Today, we’re looking at how the Finding Manuland iterative method of discovery works. And, we look at the first two of ten reasons why Finding Manuland matters.
I'm Decoding Trolls and I'm welcoming you to Finding Manuland. And this is our first recording, which is on the road, as it were. I am on the road. I am in Turkey and I am here in Ankara, here to visit the Museum for Anatolian Civilizations. We will get to this again in the future.
It does take me quite a bit of time to to process what I see. But I wanted to talk to you quickly before we get to the 10 reasons about why finding Manuland matters. I want to quickly talk about methods. So I had this vision for my life in October/ November 2021.
You might remember, you might have read one of the first episodes of Finding Manuland where I describe it being in this village called Maine in eastern France and in being in a hotel room that night and thinking:
“Look, I've always wondered why is it that the first man in Indian culture is Manu and the first in Germanic culture is Mannus and in Ireland Manannán. Instead of just wondering about this stuff, why don't I try and find an answer to it and see if there is a connection between all of these MN sounding place names, and I was in one that day, and this phenomenon which I had noticed of MN sounds also in almost every sentence we speak.
So we have this questioning about geography, about mythology, early pre-Christian religion, and also about our everyday language. And as I had this revelation that perhaps I could investigate this and see if I could come up with an answer, I passed by a warehouse in eastern France called Manuland.”
There was this Manuland writing on it. And it's basically an agricultural machinery company in eastern France. And I thought, wow, that is a bit of a sign. That's a moniker and a sign. And so I will start investigating this. And I was on my way back to my diplomatic posting in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine.
This was a few months before the full-scale invasion. And I was rushing back there after a couple of weeks vacation in Ireland. And I decided, well, why don't I take my time and just kind of wander around and test this to see if I can come up with anything interesting and to see if finally Manuland is a goer. And so I got in touch with my boss and he said, that's fine, take your time. And which was great. And I spent a couple of days wandering around, but I had this vision for my life…
And this vision I've now realized to some extent. And the vision for my life was I would just arrive in a town, maybe with an MN sound in its moniker, in its name, and I would look for a method of exploring life. And I don't know what I'm looking for. And this is how all innovation happens.
This idea of serendipity. So serendipity isn't accidentally uncovering something. It's putting yourself into a position where if you do see signs of something interesting... along a vague theme that you you will spot them you're looking for them you're scanning for them you're looking for these weak signals and you're chasing those weak signals and that realization of that that chasing of that weak signal then leads you to further.
And I learned all about this and how you institutionalize innovation as a MBA student at Oxford University a few years ago. And how do you institutionalize innovation in companies? You try to keep the explore-exploit ratio in business. sync.
So exploit is I had this idea of an MN sound in mythology, in language and in place names. And I could explore just one of those. So that would be exploiting this idea. But exploring necessitates also moving forward. And where we're at now from that moment in Maine village in France, where I arrive and I just have this vague idea of what I'm going to, what am I going to do there? Okay. I go to the center of the town. It's a church. Then I decided to go run in circles, in ever increasing circles. And eventually I came to a mound and the giant herdsman.
And that method worked for there, but I had to evolve that method. So I don't just exploit it, I explore new methods. And so three years later, we're talking about finding Manuland, which is a moniker, which is a frame for the entire project of looking at the MN sound in our everyday language, in geographical place names, and in the mythological founders inside the Indo-European cultures, as I now understand them to be.
And Now we have this new output, which is a podcast, which I'm still exploring. Thank you for being with me on this journey, this metaphorical journey, but this actual journey of iterating, of exploring, but also exploiting what I found so far.
So now, as I mentioned, I'm in Ankara and I'm spending as many days as I need to get to know the Museum of Anatolian civilizations. I probably won't talk about much about what I found for a while because it takes time. And in some respects, I'm using this museum as an index to places in Anatolia, which is the modern country of Turkey. And then by seeing where artifacts, which are of particular interest in the emanate from where they come from I note down these places and I and we will visit these places and so this idea of exploring now but I haven't I won't be exploiting what I found for a time but instantly sometimes I see an artefact which immediately I saw something yesterday very briefly which I'm going to go back again today and see and I will explore that further but this constant iteration from the explore exploit ratio and fine tuning it is Out of that process, out of that mode of being, emanates all great innovations and inventions and ideas.
And finally, Manuland is an institutionalisation of this idea. And... we don't know where we're going to end up. I have working hypotheses, which I didn't have when I was in Maine in that village. And one of the core ones is this reversion to the moon-based metaphor.
Metaphor meaning metis, device, and phar meaning light. So the device for light is a metaphor in our language. And out of metaphors, this whole... interlacing and matrices and ever-increasing networks and matrices of metaphors emanate our entire mode of interpreting external reality and our mental reality and it is a working hypothesis in Finding Manuland you may have picked up that reversion to the moon-based metaphor is an actual empirical phenomenon. So we see it in the names of the mythological founders of the great Indo-European peoples, Mannus, Manu, Manawyadan, Manannán in Ireland.
And we also see it in the place names in many different places in Anatolia and Ireland. Thousands of place names have this MN sound inside them, as indeed all across Manuland from Australia. Spiti Valley in the Himalayas, which is a valley that divides Tibet from the rest of the Indian part, the Indo-European society, and all the way between there and Emain Macha, which I also visited recently in northern Ireland, which I haven't spoken about as yet, but again, it's cooking away and I haven't exploited it yet, but I have explored it. And in each of these podcasts, we are evolving and iterating a method where we talk about MN.
So there's three elements I mentioned. I will try always to structure the podcast by MN, But of course, we do iterate, so it will innovate and we will change this. But fundamentally, it's this looking at mana, meaning energy. So this MN sound signifying energy, mana, energy, which we had earlier.
And I mentioned before we talk about in the Pacific where manna still meant energy. I believe that's an emanation of the contact from early Indo-European India with the Pacific region. And they matched their existing conception of what it means to be human and what it means to be human or an animal itself. And again,
I haven't got to this yet, but we will come to it again because it's really important. So we've got human, we've got MN in human and in animal and animate, we've got the NM is reversed. So we've got the MN is reversed and animate and animate. So we have these two forms of sentient beings in our communities, in our universe, animals and humans. And we have this idea in early, in Latin, manes, amhain, again, M-N for meaning soul, manes, soul in life. uh in in latin cultures and so it's the soul which animates the human or the inanimate creature so again we have all of these little elements in and of course mn in element as well which element contains two elements to it Alu meaning light, light shining and mana meaning the meaning shining through the light. And so we have all of these little signposts in our language. And that's the second element I'll always try and bring into our podcast, which is so first we look at mana as energy. It's what animates us. It's what spurs us on. It's what at a fundamental level we move according to energy and And I maintain that actually what matters when we're speaking to each other or communicating, amen and communicate, is this exchange of energy.
And if there's one message in Finding Manuland, Finding Manuland podcast, well, there is one message, but there's many messages. It is that this fundamental aspect of what it means to be human or an animate creature sent in being is what matters most. And this is what we're really trying to capture and maintain.
And if you're in a moment today where you are perhaps, you're feeling a bit flustered because someone doesn't really understand what you're saying and you're really trying to communicate it clearly and it's really important to you um i want us to try and recall this a fundamental message in finding manuland is actually what matters in that moment is that you're there together and communicating energy and the words and the emotions which you are communicating unconsciously if we can if we can surface them and understand that actually today, right now, I'm talking about the film with you and the film we saw, you think it was rubbish. I think it was amazing. And it doesn't really matter what we're talking about. What does matter is that we're there together and we're humans.
And in Turkey, going through the mountains, I visited this amazing Hittite site the other day.
And as I was going over this mountain range, Suddenly, I got to the top to a pass and I looked down and I could see this entire kingdom, which I now understand is the kingdom of Hatti, which the Hittites, the first Indo-European empire, which was at its height between around 1650. 1500, 1400 BCE and 1200 BCE, before the Common Era.
And this kingdom, which was the core part of the Hittite empire, laid down before me. And I could see these mountains and I got a picture of it. And so I decided to stop to take a photograph of it. And then this lion-sized dog, this massive dog, these Anatolian sheepdogs, which are everywhere, He or she, I think it was a he, he came to visit me and I happened to have bought all that. I didn't have any dog food. I'm going to get some dog food. So when you're driving around here, you see all these dogs in the mountains and they need a bit of food and cats as well.
Actually, I might get cat food because, as some of us might know, dogs love cat food because in cat food is this tureen. It's this thing which cats need to live on, but dogs don't actually need it. So cat food's a lot more concentrated.
That's a tip for those of us who feed and exchange manna with these sentient beings. And so I had this sense that this lion-sized dog resembled the lion IFC in the museum. There's just all of these sculptures of lions, these orthostats of carved lions, because in the Hittites, lion signified was very important in their religious and mythology and their idea of taming lions. The wild.
So I fed this dog all this bread and at the end his tail was wagging away and we both went on our way and I saw this lovely phenomenon on my way into the kingdom of Hatti on my way to this amazing site which again I'll talk about in in the future when I process what I saw this Hittite site with all these orthostats and actually even Bronze Age burials and along the way, along the path, along the road, I saw these little brown piles and lots of dogs sitting beside them by the side of the road. And eventually I saw a car stopping and I saw them decanting dog food out and dogs uh coming uh from from afar to eat these piles and now that was an exchange of mana between the humans in that car and and these dogs these massive anatolian sheepdogs which you you see all over the place in this um in this place so that in the context of this podcast is an explanation of what Mana exchange is it's about exchanging energy and in that case it's through food with me with this giant lion who was guarding the passage into the kingdom of of Hatti, the first Indo-European empire, which is very important to us because we have 7,000 texts in Hittite language, most of which are now translated.
They were found in the Imperial Library in Boguskoy, which I also visited a while ago. I have spoken a bit about visiting Boguskoy, but again, we'll get back to it. And if my hypothesis that MN is the fundamental signifier and sound in Indo-European languages is to hold true, then we would expect to find MN in Hittite as well, being the most attested Indo-European language, the earliest attested Indo-European language, because the earliest other text we have in Indo-European language is in the Rg Veda, which is about 1100 languages. BCE and its songs that were composed before then. And it was then recorded in there.
And MN is all over there, all over the Rig Veda. Manu being the first mythological founder of humanity. And I'm not going... Well, all I will say is... My hope was, and MN's and Finding Manuland is also predictive, it should be about helping us to predict things and...
I had this intuition in that village in Maine, Maine, M-A-I-N-E, I can't pronounce it. Oh, I remember I asked the herdsman when I got to this giant mound and I said to him, what's the, in French, what's the origins of Maine? And he pointed towards Cassels, which is the historical place for the land for the Menapii, who were this community that ruled the Marsh, the channel, the English channel, and became the Brigantes in Britain, on the island of Britain, and also arrived in Ireland. And out of the Menapii emanates a lot of the MN-sounding... names in Ireland and on the island of Britain and indeed in France and today's Belgium, around that area, the Menapii, the MN sound. But the Menapii don't explain why MN is all over Indian place names or all over Anatolia. So the essential meaning of the MN sound in Ireland on the island of Ireland those thousands of place names may have emanated directly from the Manapi who conquered the island of Ireland it would seem and gave their place names to Loch Gorman which is Wexford, Cil Mhaintin which is Wicklow, Fermanagh, County Fermanagh and Monaghan and thousands of other place names. So the Menapii may have been the proximate cause, but they are not the ultimate cause. And Finding Manuland is exploring for ultimate causes of all of these meanings and of these... the appearances of the sound. So we're looking at mana as an energy exchange and the MN sound as a moniker. We're also looking at the language because the language we use in each sentence is an artifact of these thousands, these millennia of history. And it's a core assumption of finding Manuland, but it's beyond an assumption now because of what I've found and even reported to you so far, that the language itself is an artefact. Almost every sentence we speak, we can trace when we use an MN sound in sacrament, in moniker, in mantra, in mandala, in... all of these words that communicate similar meanings in different Indo-European languages, they emanate from a common source, which is this moon-based metaphor, this MN sound, this idea of light shining through the moon, in the same way in semantics that a particular meaning sounds through a signifier and so we have this idea this light shining through the moon and in our language if we can uncover the connection between the words we use every day in our lives in our ordinary workaday lives when we're walking around the place and talking about various communities or communal meanings or we're talking about energy or we're talking about power. We're talking about why is, for instance, the president of Georgia, she still holds power even though the illegitimate government has power. has appointed its new president. But these essential elements in our way of looking at the world, our way of organizing the world in governance, in government and in our monarchies and in the security and the fertility and prosperity of our communities, there is remnants which we can trace backwards through time. And for me, back to the beginning of our evidence of the Indo-European era, which is 4,100 BCE in southeastern Ukraine, and the cultural descendants of those Yamnaya, MN and Yamnaya, ended up taking over the entirety of Anatolia, which became Turkey after the Turks invade and conquered it in the 11th century in the Common Era. And they also, those Yamnaya's descendants, a bit later, so an early group of them, left around 4100 BC and populated, eventually conquered the whole of Anatolia. And then later groups left and ended up conquering all the other, the rest of the land between Ireland and India in the various Indo-European linguistic groups. And therefore, when we find MN Sounds in the names of the mythological founders of all of these people, the Germanic people and the Indian people and the Irish people, the Celtics, the Keltoi, the hidden ones, the people who worshipped the hidden one, Dusko or... Donn in pre-Christian Ireland, who incidentally in the mythological record was born in ancient Ukraine in Scythia.
And this was known long before we understood that all Indo-European languages emanate from the Yamnaya, from this area of Scythia. And so we have this idea that as we iterate on our journey from this village in Maine in eastern France, that we've discovered quite a lot about the meaning of manna, the meaning of energy exchange, the MN sound and language. And then the third element in each of the podcasts, which is about, excuse me, if I was better at editing, I'd edit that out and I will get better at editing. But it's, anyway, it's really complicated and I'm trying to learn, but I will, I'll get better at it. So stick with me, stick with us. And so that third element in each podcast, first we got the, it's about manna, manna exchange, then about language, and then it's about journeys. It's about a physical journey between Ireland and India.
So today I'm in Ankara, as I mentioned to you. It's about this physical journey between Ireland and India to different places to look at MN-sounding places, places connected to MN. And so while I was here, I had read ages ago that the Celts, a Celtic language-speaking community, had occupied parts of Anatolia from about 300 BCE until the Romans, MN in Roman, got rid of them. And when I was coming to Ankara to go to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, I thought, okay, let me see if I can find out where the boundaries of these so-called Galassians, as they were called.
The Romans called them the Galattians, but they were a Celtic language speaking community. And it turned out Ankara was... was the center of where they lived. And this Celtic language speaking community laid the foundations of this amazing place that I ran to yesterday in Ankara Castle. And so when I talk about serendipity, it's not an accident that I discovered this, but nor is it determined. I had this memory of wanting to find the Celtic language speaking people who were just another Indo-European lair in Anatolia after the Hittites and the previous the Hittites precursors. But because I was here, I discovered it.
Another one is I wanted to... Mounds are very important. Burial mounds are really important because until we had ancient DNA analysis, it was Marija Gimbutas... who was a Lithuanian-American linguist, world-class Indo-European linguist, but also at the same time a world-class archaeologist. And it was she who, through a combination of archaeology and linguistics and looking at material artefacts and putting them all together, formulated what was then called the step hypothesis, where she looked at what we now know to be Yamnaya migrations, MN and migration as well, from eastern Ukraine, westwards and eastwards. And she determined what is known as the step hypothesis, is that we could associate the spread of Indo-European languages, which, as we know, it's an empirical fact, with We all speak Indo-European languages traditionally in this area between Ireland and India. And that emanates from a common source. And the key question was, where was that common source? Who is it? And Marija Gimbutas used the migrations of the Yamnaya, which was marked by different artifacts, but particularly by burial mounds.
And this idea of burying a patriarch, One human, one male human usually with amazing grave goods underneath a human built artificial earthen mound. And there's 100,000 of them in Ukraine, in current Ukraine. But you could chart the migrations of the Yamnaya across Europe, east and west. using burial mounds, which determined that the same people, the people with the same religious ideology had created these burial mounds. And often you'll see the artifacts in them are quite similar. Marija Gimbutas, and someone wrote to me about this earlier, so I'm going to set it out here.
It's immanent in everything I do, is what she amazingly was able to do. And ancient DNA evidence since 2015 has demonstrated the truth of what Marija Gimbutas used archaeology and artifacts to propose the step hypothesis. So we now know that ancient DNA analysis demonstrates that people from between Ireland and India have various degrees of Yamnaya ancestry, ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya ancestry inside their genome even today. And we can even see, for instance, nature, The preeminent scientific journal published emphatic evidence that on the island of Britain, around the 2,450 years before the Common Era, the genome of 90% of the population on the island of Britain changed to include Yamnaya, Or what they called Beaker, but it's Yamnaya ancestry from what we now know to be ancient Ukraine.
But this idea of mounds was very important to the beginning of finding Manuland because it was a burial mound, the destruction of a burial mound in Manuland. Dnipro in the city I was living in in eastern Ukraine in May 2021, which first led me to the discovery of the Yamnaya and this idea that one people could be responsible for spreading a language from Ireland to India and that they came from this area, eastern Ukraine, where I happened to be. But it was an article in the New York Times about the destruction of a burial mound, a Yamnaya burial mound in Dnepro in the suburbs, a posh suburb of Dnepro. Property developers wanted to build a posh house on top of it. So they use this trick in Ukrainian law where they got this archaeologist who said he would research the mound. And I use research with air quotes.
And the old Soviet way of doing archaeology, the way the old way of doing archaeology probably everywhere was you just destroy it in order to research it. And so they were able to destroy the mound by saying they were going to research it. So they got all the permissions. But underneath the mound, they found a stone circle.
And you'll see some of the first episodes, the written episodes of Finding Man. And we talk about the Kromlik and this stone circle. And that stone circle was built by the Stedni Stog community, who... who were one of the ingredients in the Yamnaya and the Sredni Stog contributed to the formation of Indo-European languages.
But they are Old Europe, according to Marija Gimbutas's separation of the two chronologies. So we've got Indo-European, which began with the Yamnaya spread from Ireland to India. And prior to that, we have Old Europe. And the Old European layer is visible in... around the same geographical space in Europe that the Indo-Europeans would eventually cross.
But they had a different material culture. And from that different material culture, for instance, as Marija Gimbutas demonstrates from her archaeological researches across Europe, that you have this break in the archaeological record virtually everywhere where the At one point, everyone in the community is buried together and you have in temples and excavated religious sites, you have roughly 95% of the artifacts are representations of the female, of women. And I will see some of these today in Museum for Anatolian Civilizations, and they're quite distinctive.
I've seen them in museums in Poland, in Ireland, in Germany, and now in Anatolia. They're quite similar, so you don't need to be Marija Gimbutas to see that, okay, we have artifacts which are quite similar in all of these places, and these represent the old Europe world. the old European layer, pre-Indo-European. And so we often talk about the old European as being more maternal, goddess worshipping, more equal societies, egalitarian, everyone buried together, not with grave goods. And then suddenly you have this break.
And in Dnepro, it was so wonderfully illustrated by this mound, which no longer exists, that that you suddenly go from this point where everyone is buried together, you don't have real grave goods apart from some female altars. The AAA culture in Ukraine, ancient Ukraine, is very typical of this old European layer.
And then suddenly you go to one male burial, patriarchal burial. The whole community must have worked for ages to build these mounds. And that demonstrates around the same time that people started speaking Indo-European languages and worshipping Skyfather, Dias Petar, who who you will remember from a previous episode, and this whole religious, this whole contract with Skyfather.
If Skyfather protects the crops, then the community will live together in peace and will eat properly. And this whole religious ideology became part of the the spread of Indo-European languages and the spread of this patriarchal mode of social organization. Well, because I'm in Ankara, I started looking at places near Ankara and I discovered Gordian, where King Midas, you might remember, and the Gordian Knot, basically the Gordian Knot, when Alexander, the so-called great, unfurled the Gordian Knot in he apparently that means he could rule asia um we will investigate this further but in this place called gordian where the third largest mound on uh artificial burial mound in the world is present which was king midas's for king midas's father and one of the the ways in which why we think of king midas having the golden touch from from our uh i was going to say shakespeare but i'm I don't know if Midas is mentioned, Shakespeare may well be, certainly mentioned in James Bond, this idea of the Golden Touch, that emanates from this, the third largest artificial burial mound in the world, which was for his father, King Midas's father, and amazing artifacts were found in there. And in fact, this site, Gordian, has the largest concentration of burial mounds anywhere. And interestingly for me, was the fact that the earliest of them dates from around 800 BCE, so quite late. So even though we had the Hittite empire collapsed around 1200 BCE, the first Indo-European empire, they didn't use burial mounds. And these burial mounds... were used by the Phrygians, by King Midas was a Phrygian, which is an Indo-European community, we assume.
And they, so they burial mounds as a mode of burial and patriarchal mode of burial didn't come to Anatolia until around 800 BC. And that is millennia later than I thought. And that's really interesting. And it's really helped. It's because of the importance of mounds and note the MN sound in mound and mountain that we iterate and we're open to evidence. And that gives you a bit of an idea of how I'm keeping the explore-exploit ratio in sync in real time. So 10 reasons why finding Manuland matters. We're not going to get to all the 10 reasons today, but I'm going to look at the first couple and then I'll leave you to it. So the first reason why finding Manuland matters is because it's not generally known that all Indo-European languages can be traced to ancient Ukraine. I'll post in the posts that generally In my Finding Manuland podcast, I record the podcast and I put it up there. And then the software automatically creates the transcript. And then I post the transcript in the post. So if you receive this by email, you'll see, you'll just receive the talk, the podcast itself.
But if you go to the website page where the talk is, a day or two later, you'll see the entire transcript. And I also post in... various artifacts images and references which i've made in the podcast interspersed through the transcript which is automatically generated and i i correct it so it takes a few days so if in the past you haven't looked at the actual website of the podcast and you're wondering about this or that reference you'll see them there. And if there's a reference you don't see that you want to see or expect to see, contact me, write a comment, and hopefully I'll see the comment.
And if I do see the comment, I will find the reference and I'll post it there. in the image. So from the perspective of Indo-European languages, I didn't really know. I just had a vague recollection. I'd seen the language tree before I found Manilan, before I decided to go on this journey. I remember seeing a language tree, for instance, when I was posted as a diplomat in Kosovo and my boss had it on her wall and Albanian, which is the lingua franca in Kosovo, was seen as it's kind of out there. It's like Armenian or indeed Anatolian, it's definitely from the common source. It's definitely from southeastern Ukraine, as we now know, but it separated from at an earlier, at an early point. from them and is quite distinctive and evolved and developed on its own. However, it does have sufficient common characteristics in the roots of verbs, the grammar and the syntax to determine it is an Indo-European language. And I remember seeing the language tree, which is a very early metaphor to describe the way languages evolve, which emanated from biology at the time in the 19th century, in the late 17th century. And I did that post about William Jones, Sir William Jones, the Welsh Sanskrit ancient Iranian scholar who discovered the existence of Indo-European languages in, I think it was 1783 in Kolkata.
He announced this discovery. I recently read the definitive biography of William Jones, which was fascinating to someone like me. And again, it wasn't an accident that he was the person who discovered Indo-European languages. He was so bright as a child. Both his parents nurtured him and gave him access to the best education. changed their entire family structure to suit his education because he was so brilliant. He spoke so many languages, even as a teenager and at school. And then he, like many of us in life, took a bit of time to try and find a way of earning a living for from doing what he loved most.
And again, like me, for instance, he went to an Oxbridge. I went to Cambridge. He went to Oxford to study law and he became a judge. And then he went to India as a judge, as a Supreme Court judge in Kolkata, just at the beginning after a load of corruption had led to the English state government. taking over India from the East India Company. And it was while there as a judge, William Jones learned Sanskrit. And while he was learning Sanskrit, this ancient Indo-European language, And the reason he was learning Sanskrit was to translate the laws of Manu, the Manusmriti, which the laws of Manu are an ancient Indian law code.
Well, we now know that basically the laws of Manu were written down around 600 in the Common Era. So it uses Manu, the Manu who is mentioned in the 1100, years before the Common Era, Argy Veda uses Manu to try and communicate a sense of antiquity to it.
And William Jones's idea was, well, if England is going to administrate the law, for Indians, the English, but Jones was Welsh actually, the English should, Welsh is a Celtic language, like Irish, and the English should then learn what the Indian's law code is and how they administrate himself. So he thought, okay, I will learn Sanskrit and translate the Manushmriti and then my judgments in cases involving Indians will be better and closer to... the judgments that they would have had had the English not taken over. So again, we see this idea that MN is everywhere. I didn't know any of this at the beginning when I was in Maine village, but then I discovered, well, actually the laws of Manu this ancient Indian law code are what led directly to the discovery of the Indo-European languages and the English, the discovery of the English, sorry, of the Indo-European language family. So the serendipity, this idea that it isn't an accident or a coincidence, it's you put yourself in position where you iterate and where you can innovate and you're open to these weak hearing this weak signals and data and following them dismissing obviously moving on moving forward not getting stuck somewhere but when you see a weak signal that communicates something relevant to the journey you're on you have the openness and the capacity to follow it and to to look at it. And so William Jones' discovery of the existence of an Indo-European family then prompted the idea that this must come from a common source.
He himself wrote, he used common source and MN obviously in common as well. that perhaps this common source does not exist any longer. And that common source we now know was spoken by the Yamnaya in southeastern Ukraine. And from there, from there, it's spread out to Ireland and India.
And so the second reason why finding Manuland matters is because all Indo-European languages can be traced back to ancient Ukrainian. in a way that no other precursor language that influenced today's Indo-European languages can be. And not a lot of people know this. And I think it's very important. So Russia, for instance, is currently prosecuting a genocidal war.
It's killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians since the 24th of February 2022. And many people have fell for the troll, which was Russia does this because Ukraine historically belongs to Russia and Ukrainians don't matter. Now, obviously, in an ideal world, we would have the intellectual discipline to think this through for more than two seconds.
But it's repeated so frequently that many people fell for this troll. And the irony, of course, I then discover is that actually ancient Ukraine not only, uh, out of ancient Ukraine emanates the idea of Russia. So, um, the, the term, uh, the idea of a Russian empire was created in, in the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, um, 16, in the 1690s, this idea that you would have to, and then in, um, 1721, when Russia occupied left-bank Ukraine, which is the western part of Ukraine, Russia decided to call itself an empire. And because of this ideology of Russian empire had been created in Kyiv, they just borrowed that. So they stole that.
So that's the modern history of Russia. So the irony that Russia somehow created Ukraine, it's the exact opposite. But then when you delve back into history, it actually turns out that ancient Ukrainians, the ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya, were the first to create Indo-European language from which Russia...
Russian culture and all the other Indo-European language from Ireland to India emanates. And so if you are going to be a German or a French person or an English person and say, oh, well, we think Ukraine definitely, no, like Russia shouldn't be conquering it, but look, it's doing it. And anyway, Ukraine used to belong to Russia.
So, you know, it's not too bad. Well, actually, The irony of this is that, well, A, all our nation states are figments of our imagination which have become reified in international law. And some people have been really lucky, like the Irish people. And indeed, the Turkish people, some people have been very lucky and fought for generations and hundreds of years to have a state in which they can exist with that and just live their lives according to their own culture. And many other cultures have not been that lucky. But in the case of Ukrainians, they're one of the lucky cultures. They have a state.
They will always have a state. And thankfully, from a military point of view, they will be able to defend their state and get rid of the Russians. But all our modern nation states are contingent on lots of different factors. So they're all new. The first unified German state was in 1870.
So this idea that somehow Germany is older than Ukraine or more valid than Ukraine obviously doesn't matter when it comes to committing genocide. What matters is the international rules-based order as established. Ukraine signed the UN Charter in 1945 when it was formed, when the United Nations, so it has been a state always.
But the second reason why it's ironic is that actually when you delve into it for a bit more than five minutes, you discover that that people occupying the land, which is today Ukraine, ancient Ukrainians, who we can use the moniker ancient Ukrainians just as we use ancient Greeks or ancient British or English or Germans. It's a retrospective.
It's anachronistic story. But if we are going to afford parity of steam to all nation states, nations which now are states, between the Greeks and the Albanians and the Indians and Iranians, then we must do so for the Ukrainians. And so it's a conscious effort on my part, and this is part of the meaning of Finding Manuland, is to help us to change our culture and our perspective of Ukraine. because of the stakes, because if we are less susceptible to this contemporary Russian propaganda, Russian disinfolklore, as I call it in my other project, then we won't find ourselves being persuaded to somehow accept that Russia can erase whole cities and kill hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of a troll. And finding Manuland...
The stakes could not be higher today, but they're also connected to how I've discovered finding Manuland, because I was in Ukraine as a monitor for a peace monitoring mission for the Minsk, MN and Minsk as well, the Minsk peace agreements that... But that was my purpose there between 2015 and 2022. The reason I got interested in this mound in Dnepro in May 2021 was because the chief mound guardian, this community of an NGO, a non-government organisation, In Ukraine, in contemporary Ukraine, the chief mound guardian who is in charge of this organization was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the destruction of this mound, this burial mound, is a national security issue. And because of that, I was able, as a security monitoring diplomat, to persuade my boss... Actually, this is important.
We have groups of local residents who are protesting We have the chief man guardian saying this is a national security issue and saying this is cultural genocide, which is the destruction of ancient Ukraine's heritage, cultural heritage, and the around which contemporary Ukrainians find their identity.
And one of the first things the Russians did when they occupy spaces was empty out the museums in Ukraine. They, in this city called Melitopol, which I know well, which is still under occupation, and a city I visited a lot in southern Zaporizhia, the very first person the Russians forcibly disappeared was the Crimean, Muslim, Crimean, Tatar, female head of Melitopol History Museum. because they wanted to find the Scythian gold there. And when she wouldn't reveal where they had hidden the gold, they took her deputy as well. Russia occupied this other amazing place nearby southern Zaporizhia on the particular... orders of the Russian president Putin called Stone Grave, which is this site that I've also visited and talked about and will talk about again, where we have evidence of ritual use going back 10,000 years. We have early example of old European writing, which we can't decipher. No one is able to been to decipher. So these, well, actually, it's a bit more complicated.
And Marija Gimbutas, who was the first really to determine this is a language, an old European language, since her insight, I've now read research that people have begun to decipher old European writing. But anyway, we'll come back to that. So this idea of archaeology and state formation and And going back to ancient times is very important in finding Manuland.
And I'm going to finish right now because I'm not going to go on forever on this today. So we've got to two reasons why finding Manuland matters. I'm going to leave you with this, why it really matters to me and to us as a community of Indo-European language speakers. And if you can understand what I'm saying, than you are an Indo-European language speaker.
We're all part of the same community, which is that this is an essential message of unity. If we've got a moniker, Manuland, to describe all the peoples between Ireland and India, including the Pashtuns in Afghanistan and the Kurds, who are also an Indo-European language speaking people, Armenians and Irish people and Germanic language speaking peoples like the English or the Scandinavians and the Romance language from the Italic, from the Indian. And if we, and the Slavic peoples and all of these different communities of people were all bound together by the fact that we use the same metaphors in our language or deep in there, the MN sound being the most important I maintain, we are bound together and this we are unified we are one people and until I came along and until William Jones came along to identify the existence of the Indo-European language family we all thought we were completely different 100% different Irish and English and Indians and Armenians and Greeks and Romans.
We all thought we were different, but in fact, we're all from the same community. And what we have since the first Yamnaya invaders, the first Beaker people, for instance, arrived on the island of Britain, we just have these successive waves of migrations, uh, But fundamental to all of these waves and migrations is the same. We're all part of the same linguistic family. And if we can remember that in moments when there is tension between us, that what we're A doing is exchanging mana and energy, And that is what makes us literally human. It's why we're called human.
It's why the MN sound is in the word human. But we are all from one community. And if we can find what binds us and ties us together in Manuland, as citizens of Manuland, then we can find a way together. to peacefully coexist more easily than if we think the differences is what divines us.
And I'm going to leave that there for today.
Share this post