Culture on the Baltic

I'm very new to the Baltic Sea and am finding it interesting. Looking at a photo of the waters of that Sea, I am somehow reminded of the wine dark waters of Homer. At the moment my focus is on its eastern shores and what has been called Prussia and Pomerania.

It seems that the Baltic is a crossroads that has long supported a high level of culture. My imagination, which seems realistic, sees that culture as much older than the Age of Vikings, older than 'the amber route' traveled by the Romans, older even then the coming of the Celts and Indo-Europeans; though the proto-Italo-Celts may have been fairly early contributors to it.
The Amber Route is the Western equivalent to Silk Road. A difference being that the Amber Route was largely on water.

I suspect that numbers of newcomers with iron technology may have been arriving as late as 800BC, but I also suspect that the culture there was significantly high 2000 years before that and maybe long before that.

There is available evidence suggesting human settlement in Pomerania going back 13000 years.

Some of Europe's, and perhaps the world's earliest man enhanced water-ways(canals) enter the Baltic and connect(or connected)it to the Black Sea and on to Greece, Egypt, Persia, and beyond. It was connected to the heart of the Eur-Asian land mass as well as to the Norse lands, the islands of Britain and Ireland and beyond.

Language students may be the source of much important knowledge of the area.

We know that in recent centuries the languages of the Poles, Swedes, Germans, and Russians too have had their impact on the eastern shore of the Baltic, as well as many others. Much earlier Indo-European languages like the Celtic ones impinged upon them strongly. But traces of much earlier languages remain. There are important traces of language which is not Slavic, German, or even Indo-European.

As late as 300AD, Roman travelers and traders were still noting a people called Veneti. And, indeed, called the Baltic the Venetic Bay (later Vikings would call it the eastern lake). The word Veneti may be related to Venus. It seems to be closely related to Old Irish words for fine, kinship, alliance, tribe, and family. It also seems to relate to Old Norse 'vinr,' meaning, I believe, friend. I think that by this 300AD date the Goths had well begun their conquest of the area.

Peaks the curiosity.

Icelandic DNA

A few years ago while in Iceland and speaking of Icelandic history, I was told the the first Norsemen on the island found Irishmen already there. It was said that they were "mostly monks living in caves."

Well, on the radio today I heard part of an investigation recently carried out in Iceland. It seems that the investigation consisted mostly of DNA testing. The Testing included testing DNA found in teeth going back a thousand years.

The upshot is that the DNA of past and present Icelanders is more similar to that of a Scott or Irishman than that of a Dane or Norwegian.

I knew it.

History Notes Two

My intent is to get at actual happenings. Still, these note will be imperfect.

The ancestors of the Irish came from someplace else. All our ancestors from some other place in time.

It seems good to begin our investigations by looking at a specific area and time. Let's start by drawing and outline which is both broad and within identifiable limits. We may reasonably Begin by suggesting that the Mediterranean and Iranian polities are well thought of as a single historic unit. That is we might benefit by looking at the Achaenid, Parthian, and Sassanid as we have tended to look at classical Greek and Roman. So, we have a starting place.

A way to approach the above historic unit might be from what we know of the great Indo-European Expansion.

The Celts who migrated to the Irish Island where part of that expansion which I'll say began about 6000 years ago. The Celtic part of those migrations, which might be said to include the Celtic-Iberians, and the Hallstat Culture, continued through the Bronze Age of about 3000 BC to past 1000 BC, and on through the Iron Age of, say, about 800 to about 600 BC. My guess is that I had ancestors in Ireland well before 800 BC. In this paragraph we begin to identify the western part of the Indo-European movement.

There were people in Ireland well before 4000 BC. Besides those people in Ireland, the Basques, the Georgians, the Etruscans, as well as Semitic, Hamitic, And Finnish peoples predate, in more or less their present locations, the Indo-European expansion.

The Basque are now largely found in the western Pyrenees. Place-name, blood-group, and now probably, DNA evidence indicates that the Basque occupied not only all of what is now Spain, but also much of what is now France. This distribution corresponds with the historic peoples known as Iberians. The few inscriptions left by the Iberians are usually, and reasonably taken as being ancestral to the Basques. We are still unable to read those inscriptions.
There are mysteries and mys tries in our history.

A Start

My sister and my niece recently got me thinking about history from kind of a family angle. My niece has begun using DNA tests to learn some family history.
My sister has been following our family genealogical paper-trail for some time.
Something my niece told me caused me to brag that I could tell her about Trans-Iberians. She said something like, 'So tell me.'

My surname is Irish, so probably Celtic. I think that the Trans-Iberians are part of the Celtic migrations across the Iberian peninsula to Ireland. I think that those migrations that were part of the great Indo-European expansion that begin about 6000 years ago. That expansion has some relation to ice age movements of men 40,000 years ago. Which is related to the great dying of giants about two-hundred thousand years ago. Which is probably related to my surname.

The fact is, I don't know much. I checked on-line and didn't find anything on Trans-Iberians. I guess a Frenchman heading to Portugal could be called a Trans-Iberian.

One encounters mysteries in history. That which isn't mystery is opinion. The proceeding, and what follows here, is my opinion.

Mystery started out meaning, a kept secret. Those who hear those secrets and kept them were called initiates. By telling you information I have kept to myself, I am making you an initiate.

The words 'story' and 'history' came into Anglo-Norman from the Latin 'historia.' The underlying meaning of 'history' is knowledge. In Greek a 'histor' was a learned man. 'Historia,' meaning knowledge gained by ones enquiries is derived from 'histor.' The Greek word comes from earlier Indo-European for wit, see, and know. By our enquiry here we are making history.