Here we see how the latest analysis of ancient DNA demonstrates the main means through which the earliest attested Indo-European language - Kanisite Hittite (1,900 -1,800 BCE) spread from the area of southern Ukraine.
Here is one of the very earliest pieces of writing in any Indo-European language. Tarmana (note the M-N- in his name!) contracts to buy a slave from another Indo-European language speaker (described as an ‘Anatolian native’ in this sign in the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations which I visited recently in Ankara).
Below are a few photographs of my visit to the Karum suburb of Kanis/Kultepe, where this tablet and 23,500 others like it were discovered in the basements of merchants’ houses. These tablets are mainly in the Assyrian language. But many of the tablets (such as the one photographed above) contain ‘native Anatolian’ (i.e. Indo-European) names. Two recent books examine these texts to parse all the translation data since these tablets were discovered to determine which of the signs in the cuneiform script signify Indo-European sounds and meanings.
Here is one of those books, which we’ll return to again (I’m grateful for your patience. It takes me a long time to process all these data in my mind):
Below is the main recent analysis of all the data we have for Indo-European sounds/meanings/signs in the language which would become Hittite - Kanisite Hittite as Alwin Kloekhorst refers to the Indo-European language that was spoken in Kultepe/Kanis and its Karum suburb 1,900-1,800 BCE:
Note below how Kloekhorst (who is not yet aware of my work tracing the M-N- across Manuland from 4,100 BCE to today) deduces that the - Uman suffix is the most common element in Indo-European names from this dataset from 1,900-1,800. So this is the earliest written evidence of an Indo-European language and -M-N- is the main distinguishing element in that dataset. Score!
Hi there, I'm Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the archetypes episode. So when we're thinking about transforming the mental models, our own mental models of our entire conception of human culture in our minds, and this is hopefully really why you're going to be interested in Finding Manuland. Obviously, you may not accept everything I say,
or you may Google it and go, oh, maybe this or maybe that, but... that doesn't matter. I'll just say as an aside, this week the Wall Street Journal has published an essay under the title The Ancient Horseman Who Created the Modern World. New DNA research shows that half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamna
who lived in Ukraine 5,000 years ago. And that was published in the Wall Street Journal on the 8th of March, 2025. So we're not chasing genetic evidence. We're chasing the evidence of sound. sound and meaning, the cryptotypic signifying system, which I believe the MN sound signifies. We're interested in tracing that sound,
the MN sound from Ireland to India, across space from Ireland to India and across time from around 4100 BCE to until today, so 6,000 years. And in Finding Manuland, we achieve this feat through various means. But that is not just the only reason to listen to Finding Manuland.
What really matters to me is that I can communicate to you my energy, my manner, my positive manner. Hopefully, I'll do my best, as we all do, to communicate positive manner every day. And now we have this technology that we can communicate our manner, our meaning, our inner self, our energy across the entire world and across time.
Because obviously, as I record this, I don't know when you're going to listen to this. It may be in a hundred years. So this is why hopefully there's a big market for this. And the vehicle for this is this amazing story about how this one sound travelled with this one community of people, the Yamna,
with an MN sound in their name. And I believe the idea of having a reminder lodged in our minds so that when you're in these moments, so reminder, minds, moments, all MN words, when our emotions take control and troll us into perhaps making mistakes, and communicating bad manner, negative manner, then we'll remember finding Maniland.
And that will remind us to communicate positive manner in this moment. And then we can just switch from being really annoyed at this poor person at the other end of the phone line or our boss or our pet who's nagging us for food and we
don't have it or we can't afford to do something and we get really annoyed that we just like flick a switch and we flick that switch into communicating positive positive manner, positive energy. So, so that is, if, if you're asking me, uh, on, um, to say, what's the, what's the,
the most important element or the most important meaning of finding my new land, it's this, it's this, I want us to use Finding Manuland as a little mantra, as a way of obviously contemplating all of the amazing aspects of our human history since 4100 BCE until today, across the space from Ireland to India. But ultimately...
this only matters in the moment when we are perhaps communicating negative or, or neutral manner or indeed positive manner. And we recognize that in the moment. And we say to our, we give ourselves a little pat on the back, a little bit of pride, never hurt anyone.
And so part of the sign of our mental model of humanity and culture is that being transformed is that our human relationships are being transformed. We're better in conflict situations. We're better in the moment when we used to get triggered into negative, communicating negative manner. But really, what I really am trying to do in Finding Manuland,
as you've probably picked up, is to transform what I call the archetype your archetype of our human history since 4100 BCE in your mind as it has been transformed in mine and as that Wall Street Journal article is making a tiny drop in the ocean to transform people's mental archetype of ancient Ukraine and where
the Indo-European languages exist. emanate from and this small community of people. We saw earlier in February, on February 5th, Nature published an article which establishes as a matter of scientific fact that instead of what up until now many archaeologists and linguists had referred to as the steppe hypothesis and had
referred to the Pontic Caspian steppe as the place somewhere between western Ukraine on the border by the Danube and Kazakhstan, where the Yamna, who were the first community of humans to speak an Indo-European language, and let's note that MN is in human as well, that they came from somewhere in that space.
And many Russian archaeologists had privileged places which are in today's Russia. And the Russian philosophers like Dugan who drive the current imperialist bent of the Russian Federation and provide the ideological backing, justify their willingness to destroy Ukraine by reference to histories which place Ukrainians in some subservient position. to Russians.
But this Nature article of the 5th of February, research article on the 5th of February, establishes a scientific fact what many linguists and archaeologists and amateurs such as myself had already worked out, was that the Yamna emanate from this small community of people on the Dnieper River down near Mykolaiv in Kherson, today's Kherson. Oblast.
And we'll go into this article again, but I just wanted to raise that for a second. So the first aspect of every Finding Man Who Land essay or podcast is what I've just spoken about, which is the main purpose to communicate positive manner in the moment. The second element of every Finding Manuland aspect is linguistics.
Mana is the X factor. It exists beyond linguistics. This is what I mean by the fundamental cryptotypic signifying system. Mana is merely the access point. It is the opening into the cave. It is the opening into the mountain. It is the keyhole. It is the access point. And this is fundamental to all human and non-human animal.
All sentient beings experience manna and all sentient beings communicate manna, whether or not they can communicate about it. or talk about mana being communicated is another question, but we as humans can. And so the linguistic element, which I did talk about in the last episode, in which I'm often raising, because
It's a really important element in establishing the basis for the argument in finding Manuland that not only did the genes and the language pass from this Yamna community in Mykolaiv in ancient Ukraine from there to Ireland to India, but But the entire Indo-European languages, all the extant, all the living Indo-European languages today emanate from that community.
This is what that nature paper established. And there's an accompanying nature paper with many Russian archaeologists on which we'll get into in in a second and that so that if we're going to look at that we've got our mn sound which is obviously what finding man in land is mainly about
but we also have this other idea dies the sky, and this patter, the sky. And if we can find this sound as we do in Greek, Vedic, Sanskrit in India, in Roman, in Jupiter, in the Germanic languages in the modern, in English as day, And also in the idea of death, to go into the sky,
because we don't really know, or many of us don't really know what happens when we supposedly die, or we say in a modern English, which is a Germanic language. we go into the sky, we're dead. So once we find that in all of these different Indo-European languages,
then we know that it is possible for sounds and meanings and indeed entire ideological systems associated with God, Zeus, and with the sky, Zeus, and with a vision of what happens after we die, and what that means for our daily life in this world, then it is possible the MN sound too,
and its meaning passed from Ireland to India, from this Yamna community. So It's a proof concept. It's also very interesting. And this is why I come back to this Zeus, Zeus Pater, Zeus Mount Hazi. I did that amazing. I was up on that amazing mountain, Hazizi, which is the Hittite, an Indo-European language speaking people,
the earliest attested Indo-European language. The Hittites, we've got 7,000 documents from the Imperial Library at Boguskoi. And in that we understand the holiest mountain was Hazi, which I visited and did that podcast recently from. So you'll see that it's the same Zeus and we have Jupiter in the Italic culture, the Roman supreme god, Jupiter,
and obviously the Greek and the Roman. interact Greek and Romans interacted directly so maybe the Roman the Romans just borrowed Jupiter directly from Zeus Peter and maybe the Romans just borrow that from the Greek but then we see that we've got Diopita Diopita in the Vedic language
and so we're wondering okay well how did a supreme deity get from Greece to India or from Rome to India. Okay, of course, we know Alexander the Great was in India, but is that enough to establish in the language? And then we discover, oh, actually, Diopitta is there almost a millennium before Alexander the Great gets to India.
So again, how are we going to explain this if we don't have an idea of the genetic transfer in various ways between the Yamna community in Mykolaiv, centered on the Donipa River. If we don't have an idea of the linguistic transfer, the existence of Indo-European language family,
where the roots of verbs and the syntax is the same in this whole series of languages, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Vedic, Iranian, and so on. So there we know that not only does the word dei come from a common source, And I've written before about how Tuesday, which is the name of our day of the week, Tuesday,
is actually meaning God, God. So Tiwaz means literally just God. I mean, the person in the sky, the entity in the sky, the concept in the sky, sky father, Zeus, pater, pater, father, Zeus, sky, sky father. So Tiwaz was a Germanic God. And then you're basically saying Tiwaz and Tiwaz comes from Zeus as well.
So you're basically saying Zeus, Zeus, you're saying sky, sky for Tuesday. So try and remember that next time you say Tuesday or next time you think Tuesday because you're really invoking the sky, invoking two gods, Germanic gods. So it's the most godly day, even though it's just Tuesday, and gosh,
you've only got three days of work or school to carry on with. But we'll come back to that again, Mount Hazi, the sound and meaning, Hazi, Z, Z, Z, so it's a mountain, it's the holy mountain, so Zeus lived on a holy mountain, and it's got that Z, Z, Z.
And we know that in Hittite, Zeus meant God. And so we can deduce that Mount Hazi on the border between Turkey and Syria, we can deduce that it is in fact, it derives from Mount... So the... The third component is journeying. So the first component is I want us to communicate positive manner.
Then the second component is the linguistic, which sits obviously in our minds every moment we speak and we're living and we're existing and thinking through language. But that sits on top of this 6,000-year history, which perhaps you weren't aware of before picking up Finding Manuland. And it also sits on this geographical space between Ireland and India.
But the third component of every Finding Manuland podcast is the journeying component through cultures, through time, through time-space, and transforming our mental archetype, the archetypes in our minds from which... or with which or through which we perceive reality. And that is also one of my targets here.
I want us to privilege ancient Ukraine in the way that today perhaps we privilege ancient Rome or ancient Greece because everything in ancient Rome and ancient Greece and in current India and in all the languages and religions which emanate from this Yamuna community is everything in there, like an acorn growing out of a seed,
that seed is in the Yamna community in Ukraine. And once you know that, and then kind of feed that through all of your other mental models of what is amazing about ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and don't get me wrong, they are amazing, and ancient India, an ancient Iran, an ancient Ireland, an ancient Celtic culture.
These are all amazing emanations with their own particular and specific characteristics. However, there is this common thread running through them. And we can, in certain sounds and meanings, like, for instance, Zeus, we can trace that through every single branch of the Indo-European family of languages. no matter how early they split from that Yamna community in Mykolaiv.
And the general consensus in this Nature paper of the 5th of February 2025 underpins this as well, that this community of Yamna last lived together around 2500 BCE, at which point, for whatever reason, the community began to divide and out of that division emanated the seeds of all today's living Indo-European languages.
Hittite and the Anatolian branch split from a community which lived between the lower Volga and today's armenia around 4100 bce and neither paper makes a claim about the relationship uh the causal relationship between the yamna community in michele of oblast and that community of yamna in the lower between the lower volga and armenia who uh who
seeded the anatolian branch which which eventually conquered all of Anatolia until the Mongol and until the modern Turkey, the Mongols and the invaded Anatolia and gradually over the course of time have to some extent eradicated the Indo-European language. as a daily language for people living in that space of Anatolia.
But that branch of the Anatolian language is attested in the 7,000 or 8,000 texts in Boguskoy, which I visited, which we'll talk about again and again, because it's a really important evidence base. And if we can find the MN sound in there... then we know we're on to something,
that the actual Yamna who lived in Mikolaev used the MN sound for this meaning which I talked about, about the exchange of energy, and that emanates from a metaphor using what I call the moon-based metaphor. And, well, we won't run ahead of ourselves. And so... the journeying, this third element, this third dimension of Finding Manuland,
which is learning so much more about the space, the geographical space between Ireland and India, which as you listen to Finding Manuland, I'm assembling in your mind a new archetypal identity for this geographical space. And we're putting it together like you might put together an IKEA bed in
And you have the bed in the attic and it's a bit of a nightmare putting it together. You don't know where all the screws go. And maybe you're like me when the last time you put something together from Ikea, you determined you were never going to do this again. It's cheaper just to buy a made object.
What I want you to maybe perhaps imagine is, yeah, you're putting it together. It's a double bed and it's for you and your spouse. And you're putting it together and you want to make sure it's properly together before you use it. So it's in the spare room. And eventually it's stable and secure enough.
It takes a few months to do that properly. We'll get all the screws and there's still a couple of screws left over. But basically it's stable and secure enough for you to import into your proper bedroom. This is what I'm doing with Finding Mandant. I'm assembling a new archetype for your view.
of the whole of human, Indo-European human history. And when I use the term human, I'm using that as an emanation of the Indo-European languages. It happens to be an MN sound. It's we humans, we have our mind shining through our bodies, like the light shines through the moon and
And that mana, that energy is in all of us as humans. And interestingly, in animals, who are also animate creatures, there is a reversal of the MN, which we find in a few other words, but we'll like name, for instance, which is an anagram from Manet.
and moniker but uh we'll we'll come back to this reversal of the of the mn in certain words like animal and animate and anima meaning soul which has a meaning so close to how i am communicating my manner and the manner the meaning of manner That makes me very interested to see this reversal taking place in certain
important words in all of the different Indo-European languages. So we've got the sound and the meaning, and then we have a similar meaning. but a slightly reversed sound in other words. So we've got human and animals. We've got two forms of sentient beings, human and animals. And in one, we've got MAN, signifying the light shining,
the mind shining through us, which distinguishes us from inanimate creatures. And in the other, we've got animal. We're slightly distinguishing it, but we're not distinguishing it from from too far. And so anyway, we vaguely know, we vaguely already have a mental model of history and it basically might start with
the Romans and the Greeks or the Egyptians or what have you. And all of these places that we vaguely know that are related to them. But we also have lots of blanks in our mental models. If you're anything like me, the space between Ireland and India was full of many blanks that I wasn't even
aware of because I didn't focus on them. And my archetyping helped me avoid focusing on what I didn't know and what... the blank that was, say, the geography of Turkey, which I'm gradually travelling there as much as I can, spending as much time as I can there when I was in there for three weeks after the
New Year and a visit in Mount Hazi. And each time I go there, my mental blanks are filling in more and I realise there's more places I need to go. Because when I go to places with, say, the MN sound in their name... or indeed places which are associated with texts or with these orthostats, these stones,
which have on them carved stories, mythological stories. I am trying to imbibe the energy and to see what it inspires in me and to see if, is there something special? Do I feel anything about it and communicate that feeling differently? to you and gradually over the coming years and God willing we have years together
with this podcast I will gradually fill in that geographical space between Ireland and India and adjust my mental model of it and the archetype I have of it between Ireland and India and And over the course of time from 4,100 BCE to the present day, so 6,000 years.
And obviously this is a huge undertaking and a huge project. but hopefully you're along for the ride. And then most of us have, thankfully, have access to Apple Maps or Google Maps, and we can just look up immediately if I mention, say, Armenia, for instance, and note the MN sound in Armenia,
and you really don't have any idea of what Armenia is today or what Armenia was, say, 50 years before Before the Common Era began, when it was at its biggest extent, there was three states of Armenia, which basically covered most of today's Turkey and today's Armenia to the Caspian Sea. But maybe just in your mind,
when I mention Armenia, and this was the case with me, it's just a former Russian place. It was part of the Soviet Union. Who knows where it is? But in two seconds today, you can look it up. And now that's your mental model has expanded.
And so that's what I'm trying to also do on a more immediate way with finding Maniland. And maybe now take a moment to look up, see where Armenia is, see how small it is, 3 million people today. But once it extended... all the way almost to Constantinople, almost to Istanbul and well into Syria.
And we see the remnants of that with communities of Armenia still in today's Syria, then Assyria. And we remember its precursor culture, Ararat, which wasn't an Indo-European culture, but that's mentioned in the Bible where they get... the Uratreans, who get a very bad rap, and basically Noah's Ark ends up in the Ararat Mountains,
which are mainly in today's Armenia, but a bit in today's Turkey. And there you go, there's your geography, your geographical mental model expanded, and so that's the equivalent of your... your Ikea maybe that's an Ikea that's a bed stand really so you can take that out
of the spare room now and insert that into your mental model of the geographical space between Ireland and India and the next time someone mentions say Armenia you you know a little bit more than you knew before about it and and obviously the MN sound in Armenia is is partly why it's of great importance to us.
And so if I tell you that the Armenian language is itself an independent branch in Indo-European languages, so it's analogous, Armenian is is analogous to the Germanic branch, which has this disproportionately popular language English, which is spoken by so many billions of people as a sub-branch of it. Armenian, on the other hand,
is equivalent to the whole Germanic branch, or the whole Italic branch, out of which... the Latin language and all Roman culture emanates and French, Spanish, all the romance, MN in romance, the romance languages in it. And Armenia, which is today spoken by only about three and a half million people,
that's the acorn seed equivalent to the acorn seed that is the entire Germanic languages. So none of us know where all of this is going in terms of our history and world history and And, um, and, and obviously, uh, today in today's, uh, reality, um, in what I call elsewhere, the distant folklore universe, uh,
things aren't looking too rosy, but, uh, we do have a capacity for reinvention. And part of finding Maniland is, is in a positive way, a distraction from this. So I hope you can kind of, you can just lie down perhaps and listen to my voice and listen to my words, fall asleep to it and be
lulled into a moment some moments that you can have this feeling of actually there's more to our life than listening to stuff about druid idon uh distant folklore and all this crazy stuff going on in the world so so that is also in my
mind from finding manly land i want this to be a rich experience uh so now you know about Armenia, which is Armenian and where Armenia is, somewhere between Turkey and Iran, and that today Armenian language, which is today spoken by about three and a half million people, and about 50 years before the Common Era,
It was at its most extensive. And so that's interesting. It's interesting to me. I didn't know anything about that before I started looking into finding Maniland. And obviously because Turkey is so important to finding Maniland and to... Indo-European languages. So we have lots of different branches in the Indo-European language linguistic family. But we have two main splits.
So we have the split around 4,100 BCE and we have the split around 2,500 BCE. So again, we keep this in our minds. So we have this Yamna community who... create a split around 2500 BCE. Perhaps the community just got too big and three sons and communities of people went in different directions. However it happened,
we'll be looking at the various different possibilities over the following episodes. But however it happened, we know that today as an empirical fact that that as a scientific fact, that not only are the genome of that community of Yamna spread from around 2500 BCE to Ireland, to the space between Ireland and India,
but we know as an empirical fact that in that space we traditionally speak Indo-European languages as well, and we find the same isotopic evidence that which is this amazing modern science where you can look at, for instance, the strontium level in people's teeth and you can relate that to the strontium level inside the...
food inside the grain for instance that is grown because of course that teeth is made of the food you eat and certain elements of that food and mn is an element as well certain elements of that food pass from the the soil into the food and then
into the human or the sentient being who consumes that food in order to keep them alive and so because of this evidence along with the linguistic we We know that that community of Yamna emanated into today's extant living languages. But then we have this other main branch, the Anatolian branch,
which was spoken and all those languages are basically dead, although thanks to modern scholarship, which... we rely on a lot in finding Manuland. And if ever you find something contradicting anything I say, please bring it to my attention because I want to only bring you the cutting edge, uh, scholarship, which is based on, on, uh,
the truth as far as, as far as we know it, uh, And so Anatolia is like a character in Finding Manly Land. Indeed, all of these countries are, and places and areas and sounds are like characters. So they're like characters in a novel. And so Anatolia,
uh anatolia you might go to turkey for your holidays there's some really cheap ways of getting to the west coast of anatolia where you can then just find your own way rent a car you don't have to stay in um in in the kind of the package holiday hotel
i did it last summer i i brought my tent and And I stayed on the beach for a couple of weeks and then travelled around from there to visit these sites to look at these archaeological artefacts and stone inscriptions, some of which I haven't really mentioned yet, but we'll get to that.
So it's so important that actually Anatolia, which is the geographical space, be occupied by Turkey today mainly. Although I was really interested to discover, because I've written about this before, the Mitanni Empire, which they worshipped Indo-European gods and the Mitanni Empire. There's lots of evidence, archaeological evidence, of the Mitanni Empire, which is a lot over modern Syria.
And they fought a big battle with the Hittites, who are purely Indo-European. And that led to the first peace treaty in human culture, that we have evidence of the Treaty of Mitanni, in which it's mentioned that these Indo-European indo-aryan gods which correspond to indra and the nasatya the divine twins and uh and um
are mentioned in writing around 1400 BCE. So that's around 300 years before the Agi Veda, which was written down around 1100 BCE, provides us with the first written evidence of the existence of these Indo-European gods. So we know the Mitanni. So I was very interested to know that the areas I was traveling around in in
The new year near Mount Hazi, near the border with with Turkey was I was actually in Assyria. I was actually also in Mitanni as understood. So that that was amazing to to to be there. And I look forward maybe over the coming years to being able to go around Syria and look for the MN sound.
But my provisional hypothesis is, and I'll get into this again, is, and this is, there is, I do have a basis for this, this isn't just my emotion, but the NN sound seems very common in Assyrian, Babylonian, And they use the NN sound to the same extent as we in Indo-European languages use the MN sound.
So we've got NN and MN. And just as my spoiler alert, really, what I've discovered in looking at this cache of documents of cuneiform texts, which come from the around 1900 documents, to 1800 BCE, so about 400 years before the Imperial Library, the Hittite Imperial Library at Boguskoy, the Hittite Imperial Library at Boguskoy,
where we have 7,000 or 8,000 cuneiform documents from that. About 400 years before that, there was a community of people who lived in a place which I have also visited and written about, but not talked about that much. Canis, which is very near Kesari in modern Turkey. And from there we've got 23,000 cuneiform texts.
And among those 23,000 cuneiform texts from between 1900 and 1800 BCE are the first examples of writing in an Indo-European language. Modern scholars have deduced, they've been able to distinguish between the Indo-European language or the Anatolian or native, as sometimes it's called, parts of these documents and the Assyrian parts, using a couple of distinguishing characteristics.
So for instance, in if a name appears in the Boguskoy archive from 1400 BCE, and it's the same name with a slight, maybe slightly different ending, in the archive, the Kanish archive of 23,000 texts from 400 years before, then they deduce that that is an Indo-European name, it's a Hittite name. And the Hittites,
we know from these library and from these texts, which have mostly all been examined now and translated, we know that they saw the beginning of their culture in this place, Kanish. So in the same way that perhaps today some of us think our culture emanates from ancient Greece or ancient Rome, the people in
the Hittite empire, their mythology and their origin story all goes back to this place, Kanesh. But the other main means which the modern scholars use to distinguish the Indo-European names from the Assyrian names in this archive from Kanesh from between 1900 and 1800 BCE is, drum roll, uman, the sound uman.
And so I started from the intuition that MN was in Manannan, Ireland's preeminent god, pre-Christian god, Manaudan in Welsh, the Welsh language, and then Manu, In India, the first human. So it's not just the sound, it's the first human. It's this preeminent mythological religious character in Irish culture. And then in Indian culture has this MN sound.
And as some of you might know, that Ireland has the oldest vernacular literature on the European continent. So aside from ancient Greek and ancient Roman texts, many we have. We have these ancient Irish texts from around 600 years into the Common Era. And so by looking at these texts,
we can see some of the earliest artifacts of Indo-European language apart from in Greek and in Roman, west of the Danube, west of the Donnieper, west of the Donetsk River, rivers of Ukraine. So they're very important for that. And of course, Manus, the first human who in Germanic culture and who has three sons,
And so we had, that was my, the beginning of my intuition. And now flash forward four years of research and following this trail from Ireland to India from 4,100 BCE until the present day, flash forward from that intuition and that decision that I made in Eastern France, which I've talked about near man already.
when I visited Man and I saw on the side of that warehouse Manuland, the word Manuland, which describes an agricultural machinery company today, when I decided that I was going to go out and spend possibly the rest of my life finding Manuland. And now I'm sharing with you in real time
my findings in this journey of finding Manulan. But flash forward from that origin moment to now looking at this very recent text, Kanesite, Hittite, in which it's the definitive story the definitive analysis of these 23,000 cuneiform texts found in the library, in merchants, basically in houses, in the basements of houses,
which all went on fire back around 1800 BCE. And because of this, These clay tablets were preserved and now scholars, after an amazing journey, some of which I've mentioned and will continue to mention, because that's part of Finding Man in the Land as well, which is this journey scholars made from seeing marks on stones,
trying to work out what are these, to today modern scholars are able to translate these documents, these 23,000 texts. And in Canisite Hittite, this amazing book, it's just itself a beautiful artifact and work of scholarship. The author is able to, he uses this He works out that this uman sound distinguishes the Syrian from Hittite, from early pre-Hittite,
proto-Hittite, what he calls Kanesite-Hittite, which is Hittite 400 years before its evolution into the documents which are in the imperial library at Boguskoy. So it's where the language was then. And so to see in there this umansand is key, is one of his key means of distinguishing between Assyrian names and Indo-European or Anatolian or native names.
And remember, I mentioned it before when I was in Ankara at Christmas and I went, I spent a week going to this amazing, absolutely stunning museum called the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. And I hoped I would see there some or the earliest piece of writing in an Indo-European language anywhere on earth. And there it was.
I'll put a photograph on the page, in my Power of Mana page for this particular podcast. I'll put a photograph. So I saw this text there, this cuneiform text, and it was more than I hoped really because... On it is Chamana. And Chamana, the plaque, which I'll also put up here, the plaque says is a native Anatolian,
which basically means Indo-European. And it shows this cuneiform text of Chamana contracting. with another native Anatolian for the purchase of a slave. So again, seeing the MN sound in Tamana's name was obviously not coincidental because, as I've just mentioned, this Uman ending in a name is characteristic of Indo-European names. even 1900 BCE to 1800 BCE in Kanish.
But equally, for me, knowing what this document meant and what native means, and you would not know that this is one of the earliest documents in Indo-European language because it's not emphasised in the museum and in the museum piece. For them, it's... And for most visitors, it's just amazing to see writing from that period of time,
1900 to 1800 BCE, in these weird marks. But for me, in searching and finding Manuland, going from Manannan, Ireland's preeminent pre-Christian history, deity who's first mentioned in writing around 650 BCE and who writes one of Ireland's earliest poems is in Mananin's voice and then to find evidence that in another Indo-European language This Uman sound is so characteristic,
it's used to distinguish in these documents between Assyrian and Anatolian, Indo-European names. Because just a quick note on that, if you think about it. So what we have is, we've got 23,000 documents, which... are mostly in the Assyrian language. And we know this because we can read Assyrian.
It's using these particular marks and the Kanesh documents near Qasari in modern Turkey. It's a particular form of Assyrian in most of the documents, but many of them have all of them, a great deal of them have been translated and amazing books have been written. For instance, there's a lot of these letters from women
from the wives of Assyrian merchants to their husbands or from their husbands who are in Assur, which is about 800 kilometers away from Kanesh. And they are living in Kanesh as it's often described as a merchant's colony. There's a lot of Anatolians and Indo-Europeans living there.
But the community of Assyrians living there are the ones who left a lot of the documentation. And so if you don't know what is Hittite at that time, you have no idea, then you're looking at documents. Your working assumption is they're all Assyrian because you know that they're in the Assyrian language.
But you can try to discern which are the names, which are the Indo-European names among these Assyrian documents. And that can be done from context where it's clear from the context of this letter that it is referring to people who are speaking a foreign language, who are what the museum in Ankara calls native Anatolians.
But you can also do it, and this is part of the clever thing, you can also do it by looking at the names which appear in the Boguskoy archive. So you know these 7,000, 8,000 documents which were found around 1908 in Boguskoy, which I visited and which we'll always be talking about, the Hittite, Imperial Hittite Archive.
And if you see a name, you know that all of those are all Indo-European documents. Well, some of them are in different languages, but you do know which are the Hittite, because we know what Hittite looks like, we know what it sounds like, we know it's an Indo-European language as a matter of scientific fact today.
It was first hypothesized to be an Indo-European language, by the way, in 1923 by a Czech artillery officer who, like me, was researching different aspects of the culture in the countries where they were posted and And he hypothesized that Hittite was an Indo-European language and many formal scholars poo-pooed this idea. But by 1953,
this was confirmed mainly also because of this other orthostat, which I visited in a place called Karatepe, which it was thought this was in Hittite, but it turns out it's in Luwin, where the same text is translated into which is on the stone and it's carved in the stone three times.
So it's a Rosetta stone and it's in Phoenician, in the Phoenician alphabet, which is very close to ours and which we can distinguish. It was also in hieroglyphs, Louisian hieroglyphs. and also in text. So the scholars were able to discern what these different sounds corresponded to,
and that helped us get to the point where we could translate Hittite as well. So you're starting off with, so you find the names in the Hittite archive, and then you see them also in the Kanesh archive. And they're pretty close. So your working hypothesis is that those are the Indo-European names in the Kanesh archive.
And of course, we have spent a century looking at Assyrian texts and the amazing texts found in Ur. And so we have a very strong idea of what are definitely Assyrian names. And then there's a subset of names which could be both. And then there's a subset of names which definitely are not Assyrian,
but could be anything else. But if you find them again in the Hittite archive, on the balance of probabilities, they are Indo-European. And then you can begin to discern certain rules. And in the Canisite Hittite book, and I'll put the cover in on the page for this podcast, On the Canasite Hittite book, he, this amazing scholar,
discerns that Uman, and obviously he has no understanding or knowledge of my work, tracing the MN sound, but he terms in no uncertain terms that if you see the suffix, if you see a word, a name in this 23,000 name archive ending in Uman, then you know that's Indo-European.
So that's just a tiny example of how our mental models of the geographical space and also cultural space and also time can be developed. And in Finding Manuland, I'm giving you pegs from which we can hang a new framework for looking at the past... from 4,100 years before the Common Era, before Christ, up until today.
So this is our main stomping ground. This is our forest, the space between Ireland and India and the time between 4,100 BCE. And today, this is our forest. We are a line. We are lines. We're stalking prey in this forest, which is bounded by these timestamps, which are established by linguists,
by those who study ancient genomes and isotopic analysis and archaeogenics and archaeologists. And this is, again, another mental model, an image I'm communicating into you, this idea of our forest, our stomping ground. And we see these forests, these stomping ground, these lines on the stones. For instance, in this place I've just mentioned, Karatepe, which are mythological texts.
carved into stone. In the case of Karatepe, where we had this Rosetta stone, which helped us to decode Luvian and eventually Hittite, we see that these are mythological texts from around 800 BC, so about a century before Homer is believed to have written down the Odyssey and the Iliad. And I've spoken before about it,
and I'll continue to speak about it because it's just an amazing book, From Hittite to Homer. So this amazing book published by Cambridge University Press, which I read recently, traces these same sounds, these same stories, which are found in the Hittite Imperial Library from around 1400 BCE, onto these stones in Karatepe around 800 BC,
and then into Homer and various aspects of the community, which we can trace these stories and their different depictions. Obviously, we can't speak to people who are still alive there, but we can trace the same... So I'm giving you this theme, this idea of the line. We are the line.
We are stalking the forest between Ireland and India. We're stalking prey in it. So that for me is establishing a mental model. And so around 1400 BCE in this Bogaskoy library, we've got this bright light shining around. this bright, this library in Boguskoy, central Anatolia. And so suddenly your mental model has just expanded a tiny little bit.
You're not just thinking of Turkey as a holiday destination or the place where perhaps Istanbul is, or maybe you've been to Ankara, or you know about Gobekli Tepe, or in other places we'll talk about, or the Armenian genocide. But then I'll tell you, well, actually, we've got these 23,000 texts from another moment before that.
from the town Kanesh, where the Hittites had their origin story. So in our culture, our origin story, this fuzzy idea we have that somehow in England or in France or America, our culture emanates from Greek and Roman culture. Well, the Hittites' equivalent origin story was, as I mentioned, from Kanesh or Kultepe, as it's also known.
So we are the lines wandering around This forest wandering around these woods, pacing around. We're surrounded by time before and the unknowable future. But we've got 6,000 years to wander around. And this is the mental model. which I want you to find in Manuland. It's the archetype. I'm archetyping this mental model into your mind. It's in,
we're assembling this IKEA, this spare bed in the spare room until it's strong and stable enough to become our main bed. And then we'll bring it into our main bedroom. And so all of this hopefully will gel with us enough so that in the moment of today's quotidian work and practices, we remember about the power of manna,
which has led me on this amazing journey, which has led me to communicate this amazing journey to you. And so as my mental model of our origins has been transformed, I'll communicate to you.
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