Here are the first words in any Indo-European language, for which we have written evidence.
These are all the names of individuals who lived between 1,900 BCE and 1,800 BCE in Anatolia.
These personal names were found inside documents which were mainly written in the Assyrian language. Assyrian, which is a member of the Semitic language family, was spoken by a group of merchants and their families who lived at Kaneš / Kanesh / Kültepe in the modern state of Türkiye.
We know a lot about the Assyrian language and culture from heaps of cuneiform script tablets found in modern Iraq and Syria, including from Babylon. We also have 8,000 documents found at Hatussa which became capital of the Indo-European Hittite Empire a few centuries after these personal names were recorded.
By comparing known Indo-European Hittite names from Hattusa with the set of non-Assyrian personal names found at Kaneš (see satellite photos below - the mound (left) and the merchants’ town where the tablets were found), scholars have been able to discern which are the Indo-European names from 1,900 - 1,800 BCE.


From an M-N- perspective, as you can imagine, I was happy (but not massively surprised) to see written evidence that the M-N- sound was immanent in five of the names found at Kaneš. If, as my hypothesis holds, the M-N- sound is the most characteristic sound in Indo-European culture, it is only to be expected that we might find it present among the earliest attested words in an Indo-European language:
Amuna, Išpunuman, Ilaliuman, Tamnašu, and Šupiuman.
By the time the Rg Veda songs are written down in India around 1,100 BCE we see that Manu is designated as the first human to sacrifice and therefore earn merit from Sky Father for the benefit of the community. And Yama (whose designation is a shortening of Aryaman in Iran) is the first monarch to sacrifice himself, thereby leading all humans on the path to an afterlife which it is inevitable that we must trod along. So this is early evidence of the importance of the M-N- sound in the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages (though it’s worth noting en passant although the songs of the Rg Veda (which is generally considered to be humanity’s oldest book) are likely to have been written down first around 1,100 BCE, we do not have direct evidence of it. The oldest extant text of the Rg Veda is much much later. By contrast, at Kaneš we found direct evidence in the form of documents actually written down 1,900 BCE / 1,800 BCE).
Then of course, as we have seen in previous episodes, M-N- is inside Erimon (first high monarch of Ireland) and in Manannán (Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity) in Celtic culture, which follows from the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages. Our earliest written evidence for both these names stems from 700 - 800 CE.
M-N- is obviously also in Menua, one of Armenia’s main founding monarchs. Armenian is also a separate main language in the Indo-European family.
M-N- is obviously also in Mannus, mythical ancestor of the Germans (and the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages, which includes English and Scandinavian offshoots), according to Tacitus (born 56 CE).
In Ancient Rome, Numitor is mythological Romulus and Remus’s mythological grandfather, while Numa is Romulus’s successor and founder of Ancient Rome’s first institutions (much like Manu in India). Note the reversal of the M-N- sound in Numitor and Numa’s names (note it too in ‘name’ itself). We will come back to this and to Numenism, Ancient Rome’s first religion, as it is key to understanding the Power of Mana.
In Hellenic ancient Greece, Menelaus, monarch of Sparta (Lacedaemon) is the younger brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Agamemnon commanded the Mycenae forces in the Trojan War at Troy in Anatolia. When Agamemnon returned to European Greece, he was murdered by Clytemnestra. The Mycenaeans governed during the last phase of the Helladic / Mycenae age that corresponds to 1,600 – 1,100 BCE. The Mycenaeans / Achaens / Danaans were the first Greeks per se, which is to say they were Indo-Europeans, whose genetic ancestors we now know from archaeogenetic research came from Ancient Ukraine.
“European” Greece is distinct from Ionian or Asian Greece / Anatolia, where Troy was. Homer whose ~700 BCE record of the Trojan War (which may have happened around 1,300 BCE) was, almost definitely, from Smyrna (modern Izmir), which is on the Anatolian coast. Interestingly, Greeks are mentioned in Assyrian texts as Yamnāiu/Yaunāiu (i.e. *ἸάFονες = Ionians). It wasn’t until the late 19th century that the first Indo-Europeans would be called the Yamnaya Culture, after the pit grave mode of burial they first practised in south-eastern Ukraine.
So Anatolia will continue to feature prominently in our travels in Finding Manuland not least because, as we are discussing, Hittite / Nešmnili is the earliest attested Indo-European language.
Also, cast a cursory glance at a map of today’s Türkiye and you will see M-N- named places everywhere. Türkiye’s territory is contiguous with Anatolia. Türkiye also grounds its origins and justification as a modern nation state on the existence of the Hittite Empire which had collapsed by around 1,100 BCE.
All this is to say we have attested evidence of the M-N- sound in names from the earliest times in each of the main Indo-European branches.
The Kaneš Anatolians’ (who lived alongside Assyrian merchants in houses that I recently visited) descendants would eventually found the Hittite empire. There’s scanty archaeogenetic data to explain how Indo-European Hittites and indeed other Indo-European Anatolians came to speak a language from a family that was first spoken in Ancient Ukraine. So until I find some archeogenetic or isotopic evidence of Anatolians’ biological / genetic link to Ancient Ukrainians, I will use the term “cultural” as distinct from “genetic” ancestor / descendant.
By “cultural” in this sense I mean to communicate that since the Anatolian named Amuna, Išpunuman, Ilaliuman, Tamnašu, and Šupiuman in Kaneš spoke a language derived from the first Indo-European language Ancient Ukrainian, they are their cultural descendants, notwithstanding the paucity (so far) of archaeogenetic research that ties together the two communities.
Those Ancient Ukrainians whose cultural descendants would be speaking languages from the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages (including Hittite) had left Ancient Ukraine around 4,200 BCE.
Given the prominence of the M-N- sound in the other Indo-European branches (which are generally thought to have begun individuating into what would become the non-Anatolian Indo-European languages that we know today at the latest by 2,500 BCE) and its prominence in Anatolia (as evidenced even in today’s place names and in the Kaneš documents)…
Then, it’s clear to me that the M-N- sound existed in and partly left Ancient Ukraine around 4,200 BCE with the ancestors of those whose culture would create the Anatolian languages. And that between 4,200 BCE and 2,500 BCE the M-N- sound remained an important designation with associated meanings (our fundamental Cryptotypic access point).
It’s possible too that between when the cultural ancestors of the first Anatolian language speakers left Ancient Ukraine and 2,500 BCE M-N- came to signify key aspects of the Indo-European innovation in patriarchal monarchy. So that this could be why we have M-N- monikered mythological founders in many of the Indo-European language branches’ cultures, and as yet I have not found any M-N- sounds in the Hittite / Nešimnili monarchs’ or mythological founders’ monikers.
So much so that today I can say with justification that despite the passage of 6,224 years since the future Anatolians left Ancient Ukraine with their language, the M-N- sound, meanings and Cryptotypic portal remains present and immanent in practically every sentence we speak in every nascent and realised Indo-European language spoken by, today, over half of humanity (no wonder then too that even our species has M-N- inside its moniker (human) and other animate sentient beings - animals - have the reversed M-N- sound inside their monikers “animate” and animal”).
One final note on the recurrence of the Al- sound in these first Indo-European names in Kaneš (and indeed in the name the Greeks give themselves the Hellenes).
I have written before about how the *Hal sound has been attributed by linguists to the proto-Nostratic layer of language that underlies all or most of the language families known to us today. Scholars have managed to discern a small set of sounds and associated meanings that are immanent in most of today’s languages.
These are believed to be remainders or remnants of languages or the languages spoken by humans before they broke up into the pre-proto- Semitic, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and other language families that we know today. This sound is preserved in the word Hell which comes from “Hel” in Germanic cultures, Allah, light / lux, enlightenment and even in the wonderful “Illuminate,” which preserves the fundamental meaning of what I term the moon-based metaphor that underpins the M-N- designation of the fundamental Indo-European cryptotype that Power of Mana and Finding Manuland is all about.
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