[Ganeshas Rat]

noemon's summary in this thread: no matter who was the first while you agree it was Greeks.

[noemon]

noemon wrote:

It's generally assumed that the ancient Slavs were a backward people who could not establish their own kingdom but the Pontic steppe was at the centre of the Yamna culture, which influenced other cultures in South Asia and Central Asia. The idea that the Slavs were conquered by the Vikings is stereotypical and Rurik was probably a local warlord from the area who assumed the Viking identity through cultural influences from Scandinavia. Some Viking settlers may have been in the region as noble guests and artisans but the ruling class was purely Slavic in origin.

The Rus' were Varangians, they were termed as such by the Greeks and the Greeks have absolutely no reason to lie for this, if the genetics are indeed similar(which is a big if) perhaps you should consider the Slavs and the Vikings being one and the same. They look identical anyway.

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Your nationalistic wishful thinking is cute Ganeshas Rat but the historical record is not up for debate to stroke your nationalism.

[Albert]

Historical records are always open for debate and different interpretation neomon. Jesus man, take it easy there.

It's generally assumed that the ancient Slavs were a backward people who could not establish their own kingdom but the Pontic steppe was at the centre of the Yamna culture, which influenced other cultures in South Asia and Central Asia. The idea that the Slavs were conquered by the Vikings is stereotypical and Rurik was probably a local warlord from the area who assumed the Viking identity through cultural influences from Scandinavia. Some Viking settlers may have been in the region as noble guests and artisans but the ruling class was purely Slavic in origin.

Rurik family line was just one out of the many viking families that came to be in the ruling class. And they came to intermarry quickly with local Slavs. So I would not be surprised that the norse blood was quickly mixed with slavic one.

But in the end, I would like to mention, I looked into the Wikipedia's source, apparently the genetic study was done by university of Helsinki. So there could be conflict of interest to claim Rurik for Fins. Another question is how the study was conducted, did they actually test Rurik remains. I doubt his remains were ever found, so most likely only decedents could be tested. Also even in the same study that is provided on wikipedia it is said, that genetically Rurik come from coastal Swedish speaking population group in Finland. Perhaps the Rus' tribe had land there as well as on main land Sweden?

There are just a lot of historical records to support that Viking invasion did happen, and the genetic evidence that seem to be inconclusive do not dispute that for me.

From wikipedia
http://www.elisanet.fi/alkupera/N1c1.pdf

Here is a Russian study
https://www.familytreedna.com/public/rurikid/default.aspx?section=news

[DmitryLeontiev]

In England, Russia was known back in the 16th century as 'Muscovy'.

Moscowia was never considered as a state. It was city, the capital of Russia:

Btw, on several maps russia is named Great Tartaria

[Political Interest]

I have tried to understand Russian national identity but it is not simple at all.

It looks as though a lot of Russian nationalists like to adopt the narrative that the Russian ethnos was conceived within the context of the Mongol Empire. Lev Gumilev believed that the 'Mongol Yoke' was a myth and that the Mongols helped to preserve and protect the Orthodox Slavs from European invaders. As far as I am aware Alexander Dugin also takes this point of view and Gumilev's work has greatly assisted in forming the basis for Neo-Eurasianist ideology. From this point of view the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and now today's Russian Federation were all successors of the same original Muscovian polity that was formed within the context of Mongol rule.

What appears to be undeniable is that regardless of influence from Mongol civilisation the Russian people are a mixture of Eastern Slavs and Finno-Ugric tribes. I don't believe that the Mongols had much influence on Russian genetics and most Russians I have met look no different to other Europeans.

[Igor Antunov]

The mongols did not really mix with those populations they conquered, outside of Genghis khan himself with his Chinese sex antics (~2 million direct descendants), because the mongols were comparatively tiny/few in number; they had little impact on populations outside of their own heartland. At the height of the contiguous mongol empire there were ~200,000 pure blood mongols, who lorded over 150 million people (after killing ~50 million). So their Asia-wide mixed genetic impact is minimal.

[ThirdTerm]

The Rus' were Varangians, they were termed as such by the Greeks and the Greeks have absolutely no reason to lie for this, if the genetics are indeed similar(which is a big if) perhaps you should consider the Slavs and the Vikings being one and the same. They look identical anyway.

The Varangians had been roaming around the areas north of the Black Sea, engaging in piracy and mercenary activities, long before Rurik's supposed arrival. The Slavs and the Varangian Rus' admixed for many centuries and the Varangians may have gone native in region by the time when the Rurik dynasty was established, which may be why the Varangians are genetically indistinguishable from the Baltic Slavs. The main difference between the Slavs and the Vikings is the haplogroup frequencies of R1a and I. R1a can be found at 10-12% in Scandinavia but its frequency reaches up to 60% in the Slavic heartland. Haplogroup I1a has a high frequency of up to 40% in Sweden, while it represents only 5% of the Russian population.

Most historians tend to agree with the Primary Chronicle that the Varangians organized the native settlements into the political entity of Kievan Rus' in the 880s and gave their name to the land. However, many Russian scholars are opposed to this theory of Germanic influence and have suggested alternative scenarios for this part of Eastern European history. Russian historiography includes a number of Anti-Normanist theories, antagonistic to the Normanist theory of a Scandinavian origin of Varangians. For example, according to Yu. Shilov, Varangians ( Vargi) were supposed to be a tribe of Baltic Slavs without roots to Norse Vikings.[23] While this dispute continues, the event of Rurik's arrival in 862 to what is now Northern Russia on the request of the local peoples, known as the Invitation of the Varangians (Russian: Призвание варягов), continues to be regarded as the traditional starting point of Russian history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians

The ancient Huns and Mongols mainly belonged to Haplogroup Q1a, which has been identified in Iron Age remains from Hunnic sites in Mongolia and Xinjiang. Haplogroup Q can be found in Eastern Europe at low frequencies (1-4%) and about 2% of Russians also belong to Q, where the Mongols invaded and occupied for several centuries. Moreover, the frequency of the Q1a2b1 (L527) subclade is 5% in southern Sweden and it's thought that the region was once colonised by the ancient Huns, who may have led Viking expeditions in Europe as chieftains.

Götaland and Gotland in southern Sweden now have the highest frequency of haplogroup Q in Europe (5%) and almost all of it belong to the Q1a2b1 (L527) subclade. The Romans reported that the Huns consisted of a small ruling elite and their armies comprised mostly of Germanic warriors. Gotland and Götaland is the presumed homeland of the ancient Goths. In the 1st century CE, some Goths migrated from Sweden to Poland, then in the 2nd century settled on the northern shores of the Black Sea around modern Moldova. The Huns conquered the Goths in the Pontic Steppe in the 4th century, forcing some of them to flee the Dnieper region and settled in the Eastern Roman Empire (Balkans). It would not be improbable that some Goths and Huns moved back to southern Sweden, either before invading the Roman Empire, or after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, displaced by the Slavic migrations to Central Europe. After all, even ancient people kept the nostalgia of their ancestral homeland and knew exactly where their ancestors a few hundreds years earlier came from.
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_Q_Y-DNA.shtml

[Frollein]

How did Southern France get its island of Huns?

[Political Interest]

The mongols did not really mix with those populations they conquered, outside of Genghis khan himself with his Chinese sex antics (~2 million direct descendants), because the mongols were comparatively tiny/few in number; they had little impact on populations outside of their own heartland. At the height of the contiguous mongol empire there were ~200,000 pure blood mongols, who lorded over 150 million people (after killing ~50 million). So their Asia-wide mixed genetic impact is minimal.

I definitely think so.

Most of the attempts to portray Russians as Asiatic were racist. In fact most of the Russians I have known look Finnic or Baltic.

Anyone who goes to real Asia and spends a lot of time there will know that Russians are within the European sphere.

The ancient Huns and Mongols mainly belonged to Haplogroup Q1a, which has been identified in Iron Age remains from Hunnic sites in Mongolia and Xinjiang. Haplogroup Q can be found in Eastern Europe at low frequencies (1-4%) and about 2% of Russians also belong to Q, where the Mongols invaded and occupied for several centuries. Moreover, the frequency of the Q1a2b1 (L527) subclade is 5% in southern Sweden and it's thought that the region was once colonised by the ancient Huns, who may have led Viking expeditions in Europe as chieftains.

Such a genetic impact is still quite minimal.

[Ganeshas Rat]

I have tried to understand Russian national identity but it is not simple at all.

It looks as though a lot of Russian nationalists like to adopt the narrative that the Russian ethnos was conceived within the context of the Mongol Empire. Lev Gumilev believed that the 'Mongol Yoke' was a myth and that the Mongols helped to preserve and protect the Orthodox Slavs from European invaders. As far as I am aware Alexander Dugin also takes this point of view and Gumilev's work has greatly assisted in forming the basis for Neo-Eurasianist ideology. From this point of view the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and now today's Russian Federation were all successors of the same original Muscovian polity that was formed within the context of Mongol rule.

What appears to be undeniable is that regardless of influence from Mongol civilisation the Russian people are a mixture of Eastern Slavs and Finno-Ugric tribes. I don't believe that the Mongols had much influence on Russian genetics and most Russians I have met look no different to other Europeans.

It is the narrative of a marginal sect of philosophers called "Eurasians". Marginal - because what else you can count for with the theory that unites your identity with Mongolian one. Very specific people, so it can be a shard of colonial politics. After all, what is called Mongolia today is the part of China that went to the Russian sphere of influence. It is not improbable that all the movement was started by the government making friends with aborigines (like European powers did with Indians). However, today it's for science freaks, Lev Gumilev is well-known as a falsificator, his theories are recognized as pseudo-scientific. And about Dugin they talk... They do not talk about Dugin, it's obscene. Yeah, he is in TV. Pavel Globa, the famous Russian astrologer is in TV too. Their followers and numbers of followers must be something similar, I think.

[ThirdTerm]

Lev Gumilyov (Лев Гумилёв) was a Soviet historian who came up with the utopian idea about pan-Asiatic people to unite Central Asians under Soviet rule, when these Central Asian republics were about to rise up against Moscow. Gumilyov was far from being a nationalist and he tried to eliminate racial differences between white Russians and their subject peoples in an attempt to appease rebellious Central Asians, which was in line with the Soviet policies in Central Asia. The Yamnaya steppe herders that I mentioned before are likely to be ancestral to the modern-day Russians and his pan-Asiatic theories were not entirely wrong about Russian ethnogenesis.



The DNA analysis of ancient human remains in Samara showed that the Yamnaya steppe herders belonged to haplogroups R1a, R1b, Q and J, which means that the Q people were already part of the ancient Russian community existed from 5,500 to 5,000 BC in Western Russia. Moreover, after the analysis of ten individuals of the Andronovo culture, two (22%) were determined to be of Asian descent (hg C), while seven (78%) were determined to be of Caucasian descent (hg R1a1a), with the majority being light-eyed and light-haired.

Drawing inspiration from the works of Konstantin Leontyev and Nikolay Danilevsky, Gumilyov regarded Russians as a "super-ethnos" which is kindred to Turkic-Mongol peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Those periods when Russia has been said to conflict with the steppe peoples, Gumilev reinterpreted as the periods of consolidation of Russian power with that of steppe in order to oppose destructive influences from Catholic Europe, that posed a potential threat to integrity of the Russian ethnic group. In accordance with his pan-Asiatic theories, he supported the national movements of Tatars, Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples, in addition to those of the Mongolians and other East Asians. Unsurprisingly, Gumilev's teachings have enjoyed immense popularity in Central Asian countries. In Kazan, for example, a monument to him was opened in August 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov