Etruscan and Daco-Thracian Relationship

[Johane Derite]

A certain people with almost no history, a people that appears on the historical stage relatively recently (in the Middle Ages), tries to construct a continuity spanning millenia.

Out of all the countless Indo-Europeans of the Balkans that were known as Illyrians, Dardanians, Pannonians, Paeonians, Triballians, Thracians, Dacians, Brygians, Phrygians, Moesians, Getae, and countless more, of all those Balkan Indo-European peoples, the only ones to have had their language survive are whoever the proto-Albanians were known as at that time.

So the Albanians are most definitely a singular historical people empirically by this fact alone.

Empirically they managed to do something the vast majority of all the other Balkan IE peoples did not, i.e. preserve their language. Language never comes alone though, it is always a part of a people and a cultural package, so obviously also a people and a culture kept this language alive.

Just their language alone has linguistic scientific value for mankind in the study of Indo-European, Balkan-Indo-European specifically, but then the accompanying also the cultural tangible and intangible heritage they also have conserved that is a treasure to be studied for Indo-European studies, again Balkan IE specifically.

And Albanian does have continuity spanning millenia. At no point was Albanian a dead language that was artificially revived or invented or anything like that. It is a language that has passed down from father and mother to son and daughter since the time of Proto-Indo-European. And these people that passed this language down had flesh and blood and haplogroups and culture and territories, political leaders, wars, i.e. history.

Your claim that our people have almost no history is obviously your personal politically motivated bias and just empirically false.

The map is not the territory.

If the Albanian language descends from Illyrians, Dardanians, or Bessi, or Triballians, which ever it is, these are people who had kings, territories and empirically a people that appear on the historical stage of the Balkans far earlier than any of the south slavs for example.

Albanopolis from whom the Albanians get their name has both inscriptions and attestations from Ptolemy way before south slavs.

This claim of a people that "appears" is an artifact of ignorance that comes from mistaking the map for the territory, not a description of the facts on the ground.

 

[Teipares]

No one claimed Etruscans are "Albanian" they are clear cut Italic people, how did this end up going to our reconstruction of continuity. We are simply paleo-balkanic and the thread is about relationship between daco-thracian and etruscan not Etruscans ethnogenesis. Johane specifically implied a minority group amongst them who might have left a tiny small linguistic trace similar to how medieval Albanians left in Greece but Daco-Thracian in Etruscan who may or may not have been our ancestors. As for our ethnogenesis and history let the foreigners tell us where we are from, because apperantly we came from andromeda as if language/history appear in a blink of an eye. If thats the case enrich us with what is history Germanics whom were plain Barbarians to the Greco-Romans they also appear more in medieval times. Do the celts have history? What about the slavs?

As an Albanian I do not care who our ancestors are for the sake of seeking glory but who they really were. To me it doesn't matter how we were, it matters how we currently are.

Keto e kane ne terezi flasin per historine tone athu sikurse paraardhesit tane vin nga ufot...

 

[norbert]

Out of all the countless Indo-Europeans of the Balkans that were known as Illyrians, Dardanians, Pannonians, Paeonians, Triballians, Thracians, Dacians, Brygians, Phrygians, Moesians, Getae, and countless more, of all those Balkan Indo-European peoples, the only ones to have had their language survive are whoever the proto-Albanians were known as at that time.

So the Albanians are most definitely a singular historical people empirically by this fact alone.

Empirically they managed to do something the vast majority of all the other Balkan IE peoples did not, i.e. preserve their language. Language never comes alone though, it is always a part of a people and a cultural package, so obviously also a people and a culture kept this language alive.

Just their language alone has linguistic scientific value for mankind in the study of Indo-European, Balkan-Indo-European specifically, but then the accompanying also the cultural tangible and intangible heritage they also have conserved that is a treasure to be studied for Indo-European studies, again Balkan IE specifically.

And Albanian does have continuity spanning millenia. At no point was Albanian a dead language that was artificially revived or invented or anything like that. It is a language that has passed down from father and mother to son and daughter since the time of Proto-Indo-European. And these people that passed this language down had flesh and blood and haplogroups and culture and territories, political leaders, wars, i.e. history.

Your claim that our people have almost no history is obviously your personal politically motivated bias and just empirically false.

The map is not the territory.

If the Albanian language descends from Illyrians, Dardanians, or Bessi, or Triballians, which ever it is, these are people who had kings, territories and empirically a people that appear on the historical stage of the Balkans far earlier than any of the south slavs for example.

Albanopolis from whom the Albanians get their name has both inscriptions and attestations from Ptolemy way before south slavs.

This claim of a people that "appears" is an artifact of ignorance that comes from mistaking the map for the territory, not a description of the facts on the ground.

Yes, the Albanians are obviously a people descended from a Balkan-IE-speaking people that managed to preserve its language. I suppose being a people of nomadic or seminomadic pastoralists, that was dwelling in the mountains, helped evade full romanization. Even so, almost half of the Albanian lexicon is Latin and I think, had the Roman Empire survived another century or two, by consolidating its grip on the entire Balkans even more, you would be speaking an idiom at least akin to Romanian today.

It seems that I have expressed myself rather haplessly in my previous comment. I did not mean that the Albanians are a "people without history" in the sense that they did not exist prior to their earliest attestation in the late 11th century CE by the Byzantines. They obviously did exist but they did not contribute to history in any meaningful way which is why no one talked about them before and your relating of the Albanians to Ptolemy's Albanoi and the settlement Albanopolis is pure fiction. The Albanian name is an exonym. It was assigned to them by foreign authors who were using tribal names from antiquity, assigning them to a people or peoples inhabiting that area during the authors' lifetime. Using names from antiquity was pretty much a trend during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Early Modern Age. We know what the Albanians called themselves: Arbër/Arbëresh. No relation to the Albanoi whatsoever. Switzerland is also known as Confederatio Helvetica but the modern Swiss people are hardly the ancient Helvetii. Considering the sizeable Albanian migrant community in Switzerland, I hope you won't start to claim them one day, too.

As for being "historical" just by existing, the Roma are also a people with their own language and culture but you can hardly call them a people that actually participated in or even made history. In that sense, every people, every tribe in the world has a history and culture. And obviously Albanian is relevant to the study of at least one branch of Balkan-IE. No one's denying that. The issue here are your repeated attempts to create a fake history spanning all the way back to antiquity by identifying certain tribes or peoples with modern Albanians. Even some of the well-attested peoples or tribes, like the Illyrians or Thracians, are little more than just names. We know so little about them and almost nothing about their languages. Take the example of the Illyrians who seem to have been nothing but fierce pirates. But in terms of cultural impact, they were nothing compared to the Romans, which is why they were romanized in the first place. Genetic research on them is also extremely difficult because it seems that most of those tribes inhabiting Illyria (another Roman-assigned name for the Western Balkans which doesn't tell us much about the actual Illyrians) practiced cremation which is a sign of a lower cultural stage. The few burial sites across the Adriatic coast cannot be representative of an entire people, even though many seem to think they are. I can already see people talking about much of what we think we know now as "outdated" in 10 years just like papers from 2010 are talked about today. Remember how I2a-M423 was once considered a Dinaric haplogroup until it was established that it came with the Slavs. That's not a minor correction of previous assumptions that were treated as undisputable facts in the 2000s and even beyond.

After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, the burial practices went from common/chamber graves to cremation. Not to mention the overall erosion of material culture. Cremation is usually a sign of extreme (cultural) poverty, not just another cultural trend. In that sense, the Illyrians were just a bunch of wild Balkan tribes that had the fortune of being in close proximity to the Romans or the Greeks, otherwise no one would have ever heard of them. Same goes for the Thracians, to a different extent. Meanwhile, the Etruscans are a pretty well-attested and studied people and not just a mere people. They were a civilization. All that was disputed in regards to them was the question of their origins. A dispute we definitely have no need for is a fairy tale that should connect them to the Thracians.

 

[Riverman]

Cremation is usually a sign of extreme (cultural) poverty, not just another cultural trend.

That's absolutely wrong, because the switch to cremation is simply the result of a specific religious belief systems demands. There were many cultures which switched from inhumation to cremation while making a cultural leap forward. You can't generalise from the Greek Bronze Age case, in which cremation was associated with a downfall of the city states, to cremations throughout time and space.

 

[Johane Derite]

Yes, the Albanians are obviously a people descended from a Balkan-IE-speaking people that managed to preserve its language. I suppose being a people of nomadic or seminomadic pastoralists, that was dwelling in the mountains, helped evade full romanization. Even so, almost half of the Albanian lexicon is Latin and I think, had the Roman Empire survived another century or two, by consolidating its grip on the entire Balkans even more, you would be speaking an idiom at least akin to Romanian today.

It seems that I have expressed myself rather haplessly in my previous comment. I did not mean that the Albanians are a "people without history" in the sense that they did not exist prior to their earliest attestation in the late 11th century CE by the Byzantines. They obviously did exist but they did not contribute to history in any meaningful way which is why no one talked about them before and your relating of the Albanians to Ptolemy's Albanoi and the settlement Albanopolis is pure fiction. The Albanian name is an exonym. It was assigned to them by foreign authors who were using tribal names from antiquity, assigning them to a people or peoples inhabiting that area during the authors' lifetime. Using names from antiquity was pretty much a trend during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Early Modern Age. We know what the Albanians called themselves: Arbër/Arbëresh. No relation to the Albanoi whatsoever. Switzerland is also known as Confederatio Helvetica but the modern Swiss people are hardly the ancient Helvetii. Considering the sizeable Albanian migrant community in Switzerland, I hope you won't start to claim them one day, too.

As for being "historical" just by existing, the Roma are also a people with their own language and culture but you can hardly call them a people that actually participated in or even made history. In that sense, every people, every tribe in the world has a history and culture. And obviously Albanian is relevant to the study of at least one branch of Balkan-IE. No one's denying that. The issue here are your repeated attempts to create a fake history spanning all the way back to antiquity by identifying certain tribes or peoples with modern Albanians. Even some of the well-attested peoples or tribes, like the Illyrians or Thracians, are little more than just names. We know so little about them and almost nothing about their languages. Take the example of the Illyrians who seem to have been nothing but fierce pirates. But in terms of cultural impact, they were nothing compared to the Romans, which is why they were romanized in the first place. Genetic research on them is also extremely difficult because it seems that most of those tribes inhabiting Illyria (another Roman-assigned name for the Western Balkans which doesn't tell us much about the actual Illyrians) practiced cremation which is a sign of a lower cultural stage. The few burial sites across the Adriatic coast cannot be representative of an entire people, even though many seem to think they are. I can already see people talking about much of what we think we know now as "outdated" in 10 years just like papers from 2010 are talked about today. Remember how I2a-M423 was once considered a Dinaric haplogroup until it was established that it came with the Slavs. That's not a minor correction of previous assumptions that were treated as undisputable facts in the 2000s and even beyond.

After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, the burial practices went from common/chamber graves to cremation. Not to mention the overall erosion of material culture. Cremation is usually a sign of extreme (cultural) poverty, not just another cultural trend. In that sense, the Illyrians were just a bunch of wild Balkan tribes that had the fortune of being in close proximity to the Romans or the Greeks, otherwise no one would have ever heard of them. Same goes for the Thracians, to a different extent. Meanwhile, the Etruscans are a pretty well-attested and studied people and not just a mere people. They were a civilization. All that was disputed in regards to them was the question of their origins. A dispute we definitely have no need for is a fairy tale that should connect them to the Thracians.

Factual innacuracy after factual innacuracy. I would recommend looking into what dunning-kruger effect means since you seem to be a cogent example of it. Maybe you read a few twitter posts by someone and now believe yourself to be competent in this subject.

Illyrians are known even by those with basic elementary readings into this subject to have almost entirely been inhumers, with the exception of LBA-EIA influences from Daco-Mysians / Basarabi inluences such as in Glasinac-Mati, alongside which also appears pottery and fibula, so a clear cultural package of a migrant population, nothing related to poverty signal.

Cremation nothing to do with poverty but a ethno-religious worldview, as it was ritualised and practised by kings, high status warriors, etc, and often slaves and marginalised victims of social punishment and such were not allowed cremation but just thrown in ritual pits or such. Such a ridiculous claim when there is plenty of research on this subject.

Concerning I-CTS10228 there were those of us that knew from the beginning based on tmrca that it was nonsense that it was called "dinaric" and had nothing to do with paleo-balkans but was a south slav group. It was pushed as dinarics primarily by south slav groups that seem to have a pathological need to be paleo-balkan and then project this onto actual paleo-balkan peoples in some twisted pyschological projection mechanism.

 

[Fshatar]

So much non sense. Illyrians are by far the best sampled Paleo-Balkan group. aDNA Illyrian sampling number wise is well beyond 200-300+ already. They notoriously used inhumation not "cremation" as can be seen from hundreds of quasi Kurgans/burial mounds during Bronze and Iron Age. We know they were Illyrians due to these things called archeology and population genetics LMAO

 

[Fshatar]

You have a history of coping about Bronze and Iron Age Illyrian samples for obvious reasons. For those who don't know Serbian, he's saying the same ChatGPT generated slop here just in his mother tongue:

 

[Riverman]

So much non sense. Illyrians are by far the best sampled Paleo-Balkan group. aDNA Illyrian sampling number wise is well beyond 200-300+ already. They notoriously used inhumation not "cremation" as can be seen from hundreds of quasi Kurgans/burial mounds during Bronze and Iron Age. We know they were Illyrians due to these things called archeology and population genetics LMAO

I agree, Illyrians are among the better tested BA and IA people, most definitely. And the most distinctive feature of core Illyrian groups is the clan tumuli, in which multiple members of the clan were buried. Barely any other group was as strict about its inhumation rule as the Illyrian core, just like the Thracian core was always cremating. However, under the influence of each other and additional groups, at least regional groups could switch or start with biritual cemetaries.

 

[norbert]

That's absolutely wrong, because the switch to cremation is simply the result of a specific religious belief systems demands. There were many cultures which switched from inhumation to cremation while making a cultural leap forward. You can't generalise from the Greek Bronze Age case, in which cremation was associated with a downfall of the city states, to cremations throughout time and space.

It can be a switch to a different belief system but that is not the case with the Illyrians.

 

[norbert]

You have a history of coping about Bronze and Iron Age Illyrian samples for obvious reasons. For those who don't know Serbian, he's saying the same ChatGPT generated slop here just in his mother tongue:




View attachment 19546

What gives you the idea that this is me? Would you please translate what is written here, since you obviously speak Serbian. I also can't help but notice your urge to downvote every comment I make. That is usually a sign of fragility. When I disagree with someone, I simply don't rate their comment at all.

As for the Illyrians being the "best sampled Paleo-Balkan group": in relation to whom? A lot of digging has to be done across the Dalmatian hinterland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slavonia (Pannonia) and Montenegro to get a better picture of "Illyrian" genetics. We don't even know how to properly identify samples as Illyrian. The Liburnian samples are basically indistinguishable from the "Illyrian" ones. It is no longer believed that the Liburnians were Illyrian. So, who's who?

 

[Riverman]

It can be a switch to a different belief system but that is not the case with the Illyrians.

For sure it was a switch to a different belief system for the clans and individuals which practised it. And the reason is easy to understand if looking at the maps, because the more Northern Illyrian groups in particular were completely surrounded by various Urnfield groups, from West to East Proto-Villanovans, Alpine and Middle Danubian Urnfield (Proto-Celtic), Kyjatice (dead end), Gáva (North Thracians?), Belegis II-Gáva (North Thracians?), Brnjica (North Thracians?). And later the contacts didn't stop in the Hallstatt period, but all Northern Illyrians were included in the Kantharos koine dominated by the Thracian groups (Basarabi and Psenichevo). So especially the North Illyrian elites shared many customs, material culture, belief system and even brides (marriage exchange networks!) with the Daco-Thracians.
And this for sure caused the religious influence on the Illyrians.

Interestingly, both the cremation rite and the kantharos koine wasn't going to all the Adriatic coastline, and left out much of modern Albania.

The extent of biritual necropoles in the Illyrian sphere is nearly identical with the kantharos koine of the Early Iron Age. And this kantharos koine was for sure anything but an impoverishment from the previous period. Here is a map for this zone of influence which was clearly dominated by the Thraican groups:

Source: https://www.academia.edu/35174707/At_the_crossroads_of_the_Hallstatt_East

The most consistently cremating group with strong Basarabi-Thracian influences and contacts in the West is Frög, and its part of the Kantharos koine too, which is quite typical. For the Early Iron Age, after the collapse of the large scale Urnfield networks, the frequency of cremations being strongly correlated with Thracian influences. This doesn't imply ethnic takeover, but strong cultural influence and contacts, including proven gene flow at least through individual migrants and marriage exchange networks.

If you compare the Illyrian groups within that sphere, in which they practised sometimes/more often cremation, with those out of it, it can't be called impoverishment.