Greatest Seafaring Nations/People of History

Just who were the Sea Peoples who played a major role in the history of many famous nations of Antiquity?
Hellenes?
 
Just who were the Sea Peoples who played a major role in the history of many famous nations of Antiquity?
Hellenes?

We have the ethnicity debate constantly on this forum, and with 'Greek' in particular it gets messy. The Sea Peoples existed around 1200 BC. Homer, writing about 700 BC, never calls the 'Greeks' Hellenes, but has various names for them such as Achaeans and Danaans: the Hellenes do exist, but they're just one of many tribes, and the fact that Homer feels able to put them in almost as an aside, with no comment on their name, strongly suggests that even at his time it wasn't a collective noun for 'Greeks'. Herodotus wrote around 450 BC, and he does use the word, but all that it denotes is speaking the Greek language, and it's significant that he's using it after the Persian Wars, which are the first time that we see anyone talking about a common 'Hellenic' identity as if it exists or means anything. Even into the Roman period, you have people born in Syria whose mother tongue is Aramaic arguing that learning to speak Greek like Plato makes them as 'Hellenic' as the next person, and the eternal use and abuse of the label by powerful Greeks and Romans for their own ends. Being 'Greek' as we understand it, as an ethnic and national category, is more securely dated as a construct of the nineteenth century than a Classical one. Suffice to say, then, that asking questions like 'were the Sea Peoples Hellenes?' is barking up the wrong tree.

The Sea Peoples themselves are tricky to pin down. What we know is that almost every major centre known to have existed in the Eastern Mediterranean outside Egypt was destroyed by fire at some point in half a century or so on either side of 1200 BC. In about 1185, we have an Egyptian record saying that the Pharoah met a horde of various peoples in boats, who had destroyed many cities, and defeated them comprehensively. Archaeologists of a slightly older school, who were more ready than most are today to look for migrations in history (largely because they assumed that any large change in culture must be explained by a replacement of people), took him at his word, and identified the 'Sea Peoples' as a mysterious force of migrants, and blamed them for just about every burnt city in the area.

Unfortunately, the truth is probably not quite that exciting. For one thing, it's rarely a good idea to take a ruler's propaganda entirely at face value. We do know that the Hittite Empire, under a great deal of pressure from various sides, eventually collapsed in about 1210 BC, and its heartland on the Anatolian plateau was hit by famine: by the time the enemy armies actually got to the capital at Hattusa, it was already empty. These people needed to go somewhere, and many seem to have ended up on the coast in Cilicia and Phoenecia, where several turned to piracy. These seem to me to have been the 'Sea Peoples'. There's certainly no evidence for large-scale migration into Greece, where these people are supposed to have ended up - we've known since the 1950s that the Greek language was broadly the same between the high point of the Bronze Age and the time of Homer, so it's far more likely that the changes in culture and manufacture that we see come from internal reasons rather than new people coming in en masse.

This leaves the issue of burning cities in Greece and Crete, where just about every urban centre seems to have been destroyed at this time. The old interpretation of it being the direct handiwork of the Sea Peoples doesn't really hold water: the walls of a citadel like Mycenae were huge, the societies by all accounts militaristic, and it seems unlikely that coastal raiders would be able to have such stunning success in all cases. However, this isn't to say that they had nothing to do with it. These prehistoric centres had palaces at their centres, ruled by kings who exerted influence over local strongmen by giving them gifts - the bronze to make weapons and armour depended on copper and tin that came from Syria and Anatolia, and there are plenty of examples from tombs of ivory goods (the raw materials for which came up the Nile or from India), gold and Near Eastern jewellery being used as markers of prestige. They got these goods through long-distance personal networks of exchange - the Uluburun Shipwreck gives an example of the sort of shipment. This is a classic example of a 'gift economy' - social status demands that you repay a gift with an equal or bigger one, and failing to do so puts you in the other person's debt. We even have a letter from a Hittite monarch complaining to a Greek one that he was being too slow to requite a particular gift.

So we have quite a neatly-balanced system operating (perhaps quite briefly) until about 1200, and Hittite collapse totally ruined it. On the one hand, the personal contacts were gone, and the powerful Near Eastern monarchs with whom the Greek leaders had been making exchanges were replaced by people who did not know them. On the other, there were now a huge number of pirates sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean, making seaborne gift exchanges hugely more difficult. As if to add to a perfect storm, this was also a time when new shipbuilding and navigational techniques were developed, allowing pirates to build ships that could chase slower merchantmen and merchants to sail all the way from the Levant to the Atlantic via Cyprus, Crete and Sicily without stopping in Greece - correspondingly, Near Eastern people start going off Greek goods in favour of more exotic things from the Atlantic. So the Greek kings now found that they couldn't get hold of the shiny, exotic goods that they needed to give out in order to keep their followers loyal. It's not difficult to imagine that they attacked each other to get at other cities' stockpiles of bronze and treasure, but eventually simply ended up abandoning their palaces. With no exotic goods, there was no reason for most of the people employed by the kings - goldsmiths, ivory workers and the scribes who kept track of industries of that sort - to stick around, and it seems that many people simply took to herding animals.

This is (necessarily) a long explanation, so I'll try to summarise it. The Sea Peoples may have been indirectly responsible for the general mess at the end of the Bronze Age, but only because they contributed to the great upset of the economic system on which power in the 'Greek' world depended. Cities were certainly destroyed, but this had various causes, and at least in some cases was simply a matter of a city (actually little more than a royal palace, along with homes and workplaces for the people who worked for the palace or for those who did) burning down because nobody was left in them. The Egyptians may well have put two and two together and assumed that the pirates who landed in their territory were responsible for burning the cities, and they may well have told them so in order to intimidate them, or the Pharaoh might have said so in order to make his victory look more impressive.
 
We have the ethnicity debate constantly on this forum, and with 'Greek' in particular it gets messy. The Sea Peoples existed around 1200 BC. Homer, writing about 700 BC, never calls the 'Greeks' Hellenes, but has various names for them such as Achaeans and Danaans: the Hellenes do exist, but they're just one of many tribes, and the fact that Homer feels able to put them in almost as an aside, with no comment on their name, strongly suggests that even at his time it wasn't a collective noun for 'Greeks'. Herodotus wrote around 450 BC, and he does use the word, but all that it denotes is speaking the Greek language, and it's significant that he's using it after the Persian Wars, which are the first time that we see anyone talking about a common 'Hellenic' identity as if it exists or means anything. Even into the Roman period, you have people born in Syria whose mother tongue is Aramaic arguing that learning to speak Greek like Plato makes them as 'Hellenic' as the next person, and the eternal use and abuse of the label by powerful Greeks and Romans for their own ends. Being 'Greek' as we understand it, as an ethnic and national category, is more securely dated as a construct of the nineteenth century than a Classical one. Suffice to say, then, that asking questions like 'were the Sea Peoples Hellenes?' is barking up the wrong tree.

The Sea Peoples themselves are tricky to pin down. What we know is that almost every major centre known to have existed in the Eastern Mediterranean outside Egypt was destroyed by fire at some point in half a century or so on either side of 1200 BC. In about 1185, we have an Egyptian record saying that the Pharoah met a horde of various peoples in boats, who had destroyed many cities, and defeated them comprehensively. Archaeologists of a slightly older school, who were more ready than most are today to look for migrations in history (largely because they assumed that any large change in culture must be explained by a replacement of people), took him at his word, and identified the 'Sea Peoples' as a mysterious force of migrants, and blamed them for just about every burnt city in the area.

Unfortunately, the truth is probably not quite that exciting. For one thing, it's rarely a good idea to take a ruler's propaganda entirely at face value. We do know that the Hittite Empire, under a great deal of pressure from various sides, eventually collapsed in about 1210 BC, and its heartland on the Anatolian plateau was hit by famine: by the time the enemy armies actually got to the capital at Hattusa, it was already empty. These people needed to go somewhere, and many seem to have ended up on the coast in Cilicia and Phoenecia, where several turned to piracy. These seem to me to have been the 'Sea Peoples'. There's certainly no evidence for large-scale migration into Greece, where these people are supposed to have ended up - we've known since the 1950s that the Greek language was broadly the same between the high point of the Bronze Age and the time of Homer, so it's far more likely that the changes in culture and manufacture that we see come from internal reasons rather than new people coming in en masse.

This leaves the issue of burning cities in Greece and Crete, where just about every urban centre seems to have been destroyed at this time. The old interpretation of it being the direct handiwork of the Sea Peoples doesn't really hold water: the walls of a citadel like Mycenae were huge, the societies by all accounts militaristic, and it seems unlikely that coastal raiders would be able to have such stunning success in all cases. However, this isn't to say that they had nothing to do with it. These prehistoric centres had palaces at their centres, ruled by kings who exerted influence over local strongmen by giving them gifts - the bronze to make weapons and armour depended on copper and tin that came from Syria and Anatolia, and there are plenty of examples from tombs of ivory goods (the raw materials for which came up the Nile or from India), gold and Near Eastern jewellery being used as markers of prestige. They got these goods through long-distance personal networks of exchange - the Uluburun Shipwreck gives an example of the sort of shipment. This is a classic example of a 'gift economy' - social status demands that you repay a gift with an equal or bigger one, and failing to do so puts you in the other person's debt. We even have a letter from a Hittite monarch complaining to a Greek one that he was being too slow to requite a particular gift.

So we have quite a neatly-balanced system operating (perhaps quite briefly) until about 1200, and Hittite collapse totally ruined it. On the one hand, the personal contacts were gone, and the powerful Near Eastern monarchs with whom the Greek leaders had been making exchanges were replaced by people who did not know them. On the other, there were now a huge number of pirates sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean, making seaborne gift exchanges hugely more difficult. As if to add to a perfect storm, this was also a time when new shipbuilding and navigational techniques were developed, allowing pirates to build ships that could chase slower merchantmen and merchants to sail all the way from the Levant to the Atlantic via Cyprus, Crete and Sicily without stopping in Greece - correspondingly, Near Eastern people start going off Greek goods in favour of more exotic things from the Atlantic. So the Greek kings now found that they couldn't get hold of the shiny, exotic goods that they needed to give out in order to keep their followers loyal. It's not difficult to imagine that they attacked each other to get at other cities' stockpiles of bronze and treasure, but eventually simply ended up abandoning their palaces. With no exotic goods, there was no reason for most of the people employed by the kings - goldsmiths, ivory workers and the scribes who kept track of industries of that sort - to stick around, and it seems that many people simply took to herding animals.

This is (necessarily) a long explanation, so I'll try to summarise it. The Sea Peoples may have been indirectly responsible for the general mess at the end of the Bronze Age, but only because they contributed to the great upset of the economic system on which power in the 'Greek' world depended. Cities were certainly destroyed, but this had various causes, and at least in some cases was simply a matter of a city (actually little more than a royal palace, along with homes and workplaces for the people who worked for the palace or for those who did) burning down because nobody was left in them. The Egyptians may well have put two and two together and assumed that the pirates who landed in their territory were responsible for burning the cities, and they may well have told them so in order to intimidate them, or the Pharaoh might have said so in order to make his victory look more impressive.

There is no way that Homer was writing 'around 700 BC', that was the age of Thales ;)

Estimates are that Homer at the latest was circa 1000 BC, and Hesiod 900 BC. Give or take an aeon or so. 700 BC is a time of a host of writers, colony foundations and other records in the Greek world.
 
Homer's dating is controversial to say the least - I think 700 may be a touch too late, you're right, but 1000 seems a bit too early as well. Certainly the process of standardising the epics cannot have begun before the 8th century, and was only really finished in the 6th - bear in mind it's not absolutely certain how far we are dealing with a single 'poet' here and how far it's better to imagine 'him' as a series of compilers.
 
Homer's dating is controversial to say the least - I think 700 may be a touch too late, you're right, but 1000 seems a bit too early as well. Certainly the process of standardising the epics cannot have begun before the 8th century, and was only really finished in the 6th - bear in mind it's not absolutely certain how far we are dealing with a single 'poet' here and how far it's better to imagine 'him' as a series of compilers.

With Troy being passed as legend of something having happened in older times, and set pretty much in the Mycenian period, it would be impossible to have Homer or his epics held as the foundation of Greek culture if he was not that much older than people such as Solon the Athenian or Thales or the rest of the sages, who are 8th-7th century BC :)

Remember that it was not a similar case to Virgil, who everyone knew was composing fiction about a mythical story of origins for Rome.

Homer afaik is always regarded as the oldest Greek poet, and then appear the various lyrical poets, and Hesiod with his theology, and then the sages and philosophers, mathematicians, attic drama and so on.

Afaik the terracota of the Lyre-player of the Cyclades is deemed to be from around 2000 BC, and one has to suppose that the Lyre was accompanied with some sort of narration at least some centuries later on already.



Of course art pre-dated that, but afaik it was mostly relief art, eg pottery in the Cycladic or Mycenian and Minoan civs.
 
Identity of the Sea Peoples aside, I don't think of them as actually great seafarers. They just came from the sea, which, from the Egyptian perspective, meant from the north.
 
We have the ethnicity debate constantly on this forum, and with 'Greek' in particular it gets messy. The Sea Peoples existed around 1200 BC. Homer, writing about 700 BC, never calls the 'Greeks' Hellenes, but has various names for them such as Achaeans and Danaans: the Hellenes do exist, but they're just one of many tribes, and the fact that Homer feels able to put them in almost as an aside, with no comment on their name, strongly suggests that even at his time it wasn't a collective noun for 'Greeks'. Herodotus wrote around 450 BC, and he does use the word, but all that it denotes is speaking the Greek language, and it's significant that he's using it after the Persian Wars, which are the first time that we see anyone talking about a common 'Hellenic' identity as if it exists or means anything. Even into the Roman period, you have people born in Syria whose mother tongue is Aramaic arguing that learning to speak Greek like Plato makes them as 'Hellenic' as the next person, and the eternal use and abuse of the label by powerful Greeks and Romans for their own ends. Being 'Greek' as we understand it, as an ethnic and national category, is more securely dated as a construct of the nineteenth century than a Classical one. Suffice to say, then, that asking questions like 'were the Sea Peoples Hellenes?' is barking up the wrong tree.

The Sea Peoples themselves are tricky to pin down. What we know is that almost every major centre known to have existed in the Eastern Mediterranean outside Egypt was destroyed by fire at some point in half a century or so on either side of 1200 BC. In about 1185, we have an Egyptian record saying that the Pharoah met a horde of various peoples in boats, who had destroyed many cities, and defeated them comprehensively. Archaeologists of a slightly older school, who were more ready than most are today to look for migrations in history (largely because they assumed that any large change in culture must be explained by a replacement of people), took him at his word, and identified the 'Sea Peoples' as a mysterious force of migrants, and blamed them for just about every burnt city in the area.

Unfortunately, the truth is probably not quite that exciting. For one thing, it's rarely a good idea to take a ruler's propaganda entirely at face value. We do know that the Hittite Empire, under a great deal of pressure from various sides, eventually collapsed in about 1210 BC, and its heartland on the Anatolian plateau was hit by famine: by the time the enemy armies actually got to the capital at Hattusa, it was already empty. These people needed to go somewhere, and many seem to have ended up on the coast in Cilicia and Phoenecia, where several turned to piracy. These seem to me to have been the 'Sea Peoples'. There's certainly no evidence for large-scale migration into Greece, where these people are supposed to have ended up - we've known since the 1950s that the Greek language was broadly the same between the high point of the Bronze Age and the time of Homer, so it's far more likely that the changes in culture and manufacture that we see come from internal reasons rather than new people coming in en masse.

This leaves the issue of burning cities in Greece and Crete, where just about every urban centre seems to have been destroyed at this time. The old interpretation of it being the direct handiwork of the Sea Peoples doesn't really hold water: the walls of a citadel like Mycenae were huge, the societies by all accounts militaristic, and it seems unlikely that coastal raiders would be able to have such stunning success in all cases. However, this isn't to say that they had nothing to do with it. These prehistoric centres had palaces at their centres, ruled by kings who exerted influence over local strongmen by giving them gifts - the bronze to make weapons and armour depended on copper and tin that came from Syria and Anatolia, and there are plenty of examples from tombs of ivory goods (the raw materials for which came up the Nile or from India), gold and Near Eastern jewellery being used as markers of prestige. They got these goods through long-distance personal networks of exchange - the Uluburun Shipwreck gives an example of the sort of shipment. This is a classic example of a 'gift economy' - social status demands that you repay a gift with an equal or bigger one, and failing to do so puts you in the other person's debt. We even have a letter from a Hittite monarch complaining to a Greek one that he was being too slow to requite a particular gift.

So we have quite a neatly-balanced system operating (perhaps quite briefly) until about 1200, and Hittite collapse totally ruined it. On the one hand, the personal contacts were gone, and the powerful Near Eastern monarchs with whom the Greek leaders had been making exchanges were replaced by people who did not know them. On the other, there were now a huge number of pirates sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean, making seaborne gift exchanges hugely more difficult. As if to add to a perfect storm, this was also a time when new shipbuilding and navigational techniques were developed, allowing pirates to build ships that could chase slower merchantmen and merchants to sail all the way from the Levant to the Atlantic via Cyprus, Crete and Sicily without stopping in Greece - correspondingly, Near Eastern people start going off Greek goods in favour of more exotic things from the Atlantic. So the Greek kings now found that they couldn't get hold of the shiny, exotic goods that they needed to give out in order to keep their followers loyal. It's not difficult to imagine that they attacked each other to get at other cities' stockpiles of bronze and treasure, but eventually simply ended up abandoning their palaces. With no exotic goods, there was no reason for most of the people employed by the kings - goldsmiths, ivory workers and the scribes who kept track of industries of that sort - to stick around, and it seems that many people simply took to herding animals.

This is (necessarily) a long explanation, so I'll try to summarise it. The Sea Peoples may have been indirectly responsible for the general mess at the end of the Bronze Age, but only because they contributed to the great upset of the economic system on which power in the 'Greek' world depended. Cities were certainly destroyed, but this had various causes, and at least in some cases was simply a matter of a city (actually little more than a royal palace, along with homes and workplaces for the people who worked for the palace or for those who did) burning down because nobody was left in them. The Egyptians may well have put two and two together and assumed that the pirates who landed in their territory were responsible for burning the cities, and they may well have told them so in order to intimidate them, or the Pharaoh might have said so in order to make his victory look more impressive.

Got to take time to study this response, I appreciate it.
 
With Troy being passed as legend of something having happened in older times, and set pretty much in the Mycenian period, it would be impossible to have Homer or his epics held as the foundation of Greek culture if he was not that much older than people such as Solon the Athenian or Thales or the rest of the sages, who are 8th-7th century BC :)

Remember that it was not a similar case to Virgil, who everyone knew was composing fiction about a mythical story of origins for Rome.

Homer afaik is always regarded as the oldest Greek poet, and then appear the various lyrical poets, and Hesiod with his theology, and then the sages and philosophers, mathematicians, attic drama and so on.

All of that means only that later ages regarded Homer as having been earlier than the other authors mentioned. That doesn't mean that he really was. Since we largely lack the writings of the eighth- and seventh-century authors you mention, among others, we can't know how they thought of Homer and in particular whether they thought of him as writing centuries earlier.

Also, be aware that ancient people were quite capable of believing that a contemporary text was centuries old. Just think of Pseudo-Dionysius. So just because somebody says that a particular author or text is very ancient, doesn't mean it really is.
 
^While that is possible, it seems less potent as a dismissal, to me at least :)

At any rate if Homer was deemed as concurrent, or more or less so, to the seven sages, he likely would have been included with them in the list at the oracle at Delphoi. Same with Hesiod. As things stand they were placed in a different, preceding order.
And while not all notables liked Homer (there is a very nasty comment against him by Heraklitos, for example ;) ), i am not aware of anyone back then claiming Homer was more or less concurrent or from just a century before.
 
They might not have had an opinion about when he lived at all. It might have been only later that he became viewed as so important and foundational, and (therefore) viewed as earlier. By comparison, Shakespeare was not generally considered an unusually great playwright until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; his importance as the central figure of English literature was a later invention. Maybe the same thing happened with Homer, and so the legends of his date and his personal characteristics e.g. blindness arose quite a bit later. Who can tell?
 
They might not have had an opinion about when he lived at all. It might have been only later that he became viewed as so important and foundational, and (therefore) viewed as earlier. By comparison, Shakespeare was not generally considered an unusually great playwright until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; his importance as the central figure of English literature was a later invention. Maybe the same thing happened with Homer, and so the legends of his date and his personal characteristics e.g. blindness arose quite a bit later. Who can tell?

Yes, but that would mean that Homer was at least quite older than Solon the legislator, or Periander, or the other sages, ie at least from the early 9th century BC. And i have to suppose that the various lyric poets also mention him (haven't read them other than through passages in Plato's work...).
 
Kyriakos - my point was more that thinking of 'Homer' as a person with a date of birth might not be entirely helpful. Clearly, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the product of incredibly old oral traditions, and they certainly lean on this tradition heavily enough that they must have been regarded as 'young' at some point by comparison with other works. For example, you can't understand the Iliad without knowing about the Judgement of Paris, the death of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, to say nothing of theological and martial myths that crop up as allusions and references, but these are only alluded to in passing in the text itself). So you have various people telling stories, hearing each other tell stories, taking what they heard and turning it into new stories. Eventually you have people writing these stories down, and much later - in the sixth century - you have Athenian efforts to write a 'standard' text of 'Homer', but scholars even in Alexandria finding that there are many different versions of the text and that it's almost impossible to differentiate between the voice of 'Homer' and his supposed imitators. What I'm driving at is that we should be wary to assume that any one of the people along this long chain of imitation and recycling is 'Homer' the genius poet and everyone else is simply a compiler or a copy-artist. Does that make sense?
 
I don't think it actually is a known one - we know, obviously, that at some point somebody became the first person to write out in full the text that we currently have, but it's not at all clear when that happened or how far we can call him a 'poet', an 'editor', a 'compiler' or anything like that. Scholars are certainly by no means agreed that the same person wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and are fairly certain that Book 10 of the Iliad was written by a person who did not write all of the other books, and reasonably confident that the same is true of the end of the Odyssey.

I'll give you that people from 800 BC or earlier would have told you that 'Homer' composed the Iliad, so there wasn't really much going for the date that I used. Note that this isn't always a good measure of reliability - partly due to the way in which ancient texts were transmitted (in big books, usually, composed of a large portion of an author's works) and partly because of a huge regard for ancient literary geniuses, an awful lot of works were assigned in Antiquity to canonical authors which we know now could not have been written by them - so they attributed to Xenophon the Constitution of the Athenians, to Virgil a huge number of poems called the Appendix Vergiliana, and to Homer the Homeric Hymns. Still, again, 700 BC was an unhelpful date to use, but I think the point stands that 'Hellenes' was not a term or concept in use during the Bronze Age.

However, this makes it tricky to date the 'views' in his poems: the process of composition lasts between maybe 2000 BC (or even earlier, depending on what you make of the references to works like Gilgamesh) and 300 BC. At some point in that time, somebody thought that you could use Hellenes as the name of an inconsequential tribe, and pretty certainly thought that nobody would assign any other meaning to it, and later people decided not to add a gloss to it on the grounds that it predated their use of the word. However, we can't tell whether the first reader thinking 'that means Greeks today, but I'll leave it alone because Homer predates the idea of Greeks' lived in 700 BC, 1000 BC or 500 BC.
 
The Greeks issue is another one, still. You do recall the various epigrams by Simonides, about the Greek-Persian wars ;)

'Fighting at the forefront of the Greeks', etc, in the case of Marathon. ("Hellenon promachountes" etc). And of course Marathon was at 490 BC.
 
Yes. My argument is that the idea of 'Greeks' was probably created thanks to the Persian Wars, when it was constructed as an identity based around the people who fought (or were being pressured to fight) against Persia. After all, our first sources for the concept are Simonides, Herodotus and the tragedians, writing about and in the immediate aftermath of the war. However, I would still argue that their concept of 'Greek' was fundamentally different to that understood by modern national thinking, and that plenty of people throughout ancient times had different and contradictory opinions on what it meant to be a 'Greek'.

At any rate, though, this makes it a bit nonsensical to ask 'were these people, living 600 years before anyone thought 'Greeks' existed, Greeks?'
 
^Far be it from be to claim that having a common language, culture and by and large education system, should mean people are of one group such as 'Greeks'.
We all know that for that to happen the group must also be a minority, or otherwise SJW-friendly :mischief:
 
By the same token, the English and Scots are the same people. Again without wishing to open the colossal can of worms, all identities are based on shared characteristics, but you can't infer them from them. The process of forming a common identity necessarily involves people, who are similar in certain respects but different in others, deciding that the ways in which they are similar are more important than the ways that they are different. Ethnicities do not exist unless people say that they do.
 
By the same token, the English and Scots are the same people. Again without wishing to open the colossal can of worms, all identities are based on shared characteristics, but you can't infer them from them. The process of forming a common identity necessarily involves people, who are similar in certain respects but different in others, deciding that the ways in which they are similar are more important than the ways that they are different. Ethnicities do not exist unless people say that they do.

Not true regardless of how drawn out the case may be*. Reminds me a bit of an old joke about a single german being picked out when complete strangers in a 18th century german town were playing a game where one would have to find the foreigner. The person always picked out as the foreigner finally got annoyed and asked them how they named him always, to which they replied that he is black.

*Pythian oracle styled sentence ;)
 
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