The Conquest of the Italian Peninsula by the Carpatho

The Conquest of the Italian Peninsula by the Carpatho - Danubians

According to Michael D. Le Monick's chromosomal theory of the migration and rapid spreading of the peoples (Time Magazine, 13 February 1995), as the human race appeared (approximately in 200,000 BC, in the south-east of Africa), the primitive men arrived in Europe around the year 40,000 BC, after crossing the strip of land connecting the Balkan Peninsula to Asia Minor. This corridor was to sink in the Mediterranean Sea around 4,000 BC, thus giving birth to the new Aegean Sea and to a big number of islands. The first men settled on an area bordering in the north upon present-day Czech Republic, and reaching south as far as the Balkan Mountains, thus marking the boundaries of the Carpatho - Danubian space. The Apennine or Italian Peninsula was occupied (by us) much later, in four waves:
1. the simple migration of the Carpatho-Danubians towards the south-west;
2. the arrival, on the Apennine area, of the Aryan Carpatho-Danubians (roughly 3,000 BC), under the name of the Etruscans;
3. the re-conquest of the peninsula by the Carpatho-Danubian Ramantes, led by the "Magnificent Aeneas";
4. the non-violent re-conquest of the Roman Empire that moved the capital to Salonika, under the rule of the Dacian leaders, Galerius the Elder and Galerius the Younger, and later, under that of the Dacian Constantine the Great who was to move the capital to Constantinople once again.

As the ice cap covering the entire Europe, except for the Carpatho-Pontic area and the south of the Pyrenean Mountains, started melting, the local population - Paleo-European - left the Carpatho-Danubian space and set out to explore and settle down on the surrounding territories propitious to life. Europe started with us, so to speak. It started neither on the Rhine (in Germany), nor on the Seine's basin (France), nor on the Thames (England). It is we, Romanians, who gave birth to what bears today the name of Europe! Consequently, the first conquest of the Apennine Peninsula was nothing more than a simple peaceful migration. Much later, around the year 3,000 BC, the Carpatho-Danubian Aryans, politically and religiously organized, and thinking of themselves as "civilizers", were to take over (again) the Apennine Peninsula from their brothers. These "new" conquerors still make historians, archaeologists, linguists and art historians have certain doubts as to the axioms speaking of the Etruscans who are said to have made their appearance on the Apennine Peninsula around 3,000 BC, and who disappeared, once the Romans took over. Both the ancient and modern worlds described the Etruscans, the Carpatho-Danubian Aryans as "a strange people, possessing an advanced civilization, and having nothing in common with the neighboring populations" (Raymond Block, The Etruscans).
Herodotus (in the middle of the 5th century BC) considered them the descendants of the Lydians (a Thracian population). Vergil, Ovid and Horace shared the same theory, while in Nicolas Frere's opinion (the 18th century AD), the Etruscans were one and the same with the Indo-European invaders who stepped on the peninsula around the year 2,000 BC. The Etruscan language is not well known, although several theories have already been formulated. However, in 1885, two young people from the French school in Athens, Cousin and Durrback, discover on the Lemnos Island (in the Aegean Sea), in the nearby of the Kamina village, a decorated funeral stele, bearing an inscription. The funeral stele has the face of a warrior or god (Zalmoxes) carved on it, armed with a spear. Two texts are engraved: one around his head, and the other on one of the stele's side surfaces. This monument, product of the local archaic art dates back to the 7th century BC, that is about 200 years before the island was to be taken over by the Greeks (around 500 BC, in the reign of Themistocles) from the Thracian branch of the Cynthian people (also mentioned in the "Iliad").
The letters are Etruscan, while the writing system goes both from the right to the left and from the left to the right. If in 1963 Raymond Bloch (in Ancient Peoples and Places) could not award them any significance, A. Bunescu in Secret Dacia has something else to say. In his own translation, one of the texts speaks of the fact that Zalmoxes lived 42 years, and that his spirit was resurrected and was defended by 10 worthy nobles. As I have already said, mankind's prehistory (and especially ours) - surrounded by mysteries and veiled up in legends as it is - is still highly enigmatic. With every new scientific discovery we change our view of the past. I wonder will we ever give up the traditional medieval scholarly opinions and re-discover ourselves? Personally, I am fascinated by the mysteries of the Romanian antiquity and I am honestly decided, as far as my knowledge allows me, to raise the veil of indifference and show the past as I think it should be shown.
Going back to the Etruscans, to the Carpatho-Danubian Aryans, we should not forget that the Etruscan Tarquin Dynasty who ruled over Rome from 616 until 509 BC (when it merged with the Carthaginian Dynasties) prevented the Greeks from colonizing the south of Italy and defeated them in the Alatrian 535 BC sea war. The power of the Carpatho-Danubian Etruscans reached its apex then. In the ensuing years, as their sway started to run low, they were defeated by the Greeks, at Cunae, in the Bay of Naples, in 474 BC. The Roman Republic would annihilate, in what I consider a fratricidal war, the Uei people, in 396, and the Volscian people, in 265 BC; the Carpatho-Danubian Etruscans die out. For almost 2 milleniums, they represented a civilizing agent in the middle of the Apennine Peninsula, which they had rescued, from darkness and barbarism. Nevertheless, Rome, after liberating itself from the tyranny of the Carpatho-Danubian Etruscans, lived on under the cultural influence inherited from the Etruscans and handed it down to the Western Europe. Beside the great number of funeral monuments and an alphabet (rich source of inspiration for the Greek and Latin ones) let us see what else these Carpatho-Danubian Aryans left behind:
- the feminine name Rhama (it is well known that the Thracian "family" numbered over 200 tribes that included the Geto-Dacians as well as the Ramantes people), with its variants: Ramatha, Ramutha and Ramtha;
- a classical phrase of the then ruling class sounds extremely arrogant; unfortunately chances are that we hear it today as well: "the working class has no rights, but only duties";
- they believed in magi and in magic rituals; at Piacenza a bronze liver was found (of Etruscan origin), divided into 45 parts, each of the parts bearing the name of a god.
However, let us stop our inquiry into the Carpatho-Danubian Etruscan heritage here and see instead who were ... the Romans.
I shall start with the well-known legend of the twins Romulus and Remus, sons of Virgin Rhea Silvia. The latter - daughter of the parent town of Alba Longa (the Alba Longa family had been founded by the Thracian Ramantes Aeneas by his marriage to Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, a local king) - a vestal virgin in Mars's Temple, suddenly gets pregnant by Mars, the god. (History accustomed us to such wonders: I will only remind you of the Carpatho-Danubian legend of Meriem, The Apple Flowers' Mother, who got pregnant, as mysteriously, by a sunray, giving birth to the two Zalmoxes, brother and sister.)
Resuming our legend, Amulius, Silvia's uncle, wouldn't believe her and therefore imprisoned her, having the newly born twins killed. However, a charitable person laid them in a basket and sent them float down on the Tiber, wherefrom, as the legend has it, they were "fished out" and fed by a she-wolf. Returning to our Geto-Dacian legend, the two Zalmoxes twins were adopted by the noble Aisepos the Pastor and his wife Brito-Lagis (the Divine She-Wolf). Roman chroniclers of those times confessed that the she-wolf legend had been taken from the Thracians. However, let us trace back the real origin of the Romans.

Oltina - Altina - Latina - Latium

Thousands of years before the Romans conquered 14% of the Dacian territory (ruled by Trajan, "the forefather") WE, the Carpatho-Danubian Thracians, had already conquered the Apennine Peninsula. Vergil knew it, long ago, whereas we, today, do not! Traces were left over as the Carpatho-Danubians migrated from nowadays' Oltina, a region in today's Dobrogea. (Altina means "greatness" or "happiness" in the Geto-Dacian language, the so-called "Vulgar Latin".)
A group of Geto-Thracian emigrants, led by the Bright Aeneas - a Thracian Ramantes - left the Carpatho-Danubian area and got as far as the Apennine Peninsula, giving the place the name LATINA ... LATIUM. Their language was to be called Latina (the Language of Greatness, the Language of Happiness). Throughout the years, "prominent researchers" have been striving to find a different origin for this Latin people; Virgil himself admitted the claim to the Thracian origin of the Roman people as he chose Aeneas as protagonist in his epic of the Latin people's foundation, having his Thracian hero start from the Trojan ruins and reach as far as the Tiber's Valley. Yet, let us see what others think of this journey.
Gheorghe Musu, in The Thracian Mythology, Victor Kernbach, in The Essential Myths, Manfred Oppermann, in The Thracians between the Carpathian Range and the Aegean Sea, Adrian Bucurescu, in Secret Dacia, M. Gimbutas, in his Old Europe, ca. 7000 - 3500 BC: The Earliest European Civilization before the Infiltration of the Indo - European People, and V. Gordon Childe, in The History of Civilization: The Aryans - all of them consider the Thracians the nucleus of the Proto-European civilization.
The Magnificent Aeneas, leading the Carpatho-Danubian Ramantes emigrants from Oltina, Dobrogea, would reach Banat, cross the Danube and stop for a short while on its southern bank, at CURTU - ZURA (the Bright Court, the White City, nowadays' Belgrade) where the idyll between the Bright Aeneas and DIDO, the Lady, the queen of those lands, seemsto have taken place. Other hundred years passed until the legend of the Thracian Aeneas, although preserving its essential elements, changed its setting for a different geographical area, and had its characters undergo certain changes. Thus, Curtuzura became Carthage, Didona replaced Lady Dido, and Oltina changed into Troja, whose Thracian citizens were part of the Ramantes branch as well. Time goes by, history changes, only for the Messapian people from the east of the Apennine Peninsula, as well as for the Venetics on the lower flow of the River Padus, to be considered today of Thracian origin (according to some, Thraco-Illyrian). Some Romanian villages still bear names such as Upper Venice, Lower Venice, or Rome. Long before the legendary name Rome was used, the name ROMULA had been fairly common with the Geto-Dacians. Not long ago, I was writing about "the Biggest Dacian Empire of our era", recalling the names of three Roman emperors - Geto-Dacians - who ruled over Rome and over the entire ancient world. The first, Galerius the Elder, was the child, born out of wedlock, of Romula, a Dacian woman from the walled town Recidava, who worshipped Zalmoxes. Galerius the Elder abolished the Roman Empire in 305 AD, changing its name into Great Dacia. Galerius (293 - 311), Diocletianus's son-in-law, had a bad reputation among the Christians as he executed the orders of his father-in-law, himself considered one of the biggest persecutors of Christianity. It seems he was also a gifted general and even likened to Alexander the Great (also of Thracian origin) by Niels Hannestad, especially after his victories in Asia Minor. The statue that was erected for him showed him holding a big brass sphere, representing the sun (according to Ioannes Lydas, 6th century AD, Fontes, II, 495). Consequently, in the 4th century AD, the Empire of Great Dacia was re-founded, the Dacians becoming once more the masters of the world. Folk songs and carols still speak of Galerius (Ler Imparat, in Romanian), the Dacians' Emperor.
Eusebius of Caesarea, writes that after Galerius changed the name of the Roman Empire into the Dacian Empire, he handed his armies the old Dacian flag - the Gnostic Snake (made of brass, leather or even cloth) - fastened horizontally to a cornel stick (according to professor Dumitru Balasa, in The History of Daco-Romania). Galerius declared himself the worst enemy to the name "Roman" (Fontis, II, 6-7) and moved the capital to Thessalonike. Lactantius, a Roman chronicler, was writing in 325 AD that Galerius the Elder was "a beast, foreign to the Roman blood" (Fontis, II, 7). Indeed, the entire army had only Dacian officers, commanders and soldiers. Their belief in Zalmoxes and in immortality made them almost unvanquished. After their victory against the Persians, the Salonic Arch of Triumph was erected. The monument was made of white marble, decked with bas-relief carvings, and was considered by the same Niels Hannestad "the most important of the tetrarchic monuments preserved", as it recorded the triumph of the Dacians over the whole ancient world, both Oriental and Occidental. In 313, before dying, Galerius decreed FREE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY. His two nephews were to ascend the throne after him: Galerius the Younger and Constantine the Great. The latter would rebuild the bridge over the Danube (built for the first time by his ancestor, Burebista).
He moves the capital to Constantinople and legally sanctions Christian worship by the Milan Edict in 313 AD. This pleased Helena, the new emperor's mother. He erects an arch of triumph in Rome on which the Daco-Ramantes are present in 8 over 3 meter high statues, representing Dacian commanders-in-chief. The two arches of triumph, as well as the three above-mentioned Dacian emperors glorify the Dacians' victories. "The Romans descended from the old Ramantes people, whose ancestors were the old Dacian tribes. Consequently, the wars between the Dacians and the Romans were nothing else than fratricidal." (Prof. Dumitru Balasa)