Musings on the National Question

I was reminded of something when writing the National Idiocies log entry.  The issue of modern groups taking credit for peoples of the past is one of the ones that comes up again and again when we're dealing with national questions.  The Turks are one good example of that, one that I've used many, many times.

The Turks first issued out of the steppes of Inner Asia in Late Antiquity and continued to do so in waves until the end of the Middle Ages.  They were a people of an already intermediate heritage from the perspective of racial typology.  That is, they are somewhere between Caucasoid types and Mongoloid ones, having some of the blood of either type.  This varies from ethnos to ethnos.

The Anatolians who call themselves Turks are another matter entirely.  They are descended mostly from a collection of people that were living there before the Turks ever came marauding through the rugged and dusty lands of Asia Minor.  The Anatolian peoples, Greeks, Armenians, Semites and Hamites all called the place home long before Turks did.

And as it happens, they are the real population of Turkey.  The horde that came after Manzikert numbered probably in the hundreds of thousands in total.  The population of Anatolia was 10-20 millions at the high end.  The Turks made themselves into a ruling class only.  The idea that most of the so-called Turks are their descendants is absurd and wrong.

The issue is a familiar one.  The language was spread by conquerers and eventually adopted by the whole population.  It is my own conviction that this is the same pattern that explains the spread of the so-called Indo-European languages.  That's an issue I'll get to another time.  But the Turks, the real ones that is, were just a ruling class, and one that became more diluted with the passage of time (see the phenomenon of the Osmanlee Sultans taking mainly European wives after the time of Suleiman).

But it remains the case that the Anatolia of Byzantium was mainly the haunt of those previous groups and remains so to this day.  Go to Turkey and you'll see Mediterranean types, you'll see Armenid types, you'll see Hither-Asiatic and Hamitic types, and you'll even see some Nordid elements mixed in from time to time.  But the Central Asian or Turanid type is rare there (though not totally unseen).

This brings me back to the original point.  The masses don't determine much about the character of the nation except its vices.  To establish a real nation requires the presence of a ruling elite sharing blood ties and an elitism that goes beyond shallow vanity - in the Oghuz Turks, this took the form of a Persianate culture.  It is never numerically dominant, but it really is the will and the coherence that counts after all.

There is more to be said on this topic, much more, but I'll leave it there for now.