Dig reveals Roman transvestite

[Beorn]

An old article



http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/37949000/jpg/_37949743_excavate300.jpg



Archaeologists in North Yorkshire have discovered the skeleton of a cross-dressing eunuch dating back to the 4th Century AD. The find was made during excavations of a Roman settlement in Catterick, first started in 1958.
The skeleton - found dressed in women's clothes and jewellery - is believed to have once been a castrated priest who worshipped the eastern goddess Cybele.
Archaeologists say it is the only example ever recovered from a late Roman cemetery in Britain.

The young man was found buried in a grave at Bainesse, a farm near Catterick, and once an outlying settlement of the Roman town.
He wore a jet necklace, a jet bracelet, a shale armlet and a bronze expanding anklet and had two stones placed in his mouth.
Dr Pete Wilson, Senior Archaeologist at English Heritage who has edited a book on the subject, said the man's jewellery was significant.
Jet was regarded in the ancient world as having magical powers and there is a link between the rise in popularity of jet and the increasing interest in eastern mystery religions at the time.

He said: "He is the only man wearing this array of jewellery who has ever been found from a late Roman cemetery in Britain.
"In life he would have been regarded as a transvestite and was probably a gallus, one of the followers of the goddess Cybele who castrated themselves in her honour.
"The find demonstrates how cosmopolitan the north of England was"
Cybele, a goddess imported from the east in the 3rd century BC, had long been a Roman state deity and was worshipped in noisy, public festivals.

Turbans and tiaras

Her would-be priests, or galli, castrated themselves following the example of Cybele's lover Atys, who had made himself a eunuch in her service out of remorse for his infidelity.
In the castration ceremony the galli used special ornamented clamps, one of which was found in the Thames by London Bridge and is now in the British Museum.
Thereafter Cybele's priests wore jewellery, highly coloured female robes and turbans or tiaras and had female hair-styles.

Inscriptions and statues show that the cult was well established in the north of England - there is an altar dedicated to Cybele at Corbridge on Hadrian's Wall.
David Miles, chief archaeologist at English Heritage told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Catterick [at the time]... had a very mixed population with people coming from all over the Roman Empire.
"Although this man may well have been local... the jewellery is not normal behaviour for the average Roman or average Yorkshireman of the 4th Century."
Most of the finds from the excavations are held by the Yorkshire Museum.


Source (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1999734.stm)

[Treffie]

Her would-be priests, or galli, castrated themselves following the example of Cybele's lover Atys, who had made himself a eunuch in her service out of remorse for his infidelity. In the castration ceremony the galli used special ornamented clamps.

:puppy_dp:

[Beorn]

Gene tests on a sample of "indigenous" Englishmen have thrown up a surprise black ancestry, providing new insight into a centuries-old African presence in Britain.
The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, identified a rare West African Y chromosome in a group of men from Yorkshire who share a surname that dates back at least as far as the mid-14th century and have a typical European appearance. They owe their unusual Y chromosome to an African man living in England at least 250 years ago and perhaps as early as Roman times, the researchers say.
Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester, UK, and colleagues recruited 421 men who described themselves as British and analysed their genes as part of a survey of British Y chromosome diversity. To the researchers' surprise, they found that one individual in the study carried a very rare Y chromosome, called hgA1.
This particular variant has previously been identified in only 26 people worldwide, three African Americans and 23 men living in West African countries such as Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. "It's so distinctive, it really sticks out like a sore thumb," Jobling says of the chromosome's unique sequence. He adds that it is virtually impossible for this sequence to have coincidentally evolved in Britain.
The white British subject with the hgA1 variant, however, knew of no African family connection.
Father to son

To explore the mysterious origin of his Y chromosome scientists recruited 18 other men that shared his rare surname, which dates back to the first use of surnames, hundreds of years ago, and was first recorded in the county of Yorkshire, in northern England. The researchers have not disclosed the surname to maintain the men's privacy.
The team hoped that this would help them pinpoint when the hgA1 had variant entered the lineage, since Y chromosomes, like surnames, are passed from father to son.
Of the 18 men with the Yorkshire surname, six of them carried the hgA1 Y chromosome - including one man in the US, whose ancestors had migrated from England in 1894.
Genealogical records linked these men to two family trees, both dating back to the 1780s in Yorkshire. Jobling believes that these two genealogies are connected by a common male ancestor of West African descent living in England at least 250 years ago.
Viking capture

The British men carry an hgA1 Y chromosome that closely matches the one identified in men presently living in West Africa. This suggests that the former group's black ancestor arrived in Britain within the past few thousand years. Had their hgA1 Y chromosome been introduced any thousands of years earlier, when humans first migrated from Africa to Europe, its sequence would have shown greater divergence from the one currently found in West Africa.
The hgA1 Y chromosome could perhaps have entered the gene pool in northern England 1800 years ago when Africans fought there as Roman soldiers, Jobling says. It also might have been introduced in the 9th century, when Vikings brought captured North Africans to Britain, according to some historians.
But scientists note that the majority of black men with the hgA1 variant currently live in Guinea-Bissau and nearby countries in West Africa. Because many slaves from this area came to Britain beginning in the mid-16th century, it is likely that the white men with the hgA1 variant have a black ancestor that arrived this way, researchers say.
This ancestor could have been a first-generation immigrant African or one whose family had lived in Britain for generations.
Famed writer

Jobling says his study provides the first evidence of a long-lived African presence in Britain. He adds that it raises the possibility that relationships among black and white people was perhaps more historically acceptable in Britain than some people might believe.
Vincent Brown of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, agrees and points to the example of Olaudah Equiano, a black man who bought his freedom in Britain in the mid 18th century and achieved fame for his writing. Equiano claimed to be a slave from west Africa, though some argue that he had arrived from colonial America. He lived in London and eventually married a white woman, notes Brown.
The new findings are unusual because they reveal the hidden African ancestry of white men, Jobling says. He notes that it is much more common for studies to discover or confirm the reverse. For example, gene tests gave strong evidence that the black descendents of the slave Sally Hemmings could also trace their ancestry to her "owner", the third US president, Thomas Jefferson (Nature, vol 396, p 27).
And several years ago, Jobling's team found that more than a quarter of British African-Caribbean men have a Y chromosome which traces back to Europe rather than Africa.


Journal reference: European Journal of Human Genetics (DOI: 10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201771)
Source (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11018-genes-reveal-west-african-heritage-of-white-brits.html)


Makes you wonder what people will find if they look.

[Manifest Destiny]

As someone who is part Italian, I'd like to say that it figures they found "him" in England. :p

[Spaniard_Truth]

The usual implications without hard figures. Black people were present in Roman Northern Britain? How many? African Y chromosomes have been found in a sample of British males? How many have ever been studied? Yorkshire was cosmopolitan? A mixture of what?

We all know black people were brought to Europe via the slave trade, the Romans etc. The question isn't Did they leave any genetic material? but How much did they leave?

[Tabiti]

That black man was surely lucky with so many male grandchildren;)

[Spaniard_Truth]

I wonder if someone more learned than I could give me a source on the number of Africans brought to Britain by the Romans. I've searched before but couldn't find anything about it except something about a North African division stationed at Hadrian's Wall and a few unsourced statements on fora.

Any help would be appreciated :cool:

[Brännvin]

Is that true?


Queen Elizabeth I became concerned with the increasing number of black people in England, and in 1596 she ordered that all black people be deported to Spain and Portugal, to be exchanged for English prisoners of war. She had to repeat the order in 1601, ordering her subjects.

[Spaniard_Truth]

Is that true?

Yes, it's definitely true.

I'll try and find the full edict for you.

Edit: "... whereas the Queen's majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which as she is informed are crept into this realm since the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain, who are fostered and relieved here to the great annoyance of her own liege people that want the relief which those people consume; as also for that the most of them are infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel, hath given especial commandment that the said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and discharged out of her majesty's dominions. ... And if there shall be any person or persons which are possessed of any such Blackamoors that refuse to deliver them in sort as aforesaid, then we require you to call them before you and to advise and persuade them by all good means to satisfy Her Majesty's pleasure therein; which if they shall eftsoons willfully and obstinately refuse, we pray you then to certify their names unto us, to the end Her Majesty may take such further course therein as it shall seem best in her princely wisdom."

[Beorn]

Is that true?

Yes.

http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3505

[Tabiti]

Is that true?
Why not? Blacks were seen like savages and not humans at all in the past, not like something "exotic".

[Brännvin]

Why not? Blacks were seen like savages and not humans at all in the past, not like something "exotic".

That was not my question, but why were blacks in England during the Queen Elizabeth I era?

[Spaniard_Truth]

That was not my question, but why were blacks in England during the Queen Elizabeth I era?

Some were slaves, some were merchants. The term 'blackamoor' also encompassed Moors/North Africans.

Edit: It should be noted that England's Negro population at the time was pretty much limited to London.

[Beorn]

why were blacks in England during the Queen Elizabeth I era?

You had Elizabethan adventurers raiding and pillaging the African coasts as early as the 1550s. Notable names like John Hawkins, John Lok and Martin Frobisher brought back much "merchandise" from such runs.

[Brännvin]

The English people then should kill the Prince Charles along with Prince William, and let Harry take the throne, it seems he would have some ability to repeat made of Elizabeth I :D

[Jamt]

Transvestitism in pre-Christian Scandinavia would be linked to Shamanism and Seiör/magic. And not without cause considering archeological finds among the Sami and in written sources concerning Seiör.

[Creeping Death]

"Turbans and tiaras"

Fairies and glitter, so the Romans had their own version of Dick Emery.

[Electronic God-Man]

He adds that it raises the possibility that relationships among black and white people was perhaps more historically acceptable in Britain than some people might believe.

Of course it would have been more acceptable when there were only a handful. The people of Britain had little (hardly any) contact with Africans at the time. A handful of Africans wouldn't have been seen as any threat, just a curiosity.

The author makes it seem like Britain was living in some happy-go-lucky multikulti world, which I am sure is the intention, and that since then Britain's "tolerance" has gone drastically downhill.

The UK has passed into the Dark Ages. Quick! Tell your sons to chop off their penises and your daughters to marry Africans! :tongue

[Óttar]

The skeleton - found dressed in women's clothes and jewellery - is believed to have once been a castrated priest who worshipped the eastern goddess Cybele.

Alas, my favorite ancient cult. There is a tune known as the gallyambic metre which these priests would beat out on a drum during their ecstatic frenzies.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DZwOmtWaXyY/SBL9SmvRkZI/AAAAAAAAAYE/XrZkj0J5Kt0/s400/cybele+riding+lion.jpg

Ave Magna Mater, Mater Idaea, macte esto!

http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/gallery/cybele.jpg

^ There is a statue of Her in Madrid.

[Óttar]

I am very excited to hear of this dance known as the tammoriata, a variation of the tarantella dance. The former is performed for feasts of the Black Madonna in Italy, and the beat is produced using the tambourine. I believe this is connected to the gallyambic metre used in the rites of Cybele, Her priests performed using a tambourine drum. I have been wanting to take up an instrument for a long time and this I believe, will provide the inspiration as I bought a tambourine at a Renaissance Faire many years ago.

I HAVE BEEN WONDERING FOR YEARS what this gallyambic metre sounds like, but I have still found no material or notation for it! While the tammoriata and other Italian folk beats may not be exact replicas of the gallyambic metre, I believe that they possibly could be the closest thing to it one can hear in the modern age!

Ave Magna Mater, Domina Mundi, Threnus Regiorum

Mater vivat!
:bounce

[Electronic God-Man]

You mean something like these?

wKRmSGzVfRM

CM-B_KL3PFI

[Beorn]

Here's that study in more detail.


The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants. Y chromosomes belonging to the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, haplogroup A, are regarded as African-specific, and no examples have been reported from Britain or elsewhere in western Europe. We describe the presence of a haplogroup A1 chromosome in an indigenous British male; comparison with African examples suggests a western African origin. Seven out of eighteen men carrying the same rare east-Yorkshire surname as the original male also carry haplogroup A1 chromosomes, and documentary research resolves them into two genealogies with most-recent-common-ancestors living in Yorkshire in the late eighteenth century. Analysis using 77 Y-STRs (short tandem repeats) is consistent with coalescence a few generations earlier. Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among ‘indigenous’ British, and emphasise the complexity of human migration history, as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.

Pubmedcentral (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2590664)

[007]

Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among ‘indigenous’ British, and emphasise the complexity of human migration history, as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.

Interesting.