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The ethnic
and racial situation on the Anatolian peninsula cannot be solved by
traditional divergence theories. Their all-inclusive recipe recommends
postulating a Common Anatolian or Proto-Anatolian
unity and peeling off its regional factions as subraces.
The very term Ἀνατολή is etymologically explained from the Greek catch-word for ‘east’ or
‘sunrise’, although the Greek themselves coined the expression Asuwa. It denoted a military bloc under an Assyroid dynasty in the Hittite kingdom and referred to Assyroid Asians renowned for fighting in two-wheeled
chariots. Its denomination survived in the present-day periphrasis Asia
Minor. The first Akkadian records
mentioned the peninsula as ‘the Land of the Hatti’.
Later the Greeks substituted it by two toponyms Ἀσία, Asía and Ἀνατολή.
Lappids. Before the Fall of Troy Asia Minor was occupied by Anatolian tribes
with cremation burials depositing the ashes in hut-urns and face-urns. U. B. Alkimdated their appearance to 1700 BC,
when cremation burials were common among Colchians
on the western coasts of Caucasia
and drifted from the cremating sites of the Georgian Trialeti
culture (3000 BC). From the 2nd century BC these cultural
complexes were united by the kingdom
of Caucasian Albania (known also
as Arran). The war of Troy
featured Trojans in Troas as a culture populated by
people practicing incineration rites. Their ultimate defeat later flooded Greece
with enslaved captives, who administered cremation funerals. Their bloom culminated
in the 11th century BC when the Aegean
Peninsula was clouded by the
twilight of the Dark Age of Greece. This era was conducted by the cultural
mainstream of the Geometric Ware with meander-like ornamentation and patterns
indulging in motifs of musical keys. The victorious champions were the tribes
of Hellenes, Ions and Aeolians, who spread cremations all over Greek islands
and carried out a temporary satemisation of Greek
elocution.
In Eurasian archaeology the 2nd
millennium BC brought a period of several overwhelming colonisations of Lappids and their incineration burial rites. Their impact
was felt on all continents: Central Europe was
shattered by the Lusatian Urnfielders
(1300 BC), South Russia and Kazakhstan
by Andronovans (1500 BC), Colchis
by the hypothetical Anatolians (1500 BC) and India
by the cremating cemetery H culture (1800 BC). Their staple endonymous ethnonyms were
Wends, Ants, Anatolians, Hindus, Andaman islanders and Annamites.
Although they spoke different languages, they manifested the common origin
from the Lappic racial prototype: short-sized
stature, brachycephalous heads, concave noses, paedomorphous faces, abundant hairiness and endomorphous constitution. In Epirus
they ran across their kinsmen from Africa, who were
called Albanians and Hellenes. Their family pedigree multiplied after Deucalion’s ‘world deluge’ and included the three main
forefathers, Ἕλλην, Hellēn – Ἴων, Íon – Αἴολος, Aeolus. Their temporary predominance gave Greece
the nickname of Ἑλλάς, Hellas
and baptized ancient Turkey
as Anatolia.
Hattians. The native autochthons of the Anatolian peninsula were Hattians, since they are regarded as its autochthones.
Their country was called ‘the Land of the Hatti’ by
Akkadians and Assyrians knew it as hatti matu. Their
tribesmen spoke the native language Hattili
and belonged to the long belt of archaic ‘axe-tool peoples’ with macrolithic
instruments used for digging for vegetal food. Their theocratic kingdom was
founded as the germ of the later Hittite empire that bore their name in its
etymology. Yet its throne was soon usurped by the violent overthrow of
foreign raiders called Nesites. They moved
their capital from Kadesh to Neša
and adopted their native dialect Nešili as
the official standard. These Nesites were
probably ancestors of the Mysians related to the
Thracian Bessoi and Greek Mycenaeans.
The ethnographical customs of Hattians were compatible with
the race of Neolithic farmers called Ubaidians,
Hittites, Hittim or Heteans
and consisted of elementalism, adoring the
mother-goddess Earth, bull cults and bull-fighting. They built multi-roomed
labyrinths with flat roofs on tell mounds heaped by burning and
repeated settlements. Their architecture in Çatal
Hüyük
or Çayönü Tepesi was comparable to
similar centres of Neolithic farmers in Elam,
Susiana, Mehrgahr, Harappa and Mohenjo daro. They shared
also a similar ergative language with suffixing b-plurals. What is,
however, surprising is that Hattic bears some very archaic features
preserved also in the Tsezic group of Caucasian languages (Godoberian, Bagvali, Dargwa, Tsaxur, Bezhita). These languages have maintained the African Bantu prenasalised consonants, prefixing
word-formation, nominal classifiers, the opposition of animate and inanimate
nouns and the SVO word order. They jut out of the morphological guidelines of
other Caucasoid languages and may stem from the colonisation of Dmanisi Negrids called as Homo georgicus (1.2 mya). It occurred in the
intermediate period between Oldowans and Acheuleans and so it deserves a special denomination. It makes it
justifiable to dust off the long-forgotten term of Chellean cultures.
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A tenable
hypothesis has it that the dark equatorial race wandered from Africa
to the Near East, Caucasus, India
and China
around 1.8 mya and Acheuleans repeated these travels with new sophisticated
industry around 0.8 mya. European Nordids
took part in the Acheulean diaspora
but conserved the archaic architecture of rectangular longhouses with
half-timber constructions filled by turfs. Oriental Acheuleans
founded their settlements in oases enclosed by arid deserts and built their
collective multi-room houses out of clay, pisé
and sundried bricks because they were vexed by lack
of woody forests. Anatolia lay on the crossroad of the
Elamite, Caucasian and Indo-European civilisations:
its western half was occupied by the IE languages with nominative-accusative
constructions and s-plurals (Phrygian, Luwian),
its eastern half was inhabited by the Elamitoid IE
ergative languages with b-plurals and its central heartland retained
the remnants of ancient Negroid languages with prefixing classifiers. The
Indo-European element loomed distinctly only in the western regions that
experienced the backward colonisation of the Danubian
Linear Ware from the Balkans. Its cultural heritage was manifested in
quadrangular longhouses and pottery with spiral patterns. Ancient Greece
and Phrygia were intermingled by at least eight local
cults devoted to the bull-god Zeus. They were administered by priestesses
called Idaean Dactyls or Ides on sacred hills
called Olympus. It is likely that the toponym Olympus originated from
the root Elam
by adding the Elamitoid b/p-plural
ending. The sacred district of Olympus on the Peloponnesos
was Elis
or Eleia. This suspicion is confirmed also by the
fact that the chain of Greek and Phrygian sacred Olympuses
continues as far as Nepal,
where people worship the sacred Mount
Elam.
Mediterranids. Speculations about how Anatolian languages developed
from Proto-Indo-European are worthless because all of them manifest strong
heterogeneous layers of alien substrata. One large group is formed by Mediterranids, who cover two extensive categories of
nomadic fishermen. One was remarkable for producing Leptolithic
prismatic flakes inserted into cutting sabre-like weapons, while the other
manufactured small triangular and trapezoid microliths
inlaid in wooden shafts of throwing knives. Egyptian Amarna
Letters reported about battles of Ramesses III
with the Hittites and enumerated their dependents among peuples
de la mer. They included Peleset (Philistines), Lukkas (Lycians), Shekelesh (Cilicians or Sicilian Siculi?) and Shardanes, whose name may mean either Sardinians or
inhabitants of the Lydian kingdom Sardis.
This proves that the ancients regarded Microlithic Turanids and both Levalloisian and Aurignacian
Tungids as one race of piratic
seafarers. Their racial unity is acknowledged also by modern anthropologists
who rank them as one category of Mediterranids.
Lydian Tungids. The
Mediterranean Tungids encompass Lydians, Carians, Lelegs and other ethnic minorities inclusive of the Sards. Their tribal plantations spanned from Palestine
and Byblus to Anatolia and from
here they continued to Greece,
Illyria, Dalmatia,
Carinthia as far the
Franco-Italian lake-district surrounding the lacustrine
centres of the Pfyn, Lagozza,
Pollada and Cortaillod
cultures. They were Non-Indo-European people clad in Greek and Roman tunics
wound and tied around the body. Besides they ate mush out of ground acorns,
adored flowers as sacred votive objects, worshipped divine twins and planted
cherry-trees. They were remarkable for slim and slender figures, leptorrhine noses, narrow faces (leptoprosopia) as well as small feet and hands.
Anatolian Turanids. Microlithic
cultures crossed Anatolia in two parallel routes, one
host of Kimmerian wanderers proceeded along the
northern coasts, while the other advanced along the southern coasts from the Taurus
Mountains to Cilicia
and Lycia.
Their abodes were hewn into the rock and cliffs as artificial rock-cut caves
with vertical shafts and horizontal corridors. Their occurrence was numerous
in Lycia
famed for the piratic adventures of its seafarers. Their
resemblance to Jewish rock-hewn monuments and cave dwellings in Nabatean Petra leaves no space for doubts about their
Semitic origin from the race of Hebroids.
Extract from Pavel Bělíček: The Differential
Analysis of the Wordwide Human Varieties. Prague 2018, pp. 90-98
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