Timothy Snyder’s Move

De-Colonisation of Ukraine’s Pre-History Goes Mainstream

⚡️T Snyder’s De-Colonisation of ‘Pre-History.’

Historians like

Timothy Snyder

usually stick only to written sources.

Now, thankfully, in this short lecture (

) Prof S has for the first time gone further back than the first Ancient Greek colonies in Ancient Ukraine to help us understand Ancient Ukraine’s starting role as THE founder of Indo-European culture.

I’ve written before about the urgency of de-colonising ‘Pre-History’ (

).

Great to see great mainstream historians like T Snyder answering the call.

Ukraine’s future depends on us understanding its centrality to everything, at least since 2,500 BCE.

Up until now, in our colonised pre-history, we inconsistently accept anachronistic monikers like “Ancient Greeks,” “Ancient India,” “Ancient Germany,”…. while drawing a line at monikers like Ancient Ukraine. Archaeologists come up with proxy formulae like “Steppe Ancestry” “Southern Russia” or “Pontic Caspian Steppe,” while annihilating the existence of Ancient Ukraine.

For Ukraine, according to colonised pre-history, this means ‘history’ would begin with Ancient Greek colonists setting up shop in Crimea and the Azov Sea around 700 BCE. Hyperboreans’ myths of Ancient Greece set along the Azov Sea coast are explained away as a function of the imagination of these first Greek colonists, rather than as an echo of the fact that the first Greeks came from Ancient Ukraine before 2,500 BCE (

).

However, now, we have new disciplines such as:

archaeogenetics (since 2015 by studying ancientDNA we’ve known that the first Indo-European language speakers came from Ukraine)

archaeology (the type site for the Yamnaya Culture who first created the first Indo-European language is in Mikhailov oblast of southern Ukraine),

Comparative Mythology / Religion (the Trito Myth is the most attested story in Indo-European culture. From Ireland to India it is found repeatedly, which means it comes from a common source in Ancient Ukraine),

Isotope analysis (in some cases we can analyse strontium content in ancient humans’ teeth to determine where the food they consumed as their teeth were growing was itself grown six thousand years ago - so we can chart migrations with scientific certainty); and many other new disciplines’ insights.

Now, conventional historians like Prof Snyder, by integrating analysis of these different disciplines deepen our understanding of the debt we owe to Ancient Ukrainians:

More than half of humanity today speaks languages which were first spoken in south-eastern Ukraine, around where the Ruschists blew the dam.

We have no conceptual difficulty relating Ancient Greek city states to the modern state of Greece. It’s time we understood that everything we love about Ancient Greece, Ancient Ireland, Ancient India, Ancient Iran, even in Buddhism, was born on the Ancient Ukrainian steppe.

If Germany didn’t exist until 1871 yet we unthinkingly speak of Ancient Germans, then affording parity of esteem to contemporary Ukraine, requires us to afford Ancient Ukraine the same anachronistic rights to monikers as we do to Belgians, Indians, Iranians, Irish,…

Now finally the mainstream is catching up with the avant garde of Cultural Archaeology. And the implications for rearranging our mental models of how our common Indo-European culture was created are huge.

Instead of vaguely thinking everything began with Greece, then Rome and onwards…

Now, from archaeological, archaeogenetics, Comparative Mythology / Religion, isotope analysis, linguistics, and other disciplines, we understand the origin of almost everything we value in our Indo-European cultures can be traced with scientific certainty to the fields of Ancient Ukraine.

While Ruschia invents trolls about this or that historical lie to justify occupation today, the truth is Ancient Ukraine is the mother culture not only of “Ruschia” but of the entirety of Indo-European culture in an area I call “Manuland.”