Category Archives: History/Deep History

…understanding our past(11):

And the general word for a ‘divinity’, ntr (‘*natur’ pl. ‘*naturu’) did make its way into Italic, where it was adopted as an unusual part of the nāscor, nāscī (‘to be born’) paradigm, with meanings centered around ‘what is natural’, ‘character’ and ‘essence’ – which eventually became our ‘nature’. 

And, separately, it  seems to have influenced all the Germanic words for water spirits: Old Norse nykr, Far. nykur, Old English nicor

…understanding our past(10):

…and ‘dond(r)’ (dnd) means ‘to rage’ 1) and that’s the origin of *tandra – the Proto-Germanic for ’ember’ – and probably also it is at the origin of ‘Donder/Thunder’…

1)A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.275

…understanding our past(9):

…and ‘mantle’ (‘Mnt3‘) 1) is probably originally the word for the protective hedge – circular and as large as the one on probably many a wood-henge or barrow – around the tomb of Osiris…

…and the tree over the grave of Osiris, the iw-tree,2) seems to have been the original yew-tree…

…and notice how in both cases the Old English is a close match: probably Anglian, from East Denmark, but including highly respected refugees from the sacred islands where elements and practices of the Megalithic culture had been preserved … (the incoming Danes had recently taken those islands – and would soon take East Denmark)…

  1. Lebenbaumsymbolik im alten Ägypten, Edmund Hermsen, pp. 144-5

2) ibid. pp. 146-7

…understanding our past(8):

And when we know that early ‘3‘ can be read as ‘l‘, then it turns out that ‘Lust‘ (‘3s.t‘) 1) is just one of the many names of Isis. 

Licht‘ (‘3h.t‘) 2) (the ‘horizon’ – the light just beginning) becomes the Germanic word for ‘light’.

‘Jubilation’ is the word for dance, ‘jb3‘ 3) picked up by Italo-Celtic, probably the ritual language of the Bell Beakers as they spread out along the coastline to become the new Megalithic elite.

Heli‘ (‘h3j‘),4) ‘to descend’,  becomes the Norse goddess of the Underworld 🙂 and much more besides…

Fly‘ (‘f3j‘) and ‘ply‘ (‘p3j‘) 5) became Germanic ‘fly.’

Dubble‘ (‘db3‘) becomes ‘double’, ‘b3b3‘ becomes ‘bubble’, ‘md3t‘ becomes ‘model’ … 6)

And ‘bull‘ (‘b3‘) 7) of course, is a word for ‘bull’ or ‘ram’ or other large piece of related livestock in so many East Caucasian and Afro-Asiatic languages – so it probably goes back to the origins of herding, in or around the Middle East towards the end of the Ice Age…

1)Grundriss des Laufes der Sterne,  tr. Alexandra von Lieven, p.354

2)Grundriss des Laufes der Sterne,  tr. Alexandra von Lieven, p.354

3)A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.219

4)A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.247

5)A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.232, 234

6)A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.230, 239, 275

7)A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.230

…understanding our past(7):

‘Till’, ’tillage’, ’tilth’ are much misunderstood. Simply, the Old English meaning, “to cultivate, tend, work at, get by labor” and the Old Frisian, “to breed, till” are probably the original meaning, and the word derives from the Pyramid-Text-Era Egyptian word that we usually translate as “land”.

  Bear in mind that the fertile Nile pretty much defined the borders of ‘Egypt’: in other words, ’tillage’ was pretty much all there was – which is why it is so important on the walls inside the pyramids!!!  And then, if we understand it in that way, the Old Norse ‘aldr-tili‘ pretty much reads as ‘the land of old-ness’ which is an entirely apt expression for ‘the end of life, death’.  

All the ‘goal’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘station’ meanings are figurative uses of the idea of ‘land’.  And the ‘to’ meaning is probably a homonym, of which there are many in Proto-Germanic – – – and, one may guess, already in the languages of the Megalith Culture – – – with all the mystical implications that we find in the kotodama homonyms of Old Japanese…

…understanding our past(6):

And it’s wonderful how so many of these words add up to the heart of how we talk and think of the Irish and English countryside: a word such as “Wild” for instance (Dutch,  Saxon and Old English ‘wild‘, Old Frisian ‘wilde‘, Old High German ‘wildi‘…) 1) 

which has no accepted etymology before Proto-Germanic, but does have a couple of Insular Celtic cognates, is probably from the Pyramid-Text-era Egyptian ‘w3d‘ (‘fresh, green, raw’) 2)…

…and then there are words such as “tilth” and “tillage” and “till” and “thatch”…

1) Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic by Guus Kroonen, p.579

2) A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by James P. Allen, vol.1, p.226

…understanding our past(5):

In fact, if one reads the hieroglyphs, which only notate the consonants, one’s mouth inevitably travels through vowel sounds to get from one consonant to the next, and those vowel sounds actually do usually match those of the Coptic, Arabic and Hebrew cognates that we have… and they turn out to be surprisingly suggestive in English – which is descended from the language of the Angles, who lived precisely in the commonly accepted location of Proto-Germanic….

So ‘m-d3‘ actually does suggest the pronunciation ‘middle’… ‘k3‘ the pronunciation ‘Karl’, ‘b3‘ a rather lazily pronounced ‘Ba-al’, and ‘3kh‘ the pronunciation ‘Lugh’ – which is precisely the name of the Celtic god…

And ‘dp‘ – that’s actually an un-aspirated ‘t’ –  pronounced ‘top’ means ‘on top of’.  

Kh’t‘ comes out as  ‘khut‘ and it’s the Pyramid Text era word for ‘knife’…

And if Sir Toby’s “Tilly-valley, lady” in Twelfth Night is actually code for “Tilly-marry”, (‘t3-mry‘, a word for ‘Egypt’ itself) then knowledge of these Megalith-era words had actually survived in esoteric and Irish culture, shortly to be destroyed by Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan troops. 

And all of these words lack a reasonable Indo-European etymology: 

…understanding our past(4):

Many of these new insights owe much to the work of Dr. James P. Allen, long time curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and since 2007, Professor of Egyptology at Brown University.  Amongst his many books, by publishing a grammar (with lexicon) of Pyramid-text era Egyptian 1), Dr. Allen has made it possible to compare the Egyptian of the time of Stonehenge with the sub-stratum of Pre-Proto-Germanic – most likely the language of the Funnel Beaker Culture: which ancient DNA now tells us is of a piece with the Megalithic cultures of the Atlantic littoral, the British Isles, and Central Europe. And all of these are linked by archeology to the Megalithic cultures we can still make out in the Canary’s (the ‘Isles of Good Fortune’)…

…and at the Eastern end of the Green Sahara in particular in the Ethiopian highlands: and all of these actually predating the Egyptian pyramids.

Importantly, too, by revisiting the phonology of Ancient Egyptian 2), Dr. Allen has established a sound-list (a phoneme list) for Pyramid-text era Egyptian that, surprisingly, is exactly the same as one important possible sound-list for Proto-Germanic – where phonemic palatalization and aspiration – and an absence of voicing – allow for the operation of Grimm’s Law in one, not two, steps…if one assumes contact with a language where palatalization and voicing – but not aspiration – were phonemic.

Phonology evolves mostly through imitation of people who are admired (and it outlasts individual languages, and language replacement) – so the sound of the priest/shamanesses of the Megaliths would have been hugely important to the sound of the wider Megalithic Culture. And if the sounds of Proto-Germanic, which would have been the sounds of the sub-strate – which is very likely the Megalithic Funnel Beaker Culture – are the same as those of ancient Egyptian, then we have to suspect ancient Egyptian as a ritual language of the Green Sahara, and contact along the Atlantic littoral.

And we may, actually, hear some of that sound in Irish today…

…Also, for the very oldest written Egyptian, Dr. Allen reconstructs the problematic ‘vulture’ sound (pictured above with its standard transliteration) as an ‘l’ or ‘r’ – possibly palatized. Only later did it evolve into the ‘a’ with which we are familiar: the celebrated Pyramid Text trio of ‘ka‘, ‘ba‘, ‘akh‘…  3) Fascinatingly, reading ‘3‘ as ‘l’ throws up numerous possible cognates.  The above-listed ‘ka‘, ‘ba‘ and ‘akh‘ in the Pyramid Texts become (if we keep the ‘a’ vowel) ‘karl‘, ‘baal‘ and ‘lakh‘ – which have cultural continuity with, and could actually be cognate with the following reflexes: ‘Karl/churl/[OIr]céle‘ ‘Bel (light)/Ba’al (master)’ and the God of Wisdom: ‘Lugh’.

Better yet, ‘m-d3‘ (the land of here/now) becomes ‘middle’ – and we perceive an old Egyptian version of Mi∂gard !

  1. A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, vol.1: Unis
  2. Ancient Egyptian Phonology
  3. the operation of the Pyramid Texts, in ritual practice, is to help the ‘ba’ of the deceased find her/his ‘ka‘ and thus become an ‘akh‘ and head sky-wards…

…understanding our past(3):

Now, the map of passage graves in Brittany is highly suggestive of maritime incursion – and these passage graves start to appear 1) in the very same centuries as the green Sahara starts to dry up 2).   Now, the aDNA 3) tells us that people of the European Megalithic Culture migrated first to Central Europe (the Michelsberg Culture), and thence to Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia 4) (the Funnel Beaker Culture) where their language is the most likely candidate for the Proto-Germanic substrate (or Pre-Proto-Germanic substrate). Now, the Megalithic Culture becomes visible a few centuries later amongst that same mix of farmers and Western Hunter-Gatherers that arose when the Mediterranean and Central European streams of colonizing farmers met up again, West of the Alps – and, indeed, the non-Indo-European half of a Proto-Germanic Swadesh List throws up the very pattern of Basque-E.Caucasian cognates that some academics 5) would expect of the Cardial Ware Culture spreading West along the coasts of the Mediterranean. But that same half of that same Swadesh List also turns out to include Afro-Asiatic cognates from four sub-families: Cushitic, Chadic, Semitic and Egyptian… which could reflect a long and complicated history of shamanic, priestly contacts up and down the Atlantic coastline during – and before – the Megalithic era… And, indeed, the Egyptian cognates in particular seem to chart to a semantic field that reflects the ritual language of a Sun, Moon and Nature Religion…  Even ‘night’ and ‘light’ could be from the name of the Egyptian night goddess, Nut, and from the Pyramid-Text-era word for ‘horizon’, ‘lucht’… fashioned into a pretty sounding doublet, so typical of East Caucasian languages – and of English schoolyard rhymes still, millennia later!!!

1) ‘Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe’ – by B. Schulz Paulsson

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

3) ‘When the Waves of European Neolithization Met: First Paleogenetic Evidence from Early Farmers in the Southern Paris Basin’ and ‘Ancient genome-wide DNA from France highlights the complexity of interactions between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers’ – by Maïté Rivollat 

4) ‘Multi-scale ancient DNA analyses confirm the western origin of Michelsberg farmers and document probable practices of human sacrifice’ – by Alice Beau  and Maïte ́ Rivollat 

5) in particular John D. Bengtson

…understanding our past(2):

Once you understand the magical, or alchemic thinking that was the way our ancestors thought, then you also need to flip your understanding of the most recent ten thousand years or so to place the sea-ways and the ocean-ways at the center.  People who travelled, people who represented contact with the exotic, people who presented themselves as shamans – if only because this was the best protection anyone could devise – would be highly respected, as much an ‘elite’ as existed, and quite multilingual. And their world was dotted with sacred islands, where there was special knowledge, and special objects… and special experiences. Even without language replacement, they would be the people whose syntactical quirks, and whose pronunciation would be copied – not always perfectly – by those they visited regularly.

And so we could see the exceedingly strange predilection for initial consonant mutation  travelling along the Atlantic coast, and becoming a defining feature of Insular Celtic – and if this feature were spread by mature travelling shaman-priestesses (in a matriarchal culture) it would leave no aDNA trace…

And think one’s self back to the ending of the Ice Age… when glaciers are retreating at one end of that coastline, and the Sahara Desert is gradually becoming green and verdant at the other end. So that any established Nature-religion along this coast has a responsibility to be there to welcome – and celebrate – this continuously appearing new land… and in Spring-time especially…