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Much of the credit for labeling “white” people as Caucasian
is due to a young woman from Georgia remarkable for her youthful beauty.
Captured in one of the Russo-Turkish wars, she was brought to Muscovy
where she died young, of disease. In death she was more useful to scientists
than in life. The flesh was removed from her skull, which could then be
measured precisely. From Moscow her skull was sent to St. Petersburg and
from St. Petersburg to Blumenbach at Göttingen, who acclaimed it
as the most perfectly proportioned human skull. Blumenbach took its beauty
as evidence that humanity originated on the southern slopes of the Caucasus
Mountains. As humanity spread out from there it was transformed by environmental
factors that effected changes in stature, color, and bone structure. Following
Peter Camper and L. T. Sömmerring, Blumenbach concluded that the
races most “deformed” from the Caucasian original were the
Mongolic and Ethiopian (African) peoples. Also deformed but to a lesser
extent were Malay and native American peoples.
In the mid-nineteenth century, T. H. Huxley attributed the “Caucasian
mystery” to “intellectual hocus-pocus.” In fact Blumenbach
did not pull the term out of thin air, nor was he unique in considering
the Caucasus to be the original location of humanity. The designation
Caucasian was formed in the process of scientific discussion, and Blumenbach’s
system did not acquire authority over night. Over the course of twenty
years in the late eighteenth century scientists discussed and debated
different schemes of human origins. C. Meiners proposed a variant of Blumenbach’s
thesis in 1786, placing a second major branch of humanity in the Altai
Mountains, but by 1793 he was forced to abandon any speculation about
the original location and retreated to the traditional division of humanity
into two branches, black and white. In the second half of the eighteenth
century heavyweights like Haller, Linnaeus, and Buffon participated in
the discussion, as did a host of lesser names from England, France, Germany,
and Italy. By the early nineteenth century Blumenbach’s model was
still standing and was gaining support from other disciplines such as
the linguistics of J. C. Adelung and Franz Bopp, the discoverer of the
Indo-Germanic language group.
But why the Caucasus? Blumenbach said the proportional beauty of the inhabitants
of the southern Caucasus was attested by “a cloud of witnesses”
who had traveled through that region and central Asia in the recent past.
I consider briefly the reports of medieval European travelers like Giovanni
de Piano Carpini and William of Rubruck, also Chinese (Faxian, Hui Chao)
and Muslim (Ibn Battuta) accounts, but the bulk of Europe’s knowlege
was known from explorers from the seventeenth to the ninteenth century.
Scandinavians like Bering and Laxmann were employed by the Czars as the
Russian empire expanded southward and eastward. Germans were invited to
colonize the Volga valley just as they were in Pennsylvania, and scientists
like D. G. Messerschmidt, R. Forster, and the Great Northern Expedition
of Gmelin and Steller evaluated and classified the flora, fauna, and culture
of central Asia, Siberia, and even Alaska. By the early nineteenth century
when Alexander von Humboldt traveled to Siberia the foundation had been
laid for a thorough understanding of the locations, customs, and identities
of the dozens of ethnicities inhabiting the steppes, mountains, and valleys
of central Asia.
These travelers also had a wealth of knowledge to draw on, the bulk of
it compiled by humanists and philologists looking for the earliest traces
of Greco-Roman culture. Recent discoveries by paleoanthropologists suggest
that the peoples of Europe migrated northward out of Africa in the paleo-
and neolithic eras. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries however
the Europeans were thought to have originated in the vast reaches of Central
Asia. The Mongols and Huns thundered out of Asia to terrorize Roman and
medieval Europe. The Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars also wrecked destruction
in the early middle ages before settling down in Pannonia and the Balkans.
But so did the nations considered to be more civilized, Celts and Goths,
Italics and Greeks. L. C. Valckenaer traced the origin of the ancient
Greeks to Central Asia where they were the neighbors of their barbarian
adversaries, the Scythians and Sarmatians.
Like my first
book, this is a project of anthropology and philology. It illustrates
how scientists and scholars combined ancient authors and modern travel
literature to construct an image of the primitive mind and the migration
of human nations. Its purpose is to show that, although we in the twenty-first
century are only rediscovering the myriad ethnic groups in Central Asia
through military intervention and petroleum exploration, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth century Europe knew with surprising depth and precision
the location, identity, customs, and languages of Central Asia before
they were subsumed by the Russian Empire.
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