8: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

Contacts at the Level of Super-Ethnoses, Polarization in super-ethnoses

Gumilev’s work is a mixture of the sciences. If time is a function of a series of events observable due to discreteness and irreversibility, then trying to understand the historical processes not as a random assortment of events, but as regular lines of development, is the very one he has called ethnogenesis.

In 3,000 years of recorded Eur-Asian history there have been 1,000’s of movements and ups and downs of all these inhabitants. War was the standard, hate was an imperative. Motives were usually not the love for something, but easily congealed onto what we’re against. For what reason? Nobody knew, just because being against something was part of your identification. War (if you win) has a lot of free stuff to gather.

WHY? This is the study. And it’s the rejection that it was/is just random.

Then there are the examples, endless examples throughout the ages. Were there so many people’s that inhabited Asia? Take it however you wish. Maybe they are past trajectories, histories, archaeological projections, stories, legends, myths, or just hear-say. Or maybe it is a fairytale told to your grandchildren or a fabulous “Yarn” (a story in a long endless string).

Most important will be to investigate if it reveals an intelligence that relates to and explains the present. I think that it does, but perhaps modifications need be considered due to technology and social media. As far as victimhood, (the billionaires are doing it to us), hasn’t that always been the case? Read these examples carefully, and be sure of that.

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Super-ethnoses have one interesting peculiarity - polarization occurs within the system. Only in the phase of passionate rise do they behave as monoliths, and then obeying the dialectical law of the unity of opposites, they find directions for activity that maintain a stable equilibrium in constant struggle with each other. However, in relation to other super-ethnoses, they appear as a whole, although the different halves of the system behave differently. Let us explain this thesis with the help of some examples.

Thucydides noticed that the Hellenes, who were unanimously fighting the Persians, split into parties, aristocratic and democratic; the first was led by Sparta, the second by Athens. Now, after much research, it is clear that these names by no means reflected class contradictions. Both sides were equally slave-owning, and the names assigned to them were nothing more than nicknames. The same is true of the Hellenized Eternal City, Rome. There the "democrats" were the richest horsemen: merchants and moneylenders, while the "aristocrats" were supported by impoverished peasants who had become legionaries for sustenance. The leader of the "democrats" was a member of the ancient Julian patrician family, Caesar, while his main opponent Labienus began his career as a tribune of the people, a plebeian. Yes, this is not a matter of titles, but of meaning. When both parties disappeared, leaving only the populace and the legionaries, these latter constantly fought with each other without any political agenda. This was the era of the soldier emperors (3rd century A.D.).

In the Arab Caliphate, a unified Islam split into three parties: Sunni, Shiite, and Khariji, the later converging with the Shiite. Medieval China also fought among the various factions: the imperial, the Tang dynasty, which relied on nomads, and the chauvinistic opposition, which prevailed in the 10th century and ruined its own country.

But the most vivid picture is of Western Europe, the Christian world, which in the nineteenth century became the "civilized world." There Christianity was understood only as Catholicism, and the popes were supported by emperors. And so, they fought among themselves. At the climax of the struggle in the Acmatic phase, the supporters of the popes were called "Guelphs" in Italy (from the name of their German allies, the Saxon dukes of Welf), while their opponents were called "Ghibellines" who defended the Swabian emperors, the Haugenstaufens.  However, they did go on crusades together.

When it became clear that the balance of power was not so much about killing over ceremonial nuances as it was about politics and economics, both sides calmed down.  A cynical slogan was proclaimed: "By Whose Power, by Whose Faith"; the subjects were forbidden to choose their own confession.

War in Western Europe did not subside, but took on a different character, characteristic of the inertial phase of ethnogenesis. The storms of the Reformation blew past, leaving behind differences in the ethnographic makeup and psychological makeup of Catholics and Protestants. Within the European super-ethnos, these differences gradually faded, but across the oceans they were felt so strongly that it would be inappropriate and impossible to ignore them.

In America

The split of the single field in the Christian world coincided with the era of the Great Discovery. And representatives of both sides of the ethnic divergence that occurred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rushed out of Europe. Catholics - the Spanish and the French - rushed out; Protestants - the English and the Dutch - rushed out as well. In the new lands they all encountered the same peoples, and suddenly it turned out that these contacts had very different results. When the Spaniards conquered Central and South America, it turned out that for all their brutality, for all the horrors and cruelties that accompanied their invasion, they found common ground with the locals: when they conquered and subdued the Aztecs and Incas, the Muisca in Colombia, they saw them as people.

It is necessary to say that the states created in the XII century: Aztec (Anaguac), Inca (Tahu Antinsuyu) and Muisca (Chibcha) were in the earliest phases of ethnogenesis by the time the Spaniards arrived in the XVI century. The Aztecs, Incas, and Muisca were therefore very cruel toward the subjugated, who were made inferior, inferior classes. For example, the Muisca (the people that inhabited present-day Colombia), who were the upper, ruling class, that is, the ruling tribes that conquered the local population, considered that should an ordinary Indian come up to them about some matter, he should strip naked, sit on his hands and knees, crawl on his back with his head in his lap, and thus make his request, which would either be granted or not. And if he looked insolently at his lord, a man of the upper class, at best he might be skinned alive; at worst he would be thrown into underground caves half full of water, and swim there in complete darkness until he was bitten by a poisonous water snake. These were the punishments for disrespect.

And when Quesada conquered this territory, calling it New Grenada, he captured these aristocrats and of course baptized them and made them his cronies. One of them, who had already become an educated man, well versed in Spanish, told Quesada: "You are acting strangely, Quesada, I see your soldiers coming up to you, they say something to you and even laugh, and you answer them, then they laugh, talk, and go away". For the Spanish Conca herdor, the soldiers were his battle companions, but for the civilized Indian they were an inferior caste; he could not understand how a soldier dared to look at his leader, he should have been killed immediately or taught a lesson.

The Incas who set up a well-thought-out administrative system introduced, at the same time, a moral police - for example, they burned people alive for homosexuality, forbade the transfer of the population from one village to another, imposed a strict system of military service, forbade the literacy which they had, and destroyed all written historical documents which were written in the ancient Preincan languages, so that the subdued Indians forgot their history.

And the Aztecs set up a service to save the world from natural disasters. According to their theory, the world had perished four times and must perish a fifth time. One time the world was destroyed by terrible hurricanes, another time by floods, the third time by earthquakes, the fourth time by fire, and the fifth time it was to perish by famine. In order to be saved, one must propitiate the sun, and "the sun loves flowers and songs." By flowers the Aztecs meant blood from the living heart, and they grabbed people and sacrificed them on their teocalli to the sun - ripping their heart out of their chest in order to save the whole world. "Well," they reasoned, "we'll kill a few people, but the rest will be saved. But the Indians, from whom the young men were taken as sacrifices, were unenthusiastic and so preferred to support the Spaniards. The Spaniards forced these freed Indians to work in their haciendas, exploited them greatly as they exported colonial goods to sell to Spain and made large profits. They drove them into the silver ore mining.

The Spaniards did not tolerate such abuse as the Indians had previously endured from their local rulers.  At the same time, the Spaniards brought with them cattle and pack animals, making it easier for the Indians to travel, they taught baptized Indians to read and write, and gave Inca and Aztec chiefs the title of "don", that is, nobility, and they paid no taxes, having only to serve the Spanish king with arms. Marriages between Spaniards and Indians immediately became commonplace.

The result was a mestizo population in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and in northern Chile, which broke away from Spain in the 19th century. Instead of the New Spain that the Spanish wanted when they conquered these countries, the mestizos created an anti-Spain with a Spanish language and an official Catholic religion, though most of these mestizos believed neither in God nor in the devil. They adopted the Jacobin cult of reason and eighteenth-century European atheism and engaged mainly in freeing themselves from Spain in order to manage their own country.

Economically, they gained nothing from this, since they had no navy, and so they became dependent first on the British, then on the American trading companies, but nationally they freed themselves and, terribly proud, walked around in their sombreros and said that they had nothing to do with the Spaniards, that they were Americans. That was the end of it.

But it happened because originally the Spaniards by conquest made contact possible, and ethnic contact is not established by legislative measures (one cannot order anyone to treat another person well), but because the victors treat the vanquished as people, and as for cruelty, it was no less cruel in Spain itself: constant plots, revolts, suppression and other unpleasant things - it was a difficult era.

It must be said that the French Catholics, who went to Canada, quickly came to an agreement with the Indians, first with the Hurons, and when the Hurons were massacred by the Iroquois, who got arms from the English, they made contact with the Algonquins, the Cree people around Labrador, all the tribes that were there. And the French themselves "customized", they married Indians (squaws) and hunted like Indians, adopted their life, keeping only their language and some abstract memory of the Catholic religion: you cannot go to church in the forest, of course, there is no place to pray, they just thought they were Catholics, nothing else. This is how the population that still exists in Canada, the Canadian Métis, was created.

Nothing similar happened in the English colonies, where Protestants settled. The Protestants saw the Indians as wild animals. Quiet Baptists declared in Massachusetts to pay for the scalp of an Indian as for the tail of a wolf; Indians were recommended to be shot, and a premium was given for this as for animals of prey. And they paid the same for the scalp of a woman, a child, a tribal chief - all the same. That is, they had an absolutely exterminating policy toward the local population. And so, when war broke out between France and England, most Indians were on the side of the French, except the Iroquois, with whom the French had an indiscreet quarrel. And then, when America had already broken away from England and become independent, the Indians raised a general Indian rebellion.

It was led by one Pontiac - the chief of the Ottawa tribe, he united all the tribes except the Iroquois, and the united tribes included the Canadian French, they fought as a tribe against the Anglo-Saxons. Of course, Pontiac was killed and the confederacy broke up. The passional tension among the Indians was weak: they were very brave, capable, intelligent, honest, businesslike people, but one thing they lacked was co-subordination, the ability to sacrifice themselves for an abstract goal, an idea, that is passionarity, and they were defeated, driven beyond the Mississippi.

The Anglo-Saxons continued their infiltration of the country, ruthlessly destroying the natives. To say that the Protestant religion blessed them with murder, genocide, would be unfair, though of course, in the Old Testament, which Protestants especially valued, can be found preaching genocide to all the "unelected" and not "predestined" by God to salvation. That is not the point. Obviously, Protestants became people of a kind who could not get along with Indians, just as they could not get along at home with Catholics or with the Irish.

In Europe

A very strange story happened to the Irish. The Irish were converted to Christianity by St. Patrick and missionaries who came from Egypt in the fifth century, bypassing Rome. So, the Irish Celts were converted to the Christian faith, not yet Catholic or Orthodox, because this happened before the Church split. And then, as religion developed in the East and West, the Irish retained the ancient skills of the Egyptian monks.

A European super-ethnic unity was created, papism and Catholic scholasticism emerged, and the Irish were not affected by it at all.   And to say that they were gray people, not interested in anything, is impossible. They were cultured people, they gave the best teachers, excellent experts in Greek, theology, but they were not part of the Christian world - Western European integrity - and they fought against it, against Catholicism until the end of the 15th century, until they were finally conquered by Henry VII Tudor, founder of the Tudor dynasty, after the Scarlet and White Rose War.

Soon his son Henry VIII proclaimed that England was becoming Protestant, that the king was creating an Anglican church and becoming its head. The Irish, who had fought against the Catholic Church for so long, seemed destined to rejoice, but on the contrary, they immediately declared themselves faithful sons of the Catholic Church, so long as they had an ideological basis for fighting against the English. This confirms the thesis that people often fight not so much "for" as "against something”. The Irish were against the English, not the dogmas of their religion; they did not know much about dogma, and who knows about dogma? You get theology in school and then you forget, that's not the point.  But the English are bad people, every Irishman knows that. And the Irish resisted until the 20th century, and they still do. So, when Irish Catholics came to America, in contrast to Protestants, they got along well with the Indians. Obviously, it was a matter of some kind of inner disposition, not just a confession of faith.

After the Reformation, the struggle between the Protestant Unity and the Catholic League started; it lasted 30 years (the Thirty Years' War), and the whole of Europe was involved in it; Russia could not remain neutral either. On whose side was Orthodox Russia supposed to take, for whom the dispute between Luther and the pope was totally indifferent. Russians recognized neither of them, they had their own faith, the patristic one received from Byzantium. And yet... although the dogma and rituals of the Orthodox and Catholic churches overlapped in many respects, the Russians sided with the Protestant union; they immediately threw their troops at Smolensk against Poland, which equally vigorously supported Catholicism, violently suppressing its own reformation.

The Reformation also affected Poland: Polish Protestants were called Aryans by the Poles themselves. Well, the Poles then defeated us at Smolensk, forced the Russian army to capitulate, surrendered artillery and bowed the banners. But our Russian people were cunning. "Aha," they said, "if we can't fight the Poles directly, we will beat them otherwise. So, they gave bread (grain) in the form of subsidies to the Swedish king. Sweden was a poor country, with two million people and no material resources. And then, during the war, bread in Europe was, of course, in a huge price. There was no one to cultivate the fields, and there was no time, and it was dangerous, because it was necessary to hide from the soldiers, foreign and friendly. So Russian bread turned out to be a powerful factor in the struggle. When he received several caravans of bread to Stockholm, the Swedish king immediately sent out an army of 20,000 troops and defeated the Austrian forces all over Germany, thus giving Protestantism a victory, albeit not a definitive one.

And, as everyone remembers, the Russians began at this time, in the seventeenth century, to procure from the West specialists in all branches of warfare, technology and industry, but only from Protestant countries.

The English were received, the Swedes were received, the North Germans were received (they came in large numbers), and the Dutch. It is true that the English occupied the middle position between the protestants and Catholics, and the Dutch the extreme position. But in 1650 there was a revolution in England and at the same time the trade agreement between Russia and England came to an end. Trade went through Arkhangelsk. Alexei Mikhailovich's government answered the revolutionary Cromwellian government's request to extend the treaty: "Since these Aglitz Germans killed their king Carolus, the Grand Duke of Moscow and All Russia ordered the Aglitz Germans not to be allowed on Russian soil", and concluded a treaty with the Dutch. Thus, the trade went along the lines of the purely Protestant countries. Borrowing occurred through contacts with Protestant Europe.

It is true that there was never a consensus in Russia. Many suggested avoiding contacts with Western Europe, but they were not successful. There was a party that sought to establish contacts with Austria and France - it was the Boyar V. Golitsyn and Tsarevna Sophia. Although they were temporarily successful, the pro-Protestant party led by Prince-Cesar Romodanovsky, the Naryshkin family, and the representative of this clique, Tsar Peter, who preferred contact with the Protestants, prevailed.

Is there a connection here? Is there any correspondence in attitude between Russia and Protestant Europe? Let's check.  If Protestant Europe was not in harmony with the Indians, how was Russia to relate to the Indians and the Indians to the Russians? Let's see, let's not guess.

In Siberia and Alaska

Russian pioneers reached the Chukchi Cape almost without resistance. It is true that they did not get along with the Chukchi - Americanoid Chukchi repulsed the Cossacks and were not allowed to enter their land, but it is also true that no one particularly tried to penetrate into this tundra at that time. They penetrated through the Aleutian Islands into America. The Aleutian Islands were the richest land of fur-bearing sea animals. Russian missionaries converted the Aleuts to Orthodoxy. Even today, the Aleuts are Orthodox, and they even have their own Orthodox bishop. The Russians had a meeting with the Aleuts, went to the coast of America, met the Eskimos, and established full contact with them. They also had full contact with the Indians. And then it began!

The first Russian sailors who landed to establish contact with the local population were killed by the Indians. And subsequently the Tlingits, who lived along the Pacific coast south of Alaska, could not be subdued, although the territory was considered Russian America. Behind the Tlingits in the Yukon Basin lived the Ata-Pasques, to whom belong, among others, the famous Apache and Navajo tribes, who had been displaced from the north and had come to the border with Mexico. They are a very brave and warlike people. The Russians did not interfere there in particular, but anyway, there was no peace with the Athapaskans. Only the Aleuts and Eskimos supported us, so it was on the coast of the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait that the Russian settlements were located - it was safe for the Russians to live there.

In California, as far as San Francisco, the Russians came in when there were essentially no European settlements, neither Anglo-Saxon nor Spanish. The Spanish then advanced some troops to stop the Russian movement, but there was no fighting, just that the Spanish officers stayed there as haciendas - raising herds of cattle and living without doing anything. And the Russians didn't stay there because the Indians didn't support them, there was no contact with the Indians. Why not? Yes, obviously because there was no contact between the Indians and the Anglo-Saxons, but the Anglo-Saxons, unlike the Russians, threw a huge force and killed almost all the Indians, and drove the rest into reservations. It is the most brutal operation for which the whole Anglo-Saxon ethnic group bears the responsibility before history. Our ancestors did not go in for such genocide, they chose to remove themselves to places where there was contact with the population and confined themselves to Siberia, the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. Then Alaska was also sold to America, but in Siberia there was complete contact with the population.

Another example. While the Russians have been in contact with the Mongols since the 13th century, the Chinese have never been able to establish contact with the Mongols. But European Catholics also could not make contact with the Mongols. So, they should have been able to make contact with the Chinese? But that's how it is! Thirty million Chinese Catholics existed at the beginning of the 20th century. Catholic preaching in China was very successful. The Orthodox missions had no such success, and if they converted anyone, it was only in Northern Manchuria, where non-Chinese people lived.

Although we call them Chinese, they are not Chinese, but Manchurians. They easily found ways to coexist with the Russians, and in a number of places mestization took place with very positive results. The Cossacks of Transbaikalia are a mix of Mongols and Russians, and not only Russian men with Mongolian women, but Mongolian men with Russian women; Russian Siberian women married Mongols willingly - good husbands, honest and faithful.

In Polynesia and Africa

Here, as we can see, some strange collisions arise. Why did the Anglo-Saxons unisex Indians? Could it be that they could not get along with anyone at all? But when they got to Polynesia, they made excellent contacts with Polynesians in New Zealand, in Tahiti, where King Pomare II converted to Protestantism in 1812, and in Hawaii. Conversely, the French, who captured Tahiti in 1880, made no contacts. There are no French-Polynesian mixtures in Polynesia, but it is full of Anglo-Polynesian ones. This is most likely a matter of psychology. After all, the French and the English, in spite of intermingling, still have different looks and a different gene pool.

But the French Huguenots, who left France in masses in the 17th century, were evicted to the English colonies and behaved exactly like the English. And when they were evicted with the Dutch to South Africa, they were part of the Dutch Boers, who were extremely cruel to the poor Negroes, that is, they did not behave like the French, but like Protestants, and so they got along with the Dutch, who were just as cruel as they were.

Here is an interesting question: What about Central Africa? And she was a stranger to both elements. It did not voluntarily adopt either Protestantism or Catholicism, but Islam spread there with amazing ease, even without any violence.   Thus, we see that the nature of the combinations is not at all racial, but ethnic. The attempt to convert Negroes to Christianity had very grim results. When the French began to settle Haiti and built plantations and beautiful haciendas, they brought slave blacks there and converted them to the Catholic faith. The Negroes embraced Catholicism, forgetting their languages. They were multilingual, from different places. So, they spoke French among themselves and they even had Catholic priests, properly consecrated. But the French Revolution happened, and then the Negroes immediately demanded that they, too, be given freedom. This, of course, was out of the question for the French.

Freedom, equality and fraternity were not for Negroes. Then the Negroes rose up, and they were not led by some ignoramus. There was a very progressive figure, Toussaint Louverture, all imbued with the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire. He was a political leader and the ideological part was taken over by Negro curées who interpreted the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as follows: "God came to the whites, but the whites killed God, so let us avenge God by killing the whites." And under this slogan the entire white French population was slaughtered.

It was impossible to get help from France, because France was at war with England, and the English navy would not allow French ships to pass, and it was impossible to leave the island. Still there is a Negro republic; officially the religion there is Catholic, but in addition there is the cult of Vodou, the cult of the snake. It is an African cult with mysteries, with secret services to the serpent. No one knows this cult in detail, because only local Catholic Negroes are allowed to attend these mysteries.

The most striking example of super-ethnic contact is the collision of four or five super-ethnoses, which took place in mid-13th century in Palestine and Egypt: "The Greeks" - the orthodox Christians, including the Armenians, the Georgians, the Syrians and the Copts; "Franks" - the name given to all the peoples of Western Europe who appeared there during the Crusades; Muslims - Arabs, Kurds, Turks; and Mongols, former non-Christians who sought to liberate Jerusalem. To these we must add the Cumans and the Circassians, who were sold as slaves in Egypt and called the Mamelukes. These played the most important role in the tragedy that resulted from the super-ethnic contact.

The Forgotten Past

Beneath the blue dome of the Eternal Sky stretches from the Yellow Sea and the Yellow River to the Black Sea and the Caucasus the Great Steppe, crisscrossed by mountains covered with dense forests and the silvery streams of clear rivers. The steppe is flanked by the brown Gobi Desert and the vast taiga (pine forests), a green desert, but between these deserts life has been boiling for thousands of years. Plants nourish herbivores, and those herbivores are eaten by predators, including humans. And this order seems eternal, and Heaven (Tengri) and Earth-Water (Iersu) - unchanged. Therefore, the ancient Türks called their power "Eternal El", just as the Latins, having built a fortress on the seven hills of the muddy Tiber, called it "Eternal City".

But time is merciless and all-powerful! It destroys and revives everything: states and cultures, dried up lakes, and mountain ranges crumbling into fragments, then covered with the dust of deserts; even the sky is not constant: the sun bursts with protuberances, burning grass and drying up rivers, then it calms down, allowing Life - the biosphere of the planet - to fill the dead regions and renew landscapes and ethnic groups.

This was understood by the remarkable writer of the 8th century, Yolligtegin, the author of the tombstones to his father - Bilge-Khagan and his uncle - Kultegin. Geniuses are born in all eras, and it is the duty of descendants to keep their memory from oblivion.

No one lives alone. The ancient Turks were no exception. Under the father of Bilge-khagan, Kutlug Elteres-khagan (683-693), "on the right (that is in the south) people of Tabgach (Tang empire, kith... "Toba") were enemies, on the left (that is in the north) people of Toguz-oguz (Uigurs)... was an enemy, the Kyr-gyz, Kurykans, thirty Tatars, Kytai and Tatabs were all enemies". Why? Where did such hatred come from?

To answer this legitimate question, let us turn to history and historical geography.

At the beginning of our era, the Huns dominated the Great Steppe. They were courageous, talented, freedom-loving people who skillfully defended their homeland from the Han Empire. Despite the fact that the Chinese had a twenty-fold advantage in strength, they could not conquer the Great Steppe. But then the Huns were subjected to the mercy of nature. In the 2nd-3rd centuries, the Great Drought struck the steppe. The Gobi Desert in the east and the Betpak-Dala in the west pushed the grassy steppe north and south, reducing the amount of pastureland and cultivated land. Horses were thinning, sheep were falling, and the Huns began to suffer defeats. They had to leave their desiccated homeland. Part of them migrated to China, where they perished, for they mixed with the Chinese, Tibetans, and Tabgachs, who had no mercy on the defeated.   The indomitable Huns went west, where in the fifth century under Attila shook the Roman Empire, but after the death of their king they were exterminated by the Germanic tribes - the Gepids, the Heruls, the Goths - in 454.

A legend has survived about this event, according to which the last Hunnish prince, with hacked-off hands and feet, was thrown into a swamp (Lake Balaton) and inseminated a she-wolf, who then fled to the Altai and left descendants there - the Huns.

But an ethnos, like a man, must have not only a mother, but also a father. It was Ashina, an opponent of Tabgachis and a friend of the last Chinese Huns, who saved his people, taking them to the Altai in 439. There the two branches of the Huns united, and in a hundred years appeared the ethnos Turkic (plural - "Turkut", because the Ashina spoke Mongolian, and only in the 6th century switched to Turkic language, usual for most Hunnish descendants).

The first chiefs of the Turks, Bumyn and Istemi, created the first Turkic Kaganate from the Great Wall of the Middle Empire - China to the border of Iran, and in the Crimea, they encountered the Byzantium. All the ethnic groups of the Great Steppe were united by the Turkic people, and this form of state was called "el". It was a system of unification of the horde - the Khan's rate - and the subordinate tribes - the oguzov. "By their forces the Turks were heroic in the deserts of the north," and they received funds for the maintenance of the state as customs duties from the merchants who carried silk from China to Byzantium. Byzantium was an ally of the Turkic Kaganate, while Iran and China were in constant enmity with it, not being able however, to win a final victory. But the trouble came from within. Iollyg-Tegin wrote: "... their younger brothers... were not like their elders in deeds, their sons were not like their fathers, unwise... The cowardly Khagans, and their "decrees" were also unwise, were cowardly. As a consequence of the indirectness of the rulers and the people... and deceit... by the people of the Tabgach (Tang Empire) and... Because the Tabgach were quarreling younger brethren with their elders, and were arming their rulers against each other, the Türkic people upset their elite, and brought destruction upon the reigning Kagan.

Everything is described accurately since 604. The Great Khaganate split into the Eastern Khaganate in Mongolia and the Western Khaganate in Kazakhstan. The Kaghanates were conquered by the Tang empire, and their ally, Sogdiana, by the Arab Caliphate in the 8th century. The surviving nomads of modern Mongolia were led by the Uigur Kaganate, but it also fell under the blow of the Yenisei Kyrgyz in the 9th century. The courageous Uighurs retreated to the southern edge of the Gobi Desert and continued to resist their enemies, but suddenly a third force, Nature, entered the protracted war.

In the 10th century the zone of high humidity shifted northward. The moisture brought by the cyclones from the Atlantic and monsoons from the Pacific Oceans began to pour into the taiga, and the Gobi Desert, expanding northward and southward, divided the enemies. The Uigurs settled in the Pryangshan oases, and the Kyrgyz returned to the Minusinsk Basin.

Thus, the combination of two parameters, ethnic old age and climatic fluctuations, caused a break in the historical time, a tradition of the Hunno-Turkic ethnogenesis that lasted for 1,300 years. The history of this remarkable culture turned out to be forgotten. When in the 11th century the rains revived the upper courses of the Onon, Kerulen and Selenga, other people arrived there, Siberians from Transbaikalia, who spoke Mongolian and who had no idea about those warriors of "Eternal Earl" who had lived in the steppe two hundred years before them. History began anew.

That is why the Mongols, who encountered only one ethnos of ancient culture, the Yenisei Kyrgyz; attributed to them all the Sarmatian, Scythian and Hunnic stone mounds (korums), calling them "Kyrgyz graves" (kyrgyz ur). But the real meaning of this name was not that, just being a synonym for "ancient". Some of the elements of the ancient culture came to the Mongols through half-forgotten legends or borrowing from the neighbors, but, although all people have ancestors, not all get their inheritance from them. The Mongol tribes of the 11th century started a new life from nothing.

And the Turks? Expelled by the drought from their homeland, scattered by the historical fate over the Western Asia, Siberia, India, Egypt, Black Sea and Transcaucasia, which lost their ethnic structure because of the entropy that destroyed their primary (impulse) passionarity, and together with it the last active phase of ethnogenesis - obscuration, they did not disappear, because they passed into the new, passive phase - memorial. This transition saved the Türks as a super-ethnos, or rather as a super-ethnic field having the most important property, that of opposing itself to all the others.

The external similarities between Turkic ethnoses: Yakuts and Seljuks, Kumans and Uyghurs, Oguzes and Telengits were really not much. But the feeling of unity did not leave them and to some extent determined their behavior. In the past century they would have called it a "Turkic soul" or "Slavic soul" when the Poles and Serbs had nothing in common, but we must translate this amorphous term into scientific language.

Yes, a discrete system cannot exist without energy nourishment, but there is imported passionarity, which has the same effect as the natural one, or push-pull. The Türks for one thousand years won many victories, captured many women whose children became Türks. There were especially many mixed marriages in the eleventh century in both Iran and Syria.

In Georgia, and in Russia. This mestization could not stop the general process of withering, because it contributed not to the cohesion but to the dispersion of the ethnos, but the ethnic field, organized by a similar mentality, continued to exist. In the 13th-14th centuries, the Turks, as it were, gained a second life, in which Mongolian passionaries played an active role. But it is unscientific to look for the culprits. When soda and citric acid are mixed in aqueous solution, they fizzle and give off heat: this is a neutralizing reaction, which happens naturally. Did the Goths and Vandals in the 3rd and 5th centuries, or the Vikings in the 9th and 11th centuries, or the Crusaders in the 12th century shed less blood? Of course not! But their movements were similar to the expansion of the Roman Republic, the difference being that the Romans made their conquests slower, which did not make it any easier for the Spaniards, Gauls, Numidians and Greeks. The Arabs in the VII-VIII centuries dealt with the Persians, Armenians, Spanish Visigoths, Berbers, and the Sogdians - a cultural and rich ethnic group - were destroyed so that only relics remained of them in the inaccessible mountains of Gissar and the Western Pamirs.

On this background the explosions of ethnogenesis in the Jurchens and Mongols do not represent anything special, although contemporary chroniclers did not spare the black paint for the history of the 13th century.

Ethnogenesis is a process resulting from natural phenomena, and as you know, nature knows neither good nor evil. Hurricanes, glaciers, and earthquakes cause disasters to people, but they are parts of the geographical shell of planet Earth, which together with lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere include the biosphere, of which anthroposphere is a part, consisting of ethnoses that appear and disappear in historical time. Moral assessments are as inapplicable to ethnoses as they are to all natural phenomena, for they take place at the population level, whereas the freedom of choice, which determines moral responsibility, lies at the level of an organism or a person. Ethnogenesis (in all its phases) is the domain of natural science, but it can only be studied through the knowledge of history, which contains the necessary material to be processed by the methods of the natural sciences. Let us therefore return to the history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Crusaders

In the Middle Ages people fought much and often, but as a rule they knew not firmly what they were fighting for, but what they were fighting against. Negative dominance was more effective than positive dominance. And when Pope Urban II uttered the fateful words, "God wills it!", the masses of ordinary peasants and knights threw themselves into a desperate battle with the Muslims and, after losing nine-tenths of their soldiers, took Jerusalem in 1099 and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem there.

This kingdom quickly began to suffer defeats, lose cities and ask the European monarchs for protection. The second and third crusades to stand up for their countrymen were unsuccessful. The fourth became a commercial operation to acquire colonies in the East, led by the Venetian doge, the blind Dandolo. It was quickly made up that "the Greeks (Orthodox) are such heretics that God himself is sickened." Constantinople was taken and sacked, and castles were erected in Greece, intermingled with the unsold fortresses of the Byzantine rulers. The fortifications of Nicaea, faraway Trebizond and mountainous Epirus held out and by 1261 had driven the Latin invaders out of Constantinople. But all the while the war was fierce, and the crusading Europeans, who first came to the aid of the Greek Christians, found in them enemies even more terrible and indomitable than the Muslims: the Arabs and the Seljuk Turkmens.

The Crusaders were a little luckier on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, because they were supported by local Christians: the Monophysites of Syria and the Monothelites of Lebanon. Excommunicated in the fifth and seventh centuries, they were alienated from the Greeks, although the reasons for the religious disputes had been forgotten and the anathemas pronounced came as much from Rome as from Constantinople. But this was weak support.

The last serious crusade was undertaken by King Louis IX of France in 1250. Another complete disaster! And then - anarchy, mutual carnage in the streets of Acre, a war at sea of the Genoese against the Venetians, on the island of Tyre of the French against the Venetians, and so on until madness - all against all! And the trouble was just coming.

The Polovtsians on the Nile

Egypt is a defenseless country. Once the Asians have crossed the Sinai desert and reached the easternmost arm of the Nile delta, the subjugation of the rest of the country is an easy matter.  So, in ancient times a fortress called Pelusium was built on this arm to prevent enemy invasion of the delta, but fortresses do give up and then are of little use. Therefore, the Egyptian rulers of the Middle Ages preferred to have a mobile army, but they did not even dream of raising the population of their country to war.

The descendants of the heroic warriors Thutmose III and Ramses II paid taxes without a word, but categorically refused to defend themselves against any enemy. Therefore, the Fatimid caliphs and sultans of Eyubid bought warriors: kypchaks and Circassians, and they fought so that even the brave French knights could not withstand their onslaught.

The Mamelukes constituted two divisions composed along ethnic lines: the Kipchaks and other steppe people stationed on the island of Ar Rauda on the Nile (al-Bahr) and the Circassians stationed in the citadel of Cairo (al-Burj, that is, burg, a German-French word that had settled in Egypt). It was the Bahrians who twice defeated the French knights and thought their courage deserved a reward. But the young Turanshah, trained in the madrasahs of Baghdad in law, dialectics, theology, etc., knew nothing of ethnography, so he had no idea of the men who had saved his throne and driven out the insolent invaders. He did not bestow ranks on them, but on his favorites, and appointed philologists as emirs. One night he drunkenly ordered them to bring many lamps, and he put them out by cutting down the flames with his sword, and shouting: "This is how I will massacre the Bahrites." A few days later, on May 2, 1250. - the Bahrites attacked his tent. When the sultan came out, they cut off half his arm, he fled into the forest that grew along the bank of the Nile, and entered the river up to his throat. There he was finished off with arrows.

Another paradox of history! The Kipchaks, or Cumans, defeated, betrayed and enslaved, became the masters of a Muslim country, where the oppressed Christians, the Fellahs and Copts, made up the greater part of the population. It seemed that Egypt had become an ethnic chimera, (a combination of incompatible elements) of the system, but this was not the case.

All these elements lived separately, in symbiosis, so that the social structure remained strong. However, the Mamelukes decided that they did not have to serve such an inferior country, but to make that country serve them. They staged a coup, killed Sultan Turan Shah and gave the throne to the Sultaness, the widow of the preceding Sultan, who gave her husband, the Mameluk emir, the Turkoman Aybek.

The sultaness fell in love with her husband to such an extent that she sacrificed everything out of jealousy. Having found out that Aybek found her rival, she waited until, after a game of horse drawn balls, he had gone to the baths, sent her eunuchs to kill her husband, and offered the throne to the young emir.

Poor, foolish woman! She did not know what steppe friendship was. And the Mamelukes were steppe friends. The Emir refused the throne. The murderous eunuchs were crucified. The Sultaness was taken from the palace to the Red Tower, where a young slave beat her to death with his heels and the body was thrown into a prison cellar. This happened on May 2, 1257.

Ignoring ethnography and fantasizing about it always leads to tragic consequences. People are not the same, and even more so ethnoses are different. Reactions that are natural for Arabs are ridiculous for the French, insulting for Turks and Mongols, and unnatural for the Chinese. That is why symbiosis is the best form of ethnic contact, when the ethnic groups live side by side but apart, maintaining peaceful relations but not interfering in each other's affairs. Such a system was developed in Egypt and gave excellent results.

The tragedy of Sidon

In the summer of 1260 the Mongol ruler of Syria, Kitbuga-noyon, with his tiny army (20,000, according to Kirakos, and 10,000, according to Guyton) stood at Baalbek, believing that he and his army were safe. To the east he was guarded by the desert; to the west stood the castles of Christian knights. Alas, Kitbuga knew the desert, but he knew no knights. He was a Christian and believed in Christians.

The ruler of Sidon, Julien had inherited the city from his grandfather and father who had fought the former against the Muslims and the latter against the Imperials. Julien had very large hands and feet, was broad-boned and fat, and was considered a brave knight, totally disgraced morally. His gambling and frequent amusements made him a debtor to the Templars, and it got to the point that he had to mortgage his liege, Sidon, to them. R. Grusse describes him as "a heavy baron with a light head" and says that he corrected his financial woes by robbing his neighbors. Thus, he robbed the environs of Tyre, where his uncle ruled. In the absence of the Mamelukes he plundered Syria, and after the conquest of Syria by the Mongols he again attacked the defenseless population and returned to Sidon with booty and prisoners, forgetting that Syria had belonged to the Mongols for a year.

The Mongols were astonished. They believed that raids could and should be made on enemies, but not on allies, and that plundering could be done by an outlaw, not by a sovereign prince.   The nephew of Kitbugi, with a small party, chased the Sidon knights to find out the misunderstanding, free the prisoners and return the property belonging to them. The knights saw that the Mongols were few in number, turned their horses, surrounded the Mongol detachment... and killed all the Mongols.

Thus occurred the first betrayal, which broke the causal link of events by an act of arbitrariness, which in this case had an unnatural dominant character. After all, according to the force of things, the robbery and murder could not have happened.

In fact, if this had happened anywhere near Limoges or Arras, there would have been no particular consequences. The relatives of the deceased would have filed a suit at the royal court, where the case would have languished until it went into the archives. Maybe the dead man's brother or father would have killed a couple of murderers on occasion, and then the whole thing would have been consigned to oblivion. Such are the benefits of civilization and the benefits of culture.

But Kitbuga was not a Frenchman, but a Naiman. He knew that there is no trial for valor in battle, and that the treacherous murder of a confidant is not forgiven. No sooner had the people of Sidon been able to celebrate their lucky raid than Mongol horsemen appeared at the walls of the city. Ser Julien showed Frankish courage. He defended the walls, allowing the inhabitants of Sidon to evacuate to the islands where the Mongols, without a fleet, could not reach. Then he himself fled there on a Genoese Galleys. The mainland part of the city was completely destroyed and the walls torn down.

Can the demise of Sidon be considered a manifestation of the power of things? No. Banditry is not embedded in the nature of human relationships. Crimes are unnatural, and therefore punishable. It is a pity about Sidon, but an even greater pity that the Mongols did not catch Julien. Even his father-in-law, the Armenian King Getum I, believed that his son-in-law should simply be hanged "high and short".

A different position was taken by the Templars, who justified Julien's robbery and himself. They even bought the ruins of Sidon from him, thus paying off the debts of the liege lord, unsuccessful in both game and war. And strangest of all, a similar attempt to plunder no man's land was made by the sire of Beirut, the marshal of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and many of the knights of the temple. They attacked the Turkmens who had pitched their tents in Galilee, where they had fled the horrors of war.

The Turkmens defeated the crusading bandits, captured their leaders, and brought them home for a big ransom. It is clear from this that the feudal lords and knight-monks were not guided at all by religious or even patriotic motives. They could have been understood and even justified if they had not lied. And they lied brazenly, systematically, and meanly.

The affairs of the Overseas Land, and especially of Jerusalem, were of interest throughout Europe. They rejoiced over the successes of the Eastern Christians, compared the Mongol khan Hulagu and his Christian wife Dokuz-khatun with Constantine and Helen, who brought Christianity to the Roman Empire in 313, and they waited for the final liberation of the Holy Sepulchre. But at the same time of these sentiments, there were others to the contrary. The Pope received information from the Knights Templar and the Johannites, who openly declared that "if the Mongol devils come, they will find the servants of Christ ready for battle. Why? Because the Mongols were coming to their rescue. Strange logic, to say the least.

When the Knights of Acre were asked why they treated the Mongols so badly, the knights cited the destruction of Sidon as an example. It appeared that if an earl or baron killed an Asian he was a hero, but if the Asian defended himself and fought back it was monstrous. This position is clearly lame, if only because the Prince of Antioch, Bohemund VI, was allied to the Mongols. The pope excommunicated him to avoid any unfortunate misunderstandings.

In fact, this is where the "black legend" of the Mongols, and indeed of the Byzantines, who returned their capital one year later without a shot being fired and continued to drive the "Franks" out of the Latin Empire, began to circulate in Europe. The brothers of the Teutonic Order had the same attitude toward the Lithuanians and Russians who would not let themselves be conquered. Even the 19th century German historian A. Müller wrote: "Fighting the Turks with such barbarian allies is the same as casting out a demon by the power of Welze-Vul", but the 20th century French historian R. Grusset, on the contrary, considered the position of the knights as treason to Christianity and madness, and their version as a vile lie. And we agree with him.

The road to disaster

Sultan Kutuz's Mamluks quickly crossed the Sinai desert and, using their numerical superiority, easily overthrew the Mongol barrier in Gaza, but the Mongol noyon Baydar had time to notify Kitbuga of the invasion. Kitbuga was standing at Baalbek. When he learned of the sudden outbreak of war, he moved south with all his troops to Nazareth to stop the enemy. Kitbuga correctly calculated that the Mamelukes' horses were exhausted from the crossing and had nowhere to rest; and at that time the degree of fatigue of the horses determined the outcome of the battle, just as today the availability of gasoline for the machines. Kitbugi's calculations were correct, but he did not take into account something.

That Syrian Muslims were as impatient to see Kutuz as Christians were to see Hulagu a year ago was clear. That the churches in Damascus were on fire, as the mosques had been shortly before, was evident from the course of events and the balance of power. That the Genoese continued to deal with the Venetians, and the Templar bank with the Johannite bank, while the enemy approached the walls of Acre, was also imaginable. But that the knightly council of Acre would discuss an alliance with the Mamluks against the Mongols, that is, with the Muslims against the Christians, was beyond normal imagination.

But it was discussed, and only the master of the Teutonic knights prevented the conclusion of this alliance. They limited themselves to a compromise: they accepted the Mamelukes as guests, provided them with hay and products, allowed them to rest under the walls of Acre and even let the Mameluk chiefs into the fortress to treat them well. Kutuz, seeing such frivolity, wanted to seize Acre, but the inhabitants of the city began on their own initiative to drive out the Mamluk warriors, partly politely, partly rudely. So, it was not possible to get enough soldiers into the city.

For all this mad frivolity, the Knights of Acre made a trade deal with the Mamluks: The Mamluks pledged to sell them for a low price the horses that would be captured from the Mongols. The Mamluks agreed, but then did not fulfill their obligations. Apparently, these steppe people were too disgusted by the titled speculators.

Giving the troops and horses a good rest, Cthuz passed through the Frankish possessions into Galilee to be able to rush from there to Damascus. Kitbuga with Mongolian cavalry and auxiliary detachments of Armenians and Georgians met the enemy at Ain-Jalud, near Nazareth, on September 3, 1260. The Mongol horses were fatigued by the forced march, but the Mongols had not yet suffered defeat. "Burning with zeal, they marched forward, trusting in their strength and courage," wrote the Armenian historian Kirakos. The hope of victory did not leave the Mongols until the end.

Kutuz, using the numerical superiority, covered his flanks in deep hollows, and against the main forces of Kitbuga he put vanguard under the command of his friend Beibars. The Mongols went on the attack and again crossed swords with the Cumans. Beibars held out. The flank units came out of the ravines and surrounded the Mongols. Kitbuga, saving the honor of the banner, galloped across the battlefield until a horse was killed beneath him. Then the Mamelukes piled on him and twisted his arms.

The rout was complete. The fugitives from the battlefield did not survive either. Their tired horses could not get away from the fresh Mamelukes. The Yellow Crusade ended in disaster. The bound Kitbugu was brought before the face of Sultan Kutuz. The captive naiman proudly declared to the victorious Kuman that Hulagu Khan would raise a new cavalry, which, like the sea, would flood the gates of Egypt. And he added that he was a faithful servant of his khan and had never been a king-killer. After these words, Kutuz ordered that Kitbug's head be cut off.

The hopes of the last paladin of Eastern Christianity, the Naiman bogatyr Kitbuga, did not come true. The civil war in the Mongol Ulus dragged on until 1301, and was only extinguished when the Mongolian bogatyrs killed each other. The overheated passionarity burned the Mongol ulus and the steppe tradition. The Ulus khans turned out not to be sovereigns but captives of their subjects, who forced them to adopt their faith: Islam in the West, Buddhism in China. The death of Kitbugi and his veterans proved to be not an isolated loss, but a turning point in history, after which the force of things set the chain of events on a different path.

After the Mongol army retreated across the Tigris, the extermination of Christians began in Syria and Mesopotamia. The Byzantine cultural heritage, spared by the Arab right caliphs, the Umayyads and Abbasids, the heretics Fatimids and the chivalrous Eubid Kurds, was swept away by the Mamluk onslaught. And you can't say that the newly converted Polovtsians were rampant. No, they only allowed the Muslims to kill Christians, and they themselves expanded the area of destruction, winning victory after victory.

In 1268 Antioch fell, in 1277 the Bey-Bars scored their last victory over the Mongols at Albistan, after which his successor, Sultan Calaun, took Tripoli in 1289, and in 1291 Akra, Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. The Middle East was transformed from Christian to Muslim, but that was not the greatest misfortune. With the loss of tradition went the culture and it was not replaced by another. The broken shards were picked up in 1516 by the Ottoman sultan, the ruthless Selim I. The wise, valiant, and creative Middle East became an ethno-cultural ruin, as described by Mikhail Lermontov in his poem The Dispute, in which Mount Kazbek and Mount Elbrus argue about the possibility of human conquest of nature:

I am not afraid of the East! - Kazbek answered. -

The human race has been asleep there for nine centuries.

Look: in the shade of a plane-tree sweet wine foam pours

On the patterned shalvars of a sleepy Georgian; 

And leaning in the smoke of a hookah on a colored sofa,

By the pearl fountain Tehran slumbers.

Here at the feet of Yerushalim, God-burned,

The voiceless, immovable dead country;

Farther, eternally alien to shadow,

Washes the yellow Nile the fiery steps of royal graves.

The Bedouin has forgotten the treads for the colored tents.

And sings, counting the stars,

Of the deeds of his fathers.

All that here is available to the eye,

Sleeps, treasuring peace.... No!

Not the decrepit East can conquer me.

Lermontov is only partly right. He described the hardest, most unsuccessful era for development in the Middle East - the early nineteenth century. But times change, and people change in them. Time heals the worst diseases of ethnic groups. And recovery comes when the process of secondary integration or, rather, regeneration takes place.

As long as the nomads, who left their homeland and became masters of their former slave masters, confronted them and with the defenseless masses, whom they only oppressed and did not think it necessary to protect; the countries of the Middle East grew weaker. But the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Cumans, Karluks, Kangls and Naimans, born in the flourishing oases of Khorasan, in the expanse between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in the country called Diarbekir - Mesopotamia, gradually merged with the local population into new ethnic units. And this process of secondary crystallization of ethnogenesis is going on today.

This process was unnoticed by the great poet. It had been going on gradually since the 16th century and, like any incubation period, could only be seen from a great distance. Ethnic groups were renewed on the basis of a very complex genesis, overcame the inertia of disintegration, and today we can expect the emergence of renewed culture of Western Asia, Iran and North Africa.

This difficult period of decay, which over the past six hundred years has not been preordained by history, was in the end a tragic result of the tragic events of the past. It was, also after all, the result of a tragic accident - the victory of Sultan Qutuz over Kitbuga Noon in the Valley of Ain-Jalud.

The hypothesis of an ethnic field

The principles of "field" and "system" not only do not contradict, but also complement each other. The initial passionate outburst creates a population of individuals that are very energetic and reach out to each other. The "field" creates a reason for their unification and further solidarity, most often unconscious. But even this primary consortium, coming into contact with the environment, organizes itself into a corpuscular system, (flexible, not rigid), thus opposing itself to the environment. The next step is to formalize oneself as a social group, i.e. to create a rigid system with the separation of functions of its members.   This is the entry into the historical process of development programmed by the local specifics of the geographical and ethnic environment, which creates unique collisions in each particular variant of ethnogenesis, despite the unity of the model of ethnogenesis.

If one can define psychology of personality as a science of impulses of human activity, then ethnopsychology should be considered a science of impulses of behavior of ethnic units, i.e. nations. The proposed definition immediately poses several difficulties that could have been avoided with any other approach, but as we will see below, any other way leads the researcher down a blind alley, whereas the one we adopt, after a difficult pass, leads to a fertile valley full of scientific results, implications and applications to an extremely varied material.

So, we see that whatever the racial composition, whatever the cultural ties, whatever the level of development, there are certain moments that make it possible in some cases to establish friendly ethnic contact, in other cases it becomes undesirable, hostile and very bloody. What is the point here?

If we accept our hypothesis of an ethnic field with a certain frequency of fluctuations of each super-ethnic and ethnic group, we see that everything can be explained here. Let us imagine that the "Christian world" existed as a kind of ethnic field in which fluctuations followed one particular rhythm. At that time, a Spaniard and a Swede, an Englishman and a Neapolitan considered themselves as belonging to the same whole, to "Christendom," which of course did not include the Irish, the Greeks, the Bulgarians or the Russians - they were all schismatics, "such heretics that they make God himself sick". That's a quote!  All the Catholics were in one state, but as a result of the decline of the passionate forces the field split into two parts with different rhythms. In such a split, perhaps, lies the inner content of the fracture phase, which leads to the loss of the sense of unity within the super-ethnos.

As we have seen, the difference in the newly formed field rhythms is such that one rhythm corresponded to the Indian, the other was closer to the Polynesian.  Those sounds that were in harmony with the Indian sound were disharmonious with the Russian, Abyssinian and Mongolian sounds, but were consonant with the Chinese sound. Conversely, the Protestant sound was culturally alien to Orthodoxy and the distant Polynesian world, but incongruous with the Chinese. Indeed, the English in China are considered bad, colonizers, although they are much more humane than the French. The French are exceptionally cruel people. But the French were well received in China and French Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries created the main literature on Chinese history, especially freeing me from having to learn Chinese. Reading in French, in the old spelling, was enough. Everything has been translated, whole volumes, whole shelves of books stand, and there are almost no English works of such importance on China. Thus, the concept of the biophysical basis of ethnicity provides an opportunity to explain the totality of the observed facts. I know of no other concept that could explain it all, and no one tells me.

Diachrony as a principle, (change over time)

The synchronic approach allows us to collect a large and necessary material on ethnic history. But this is only preparatory work for the main task of ethnology, the diachronic comparison of different ethnogenies. So, let's start a countdown not from this or that year, conventionally accepted as the beginning of the chronology, but from the moment of birth, or rather "conception" of the ethnos. It is clear that for each of the known ethnic groups such a moment is individual. And they coincide, as with people, only when ethnoses are of the same age, that is, they were brought to life (ethnogenesis) by one and the same passionary impulse.

The starting point - the passionary impulse itself, or micro-mutation - is difficult to date, since contemporaries did not notice it and, therefore, were not yet able to connect events with cosmic phenomena. But even when the first generation of mutant passionarians begins to act, contemporaries are still unable to notice in their activity the beginning of a grandiose, almost fifteen hundred years long, process. The Romans, for example, did not notice the birth in B.C. 5 of a galaxy of passionarians (or more exactly, the events of the A.D. 30s-40s, connected with its activities); they were surprised by fanaticism in Judea in 65 and in Dacia at about the same time and only in about 155, After the apology of Justin Martyr, it was realized that a special "breed of people" (as Celsus, the philosopher and friend of Lucianus, put it) existed, i.e. Christian consortia as a phenomenon in its own right, which, in the following period (2nd-4th centuries), grew into the Byzantine super-ethnos. Byzantine ethnogenesis is a rare case where, thanks to church history, we can retrospectively determine the exact date of the shock. In other cases, it is not at all elusive.

But the tremor is not the only reference point for chronologizing ethnogenesis. The most vivid, impressive event is the moment of birth of an ethnos as a new systemic integrity with an original stereotype of behavior. Such a phenomenon, for all intents and purposes, cannot fail to be recorded by the neighbors who possess a written historical tradition. The appearance of a new ethnonym, i.e. the self-name of an ethnos, is often connected with this event. Thus, September 20, 622 (Hijra) is an event of the incubation period of the Arab-Muslim ethnonym. Before 632-642, the Arabs did not yet appear as "Arabs" (ethnos), and the term itself was used as a synonym for the nomads of the Arabian Peninsula. It was only after the Muslim armies invaded Syria and Iran and defeated the Greeks and Persians that Arabs began to be called an ethnic group inspired by the preaching of the prophet. Only after the grandiose event, embodying the birth of an ethnos, the passionate population has the need to oppose itself as a systemic integrity to all surrounding neighbors and the need to call itself by its own name.

In the future, the descendants do not remember the reasons for what happened, because the ethnonym often loses its original meaning. Thus, as early as in the 10th century Abu Mansur al-Azhari (d. 980/981) wrote: "And people differ in opinions as to why the Arabs were called Arabs”. Comparing the moment of birth of an ethnos and the date of the shock in the known cases (the shocks in the 1st and 13th centuries A.D.), we can determine the length of the incubation period of ethnogenesis - 130-160 years - and thus "tie" the processes of ethnogenesis in other cases to a diachronic scale.

It is possible to count the age of the ethnos not only from the beginning of the shock, but also from any bright and easily diagnosable period, such as the phase of the breakdown: its beginning or end. The error for ethnogenesis that is not displaced by contacts is only plus or minus one generation, which is within the tolerance necessary for understanding the laws of ethnogenesis. The supra-challenge is an expressive phase, and it is difficult not to notice it. The passionate tension of the ethnic system suddenly begins to spontaneously decrease.  The easiest way to do it is to kill the most prominent figures. First the politicians die, then the ideologists - the poets and scholars, then the administrators, and finally the workers - the followers of those who are already dead.

The only ones left are the traitors, who constantly go over to the side of the next winner in order to betray him as soon as he gets into trouble, and people so insignificant that they are not touched unless they are in the hot seat. It is the contemporaries, not all of them of course, but the most patriotic and far-sighted who notice the beginning of the breakdown. In Rome, Cato the Elder had already noted the moral decline; Cato the Younger tried to discourage frivolous Roman fashionistas, but without success; and from the Gracchus, the ideals of the republic no longer held sway with most senators and were openly pandered to. The civil wars that ended with Augustus' principate, mark the end of the breakdown and the ethnos's entry into an inertial phase, which on the diachronic scale corresponds to 700-750 years from the moment of the initial shock.

Dynamics of Ethno-cultural Systems

In ancient China, the beginning of the break coincides with the preaching of Legism and the end with the triumph of the Qin dynasty. In Byzantium, it was the era of iconoclasm; in the Christian world, it was the Reformation. The Muslim super-ethnos collapse occurred before the programmed laws of ethnogenesis as a result of active ethnic contacts and was associated with the transfer of the Caliph Mutasim's actual power into the hands of the Gulams (foreign mercenary soldiers). It ended with the "displacement": the capture of Baghdad in 945 by Ahmed Buid - the leader of the Deylemites. Sometimes, but not always a convenient point of reference can be the phase of obscuration, accompanied by the collapse of the ethnic system. Thus, diachrony allows us to clarify the general pattern of natural processes - ethnogenesis - by comparing them with each other.

The first historian who attempted to grasp the principle of diachrony was the Athenian Archonet and priest of Apollo, former procurator of Greece - Plutarch (d. about 120). Among his many works, his parallel life accounts, of forty-six great figures from Hellas and Rome are exceptional.  The two are paired, thus trying to understand the historical processes of both countries not as a random assortment of events, but as two regular lines of development, the very one we have called ethnogenesis. Limited in erudition to these two ethnic groups and to a short span of chronology, less than a thousand years, he was forced to assume an ethnic rather than a super-ethnic level, which influenced the degree of proof of comparisons. Later it was perceived by readers simply as a literary device rather than a promising scientific method.

The fact is that Plutarch was comparing the deeds of his characters and, therefore, the similarity of their roles in history, that is, in two histories, two processes that followed the same pattern. This means he discovered one of the qualities of historical time: direction through causality, the causal nature of the course of events, despite the different lengths of their phases.

Hellas at the time of Plutarch was already in ruins (the phase of obscuration), because intensive colonization had driven away most of the passionates (Hellenism), and the local tyrants had dealt with the rest at home: Nabis in Sparta and the Roman commanders Metellus in Corinth and Sulla in Piraeus and Boeotia. Rome, on the other hand, was on the crest of power: it had got rid of excessive passionaries, retained the "golden mediocrity" of the age of Augustus and the accumulated wealth of the conquered provinces. This was the inertial phase of ethnogenesis, when Rome appeared to contemporaries as the "Eternal City", as in 19th century Europe, "progress" seems to be an endless perfection.

Plutarch sensed the truth, but could not prove it, or even explain it. He lacked comparative material, he did not know what "energy" was, let alone "entropy", and not everyone knew the concept of "system" as a whole, even nowadays. However, he was the closest to the problem of historical time as a function of a series of events, observable due to discreteness and irreversible, like the irreversible biography of an organism from birth to death, because an organism or, if you like, a star, are also systemic integrity.

The accuracy of the scientific conclusion is proportional to the amount of accumulated and accounted data. In the 20th century, the event history of mankind was written for three thousand years, and in fragments, even for five thousand years. There is little doubt that the anthroposphere is a constituent part of the planet's biosphere and that ethnogenesis is a zigzag in biological evolution, whose variants in plants, animals, and microorganisms are extremely diverse. Species succeed one another, but life as a phenomenon goes on, defeating death, so biological times (where the counting is by generations), specific to each individual species, are evident. This is the dialectical negation of negation; without it, there would be a break in development.

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