M-N- sound appears to have many of the same meanings in Turkic as well as in Indo-European languages (Manas is the mythological founder of Turkic Kirghiz culture, Zaman signifies time in Turkish, for example).
M-N- might therefore be Turkic rather than of Indo-European origins?!
Especially where its meanings and immanences hover around the same Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system of southern Ukraine from ~4,100 BCE as Finding Manuland has so far been elucidating.
However, among the first documents with writing in any Indo-European language is this text I photographed in Ankara.
It mentions a native Anatolian language speaking (Indo-European as distinct from an Assyrian language speakers) Tarmana (1,900 - 1,800 BCE).
Also, since modern linguists determine the -Uman element was ubiquitous in the first attested Indo-European language - Kanisite Hittite (1,900 - 1,800 BCE), it’s clear M-N- was in Anatolia five millennia before the first Ottoman / Mongol Osman brought it there around 1,200 CE from Central Asia / Quaziqstan.
it seems clear M-N- transferred into Turkic as the first Central Asian Turkic language speakers with Ancient Ukrainian so-called Steppe / Scythian ancestry millennia later abandoned their Indo-European tongues.
Then with much later Turkic migrations into, say, Anatolia with Osman, the founder of the Ottoman / Osman dynasty that would dominate Anatolia from 1,200 CE onwards, M-N- returned and just become another source of M-N- immanent toponyms and words / meanings relating to measurement and the Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling systems in formerly Indo-European occupied areas such as Anatolia.
I’m Decoding Trolls. This is Finding Manuland. It’s very hot where I am, deep in Manuland. I thought today we’d go through a précis of where we are. The other day, somebody asked me about the MN sound and where I am with my research. Over the course of about 40 minutes, I outlined the whole system to them, including some of the latest discoveries, which were extremely exciting but which I haven’t yet properly explored. I’m going to hang these new little frames around various parts of Manuland — the area between Ireland and India geographically, and between 4100 BCE and today temporally — like those little hooks you put towels on in hotels.
Each Finding Manuland episode goes through the method: mana as energy exchange, the linguistic elements of the MN sound, and the voyaging, the journeying aspect, which is obviously the most exciting and perhaps the most accessible for those of us who aren’t specialists in linguistics or energy exchange. The journeying component, the third dimension, is geographical — between Ireland and India, that space I call Manuland, and obviously now the Americas and Australia, but I’m talking about the traditional areas which became anchored in Indo-European languages after around 1100 BCE. There’s also the temporal aspect: 4100 BCE, when the Yamnaya in southeastern Ukraine spoke the first Indo-European language and began migrations. The first wave of migrants ended up colonising the whole of Anatolia, today’s Turkey, establishing the first Indo-European empire, the Hittite Empire. The second wave was around 2500 BCE, and out of that emanate all of today’s living Indo-European language families. In between and since, there have been constant successive subwaves.
Before the advent of ancient DNA, Marija Gimbutas, the brilliant Lithuanian-American scholar who discovered the steppe theory of migration — now as factual as we can get — was looking at archaeological artifacts from digs across Europe and was able to develop a timeline corresponding to three waves of steppe migrants. That has evolved a little since ancient DNA, but essentially what she discovered is still correct.
When Jung was writing in the 1930s and 1940s about archetypes, hypothesising that archetypes must be universal to all humans — otherwise how would you explain Tibetan monks having the same archetypes of the Lord of Death as people in Ireland with Lord Donn? — apart from, as he put it, the wildest migration theories. Well, Marija Gimbutas established from linguistics, archaeology, and mythology that these connections were real. She did a lot of work on folk songs from the Baltic countries and was able to establish continuities between Vedic Indian folk songs and Irish and other Indo-European traditions. We have these different vectors of evidence connecting all of us.
As Finding Manuland followers know, Sir William Jones, a Welsh Sanskrit scholar, learnt Sanskrit to translate the Manusmriti — those two sounds so important to Finding Manuland: MN in Manu, and smriti, with the RT sound, meaning truth, the non-illusory. The Manusmriti, the Laws of Manu, is the usual translation. Manu was the first human in Indian culture. The Laws were written down around 600 CE as later extrapolations, whereas Manu as the first human first appears in writing around 1100 BCE in the Rigveda — there’s that righ, the RT sound, in right, regina, rex.
Every Finding Manuland podcast deals with the mana energy exchange element, the linguistics element, and the voyage — the conceptual, geographical, and temporal journey, the uprooting and rebuilding of mental models.
When I was describing to my friend where we’re at with Finding Manuland, I went through the whole universe, and I thought I’d record it and tell you where we’re at. I’ve made quite a few amazing advances recently which I have yet to explore properly.
The mana exchange element has two dimensions I’ve recently discovered. One comes from the discipline of social or cultural psychology. Long before I knew cultural psychology existed, I began to label myself as a cultural archaeologist. One of the emerging dimensions of cultural psychology looks at consumer behaviour, how fashion works, how contagion operates. The first time you see me wearing this thing on my head, you think it looks ridiculous. Then you see someone else wearing it — this device originates in Afghanistan and gradually spread across Central Asia — and now it’s on my head. We have this phenomenon of how different cultural phenomena, whether words, music, ideas, clothes, designs, anything we can cognise, are susceptible to contagion.
This aspect of cultural psychology emanates from one of the same sources my work does: the amazing writer Marcel Mauss, who noticed that the mana exchange in Polynesia was equivalent to orenda elsewhere. It’s this idea of how people exchange energy, using the moniker mana in Polynesia. He was writing before we knew how Polynesia was populated by migrants from various parts of the world. The mana they exchange, part of their religion, is now seen in cultural psychology as a mechanism for examining how fashions take hold, and they use the term contagion.
This idea of contagion is hardwired into the beginnings of my understanding of mana as a method to describe the essential exchange of energy between sentient beings, between humans — and that NM in animals, the anima, animal, the NM reversed, as in Numitor, Romulus and Remus’s grandfather, the mani backwards. We have this slight reversal, a phenomenon in linguistics that Ferdinand de Saussure also noticed.
Some of you will have read what is probably my greatest piece, “The Meaning of Meaning,” in which I announce that I’ve found one of the cryptotypic signifying systems underlying all human communication in Indo-European languages — this MN sound. In there, I’m talking about this mnemonic through sound, through our language, of a physical phenomenon which on the micro scale happens in the mitochondrial aspect of our cells. Each of our cells has two different genomes; one is mitochondrial DNA, a quite small genome of maybe 32 to 35 genes. This is what launched the ancient DNA revolution — instead of the gazillions of lineages in nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is much shorter. When I say I’ve got steppe ancestry or Yamnaya DNA, it’s when we’re looking at mitochondrial DNA. And of course MN is in mitochondrial — that may be a coincidence, I don’t know.
Mitochondrial DNA gives our cells their energy. The ATP — I always remember this because it’s a supermarket in Ukraine owned by Yulia Tymoshenko’s family, the first female prime minister of Ukraine — ATP is what powers our cells. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing photographs of how particular organelles, these mitochondrial elements, are joined and connect with each other. That’s on the micro. On the macro, it’s me communicating with you — and MN is in communicate. Our mana is exchanging, even though at the moment it’s going one direction. But if you comment or subscribe, our mana is being exchanged.
We go from the micro inside our bodies to the macro, whole human communities and the communal, communitarian sense of exchanging energy. The cultural psychology element is brilliant. When I discovered Marcel Mauss’s work on Polynesian mana, I was already interested in mana, and now I think I can genetically connect it through the migrations from South Asia, from India — they could well have brought with them this signifier, mana, for the phenomenon of energy exchange which all sentient beings experience.
Part of the purpose of Finding Manuland is to remind ourselves in our communities, when we’ve gotten so far removed from these basics, what it means to communicate with people every day, to smile at them. We’re exchanging energy. Part of my purpose is to implant a reminder, a mana reminder system, through this MN sound. If you’re scanning for the MN sound in meaning, in all these common words we use in almost every sentence, when you spot it, it will remind you that in this interaction we’re exchanging mana, and that’s all that really matters. That is the essence of being human, the essence of living inside a community and keeping language alive. The MN sound at its most basic meaning is to remind us of this energy exchange.
It’s particularly interesting to discover this whole area of cultural psychology, which has taken Marcel Mauss’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s insights from early twentieth-century anthropology and moved them forward into a heavily resourced area of academia — understanding consumer behaviour, how fashions take hold, how human culture works. That was a great discovery for me.
The second element I’ve recently discovered, apart from cultural psychology, is essential to Tibetan Buddhism, which is an Indo-European religion. We have this idea of bodhicitta, which distinguishes Tibetan Buddhism from, say, Sri Lankan Buddhism — or as the Dalai Lama would put it, the Sanskrit tradition from the Pāli tradition. In the Sanskrit tradition, there’s this essential idea of bodhicitta: everything one does as a Buddhist is for the sake of all sentient beings. It’s more than compassion. It’s an entire motivation for practice and for everything we do — the core element in Tibetan Buddhism and the Sanskrit tradition.
There are two ways of generating this motivation, bodhicitta, the spirit of enlightenment or awakening spirit. One is remembering the love that one’s mother has for one’s child — if one is lucky enough to have known one’s mother through life. But if not, one can remember seeing other depictions of this, or perhaps good friends. As James Joyce puts it in Ulysses, amor matris — the love of the mother. It’s one of the two core ways of motivating bodhicitta, which is for the benefit of all sentient beings. As distinct from the Sri Lankan or Thai tradition, where you seek enlightenment for yourself. In Tibetan Buddhism, one seeks enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, not just oneself. It’s trying to get to the same result through different methods, all emanating from the Buddha.
The second core way of generating bodhicitta is exchange of self and other. At the cellular level, our mitochondrial cells are exchanging energy — we can actually see the connections between cells, between the ATP, between the mitochondrial elements, with incredible microscopes. They are exchanging self with other. If you remember this element of exchanging self and other, this mana exchange, then that is the core, the fundamental aspect of human community in the Tibetan Buddhist worldview. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognise how you can be energised in a positive or negative way by other people coming into your awareness, whether over the internet through trolls or in your own life when you’re feeling down and someone you love comes in, or your kitten comes looking for affection.
That is the mana element. We’ll be looking more at that and tracing it. One of the first podcasts I did was on the X energy — the idea of mana powering Tibetan Buddhism, but also on the micro level, the idea powering our mitochondrial DNA.
The second dimension to every Finding Manuland podcast is the linguistic element. Someone said to me recently: is the MN sound just a fundamental sound that humans make biologically? Perhaps it is. But what is particularly Indo-European about the MN sound is that in many cases we can trace it to the Yamnaya community in southeastern Ukraine’s use of the MN sound in menyot, meaning moon — the mechanism for measuring months, days, and moments. The idea of meaning, if my hypothesis is correct, is that the light shining through the moon, the illuminate light shining through the moon, is the moon-based metaphor underpinning much of our language. In humans, the idea of the mind shining through the human, through organic matter, which is the difference between the human and the stone, animating us.
This light shining through the moon, the moon-based metaphor, comes through in the signifier “meaning” — the idea of one particular signifier shining through another, their meanings being connected. The metaphor, the idea that you’re bringing a meaning across from one part to another, and these networked connections, is the totality of the language we use and the meanings we communicate — a particularly effective means that humans and animals have evolved for exchanging mana. It’s not just an organic or biological medium for keeping each other alive, not automated like our mitochondria exchanging energy from one cell to another. When particular cells’ ATP factories aren’t working well, others will communicate energy to them. We can see these connections now with incredible microscopes.
But on the linguistic level, I can communicate many more complex thoughts through language and meanings. The language I’m using, an Indo-European language, is made up of networked connections all generated from fundamental metaphors, the most fundamental of which, as far as I can see, is this MN sound.
We see the MN sound across the Indo-European linguistic sphere, but there are also mysteries. In Turkey, MN is everywhere in place names, just as in Ireland. We can explain Ireland’s MN everywhere through the direct genetic link with the Menapii, who came from Cassel — you might remember from my first and second episodes. Cassel was the centre of this great polity which gave its name to La Manche, and many places: Mons, Main, where Finding Manuland began life, Monaghan, Fermanagh, Cill Mhantáin — the Irish for Wicklow — Loch Garman. This MN sound is in thousands of place names in Ireland, but also in Turkey.
We have the Ottoman Empire, which began with Osman. In the past few weeks, Nature has published the analysis of one of the successors in the Ottoman Empire, still alive today, tracing their DNA back to Osman and a particular geographical location in Central Asia, in Kazakhstan. The people who migrated from there eventually took over Anatolia from us Indo-Europeans.
We had successive waves occupying Anatolia: from the first great empire that really unified it, the Hittites, which I talk about a lot. We can now trace the Areni-1 man, from Areni in Armenia — and MN in Armenia — from about 4000 BCE, whose DNA reappears in the Hittites 2,000 years later. We’ve got this genetic trace and the linguistic trace. The Hittites used a form of Zeus for God — Zeus, Jupiter — so we can deduce that the Areni-1 man was probably an Indo-European who brought this tradition, and the other migrants with him, to found what would become the Hittite Empire 2,000 years later.
Then you have multiple other Indo-European waves: the Greeks, the Lycians, the Cilicians, the Armenians, who were at their greatest extent around 50 BCE with three different states across Anatolia. Successive waves. But the end of Indo-European dominance in Anatolia began with the migration of the Turkic-language-speaking peoples — often called the Mongols, but in fact Turkic. We can trace the Ottoman family, still alive, and their ancient DNA to where they emanated from. They speak a Turkic language — the clue is in the name, Turkey — and the Turkic peoples emanated from Central Asia near Mongolia.
It had been an interesting problem to explore: the MN sound in Ottoman and in Osman, the founder of this empire. Osman was around 1100 to 1200 CE. Given the recent ancient DNA analysis and the work I’ve cited about how uman was deeply embedded in Indo-European from the texts of 1900 to 1800 BCE, we can begin to trace this.
We know the uman sound is very important to the Hittites — so important that modern linguists use it to distinguish between Assyrian and Hittite in the 23,000 texts from Kültepe-Kanesh, where the first example of Indo-European writing was found, and which I saw in the Ankara museum. Ankara, which Celtic-language-speaking people founded about 300 BCE, before the Romans conquered them. Again, successive waves of Indo-European peoples moving into Anatolia. Then the break, often represented as the fall of Constantinople, which began with Osman, founder of the Ottoman dynasty, arriving in Anatolia with the Mongol invaders.
We’ve already been to one of the places of great battles — Sakarya, near the Sakarya River in Gordion. I was there in January on a very foggy day, where I found the first burial mound in Anatolia, not actually the Midas Mound but Mound W, close to the Midas Mound. Right nearby, the Battle of Sakarya was one of the great fights the modern Turks had against the Greeks — the Turkic-language-speaking Turks against the Indo-European Greeks, effectively ending the Greek presence in Anatolia.
We have these successive waves over millennia, whose remnants are in our stories. Through all of them, from at least the time of the Hittites, is this MN sound. When linguists try to distinguish between Assyrian and Hittite, between Indo-European and Semitic, they use uman. When they see uman, they know it’s Hittite, Indo-European, not Assyrian. We have textual evidence of the MN sound’s presence in Anatolia from 1900 to 1800 BCE, nearly 4,000 years ago.
Then flash forward 3,000 years to the arrival of Osman, who’s travelled with his crew all the way from Kazakhstan, from Central Asia, with his Turkic-language-speaking people. They arrive and bring this MN sound — but they’re arriving in a place where the MN sound is already embedded in many place names. We know this from Homer, who’s from Anatolia, probably from Smyrna — MN sound — and around Halicarnassus. MN is all over the early Greek material, and it hasn’t just come from what we today consider Greece.
Modern Turks often describe words which are clearly Indo-European as from the Persian influence. They tend to downplay the Armenian influence — and MN in Armenia. We’ve got layers upon layers of place names which have been present in Anatolia since at least 1900 BCE, from the texts at Kültepe. We saw Chamana — one of the earliest examples of Indo-European writing — in the Ankara museum in January, described as a native Anatolian, which basically means Indo-European. These texts also mention places with the MN sound in them. Flash forward 3,000 years and the Ottoman Empire begins when Osman comes in from Central Asia. The MN sound is also embedded in the Turkic-language-speaking peoples.
My hypothesis is this: there’s a moment in Neolithic times when the Scythians — the ancient Ukrainians — and the Mongolians who created the Turkic language around Lake Baikal meet. The MN sound is very ubiquitous in Turkic language, and I believe that is a remnant of the Indo-European encounter. We know uman is deeply embedded in Indo-European before any encounter with Turkic speakers. But we also know the MN sound is present in Anatolia in almost every layer from at least the Hittites, whose mythological foundation is in Kanesh-Kültepe, around 2000 BCE. The height of the Hittite Empire is around 1400 BCE.
We know the Areni-1 man from Areni in Armenia, from about 4000 BCE — his DNA reappears in the Hittites at Boğazköy, the capital of the Hittite Empire. We’ve also got certain motifs: the amazing Karashamb goblet found in Armenia has the same motifs as items found in Boğazköy and Kanesh — particular motifs which haven’t appeared anywhere else. We have the genetic ancient DNA connection, the artistic and cultural archaeological connection, and the linguistic connection, manifest in the MN sound.
This is a particular aspect we can follow from modern Turkey through Armenia up to Kazakhstan and all the way to Mongolia — MN in Mongolia — and the Mani culture in Mongolia, an archaeological culture which is another strand to explore. This is how the linguistic combines with the cultural and migratory strands across Manuland, from Ireland to India, from Lake Baikal near Inner Mongolia down to Mount Hazi, where the Hittite and Assyrian gods lived.
The third aspect, the voyage element: the geographical journey and the temporal journey between 4100 BCE and 2025, and also the conceptual journey. Our mental models of a world in which Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross in the early Roman Empire — where Greek is the lingua franca, and the structural tale which recurs in Odin and in Celtic culture — is the beginning of time. In Finding Manuland, as my brain has expanded, I’m trying to expand yours — your temporal mind, your mental models.
And so to the meaning of Finding Manuland. We’ve got the meaning of the MN sound as a mnemonic reminding us about energy exchange, reminding us in the moment when perhaps we’re getting emotional that the point of this interaction — whether in a shop, with a friend, or with our enemy in the office — is energy exchange. That’s all that really matters. That’s what life is about. That’s on the micro.
On the macro, Finding Manuland itself as a moniker for a geographical space between Ireland and India, as a moniker for a temporal community between 4100 BCE in southeastern Ukraine — around Kherson, around where the Russians are today killing Ukrainian children through first-person-view drones — and today. Looking at the Yamnaya community spreading out from there and taking over linguistically the space between Ireland and India is an amazing story in itself.
But now we can encompass the Turkic and look at the Mongolian-Scythian unification. In Kazakhstan, we have this amazing unity of a community between the Iranian Indo-Europeans — the Yamnaya who went all the way to the Sintashta and probably all the way to Iran — and the Mongolian. The Turkic and Indo-European languages, at a very ancient level, unified in Kazakhstan as a space and as a community. We now know through ancient DNA, through the mitochondrial DNA of ancient humans in the Sintashta culture and elsewhere in Kazakhstan, that this Iranian Indo-European and Turkic combination is where they unified. It’s the space from which Osman came, as well as whole waves of migrants for millennia, to conquer Anatolia and add their layer.
Finding Manuland is not a message of division. It’s a message of unity. Irish people and Indians are the same. Pashtuns and Ukrainians are the same. We are from the same community. We speak languages from the same family. However different the signs, our mythological founders often have MN sounds in their names. And now we can do the same with the Turkic-language speakers, this emanation from Kazakhstan, from this area where we can trace the connection between the ancient DNA of Osman and his living descendants.
Where we come across differences in human communities premised on linguistic differences between Indo-European and Turkic speakers, Finding Manuland has a powerful new story to tell, which we can use to bind us closer together. Let me leave it at that for now. We’ve got several years’ worth of podcasts and publications to make and a lot of travels to come. I’m very glad you’re on this journey with me.
Continued from:
First in series:
