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Jim_Duyer
16th November 2023, 20:24
I thought I should post this, since I have permission from the Author, a friend of mine who passed away last year. Leonard was from Oklahoma and he worked as a radioman in the U.S. Navy, so when I first contacted him in 2011 we hit it off right away. He went on several archaeological digs and had a Bachelors degree in archaeology, as well as a firm grip on the ancient India writings, and his main interests were in researching and writing about Atlantis, as well as ancient languages.

Leonard and I shared an interest in Canaanite symbols and when I recently discovered that the group of markings that were uncovered at Wadi el Hol are not, as our traditional scholars tell us, in the proto-Canannite alphabet, it brought up a memory of our many shared emails.

Leonard was self-taught in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, as well as in the Canaanite and Phoenician inscriptions. Some of his publications include:

“Flying Saucers, Ancient Writings and the Bible,” Exposition Press, New York, 1969.
“The Vestiges of Atlantis,” Special Paper No. 2, Cowan Printing, Bethany, 1979.
“Quest for Atlantis,” Manor Books, New York, 1979.
“Quest for Atlantis II,” Books by Lulu.com, World-Wide-Web, 2005.

In speaking with him about his translation he commented: "You might be interested to know that, as far as I have been able to determine, my Interlinear Translation is the ONLY one which has ever been published. Until I published my version, only 'smoothed out' English translations appeared in published material. I felt like I needed to show this on my site to illustrate that I didn't merely take another person's English translation and, modifying it slightly, pass it off as my own. "

And here is his Revised Translation of the Tulli Transcription for your enjoyment:

Fire Circles
A Revised Translation of the Tulli Transcription
By R. Cedric Leonard

I came across a transcription of the famous Tulli Papyrus—the Egyptian text recording an event which allegedly occurred during the reign of Thutmose III of the 18th dynasty (circa. 1480 B.C.).

The following is my revised (2007) translation of the Tulli Transcription. It differs only slightly from Rachewiltz’s translation.

In the year 22, of the third month of winter, sixth hour of the day […] among the scribes of the House of Life it was found that a strange Fiery Disk was coming in the sky. It had no head. The breath of its mouth emitted a foul odor. Its body was one rod in length and one rod in width. It had no voice. It came toward His Majesty’s house. Their heart became confused through it, and they fell upon their bellies. They [went] to the king, to report it. His Majesty [ordered that] the scrolls [located] in the House of Life be consulted. His Majesty meditated on all these events which were now going on.

After several days had passed, they became more numerous in the sky than ever. They shined in the sky more than the brightness of the sun, and extended to the limits of the four supports of heaven […] Powerful was the position of the Fiery Disks.

The army of the King looked on, with His Majesty in their midst. It was after the evening meal when the Disks ascended even higher in the sky to the south. Fish and a variety of birds rained down from the sky: a marvel never before known since the foundation of the country. And His Majesty caused incense to be brought to appease the heart of Amun-Re, the god of the Two Lands. And it was [ordered] that the event [be recorded for] His Majesty in the annals of the House of Life [to be remembered] forever.”

He provided me with his interlinear, symbol for symbol translation into English, which rendered the above text, but the images are so large that it makes it difficult to post here. I would be happy to share them with any who are interested.

I'm glad he undertook this - I have no skills in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he always does an excellent job.

So, Saucers in Egypt - and seen by the same Pharaoh that ruled when the Exodus was said to have occurred. Were they the ones that helped to convince him to allow the peaceful movement of those former residents?

lucine
16th November 2023, 23:08
Could you perhaps share the images to imgur.com and then link those here? Not sure if it's allowed here but it's a neat option.

Jim_Duyer
17th November 2023, 00:06
Here are those images - for some reason I can not seem to find a way to upload them into the image vault here?

http://paleoaliens.com/AAAA_001.jpg

http://paleoaliens.com/AAAA_002.jpg

http://paleoaliens.com/AAAA_003.jpg

Johnnycomelately
17th November 2023, 07:50
Hi Jim. I like your expertise, describing stuff I don’t know. I have hated learning of brutalities from history, but your stuff is different. I am happy to learn that various ancient folk were smarter than me, at least from this life’s vantage point.

One thing about the above pic (#1/3 of your symbol translations), is the almost entirety of absent intuity. The only one that makes sense is the combination of the fish and the dead symbols, for smelly lol.

I wonder how those equations were made, like what intermediate proving steps were made.

Cheers, Sir. 😊👻✍🏼

Jim_Duyer
17th November 2023, 14:19
I would like to mention a few things connected to this. Leonard was a very humble man, and his many accomplishments are also being downplayed on the net. He was one of the earliest divers on the underwater walls in Bimini in the 1970s, and he translated the Vimmas as well.
Here's one conversation where I provided him with the answer to a curious question that he posed to me. He asked "Could the Maya have originated in the middle Pacific?" And here is my answer:


There was a serious campaign of disinformation by Jesuits and others in the 16th and 17th centuries. One of
the 'mis-translation errors' made was by Father Diego de Landa in his works about the Maya.

He intentionally mistranslated their sayings and wrote that the Maya stated their ancestors came from the "East" and that perhaps they were the "Lost tribes of Israel". This was repeated since those days in the 1500s and today it is found in every report we can find - the Mayans said they came from the West. Nothing can be further from the truth.

I happened upon the original in Mayan and the original transcript in old Spanish, both of which I am able to translate, and it clearly states "West". When the Jesuits translated this to Spanish they told the people in Europe that, when asked, the Mayans said they came from the East (Occidental). But what they said was, they came from the area towards China. Meaning that they were aware of lands to the far west of their location in Mexico and Central America. The Jesuits coyly translated this to "Occidental" or the Orient, and made their statements.

Therefore the origin of the Olmecs, predecessors of the Maya, and therefore the
Maya origins itself, lie in the Pacific Islands of Polynesia. And thus the Black Stone statues
that resemble Africans so much that some believe in an African origin, are actually closely
related to the races of Eastern Polynesia and not to the African continent..
He thanks me and then offered me this, when I asked about connections with Egypt and Atlantis:


Let's look at a possible etymological origin of the word "Atlantis". Egyptian, in its early stages, had no letter 'L'. So originally the word 'ATR' (or "ATL" as it later became), had several meanings in relation to water: "ATRU" is the water, the flood water, the water boundary, a limit, measure, or water embankment. But once 'R' became 'L', 'ATR' would change to 'ATL'. (Ward, 1960)

Add this to the root word 'ANTU' or 'ANTI', which equals a division of land. Thus, Atlantis is a compound of 'ATL' and 'ANTI', with a Greek 'S' ending added, meaning 'a division of land bounded by water'. We know that Plato described Atlantis in his Timaeus as a land in the midst of the ocean. Thus, the word Atl-anti(s) may have an Egyptian connection after all.

I urge any who are interested to use the WAYBACK machine, choose a date in 2015 or so, and visit his original
website. The search term for Wayback is http://www.atlantisquest.com

I did so yesterday and was reminded of the very early work he did. His comments about a large corporation in America (Raytheon?) who took over the dive site by purchasing the land, and then claimed it was simply crab farms will perhaps astound you. The walls underwater are three feet thick, they go nine feet under the sand, and they resemble the designs in ancient Egypt.

Jim_Duyer
17th November 2023, 14:33
Hi Jim. I like your expertise, describing stuff I don’t know. I have hated learning of brutalities from history, but your stuff is different. I am happy to learn that various ancient folk were smarter than me, at least from this life’s vantage point.

One thing about the above pic (#1/3 of your symbol translations), is the almost entirety of absent intuity. The only one that makes sense is the combination of the fish and the dead symbols, for smelly lol.

I wonder how those equations were made, like what intermediate proving steps were made.

Cheers, Sir. 😊👻✍🏼

Wow, thanks for those kind comments.
Just this week I discovered that the symbols which we are being told are proto-Canaanite are in fact much, much earlier proto-Sumerian. In fact, the scholars tell us that the Sumerians were in Egypt, and that quite a bit of trade went on between the two peoples, as early as 3600 BC. And the evidence for this is in silver content that could only have come from the areas that Sumeria controlled. Along with thousands of artifacts and tablets as well - all in proto-Sumerian.
Proto-Sumerian ceased to be used in 3100 BC. So when I found those inscriptions I could easily date them.
Now that's a long preamble, so let me get to the meat and potatoes.
It means that it is very possible that the Egyptians learned to write by copying the Sumerians.
They then decided to leave the syllabic (vowels and consonants combined) style of the Sumerians and come up with something on their own. BUT and this is a big but, they did not wish to waver too much from what they were shown. And so their symbol for an ox or bull is identical to the Sumerian, but their assignment of characters to that symbol is not. Indicating that they adopted the shapes but not the meanings. Which is perfectly fine. What's not so fine is that our scholars don't wish to admit this.

In fact, I am so personally disgusted at this deceit that I am preparing a paper for publication on acedemia.edu, to at least give another viewpoint - perhaps some young student will see it and understand that much of what he is being taught is politically or religiously influenced and false.
Maybe, just maybe, things might change in a million years.

I would have simply let it slide and moved on - but the authors of the Canaanite idea are from Yale and Harvard. They should know better (they do know better).

BTW Leonard was one person I knew that I could happily say was smarter than myself. I learned from him as much as I shared.

¤=[Post Update]=¤


Hi Jim. I like your expertise, describing stuff I don’t know. I have hated learning of brutalities from history, but your stuff is different. I am happy to learn that various ancient folk were smarter than me, at least from this life’s vantage point.

One thing about the above pic (#1/3 of your symbol translations), is the almost entirety of absent intuity. The only one that makes sense is the combination of the fish and the dead symbols, for smelly lol.

I wonder how those equations were made, like what intermediate proving steps were made.

Cheers, Sir. 😊👻✍🏼

Thank You! Please see my last post - it explains just what you noticed (good catch by the way) - that there was some copying going on.

Jim_Duyer
17th November 2023, 15:25
Talk about insensitive, I completely forgot to mention that the reason that I am very happy to be a contributor here is that there are several (if not many) people on here that are highly intelligent and that I learn from. In fact, Bill Ryan's comments on Sitchin from earlier saved me quite a bit of time and allowed me not to follow down that rabbit hole, to mention just one. And others provide comments that make me think, which is something that I both need and enjoy.
Jim

Bill Ryan
18th November 2023, 11:51
Jim, this is off-topic on this thread, but I thought this might interest you. (We can easily move this to start a new thread if you'd like to discuss this in detail)


https://explorersweb.com/new-language-kalasma

A New Language Has Been Discovered

https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.explorersweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/17211851/site_0377_0014-1000-669-20140708152129-e1700256177712.jpg
The Aslanlı Kapı, Lion Gate, at Hattusha

Archaeologists discovered a new language this week. It was written on cuneiform clay tablets at a UNESCO site in Turkey that was once the capital of the Hittite Empire. This was one of Western Asia’s great powers during the Late Bronze Age.

Excavations have gone on at the site for a hundred years. Over the last four decades, researchers have unearthed 30,000 clay tablets. Most of them are in Hittite, the oldest known Indo-European language. A number of them show other languages, including Luwain, Palaic, and Hattic. As researchers poured over the tablets, they realized some displayed a totally new language.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.explorersweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/17211855/site_0377_0012-1000-669-20140708152029-e1700256170567.jpg
An aerial view of Hattusha, the Hittite capital

No one knows what the words on the tablets mean, but they are clearly not in a known vernacular. They may be part of a ritual. Researcher Daniel Schwemer admits that he is not overly surprised by the discovery. The Hittites had “a particular interest in recording rituals in foreign languages,” he commented in a press release (https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/).

The Hittite king’s scribes would have written the texts. The Hittites controlled vast regions, from Anatolia to the northern Levant to northern Syria.

Another researcher involved in the excavations believes that this culture’s interest in other rituals and religions served a purpose. As their empire expanded, it engulfed communities with different religions and unfamiliar gods. The tablets detail thousands of different deities. By embracing other religions, the empire may have gained the respect of its new subjects.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.explorersweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/17211903/site_0377_0001-750-750-20151105154545-e1700256198659.jpg

Master chroniclers

The Hittites were master record keepers. Other tablets contained treaties, decrees, prayers, myths, and incantation rituals, alongside records of their battles and laws. They were one of the most formidable military powers of the time, regularly clashing with the Egyptians for dominance. They eventually entered into the world’s first peace treaty.

The empire was born around the time of the invention of the alphabet. Their meticulous chronicling is a rich trove of information about life during this period.

Researchers have named the language Kalašma because it seems to have been used by the people from that place. An introduction, in Hittite, on one of the tablets roughly translates as, “From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalašma.”

Kalašma was an area on the northwestern edge of Hittite. Its people fought with the Hittites against the Egyptians. What is surprising is that the language shares the most similarities with Luwain dialects, although geographically Kalašma was far closer to Palaic.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.explorersweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/17211859/site_0377_0004-1000-1333-20151105154547-e1700256241620.jpg
Intricate carvings at the site

The team hopes to publish more findings next year as they frantically try to decipher the tablets.

Jim_Duyer
18th November 2023, 13:22
I love it Bill! And boy, whoever they chose to write that article, he's way off base.
First, - yes Hattusha is known to everyone that has read Gilgamesh, but they probably don't recognize it since they have never had that part explained.

When Gilgamesh goes on his journey to discover the secrets to eternal life, he passed through those gates of the Sphinx in Hattusha, and we know this because he describes it in such detail.
What he was searching for was not just eternal life - as a half-god himself (a mixed one as the tablets say, half human and half visitor) he was looking for the clone machine controlled by Enlil. That's how the bad guys kept the good guys (Enki) in control - they had the only access to rejuvenation.

And you have also heard of the Hittites, because the Bible says in Exodus - your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite - about Jerusalem.

Now, what I have not published yet, is that not only is Job, from the Book of Job, a Hittite, he speaks about his home in the bend of the Halys River, just south of Hattusha (or Hattusa, more properly).

I also find it odd, and beyond coincidence, that once I began publishing the fact that I have succeeded in translating the markings at Gobekli Tepe and nearby sites, they come up with a "new" language. But if anyone wishes to take a serious wager - I will bet that we don't get to see clear, up-close images of this "find" for years. It's probably a variant of the Gobekli writings - proto-Sumerian.

I noticed that one archaeologist (or at least they claim he is one) posited that the markings at Gobekli are in the Luwian language - and notice in the above article that they tried Luwian? The Luwian people did not arise as even a tribe before 1500 BC. That's from their own books. So did they time travel? How did they go back 8000 years and write the markings at Gobekli. They are being their ridiculous attention-seeking selves, as usual - if they don't know they won't say, they will just make something up.

Hatti, or Hattic, is another story entirely. That group pre-dates Gobekli Tepe, the Sumerians, the Hittites and everyone else except for the Russian plains groups. They arose in the southern Caucasus mountains, and, believe it or not, my research tells me that Abraham's group (on his mothers side) came from that same region. It was the first place in the world to domesticate and produce wine, so there's the Noah tie in as well. But, and yet there is a but, we have not yet been able to translate Hatti because there is not enough of it remaining. Or at least not enough that they could share it with the common folks. There are probably sufficient examplars extant in the back of some Museum, but they won't let us put our eyes on those - else they are just sad unemployed archaeologists.

I will wager, further, that I could decipher it in a week. Bold statement, perhaps, but that's the level of confidence you get when you have done it a few hundred times. It may be connected with the Old European language as well, and I have already done that.
Odd that they come up with a coherent sentence right off the bat, when they are still puzzling it over. I smell BS. My crap detector is very well refined and it is going off on this one.

I hope they do publish something soon.

UPDATE, yet again. So, I decided not to fight Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, and the Univ. of California, and publish what I found in Egypt. Not because I don't wish to take them on, but because I finished the last part of the second tablet. It speaks of Giants, twice. And Mixed people. And bark-like or scaly skin on "strange" beings that they call "near people".
From the border with Iraq and Elam, in 3400 BC. Giants in Egypt, half-breed sky gods, those I can use. It means that we can tie in the visitors to Egypt as well.

Thanks Bill - made my morning. I was going to work on my room addition today but it's raining here - so I got up at 5 AM for nothing, until I read your comment that is.

FURTHER: Well, they already have a wakipedia page up on it. Prof. Dr. Daniel Schwemer is lead on this and his research interests are Akkadian and Hittitology. Akkadian is Semitic and Hittite is supposedly Proto Indo-European. So, no Sumerian experts on it yet.
And I was in error - he was able to decipher that first line so quickly because it was the introduction written in Hittite and he's an expert in that.
It mentions: The text will be published once initial analysis is complete, expected in 2024. Good luck with 2024, since, in the next sentence they tell us that the location of Kalasma is uncertain. So no other examples to work with, and no Rosetta Stone. That's a tough one. It can be done, but they will really need to put on their thinking caps. I figured out the Old European alphabet on my own with not very many examples, but it took me four years. So, not so easy.
And, as usual, they will not publish a single image until they are done fiddling with it - reminds me of the Dead Sea Scrolls - how long have they been messing around with that before they published anything - 50 years or was it 51?

Jim_Duyer
18th November 2023, 14:03
Anyway, I figured out why the Yale group didn't wish to admit the Egyptian writings were Sumerian. Sky-gods, Giants, and half-aliens, in Egypt, at the time they claim the pyramids were built (but actually it was much earlier) - that can't be right! Ruins their story.

BTW Gilgamesh had a best friend. And he was said to be "wild" with an "unknown language". But he is also said to have had hair the color of Wheat - or Blonde, so he was probably from this same Caucasus region where blond and red hair first arose.

Unless forced to by some Professor in University, nobody wishes to voluntarily research Gilgamesh to uncover the details that I mentioned above, and I certainly don't blame them. So here it is:

"At night when he came to the mountain passes Gilgamesh prayed: ‘In these mountain passes long ago I saw lions, I was afraid and I lifted my eyes to the moon; I prayed and my prayers went up to the gods, so now, O moon god Sin, protect me."

We can tell that this is a later rewrite by the Babylonians (Amorites, like Abraham) who conquered Sumeria and inherited their epic tablets because Gilgamesh never prayed to Sin, the Moon God, and he needed no protection from lions - he killed the giant in the woods, why be afraid of lions?

"So at length Gilgamesh came to Mashu, the great mountains about which he had heard many things, which guard the rising and the setting sun. Its twin peaks are as high as the wall of heaven and its paps reach down to the underworld. At its gate the Scorpions stand guard, half man and half dragon; their glory is terrifying, their stare strikes death into men, their shimmering halo sweeps the mountains that guard the rising sun."

And if you look at pictures of Hattusa you will see these same Scorpion Gates, or you can google it directly. So yes, Gilgamesh was in Hattusa, although the scholars don't mention it.

"When Gilgamesh saw them he shielded his eyes for the length of a moment only; then he took courage and approached. When they saw him so undismayed the Man-Scorpion called to his mate, ‘This one who comes to us now is flesh of the gods.’ The mate of the Man-Scorpion answered, ‘Two-thirds is god but one-third is man.' "

Yes, the math is a bit tricky here - we seem to always be looking for half this and half that. Again, that is probably a Babylonian addition.

Later in the story he asks one of the sky gods for the plant that will give eternal life, but the story ends here on the original, Sumerian tablets - they were broken off so we don't know what happens next. It's so easy to break off tablets - but what a coincidence that it is always the good parts that end up broken off. Amazing. But the Babylonians, with their gifts as writers, made up a new ending - he gets the plants but a snake steals them and eats them. Well, this is one of their twists, since they were aligned with snake gods themselves they are attempting to put their own people as the recipients of this secret knowledge.

Only two problems with that idea. One, they were just writing - it isn't true nor reported anywhere else that it was, and two, Gilgamesh was searching about 400 miles north of where he should have been. The secrets of rejuvenation were in the caves south of there - and in one tablet they tell us where this is, within 500 meters. I haven't disclosed that location because we might want to go looking for alien tech or knowlege there one day. I will when I publish though.

I can tell you that the location is Kur, the famous mountain home of the sky gods, which one famous scholar has called the Garden of the Gods, but then again he was an atheist.

Even after this time, something should be left. And we need to get it before the governments do.

Jim_Duyer
18th November 2023, 19:53
Ooops. I forgot to clarify. When I said I could probably solve it in a week, that's for this location, this Hittite group only, not any language, anywhere. And I said that because there are less than a half dozen that it could be, based on the timeline and association.

Michel Leclerc
18th November 2023, 20:27
(...)

There was a serious campaign of disinformation by Jesuits and others in the 16th and 17th centuries. One of
the 'mis-translation errors' made was by Father Diego de Landa in his works about the Maya.

He intentionally mistranslated their sayings and wrote that the Maya stated their ancestors came from the "East" and that perhaps they were the "Lost tribes of Israel". This was repeated since those days in the 1500s and today it is found in every report we can find - the Mayans said they came from the West. Nothing can be further from the truth.

I happened upon the original in Mayan and the original transcript in old Spanish, both of which I am able to translate, and it clearly states "West". When the Jesuits translated this to Spanish they told the people in Europe that, when asked, the Mayans said they came from the East (Occidental). But what they said was, they came from the area towards China. Meaning that they were aware of lands to the far west of their location in Mexico and Central America. The Jesuits coyly translated this to "Occidental" or the Orient, and made their statements.

(...)



Jim, thank you for this. Unfortunately you somehow mixed up the Latin (Spanish) and Germanic (English), which are probably not part of your expertise. I highlighted (see above) the wrong combinations. You may want to correct them – it will clarify your intention, I guess.

Michel Leclerc
18th November 2023, 21:01
(...)

so let me get to the meat and potatoes.
It means that it is very possible that the Egyptians learned to write by copying the Sumerians.
They then decided to leave the syllabic (vowels and consonants combined) style of the Sumerians and come up with something on their own. BUT and this is a big but, they did not wish to waver too much from what they were shown. And so their symbol for an ox or bull is identical to the Sumerian, but their assignment of characters to that symbol is not. Indicating that they adopted the shapes but not the meanings.

(...)



Thank you Jim.

In the above I highlighted a passage in your post, which I do not understand. Allow me to explain my puzzlement.

Your passage “their symbol for an ox or bull” (you are referring to the Egyptian symbol) does refer, in my understanding, to a “meaning”. The meaning being “ox or bull”. The fact that you state this, means that the "symbol” can easily be read as meaning "ox or bull”. My – maybe quite uninformed – question aims at your source. A dictionary of Old Egyptian? (I myself use Gardiner‘s “Egyptian grammar”, which contains a sizeable dictionary and thesaurus on Middle Egyptian.) Or alternately, do you infer this meaning from the resemblance between the Egyptian (combination of) pictogram(s) and the cuneiform stylisation of the corresponding pictogram? (Supposedly the one leading to the head and pair of horns in alphabets of Western Semitic languages?)

But in that case, if the Egyptians somehow “copied” the pictographic/cuneiform writing for the meaning “ox or bull”, what does your phrase “assignment of characters” mean? Surely we are in a pictographic/ideographic phase of Egyptian writing (the “parallel alphabetic” use being of a later date (Middle Egyptian). So what do you mean by “characters”?

You add: “indicating that they adopted the shapes but not the meanings”. Do you mean that they chose to imitate the pictogram for a Sumerian word meaning x (e.g. wine jug, house-roof, lion etc.) in order to assign the meaning “ox or bull” to it? If that is the case, how do we know then that it is a real imitation, and not an originally Egyptian graphic expression?

As an aside another question. Let us assume that indeed, the Sumerians influenced the Egyptians considerably. But is it not being suggested by many more unorthodox readers of Egyptian texts that the most original form of Old Egyptian writing in the oldest monuments dates from pre-dynastic times, going back even to "Atlantean” times? How does that square with the idea that Egyptian writing stems from Sumerian writing?

Thank you in advance for your reply, specifically explaining where my interpretation of your statements errs.

Jim_Duyer
18th November 2023, 23:03
(...)

There was a serious campaign of disinformation by Jesuits and others in the 16th and 17th centuries. One of
the 'mis-translation errors' made was by Father Diego de Landa in his works about the Maya.

He intentionally mistranslated their sayings and wrote that the Maya stated their ancestors came from the "East" and that perhaps they were the "Lost tribes of Israel". This was repeated since those days in the 1500s and today it is found in every report we can find - the Mayans said they came from the West. Nothing can be further from the truth.

I happened upon the original in Mayan and the original transcript in old Spanish, both of which I am able to translate, and it clearly states "West". When the Jesuits translated this to Spanish they told the people in Europe that, when asked, the Mayans said they came from the East (Occidental). But what they said was, they came from the area towards China. Meaning that they were aware of lands to the far west of their location in Mexico and Central America. The Jesuits coyly translated this to "Occidental" or the Orient, and made their statements.

(...)



Jim, thank you for this. Unfortunately you somehow mixed up the Latin (Spanish) and Germanic (English), which are probably not part of your expertise. I highlighted (see above) the wrong combinations. You may want to correct them – it will clarify your intention, I guess.

Thanks. I believe it's called the three things at once syndrome. The Mayans said they came from the west, the direction of the setting sun. The Jesuits spoke Spanish to them, and changed west to Oriental in their reports - the place where the sun rises to those in Europe. The Maya don't use Oriental or Occidental, or east-west for that matter.
But I should be more precise, so thank you.

Jim_Duyer
18th November 2023, 23:27
(...)

so let me get to the meat and potatoes.
It means that it is very possible that the Egyptians learned to write by copying the Sumerians.
They then decided to leave the syllabic (vowels and consonants combined) style of the Sumerians and come up with something on their own. BUT and this is a big but, they did not wish to waver too much from what they were shown. And so their symbol for an ox or bull is identical to the Sumerian, but their assignment of characters to that symbol is not. Indicating that they adopted the shapes but not the meanings.

(...)



Thank you Jim.

In the above I highlighted a passage in your post, which I do not understand. Allow me to explain my puzzlement.

Your passage “their symbol for an ox or bull” (you are referring to the Egyptian symbol) does refer, in my understanding, to a “meaning”. The meaning being “ox or bull”. The fact that you state this, means that the "symbol” can easily be read as meaning "ox or bull”. My – maybe quite uninformed – question aims at your source. A dictionary of Old Egyptian? (I myself use Gardiner‘s “Egyptian grammar”, which contains a sizeable dictionary and thesaurus on Middle Egyptian.) Or alternately, do you infer this meaning from the resemblance between the Egyptian (combination of) pictogram(s) and the cuneiform stylisation of the corresponding pictogram? (Supposedly the one leading to the head and pair of horns in alphabets of Western Semitic languages?)

But in that case, if the Egyptians somehow “copied” the pictographic/cuneiform writing for the meaning “ox or bull”, what does your phrase “assignment of characters” mean? Surely we are in a pictographic/ideographic phase of Egyptian writing (the “parallel alphabetic” use being of a later date (Middle Egyptian). So what do you mean by “characters”?

You add: “indicating that they adopted the shapes but not the meanings”. Do you mean that they chose to imitate the pictogram for a Sumerian word meaning x (e.g. wine jug, house-roof, lion etc.) in order to assign the meaning “ox or bull” to it? If that is the case, how do we know then that it is a real imitation, and not an originally Egyptian graphic expression?

As an aside another question. Let us assume that indeed, the Sumerians influenced the Egyptians considerably. But is it not being suggested by many more unorthodox readers of Egyptian texts that the most original form of Old Egyptian writing in the oldest monuments dates from pre-dynastic times, going back even to "Atlantean” times? How does that square with the idea that Egyptian writing stems from Sumerian writing?

Thank you in advance for your reply, specifically explaining where my interpretation of your statements errs.

OX - BULL. I was reading from the report by the scholars from Yale, who claimed that an OX head indicates a bull or oxen in Egyptian. I have no skills in Egyptian. I've never studied it. But I am familiar with proto-Hebrew, proto-Canaanite and Phoenician, all of which use a similar symbol to indicate ox or bull. In Sumerian (proto) it is a very similar symbol, and for them it can mean calf, oxen, bull, lion or in some cases dragon, in the mythical sense.

I don't believe that the Egyptians copied the Sumerian writing (proto) whole cloth. However, the phrases that I translated were written in the southern part of Egypt at 3500 BC, very close to when the Egyptians were formulating their hieroglyphics. Influence? It seems likely. There was quite a bit of cross-cultural influence going on at that timeline.
Egyptian (early) is consonantal, with a few exceptions. I may be wrong in that statement but it's what I have seen based on transliterations done by modern scholars. Similar to ancient Hebrew which was also consonantal with a few exceptions. So when they speak of an alphabet, an abcdefg assignment, they use those writings as an example. But then two things occur. They tell us that they really have not got a firm idea of what the Wadi el Hol inscriptions mean, although a few suggestions have been made, and when they do attempt to transliterate it for translation, they use Egyptian as the underlying language and this results in a nearly consonantal result as well. So if they had said that they believe it to be proto-Egyptian, that's one thing, but to try and wring an alphabet out of it, and further to assign this to the same school as one done in Canaan (proto-Simitic) some 1800 years later, they loose me. Again, unless they had a time machine. I looked at the proto-Sinitic from Sinai, and it seems to be proto-Sumerian as well, but the book by Wallis that I have offers one whole image. People take more pictures than that when they try on shoes. So, while there are certainly other exemplars from Sinai, I don't intend to go further with them - mainly because, by their own admission, they are from circa 1600 BC, way too late for the topic that I am working on.

I had the good luck to read your comments previously, on one of my earlier posts last year, and it seems to me that you have a good command of this area as well - or have I confused this? I appreciate, certainly, your gentlemanly way of phrasing it, but I believe that I can learn from you.

[As an aside another question. Let us assume that indeed, the Sumerians influenced the Egyptians considerably. But is it not being suggested by many more unorthodox readers of Egyptian texts that the most original form of Old Egyptian writing in the oldest monuments dates from pre-dynastic times, going back even to "Atlantean” times? How does that square with the idea that Egyptian writing stems from Sumerian writing?]
I think that the Egyptians used what was around - the proto-Sumerian, and for which they had ready translators, scribes and tutors due to the trade going on, and borrowed a few of their ideas, while changing the syllabary of Sumerian into the consonantal accented form that they came up with. I certainly do not claim that they simply copied it all. As to pre-dynastic, according to what I have read, and I am not good at Egyptian hieroglyics, the same scholars who wrote the report of Wadi el Hol and tried to sell it as proto-Sinaitic, say that these markings come from as early as the pre-dynastic period of Egypt. That's from them, not something my research pulled up.

My friend Prof. Leonard believed that the Egyptians were connected somehow to the Atlantis crowd. I have not found that to be true in any of my personal research over the years. Neither did I come across any connection between the Bahamas and Egypt. We sometimes disagreed on some things, but in the main we agreed.

So, bottom line, I believe that they were influenced by the shapes of the proto-Sumerian symbols, just as the Phoenicians were influenced by the Egyptian symbols, and the Hebrews by the Phoenician, and on and on.

I will admit that my not learning Egyptian hieroglyphic might have been an error in judgment on my part. When my research did not bring up the ties that I was looking for - way back in history - on the part of Egypt, I elected not to learn it.
There is quite a bit of Masonic and middle-ages connections to Egypt, but frankly every time I go in that direction I see that they got it originally from somewhere else. My personal opinion, without evidence other than my crap detector, is that the powers that be prop up Egypt and downplay Sumer because they are afraid concerning what we will find there. That and it's the written language found on dozens of landed UFOs, and they remain well versed in it such that they change the symbols reported on UFOs just to throw us off track. Of that idea I have written evidence - from their own UFO reports. It's something like ancient Latin or Greek is to us - the visitors used it from time to time, and reports from civilian observers back this up. So if they don't want us to be familiar with Sumerian, and especially proto-Sumerian, that's enough for me to learn it to the best of my abilities. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind man.

Michel Leclerc
19th November 2023, 23:25
Thank you Jim for your clarification, and also for your appreciation.
Just a few personal facts so you can see where I come from. Part of my academic education was studying linguistics in its broadest sense: studying languages of course, but studying especially language as a system – a sound system (phonetic and phonology), but also a vocabulary or meaning system and a grammar system (syntax and morphology) – and doing that both “synchronically” – i.e. for a given time period, like now as in "contemporary French" let’s say, but also like in the past as in “classical Sanskrit“ or “Middle Dutch” or “Qur'anic Arabic” – and “diachronically” i.e. historically, as in how has the sound system of Greek evolved over the years? On this basis, I studied Indo-European linguistics thoroughly (and hence am quite excited about the "unknown" language at Hattus(h)a Bill posted on) – and moved on to the Nostratic level. That was prompted by my study of Persian and Urdu, whose learned vocabularies are heavily Arabic – so that by the end of the 70s I was concentrating on Arabic as well. My philosophical and personal interest in Sufism only added to that. I have not been disappointed. Many standard philosophical works of Sufism are in Arabic (two name just two giants among the philosophers world wide: the “Murcian” (South East Spain) Ibn 'Arabî and the Persian Mollâ Sadrâ have written their work in Arabic and to me it is of a value equal to the work of Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel – to name just those I have some familiarity with. (Persian then is an Indo-European language and has maybe even more of my love, and that is because the greatest works of Sufi poetry have been written in Persian: I’ll just mention Attar, Sa'adi, Rumi and Hafiz.)

Arabic then is a Semitic language as you know and have explained in one of your posts – and Semitic languages, belong to a “hyper-macrofamily” called Nostratic of which the other branches are Indo-European, Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian etc.), Altaic (Turkish, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese), Dravidian (the four non-Indo-European languages of Southern India), and a small group (Kartvelian), of which only one language gained "civilisational" status: Georgian.

Important to your interest however is that Egyptian belongs to the family of Hamitic languages (as does Berber and the so-called Omotic group of languages spoken in Western Ethiopia for instance), and as such is related to Semitic languages. The Semitic group and the Hamitic group are grouped together and are called in a number of languages the "Hamito-Semitic group” and in English the "Afroasiatic” group.

Disconsidering for a moment the respective writing systems, both Egyptian and Berber as Afroasiatic languages share with the Semitic languages the quite creative and systematic way in which word roots (mostly consisting of 2 or 3 consonants (which last possibility has practically become all-pervasive in Arabic)) can be enriched with typical vowel patterns or syllabic infixes and pre- or postfixes to carry systematic meaning development. These correlations between such enrichments and specific meanings or specific grammar functions are so systematic that they may not need not be written because their predictability in the sentence structure makes the reader fill them out by himself quite easily. (In modern Arabic only long vowels are written, short vowels are not.) This feature is shared by Arabic, Aramaeic, Hebrew etc. on the Semitic side, with Egyptian (once it was written with an alphabet exclusively as in its late offshoot Coptic) and Berber on the Hamitic side.

So it is not surprising that Proto-Sinaitic is suggested as a possible candidate for deciphering a text coming from ancient Near and Middle East because a Semitic and a Hamitic language share this “deep structural” feature of word formation. However, with the little knowledge I have of Sumerian, I can clearly see how justified your opinion is that Sumerian or Proto-Sumerian is not really comparable to a 2nd-millennium BCE Semitic language.

As far as I know, Semites migrated to Sumerian lands in the 3rd millennium and, confronted with a sophisticated writing system they started to use it for their own language (leading to the extensive literature in what is generically called "Akkadian” i.e. Babylonic, Assyrian etc.) but this did not change the fact that Sumerian and “Akkadian” are vastly different languages belonging to language families that do not both belong to the Nostratic mega-group (Semitic “Akkadian” does, Sumerian does not). A (maybe awkward) parallel is the fact that Japanese (a Nostratic language like “Akkadian”) started to use the Chinese writing system although Chinese does not belong to the Nostratic group (it belongs to the Sino-Tibetan group).

To complete this little self-presentation as a Nostraticist I would like to make a suggestion that may be of use to you Jim – as you have studied Hittite for instance: do download Aharon Dolgopolsky’s Nostratic Dictionary (https://archive.org/details/DolgopolskyNostraticDictionary2012/mode/2up): you will be inspired by the range it covers (several thousands of pages) – but it calls for some tenacity to get fluent in the vast number of abbreviations they use – and using it needs a bit of "finder’s luck” as it has no Index (!!!). There is a list of all the Indo-European roots however to which parallels and cognates in other, non-Indo-European Nostratic languages, exist. Quite eye-opening I must say.

I hope that this may be helpful to you.

In order to discover a bit of Sumerian – could you give me good advice on dictionary and grammar for instance?

Jim_Duyer
20th November 2023, 15:41
Dear Michel Leclerc:


Thank you for sharing your knowledge, which is indeed extensive. I have downloaded your suggested dictionary (all 3667 pages - how does he have time for life?). It's somewhat unorganized, but it offers some deep looks into the interconnectedness of the various forms of communication.

When I saw the map of the spread of the various families of Nostratic it brought to mind the Turks. If you examine the language spread from west of China to Anatolia it seems that language, as well as affiliations, may have led them to their adopted lands. Perhaps.

I have and use frequently, this one: Leiden Inda-European Etymological Dictionary Series Edited by Alexander Lubotsky Vol. II. I use it when I am puzzling through Old Norse, Frisian, Anglo-Saxon and early Germanic roots to determine the proper translation of early middle ages texts. I discovered, for example, that the sayings of Odin are woefully misunderstood by English (in particular but not exclusively) scholars, and they tend to leave out a great deal of what the original authors were hoping to convey. I also find the Beowulf and other translations as we have them today, to be lacking in empathy.


One of the translations that I completed recently tells us that one part of the people who would later be known as the Hebrews, in a time predating Abraham by a few hundred years, split off and headed down to Magan. We believe that Magan is located in modern Saudi Arabia, but perhaps Oman, since they mention wharves and the coastal area in the text I work with. Or again it may have simply been their starting point in that area. I could easily posit them heading into the Sinai to work the turquoise and copper mines for the Egyptians. So that puts Elamite related peoples, also related to the tribes of Adam, with a knowledge of Sumerian, in that area, earlier even than the proto-Sinaitic alphabets suggest. The Wadi el Hol could easily be reached by continuing that journey by boat around the cost and into the gulf. Then its just a hop through the Wadi.

Sumerian. Ah yes. Well, I will try to keep it short. The Univ of Oxford has their "experts" and they claim that the Sumerian e is actually an i ( or vice versa, I can never understand what they are up to if I am honest.) They have very excellent prose writers but they tend to lose track of the threads of a theme and go off on some type of epic presentation.

The Univ. of Penn. had their "experts" (influencd as the Yale and Harvard groups are by Ministers of one variety or another ) and they see "heaven" where the UCLA group and Oxford reads "sky-gods".

The UCLA group hold themselves to be superior on all of their undertakings, but even with the great Englund I have discovered errors in translation. Sorry, but that's the truth. Whether they are the result of an agenda relating to scholarship I do not know. They also have their own way of assigning various meanings and it differs from most of the others.

The best tablet collection is of course the UCLA group. Lately, however, they have begun removing the images of the source tablets. Luckily I downloaded all that I need before they began this. Perhaps its something to do with their economics.

Most, and I mean this sincerly, most of what is called Sumerian is not. It represents rewrites of the original Sumerian into Akkadian, or into Sumerian but done by Babylonians. And the Babylonians (or Elamite-Amorites as we should call them) tend to elaborate the stories, add their own idea, rewrite, remove, edit, play with - many terms fit here, the original stories.

I work only in proto-Sumerian. I can and have done classical, but I prefer the oldest form. It give the story as the Sumerians tell it, prior to editing by the conquerors, and it can provide results that are beyond what the classical tablets tell us. Why then do the vast majority of our scholars concentrate on the classical style (dated much later) ? Because it is the closest to Semitic languages in that the Akkadian, which they know quite well, is often used to puzzle out meanings. However, there's a problem in my opinion, with this route. It only tells us what the conquerors want us to know about the Sumerians. And, as we know from history, the conquerors shape the story.

However, there are no grammars for the proto yet. So you will need to use two dictionaries online to begin with.
The first is the Univ. Penn: http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/nepsd-frame.html
The second is also U. Penn but updated and expanded:
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/epsd2/sux

Now, the problem arises when using the two, as I do on a daily basis. That is the dating. Obviously I need a definition from the period that matches the source tablet. You can't use Old Babylonian meanings to translate ED IIIa tablets, for example. You will be tempted to, and most of our scholars do so, but it is extremely misleading to do this. Sumerian is a language isolate. And the Semitic groups changed and amplified the meanings, just as they changed the Sumerian goddesses into gods, and their laws into the laws of Hammurabi (i.e. laws with civil penalties into the eye for an eye, tooth for tooth of the Babylonians). These conquerors had no problem with changing the epics and then calling them their own - they now owned them, right? Just compare the Sumerian Gilgamesh with the Babylonian and you will see this right away. Or the Sumerian creation or flood stories which are not Sumerian. They had a very different creation story and nothing on the flood. All of that was written first in Kish, then in Akkad, then Babylonia, etc.

You will also need to have a knowledge of the various transliterations that are attached to each meaning. We do this by way of the signs list, that tells us that the transliterated symbol of "BU" for example, can also mean: bur12, dur7, gid2, kim3, pu, sir2, su13, sud4, tur8
And yes, you will need to chase down each of those, and their meanings, verify the timelines, and decide, by consensus of agreement, what they were trying to tell us. In both dictionaries.

The best way to find the various associations of signs is via the Oxford site:

https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/signlist.php

And, Oxford and the Germans tend to use an accented "h" for what the Univ. Of Penn calls an accented "g". It makes for a lot of amusing periods of lost life.

I tend to be a perfectionist in that unless I can reach 95% accuracy I will usually discard the entire tablet. And to make it worse, there are an equal amount of proto signs that they claim they have not yet deciphered. Or at least not to the public. It's a very tiny school of scholars and I am not a member. Anyway, those are called the ZATU, after the German phrase from the author. I have been able to decipher a half dozen or more of them, and have a good idea on perhaps a dozen more, but there about 100 in this group of unknowns.

And of course if you have a question about a sign or phrase just ask. If I know it I would be happy to help.

I consider myself a Semiotician. I am not the one to help you with the various grammatical questions - I felt that my role was to dedicate my time to the overall picture and leave the evolution of the writing systems to the experts - like yourself. I place signs with what they intended us to understand about them. I am familiar with the historical placement of those signs, and the cultures associated with them, but I could not, for example, explain the waves of language through geographical terrain based upon the evolutionary placement of them. Sorry. But then again, no one is really doing what I do, so perhaps it's for the best.

Michel Leclerc
20th November 2023, 23:14
Thank you Jim for this hands-on help in the form of useful links!

As far as translating is concerned I use as a rule of thumb that knowledge as precise as possible of syntax, morphology and phonetics/phonology is necessary to decide on the meaning of a language item – because they influence it. (That is absolutely necessary for the Semitic languages, for instance, particularly because morphological modifiers are often not written.) E.g.: he agglutinative nature of Sumerian seems to me to compel us to know what “agglutinated” particles they used, and with what meaning.

You refer to Elamite-speaking people who knew Sumerian. How do I have to understand this? As far as I know, a "family link” between Sumerian and Elamite has had its defenders and deniers. Could you tell us your ideas about this?

Two more questions about Sumerian. As “classical Sumerian” is heavily influenced by Semitic “Akkadian” Mesopotamia, which grafted maybe all of Semitic syntax, morphology and phonology onto it, how can we reach what we may call “pure Sumerian” (antedating the “invasion”)? (By the way, I am putting invasion between brackets, because I have always read that it was never an invasion, but rather a slow migration.)

And not really a question, but more of a suggestion that I would like to hear your thoughts on. As I appreciate what you write about the migration of the Turks, my working assumption is that the spreading of Indo-European (and the subsequent spreading of Semitic into Mesopotamia and Arabia (and maybe of the Hamites into Egypt and beyond)) was the consequence of the “Black Lake into Black Sea” catastrophic transformation around the middle of the 6th millennium – and of parallel catastrophes around that time elsewhere around the Mediterranean and in North Africa. However, that was pre-dated by the “for real" worldwide catastrophe that Graham Hancock and others are circumscribing, which predates the Göpekli Tepe sites by not so many centuries and which more or less coincides with what would be the times that “Nostratic” as such still existed – this last period being suggested by statistical data on language evolution. So in a way, the Uralic, Afroasiatic, Altaic, Dravidian, Indo-European and Kartvelian families started to split off Nostratic shortly after the time of the “real” (Greenland originated) flood. To put it in a slightly defiant form: the civilisation of the “tepes” in Turkey spoke Nostratic and/or the Atlanteans spoke Nostratic.

Hence, refining our knowledge of the real features of Sumerian might help answer the question: does Sumerian belong to the Nostratic language megafamily? Or is it more like Basque, which was spoken by the people who fled to the Pyrenee mountaintops, considering that Basque is related to non-Nostratic languages of the Caucasus, to Sino-Tibetan of the mountains, and to the languages of the Na-Dene Indians who got shelter on the Rockies?

Jim_Duyer
21st November 2023, 02:02
I understand completely what you mean by the necessity of understanding syntax, morphology and phonetics/phonology. I go a different route. I examine how the word has been used in context, not only in the most ancient use but as it morphed over the centuries. That tells me a lot about the various civilizations that handled it, and from there I get an idea of what to expect from them on other tablets. Not to use their suggestions, but to use their appreciation of the source, or their lack of same. I also use the context, which is of utmost importance.

Were they on a journey? Was it written in a temple by scribal priests or under the direction of the ruling body? Who held the reins of power, and how did they phrase their commuications with him or her? That context tells me something about how they expressed themselves.

After awhile (a few years in my case but your mileage may vary) I was able to determine, and still can, which culture wrote the message. Was it a Hurrian, Hittite, Assyrian, Amorite, Akkadian, Elamite or others? That tells me that their god, X, would have been called Y, by the Sumerians, and it shows me how they relate to a similar deity. Deities, family relations, kingship, laws - these are all keys pointing to their customs and personalities. Eventually you will recognize these as well.
I have 18 years working in this - more than many scholars. Never cared for, never attempted, and do not wish to receive formal training nor professional acclaim. I prefer to work for the spirit of it.

To answer your question about the Elamites - they were obliquely related to the Hurrians, and directly related to some of the Amorite tribes, in essence the Sim'alites or left-hand, northern branches. And they wrote their cuneiform but used Sumerian as the underlying language. When the northern and southern tribes that were later known as Hebrews split, the northern group went to the east side of the Tigris near the border with Elam, and also to Mari and Tutti and the central part of Sumeria. The southern tribes went to Emar and other parts of coastal Syria and down into the Levant.

The Amorites wrote in Sumerian with Sumerian as the underlying, for the most part, as did the Hurrians. The Assyrians and some of the Amorites (Mari) wrote in cuneiform but used Akkadian as the underlying language. Again, this context depended upon the relationships of that time and place, which changed as events did. This lets me know, after confirmation, what type I was dealing with. Assyrians and northern Amorites hid their strength behind flocks. Either sheep or cattle, did not matter. They were swarmers. They crouched in fields, tending their sheeps, until one day they threw off their robes and swarmed your lands. Usual with success. They pretended to be herders but were in fact the paid mercenaries used by a great many peoples in the region.

The southern, left-hand, Yaminite led tribes of Amorites were smaller in numbers. They were mainly peaceful, and dedicated to knowledge and religion. They eventually were wiped out.

The Akkadians loved to boast. You can count on them to change a goddess of writing into a god of war, and they won't let you down. Intelligent to some extent but absolutely filled up with the greatness of themselves. They wrote in cuneiform with their own language as the base but changed the meanings to suit them. You can count on being mislead by what they wrote.

The Hurrians were neighbors of the Sumerians at their point of mutual origin, with the Hurrians ranging slightly north of the Sumerians and the Hatti and later Hittites to the southwest. They wrote in proto-Sumerian about 50 years after the Sumerians employed it, so they had a big jump on the rest. Abraham's mom was a Hurrian. Very intelligent. They have a wonderful way to turn a phrase. Their own language was complicated, but arranged in a sensical way. Luckily they mostly wrote in Sumerian.

In common with the original Sumerians, the Hurrians did many things but they did not brag about it. I have translated the Hurrian of their tablets and read how they respond to fences, sharing land with neighbors, honoring the wishes of their fathers and supporting their brothers, and this tells me what I need to know about them. The liked to write their sayings and bury them in the corners of their temple buildings. An Akkadian, Assyrian, Elamite or Amorite would have placed them, in multiple copies, where all of their conquered subjects could read their "wisdom". That's why we have so much of the Semitic writings and so few of the valuable others.

Yes, we have millions of tablets, most of them untranslated to date, but not very many written by Sumerians or Hurrians of great intelligence.

The Elamites of Iran were later known as clever Persians. Highly intelligent, but sloppy authors. Not their phrases which were acceptable but not outstanding, but their use of their hands when creating the characters. They were handicapped because while they often wrote with Sumerian as the underlying language they had their own language and their own symbols as early as the Sumerians did, so they wrote this way for advantage in trade and politics, and not out of love, and it shows in their style. However their own writing system is like their skill in making tablet markings - sloppy and difficult to piece out.

The Hittites were not that skilled at writing. However, and this makes them important, very early on they overran other cultures such as the Hatti. In fact, they respected the Hatti so much that they did not change much of what they inherited. The Hatti may have written in a PIE language - we really are not sure yet. Not many exemplars left to work with. But they had an advanced culture very early and originated in that region near Georgia.

You can call them Assyrians, but in the beginning the people used Amorite generals for their armies and later those generals took over. So you had a northern Amorite leadership for the most part, early on. Later of course this changed. Several times. I've never seen anthing that they wrote that caught my attention. Not super intelligent for sure. Assyrians like to change the direction of the placement of symbols on tablets - not for any intelligent reason, just because they are Assyrians.

To sum up, I learn the people first. Then their connections. This helps me build empathy, and then I puzzle out what they so desperatly wished to tell me that they would cut it into stone in the heat of the desert. We've had good men, good humans, from the beginning of writing. You just have to learn to pick them out of the chaff.

The Elamites had a firm connection with the Sim'alite branch of the Amorites, who joined with them to conquer Sumeria about 2004 BC. Then the Amorites threw out their former partners who returned to Elam. Amorites love to form partnerships, especially through marriage relations, and then double-cross their partners. It's their clear pattern, along with swarming. Just as they formed parters in Syria through Mari and Tulli, and then Hammurabi double-crossed them as well.

Yes, classical Sumerian cuneiform is influenced by the conquerors. Highly. So we go back and only use texts written prior to 2900 BC, and in proto-Sumerian if at all possible. Anyone who says it was a slow migration is being soft on the Babylonians due to their Hebrew connections. They swarmed - and the Sumerians built walls across the two rivers to hold them back. They the Amorites intermarried with some of the weaker Sumerian rulers, and those same rulers trusted their sons-in-law, who betrayed them. Swarming is not migration. Swarming is invading. Let me be crystal clear - after the final invasion of the Amorite swarms, accompanied by their Elamite partners and Assyrian associated generals, Sumer as a culture, effectively ceased to exist. What was left of the general public assimilated and walked off the pages of history. Period.

Now, you will need a list of the proto-Sumerian symbols. Here is that link:
https://www.academia.edu/33396974/Proto_Cuneiform_Signs

I created a desktop template from the above, and then I added a few more signs that I found over time, and I use this daily.

Please, please do me one favor. Do not believe them, no matter how well credentialed they are, when they tell you that most of the earliest Sumerian tablets are simply accounting and token type writings. That's one of the biggest lies they have ever perpetrated. Read them for yourself, as I did, and you will quickly see that 1 unit of goats is not always 1 nor 1 unit, nor even goats. They are under a strict prohibition towards teaching this to outsiders - it is the language of the visitors after all. Sitchin was their child, and they let him run, but visitors with chemical rockets? Please. We all know better. Don't be alarmed when your translation does not match the traditional one given. Many of them make no sense whatsoever - it's almost as if they were Frankensteined together from a multitude of authors over millennia - which is what they are. I don't trust Oxford Sumerologists as far as I can throw them. The Univ. of Penn. people give you a balance, but they are highly influenced by modern religious beliefs. They will see heaven in every upper atmosphere definition, for example.

And one other caution. What you discover will make you sad, perhaps. It may change your life to some extent, and it may cause you to be bitter and to hate all the indoctrination that you have faced since childhood. That will not pass. But it will, hopefully, eventually become satisfying. If, that is, knowing the truth makes you happy as it does me. But that's the historian in me I imagine.
Good luck to you.

As to the Turks. Well, it seems that scholars try to place them with every group imaginable - from the Mongols to the Cimmarions to the Scythians to the Iranians, etc. I believe that when the groups of various peoples left the Altai mountains they quickly pushed others out. They were smarter, for sure, with a highly developed civilization that no scholar today talks about. And they began to compete in western Tibet and Mongolia. The flood of 7300 BC caused the Sumerians, Hurrians, and both tribes of Amorite, to leave their places of origin and flow generally eastward and south.
Graham Hancock, and I know him not, but he was, in my opinion, much more centered and academically believable before he married into the India culture. After that it was all India, all the time. Now, there is probably a great many cities under the waters of India. But you could say the same of every single land mass on the Earth.

My money on the best places to look for exciting new finds is (1) the Sahara (2) Polynesia (3) the Amazon basin.

The original tepes in Turkey and indeed most of the original peoples of Anatolia, spoke a variety of languages but used Sumerian as their system of writing. That I believe due to my having translated the Gobekli Tepe and other sites messages. I also, by the way, translated clearly the Tartaria Tablets. Also in proto-Sumerian. I believe the Nostratic was the northern wave of the southern Sumerian. In that those groups spread much like our own influx of Europeans from the steppes region, at the same time that the Sumerian and the original Anatolians were spreading further south. That's based on the non-PIE found in the south and the many groups that came out of that area - about as many as the Nostatic but with tighter geographical sway. I may be wrong, but until further information comes my way that's my tentative position.

I can tell you this much - I will be looking more closely at Nostratic.

I've done a lot of work with Basque. It's the survivor of the border groups that were much, much older than them, and it retains much of that older language. (The Aquatani). I keep a Basque dictionary (Trask) on my desktop as well. I try not to become too focused on them because my wife is Basque and I don't wish to become another Graham. (Smily)

Sumerian is not Basque, although both are language isolates. But a template that I developed can use Basque shapes to translate Sumerian. Of course they are ancient Spanish marks and not Basque for the written part but Basque was the underlying language of the texts. That's why it was so easy for me to adapt it to translate proto-Hebrew consonantal writing into Sumerian. Some changes, but basically all work towards similar meanings. Yes, that's just how interconnected we were in the past. I believe, personally and without evidence, that if we were to say that perhaps the Aquatani were related to the Atlantis group (which I still believe comes from the northern pole region) we might not be too far off. Similar and related, if you wish to examine them, is the Glozel writings - especially the translations offered by the Germans. Very smart group.

Now, this might make your day. The Glozel symbols, with modification, show up again, in our modern time. A certain group of Gauls who had beaten the Romans, migrated to Anatolia, and from there they became guards for the Macedonian Pharaohs in the 290s BC. They were caught sneaking into the Library, and perhaps taking some maps and things. They were placed on an island near Alexandria - but then we find reports that a ship was missing along with them. Next we find mention of them near Sumatria, by the locals. And then we find the writings in Caverns in Western Australia - in a pure dialect of Glozel, along with some very strange images of something like a star man. And next we find three symbols drawn under a sailing ship mark, found in the central part of the modern United States, also in a variant of Gaulish-Glozel, which in turn is a variant of Basque-Aquatani. I was going to write about the Gauls who discovered Australia, but I have more things to write down than I have time. So yes, a great many connections indeed.

Basque is also related, or Aquatani, to the original natives of northern Japan. Yes, those hairy Ainu ones. So when they tell me that Basque might be part of the Sino-Tibetan language group I calmly shake my head yes, while going about my business. But, nobody carries this forward to the Algonquin of Canada and northern USA, and they should. The second biggest lie I have heard is that they had no early writing skills. Rubbish. Their birch bark missives may have lasted no longer than the Angle and Frisian writings, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. And some do. Yes, they are related to the Na-Dene. My father traded with the Navajo, so fairly and with such respect for them that they made him an honorary member of the tribe of Pueblo - Navajo.

About the only thing that we can say for certain, and without any risk of being denigrated, is that our so-called scholars have always underestimated our early ancestors. Especially when they did not share their beliefs.

Have you had a chance to study the western Tibetan writings? They have writing skills (BonPo) that are not understood nor studied due to the commies taking over their lands, that go back millennia.
I wrote a BonPo translator for my website because I found that they are part of the Dropa Disks story. Very clean and intuitive symbols that they use.

I probably should close this book for now. Look forward to chatting again. Jim

Jim_Duyer
21st November 2023, 16:26
Please let me know when you are ready for your quiz on proto-Sumerian symbols.

Jim_Duyer
21st November 2023, 19:21
Thank you Jim for this hands-on help in the form of useful links! ?

Here is a 777 page Sumerian Grammar that I found:
https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2961989/view

Jim_Duyer
22nd November 2023, 15:17
OK No Quiz. But please allow me to prove that the traditional scholars are being lest than honest. I found this yesterday in a scholarly publication published prior to final draft and peer review. But it's sitting there ready to go.

[PIRIG the fast knee lion The name lion is the most spectacular noun in Sumerian. It has preserved the transference from the Akkadian metaphor fast runner, fast animal, into Sumerian perfectly
Akkadian petân birki
an animal that opens the legs fast = lion became Sumerian pirig = lion So the Akkadian metaphor produced the name lion in the language.]

Now, how do we know that they are being disingenuous?

Because Sargon of Akkad, who formed the tribes into the Akkadian group, and began their written records,
also called Sargon the Great, was the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire, known for his conquests of the Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BCE

And yet, when we look in the Sumerian dictionary, we find this item that was from several tablets authored in the year 3100 BC, or about eight hundred years before Sargon:

3100 BC
pirig [LION] (205x: ED IIIa, ED IIIb, Old Akkadian, Lagash II, Ur III, Old Babylonian) wr. pirig; pirig3; bi2-ri-ig3; gešpirig; pirig2 "lion; bull, wild bull" Akk. lû; labu; nešu; rimu

As icing on the cake, there are indeed Akkadian words for the Sumerian word Pirig, meaning lion, bull, wild bull, etc.,
but they are not as the author has proposed.
Again, who hands out these time machines? Can I get one? But seriously, this is why you need to be sure of the dating of the definition that you choose for each word or word part - to ensure that it was actually used at that early date.