From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1999 #2 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Sunday, January 3 1999 Volume 1999 : Number 002 ane African and Aegean contacts ane Theran mural & Colchians ane Ninuwa & Linear A ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1999 10:36:12 -0800 From: Louise Hitchcock Subject: ane African and Aegean contacts - --============_-1296820301==_ma============ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The identification of Libyans in the flotilla fresco is something of an assumption by Spyridon Marinatos the original excavator. He was no doubt influenced by Evans who applied Darwinian/Vassarian models of biological evolution to Minoan art forms in order to trace them back to originary forms -- some of which were Libyan. There are, however, several examples in Minoan/Aegean art that indicate contact with Africa. One may be Marinatos' fresco of a "Libyan" from Akrotiri, Sector Alpha to the north of the site which depicts a male with markedly African features (esp. tight curly hair) looking up at a palm tree Another is the Blue Monkeys fresco from Akrotiri, upper storey of House Beta 6, N & W walls; the top of the composition is framed by a spiral motif; beneath are blue monkeys cavorting among what appears to be Theran landscape. These monkeys were recently identified (several years ago in an AIA paper by Thomas Strasser) as the blue vervet: a species native to Nubia; indicates contact with Africa, either directly or thru Egypt as an intermediary The best example is the Captain of the Blacks fresco which stylistically dates to the Mycenaean period at Knossos and was found outside the Palace near the House of the Frescoes. This piece serves as important evidence of Aegean contact with Africa. The 'captain' is depicted wearing a bristly cap with horns that resembles a Nubian cap. He appears to be carrying a spear and he is being followed by at least one individual whose black skin indicates an African origin. Despite the different skin color of the "Captain" and the individual behind them, the similar black and white fringe on their kilts indicates a connection. The piece is too fragmentary to reveal what was going on with certainty and there is no reason to assume that the "captain" is in command. Arthur Evans conjectued that this fresco depicted the 'Palace guards' at Knossos. Right now the only illustration of it is in Evans' 'Palace of Minos,' however, it will be illustrated in Preziosi and Hitchcock, Aegean Art and Architecture, Oxford: 1999. A useful source for later mention of/depictions of Africans in the Classical world are Frank Snowden's Blacks in Antiquity and Before Color Prejudice. Louise Hitchcock Dr. Louise A. Hitchcock Research Associate, UCLA Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies 310-825-9639 - --============_-1296820301==_ma============ Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" Times_New_RomanThe identification of Libyans in the flotilla fresco is something of an assumption by Spyridon Marinatos the original excavator. He was no doubt influenced by Evans who applied Darwinian/Vassarian models of biological evolution to Minoan art forms in order to trace them back to originary forms -- some of which were Libyan. There are, however, several examples in Minoan/Aegean art that indicate contact with Africa. One may be Marinatos' fresco of a "Libyan" from Akrotiri, Sector Alpha to the north of the site which depicts a male with markedly African features (esp. tight curly hair) looking up at a palm tree Another is the Blue Monkeys fresco from Akrotiri, upper storey of House Beta 6, N & W walls; the top of the composition is framed by a spiral motif; beneath are blue monkeys cavorting among what appears to be Theran landscape. These monkeys were recently identified (several years ago in an AIA paper by Thomas Strasser) as the blue vervet: a species native to Nubia; indicates contact with Africa, either directly or thru Egypt as an intermediary The best example is the Captain of the Blacks fresco which stylistically dates to the Mycenaean period at Knossos and was found outside the Palace near the House of the Frescoes. This piece serves as important evidence of Aegean contact with Africa. The 'captain' is depicted wearing a bristly cap with horns that resembles a Nubian cap. He appears to be carrying a spear and he is being followed by at least one individual whose black skin indicates an African origin. Despite the different skin color of the "Captain" and the individual behind them, the similar black and white fringe on their kilts indicates a connection. The piece is too fragmentary to reveal what was going on with certainty and there is no reason to assume that the "captain" is in command. Arthur Evans conjectued that this fresco depicted the 'Palace guards' at Knossos. Right now the only illustration of it is in Evans' 'Palace of Minos,' however, it will be illustrated in Preziosi and Hitchcock, Aegean Art and Architecture, Oxford: 1999. A useful source for later mention of/depictions of Africans in the Classical world are Frank Snowden's Blacks in Antiquity and Before Color Prejudice. Louise Hitchcock Dr. Louise A. Hitchcock Research Associate, UCLA Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies 310-825-9639 - --============_-1296820301==_ma============-- ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 02 Jan 1999 22:40:49 -0500 From: nyokabi@kingcon.com Subject: ane Theran mural & Colchians On January 1st Bjarte Kaldhol wrote: >>On the last day of the year 1998, E. Adams wrote: >>"Is it unthinkable that blacks ever invaded the Aegean, no matter where >>they came from, no matter if they failed? [they do seem to be abandoning >>ship in some disarray!] Don't we have a tale in the Argonaut story of a >>Colchian colony Illyria at Polae? Perhaps they tried first to land at >>Thera!" >Well, it is not unthinkable, but there are a few facts we should keep in >mind: Thanks for the numbers, so I can answer them out of order! >4. There can have been no "return invasion" of Libyans or Africans in Thera >at the end of the 16th century (conventional date), when the frescoes were >painted, since the Sea Peoples invaded Egypt three hundred years later. 4. This is your best point. Should teach me to try to put thoughts into other people's minds, i.e. trying to figure out why the Time writer called them Libyans!He gave the date of the fresco in the article, so I knew it. One could argue that the Theran invasion went back as early as the OK, as we have murals all over the place of very ancient events, but certainly not forward 400 years!! -That's what the flu does for my brain! BTW - is that 1600 BC date an actual date for the mural, or only for its burial -- i.e. couldn't be any later than that? (Is that a post quem or an ante quem? can't ever remember which is which..) >3. No Linear A inscriptions have ever been found in Mali. 3. I never said there were any linear A inscriptions in Mali, the guy who found them did. In fact my take in this discussion was that this might be an example of the classic type of Eurocentrism in Africa, who when they find anything surprising to them assumed that some outsiders half way around the world did it! - like the palace of Zimbabwe being attributed to Phoenicians or King Solomon, Rather than assuming first that this might be Malian writing, of which Van Sertima has written in relation to some rock glyphs in the Caribbean. What is the upshot? Is it a modern fraud? or are they genuine ancient inscriptions? >1. In Minoan and Therans frescoes, men are conventionally painted red (and >women normally white). There is no reason to think that the men abandoning >ship "in some disarray" are Libyans or Africans. 1. I cannot remember if I have since seen a reproduction of this mural in color. If I have it didn't change my mind that they were black folks. I am aware of the red/yellow color thing in Cretan art. In the Time picture in black and white they were jet black, which can happen in bad reproductions -that brown looks black. But it was the hair which drew both the writer's and my attention. Looked like spiky young dreadlocks (i.e. not full grown and hanging downwards). Definitely not feathers. No other races' dreadlocks (one can see all sorts of them in every race nowadays at reggae concerts!) ever pass through this standing up straight stage. It takes the real wool, to do that, the kind Herodotus said the Colchians had: -ulotrichioi. >2. Colchis was a country in the eastern Black Sea region, and I do not >think the Colchians were black people. It is well that you added the location of the country, of which I am well aware, to your second statement, for the latter is certainly an opinion and not a "fact". Evidence proving they were not? Given the fact that Herodotus did write that they were black skinned and woolly haired and had rebelled from an Egyptian army led by Sesostris, and that he lived considerably closer to them in time and space than we do, I would think the burden of proof would be on you. Other info that might support Herodotus can be found in many areas: the royal title Aetes could be Eg jtj for king, lord,father. (Several commentators have taken Aetes for a title like Labarna and not just a PN). Acc.to P.K. {is it Kaplony?)article on Iti in the Lex d Ag: although iti could be applied to any man in the sense of father or "patron", "Im MR wird I. einseitig zum Konigs- und Gottertitel" - in the MK iti was exclusively used as a title for kings and gods. The gods of Colchis, Ares and Hekate, are from the Nile. Can't find my LdA on Hekate, but by the Greeks she was associated with black magic, the dark of the moon, goddess of the underworld. In one version she is Aetes' wife, mother of Medea and Circe, both wicked workers of black magic. In Egypt she was a frog wasn't she? Ares, god of war, acc. to Edith Hamilton not particularly loved by the Greeks and regarded as somewhat foreign, was worshipped in Nubia as Onuris Nb A/Itr.t, which H Junker calls "a Nubian region" (lord of Aether?)and also in Jebel Barkal and many other places in the late period. That the Greeks equated Onuris with Ares is attested in Papyrus U in Griffith, Rylands Papyrus III, 230 (Junker,Onurislegende, p 3). Onuris/Inhrt (Ninurta?) combines roles with Horus and Shu and Arensnuphis, and even Seth in his role as subduer of the Apophis giant serpent. Note that a giant serpent whose hiss can be heard in the mountains of Iberia guards the golden fleece in the temple of Ares, as if he is now a servant of the god who conquered him. One would expect a nation which was founded by soldiers to worship a war god. Aetes had chariots and ships, and maps showing the sea routes to the Mediterranean - how many other little peoples on the SE black sea coast had chariots and ships which could reach the Adriatic in the mid 2nd milennium? [Isn't the Argonaut legend still held to be earlier than the Trojan war?]. All of this relates to the Colchians' having been Egyptian soldiers, who might well have been recruits from up river, perhaps more likely to rebel. Specific evidence about skin is hard to come by, as men who had to take local wives become red in one generation, and eventually yellowish with the passage of centuries , though they would probably have tried to marry each other's daughters to in some way preserve their race. The fact that Strabo found them yellow and sickly several hundred years later would suggest that they also diluted their resistance to malaria through intermarriage, as the Phasis valley was notorious for it's dank subtropical "unhealthy" climate. Turning to language we find that the SW Caucasic languages which occupy the Colchian territory, Mingrelian, Lazian, Kartbelian/Georgian, Ingiloish, Rutulian all have the same plural -be/-pe suffix as do Meroitic, Elamite, and several E & C Sudanic languages (it spread to Nubian and Beja as a -b plural for gentilics). It also appears in Cushitic languages; indeed A Zaborski opines that both probably go back to proto-Afroasiatic. So since -k and -g plurals are more typical of Nilo-Saharan, this suffix may have spread to the Nile folks from Cushitic. [I will put a quote and the rest of this with the refs in a separate post because it relates more to the Ninuwa argument than to Colchis/Thera.] [Most of the Georgian is coming from Howard Aronson, Georgian, A Reading Grammar, my transcriptions from the Georgian letters.] Georgian also shares a genitive suffix -s with Meroitic, which falls in the same place in relation to the plural suffix in both languages, -ebis. They also have the same -ili/-el- suffix of derivation [as does Khattic]. Georgian also has some traits relating to toponyms which to me seem reminiscent of Egyptian: a suffix -et- is added to ethnic nouns to form the name of the land or country: Rusi/Russian/ Ruseti/Russia. Indoeli/Indian Indoeti/ India. Georgian also uses a prefix Sa- on ethnic names to form to indicate "land of" much as Egyptians used Ta as in Ta Seti/Nubia, inhabited by Setyu: Kartveli/Georgian Sa-kartvelo/Georgia; Prangi/ French Sa-prangeti/ France.(Of course it does not mean "land" today, it is considered a formative circumfix [?]for making adjectives.) Like all the other non-Semitic, non-IE langs of the ANE and Meroitic and most non-Af-As African languages, the SW Cauc langs have no gender. For some vocabulary see Georgian cer, Meroitic sor, Egyptian shr / all meaning to write. Georgian mze/sun, Meroitic Mash/ the sun god. The Georgian emperor in the 13th c AD was entitled the Kyr, Meroitic qr/kr king. NE Caucasic: Andi: mitche/young, mitchi/small. NW Cauc: Abaze: mez/youth, child. Meroitic: mete/ young, small. Dinka/Jiang: meth: child; Lwo: maten/little. The surviving Georgian word for man is kachi/ or katsi, which through a>o change becomes Mingrelian: kodji/man. If these stem from a word for "man" in some now lost language of the Nile, it might relate to the origin of the name Kush/Kash [which acc. to Arkell surrived in Dar Fur as Kaj]. cf. the remnant Uduk (E. Sudanic, east of Meroe area now on slopes of plateau) whose word for man is kuas/kwat. cf. Udi, a Caucasion language. In Nera/Barya, which is related to Nubian, ko/man, kuti/ kotade/people,crowd which could have something to do with the name Kutaisi as the capital of this "Kytaean land." Also note Georgian eri/people, nation; Mahass Nubian iri/men, people. Remember, Sesostris' soldiers, like Uni's , would most likely have come from several different language groups...There are many words which I have omitted because they also appear in Hurrian or Khattic, and it is now quite fashionable to claim, I am sure correctly, that they have posterity in modern Caucasic. But since I see Nilo-Dravidian connections in all three groups to me this is all part of the big picture. I have omitted such words for this reason, because once people find a proximate relative, they are not interested in great-grandfather, especially if he's black. The name Colchian most likely derives from the Georgian word for "people, folk", xalxi. Western Georgia is today called Kolxeti --note that it's in the direction of the a>o folks, the Lazi and Mingrelian, who being on the sub-tropical littoral, would have been encountered first. D. Laing (The Georgians, p 20) points out that prior to the Seljuk invasions this western Pontic region played a central role in the cultural, linguistic and ethnic dvpment of the Georgian nation. (p 23): During the Arab domnation of Caucasia, many Georgian speakers emigrated west over the Surami pass into ancient Colchis, driving a wedge across the Rioni delta, cutting off the Mingrelians from the cognate Laz population to the south. Note that Abkhazian, on the coast north of Colchis (and a member of NW Caucasic rather than SW Caucasic) has agu/man, as does Central Sudanic Lugbara, whose plural in Lugbara is Agupi. [Agupti, anyone?!] The Abkhazians have a legendary hero Abrskil, who was famous for "fighting the blue-eyed devil" acc to Laing (p.70-1). cf Meroitic abrsl, an unexplained form of the word abr/ man. It is also interesting that Meroitic had an honorary suffix -qo sometimes attached to royal and other names. Klaproth (1836, p12) reports that two Caucasian princes of the Jane at war with the Russians were called Saneko and Medawoko. [all names rife with ancient Nubian echoes! cf the Dinka/Jiang and the Jwnw]. A thought linking Caucasian Iberia with Spanish Iberia through an Ethiopian population named abr/man as in Adiabari, Megabari as Meroitic tribes: the Ethiopian dynasty of Cadiz supposed to have been founded by Tirhaka when he visited the Gates of Hercules at Gibraltar (Isidore of Seville). I have always wondered about Spanish Hay/ there is, there are... Georgian has ai/ there is , there are, here is, here are. Note Georgian tsinapari/ ancestor, and Georgian megali/ high, tall. Just one more odd thought to be really off the wall: when I went to my Greek lexikon to check Hekate, the book fell open to the page with Laxeh ? meaning "soft, woolly hair". Aren't the Lakhs a nation of Caucasic speakers? There is also a language in which lazi means "woolly haired"; I have misplaced my ref for now. I have been meaning to ask about the etymology of Alalakh since my notes say that the town was also called Alkhalkha and Atchana...And we might as well throw in the Leleges who were helots of the Carians? I had already stumbled on the fact that Nubian: Kenuzi:gurgur and Dongolawi:gurgud mean woolly Negro hair. Kenuzi also has the word gutti-gutti meaning "tightly curled hair". [the G/Kutians from the mountains who look like monkeys in the Curse of Agade?] The Georgians do not accept the name Gurj/Georgia, it was imposed on them by the Arabs. Their name is Kartb/veli, their language Kartuli. What is Gurj supposed to mean? [cf also Proto-E. Cushitic *gur/ger/man; in the early literature on the Turks in this area one often encounters people called Ghurs, who are insultingly referred to as being of "low physical type". The early literature on the Kurds has similar references to "dark, ugly types" in contrast to the fair ones, etc]. E. Adams ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 02 Jan 1999 22:38:23 -0500 From: nyokabi@kingcon.com Subject: ane Ninuwa & Linear A As I was rereading something I wrote years ago called "Ethiopian version" looking for Colchian stuff which is not piled in my unpacked boxes, I stumbled on the following, which seems relevant to the discussion on - -uwa suffixes in the ANE. "Acc to A. Zaborski plural suffixes in -uba>-uwa go all the way back to proto-Afro-Asiatic, the mythical language which scholars have invented as the parent of all the Af-As languages. One might as well call it the language of Noah! Of the six branches of Af-As, the one which manifests the form of this suffix which most closely approximates to the -opa we are searching for, is, quite appropriately, Cushitic. Zaborski traces the suffix -uwa to Proto-Cushitic. It occurs in Sidamo and Hadiya and Darasa of SW Ethiopia, as well as in Saho, Afar, Oromo, and Somali in E Eth and the Horn. The suffix -uwa also appears in C Cushitic (in Bilin, Kwara, and Hamta)in S Cushitic (Iraqw) and in anc Egyptian in attenuated form -w. It appears in Chadic (Hausa) as -uwa or -awa and is impt thruout the family." The ref is Zaborski, "The Semitic External Plural in an Afroasiatic Perspective" which seems to be from Anthropological Linguistics 3/6,1976. Zaborski's prefatory blurb says: "Vocalic lengthening is not to be reconstructed as a plural marker in Afroasiatic. Rather there was -w that assimilated in Semitic to the preceding vowel. This -w ~ -uwa is well attested in the various branches of Afroasiatic." On p. 4 he discusses the -uwa suffix in E Cushitic: Sidamo: anna/father pl. annuwa/; rodo/brother/pl. roduwa/ . Darasa: dayo/brother/pl. dayuwa. Saho: bar/night/pl. baruwa. He then footnotes an MS by Hudson (?) , who finds that in Sidamo, "nouns that have /b/ in any position in the stem often have -bba in the plural. buuda 'horn' pl. buudubba, sombo 'lung' pl. sombubba...this suggests a reconstructed plural suffix -uba, which ordinarily gave - -uwa except where stems with /b/ encouraged retention of the suffix which was then geminated." Zaborski adds, "Yet an original w could also have been assimilated to the b of the stem." I guess they are arguing about which came first the -uba or the -uwa. It would be interesting to check the ANE and see if there are any suffixes in -buwa, or if -bubba/-buba is more common. E. Adams PS While looking for other stuff I stumbled on three corrections, or improvements to my Tehenu/Danaeus argument. I had said Meroitic tino/ west, but acc to P. Behrens in SUGIA 3, 1981, it is ten~ke/teneke [ that squiggle is supposed to be on top of the n!], which does resemble the Rhodian Tenages. And I had used an older explanation of Hatia in Tehenu as "princes/chiefs of Tehenu", whereas W. Helck in LdA under Hatia simply gives them as the "Bewohner", inhabitants of Tehenu. And in a Carlton Hodges article in Anthropological Linguistics, 10,3, 19??, I found Proto Af-As: *dan; Akkadian dananu/ strength, force, violence. Eg dn'/ hold back, restrain, dam (water)revet (earthen banks). Wasn't Danaeus credited with introducing irrigation to Greece? ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1999 #2 ************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html