Transcription
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Did Caucasians rule all the great ancient civilizations? That’s what one YouTuber thinks. He even claims to have the scientific and archaeological evidence to back it up. How strong is his case? Let’s find out right now.
Robert Sepehr is a YouTuber who makes videos about ancient history, ancient mysteries, esoterica, and conspiracy theories. He refers to himself as an “anthropologist par excellence.” He used to be on Twitter, but his account has been suspended. We’re going to look at a video of his today, in which he makes some interesting claims about ancient races. It’s called “Aryan Bloodlines of Ancient Babylon.” This may be the most controversial video I’ve looked at yet.
I decided to get some exercise, and since it's a nice day, I wanted to go for a bike ride. So I rented some sort of bike at the lake, which happened to get me thinking about ancient chariots and how during the Holocene, there was only one specific tribe of people that first used chariots and disseminated the technology to other parts of the world…
There was a short period of time when chariots were used by only one tribe of people. The earliest known chariots are from around 2000 BCE. Within a few hundred years, though, the invention had spread to numerous other peoples unrelated to the original inventors.
…as it was only this one tribe of people that domesticated the horse and other animals used in agriculture around the area known as Anatolia, where the Caucasus mountains are located. Horses are not native to Africa. They were introduced to the continent by these Caucasians, a term derived from people coming from the Caucasus mountains…
Horses were domesticated in two places, not just one. He seems to be referring to the ancestors of modern domestic horses, and their origin has been traced to an area north of the Caspian sea. See my recent video on the subject. The people who domesticated them probably did speak a Proto-Indo-European language and they probably did invent the chariot. Sepehr says he is an anthropologists, so I am surprised he doesn’t know the term Caucasian is an obsolete racial category that biological anthropologists no longer use, as it is based on a now-disproven view of racial categories, though I realize the term still sometimes appears on census or survey forms in the US as another word for “white.” Sepehr appears to be using it in a racial sense here, so if he wants to keep pace with science, he needs to update.
…Caucasians, a term derived from people coming from the Caucasus mountains and that history remembers as the Hyksos, a term used by the Egyptian historian Manetho, which means “foreign rulers” and that the Jewish historian Josephus translated to mean “shepherd kings,” who he identified with the Hebrews in the Bible.
It’s not clear why he is bringing up the Hyksos, as they most certainly spoke a Semitic language, not an Indo-European language. Semitic is an entirely different language family. I get the impression that Sepehr is understanding the Hyksos as related to the Caucasian race, but the domesticators of the horse were not the genetic ancestors of the Hyksos, or at least not the primary genetic ancestors. Yes, the Hyksos had horses, but by this time, many groups of people from different regions and language families had already adopted the horse. The domesticated horse didn’t stay with only one race.
Most modern historians have identified most of the Hyksos king names as Semitic. This term, Semitic, comes from one of Noah's sons called Shem or Sem. Noah was the biblical figure that allegedly saved pairs of many animals on an ark, which after a great deluge settled on Mount Ararat, which is in the Caucasus mountains.
The term Semitic does derive from the name of Noah’s son Shem in the Bible, but Sepehr is being far too literal. When linguists today speak of Semitic languages, they are not using the term in a genetic sense. It is purely a linguistic designation and nothing more. What’s interesting is that Sepehr seems to have the notion that Noah and all of his descendents were Caucasian, that is, white. His support for this is that Mt. Ararat, where the Bible says Noah’s ark landed, is in the Caucasus mountains. Or maybe he doesn’t believe in a Noah, but just thinks the story adds weight to the idea that a group of people originated in the Caucasus mountains. But that same story says that all the peoples of the earth started there. Anyway, that is neither here nor there, because there really is no such thing as Caucasians in a racial sense anyway.
Regardless of what one thinks about the validity of the Bible, this flood myth seems to fit in perfectly in an anthropological context, because it not only is the right geographical location, from which domesticated animals and agricultural civilizations spread from after the ice age…
There is no evidence that agricultural civilizations began in the Caucasus region. On the contrary, the earliest known agricultural communities are in the Levant, along the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard, and the earliest known urban centers are in southern Mesopotamia. He is way off.
…it also makes sense genetically, as DNA testing has shown that animals, such as horses, were domesticated far earlier than previously thought and were likely retained from the Pleistocene or ice age, rather than first domesticated during the Holocene or our current age.
He hasn’t provided any references, so I have no clue where he got the idea that horses were domesticated in the Pleistocene period. Anyway, he is incorrect. The earliest known domesticated horses, and this has been demonstrated archaeologically and genetically, come from the Botai culture circa 3500 BCE. I will leave a link to the scientific data.
The rise of the Hyksos god kings in Egypt was made possible by an influx of immigrants from Palestine into Egypt beginning around the 18th century BC. The immigrants brought with them new technologies, including the horse and chariot, but also the compound bow and improved metal weapons, as they also introduced bronze to north Africa, which is far superior to copper.
It’s true that Egypt was a little behind in military technology and that with the entry of the Hyksos into the country, they made significant improvements, employing the horse and chariot. It’s not true that the Hyksos introduced bronze into Egypt. Egyptians were making bronze for well over a thousand years by that point. The reason Sepehr mentions all this isn’t entirely clear, but considering what he says later, his point seems to be that a superior light-skinned race came to Egypt, began ruling over it, and taught the inferior darker-skinned inhabitants their better ways. Before you come at me for implying something unseemly about Robert Sepehr, just watch the rest of the video, and you will see what I mean. But also keep in mind that the Hyksos weren’t white.
With the rise of DNA studies, anthropologists can now clearly determine the ethnicity of various ancient populations, which clarifies ancient biblical stories and mythology, which, while sometimes embellished, contain a surprising amount of accuracy when properly interpreted and should not be dismissed as simple fantasy.
Okay, so he is going to look at some DNA studies.
The Philistines were an ancient people who lived on the south coast of Canaan from the 12th century BC until 604 BC, when they were exiled to Mesopotamia by King Nebuchadnezzar II.
So far so good.
They are known for their biblical conflict with the Israelites with probably the most famous Philistine being Goliath, who is described as being a giant. While most people have heard of them through the Bible, they're first attested to in reliefs at the temple of Ramses III, in which they are called Peleset.
Yes, the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu commemorates a victory over the Sea Peoples, and among the Sea Peoples is a group called the Peleset, which probably are to be equated with the Philistines mentioned in the Bible.
There are several theories about the origins of the Philistines, the most popular being that they came from Crete, the island which was home to one of Europe's first civilizations called the Minoans. A recent study published in the journal Science Advances suggested the Philistines indeed migrated to the Middle East from southern Europe. In 2016, a large Philistine cemetery was discovered near Ashkelon, containing more than 150 dead buried in oval-shaped graves. A 2019 genetic study found that their DNA at the time was distinctly European, a genetic signal that is no longer detectable in the later Iron Age population.
I will leave a reference to this study below the video. He is correct that the Philistines had European origins. There is nothing controversial about that conclusion, because it was already widely believed, based on their material assemblages, that they came from the area of the Aegean. The genetic composition of the population of the Levant before their arrival consisted of indigenous inhabitants with added contributions over time from Anatolian and Iranian populations. By the way, the Hyksos mentioned earlier, having existed in the Levant before the arrival of the Philistines, would have had no direct relation to the Philistines and are to be understood as indigenous, as the rest of the Canaanites were prior to Philistine arrival. The Philistines got there in the 12th century BCE. They were on average taller than the Canaanites and Israelites, whom they encountered and fought in battle after their arrival. The DNA samples were taken from 3 different time periods, from a Middle/Late Bronze Age burial ground (about 1650-1200 BCE), which pre-dates the arrival of the Philistines, infant burials from around 1100 BCE, after the arrival of the Philistines; and individuals buried in the Philistine cemetery in the later Iron Age (10th and 9th centuries BCE). There was found roughly 14 percent more European ancestry in their genetic signature after the Philistine arrival than in the pre-Philistine Bronze Age samples, which were 2 to 9 percent. This confirmed what was already suspected.
The modern name Palestine is derived from the biblical term Philistine, and the demographic population of the area during the time referred to in the Bible were racially European or Mediterranean people.
Well, as Sepehr mentioned before, the European genes of the Philistines had little long-term effect, and pretty much disappeared in the Levantine population in the Iron Age.
The Hebrew Bible says the Philistines are descendants of Mizraim, the biblical progenitor of the Egyptians. Mizraim is the Hebrew and Aramaic name for the land of Egypt, meaning a mound or fortress, and is ultimately the name of a people descended from Ham who was another son of Noah and the father of Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. Ham's descendants are interpreted by Josephus and others as having populated Africa and adjoining parts of Asia and in ancient times were all historically Caucasian. While some modern politically-motivated interpretations of the Bible promote the idea that Noah had three sons that represented three different races reflecting the demographics that populate the various parts of the world in modern times…
He seems to be speaking of some common ideas from 100 years ago or more. I don’t know of any scholarly interpretations today, politically-motivated or otherwise, that say that Noah’s three sons represent three races or are intended to represent three races. Sepehr must be reading some antique books. I find this ironic, though, considering he still uses the term Caucasian, which comes from a time when it was thought that there were three main races of people: Caucasoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids. All that has gone by the wayside, and people who use those obsolete terms today are behind the curve in science or perhaps politically motivated themselves.
…this was not the case, as all early civilizations shared the same ruling nobility, which were ethnically distinct from the populations that they governed.
This is absolutely not true. Think about how wild this claim is. All early civilizations - not some, but all - shared the same ruling nobility which were ethnically distinct from the populations that they governed. And yes, he does appear to mean that those he calls Caucasians ruled every ancient civilization. Now, of course, to demonstrate this claim, he would have to show the evidence for each and every one of these ancient civilizations. How many would there be? A lot. He discusses only three.
Probably the clearest example of this is in India, which, like Egypt, did not have any horses in the fossil record until the arrival of the Aryans from Anatolia, which also introduced the chariot, the swastika, Sanskrit, which is an Indo-european or Aryan language, and an ethnic caste system to the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago.
While it is true that horse-driven chariots came to India around the same time as the Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryans, and so they probably came together, the swastika had been in use as a symbol in India long before that. As for the caste system, its origins are obscure, but it seems clear from the evidence that it developed gradually over time and probably did originate with the Sanskrit-speaking Vedic people in northern India. But to suggest that it was based on ethnicity or skin color is too simplistic and probably incorrect. I suppose he could use this as evidence that members of the Indo-European language family were able to become rulers in some parts of South Asia. Yet he is leaving out the obvious fact that such rulers also ruled over their own people. He’s got a long way to go before demonstrating that they became rulers of all early civilizations. Let’s see what else he’s got.
While the term Aryan is confined to describing a linguistic group in modern times, it is also etched into stone millennia ago in places like Iran by Darius the Great, who refers to his race and lineage as Aryan, which is why I use the term, which is also used to describe Buddha, who was a blue-eyed Aryan according to ancient writings and why he is depicted with blue eyes even today in places like Thailand, which managed to escape colonialism and the politically-correct whitewashing of history that comes with it.
For those who don’t know, the language of both the ancient Iranians and the ancient Vedic people of India belong to a subgroup of the Indo-European language family that we call Indo-Iranian. Indo-Iranian is divided into two main language groups of its own, one called Indo-Aryan, which Sanskrit belongs to, and the other called Iranian, which Avestan and Persian belong to. The Persians had a word airya, which was related to the Sanskrit word arya, and they both mean “noble” or sometimes “free person.” Early on in the history of these cultures, the word carried both a cultural and ethnic meaning, a form of self-identification for the people who spoke these languages in contrast to the peoples they came in contact with. Now yes, it is true that when the Persians ruled over other people, they reserved the term airya for themselves. But this is insufficient reason to take the word Aryan and give it a biological or genetic meaning and apply it to a presumed white race. Think about this for a minute. Whenever any empire is created, the rulers of that empire are going to rule not only over their own people, but over other people as well. There is nothing remarkable about finding speakers of Indo-European languages sometimes creating states in which they rule over speakers of other languages. But there are also speakers of other languages that ruled over Indo-Europeans too. It goes both ways. So, for example, we have the Minoans who ruled over the Greeks, Assyria who ruled over parts of Anatolia and Urartu, the Etruscans who ruled over the Romans, the Carthaginians who ruled over the Celts in Iberia, etc. The Indo-Europeans did not have a monopoly on rulership. On a side note, no one knows what the Buddha looked like, if the Buddha even existed. He is portrayed in all sorts of ways. To suggest that the various portrayals of him without blue eyes is some kind of plot to change history is silly. There are hundreds of interpretations of him.
While certain words, such as Aryan, have been changed into words like Indo-european, which means the same thing, certain historically Aryan symbols, such as the swastika, which goes back many thousands of years, are being scrubbed from academia altogether. This brings up the question why.
Okay, so here he is complaining about how the word Aryan is not used much anymore and the swastika isn’t studied as much as it should be. I looked on Google scholar and found quite a bit of swastika research. Admittedly it’s mostly about its usage in the last 200 years, but there are also academic studies, yes, even recent ones, on the symbol. I can leave some links below, if you like. But one thing that the evidence is very clear about is that the swastika is not a symbol unique to Indo-Europeans. Of course, you can use circular reasoning, as Sepehr will, and say that if that symbol appears somewhere, then it must have been Indo-Europeans who made it.
Whatever the reason, what cannot be denied is the reality of 4,000- year-old blonde and red-headed mummies discovered in places like China, which predate the arrival of East Asians to the area by several millennia…
Sepehr is referring to the Tarim mummies, found in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China in Central Asia. Hundreds of naturally mummified human remains dating to between 2000 BCE and 200 CE have been discovered there. They’ve attracted attention, because of their apparent “Western” physical appearance, such as their felted and woven wool clothing and their agro-pastoral economy that included cattle, sheep, goats, wheat, barley, millet and even kefir cheese. Archaeologists refer to the several sites that share this distinctive material culture as the Xiaohe archaeological horizon. Why is Sepehr emphasizing the point that these people arrived in the area first? Presumably in order to demonstrate that “all early civilizations shared the same ruling nobility which were ethnically distinct from the populations that they governed.” So the implication he is making is that these people were the true builders of Chinese civilization. Am I reading him right? Several genetic studies have been done on the mummies, and early results seemed to indicate that it was possible, though not certain, that these people may have spoken an Indo-European language. But a more definitive study came out this past October, and I should point out that this was since Sepehr’s video came out, so he can’t be blamed for not knowing this, and the genetic evidence now indicates that the people of the Tarim culture were from an isolated genetic group and not likely to be Indo-European speakers. Their so-called Western physical features are probably due to their connection to the Pleistocene Ancient North Eurasian gene pool. I will leave a link to the study below, so that you can read up on the details.
…Aryan mummies that share genetic affinities to the many blonde and red-headed mummies of pharaohs in Egypt, spanning all dynasties, reflected in the blue-eyed Egyptian statues of their nobility and pharaohs, which brings us back to the philistines…
First of all, the Tarim mummies are not Aryan. Second, blonde hair, red hair, and blue eyes are not unique to Indo-Europeans. These features are more common in Europe, but they can be found all over the world. Finding the occasional red haired mummy in Egypt is no surprise. I should add that the mummification process also can turn brown hair red. And only one king of Egypt that I know of, Ramesses II, was found with red hair. Most of the blonde haired and red haired mummies from Egypt come from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, which was the time when people from around the Mediterranean were migrating to Egypt. People in Southwest Asia had a higher occurrence of blue eyes, and many of these people migrated into Egypt over the years too.
That said, DNA findings published in the journal Nature Communications found that, thousands of years ago in what is now northern Israel, waves of migrating people from the north and east, present-day Iran and Turkey, arrived in the region, not only bringing new cultural practices, they also introduced new genes, such as blue eyes, archaeologists analyzing DNA from 600 skeletons preserved in an israeli cave, which experienced a significant cultural shift around 4500 BC, or 6500 years ago, these waves of blue-eyed immigrants from the Caucasus mountains of Anatolia, where Noah was said to have settled, and from where we get the term Caucasian from, as well as from Iran, a word that comes from Aryan.
Yes, the blue-eye gene made its way into the Levant and became more common there, but that didn’t make all the people white. The DNA study that Sepehr refers to was published in 2018, and the geneticists found that people buried in Peqi’in Cave in what is now northern Israel between 4500 and 3900 BCE were part of a homogeneous population that derived around 57% of its ancestry from groups related to those of the local Levant Neolithic peoples, about 17% from groups related to those of the Iran Chalcolithic peoples, and about 26% from groups related to those of the Anatolian Neolithic peoples. Yes, they were an admixture of people, not genetically pure Aryans. And there is no indication that they ever came to be rulers over other ethnic groups. The rest of the video, which gives extensive coverage to the speculations of someone named Lauren Moray, descends into conspiracy theories about world domination, pseudoscience, and esoteric nonsense. Maybe I’ll come back to it at some point, but I wanted to cover Sepehr’s own ancient history claims at least. It demonstrates how easy it is for people to take scientific reports and twist them to make them fit one’s own preconceptions. Be wary of that. It happens a lot on YouTube.
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