Reading an article on historical linguistics by the great, late Larry Trask and found this ...

Nice to know that the #Basques in #Euskadi held out agaimnst Christianity just as long as the Scandinavian countries did.

From Trask's article "Some issues in relative chronology" from the anthology "Time Depth in Historical Linguistics".

Newfound and mad respect for the #Basques people now.

#history #IsaacAsimov #DarkAges

@MnemosyneSinger

It's meaningless

"Western" is an absurdly vague term that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

But even if we restrict it to, say, Europe, there have always been multiple civilisations. While they tend to be lumped together, the ancient #Greeks and #Romans were distinct cultures, and the #Slavs, #Norse, #Celts, #Basques, and #Finns are all distinct from each other. Lumping them all together as "Western civilisation" is absurd.

The Hand of Irulegi (cool name!) has writing on it, and is from the time of the Vascones, the forerunners of the Basques. The one word that’s been deciphered so far is nearly the same as the modern Basque word for “fortunate”, so it’s probably a good luck amulet. It was not known before that the Vascones were literate before contact with the Romans; this shows that they were.

#archaeology #Basques #Vascones #AncientWriting #TheHandOfIrulegi — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-2100-year-old-bronze-hand-may-help-rewrite-the-history-of-basque-language-180981153/