Ancient Ukrainians: First Indo-Europeans

Finding Manuland V

Relatively early in my research, I read that the builders of the mound that concealed the Dnipro stone henge were from what archaeologists call the Yamnaya Culture.

I had never heard of the Yamnaya before. Even the idea that archaeologists defined ancient peoples as “cultures” according to similarities and differences in the way they treated their dead was new to me.

Sacrificial horse burials inside pits characterised Yamnaya entombments. Another common characteristic of Yamnaya mausoleums that could be used to identify them before ancient DNA analysis was that Yamnaya were buried under a tumulus or barrow, with their knees raised in a supine position. Wheeled vehicles, sleeved axes cast in bivalve molds, silver or copper hair rings, tanged daggers, canine-tooth pendants, a manifold range of fourth-century BCE ceramics, and cord ornaments also characterised Yamnaya Culture burials. Yamnaya bodies, like those pre-Yamnaya bodies found at Dereivka, just north of Dnipro, were sprinkled with red ochre. Then, tonnes of soil would be heaped on top of the pit grave to form the Mane, which still stood prominently across the landscape between Ireland and India five millennia later.

Using these customs as a unique signifier, archaeologists had for several decades been able to trace Yamnaya cultural influence eastwards across the Steppe as far as China, and westwards as far as Ireland. In different countries archaeologists had different words to describe the same people with the same characteristic burial customs. I shall just use the word “Yamnaya” as a universal descriptor for cultures which adhered to the same grave models and whose ancient DNA now shows they were of the same stock.

The word “Yamnaya” and the immediate linguistic root in the Russian language from which it emanates – Yama – was immediately significant to me, in a way it wouldn’t be for most people, for non-Buddhists at least.

During an earlier diplomatic mission, I had spent fourteen enlighteningly cold January days in another former Soviet colony, the ancient Buddhist land of Mongolia.

It had been so arctic that it was impossible to spend more than half-an-hour outside without needing to go indoors to get warm for an hour. It was Christmastime and around -20 degrees. I was suffering after a pre/never-to-be romance had ended. I had tried extremely hard to perform mantic magic; to enmance my would-be lover. All my offerings of services – like those I imagined would be welcomed by a potential boyfriend; my spells and bewitching strategies had failed. They had not been romanced by me into a kind of loving magical trance. As ever when these matters turn out this way, it was very dispiriting. I was in an altered state of mind, all alone. I determined to make one last manistic offering - a self-sacrificing visit to Mongolia.

While there, I found myself drawn into the warmth of an ancient Tibetan Buddhist temple in the centre of Mongolia’s capital city’s religious citadel. I would keep hypothermia at bay, by mimicking pilgrims’ circuits around the temple, spinning Maṇi prayer wheels as they went. I could hear the constant hum of Buddhist Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ incantations all around me.

I didn’t know any actual Buddhist mantras then. I chanted my own sacrilegious, secular “prayer;” one last hex to bespell my never-to-be lover: “fall, fall, fall in love with me...” as I circumambulated the temple, following in devout Mongolian pilgrims’ footsteps.

On 6^th January 2014, while sheltering from the cold inside the temple, I got talking to a Buddhist nun (monashka, in Russian). She invited me to a workshop on how to begin a Buddhist practice. I didn’t have any intention (mens rea) or even interest in religion before I went to that teaching. It wasn’t a thing which I did – seeking out esoteric religions. If you had met me in 2013, you would probably have classified me as Least Likely Person Ever to Take To Religion. Something however in that moment, and in those circumstances coalesced.

Perhaps it was just the thought of what I presumed would be quite a warm space in which to pass an icy Sunday in Ulaanbaatar, while I waited in vain for my never-to-be-lover to respond to one of my emails or SMSs! By the end of that day, in search of an end to my suffering, I had started to practise Buddhism.

In a way inverse to my stopping smoking on my thirtieth birthday and never once smoking again, since that icy January Sunday, I’ve kept up my Buddhist practice. Now I know off by heart a heap of mantras which help me refocus whenever I find myself lapsing. The Dalai Lama initiated me into Tibetan Buddhism’s most famous mantra: Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ in June 2016. Since that moment of transmission, somehow, it is lodged constantly at the forefront of my mind.

In many situations I chant it quietly quite consciously. I also catch myself unconsciously chanting it too. As if by mantic magic, His Holiness the Dalai Lama had conveyed it directly into my constant awareness. Though I didn’t know this before I became a Buddhist, the Maṇi mantra is so well known, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s even part of the English language!

I mention this here, because of the similarity in sound and form between Yama, Lord of Death in Tibetan Buddhism, and the ancient Ukrainian culture known as the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya have many claims to fame.

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Ancient Ukrainian Invasions of England.

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They are believed to have first used cannabis for ritual purposes. They took the invention of the wheel and wagon and built their entire economy around this new form of mobility. Their methods for domesticating and horse breeding facilitated their genomic immanence in the DNA Steppe ancestry of every Indo-European people. Most of today’s horses are genetic descendants of Yamnaya Culture’s horse breeding excellence. However, of all the Yamnaya’s claims to fame, creating and seeding the first Indo-European language anywhere is the greatest. Today more than half of humanity speak languages descended from the Proto-Indo-European (Ancient Ukrainian) language Yamnaya forged in the river valleys of eastern Ukraine.

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What That Exploded Dam Reveals About The First "Humans."

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Christianity renders the whole of our lifecycle unto the jurisdiction of one sole god (or two if you count Jesus as an actual God). This is a hugely efficient downsizing. Christianity simplifies the array of Gods who, in many religions, take responsibility for different parts of our world: magic, justice, war, crops, fertility, and death, for example. Even our days of the week are reminders of how usual it is for religions to have many Gods to look after the different realms of our existences!

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Continued:

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Continued from:

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First in series:

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Indo-European Immanence in Early Christianity.