Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts

Christian History Myth and Reality


Things They Don't Tell You About Christianity

by ecclesi, freetruth.50webs.org

History

Ancient Greece and Rome

The early fathers of the Church hated Greek civilisation and sought its destruction:

The philobarbarian attitude of Saint John Chrysostom [3rd-4th century]:
"The more a nation looks barbaric and is estranged from Greek culture, the more our teachings shine - this (faithful) barbarian has conquered the entire world and while all Greek culture is extinguished and destroyed, his (the barbarian's) shines brighter every day".

All over the empire, mobs of Christian monks went about destroying the many Greco-Roman works of art, libraries of antiquity, and pre-Christian temples:

The Greek called them "swinish black-cloths", because "they looked like men but lived like pigs".
A contemporary writer tells us

"armed with clubs or stones and swords they ran to the temples, some without these weapons only with their bare hands and feet"
-- (Libanios "Pro temples" 389 AD)

As soon as they had destroyed one temple, they dashed away to the next. They toppled over walls, smashed idols, statues and art-objects and altars, and stole the temples wealth for themselves.

From the time of Constantine, Rome's first Christian emperor:
from 314 CE all the way to 988 CE, the Hellenes (ancient Greeks) were persecuted and their civilisation destroyed. The Greeks were exterminated if they would not convert -

359 CE - In Skythopolis, Syria, Christians organise the first death camps for the torture and execution of arrested Gentiles [adherents of pre-Christian religions] from all around the Empire.
...
385 to 388 - Maternus Cynegius, encouraged by his fanatic wife, and bishop, "Saint" Marcellus with his gangs scour the countryside, sack and destroy hundreds of Hellenic Temples, shrines and altars. Amongst others they destroy the Temple of Edessa, the Cabeireion of Imbros, the Temple of Zeus in Apamea, the Temple of Apollo in Dydima and all the Temples of Palmyra. Thousands of innocent Gentiles from all sides of the Empire suffer martyrdom in the notorious death camps of Skythopolis.
...
950 to 988 - Violent conversion of the last Gentile Hellenes of Laconia by the Armenian "Saint" Nikon.

The oldest and most renowned Churches are actually built on sites which previously had pre-Christian temples on them - which Christians had demolished. This happened all over the Roman Empire, to Syria in the East and North Africa and Palestine in the South.
And:

The cave of the Vatican belonged to Mithra until 376 A.D., when a city prefect suppressed the cult of the rival Savior and seized the shrine in the name of Christ, on the very birthday of the pagan god, December 25.
-- Barbara G. Walker

Until Constantine's time, the most favourable estimate (which many scholars consider too optimistic) of the Christian population in the entire empire was no more than 5%. About 2/3 of these were in Armenia, and much of the remainder in Syria and Asia minor.

According to Roman sources, the Christians ...in Rome ...were considered a small, uneducated group of religious troublemakers from the lowest social classes, operating in the shadowy sides of society.

The educated Romans disliked the religion. Some of them wrote books refuting Christianity, like the Epicurean Kelsos in his Alethes Logos, the last pagan emperor Julian in his Kata Christianon, and Porphyry's Against the Christians. The Church, unable to sufficiently counter their well-reasoned arguments (which it occasionally attempted), "won" the debate by destroying these works when it finally got into power. Even so, some scanty ancient literature against Christianity remains, pieced together from the unsuccessful attempts at responding by Christian Church fathers.

The ancient Romans: persecutors or persecuted?

Facts
No Christian was put to death in the ColiseumAll stories of Christians being exposed to lions in the Roman Amphitheater are bogus.
-- Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

How many persecutions? And why?

Not 10, as Christians claim, but no more than 2 or at most 3:

Decius (249-251), Valerian (257), and Diocletian (303) were the only general and systematic persecutors.
There is no doubt in the mind of any historian that in trying to suppress or check Christianity -- at first in each case by the lighter penalties -- they were consulting the welfare of the state, which was then sinking.
Professor Gwatkin himself remarks that many of the Christians, so far from being willing to defend the Empire, were "half inclined to welcome the Goths and Persians as avengers." The Pope insolently and openly defied Valerian at Rome: and Diocletian's decrees were torn down by Christians in his own palace who relied on the protection of his womenfolk.
Before Diocletian the Church had had forty years of peace, and it had grown sufficiently to make its anti-patriotic teaching a matter of concern. Yet in not one of the three decrees of Diocletian is the death sentence imposed.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

Facts: Historical truths vs Christian fictions
The Acta of the martyrs (records of trials and execution) are entirely from fictitious lives or are forgeries. Pagan deities were sometimes used as martyrs and were turned into Saints.
The fraud led to the birth of the profitable relic industry.Instead of a vast number martyring themselves for Christianity upon persecution, and inspiring pagans to convert, there was a vast apostasy as Christians left the faith in droves. One of these apostates was Pope Marcellinus, wrongly revered as a Saint and Martyr.
Find out the details

Did Christian virtue inspire the pagans to convert?
3rd century St. Cyprian's

letters to the pope describe how a large part of his clergy and bishops were unmitigated scoundrels: fornication, murder, embezzlement, and all the rest of it.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe


St. Jerome was convinced that Christian men and women, including priests and nuns, could not be trusted. According to him the only women of virtue to be seen on the streets of Rome were not Christians but pagans.
All the early bishops from all over the empire - St Augustine, Bishop Optatus, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Hippolytus and others - insisted that their congregation of Christians were highly immoral and corrupt.

Why and how did the pagans of the empire convert?

The ... undisputed fact is that there was no "attraction" of the pagans at all. In the extant Theodosian Code we have ten decrees which the bishops got from the emperors suppressing all rival religions and sects under pain of fine, imprisonment, or death.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

See details
The conversion of the ancient Greeks and Romans was achieved through violence and systematic destruction of the Greco-Roman civilisations

Christianity improved Rome?

Slavery

Professor Dill comes close to the facts when he says that "the slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class." It will not do, therefore, to identify Pagan with Christian slavery.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen


By the first century the Stoics openly condemned slavery. Other Greek moralists besides the Stoics condemned it.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

Such was their influence that in still-pagan Rome:

the "manumission" of slaves -- the grant or sale of freedom to them -- was a daily occurrence.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, Joseph McCabe

It is an historical fact, supported by the most positive of evidence that slavery in the Roman Empire was mitigated by the noble philosophy of the Stoics and not by the teachings of the church fathers, who never thought of recommending the abolition of slavery.
-- History of Civilization, by historian Emil Reich

Emperor Constantine wasn't the only one who undid the humane laws enacted by the Stoic emperors.

in 541 C.E. the Council of Orleans required that the descendants of slaves should be re-enslaved.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, by J.G.R. Forlong

This was but one of many laws on slavery enacted during various Church councils.

Pope Gregory was the greatest slave-owner in the world in the sixth century. ... He would not allow any slave to become a cleric, and he expressly reaffirmed (Epp. vii, 1) that no slave could marry a free Christian.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The early Church fathers, Saints, Popes, Protestant Reformers all condoned slavery - it was Biblical, after all.

The Abbey of St Germain des Pr�s owned 80,000 slaves, and that of St. Martin de Tours 20,000.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, by J.G.R. Forlong

Find out more facts about slavery before the trade in Africans

Education
The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Since Christianity regarded learning, mathematics and science as paganism, its followers went about the empire destroying all the schools as they had done the libraries, temples, hospitals and works of art.
Latin, taken over by the Roman Church, was ruined; even monks at the Vatican wrote in barbarous Latin, whilst most priests were illiterate. McCabe writes:

Rome under the Popes had sunk to an illiteracy that has no parallel elsewhere in the history of civilization.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

So much so that by the 11th century:

The illiteracy of Europe had increased to more than ninety-nine percent.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Facts about "monks preserving knowledge"

Where the monks did spend any part of their time in "the writing room," they were, naturally, copying the Fathers of the Church and later Christian literature.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Most of the ancient writings had been burnt on purpose, either along with the ancient libraries or in the Medieval auto-da-fes. A few were preserved wholly by accident when monks, desperate for papyrus which was expensive, collected old manuscripts and overwrote them. Among them:

Parts of the Iliad and the 'Elements' of Euclid were covered by monkish treatises.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Ancient works were never willingly preserved:

As for "monks constantly occupied in copying the classic texts," for the preservation and diffusion of Pagan culture, it is a joke! They couldn't read Greek nor good Latin, and nobody else could read at all, -- also, Holy Church and Churchmen loathed Pagan culture and literature.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Read more about the ignorant Dark Ages brought on by Christianity

More Christian fictions about Rome

Converting the rest of Europe to the True Faith

It is estimated that Europe was Christianised at a cost of about 8 to 10 million lives.


804 CE. The last heathen resistance in Saxony is put down. In thirty years of genocide, from 774 to 804, two thirds of the Saxons have been killed.

Sami people [the indigenous people of Scandinavia] were converted to Christianity by force and shamanic practices were forbidden.

And like in Greece and Rome, Christians demolished heathen shrines to build a Church over them. For instance, in

1083 CE The temple at Uppsala (Sweden) was destroyed, and construction of a church on the site is initiated.

16th and 17th century Ireland. English troops "pacified and civilized" Ireland, where only Gaelic "wild Irish", "unreasonable beasts lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing."
One of the more successful soldiers, a certain Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, ordered that

"the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies... and should bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie", which effort to civilize the Irish indeed caused "greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds on the grounde".

Tens of thousands of Gaelic Irish fell victim to the carnage.
[ citing American Holocaust, by D. Stannard, 1992]

More
Eastern-Europe remained unconverted until the Crusades when pious Christian knights committed mass-murder and even complete genocide in the north-east.

Intolerance

"Unbelievers deserve not only to be separated from the Church, but also... to be exterminated from the World by death."
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1271


The early Church Councils
These volatile and often violent meetings were held during the 4th and 5th centuries, when bishops voted on which doctrines would be Christian orthodoxy ("divinely inspired") and which were to be considered heresy and persecuted. Disagreements were rife and gave rise to numerous Christian sects which were inimical to each other. The Arians had been persecuted to extinction, so too the Donatists, and the Nestorians killed or driven out of the empire. In the 5th century, the Pelagianists, the Priscillianists in Spain, and the Manichaeans in the whole Roman empire, were persecuted - mostly to extinction.
Read more about the early Christian sects victimised for heresy, and how murder and threats ("divine inspiration") during the early Church Councils determined the orthodox Christian doctrines of today.

Crusades
Besides the infamous Children's Crusade, and those against the Jews and Moslems and Eastern Orthodox Church, there were also:

Crusades to convert-or-kill the pagans of Eastern-Europe and the Balkans:

among such pagans were the Obotrites, Pomeranians, Wiltzi, Serbs, Letts, Livonians, Finns, and Prussians.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

The Baltic (original) Prussians were completely exterminated in a mass genocide, as were the Stedingers of Germany. Heathen Lithuania also faced routine genocides of its population by Christians, and in the end lost out:

Crusades were undertaken against Livonia, Courland, Esthonia, and Prussia. In Lithuania Christianity did not win until 1368.
...
In Hungary, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, "the new religion was spread by the sword. ..."
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Crusades to exterminate heretical Christian sects: The Catharan, Albigensian heretics: in the Albigensian Crusade half of France was exterminated. By the end of the 13th century one million of the French heretics had been massacred. In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII called for a Crusade against the French Waldensians, who had already been declared heretics in the 1184 Council of Verona. They were hounded and killed until the 17th century. See more on the Crusades

Inquisitions and witch hunts

Then there were the three Inquisitions: the first was against heretics and witches mainly; 95% of the victims of the Second (Spanish) Inquisition were Jews; and the Third Inquisition went after Protestants and other heretics as well as witches again.
At the start of the First Inquistion, the victims were only burnt to death. But:

Torture of suspects was authorized by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, and thus inquisition chambers were turned into places of abject horror.
...Torture was not finally removed as a legal option for church officials until 1917 when the Codex Juris Canonici was put into effect.
Inquisitors were placed entirely above the law by Pope Innocent IV's bull Ad extirpanda. Most of the torturing was performed by members of the Dominican order, whilst many other inquisitors and torturers were monks of the Franciscan order. The inquisitors and the Holy Church became filthy rich from the assets of their victims.

The edicts that established the Inquisition have never been repealed. They are "officially still part of the Catholic faith, and were used as justification for certain practices as recently as 1969."

Historian Will Durant, in his History of Civilisation puts the number of fatalities of the witch hunts between 7 and 9 millions.

Entire villages and towns were depopulated of their women-folk.
For 5 centuries throughout Europe, both the Protestant and Catholic Churches went after "witches", especially those referred to as "good witches":

Even relatively permissive England killed 30,000 witches between 1542 and 1736.

More on the inquisitions and witch hunts

Reformation

The Thirty Year War (1618-48) between the Protestants and Catholics, led to the deaths of more than a quarter of Europe's population. -- Ed Babinsky In Germany alone, the war resulted in an estimated drop of its population from 18 million to 4 million. In Bohemia, its 30,000 villages were reduced to 6,000 and its 3 million citizens slaughtered down to 780,000. -- Joseph McCabe In the Netherlands, Catholic Spain murdered more than a 100,000 men and women. -- Joseph McCabe

During the many Huguenot wars ravaging France, Huguenot soldiers hunted [Catholic] priests like animals and one captain is reported to have worn a necklace of priests' ears.

The Catholics butchered 30,000 Huguenots in one day: the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

There was also utter intolerance and mutual persecution between the numerous Protestant sects that had sprung up all over the continent.

More on the Reformation, its intolerance and the Reformers

Women
Woman was merely man's helpmate, a function which pertains to her alone. She is not the image of God but as far as man is concerned, he is by himself the image of God.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430)

"Wife: Be content to be insignificant. What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born."
-- John Wesley (1703-91), Reformer, founder of the Methodist movement

More of what respected Christians have said about women, firmly basing their views on the Bible.
The Biblical Curse of Eve was used by clergy to prevent physicians from administering anaesthetics to relieve pain during child birth.

Fact
584 CE Council Of Macon: bishops gathered to vote on "Are women human?" By a narrow vote (of 1), women obtained human status in Christianity.
Apparently, the decision was not final, as the question had to be reconsidered by the Protestants too:

Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all.
-- The Dark Side of Christianity, by Helen Ellerbe
Equality in Christianity today:

"A wife should submit herself to the leadership of her husband. Leadership in the church should always be male."
-- Southern Baptist Convention (2000)


Children

Since the birth-control policy of Christianity resulted in couples having many unwanted children, many of them were mistreated in the Middle Ages. In later times (like during the Industrial Revolution) they were still seen as just another mouth to feed and sent off to do gruelling work, even in mines, and were often kept illiterate. Besides hard labour, children of Christian families have also been subjected to severe mental abuse and have also suffered from physical abuse, as sanctioned by the Bible.

Fact
Several Christian denominations have brought back child-beating to chastise their erring children. There are Christian sites selling rods for this purpose, as specified by the Bible.

Christianity in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific

Convert and kill in the Americas

When in 1530 CE the Pope finally declared that the Indians were human, the pious Christians began converting the heathens:

"The [Catholic] Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven."
-- Bertrand Russell

The Indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As

"they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell."
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

The Inquisition remained active until 1834, especially in Central and South America, where "heathen" natives were tortured and burned for crimes against the true faith, such as, "not believing in it".

Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs' waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed.
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

Christianity in the Americas: 60 million Native Americans had been exterminated by the end of the 16th century itself.
For instance, good Christians from Spain

"hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles ... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive."
-- American Holocaust, by D.Stannard

Christians went around burning down libraries of the Indians of Central America, demolishing shrines and burning books Convert or die: 19th century Christian missionaries exterminated the Californian Indians in the most gruesome manner. More on the horrendous history of Christianity in the Americas

Africa: Christian slavery and colonialism

Facts
Estimates vary, but somewhere between 20 million and 60 million people were captured, enslaved and brought to the Americas. Millions more died in the slave raids, in the dungeons and in the Middle Passage.
-- Through slavery's darkest passages - Ghana's slave dungeons - Essence, Special Travel Section, October 1992

Slave castles, with central Churches, were often built over the ancient shrines of the pagan Africans Slave ships often bore appropriate names, like those of the devout slave trader John Hawkins: Jesus, Solomon and John the Baptist. (-- Joseph McCabe)The Africans who survived the journey, were often worked to death:

"The policy of the slaveholder," says Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, "was to kill off the negroes by overwork and buy more."
-- Christianity Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

This was even more so in South America:

Brazil and the Caribbean were graveyards for Africans and their descendants.
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, Peter Kolchin

The Bible was used to justify slavery and led to racism: the Curse of Ham, supposedly applicable to Africans, was the reason they "deserved to be slaves". Chuches also went so far as arguing that slavery was all for the best of the pagan Africans:

...the most widespread and effective religious argument was the simple suggestion that slavery was part of God's plan to expose a hitherto heathen people to the blessings of Christianity.
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin

As Presbyterian minister (and Georgia slave owner) Charles C. Jones argued in The Religious Instruction of the Negroes (1842), blacks "were placed under our control...not exclusively for our benefit but theirs also," so they could receive moral and religious uplift; "we cannot disregard this obligation thus divinely imposed, without forfeiting our humanity, our gratitude, our consistency, and our claim to the spirit of christianity itself."
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin

In 18th century France, Voltaire estimated that the [Catholic] Church held between 50,000 and 60,000 slaves.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel employed slaves on its estates in the West Indies, and there were 80,000 black slaves in London as late as 1760 (Independent Review, October 1905). The American Churches, Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist, owned 600,000 slaves, and "the authority of nearly all the leading denominations was against the abolitionists," says J. Macy in the chief and impartial recent American work (The Anti-Slavery Crusade, 1920, p. 74). The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian authorities, he shows, expelled any minister who advocated abolition.
-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, Joseph McCabe

Find out who did and who (predictably) did not agitate for abolishing African slavery.

Fact
During the brutal Christian colonisation of the Congo, which was defended by the Catholic Church,

As many as 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of executions, unfamiliar diseases and hunger.
-- Leopold reigns for a day in Kinshasa - The Guardian, February 4, 2005

This and much more on the history of Christianity in Africa

Christian colonisation of Asia

In China, Japan, Thailand: Here Christians of the Catholic Church implemented forced conversions, persecuted the followers of Buddhism and other pre-Christian religions, and attempted political take-overs of these countries. Christian converts became traitors to their own government, like those of ancient Rome had been. Fortunately, the end result in each case was that these countries expelled the Christian missionaries and closed themselves off to foreign (Christian) relations entirely.In Vietnam the situation was much the same, except that it did not succeed in expelling the missionaries, for which it paid the price later.In India and Sri Lanka, Christians from Portugal destroyed hundreds of indigenous shrines and built Churches over them (as usual). Once again, they went about violently converting the local population and exterminating any of the Hindus and Buddhists who did not convert. In India, Saint Francis Xavier got the Inquisition started in Goa which terrorised, tortured and gruesomely murdered many of the pagans. Read the details on the ruthless Christian colonisation of Asia

The Pacific

Fact

In thirty years of despicable missionary rule in Tahiti, only 6,000 of the indigenous people remained from an initial 200,000. [The Missionaries, by Norman Lewis]

The Protestant missionaries then carried out the same conversion/extermination campaign in the rest of the Pacific.
Christians in Hawaii, had massacred most of the population:

By the 1860s,

"in Hawai'i the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands' native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to 'the amputation of diseased members of the body'."
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

More on Christian genocide in the Pacific

Missions and colonialism

Teurer Segen - Christliche Mission und Kolonialismus by Gert von Paczensky ("Costly blessing - Christian mission and colonialism"),
translation of the book summary and review at KirchenKritik:

Missions were in league with colonialism, often even gruesomely so.
They helped to destroy old cultures, to uproot people, to divide families and entire populations.
They supported and approved of a system that let countless of millions in three continents be reduced to poverty, bringing them hunger and sickness.
In the misdevelopment of Latin America, Africa and Asia - [which is] the major problem in the present - missionaries and Churches of all persuasions and confessions (denominations) were complicit.

Review from KirchenKritik:
This work lacks neither facts, nor references nor information handed down from the time of mission-work and colonialism.
It is established that the Church has to answer for the main share of the guilt of the impoverishment of the present 3rd world. Yes, one can even go so far and assert that without the Church everything would have turned out differently!
In light of this book, the numerous speeches of Pope John Paul II in impoverished countries appear hypocritical and cynical.
Moving historical literature at it's best. Parts of it are not for weak nerves.

More on this

Anti-Semitism before Nazism
The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews.
-- Saint John Chrysostom, Church Father, 4th-5th century C.E.

More of the highly anti-Semitic statements of the pious early fathers of the Church, Popes and Reformers. The centuries of Christian preaching against Jews was founded on the Bible - the New Testament in this case. Martin Luther's book On the Jews and their Lies inspired Nazis and Christian Churches in Nazi Germany. The Church invented most of the means of persecuting Jews which the Nazis later used All the early non-Jewish Christian sects, like the Marcionites, were anti-Semitic.As soon as the Greco-Roman empire was wrested from pagan hands, the Christians started persecuting the Jews. Christian Roman Emperor Justinian was the one

who legalized the burning and pillaging of Jewish synagogues by Christian bishops and monks (often canonized later).

Then in the Middle Ages, a great many extermination campaigns were enacted by Christians.In the large scale pogroms of Orthodox Christian Russia and Ukraine, at least several hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated.

"But we must never forget that the Jews have crucified our Master [Jesus] and have shed His precious blood."
-- Czar Alexander III, affirming the eternal Christian doctrine

Fact
The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion, in which Jews supposedly conspired to bring down the western Christian nations, is a Russian forgery:

If The Protocols appeared outlandish, it may have been because they were a Russian forgery plagiarized from a 1869 German novel which, itself, was plagiarized from a 1864 French political satire.

The forger was Czarist agent Sergei Nilius whose work was designed to deflect the misery of Nicholas II's policies onto a scapegoat: the Jews of Russia.

This forgery is still used by many pious Christians as additional "proof" of why Jews are to be hated.

More on anti-Semitism before Nazism

Roma (Gypsies)

When Gypsies first appeared, Christianity had shaped the doctrine of war between light and dark and personified the white angels against the black devils. To the church the Gypsy culture was non-acceptable and their dark skin exemplified evil and inferiority. Hence in western Christian Europe the dark-skinned Gypsies became victims of prejudice as a result of this Christian doctrine.
-- Gypsies: a persecuted race, by William A. Duna

The persona of the Romani as non-white, non-Christian outsider became incorporated into Christian European folklore, which served to justify and encourage the prejudice against him. Like Asahuerus, the Jew doomed to wander through eternity because he refused to allow Jesus to rest on his way to Calvary, Romanies were accused of forging the nails with which Christ was crucified. And while Jews were accused of drinking the blood of Christian babies in hidden rites to which no outsider was privy, Romanies were likewise charged with stealing and even eating those babies. Parallelling even more closely the Asahuerus myth is the belief that the original sin of the Romanies was their refusal to give Mary and the baby Jesus shelter during their flight from King Herod into Egypt (Scheier, 1925, vol. II, p. 77).
-- The roots of Anti-Gypsyism: To the Holocaust and After, by Ian Hancock

Of course, the Roma were nowhere near the Middle-East in the 1st century CE, and this libel was but another Christian fiction. Like Jews, the Roma were also attacked in sermons. Monasteries in Eastern-Europe kept large numbers of Roma as slaves until the the 19th century. Roma who converted to the Christian (and Islamic) faiths were not accepted or if they were, then they were still treated as outcasts.The anti-Roma prejudice which had been created and had long been fostered by Christianity would result in their persecutions and exterminations in Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and other countries during the Nazi era. In fact, the same continues today. More on Romany and anti-Gypsyism

Fascism including Nazism

Nazism in Germany

Nazi Germany was a very Christian country. Its anti-Semitism was rooted in Church teachings:

according to historian Dagobert Runes, Hitler's methods were actually modelled on the Christian one:

Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horrible, unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches ... The isolation of the Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books and finally, the burning of the people - Hitler learned it all from the church. However, the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas.

And the anti-Semite Luther had written On the Jews and their Lies which inspired the Nazis as well as the Christian clergy.

"If I had to baptise a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over with the words 'I baptise thee in the name of Abraham'."
-- Martin Luther, "Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor" by Peter F. Weiner

Thus, it's not surprising that inspired by the the New Testament and centuries of Church tradition, Saints and Church fathers, Popes and Reformers, the clergy in Nazi Germany merely added to the existing Christian anti-Semitic literature:

Bishop Martin Sasse of Thuringia, a leading Protestant churchman ... edited a brochure for his ministers at the end of November 1938 titled, "Martin Luther and the Jews: do Away with Them!" He quoted extensively from Luther's book "On the Jews and their lies." (Wollenberg, p.73)

The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere.
-- Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit monthly publication, cited in John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope"

All German Churches, except the Confessing Church, were in line with Nazi Germany and its policies. Many clergymen and pious Church-goers were prominent Nazis. Most Germans were members of the mainstream German Churches, whilst the Confessing Church had but small numbers of members.The Catholic and Protestant Churches and their congregations actively helped the Nazi state in hunting down Jews. Both furnished racial data about Christian members in their own congregations who had Jewish ancestry. Neither Church accepted such Christians:

After the Nazi party took over, Protestant Churches began to exclude Jews from jobs and schools and later to exclude baptized racial Jews from the Land churches and to force them to live completely by themselves.

Catholic priests across Germany became part of an anti-Semitic attestation bureaucracy, supplying details of blood purity through marriage and baptism registries in accordance with the Nazi Nuremberg laws which distinguished Jews from non-Jews

In fact, the German churches

advocated composing an "Aryan Paragraph" in church synods that would prevent non-aryans from joining the Church, which of course included Jews.

The small, dissenting Confessing Church did not oppose Hitler for his anti-Semitic policies. Many of the prominent Pastors in this Church were self-admitted anti-Semites. It turns out they opposed the "Aryan Paragraph" in order to retain Jewish converts, but

For Jews who did not convert, they held strong anti-Semitic feelings.

The Catholic and Protestant Churches helped in the murder of people with disabilities.
There is nothing new in this, as the Church had for centuries taught that people with physical disabilities were devils and those with mental disabilities were possessed by devils. Throughout the Middle-Ages, handicapped children would be brutally murdered, often by their own Christian parents.Protestant and Catholic Churches used forced labourers during the Third Reich Strangely, Christians today are surprised when faced with such facts, forgetting how, throughout Christianity's history, Churches, clergy and everyday Christians had been involved in extermination campaigns against Jews and others, murdered people with disabilities and had kept slaves for centuries.

Read more about Nazi Germany

Nazism in wartime Yugoslavia

It is a matter of historical record that the Croatian Catholic Church was closely entangled with the Ustashas. In the early years of World War II, Catholic priests oversaw forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs under the aegis of the Ustasha state; Franciscan friars distributed Ustasha propaganda. Several high Catholic officials in Yugoslavia were later indicted for war crimes.
-- A vow of silence - U.S. News and World Report, March 30, 1998
"Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and I will confess you and free you from sin."(54)
-- Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica Monastery, reassuring his fellow Ustashi prior to a massacre

The Ustashe were the Catholic Nazis of CroatiaThey ruthlessly exterminated about 750,000 people: mostly Orthodox Christian Serbs and several tens of thousands of Roma and Jews.In the Catholic Independent state of Croatia that was formed during the Nazi era, clergy took part in great numbers in the massacres.The Italian fascists and even the German Nazis were horrified at how gruesomely they murdered their victims.

The Croatian clergy brought the Ustashe to power

While the Catholic Press in the country kept praising the rising Fascism in Europe:

Monasteries, parish houses, cathedrals, Franciscan high schools, seminaries, etc., throughout Croatia doubled as meeting places, recruiting centers, arms depots and staging areas for Croatian fascism and terror in the years prior to the war.
... Among the very first armed divisions of the Ustasha army were numerous Catholic priests. The military exploits of one priest, Ilija Tomas of Klepac, were hailed in the Croatian fascist publication "Hrvatski Narod" on July 25, 1941.(21) Another Catholic publication "Nedelja" praised the military exploits of dozens of priests, especially those in monastic orders such as the Franciscan Radovan Glavas, and the priest Ivan Miletic who led Croatian fascists in joint battle with Wehrmacht forces.
... The entire Catholic press in this period in Croatia was thoroughly pro-fascist, racist and supportive of the elimination of the "minorities." [the Serbs, Jews and Roma]
-- The Vatican's Holocaust, by former BBC commentator Avro Manhattan
Christian priests create racial theories again

Ustashi's leading racist theorists were Catholic clergy. ... priests were among the intellectual godfathers of Croatian fascism and racism.
... anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia was almost entirely the product of Catholic propaganda after World War I.
... The Catholic Press preached racial theories - e.g. the theory that the Croats were not of Slav descent, but were Gothic German. One of the founders of this race theory was a well-known Catholic priest, Kerubin Segvic, who as far back as 1931 wrote a book entitled, The Gothic Descendance of the Croats, with a view to creating racial odium against the Slavs, which was synonymous with "Orthodox."
-- The Vatican's Holocaust, by Avro Manhattan

The Vatican and communism united after WWII to whitewash history.

More on Nazism in Yugoslavia during WWII

, by Barry Lituchy describes how it is that the Vatican got away scott-free from its active involvement in genocide, especially in Croatia. How, through deflection and obfuscation, it has absolved itself of all crimes pertaining to genocide, restricting its "errors" merely to "not speaking out" against what was happening to the Jews. Though it is well-known that the Catholic Church was involved in tracking down Jews for Nazi Germany, and involved in Nazism in general (see ), it has carefully kept silent about its . Among other things, Pius XI and Pacelli (Pope XII) arranged the with dictator Mussolini and the with Germany. The Pope was directly responsible for the dissolution of Germany's parliamentary system which gave dictatorial powers to Hitler. Pope John Paul II's intended beatification of Pius XII was to make the public believe Pius' conduct was above board, when in fact it was wholly the opposite. on these wartime Popes, including that deal with the Papal involvement in Nazism and Fascism. Croatia's Nazi (Ustashi) leader Pavelic is another example: Much Nazi blood money made it into the Vatican, but not out. Further details

Source
http://freetruth.50webs.org/Index.htm

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Did Megasthenes Meet Chandragupta Maurya

I got a comment on the post Dating Indian History by one GD Prasad , who claimed that to see the correct Indian History refer to Purana date, which I dismissed it as there was nothing to backup the comment. But curiously he said that the Chandragupta at the time of Alexander was of Gupta Dynasty not Maurya Dynasty. Now that worm has entered my head, After Googling much I am writing this article. Since this is the date that determines the entire Indian history is based on, we have to identify correctly who was the Chandragupta at the time of Alexander who met Megasthenes. Chandragupta Maurya is Indian King who renounced his empire and became jain monk , he went to Shravanbelagola in karnataka and died as simple man.
Megasthenes story
Megasthenes was the Greek ambassador sent by Seleucus Nicator in c. 302 B.C. to the court of the Indian king whom he and the Greek called "Sandrocottus". He was stationed in "Palimbothra", the capital city of the kingdom. It is not clear how many years Megasthenes stayed in India, but he did write an account of his stay, titled Indika. The manuscript Indika is lost, and there is no copy of it available. However, during the time it was available, many other Greek writers quoted passages from it in their own works. These quotations were meticulously collected by Dr. Schwanbeck in the nineteenth century, and this compilation is also available to us in English (J.M. McCrindle: Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian). When European Indologists were groping to date Indian history during the nineteenth century (after having arbitrarily rejected the various Puranas), the Megasthenes account came in very useful.
How Chandragupta Maurya was Equated with Sandrocottus – Sheet Anchor Chronology.
Sir William Jones could not believe in the antiquity of the Bharata War according to Indian accounts because of his Christian faith which told him that Creation took place at 9-00 a. m, on 23rd October 4004 BC. He tried to search the Greek and Roman accounts. These accounts supplied some information about India of the time of the Macedonian king Alexander. It mentioned seven names of three successive Indian kings. Attributing one name each for the three kings the names are Xandrammes, Sandrocottus and Sandrocyptus. Xandrammes of the previous dynasty was murdered by Sandrokottas whose son was Sandrocyptus.

Jones picked up one of these three names, namely, Sandrokottas and found that it had a sort of phonetic similarity with the name Chandragupta of the Puranic accounts. According to the Greek accounts, Palibothra was the capital of Sandrokottas. Jones took Palibothra as a Greek pronunciation of Pataliputra, the Indian city and capital of Chandragupta. He, then, declared that Sandrokottas of the Greek accounts is Chandragupta Maurya of the Puranas. Jones died just a year after this declaration and possibly before his death, could not know that Puranas have another Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty.

Later scholars took this identity of Sandrokottas with Chandragupta Maurya as proved and carried on further research. James Princep, an employee of the East India Company, deciphered the Brahmi script and was able to read the inscriptions of Piyadassana. Turnour, another employee of the Company in Ceylon, found in the Ceylonese chronicles that Piyadassana was used as a surname of Asoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya. The inscription bearing the name of Asoka was not found till the time of Turnour. In 1838, Princep found five names of the Yona kings in Asoka's inscriptions and identified them as the five Greek kings near Greece belonging to third century BC who were contemporary to Asoka.

In the Greek accounts, Sandrokottas of Palimbothra is described as a contemporary of Alexander of Macedonia who invaded India during 327 BC to 323 BC This decides the approximate date of Chandragupta Maurya. Princep's research decides the approximate date of Asoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya as in 3rd century BC Both these dates were adjusted with the reign periods of the three successive Magadha kings, Chandragupta, Bindusara and Asoka of the Maurya dynasty given in the Puranas. Thus, the date c. 320 BC was fixed as the date of coronation of Chandragupta Maurya. It is on this date that every other date of Indian history has been constructed.

Max Mueller, in 1859 AD, finalized this identity of Sandrokottas with Chandragupta Maurya and declared c. 320 BC, the date of coronation of Chandragupta Maurya as the Sheet Anchor of Indian history. M. Troyer did not agree with this conclusion and noted this fact in the introduction to his translation of Rajatarangani of Kalhana. He even communicated his views to Prof. Max Mueller in a letter but did not receive a reply from him.
Smith's Chronology:
Historian V. A. Smith took the chronological identity asserted by the predecessors in this historical hierarchy as the basis for further calculation of the exact dates of the different dynasties that ruled over Magadha after and before the Mauryas. He took the aid of numismatics in addition to epigraphy. He could not however get over, as if by compunction, to follow the Puranas in the enumeration of the kings and their dynasties. But he reduced their reign periods. The total reduction done by these British scholars, from Jones to Smith, comes to 1300 years according to some Indian chronologists.

Indian View Chandragupta Maurya did not meet Megasthenes
  1. Megasthenes has nowhere mentioned the word Maurya
  2. He makes absolutely no mention of a person called either Chanakya or Kautilya.
  3. Indian historians have recorded two Chandr aguptas, one of the Maurya dynasty and another of the Gupta dynasty. Both of them had a grandson called Ashoka. While the Mauryan Chandragupta' s son was called Bimbasara (sometimes Bindusara), The Gupta Chandragupta had a son called Samudragupta. Interestingly Megasthenese has written that Sandrakuttos had a son called Samdrakyptos, which is phonetically nearer to Samudragupta and not Bindusara.
  4. The king lists given by the Puranas say that 1500 years elapsed from the time of the Kurukshetra war to the beginning of the Nanda dynasty's rule. If one assumes the Nandas' period to be 5th century BCE, this would put the Bharatha war around 1900 BCE whereas the traditional view has always been 3100 BCE. This gives a difference of 1200 years which go unaccounted.
  5. Megasthanese himself says 137 generations of kings have come and gone between Krishna and Sandrakuttos, whereas the puranas give around 83 generations only between Jarasandha's son (Krishna's contemporary) to the Nandas of the Magadha kingdom.. Assuming an average of 20 to 25 years per generation, the difference of 54 generations would account for the gap of the 1200 years till the time of Alexander.
  1. The Chinese have always maintained that Buddhism came to China from India around 1100 -1200 BCE, whereas the western historians tend to put Buddha at 500 BCE
  2. According to the Greek accounts, Xandrammes was deposed by Sandrokottas and Sandrocyptus was the son of Sandrokottas. In the case of Chandragupta Maurya, he had opposed Dhanananda of the Nanda dynasty and the name of his son was Bindusara. Both these names, Dhanananda and Bindusara, have no phonetic similarity with the names Xandrammes and Sandrocyptus of the Greek accounts.
  1. Asoka's empire was bigger than that of Chandragupta Maurya and he had sent missionaries to the so-called Yavana countries. But both of them are not mentioned. Colebrook has pointed out that the Greek writers did not say anything about the Buddhist Bhikkus though that was the flourishing religion of that time with the royal patronage of Asoka. Roychaudhari also wonders why the Greek accounts are silent on Buddhism.
  1. The empire of Chandragupta was known as Magadha empire. It had a long history even at the time of Chandragupta Maurya. In Indian literature, this powerful empire is amply described by this name but it is absent in the Greek accounts. It is difficult to understand as to why Megasthanese did not use this name and instead used the word Prassi which has no equivalent or counterpart in Indian accounts.
  1. To decide as to whether Pataliputra was the capital of the Mauryas, Puranas is the only source. Puranas inform us that all the eight dynasties that ruled Magadha after the Mahabharata War had Girivraja as their capital. Mauryas are listed as one of the eight dynasties. The name Pataliputra is not even hinted at, anywhere in the Puranas.
No Concrete Proofs:
The Western scholars and their followers in India have been all along insisting on concrete evidence for ancient Indian chronology but they themselves have not been able as yet, to furnish any such evidence for the sheet anchor.
All the evidence supplied so far is conjectural. No numismatic or inscriptional proof is available for the date. Same was the condition at the time of V. A. Smith. He had written, "Unfortunately, no monuments have been discovered which can be referred with certainty to tile period of Chandragupta Maurya and the archaeologist is unable to bring any tangible evidence afforded by excavations."
Pandit Bhagavaddatta seems to have studied the fragments of Megasthenes in more detail than those who decided the identity. On the basis of Megasthenes's statements, he has arrived at the following conclusions. "Yamuna was flowing through Palibotha i.e., Paribhadra, the capital of the Prassi kingdom. Palibothra was 200 miles from Prayaga on way to Mathura. The kshatriyas there were known as Prabhadrakas or Paribhadrakas. Their king was Chandraketu. The capital Paribhadra was near to Sindhu-Pulinda which is in Madhya Desha and is today termed as Kali-Sindha. The Karusha Sarovara was between Sindhu-Pulinda and Prayaga." He further states, "Pataliputra cannot be written as Palibothra in Greek because 'P', in Patali is written in Greek as English 'P', only ; then why 'P', in Putra is changed to 'B', in Greek? There is no instance where Sanskrit 'P', is changed to Greek 'B'." Putra cannot be Bothra.

Conclusion
Based on all these, I would say the Sandrakuttos of Megasthanese was not Chandragupta Maurya. As far as Chandragupta of Gupta Dynasty meeting Megasthenes , we will see in another Article.

Source
  • Defalsification of Indian history By Dr. Subramanian Swamy
  • Bharateeya Historiography by Sriram Sathe
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Origin of Hungarians

Who are hungarians?
Sumerians, Hurrians, Mitanni, Habiru, Hyksos, Kassites, Chaldeans, Medes, Khwarezmians, Scythians, Massagetas, Alans, Sabirs, Avars, Huns, Magyars, OnOgurs, Khazars, Uyghurs, Kushitic, Semitic and Japhetic , who are they?

Let us see Hungarian history for some view.

Early Hungarian History
Hungary is located in the heart of Europe, in the Carpathian Basin, surrounded by the Carpathian mountain chain, the Alps and the southern Slav mountains. This area has, since the dawn of civilization, been inhabited by human beings, a meeting point where cultures blended together. From the first century B.C. people on horseback - the Scythes - of Iranian extraction, and Indo-European tribes /Celtic, Illyrian and Thracian/ that pursued a more or less settled existence constantly replaced one another. In the final stages of the expansion of the Roman empire, for a short while the Carpathian Basin fell into the sphere of the Mediterranean, Greco-Roman civilization - town centers, paved roads, and written sources were all part of the advances to which the Migration of Peoples put an end. Germanic and Turkish /Hun and Avar/ tribes attacking from the east then appeared in the region. From the beginning of the 3rd century onwards Rome was gradually forced onto the defensive, and around the year 430 AD, bowing to Hun sieges, it ultimately surrendered its Carpathian Basin province of Pannonia.The famous Hun king, Attila, operated his powerful but short-lived empire from the River Tisza. Upon his death the Hun empire disintegrated and Germanic tribes again split up the region. However, their hegemony was soon smashed by the advent of the Avars. Their empire, established by the end of the 6th century, was destroyed by the wars launched by Charlemagne /around 790/ and Bulgarian attacks from the Danube. Transdanubia marked the eastern province of the declining Frankish empire. Bulgarians ruled the Hungarian Great Plain and Transylvania, while in the north there was the state of the Morvas, these peoples formed the status quo in the Carpathian Basin at the time of the arrival of the Magyars.

Magyar Migration Theory
The first temporary raids of ancient proto-Magyars in this territory occurred in the 860s. It was only in 895/896 that the Magyars decided to cross the Carpathians permanently. The chieftain Árpád is traditionally said to be the person who led the seven proto-Magyar tribes (including the Magyars proper) out of the steppes of Ukraine and into the Carpathian basin. These seven tribes later became the nucleus of the Kingdom of Hungary under Árpád's great-great-grandson, Stephen I of Hungary. Although Christianization of this territory began as early as in the 4th century AD, the newly-arrived Magyars were Christianized only at the end of the 10th century under Géza: this task was finished by Stephen I of Hungary, who was officially crowned king by the pope in 1000 AD.

By the end of the 11th century Hungary, which had risen to become a Central European power, acted as conqueror in the east and south. Campaigns launched into what is Galicia and Ukraine today were without success, but Croatia recognized the supremacy of the Árpád dynasty in 1091.

The relatively steady progress was interrupted in 1240 and 1242 by the dramatic incursion and ruthless ransacking of the country by Tartar /Mongol/ forces, who swept across the country scorching the land and forcing the king and his court to flee to the Adriatic. One third of the country's population was killed during the single year of the Tartar invasion.
King Béla IV /1235-1270/ was, with some justifications, dubbed the "second home founder" as he had to rebuild the scorched country practically from scratch. By establishing a series of stone castles he created a strong defensive system, he invited settlers to unsettled parts of the country, and reorganized life in the country by pursuing tolerant and persistent policies.

Theory of Gyula László Theory
The Hungarian archaeologist Gyula László has proposed a very controversial theory, also known as "theory of double conquest”, in recent decades. He has argued that the Magyars arrived in two separate waves, centuries apart, a notion which is still controversial. The theory argues that around 670 a new ethnic group moved into the Carpathian Basin, representing the late-Avar culture with a griffin-creeper pattern on their belt-clasp. The theory says that these latter Avars were actually Magyars and that they survived the centuries until the Árpád's Magyars arrival.

Theory of Grover Krantz:

In his book Geographical Development of the European Languages, anthropologist Grover Krantz argues that the Hungarian language must have been present in the Carpathian basin when the Indo-European languages diffused into Europe. His theory is based on the development of early forms of agriculture, to which the spread of the Proto-Indo-European language was tied. These agricultural developments and tools were such that the people relying on them were not able to penetrate the Carpathian basin, as a result the Indo-European languages avoided that region as they were diffusing.

Theory of Mario Alinei:

As part of his "theory of continuity", Mario Alinei, linguist at the University of Utrecht, sees the Etruscan language as an archaic form of Hungarian. The basis of the connection is the extraordinary resemblance of Etruscan and ancient Magyar magistrature names and other similarities: typologies, lexicon and historical grammar. This theory also contradicts the view that Magyars arrived in the Carpathian basin in 900 AD.

Let us see the legends of origins

Legend of White Stag.
The Legend of the White Stag ascribes the origin of the Hungarians to the merging of three peoples: Huns, Magyars and Alans. Since the Alans, together with the Yazyg and Roxlans are classified as Massagetas in early records and as Sarmatians in later ones, henceforth the terms "Alan", "Yazyg", "Roxlan" and "Massageta" will be mentioned as "Sarmatian" in order to make this essay more intelligible, avoiding synonymous or quasi-synonymous terms (unless specification is required). They are identified with the Moshkhi of the Assyrian chronicles and Meshekh of the Bible.

Sumerian Legend
This legend starts with Tana, that is undoubtedly the same as the Sumerian Etana of the city of Kish (Kush) and who is equivalent with the Biblical Kush, the father of Nimrod – The Kushan Scythians also had an ancestor called Kush-Tana. The Sumerian Etana was the first mighty one on earth who wanted to visit heaven, and did. This story coincides with the Biblical account concerning Nimrod, though it is feasible that Nimrod set up the construction of the Tower of Bavel on behalf of his father, being coherent with the Babylonian myth in which the founder of Babylon was Bel, the father of Ninus (Nimrud), that was the first king. In the Hungarian account, the son of Tana is Ménrót or Nemere (Nimrod), who had twin sons called Magor and Hunor. Also Nimrud's wife, Anuta/Bau, has similar names in the Hungarian version, Eneth/Boldog-asszony. The Assyrian accounts refer that Nimrud had twin sons, one of whose names was Magor, confirming the Hungarian myth.

Scythian Legend
The legend says that Hunor and Magor were pursuing a female stag that led them into a foreign land and there she vanished without leaving any trace. The disappointed hunters however, met there two sisters, princesses of the Sarmatians, kidnapped and married them, becoming the forefathers of the Huns and Magyars. The stag is also relevant in Scythian mythology.

Nimrod Legend
Hungarian legend the sons of Ménrót/Nemere were hunters, and Nimrod in the Bible is described as a "mighty hunter". His Sumerian name – or better, his title – was Nimb-ur-shag, meaning "Lord of the Panthers", which in Hungarian is translated "Parduc-Uraság", conveying the same meaning of the Hebrew name quoted in the Bible, related with the word "nimra", that means "panther, leopard", combined with the verb "rad", that is "to subdue". Therefore, the first part of the Sumerian name resembles the Hebrew one, but the second component is definitely quite similar to Hungarian. It is relevant that Nimrod had to "subdue" panthers in order to become a "mighty" hunter: this title is often misinterpreted as he being a leopard-hunter – because it was the most dangerous animal in those times – but the actual meaning is another; in fact, the "lord" or "subduer" of the panther, implies that he was able to tame these animals in order to use them as a valuable aid in hunting other wild beasts. Indeed, also the kings and notables of Central Asia (from where the Hungarians departed towards Europe) trained the panthers to employ them in hunting. Panther skin has traditionally been the most precious garment among Hungarian kings and leaders, recalling the very fashion in which Nimrod himself was portrayed. The historian Yosef ben-Gorion ha-Kohen, also known as Yosippon, thought that Ménrót was to be identified with the first Egyptian king Menes, later merged with the Mesopotamian Nimrod, and his wife Eneth with the Egyptian female deity Neith.

Legend of the Turul Hawk
A mythical bird identical to the Sumerian "Dugud", that is the emblem of both the house of Attila the Hun and the house of Árpád. This story is about Emeshe, a Sumerian princess that was sterile until the Turul hawk came down from heaven and gave her fertility. She was married to Ügyek, the king of Scythians, of the lineage of Magog – in agreement with the Assyrian chronicles, that report Magog as the founder of the Scythian nation in northern Mesopotamia. Emeshe conceived Álmos (the same name of Árpád's father, that was a descendant of Attila the Hun), and in her dream she saw her descent as a river flowing from her womb that was growing towards the west, passing over the mountains and from which a great golden tree arose, representing a royal lineage of kings ruling in a far away land in the west. This story recalls the dream of the Mede king Ištumegu (Astyages) concerning his daughter, from whose womb he saw spring a river that flooded the earth, and in a second dream he saw a grape vine growing from her womb that became a mighty tree that covered the continent. These dreams were interpreted as a royal line from his daughter's offspring that would have built an empire, though dethroning him. The parallelism between both legends is amazing. Indeed, there is a relationship between ancient Medes and Hungarians. The characteristic aspect of this story, that credits the actual Sumerian origin of Magyars, is that Álmos is described as dark complexioned and black-eyed, namely, a Kushite. His name means "dreamer", since according to the legend he was conceived after his mother's dream.

Finno-Ugrian theory
This thesis, however respectable it may be, lacks of proofs and leaves many enigmas unsolved, as it was formulated only in the later 18th century c.e. neglecting all the previously existing historic records. Even though the process of Germanization of the Hungarian people began with King Vajk (then christened as István) by the end of the 10th century c.e., it was under the Austrian rule that the need of a sharp distinction from the rival Ottoman Empire required a new theory of origins which placed the Hungarians definitely on the European side. Besides this, the religious leadership of Rome monopolized the official history of Europe, and Hungarians had to be "cleansed" of the ugly picture of the Huns portrayed by the Romans ‒ the alleged higher degree of civilization attributed to the Romans in comparison with Attila's Huns is strongly disputable, however. Consequently, a prestigious leading monarchy as the Austro-Hungarian could not acknowledge any non-European component, and the Ugro-Finnic theory, strongly supported by German linguists, was hallowed as the only feasible one that may have made of Hungarians a fully European, western people that with time would have finally forgotten its obscure, barbaric origins and recognized the valuable contribution of Germanic civilization to their cultural development .

Hurrian Theory
The land known by Sumerians as "Subar-Ki" or "Subar-Tu" was inhabited by the Hurrians, whose language was Indo-European languages So, the Hurrians cannot be directly related with Hungarians. Yet, they were not the only people in that region, the same country was known under different names, Assyrian documents as "Sapar-da", Egyptians as "Magor", in Persian as "Sabarda" and "Matiene/Mada", while the Biblical name Haran/Charan is obviously connected with the Hurrians. Greek refer to them as "Sapir/Sabir", "Makr/Magar" and "Matiene". All these terms point out to the denomination of two Hungarian tribes: Sabirs and Magyars. This is the basis of the theory Similar sounding names of Sabirs and Magyars.

Mittani Theory
Northern Mesopotamian region was also known as "Mada/Mata/Madja". The term that may be transliterated as "mat", "madh", "madj" means "country" or "district" in Sumerian, Subarian, Parthian, and other related languages, and it was also used by the Assyrians and Egyptians with the same meaning. Notice that in those languages, the phoneme "dh" or "dj" is equal to the modern Hungarian "gy", and "megye" is still "district" or "province" in Hungarian. Therefore, if the denomination has been transferred along the generations, the Magyars might be the ancient tribe of Mitanni, Claims this theory.

Habiru
Habiru are people of Meditaranean spread far and wide, they are group from which Israelites emerged. Based on the Nimrod legend links are made between Habiru and Hungarian. But Habiru are Semitic, so they cannot be Hungarian.

Hyksos
Based on the Habiru , further links are made to Hyksos , but this is just a far fetched theory.

Kassites
By the time of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt to Canaan, a mysterious people arose in Southern Mesopotamia: the Kassites (Kasu). and after they lost control of Babylon they retreated to the Zagros Mounts and had not any further history. Very likely, they and not the Neo-Babylonian Chaldeans were the authentic Kasdim. The Kassites apparently spoke a language similar to Sumerian, Kassites were excellent horse-riders, a feature that primarily distinguished the peoples of the north, By some Kassite king names, which are evidently Indic (for example: Shuriash = Surya, Maruttash = Marut, Inda-Bugash = Indra-Bhaga), The Kassite kingdom in the south preceded about 90 years the Mitanni kingdom in the north, and survived it for other 90 years. At this point, the other meaning of the word Kasdim, "Chaldeans", and their relationship with Sumerians allows us to link our reasoning again with the "Hungarian-Hebrew connexion".The dynasty that ruled over Babylon about 130 years after the Kassites were dethroned is known as "Chaldean", the one to which Nebukhadnetzar the Great belonged.

Chaldean
Chaldeans (Kasdim) are not a people but a kind of social class or caste associated with the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers, soothsayers. They probably belonged to a different people, as they had their own language, "the language of the Kasdim", but spoke to the king in Aramaic, the Assyrian tongue of Babylon. The likely hypothesis is that, after the Kassites were defeated by the joint Assyrian-Elamite armies and the 2nd Dynasty of Isin took the power, they withdrew to the Zagros Mountains. How this is related to Hungarian is not known, but this is the theory.

Medes
This theory is supported by Mittani theory and further development on that.

Alans, Massagetas,
The Legend of the White Stag ascribes the origin of the Hungarians to the merging of three peoples: Huns, Magyars and Alans. Since the Alans, together with the Yazyg and Roxlans are classified as Massagetas in early records and as Sarmatians in later ones, henceforth the terms "Alan", "Yazyg", "Roxlan" and "Massageta" This is the basis of the theory linking Alans, Massagetas and Hungarians.

Sabirs
is probably synonymous of "Hun" or "Magyar". In fact, Herodotus mentions them as Sapir/Sabir, Makr/Magar, in reference to Subarians and Mitanni. Other classical sources and historians always mention these two terms together (Sabir and Magor). In Persian inscriptions, Sapardia and Hunae are also consecutive. The descriptions of their mastery in the art of war and powerful cavalry and their somatic and cultural features lead to identify them with the Huns, so that they appear as the same people. The equation Subarians-Mitanni of old is paralleled in later times by the association Huns-Magyars.

Altaic
One of the major controversies among different scholars regards the common origin of Hungarians and Turks. Undoubtedly, Hungarians are not a Turkic people, and probably they never were. The cultural differences existing between these two groups, mainly after the Magyar settlement in the Carpathian Basin, generated the elaboration of a new "official" theory of origins supported by the Austro-Hungarian élite, followed by the Soviet-ruled Hungary and by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Khazars
Indeed, the last word is not said, because there were Turkic peoples that contributed to the definitive formation of the Hungarian nation: Khazars/Kabars, Kumans (Kipchak) and, in a lesser amount, the Besenyö (Pechenegs). Historically, the most relevant of them have been the Khazars, with whom the Magyars had intensive interaction as allies, subjects, confederates, neighbours or rivals. When the Khazar empire collapsed, they were welcomed by the Magyars in their already conquered Danubian land. Both peoples had similar languages, so that they were understandable to each other. The Khazar tongue was still spoken in Hungary until the 10th century c.e. Paradoxically and in apparent contrast with the purpose of this essay, the Khazars did not add any substantial contribution to the presumed Hebrew-Hungarian connexion: they were a Turkic people related with the Uyghurs that became famous for the adoption of Judaism of their leading class but they had not Jewish bloodline, facts that have generated a series of speculative theories mainly in an anti-Semitic sense. They arose from the collapsed kingdom of the Kök Turks and built their own empire, which was ethnically quite heterogeneous, composed by almost every Scythian-related tribe between Khwarezm and the Dniepr. The OnOgurs and Bulgars were consistent elements within the population of Khazaria, as well as Magyars, that had also their own realm by the western border.

Huns
The Huns are undoubtedly the most famous of the Hungarian ancestors, though much of what is known of them is tainted with biased accounts and legends that exalt their allegedly ferocious character, so that any horde of invaders is still qualified with this name. The western civilizations have received the Roman viewpoint first and the Catholic superstition later ‒ the mediaeval prayer "De sagittis hungarorum libera nos, Domine", that is "Save us from the arrows of the Hungarians, O Lord" was framed as an invocation for protection from the Magyars, enhancing the excellence of their archery. The Magyars were recognized as the same Huns that four and half centuries before rushed into the heart of Europe with their outstanding archers.

Avars
Avars, as exposed in the previous chapter, were culturally related with Scythian-Dahae tribes, but probably their early origin was Subarian/Habiri. Concerning their homeland, the Persian name Varkâna means "Land of Wolves", name that translated to modern Hungarian would be "Farkasok-földje/Farkasok-országa", but in old Hungarian it is correct to say "Farkasok-hona", which resembles to the historic Persian name. Even more similar is "Avarok-hona", meaning "Land of the Avars". Therefore, a possible sequence may be that the Persians adapted the Avar designation of the land, either translating the meaning (in case that the Avar name was actually "Land of Wolves") or else applying a meaning in Persian (converting the term "Avar" into "Wolf"); therefore, the modern Hungarian term was translated after the Persian historic name, being the complete sequence as follows: Farkasok-hona»Varkâna»Várkony, or Avarok-hona»Varkâna»Várkony. In this case we assume that the Avars' language was an old form of Hungarian, which is not unlikely considering that they were Subarian Habiri, speaking a transitional tongue between Emegir and Magyar. There are additional evidences to establish these facts: The Avars' arrival in Europe and subsequent settlement in the Danubian Basin is chronologically placed after that of Attila's Huns and previous to the HunOgurs and Árpád's Magyars. Even though these migratory waves are interpreted as different, as a matter of fact, they represent a continuity, a "proto-Hungarian" territorial claim. The Avars held the land previously conquered by the Huns as a permanent resistance force against European occupants. Indeed, contemporary sources were not able to explain a clear distinction between the Avars and the Huns that preceded them, nor did between them and the Magyars that followed. The Avars easily "assimilated" the remnants of Attila's Huns, and in the same way did the Magyars with the Hun/Avar/HunOgur inhabitants - having the same language, life-style, clothing, cooking, ornaments, metallurgy, etc.

Hephthalites or Hayathelaites:(White Huns)
Usually known as "White Huns", they had indeed not any real relationship with the Huns. Such association is caused by misleading name resemblances: apparently they called themselves "Hua", according to the Chinese accounts, while their Sanskrit name was "Huna", terms that historians have connected with the Huns. Refer to Article who are white Huns

Scythians
original Scythians came from the line of Magog, being an Indo-European people. Notwithstanding, this term was applied to every sort of wandering tribes, and since the Scythians were present in a very vast area of the continent, they have taken many cultural features of the peoples with whom they were in contact, usually as allied. Therefore, there is a wide range of peoples, from Europe to India, sharing several Scythian features and claiming Scythian ancestry, even peoples from opposite sides, Aryan and non-Aryan, Indo-Iranian and Eurasian, Turks, Slavs, Hungarians, Indian, etc. They apparently spoke an Iranic tongue (Zend). Their religion was centred in the worship of natural forces.

Conclusion
It appears therefore that a fundamental revision of early Hungarian history is necessary in order to arrive at a more accurate picture, and much research work remains to be done in this field. Based on the available information, it seems most probable that the Hungarians are a synthesis of the peoples which have settled in the Carpathian Basin since the Neolithic period up to the Middle Ages: the Sumerian-related peoples of Near-Eastern origin (Neolithic, Copper and Bronze Ages), followed by the Scythians (6th c. BC), the Huns (5th c. AD), the Avars (6th c.), the Magyars (9th c.), the Petchenegs (11th c.), and the Cumans (13th c.). This Hungarian synthesis is characterized by a remarkable ethno-linguistic homogeneity and has remained highly differentiated from the considerably more numerous surrounding Indo-European people. The conclusion which can be drawn from this is that the Hungarians were able to preserve their ethno-linguistic identity and to maintain a demographic majority or critical mass within the Carpathian Basin as a result of the periodical inflow of ethno-linguistically related peoples. These peoples were designated in the 19th c. as Turanians, and the Sumerians, Scythians, Huns, Avars and Magyars were all considered to belong to this ethno-linguistic group. So more research is needed and also may be Hungarians are a not one of the said groups but all the groups.

Related Posts

Origin of Indo - Europeans

The whole theory of Indo-European is based on the premise that if Latin, Greek and Sanskrit were similar, it should be branched out of earlier single Language. So next question comes , what is the original home of Indo – European people who spoke this language. Let us see the likeliest candidates.

First we have to see the characteristics of Indo – Europeans. Are they?

  1. Hunter gatherers, Pastoral Nomads, Agriculturists etc

  2. Vocabulary : Animals, Plants, Agriculture etc

  3. Technical sophistication

  4. Culture Level

  5. Geography

Anatolia

Collin Renfrew says Indo-European homeland as Anatolia and they practiced agriculture around 7000BC. one of their groups moved westward to Europe, crossing the Bosporus and another -group, moving eastward, via the region south of the Caucasus mountains and the Caspian Sea, into Iran from where it must have subsequently entered Afghanistan and India. In an alternative scenario, Renfrew thinks that the Indo-Europeans split up after entering Europe and then the eastern branch went to south-central Asia, via north of the Black and Caspian Seas, whence it moved on to northeastern Iran, Afghanistan and India.

Theory fails on two counts

  1. If Indians and Europeans lived together as farmers ,their vocabulary should have common words or words originating from common words. But there are none.

  2. Secondly Hittite language from which the commonness is perceived is a minority language of Elite and basal language is non-European.

Caucasus

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov say Indo-European homeland between Black Sea and Caspian sea. This theory is based on linguistic paleontology. Since there is mountains , rivers, Lakes in the vacabulary. They also added that the Indo-European has lot of semitic loan words.

This theory fails because.

  1. Many scholars have shown semitic loan words as misplaced theory.

  2. Armenian language spoken in the area has large number of non Indo-European words, meaning there is another native language spoken. Which suggest that Indo-Europeans are not from that area.

Kurgan

Kurgan is steppes north of Black and Caspian Sea. There archaeological remains of Burial barrows (Kurgan in Slavic language) have been found. Maria Gimbutas says Indo- Europeans are essentially horse riding warriors who can thrust the weapons and can easily overrun the area. By 4000BC they reached central Europe.

This theory fails because

  1. On the technology and cultural level kurgan were essentially pastrol nomads.

  2. Mounted warriors were seen in Europe around 1000BC only says Renfrew

  3. Linguistically there is no relation between pastrol Kurgan and Farming Indo – European says Kathrin Krell, Mallory and Schmitt

Sogdiana

Johanna Nichols says Sogodiana was their homeland, from there they spread to Aral sea and they split into two.

This theory fails on the basis

  1. There seems to be only language spread with no people movement. It is unlikely to have happened when there was No TV , Radio or Internet.

  2. There is no centre to periphery spread, there is no eastern spread of the language which is baffling.

Indian Subcontinent

According to this theory India is the home of Indo- European languages. This theory was put forward in 18th century but has no takers then. Why now? Because new findings have come which has resurrected the theory. They are

  1. Mehrgarh neolithic are farming in wheat , domesticated animals in contrast to pastrol sheep and goat. So the Mehrgarh are Indigenous.

  2. Journey from Early charcolithic to Indus valley civilization is continuous. After studying the skulls there was a Biological continuity as well right up to the present day from early charcolithic days.

  3. Most Important one is finding the Indus valley and Rig veda people are same Mentioning of the River saraswathi which is cradle of Indus valley Civilization.

  4. Geographical evidence of confirms to Rivers , Mountains , Lakes etc.

  5. Boghaz Kuei inscription(1400BC), refers to Indra, Mitra, Nasatya and Varuna as witnesses to a treaty between the Mitanni king Matiwaza and the Hittite king Suppiluliuma.

  6. T. Burrow came to the conclusion: “The Indo- Europeans appear in Mitanni from 1500 BC as the ruling dynasty, which means that they must have entered the country as conquerors from no where else but from India.

Conclusion

Indo- Europeans are from India. Whether the Greek , Latin and Sanskrit (Vedic) are related we will see in another article.

Source

The Homeland of Indo-European Languages And Culture: Some Thoughts

Author: Prof. B. B. Lal