ενα ενδιαφερον κειμενο που ειχα βρει πριν 6 χρονια στο ιντερνετ (αλλα δυστυχως εκτοτε εχασα το λινκ!)
το πρωτο μερος
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
OSSETIA
Here’s my attempt at a bit of ethnography, using information I found on the Web or in Sebastian Smith’s book about the Russian Caucasus:
Right in the centre of the North Caucasus region with the Circassians to their west and Ingushetia, Chechnya and Daghestan to their east, the Ossetians are unusual amongst these peoples in being mainly Christian and in speaking an Indo-European language. In fact, they claim to be descendants of the Sarmatians, an Iranic people who succeeded their near relatives, the Scythians, in the control of the steppes of southern Russia in Classical times (the Sarmatians were traditionally thought to be married to the Amazons, perhaps because they had female warriors). Allied with Greek colonists in the Crimea region and various other local tribes, the Sarmatians formed part of the Kingdom of the Bosphorus, founded in the fifth century BC, which made its money by controlling most of the trade on the Black Sea. The Ossetians are actually descended from one particular Sarmatian tribe called the Alans who are first mentioned in Chinese sources in the first century AD (BTW before anyone asks, the name “Alan”, as in “Alan Partridge”, apparently doesn’t derive from this tribe but from a Breton word of uncertain meaning). The Alans are famous for: (a) taking part in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and (b) possibly serving as a major inspiration for Medieval European knights and chivalry.
(a) Though the Sarmatians had never been averse to a bit of raiding in the Roman Empire (Ovid describes them crossing into Romania in one of his poems, “with the icicles hanging off their beards”) it wasn’t until relatively late that they made their mark in western Europe. The Kingdom of the Bosphorus had gone into slow decline under Roman influence and in the late fourth century AD it was dealt a deathblow by a frightening new nomadic power from Central Asia, the Huns. The Huns forced the Alans to submit to them then headed westwards, pushing the terrified Goths across the Danube into the Roman Empire in 376. In 406, a group of Alans, in alliance with some Germanic Vandals and Suebi, penetrated the empire themselves by invading Gaul. Here, and further south in the Pyrenees, they set up kingdoms which were short-lived, but left their mark in French place names such as Alencon. They also managed to get their revenge on the Huns by joining the Romans to defeat Attila at the battle of the Cataulanian Fields in 451. (b) The Sarmatians were credited with introducing the earliest version of the medieval knight to Europe when the Romans either copied their heavy cavalry or employed Sarmatian soldiers in their armies. The Sarmatians were famous for arming their horsemen with full body armour and a lance. The Alans also had another weapon, dogs called alaunts or alanuts, which they would use to savage their enemies’ horses. The codes of gallantry still present in the Caucasus today may have been transmitted along with the use of Sarmatian cavalry as the basis of medieval chivalry. At least one theory has a Sarmatian foundation to the myth of King Arthur:
Another interesting fact about the Alans is that they might be responsible for the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table and the Holy Grail.
Littleton and Malcor [in a book reviewed here] made the significant discovery that the scene of Arthur's death in Mallory's Morte d'Arthur, where the sword Excalibur was thrown into a lake, occurs in almost identical terms in the legends (Nart Sagas) of the Ossetians in the Caucasus. There is a possible connection, since the Ossetians are descendants of the Alans, and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius had settled in Britain a particular tribe of Alans (the Iazyges), whom he had defeated at AD 175 and taken into Roman service. The Alans had settled in the north of Britain, many of them at Ribchester or Ribelcastre, south of Lancaster. The legion to which the Alans were assigned, the VI Legion Victrix, was commanded by alanian warlord named by the Romans as Lucius Artorius Castus. "Artorius" looks like the Latin source of the name "Arthur".
The Narts are the heroes of legends common to the North Caucasus. They are a race of warrior giants, with many similarities to the Titans of Greek myth (in particular, there are plenty of tales with a surprising resemblance to the story of Prometheus, traditionally thought to have been chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains as a punishment for stealing fire from heaven).
Meanwhile, the Alans who remained in the Caucasus fell under Byzantine influence and became Christianized, although many of them only superficially (and there is also a Muslim minority today). There is still a great deal of pagan belief in Ossetia. Missionaries tried to help convert the Ossetians by replacing their gods with similar Christian saints. The most popular was (and still is) Wasterzhi, a knight-like rider on a white horse, who was transformed into Saint George by the Church, although his main function is as a fertility god (he is supposed to be so effective in this department that women are forbidden even to name him). His chief place of worship today is Hetag’s grove near the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz. Hetag was a fugitive somewhere between the 14th and 16th centuries who was rescued from his enemies when Wasterzhi sent down a grove of trees to hide him. From that time on the trees there have been sacred and the cult has received a massive boost as part of the general religious revival in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Kingdom of Alania flourished as part of the Byzantine sphere of influence until, like most of the rest of the Caucasus region, it was devastated by two waves of Mongol invasions: the first by the followers of Genghis Khan in the 1200s; the second by Timur Leng (Tamburlaine) in the fifteenth century. After that the Ossetians retreated further up the Caucasus mountains and became the target of the expanding Safavi Persian empire. This led them to throw their lot in with the other expanding empire to the north, Russia, which at least had the merit of being Christian Orthodox. This willingness to submit to Russia hasn’t always made the Ossetians too popular with their predominantly Muslim North Caucasian neighbours. The Russians used Ossetia as a base for their conquest of the Caucasus, founding the major fortress town of Vladikavkaz (roughly “ruler of the Caucasus”) in 1784. This defended the north end of the Daryal Gorge, the main route through the Caucasus to the rich kingdom of Georgia to the south. In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ossetians found themselves split into two republics, one within Russia, the other within Georgia. The effort to unite the two led to a bloody war with Georgia. In 1992, they also fought their Muslim neighbours, the Ingush, for control of the Prigorodny region. Famous Ossetians, apart from King Arthur (I put that bit in to annoy the Welsh) include Stalin (allegedly), though I far prefer conductor Valery Gergiev, chief of the Kirov Opera.
το πρωτο μερος
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
OSSETIA
Here’s my attempt at a bit of ethnography, using information I found on the Web or in Sebastian Smith’s book about the Russian Caucasus:
Right in the centre of the North Caucasus region with the Circassians to their west and Ingushetia, Chechnya and Daghestan to their east, the Ossetians are unusual amongst these peoples in being mainly Christian and in speaking an Indo-European language. In fact, they claim to be descendants of the Sarmatians, an Iranic people who succeeded their near relatives, the Scythians, in the control of the steppes of southern Russia in Classical times (the Sarmatians were traditionally thought to be married to the Amazons, perhaps because they had female warriors). Allied with Greek colonists in the Crimea region and various other local tribes, the Sarmatians formed part of the Kingdom of the Bosphorus, founded in the fifth century BC, which made its money by controlling most of the trade on the Black Sea. The Ossetians are actually descended from one particular Sarmatian tribe called the Alans who are first mentioned in Chinese sources in the first century AD (BTW before anyone asks, the name “Alan”, as in “Alan Partridge”, apparently doesn’t derive from this tribe but from a Breton word of uncertain meaning). The Alans are famous for: (a) taking part in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and (b) possibly serving as a major inspiration for Medieval European knights and chivalry.
(a) Though the Sarmatians had never been averse to a bit of raiding in the Roman Empire (Ovid describes them crossing into Romania in one of his poems, “with the icicles hanging off their beards”) it wasn’t until relatively late that they made their mark in western Europe. The Kingdom of the Bosphorus had gone into slow decline under Roman influence and in the late fourth century AD it was dealt a deathblow by a frightening new nomadic power from Central Asia, the Huns. The Huns forced the Alans to submit to them then headed westwards, pushing the terrified Goths across the Danube into the Roman Empire in 376. In 406, a group of Alans, in alliance with some Germanic Vandals and Suebi, penetrated the empire themselves by invading Gaul. Here, and further south in the Pyrenees, they set up kingdoms which were short-lived, but left their mark in French place names such as Alencon. They also managed to get their revenge on the Huns by joining the Romans to defeat Attila at the battle of the Cataulanian Fields in 451. (b) The Sarmatians were credited with introducing the earliest version of the medieval knight to Europe when the Romans either copied their heavy cavalry or employed Sarmatian soldiers in their armies. The Sarmatians were famous for arming their horsemen with full body armour and a lance. The Alans also had another weapon, dogs called alaunts or alanuts, which they would use to savage their enemies’ horses. The codes of gallantry still present in the Caucasus today may have been transmitted along with the use of Sarmatian cavalry as the basis of medieval chivalry. At least one theory has a Sarmatian foundation to the myth of King Arthur:
Another interesting fact about the Alans is that they might be responsible for the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table and the Holy Grail.
Littleton and Malcor [in a book reviewed here] made the significant discovery that the scene of Arthur's death in Mallory's Morte d'Arthur, where the sword Excalibur was thrown into a lake, occurs in almost identical terms in the legends (Nart Sagas) of the Ossetians in the Caucasus. There is a possible connection, since the Ossetians are descendants of the Alans, and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius had settled in Britain a particular tribe of Alans (the Iazyges), whom he had defeated at AD 175 and taken into Roman service. The Alans had settled in the north of Britain, many of them at Ribchester or Ribelcastre, south of Lancaster. The legion to which the Alans were assigned, the VI Legion Victrix, was commanded by alanian warlord named by the Romans as Lucius Artorius Castus. "Artorius" looks like the Latin source of the name "Arthur".
The Narts are the heroes of legends common to the North Caucasus. They are a race of warrior giants, with many similarities to the Titans of Greek myth (in particular, there are plenty of tales with a surprising resemblance to the story of Prometheus, traditionally thought to have been chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains as a punishment for stealing fire from heaven).
Meanwhile, the Alans who remained in the Caucasus fell under Byzantine influence and became Christianized, although many of them only superficially (and there is also a Muslim minority today). There is still a great deal of pagan belief in Ossetia. Missionaries tried to help convert the Ossetians by replacing their gods with similar Christian saints. The most popular was (and still is) Wasterzhi, a knight-like rider on a white horse, who was transformed into Saint George by the Church, although his main function is as a fertility god (he is supposed to be so effective in this department that women are forbidden even to name him). His chief place of worship today is Hetag’s grove near the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz. Hetag was a fugitive somewhere between the 14th and 16th centuries who was rescued from his enemies when Wasterzhi sent down a grove of trees to hide him. From that time on the trees there have been sacred and the cult has received a massive boost as part of the general religious revival in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Kingdom of Alania flourished as part of the Byzantine sphere of influence until, like most of the rest of the Caucasus region, it was devastated by two waves of Mongol invasions: the first by the followers of Genghis Khan in the 1200s; the second by Timur Leng (Tamburlaine) in the fifteenth century. After that the Ossetians retreated further up the Caucasus mountains and became the target of the expanding Safavi Persian empire. This led them to throw their lot in with the other expanding empire to the north, Russia, which at least had the merit of being Christian Orthodox. This willingness to submit to Russia hasn’t always made the Ossetians too popular with their predominantly Muslim North Caucasian neighbours. The Russians used Ossetia as a base for their conquest of the Caucasus, founding the major fortress town of Vladikavkaz (roughly “ruler of the Caucasus”) in 1784. This defended the north end of the Daryal Gorge, the main route through the Caucasus to the rich kingdom of Georgia to the south. In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ossetians found themselves split into two republics, one within Russia, the other within Georgia. The effort to unite the two led to a bloody war with Georgia. In 1992, they also fought their Muslim neighbours, the Ingush, for control of the Prigorodny region. Famous Ossetians, apart from King Arthur (I put that bit in to annoy the Welsh) include Stalin (allegedly), though I far prefer conductor Valery Gergiev, chief of the Kirov Opera.
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