Investigate if Ancient Languages even had a word for blue... or why today some languages do not even make the distinction blue / green linguistically.
(http://thechromologist.com/no-word-blue-mystery-historys-missing-colour/)
^ Very nice read.
"[FONT="]The origins of this theory come from the work of William Gladstone, who before he became Prime Minister of Britain was a scholar reading Homer’s [/FONT]The Odyssey[FONT="]. A simple exercise in counting the references to colours in the work threw up some surprises. Black appeared around 200 times, white 100, but elsewhere colours were either barely mentioned or seemed slightly odd. Sheep were violet, honey was green. And most mysteriously of all, the sea is described as “wine-dark.” Evocative, certainly, but why not blue?"
[/FONT]"[FONT="]Further study of numerous ancient Greek texts revealed no reference to the colour blue at all. Following on from this discovery Lazarus Geiger decided to expand colour research across a number of ancient languages, studying Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Not only did he find no reference to blue in these texts either, but he noticed wider patterns around how colour language has developed, common to all languages."
[/FONT]"[FONT="]He found that across all languages the first colour words to emerge were for black and white, closely followed by red (the colour of blood, he theorised). Red is followed by yellow and green, with blue and green remaining indistinguishable in language until a much later point. The first ancient culture to develop a word for blue on its own was in Egypt – surely no coincidence that this was also first place that produced a blue dye."
[/FONT]
"[FONT="]In some modern languages the blind-spot over blue remains, with blue and green being confusingly interchangeable in Japan, where traffic lights turn ‘blue’. However a fascinating experiment with the Himba tribe in Namibia suggests that having no word for a colour may indeed limit our ability to see it. The Himba have no word for blue, and no distinction between green and blue. Researcher Jules Davidoff devised a test where members of the tribe were asked to pick the odd one out of a circle of coloured squares. In one set of green boxes a single blue one was very hard for them to identify. However a set of green squares with one subtly different green square was easily spotted. The Himba have many words for green…"
[/FONT]
[FONT="]
([/FONT]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language)
[FONT="]
[/FONT]Useless Trivia:
(AL)(verdhë) is (EN)(yellow) and (AL)(gjelbert) is (EN)(green). In Italian however... (IT)(verde) is (EN)(green) while (IT)(giallo) is (EN)(yellow) / Just some trivia I always found peculiar.
I can inform you a bit about the cimbri (latin name.) They come from "Himmerland", Moraene hills in the middle of Jutland, Denmark. The Cimbri certianly migrated, south through Europe. Reached France and Spain, fought the Romans and were annihilated in about 200 bc. I have never head of them going to Persia, The goths however were at the Black Sea.
The Cimmerians made it as far as eastern Turkey and Armenia, where they established some cities (possibly Gyumri, Armenia, possibly Til-Garimmu and Gamirk, both of which were somewhere in Turkey) and battled the Assyrians in northern Mesopotamia. They helped to overthrow Urartu. They may have been the Gomer of the Bible. However, I'm not sure that they made it to Iran.
spruithean
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The Cimbri of Cimbrian War fame were annihilated, yes, and most certainly did not migrate to Persia, some report Cimbri still living in Jutland circa 1 AD, whether they were literally Cimbri is up for debate (we know Saxons settled land which was once inhabited by the Frisii, and eventually they acquired the name Frisian, despite the discontinuity). The Goths were not originally from the Black Sea, a relatively recent mtDNA based paper established a connection between Iron Age Jutland and Iron Age Wielbark males (the female samples showed affinity with Neolithic Farmer populations). The paper can be read (and downloaded) here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43183-w
Jensen was talking about the Cimbri, who really shouldn't be confused for Cimmerians.
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