seems i need to start a separate thread giving some sense to the likes of pasban.
I am very sorry to see such anger directed at our friend, Pasban, who has brought an extremely interesting and topical piece to our attention. What is written there is not authored by him; he has merely cited somebody else's writing.
I dedicate my answers here, although many of them as speculative as those that they replace, to
Pasban, and to our Iranian brethren, the closest to us outside the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, the Nepalis, the Bhutanese and the Lion Race.
my god... i dont have comments to fathom the stupidity of this line.
You are commenting that you have nothing to comment on this. Quite right. It is best to be clear about these things. Very good practice.
Well, Iranians are as susceptible as some Indians who believe that everything that was ever invented or created was already done or found by our ancient ancestors
This rather menacing paragraph really made me think a lot before proceeding further. However, in the rather forlorn hope that some kind souls may tell Bang Galore NOT to shoot the pianist, let us try our luck.
Towards the noble objective of self-preservation, may I point out that I found little really to differ with Bang Galore; there were nuances I would have preferred, but nothing show-stopping. My comments sometimes read as expansions of Bang Galore; perhaps it is best to leave it at that.
Pray for me, please.
"Persia" is the Greek name of Pars, a province of modern day Iran. Meanwhile, the name Iran (==Land of the Aryans) is derived from the Aryan people, who first moved from Central Asia, and settled in what is now Iran, some 30,000 years ago. And here are some of the most important contributions of the people of Persia or Iran, to the world civilization:
1. The first human civilization - - The Persian Civilization (==Eilam); It was ahead of Egypt by 500 years, of India, by 1,000 years, and of China, by 2,000 years, of Greece by 3,000 years, and of Rome, by 4,000 years! According to Professor Arthur A. Pope, the famous Orientalist (A.H. Saidian, Iran: Land and the people, Tehran 2001 P. 358).
Well, that would put egyptian civilisation at around 29,500 years old, the Indian civilsation at about 29,000 years,the Greeks at 27,000 & the Romans at 26,000 years ago. since none of these civilisations claim anything like that, we would probably have to rewrite the whole of recorded history.
These claims are truly fantastic. Let’s take them one by one, in order not to have our brains jump out of our skulls and run squeaking about on the floor, desperately looking for a hole to hide in.
3. Cyrus the Great conquered Babylonia, Assyria, Media and India; His son Cambodia (any influence on the Cambodian People?) added Egypt later, and for the first and the last time in history, all the governments of the known world were ruled under one color!
Would be interesting if Cambodians were at anytime Zoroastrian, unfortunately for the argument, they were Hindus & then Buddhist.
That doesn’t follow.
Zoroastrianism wasn’t the ancestral religion of the Indo-Iranians; that may have closely resembled Vedic cosmogony, except that their concept of the descent of Devas and Asuras may have been reversed: as has been pointed out elsewhere, whereas in the Avesta, Daiva is the devil, and Ahura Mazda is the one, supreme god, in the Vedas, it is the opposite (NB: the Iranians tended to aspirate their ‘s’, so, Asura=Ahura, Sapta Sindhu = Hapta Hindu, etc.).
Zoroaster was in all probability a prophet of a period not clearly known to us. We can only conjecture. His date is probably after 2000 BC, although Parsis prefer a figure of 6000 BC, and current historical sentiment is for between 1800 to 1000 BC.
By then, the Parama Kamboja were already positioned in the Ferghana Valley region. They are known to the immigrant tribes of North India as the Parama Kamboja, the further Kamboja, as distinct from their cousins closer to the Punjab. Legend says, and this is not cited as historical evidence, that they fought in the battle of Kurukshetra, on the Kaurava side. They are described as very tall, very fair and brilliant horsemen with outstanding horseflesh; Kamboja horses were much sought after. Their war-leader was commander-in-chief after a succession of Kaurava commanders-in-chief died in battle; I think he came after Dronacharya, but am not sure. They were expert blanket makers, and their gifts to North Indian Aryans often had a component of blankets in it, apparently greatly appreciated by all fortunate recipients.
In history, they are associated with the Sakas, or Scythians, horse-people on the steppes, who ranged far and wide, from the Takla Makan in the East, bounded by the Indo-European Tocharians (how these Indo-Europeans got here, nobody has a clue), on the west by the Gothic nations.
Another poster has already mentioned Darius’ desperate expeditions after them, in the Danube region, which flailed around in the air and came back achieving nothing except blisters and saddle-sore backsides among the expedition.
Part of their tribe was pushed down south and east by the fleeing Tocharians, otherwise known to the Chinese as the Yueh Chi, the
chandravanshi clan (I am using the word to explain to readers that this Sun-descended, Moon-descended, Fire-descended business may have come from the Tocharians), one of five ruling the bigger tribe, or the Kushana, the Tocharian word for moon clan. The Kamboja found themselves pushed into Gilgit and Kashmir. Their names are still to be found widely across Afghanistan and Pakistan and India; one version is Kamboh. Tibetan records show that one branch of the tribe was pushing east into Tibet around the beginning of the first millennium AD.
It is SO tempting to speculate that this eastward-pushing tribe managed to make their way across, intact, to the Burma – South China region, and then further into South East Asia to become the Cambodge there. To tell the truth, this HAS been speculated, but it is such a long shot that we should leave it at that, unless better evidence from Tibetan records, or from genetic analysis crops up.
Incidentally the Cambodians were not intrinsically Hindu, they became Hindu due to conquest. The story of Indian penetration into South East Asia is another completely separate, mind-bendingly spectacular history with its own value.
So it is far-fetched but with a possibility that leaves it at the level of tempting speculation.
6. Sanskrit, which is the mother of all modern languages, was born in Iran, before it went to India
Very interesting! Did it go lock,stock & barrel since it seems to have left no traces in Iran? seems the Iranians/Persians forgot the mother of all languages completely. Very poor show from them - forgetting the mother !!
Please, please, please….
That was rather bitter; whatever for?
The combined common tongue, Indo-Iranian, was prevalent apparently up till the time that the tribesmen got to the steppeland between Caspian and Aral Seas. Here they gradually separated from each other, doctrinal rifts occurred, their common cosmogony reversed direction, and one branch went down south east over the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush, the other went south west over into Balkh and Khurasan. Ancient Khurasan is more Iran than modern Persia is.
The Indo-Iranian that the south eastern branch spoke was gradually separated out. The hymns composed in that now-dead language were later formed into four books, the Vedas, and the language continued to develop into what Panini codified as Sanskrit. There is a distance between Panini’s codified language and the language of the Vedas, and LESS of a distance between the Vedas and the Avesta!
So the Iranians did not forget the mother of modern INDIAN languages, they carried with them a sister of that mother language, which was the mother language for the Persians, as Persian, the Azerbaijanis, the Tajik, and the Afghans, among others, in both Dari and Pushto versions.
7. The Stone Age, which dates back some 70, 000 years ago, was started in Iran, the cradle of the earliest human civilization!
So, do Iranians/Persians claim ancestory from them or the Aryans?
Leaving aside the good Professor Tabra’s lucubrations, this date relates to the exit of Homo Sapiens from Africa. We all claim descent from that band of about 1,500 people. They seem to have followed the sea-coast into Arabia, then Iran, then modern-day Pakistan, then India, finally down to Australia and Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia (remember that the seas they faced were at the outset nearly 50 m. less in depth, and over the centuries, gradually deepened).
Another band, settled in the Levant, sent off offshoots into the Mediterranean and into Europe. Then the group in the Levant was the group from which a very large group broke away and traveled north, up through Asia Minor and through an undetermined route, to the steppe-lands around the Black Sea.
It was from HERE, according to current consensus, from what I can make out from my readings, that there was the domestication of the horse; the design and development of the horse-drawn chariot, perfect for a rolling steppe-land; and, in due course of time, after millennia, a two-way split, between the Centum languages and the Satam languages.
The Indo-Iranians were the Satam languages; they therefore are descended from the original African band of migrants, but at that time, had forgotten their own history, and knew nothing of Africa and of migrating from there. Instead, as they traveled east, they developed the habit of describing the nobles and members of the war-band among them as the ‘Arya’, the nobles. The Arya were not the people, they were the king and the close relatives of the king and the members of the war-band. Today, they do not exist; in India, they have been diluted so thoroughly that there is for practical purposes no genetic variation among Indians. Instead, the word Arya is used to describe a group of languages which were brought in by the migrants from the north west (and the western) passes, and which finally became Sanskrit.
9. The first accounting tools were found in Iran, belonging to 9,000 years ago.
Possible. This article is an outcome of some very creative accounting.
This is wholly untrue.
The accounting tools found 9000 years ago were tools developed by Stone Age people, nothing to do with the Iranian migrants whatsoever. The juxtaposition is misleading.
16. According to Professor Griffith Taylor of Australia, the homo sapiens (Caucassians) were originated from the Iranian Plateau, also known as the Land of Mahd(the Medes?) and scattered throughout the world some 17,000 years ago (15,000 B.C.)Gardeshgari, Iran, Jan. 2001.
Contradicts the first statement which said that the Aryans came from central Asia & Caucasians( those who originated in the Caucuses) are not the only examples of Homo Sapiens. If they scattered only 17,000 years ago, how did they mange to build all those civilisations that is claimed to be have been built(according to #1) between 29,500 & 25,000 years ago.
No, it is bunkum, but not quite in the way that you have described it.
Around 17,000 years ago, the Indo-Iranians would have been part of their parent body on the steppes behind the Black Sea. Medea was still some 15,000 years in their future, and a curving, right-handed traverse through many thousands of miles away, from the Black Sea steppes to the banks of the Caspian, then to the banks of the Aral Sea, possibly further east. There they were stopped by the Tocharians, who presumably had turned right instead of turning left into Europe like the other Indo-Europeans, and had landed up at a point where they could go no further without irritating the East Asians who had landed up there around 30,000 years earlier, the Indo-Iranians spread out south and west. Some south and east.
[Personal Message to Bang Galore]
Now hear this!
There was NO US Senate until there was a US; therefore these Caucasians did NOT come from Caucuses.
Nor did they come from the Caucasus Mountains. In this context, this is a term referring to blonde and brunette white-skinned folks. That includes Spaniards, south Italians and Greeks; Maltese, Semitic as they are, don't belong.
23. The Turkish People are a result of the mixture of the early Iranians, and the Chinese; Semites and Egyptians, Palestinians and Arabs, are the mixtures of Iranians and Africans; while the Indians are a mixture of Iranians (Brahman) and the native blacks of India, Dravidians.
The middle one is the joker. The first and third are accepted widely
( Even Sanskrit itself was born in Persia, before it reached India, some 7,000 years ago!). ( Even Sanskrit itself was born in Persia, before it reached India, some 7,000 years ago!).
Pity it didn't like the place of its birth and washed its hands completely of that country.
74. The origins of all the Indo-European languages, including Indian, German, English, Greek, Spanish, French and many other European languages today, are Iranian. (Gardeshgari, Iran, Sep. 2002) So, it should be called Irano-European, not Indo-European!
Bull’s wool.
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-European
Greek
Latin
(Spanish)
(French)
Celtic
(English)
Germanic
Indo-Iranian
Iranian
Farsi
Azerbaijani
Tajik
Dari
Pushto
Pali
Prakrit/Sanskrit
Punjabi
Sindhi
Hindi
Marathi
Gujarati
Maithil
ABU
Assamese
Bengali
Udiya
There's a town called Singapur in the Indian state of Andra Pradesh. What conclusions are you going to draw from that?
That there is a town called Town of the Lions. That there could be many towns of the lions, where the same language is spoken (there was extensive cultural exchange with the Malay Peninsula, and South-East Asia in general, and the traces are still broad and wide). That there could be even a country of the lions – Sinhala – claiming descent from Vijaya Singha. That the word Singha seems to have been widely known across a large swathe of territory.
113. The world's most educated (100% highly educated) Community is that of the Parsis (the Persian Zoroastrians) who live mostly in Iran, India, Pakistan and England. They are also one of the most financially successful communities in the world. (They established the first Cancer Hospital, and many other educational and Social Centers, including some of the oldest and biggest libraries in India - -see International Herald Tribune, April 24, 2003).
Incidentally, the most well known poet of the Gujrati language in India is a Parsee by the name of Khabar-Dar.
And they all fled Iran for India. Not very nice of you, was it?
Not all. As the resident fire-worshipper has been hinting madly, there is a residual population of Fire-worshippers in Iran. National Geographic covered them once.
They are tolerated and allowed to worship, as People of the Book. Their main centre is Yezd.
116. In the fields of Religion and Philosophy: The oldest living religion in the world, is Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia, (Philippine Star, Jan. 26, 2002).
Would be believable if Zarathushtra, the founder did not reverse the belief that existed & claim that the Devas(Hinduism anyone?) were the false gods & the Ahuras(Asuras anyone?) were the real gods.
No, this is not precisely correct. The religious split seemingly occurred before Zarathustra. Zarathustra's religion, from existing accounts, was radically different, was monotheistic (there was no God but Ahura Mazda) and had to fight for its acceptance. The monotheism in Zoroastrianism is qualified by the existence of Yazatas = Angels, of whom Mithra is the supreme (earlier, he had been next only to Ahura Mazda).
Zoroastrianism is ONE of the oldest prophetic religions; they must compete with Israel for the oldest title. Hinduism had no prophets in 1800 to 1000 BC that we know of today, the earliest being around 600 BC. Perhaps between 1500 BC and 1000 BC, there was the figure of Krishna, but contemporary accounts of Krishna soon gave way to a deified version.
Many Christian traditions as well as some of its Philosophy are actually the adaptations from the Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, the Persian Religion of Sun god worshipping. Here are some examples:
1. The Christmas is, in reality, the Birthday of Mithra the Sun-god (Not the Son of God!) which was born on December 25, after the Saturnalia Festivals).
2. Virgin Mary (mother of Baby-god Jesus) resembles Anahita, the Persian goddess, The Mother of gods!
3. Sunday (the Christians Holiday) is actually dedicated to Sun-god or Mithra, the Persian god.
Probable except that Mithra was a pre - Zoroastrianism deity who was popular enough to be incorporated within Zoroastrianism even though he was one of the Devas. BTW, you can find his mention as a minor god in the Rig Veda (Hinduism)where he always accompanies Varuna.
Since you have gone so far, you might as well go further and check out Boghaz Kuei, the Hittites, the Mitanni, Varun=Ouranos=Uranus, Mitra=Mithra (that ‘h’ again?) and the Nasatyas. All members of the divine war-band riding behind Indra the thunderbolt-wielder. In European cosmogony of the incoming Indo-Europeans, he became Zeus, from the earlier steppe divinity Dyaus Pitar = Sky Father, or Jupiter <= Du Pitar <= Dyaus Pitar; so, Zeus’ divine thunderbolt, so effectively demonstrated throughout Greek mythology.
123. Special respect for the animals, particularly cows and bulls, which was very popular among the early Egyptians and the Indians today, has an Aryan (Iranian) origin. It's because of those animals' great roles in agriculture and human sustenance. (And considering that the early Egyptians and the Brahmans of India, were actually the emigrants from the Land of Arya, the connections becomes more evident).
The only problem with the land if the Arya/n is that one of India's early names which finds mention in all its major epics is Aryavarta - the abode of the Aryans.
Please let us not get confused. Both groups, the Indo- and the –Iranian, remembered and carried along the word Arya, noble, war-lord, great one. Exactly the way it is used in Classical (Paninian) Sanskrit. Both named their territories after their chiefs. It was not out of Iran into India; it was out of Scythia into Iran and into India.
In the end, I would like to point out that I have nothing but the greatest of respect for what ancient Persians achieved & for the richness of their culture.
There is no need to cook up facts or to quote silly lies to try & embellish one of the greatest civilisations to have ever existed on earth. There is far too much greatness in the truth itself.
I could salute that sentiment.
)
