Decolonising Prehistory: Our Expanding Mental Model of ‘History’
Decolonising Prehistory: Our Expanding Mental Model of ‘History’
Manuland XIV: Why ‘Pre-History’ is Outmoded.
Finding Manuland is a travelogue of physical and mental journeys through today’s Europe and Asia.
It seeks out and explores monuments and phenomena in today’s culture that have a family resemblance to nominal and substantive phemomena traceable at least five or six millennia ago - the M-N- sound immanent in almost every sentence we speak in Indo-European languages mainly.
This M-N- sound is a monument of something very ancient, and a portal into a past that hitherto remained invisible to us as we go about our busy every day lives.
Finding Manuland discovers patterns in how many sounds, words and meanings relate to one another that no-one has ever before uncovered across the whole Indo-European cultural zone.
Spoiler alert: Ukraine is absolutely central to the solution of the centuries-old mystery about these nominal and substantive continuities.
That the ancient religious characters called Yama (India), Yima (Iran), Tvisto (Mannus’s father in Germany’s foundational myth) and Odin’s (after whom our Whodanaz Dyeus (Wednesday) is named) father Ymir (Norse) are all derived from the ancient Ukrainian *Yemos, which signifies “twin,” was one of the earliest clues I found.
It’s mind-bending then that ancient Ukrainian *Yemos evolved into the Latin “geminus,” the Sanskrit (ancient Indian) “yama,” the Irish word “emon” (which means twin and is part of Emain Macha and Emain Ablach, two of Ireland’s most important mythological locations), and much else besides.
If this was just a nominal coincidence – in the sound or spelling of a name- that would be one matter.
But the coincidence extends to the meaning of the name, as well as the function of the religious character described by the name.
When you learn that the word in modern English “meaning” itself is a cognate of Manu, and that “name” is an anagram of “mean” (as in “signify”) and “mane” (as in “mound” and “horses’ neck”), then, the enigma underlying Manu and his twin Yama, as well as their persisting mysterious roles in our culture, intensifies. Finding Manuland identifies these manifold perplexities for the first time, explores them, and offers a resolution that I arrive at through scientifically acceptable means.
By the time I encountered Yama for the first time in that warm temple in Mongolia in 2014, he had evolved out of his original role as Manu’s twin in early Indian religion. Tibetan Lord of Death, Yama, like Saint Peter in Christianity, is visualised as sitting in judgment on which fate Buddhists deserve as the effect of their actions (Karman).
Yama marks the result of our karma (‘karma’ is what linguists call an inflection of ‘Karman’) as we’re going through the death process using white stones placed in a pile to represent all our good actions, while each instance of negative karma is symbolised by a black stone that Yama places in another mound.
Cairns of white mani stones – called mani walls – which are found across the Tibetan Buddhist cultural zone in villages and at high points echo this visualisation of Yama’s means of recording positive karma. Yama’s often represented in ancient Tibetan monastic art as standing on the skulls of those who have negative karma (any action that results in suffering). Here’s a photograph I took of a Yama-like painting in a monastery I visited in India, close to Tibet’s border and Mane village, in the autumn of 2019, just before Covid transformed our world, and gave me the space to discover Manuland.
Knowing that I am a Buddhist and the significance of Yama to Buddhists perhaps explains why learning that the moniker given to the first people to speak an Indo-European - Yamnaya - immediately caught my attention. I remember the moment I read about the Yamnaya. I was in my apartment in central Dnipro - the eastern Ukrainian city whose suburb hosted the stone circle that launched this journey.
I could scarcely believe that not only were the Yamnaya called the Yamnaya but also that they weren’t just one of many thousands of archaeological cultures - they were THE culture who created the language today spoken by over half of humanity.
The ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya who built that stone circle in Dnipro, I soon discovered from texts I read online from Oxford University’s library, are a particularly unique community. Of thousands of cultures, we can identify across the entire Indo-European cultural zone from Manirang mountain in northern India to Slemain near the hill of Uisneach, Ireland’s navel, the Yamnaya have one quite extraordinary unique selling point.
Manuland corresponds to a geographical space where today we mostly speak Indo-European languages. So as we move across that space, our minds’ mental models of the geography of our world is also expanding.
In the previous episode we encountered the evidence of the gene flow, the linguistic flow and the conceptual flow from Ancient Ukraine to Qazakhstan to Anatolia (today’s Türkiye), further south into the land the Indo-European Mitanni controlled and hence to Judea / Canaan / land of today’s State of Israel where in the centuries between 1,000 BCE Judaism cohered into one community, which, thankfully, is still with us today.
Manuland is also a deeply temporal space. In the last episode, we looked at movements from Ancient Ukraine - between 3,500 and 2,500 BCE some of the first Ancient Ukrainians speaking an Indo-European language headed eastwards to Qazakhstan, and formed the Sintashta Culture between 2,100 and 1,800 BCE.
Because the Sintashta are the earliest archaeological evidence of funeral ceremonies that we would encounter again in one of the earliest holy books in Indo-European culture - the 1,200 BCE Rg Veda (the way / right / rite (Rg) seeing (Veda)), they are described (albeit) anachronistically as the first “Aryans.” I wanted to find a plausible physical connection between the Sintashta and those with the Aryan names of those we know ruled monarchies in Judea around 1,400 BCE. And at least perhaps this is a plausible connection - temporally and spatially.
Perhaps this is the first time you began to have an idea of what went on at these moments in what historians call pre-history. Historians alas (I should know - I trained as one) stick only to textual sources. Religiously, these historians avoid the other sources multidisciplinary scientists use like archaeogenetics, isotope analysis, comparative mythology / religion, archaeology, historical and comparative linguistics.
As one of the greatest living Celtic linguists and historians John Koch put it in a recent paper1:
“At the present moment in intellectual history, the great question posed by genome-wide sequencing of aDNA is how to map languages onto populations and archaeological cultures for the period between the mass migrations from the steppe and the earliest attested Indo-European languages. Bronze Age Europe can no longer be treated as mute prehistory. Rather, it occupies a post-Proto-Indo-European interval, between the expansion of post-Anatolian Indo-European from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the third millennium BC and the appearance of diverse written Indo-European languages.”
This idea more than almost any other dominates Finding Manuland:
Today, we can reassess what used to be termed ‘pre-history’ before the 2015 archaeogenetics revolution.
We can back-propagate our interpretations of the linguistic, archaeological, mythological/ theological, textual, archaeogenetic, isotopic (particularly the analysis of strontium in teeth of ancient humans, which enables us to know where they lived while their teeth were being formed) data…
And today, by parsing this multiplicity of often emerging disciplines, we can understand as much about how the first generations of Indo-European language speakers saw the world, than we would about people who lived a few centuries ago, if we just confine ourselves to the textual evidence traditional historians fetishise.
And, today, we can know beyond all reasonable doubt that in the search for the origins and source of the first Indo-European language speakers - the Yamnaya- ALL roads lead to Ancient Ukraine.
“…The breakthrough of the past few years thanks to the archaeogenetic revolution is a game changer. Genome-wide sequencing of ancient DNA has revealed the massive gene flow from present-day Ukraine and South Russia into Central, Northern, and Western Europe during the third millennium BC…”2
While Koch et al is willing to consider today’s Russia as the part homeland of Indo-European languages and culture, I’m with Don Ringe: only Ukraine makes sense.
Up until now the code for the Indo-European homeland was variously “South Russian Steppe,” “Pontic Caspian Steppe” or “Steppe Hypothesis.”
In fact no Yamnaya settlement of any size has been found east of the Don River (who created the first Indo-European language). The Don is the eastern border of Ukraine language speakers as far back as we know. Only in the 1950s did Muscovy steal Ukraine’s ancestral territory of Rostov, Yesk and the Kuban from Ukraine.
The type-site for the Yamnaya Culture is in southern Ukraine in Mikhailov Oblast near Kherson - a settlement at what was most likely a bridging point of the mighty Dniepr (Don Hyper) river. The best preserved Sredni Stog site (the Sredni Stog culture was one of the major constituents of the Yamnaya Culture, including the innovation of corded wear, horse and dog sacrifice, and we presume linguistically) is at Dereivka - see:
north of the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Russian and Soviet archaeology, as in every other area of Russia’s / Soviet Union’s military occupation of Ukraine stole, pillaged and destroyed Yamnaya Culture artefacts.
Instead of properly exploring and preserving the ancient DNA- laden bodies Soviet archaeologists destroyed them. The so-called archaeologist in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro whose “research” of the Dnipro mound that led to my discovery of the Power of Mana was an inheritor of this primitive Soviet archaeological tradition - using “research” as a ploy to destroy then build elite houses atop the evidence left for us by our genetic and linguistic ancestors.
It’s scarcely believable but ancient DNA analysis of Yamnaya bodies in Ukraine is in its infancy by comparison to Russia.
So the two bodies in the 2015 Nature paper that launched the archaeogenetics revolution are from Russia.
This is partly why some unreflecting archaeologists, linguists, and undecolonised experts like the German president Steinmeier still in January 2022 refer to Ukraine as “Southern Russia.”
Travelling from Ukraine across Europe in early February 2022, just before the full-scale invasion, I visited Halle, home of the 4,000 year-old Nebra moon disc. German president Steinmeier who as German foreign minister between 2015 and 2020, relentlessly pressured Ukraine to give Ruschia its land & people wrote the introduction to the exhibition guide.
Even in 2022 Steinmeier who spent years working on the Ukraine issue still mistakes and annihilates Ukraine for "Southern Russia." This is the task ahead of us for those of us who are working to decolonise so-called pre-history.
Until proven otherwise and until Ukrainian Yamnaya ancient DNA is systematically analysed and modelled as a source for ALL (or most) of the Steppe ancestry running through the veins of ALL Indo-European language speakers in Europe whose ancestors were also Indo-European language speakers then my working assumption is that Ancient Ukraine (and not its daughter state Russia) or any of Ukraine’s lands Russia has occupied is the homeland of all Indo-European languages, mythology / religion and culture, as well as the place where the M-N- sound that infuses almost every sentence we speak with the Moon-based metaphor at the foundation of our speech.
To posit that the Indo-European homeland is in Russia, as Steinmeier does, because in the 1950s the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic stole lands from Ukraine (which as a founding signatory of the UN Charter was as much a state as its daughter state Russia) is to fall for Russia’s historical propaganda.
Whereas if we want of what those texts consist linguistically and of which genes and cultural memes the authors of those texts consisted, it’s time for history to expand to include what conservative historians call pre-history. Having been brought up to see pre-history as the poor cousin of history, it continually surprises me how much we can know about the linguistic, archaeological, mythological / religious and archaeogenetic past. And of how having even an inkling of those disciplines’ grounded stories.
This nascent mental framework extends geographically across Manuland and in temporal depths from today backwards for six to seven millennia to when the first Indo-European language speakers began forging certain sounds with certain meanings into everyday speech.
Instead of taking Christ’s year of birth or the first writing as the beginning of our model of history’s beginnings, in Finding Manuland we take a much longer and deeper and wider viewpoint.
We have to - as otherwise we will never understand why communication of certain sounds and meanings which we still use today in every sentence we speak in Eastern Ukraine persist over time - the M-N- sound.
Continued:
Continued from:
First in series:
Koch JT, Ling J. “From the Ends of the Earth”: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Long-Distance Contact in Bronze Age Atlantic Europe. In: Kristiansen K, Kroonen G, Willerslev E, eds. The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press; 2023:157-171.
Koch JT, Ling J. “From the Ends of the Earth”: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Long-Distance Contact in Bronze Age Atlantic Europe. In: Kristiansen K, Kroonen G, Willerslev E, eds. The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press; 2023:157-171.