Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3

Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the third episode of our new Atlas orientation series, which will last, hopefully, for hundreds of episodes. So this is the third episode. We went from Ireland to Britain, then on to the continent, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria, and into Greece — and Ukraine, where I spoke about the Yamna emanating from there, carrying the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages, in the first two pilot episodes of the Atlas.

So, what we’re doing in Finding Manuland: each episode integrates Mana, meaning energy — the charge we exchange as a function of being sentient beings and human beings. And when we talk about places, and visit places, and connect with the words and the meanings we use which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we’re exchanging what I call Mana. I could have used another word for it; Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.

And the second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: this MN sound, which is imminent — one of the three cryptotypes we look at, the others being RT, Rit, that sound, and DN, the DN sound of the Danube, the Donets, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester — the great rivers of ancient Ukraine, where, genetically, most of us who today speak Indo-European languages emanate from. It’s in our genes, as demonstrated by the Alexey Nikitin paper, which was published in Nature in February 2025. We’ll come back to that. I write most days on Bluesky, Mastodon, and X, as well as on Substack.

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Podcast | What is Infolklore?

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The Mental Model, and the Urgency

So today: you might notice I talked about how all living Indo-European languages emanate from ancient Ukraine — what the ancients called Scythia, but which we’ll call ancient Ukraine. And you might notice my piece recently, In Defence of Ancient Ukraine. I won’t go into that at the moment, because I’m going to try and stick to this geographical survey.

What I’m trying to communicate into your minds, and all of the listeners’ minds, is this new mental model, which has gradually grown over me since I began the Finding Manuland journey consciously and intentionally in November 2021, in Maing village in northern France. I usually say eastern France, for some reason — but that’s actually northern France, where the Menapii tribe lived, by the Manche, near Mons in today’s Belgium, near Frankfurt-on-Main, and Mainz, and various other MN places and rivers.

And so what I’m trying to communicate is this mental model, which has been disrupted by my travels. Finding Manuland is about finding and identifying a unifying force in all the areas between Ireland and India where we speak, traditionally, Indo-European languages. By monikering it Manuland, I’m giving us a collective identity, and I’m trying to disrupt the type of mental models we imbibed at school, which are old-fashioned, and the product of a time before we had archaeogenetics and scientific linguistics — the comparative method and comparative methodology. They are artifacts of a time when we thought history, and myth, and Finding Manuland, and language, honestly, didn’t matter that much. But because Russia uses the bogus history as an excuse — to disarm us, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country — there is a certain urgency, and a meaning, to Finding Manuland, which in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. So I do have a sense of urgency.

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Anatolia: The Palimpsest — First to Write, Not First to Be

So today, this is the Anatolia edition. I talked about living Indo-European languages emanating from Ukraine. Anatolia is the palimpsest where seven Indo-European layers are stacked, and where the oldest Indo-European writing survives. First to write — not first to be. The homeland is still the steppe. And I’ve walked hard, to and fro, across Anatolia.

I’ve told you in past episodes — pre-Atlas episodes, let’s call them — about some of my journeys in Anatolia. Some of those journeys I have not yet told you about, and I have many more journeys planned, crisscrossing Anatolia, which we know today mainly by the country of Turkey. So part of the mental-model aspect is: we start in Ireland, we cross onto the island of Britain, then we hop across the Manche — MN in Manche — into France, and the Netherlands, and Belgium, and then gradually move across. So this is what I’m going to try to do — and forgive me if I miss doing it — using the geography.

So we swing back south of the Black Sea, into the peninsula where the Indo-European family first learned to write. This is a place I’ve walked hard across, over three journeys so far, between October 2023 and January 2025. It is the first attested Indo-European language, but not the first: the oldest Indo-European text only marks the branch that wrote first, and that branch is the family’s elder sister — the one that split off before the rest.

The Hittite Miss: The Branch with No MN Founder

The Hittite founder monarchs carry no MN — unlike Manannán of Ireland; Manawydan of Wales; Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, the Roman historian writing about Mannus fifty years into the Common Era; Menua in Armenia; Minos and Rhadamanthus in Greece — and Orchomenos, and angry Manyu; the gods and the Achaemenid Empire in Iran; and Manu, the founder of the Indo-European part of the history of India. So, formally, six of eight living branches have MN founder-monarchs. But the Anatolian branch is dead — that’s why I talk about living Indo-European languages. The Hittite founder monarchs carry no MN. It’s a miss the Finding Manuland method keeps on the page: the one branch with no founder on the frame — the MN frame, the continental frame, the continental skeleton, imminent in so many words, including imminent, which Finding Manuland is exploring — is the one that split first.

Ankara: Tarmana in a Glass Case

I spent days and days and days in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara — a city founded by the Celts — using it as an index to every site I meant to reach. And it was there, in a glass case, that I stood before some of the very first writings in any Indo-European language: a clay contract from around 1900 BCE, before the Common Era, by which a native Anatolian named Tarmana — MN in Tarmana — bought a boy. So among the first writing in an Indo-European language, from 1900 BCE, a native Anatolian named Tarmana — we know that because it’s written in cuneiform — bought a boy: the MN already inside a man’s name, in the oldest tablets we possess. I ran up that day to Ankara Castle, to find the castle rock had been a stronghold of the Celtic Galatians.

Kanesh, Kültepe, and the Karum

Then I went to Kanesh, Kültepe, near Kayseri — named for Caesar — a couple of times, to stand where those tablets were dug: the karum, the merchant suburb. And I wanted to exchange my Mana, my energy, with this site — to go there, to see if, by being there, I could pick up some energy and exchange mine, and try to understand, so that when I read about these places on a page, or I speak about them, I’ve been there and I felt it. I remember the day; I remember what I ate that day; the dogs I might have fed; the kindly watchman who might have helped me out and let me into a museum which was closed. These are the stories I will tell, a bit of them, in Finding Manuland, because they add to my own mind, my own memory.

I could just sit in a library — as indeed could you — and read all of this. You could put all of this together. I could share, as I will, on archive.org, my library of 7,000 texts, which I’ve read, and which are imminent in every one of these podcasts — which I’ve read since 2020, when I really, full-time, started focusing on what would become Finding Manuland.

So I wanted to stand where those tablets were dug. There are none of them left there, because they’ve all been moved to the safety of this extraordinary museum — if you ever have the opportunity to go to Ankara, please go; it’s an amazing museum; go to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The karum merchant suburbs: some 23,000 cuneiform tablets, and among the traders’ names, the diagnostic -uman suffix that marks an Indo-European name, and proves the method — the Finding Manuland method — on the ground. I did not know, before I read Kanišite Hittite, the preeminent book by the preeminent linguist and specialist in Hittite linguistics, that this was how you could determine it. So that was a huge moment: to determine that the MN sound was imminent in the dead Anatolian branch. We will come back to that.

Hattusa and Mound W at Gordion

At Hattusa, the Hittite capital — the Indo-European Hittites, at their height around 1300 years before the Common Era. And 400 years before their empire rose, this trading colony — Assyrian and native Anatolian — was just a city a couple of hundred kilometres, which I’ve driven, from Hattusa. And little were they to know that the people who wrote those tablets, which I was then to see in the Ankara museum, were to found a great empire — their descendants. None of us know what is going to come next, and that’s part of the sense of urgency I have with Finding Manuland — and in all of our lives. If you have ever wanted to go to any of these places: go. And you can. Go. If you can’t go, I’ll bring you there in these podcasts.

I photographed the Royal Palace ruins in Hattusa, where 8,000 cuneiform texts, from about 400 years after those Kanišite Hittite texts where Tarmana featured, were dug out. And on a foggy January day, I walked to Mound W, the oldest burial mound in the whole of Anatolia, and the first built in the Yamna tradition — the steppe surfacing in Phrygia, via Bulgaria, via a totally other route. And Gordion — where Midas and Gordias were. So you see the sound: deus, dies, god. And when people say someone has died — dies — that literally means they’ve gone to the sky, the bright sky. That’s a word and a sound, a meaning and a sound, that’s been with us since the earliest Indo-Europeans in Ukraine. And we know this because, if you find the same word-meaning in every Indo-European language, and it’s not borrowing — so obviously computer is a relatively modern word, but deus, deus in Dyēus Pater, Dyēus Pater in Jupiter, Dyaus Pitar in India — these words were with us from the very earliest, so they come from this common source.

And so Gordias and Midas, the famously rich — I went to their burial mound, and I tell that story. And I saw Gordias written — written down. It looks like a child wrote it, but actually it was written down at this time, and it was found on a wooden slat inside — not in Mound W, in another mound.

Karatepe: Teššub, Tarhunzas, and the Danuna Trail

The eastern arc of Anatolia is where the DN river-thread runs down to the sea. At Karatepe in Cilicia, I photographed the storm god Teššub, at a site whose resonance rides not its modern Turkish name, but the ancient ones under it: Danuna, Adana — a river goddess’s name became a travelling people’s name. And I read about it first in a great Armenian Indo-Europeanist scholar’s work. And because I was interested in this DN sound, I decided to go there — and that is the Finding Manuland method in miniature. I’m hoping to inspire you to go on actual, concrete, material journeys. If you don’t know what you’re going to do for your next holiday, well, hopefully I can give you some inspiration — not only of places to go, but of trails to follow. And this trail is so rich, and so deep.

Çatalhöyük and Alaca Höyük: The Mother’s Trail

And at Çatalhöyük, which is the first farmers’ settlement, way pre-Indo-European, I followed the trail of the mother, who came into Europe from Anatolia with the first farmers — the symbols handed on towards Ukraine. The paper, which I’ll speak to you about and make into a podcast: Handed On, Not Lost. And when I found the mother goddesses had been moved to Ankara for safety, I followed them there, and photographed all hundred-odd of them — the seated woman of Çatalhöyük, with her hands on two felines, like the cat you might have on your lap as you listen to this. At Alaca Höyük, I photographed my favourite piece of sacred art, from around 1400 BCE.

Mount Ḫazzi and the Amanos

And on the Mediterranean coast, driving, I turned a corner, and there suddenly was the shadow of Mount Ḫazzi, the holiest mountain in Hittite religion, on the border with Syria — the MN audible in its range-name: the Amanos. I recorded a video there. I made the pilgrimage up it, and was stopped about five kilometres below the summit, at a soldiers’ checkpoint. The day before, I had been down in Antioch, subject of a massive earthquake — and so the museum was closed. So we will return there, because we need to go to that museum; there are things there, collected, which you cannot see anywhere else. And Antioch, which was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire.

At a mountain pass in the old Kingdom of Hatti, I looked down on the whole kingdom at once — the Hittite Empire, the mightiest empire in Indo-European history — and I photographed it, and fed an Anatolian sheepdog. And I watched as a couple in a car, running ahead of me, stopped every few miles to feed these massive Anatolian sheepdogs along this mountain range. I drove by the source of the Euphrates near Mercan, one of the rivers of Babylon — the MN in Mercan — and I reached Myra on the Lycian shore, where St Nicholas, of Santa Claus fame, hung out, a millennium after the first ruins visible there.

The Winged Moon God Men, and Lydia’s Triple MN

What waits in Anatolia could easily fill a season by itself, and I’ll spend the rest of my life going to and from there, and telling you about it. My own files bulge with Anatolia. The winged moon god Men, whom I saw in the Ankara museum, waits on the reliefs of Malatya, Sakçagözü, and Carchemish — where I visited the great mounds — a god with his wings on his head and, on another stone, a crescent on his hat. I’ve pasted that description entirely into my files. His name is not a cousin of the moon word, but the word itself, stood up and given a temple. Worship is attestation of another order: Anatolia takes the asterisk off. I’ve not yet stood where the moon was named god.

Lydia waits with a triple MN: its first king, Manes, whose grandson, Herodotus records the Lydians claiming, gave his name to Asia itself. Homer calls the Lydians the Maionians. Their kings sleep under the hundred mounds of Bin Tepe, by the Gygaean Lake — steppe-shaped tumuli in Aegean Turkey — and the greatest of them climbed and described by Herodotus himself.

Sipylus, Niobe, and Lake Bafa: Selene and Endymion

On Mount Sipylus, above Manisa — a city whose Bronze Age king was Manapa-Tarhunta — the rock figure of Niobe weeps when you stand at the right distance. We will go there, and I will tell you about that place; I will communicate what it means to be there, and why it matters. And Pausanias, who went up the mountain, describes the exact experiment: close up, a mere crag, and from further off, a woman in tears. I will repeat that experiment.

At Lake Bafa, ancient Latmos, the moon herself loved a sleeping mind: Selene and Endymion, whose fifty daughters have been read since antiquity as the fifty moons of the Olympiad — and the prehistoric rock paintings. We are discovering new, amazing things all the time. Some of the statues I saw in the Şanlıurfa museum, from Göbekli Tepe, had only been dug up last summer, and I was able to see them in January — and I cannot wait to see what they dig up this year, and I’ll go and see. And a nice family offered me tea in their house.

Nemrut Dağı and the Oracle Triangle of Mopsos

And on Nemrut Dağı, a king who claimed descent from Persia and Macedon at once — trying to sit on both chairs, but not knowing, not understanding at the time, that both chairs emanated from Ukraine — carved a sacred law, his nomos — NM, the mirror — across the backs of colossal thrones, with a crescent moon on the breast of the lion in his stone horoscope. And a triangle of oracle sites waits on the southern shore — Didyma, Claros, Mallos — tied to the seer Mopsos, after whom my cat is named. If you wanted to signify that you were from Greece, and also from Asia, from the Anatolian side, you would say you claimed descent from Mopsos.

And Mopsos’ name appears on that Rosetta Stone — where I saw the statue of Tarhunzas at Karatepe, which I went to because of the great Armenian Indo-Europeanist Armen Petrosyan saying that here is where the Danuna were — the DN which I was trying to follow, because of the DN from the Don, the Dnieper, the Donets, where I worked for three years; the Dnipro, which I lived by for four years; the Dniester, which I crossed many times; and the Danube, which I also crisscrossed, and saw all the way up towards its source. And we will go to all these places again.

And I wanted to find: could I be going to where the Danaans — who were the first Greeks, according to Homer — the sea people; the Danavas in India; could I find the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were the second wave of Indo-European mythological migrants onto the island of Ireland? Is there something in this DN — Daēna, Danu, Dana — Daēna, who in Zoroastrian religion marks the moment between life and death? Is there something in this DN? So I read about it in Armen Petrosyan, and I went to the place, and I’ll bring you on these journeys.

And Mopsos is mentioned, too, on that Rosetta Stone, written in Phoenician and written in Luwian hieroglyphics — though when they first saw them, they thought they were Hittite hieroglyphics; they weren’t deciphered yet. But even to this day, you can look — and I show you the photographs — you can look at that statue of Tarhunzas: the same Tar in Tarmana from, well, 1,200 years later. Tarhunzas is the storm god, as is Teššub. And Tarmana is that Anatolian in the first piece of writing in an Indo-European language, which I saw. And so I’ll bring you on all of these journeys.

And there I expect the question to grow new branches, because that is what Finding Manuland does. I started by a warehouse called Manuland in northern France — and look where we are now. Every place I’ve ever reached has handed me a new road out. And that is the iterating Finding Manuland method — the third dimension, the voyaging dimension. Those of us who, for however long, who knows, are able, and have the power, to journey, and to go to these places around the world: this gives us an organising focus for such journeys. And that’s the kind of trip that I will bring you on.

Van and Armenia: Menua at the Eastern Frontier

And Van, and Armenia — the eastern frontier. Menua, the great king of Urartu, cut into the rock at Van, which I visited and told you about before — but we’ll go back there; there’s so much more to be seen. I was just scoping it, just like I’m scoping the whole of Finding Manuland in this brief — I think it’s going to be four or five episode — survey, before we go into the micro. This is the macro. And so when I travel around Anatolia, I’m just trying to get the lie of the land.

And in the kingdom under Ararat — the mountain range where Noah’s Ark, in the Bible, rested — here the MN word and the NM name word meet their Irish cognates, at the family’s other end. Now take your map by the corners and stretch it east, past the last place your schooling furnished — because the far frontier of the Indo-European family is people too. Here the founder name turns up again, at the opposite end from Ireland, cut into rock. Menua was the great builder-monarch of Urartu, the Iron Age — so around 800 BCE — kingdom under Ararat, whose successor state, 2,000 years later, is Armenia. He is the eastern brother of Minos and Manu — Minos from Greece, and Manu from India — at the level of the cognate itself, a linguistic term. The second dimension of every Finding Manuland episode is about the language, because the monuments, the remnants, the memories of all of these places, and the people who lived there, are in the words we use today, and the meanings that travel with sounds like MN. Manu, Menua, Minyas, Minos: all lined up on one reconstructed word for man. But why does man mean man?

The state’s chancery wrote Hurro-Urartian, which is not an Indo-European language — and the aforementioned scholar Armen Petrosyan’s case, that the ruling line itself was Indo-European, I hold as strong. And the frame does not wait. The kingdom next door was named Mana by Urartu, Mannai by the Assyrians, and Minni by the prophet Jeremiah — on the record from 829 BCE, two decades before Menua’s reign began. What its people spoke is unknown. But remember: this is 3,171 years after the first Yamna, the first Indo-Europeans, began to forge the sounds and meanings which we still have today in almost every sentence we speak. And the MN stands in that highland before Menua, and independently of him — Van, the great saltwater lake, just west of Urmia, the other great saltwater lake, in Iran. And the Armenian tradition names its own founder on the same MN frame, the cryptotypic frame, in its own literature: Manavaz, of the line of Hayk, whose name the city Manazkert still carries.

Van Castle, the Hakkari Stelae, and Erebuni

I first saw Van Castle the night before, as lights on a cliff in a snowstorm. The next morning was an amazingly blue-sky day, and I filmed myself there, and you can see it — look on powerofmana.net for a previous podcast. And I climbed up through the fresh snow — mine the only footprints — looking for the stables and inscription of King Menua. His rock-cut canal still runs water: 51 kilometres of it, watering 5,000 hectares.

The museum in Van held reference after reference to him. And the museum’s own panel on the Hakkari stelae says the earliest examples of such stelae — naked warriors and hunters cut in standing stone — are found north of the Black Sea, in Ukraine and Crimea. We’ll look at that great book by J. P. Mallory and the great Ukrainian archaeologist Telegin on the anthropomorphic stelae. You can trace the migration paths by where these stelae are found. And so these stelae, which I saw in the great museum in Van, are from two millennia after the latter half of the fourth millennium, where most of them start appearing, in Ukraine. The steppe monument tradition stood in this highland long before Urartu — by the custodians’ own region reading, the custodians being the Turkic-language-speaking current occupants of Anatolia.

At Erebuni — the fortress Argishti, Menua’s successor, his son, raised above what is now Yerevan — Erebuni: that -buni, Van; it’s the same. The Ararat people didn’t call themselves Ararat; they called themselves the Biainili people. And that Biainili is now in Van — the great saltwater lake and city in eastern Turkey — and Erebuni is by Yerevan. So the -van in Yerevan corresponds to the -buni. These are the same sounds, preserved over millennia. So at Erebuni, the fortress Argishti raised above what is now Yerevan, I photographed the museum’s own panel naming Haldi, the supreme god.

Ani: What I Do as a Writer

I recorded my testimony of what it means to be a writer. Please feel free to look at that, and read it, because you’ll understand what it means to be a writer — what Finding Manuland is about, and all my other work at disinfolklore.net and decodingtrolls.net and powerofmana.net; you’ll understand what I am doing here, and my purpose, and the reason I am out there, finding Manuland. I recorded my testimony from a very remote and very beautiful place — the watchtower of the modern Armenian state visible just across a line I could not cross from there. But now the Armenians and the Turkish government have signed an agreement, perhaps, to rebuild the bridge connecting their two great countries.

This is the end of the family, where the MN moon word — the MN moon word in Armenia — and the NM name word meet their Irish cognates. Old Irish mí and Armenian amis, the word for month. Old Irish ainm and Armenian anun, the word for name — NM words, the reversal, the mirror of MN. The two most widely separated witnesses of the family, agreeing.

The Armenian Files: Lchashen to the Kelishin Stele

My Armenian files are full of the next journeys. Twice over I have flagged Lchashen, on Lake Sevan — because when the Soviet engineers lowered the lake in the 1950s, the receding water uncovered a Bronze Age necropolis whose waterlogged kurgans yielded whole wagons of solid oak, wheels and all: the steppe’s signature vehicle, preserved in wood as it never survives on the steppe itself. They stand now in the amazing — amazing — History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, one of the best I’ve ever visited: the nearest thing on earth to seeing what Mykhailivka’s people actually rolled.

Karahunj waits in the south — the stones my notes call the Armenian Stonehenge. Metsamor waits in the Ararat Valley, with its Chalcolithic citadel. Khndzoresk, a cave town beyond Goris. A village called Kalavan, above Lake Sevan, where my note records the mayor says there are Stone Age ruins. And two stones with Menua’s own name on them wait at the edges: the Kelishin stele, a bilingual he raised with his father on a 3,000-metre Zagros pass, where Rawlinson in 1838 tried to take a paper squeeze at twenty below zero, and the paper froze on the stone. And in Georgia — a non-Indo-European-language-speaking people — the gold disc of Trialeti, dug up in the 1930s and lately read as a lunar calendar: full moons and new moons alternating around a centre. The Caucasus above is a conduit of the whole story — the road by which Mesopotamian metallurgy and ideas reached the steppe world, at Maikop.

Mardin, the Kura-Araxes, and Ararat the Exonym

Travelling through, I saw the lights of Mardin from a distance, in northern Mesopotamia, south of Van, and turned its name over towards Marduk, the great deity of Babylonia. And I passed through the Kura-Araxes — a great archaeological culture, of just around the time the steppe began to return to this land, from which one of its constituent elements had travelled to Ukraine, and then came back as the Kura-Araxes: the great culture that we can see in the same archaeological artifacts between the Kura and Araxes rivers — the Kura river of Georgia, and the Araxes of Armenia. Country thick with Assyrian and Hittite inscriptions.

Above it all stands the mountain I’ve not yet approached from close quarters. I slept for a couple of nights near it, but it was so foggy and snowy, in the middle of winter, I couldn’t see it — so we will return there. The name is the Hebrew Bible’s own for Urartu: an exonym — outsiders naming a people by the sound they seemed to make. Just like Wales: ‘foreigners,’ a foreign word, in the Indo-European and the Germanic — the first English named them as foreigners, Wales; the Welsh call themselves y Cymry. Exonyms are very common across Manuland, and they’re great clues to very interesting information. Ararat is an exonym — outsiders naming a people by the sound they seemed to make — and it belongs to the RT pattern, one of the three cryptotypes: MN, and NM, its reversal; RT, and TR, its reversal; and DN, and ND, its reversal — the ND of Indra and Alexander. The same shape as Turk, named from the outside, or the Hittite tarwanis hardening into the Greek tyrannos. One verse of Jeremiah summons the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz — the rule sound and the founder sound side by side, written down by a prophet with no stake in the Indo-European family. It’s not a moon word, and it stays off the moon axis. The sacred mountain waits.

Urfa, Edessa, and Göbekli Tepe

Urfa, Edessa, Antioch — and Göbekli Tepe: the easternmost stone-circle arc, and the oldest one of all. Foragers who carved a crescent more than 10,000 years ago, and a Roman inscription to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. And the people today, obsessed with the idea — that is the cultural meaning of Göbekli. But we’re interested in Göbekli in Finding Manuland because we look at the stones, and we look at what archaeologists can tell us about the stones. This is the arc where the stone circles are oldest — older than Stonehenge by 6,000 years, older than the Dnipro cromlech, which started this story, from 4000 BCE. Older than the words themselves.

I recorded on site at Göbekli Tepe — so go back to powerofmana.net if you’re interested — just as I was about to enter the first stone circle of them all, and I said so, standing there. If you’ve ever stood on the western shores of the Atlantic and looked at the great megalithic tombs, in southwest Wales or Ireland: they began in Göbekli Tepe. The people from there brought farming, over thousands of years, as far west as Ireland. And this is the story of migrants long before the Indo-Europeans came.

And our story had begun in a stone circle uncovered by the Dnipro in May 2021 — and here was its mirror, at the far end of the road: the crescent, the crescent of the moon. I saw it referenced, carved on a stone bench underneath the painted boar of Special Building D — the painted boar is in the Urfa museum; the bench is not there, but I wrote to one of the archaeologists, and he sent me very clear photographs of the moon, which was referenced in the museum as being on this stone bench. And the Şanlıurfa museum’s own label calls it a half-moon, and dates it more than 10,000 years back: the earliest hard sign of the moon-thread whose other end is the cromlech by the Dnipro. The migration that carried the first farmers from this country towards Trypillia and Ukraine is in the genes, and the pottery, and the reading of the symbols beside it — crescents at both ends — as peer-reviewed, assembled link by link, and published in the last twelve months. This is what I mean on Finding Manuland. I am reporting. We didn’t have the archaeogenetic technology; and since then, the archaeogenetic revolution has unfurled at a dizzying pace. And I’ll bring you through that as we journey to all these places. It adds an extra layer to the languages we use, and the archaeology, the history, the writing, the religions — the patterns which repeat, that sometimes manifest from a common source, sometimes are borrowing, and sometimes are coincidence.

I visited the museum in Urfa, ancient Edessa, and it holds Göbekli’s finds. And the day before, in that same city — an amazing city; if you ever have the chance to go to Urfa, Şanlıurfa in the modern Turkish, glorious Urfa, you must go there; Abraham, the prophet Abraham, either came from there or Ur; it’s an extraordinary place, and the museum there is unbelievable — the day before, in that same city, I saw a Roman-era inscription on the city walls, dedicating columns to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. Everywhere you go, you find MN, the founder name, surfacing on a column — MN in column — at the eastern edge of the arc.

Karahan Tepe, Sumatar, and Harran

An hour east from Göbekli is Karahan Tepe. I think I did a podcast from there — maybe I didn’t publish it, because it was a bit disappointing: I drove all the way there, through the Tektek mountains, but it was closed. A very nice security guard came out and said, sorry, it’s closed. It’s where the pillars grow faces, and the excavators now speak of a settlement, not just a shrine. And nearby, two moon addresses I’ve kept for the journey still to come. Sumatar, also in the Tektek hills — an oasis ringed with standing stones and altars to the moon god Sin — which I visited; and I think I did a podcast on it. We will visit that again. And Harran itself — which, I was so tired at the end of the day, I just drove through it. I could see the mighty city walls and the old city, but I just didn’t have the energy to go through it. But then I went back to my hotel in Urfa, and I downloaded heaps of journal articles. So we will go back there — we’ll go back to these places, among the oldest moon-cult centres in the Near East, where Indo-European gods were once sworn under the moon. Sin is a Semitic god, and a neighbour, rather than a witness, to the Indo-European journey. However, the moon city itself we will return to.

And some journeys I leave on the map. I’m human, after all. And this is the third element of Finding Manuland: the journeys — and I’ll do my best to overcome my mere humanness, and my physical inability, sometimes, to visit these places, because I’m just so tired from these amazing journeys. I’ll take you on that: through the language, through the journeys, and through the exchange of our Mana.

The Iranian-Mesopotamian Crossroads

And this whole area is the Iranian-Mesopotamian crossroads. Here the rule sound — Rit, in right — meets its lie-mirror; an MN horde is named by the scribes outside the family; and the sea god’s realm reaches behind them, beyond, towards Sumer — almost entirely still to be walked, in Iraq. This crossroads I hold almost wholly as anticipation, reached so far only through the Brussels tablet, and the museums west of it.

Behistun: The War of Truth Against the Lie

Under a cliff at Behistun in Iran, Darius carved the war of truth against the Lie. Arta — truth — still in the name Arthur, and in right, human rights: the rule sound, Reich. And its reversal — the same reversal that runs down to what we now call drama, and deception: the same in Druj, Drauga. The same rock carries the mind-word twice. Haxāmaniš — MN — the ancestor Darius the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled Canaan and Judea for 300 years before Alexander, another Indo-European, arrived there, derives his dynasty from: ‘having the mind of a friend,’ Haxāmaniš literally means. And Ardumaniš — upright-minded; Ard, as in the Ard names we still have in Ireland; upright-minded, MN — stands among the six helpers, with the land written Armina on the same face, three times.

I have not yet stood beneath that cliff. And when I do, I will go in the footsteps of the man who hung from it: Henry Rawlinson, who scaled the rock in the late 1830s to copy the inscription — and his own memoir of the decipherment I will carry with me, as I bring you on that journey. His road to Behistun began, in fact, on another rock — and its importance is: it’s written down entirely; it’s in rock, 600 BCE; we have a memorial of the language, and the MN sound is all over it. At Ganjnameh, in the Alvand gorge above Hamadan — the ancient Ecbatana — where, in April 1835, a young soldier copied the twin trilingual panels of Darius and Xerxes, and teased out his first royal names. Each panel opens on the god whose own name carries the mind word, the MN word — or may not be mind; we will come to that — Ahuramazda: mazdā, the setting-in-place of mind. The MN root of thinking, cut into the mountainside, in the god’s own name, at the spot where a dead empire’s writing first came back to life.

Hasanlu: The Golden Bowl

And south of that great saltwater lake, Urmia, the burnt citadel of Hasanlu waits, in the heartland of the very kingdom Jeremiah calls Minni — MN — a town destroyed around 800 BCE, like towns destroyed today in Kherson, in all likelihood by the army of Menua’s own dynasty: he destroyed a city with the MN frame in its name. Its last hours sealed — and in 1958, an excavator’s brush found the golden bowl of Hasanlu beneath a fallen soldier who had been carrying it: a looter who got his just deserts.

Closing

So I’ll leave it up there for today. I’m Decoding Trolls. You’ve been listening to Finding Manuland. You can subscribe to my work at powerofmana.net, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net. I write daily on X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. And my masterwork is disinfolklore.eu. I’m bringing you on this atlas, which is just a very brief survey of what we’re going to go into, in the micro, over the coming years, on the Finding Manuland podcast. And I hope you’ll tune in for the fourth episode — this was the third episode — the fourth episode, very soon.

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