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by ilayn
1581 days ago
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You are confusing tribes with nations. None of those examples you gave had any nation-states especially greeks, persians and you can add ottomans, ming, mogul so on, they all had empires with tribal ruling with a dynasty and tribes, with extremely diverse ethnicity impossible to form a coherent nation with a common denomination. There is hardly ever a turkish grand-vizier in Ottoman catalogue to give a trivial example contrary to what you would expect from a "national" point of view. Race exists but not nearly relevant as you claim and has nothing to do with nation-states. I don't claim to side with the parent but you are not nearly correct either. IF there is a footnote to a source, you better read it next time. Wiki is not authoritative but not complete junk either. |
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However, I don't agree with some of the distinctions you're making. Tribes are nations. Like, literally, "nation" is the Latin word for tribes that weren't one of the the three tribes of Rome. "Race" is another synonym; Webster defines "nation" as "A part, or division, of the people of the earth, distinguished from the rest by common descent, language, or institutions; a race; a stock." If a tribe or a race is roughly coextensive with a state, that state is a nation-state. So race has everything to do with nation-states; this is one of the main reasons I think it's important to point out that countries like the United States are not nation-states, despite the efforts of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and that nation-states are something we can do away with.
Consider ancient Greece. Classical Athens was considered to consist of four tribes, and the state of Athens only governed a tiny minority of Greeks, so the political division into states just didn't coincide with a division by common descent, language, or institutions even very roughly; and Greece remained divided into such city-states until being conquered by the Romans. Mycenaean Greece was far more politically unified, but much more diverse in terms of ethnicity, language, and institutions; archaeological evidence confirms Homer's hearsay on this count. Biblical Israel was classically divided into twelve tribes, and the myths of Abraham and the Exodus was used to falsely claim a common descent for what archaeological evidence tells us were Canaanite people who spoke the same Semitic language as their neighbors but began to distinguish themselves by the cult of Yahweh; and we have both documentary and archaeological evidence of their subsequent divisions and reunions, continuing through the intertestamental period.