The Tuareg not just a volkswagon SUV

The route of the Romani









Spatzo (Vittorio Mayer Pasquale) a Romani poet

("In the language of the Estrekarja Sinti, spatzo means "baby bird" or "sparrow", a nickname that recalls the sense of liberty often celebrated by this poet who along his life has experienced very bitter periods of suffering. Through his poetry, in opposition to the adversity of his fate, Spatzo shows us that he knew how to keep intact the Romani love of things simple and immediate.")


Freedom

We Gypsies have only one religion: freedom.
In exchange for this we renounce riches, power, science, and glory.
We live each day as if it were the last.
When one dies, one loses all: a miserable caravan just as a great empire.
And we believe that in that moment it is much better to have been a Gypsy than a king.
We don't think about death. We don't fear it; here is all.
Our secret is to enjoy every day the little things
that life offers and that other men don't know how to appreciate:
A sunny morning, a bath in the spring,
the glance of someone who loves us.
It is hard to understand these things, I know. One is born a Gypsy.
It pleases us to walk under the stars.
They tell strange things about Gypsies
They say they read the future in the stars
and that they posses love potions.
Most people don't believe in things they can't explain
We instead don't try to explain the things we believe in.
Ours is a simple, primitive life.
It is enough for us to have the sky as a roof,
a fire to warm us,
and our songs, when we are sad.

Very cool stuff Paige. Thanks.

Chester wrote:


You're Welcome!
Safe travels Chester:)

Welcome!




Irish Travellers by Dr. Frank O'Clark 2001


"This road is well travelled too! Irish Travellers are not Gypsies, yet they are often called so by Gadjo (non-Gypsies). Irish Travellers share many traits with Gypsies, but are not of Asian Indian origin. Irish Travellers are Celts, fair of skin, often blond, often blue eyed. Some claim they even predate the Celtic invasion of Ireland, and this may be so.

Travellers claim that they even predate the Celtic invasion of Ireland, and are the oldest inhabitants of that Island. The Travellers claim by oral tradition to be descended from the pre-Celts, Mab is an old pagan female goddess of the pre-Celts, who were known as the "fairies," "Fir Bolgs," and "Tuatha De Danann." There is pretty good coverage of this history, such as it is still known, (off site), although it does not discuss Travellers, per se, just a history of the Irish.

In other words, the history of the Irish Travellers goes back much further than the Gypsies. Gypsies came to Europe from India in the early Middle Ages. Traveller history predates the English legend of King Arthur by several centuries."




















Perhaps an Anthem for Irish Travellers:


Oh yes, we are the Travellers of this land,
those who stride out to an older chant,
obeying our ancient spirit's command,
"mishlee the thoaber, thaari the Cant."

Not for us were the country man's ways,
nor for any other to be deemed our master,
we'd go where we wish, at our own pace,
fast as we wished and surely no faster.

Scant welcome had we on the byroads of Erin,
and of late even America forsakes our hand;
the lies now pursue us beyond toleration
and freedom for nomads is sought to be banned.

The Life can never be fettered and numbered,
nor lines and borders ever enslave our band;
our people will never by chains be encumbered.
Oh yes, we are the Travellers of this land.


Molly St. Georges










A poem for all the Roses who have gone before:



A Rose becomes when wandering seed takes root

and in trembling Winter, from the vine must fall.

Were this all of Rose's fate that nature knew,

then life is cruelty and nothing else at all.



Ah, but in the Spring when sunshine splashed and spun,

while her perfumed petals enchanted your hearts;

she held you all like golden bees in worship.

Think of her then, when Rose perfected her arts.



Molly St. Georges







A poem for the Travelling Life: Bypass


I'm headed down the road today,
just reading billboards and
watching signposts rush the other way.
There's young-love songs
that fill the air,
but I am otherwise, it's sad to say.

It's just that sometimes it seems to be,
that my trailer's pushing me!
God only knows what I hope to find,
ploughing bow-waves,
the wind-shadows
passing truckers always leave behind.

There is naught back there but broken dreams
to rain upon my soul
and here sunbeams sing and wind-leaves sway
to airs so faint,
I can't quite hear.
Maybe I could further down the way.

The air of the open road is sweet,
free and clear of yesterday,
though traces linger from long ago,
just wisps of joy
that touch the heart
and call to mind how I loved her so.

by Miss Hamilton

Our secret is to enjoy every day the little things
that life offers and that other men don't know how to appreciate: reminds me of the saying "live simply so that others may simply live" very interesting stuff keep it coming only thing worth reading here lately

83msg1sttyme wrote:


Thanks 83!!!

Paige

"Who were the Tuatha De Danaan?

... and other musings....

The Tuatha De Danaan were "the people of Anu" and formed the pantheon of the pre-Celtic Irish. They could be roughly compared to the Greek gods of Olympus. They were remembered by the Old Irish for their goodness and great skills, used for the benefit of the people of Ireland.

The arrival of the Tuatha De Danaan was not only shrouded in mystery, but was so strange to the local people that they had to create a rational explanation as to how they appeared...

They were recorded as having landed in Northern Ireland from Scotland on a day which was later to be termed Beltaine, better known as May Day - 1st of May. It was stated that, after burning their ships, they surrounded themselves with a mist of draoideacht, which means 'magic' or 'sorcery' and marched inland for three days. By this means they hid themselves from the local inhabitants - the Firbolg - until they reached Sliabh-an-lerainn, the Mountain of Iron in Co. Leitrim, where they were first seen.

Effectively speaking, the locals tried to explain away the fact that these strange visitors appeared, literally, out of thin air ... and down off the mountain, quoted as having come 'out of nowhere' and 'out of the heavens'. Eachaid Ua Flainn, a poet who died in A.D.985 says "They had no vessels.... No one really knows whether it was over the heavens, or out of the heavens, or out of the earth that they came. Were they demons of the devil... were they men?"

The Tuatha appeared as tall, fair haired, 'shining-faced' sages with a highly organised small group of highly skilled leaders, artisans and craftmen. They were remembered for teaching the Irish people agricultural skills and animal husbandry.

It's interesting to note that according to the traditions of the Tuatha de Danaan, they had spent seven years in the north of Scotland before reaching Ireland, at places named Dobhar and Iardahar. Before Scotland, they had spent some years in Lochlonn, which has been equated with Scandinavia. In modern Gaelic, Lochlainn refers to the state of Denmark, and it seems a rather interesting coincidence that the Danes call their country Danmark; the land of the Dan people.

Apparently the Tuatha De Danaan were welcomed to Scandinavia where they settled in four cities where they taught to the young. Sages, resident in the cities were there to 'teach the sciences and the varied arts'. Prior to their teachings there, they apparently came from a place called Achaia.

It may be a tenuous link, but a region called Achaiyah, north of Mount Hermon, Syria is sited as being a possible site for Kharsag, the homeland of The Annage the so called 'Shining Ones' - great teacher gods of Sumerian tradition. These were the gods of the Sumerians who began the cradle of Western civilisation in the Mesopotanian Valley.

The Sumerians ruled the region from at least 4000 B.C. and there is still a certain degree of mystery as to the sudden rise of culture of the indigenous population - which they, themselves, attributed to the influence of their teacher gods.

It's possible that a small band of these elusive 'teachers' who could have been, themselves the last vestiges of an elder culture in decline, deciding to pass on their skills to the indigenous peoples, working their way through from the Mesopotanian basin through southern Europe, possibly teaching the Greeks in the same manner as the Tuatha De Danaan taught the old Irish... leaving memories of gods... who came from the Mount Olympus.... could they have then moved up northwards, spreading their knowledge via France, Germany, upto Scandinavia - again with their own pantheon of gods - and thence across to Britain and then Ireland?

Maybe....."

Further reading:
The Megalthic Odyssey (a search for the Master Builders of the Bodmin Moor Astronomical Complex of Stone Circles and Giant Cairns) by Christian O'Brien, first published 1983 by Turnstone Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire ISBN 0-85500-188-7
From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race by Andrew Collins, first published in 1996 by Michael Joseph Limited, London ISBN 0-7181-4132-6

























The Tribe of Dan

Israelites took Phoenicians (Sidonians) as their wives (1 Kings 16: 31).

And most of us remember the story of Sampson ( of the tribe of Dan) and his Philistine women, particularly Delilah









2 Chronicles 2: 14 also reads (NIV) -

''I am sending you Huram-Abi, a man of great skill
whose mother was from Dan and whose father was from Tyre''




The above passage is in reference to the trade of skill and material King Solomon of Jerusalem needed from to King Hiram I of Tyre, in order to build a House for the Lord.









By Rick Gore Photograph by Robert Clark






We know they dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean for 3,000 years. Now DNA testing and recent archaeological finds are revealing just what the Phoenician legacy meant to the ancient world—and to our own.



Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

"I am a Phoenician," says the young man, giving the name of a people who vanished from history 2,000 years ago. "At least I feel like I'm one of them. My relatives have been fishermen and sailors here for centuries."

"Good, we can use some real Phoenicians," says Spencer Wells, an American geneticist, who wraps the young man's arm in a tourniquet as they sit on the veranda of a restaurant in Byblos, Lebanon, an ancient city of stone on the Mediterranean. The young man, Pierre Abi Saad, has arrived late, eager to participate in an experiment to shed new light on the mysterious Phoenicians. He joins a group of volunteers—fishermen, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers—gathered around tables under the restaurant awning. Wells, a lanky, 34-year-old extrovert, has convinced Saad and the others to give him a sample of their blood.

"What will it tell you?" Saad asks.

"Your blood contains DNA, which is like a history book," Wells replies. "Many different people have come to Byblos over the centuries, and your blood carries traces of their DNA. It's going to tell us something about your relationships going back thousands of years."

Wells has no doubts about the power of the new genetic techniques he is bringing to our understanding of ancient peoples. Nor does his bespectacled colleague standing beside him on the veranda, Pierre Zalloua, a 37-year-old scientist with a dark goatee and an intense passion for his Lebanese heritage. The two men hope to find new clues to an age-old riddle: Who were the Phoenicians?

Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"—a name that became Phoenicians—after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.

The culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force.

From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise steeply from the coast of their homeland.

The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.

Acting as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the book," also derives from Byblos.

Today, Spencer Wells says, "Phoenicians have become ghosts, a vanished civilization." Now he and Zalloua hope to use a different alphabet, the molecular letters of DNA, to exhume these ghosts.

Paige MoonDancer wrote:


Great stuff Paige Moondancer. Thank you! You mention "Many other beautiful and unique mysteries and delights dwelt within" Do you have any pictures of the interior of Silverbear that you can share?

I can tell you more about the inside; however, we never took pictures of the inside, that would have been disrespectful to Silverbear...I have a few older pix of Patchs when the paint job was a bit more green, I can look for them. A little bit more on the interior...two old fashioned saunas on the rear, a jewelery workshop, and a special space built in the same dimensions as the Ark of the Covenent...perhaps one day you can see the inside yourself, there has been talk of the Smithsonian buying it.

(bet Noah and his sons and wives were glad to be in the Ark...the only way to travel when the road is all water)


Noah had three sons


Shem and his two brothers

From Shem came the people who would become the Sumerians. From the Sumerian city of Ur came Abraham, who took to traveling with his household after God told him to quit the city life and venture furthur.

Shem begat Arphaxad, Arphaxad begat Salah, Salah begat Eber, Eber begat Peleg, and Peleg begat Reu, and Reu begat Serug, and Serug begat Nahor, and Nahor begat Terah, and Terah begat Abram (his wife was Sarai), Nahor, and Haran, and Haran begat Lot.



The Sumerians
the city of Ur




"The cities of Sumer were the first civilization to practice intensive, year-round agriculture, by perhaps c. 5000 BC showing the use of core agricultural techniques, including large-scale intensive cultivation of land, mono-cropping, organized irrigation, and the use of a specialized labour force. The surplus of storable food created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place, instead of migrating after crops and grazing land. It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labour force and division of labour. Sumer was also the site of early development of writing, progressing from a stage of proto-writing in the mid 4th millennium BC to writing proper in the third millennium (see Jemdet Nasr period)."
Wikipedia



The Sumerians are the first known civilization to invent the following:
Writing,
Cuneiform tablet, the first known type of pictograph writing

Agriculture with the plow, mono-cropping, and diversion of water

Zigguarats, (similar to the Tower of Babel)

Organized Religion on a mass scale

The Lyre



"Biography of Enheduanna, Priestess of Inanna"

by Roberta Binkley
[Copyright 1998]

Enheduanna is at once a mystical and heroic figure, one whose image may be destined to take hold of the popular imagination in an era of emerging feminism and the reclaiming of ancient feminine images. She is the world's oldest known author whose works were written in cuneiform approximately 4300 years ago. Two of her known works are hymns to the goddess Inanna, The Exaltation of Inanna and In-nin sa-gur-ra. A third identified work, The Temple Hymns, addresses the sacred temples and their occupants, the goddess or god to whom they were consecrated. In each of these works she steps forward to speak in the first person moving from the third.










The Sumerians are also important in this story because they are one of the civilizations that independently invented the wheel, and they gave the world the wagon.

these techniques are still used today, wheni was a rigger we used sled and rollers all the time to move heavy items that would break a dolly.we would joke that things havent changed much over the years .keep it coming paige ,very informative,i hope there wont be a test later