6. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev

XI. Ethnic contacts, HIERARCHY OF ETHNIC TAXONOMY

My apologies for not posting for two weeks. I am involved in ongoing outside projects away from the office, and give not-enough-time to the computer. This chapter has some very descriptive examples of all of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, of Rome, and of East Asia. Gumilev is a deep learning, of both ethnogenesis, and of all the historical examples that he gives.

[By the way; I have mentioned that I also post on a discussion forum called WhyNotThink-(differently). The posts are comprised from a team of separate authors. Last night a new team member posted a provocative analysis of capitalism. We often claim that hyper-capitalism is created through rabid-GREED. But that is off-loading responsibility and it’s a victim mentality. In this post it is proposed that the foundation of capitalism is Discontent and your Covetousness, and that the word “Freedom” is misconstrued as ENVY; that I deserve whatever “HE” has. It is worthwhile to take a look at it. I have yet to make my comment, which I certainly will.]

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Ethnic taxonomy differs from social classification. Only rarely do they coincide. The use of one or the other depends on the aspect of research, i.e. on the angle from which the chains of historical events are examined. The latter is determined by the task set before the researcher, who also chooses the degree of approximation that suits his goals. The fact that this task has been repeatedly raised so far, and has not been satisfactorily solved (D. Vico, O. Spengler, A. Toynbee)[58], should not dissuade the researcher from continuing to try to make empirical generalizations, however difficult they may be. In contrast to a number of authors, figuring out how the process goes, we have an opportunity to answer the question of what exactly undergoes change, although we will get a fundamentally one-sided model that characterizes certain aspects of the phenomena. But the creation of concepts is the basis of any historical interpretation, which distinguishes history ("search for the truth") from chronicles or simple enumeration of events. We proceed from the diverse material accumulated by historical science, so the object of research is not Spengler's "soul of culture" or Arnold Toynbee's "mental field of research", but the system of phases of ethnogenesis at this or that level and in this or that particular epoch. For the next era occurring in historical time, the arrangement of the components will be different.

Now we can build an ethnic hierarchy in a general form, and at the same time clarify the meanings of terms.

Anthroposphere - is the biomass of all human organisms[59].

 Ethnosphere - mosaic anthroposphere[60], i.e. a combination of systemic ethnolandscape wholes, always dynamic.

 Super-ethnos - A group of ethnoses arising simultaneously in the same region, and manifesting itself in history as a mosaic integrity.

 Ethnos - a stable, naturally formed collective of people, opposing all other similar collectives and distinguished by a peculiar stereotype of behavior, which naturally changes in historical time.

 Subethnos - an element of the ethnos structure interacting with the others. In the simplification of the ethnosystem in its final phase, the number of sub-ethnoses is reduced to a single sub-ethnos, which becomes a relic.

Taxonomic units of the same order

 Consortium - A group of people united by the same historical destiny; either disintegrating or becoming convixia.

 Convixia - A group of people united by a single characteristic life and family ties.        Sometimes passes into a sub-ethnos, fixed not by history, but by ethnography.

Having agreed to understand under ethnogenesis not only its starting point, the emergence of ethnos on the arena of history, but the whole process of development up to the transformation of ethnos into a relict and its disappearance, which will be described below, we can give the following definition: any directly observed ethnos is in one or another phase of ethnogenesis, and ethnogenesis is a deep process in the biosphere, revealed only in its interaction with the social form of movement of matter. So, the external manifestations of ethnogenesis available for study are of a social nature.

And here arises the main question: why do the processes of ethnogenesis appear, generating the ethnoses studied by ethnographers? According to a widespread viewpoint, new ethnic groups emerge in close cohabitation due to the mutual assimilation of primary ethnic substrata[61]. Mutual assimilation in the formation of ethnicity is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

On the banks of the Rhine, the French and the Germans have lived side by side for over a thousand years, practice the same religion, use the same household items, learn each other's languages, but do not merge, just as Austrians do not with Hungarians and Czechs, Spaniards do not merge with Catalans and Basques, Russians do not merge with Udmurtians, Vepsians and Chuvashs.

Sometimes, very rarely, the influence of ethnic groups in one region occurs, but then the merged ethnic groups disappear, and a new ethnic group appears in its place, unlike any of the former ones. At first, the members of the new ethnos cannot get used to their identity, but in the second or third generation, they state their difference from their ancestors. It is impossible to consider these phenomena as the result of mutual assimilation, because they do not always appear and occur very quickly; there is a kind of an explosion. Therefore, some additional factor is required for their emergence, which has yet to be discovered.

In addition to those described above, there is another way in which ethnic groups emerge, not unlike the first. Often, as a result of historical peripeteia, a group of people splinters off from an ethnos and changes its place of residence. Over time, these people develop a new stereotype of behavior and lose contact with the metropolis.  Sometimes these groups perish, but often, mixed with aborigines or other settlers, they form independent ethnic groups.

Examples of the second variant are Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin, who severed ties with the English in the late 18th century; descendants of Spanish conquistadors, Creoles; grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Dutch, French and North German peasants, Boers; Sikhs, who separated from other Hindus in the 16th century. The Buryats - those Mongols who at the Kurultai of 1688 preferred an alliance with the Russians to the submission to the Manchus, and others like them, separated from the basic ethnos by the vicissitudes of historical destiny.

It is easy and very necessary to notice that the genesis of both variants is different, and the character of variability in both variants has nothing in common. In the second variant, the newly emerged ethnic groups remain in the orbit of their culture, acquiring only local features. In the first case, there is a completely new phenomenon, preserving the institutions of the peoples who generated it only as vestiges or borrowings. Obviously, the first variant is true ethnogenesis - the birth of new super-ethnoses, while the second variant is only an increase of super-ethnic diversity. Thus, the United States is not a super-ethnos, but simply an overseas continuation of Romano-Germanic Europe and partially of Africa - at the expense of the slave trade. The Atabasca, Sioux, Algonquin, and other tribes are fragments of American super-ethnoses. Therefore, in what follows we will speak only about the first variant, and since history is a science of events, and events occur in encounters during contacts, it is the contacts that should be given priority. This topic has been touched upon, but not sufficiently.

CONTACTS AT DIFFERENT LEVELS

Returning to the problem of ethnic contacts, it is necessary first of all to raise the question of the level at which contact takes place (see Table 2). The combination of two or more consortia and convixia is unstable. It leads either to disintegration or to the formation of a stable form of sub-ethnos. At the subethnic level, mixing is interpreted as an "unequal marriage" with a person "not of our circle", and the level of the social ladder often does not matter. Thus, even in the 19th century Cossacks considered marriage with peasants and even noblemen to be "unequal", although the latter were much richer and more noble than Cossacks. I heard a maxim that apparently dates back to the Time of Troubles: The Scriptures say:

“The Jews shall not breed with the Samaritans, but the Cossacks with the nobility”. Of course, this is not in any "scripture", but how similar is the attitude of the Kurds to the Persians and Armenians! A poor Kurdish shepherd wouldn't dare introduce a Persian wife to his family unless it was known that she had a lavish genealogy. The Albanians in the Ottoman Empire, the Basques in Spain, the Scots-Guilanders in Great Britain, and the Patans in the Hindu Kush maintained themselves in the same way. They formed with other sub-ethnoses persistent ethnic unities on the basis of symbiosis, strengthened by endogamy. In the central part of the Eurasian continent the forms of symbiosis of ethnic groups were manifested very clearly in ancient times.

Ethnic groups occupied different landscape regions that corresponded to their cultural and economic skills and helped rather than hindered each other. For example, the Yakuts settled in the broad floodplain of the Lena, and the Evenks settled in the watershed massifs of the taiga. The Velikorosses settled in river valleys, leaving the steppe expanses to the Kazakhs and Kalmyks, and the forest thickets to the Ugric peoples. The more complex and branched out such ethnic integrity was, the stronger and more resistant it was.

Table 2: Ethnic Hierarchy

 Taxonomic unit

          Hybrid

                                  Direction of development Limit of formation

 Co-occurrence

          Unstable combinations

                                   Subethnic self-assertion

 Subethnicity

            Convixia

                                   Deformed combinations

Creation of a territorial community

             Subethnos

                                   Subethnos Symbioses *

Ethnic self-assertion

               Ethnos

                                    Ethnos Xenia **.

Creation of social institution

                Leading role in super-ethnos and conserving structure

Superethnos

                 Chimera ***

                                Annihilation ****

                                                  Reluctance *****

 Humanity

                 Hypothetical mixing with paleoanthropes in the Mesolithic on Mount Carmel

Ethnogenesis

                    ?

 Hominids

                    ?

Evolution as phylogeny

                    Disappearance of species.

* Symbiosis is a form of mutually beneficial coexistence of ethnoses in which symbionts retain their distinctiveness.

** Xenia (from Greek - guest, hospitality) is a form of neutral coexistence of ethnic groups while preserving their uniqueness.

*** Chimera (mythical animal with a lion's head, a goat's body and a dragon's tail); here - a form of contact between incompatible ethnoses of different super-ethnic systems, in which their uniqueness disappears.

**** Annihilation (phys. - transformation into nothingness) is a phenomenon of mutual annihilation of elementary particles of different signs with emission of light (photons) and loss of mass.

A different case is the combination of two or more ethnic groups in a single social organism. The nature of this or that social organism imposes its own imprint on the interaction of adjacent ethnic groups, which in some cases are forced to live in the same region, put up with the fact of existence, but cannot help gravitating toward each other. They can be called "xenias." Such is Belgium, where the Walloons and Flemings have been "pushed in" like tenants in a communal apartment. Such is Canada, where the English, the French, the French-Indian mestizos, and now also the Slavs coexist, but do not merge or share functions, which is characteristic of symbioses.

But even more painful is the contact of two or more super-ethnoses. Then there is often not only ethnic annihilation, but also demographic decline, simply put - extinction from unbearable conditions or physical extermination of the weaker side. Such situations occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States - the shooting of Indians with payment for their scalps, in Brazil - during the rubber rush, in Australia - during its capture by the British, and in the Yellow River Valley, where the civilization of ancient China collided with the culture of the ancient tribes of the Juns (Tangurs). The latter did not remain.

But at the same time in history entire epochs of coexistence of super-ethnoses are observed, not always peaceful, but also not mutually exterminating. And sometimes sub-ethnoses in one integrity wage destructive wars against each other, finding and sometimes not finding a reason to hate each other. Let us select the most striking examples and see how this happens. And can the history of the states provide a comprehensive explanation of the course of events?

THE RELATION OF ETHNICITIES OF DIFFERENT ORDERS

The proposed division of ethnicities is very useful not only for modern but also for historical ethnography. We will try to show it by taking as an example an epoch, well-studied and long ago finished, - XII century on the Eurasian continent,[62] and as a special example - Ancient Russia, about which there were so many disputes, because it was ranked by a banal and therefore very common division now to the "West", now to the "East". This quite irrational division was born in the super-ethnic integrity of the Romano-Germanic world, ideologically united by the Roman Church and opposed to all others. In short, it is a Philistine Eurocentrism that made sense in the Middle Ages, but which still exists in Western Europe and its transoceanic extension, America.

If we take the Western "Christian world"-as a super-ethnic benchmark (1), then equivalent to it would be: 2) the Levant, or "world of Islam," an integrity not at all religious, but ethno-cultural, spreading from Spain to Kashgar; 3) India, except for that part of it where Muslims dominated[63]

4) China, which considered itself a "Middle Empire" with a barbarian periphery: 5) Byzantium, an Eastern Christian entity whose political boundaries were always already super-ethnic; 6) the Celtic world, which defended its original traditions against the English feudal lords until the 14th century. [64] 7) Baltic Slavic-Lithuanian pagan integrity, which turned into a relic in the 12th century; 8)  The Eastern European super-ethnic unity is the Russian land. We will focus our attention on it, but we will consider its ethnic fate against the background of intertwined conflicts of all other above mentioned super-ethnoses, because the isolation on the Eurasian continent was possible only for the tenth, 10) super-ethnos - circumpolar peoples of Siberia, and even then it was often broken by Evenks, and Yakuts.

As is known, the Slavs at their appearance in the Eastern Europe divided into tribes, which already in the beginning of XII century survived only in the memory of the authors of the "Primary Chronicle". This is natural. Ethnic integration went on intensively around the big cities, where in the new conditions the former tribal distinctions lost value. A. N. Nasonov describes Russia in the XI-XII centuries as a system of "half-states"[65], standing an order of magnitude lower than the "Russian Land": 1) Novgorod Republic with its suburbs; 2) Polotsk Principality; 3) Smolensk Principality; 4) Rostov-Suzdal Land; 5) Ryazan Principality; 6) Turova-Pinsk Land; 7) Russian Land, which included three principalities: Kiev, Chernigov and Pereyaslavl; 8) Volyn; 9) Chervonne Russia, or Galician Principality. To this list should be added the conquered by Vladimir Monomakh Cumans steppe between the Don and the Carpathians. At the same time the Great Bulgars, Kipchaks' pastoral routs, the Alanian lands in the North Caucasus, and Volga Khazaria with the city of Saksin lay on the other side of the Russian border in XII-XIII centuries.

Bulgars and Khazars at this time belonged to the Levantine, or Muslim, super-ethnos. They did not differ from their neighbors in the way they adapted to the landscape. However, the commercial and cultural systematic connections of Bulgar city with Iran were more effective than the influence of the geographical environment. They made the Volga Bulgaria an outpost of the "Muslim" super-ethnos and an opponent of the Vladimir (Kievian) princes.

Following the accepted principle, we can attribute Alans and Crimean Goths to the Byzantian super-ethnos, and Lithuanians, Latvians and Yatviags, to the Baltic. The Poles and Hungarians became part of the Western European super-ethnos in the 10th century, and the victory of the German crusaders over the Polabian Slavs turned Catholic Western Europe into a culturally monolithic, though mosaic ethnic entity, which in the 12th century tirelessly, though not always successfully, expanded its area, which led to the crisis-defeat of the Crusades in the 13th century.

Going down one more order of magnitude, i.e. taking one of the Russian sub-ethnoses, say Kiev, we find there three active consortia: westernizing (supporters of prince Svyatopolk II, including Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra), greekophile (supporters of Vladimir Monomakh and the metropolis, placed in St. Sophia) and national, strongly affected for sympathizing with Vseslav after his expulsion from Kiev[66].

It is easy to see that consortia do not coincide with class, religious and tribal divisions, being phenomena of an independent system of reference. This system can be considered very useful, because thanks to it, it was possible, for example, to grasp the motives of the proponents of the above-mentioned political directions. When analyzing the class contradictions, this cannot be done, since all the participants in the events belonged to the same class, and they drew their strength from their like-minded people in the thick of the people. But the struggle was nevertheless active and brutal. What was it about? And for what???

THE CONTACT BETWEEN THE "FIVE TRIBES" AND THE INHABITANTS OF THE "MIDDLE PLAIN". In China

From the 3rd century BC to the end of the 3rd century AD the agricultural China and the Great Steppe, inhabited by the Hunnish herdsmen, existed side by side. Each ethnos lived in its own landscape, but together with its neighbors was part of the super-ethnic constructions of the nomadic culture and the Far Eastern civilization. Both were polyethnic. The nomadic world included, in addition to the Huns, the Xianbi (ancient Mongols), Qiang (nomadic Tibetans), Minor Yuezhi, Usuns, Kipchaks, and other tribes. In China, in addition to the Chinese, lived the aborigines: the Juns, Di, Man, and Yue, who belonged by language to the Tibeto-Burman, Thai, and Malay groups.

The duration of the existence of these super-ethnoses, bound by a common culture, gave reason to contemporaries to consider the historical reality as a "state", but in fact it was a slowly flowing process. Creation of the united Chinese state and aggravation of class contradictions, which became antagonistic in the III century B.C., took away more than 60% of inhabitants, and the collapse of the empire in the III century A.D. - more than 80%. At the end of the III century the depopulated and impoverished country was united by the Jin Dynasty. In the III century the Chinese population was 7.5 million people instead of the former 50 million. Then, by the IV century, it rose to 16 million.

However, despite the most brutal social upheavals, there were not sufficient internal reasons for the Chinese people to perish. There was plenty of free land, and, consequently, the population could have increased.

The state system was functioning, the persecution of culture had ceased.  The ancient Chinese ethnos might have continued to exist had it not been for too close contact with nomads and a strange loss of resilience, which was a surprise to the Jin dynasty government itself.

The steppe was dominated by the clan system, and its decay proceeded so slowly that it did not cause much damage to the nomads. On the other hand, the desiccation of the steppe, which began in the 1st century and reached its maximum by the 3rd century, oppressed them. The reduction of pasture lands forced the Huns and Xianbi to shrink to the Huang He and Liaohe rivers and come into contact with the Chinese. Since the lands were in disrepair, the Jin government permitted the settlement of 400 thousand nomads and about 500 thousand Tibetans of various tribes on the border. The Chinese politicians of the 3rd century thought that ethnicity was a social status and a numerically insignificant inclusion was easy to assimilate: the princes were trained in culture, and the tribesmen were turned into a taxed class. The calculation was audacious and bad. The clansmen endured the arbitrariness of officials and exploitation of landowners, but they did not turn into Chinese; the princes learned hieroglyphics and classical poetry, but at the opportunity, which came in 304, returned to their tribesmen and led a rebellion, aimed at "regaining lost rights with weapons”.

False theory, applied to reality, caused catastrophe.

By 316 - 40,000 Xiongnu had taken over all of northern China, including two capitals, two emperors, and all the accumulated wealth. The Chinese were driven to the banks of the Yangtze, at that time the outskirts of China, and were forced to mix with the Man tribes in the tropical jungle, which greatly transformed their appearance and mental makeup. A special process of ethnogenesis began there, which subsequently led to the creation of the South Chinese ethnos. And the Chinese who remained in their homeland mingled with the Xiongnu... and thereby ruined them. Already the children of the conquering Huns and Chinese had forgotten about the manners of the steppe nomad. Raised in the palace pavilions, they retained their energy and courage. but lost their sense of "their own", their sense of elbow and the imperative of loyalty. The strife undermined their strength, whereas before their fathers had been able to live in harmony. Their grandchildren had become spoiled courtesans, amused by cannibalism and betrayal of loved ones. There was no question of offensive wars, even in defense the Huns began to suffer defeats. Finally, in 350 the emperor's adopted son, a Chinese, killed his brothers, heirs to the throne, and, taking power into his own hands, ordered them to slaughter all the Huns in the state. This was executed with such zeal that many bearded and hunchbacked Chinese, similar to the Xiongnu, were killed.

Genocide did not save the usurper. The Xianbi Moyuns defeated his Chinese army and executed he himself. The Chinese were not helped by their numerical superiority, they also lost their traditions of valor along with their culture. The Muyuns suffered the fate of the Xiongnu. They were overtaken and defeated by the steppe Tabgachs. The latter first consolidated around themselves the nomads (mixture at the level of ethnic mestization), but then, to their misfortune, they conquered Henan, where lived a monolithic Chinese population. By the end of the 5th century, they mixed with the Chinese to such an extent that their khan, assuming the title of emperor, forbade their native language, tabgach dress and hairstyle, and names.

The masses of his subjects, devoid of their inherent stereotype of behavior, became victims of the adventurous condottieri who overthrew the dynasty and brought the unhappy country to ruin,[67] which in addition was ravaged by a famine that killed about 80 % of its people[68]. The two super-ethnoses intermingling had such impact on the people, but the survivors in the VI century suddenly united into a new ethnic group, then called Tabgach (Syanbi name), which used Chinese language (different from the ancient) and adopted a foreign ideology of Buddhism. This was the great Tang era, which marked the beginning of the medieval Chinese ethnos, which lost its independence only in the 17th century, when China was conquered by the Manchus. But this is a new cycle of ethnogenesis relating to Ancient China, as Byzantium to Ancient Rome[69].

From this example the connection of ethnicity with the landscape is evident. The Xiongnu, having occupied the Huang He valley, grazed cattle, the Chinese sowed arable land and built canals, while the Xiongnu-Chinese mestizos, having no skills in either cattle breeding or farming, predated neighbors and subjects, which led to the formation of fallow lands and the restoration of the natural biocenosis, although impoverished due to deforestation and the extermination of ungulates during the royal hunts. But already in the 7th century the Chinese regained the lost lands and deformed the landscape again by intensive predatory agriculture. But more about that later.

BARBARIAN AND ROMAN CONTACTS

We can see a similar picture of a disorderly mixing of ethnicities in the same era on the western edge of the continent, where the Roman Empire collapsed. Many judgments have been made on this subject, but almost all of them overlap with E. Gibbon's famous thesis:  "Hellenic society, embodied in the Roman Empire, which was at its zenith in the age of Antoninus, was overthrown by the simultaneous fall of two enemies who attacked it on two fronts: the Northern European barbarians who emerged from the deserts beyond the Danube and the Rhine, and the Christian Church who emerged in the conquered but unassimilated eastern provinces."[70] Let us see if he is right?

The Roman Empire's four hundred-year war with the Germans, which lasted from the first to the fourth century, ended in victory for Rome. Neither the Rhine nor the Danube frontiers were breached. The several defeats inflicted on the Romans by the Goths and the devastation of the Aegean coasts by the Gothic fleet were atoned for by the victories of Theodosius. Rome lost only the Zarene regions of Germany and voluntarily cleared Dacia, but the Italians did not want to settle in these countries, and the provincials were exiled there, whose interests the Senate and the Roman people did not care about. The situation changed sharply in the fifth century, when resistance to foreign invasions fell sharply, but then Stilicho and Aetius won victories over the Germans and Huns, until they were killed by the Romans themselves - scheming and degenerate men in purple and tiaras. The trouble of Rome was in it, not outside it.

Nor did the barbarians themselves seek to destroy the culture of Rome. King Ataulphus of the Visigoths, according to his own confession, "began life with a longing to convert the whole Roman domain to the empire of the Goths... In time, however, experience convinced him that it would be a crime to expel the administration of law from the life of the state, for a state ceases to be itself if the law ceases to be instilled in it. When Ataulph realized this truth, he decided that he would achieve glory... by using the vitality of the willing to restore the Roman name to all, and perhaps more than all, its ancient greatness."[72] But if so, why has the Roman culture disappeared, and with it disappeared from the ethnic map of the world the courageous and strong Goths who were in love with this culture?

The fact that the success of the Germans coincided with the triumph of Christianity on the whole territory of the Roman Empire seems to confirm the perniciousness of that doctrine for the people and the state. This concept was put forward as early as 393 by the defenders of paganism, Eugenius and Arbogast, who attempted to rebuild the altar of victory in the Capitol. As in 312, however, the Christian legions proved more resilient. The leaders of the pagan army died heroically in battle, but in so doing they showed that the prospect of development was not in this or that confession of faith, but in matters far more earthly. And the interesting thing is that the church fathers say the same thing.

Blessed Augustine or any other fifth century Christian thinker might have said, "It was not we who advised the emperor Aurelian to leave Dacia and to disregard that policy which erected strong military posts on the borders. It was not we who advised Caracalla to elevate all kinds of people to the rank of Roman citizens, or to force the population to move from place to place in the intense pursuit of military and civil posts... As for the sense of patriotism, has it not been destroyed by your own emperors? Converting Gauls and Egyptians, Africans and Huns, Spaniards and Syrians into Roman citizens, how could they expect such a disparate crowd to be loyal to the interests of the Rome which conquered them?

Patriotism depends on concentration, but it cannot endure disunity. Blessed Augustine would be right, but the question immediately arises: why did sacrifice, a sense of elbow-jointedness, cohesion, and opportunities for development arise in Christian communities that were equally heterogeneous?

The answer is simple: racial differences are not decisive, and generally speaking, not of great importance, while ethnic differences lie in the realm of behavior. The behavioral pattern of Christian communities was strictly regulated. The neophyte was obliged to observe it or leave the community. Consequently, already in the second generation a sub-ethnos, heterozygous but monolithic, was forged on the basis of Christian consortia, whereas in a pagan, or rather irreligious, empire the psychological remelting of the subjects was not carried out. Members of different ethnic groups coexisted within a single society, which collapsed from its own weight, for even Roman law was powerless before the laws of nature.

And no less pernicious were the migrations of the population within the empire mentioned by Augustine. The relation of man to his natural environment - the landscape - is in every case a constant value, determined by adaptation. The landscapes of Syria and Britain, of Gaul and Thrace, are very different. Consequently, migrants preferred to live in cities, where walls separated them from an alien, unfamiliar and unloved nature. It means that their attitude towards nature was purely consumerist, or more simply, predatory. As a result of this 2/3 of the forests of Gallia and beech groves of the Apennines were cut down and the valleys in the Atlas Mountains were ploughed and the hills of Hellas and Phrygia were sacrificed to goats. And the most devastating devastation was produced not by the military tribunes themselves, but by their columns, i.e. prisoners of war, settled far from their homeland, to make it more difficult for them to escape from captivity. 

In other words, while the rigid social ties of the political system of the Roman Empire were intact, the ethnic ties were completely destroyed already in the fourth century, and the Germanic invasion in the fifth century aggravated this process, because the active mestization, eating away the Goth, Burgundian and Vandal ethnoses, involved them in the general process of disintegration. Where in the same centuries a new ethnos was formed, and this occurred on the eastern edge of the empire, apparently an additional "factor X" acted, the significance of which we must disclose.

ETHNIC GROUPS ALWAYS EMERGE FROM CONTACTS.

What distinguishes super-ethnoses and what prevents them from merging with each other or inheriting the wealth of their predecessors? For the ethnoses within a super-ethnos merge frequently and unhindered. This increased persistence of super-ethnos can be explained by the presence of ethnic dominants, verbal expressions of certain ideals, which in each super-ethnos have uniform meanings and similar semantic dynamics for all ethnoses, included in this system. It is possible to change the ideal only hypocritically, but then the fusion of super-ethnoses will be imaginary: each representative of different super-ethnoses deep down will remain with what seems natural and the only right thing. After all, the ideal seems to its follower not so much an indicator as a symbol of its vitality. So, we call the dominant that phenomenon or complex of phenomena (religious, ideological, military, everyday life, etc.), which determines the transition of the initial ethnocultural diversity for the process of ethnogenesis into a purposeful uniformity.

Let us recall that the phenomenon of ethnos is the behavior of the individuals that make it up. In other words, it is not in people's bodies, but in their actions and relationships. Consequently, there is no human being outside of ethnos, except a newborn baby. Each person must behave in some way, and it is the nature of his behavior that determines his ethnicity. And if so, the emergence of a new ethnos is the creation of a new stereotype of behavior, different from the previous one. It is quite obvious that the new stereotype is created by people, but there are puzzles immediately. First, do these innovators act consciously or unconsciously? Second, is the new always better than the old? Thirdly, how did they manage to break the inertia of tradition, not even in their fellow tribesmen, but in themselves, for they are flesh and blood of the former ethnos? Theoretically these doubts are insoluble, but the material from paleoethnographic observations comes to the rescue, which allows us to formulate an empirical generalization: each ethnos emerged from a combination of two or more ethnic substrata, i.e., ethnoses that existed before it.

Thus, modern Spaniards formed into the ethnos bearing that name relatively late - in the Middle Ages, from a combination of ancient Iberians, Celts, Roman colonists, Germanic tribes: Sveves and Visigoths, joined by Basques, direct descendants of Iberians, Alans, descendants of Sarmatians and closest relatives of Ossetians, Semitic Arabs, Moors and Tuareg Hamites, Normans and Catalans, who have partially preserved their ethnic identity.

The English are a complex ethnos of Angles, Saxons, Celtic women whose husbands were killed in battle, Danes, Norwegians, and West French from Anjou and Poitou.

The Velikorosses include in their composition: the Eastern Slavs from Kievian Rus, the Western Slavs - Vyatichi, the Finns - Merya, Muroma, Vse, Zavolotskiy Chud, Ugri, who first mixed with the listed Finnish tribes, Balts - Golyad, Turks - baptized Polovtsy and Tatars, and in a small number the Mongols.

The ancient Chinese were a mixture of many tribes of the Huang He valley, belonging to different anthropological types of mongoloids and even of Europeans. The picture is similar in Japan, where, in ancient times, tall Mongoloids resembling Polynesians, squat Mongoloids from Korea, bearded Ainu and Chinese immigrants fused into a monolithic ethnos.

Even small and isolated ethnic groups, whose history is drowning in the mists of centuries, retain the former differences of ethnic substrata in relic anthropological and linguistic features. Such are the Eskimos and Easter Islanders, Mordva and Mari, Evenks and Patans of the Hindu Kush slopes. This shows that in antiquity they were complex ethnic groups, and the uniformity observed today is the fruit of long ethnogenetic processes that smoothed out the roughness of the different traditions.

But this contradicts the descriptions just made about the destructiveness of the mixing of ethnic groups that are distant from each other. And both the first observation and the second are indisputable! Can a conclusion containing an internal contradiction be correct? Only in one case: if we have not grasped some very important detail, some "factor X", without disclosing which it is impossible to solve the problem. So let's move on by trial and error to find a non-contradictory version that explains all the known facts.

"FACTOR X".

Let us check another assumption. Could it be that not a long process, but an instantaneous leap is the cause of the formation of a new ethnic group? This can only be verified by examples of new history, the events of which are described in sufficient detail. Let us turn to the history of Latin America. The Spanish conquistadors were fierce in battles, but after the bull of Paul III in 1537 they saw the Indians not as an "inferior race", but as worthy opponents. Surviving Indian chiefs were baptized and welcomed into their midst, and common Indians were made peons in the haciendas. This is how the populations of Mexico and Peru developed over two hundred years, but pure Indian tribes remained in the mountains and rainforests. The slave trade led to the emergence of Negroes in America, and the lack of prejudice led to the emergence of mulattoes and “sambos” (offspring of Negroes and Indians). When the struggle for liberation from metropolitan Spain, which had been seized by the French, began in the early 19th century, most of the leaders of the rebellion were not Spaniards, but mestizos and mulattoes.

Bolivar himself, in 1819, put it this way: "It must be remembered that our people are neither European nor North American, they are a mixture of Africans and Americans, rather than the offspring of Europeans, for even Spain itself ceases to belong to Europe by its African blood, by its institutions and its character. It is impossible to indicate with precision to which family of humanity we belong. Most of the Indian population has been destroyed, the Europeans have mingled with the Americans, and the latter with the Indians and the Europeans. Born in the bosom of one mother, but different in blood and ancestry, our fathers are foreigners, people of color. This difference is fraught with important consequences."[73]

This nation, which emerged before the eyes of historians, turned out to be very persistent and unlike other, neighboring peoples. In all outward traits - language, culture, religion, etc. - the people of Venezuela and Colombia were close to the Spaniards. Economically, they had only lost out, exchanging Spanish protectionism for dependence on English and North American trading companies as a result of the War of Liberation. The War of Independence was so fierce that it took a million lives from a sparsely populated territory as much as all the Napoleonic wars in densely populated Europe. But in the eyes of the rebels, all the sacrifices were justified by the fact that they were not Spaniards and therefore must live separately. Curiously, at the same time, some Indians supported the Spanish government. So, the mixed origin is not an obstacle to the creation of monolithic ethnic groups.

But is it so? After all, it is known that in animals mestizo forms are often unstable and usually lack the acquired abilities of both parents, making up for it in the first generation with increased vitality, often disappearing in subsequent generations.

Descendants from mixed marriages either return to one of the original types (paternal or maternal) or die out, because adaptation to a particular environment is developed by several generations, it is a tradition, but a mixture of the two traditions creates an unstable adaptation.

Yes. it happens in most cases, and perhaps sometimes in humans, but if it were always the case, no new ethnic groups would arise, and mankind, which has long practiced mixed marriages, would degenerate back in the early Neolithic period. In fact, very few ethnic groups degenerate and disappear from the ethnographic map, and humanity as a species develops so intensively that population growth is now called a population explosion. Apparently, there is a factor that balances the destructive influence of natural selection and the stabilizing role of signal heredity or tradition. This is the "X factor," and it should manifest itself in changes in behavior and be perceived by people themselves as a peculiarity of mental structure. Hence, it is a feature that excites and stimulates processes of ethnogenesis. Having found "factor X" and having uncovered the content of the sought feature, we will understand the mechanism of process development for each individual case of ethnogenesis and for all of them in the aggregate.

In order to achieve this goal, we need abundant, verified and strictly dated material from the universal history of mankind. If we process it using the methods accepted in the natural sciences, we will be able to obtain data for the solution of our problem, but for now we will limit ourselves to answering the above-mentioned questions: 1. It is impossible to invent a new stereotype of behavior because even if some weirdo set himself such a goal, he would still behave himself according to the old, accustomed one - as the most adapted to the existing conditions of the ethnic collective. To leave ethnicity is like pulling oneself out of a swamp by one's own hair; as we know, only Baron Munchausen did this. 2.Since the new stereotype of behavior arises as a result of people's unaccountable activity, it makes no sense to ask whether it is better or worse.  There is no scale for comparison. It's just different. 3. But if it is impossible, unnecessary, and nobody consciously wants to break the existing tradition, which is expressed in stereotypes of behavior, then, apparently, it happens due to a special set of circumstances. What kind of circumstances? This is the question that must be answered.

WHAT IS THIS “X” FACTOR????

NOTES

[58] Bertalanffy D. General theory of systems. С. 65-68.

[59] The term is established, but too general, giving no prospects of solving and understanding the problem.

[60] "Mosaicism" implies a structural division in the anthroposphere based on an ethical principle.

[61] Eats R.F. Introduction to Ethnography. С. 43-46.

[62] America, Oceania and Africa south of the Sahara have been omitted, as they require a special description.

[63] The Indian Peninsula is a semi-continent, on the territory of which super-ethnic wholenesses have arisen since ancient times. The modern integrity is a memorial phase of the ethnogenesis of the super-ethnos created in the 8th century by the Rajputs. The so-called "Rajput Revolution" took place in the 7th century simultaneously with the Arab-Islamic, Tabgach (the Tai Dynasty in China) and the rise of ancient Tibet (see Gumilev L.N. The Greatness and Fall of Ancient Tibet // Countries and Peoples of the East. М., 1968. С. 153-182). The invasions of the Muslims and English were extraneous influences that took many lives, but did not disturb the process of Indian ethnogenesis.

[64] The Celts were conquered already in the 1st millennium by the Romans in the West, by the Marcomans in Eastern Europe, and by the Sarmatians in the steppes. But the beginning of the "Celtic world" lies in the 10th century BC, when the Celts were spread from the North Caucasus (Cimmerians) to Iceland (Celtiberians). To characterize a super-ethnos it is necessary to consider not only spatial but also temporal boundaries and, therefore, to take into account the ages of the ethnic groups composing the super-ethnos. To characterize super-ethnoses, their expansion and contraction, as well as military power, do not matter, only the degree of interethnic affinity is important

[65] Nasonov A.N. "Russkaya zemlya" [Russian land] and the formation of the Old Russian state territory. М., 1951.

[66] Gumilev L.N. Tale about khazar tribute //Russkaya literatury 1974. -3.

[67] For details see: Gumilev L.N. Huns in China. М., 1974.

[68] Wieger L Textes historiques. Hien-Hien, 1905-1907. P. 1428.

[69] Grousset R. L. Empire des Steppes. Paris, 1960. P. 96.

[70] Quoted in: Toynbee A. J. Study of History /Abridiement by D. Somervell. London; New York; Toronto, 1946. P. 260-261. [71] Toynbee agrees with that (see Ibid. P.262).

[72] Ibid. P. 409-410.

[73] Bolivar S. Selected works, Moscow, 1983. С. 83.

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