Iron Age Doings
The Great Movement of Humanity
This is my first attempt to write a bit about a very great movement of Iron Age people. Much of that movement seems to have been done on horseback and to have continued over a considerable period of time. It is likely to have included much of the of the development and usage of what we know as the Silk Road network of trade. And it probably had much to do with the Bronze Age collapse in the Near East.
This great movement of humanity mostly from northeast to southwest affected China, India, Russia, Ukraine, the Near East, and Europe, that is much of our world.
The people who did much of that movement have been called Alani, Alan Scythian, Indo European, Celt, Sarmatian, Massaget, Alan-na, Saka, Irani, variations of these and more.
These people did a lot of learning and cultural development during their migrations. They brought with them their art, their, knowledge of the use of the horse, and lore of the extraction of iron and its working. We are far from learning all there is to know about them. I do not know what prompted their amazing migration. They did it in part because they could and the did it in very great numbers. I am coming to greater realization of how much they changed our world and us. In fact we seem to be very much a result of them. Though our numbers were few compared to theirs, they also learned from us. Still our language and most of our very DNA comes from them. Perhaps the most representative among us are the Iranians! Some of them came to know more of us than we knew of ourselves. They had traveled among, worked among, and lived with a greater variety of us than had anyone. They learned and their iron added to our alchemy
Our First Knowledge
Our first knowledge of them began soon after their arrival in the steppes just to the north of the Caspian and Black Seas. Do not believe that they came all at once. They came and they continued to come. From the earliest days they were known as travelers on horseback with fine horses and sharp strong metals. They were known as warriors who fought on horseback with effective weapons. They were mostly a good looking people who worked their hard iron beautifully, they lacked the knowledge of the best of us, but they were very many. The people of northern India may have known them before we did.
Later we learned of their having stopped the southwest movement of the Huns. Their doing so probably save the much of the West from the depredations of these nomadic horsemen. They appeared on our world stage near what is now Kazakhstan and are still a bit mysterious to us. They were warlike horsemen and seem much like cousins of the Scythians or Alani who stopped them from overwhelming Europe.
Alani
In late antiquity the people we may call Alani arrived in what may now be called Spanish Cantabria. Near this time may have begun to be called Iranians. We came to call them Celts. This was a time of a more far reaching Iron Age in the West. Near this time many of them may have been populating northern India. Some historians seem to have reason to call them Sarmato-Alani. These Alani seemed culturally related to the Scythian of about 100 AD.
By about 200 Ad there were Alans between the Vilga and the don rivers. Persians and Chinese historians spoke of the Alani of this time. These Alani may have been called Celts or Indo Europeans by us. It has been said that they looked like Sarmatians and Scythians.
Early Romans spoke of Alan and Alani as an ancient nomadic people who occupied the steppe region of the Black Sea. They said that they were warlike and specialized in horse breeding. To others they were much like Celts and Indo-Europeans. They were known as being from the North Caucasus and considered Sarmatians.
Scythian
Scythian were of Iranian stock. They migrated westward from central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine. They became a power in what is now Crimea. They were active in the 8th and 9th century BC until the 4th C, AD. They played and important part on the early Silk Road network and were a connecting influence among Greek, Persian, Indian, and Chinese.
The Alans sometimes seem to be as mysterious as the Huns. In my early history lessons I seem to have heard more about Huns than I did about Alans. T am told that in earlier times the Alans were called Massaget. Who called them that? By the 3rd century Ad the chinese were calling them, or someone, Alan-na.
Humans have a lot to learn about humanity. We are now finding that some of us of 10,000 years ago seemed to have been more more advanced than many of us of 7,000 years ago. We also now have some hints of the nature of mankind of 20,000 and 30,000 years ago and are pretty sure that there were people on Earth 200,000 years ago. What were those guys doing? Do the Ukrainians and Iranians know that they came on horseback from central Asia and were soon using horse drawn wheeled vehicles? Do we know that "they is us?"
rcs
