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Volume 2, Issue 8

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And Now For Something Completely Different


published: July 18,2004

Recently a critic, who shall remain nameless, said that this website was "the deranged maunderings of an insane ego." I guess that's about as complimentary as the remarks are going to get. So in honor of this critic, I'm going to skip the apocalyptic asteroids from heaven, the thundering hordes, the efforts of forgotten mariners from lost kingdoms and tackle the urgent question that vexes us all. Did Hobbits exist? No, you're wrong. Hobbits are merely figments of a British antiquarian's imagination who became incidentally famous when hippies discovered his lengthy and ponderous trilogy sometime in the 1960's. No doubt the aftereffects of hemp had something to do with the popularity of a story where one of the lead characters bursts out blubbering every twentieth page or so, but that is incidental.1 But where exactly did Professor Tolkien get his inspiration? And could there be any truth to the idea of the little people? It is from the funerary text of Harkhuf, governor of Aswan in the reign of the Pharaoh Pepi II (6th Dynasty) that the little people make their appearance in written history. "You have said...that you have brought a pygmy of the god's dances from the land of the horizondwellers, like the pygmy whom the god's seal-bearer Bawerded brought from Punt in the time of King Isesi. You have said to my majesty that his like has never been brought by anyone who went to Yam previously...Come north to the residence at once! Hurry and bring with you this pygmy whom you brought from the land of the horizon-dwellers live, hail and healthy, for the dances of the god, to gladden the heart, to delight the heart of King Neferkare who lives forever!" - message from Pepi II to Harkhuf The first mention in classical Greek literature is from Homer: "The clamour of cranes goes hight to the heavens, when the cranes escape the winter time and the rains unceasing and clamorously wing their way to streaming Okeanos, bringing the Pygmaioi men bloodshed and destruction: at daybreak they bring on the baleful battle against them." Iliad 3.3 This strange reference is explained later by Pliny: "This tribe [the Pygmaioi] Homer has also recorded as being beset by cranes. It is reported that in

springtime their entire band, mounted on the backs of rams and she-goats and armed with arrows, goes in a body down to the sea and eats the cranes eggs and chickens, and that this outing occupies three months; and that otherwise they could not protect themselves against the flocks of cranes would grow up; and that their houses are made of mud and feathers and egg-shells." -Pliny Natural History 7.26 The Oi Pygmaioi to this day still live deep in the jungles of the Ituri near the headwaters of the White Nile, west of the mountain known to the Arabs as Jebel Kamar, or the Mountain of the Moon. To the Pygmaioi, the mountain is Baba Tiba and some African legends say this locale is the Biblical Garden of Eden. Here at the edge of Grecian knowledge of the world, the Pygmaioi have lived in an unchanging environment for up to 10,000 to 1,000,000 years - in other words we don't know for how long. But in ancient days, it seems very probable that the pygmy hunter gatherers were the first to accomplish the "Out of Africa" trek. Tens of thousands of years before the Ancient Egyptians illustrate them on the walls of their tombs, the pygmies were on the move into the furthest reaches of Asia. But before we follow their traces a quick note on race. First off, there is more variability among a tribe of chimpanzees than there is among the entire human race. Thanks to the "genetic bottleneck" imposed on the human race by the Toba supervolcano , we really aren't that diverse a species as some would have us believe. Our definitions of race are nothing more than the results of inbreeding and environment, and I'm not going to elaborate any more on this issue as it can become too contentious. I am going to follow the standard definition of a pygmy as a human who happens to be under four foot nine inches in height. Most of the pygmy tribes in Asia are labelled as negrito: "generally short-statured, peppercorn-haired, dark-skinned people found in small surviving pockets all over tropical Asia and perhaps beyond." In Yemen, the crossing point out of Africa there is a negrito population that is officially not recognized by the Arab majority, which vehemently argues that all blacks within their country come from later slave origins. But archaeological digs along the Red Sea indicate otherwise. No traces have been found in the Iranian-Pakistan region, for the simple reason no one has looked in the region known as Gedrosia. India had and has a large population of pygmies. They are described by Ctesias Indica, a Greek historian of the 5th century BC: "In the middle of India there are black men, called Pygmaioi (Pygmies), who speak the same language as the other inhabitants of the country. They are very short, the tallest being only two cubits in height, most of them only one and a half. .. Being very skilful archers, 3000 of them attend on the king of India. They are very just and have the same laws as the Indians. They hunt the hare and the fox, not with dogs, but with ravens, kites, crows, and eagles." - Ctesias, Indica (as summarized in Photius, Myriobiblon 72) There are pygmy tribes on the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean. Stranded by the rising sea levels in the wake of the last Ice Age, the legends of the A-Pucikwar tell of this time. Averaging only four foot six inches in average height they "have a singularly short life; for though [they] attain puberty at much the same age as ourselves, the twenty-second year brings him to middle life, and the fiftieth, if reached, is a period of extreme senility." if Professor De Quatrefages' can be believed. For an exhausting look at the Andamanese, I recomend the following website. andaman.org Continuing through Indonesia we find an aboriginal people in the Nicobars, and the Semang and Jakun tribes throughout Malaysia. Barrinean pygmies were among the first to inhabit Australia 40,000 years ago, and their sad tale can be found here. In the Philipines, there are still small numbers of the original inhabitants of the islands, the Agta. Physically small, dark skinned and broad nosed the Agta were there long before the Tagalogs came to the archipelago. There may have been a pygmy population in China. From the annals of the Bamboo books "In the twenty-ninth year of the Emperor Yao, in spring, the chief of the Tsiao-Yao, or dark pigmies, came to court and offered as tribute feathers from the Mot." At best guess this entry would have been recorded around

2048 BC. Skulls found in southern China are evidence of the 'Black Dwarf' presence in the mountainous regions south of the Yangtze. Folklore in Taiwan tells of the 'Little Black Men' who lived in the hills. In Thailand there are tales of a race of black dwarfs who lived in caves and nests made of palm leaves. For Europe there are no living pygmy populations at present. And the evidence becomes thin as to whether they were there at all, but we do have possibilities. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder describes a race of Pygmaioi that lived in the Anatolian highlands of Turkey. He further mentions the Catizi dwarfs who lived along the Black Sea coast before being driven away. Pliny is also considered to be something of a fabulist as he also described flying snakes. But flying snakes do exist. Tales of faeries, pixies, Germanic dwarfs and all have been as potential evidence that at one time pygmies roamed the forests of Europe, living in pit dwellings and using only stone weaponry. This "pygmy theory" of a race of "people of foreign race, misunderstood, looked on with superstitious fears, whose very ways encouraged mistrust" reached almost manic proportions during the Victorian era when such notables as A. Conan Doyle vigorously defended the notion. Though I can't confirm the accuracy of the following, "Skeletal remains of people whose average height was under five feet were found in Poland: they were thought to indicate that a pygmy race lived in the Breslau/Sobotka region around the first century B.C." There have been several finds in Switzerland of the remains of people less than five feet tall near Schaffhausen, in the northern canton, and also in Eguisheim in Alsace who would have lived in the neolithic period. It is ironic that in the British Isles where the most enthusiasm for the little people exists that if there were any "conclusive skeletal remains of these small dolichocephalic (long-headed), non-Aryan, "intrusive people" had been destroyed not by the superstitious country folk but by the bourgeois tourists trampling on the sites in their quest for the English past." 2 Without a spectacular archaeological find, the search for hobbits becomes imaginary. For now the European "pygmy theory" is just that. A theory. Update: The recent discoveries shed a whole new light on the topic:

1. "Hooray!" shouted Sam, and then burst into tears. Fellowship of the Ring, p 63. 2. The source of most of "pygmy theory" of the Victorian era came from A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients, Author: Edward Tyson which is available at Gutenberg.org if anyone is remotely interested.

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