Anatolia!

In case you haven’t seen, in October I posted three essays and one podcast on Anatolia’s history and genetics:

1. Ararat’s long shadow: Asia Minor’s major impact on humanity
2. Hittite Words, Byzantine Walls: what the West as we know it owes Anatolia’s empires
3. The Turkification of Anatolia: tales of Rome’s last conquerors

And the podcast, Anatolia over 10,000 years – From first farmers to the Turks.

Also, if you didn’t notice, I put all my podcasts (2-week delayed) on YouTube. Subscribe to the channel if you get your content that way.

Finally, if you wouldn’t mind rating my podcast on Apple (or wherever you subscribe) highly, I would appreciate that.

Septimius Severus was not black, who cares?


Septimius Severus is important because he brought the Roman Empire back from the chaos ushered in by the assassination of Commodus. He was born in 145 AD and so grew into adulthood during the later Antonine period. He remembered the tail end of the time of peace and prosperity that characterized the reigns of the rulers up until Marcus Aurelius, who had to deal with German invasions and plague.

Though Severus and his heirs did not usher in the despotic “Dominate” phase of the Roman Empire, I think it is correct that his military regime ended some of the illusions of the late Principate. During Severus’ reign, the rubber-stamp role of the Senate faded more as he nakedly asserted that his will and word were the law.

But Severus is important for another reason. He was the first “African” Emperor. More precisely, he was born in the Libyan city of Leptis Magna, near modern Tripoli.  His father was of Punic background, as Leptis Magna was once a Phoenician colony. His mother was of colonial Italian stock.

In the current era, he has become newly relevant. Challenging the whiteness of classics – remembering the Black Romans:

There is a gap here between the likely racial make-up of the Roman population and how that has been understood. This gap, I suggest, derives from a systematic erasure of Black Romans from Roman history. This erasure is similar to the “whitening” of histories and cultures, in which the presence and contribution of Black people is ignored.

Greeks and Romans didn’t think in these ways. They were aware of differences. But for Romans, White or Black were not meaningful social categories. As a result, our sources hardly ever mention skin pigmentation, since it wasn’t important to them. It is normally impossible for us to associate particular ancients with those modern racial categories. But this absence of evidence has allowed the assumption that most prominent Romans were, in our terms, White.

However, there is every reason to think that many leading Romans were, in our terms, Black.

Septimius Severus was a Roman general who became emperor in 193 CE. He was born in Leptis Magna in modern Libya. Almost all depictions of Severus are statues or on coins. They show him as having curly short hair and a beard, which is sometimes forked. Such depictions do not represent his skin pigmentation.

After centuries of interaction, it is almost impossible to imagine that there were visible differences between the citizens of Leptis and the surrounding African inhabitants. We cannot prove Severus’ skin colour, but it is wrong to assume that he was light-skinned.

Roman Africa was an economic and cultural powerhouse in the later Roman Empire. Goods from Africa circulated throughout the Roman world. One of the first Roman dramatists, Terence, came from Carthage in Tunisia and his appearance is described by the historian Suetonius as fuscus, “dark”.

The second-century CE rhetorician, philosopher and novelist Apuleius was from Madouros, modern M’Daourouch, Algeria. Saint Augustine of Hippo studied in the same town. He and Cyprian of Carthage were major figures in Christian theology. Egypt was a major centre of literary and theological innovation in the late imperial period. Why would we imagine any of these individuals as White?

The classical world is a part of our cultural traditions. Colonialism has whitened classics. Such Whitening marginalises Black people. Making Black Romans visible resists colonial mentalities. It embeds Black people in that cultural tradition.

We have a fair amount of ancient DNA from Rome. Combined with analysis of ancestry tracts in modern populations it is pretty clear that most of the Sub-Saharan African ancestry, that is, black ancestry, on the southern shores of the Mediterranean date to the Islamic period or later. Not imperial Rome.

This plot below shows consistent but usually low levels of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in southern shore Mediterranean populations today:


From the paper that that plot comes from, “We estimate that a migration of western African origin into Morocco began about 40 generations ago (approximately 1,200 ya); a migration of individuals with Nilotic ancestry into Egypt occurred about 25 generations ago (approximately 750 ya).” They look at ancestry segment lengths and fit it to a model of decay over time due to recombination. It’s not rocket science.

The upshot is that only a very small minority of the population of the Roman Empire were of black African appearance. Though as noted by the scholar above, these people were salient and notable and crop up in the literature as objects of curiosity. Septimius Severus may have had dark skin, but that does not mean he was of black African background or identity (I have dark skin, and people routinely accuse me of being a white-adjacent Asian, so it’s not like they can’t reason when given proper incentives).

I do believe it was likely Septimius Severus was culturally Punic but of mixed heritage, as colonial settlements often exhibited a level of intermarriage with the local populations (I suspect his “Italian” mother also had indigenous ancestry due to the generations elapsed). In the case of Leptis Magna, that would be the indigenous Berber Libyans. We know what these people looked like from the Greeks and the Egyptians. Below is some reconstructed wall art:

Four Libyan kings on the left

I would caution against taking the skin colors too literally, but the Egyptians describe and depict the Libyans as light-skinned like their West Asian neighbors, while the Nubians are shown to be darker in complexion. The Nubians are Sub-Saharan African, or black, while the Libyans are not.

What’s the point of this? Most of you know this? Well, a Ph.D. geneticist who isn’t even particularly woke pointed me to the article about Septimius Severus being black as if it wasn’t a farce. The lie has become true, even if you laugh it off.

What’s going on? Since 2020 and the “racial reckoning” white scholars have been engaging in political activism. The classicist above understands the “need” for racial representation, so is making the best case in a lawyerly manner.

Though the Greco-Romans didn’t have our racial classifications and understandings, they were not ignorant and even distinguished between the physical appearance of North and South Indians, correctly observing that South Indians resemble “Aethiopians” in color but differ in having straighter hair. The ancients were also aware that Mediterranean people differed in complexion, with Egyptians being darker in complexion than Thracians, and individuals had color terms in their names such as Albinus and Niger.

The Roman-era Egyptian portraits probably correctly depict the range in complexion in northern Africa, from relatively fair to medium-brown, with most people being brunette white or light brown. Without a deeper investigation, it is reasonable that Septimius Severus had darker skin than the average Italian, but it is also reasonable that his subjects did not perceive him to be black, or more accurately for the time “Ethiopian.” Instead, he was a provincial from Libya. Part of the problem with classicists trying to concoct a black identity and appearance for Septimius of Severus, Augustine of Hippo and Terence is that they are engaging in what is now fashionably called “erasure.” The history, achievements, and identity of the Afro-Asiatic people of North Africa, from the Maghreb to Egypt, are co-opted to make the case for black representation in antiquity because during this period the Sahara was far less penetrable than it became under Islamic states deploying camel caravans. It is one thing when Afrocentrist ideologues engage in this, but when intellectuals and scholars do so, it is very alarming.

The job of scholars in the modern West is, to tell the truth and represent facts as they are. They may miss the mark often, but they should aim as best as they can. The problem with classicists over the last few years is they temporize, equivocate, and intentionally mislead their audiences when they very well know that the North African people that suggest “may have been black” were likely no more black than the typical West Asian. This is not to say they were “white” (though many people from the MENA do identify as such today and did in the past), but scholars should have the courage to admit that the past was not black and white, and it does not always easily fit in our narratives, whether we are 19th-century Victorian white supremacists or 21st-century anti-racists.

I write this in 2022 with the clear understanding that the lie will likely become the truth. But some of you will remember the truth, and the more I write and talk about this, the more the truth shall not die. The will come when the darkness will end, and we or our descendants should be prepared to remember the world as it was rather than only have the understanding of priests who preach how it should have been.

The southern arc papers

Since David has not posted, here they are…

The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe:

By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra–West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe.

A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia:

Literary and archaeological sources have preserved a rich history of Southern Europe and West Asia since the Bronze Age that can be complemented by genetics. Mycenaean period elites in Greece did not differ from the general population and included both people with some steppe ancestry and others, like the Griffin Warrior, without it. Similarly, people in the central area of the Urartian Kingdom around Lake Van lacked the steppe ancestry characteristic of the kingdom’s northern provinces. Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself. During medieval times, migrations associated with Slavic and Turkic speakers profoundly affected the region.

And, Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia:

We present the first ancient DNA data from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Mesopotamia (Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq), Cyprus, and the Northwestern Zagros, along with the first data from Neolithic Armenia. We show that these and neighboring populations were formed through admixture of pre-Neolithic sources related to Anatolian, Caucasus, and Levantine hunter-gatherers, forming a Neolithic continuum of ancestry mirroring the geography of West Asia. By analyzing Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic populations of Anatolia, we show that the former were derived from admixture between Mesopotamian-related and local Epipaleolithic-related sources, but the latter experienced additional Levantine-related gene flow, thus documenting at least two pulses of migration from the Fertile Crescent heartland to the early farmers of Anatolia.

I haven’t read the supplements, so no major comment from me, except for one: the Greece-focused paper confirms using phenotypic prediction that West Eurasians have been getting lighter-complected since the late Neolithic/Bronze Age. I have no idea why, but some Nazis are offended by this reality and cherry-pick data, but trust me, I open up all the supplements to look at the HIRIS-plex predictions.

The weak shall abide, persist and inherit


To the Melians the Athenians declared “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This observation from Thucydides 2,400 years ago echoes down to the present because it reflects much of the world we see around us. The ancient Athenian wisdom clearly come naturally to the government of the People’s Republic of China:

At this point, I’ll reiterate the wisdom of Thucydides. It’s not like on a deep level Muslims don’t know how the People’s Republic of China treats its co-religionists. So why the quiet? Because they know that their bleating and remonstrations against China will fall on deaf ears. A nation like Pakistan needs China far more than China needs it, and China and the oil kingdoms need each other mutually and are aligned on other salient geopolitical issues. In contrast, remonstrating against India or the West will obtain results.

Notice with China there are two issues. First, its raw power insulates it from external moral pressures. China’s concessions to morality are a matter of its own choice, its own agency. Second, there is the axis of self-interest. Self-righteous social justice warriors like NBA coach Steve Kerr balk at criticizing China’s atrocious human rights record because the economic carrot and stick dynamics loom large. Rather than a matter of practicality, where protestation would have no effect on China, the calculus of decision-making is on self-interest for much of the American corporate elite. They wish to become richer, so they turn a blind eye. Obviously, these two are often comingled, especially in the case of small Muslim nations who may empathize with the Uyghurs, but know their protests will have only negative impacts geopolitically and economically on themselves.

From this one might conclude that I’m a cold rationalist, espousing Nietzschean amorality. But 2,400 years on, despite all its flaws, the legend of Athens shines brighter than the militaristic ethos of Sparta. The victors lost in the halls of memory.  2,200 years ago the First Emperor of China crushed the power of the classicists and literati, only to have his image and name tarred by their depictions of him in future ages. The Christians were a pacific and marginal group for the first two centuries of their existence, but within a few generations, they captured Rome and became synonymous with Western civilization. The martial ethos of the Vedic Kshatriyas is not what undergirds Hindu civilization, rather, it is the pacific ritualists and the philosophers, the Brahmins, who turned away from animal sacrifice in the first millenium AD.

Blood wins the battles, but ideas win the war.

The universality of the res publica and reality of Greco-Roman contingency

A small discussion on social media has arisen about the idea that freedom and political and social freedoms are fundamentally Western. Setting aside the libertarianism present in non-Western traditions like Daoism (David Boaz devoted a portion of Libertarianism: A Primer to this connection), more interesting are questions of the form “did the Greeks invent democracy?” My contention, broadly, is that the Greeks did not invent democracy, but all modern democracies are genealogically descended from the Greeks.

Small self-governing political units have existed in many places. Early Iron Age India for example had many statelets that are often described as “republics,” like the that of the Sakyas. If you look at the history of Mesopotamia it seems clear during the early periods some of the city-states were run on an oligarchic, not autocratic basis. Across the Iron Age, the arrow of history pointed to despotism. This is true in Greece and Rome, as the original more representative and distributed political systems slowly gave way to top-down despotism. But, the transition, especially for the Romans, was pragmatic, gradual, and de facto, rather than de jure. This means that they did not turn their backs on their republican institutions, but maintained the external facade for centuries after they were functionally powerless. The republican facade faded piecewise between the reign of Septimius Severus (who began promulgating law in his own name rather than with the figleaf of the Senate), to the emergence of the autocracy of the Tetrarchy a century later, that initiated the Dominate and the end of the Principate.

This persistence, along with Greco-Roman articulation, explication, and literary detail and depth, means that the political forms of the ancients were stored away in a manner that could be resurrected through replication in later centuries. In contrast, the Indian oligarchic Mahajapandas are historical footnotes, while the republican city-states of early Mesopotamia left no cultural descendants. I believe autocratic governmental forms are cultural adaptations. The fact that they spread across much of the world indicates they’re effective ones, but that doesn’t mean they’re “natural.” Primordial human bands were not run anarchistically, but in all likelihood, power structures were flatter than what became the norm during the Iron Age. If the democratic impulse is common why are the Greco-Roman models so critical? Because the Greco-Romans engaged in extended and copious abstraction and systematization of their social and political forms, and this process lends itself to translation into literary form. The written word is immortal and echoes down the centuries. The memories of the Mahajapandas fades. The speeches of Demosthenes persist.

R1b-L21 and Goidelic Celtic

The new paper, Large-scale migration into Britain during the Middle to Late Bronze Age, did not resolve the origin of the Celts. But one thing I was curious about:

Evidence for a substantial contribution from the C/EBA population to later populations also comes from Y chromosome haplogroup R1b-P312/L21/M529 (R1b1a1a2a1a2c1), which is present at 89±5% in sampled individuals from C/EBA Britain and is nearly absent in available ancient DNA data from C/EBA Europe (Supplementary Table 9). The haplogroup remained more common in Britain than in continental Europe in every later period, and continues to be a distinctive feature of the British isles as its frequency in Britain and Ireland today (14-71% depending on region19) is far higher than anywhere else in continental Europe (Extended Data Fig. 5).

If you go online you can see the frequency of R1b-L21 varies a lot in England, with rather low frequencies in East Anglia, and higher fractions in western Britain. In Ireland, the frequencies may exceed 80% in the western counties. Lara Cassidy noticed early on that the Rathlin sample from Bronze Age Ireland, an a Bell Beaker individual, carries this mutation. On the continent, the mutation is found in Brittany, subject to migration from Britons, while in Spain it seems to be found in lower frequencies, mostly in the western provinces.

One of the insights of the new paper above is that there seems to have been an Urnfield-related migration that arrived in England around ~1200 BC. Did they bring Celtic speech? I think they were  Brythonic and P-Celtic speakers. I believe that R1b-L21 and the Bell Beakers brought Goidelic Q-Celtic languages, and there are some who argue that Celtiberian was a Q-Celtic language.

The echoes of greater Scythia


I’m reading The Great Indo-European Horse Sacrifice: 4000 Years of Cosmological Continuity from Sintashta and the Steppe to Scandinavian Skeid, since we now know that modern horses come from the Sintashta.

The Indo-European horse sacrifice is a pretty widespread thing. Please note the table above and its shared characteristics. Notice the references to the chariots. Chariots were clearly invented by the Sintashta. And, it seems the horses that could pull them were a special breed, the ancestors of modern domestic horses. But putatively Indo-European people expanded in Europe long before the emergence of the Sintashta in 2200-2100 BC. For example, the Bell Beakers show up in Ireland ~2500 BC. Steppe ancestry shows up ~2300 BC in Greece. Therefore, the spread of chariot-culture, and the modern horse lineages, post-date Europe’s original Indo-Europeanization.

I think this indicates that the influence of the Iranian Scythians was felt all over the Indo-European zone…

The heavenly horses of the Sintashta

Matt pointed me to the fact that the paper that’s going to come out:

Horse domestication fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare. However, modern domesticates do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling at Botai, Central Asia ~3,500 BCE (Before Common Era). Other long-standing candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia and Anatolia, were also recently challenged. Therefore, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses remained unknown. Here, we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they rapidly expanded across Eurasia from ~2,000 BCE, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioral adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe ~3,000 BCE driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the situation in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BCE Sintashta culture.

If you have an interest in the domestic horse (I have) you are aware it’s the product of massive demographic radiation from a small founder population. With ancient DNA we now know where it started: with the Sintashta people of the Volga to the Ural steppe 4,000 years ago.

This is not totally surprising, because we know that the Sintashta were highly warlike and they invented the light war-chariot. This technology spread across the whole Old World, from Egypt to China to Ireland. In some cases, I believe that this was mediated directly by the Sintashta, the early Indo-Iranians. Not only were the Mitanni elite of Syria 3,500 years ago speaking an Indo-Aryan/Iranian language, and worshipping Indo-Aryan/Iranian gods but genetically some of them retained their steppe character. The Sintashta also had domestic dogs, but the lineage of these dogs persists only in China today. Not coincidentally, light war-chariots that are clearly copied from the Iranian-style vehicles show up in Shang China in 1200 BC.

The genetic/demographic impact won’t be visible in many areas. Perhaps Indo-Iranian mercenaries arrived in a city-state, and eventually taught the natives how to build, maintain, and utilize war chariots? This seems plausible. To this day we aren’t quite sure where the wagon was invented because it spread almost immediately over much of Western Eurasia 5,500 years ago.

We also have to remember that the “Iranian” zone of domination was far wider in antiquity than in the present. Around 500 BC Scythians were present as far east as Mongolia, as far west as Hungary, and as far south as northern Iran itself. This means that they could easily have spread the chariot within their own cultural-zone and then it was rapidly adopted by adjacent groups to the east, west, and south.

Related: check out my steppe series.

A Fallen World



As you may know, I’ve been thinking about the Indo-European expansion a lot. I did a lot more archaeological reading than I’m wont to for my Substacks, Steppe 1.0, Going Nomad, Steppe 1.1a: A nowhere man’s world, and Steppe 1.1b: culture vultures descend. I also got the archaeologists’ view from David Anthony, Kristian Kristiansen, and J. P. Mallory. Obviously, there are emails and earlier conversations that don’t make it into a podcast.

A few years ago I also read First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies and other archaeological works. But unlike with genetics archaeology is foreign territory to me, and I didn’t totally integrate and internalize what I read. Nevertheless, lately, when it comes to the transition between the late Neolithic and the early Copper Age in Northern Europe, the switch from the Funnel Beaker people to the Corded Ware cultures, I’ve developed a new sense of what happened and how to describe it: the arrival of Indo-Europeans en masse in the centuries after 3000 BC was into a fallen world well past its peak.

Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization convinced me that material remains, or lack thereof, tell us something about social complexity and civilization as such. Eric Cline in 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed brings home to us just how fragile early societies were. Four centuries after the collapse of Mycenaean Greece the people of archaic 8th-century Greece seem to have had only vague memories and recollections of this period, and were unclear as to the provenance of the ruined citadels strewn across their land (these were constructed by the Greeks themselves).

The Megalith societies of Western Europe and Cuceteni-Tripilliya were pretty impressive. The last Neolithic societies left more substantial material remains than their Indo-European successors. Because we don’t have written records we don’t describe it for what it was: a “Dark Age.”

This pattern is clearer in South Asia. The Indus Valley Civilization was connected, at least tenuously, to the West Asian oikumene. After its decline and collapse, the Indo-Aryans created and perpetuated a much simpler and barbaric society. Only in the 5th century BC did post-tribal polities come into being.

More generally, the ancient intuition that the Golden Age lay in the past might not be unfounded. Many of the people whose mythologies we have were heirs of great past civilizations which were barely a memory.

If the late Neolithic societies were Arnor, the Yamnaya and their cousins were the Rohirrim.

Darwin will fall

Over at his Substack, Robert Wright puts in a defense of Charles Darwin against a comment in Science, “The Descent of Man,” 150 years on. On the whole, I agree with Wright, and not with the author of the Science piece, Augustin Fuentes. But, I will say that I’ve always found the hagiography and adulation given to Darwin the man a bit tiresome and overdone. This was probably taken to the most ridiculous extremes in Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. Fuentes’ piece is somewhat hard to parse for me, but if he thinks that most students (as opposed to intellectual historians) should reflect on Darwin’s non and para-scientific views as if it’s worth their time, then he’s not super interested in the science. In many ways, Darwin was not an atypical exemplar of the English gentry of his period.

The reason we remember Darwin is because of his exceptional science, not his unexceptional social views. For Victorians, Darwin would have been viewed on the liberal or progressive side. But for our time he would seem hopelessly reactionary and problematic. That’s really all there is to it.

But as a practical matter, I think Fuentes will win and Wright will lose, and that in the near term the muddled thinking will reign supreme. The analogy here I will use is Herbert Spencer, whose views were misrepresented by Richard Hofstadter in the 20th century. Today, most non-specialist intellectuals know Spencer through Hofstadter’s distortion, not Spencer’s primary works. Those who read Spencer in the original are often surprised at the extent of the misrepresentation, but attempts to correct the record are futile. No one cares nerd.

I believe that something similar may happen to Darwin. Many scientists know the truth and have read Darwin’s work. He’s a complex figure who is hard to position in the modern landscape, and reductive analyses often miss the mark. But most scientists have better things to do, at least in their opinion, than counter ridiculous propagandists. Additionally, those ridiculous propagandists are often fellow-travelers in far-Left politics, which saturates modern science. I believe that one day scientists will wake up, and come to understand that the lie has become the truth, and then they will have to make the choice whether to speak the true truth, as opposed to the socially expected false truth. I don’t think there’s any suspense in my guess as to what choice they’ll make.

Of course to understand the fullness of who Charles Darwin was you can read his works and his letters, and draw your own conclusions. But you will be the few. Most people will rely on the most lurid and misrepresentative letters posted as screenshots on Twitter.