Should we call Ancient Ukrainians the first Aryans?
Finding Manuland XI: The First Greeks Edition.
Finding Manuland’s starting point was noticing the similarity of sounds and meanings immanent in the mythological / religious monikers of the first monarch founders of many great peoples between Ireland and India - Manu (India’s first human), Erimon (Ireland’s first high king), Manannán (Ireland’s preeminent pre-Christian deity), Mannus (founder of the Germanic people - according to the Roman Tacitus - and son of Tuisto (twin)), Ayryaman (who gave their name to Iran), Menua (son of the founder of Armenia’s predecessor state Ararat / Bianili). Rhadamanthys and Minos born of Zeus Pater’s union with the goddess Europa. That union itself symbolises the conquest of Old European Greece (represented by Europa) by the Indo-European language speaking Ancient Ukrainians.
We know for linguistic reasons that Zeus Pater appeared first around 1,000 years before the first Mycenaeans as Dyeus Pater in Ancient Ukraine: we know this because we have deities whose monikers are derived from the same Common Source in Ancient Indian, Italic (Iuppiter) and Greek cultures. Zeus is attested in Homer whose poems date from around 700 BCE about mythologised events that had occurred (to some extent) around 700 years before he lived and around 1,000 years after 2,500 BCE when those who would go on to create the Greek, Italic, Armenian, Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, Indo-Aryan,… linguistic and religious cultures last lived together in one community in Ancient Ukraine.
Menelaus, monarch of Sparta (Lacedaemon) is the younger brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. The Mycenaeans governed during the last phase of the Helladic / Mycenae age that corresponds to 1,600 – 1,100 BCE.
Homer is our first source for the existence of Menelaus who was associated with the Moon long before my discovery of the M-N- sound’s relationship with the Ancient Ukrainian / Proto-Indo-European sound for the moon.
Helen (of Troy-fame) is married to Menelaus, and together they may well be reflexes of the sun (*Hel is the Ancient Ukrainian word for “burn”) and moon deities, respectively, worshipped in the Indo-European homeland of Ancient Ukraine before the migrations.
Evidence of sun worship is immanent in most archaeological collections of Bronze Age artefacts. And “Helen” of course is cognate with the word the Greeks use to describe themselves the Hellenes or “Hellenic People.”
The first Greeks were, literally, the first Indo-European language speaking people to occupy the land now known as Greece. They are known as the Mycenae.
Homer uses two terms to signify the forebears of and the Greeks as a collectivity.
In the Iliad Homer uses the term Achæns 598 times and the term Danaans 138 times. One might compare the father of the Greek Danaïdes - Danaus - to the Danaans, another name for the Ancient Ukrainian / Proto-Indo European goddess *Danu. Compare Old Irish Danu whom the Tuatha de Danaan (the second community of Indo-European invaders unto the island of Ireland) worshipped.
Compare also the Indian Danavas who are descended from the Goddess Danu and who, by the time they are mentioned in writing, had become mythologised as something akin to invading dæmons.
Note also that Various rivers in Ukraine’s historical territory bear her name even today: The Don, Donets, Don Aper (Dniepr), Don Istris (Dniester), and Danube.
“And they [Odysseus’s son Telemachus] came to the hollow land of Lacedaemon (Sparta) with its many ravines, and drove to the palace of glorious Menelaus… for to Helen the gods vouchsafed issue no more after that she had at the first borne her lovely child, Hermione, who had the beauty of golden Aphrodite… So they were feasting in the great high-roofed hall, the neighbours and kinsfolk of glorious Menelaus, and making merry; and among them a divine minstrel was singing to the lyre,… at the sight they marvelled as they passed through the palace of the king, fostered of Zeus; for there was a gleam as of sun or moon over the high-roofed house of glorious Menelaus.
Long before I identified that what binds all of these deities together is the M-N- sound Adalbert Kuhn (in 1855) had an intuition that Minos (who we first hear about in Homer around 700 BCE) and Manu (whom we first know of in writing from the 1,200 BCE Rg Veda) were cognate. He tried to derive the one from the other, linguistically. It did not quite work.
Muellner had more success:
“Even a single word can be a gateway to inherited mythology. Examining the word mēnis, Muellner uncovers some of the fundamental springs of the Iliad’s action.
“Semantically, the closest parallel to mēnis is its Vedic cognate manyú, which, like mēnis, denotes a primordial cosmic force associated with the thunderbolt and the lord of the pantheon (Muellner 1996, 185-6). The meaning of this word contains myth within it (see Muellner, Homeric Poetics).”
So again the value of my discovery of the ubiquity of the M-N- sound immanent in such words can be measured by reference to how many researchers before me intuited some relationship, some Family Resemblance between such monikers for mythological / religious first founders without succeeding in nailing down what it was.
By 1896 experts on Ancient Greek culture were using the term “Aryan” to describe the community from which the first Greeks emanated.
“Aryan” as we have seen in previous episodes is an emanation of what we today call Iranian culture. Up until relatively recently the term was used to describe the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. This branch includes all the ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages spoken indigenously in India, and all of the ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages spoken in the country we today call Iran. By 1850 Aryans were perceived to be a race that was distinguished from Semitic language speakers. And we see where that troll ended in the gas chambers, which rather colours the use of the term Aryan to this day.
As we saw in the last episode, the Aryan-like funereal ceremonies of the Sintashta culture in today’s Kazakhstan give that short-lived culture 2,100 - 1,900 BCE the best claim to be the first Aryans. In this sense Aryanism is a set of cultural attributes such as burial customs that included burying horses and chariots as well as the monarch’s groom along with a certain arrangement of race horses’ heads under a burial mound / mane / kurgan. Then by the time the Rg Veda was written down 2,500 km south-east of the Sintashta Culture’s homeland the memory of these rituals was recorded in writing in India’s Rg Veda.
It is somewhat ironic that by 1896 the homeland of those who migrated into Greece to become the first Greeks was thought to be Iranian Aryans. The discoverer of the Indo-European family of languages was the Welsh Persian and Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones. Jones was working at the time in India as a judge in the newly founded English colony. We will come back to Jones again and again throughout Finding Manuland, not least because it was his translation of the law code in operation in India when the English invaded - the Laws of Manu, which had been written down around 600 CE - that led to his discovery of the Indo-European family of languages. Jones announced the discovery on the 2 February 1786 thus during the third anniversary discourse to the Asiatic Society that he founded in Kolkata:
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [Germanic language branch which includes English] and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.”
Jones was a brilliant scholar of the Persian language at Oxford University before he became frustrated with academic life. He retrained as a lawyer (as I also did, though at Cambridge University, rather than at Oxford), before going to work abroad for his country (as I did too).
It is ironic that he is not quite sure, if my reading of the above part of his discourse is correct, that Persian fitted into the Indo-European language family. Yet, one hundred years later, the Aryan language was thought to be the Common Source of from which the entirety of Greek culture sprung!
The Nazis of course sought the homeland of the Aryans, which they believed to be in Scandinavia. They thought that somehow the Iranians and Indians had migrated from Scandinavia with their culture intact all the way to West and South Asia. Ironic too that the Nazis militarily occupied (as the Soviets would do too) the actual homeland of Indo-European languages in Eastern Ukraine between 1941 - 1945, yet they had no inkling that it was the actual homeland of what they thought of as the Aryans - i.e. the Common Source from which all Indo-European culture sprung.
The fundamental meanings of “Aryan” itself stems from a number of layers.
In the monarch’s household in ancient Iran even before Zarathustra / Zoroaster’s religious reforms of around 1,400 BCE the ‘aryaman’ was the functionary in charge of the treasury (household = nmäna - note how the M-N- in the ancient Iranian signifier for house also is immanent in the English words “domain,” “demesne,” “Manor,” “mansion,”… ).
In time this domestic household structure became celestialised with these functionaries taking on the attributes of deities, before Zoroaster / Zarathustra demoted Aryaman to the status of Dæmon.
Yet, not even that great religious reformer could prevent the Arya- sound becoming identified not just with the word used for the Iranian people but also for (as we have seen) the entirety of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages, and even, by 1896, for the Common Source for all of Greek culture.
I believe, however, the reason why the signifier “Arya” took such a hold on great Indo-European cultures like Armenia, India and Iran (where even today in all of these three lands the sound -Arya is ubiquitous in place, family and personal names) is the meaning that clusters around what we would today say in English is an “area.” That word itself in English was first used in 1552.
That Area in English stems from the Italic Latin branch of the Indo-European language family and Arya meaning more or less the same concept in the Armenian, Iranian and Indian branches suggests strongly that the Common source from which that signifier stems is in Ancient Ukraine.
Basically, in Indo-European linguistics there is a more or less effective rule that if you find cognates in branches east and west of Ukraine, then, all other things being equal, the root of those cognates is more likely than not to be found in Ancient Ukrainian / Proto-Indo European or the Common Source from which all the main extant branches of Indo-European languages today emanate.
This same rule also, by the way, applies to the M-N- sound, which since it is embedded in every branch must have been present in Ancient Ukrainian before the migrations in 2,500 BCE.
Many scholars also believe that Erimon, Ireland’s first high king, is cognate with Aryaman.
Georges Dumézil, who discovered the tripartite conception of society in Indo-European culture, offers a customarily elucidating outline of the fundamental meaning of Arya- in his seminal The Destiny of a King1.
“When the expression was taken in its most comprehensive sense, the center might refer to the ārya, surrounded on all sides by the barbarians (cf. the Chinese expression "Empire of the Middle");
In this sense all of us Indo-European language speakers are part of the ārya. And all of the speakers of the individual languages and dialects and the lands and communities where we live might also be considered to be of the (more micro) Arya- (if you can understand these words / meanings then you are within the Indo-European Arya-).
This is the sense Dumézil refers to when he writes: “when it was restricted to the ārya, the center, as occurs frequently, would presumably be the land, the particular land or clan of the poet or of his royal employers, surrounded by the rest of the nation, whether friendly or hostile.”
In the terms I describe it in my other main project Disinfolklore, the Arya is the Inner Realm, while those outside the Inner Realm are painted by manipulating Inner Realm exploitative politicians in our current age as, say, migrants attempting to enter our Inner Realm / Arya to steal its Sovereignty, Security, and Fertility.
In time those occupying the Arya- became known as the Aryans (in the Indian context those occupying the three Dumézelian functions in Indo-European communities as manifested in traditional Indian society as the Priestly (Bramans), Warrior, and Householder castes, and in Roman society as the Patricians (rulers) / Flamines (priests), Soldiers, and Plebeians (Equites)).
So the sense of Arya- that includes the idea of “superiority” arises from this sense of Inner Realmness. And “Aryaman” where “M-N-” as it is in Finding Manuland recurs as the centre of the energy / mana / meaning / power is an Inner Realm within an Inner Realm - the heart of our communal community or municipality.
To this day, the Germans refer to what we call the Indo-European languages as the “Indo-Germanic” family of languages - an ossified remnant of a time before we understand what we get today about how the different branches relate to one another and split away from the Common Source in the Yamnaya homeland of Eastern Ukraine.
“Proto-Indo-European” is simply the modern term for the Common Source of which Jones spoke above (and what that Greek scholar quoted above meant in 1896 when he referred to the Common Source from which Greek language and religion sprung as being “Aryan”).
Given that we now know the Indo-European family of languages emanates from Ancient Ukraine, I argue and campaign for Ukraine to be recognised as this Common Source by adjusting the moniker of the family of languages to reflect what we now know today, but which Jones could never have known then. And indeed which we would never have discovered had we not spent the past 230 years researching Jones’s intuition announced on that balmy night in Kolkata.
It is tempting, then, to use the word “Arya-” to describe the first Ancient Ukrainian Indo-European language speakers and to refer to Ukraine as our Indo-European Arya-.
But, frankly, the stench of Nazism, the holocaust and the Nazis’ hijacking of the Arya- terminology is still too present in Europe for this to become a value-free and non-distracting moniker.
In a later episode I’ll set out the case for why using the moniker Ancient Ukrainian instead of Proto-Indo-European is no more anachronistic a moniker than, say, using Iranian, or German, or Armenian, Roman, or Belgian or Irish or French or Greek to describe other ancient cultures.
Continued:
Continued from:
First in series:
Dumézil, Georges. The Destiny of a King. Chicago ; University of Chicago Press, 1973. Print.