Rapid Fire
Plato and the Avars
- 01 May 2024
- 2 min read
Recent scientific advances have uncovered Plato's burial site and shed light on the Avars' historical significance, unveiling two intriguing past chapters.
- Plato (427-348 BCE), a prominent philosopher from Greece, was a student of Socrates (470-399 BCE) and a teacher of Aristotle (384-322 BCE).
- In North India and Pakistan, they are known as ‘Sukraat’, ‘Aflatoon’, and ‘Arastu’ respectively.
- Ancient papyrus scrolls (writing material used in ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean) discovered in the 18th century from Herculaneum unveiled Plato's burial in Athens' Academia garden.
- Avars, a dominant power in eastern central Europe from the late 6th century CE to the early 9th century.
- The Avars originated from eastern central Asia and settled in the Carpathian Basin. The researchers collected DNA from Avar cemeteries and used a method called ancIBD to investigate the social practices of the Avars.
- ancIBD detects Identity-by-Descent (IBD) segments in ancient human DNA (aDNA). IBD segments are long DNA sequences shared between two individuals and are a signal for recent genealogical connections.
- The findings reveal that Avars avoid cousin marriage and have minimal intermarriage with non-Avars.
- They practised Levirate unions (a widow married a male from the family of her deceased spouse), which is not common in Europe but were an established feature of steppe peoples from Asia and had a strict patrilineal structure.
- The Avars originated from eastern central Asia and settled in the Carpathian Basin. The researchers collected DNA from Avar cemeteries and used a method called ancIBD to investigate the social practices of the Avars.
