Historiography and Nationalism - Nationalism and Ancient History

Nationalism and Ancient History

Nationalist ideologies frequently employ results of archaeology and ancient history as propaganda, often significantly distorting them to fit their aims, cultivating national mythologies and national mysticism.

Frequently this involves the uncritical identification of one's own ethnic group with some ancient or even prehistoric (known only archaeologically) group ("antiquity frenzy", a term coined by the 'Warring States Project' of the University of Massachusetts Amherst). For the ideological implications of such identifications, it is secondary whether mainstream scholarship does accept as plausible or reject as pseudoarchaeology the historical derivation of a contemporary group from an ancient one. The decisive point is the ideology, often assumed implicitly, that it is possible to derive nationalist or ethnic pride from a population that lived millennia ago and, being known only archaeologically or epigraphically, is not remembered in living tradition.

Examples include Albanians claiming as their origin the Illyrians, Bulgarians claiming identity with the Thracians, Iraqi propaganda invoking Sumer or Babylonia, Georgians claiming as their origin the Mushki, Hindu nationalists claiming as their origin the Indus Valley Civilization — all of the mentioned groups being known only from either ancient historiographers or archaeology. In extreme cases, nationalists will ignore the process of ethnogenesis altogether and claim ethnic identity of their own group with some scarcely attested ancient ethnicity known to scholarship by the chances of textual transmission or archaeological excavation.

Historically, various hypotheses regarding the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been a popular object of patriotic pride, quite regardless of their respective scholarly values:

• Albanian Nationalism: Protochronism, descent from the Illyrians and Pelasgians
• Northern European origins of an Aryan race (Germanic mysticism, Nazi mysticism, Ahnenerbe)
• Greek nationalism: Epsilonism
• "Indigenous Aryans" and Archaeoastronomy and Vedic chronology in Hindu nationalism (see also Out of India theory)
• Pan-Turkism and Neo-Eurasianism postulate mythical origins of humanity or culture in Central Asia, (Sun Language Theory, Arkaim)
• Dacomania or Protochronism is the corresponding concept in Romanian nationalism.
• Slavic nationalism: Sarmatism, Bosnian pyramids, Macedonism, Illyrian movement
• Armenian nationalism: Armenia, Subartu and Sumer
• Pakistani nationalism : Indus valley civilization