Isj{ah}=man{nin] & kin{d} in opmars - Re: 15-3-'04

ONE MORE
ODD CONTRAST
between the life of old Thebes or Babylon
and 'modern' life
was the absence of
coined money.

Most trade
was still done by barter ...
Babylon was financially far ahead of Egypt.
Gold and silver were used for exchange and kept in ingots;
and there were bankers,
before coinage,
who stamped their names and the weight of these lumps
of precious metal!
A merchant or traveller
would carry precious stones to sell
to pay for his necessities.
Most servants and workers were slaves
who were paid not in money
but in kind .............
As money came in
slavery declined?!
@
A modern visitor
to these crowning cities of the ancient world
would have missed two very important articles of diet: there were no hens
and no eggs!
A modern day European cook would have found small joy in Babylon?
These things came from the East
somewhere about the time of the last
Assyrian empire ...
@
RELIGION
like everyting else
had undergone great refinement.
HUMAN SACRIFICE for instance
had long since disappeared; anumals or bread dummies
had been substituted for the victim.
{BUT the Phoenicians and especially the citizens of Carthage,
their greatest settlement in Africa,
were accused later of immolating human beings!}
When a great chief had died in the ancient days it had been customary
to sacrifice his wives and slaves
and break spear and bow at his tomb
so that he should not go unattended and unarmed
into the spirit world .............
In Egypt there survived of this dark tradition the pleasant custom
of burying small models of house and shop and servants and cattle
with the dead,
models that give us today
the liveliest realisation of the safe and cultivated life
of these ancient people of 3000 years
and more
ago!



@
SUCH
was the ancient world
before the coming of the Aryans
out of the northern forests
and plains.
In India and China
there were parallel developments!
In the great valleys of both these regions
agricultural city states of brownish peoples were
growing up,
but in India they do not seem
to have advanced or coalesced so rapidly
as the city states of Mesopotamia
and Egypt?
THEY were nearer the level of the ancient Sumerians
or of the Maya civilisation in America ...
CHINESE history
is only now being modernised by Chinese scholars
and cleared of much legendary {Mao-}matter?
PROBABLY
China at that early time was in advance of India ...
Contemporary with the Seventeenth Dynasty in Egypt,
there was a dynasty of emperors in China,
the SHANG dynasty,
also priest-emperors over a loose-knit empire
of subordinate kings ...
The chief duty
of these early emperors
was to perform the seasonal
sacrifices!
Beautiful bronze vessels
and lots of other rediscovered artifacts
from the time of the Shang dynasty still exist,
and their beauty and workmanship compel us to recognise
that many centuries of civilisation{s}
must have preceded their
manufacture?!!
@
SO
four thousand years ago,
that is to say about 2000 B.C.,
central and south-eastern Europe and central Asia
were probably warmer, moister and better wooded than
they are now?
IN
these regions of the earth
wandered a group of tribes mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race,
sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely variations
of one common language from the Rhine to the
Caspian Sea ........
AT that time they may
not have been a very numerous people,
and their existence was unsuspected by the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws,
or by the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt
which was tasting in those days for the first time
the bitterness of foreign
conquest!
@
These Nordic people
were destined to play a very important part indeed
in the world's history?
THEY were a people of the 'parklands' and the forest clearings;
they had no horses at first but they had cattle;
when they wandered
they put their tents and other gear on rough ox-waggons;
when they settled for a time
they may have made huts of wattle or mud ...
They burned their important dead;
they did not bury them ceremoniously as the brunet peoples did.
They put the ashes of their greater leaders in urns
and then made a great circular mound
about them ........
These mounds are (also to be found all around Irminloo!}
the 'round barrows' that occur all over north Europe!
The brunet people,
their predecessors,
did not burn their dead but buried them in sitting position
in elongated mounds;
the 'long barrows' ...
@
The Aryans
raised crops of wheat,
ploughing with oxen,
but they did not settle down by their crops;
they would reap and move on ......
They had bronze,
and somewhen about 1500 B.C.
they acquired iron.
THEY
may have been the discoverers of iron smelting.
And somewhen vaguely about that time they also got the horse -
which to begin with they used only for draught purposes.
THEIR
sicial life did not centre upon a temple
like that of the more settled peoples round the Mediterranean,
and their chief men were leaders
rather than priests.
THEY
had an aristocratic social order
rather than a divine and regal order;
from a very early stage they distinguished certain families
as leaderly and noble .............
@
THEY ALSO WERE
a very VOCAL people!
They enlivened their wanderings by feasts, at which there was much drunkenness and at which a special sort of men,
the bards,
would sing and recite ...
They had no writing until they had come into contact with civilisation,
and the memories of these bards were
their living literature!
THIS USE
of recited language as an entertainment did much to make it a fine and
beautiful instrument of expression,
and to that no doubt the subsequent predominance of the languages
derived from the Aryan is,
in part,
to be ascribed?
Every Aryan people had its legendary history crystallised
in bardic recitations, epics, sagas and
VEDAS,
as they were variously called ...
The social life of THESE people centred about the households of their
leading men: the hall of the chief where they settled for a time
was often a very capacious timber building.
There were no doubt huts for herds and outlying farm buildings;
but with most of the Aryan peoples
this hall was the general centre,
everyone went there to feast and hear the bards and take part in games
and discussions ..............
Cow-sheds and stabling surrounded it.
The chief and his wife and so forth would sleep on a dais
or in an upper gallary;
the commoner sort slept about anywhere as people still do
in Indian households ..........
Except for weapons, ornaments, tools and suchlike personal possessions
there was a sort of patriarchal 'communism' in the tribe.
The chief owned the cattle and grazing lands
in the common interest;
forest and rivers were
the wild ...
@

And
I'm going
to sleep once again
to dream about
it all!
@
Bye
for now
from your 'old'
Ch@i!
verliefdvrolijkknipoogerg vrolijkcool!verliefd
{'Vale Ouwe' forever?}
30 jun 2004 - bewerkt op 08 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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