He who dwells in the mountains... having carried on much strife... he knows not submission, he eats uncooked food, he has no house where he lives, he is not interred when he dies . . .” - Sumerian Myth (Martu)
I thought Barbarians were those burly Conan style, sword-wielding evil guys. No? As I delve deeper into my history lesson and personal observations I'm confronted by a duality that has played out over millennia and has manifested itself into what we see today. Let's get to the roots.
Are we even capable of seeing the world through the lens of a "Barbarian"? (the term derived from the description of the way people spoke - obviously the listener couldn't understand) First we have to define what a Barbarian potentially is. That is to say, in a Dualism perspectives, a person inhabiting areas outside of the sedentary states that had grown and evolved over time.
There are two distinct features of each group that I'd like to relate to the world in which we live today.
States
- The "states" were mainly centralized autonomous regions that relied on the cultivation and domestication of grain and livestock by a laboring population. These "states" were also fundamentally sedentary. Today we call it "civilization".
Barbarians
- The "barbarians" on the other hand were mainly nomadic populations living on and around the fringe of the "states" who were mostly semi-sedentary people who came from the tradition of the "hunter-gatherer". Which some might still think of as "primitive".
It's the complex relationship between these two groups I'm interested in and the less-often scrutinized narrative that we have all come to not know. What would the Barbarian say?
Understanding the nature of each group and how they coexisted is crucial in gaining an often overlooked perspective of our shared history and the idea of Nationalism and the borders that now constitute as countries. In our lifetime we only know the concept of the "state" in its highest (all relative) capacity - A collective of countries engaged in a Globalization effort in order to facilitate a hypothetical One World corporate "state". I'm not going into the realm of conspiracy here, I'm merely looking objectively and creatively at the information I've been absorbing and wanting to come to a rough conclusion.
I postulate the continual fighting between the groups, which led to historically monumental structures (walls) went on until the "state" inevitably "won" as it expanded and continued to push the "barbarians" further into more remote and desolate areas as well as into their own expanding domain. Today we see very few remnants of the so-called "barbarians" in the nomadic populations around the world, a way of life that is slowly being lost and interfered with by globalization. Throughout all the battles that were previously fought between the states and their nomadic neighbors came the evolution of warfare, weapons and increasingly sophisticated methods of self-defense. I would hate to use the example of Israel and Palestine but I think it fits this narrative perfectly. An existing group of people who no where near as militarily sophisticated as the other like slingshots vs missiles. You get the picture here. That "state" is on the verge of winning the "war" in more ways than one.
Fast forward today and you can see see the different tribal factions around the world who have created and expanded their "states" influence and sphere. We can hypothesize a variety of ways in which we got here using the historical evidence available but I'm not that much of a nerd so I'll go with my own logic in this conclusion to...
What would the Barbarian say?
Day Thirteen
The End