The non-Judaean origins of Medieval and modern Jews, who were local converts

Collecting together all of the evidence and conclusions from the previous comment section, on the general topic of the origins of Medieval Jews and their present-day descendants. Just cutting & pasting the comments into two standalone posts, on related but slightly different themes, so it's easier to find with search engines.

* * *

I'm now convinced that Ashkenazi Jews are originally from Khazaria, i.e. the territory of the Khazar Khaganate and drawn from the variety of genetic and cultural groups under its administration. Not the Turkic elite themselves, but not being a WASP doesn't make you not-American. So in that sense, they were Khazars, which is a cultural, not a genetic, designation.

I'll probably write up a separate post, since it touches on a lot of what's gone wrong in science during the 2010s.

Most of it will be reviewing what others have said, but I do have some original contributions of my own to weigh in with -- linguistic ones, about the nature of Yiddish. Namely, it bears all the hallmarks of a language with a large share of its speakers being L2 learners.

That did not characterize the speech community once they were in Germany or Poland or Lithuania -- they were the sole speakers, non-Jewish Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians never bothered learning Yiddish.

So it must reflect the state of the language before they showed up in Germany, Poland, etc. And the only place where a language of Jewish religionists would have been spoken by lots of L2 speakers, is in an international / polyglot empire or an international / polyglot trade network. And the Khazar Khaganate was both of those, as was the Silk Road's western terminus, even before the Khazars began expanding into a steppe empire.

The genetics of Ashkenazi Jews in Germany in the High Middle Ages reflects that -- there were two separated / bi-modal sub-groups even genetically, with one being more "Middle Eastern" and one being more "Eastern European".

See Waldman et al (2022), "Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews..."

That attests to the highly heterogeneous origin population, and is consistent with that source being polyglot -- and needing a lingua franca that changed to be easy for L2 learners to pick up. And that's what Yiddish was.

Briefly, if Yiddish were the language for a speech community with mostly / all L1 learners, and the cultural and genetic group were mostly endogamous, it would be highly complex morpho-syntactically -- but it is in fact simplified like crazy, about as much as the imperial lingua franca of English. And unlike the never-imperial never-lingua-franca like Icelandic, or Lithuanian.

And phonologically, they don't distinguish long from short vowels, seems to be stress-timed -- not mora-timed, at any rate, like pre-imperial Latin, Ancient Greek (pre-Byzantine Empire), Lithuanian, Japanese, pre-expansion Arabic, and so on and so forth.

Yiddish speakers were never leaders of an expanding empire in Europe, and Yiddish was not a lingua franca with non-Jewish people in Central or Eastern Europe. And it doesn't go back to Classical or Antiquity times. They never led an empire during the Middle Ages, so that only leaves the trade network and incorporation into someone else's empire as the explanations -- and that puts it within the time-and-place of the Khazar Empire.

Dum-dums see "Roman" or "European" DNA in Ashkenazi Jews, and assume the only way that could've happened is if the Jews left Judaea, traveled into Rome -- or at least the Italian peninsula -- picked up Roman DNA from a static Roman population, then left along with this newly acquired Roman DNA, and wound up in Germany with some of their original Middle Eastern DNA, plus the Roman DNA they picked up along the way.

As though intermixing is a passive activity like stepping in mud, and you're tracking the mud into your destination building.

What if the mud found you -- somewhere else?

Well, mud can't move around, but people sure as hell can.

And in a post-imperial collapse environment, they have every incentive to GTFO and roam in search of greener pastures. I.e., in search of a thriving empire, which has tons of wealth and activity and dynamism and chances for upward mobility, etc. All the reasons why people come to America rather than Iceland these days.

In that part of the world, the Roman Empire went into terminal decline during the 3rd C -- no point in flocking there, or staying there, after that point.

Then there was the Byzantine Empire -- but they went into terminal decline in the 8th C -- no point in flocking there, or staying there, after that point.

In NW and Northern Europe, there was the Frankish Empire, but that bit the dust in the 9th C. Even its successor, the French Empire, was in NW Europe -- not near the Greco-Roman region. And the Viking Empire was even more remote.

There was the Abbasid Caliphate, but that might be a bridge too far for Greco-Roman people. Ditto for the later Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Islam was just too different.

That only leaves the Khazar Khaganate for enterprising strivers of the late 1st millennium. If you're in Italy or Thrace in 800 AD, what's keeping you there? Empires that collapsed centuries ago, or are currently in terminal decline? Thanks but no thanks -- let's try out luck in this whole Khazar Khaganate deal...

Eastern Meds flocked to the Italian peninsula when the Roman Empire was the place overflowing with riches and opportunities -- why wouldn't Italians and Greeks flock to the Caucasus and Pontic Steppe if that's where all the imperial action was at, in the 700s and 800s?

Empires are materialist magnets for genetic and cultural out-group members looking to move on up in the world, so of course the Khazar Khaganate would've drawn Italians and Greeks into it, mirroring and paralleling the Eastern Med migrations to the Roman Empire many centuries earlier, when *that* was the place to be.

Or maybe Jews met these Italians and Greeks in eastern Anatolia, still next to the Caucasus, somewhat earlier when the Byzantine Empire was still highly attractive to foreigners.

Point being -- especially during a weak central state / nomad-dominant era like the Dark Ages, people roam around wherever they think they'll make a better life for themselves and their posterity. Not everyone -- but a large enough minority to create an enclave within the destination. And maybe, like Italians and Irish who migrated into the American Empire, those enclave borders won't stay solid for too long...

If someone who's "mostly Irish" American has some Italian DNA, we don't conclude his Irish ancestors migrated through Italy before migrating to America. Maybe the Irish and Italians were both migrants to the same foreign destination, whether they both stayed there or not after inter-mixing.

So it must have been with foreigners of all sorts of source populations that poured into the Khazar Khaganate's territory, once they were an expanding empire and in control of massively lucrative trade routes on the Silk Road.

In Ashkenazi weddings, as one tell-tale example, there's the ritual of one or both of the bride / groom walking around a focal location near where the final marriage ceremony takes place, and the number of circles completed is either 3 or 7.

In Ashkenazi weddings, it's only the bride, not also the groom, who does the circling -- she walks around the groom, typically 7 but in some sub-traditions 3 times, at the wedding canopy location.

This almost exactly parallels the saptapadi or saat phere ritual in Indo-Aryan weddings, where both the bride and groom walk around the sacred fire 7 times, and this sacred fire is located under / inside of a wedding canopy.

In Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, and Georgian Orthodox weddings (at the least -- all Eastern Orthodox that I checked), both the bride and groom walk around the altar 3 times near the completion of the wedding. Reminder that "Greek" culture used to extend throughout Anatolia to the base of the Caucasus, and Georgia itself is part of the Caucasus.

So, the Ashkenazi wedding derives from a source somewhere between the Balkans and northern India, and north of the Semitic / Saharo-Arabian cultural sphere.

Sephardi Jews have nothing to do with this walking-around ritual in any shape or form whatsoever. It's not part of their "common heritage" as Jews. And the Ashkenazi did not pick it up from the ancient Babylonian captivity, when they absorbed some Persian / Iranian influences -- otherwise the Sephardic ceremony would have it, too. But they don't.

So, there are only two possibilities:

1. The Ashkenazi used to share a culture with the Sephardic Jews, in ancient and early Medieval times, but the Ashkenazi alone came into contact with these mainly Indo-Euro cultures and swapped out their own Semitic rituals (that would have been shared with the Sephardic) for new Indo-Euro ones. Or,

2. The Ashkenazi did not share much culture with Sephardics to begin with. So the fact that their wedding rituals look more Indo-Euro than Semitic simply reflects their own largely Indo-Euro cultural origins. This implies that a mainly Indo-Euro group adopted a Jewish religion sometime in the Middle Ages.

Given how stubborn rituals are to change, especially at highly important rites of passage like weddings, the 2nd possibility is far more likely.

This is not the only piece of evidence like this (for weddings, or culture in general) -- and in their totality, they point to a largely Indo-Euro cultural origin for the Ashkenazis.

Forgot to mention the Armenian ritual of circling 3 times -- not at the church itself, but around the firepit ("tonir") in the groom's home. This firepit is not just a utilitarian cooking tool -- it is blessed and treated with holy water to consecrate it against demonic forces. So it is just like the sacred fire in the Indo-Aryan wedding.

This also seems to delineate the 3 vs. 7 circles divide, with the Caucasus being the far-eastern end of the 3-times ritual, and to the east, it's the 7-times ritual.

I'll have to dig deeper to see where the Iranians fall within this divide, though. And presumably, it's an Iranian group who the Ashkenazis either descend from, or came into contact with, in the Middle Ages.

Ashkenazis and Armenians also share the wedding ritual of breaking a plate, and both the bride and groom's sides have to do this. Sephardics do not do this.

To only briefly cover the genetic side, since that's the least important side -- we're talking about ethnic groups, i.e. culturally defined in-groups.

This highlights the importance of including as many east-of-Italy genepools when trying to tease apart the Ashkenazis' genetic history. In ones that include Greek, those work just as well or better than Italian. And crucially they must include genes from the Caucasus, covering all the distinct linguistic groups. And then various Iranian groups, from as far west as possible, like Kurds, middle ones like the Ossetians, and Persians and Tajiks and Pashtuns to the east.

Most studies lazily condense all of the "Middle East" into one genepool, or don't even include the Caucasus in the first place!

The question is not "Middle East" vs. somewhere else -- the question is Semitic from the Levant, or maybe also Semitic from Mesopotamia, vs. Indo-Euro from the northern part of the "Middle East", and separately (though far less likely) Turkic from this same northern part.

If the story of the "Middle Eastern" origins of Ashkenazi Jews turns out to be mainly about (eastern Anatolian) Greeks, Caucasians, (western) Iranians, and (eastern) Slavs -- that's not exactly establishing their Levantine Semitic bona fides, is it?!

Ashkenazi Jews build bonfires in springtime for Lag B'Omer -- I swear to God, if I find out that at some point in history, they used to *jump over* these public fires of springtime renewal, I'm going to shit myself...

But so far, it seems like they limit their interaction with the fire to forming a circle around it, either standing still to behold it or dancing around it -- but at some distance, since these tend to be rather large bonfires, not the smaller ones that you can jump over, like the Persian Nowruz or the Turkish Hidirellez (reflecting their pre-Turkic conquest culture).

Of course that could reflect the May Day ritual from Indo-Euros, but among those closest to the Ashkenazi urheimat, like Bulgarians and Greeks (not to mention Anatolians and Persians), they jump over the fire too, not just circle around it.

Jumping over the fire is the best confirmation, but just building them and circling around them is fairly suggestive itself.

I wonder if the apocalyptic, messianic strain in Ashkenazi culture -- whether overtly religious or secularized -- actually comes from their partial Iranian roots.

Greeks and Persians already influenced the ancient Judaeans in a more heaven-and-hell, resurrection of the dead, kind of direction. Especially Zoroastrianism, with the heavily dualistic good-and-evil, messiah / saoshyant, apocalypse, end of the world as we know it, light and dark, truth vs. lies, etc.

But then that seems to have dissipated among the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, sometime in the Middle Ages.

Whereas right up through the present day, there are so many latter-day prophets who write or speak jeremiads about the upcoming apocalypse, due to the people having strayed from the path of righteousness, a savior perhaps backed up by a cadre of angels will deliver the good people from destruction, delivering them into eternal paradise, while the wicked are sent to hell and punished in a reciprocal way in which they were wicked on Earth.

Karl Marx, Trotsky, Chomsky, Allen Ginsburg, Carl Sagan (climate change, nuclear weapons, superstition, etc.), Bernie Sanders, and so on and so forth. There's so many of them, it's hard to keep track of them all, just off the top of my head.

I thought that was just part of their ancient Judaean roots, a la the Old Testament, perhaps reflecting even further-back Iranian / Zoroastrian influences.

But why didn't these ancient strains persist in the non-Ashkenazi groups of Jews? It sure as hell did among Ashkenazi Jews -- perhaps because the latter were fairly Iranian (and/or Greek, and/or Armenian -- but all reflecting Indo-Euro religion and folklore). They held onto those Iranian influences cuz they're heavily Iranian / Indo-Euro to begin with! Not just borrowing a foreign influence, like ancient Judaeans.

Ashkenazis also have old Slavic roots, not just Anatolian / Caucasus / Iranian roots. Genetically and culturally. From the DNA, looks like the Ashkenazi began as a confederation, with a Slavic group and an Anatolian-Caucasian-Iranian group.

At first the union was purely cultural, economic, and political, with genetically segregated sub-populations (as shown in the Ashkenazi burials at Erfurt in Germany from the 14th C.). Only later did they start to genetically unify and mix, such that their present-day population has genetically homogenized to a mid-point between the two source genepools.

Point being -- we can investigate the deep Slavic roots of Ashkenazi culture, not just their Anatolian, Caucasian, and Iranian roots. Not cuz they adopted such Slavic culture after they settled into the Pale of Settlement in the Early Modern era -- but cuz they brought those elements with them to their confederation during and just after the Khazar Empire.

I don't know the exact percentage, but the Slavic roots are in the minority, and the Anatolian / Caucasian / Iranian roots are in the majority.

Given how badly Israel is getting its ass whooped by Lebanon and Yemen, already a total pariah internationally -- I think the next gen of Ashkenazi Jews (meaning, under 40 or 50) will actually LIKE reconceiving of their roots, to being an exotic melange of Anatolian Greek, Caucasus, and Iranian, with a minority of East Slavic blended in as well.

Hardly Semitic at all -- but I don't think they're so committed to having Semitic / Levantine / literal descendants of Moses being the core of their identity, like the Zionist generations did.

Fun-packed, topsy-turvy times ahead!

Aaron Swartz (hacker who was Ashkenazi) looks Persian, not Palestinian (saw a pic recently on Red Scare subreddit).

Ashkenazi beatnik from 1960s Greenwich Village -- or future Ayatollah of Iran?

That is WAY more what we mean by "looks Jewish" than, say, Yasser Arafat:

Just eye-balling, without whipping out the calipers, seems like Ashkenazis -- like other Indo-Euros from the Middle East -- have higher and more prominent cheekbones, compared to Saharo-Arabian groups (whether Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, etc.).

High and prominent cheekbones are most typical of East Asians, but "Ancestral North Eurasians" ("Paleosiberians") intermixed with the Steppe pastoralists to the west, just north of the Caucasus, who went on to become the Indo-Europeans. Part of the East Asian heritage of Indo-Euros is our higher and more prominent cheekbones.

Could be other phenotypic similarities, just one that popped out to me.

I'm more interested in the ancestral DNA and cultural similarities, but it's worth a brief visit to the skull-measuring lab in order to clarify what we mean by someone "looking Jewish" -- Michael Tracey (who's half Southern Italian) says he gets mistaken for being Jewish. And so could a young Ayatollah Khamenei.

It's an Indo-Euro look, from the central region of the meta-family (not West Euro, not Indo-Aryan).

This is also related to Ashkenazi braininess and intellectual / cultural accomplishment. Sure, when they settled in Europe, they underwent positive genetic selection for such traits when they were restricted to economic niches that required being brighter than the average bulb, for centuries, and with little gene flow in or out (by that point). The Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending story.

But that story is a lot more plausible if they already began somewhat higher on average, compared to other groups. And if they had deep cultural traditions for intellectual and cultural creativity.

In the "selection for Ashkenazi IQ" article, they mention that nobody ever commented on how smart the Sephardic or other Jewish groups were -- only the Ashkenazis.

But also, that people *did* comment that Greeks were smart, Armenians were smart, and Persians were valued so much in empires of Semitic origin (like the Abbasid Caliphate) that they made up a large share of the scientists, mathematicians, poets, philosophers, etc.

If Ashkenazis started off smack dab in the middle of these various groups who were famous for being smart, and if they played a key role in mercantile activity in that part of the Silk Road (similar to their later niches in Europe), then maybe they were already halfway toward their final state, during the Khazar Empire.

Slavs, particularly East Slavs, punch above their weight intellectually as well -- although it requires societal institutional support of the kind found in empires, in order for these traits to be expressed in actual scientific discovery, musical composition, etc. Point being -- the minority of Ashkenazi genes + culture that are Slavic, would also give them a boost creatively.

Iranians punch above their weight in the International Math Olympiad, and chess (youngest grandmaster to have a 2800 rating is an Iranian Zoomer). Both fields that Ashkenazis (but not other groups of Jews) have a penchant for as well.

Twins separated at birth!

"This is what Tehran looked like before the Islamic Revolution" -- or host of Cosmos?

Susanna Hoffs, ageless super-babe rocker chick from the Bangles, is Ashkenazi on both sides of her family. She has an exotic Middle Eastern look -- but the Middle East is a vast place, with a major division between Saharo-Arabian and Indo-European regions.

So which side of that divide does she resemble? Why, she looks just like half-Armo super-babe Kim Kardashian, especially pre-plastic surgery!

Amazing similarity! Like Kim Kardashian, who is also half-British, Ashkenazi Jews are minority Slavic -- not exactly West European, but still from the Euro side of Indo-Euro.

She doesn't look like a Levantine Semitic super-babe like Fairouz or Bella Hadid (half-Palestinian, half-Dutch).

Again, I'm not whipping out the calipers to analyze which specific features are responsible for these distinctions -- cuz they're obvious at the first-glance, gestalt level.

Ashkenazi Jews are the only supposedly non-Indo-Euro group who perform egg-tapping games during their springtime new year holiday.

All sub-regions of Indo-Euros perform this game, and they are the only ones who do so. It's heavily concentrate from the British Isles all the way through Iran, but it is also attested in the far northeast of India (Assam).

The holiday may be adapted to various developments that came after the original Indo-Euro culture -- Easter and Christianity in the West and Caucasus, a cattle holiday (Goru Bihu) in Assam, Nowruz in Iran, and Hidirellez in Turkey. But all are springtime renewal holidays, putting the long difficult times of winter behind, looking forward to a newly reborn world with the arrival of spring.

The counterpart to Easter in Judaism is Passover (putting a long difficult time behind, looking optimistically toward a renewal to come), particularly the Seder dinner and ritual. Wiki claims without citing any source that Jews are known to play the egg-tapping game on this occasion, but I did track down some sources that confirm it.

They may also do a minor variation, where the game is to crack a hard-boiled -- not raw -- egg on someone's head.

All of these references are to Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardic or Mizrahi or other Jews of the broad Middle East.

While you could claim that the Ashkenazis picked this game up from the Indo-Euro societies that they settled among, that is not necessary -- anymore than it is to suppose that the British picked it up from contact with the French, or the Serbs from contact with the Greeks, or the Greeks from contact with the Armenians, or the Armenians from contact with the Persians, or the Assamese from contact with the Persian-ified Mughals.

The distribution of the game plainly fits the Indo-European territory, so the default assumption is that Ashkenazi Jews belonged to this territory as well when they first practiced the tradition, and that they all stem from a very deep ancient common ancestor game played among the Indo-Europeans during their springtime renewal New Year holiday.

It doesn't specify which sub-region of Indo-Euro territory they came from, but it does rule out a Saharo-Arabian territorial and cultural origin.

Also linking Passover Seder rituals with Nowruz rituals is the similarity between the Seder plate and the Haft-sin ("7 S's") plate, which even the midwits at Wikipedia have noticed.

Both accompany the major meal for the springtime renewal holiday. Both have the magical number 7 elements (sometimes counted as "6 + matzot" for the Seder plate), arranged in separate small containers around a plate, each one having a detailed rationale and narrative that is overtly pointed out and discussed during the ceremony. Other key items are present at the table, but not on the plate itself. Many of these items overlap or are similar (boiled / roasted egg, herbs, sweet pudding / mashed dessert, etc.). And a key sacred religious text is physically present, and read from during the ceremony.

Unlike the egg-tapping game, this ritual is far more localized within the Indo-Euro territory -- mainly Iran, with partial attestations in neighboring Armenia (boiled eggs, growing sprouts from wheat, lentils, etc. ahead of time to place on the table), and Afghanistan (the "Haft Mewa" or 7-item dessert salad made of fruit and nuts).

This narrows down the Ashkenazi origins to somewhere with a heavy Iranian influence, which have historically stretched westward to south of the Caucasus and bordering eastern Anatolia. That was the furthest extent of the Sasanian Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate, from the relevant time periods.

Encyclopedia Iranica says the nature of Haft Sin has changed over the centuries:

...Sasanians greeted Nowruz by growing seven kinds of seeds on seven pillars (setuns) and placed on their Nowruz table trays containing seven branches of vegetables (wheat, barley, peas, rice, etc) as well as a loaf of bread made from seven kinds of grain (Ketāb al-maḥāsen wa’l-ażdād, p. 361)...

They argue for a narrow view of what counts as Haft Sin, ruling out the obvious similarity to this Sasanian practice. If we're taking the broad view, this goes back to Sasanian times, but the form today must have originated later, perhaps as early as the Abbasid era but possibly as late as the Early Modern / Safavid era.

The Passover rituals were only first standardized during the Dark Ages / Talmudic era in Judaism, alongside the Sasanian era in Iran. The main Talmud historically has been the so-called Babylonian Talmud -- composed near historical Babylon, but by that time, under Persian / Iranian occupation and influence.

But much like the Haft Sin, Passover rituals seem to have varied much over the centuries. At least by the Early Modern era in Europe, Ashkenazi Jews are shown performing fairly contempo-looking Seder dinners, long after they lived anywhere near Iran or Babylon.

The two rituals are not identical, and the "four glasses of wine that punctuate the ceremony at intervals" seems to be an older, specifically Judaean practice. But it does incorporate other elements that bear an uncanny resemblance to the Haft Sin of Persian Nowruz -- which, again, is not even broadly shared outside of present-day Iran among their close cultural neighbors.

This points to a Persian (not ethnically Semitic, not religiously Jewish) origin specifically for the group whose ethnogenesis sometime in the late 1st millennium / early 2nd millennium would result in the Ashkenazi Jews (when they adopted Judaism).

Finally, there's egg decoration, which is mainly associated with the Indo-Euro springtime renewal holiday.

There is only one key area outside the Indo-Euro territory that practices this ritual for their springtime renewal holiday -- Egypt. But by all accounts, it originally was introduced to them by Christians (whose center of gravity was the Byzantine Empire, part of the Indo-Euro region), during the Dark Ages. It was maintained by Muslims as well, after the Muslim conquest. There doesn't seem to be any proof of it existing in the Bronze Age in Egypt, when it was totally Saharo-Arabian, before Hellenization and later Christianization.

And since Christianity is a global religion, and Egypt was conquered and influenced by the Byzantine Empire, I conclude the Egyptian practice is a foreign import from the Indo-Euro Byzantines.

Oddly enough, another Jewish sub-group enjoys eggs whose shells are colored / dyed / marbled -- Sephardic Jews and huevos haminados. However, these eggs are not prepared specifically for the springtime renewal holiday, but for the typical weekly Sabbath stew. So although they have a similar appearance to Easter / Nowruz eggs, they don't share the links to the important once-a-year holiday with the arrival of spring. So they seem to be a separate development altogether.

It's also not clear that they deliberately altered the appearance of the eggs -- they were just one of many items thrown into the stew pot, and after hours of slow cooking, they changed color -- like many other kinds of food after slow-cooking. Easter / Nowruz eggs are deliberately altered in appearance, to indicate it's a special ritual occasion.

By now, Sephardic Jews have been heavily influenced by Indo-Euro cultures of various types, including by the Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. (And as outlined in the next post, Sephardic Jews are local converts as well, with a substantial Indo-Euro source from Iberia, but this post is about the non-Judaean origins of the Ashkenazis specifically.) So they may presently do the more deliberate altering of the egg's appearance, but still, not limited to the springtime renewal holiday alone -- that's the only time that Christians, Nowruz celebrators, and pagan Slavs decorated them prior to eating.

Ashkenazi Jews include a roasted egg on the Seder plate for Passover, and after roasting, the shell does take on an unusual and special color and pattern. And because this is the only time they do this during the year, their ritual is similar to Easter and Nowruz, not to the Sephardic weekly Sabbath stew (and the start of Passover does not necessarily land on a Sabbath day, further severing any link between the two Jewish practices).

Although egg decoration for the springtime renewal holiday is widely attested among Indo-Euros, it isn't 100% -- no mention of it among ancient Greeks or Romans or Celts, and it doesn't seem to be present in India, even where the egg-tapping game is played (all the pictures from Goru Bihu show normal white eggs).

So this would seem to localize it to the Balkans or more likely Anatolia, through the Caucasus, including the Slavs to the north, and eastward into Iran.

Those are just the groups that other evidence points to the Ashkenazi Jews as descending from. So their special-looking ceremonial egg for their springtime renewal holiday is in agreement with a mixed Iranian and Slavic origin, and goes against a Levantine or broader Saharo-Arabian origin.