Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscription Deciphered?

“the Luwians from western Asia Minor contributed decisively to the so-called Sea Peoples’ invasions – and thus to the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.”

What an ignominious end, that the tales of their military adventurism should end up as material for building a mosque.

James Mellaart has form in the forgery business:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorak_affair

I usually am very fond of scholarly forgery stories, but this is too much for me. I don’t trust James Mellaart. I don’t trust Eberhard Zangger. I don’t trust Woudhuizen (who reads the Phaistos disk as Luwian, and Etruscan as a Luwian dialect). When it comes to the Dorak treasure, I don’t trust Mellaart’s (friend? enemy?) Aydın Dikmen. I don’t fully trust Susan Mazur, who has doggedly worked to debunk Mellaart’s story, but also has a career as an anti-evolutionist and exposer of the “evolution industry” (see her blog for some Mellaart articles.)

I also don’t trust conveniently telegraphic translations like “guard Wilusa [an ancient name for Troy] (like) the great king (of) Mira (did).” (quoted in the livescience article).

The intro and bibliography to Zangger’s book on the subject, are at his academia.edu site. The details of the reading will be published in the Dutch journal Talanta in December (where Woudhuizen sits on the editorial board and where he has published various articles in the past.)

Thanks, Y. I saw the story a couple of days ago, noted the impressive lack of verifiable provenance and corroborating evidence, and meant to do some research on the circumstances.

“What is the origin of the name “Troy” for Wilusa?”

It’s the Hittite form of the name that became Ilios in Greek, which furnished the name for the Iliad.

It was decided by the Iliuminati.

“It was decided by the Iliuminati.”

Do. you. mind?

Is it unfair to say that if ‘translations’ of inscriptions are interesting, they’re probably wrong?

I don’t remember the exact quote from from Ventris, something like “I object in principle to finding names of deities in old inscriptions.” That was in a letter, by way of apologizing for actually having found a goddess’s name in a Linear B inscription.

Y: Do. you. mind?

Huh, a reference I don’t take. What’s even worse: An Illuminati reference that my daughter doesn’t take.

Many seem to think that T(a)ru(w)iša denoted the land and Wiluša the city, similar to e.g. Lakedaimon/Lakonia and Sparta.

I read Brett’s question as implying “How do we know that the Hittite and Greek names all denote Schliemann’s archaeological site?” But that may have been coloured by the direction of this thread. And I read Jim’s answer as connecting a couple of those dots.

About Troy : Jim wrote “It’s the Hittite form of the name that became Ilios in Greek,” which strongly suggests he was talking about Wilusa, not Troy.

Indeed, but the sentence is not entirely clear. I would rewrite it as something like : Troy is ultimately derived from Truisa, the Hittite name of the city. The local name was Wilusa, which the Greeks adapted as Ilios.

the voice of a stuffy upper-class hostess

Of course! I’m sure everybody heard that but me. But I’m tone deaf for hints about etiquette even in real life. Or that’s what people keeps explaining to me.

Kloekhorst argues that the Trojans were Tyrrhenic speakers and Troy is etymologically the same as Etruscan: https://www.academia.edu/2250637/The_Language_of_Troy_2012_

Yes, thank you Greg. Why migrate all the way from Troy/Wilusa to central Italy? Was there nowhere they could stop off on the way? (Or perhaps there was: are there other Etruscan enclaves in the Eastern Med?)

And did they have enough ships to take a significant population? Did they make multiple voyages? Or did the bulk remain in/around Troy/Lemnos and were overrun?

Is this like the Vikings/Norsemen founding Normandy?

Does anyone have access to this Beekes article? The main justification that the Kloekhorst excerpt gives for an Etruscan language being spoken in Bronze Age Troy is “Beekes says so”. I’ve got to admit I’m not super reassured by Kloekhorst using Aneas’s journey from Troy to Latium as evidence of the Anatolian origin of Etruscan. What’s the logic here? That, rather than Virgil making a conscious effort to connect Rome to important events in prestigious Greek culture, he’s channelling a folk memory (over 1000 years old at that point) of Trojan invaders who would’ve been the ancestors of the Etruscans, rivals of Rome, rather than Romans?

I’ve finished what Zangger has put online of his forthcoming book. No red flags, no new revelations. There is one detail that is glaringly wrong – Luwian and Hittite are declared to have resulted from two separate IE incursions, and there’s no mention of the Anatolian language family – but that’s probably irrelevant to the rest of the book.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover this paper in English on Zangger’s academia.edu page; it’s a surprisingly good short summary of his German book which has whole chapters on some of the sentences in the paper.

As much as I like the argument by Kloekhorst & Beekes that Etruscan came from Troy, Lemnian may not be evidence for it: Eichner thinks it’s due to a back-migration from Italy (parts 1 and 2 of a long paper about every word on the Lemnos stele, in German); this is somewhat bolstered by this interesting paper (don’t read the comments, though).

I mistrust Woudhuizen mainly because I think that if one can confidently read Luwian (or language X) in the Phaistos disk and in the Etruscan language, one can confidently read Luwian (or X) in anything.

If the texts are straightforward Luwian hieroglyphics, and have not been read before only because they were inaccessible since decipherment, then surely some other Luwianist will comment on them soon.

Beekes, The Origin of the Etruscans.

Yes, Beekes claims the siege wasn’t of Troy/Wilusa, but a folk memory of some other siege. The Greeks transferred the story later to be about Troy.

Troy was invaded/destroyed circa 1200 BC, by movements of peoples from the East/Asia Minor, as part of the disruptions associated with drought (the so-called “Sea peoples”). And that forced the Tyrrhenians/Trojans westwards, after several coastal skirmishes ending up in Tuscany, where they biffed out the Umbrians.

Only, Beekes’ writing is so chock-full of ifs and maybes and creative re-imaginings of episodes for which there’s no archaeological evidence. You couldn’t say it’s false, so much as that it’s unfalsifiable.

I like the interpretation ‘the shore people’, which is entirely generic. Of course, Gilbert Murray’s ‘neighbors’ (cf. πέλας ‘near’) is also reasonable, and parallels neighbor itself, from neah ‘nigh’ and gebūr ‘dweller’ (cf. boor and dialectal bor). There’s a nice etymological triplet in Dutch from this root: buur ‘neighbor, fellow, dude’; boer ‘farmer, peasant, knave (at cards), pawn (in chess)’; bouwer ’tiller, builder‘.

>It was decided by the Iliuminati.

First time I’ve missed a pun and could blame it on an outdated vision prescription. That dotted I …

>I’m much more likely to believe a proposed translation that says things like “15 [measures] of barley and […] to the priest[?].”

and

>his conclusions are so tentative that I’m inclined to accept them

This is my winning ticket! I’m going to score huge career successes with a series of mildly interesting forgeries that build towards a stunning new paradigm that I will write up in papers that advance it only cautiously and provisionally.

But you’d expect the oldest Etruscan culture to be centered on the trading ports and the inland minimg regions to be conquered from there.

My impression that a distinct Etruscan culture grew out of central Tuscany may be just that. This could of course be a case of language and culture having separate origins. The civilization grew out of the Italic Villanovan culture, while Etruscan was an elite language imposed on the Umbrian population by Tyrrhenian traders&raiders. This could also explain why so little Etruscan survived into documentation.

>I was pleasantly surprised to discover this paper in English on Zangger’s academia.edu page; it’s a surprisingly good short summary of his German book which has whole chapters on some of the sentences in the paper.

Stesichorus must have been extraordinarily influential, to wrest the story of such a central figure as Herakles out of the Dardanelles and place it at the mouth of the Mediterranean, naming the Atlantic as he did, and have all his countrymen believe him ever after. All pinned to a weird story his contemporary, Solon, brought back from Egypt.

Of course, Stesichorus cause had already been advanced by Hesiod a century before Solon and Stesichorus, tying Atlas to the Hesperides.

It’s amazing that Zangger was able to untangle the whole thing based on the exact, and no doubt accurate, details of Plato’s retelling of the story from his friend’s grandfather’s great-grandfather, who got it from a friend, despite the fact that even Plato didn’t figure it out.

I can sympathize with Zangger’s desire to leave Stesichorus and Hesiod out of his paper. He must have been so angry at their devious trickery.

I’m intrigued at where Zangger will suggest the Hesperides *really* were. Maybe they were the nymphs of the golden light of sunset from the point of view of the Black Sea.

And one can only marvel at what other stories Zangger may one day magically connect to a Luwian speaking Troy. Prester John? The missing Romanoffs?

Yes, and the fact that that sentence suddenly introduces a council of the gods – the one the plot of the Iliad begins with – is supposedly not a coincidence either. (That’s in the book, not the paper.)

Stesichorus must have been extraordinarily influential, to wrest the story of such a central figure as Herakles out of the Dardanelles and place it at the mouth of the Mediterranean

Columnas Herculis legimus et in Ponto et in Hispania, as quoted in the paper and discussed at greater length in the book.

>Wherefore he assembled together all the gods into that abode which they honor most, standing as it does at the center of all the Universe, and beholding all things that partake of generation and when he had assembled them, he spake thus: …

What suggests this is the very assembly that launches the Iliad? Did the gods only assemble once? Were their schedules otherwise quite busy? It’s introduced in a way that suggests Zeus will righteously chastise the Atlanteans for their wealth and lust, not consider bringing an end to a war in its 9th year.

>Columnas Herculis legimus et in Ponto et in Hispania, as quoted in the paper and discussed at greater length in the book.

As written by Servius, 700 years after Plato, 1,000 years after Hesiod, 1,600 years after the supposed events, closer to birth of Zangger himself than to the Bronze Age collapse that Zangger would have us believe Servius is a source for. With the empire subdividing, the Mare Nostrum being diked into smaller ponds, and Servius tendentiously attempting to knit it back together via his commentary resuscitating Virgil’s idea that the ends of the earth in the myths of Troy and Heracles were the proper bounds of a united Roman world.

Is he a source on the origins of Atlantis? Or a partisan commentator casually dropping a word about the Mediterranean without ever considering someone could connect it to Atlantis?

Was Servius artfully mentioning that Menelaus passed through one, Hercules the other two of the three main exits from the Mediterranean, which was common knowledge, because it was useful to underline again (if falsely) that a united Roman empire had a continuity that went back to the Bronze Age, that the Mediterranean was a natural unit of culture and regime since time immemorial?

After all, there is no real reason to bring Herakles into the discussion. Proteus had a direct connection to Pharos. The only reason to bring Herakles in is to engirdle the Roman world.

Or was Servius voicing, unsourced and offhandedly, a milliennium-old seditious theory that is otherwise not extant in the many, many ancient expositions of Hercules, Troy and the myths of Gadir and Lixus?

I find the latter idea pretty unpersuasive.

As to the theory that Plato was moved to write and then abandon a book about a true tale handed down by Solon’s friend’s great-grandson, let’s consider it. He is privy to a story he already found fascinating. Now, he realizes the story also has unprecedented links to THE story, the Iliad, one of the foundational works of literature of his nation and culture.

Zangger’s theory is that he drops it because those links to the Iliad were true, and he’s no longer interested.

I submit that that’s absurd. If Plato indeed noticed parallels to the Iliad (and some of the parallels proposed by Zangger are just ludicrous – it’s the same place because Atlantis and Troy both experience northerly gales! And the Atlantis story describes the Greeks as warlike, while we know that the Greeks who attacked Troy were warlike!), but if Plato indeed noticed parallels and felt they were true, he would have been even more excited.

Imagine going over some story you heard from a friend about his great-grandfather, and suddenly realizing that the central character who lived in a cabin in Illinois a long time ago, whose story you found so interesting that you’d already begun a book about him, was also the young Abraham Lincoln! And you’re one of the preeminent writers of your day, with the ability and the reputation to put it across and make sure everyone believes you.

Do you drop it like a live grenade?

If it were even accurate that Plato had heard this story from Critias, and then dropped it when he noticed parallels to the Iliad, isn’t it much more likely Plato decided that Critias either made the whole thing up or embellished lavishly and unimaginatively with details purloined from Homer?

And instead of either theory, isn’t it that much more likely that Plato was writing about Atlantis not because he had access to an unknown but true history, not because he’d heard anything remotely like it 5th hand from the great grandson of a friend of some old Athenian lawgiver, who in turn got it via translators with agendas, from the priests in Sais, with surprising details that anyone along that chain might have decided to grab from the Iliad to make up for lack of verisimilitude. But that instead, he just made up a pedigree for a story he had wanted to tell to illustrate a point about ideal republics and their cycles of life and death? That he himself provided all the details from Homer. And that he dropped it because he came to believe it no longer served his purpose?

I mean, c’mon. What better way to have a free hand to show why regimes fall than to posit some realm that magically disappeared from the earth, and the only person who could contradict you is some long-dead priest in a former capital of a land that has since gone through repeated cycles of conquest and overthrow.

Those are parts of why I think Zangger’s Atlantis theory is somewhere on the silly/fraudulent spectrum, rather than a plausible hypothesis. And I think it’s relevant to how we receive his new theories about other things with surprisingly tight relationships to his Luwian-speaking Trojans.

Which parts are the geographic details that resemble Troy so suspiciously?

Is it the abundance of elephants in the country?

Is it the way that, “when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, it became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers?”

Is it that “whatever fragrant that now grows in the earth” grew there? Now there’s a detail you can pin down.

Is there an island near Troy named for Gadeirus? I might have thought this was clearly Gadir = Cadiz.

Did Troy ever hold sway over all the country from the Pillars to Egypt?

Did Schliemann find a temple with a roof of ivory, inside an enclosure of gold?

Can you point to the remains of the series of concentric circles of water and land 2-600 meters wide that protected the city? The innermost of these circular canals ran around the whole plain, 10,000 stadia in length, that is, roughly 1200 miles.

Or is it the straight canals at intervals of 100 stadia (6 miles or so), cut 100 feet in width? And it does say intervals, the implication being that there are 3+ and the text makes it sound more like dozens of these – one every 100 stadia feeding into the 10,000 stadia-length circular canal. They are also said to have transverse passages cut between them.

In the face of this description of an intricate network of straight, circular and transverse canals broad and deep enough for ships, Zangger points to two rock-cuts, one of which is said to have been too far above the plain to hold water.

To me, that seems an adequate summary of Zangger. Not deep enough to hold water.

The quality of Zangger’s thinking is shown by the fact that in a published paper in which he is trying to prove that Atlantis was really Troy, he points out that Atlantis was said to have had a navy of 1,200 ships, and indeed, the united Greek army of Homer had 1,185 ships. Notice the sleight of hand there?

Zangger is just doing free association on whichever details he can find the most strained connection to. There is nothing solid to hold onto in the entire essay.

Of course I know that silly and fraudulent aren’t the same thing. I just don’t know whether Zangger is a conman or a doofus.

Can you point to the remains of the series of concentric circles of water and land 2-600 meters wide that protected the city?

Zangger certainly tries in the book. As I said, wait for Christmas.

I don’t think “barely two dozen” as the number of living humans who can read Hieroglyphic Luwian is a fair estimate. I can’t read it, to be sure, but I personally know a few of those who can. I don’t see a single one of them on the advisory board of the Talanta journal. I wonder: was any expert on Luwian invited to review the submission?

I wonder: was any expert on Luwian invited to review the submission?

If not, the credibility of the journal will take a severe hit. But stupider things have happened.

The ancient Greeks had four names for themselves, of which the Romans spread the rarest one

Hellenes, Ionians… can’t think of the last one?

IIRC, Graecas (I might have misspelled it) comes from the name of Graia, a small colony that happened to be the closest to Roman territory.

January First-of-May says: Hellenes, Ionians… can’t think of the last one?

Achaeans, Danaeans in Homer

Hellenes, Achaeans, Danaeans, and wasn’t graikoi was on rare occasions generalized as an endonym, too? I don’t think all Greeks ever called themselves Ionians; even the i-a-wo-ne mentioned in Knossos are clearly not an overarching term.

Exotic names like Rasna can only be rendered pronounceable by sticking something in front, like ‘Ta’ or ‘A.’ I once floated the theory that Arzawa was the Etruscan homeland, known to them as Rasna-wa. (Or Ras-wa.)

Dropping ta from heaven seems highly unlikely, but Ras-wa becoming Ars-wa and then Arts-wa (spelled with an extra a in the middle for cuneiform reasons) is conceivable… if Rasna is indeed composed of ras- and -na.

He ignores the final /s/ (what happened to it in Hittite?

I thought that’s the first one in Truisas (ta-ru-i-ša-aš or whatever it is)? He doesn’t answer your other questions, though.

Don’t forger Argei(w)oi, “Argives.”

Ras-wa becoming Ars-wa and then Arts-wa (spelled with an extra a in the middle for cuneiform reasons) is conceivable…

Not really. Etymological obstruent + glide clusters (/Cj/, /Cw/) are never render with an extra a in Hittite. A sequence like *arswa- would normally have become ar-su-wa-, not ar-sa-wa-, let alone ar-[ts]a-wa-.

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dkavitskaya/assets/files/Kavitskaya2001.pdf

תִּירָס tiras is the Modern Hebrew word for ‘maize’, from an early 19th century identification of tiras with Turkey, by way of חִטֵּי תִּירָס xitei tiras ‘Turkish grain’.

Both are in the far West from Europe.

The Book of Jubilees (c. 9) says that the territory of Tiras were some “great islands [four, by one version] in the midst of the sea reaching to the land of Ham [i.e. Africa]”. I wish I had a modern version of the book. I would guess these would be four of the larger Aegean islands, since Genesis geography doesn’t reach much past Greece. Cyprus is mentioned separately, appearing in the Ethiopian version as “land of Kamātūrī”, evidently a misreading of Kaftūr.

So why Italian granoturco ‘maize’?

Possibly because I am wrong.

In Turkish it is mısır buğdayı ‘Egyptian wheat’ or mısır darısı ‘Egyptian millet’. It’s one of those words.

@GP: Maybe for the rhyme?

Thanks for the Kavitskaya paper! I’ve been wanting to read it for years, but couldn’t recall the author’s name…

In Turkish it is mısır buğdayı ‘Egyptian wheat’ or mısır darısı ‘Egyptian millet’.

Or just mısır; I once bought some excellent polenta labeled that way in a major supermarket here in Berlin.

Kukuruz, with a spelling-pronunciation with [ts], used to be widespread in Austria and perhaps still is.

@GP: Maybe for the rhyme?

Obviously! Compare odio eterno al calcio moderno “eternal hate for modern football”.

@Brett: Thanks. I think I may have actually known that once upon a time. I think he also identified P(h)ut with Libya, while today we’d probably think of Egyptian Pwnt, the horn of Africa.

@Y: I wonder if those islands might have been Corsica, Sardinia, etc.? The Table of Nations does thin out quickly the further west you go, but it gets as far as Tarshish (usually equated with Tartessos).

Piotr: If the source is the same as that of Gk. τύρσις ~ τύρσος ‘tower, bastion, walled city’, the ethnonym could have been a descriptive one, ‘the tower folk’, ‘people living in walled forts’ or the like, and not necessarily Etruscan at all

Y: The Book of Jubilees (c. 9) says that the territory of Tiras were some “great islands [four, by one version] in the midst of the sea reaching to the land of Ham [i.e. Africa]”

Rodger C.: I wonder if those islands might have been Corsica, Sardinia, etc.?

I was thinking the other day that the Sardinian Tower People would be the closest candidate for a Non-IE take-over of the Etrurian copper mines.

Maybe something Arabic based on ’aruzz ~ ruzz ‘rice’?

Could the Tiras islands be the Baleares?

Of course, geographical knowledge was likely more extended when the Book of Jubilees was written (late 1st millenium BC) than when the biblical account was written, at least 500 years earlier.

You’re right, the Jubilees authors would have. Still, the description doesn’t match the Baleares too well.

—Rusi camp on the river Kira [Kura?] and it empties to the sea of Gurgan [Caspian Sea?]”(That last bit doesn’t make any sense, but there you have it.

Actually it makes very good sense.

The Rus Vikings fielded several pirate raids into Shirvan and Arran regions of modern Azerbaijan in 10 century and on these occasions they indeed camped on the banks of Kura river which does flow into the Caspian sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_expeditions_of_the_Rus%27

I have no doubt that the names in the Japhetic branch originally referred to entities in Asia Minor and thereabouts. Also, this is a list of the countries of the known world imagined as portions of land that were given to sons and grandsons of Noah. It’s a mental map, a way to remember how it all fits together by giving it a parallel in the daily life.

What I mean to suggest is that the map was redrawn with new knowledge coming in from the seafarers of Tyre and Sidon, and names that no longer had a transparent referent were repurposed. This may not have been easy, with priests at the Temple negotiating acceptable compromise between the facts on the ground and canonical genealogy.

Y: The Book of Josippon, written in Italy in 953 AD, expands on Josephus Flavius. The lands of the sons of Yapheth are interpreted there as occupying a large swath of Europe.

That may explain N.Ia. Marr’s use of “Japhetic” for European languages.

Gomer are “Frankos who dwell in the land of Frankos on the River Signa [Seine]; Riphath are Britanos who dwell on the river Lira [Loire]”

By 953 the Franks had been established for over 300 years, referring to the country as “Francia” in Latin. And the Bretons, originally refugees from Britain fleeing Germanic invaders, had been in their present territory for even longer.

It is interesting that the writer refers to rivers to locate the peoples, even if (unlike the original Vikings – Rus or Normans ) the newcomers did not arrive through rivers. But those are the places where later seafarers could enter the territories.

“Gomer” and “Riphath” do not ring a bell at all. The name of the Seine is given as “Signa”, from Latinized Gaulish “Sequana”, implying stress on the first syllable of the name.

names that no longer had a transparent referent were repurposed

The most obvious example being Ashkenaz for ‘Germany’. Quoth Wikipedia: “likely a derivation from the Assyrian Aškūza (Aškuzai, Iškuzai), a people who expelled the Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates. The Assyrian name is likely based on that of the Scythians. The n in the Hebrew form of the name has been explained as a scribal mistake confusing a waw ו with a nun נ (i.e. writing אשכנז ašknz for aškūz אשכוז).”

The use of Japhetic for the Indo-European languages goes back to at least William Jones, and has little to do with Marr’s Japhetic theory, which placed Afroasiatic, Basque, and Kartvelian in a common family.

: Lud is obviously Anatolia.

To the contrary, any reader of Stephen King knows Lud is New York. Javan’s “islands which are towards the border of Lud” must therefore stretch from Long Island itself to Martha’s Vineyard or so (the name survives in the first half of the modern ethnonym “Abenaki”). Magog is obviously a corruption of Mi’gmaq, the name of the indigenous inhabitants of Nova Scotia. Madai must therefore be a land to its west, yet containing islands – evidently the St. Lawrence river. This allows us to interpret this puzzling term as a hypercorrection via later Babylonian (in which *m became w) of the name of the Wyandot. Another reflex of this name, presumably transmitted via Phoenician rather than Babylonian, yielded the “sea of Me’at”, really the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I leave the remaining sons of Japheth as an exercise for the reader, but the revolutionary implications for our understanding of pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic contacts should be clear.

(I’ll get my coat.)

I doubt that. Lud is in the mist, and New York City is not particularly misty, the annual average being 131 foggy days per year.

No more encores, Ladies and Gentlemen! Lameen has left the building.

Lameen: (I’ll get my coat.)

Y: No more encores, Ladies and Gentlemen! Lameen has left the building.

He’ll be back. He forgot his New Jersey.

at least William Jones

And before that, Leibniz, sort of.

Incidentally, Robert E. Howard recognised (or pretended to recognise) Gomer as a reference to the Cimmerians. “The Cymric tribes of Britain were a mixed Nordic-Cimmerian race which preceded the purely Nordic Britons into the isles, and thus gave rise to a legend of Gaelic priority. The Cimbri who fought Rome were of the same blood, as well as the Gimmerai of the Assyrians and Grecians, and Gomer of the Hebrews.”

—No idea of what those names are.

Vannes and Venäjä

Both derived from name of the ancient Veneti people who were found in ancient times living on opposite sides of Europe – on the Atlantic coast, Adriatic and Baltic.

my proposed expedition

Win.

the ancient Veneti people

As I recently mentioned on another thread, I’ve encountered the idea that this is the “late IE” endonym, meaning “friends” or “allies” (cognate with Germanic *win- as in Winston; parallel to los texas), which was kept by all those groups that didn’t create a new endonym for themselves. A more recent example of this phenomenon would be the Slovenes and the Slovaks.

—I’ve encountered the idea that this is the “late IE” endonym, meaning “friends” or “allies”

My folk etymology is that the term simply means “immigrants”.

veniō (present infinitive venīre, perfect active vēnī, supine ventum); fourth conjugation
(intransitive) I come
(intransitive) I approach

From Proto-Italic *gʷenjō, from Proto-Indo-European *gʷm̥yéti, from zero-grade of *gʷem- + *-yéti. Cognates include Sanskrit गच्छति (gácchati), Ancient Greek βαίνω (baínō) and Old English cuman (English come).

Me:
1. Gomer is the Eastern shores of the Black Sea until Don..
2. Magog is the distant north, beyond the Black Sea.
3. Madai is the west of the Black Sea down to the Aegean.
4. Jovan is the Greek islands, all the way back towards Asia Minor.
5. Tubal is the land from mainland Greece and over into Italy*.
6. Meschech is the coast from Italy and all the way towards Cadiz.
7. Tiras is the four big islands between there and the coast of Africa.

*) I remain silent about the first and second tongue, though.

I can’t even do pseudo-science right.

It seems that the Book of Jubilees incorporates the classic tri-partition of the world by antique geographers in Asia, Africa and Europe, identified with the portions of Shem, Ham and Japhet. The border between Europe and Asia in this system is the Don (Tanais, Tina). The logical consequence of this is that

1. Gomer is the northern shores of the Black Sea, east to the Don (south and east of which lays the land of Shem’s son Ham).
2. Magog is the far north, the regions north of Gomer.
3. Madai is the area west of both and south to the Aegean shore.

The tongues aren’t as twisted as I thought. Reading again, I see that those are bays, not peninsulas. The first tongue is the Aegean, bordering on Lud. The second tongue is the Adriatic. The third tongue must be the Tyrrhenian Sea.

I remember a rather painful conversation with my brother about the various place and tribe names in Howard’s Hyborean Age. He initially refused to believe that they were (almost) all drawn from real myths and/or history. I did not want to hear any more about how cool the “sons of Aryas” sounded.

He really ought to have known better, since he minored in pre-Christian northern European literature. Then again, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (founding members of the August Derleth school of incompetent posthumous collaboration) did not appear to understand it either; they thought the Hyrkanians were Mongols.

I forgot about Sicily.

Lin Carter I grant you: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings is in the same one-error-per-page (or more) class as Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue, and he never got anything right.. But de Camp, no. He took Howard’s crude and impossible character and made him a realistic steppe barbarian.

My folk etymology is that the term simply means “immigrants”.

That only works in Italic.

Of course, Venice is traditionally explained as veni etiam “I’ve come, too”.

Trond: The “Tower People” of the Nuraghi Culture of Sardinia may have had offshoots on Corsica, Mallorca and Menorca, says Wikipedia. I like this more and more.

Yes, I do too.

“A thing, as the Bellman remarked / Of frequent occurrence in tropical climes / When a vessel is, so to speak, snarked.”

>If there were four such islands, I thought they would be a group, hence my suggestion of the Baleares. But if the islands do not have to be a group, then the other two could be Malta and Mallorca.

>All these islands were at least visited by the seafaring Phoenicians, through whom the knowledge of remote countries reached by sea must have come to the Bible writers.

Jubilees was written at latest in 100 BCE, probably earlier.

Through the second Punic war, Malta wasn’t just visited. It simply was Phoenician/Punic (or better – Canaanite. Since despite the modern experts in the field who say they had no endonym, Augustine tells us that Punic speakers in his day called themselves Chanani, and there’s little reason to believe they picked that up late – can you imagine being a North African Christian and deciding anachronistically to identify with the Canaanites?)

Malta surely remained Canaanite in terms of settlement, language and culture long after the war. I don’t why anyone in the Levant would describe Malta as belonging to anyone but Carthage or Rome at any time between 800 BCE and 400 AD.

Mallorca is the main island of the Baleares, which also would have been considered Phoenician or Punic at virtually any time that any that Jubilees could have been written (since it was only conquered by the Romans in 123 BCE). And probably considered Phoenician at any time that anyone in the Levant could have known they existed.

I think we have to look elsewhere for the Tiras isles.

Indeed, the Canary Islands are not between Europe and Africa. And the African possessions mentioned (however vague) are in North Africa, not beyond the strait of Gibraltar, which would surely had been mentioned in some way if the Canaries had been meant. The Tiras islands must belong to the Western Mediterranean.

they thought the Hyrkanians were Mongols

Not a mistake you can make if you’ve read Dido’s magnificent rant in Book IV of the Aeneid; the line Hyrcanæ admorunt ubera tigres is one of my favourite literary insults.

Completely OT: I’ve always wanted to see a modern day adaptation in which this scene is played as signifyin’.

-I hope you can find it online somewhere, because this isn’t something I’ve ever seen mentioned.

The primary work is
(Russian) Мартынов (Martynov), Viktor Vladimirovič (1978). Балто-славяно-италийские изоглоссы. Лексическая синонимия. (Balto-slaviano-italiiskie izoglossy: leksicheskaia sinonimiia.). Minsk: Izdat. AN BSSR.

Unfortunately I can’t find it online. There is short article by Martynov on the same subject online
http://historylib.org/historybooks/Pod-red–A-S–Gerda–G-S–Lebedeva_Slavyane–Etnogenez-i-etnicheskaya-istoriya/7

He dates Slavic-Italic contacts to XII-X centuries BC and he suggests that they rather should be called West Baltic-Italic contacts since proto-Slavic was still part of West Baltic at the time.

Found online the most detailed treatment of the subject in another Martynov book:

https://www.myfilology.ru/media/user_uploads/Tutorials/martynov_v_v_yazyk_v_prostranstve_i_vremeni_k_probleme_glott.pdf

Start from page 57

Very good point about the Amber Road.

I’m reading the paper now, but that’ll take a while.

италийск. galumbis

So where is Latin columba from, then?

Thanks Trond for the map.

Although its focus is on the Urnfield territory, it also shows the Western Mediterranean, with four prominent islands: Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Mallorca.

So the closest thing to a reflex of *páh₂s-tōr in Russian is s-pas-i-tel-ь?

Precisely — it’s what productive derivation gives in Slavic.

The common Slavic prefix sъ- (which functions like Latin com- or like Germanic ge-). The weak vowel has become mute in this position and is no longer represented orthographically in Russian.

>para-celtic urnfield wave

Wait. You mean that’s not something done in Glasgow on Saturday mornings.

Unfortunately I can’t find it online. There is short article by Martynov on the same subject online
http://historylib.org/historybooks/Pod-red–A-S–Gerda–G-S–Lebedeva_Slavyane–Etnogenez-i-etnicheskaya-istoriya/7

He dates Slavic-Italic contacts to XII-X centuries BC and he suggests that they rather should be called West Baltic-Italic contacts since proto-Slavic was still part of West Baltic at the time.

I’ve finished reading it. Questions:
– Superstrate influence so strong it restructures the system of personal pronouns would be expected to leave hundreds upon hundreds of loanwords, yet only a few have been identified.
– Conversely, perhaps the things Slavic shares with West but not East Baltic are all due to Italic influence rather than exclusive common ancestry? This paper (in English, scroll past the table of contents and the German introduction to the volume) “intends to foster the theoretical discussion by pointing out two nontrivial phonological developments which must be assumed for both ‘East’ and ‘West Baltic’ but not for Slavonic and therefore may constitute evidence for Proto-Baltic as a parent language of both ‘Baltic’ branches”. Unfortunately it doesn’t cite any of Martynov’s work.

That’s when you apply Ockham’s Razor to the question of which shared innovations are inherited and which are borrowed. I’m running two comparable analyses right now.

That’s when you apply Ockham’s Razor to the question of which shared innovations are inherited and which are borrowed. I’m running two comparable analyses right now.
By “borrowed,” are you referring to homoplasy? Or, does your analysis make room for reticulation?

(Sorry, other readers, for the somewhat technical terminology. I believe the term corresponding to “homoplasy” of biology / systematics is called “accidental coincidence” in textual criticism / stemmatics, involving different origins for a particular reading in different manuscripts. “Reticulation” refers to a network-like diagram rather than a tree [i.e., a(n open) stemma involving “contamination” or “mixture” ]. Not exactly sure what the corresponding terms in historical linguistics are.)

By “borrowed,” are you referring to homoplasy?

Yes; I don’t expect lateral gene transfer between the fossil vertebrates in my dataset – though it wouldn’t be distinguishable from convergence.

Hopefully, either some of the new place names and/or orthographic variations will appear in other discoveries, or at least will prominently fail to.

David M.: I’ve now read the whole thing and recommend it.

I opened it on my phone and got as far into the introduction as the summary of Mellaart’s merits, thinking it wouldn’t be worth starting up my computer for. I should probably give it another go, then.

I see that my “Third” is ambiguous. To be clear, Emilia Masson did publish the article. It’s even available from De Gruyter for an insane fee. What I meant to say is that there should be traces and living memory of interaction with the members of the international project that Mellaart had just become involved in.

I have finished the paper. I agree that it seems overly elaborate for a forgery, at least if the linguistic interpretation stands scrutiny. Much rests on confirming the provenance. Or archaeology,

There are at least two villages called Beyköy (“Lordston”) in Turkey, The one marked on the map in the paper is the smaller and more rural one, here. The map doesn’t mark any Mosque in this village, but the photo in the left margin shows a green building that could be a mosque.

Following the link, it’s this article from October. Google Translate:

Ihsaniye springs from Beyköy

Located in the village of Beyköy in the district of İhsaniye in 1878 and lime stone
October 12, 2017 Thursday 17:26
Ihsaniye springs from Beyköy

Ihsaniye springs from Beyköy

In the village of Beyköy in the district of İhsaniye in 1878, the lighthouse is written in the language of the Luvi deciphered the information on the tablet, then the eyes are turned to this kale. Residents of the village want to build a new mosque before the archaeological excavation.

A stone inscription found in Beyköy in 1878 is expected to shed light on one of the greatest mysteries of the Mediterranean archeology. According to the news of the “Independent” newspaper, archaeologists succeeded in solving hieroglyphic writings that were scribbled 3,200 years ago. The inscription contains the oldest writings from the Bronze Age. The first translations of the letters written in limestone contain information on the powerful and advanced civilizations of the Bronze Age. According to the script written in ancient Luwian language on a stone plate of 10 meters long, the combined navy of the kingdoms of Western Anatolia raided the coastal cities in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the inscription, the spoils of this seafaring confederation played a role in the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, which were born according to historians. The investigators believed that by the order of King Kupanta-Kurunda of the Bronze Age kingdom of the inscription, Milat was first built in 1190. A new team of Swiss and Dutch archaeologists arrived on the new findings. One of the 20 people who can read the ancient Luwian language in the world, Dr. Fred Woudhuizen translated the writings. Stone plate of 35 centimeters in height was found in 1878 in Beyköy village of Afyonkarahisar. After the French archaeologist George Perrot copied the manuscripts on a piece of paper, the peasant inscription was used as construction material on the basis of a glass. The copy of the inscription was found at the home of British historian James Melaart in 2012. When Mellaart died, his son wrote the example of the inscription at the foundation of Luvi Studies. Eberhard sent it to Zangger. The Dutch linguist and the Luigi language expert Zangger wrote that “the living Luwians living in Anatolia have supported the raids of groups called” Sea People “and that the Bronze Age has thus ended in the Eastern Mediterranean, thus one of the greatest mysteries of the Mediterranean archeology has been solved.

The findings of the writer’s translation and the researchers were recorded in a scientific archeological journal and a book will be published in December.

“The production date of the glass is written in 1922”

Surprised by the news, and at that point, the 170-pointed village headman Bahattin Devrim, who expressed his appreciation for the village’s reputation in the sense of tourism, wanted a new mosque to be built before an archaeological excavation to begin the tablage claimed to be the foundation of the mosque. The revolution says, “The production date of the mosque is 1922, but an older history says that the village elders are restoration and repair. The construction of the glass is older. We have no idea what is used in the construction of the glass. There are inscriptions and fountains near the mosque where the ancient writings are. We have not received any information about archaeological excavations. If an archaeological excavation is done here, we need a new mosque first. We allow work later, so that the people do not become victims. We will support the excavation work if our wish is fulfilled. There has not been any information about any archaeological excavations before,” he said.

“There is no definite information on the construction of the glass”

“We do not have any knowledge that the mosque is a tablets that will illuminate the history of the construction on the basis of the mosque. It is such a date that we learned new. In our elders who are involved in the making of the glass, there is no definite knowledge of the elderly. We heard from our great people that it was only burned after the War of Independence and that it was renovated from 1923-24 after the war. If there is such an excitation we would like to be brought out to the earth. However, archaeological work can be allowed if a suitable mosque is built by showing the place for the villagers not to be victims.”

Using Google Earth I found one certain mosque on the edge of the village and one one possible facing a square. To find out more, I did an image search for “Beyköy Cami” and picked hits for the right village visually. That soon brought me another news story from October, this one even with a 5 min. TV clip. Google Translate again:

Afyonkarahisar Ihsaniye’ye Beyköy’de, explored in 1878 and Luvi in ​​the language of the 3 thousand 200-year-old inscription was deciphered for the first time, explaining that the eyes turned this dog.
Afyonkarahisar Ihsaniye’ye Beyköy’de, explored in 1878 and Luvi in ​​the language of the 3 thousand 200-year-old inscription was deciphered for the first time, explaining that the eyes turned this dog. It is wondered where the inscription on the paper is copied, and where the inscription says it was used as a building material on the base of a glass.

It was believed that the bronze kingdom of Mira’s King Kupanta-Kurunta was prepared in 1190 BC, and the inscription found in 1878 was copied by a French archaeologist George Perrot on a piece of paper, 35 centimeters in height and 10 inches meter-long inscription was used as a construction material on the basis of a camel in the east.

WHERE IS YOUR KNOWLEDGE

The fact that the subject was subject to news in national and international circles caused astonishment in the villagers who were unaware of the situation. The peasants began to debate discussing between them, thinking that the 3,200-year inscription was under the oldest of the two walks in the country. The curiosity increased the fact that even the oldest of the village did not know when the mosque was built. As the villager’s mosque was burned and restored during the War of Independence, he began to be curious about whether the mosque would have been demolished and underwent excavation work.

MOSQUE TIME RESTRICTED

The village chief Bahattin Devrim said that the mosque, which is claimed to contain the inscription, was a historic mosque, but no one had any knowledge of when it was built. Revolution telling that the mosque was changed due to the restoration in time, There are two mosques in our village but this is our oldest cam. He said that if a new mosque is made to us, there is no problem in excavation under this glass.

HISTORICAL FOUNTAIN

There is also a village fountain, with fountains on the side of the outside wall of the glass said to have been found, and a fountain on the opposite side of the glass, which is considered to be Persian or Ottoman.

So there seems to be two mosques in the village. There’s no village lore about the 1878 search and rescue operation, but the villagers speculate that if there’s anything there, it must be in the foundations of the oldest one, which was burned and rebuilt in 1923-24. They welcome archaeologists if they just get a new mosque first.

Google Translate has produced some wonderful Stilblüten “blossoms of style”.

IN 1190 B.C.
WAR WAS BEGINNING.

@Trond:

Exactly so. World English has become autonomous to the extent that people see no need to consult a native speaker even when it comes to expensive hardback publications, let alone less formal situations. (Brill, in particular, seem to feel that it would be superfluous to hire English-speaking copy editors for English-language publications.) Presumably this becomes self-reinforcing; the more people are groundlessly self-confident that they have L1 command of the language, the less the systematic failure is apparent to other L2 speakers.

Mostly it’s just annoying if you happen to be a native speaker, but it can tip over into actual communication failure; I suspect it will tend to more often in future.

On reflection, I may be being naive about Brill and English-speaking copy editors. I get the impression that even once-careful academic publishers now tend not to see the point of any copy editor. (This is not an attempt to troll Hat, really it isn’t …)

On the other hand, I imagine that native-speakers of Akkadian got pretty narked by what all those Hittites and Amorites and Canaanites and what-have-you did to their beautiful language. To say nothing of Egyptians.

Look what all those bloody Gauls, Iberians, Dacians, Goths, Franks, Langobards and others did to good imperial Latin! Their descendants can’t even understand one another.

So! Finally! Zangger’s Atlantis book.

Turns out the German version is a translation of the English original The Flood from Heaven, published by Sidgwick & Jackson in an undisclosed year. The translation is not by Zangger himself. I have to say the German title ATLANTIS – Eine Legende wird entziffert (“a legend is being deciphered”) is much, much more informative, quite against the usual outcome of title “translation”.

Plato’s story in Timaeus and Critias, finds Zangger, is not just internally consistent, but “downright tiringly detailed”, far too much to be a mere parable for some profound issue of morality; for instance, there’s quite a bit about soil erosion in ancient Attica (Zangger noticed that part immediately, being a geoarcheologist) as well as descriptions of the most popular desserts and of bath temperatures. Plato called it logos rather than mythos on all six occasions, was “not inclined to accept myths as truth” and was also aware that old (hi)stories have to be wrong because not all details are known, had Critias insist twice (in Timaeus) that the events are real, and had Solon approve it, and made explicit in Critias that he was actually interested in prehistory. “Why, then, would he render his own objective ridiculous by such an incredible, exaggerated fairytale?” (All quotes are my retranslations.) The story is placed within a treatise on the history of the universe; Solon’s travels and the genealogies of Athenian families are described accurately as far as can be determined today. The narrator admires the technological achievements, which are described to a degree unusual for Plato, not ethical principles or religious practices; there are details about quarry work, ship construction, artificial harbors and so on. Atlantis is described as strange, somewhat barbarous; bulls are brutally slaughtered and their limbs burnt as an offering, more Homeric than Platonic, and the aristocrats can punish and execute whoever they want, except for each other, in which case they need a majority decision by their peers first; that’s not Plato’s ideal state, and Atlantis is far too much the focus of the story to be a mere contrast for Pre-Ancient Athens/Greece (its enemy).

Near the beginning of his book, Zangger presents the whole Atlantis story in translation so the readers don’t have to make up their minds from snippets out of context. At least in the German version (don’t know about the English one), the translation is not his own but a previously published one by someone else.

The abrupt end of the story requires an explanation. All other of Plato’s writings seem to have been thought through in advance, and yet the Atlantis story reads as if Plato had somehow cornered himself, added a surprisingly superficial passage on divine punishment and then gave up altogether. On top of that, it is heavily implied twice that the whole work was supposed to be a trilogy Timaeus – Critias – Hermocrates (history of the Earth, physics, biology – prehistoric Greece and its opponents – recent history); if all three volumes were supposed to be the size of Timaeus, the trilogy breaks off after 20% of Critias and 40% of the whole thing. It’s not like Plato died at that point; instead, he wrote the whole work Nomoi, which was reportedly “in the wax” when he died. Furthermore, although Critias is unfinished, it has a final form, lacking the shortcomings expected of an unfinished work. This is an argument that Plato used Solon’s manuscript without thinking much about it. Analyses of Plato’s style have shown (endnote 411, from 1989) that Timaeus and Critias are very similar to each other in composition, but differ so much from all other of Plato’s texts that, if Plato is assumed to be their author, they would have to be placed at the very end of his life, a position that is already occupied as mentioned (footnote 412: Diogenes Laërtius 3.37), and twenty years after the Letters and the Nomoi.

Timaeus is a conglomerate of knowledge from many different sources, which Plato scholars have identified (Empedocles, Diogenes of Apollonia, Alcmaeon, Eudoxus, Philistion, Theaetetus…), embedded in a rather small amount of Plato’s own doing which binds the parts together and adds some Platonic philosophy. We should expect Critias to be composed the same way.

Plato did not blindly believe what he was told; “there are several examples for Plato’s caution with oral tradition whose accuracy he doubted. Why would he have endangered his reputation by repeatedly portraying as correct what in reality was just a fairytale? How many great thinkers have there been who created a piece of novel-like literature like the Atlantis legend and then insisted again and again it was real – without losing their glory?”

“The uppermost layer, however, potentially the hardest one to get through, is the zeitgeist and preconceptions of modernity. Plato’s story of Atlantis states unmistakably that a Greek civilization was destroyed by simultaneous earthquakes and catastrophic floods, but it is generally believed that Atlantis was the victim of these catastrophes. Likewise it is commonly believed that a tidal wave could have destroyed the old civilization, while the story unambiguously describes the flood coming down from the sky. There are thus at least eight layers of potential distortion covering the truth.”

Then follow about 40 pages about Zangger’s actual favorite topic: archeology of Mycenean Greece and the Troad, including geoarcheology, i.e. how people have changed the landscape by soil erosion as well as by building dams and canals.

Then he goes through the story almost sentence by (long) sentence. Turns out there is an example of Plato’s (or Socrates’s, as the text claims) ideal state in the story: “the city that is today called the Athenian one”, says the Egyptian priest who informs Solon, is the one of which it is “said that it had the best political institutions of all under heaven that we have ever known”. That explains why the Atlantis story is briefly mentioned in Timaeus, following a summary of a speech by Socrates on the ideal state and Socrates’s wish to learn about the existence of such a state: Critias says he has an example to offer, and starts talking, but then says he’ll hold off on the rest till Timaeus has finished presenting everything that happened earlier. – Of course, says Zangger, “Athens” could be Solon’s misunderstanding of “Greece”, whose Mycenean version (more federal than in Classical times, with the Argolid – Mycene, Argos, Tiryns – more important than Attica) the Egyptians are likely to have understood as a single country more like their own.

The text emphasizes several times that the story is set nine thousand years before Solon. Clearly, that’s nonsense. But there’s half a sentence from Diodorus Siculus saying that “in earlier times the year used to be calculated by moon cycles”, and in Egypt, from 2500 BC onwards, three calendars were in use simultaneously: two religious lunar calendars and one bureaucratic solar calendar. So, if we interpret the “years” as months and divide 9,000 by 12.37, and if Solon made his trip in 560 BC, the story is set in 1207 BC, which is practically perfect. Such a confusion would also explain why later Egyptians told Herodotus that their deities were 17,000 years old, and why the Egyptian historians Manetho, Syncellus and Eusebius claimed that there were 36,525 years between the First Dynasty (~ 3100 BC) and the end of the 30th (332 BC): divided by 12.37, these 36,525 years become 2952, close to the ~ 2800 proposed by modern archeology. Alternatively, says Zangger, all these absolute numbers could be completely bogus; even those found in Pausanias (2nd century AD) can’t just be taken at face value (partly because e.g. a talent wasn’t the same weight everywhere any more than a ton is today).

The lengthy description of prehistoric Athenian society fits Mycenean Greece very well.

The greatest and most heroic deed of prehistoric Athens, says the text, was to put an end to an enormous power that set out “from the Atlantic sea” against all Europe and Asia at once. Back then, says the text, it was still possible to pass there by ship, because (?!?) in front of the “mouth that you call in your language the Pillars of Hercules” there was an island larger than Libya and Asia Minor together. From that island there was “an access” to the other islands, and from those to the whole mainland opposite them “all around that sea that can rightly be so called. For all that lies within the mentioned mouth seems like a harbor bay with a narrow entrance; that [sea], however, can really be called a sea and the land around it in fact and truth and the full sense of the word a mainland.”

First, never trust an Egyptian who says “island”. The Egyptian coastline is so simple that e.g. Aegean geography is just confusing in comparison; compare the famous “and the foreign peoples conspired on their islands” or “the northern lands, on their islands, trembled”. The Ancient Egyptian word usually translated as “island” today, cites Zangger, “actually just designates a sandy beach or a coast and is widespread as a determinative for foreign lands or areas beyond the Nile valley.”

Second, foreign place names written in hieroglyphs are always hard to identify because the vowels are missing. Solon and the anonymous Egyptian priest must have had that problem if they stood in front of a column that told the tale, as the text says, and Plato mentions in Critias that Solon later replaced some names by their supposed Greek equivalents (indeed that he translated the personal names into Greek because they had earlier been translated into Egyptian and thus were only preserved in Egyptian translation). So, perhaps the Pillars of Hercules are an inaccuracy.

Third, which Pillars of Hercules? The term occurs in the Odyssee, even though Homer, says Zangger, had almost certainly never heard of the Straits of Gibraltar. Even in Strabo’s time (Geographica 3.5.170) there was still uncertainty about what the term meant; and Servius (around 400 AD) wrote columnas Herculis legimus et in Ponto et in Hispania. Some guy named Richard Hennig determined in 1927 that the term began to refer to the Straits of Gibraltar only after 500 BC. The Pillars of Hercules were the end of the known, accessible world, and Gibraltar became accessible to Greek ships within Solon’s lifetime, when Massilia was founded, while in the Late Bronze Age the Greek world ended at the Bosphorus.

Interestingly, the term “Atlantic Sea” is used here for the first known time. The next is in Herodotus, where it’s connected to a mountain range called Atlas, but there were mountain ranges of that name all over the place, in Crete, the Peloponnese, Sicily, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and the Sahara; they were all named late, so perhaps the Atlantic “is derived from antlos or antl-ant, which means ‘strong, foamy current’.” Endnote 247 provides a reference from 1951 in German, so presumably that’s “Old European hydronymy”, on which I would recommend great caution. (I presume “antl-ant” is a supposed root *antl-/*ant- with unexplained variation.)

Fifth, “the Atlantic Sea” is a póntos. On the Mediterranean side of the stóma, there’s instead a pelágos. The Black Sea, of course, has been called a póntos in Greek since ever. And it is, as described, truly a sea and verily surrounded by terra firma. And – never mind Jason and the Argonauts (oldest band name ever) – there are Mycenean finds from Romania to Georgia.

Sixth, “larger than Libya and Asia Minor together” is not in the Greek text, “which does not use an adjective, but an adverbial phrase meaning ‘to be of greatest importance'”.

Seventh, that strange part about “it was still possible to pass there by ship” fits the lack of archeological evidence for trade through the Bosphorus between the 10th and the 8th century BC; strong currents & stuff must have made it difficult at best to get through before the Ionian pentakonter was invented around 680 BC, so perhaps the pilots who knew the currents well enough to steer a ship through all died in the Greek Dark Age. Navigating the Dardanelles against the current and the prevailing wind was hard, too – even in 1908, when the Black Sea Pilot said that often 200 or 300 ships were waiting for favorable wind at the same time.

Then the “island” is named for the first time. Literally, Atlantis is a daughter of Atlas. As chance would have it, Homer (Iliad 20.215) and Apollodorus (3.12.1) provide a seemingly unrelated genealogy: Atlas – Electra – Dardanus – Erichthonius – Tros – Ilus – Laomedon – Priamus. Yup, that one. The Ancient Egyptians, says a source from 1984, commonly reapplied outdated names to new settlers in the same area; and while no Atlanteans have shown up in Egyptian sources, Dardanians may have (drdny fought on the Hittite side in the battle of Qadesh).

The royal rule of Atlantis, the text goes on, “exercised power over the whole islands as well as many other islands and over parts of the mainland; further, these kings ruled on the side opposite us over Libya, all the way to Egypt, and over Europe all the way to Tyrrhenia.” A conflict with Greece makes more sense if the area where Atlantis “ruled” was closer to Greece than Tuscany. This “rule” may refer to trading or raiding, perhaps in particular a participation in the Sea Peoples, but “it is more probable” that the “rule” over the eastern Mediterranean was indirect, e.g. by control of the trade route through the Dardanelles. At this point Zangger cites his favorite enemy Manfred Korfmann, the “current” (1992) leader of the excavations in Troy, as saying: “It may not be wholly wrong to present Troy as a pirate fortress that ruled over the straits.” I do wonder if the Sea Peoples invasion is implied by the next sentence of the text, however: “This whole power, thus, once gathered as an army and made the attempt to subjugate the whole area, yours and ours and everything this side of the mouth in a single attack. Then, Solon, the power of your city with its brave diligence and strength became visible before all eyes”, and the Greeks attacked Atlantis and restored freedom to the Galaxy area this side of the Pillars of Hercules. Immediately Zangger cautions that there’s no direct archeological evidence for the Trojan war, just two layers of destruction a few decades apart. (That question happens to be the subject of his next book, though, which doesn’t mention Atlantis much. Ein neuer Kampf um Troia – Archäologie in der Krise, German in the original, Droemer Knaur 1994.)

Text: “During the following time, however, there were enormous earthquakes and floods; there came a bad day and a bad night when your whole army sank at once into the earth, and likewise the island of Atlantis sank into the sea and disappeared in it. This is why the sea there can neither be passed through nor explored, because at very shallow depths the mud that the island left behind when it sank is in the way.” Tiryns experienced an earthquake and a flood between 1250 and 1200 BC; part of the lower town “sank” in this flood. Likewise, many Trojan buildings on the plain were buried under floodplain sediments “after the war”. The mud in the sea may be an ahistoric rationalizing attempt to connect the natural catastrophes and the loss of the knowledge of how to sail through the Bosphorus causally.

Then Critias says he ought to tell the details after Timaeus has presented everything from the origin of the world to the origin of man. When it’s finally his turn, Critias very briefly recapitulates what he said, with a few interesting discrepancies (Atlantis having sunk because of earthquakes, instead of Atlantis and the Greek army having sunk for unspecified reasons; “our city” instead of the “land” where Solon lives or “the Greeks”; the war between the latter and Atlantis being placed 9000 years ago instead of prehistoric Greek culture having originated 9000 years ago), and then promises to describe first prehistoric Attica and its enemies, then “the many barbaric peoples and what Greek tribes there were”. Alas, the text ends after Attica’s first enemy. The description of Attica seems to be based wholly on local tradition, not on Solon or the Egyptian priest, except for accepting the reportedly Egyptian presentation of the Greek Dark Age to explain why more isn’t known. In the process, cites Zangger, Plato confused it with the Flood of Deucalion, which becomes even more apparent in Nomoi.

The geographic description of the plain “said to be the most beautiful of all plains and of rich fertility”, situated “by the sea, about in the middle of the whole island”, fits the plain around Troy, even in its dimensions (a low mountain range “about 50 stadia” from the sea, thus about 9 km).

Then come the alternating rings of water and land, created by Poseidon before ships existed, so perhaps of natural origin and neither perfectly circular nor perfectly concentric. Turns out the Troad is full of dry meandering riverbeds and sand heaps, on which see below.

There’s a warm and a cold spring in the Atlantis story, in the Iliad, and nowhere else in Ancient literature. They haven’t been identified in the real world; the Roman town of Novum Ilium had an aqueduct, so perhaps the springs had ceased to exist already by then.

Atlantis was divided into 10 parts, each with a ruler from the same dynasty; one of them, ruling over the best part, was at the same time king over the whole thing. That’s also how Troy is described in the Iliad (varying between 8 and 10 rulers).

The twin brother of Atlas, the first king, ruled over “the heights of the island toward the Pillars of Hercules, toward today’s area of Gadeira, which is so called after the place name of the time. [?] Poseidon called him in Greek Eumelos, in the local language Gadeiros, which presumably gave the area its name”, says the text. Of course Cádiz used to be Gadir, a Phoenician name from the 8th century BC. Zangger interprets this as an interpretation by Solon, misinterpreting a name as Gadeira after misinterpreting the Pillars of Hercules. Instead, the description of the supposed Gadeira fits the Yenişehir peninsula, 5 km from Troy at the Dardanelles; this kind of distance is found between the kingdoms in the Argolid, and there is even “a large number of megara in Troy VI”.

Atlantis wasn’t just rich (like Troy) and had rich soil (like the Troad), there was also lots of mining going on there (like in the Troad). One of the metals mentioned is orichalkos, which “sparkles like fire”, was dug out of the ground (so not an alloy), was almost as valuable as gold and is “today known only by name anymore”, says the text. Nowadays, this word is used for brass; that, however, is an alloy of copper and zinc, and zinc was unknown in Antiquity. This has caused much consternation. However, the other mentioned metals (iron, gold, silver, copper, tin) occur in hydrothermally deposited lead-zinc ores, which are the most common ores in the Troad and worldwide; and Strabo (Geographica 13.1.56) comes to the rescue:

“Near Andeira there is a stone that turns into iron when it is burnt and excretes false silver when it is heated in a melting oven with a certain earth; and this, when copper is added, produces the ‘mixture’, as is said, that is called oreikalkon by some.” (Reproduced by Zangger in Greek letters, without an accent, and with a kappa instead of the expected chi. Strange. The man speaks Modern Greek. Perhaps the German translators or publisher are to blame?)

Zangger concludes that brass was made in Antiquity by heating copper with smithsonite (zinc carbonate), and that specifically in the Troad, Andeira being some 80 km southeast of Troy. That may leave the issue that the text says orichalkos was dug up directly and not produced later; therefore it may have been, at least initially, “the natural alloy of copper and zinc. This ore was rare but not unknown in Antiquity. Aristotle said that it was used for steles. Today it is called ‘aurichalcite’.” (2 footnotes omitted) Aurichalcite is indeed a hydroxide-carbonate of zinc and copper together.

The riches go on, almost explicitly illustrated with the claim that “even the elephants were particularly numerous there, because there was enough food not only for all the other animals that live in the swamps and lakes and rivers and also for those that graze on the mountains and the plains, but also for the elephant, which is the largest animal and eats the most.” Well, the elephants – “who knows?”, says Zangger feebly – have to be an exaggeration, but the rest of the diversity and density sounds realistic. Homer called Ida (the one in the Troad, not the one in Crete) “the mother of wild anmals”; bears, wolves and jackals lived there, even lions could still be found in Asia Minor in the 16th century AD. Archeological excavations have found plenty of domestic animal remains, also mentioned in the text, which then goes on to mention several unidentified tree fruits that are not named, only described by what “we” do with it.

First the Atlanteans built bridges across the rings of water to make the royal palace accessible. Given where the Scamander (the river, not the Newt) was in the Bronze Age, a bridge was needed to make the palace mountain of Troy accessible.

Then they dug a navigable canal, “100 feet” (~ 30 m) deep and “50 stadia” (~ 9 km) long, from the sea to the outermost ring. A harbor has never been identified in the Troad. That’s very strange for a city in this position, as are the many remains of trenches and unexplained sand heaps which have all long been known. Here Zangger makes the first attempt to interpret all of them as a whole. Jsut such a canal is on every map of the Troad, cutting through thick layers of bedrock between the Troad (pointing straight at Troy) and the Bay of Beşik. There has never been a serious attempt to determine its age. Schliemann, who noted several phases when the canal was renewed and used again, thought it had to be very old because the water had piled up a beach of 2 x 2 km in the bay; he cited someone who said the canal had already existed in the time of Xerxes and had, in the time of Demetrios of Skepsis (a source for Strabo), diverted all of the water of the Scamander into the Aegean. Pliny mentioned a navigable Scamander, and “many researchers” (one endnote) have interpreted it as this canal. Its construction may have been mythicized in that Hercules was said to have dug the bed of the Scamander – skámma andrós (Greek letters with accents this time) meaning “foam by human hand” (…or anyway “foam of man”; I don’t know how straightforward an interpretation “by human hand” is, though it’s certainly plausible, but Zangger later adds that the Iliad [20.74] says the Scamander had an older name, “given by the gods”, namely Xanthos, simply “yellow”). If the whole Scamander was diverted through the canal, that would explain the sediment in the Bay of Beşik and also why the canal had to be renewed periodically. Zangger then explains how this hypothesis could be tested by digging a trench transversely through the canal. – 5 km north of that canal, there’s another parallel to it. It’s much wider and deeper: some 100 ft deep and, at the top, some 100 ft wide. The depth fits that in the text. This canal is much larger than necessary to drain the plain; more likely it was a harbor entrance as in the text. “Extended swamps” around the Troy-ward end of the canals “could indeed” turn out to be remains of ancient harbor basins.

Then the Atlanteans dug a canal (one, not several as often shown) connecting the three water rings at the height of the bridges, wide enough for one triere, and roofed. Zangger identifies a fitting trench in the landscape. To be – if I understand the strange wording – deep enough to be navigable from the sea, it would have had tall, steep dams on both sides that could have been covered by wooden planks if someone indeed got that strange idea.

The widths of the three water rings fit the three rivers in the Troad; the widths of the land rings are a bit too narrow. The diameter of the central island (5 stadia) fits the city center with the royal palace.

The description of the quarrying fits the Troad and many other places around the Aegean. The text goes on to state that some of the quarrying produced two artifical caves which were used as docks; Schliemann found one of them “hardly 300 m from my house, on the south side”; it was filled in, “but, as everyone assures me, it was still open 20 years ago”. And the nearest town, 5 km from the coast, “is today called Kalifatli; this is the Turkish word for shipyard.” Google Maps instead offers Kalafat.

A drawing on p. 213 tries to project the geography described in the text onto the Troad, except that the rings aren’t complete, the land rings are 50% wider than the text says, and the floodplain is interpreted as occupying about 20 rather than about 200,000 km². It looks very compelling. The size of the floodplain stunned Plato himself, who had Critias interrupt the narration here for the only time to state that it was quite implausible that a plain that size could have been surrounded by a trench, but that he had to tell what he had heard. Implausible indeed, because the plain is described in the next sentence as “protected from the north wind”, which isn’t going to happen to a plain 540 km long. All around the Mediterranean the only place with extreme and almost constant north wind is the Troad, as already mentioned at every occasion in the Iliad (poetically) and then again by Schliemann (complainingly).

The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad says that Troy and its allies had a total of 1185 ships. Atlantis? 1200.

A few sentences before the end the Atlanteans are still praised for their “divine nature” and “leniency combined with prudence”. Then the amount of divine nature diminishes as the amount of divine ancestry diminishes, and their riches make them decadent. Zeus sees this and decides to punish them so they can repent and improve. “Therefore he called together all gods to their most honorable residence which rises in the middle of the whole world and oversees everything that ever had a part in becoming. And when they were gathered, he spoke”

Thus, Critias ends exactly where the Iliad begins: when Zeus summons the assembly of all gods to discuss the fate of the Trojans and the Greeks.

Zangger speculates that Solon had intended to use the Atlantis story “for his own epics”. “But Solon dropped the project just like Plato did later. Solon may have been too old – says Plutarch – or too busy – as Plato believed. But it is just as possible that he, too, noticed the parallels to Troy and therefore didn’t continue to work on the text.”

In the Nomoi, Plato praised Homer as divinely inspired. Quite the turnaround after he had, in the Republic, expressed disdain for poetic imitatio and even called Homer unsuitable for educating the youth. This can be explained if Plato took the Atlantis story as confirmation of Homer’s description of Troy.

In a later chapter, Zangger tries to reconstruct the whole development of the plain of Troy with all the canals and sand hills.

So! Finally! Zangger’s Atlantis book.

Turns out the German version is a translation of the English original The Flood from Heaven, published by Sidgwick & Jackson in an undisclosed year. The translation is not by Zangger himself. I have to say the German title ATLANTIS – Eine Legende wird entziffert (“a legend is being deciphered”) is much, much more informative, quite against the usual outcome of title “translation”.

David’s Finally! refers to the German translation. I have a copy of the English edition, which is dated 1992. Someone must have given it to me, as the English title would probably not have attracted my attention at the time. Perhaps it did not attract too many readers, since I don’t remember have seen Zangger’s hypothesis (which is amply supported with photos, maps and drawings in addition to quotations) even mentioned anywhere.

David’s masterful summary and comments made me promise myself to reread the book at the earliest opportunity.

As regards precious alloys occurring naturally, Western Anatolia was famous for its ἤλεκτρον. If I were Zangger, I’d try to argue that electrum and orichalcum somehow got confused in translation (into and from Egyptian?). Cf. the Latin folk-etymological variant aurichalcum.

Of course electrum is mined. It’s just usually called “gold mining.”

Gold and silver are mined, but electrum isn’t… there is no electrum ore.

Gold in particular is usually native (and always was in the Bronze Age, when such things as calaverite and sylvanite probably hadn’t been discovered yet). Electrum isn’t.

(…And while sylvanite contains both gold and silver, the ratio is far from the one in electrum, so most likely it can’T be used as an electrum ore.)

Very interesting.

So, that was unexpected… Zangger is coming here to Berlin and will give a talk on “The Luwians: an archeological discovery story” on Monday. I’ve bought a ticket. (Well, two, thanks to my unreliable Internet connection.)

I look forward to it!

It turns out that this really was a giant fraud as many suspected as the same group who produced the claim has now recently come out and admitted that the man who produced it – James Mellaart – was a habitual forger. Link: https://luwianstudies.org/james-mellaart-forged-documents-throughout-life/

Too bad that this effective retraction will never receive the same widespread reporting as the original, now proven fraudulent, claim. We can therefore look forward to years if not decades of believers pushing it out as “evidence.”

Back to Troy/Atlantis: I have been rereading Zangger’s 1992 book on and off, as I had forgotten most of it. Coincidentally, for unrelated reasons I happened to be browsing in a book about ancient Anatolia. In describing the houses of Atlantis, Plato mentions that many of them were built with alternating rows of light and dark stones, to create a pleasing effect. Guess who else built houses the same way? The Hittites!

Zangger quit science in the 1990s or so, founded a PR agency in Switzerland, got rich (for a scientist anyway) and founded the Luwian Studies Foundation which is dedicated to (him) doing research on the Late Bronze Age of western Anatolia. That’s all mentioned in his latest book, which I’ve finished reading and have yet to report on.

I don’t think there’s a lot of money in that foundation in the first place; and why would Gülen invest in that kind of thing?

Yeah, I only mentioned Gülen because luwianstudies.org is a weird Turkey-related thing and he pops up occasionally in weird Turkey-related things. Maybe an attempt to create an alternative narrative of Anatolian continuity to rival the state co-opted Hittites ????? (Of course, everyone knows that the Turkish language is descended from Sumerian, just look at Gülen = Gül [rose] + En [ruler in Sumerian] = Rose Ruler, or ruler of [Abdullah] Gül, former President of Turkey and Erdoǧan croney!)

It does seem odd, though, that one guy could rustle up the money from private donors for such a slick presentation of a personal research project on a pretty obscure topic. Is he just super charismatic? Are there enough eccentric Swiss businessmen that I could cash in on too?

And, I’m not saying that university affiliation is necessary for a pop-archaeology project (in the sense of “popularizing,” not as a term of denigration), but it’s interesting that there’s no university involvement. Like I said, the whole thing strikes me as odd, but not sinisterly so.

Most of Zangger’s new book, actually, is about how the German university establishment (as far as the Ancient Near East is concerned) is and has always been 1) unduly conservative and 2) dominated by very few figures who have been motivated by a quest for personal fame or power

Ah, so very different from the American system ????

What’s that aphorism about the size of the hill being inversely correlated with the ferocity people will display to be king of it?

that the Maya script did not represent an actual language but rather nebulous ideas

Which is exactly what the Renaissance believed about Egyptian writing.

I remember reading an aphorism somewhere, going something like “academic fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low “.

Adding the opening paragraph:

The topic of the present contribution is two ethnic terms of likely Aegean origin specified in the title, which appear, in different guises, in written sources of the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC across the entire Eastern Mediterranean, from Egypt in the South to the Levant to Cilicia in the North (besides the Aegean itself). My discussion of them will be, however, not quite the same. As for the first one, Ahhiyawa or Hiyawa, I will summarizethe recent discussion revolving around recognition of this name in the Hieroglyphic-Luwian inscription KARATEPE, adding some details and placing it in a more general historical context. The second and central part of the paper will concern Danu(na), in which a full linguistic reassessment of this term and a revision of different sources which mention it will be offered. The third part will discuss the distinction between the two terms, also touching upon the problem of ethnolinguistic boundaries in Late Bronze Age Greece.

A story about deciphering of a newly discovered Luwia stelae just showed up in my feed…

https://phys.org/news/2020-02-archaeologists-lost-city-conquered-kingdom.html

I googled up a map of ancient Anatolia, found the kingdom of Tarḫuntašša, and thought “that could be it”. So did professor Osborne, according to Wikipedia on Tarḫuntašša. I suspect this article to change soon, so for posterity (sources and all):

Tarḫuntašša (Hittite: ???????????????????? dIM-ta-aš-ša “City of Tarhunt”; Hieroglyphic Luwian: ???????????????????? (DEUS)TONITRUS-hu-ta-sá) was a Hittite Bronze Age city in Asia Minor mentioned in Hittite documents. Its location is unknown; in 2019, a previously little-researched site at Türkmenkarahüyük, near Çumra on the Konya Plain, was investigated and put forward by Michele Massa and James Osborne.[1] Previously proposed locations include Konya, somewhere near Cilicia, the Göksu valley, the vicinity of Kayseri,[2] Kilise Tepe (near Mut, formerly known as Maltepe), and Kızıldağ (north of Karaman).

In the early 13th century BC, Muwatalli II moved the Hittite capital from Hattusa to Tarhuntassa, officially as the result of an omen. His son Mursili III later moved the capital back to Hattusa.[3] After Hattusili III deposed Mursili, the new king[4] appointed Muwatalli’s son Kurunta as king in Tarhuntassa. The treaty which survives[5] mostly refers to the appointed king as “Ulmi-Tessup”, and so some scholars believe that Ulmi-Tessup and Kurunta are two different rulers of Tarhuntassa.

Tudhaliya IV re-ratified Kurunta as king in a treaty inscribed in bronze.[6] At this time, Kurunta was leading his forces to war with Parha. This treaty, unlike previous treaties involving Tarhuntassa, calls to witness the Hittites’ vassal kings of Mira and the Seha River Land on the Aegean coast. This implies that Tarhuntassa’s stature was now a matter of importance for all western Anatolia.

Kurunta later claimed the title of Great King for himself. Whether or not this claim extended to the whole domain of Hatti, the court in Hattusa contested it (and buried the treaty).[citation needed]

Toward the end of the Hittite empire, Suppiluliuma II recorded in a Hieroglyphic Luwian inscription that Hatti had attacked and sacked the city of Tarhuntassa.[7] Other Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions from the late 13th century BC also mention a certain great king Hartapu, son of the great king Mursili (III), who likely ruled Tarhuntassa. It may be possible that Suppiluliuma II’s campaign was directed against Hartapu.[8]

References
1. James Osborne & Michele Massa, 2019, A New Iron Age Kingdom in Anatolia: King Hartapu and his Capital City (lecture; video) Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.]
2. “hittites.info – Informationen zum Thema hittites”. ww1.hittites.info. Archived from the original on October 14, 2013.
3. KBo 21.15 i 11-12.
4. And not Tudhaliya IV, according to Gurney (1993), p. 19.
5. This treaty is referenced as KBo. IV 10 + KUB XL 69 + 1548/u, CTH 106 in Gurney (1993).
6. Bronze Tablet III 59.
7. (chamber 2)[clarification needed]
8. Trevor Bryce: The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms: A Political and Military History. Oxford, New York 2012, p. 21 f, 29, 145.

If I read it correctly, a king Hartapu is already known from other Luwian inscriptions.

(I’m going to listen through the lecture, but it’s more than an hour long.)

Professors Osborne and Massa do not invoke the mythical king Midas as anything but a point of recognition for the audience. They do equate Muška and Phrygia, though. And the historical Midas would be a close contemporary of king Hartapu (or Kartapu, as the stele actually says).

They date king Hartapu to the 8th century BCE. The Cimmerians came a little later. Early-mid-seventh century. I also gather that they had Indo-European compound names.

The form of the name H/Kartapu is briefly commented on early in the lecture by Osborne, who says that linguists will undoubtedly discuss the significance of the H/K alternation for years. It comes up again in the question section, answered by Petra Goedegebuure, I think. She says that it’s not analyzable in Luwian or Hittite and speculate that it may be from the kingdoms further west, but they really don’t know.

Osborne also says that they don’t yet know the name of the kingdom or the city. Massa says that he believes they have found the city of Tarḫuntašša, based on its size compared to Ḫattuša and the dating of its spurt of growth, but he also says that the name of the kingdom at the time of Hartapu is unknown.

According to Dyakonov, the Mushka were proto-Armenians.

They were originally Indo-European invaders in Asia Minor coming from the Balkans. Got mixed with the natives (speaking Anatolian languages like Luwian, but also Hurro-Urartian languages) and transformed into Armenians.

Curiously, I was having a conversation with colleagues only last week in which topic of Jews in the far future came up (as it so often does.) I said I was quite sure that (assuming any human beings were left at all) there would still be Jews in two thousand years’ time, and was actually rather surprised by my colleagues’ surprise at what I thought was practically a truism. I said I was quite prepared to put a substantial wager on it.

I do not know what it is like in Africa, but Europe is largely “post-Christian”, apart from countries like Ireland and Poland, where the religion was an assertion of national pride in the time of foreign rule. The Jews of Europe were participating in the process and becoming “post-Jewish” (i think serving as conscripts or volunteers in various armies during WWI was a particular stimulus) until this was blocked by the actions of the fascist and other authoritarian governments post WWI.

apart from countries like Ireland and Poland, where the religion was an assertion of national pride in the time of foreign rule

Even there the deconversion is coming along at full steam, just a generation or two later than in, say, Germany’s average.

India was getting steadily more secular

I would guess it’s getting steadily more secular and steadily more fundamentalist at the same time – the polarization of the society is increasing. No wonder they elected the most Trump-like party possible.

There are atheists in Saudi Arabia now. Everything globalizes.

Hmmmm. I don’t see much of a possibility of being a secular Jew outside Israel for more than 2-3 generations. If you don’t believe in the covenant anymore, for how long it makes sense to keep answering question with a question? That is assuming that the people marching with garden torches and chanting “you won’t replace us” won’t go very far.

I usually am very fond of scholarly forgery stories, but this is too much for me. I don’t trust James Mellaart. I don’t trust Eberhard Zangger. I don’t trust Woudhuizen (who reads the Phaistos disk as Luwian, and Etruscan as a Luwian dialect). When it comes to the Dorak treasure, I don’t trust Mellaart’s (friend? enemy?) Aydın Dikmen. I don’t fully trust Susan Mazur,

I’m late to the party I know, but my gosh. James Mellaart, Eberhard Zangger, Woudhuizen and Aydın Dikmen must be truly awful if Susan Mazur only rates a “don’t fully trust”.

Bratt, LH, you’ve accomplished nothing short of miraculous, convinced a person on internet to change their mind. At least to open.

@FJ: A lot of them do marry other Jews. Those that don’t tend to marry people who do not have a strong religious identity, and so they mostly raise their children Jewish. Sometimes the spouse converts, sometimes not. (And sometimes the spouse does not officially convert but end up practicing Judaism anyway. The longtime treasurer of our synagogue is technically not Jewish, having never converted. He jokes that he keeps it that way to ensure that he can never be elected president of the congregation.)

A lot of them do marry other Jews. Those that don’t tend to marry people who do not have a strong religious identity

I.e. the rate of intermarriage depends on the rate of irreligion in the wider community, which we’ve established has been recently rapidly rising. “Secular Jew” would to me only seem to be an indefinitely maintainable minority identity in a society where both terms work for exclusion (not merely delineation).

The altogether existence of Jews in 4000 CE, however, is not conditional on the continuation of currently established Jewish diaspora; the future of Israel figures here too. I note that even quite marginal micro-religions have traditionally had a good track record of surviving in the Middle East, one way or the other.

I had a similar experience with my Other Significant Other’s sister-by-choice[*] (Not even Yiddish has a word for that.) Insert the goyish yeshiva bocher joke here.

[*] She was Jewish, her brother (of the whole blood) was Irish.

Oh, interesting. So that’s a complete disproof of what I had seen long ago.

That massive immigration of Greeks (as they must have been one way or another) all through imperial times is interesting in its own right, though. It might explain why there’s quite that much Greek in Romance.

marie-lucie (2017): The name of the Seine is given as “Signa”, from Latinized Gaulish “Sequana”, implying stress on the first syllable of the name.

Maybe not exactly relevant, but here’s an article on the ON theonym Sigyn and the river name Sequana:

Riccardo Ginevra (2018): The Old Norse theonym Sígyn (*seikʷ-n̥-iéh₂- ‘she of the pouring’), Vedic Sanskrit °sécanī- ‘pouring’, the Celtic river-name and theonym Sēquana (present-day river Seine, France) and Proto-Indo-European *seikʷ- ‘pour’ [Loki and Fire, n.2]

In the present contribution, after briefly presenting the myth of Sigyn and its possible ritual associations (§2), I will discuss the possibility of an inner-Germanic analysis for the goddess’s name and argue for a different scansion as Sígyn (§3). On the strength of it, a new interpretation for Sígyn will be advanced, namely as the reflex of the weak stem of PIE*seikʷ-én-ih₂-/-n̥-iéh₂-‘she of the pouring’, a devī- derivative of *seikʷ-eno- ‘pouring’ (: Ved. °sécana- ‘id.’), whose semantics would closely correspond to Sigyn’s main role in myth; exact and partial matches for this analysis may be identified in Ved. °sécanī- ‘pouring, pouring ladle’(*seikʷ-én-ih₂-) and in the Latinized Celtic river-name and theonym Sēquana (*seikʷ-en-eh₂-), respectively (§4).

(Typographically edited)

I think the idea of a single Gaulish language in all of Gaul is just copied from the single French language in 21st-century France.

Recently I came across a short list of unshifted *kʷ words in Gaulish placenames and inscriptions, IIRC. Sometimes the same word is attested both ways.

@DM: If you can find that list again, I’d be interested in seeing it.

At the time of the French revolution most residents of France were not speakers of French at all; southerners spoke Occitan, Bretons spoke Breton, Alsatians spoke their Alemannic German. And so on.

(Also there were seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was gloriously stormed.)

… the prisoners, who were for the most part ordinary criminals.

Not so:

#
La Bastille était une prison plutôt confortable pour les personnes de qualité (nobles, grands bourgeois) emprisonnés dans les cellules (au nombre de 42[18]), elles mangeaient tous les jours « à la table du gouverneur » (non avec lui mais bénéficiant du même repas que lui). Ces cellules disposaient de grandes pièces avec repas fins et d’un domestique si ce dernier acceptait (tel le domestique du banquier de Gérard Michel de La Jonchère qui a partagé le sort de son maître mais finit par ne plus le supporter, sans pouvoir ressortir[19]), de meubles et d’une cheminée avec bois de chauffage (grâce à la « pistole »[20]).

Les prisonniers royaux sont autorisés à correspondre avec l’extérieur, recevoir des visites et jouissent d’une relative liberté de mouvement au sein de la forteresse.
#

The marquis de Sade-Sacque just missed being gloriously liberated, having been released a few days before July 14. He had dined so well there that he became grotesquely fat, so much so that he could hardly move (as he complained afterwards).

The form of the name H/Kartapu is briefly commented on early in the lecture by Osborne, who says that linguists will undoubtedly discuss the significance of the H/K alternation for years.

Indeed it has been: check out this paper and a few references therein (which are also on academia.edu).