Denmark won. Bonnie Tyler, representing England, was totally eclipsed, but for those of us who remember the 1980s, the Bay City Roller seem to have been strong contenders:
(Footnote: Yes, I am aware that the Celts, long before they were driven to the stony Atlantic fringes of Europe, probably picked up both the kilt and the bagpipe from the Greeks.)
? Martin
Most of the bagpipe elements predate the Greeks. They picked it up from the Egyptians.
PeakVT
Are we caring about that?
Origuy
Actually, there’s no evidence of kilts being worn in Scotland before the 16th century. Bagpipes, however, have been around since the Hittites.
JGabriel
Anne Laurie @ Top:
As for the kilt, the Celts and Greeks may have both had them from an even earlier tribe. Tocharian mummies from the Tarim basin in China had tartan (plaid) fabrics similar to those of the Celts. Since the Tocharian languages‘ closest relative in the Indo-European family appears to be the Anatolian family (including Hittite), the Tocharians, or at least their language, separated from the rest of the Indo-Europeans by as much as 4000-5500 years ago, with not much contact afterwards outside of the Silk Road trade.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that kilts and tartans originated with the Anatolian tribes, or the proto-Indo European tribes, and spread to the later tribes (Greeks, Celts, Tocharians) as a shared inheritance — but that’s probably the best place to start looking.
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Villago Delenda Est
If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!
MattF
I’ll allow that an ancient Hittite may have discovered that if you squeeze a bag with your armpit, you can produce an exceptionally rude noise. Whether that counts as ‘inventing the bagpipes’ is less clear.
JGabriel
Origuy:
Perhaps kilt is the wrong word. I’m thinking of it as basically anything in a plaid fabric that can be worn wrapped around the waist like a towel or pencil skirt
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JGabriel
@MattF:
Do you mean the Egyptians that ? Martin mentioned?
I was talking about plaid/tartan fabrics originating with the Hittites or some earlier IE tribe. I assume the bagpipes, or whatever its ancestral form was called, were a later invention.
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TheMightyTrowel
Apologies in advance. Archaeologist rant:
-“Celts” is an abysmal term to use when talking about the nw fringes of Europe. Yes the greeks called some people Keltoi (they were probably – though not 100% obviously) in central Iberia. The Romans called lots of people Gauls. No one called anyone at the fringes Celts
-“Celts” in the nw European fringe sense really only appeared as an identity in the 17th century – largely in relation to developing ethnic identities linked to languages in confrontation with hegemonising political and social forces in France and England. Celts, as such, were invented by intellectuals who wanted to express their scottishness/welshness/irishness/bretonness in a culture that valued acculturation to the mainstream
-tartan – as in scottish tribal plaids – and simple plaid weaves are not the same thing
-we have evidence of woven plaids dating back to at least 1000 BC (and probably older, it’s just that that’s where we have fabric from) – one of the reasons plaids are common is that in warp/weft weaving they’re relatively simple to make and easy to distinguish. There is no ancestral link between 1000 BC plaids, hittite/egyptian (WTF???) woven material and Scottish people
-wind instruments using long pipes and bladders are reasonably common around the world. The bagpipe as such is only a few thousand years old. again, no links between hittite/egpytian and scots instruments (again, WTF????)
-the whole Scottish couture thing is also 17th century (more or less) in origin. It’s not ancient.
-quite a lot of the narratives which link nw europe and the eastern Med developed out of explicitly racist ideas of ethnicity, identity and cultural worth in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Seriously, look up the intellectual history of the bad science you spout before you spout it.
TL;DR: No! Bad!
Anne Laurie
@TheMightyTrowel:
Oh, c’mon. Lots of people have fond memories of the Bay City Rollers…
TheMightyTrowel
@Anne Laurie: wink wink, nudge nudge.
MC Simon Milligan
@TheMightyTrowel: ”Celts” is an abysmal term to use when talking about the nw fringes of Europe.
It’s a perfectly cromulant word for describing a cultural/linguistic group whose speakers survived into the modern era in the NW fringes of Europe. Just as apt as the Latin derived “Greek” (probably from the small proto-polis of Graia in Boeotia whose 8th century BCE colonists made up a significant portion of the inhabitants of Cumae near Rome) is for the Hellenic peoples of SW Europe really.
It’s not like the Arabs don’t call all of us western Europeans “Franks”. Such is language.
Xenos
@TheMightyTrowel: A lot of ‘Scottish’ culture derives from the Victorian period, following the trends of the royal family and, not incidentally, helping to promote the british cloth industry around the world. Being of lowland Scots ancestry, my family’s tartan pattern dates from 1870 or so. It is quite garish, using colors that would not have been available before the industrial revolution.
Xenos
@MC Simon Milligan: And there is some consistency to Roman uses of the term ‘Gaul’, whether for the cisalpine Gauls or the Galatians in Anatolia. Whether it is fair to lump the Britons, the gauls of Gaul, and the indigenous non-Basque Iberians together as part of a larger complex is an open question. As a matter of archaeologically-defined, material cultures, I would say it is fair to lump them together until you find enough distinctions to split them.
Maybe they are all latter-day Beaker people. I just love that there is a culture known as ‘Beaker People’.
Foregone Conclusion
What, no love for Romania?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmI4wgyWKU
oldster
@Xenos:
Weren’t the Beaker people eventually driven to extinction by the Honeydew people? There are still archaeological traces of the Bunsen event. It’s a paradigm example of bunsenated equilibrium model.
JGabriel
TheMightyTrowel:
My source was The Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, an expert on textiles and a Professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College.
Barber noted similarities in the four thousand year old fabrics preserved with the mummies to the weaving and patterns of Indo-European fabrics, with mention of similarities to Scottish plaids, and she used those similarities as part of her data to conclude that the Urumchi mummies were Indo-European. Given that we know Tocharian was used as a religious language up till at least 800 AD in Xinxiang region, identifying these mummies as ancestors of the people who spoke Tocharian is not that far of a stretch.
The Hittite speculation is my own, but if one suggests a shared origin for Celtic and Tocharian plaids, then you’d have go back at least 4000 years to find it. Clearly trade is a plausible explanation, and/or independently creating the same techniques and patterns is also possible though it does seem less likely.
I don’t know that anyone was using Celt strictly in that sense. I was using it as a modern term for the tribes that spoke languages in what we now call the Celtic language family, which includes: Brythonic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish), Gaelic (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx), Gaulish (Lepontic, Galatian, et. al.), Hispano-Celtic (Celt-Iberian, Gallaecian), and, no doubt, sundry others of which I’m not aware.
If you have a different word we should use for the peoples who speak or spoke those languages, please, pray tell, tell us what it is — as I note you did not.
JGabriel
@TheMightyTrowel: FYI, Link to Google Books preview of The Mummies of Urumchi.
It’s an interesting work, if you want to check it out. I’m sure I haven’t done it justice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: The Bay City Rollers were a 70s band. Don’t try to pass that shit off as the product of my era.
JGabriel
JGabriel (Me): :
Correction: Barber noted similarities to ancient plaid twills found in Austrian salt mines that were woven by Celtic-speaking tribes in Hallstatt, circa 800–450 BCE, not Scottish twills.
oldster
So I watched the Eurovision winner, from Denmark, called “Only Teardrops.”
The song was meh, the singer is very fetching.
But here’s the weird part: more Scots kitsch.
No, the guys aren’t wearing kilts, exactly, but the two drummers and the piper sure give off a Scottish vibe.
Is this some weird European way of nodding to UK culture while not embracing England? I’m thinking about the fact that so many of the entries also have English lyrics (“Alcohol is free” ain’t Greek, and “Only teardrops” ain’t Danish). That must feel like a weird kind of linguistic hegemony to have to suffer under. We are all Scots now?
Tokyokie
Bay City Rollers? They may dress similarly, but they sound a lot more like Brave Combo (and that’s a good thing).
Ash Can
@Tokyokie: Yes, that’s a good thing, but Brave Combo has a much more refined and authentic sound than the Bay City Rollers.
MC Simon Milligan
OK. I’ve watched all the entrants and nine out of ten were, basically, the lovely, leggy Pearl Forester.
Svensker
@Foregone Conclusion:
That is the weirdest frigging thing… Is he serious? He’s actually got a pretty good counter-tenor. But, jeez.
Amir Khalid
@Anne Laurie:
The “Bay City” Rollers were phonies. They came from Edinburgh, and chose their name by throwing a dart at a map of the US; it landed on Bay City, Michigan, where they only ever played one gig.
Mike E
@Omnes Omnibus: GTF off my lawn!
Tokyokie
@Ash Can: Yes, but Brave Combo’s still together, and, in fact, you can catch them live at the Natioinal Polka Festival next weekend in Ennis, TX (a city that still has a multiscreen drivein movie theater.)
@Amir Khalid: But the Bay City Rollers at least inspired a Nick Lowe EP.
Yatsuno
@Svensker: That was…bizarre.
pseudonymous in nc
@Foregone Conclusion:
Seriously. They didn’t even get douze points from Moldova. When not being a gay vampire for Eurovision, that guy’s a professional counter-tenor. What a voice.
Grover Gardner
I’m just noticing now, but the new format really sucks bigtime in an iPad, in non-mobile mode. Anyone else have a problem?
Xjmueller
@Grover Gardner: The iPad version looks good, but I couldn’t comment. Had to change to non-iPad mode to do that. Scrolling through this post was a challenge too in mobile mode. The non-mobile version is a little funky on my iPad, but not terrible.
EdIted to fix spelling and to add FYWP.
JGabriel
Tokyokie:
Good lord, I loved Brave Combo back in the eighties. I had no idea they were still together.