I read something interesting about Alexander the Great this morning. On pages 59 and 60 of Jack Fincher’s Lefties: The Origins & Consequences of Being Left-Handed, it says, “. . . legend has it that Alexander the Great . . . conquered a country whose inhabitants were left-handed and who accorded that hand the greater honor because it was anatomically nearer the heart.”
My question: Who were these left-handed people? I’m hardly an Alexander the Great scholar, but I thought I at least knew most of the big stories about the guy, yet this is new to me. I did a couple Google searches, of course, but found little besides lists of famous southpaws. Therefore, I have turned to the greatest store of knowledge on the Internet, the Straight Dope Message Board. Anybody know what ancient country, real or otherwise, this writer is talking about?
I’m just trying (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to think of which countries ol’ Alex conquered. Unless it was some very small country (that is, not Persia :p), I find this highly suspect.
Perhaps “country” isn’t the right word. It is possible that a group of people (a tribe, or something) that was conquered did treasure left handedness, but why someone would have felt the need to right that tidbit down in the first place, and have the document survive lowers the chances of this being true, if that makes sense.
Well, a lot of issues come into play here… not all cultures, especially ancient cultures, have the same viewpoints on the heart being important or honorable, or it being associated with the left side of the body (many real old drawings of the human body I’ve seen show it being in the center of the chest)… doesn’t rule either way, though.
Never minding that with terribly low literacy rates, handedness is not quite as big a deal. Consider how accurately the average computer user can type left handed, even when they are right handed and consider themselves clumsier with that hand. Also, things like using weapons are not always related to handedness. I know a lot of righties who shoot like lefties, and vice versa. This is why you are advised to do what is most comfortable.
Aside from that, the odds of a culture being all left handed are pretty damn low, unless they were “left handed” from the point of view that they fought with left-handed weapons for social reasons, as mentioned, but that type of left handedness would be a result of training. But I’ve never heard of it.
Well, there’s another aspect to confuse things as well. The Egyptians, IIRC, had a bit of an anti-left swing. In battle scenes, they would paint the enemies as being left handed (i.e. carrying their weapons in their left hand) while the Egyptian soldiers would be righties.
I can see a society treasuring left handedness because it is rarer than right, but… I have no idea what I’m talking about, so carry on.
One has to be extremely skeptical of such a report. Maybe that’s why it’s called a legend. How could there be such a country? The great majority of people are born right handed. Although handedness is not completely understood, it’s clearly related to brain wiring and hemispheric functioning. In order to have such a country, all right handed men and women would have to have been exiled, and all right handed children would have to be either killed or forced into left handedness, which would in theory be difficult, if not impossible. If such a country were to exist for more than a generation, then such a set of policies would have to endure, against many odds. Sure, you could posit a place where such a culture could possibly exist, but it’s extremely far-fetched. Furthermore, the fact that no one has ever heard of this land makes it even more unlikely. On top of that, wherever handedness has been valued or de-valued, it’s almost ALWAYS the left hand that’s despised. You must know all the history of left hand and sinister, etc. This just seems like bunk.
I shall continue to search for a left-handed people that may have been conquered by everbody’s favorite Macedonian. If necessary, I might even send a note to the author who wrote this book . . . and except for that one citationless sentence, it is a surprisingly good book. Whatever I discover, I will post here.
A tribe of all left-handed people? Of course I’ve heard of it. Several years ago I was working at a summer camp and all 20 members of the staff were left-handed.
True as that my be the odds of there being such a civilization of “natural” left-handed people, meaning people who had a left-hand preference naturaly and not as a part of weapons training or some such, are very slim, if such odds exist at all.
True, because it’s a recessive gene … If the country was fairly isolated, and the tribe occupying it started from a small gene pool, which happened to have the left-handed gene strongly represented, that trait would persist through the generations, unless and until the inhabitants began reproducing with outsiders. Kind of like red hair in Ireland-the trait, while extremely rare in general, is quite common there.
Not that they would have been conquered by Alexander, but if you read the bible…the books of Judges and Chronicles, I believe, you’ll see that a number of Benjamite soldiers are listed as being left handed, and there was a Benjamite force that could use “swords and slings as easily with their left hands as their right”
Except that studies have shown that the odds of one left-handed parent and one right-handed parent having a left-handed child are less than 25%, and that if you have two left-handed parents the odds of having a left-handed child are aproximately 45% (averaging the 40-50% figures frequently quoted). Even if all the adults were lefties, you’d still have the majority of the next generation being right-handed.
