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Comment by arminiusreturns | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is very interesting and right up my alley. One of my many random hobbies is collecting images of artefacts and I have a huge dir dedicated just to ancient swords. Bronze tends to look very similar due to the casting methods but it's cool to see an older iteration and compare it to say the Scythian (my personal favorites), Mycenaean, Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, etc.

Funny enough, the ones I have marked as oldest are called "The Swords of Arslantepe" [1] (which the article mentions in passing) from the same general region as this one, and are said to be also ~5k old, and of a very similar chemical composition. The weapons of the royal tombs of Ur [2] are right behind these in age.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Swords+of+Arslantepe&iax=im...

[2] http://sumerianshakespeare.com/117701/118301.html

edit: From the article, a new one to me: "and the sword found in the Tokat Museum in Turkey", now I have a new something to search for!

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What do you make of the myth that Scots came from Scythia - e.g. in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath:

They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous.

Now I'm not say there is much chance of historicity of this myth - but I've been puzzled as to why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from?

https://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesBritain/Medieval_Text...

I think there might be more merit to it than previously thought, but not just for the Scots, much more broadly to the earlier Celtic progenitors of a few later more distinct groups. For example, I don't remember the tribes name, but I recently learned one of the southeasterly Germanic tribes who claimed to be the oldest of the Germanic tribes also said they came from Scythia!

I tend to think of the Yamna and Corded Ware a lot when considering this question.

While it used to be more controversial, this has also been why the reduction of cost of genetic sequencing has been showing more and more scientifically viable analysis of these types of questions because DNA is much easier to follow! So the Scythians are really just a much younger version of some common ancestors, with haplogroup R1a being one of the more dominant ones.

In short, I think overfocusing on the younger "Scythian hypothesis" is too specific and prone to error, but there are lots of great insights to be had in following the genetic maps that have been exploding the knowledge set of proto-indo-european archaeology since about 2010.

> why anyone would pick on Scythia as a place to come from?

still a bit of a thing today

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans#Steppe_th...

I wanted to answer to arethuza but you just provided a reference to the essence of what I was going to say: "The [...] Indo-Europeans, a nomadic culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, expanded in several waves during the 3rd millennium BC. Their expansion coincided with the taming of the horse." Basically, using horses as an overpowering advantage over others, the people living in the space that was later inhabited by Scytians spread all over, including westward. Not much room for "picking a place to come from", as I understand it.

I think that was a poor choice of phrase by me - what I meant was, how did the Scots (who definitely have historical roots in Ireland) get this idea from?

NB Scots in the sense of Dál Riata Scots, who eventually became the most powerful grouping in what became Scotland in the 9th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata

The way I see it, there are two factors for the origin myths:

The misidentification of various people. Practically every barbarian horde descending from euro-asian steppe into europe was called scythian as if it was one and the same. That was the case for huns, avars, magyars and others.

The desire to be associated with martial might/success. The desire to claim primacy (and therefore rights) over some territory. History is rife with such myths of origin.

It seems your user name matches your hobby!

I suppose you have a point! Most people don't know the story of Arminius so I usually dont get any comments about it.

I just heard about it the other week via In Our Time on the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f69q

is your collection of images shared anywhere?

No, I'm not sure about copyright on most of them and how fair use would work for that. (I also have a map collection that is pretty awesome that suffers the same issue.)

That’s an interesting space. There should be a way to share just file hashes with a description and basic metadata for each of them, eg:

dea939...82f A scan of Newton’s personal notebook, page 13 (image from London Museum of History, 2013, 8000x6000 pixels)

That way people who like to build such collections would have ways to share and compare theirs, and see if they have anything missing from bigger datasets, etc. You could even imagine a wikimedia style commons to manage a repository of these hashes and associated metadata.

That's actually quite a brilliant idea! Now you have me thinking...

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