By Sh
Editor’s Note: We would like to welcome Sh, who hesitates to state much about his background, but loves to give alternative perceptions on history and our sense of selves. If you aren’t open-minded yet, perhaps a walk through his views will change it.
Years ago, I heard that Norsemen are descended from the Ariyans.
At the time I thought the proposition was absurd. I thought, how could blue-eyed, blonde-haired Scandinavians and brown-haired, brown-eyed Persians/Indians possibly be related?
A while ago I thought I’d try to learn a little bit of the Old Persian language. (circa. 2500BC) The language of the Achaemenids.
I quickly came upon something inexplicable. The word for “wolf” in Old Persian is “varka.”
When I first saw this I thought there must be some mistake, because the Old Norse word for wolf is “varg.”
I believe, linguistically, the idea of ‘wolf’ is probably among the oldest things that we have a name for. People living in temperate climates have been encountering wolves since time immemorial.
So, I dug some more. And soon enough, I was facing an incomprehensible situation.
In the modern Farsi language, the language of Iran, the word for cow is “gaw.” (pronounced ga-uv) I believe it goes without saying that cows were named in very ancient antiquity.
At this point it was obvious what I should be looking for, and where.
There is a month in the modern Iranian calendar named “Tir.” (pronounced tee-r) It is named after a god of the pre-Islamic era. Tir also means “arrow” in modern Farsi.
The Norse god “Týr” is also associated with a symbol that looks just like an arrow.
In modern Farsi the word for eyebrow is abro; pronounced ah-brew.
Mother is madar, from Old Persian matar; pronounced muh-tar.
Father is pedar, from Old Persian pitar.
Brother is baradar, from Old Persian bra-atar.
The word for “is” is ast. French est. German ist. Spanish es.
Jungle is jangal.
Daughter is dokh-tar.
Bad is bad.
Old Persian “marta” is mordeh in Farsi; muerto in Spanish; mort in French; means dead.
And last but not least, in Farsi, “to,” pronounced toe, means you. German du. French tu. Old English thou.
These, I believe, are all very ancient words. Possibly, among the first things ever named by people.
We know that Persians and Scandinavians haven’t had much contact historically. Certainly no cultural exchanges or intermarriages of any great significance have occurred in the last 2500 years. We also know that the Achaemenids could not have had any direct contact with the British.
The question that, I believe, is begging to be asked is: what does all this mean?
If we were to assume that the Germanic peoples and the Persians are descended from the same biological ancestors, then I believe it’s incomprehensible that they should have evolved to look so different, in such a short time as a few thousand years.
The indigenous peoples of Canada and the northern USA have been living in an environment practically identical to that of northern and western Europe, for at least ten thousand years. Yet, they have dark skin, dark eyes and dark hair.
So, I believe it’s safe to say that Germans and Persians could not have descended from a single people who lived any time after the end of the last glacial period.
What is evident, however, is that our biological ancestors, while being of different race, all spoke the same language at some point.
I think the obvious question now, is how can this be?
Apparently, the Norse gods came from a place called “Asgard.” Some people have identified Asgard as Asia. More specifically, the Central Asian steppes; the alleged homeland of the Ariyans. The same Ariyans that Darius I of Persia claimed to have descended from, 2500 years ago.
Here I would like to advance a theory that, the original Ariyans were the people who spoke a language that we have identified today as Proto-Indo-European.
I have assumed that in a time pre-history, there was a small community of civilized people living somewhere in the Central Asian steppes. I will call them the Ariyans.
I speculate that in the greater geographical area surrounding this community, there were only scattered wild men and women.
These wild people may have either had no linguistic abilities at all, or extremely primitive ones as required by their wild, and probably solitary existence.
At this point, my contention is that these wild men and women were the survivors of an upheaval that had destroyed human civilization. Or perhaps they were the descendants of those survivors.
I think it’s possible to account for a solitary lifestyle by the fact that cannibalism would be a certainty under the conditions following a total collapse of society.
The Ariyans then, may have been another group of survivors, that unlike most people, who had reverted to a wild state, were able to maintain some degree of their previous civilization(s).
They probably had all kinds of artifacts, books and technology saved from their destroyed world.
I am betting that these people spoke a language that we vaguely know today as “Proto-Indo-European.”
At some point the Ariyans must have ventured outside of their area. This probably happened once they were able to achieve a certain degree of stability, security and proficiency.
So, these civilized men and women, probably well-armed and masters of reason, found the wild people who were scattered all about. They may or may not have introduced themselves as gods, and either enslaved or civilized these wild humans, depending on who you ask.
They gathered the men and women into settlements and taught them the Ariyan language. Then they taught them a code of conduct. They prescribed behavior for the wild people.
It seems like the “gods” taught some of these people how to become gods, while others only to be slaves.
And so each new “tribe” thus formed, was isolated.
Some expanded and conquered others. Others were conquered and disappeared.
As the generations came and went, the language which had been the same at first, became a whole family of languages derived from the common source.
The cultural descendants of these Ariyans live in a vast geographical area today. All the way from India to western Europe, the Americas and Australia.
Also noteworthy is the fact that in the modern Farsi language, the word for god is “khoda.” The suffix -a or -ha in Farsi makes a word plural. In Farsi, “khod” means self. Hence, the literal translation of khoda is “the selves.”
Before the monotheistic era, the idea of god was always expressed in the plural form, gods.
The word for self (I, me) in the Old Persian language is adam. In modern Farsi the word adam means a human being, with no reference to gender. In English, Adam is widely known as the name of the mythical first human being.
A human being is also called a “man” in English. In Farsi, man is reference to the self. (I, me, my)
What I would like to propose is that these wild men and women most likely no longer possessed any significant degree of self-awareness, or a self-image, when the Ariyans found them. And the Ariyans, as beings with a high degree of self-awareness, capable of rational thought, not unlike the people of today, seemed like ‘gods’ to the savages.
karlsie
[Quote=Article]We know that Persians and Scandinavians haven’t had much contact historically.[/quote]
That’s not entirely true – while they migh not have had much direct contact, the Norse actually controlled a number of major hubs in which artifacts from lands as far away as India have been recovered. And where there is the exchange of goods, there often is an exchange of ideas as well: and since the ancient world had an extensive trading network that extended from the Silk Road to Palestine (which made the area a major commercial hub that various empires fought over for centuries) to Mediterranean sea lanes that extended all the way to Scandinavia it’s not inconceivable that similar words found their way to opposite ends of the known world (as well as goods).
Let’s say that the TV was invented in an English country. So, today the whole world knows it as Television.
Az, if what you’re saying is correct, then the Old Persians must have invented concepts such as eyebrow, you, mom, etc. And then exported them to people all over Europe.
-f
Possible, but then again there’s also the possibility that the old Persians acquired these notions from somewhere else or that the foundation for such ideas came about from contact with foreign traders and they just built upon those.
The problem with memes is that no one can ever truly own them (copyrights be damned – even those can be difficult to enforce!) – they can pass from person to person (or people group to people group) like a virus: by the time the meme has run its course, it’s hard to say just where it originally came from because it has passed to so many other carriers who also had memes of their own (which can modify spreading memes – creating newer and newer variations of them) – all the while altering the very mental make-up of its carriers; by the time the meme has spread as far as it can, is it even possible to really imagine a world without it (let alone ask the right questions regarding the meme’s original form)?
I think that this is likely to be a subject area that linguistic scholars will debate for centuries – and they may never quite reach the point of tracking down those original memes.
I understand what you’re saying, Az.
But, someone, at some time, must have been the first to name cows. And I think it’s fairly obvious that the Old Persians weren’t that someone.
I think it’s also obvious that Europeans couldn’t have gotten the word “cow” directly from the Old Persians either.
So, all this leaves me with, is to conclude that a certain people knew cows and the practice of animal husbandry, before our current recorded history began.
IMO, our languages, and our history with it, all began once those ancient people introduced cows to the ancestors of the Persians, Indians and the Europeans.
Also, while the ancestors of Persians and Indians may have been the same people, with the Europeans this is highly doubtful.
-f
Also, consider the word for “dead.”
I believe, death is one of the first things any human being would have noticed on becoming self-aware.
If different tribes of people with self-awareness were naming the concept of ‘dead,’ separately and on their own, we should have countless different words for it.
It’s unthinkable that a people who already have a word that means “dead” would accept another people’s word for it.
Do you see where this is leading?
-f
Sh
Regarding similarities between languages far apart see this: http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/language.htm
It hints at the possibility of major natural events as the reason for more or less permanent clan/cultural and hence language separation.
In addition, most maritime expressions are of scandinavian origin – that figures if you accept the the idea of vikings teaching the world how to sail.
English-Danish
Ship -Skib
Mast -Mast
Oar -Åre
Boat -Båd
Starboard -Styrbord (meaning litteraly the side where you steer)
Keel -Køl
Sail -Sejl
Rudder -Ror
Rigg -Rigning
LoneStarr
I see your point sh, but still the evidence surrouding your hypothesis is circumstancial – at this point it’s all just speculation as to who came up with what word for what concept first and the reality is that it could have been anybody who set in motion the chain of events that would culminate in modern language. I suppose it could have been the old Perisans who set it in motion, but I think that it’s *equally* likely that the credit is owed to another party (perhaps the ancient Sumerians or Egyptians may have made those contrabutions and the Persians adopted them? Or maybe the Persians came in contact with another people lost to history and spread their memes to everyone else? Who knows for sure?).
Nonetheless, I suppose it is fun to speculate…
I know. But isn’t linguistic evidence pretty much circumstantial all the time? 🙂
And about the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians.. I think they were already long gone when the Ariyans came. Apparently, most ancient Sumerian cities were buried under loads of silt and rocks at some point.
Presumably, the Semitic peoples of today are the descendents of certain people who lived in ancient Sumer, and supposedly emigrated there from Egypt.
I think it’s safe to say that the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians had nothing to do with the development of the Proto-Indo-European dialects.
-f
Actually, the Aryan languages began to diverge circa 2000 B.C.E. – the Egyptians were a major player up until around 1070 B.C.E. (and they still remained a significant regional force until Alexander the Great conquered them, which was the beginning of the Ptolemaic dynasties) and the Sumerians stuck around until about 1940 B.C.E. before being surplanted by the Amorites and (eventually) the Babylonian Empire. So, there is at least some chance that these civilizations had at least some indirect measure of influence on their language (and vice versa) before and during this time period.
I see things differently, Az.
I see that the original Sumerians and Egyptians were destroyed, and then savages appropriated their culture and society. Personally, I would say that this happened around 3000BC.
But I accept your date of 2000BC for the Ariyans.
-f
You should look into the fact that it has been proven beyond all doubt that the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza were not, and could not have been built by Khufu, Khafra and Menkaura.
It is pretty clear that Egyptian culture was on the decline after 3000BC.
With the Sumerians, it’s altogether much more simple and obvious, IMO.
-f
@ sh,
“I see that the original Sumerians and Egyptians were destroyed, and then savages appropriated their culture and society. Personally, I would say that this happened around 3000BC.”
And what evidence do you have to support these assertions?
I think the original post somehow failed to convey my point.
What I am proposing, is that all of our basic skills of civilization, including language, agriculture, domestication of animals, stoneworks, etc. were developed by unknown peoples before our recorded history began.
IMO, the savages who took over the Egyptian and Sumerian cultures, had no idea how their civilization had been developed.
As for evidence, it is out there, Az. We just need to look beyond our currently-accepted views.
Also, to me, the word savage implies people who have very little self-control, like the people of today.
-f
A very radical hypothesis indeed – but again, your problem is evidence: what do you have to substantiate this hypothesis other than a number of common words found in various languages (which can be explained via other means – i.e. trade contact)? Out of the box thinking is great as long as you have a foundation to support it, but I don’t see much of a foundation here…
Graham Hancock – Fingerprints Of The Gods
Graham Hancock & Robert Bauval – The Message Of The Sphinx
John Anthony West – Serpent in the Sky – The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
Colin Wilson – From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Evidence is presented in these books, to the point of exhaustion.
And please, don’t be put off by what Wikipedia says about these authors. Read their works, and you will see that their evidence is irrefutable.
-f
Also,
Colin Wilson & Rand Flem-Ath – The Atlantis Blueprint, is quite interesting.
These works are NOT in the same class as James Churchward’s “Mu” series, IMO.
-f
Dude, these people have no background in archeology at all! Yes, they have some interesting ideas and certainly do have backgrounds in other fields (such as occult mythology and journalism) – but they lack the necessary training to understand archeology and thus their credibility is tainted from the start.
Simply put, I’ll take the word of the archeologist over these guys on matters of ancient history for the same reason I trust the word of a doctor over a physicist in matters of medicine – the former has the tools to understand that filed of study, the other does not…
Heh, I think the real evidence is so simple that it’s just ridiculous.
Today we speak language without knowing how it was created. We use our capacity for “reason” without knowing what it really is.
We haven’t domesticated any new animals since pre-history. We’ve caged them in zoos sure, but that isn’t the same as turning an auroch into a cow, or a wolf into a dog.
All of our crops were handed down to us by unknown people. We have no idea how the domesticated seedless banana achieved pan-tropical distribution before the dawn of history.
Out in the desert here, there is a certain little plant that looks exactly like barley, but its seeds are infinitesimally small. Anyone who has seen barley will have no doubt that this little plant is its ancestor.
There are countless varieties of wild maize in Mexico, that follow the same pattern as barley over here.
We have dozens of fruit trees that can only be propagated by cuttings. We don’t know where the first cuttings came from.
Really, if we were the people who did all this, shouldn’t we know how we did it? What with all our advanced technology and superior knowledge. Heh.
-f
Az, a background in archeology is achieved by spending a few years studying books at a university.
You sure seem to love the system that you claim to hate so much..
-f
Az, please don’t take offense, but if you took the time to educate yourself on all matters pertaining to humanity, you would no longer see a distinction between archeology, linguistics, anthropology and even medicine.
Knowledge is one. It has no different “fields.”
-f
I’ll just state my basic premises here. It’s as good a place as any.
Mankind is fucked up. Her whole establishment is fucked up.
To me, this implies that her government is also fucked up, together with her sciences and education programs.
I think if we want to find the problems and fix them, we need to assume that every single thing we know is wrong, and fubar. Work from here.
For example, to me, just the name of “The Education System” sounds like some one size fits all brainwashing program for sheep.
This education system educates us on what we are and what the world is. And it provides us with norms of behavior and beliefs, also with descriptions of existence.
But what this system is lacking, IMO, is the true knowledge of what we are, where we came from, why we are here, etc. (ie. the knowledge that counts) So it turns all these questions into a matter of beliefs and faith, and disregards them whole, as religious mumbo jumbo.
What the education system actually does, IMO, is define basic beliefs for us. We then build our whole understanding of reality based on these pre-defined beliefs. If anyone reading this, can claim that they believe absolutely nothing, then I congratulate them: the establishment despises you.
Today, we don’t care about anything beyond immediate gratification, because this is how we’ve been trained to be. Cows have also been trained to be exactly this same way.
As for the pursuit of knowledge, or science, this is also a corrupt system, I believe. Our scientists are people who get their salary from the establishment. To me, this is enough reason not to trust their “science.”
The establishment has split up the concept of “knowledge” into separate fields, that it calls professions. At higher education institutes, people are trained for professions, rather than provided with means of satiating a thirst for knowledge.
For example, we have countless numbers of Psychologists and Psychiatrists today. By our own definition, these people are masters in the understanding of the human soul, spirit and mind.
If any doctor reading this, really believes they are masters of the human soul and mind, GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Psychiatrists are trained to keep people in “consensus reality.” This is why they get paid.
To me, consensus reality sounds like some magical fantasy land where people live until death, while they are for all practical purpose, asleep and dreaming.
Mankind is fucked up. She doesn’t know how she came to be what she is. She doesn’t know what is to become of her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here.
-f
In short, I perceive that the whole human establishment on earth is geared for raising people into servitude.
This would be great if we were actually serving our society. But we are serving a select number of corporate entities and people.
-f
Okay, i’m late jumping into the fray, but i do think that Sh raises an interesting hypothesis. He first introduced this idea at the forum, and i was intrigued by it because of my experiences while tracing the origins of Native American history. I visited a pyramid in Mexico that had only been partially excavated because in order to finish the excavation they would have to remove the church that sat on top, which the local people refused to do. While i was resting about halfway up the steps, i noticed that graffiti had been traced into the ancient mortar before it had dried. What astonished me when i looked closely was that the lettering was not hieroglyphics, but cuneiform.
This was only my first surprising discovery. After quite a few years, i got to know the Zapotecan people, said to be the oldest of all the North American tribes, older than the Aztecs, Mayans or even the Olmec. The language of the Zapoteca sounds almost exactly like English, it’s just that the words are in a different order and have different references.
During my ten year immersion, i learned not to have a great deal of respect for Western anthropology, as they invented an entirely different scenario of their society, politics, history and education than what the tribes said took place. The tribes are all in agreement. The Zapotecans were here first. The Olmec came from somewhere else. They were black. They built an advanced civilization, then disappeared.
The Mayans appeared next, bringing with them incredibly advanced technology and a history that they, too, were from somewhere else, and were the survivals of a terrible, world wide calamity. The archeological finds support the evidence of their advancements; not just the calendars, but the pyramids themselves are in exact juxtaposition with various constellations. They have a road that extends for hundreds of miles through the mountains of Oaxaca and the jungles of Veracruz. They have hundreds of miles of hydro-powered canals that are still in use to this day. They performed successful, multiple surgeries on brain tumors. They had batteries and air conditioning.
The Book of the Mayan details the catastrophe and outlines the type of society they needed to survive. The book of the Hopi is in complete agreement with the Book of the Mayan. The Navajo are in complete agreement with the Hopi and in recent years it has been confirmed that the Navajo and the Athabascan, which extends all the way into the Arctic Circle, are the same tribe. The tribes, from Mexico to the Arctic Rim are in complete agreement as to their history, but Western Anthropology insists on warping it and insisting they were a primitive people who had somehow managed to figure out some rather amazing technology. Don’t let Colonialism hinder you. The anxiety is to present themselves as the most advanced and brilliant that has ever been. We all know that’s not true. Isn’t it fun to open the mind to other possibilities?
“Isn’t it fun to open the mind to other possibilities?”
Well, actually.. It’s not. 😉
-f
It is fun I think to mine possibilities. Here’s something else to consider.
You stated that the Aryans/Persians had no contact with the British Isles which is true in pre-history. Yet, Rome most certainly did and they used, Greek, Egyptian and Persian/Farsi to communicate. In addition their legions were filled with captives of other countries. In addition The Isles had contact with Gauls, Goths, Norsemen and all manner tribes from the mainland.
It is my thought that it may not necessarily be a cataclysmic incident that split the language but rather that we see similarities due to trade.
There have ever been adventurers and ever will be, they would have carried their languages to far away lands.
Yet it is entirely possible that migration was the factor. And/or raiding and wife stealing.
I just don’t see why people who already have words for mother, father, brother, daughter, etc. should accept another people’s terminology. This doesn’t happen today, anywhere in human society.
Since the evidence points to the Old Persians as the first who were recorded to have used these particular terms, the only other possibility I can see, which isn’t even possible, is that the Old Persians must have conquered the Romans, and forced their language on them. Or, maybe the Romans didn’t know concepts like mom and dad and the Persians taught them? Ridiculous, I think.
I try to keep an open mind, but so much so that my brain doesn’t fall out. 🙂
You see, it’s completely acceptable in that sense, to say that Europeans call the latex of papaver somniferum “Opium,” because the Persians called it Afion. Obviously, Opium was introduced to Europe from Persia, which is its endemic zone.
It’s also understandable that Europeans would call the pressed resin of cannabis indica “Hasheesh,” because that is what the Persians called it.
Opium and Hasheesh were introduced to Europe by the Persians. Is this same thing true for cows and wolves and death?
-f
@ sh,
I’ll admit to having my own criticisms of the educational establishment (particularly it’s “in the box” thinking concerning the social studies [particularly the misnomer of “political science”] and its tendency to focus on “career skills” [i.e. mold the student into a worker drone]) – however, regarding the separation of knowledge into fields I’d say that got that one right: being a good chemist doesn’t necessarily translate into being a good physicist (especially not theoretical physics, which is filled with all manner of counter-intuitive ideas) and likewise being a good physicist doesn’t make one a good doctor and so forth – if all knowledge is one (as you claim), then it logically follows that the study of one field would translate into knowledge of all fields.
While I admit that people in different fields can introduce out-of-the-box ideas and challenge conventional wisdom, such people that have very limited training and experience in a given field tend to lack the tools to adequetly develop those ideas – hence they make all manner of error in their work. Concerning the authors you mentioned, it’s best to look upon them with the eye of a skeptic and check their claims against known acheological data: as Grainne and I pointed out, there’s other possible explinations for the phenomena you describe which don’t require some kind of “Atlantis” scenario – and based on Occam’s Razor it’s best to go with the simpler answer as there’s a lot less to explain than with the more complex answer.
I’m not saying “you’re wrong,” BTW – just that you might want to have more empiracle data before you start making these claims. After all, much of history *is* but a set of agreed-upon lies: who knows just how much of our historical record is “the truth” and how much is fabricated anyway?
Az, how can you make any claims about books that you haven’t read?
You’re right about empirical evidence, though. Can’t argue with that.
But I stand by what I said, It is impossible for words such as mom and dad to have been spread via trade routes, IMO.
-f
@ sh,
“Az, how can you make any claims about books that you haven’t read?”
I can make claims about them based on what I know of the authors – you would be a little less inclined to approach a treatise on heart surgury written by a historian with the level of credibility than a treatise on the same subject written by an actual heart surgeon, yes?
“But I stand by what I said, It is impossible for words such as mom and dad to have been spread via trade routes, IMO.”
It may be true on the individual level that such words fixed into one’s psyche, but keep in mind that language develops over the course of centuries or more (well beyond the space of a sinngle human lifetime) – things that are not possible on the individual level can (and often do) happen on the collective level as the group mindset evolves and newer and newer memes are introduced into the culture.
Man, talk about judging a book by its cover..
-f
By your logic, unless someone is “certified” by the establishment, they should STFU and die.
I don’t like this logic.
-f
Alright, I have another example here.
In Finnish “minä” means me, “sinä” means you.
In the Turkish language spoken in vast areas of Iran today, “mänä” means me, while “sänä” means you.
In Finnish “isä” means father, “äiti” means mother.
In Iranian Turkish, “ata” means father, “ana” means mother.
The Turkish and Finnish languagess are not derived from Proto-Indo-European. I don’t need a degree from Harvard to know this.
The Turks live inside Iran today, and historically, they have been part of Greater Persia.
The Finns also live within the “Ariyan zone.”
Why have these people kept their own words for mom, dad, you and me? Occam’s razor to the rescue? Let me try, because Turks and Finns aren’t descended from Proto-Indo-Europeans.
-f
In modern Farsi, there are only two basic words for mother; madar and maman. (pronounced mom-on)
In modern English, there is also only two basic words for mother; mother and mom. (and then there’s a whole list of words derived from mom: mommy, mama, etc)
So, what is going on here?
Az, I really appreciate your criticism. Keep it coming, please.
-f
Don’t be shocked, but in Farsi the only other word for father (besides pedar) is papa or baba. (baba is the Arabic-Farsi version of papa, because the Arabic alphabet has no ‘p’)
-f
In Arabic, father is “ab” and mother is “om.”
Don’t tell me the Arabs have never traded with the rest of the middle east and Europe.
It’s just really obvious. The Arabs are a Semitic people. Why on earth would they accept Proto-Indo-European words for concepts that they already have names for?
-f
Alcohol was first discovered by a man named Zakaria Razi. He named it Al-Kohl.
At that time, no one knew such a thing even existed. Obviously, everyone knew that wine made them drunk, but no one knew why.
Today, the whole world knows Al-Kohl, and we all call it Alcohol, etc. because this is the name by which the concept was introduced to us in the first place.
If people already knew Alcohol, then no one would have bothered learning a new name for it, IMO.
-f
@ sh,
1. I never said that no experts should just STFU (as you put it) – only that those without the necessary background who offer commentary on areas outside their field should be treated with a little more skepticism than those who *do* have experience in that field (see above example concerning the historian and the heart surgeon): I’m all for out-of-the-box thinking, but if said thought is to have intellectual integrety it needs to be backed by research and experience – with is what the authors you cite lack.
Non-conventional hypothesis are fine (regardless of who proposes them), but in scientific fields they need to be backed up by data – and analyzing data in any given field requires a certain measure of training and experience.
2. Regarding the linguistics you allude to – I’m no expert, but I don’t find it unlikely that these words you allude to could have come about via cultural contact (particularly the Arabic/Farsi similarities – they lived in close enough proximity to have at least semi-regular contact with each other). And the spread of Arabic words to Europe is also fairly easy to explain considering the level of contact Europe had with the Arab world since the fall of Rome (ex. the Moorish colonies in Spain, the Crusades, the re-opening of oriental trade routes at the beginning of the Renaissance period, etc…).
I know, it’s your opinion that certain concepts can’t be acquired by cultural contact – and like I said, such assertions make sense at the individual level but language does not develop on the individuals level: it’s a cultural phenomena and it changes to reflect the changes in the collective mode of thinking – and I for one have no trouble imagining new words for things like parents or the self being used as a culture evolves and its perspective on such things undergo metamorphasis (ex. change in relationship between parent/child, chage in relationship between individual and society, etc…).
Certainly, if you take a gander at Monument to the Sun God – obelisk, you will witness some of the scribed lingo of the time. That would suggest some uttered communication that also later took writing form.
Here’s a photo for your observation. http://ii-prod-rw.marketlive.com/DesignToscano/images/products/en_us/source/CL51714_1.jpg
Are you suggesting they hadn’t formed human sounds to accompany these?
The Aryan Civilization wasn’t even in existence until the Vedic & Epics Periods of around 1500-500 BCE.
By this time the Chinese civilizations were living along the banks of the Yellow River and Yantzee, having begun 5000 BC. In 1765 BC the Shang Kings were writing on bones. I’m confident that the words of these languages and the words from the Aryan languages were not identical. They come from two different root groups.
In the Indus Valley 3000-1500 BCE, the ancient city called Harappa had people who used various animals to travel over land. They had ships that sailed around the Arabian Sea. And during this time, they had pictographic script, which has not as yet been deciphered; but they have determined similar seals were found in Mesopotamia, which seems to indicate possible trade between these two civilizations.
So it’s more than likely that language evolved in the Sumerian Era and spread or in the Shang Dynasty. It could have been in Peru in 2000 BC during the Chavin Civilization…the oldest recorded in South America or the Nazca people of that region who created giant outlines of animals in the desert.
Why on earth would you speculate that ONE civilization contributed a single language and that this civilization was from one region? It defies logic.
Well, this a a fascinating discussion! Thank you sh for your article. It is most intriguing. I applaud sh for his insightful conclusions. It’s very easy to arrive at said conclusions but as Jennifer points out, humanity is not likely to have just one common ancestor, lost in the mists of the earthly time-space-continuum.
China is a great example of an ancient and quite advanced civilization, drawing nothing whatsoever from the Indo-Aryan culture. Not to say they had no contact, as they certainly did, based on the proto-Turkestani settlements, found in Western China.
Still, China was well on it’s way towards it’s advanced degree of linguistic, agricultural and overall social development by that period.
Now, as Jennifer also suggests, there were definitive trade routes between the Indus Valley peoples (in Mohenjo Daro and Harapa) and both, the Sumerians and the Egyptians.
I am a jeweler by trade and have studied archaeology, cultural anthropology, mineralogy and entheogenealogy, for decades now. What is irrefutable fact is that gemstones and precious metals origante in isolated locals and migrate through complex trade routes. The carnelian agate (an orange variety of quartz that looks like tomato soup) found it’s way to Dynastic Egypt from the Indus Valley and that lapis lazuli (la ja-ward in Persian) mined in Afghanistan, some 4000-5000 years ago, traveled first to Sumer and Ur, then onward to Egypt.
In short, “the good stuff” makes it’s way to receptive cultures as trade currencies. the same is true for many of the entheogens which circulated between these early civilizations. Even so, this does not explain many of the issues sh raises. and if an ultra-ancient civilization was the root of many of these cultures (perhaps Atlantis & Lemuria), how was it that these proto-civilizations became so damned smart i the first place? Keep in mind, many tribes upon this earth never developed such advanced understanding and profound intelligence.
I often wish I could see clearly into the distant past and observe the nuts & bolts of our collective growth, as an organic species. what we do have for evidence is based on metaphysical epiphanies and clairvoyant visions by mystics like Edgar Casey and many, many others.
@sh, what are your thoughts along this line? Do you feel that it was alien intervention that brought these early cultures to their zeniths… or was it the encoded “knowledge” hidden in the entheogens which humanity has been gifted by nature? I am curious as to your conclusions, speculations, deductions and/or intuitive insights.
-JP
BTW,
I may have meant entheology, when I typed “entheogenology”? My reference is to the the Sacred Medicine which so fills the pages of the Indo-Aryan Rig Vedas and the Persian Zend Avesta. Yes, I refer to Soma and Haoma.
The evidence has been piling up that this elixir was an spiritually euphoric drink made from Syrian Rue bush (“the burning bush”)and the Acacia tree. There may or may not have been hashish in the mix? It’s New World parallel is, of course, Ayahuasca.
Since Zoroaster is in the line of ancesters of Gilgamesh known in the actual Sumerian Kings list as King Etana or Atun, who saught the bush of life, the very ancient plant of life may here have been partially identified. Through the grand son of Zoroaster, Nimrod or King En.Meru.dug, who founded the Egyptian 2nd ynasty, that this plant of life became central in the Mysteries and healing schools of ancient Egypt.
It has been unearthed in recent decades, that the early Egyptian mystery schools (Essene) also imbibed this Sacred elixir, as did the Gnostics and later, the Alchemists. Many of today’s most astute researchers believe that these were connected by one initial movement of God-intoxicated mystics. Thoughts?
I’m not claiming that every civilization on earth stems from the Ariyans or Atlantis. Where did I ever say this?
All I’m saying is that certain language similarities today among Europeans, Persians and Indians, coupled together with the fact that they all claimed descent from the Ariyans, while they are obviously not descended from the same biological ancestors, implies that the Ariyans were the ones who taught them their language and culture. (in Old Persian “aryan” is synonymous with nobleman)
I find it absurd to believe that different tribes all over Europe and the mid-east invented their languages separately, because even the dumbest linguists today have noticed that all these languages are derived from a common source, namely Proto-Indo-European.
I believe that around 2000BC, the vast majority of Europeans, together with the Persians and the Indians, all spoke the same language. Today this language has spread out into branches, but the “first words” have remained the same. (2000BC may not be accurate, but it’s impertinent)
Az, I don’t think you understood. There are no word similarities between Arabs, Turks and Finns, and Indo-Europeans and Persians today, where primary concepts such as cow, wolf, mom, dad, etc. are involved.
Zen7, I really like your ideas. I hope you’ll stick around.
-f
Jennifer, all I can say is that you-yourself, are a descendent of Proto-Indo-Europeans aka Ariyans, because you speak English and Spanish.
You might feel the need to deny this, but what does that even mean?
The Sumerians and the Chinese, however, came from different linguistic lineages. This is a fact.
This article has very little to do with race.
-f
I think it’s the name of the article that’s throwing you guys off.
The fact that you’re debating points that have nothing to do with the basic ideas in the OP is really strange to me.
-f
Zen7, I think it’s possible that language was developed in the first place by people who were sharing a telepathic mental connection as produced by entheogens like Ayahuasca.
In said states, people see the same visions and share the same meanings without words. From here, it’s a very short step to make a sound and then reach consensus on what the sound implies.
I find it fascinating that all of our linguists today, masters and experts by the establishment’s definition, have absolutely no idea how a non-speaking monkey could have started talking all of a sudden. And yet they still believe themselves to be experts.
I think it’s the ultimate irony to try and explain how language came to be, by talking about it.
-f