Aryan Agrarian
Aryan Agrarian ...
by Tony Ryals
by Tony Ryals
Migrating further north as he settled southern land,
And losing to survive his healthy southern tan,
Creeping further north a kilometer or so a year,
Darker complected babies dying causing pain and fear,
Bringing agricultural seeds from the Fertile Crescent or Turkey’s Anatolian,
Where god was once revered as a woman not a man,
But one thing they could not predict one thing they could not foresee,
Was that their diet, which once sustained them well, was now deficient of Vitamin-D,
What was once a vitamin provided by the sun reacting with the skin,
Was now blocked by protective clothing and skin pigment melanin,
Which deprived their bones in turn of assimilating calcium,
So the disease we now call rickets got the best of them,
How many generations and pain they would endure,
Before the skin was pale enough to provide a rickets cure,
And somewhere in that migration,
They evolved the characteristics of the agricultural northern European,
Lighter skin pigmentation,
Only lighter skinned babies surviving to reproductive age,
Human history turning another page,
A critical distance north and a critical dietary deficiency,
And of sunlight to produce enough Vitamin-D,
The non-agricultural Inuit, or native Alaskan,
Probably,
The indigenous Siberian,
Or the in-land Asian,
Mongolian,
Who are the Inuit’s animal-herding cousins,
And possibly,
The Saami speaking “Lapp,”
With Vitamin-D in seafood and animal fat,
Never faced an evolutionary pressure such as that,
And somewhere in that migration now believed to be Ukraine,
These pale skinned agricultural men encountered the horses they would tame,
They attached them to the wheel and rode them south again,
Like warm air rising then cooling and coming back down,
White skin dropping back south where once they had been brown,
Like Vikings of the land but with horses and chariots too,
Back south they traveled over how many a migration and generation as their numbers grew,
Back south they became the Hitites, pre-Islamic Kurds, and Iranian Persians too,
Till they came upon what we call India and became Hindu,
Indo-European speakers we call Hittites settled in the Turkish Anatolian,
Possibly the cradle of their birth,
But roamed and warred over much of the surrounding earth,
As far as Egypt they invaded,
Their horses and chariots carrying them,
Both sides claiming a military win,
In Europe and Central Asia, Indo-Aryan,
Horsemen,
Were present,
Several millennia ago BC,
Called Mattini,
In the Fertile Crescent,
Hittites in Anatolia,
Aryans in India,
They were called Kurgans in Europe’s east,
And eventually Acheans,
Then Dorians,
In Greece,
There were probably more where they came from,
Lost in the dust to the historian,
And long before fair-haired Alexander sacked his fellow Indo-European Persians,
In what is now called Iran,
And grew weary there in India after crossing Pakistan,
His ancient, Indo-Aryan, or proto-European, ancestors had settled there,
And the Vedas and the Upanishads had writ,
In an earlier Indo-European language we call Sanskrit,
And even longer before Marco Polo inspired the west with his Chinese lore,
These Indo-European agrarian horsemen were knocking at China's door,
But there they dissipated and crashed upon its desert floor,
Caucasian mummies in the Chinese desert so recent headlines read,
For up to 2,000 years before our Christian savior these Caucasians had been dead,
Caucasians with a difference if one might for human evolutionary history discriminate,
Neither Middle Eastern Semitic nor the marginalized Asian Ainu,
These Caucasian mummies show their historic Northern European agricultural Vitamin-D deficiency through and through,
Buried in history, wearing Nordic textiles, and with the Ukrainian wheel of their horsemen too,
Try to imagine if you will, try to imagine if you can,
The horses rode on, the horses rode on,
Carrying chariots and pale men,
And judging from the mummies--they wore handsome woolen pants,
Meaning also on horseback they did prance,
Looking for new old land to settle, doing their Aryan agrarian war-like dance,
And the horsemen charged like a thousand horsemen of the apocalypse,
The old Dravidian culture shining in the Indian sun is shaded in cultural eclipse,
Thus ended a culture that had perhaps for millennia,
Before the invasion of the arya,
Traded with Sumeria,
And cultivated cotton for textiles 2,000 years before Egypt or Mesopotamia,
How strange and frightening it must have been,
To have been confronted by these pale light-haired horsemen,
Invading lands of the darker-skinned horseless tribes and cultures of India's indigenous Dravidian,
Something like that would happen millennia later,
To America's indigenous culture,
Forced to go to war,
With and against the Euro-Spanish conquistador,
All too easy for these Indo-Aryans to see themselves apart,
With their language, religion, art,
Skin-color, agri-military, horse and chariot,
Pastoral,
And agricultural,
They came not just to fight, loot, rape, and run away,
These agri-military invaders came to stay,
The conquered Dravidian to the south withdrew,
Leaving northern India-Pakistan to the Aryan-Hindu,
And those Dravidians who stayed behind,
To the new social order resigned,
Were absorbed into the caste system the conquerors designed,
Although these Dravidians had themselves been agrarian,
Creators of an enviable civilization,
The Indo-European conquerors took for themselves the title of 'Aryan,’
Which in their language meant ‘agrarian,’
Which is to say 'tiller of the soil,’
Although the lower castes no doubt performed the toil,
And in this title lies the paradox within,
These Indo-Aryans had named themselves for the very phenomenon,
That in northern Europe had lightened their skin,
And that's a root word for the area and peoples of the world now called 'European,’
Which is just another spelling for what could as well have been spelled ‘Aryapean,’
Which means more or less “of the agrarian,”
And oh, did they bring their Baltic or Ukranian,
Lithuanian or Iranian,
Gods with them?
To incorporate them into their Indian religion,
Hinduism?
Did they incorporate Dravidian gods into,
These Hindu,
Their own godly pantheon?
No doubt there were polytheistic similarities,
And Dravidian religious art,
That could not help but inspire their Hindu conqueror adversaries,
To see their gods through it in part,
A god for every need a god for every question,
Till the ones trying to placate them are filled with god indigestion,
Then some flirting with monotheism,
Although with healthy skepticism,
As in the Veda's ‘Song of Creation’:
1. Then there was not non-existent nor existent: there
was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter?
was water there, unfathomed depth of water?
2. Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal:
no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
That one thing, breathless, breathed by its own na-
ture: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.
3. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness, this
All was undiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and formless; by the
great power of warmth was born that unit.
4. Thereafter rose desire in the beginning, Desire the
primal seed and germ of spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart's thought dis-
covered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.
5. Transversely was their severing line extended: what
was above it then, and what below it?
There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free
action here and energy of yonder.
6. Who verily knows and who can here declare it,
whence it was born and whence comes this
creation?
The gods are later than this world's production. Who
knows, then, whence it first came into being?
7. He, the first origin of this creation, whether he
formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he
verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not.
The Rig Veda is the first book of the Vedas,
And is probably the earliest book humanity possesses,
It is dedicated to those ancient Baltic or Ukrainian,
Proto-European,
Travelers,
Or Invaders,
'To the Seers, our Ancestors, the first path-finders,’
And all so ingeniously simple its writ,
In a 35 letter alphabetic script,
We call Sanskrit,
An ingenious innovation,
Long before Greek or Hebrew speculation,
Fifteen hundred to 2,500 BC is its age of estimation,
Veda from the Sanskrit root means to Know,
Ver in modern Spanish means to see,
Seeing is believing?
Seeing is knowing?
Maya in Sanskrit means illusion,
All is Maya,
Maya, Mother of Buddha,
Maya,
Indigenous agrarian,
Civilization,
Of Meso-America,
So we flash ahead a millennia or so later and the Aryans have long settled down,
They have so far avoided Dravidian agricultural collapse,
A miracle perhaps,
And affluence is all around,
If you're an Aryan,
A privileged one,
Around 800 BC more religio-philosophic writings--the Upanishads are born,
Of some of the old ways of ritual,
It is critical,
Saying ‘those engaged in them considering themselves men of understanding and learned stumble along aimlessly. Like blind men led by the blind, and fail to reach the goal,’
Although for the less educated, probably overly intellectual,
For ritual to them was heart and soul,
And in saying 'Nothing is higher than the person ' thus exalting not society but the individual,
Was for the lower caste unreal,
And for the upper caste who sought to bribe the gods or god not ideal,
'What is the universe? From what does it arise? Into what does it go? In freedom it rises. In freedom it rests. In freedom it melts away.,’
And in the Bhagavad Gita,
We find Arjuna,
A sort of Hindu-Aryan Cain,
Although more cerebral,
With organized military might at his disposal,
But grieving over his friends and relatives to be slain,
And with his Lord Krishna at his side,
Helping him find meaning in his bloody chariot ride,
Fratricide,
A story that would be applicable to his fellow Indo-European Greeks,
Always at one another's jugulars trying to topple each other’s city-states,
'The whole works of mortals is an interdependent organism' says the Mahabarata,
A sensitivity to nature also shared by Buddha,
A very early biospheric vision,
Monism,
By the 6th or 7th century BC,
A Sanskrit grammar is written by Panini,
It is still referred to as the foremost Sanskrit authority,
In it Panini makes reference to Greek script,
Meaning contacts with the West long before Alexander into India slipped,
And written some two millennia before their Indo-European cousins to the west,
Would undertake the same linguistic quest,
Ten formed the basis of enumeration as early as the writings of the Rig Veda,
They also invent a zero sign,
Decimal place value system and the minus sign,
And use letters of the alphabet,
From their writing system—Sanskrit,
For unknown quantities in algebra,
The earliest known use of the zero sign or “shunya,”
Conceived also in the New World by the Maya,
Is found in a 200 BC,
Approximately,
Book of scripture,
Represented by a small dot and later a circle,
From nothing,
Arises something,
While most civilizations,
Saw math or time,
In terms,
Of hundreds or thousands,
The Indians,
Contemplated the millions,
Using their zeros,
To contemplate the manys,
The infinities,
A sign of their respect,
For such intellect,
It is a legend of the Buddha,
Between his nightmare and his Nirvana,
His ability to calculate the larger,
Metaphysical number,
Yet it was not until the 8th century AD,
A number of Indian scholars journeyed to Baghdad carrying with them books on mathematics and astronomy,
There, Moslem as well as Greek and Jewish scholars met, bringing mainly Greek philosophy,
As well as Greek science and geometry,
But in Europe they were considered works of the infidel,
It was good enough for them that Euro-Christian Roman numeral,
The earliest European use was a Sicilian coin of AD 1134,
Britain was a little slower,
And waited a couple of centuries more,
Even if the idea of the zero was developed earlier in Babylon,
It was the Indian system,
That was passed along,
From Baghdad, Iraq,
Another historically prime piece of real estate,
Upon which Babylon once sat,
The Fertile Crescent,
Tigris-Euphrates,
Mesopotamia,
All the same area,
From which sprang Ur and Sumeria,
Later Babylonia,
Once real estate prime,
But even during the early Moslem time,
Was in a state of agricultural decline,
'Where women are honored the gods dwell'
Thus said Manu,
Early exponent of the Law who knew,
The legal position of women well,
Always knowing someone,
A father, a husband, or a son,
She had to stand behind to get things done,
And the Lawgiver Yavnavalkya,
Before Buddha,
And several hundreds years before Christ,
Had this advice,
'It is not our religion, still less the color of our skin, that produce virtue; virtue must be practiced. Therefore let no one do to others what he would not have done to himself.’
Long before Christ's golden rule,
Yavnavalkya suggests it as a legal tool,
And documents that discrimination by color of skin,
Remains long after that initial invasion,
Of the Aryan,
Arya comes from the root word to till,
An occupation the invaders saw as noble,
The caste system was harsh,
And by skin color at first,
But other cultures solution to enslave or exterminate worse,
But neither feudal Japan nor Medieval Catholic Europe had advanced any further,
They all had their social pecking order,
Although not so much by skin color,
With time arya loses racial significance and literally comes to mean noble,
Just as unarya means ignoble,
Thus as time passed,
Noble genes mix at last,
And variation of skin color becomes more mixed in the upper class,
So social prestige and class,
Become more confused as the past,
Went hurtling ahead to the future,
And back to those Indo-Aryan,
Chinese mummies again,
A fair-haired female mummy whose double pointed felt hat is interpreted to mean,
More than one husband,
Perhaps a real problem for the wandering Aryan,
Wanting to settle down and be an agrarian,
Far from home but of the military conquest wearying,
No chance of finding an Indo-Aryan female for marrying,
And feeling as so many organisms that drive that biological function,
For sex, orgasm, and reproduction,
And if the Aryan female mummy with the double pointed hat is any indication,
Most had stayed home and weren't available at every occasion,
The Uyger people of the area,
Of western China,
Xinjiang, where the Aryan mummies are found,
Have unusually fair hair and lighter complexions,
Than others in the areas that surround them,
An indication,
Of their eventual genetic assimilation,
With the local population,
So later they came,
Bringing with them their women,
They came to stay,
After the war had driven the Dravidians away,
In carts they more slowly creeped,
In agricultural lore and technique steeped,
And though no doubt rape occurred upon conquest,
Or a more gentle reproductive love was sometimes bequest,
Only formal marriage provided the clout,
To put this racial caste system in doubt,
To put the dominant melanin genes back into this,
This white conqueror misogynist,
Who would want for his children--regardless of skin color--the best,
Yet for many generations Aryan-noble would be proffered by skin color,
The highest ruling class strictly marrying with their Aryan other,
And women,
Will be controlled by their men,
To keep the Aryan genes within,
Similar to the elite conquistadors,
Who after their New World wars,
Sent for their Spanish women,
To reproduce with them,
While both low and high military rank,
Took local women to mate,
Through rape, marriage, or concubinage,
And wealth through lineage,
And with it a chance for a better education,
Than a lower caste Aryan,
Or of darker skin pigmentation,
Would occasion,
And this in turn would give them a free pass,
Into the eventually re-established mercantile class,
That had once flourished in the distant Dravidian past,
Profiting from the specialized craft villages of the lower caste,
The Persian epic poem Sha Namah,
States that when Alexander invaded Persia,
Swords and other weapons were sent for from India,
That the pre-Islamic Arabic word for sword is Muhannad,
Meaning it comes from India is not so odd,
When one considers the enormous Delhi Iron Pillar,
Whose resistance to oxidation for millennia has shown itself to modern technique superior,
But at what a price,
That chunk of metal ice,
How many trees did its manufacture sacrifice?
Perhaps like Meso-American,
Mayan,
Limestone manufacture,
Perhaps consuming natural resources faster and faster,
Bow to the god Shiva the destroyer,
Shiva the creator,
Buddha who achieved enlightenment sitting under a tree,
Included in his teachings that every good Buddhist should plant and see,
To the establishment every five years of at least one tree,
Most historians agree,
The first sizeable lasting civilizations,
Were on the Nile, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley,
They all had fertile soil and irrigation,
And relatively flat land to hinder erosion,
Yet even before the Aryan invasion,
The Hindu Kush and Himalayas under the Dravidians experienced deforestation,
Causing agricultural land below to suffer from increasing siltation,
The invading Indo-Aryan,
Perhaps at first with a smaller population,
May have retreated temporarily from entering into this losing agricultural,
Grain battle,
They simply call war ‘a desire for more cattle,’
Buddha was descended from this Kshatria or ruler-warrior class,
Heir to the Indo-Aryan military victors and rulers of the past,
Yet renouncing the old social ways that gave him and the Brahman priestly class,
Clout by caste,
Looking in pain for a new identity,
Trying to see the infinity,
It is said that he,
Died at the age of 80,
In 544 BC,
In the month of Vaisakha,
On the full moon day of Vaisakhi Purnima,
The very same symbolic Indian day,
On which he was also born and received enlightenment,
Or so they say,
In the months we call May and June anyway,
And as it’s said in western science,
He stood on the shoulders of his cuture’s religious giants,
He had the courage to attack popular religion,
Ceremonial priestcraft and superstition,
The brahmanic priestly classes’ social position,
In Buddha’s time there were forest universities,
A place to learn amidst the trees,
Where students gathered round well known scholars for education,
Surrounded by nature for inspiration,
Buddha spoke his first sermon in the Deer Park near Benares,
Long before Buddha’s time a center for learning and scholars,
And yet Benares had no university,
But more a reputation of teachers and students willing to nurture or debate a good controversy,
Some say that Jesus was a black man,
But at least,
Living in the semi-nomadic Middle East,
He must have had a tan,
And who knows if wise King Solomon,
Was cavorting with a Queen who was Sheeban,
But specific languages and religions in humans are learned not genetic,
And the language Jesus spoke was Aramaic,
A language that’s Semitic,
It appears that Semitic languages back then,
Had greater tribal diversity in,
Back then,
When a language was Semitic,
It wasn’t necessarily Hebrew or Arabic,
And yet after all those years Indian,
Buddha’s ancestors were probably in part Dravidian,
But we know that he spoke and he thought in Sanskrit--Indo-Aryan,
A product of an ancient invasion,
A product of a cultural collision,
No longer just Aryan or Dravidian,
Feeling something was still amiss,
And in need of a synthesis,
Sanskrit is said not to be too hard to understand,
If you are a modern day speaker of an Indian language that’s Indo-Aryan,
That is to say if your language be,
That of Hindi or Bengali,
Gujrati or Marathi,
Dravidian languages of the south though very different,
Have adopted many words of Sanskrit,
Pashto spoken by Moslem fundamentalists of Afghanistan,
Is also the legacy of a past that was Indo-Aryan,
And of a time when Hinduism,
And later Buddhism,
Once was their religion,
Slavic languages have many common roots and forms of Sanskrit,
Although Lithuanian is the closest surviving language in Europe to it,
The Russians speak a language that’s Slavic,
Although their founders were of Swedish “Rus” Viking descent,
Who sailed to Russia on the Baltic,
And only borrowed it,
Because the majority of the Russian population,
For millennia before the Rus-Viking invasion,
Were Slavic-speaking and agrarian,
Living near the western most steppes of the continent—Eurasian,
And the eastern most portions of the Baltic region,
Which may be,
Approximately,
The cradle from which so much Indo-Aryan migration,
Or invasion,
Both to India and Iran,
But more so to southern and western,
European land,
For millennia on end,
Sprang from,
Long before they were shuffled up again,
In the first Christian millennium,
By the Hun,
And perhaps the place where this linguistic group,
Originally a darker western Asian,
Agrarian,
Caucasian,
Lost much of their melanin,
Skin pigmentation,
During their northerly pedestrian,
Agrarian migration,
Before the steppe horses’ domestication,
And the conversion,
Of some of them,
From agricultural,
To a more nomadic pastoral,
Lifestyle,
But Indo-Aryan,
Or Indo-European,
Linguistic roots—whether from agrarian migration,
Or invasion,
Are in German and all languages Scandinavian,
They’re in Greek, Italian, and Romanian,
They’re in Serbian and Albanian,
Indo-Aryan roots are also in English,
French and Spanish,
And in Portuguese,
Although the historically agrarian “Finns” of Finland,
Share the same Finno-Ugric,
Language group,
As their northern reindeer herding neighbors of “Lapland,”
But the Finn,
Historically agrarian,
Was perhaps more stressed by Vitamin-D deficiency than,
His reindeer herding linguistic kin,
Of Lapland,
The agrarian Finn,
Naturally selected for genes that produced less melanin,
And they may originally have spoken,
A language that was Indo-European,
Before they became the majority population,
Of Finland,
Even the descendents of the eastern European,
Jewish population,
Show signs of less melanin pigmentation,
Than one whose history is only Middle Eastern,
Or Mediterranean,
After centuries of having spoken,
A mixture of old Eastern European Germanic,
With a little mix of Slavic,
Called Yiddish,
The traditional language of Eastern Europeans who were Jewish,
It really doesn’t matter whether their original language group was Semitic,
Indo-Aryan or Turkic,
The claim to Semitic roots is not perfect,
Whether by genetic mixing,
Within the local population,
In this “melting pot” of the European,
Or a history,
Of a northerly migration,
Long enough to be,
Naturally,
Made lighter by deficiency,
Of Vitamin-D,
Long before the Old Testament came to be,
Probably,
It just happened that in this ancient agrarian migration,
The majority of those ancient migratory agrarians,
Shared the same linguistic group Indo-Aryan,
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