Jean Haudry: Aux sources de notre identité

Jean Haudry:

"Aux sources de notre identité : les racines Indo-Européennes"

Conférence de Jean Haudry "Aux sources de notre identité : les racines Indo-Européennes", organisée par le Cercle Afl Okkat le 07 octobre 2015 à Strasbourg.

Présentation :

L’Europe, confrontée à des défis sans précédent qui menacent de bouleverser irrévocablement son paysage ethnique et culturel, se cherche un destin et s’interroge sur son identité.

L’Europe, ce n’est ni Lampedusa, ni Bruxelles : il ne s’agit ni d’un espace aux frontières fluctuantes, ouvert à tous vents et porteur d’un système de valeurs abstraites et universelles, ni d’un espace économique voué à s’étendre au-delà de l’Atlantique, au mépris des réalités géopolitiques.

L’Europe, c’est d’abord un ensemble de peuples héritiers d’une très ancienne culture commune, vieille de plusieurs millénaires, qui s’est déployée à partir de son foyer originel jusqu’aux confins de l’Asie. De cette matrice, à laquelle les spécialistes ont donné le nom de culture « indo-européenne », sont notamment issues les langues et les civilisations grecques, latines, celtiques, germaniques, baltes et slaves.

Prendre conscience de la richesse de cet héritage commun constitue plus que jamais pour les Européens enracinés un enjeu majeur : « qui contrôle le passé, contrôle le présent », affirmait George Orwell. C’est aussi la raison pour laquelle certains idéologues, s’appuyant sur une argumentation pseudo-scientifique pour promouvoir l’idée de culture « métisse », prétendent littéralement « déconstruire » notre passé en refusant à notre civilisation toute origine spécifiquement européenne.

Ces attaques en règle contre notre « longue mémoire », récemment renouvelées avec l’appui des media, ne résistent cependant pas à un examen scientifique sérieux, prenant en compte les données de la linguistique, de la mythologie comparée, de l’archéologie et de la génétique des populations.

Soucieux de contribuer à la nécessaire ré-information sur ce sujet essentiel, le cercle Afl Okkat fait appel à un éminent spécialiste, le professeur Jean Haudry.

Normalien, agrégé de grammaire, professeur émérite de l'Université Lyon III, ancien doyen de la faculté des lettres, ancien directeur d’étude à l'École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Jean Haudry est l’auteur de nombreuses études sur la linguistique et la civilisation indo-européennes (notamment deux manuels parus dans la collection « Que sais-je ? »). Il prépare actuellement un « Dictionnaire de la tradition européenne ».

Russia’s Urals region might hold the key to Europe’s ancient origins

Darya Kezina ⋅

Ex: http://www.therussophile.org

In August 2015, the Shigir Idol was recognized  as the world’s oldest known wooden sculpture. Prominent dendrochronologists and archeologists established that the statue is 11,000 years old, dating to the start of the Holocene period at the end of the last Ice Age and beginning of the present era.

The scientific community will probably have to revise the prevailing opinion that almost everything, starting from crop farming to philosophical perceptions of the world, was brought to Europe by ancient Middle Eastern farmers.

Mikhail Zhilin, a leading researcher at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Archeology, is convinced that hunter-gatherers who lived in the Urals and Siberian forests 11,000 years ago exhibited a high level of development. “They lived in harmony with the environment and knew far more about it than modern people can imagine,” Zhilin told RBTH.

The mystery of the idol: a seventh drawing

In 2014 Professor Thomas Terberger, head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony (Hannover), proposed an independent analysis of the Shigir Idol. He wanted to establish the age of the sculpture using the most advanced equipment available, and tests subsequently showed that the idol was older than previously thought, in fact dating to 11,000 years ago.

Dendrochronologists at the German Archeological Institute in Berlin established that the idol was made out of freshly-cut Siberian larch. The tree was at least 157 years old when the ancient craftsmen began to work on it.

Prof. Terberger believes the Shigir Idol is one of the most outstanding Eurasian cultural  masterpieces of the Stone Age. “Based on our studies, one can boldly assert that the development of Eurasian culture was driven not only from the Middle East but from other equally developed centers, in particular, from the Urals,” Terberger said.

Furthermore, scientists recently discovered a seventh mysterious drawing on the idol’s back side, which can be seen only with the help of a microscope. Previously, only six drawings were known. There are markings carved on the idol that depict a series of figures, with a total of eight characters. Their meaning remains a mystery, as well as many other of the idol’s secrets – what it was made for, and with what tools.  

How the idol was discovered and studied

The Big Shigir Idol was discovered in 1890 in a peat bog halfway between Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Tagil. At that time, the area was known for its gold mine. During excavations many ancient artifacts of the Shigir peat bog were lost but some were preserved, such as Stone Age bone arrowheads.

The idol was retrieved from the bog piece by piece, and when they were assembled it turned out they form a sculpture 5.3 meters tall, covered with mysterious carvings. Later, the lower part of that archeological wonder (about 193 cm long) was lost. The gold mine’s owner, Count Alexey Stenbok-Fermor, handed over the idol to the Urals Natural Sciences Society, today known as the Sverdlovsk Region History Museum.

Russian scientists first began to study the idol in 1997, and with the help of radiocarbon analysis they established that the idol was at least 9,500 years old. That announcement caused quite a stir, and skeptics suggested somebody had taken a larch lying in a peat bog for 3,000 or 5,000 years and made an idol out of it. Still, scientists knew that the idol would reveal more secrets.

“We were convinced that it was originally made out of a freshly-cut tree because we know how quickly wood taken out of a peat bog becomes dry and deformed, leaving it practically useless for making a sculpture,” said Svetlana Savchenko, a research associate at the Sverdlovsk Region History Museum.

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