by Antonio Ryals
Then there was later Old World agricultural man,
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,
(This is from the beginning of a longer historical rhyme that was started in 1979 but never finished although I did finish much more than is here.I realise the Indian controversy related to the origen of 'aryan' language speakers of northern India and Pakistan's Indus and that more research and dispute always remains.)
Tony Ryals
endoscam@lycos.com