Nationalism and ancient history
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Nationalist ideologies frequently employ results of archaeology, ancient history and historical linguistics as propaganda, often significantly distorting them to fit their aims, cultivating national mythologies and national mysticism.
Frequently this involves the uncritical identification of one's own ethnic group with some ancient or even prehistoric (known only archaeologically) group. For the ideological implications of such identifications, it is secondary whether mainstream scholarship does accept as plausible or reject as pseudoarchaeology the historical derivation of a contemporary group from an ancient one. The decisive point is the ideology, often assumed implicitly, that it is possible to derive nationalist or ethnic pride from a population that lived millennia ago and, being known only archaeologically or epigraphically, is not remembered in living tradition.
Examples include Armenian claims of Urartian origins, Albanians claiming as their origin the Illyrians, Bulgarians claiming identity with the Thracians, Iraqi propaganda invoking Sumer or Babylonia, Georgians claiming as their origin the Mushki, or Hindu nationalists claiming as their origin the Indus Valley Civilization — all of the mentioned groups being known only from either ancient historiographers or archaeology. In extreme cases, nationalists will ignore the process of ethnogenesis altogether and claim ethnic identity of their own group with some scarcely attested ancient ethnicity known to scholarship by the chances of textual transmission or archaeological excavation. While such simplistic views are often harmless popularisations of history, they have led to catastrophic results in the past, in the worst case ending in genocide; most notable is the case of the Nazi concept of an ancient "Aryan" ethnic essence, but most other instances of ethnic cleansing known to history were fuelled by similarly naive concepts of ethnic history.
Historically, various hypotheses regarding the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been a popular object of patriotic pride, quite regardless of their respective scholarly values:
- Northern European origins of an Aryan race (Germanic mysticism, Nazi mysticism, Ahnenerbe)
- Out of India theory in Hindu nationalism (see Indigenous Aryan Theory)
- Armenian hypothesis in Armenian nationalism
Pan-Turkism and Neo-Eurasianism postulate mythical origins of humanity or culture in Central Asia, (Sun Language Theory, Arkaim)
Dacomania or Protochronism is the corresponding concept in Romanian nationalism.
[edit] References
- Kohl, Fawcett (eds.), Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology, Cambridge University Press (1996), ISBN 0521558395
- Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, University Of Chicago Press (2000), ISBN 0226482022.
