The axis mundi (also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar, columna cerului, center of the world, world tree), in religion or mythology, is the world center or the connection between Heaven and Earth.

As the celestial pole and geographic pole, it expresses a point of connection between sky and earth where the four compass directions meet. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms.

Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The spot functions as the omphalos (navel), the world’s point of beginning.

The image is mostly viewed as feminine, as it relates to the center of the earth (perhaps like an umbilical providing nourishment). The image appears in religious and secular contexts.

It may have the form of a natural object (a mountain, a tree, a vine, a stalk, a column of smoke or fire) or a product of human manufacture (a staff, a tower, a ladder, a staircase, a maypole, a cross, a steeple, a rope, a totem pole, a pillar, a spire). Its proximity to heaven may carry implications that are chiefly religious (pagoda, temple mount, minaret, church) or secular (obelisk, lighthouse, rocket, skyscraper).

The axis mundi symbol may be found in cultures utilizing shamanic practices or animist belief systems, in major world religions, and in technologically advanced “urban centers”. In Mircea Eliade’s opinion, “Every Microcosm, every inhabited region, has a Centre; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all.” The axis mundi is often associated with mandalas.

Axis mundi

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno or Bat’ko (“Father”) Makhno (October 26, 1888 (N.S.November 8) – July 6, 1934) was a Ukrainian anarcho-communist revolutionary and the commander of an independent anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War.

As commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, more commonly referred to as the Makhnovshchina, Makhno led a guerrilla campaign during the Russian Civil War.

Makhno fought all factions that sought to impose any external authority over southern Ukraine, battling in succession the Ukrainian Nationalists, the Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian occupation, the Hetmanate Republic, the White Army, the Red Army, and other smaller forces led by Ukrainian atamans.

Makhno and his movement repeatedly attempted to reorganize life in the Gulai-Polye region along anarchist-communist lines, however, the disruptions of the civil war precluded any long term social experiments.

Although Makhno considered the Bolsheviks a threat to the development of an anarchist Free Territory within Ukraine, he twice entered into military alliances with them to defeat the White Army.

In the aftermath of the White Army’s final defeat in November 1920, the Bolsheviks initiated a military campaign against Makhno, which concluded with his escape across the Romanian border in August 1921. After a series of imprisonments and escapes, Makhno finally settled in Paris with his wife Galina and daughter Yelena. In exile Makhno wrote three volumes of memoirs.

He is also credited as the inventor of the tachanka, a horse-drawn platform mounting a heavy machine gun. He died in exile at the age of 45 from tuberculosis-related causes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that at least 80 percent of the members of the first Soviet government were Jewish  guided by false ideological considerations.

According to the official transcription of Putin’s speech at the museum, he went on to say that the politicians on the predominantly Jewish Soviet government “were guided by false ideological considerations and supported the arrest and repression of Jews, Russian Orthodox Christians, Muslims and members of other faiths. They grouped everyone into the same category.”

Widely seen as the first Soviet government, the Council of People’s Commissars was formed in 1917 and comprised 16 leaders, including chairman Vladimir Lenin, foreign affairs chief Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, who was in charge of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities. Thankfully, those ideological goggles and faulty ideological perceptions collapsed.

Putin: First Soviet government was mostly Jewish

Creation Myths of the World: Parts I-II

Hurrian mythology

The Hurrian culture made a great impact on the religion of the Hittites. From the Hurrian cult centre at Kummanni in Kizzuwatna Hurrian religion spread to the Hittite people. Syncretism merged the Old Hittite and Hurrian religions.

Hurrian religion spread to Syria, where Baal became the counterpart of Teshub. The later kingdom of Urartu also venerated gods of Hurrian origin. The Hurrian religion, in different forms, influenced the entire ancient Near East, except ancient Egypt and southern Mesopotamia.

Hurrian cylinder seals often depict mythological creatures such as winged humans or animals, dragons and other monsters. The interpretation of these depictions of gods and demons is uncertain. They may have been both protective and evil spirits. Some is reminiscent of the Assyrian shedu.

The Hurrian gods do not appear to have had particular “home temples”, like in the Mesopotamian religion or Ancient Egyptian religion. Some important cult centres were Kummanni in Kizzuwatna, and Hittite Yazilikaya.

Harran was at least later a religious centre for the moon god, and Shauskha had an important temple in Nineve, when the city was under Hurrian rule. A temple of Nergal was built in Urkesh in the late third millennium BCE. The town of Kahat was a religious centre in the kingdom of Mitanni.

The Hurrian myth “The Songs of Ullikummi”, preserved among the Hittites, is a parallel to Hesiod’s Theogony; the castration of Uranus by Cronus may be derived from the castration of Anu by Kumarbi, while Zeus’s overthrow of Cronus and Cronus’s regurgitation of the swallowed gods is like the Hurrian myth of Teshub and Kumarbi.

Kumarbi is the chief god of the Hurrians. He is the son of Anu (the sky), and father of the storm-god Teshub. He was identified by the Hurrians with Sumerian Enlil, and by the Ugaritians with El.

Kumarbi is known from a number of mythological Hittite texts, sometimes summarized under the term “Kumarbi Cycle”. These texts notably include the myth of The Kingship in Heaven (also known as the Song of Kumarbi, or the “Hittite Theogony”, CTH 344), the Song of Ullikummi (CTH 345), the Kingship of the God KAL (CTH 343), the Myth of the dragon Hedammu (CTH 348), the Song of Silver (CTH 364).

The Song of Kumarbi or Kingship in Heaven is the title given to a Hittite version of the Hurrian Kumarbi myth, dating to the 14th or 13th century BC. It is preserved in three tablets, but only a small fraction of the text is legible.

The song relates that Alalu was overthrown by Anu who was in turn overthrown by Kumarbi. When Anu tried to escape, Kumarbi bit off his genitals and spat out three new gods. In the text Anu tells his son that he is now pregnant with the Teshub, Tigris, and Tašmišu.

Upon hearing this Kumarbi spit the semen upon the ground and it became impregnated with two children. Kumarbi is cut open to deliver Tešub. Together, Anu and Teshub depose Kumarbi.

In another version of the Kingship in Heaven, the three gods, Alalu, Anu, and Kumarbi, rule heaven, each serving the one who precedes him in the nine-year reign. It is Kumarbi’s son Tešub, the Weather-God, who begins to conspire to overthrow his father.

From the first publication of the Kingship in Heaven tablets scholars have pointed out the similarities between the Hurrian creation myth and the story from Greek mythology of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus.

It has been argued that the worship of Attis drew on Hurrian myth. The Phrygian goddess Cybele (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya “Kubeleyan Mother”, perhaps “Mountain Mother”; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Kybele, Kybebe, Kybelis), originally an Anatolian mother goddess, would then be the counterpart of the Hurrian goddess Hebat, the mother goddess of the Hurrians, known as “the mother of all living”. She is also a Queen of the deities.

In the Hurrian language Hepa is the most likely pronunciation of the name of the goddess. In modern literature the sound /h/ in cuneiform sometimes is transliterated as kh. During Aramaean times Hebat also appears to have become identified with the goddess Hawwah, or Eve.

Hebat was venerated all over the ancient Near East. Her name appears in many theophoric personal names. A king of Jerusalem mentioned in the Amarna letters was named Abdi-Heba, possibly meaning “Servant of Hebat”.

Cybele was Phrygia’s only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.

Cybele may have evolved from an Anatolian Mother Goddess of a type found at the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük (in the Konya region), dated to the 6th millennium BCE, where the statue of a pregnant goddess seated on a lion throne was found in a granary. This corpulent, fertile Mother Goddess appears to be giving birth on her throne, which has two feline-headed hand rests

Sumerian mythology

In Sumerian mythology, Anu (also An; from Sumerian An, “sky, heaven”) was a sky-god, the god of heaven, lord of constellations, king of gods, spirits and demons, and dwelt in the highest heavenly regions. It was believed that he had the power to judge those who had committed crimes, and that he had created the stars as soldiers to destroy the wicked. His attribute was the royal tiara. His attendant and minister of state was the god Ilabrat.

He was one of the oldest gods in the Sumerian pantheon and part of a triad including Enlil (god of the air) and Enki (god of water). He was called Anu by the later Akkadians in Babylonian culture. By virtue of being the first figure in a triad consisting of Anu, Enlil, and Enki (also known as Ea), Anu came to be regarded as the father and at first, king of the gods.

Anu is so prominently associated with the E-anna temple in the city of Uruk (biblical Erech) in southern Babylonia that there are good reasons for believing this place to be the original seat of the Anu cult. If this is correct, then the goddess Inanna (or Ishtar) of Uruk may at one time have been his consort.

Uraš or Urash, in Sumerian mythology is a goddess of earth, and one of the consorts of the sky god Anu. However, Uras may only have been another name for Antum, Anu’s wife. The name Uras even became applied to Anu himself, and acquired the meaning “heaven”. Ninurta also was apparently called Uras in later times. She is the mother of the goddess Ninsun and a grandmother of the hero Gilgamesh.

In the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, Anshar (also spelled Anshur), which means “sky pivot” or “sky axle”, is a sky god. He is the husband of his sister Kishar. They might both represent heaven (an) and earth (ki). Both are the second generation of gods; their parents being the serpents Lahmu and Lahamu and grandparents Tiamat and Abzu. They, in turn, are the parents of Anu, another sky god, and Ki, is the sign for “earth”. In later Akkadian, Enlil is the son of Anshar and Kishar.

The Enuma Elish begins: When above the heavens did not yet exist nor the earth below, Apsu the freshwater ocean was there, the first, the begetter, and Tiamat, the saltwater sea, she who bore them all; they were still mixing their waters, and no pasture land had yet been formed, nor even a reed marsh…

In Mesopotamian Religion (Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian and Babylonian), Tiamat is a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû (the god of fresh water) to produce younger gods. She is “Ummu-Hubur who formed all things”. She was the “shining” personification of salt water who roared and smote in the chaos of original creation.

Thorkild Jacobsen and Walter Burkert both argue for a connection with the Akkadian word for sea, tâmtu, following an early form, ti’amtum. Tiamat also has been claimed to be cognate with Northwest Semitic tehom (תהום) (the deeps, abyss), in the Book of Genesis 1:2.

Tiamat was later known as Thalattē (as a variant of thalassa, the Greek word for “sea”) in the Hellenistic Babylonian Berossus’ first volume of universal history.

It is thought that the name of Tiamat was dropped in secondary translations of the original religious texts (written in the East Semitic Akkadian language) because some Akkadian copyists of Enûma Elish substituted the ordinary word for “sea” for Tiamat, since the two names had become essentially the same due to association.

Although there are no early precedents for it, some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon. The Enûma Elish specifically states that Tiamat did give birth to dragons and serpents, but they are included among a larger and more general list of monsters including scorpion men and merpeople, none of which imply that any of the children resemble the mother or are even limited to aquatic creatures.

In the Enûma Elish her physical description includes a tail, a thigh, “lower parts” (which shake together), a belly, an udder, ribs, a neck, a head, a skull, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, and lips. She has insides (possibly “entrails”), a heart, arteries, and blood.

It is suggested that there are two parts to the Tiamat mythos, the first in which Tiamat is ‘creatrix’, through a “Sacred marriage” between salt and fresh water, peacefully creating the cosmos through successive generations. In the second “Chaoskampf” Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos.

The Babylonian epic Enuma Elish is named for its incipit: “When above” the heavens did not yet exist nor the earth below, Apsu the freshwater ocean was there, “the first, the begetter”, and Tiamat, the saltwater sea, “she who bore them all”; they were “mixing their waters”.

It is thought that female deities are older than male ones in Mesopotamia and Tiamat may have begun as part of the cult of Nammu, a female principle of a watery creative force, with equally strong connections to the underworld, which predates the appearance of Ea-Enki.

Harriet Crawford finds this “mixing of the waters” to be a natural feature of the middle Persian Gulf, where fresh waters from the Arabian aquifer mix and mingle with the salt waters of the sea.

This characteristic is especially true of the region of Bahrain, whose name in Arabic means “two seas”, and which is thought to be the site of Dilmun, the original site of the Sumerian creation beliefs. The difference in density of salt and fresh water drives a perceptible separation.

In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, she gives birth to the first generation of deities, the elder deities Lahmu and Lahamu (masc. the “hairy”), a title given to the gatekeepers at Enki’s Abzu/E’engurra-temple in Eridu.

Lahmu and Lahamu, in turn, were the parents of the ‘ends’ of the heavens (Anshar, from an = heaven, shár = horizon, end) and the earth (Kishar); Anshar and Kishar were considered to meet at the horizon, becoming, thereby, the parents of Anu (Heaven) and Ki (Earth).

In the myth recorded on cuneiform tablets, the deity Enki (later Ea) believed correctly that Apsu, upset with the chaos they created, was planning to murder the younger deities; and so captured him, holding him prisoner beneath his temple the E-Abzu. This angered Kingu, their son, who reported the event to Tiamat, whereupon she fashioned eleven monsters to battle the deities in order to avenge Apsu’s death.

Tiamat possessed the Tablets of Destiny and in the primordial battle she gave them to Kingu, also spelled Qingu, meaning “unskilled laborer,” a god in Babylonian mythology, the deity she had chosen as her lover and the leader of her host, and who also were one of her children. She placed him as the general of her army.

The deities gathered in terror, but Anu, (replaced later, first by Enlil and, in the late version that has survived after the First Dynasty of Babylon, by Marduk, the son of Ea), first extracting a promise that he would be revered as “king of the gods”, overcame her, armed with the arrows of the winds, a net, a club, and an invincible spear.

The heavens and the earth are formed from her divided body. Slicing Tiamat in half, he made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the source of the Tigris and the Euphrates, her tail became the Milky Way.

With the approval of the elder deities, he took from Kingu the Tablets of Destiny, installing himself as the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Kingu was captured and later was slain: his red blood mixed with the red clay of the Earth would make the body of humankind, created to act as the servant of the younger Igigi deities.

According to one traditional story, Marduk mixed Kingu’s blood with earth and used the clay to mold the first human beings. Kingu then went to live in the underworld kingdom of Ereshkigal, along with the other deities who had sided with Tiamat.

The principal theme of the epic is the justified elevation of Marduk to command over all the deities. “It has long been realized that the Marduk epic, for all its local coloring and probable elaboration by the Babylonian theologians, reflects in substance older Sumerian material,” American Assyriologist E. A. Speiser remarked in 1942 adding “The exact Sumerian prototype, however, has not turned up so far.”

Without corroboration in surviving texts, this surmise that the Babylonian version of the story is based upon a modified version of an older epic, in which Enlil, not Marduk, was the god who slew Tiamat, is more recently dismissed as “distinctly improbable”, in fact, Marduk has no precise Sumerian prototype.

It is generally accepted amongst modern Assyriologists that the Enûma Elish – the Babylonian creation epic to which this mythological strand is attributed – has been written as political and religious propaganda rather than reflecting a Sumerian tradition; the dating of the epic is not completely clear, but judging from the mythological topics covered and the cuneiform versions discovered thus far, it is likely to date it to the 15th century BCE.

Egyptian mythology

Hathor, along with the goddess Nut, the goddess of the sky or visible daytime and nightly firmament, in the Ennead of Egyptian mythology, was associated with the Milky Way during the third millennium B.C. when, during the fall and spring equinoxes, it aligned over and touched the earth where the sun rose and fell.

The four legs of the celestial cow represented Nut or Hathor could, in one account, be seen as the pillars on which the sky was supported with the stars on their bellies constituting the Milky Way on which the solar barque of Ra, representing the sun, sailed.

A sacred symbol of Nut was the ladder, used by Osiris to enter her heavenly skies. This ladder-symbol was called maqet and was placed in tombs to protect the deceased, and to invoke the aid of the deity of the dead. Nut and her brother, Geb, may be considered enigmas in the world of mythology.

In direct contrast to most other mythologies which usually develop a sky father associated with an Earth mother (or Mother Nature), she personified the sky and he the Earth.

Nut appears in the creation myth of Heliopolis which involves several goddesses who play important roles: Tefnut (Tefenet) is a personification of moisture, who mated with Shu (Air) and then gave birth to Sky as the goddess Nut, who mated with her brother Earth, as Geb.

Geb was the Egyptian god of the Earth and a member of the Ennead of Heliopolis. It was believed in ancient Egypt that Geb’s laughter were earthquakes and that he allowed crops to grow.

The name was pronounced as such from the Greek period onward and was formerly erroneously read as Seb or as Keb. The original Egyptian was perhaps “Gebeb”/”Kebeb”. It was spelled with either initial -g- (all periods), or with -k-point (gj).

In mythology, Geb also often occurs as a primeval divine king of Egypt from whom his son Osiris and his grandson Horus inherited the land after many contendings with the disruptive god Set, brother and killer of Osiris.

Geb could also be regarded as personified fertile earth and barren desert, the latter containing the dead or setting them free from their tombs, metaphorically described as “Geb opening his jaws”, or imprisoning those there not worthy to go to the fertile North-Eastern heavenly Field of Reeds.

Shu (meaning “emptiness” and “he who rises up”) was one of the primordial gods in Egyptian mythology, a personification of air, one of the Ennead of Heliopolis. He was created by Atum, his father, and Iusaaset, his mother, in the city of Heliopolis. With his sister Tefnut (moisture), he was the father of Nut and Geb.

His daughter, Nut, was the sky goddess whom he held over the Earth (Geb), separating the two. The Egyptians believed that if Shu didn’t hold his son and daughter (the god of the earth and the goddess of the sky) apart there would be no way life could be created.

As the air, Shu was considered to be cooling, and thus calming, influence, and pacifier. Due to the association with air, calm, and thus Ma’at (truth, justice and order), Shu was portrayed in art as wearing an ostrich feather.

Shu was seen with between one and four feathers. The ostrich feather was symbolic of light and emptiness. Fog and clouds were also Shu’s elements and they were often called his bones. Because of his position between the sky and earth, he was also known as the wind.

Tefnut (Tefenet) is a goddess of moisture, moist air, dew and rain in Ancient Egyptian religion. She is the sister and consort of the air god Shu and the mother of Geb and Nut.

Literally translating as “That Water”, the name Tefnut has been linked to the verb ‘tfn’ meaning ‘to spit’ and versions of the creation myth say that Ra (or Atum) spat her out and her name was written as a mouth spitting in late texts.

Atum (/ɑ-tum/), sometimes rendered as Atem or Tem, is an important deity in Egyptian mythology. Atum is one of the most important and frequently mentioned deities from earliest times, as evidenced by his prominence in the Pyramid Texts, where he is portrayed as both a creator and father to the king.

Atum’s name is thought to be derived from the word tem which means to complete or finish. Thus he has been interpreted as being the ‘complete one’ and also the finisher of the world, which he returns to watery chaos at the end of the creative cycle. As creator he was seen as the underlying substance of the world, the deities and all things being made of his flesh or alternatively being his ka.

In the Heliopolitan creation myth, Atum was considered to be the first god, having created himself, sitting on a mound (benben) (or identified with the mound itself), from the primordial waters (Nu). Early myths state that Atum created the god Shu and goddess Tefnut by spitting them out of his mouth.

To explain how Atum did this, the myth uses the metaphor of masturbation, with the hand he used in this act representing the female principle inherent within him. Other interpretations state that he has made union with his shadow.

In the Old Kingdom the Egyptians believed that Atum lifted the dead king’s soul from his pyramid to the starry heavens. He was also a solar deity, associated with the primary sun god Ra. Atum was linked specifically with the evening sun, while Ra or the closely linked god Khepri were connected with the sun at morning and midday.

Iusaset (“the great one who comes forth”) or Iusaas is the name of a primal goddess in Ancient Egyptian religion. Many alternative spellings of her name include Iusaaset, Juesaes, Ausaas, and Jusas, as well as in Greek Saosis.

She also is described as “the grandmother of all of the deities”. This allusion is without any reference to a grandfather, so there might have been a very early, but now lost, myth with parthenogenesis as the means of the birth of the deities from the region where her cult arose near the delta of the Nile.

Eridu/NUN.KI: Enki/Nun

Eridu (Cuneiform: NUN.KI; Sumerian: eridu; Akkadian: irîtu) is an ancient Sumerian city in what is now Tell Abu Shahrain, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq. It was long considered the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia.

In Sumerian mythology, Eridu was the home of the Abzu temple of the god Enki, the Sumerian counterpart of the Akkadian water-god Ea. He came to share, according to the later cosmology, with Anu and Enlil, the rule of the cosmos. His kingdom was the waters that surrounded the World and lay below it (Sumerian ab=water; zu=far).

The stories of Inanna, goddess of Uruk, describe how she had to go to Eridu in order to receive the gifts of civilization. At first Enki, the god of Eridu attempted to retrieve these sources of his power, but later willingly accepted that Uruk now was the centre of the land. This seems to be a mythical reference to the transfer of power northward.

Babylonian texts also talk of the creation of Eridu by the god Marduk as the first city, “the holy city, the dwelling of their [the other gods] delight”. In the court of Assyria, special physicians trained in the ancient lore of Eridu, far to the south, foretold the course of sickness from signs and portents on the patient’s body, and offered the appropriate incantations and magical resources as cures.

Nu (“watery one”), also called Nun (“inert one”) is the deification of the primordial watery abyss in Egyptian mythology. In the Ogdoad cosmogony, the word nu means “abyss”.

The Ancient Egyptians envisaged the oceanic abyss of the Nun as surrounding a bubble in which the sphere of life is encapsulated, representing the deepest mystery of their cosmogony.

In Ancient Egyptian creation accounts the original mound of land comes forth from the waters of the Nun. The Nun is the source of all that appears in a differentiated world, encompassing all aspects of divine and earthly existence. In the Ennead cosmogony Nun is perceived as transcendent at the point of creation alongside Atum the creator god.

Nu was shown usually as male but also had aspects that could be represented as female or male. Nunet (also spelt Naunet) is the female aspect, which is the name Nu with a female gender ending. The male aspect, Nun, is written with a male gender ending.

As with the primordial concepts of the Ogdoad, Nu’s male aspect was depicted as a frog, or a frog-headed man. In Ancient Egyptian art, Nun also appears as a bearded man, with blue-green skin, representing water. Naunet is represented as a snake or snake-headed woman.

Beginning with the Middle Kingdom Nun is described as “the Father of the Gods” and he is depicted on temple walls throughout the rest of Ancient Egyptian religious history.

The Ogdoad includes with Naunet and Nun, Amaunet and Amun, Hauhet and Heh, and Kauket with Kuk. Like the other Ogdoad deities, Nu did not have temples or any center of worship. Even so, Nu was sometimes represented by a sacred lake, or, as at Abydos, by an underground stream.

In the 12th Hour of the Book of Gates Nu is depicted with upraised arms holding a “solar bark” (or barque, a boat). The boat is occupied by eight deities, with the scarab deity Khepri standing in the middle surrounded by the seven other deities.

During the late period when Egypt became occupied the negative aspect of the Nun (chaos) became the dominant perception, reflecting the forces of disorder that were set loose in the country.

Chinese mythology

In Chinese mythology, the goddess Nüwa or Nügua repaired the fallen pillars holding up heaven and later created human beings. The ancient Chinese believed in a square earth and round domelike sky or heavens, which was supported by four or eight giant pillars (cf. Axis mundi), or four mountains reaching from earth to sky.

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“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

― Noam Chomsky

Filed under: Uncategorized

The main haplogroup among the Semites are J1 P58, which is from Van. Chiaroni et al. (2010) found that the greatest genetic diversity of J1 haplotypes was found in eastern Anatolia, near Lake Van in central Kurdistan.

The first J1 men lived in the Late Upper Paleolithic, shortly before the end of the last Ice Age. Like many other successful lineages from the Middle East, J1 is thought to have undergone a major population expansion during the Neolithic period.

Eastern Anatolia and the Zagros mountains are the region where goats and sheep were first domesticated, some 11,000 years ago. Chiaroni et al. estimated that J1-P58 started expanding 9,000 to 10,000 years ago as pastoralists from the Fertile Crescent. Although they did not analyze the other branches, it is most likely that all surviving J1 lineages share the same origin as goat and sheep herders from the Taurus and Zagros mountains.

Kitchen et al. (2009) estimated through a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis that Semitic languages originated in the Levant around 3,750 BCE, during the Early Bronze Age. It evolved into three groups: East Semitic (an extinct branch that comprised Akkadian), Central Semitic (which gave rise to Aramaic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic), and South Semitic (South Arabian and Ethiopian).

Haplogroup J1 Y-DNA

The Kurds as an Northwestern Iranian ethnic group enter the historical record in the medieval period, after the Islamic conquests.

The Kurdish people are believed to be of heterogeneous origins combining a number of earlier tribal or ethnic groups including Median, Lullubi, Guti, Cyrtians, Carduchi. They have also absorbed some elements from Semitic, Turkic and Armenian people.

While various predecessor groups that may have contributed to Kurdish ethnogenesis are of intractable anqituity (the Gutians being a people of the Middle Bronze Age).

The emergence of the Kurds as speakers of an identifiably Northwestern Iranian language (viz. Kurdish) necessarily post-dates the unity of the Northwestern branch. This would correspond to the time following the breakup of the Median Empire in the 6th century BC.

Kurds and Armenians became increasingly distinct, both culturally and politically, as Armenians chose Christianity as their official religion while Kurds, later, chose Islam.

Although most Armenians stayed Christian, some converted to Islam because of the favourable status given to Muslims under Turkish rule.

The Armenians of Vaspurakan who converted to Islam, gradually assimilated into Kurdish culture over time. This is likely to have occurred elsewhere as well, and probably accounts for the comparatively low census of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, as compared to the Middle Ages, alongside other factors, such as selective recording, extermination and migration.

Toward the 11th century the nomadic Turkic tribes from Central Asia moved towards the Middle East and Anatolia and further altered the ethnic mix at the expense of the local populations of Kurds, Armenians, and other natives.

A group of Armenian scientists conducted a study about the origins of the Turkish people in relation to Armenians. Savak Avagian; director of Armenia’s bone marrow bank found that “Turks and Armenians were the two societies throughout the world that were genetically close to each other. Kurds are also in same genetic pool”.

Yes, Yezydies are Kurds, but you should not think that language necessary define genetics etc. Language, etnicity and religion doesn’t always relate to each other. The Kurds was nomads, who used to live in peace with the Armenians, but it changed in the later part of 1800 century.

In the war between Russians and the Turks they became violent etc. The Turks used them against the Armenians. They have been used by different big powers, including the US, in a dirty game for oil and control. The Kurds have also been fighting between themselves. The Kurds now fighting in Turkey and Syria has been cooperating with the Armenians since the genocide.

The Kurds have no where to go if they can’t stay at the Armenian Highland – the only way it can be peace is by cooperation. We have to be aware of the Kurds, because not all of them are good, but cooperation is the way foreward.

Archaeogenetics of the Near East

Iranian peoples

Iranian languages

Northwestern Iranian

Kurdish languages

Kurds

Kurdistan

Origins of the Kurds

History of the Kurdish people

History of the Turkish people

Genetic origins of the Turkish people

Turkification

Demographics of Turkey

Forced conversion to Islam

Armenian–Kurdish relations

100 years – 100 facts

“Most of all I love the Sun. To love the Sun is to love the world, the Earth and everything on it…” Martiros Saryan (28 February 5 May 1972) – Armenian painter, the founder of the Armenian national school of painting. In Armenia people say: Martiros Saryan drew Armenia, and only then God created it.

Portasar

Portasar (“Navel” in Armenian) or Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill” in Turkish) is an archaeological site at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, approximately 6 km (4 mi) northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa.

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Stumbling block: Greeks offended by Brits lending ancient sculpture to Russia

The reclining marble sculpture of the river god Ilissos, which 25 centuries ago decorated the facade of Greece’s Parthenon temple, has now been moved for the first time in some 200 years – from London’s British Museum to Russia’s Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

The British Museum has ‘secretly’ sent a 2,500 years old Parthenon sculpture to St. Petersburg, where Russia’s Hermitage museum are going to celebrate an anniversary. The move infuriated Greeks, who have long tried to reclaim the ancient piece.

The headless Ilissos, which is considered to be one of the greatest works of ancient Greek art, is part of the so-called Elgin Marbles collection, which the British Museum acquired in the early 19th century. The artifacts were brought to the UK by British diplomat Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, who sold them to the Parliament in 1816, and the collection was then presented to the museum and given the earl’s name.

For decades, the Elgin Marbles have been rocks of offence for Greece and a source of one of the world’s longest-running cultural disputes. With Athens arguing that the art works were removed from their native land illegally, while the country was under Turkish occupation as part of the Ottoman Empire, London says there is no legitimate claim to the statues.

None of Greece’s several high-profile campaigns to have the “stolen” items returned – with UNESCO’s involvement and the recent participation of lawyer and activist Amal Clooney, the wife of actor George Clooney, have ended in Athens’ favor.

The British loan to Russia – with the sculpture having left Britain for the first time ever – only added fuel to the flames, with Greece reacting with fury. Calling the move a “provocation,” Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said the sculpture was part of the country’s history and culture, which “cannot be cut up, borrowed and handed over.”

The minister’s statement also questioned one of the British arguments for keeping the marbles in London and not being moved – for being too fragile. “You see, they can be moved,” head of the New Acropolis museum, Dimitris Pantermalis, told Reuters, expressing hopes that the current loan could demonstrate the collection could one day be displayed in Greece.

Hasan Cemal

Djemal Pasha was an Ottoman military leader and one-third of the military triumvirate known as the Three Pashas that ruled the Ottoman Empire during World War I , and one of the top three Turkish government organizers of the Armenian Genocide and the Assyrian genocide.

A military court in Turkey accused Djemal of persecuting Arab subjects of the Empire, and sentenced him to death in absentia; despite this, the courts were considered a travesty of justice by the Allied Powers. Later, Djemal went to Central Asia, where he worked on modernisation of the Afghan army.

Due to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, Djemal travelled to Tbilisi where he was assassinated, together with his secretary, on 21 July 1922 by Stepan Dzaghigian, Artashes Gevorgyan, and Petros Ter Poghosyan, Armenians, as part of Operation Nemesis, in retribution for his role in the Armenian Genocide and the First World War. Ahmed Djemal’s remains were brought to Erzurum and buried there.

Hasan Cemal (born 1944 in Istanbul, Turkey), the grandson of Djemal Pasha, will on December 11, 2014, present his new book “1915: The Armenian Genocide” in Yerevan. In his book he highlighted his personal experience of going from denial to the full recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

A prominent Turkish journalist and writer, Cemal began working for the weekly Hakkı Devrim in 1969 and soon thereafter, he became an Ankara representative of the Cumhuriyet newspaper.

Between the years 1981 and 1992, he was the chief editor of the Cumhuriyet newspaper. He resigned in January 1992 in a dispute over editorial policy: “I tried to widen the spectrum, to keep the balance. But they (old-guard intellectuals) always resisted, calling us plotters, tools of big business and the United States”. He became the editor of the Sabah newspaper in May 1992, remaining in the position until 1998. From 1998 he worked for Milliyet.

He has extensively covered the Kurdish issue and has been criticized by the Turkish government for his publications. During the heightened tensions between the PKK and the Turkish government, Cemal would be noted for conducting interviews with notable PKK leaders such as Abdullah Öcalan and Murat Karayilan.

In 2013 the Milliyet newspaper he wrote for suspended him for two weeks after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had criticised his article supporting Milliyets publication of minutes of a parliamentary visit to Öcalan. When Milliyet then refused to publish his returning column, he resigned.

Cemal was initially a denier of the Armenian Genocide, but later, after he traveled to Armenia and visited the Armenian Genocide memorial, he become known for acknowledging and apologizing for the Armenian Genocide, a crime which was perpetrated in part by his grandfather and his colleagues. He also has insisted that the Turkish government should also apologize to the Armenians for the Armenian Genocide.

His 2012 book on the subject (written in response to the 2007 assassination of his friend Hrant Dink) is titled 1915: Ermeni Soykırımı (English: 1915: Armenian Genocide). The book became a bestseller in Turkey. He remarked in his book: “To deny the Genocide would mean to be an accomplice in this crime against humanity.”

The book highlights his “personal transformation” and his experiences in Armenia. While he was in Armenia, he had an opportunity to meet and have lunch with Armen Gevorkyan, the grandson of Artashes Gevorgyan, the man who assassinated his grandfather Djemal Pasha in 1922.

In 2008, after a visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Cemal left a note in the commemorative book, stating that the denial of the 1915 Armenian Genocide by the present Turkish government and all those that do, indicates complicity in this ultimate crime against humanity.

US and Israel: Partners in High Crimes Against Peace

UN Peacekeepers Observe IDF Interacting With Al Nusra in Golan

Syrian FM: Israel ‘Secretly’ Behind Al-Nusra

Regular contact between Israel and Syrian rebels

Israeli Hospital Treating Wounded Syrian Rebels

Sir John Baggot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha, was one of the modern Mideast’s most colorful and romantic figures. He and ‘Chinese’ Gordon of Khartoum were the last of the great British imperial officers.

Seconded by Britain to its protectorate, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Glubb built up its small Bedouin army, the Arab Legion, into the Arab world’s finest military force.

Glubb’s Arab Legion would likely have defeated Israel’s forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War had Britain and Jordan’s double-dealing king Abdullah not blocked the Legion’s advance, as Glubb Pasha bitterly recalled in his memoires.

When asked which of his many medals and honors he valued most, Glubb surprisingly replied , “Defender of the Shepherds of Iraq, ” This obscure award was conferred upon Glubb by the King of Iraq when Sir John commanded the Iraq Border Constabulary during the 1930’s.

Glubb Pasha and his men had waged a long campaign against the Ikhwan of Saudi Arabia. The Ikhwan (Brotherhood) was a collection of fanatical Saudi tribesmen imbued with the puritan desert creed of Wahabism. They saw all non-Wahabi Muslims as infidels (kufr), fair game to be robbed or killed. Even the king of Saudi Arabia failed to control the marauding Ikhwan.

Eight decades later, the Ikhwan is back, this time with heavy weapons. Instead of camels and horses, its men are riding Toyota Land Cruisers and American Humvees captured from Iraq’s puppet army. The Ikhwan in Syria and Iraq now calls itself, the Islamic State.

There is nothing Islamic about the Islamic State, or ISIS. It is not a state. What we are seeing is the recrudescence of the fanatical Wahabi movement from Saudi Arabia combined with a bizarre modern form of violent Arab anarchism and nihilism embraced by bitter, marginalized young men from the Mideast and Europe who have too much testosterone, too little sense, and deep anger from being discriminated against in Europe. They are Europe’s forgotten underclass among whom unemployment is over 60% and drug dealing endemic.

ISIS is also pure blowback from western imperial bungling in the Mideast. The fanatical group was formed and armed in Jordan by CIA, British, French and Turkish intelligence, and funded by Saudi Arabia.

ISIS, in Washington’s thinking, was supposed to be composed of “moderates,” a short-lived, easily controlled force used to overthrow Syria’s government, which had been marked for death by the western powers for refusing to turn against ally Iran.

As often in the past, the Saudis sought to use militants, in this latest case ISIS, as a tool to vent revolution away from their borders. The Saudis contribution to ISIS was arms, cash and Wahabi fanaticism. Ironically, while the world recoiled in horror at ISIS beheadings, its Saudi patrons cut off the heads of 27 prisoners at the same time – without hardly any notice from the western media.

But the ISIS Frankenstein quickly ran out of control and turned on its creators.

The next step in this disaster was to further widen the chasm between Sunni and Shia. Soon after invading Iraq in 2003, the US, in the best imperial divide and conquer policy, made an alliance with the Shia majority against the nation’s Sunni minority. The strategy of using Shia against Sunni was highly successful in keeping US control of Iraq. Washington even quietly aligned itself with Tehran over Iraq.

Shia death squads were unleashed against Sunni regions; Shia torturers used electrical drills and acid to make Sunni prisoners talk and break the anti-US resistance. The US funded and abetted this dirty war, using technique perfected in Central America’s civil wars. Israel provided much useful advice.

Turning Shia against Sunnis “stabilized” Iraq, but it intensified dangerous tensions across the Muslim world all the way east to Pakistan. The long proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iranian intensified.

As religious hatred was being fanned, out of the bowels of the Mideast came the ferocious ISIS claiming to be waging jihad against Shia “unbelievers” and “apostates,” among them the Assad Alawite regime in Syria. ISIS became Saudi Arabia’s weapon of choice. But then ISIS turned on the US-installed regime in Iraq and routed its toy soldiers.

Throw into this witch’s brew the hatred and fury of the Arab world that has been invaded, bombed and exploited by the western colonial powers for a century. The US has committed acts of war against at least ten Muslim nations in our era, killing untold numbers of people and imposing ruthless tyrants as overseers, all under the banner of fighting “terrorism.”

Can there be any doubt that the thirst for revenge is intense? These are the sons of the aborted “Arab Spring” that has withered and died under western and Saudi counter-revolution. They are the cousins of the 9/11 hijackers – who were mostly from Saudi Arabia.

ISIS uses the idiom of Islam, but it’s a bloodthirsty mob of enraged young men who understand little about Islam. Their stupid brutality is stirring up intense Islamophobia everywhere.

Interestingly, there is an ancient Muslim saying (hadith) that warns of the coming of dangerous men with black flags, phony geographical names and long hair.

They appear to have finally arrived. Now it’s up to the Muslim world, not outsiders, to eradicate this lethal plague of 20-something crusaders.

by Eric Margolis

Arta/Asha – the guardians of the truth, the righouss – ARmenia

Marianne (the heroinne of France), Maria (together with Jesus), Maryannu (the Aryan tribe) and Aryan (Armenians) – wellknown by their Phrygian cap, the liberty cap. The ARmenians had cities and countries: Mari, Armi, Aratta, Armanum, Ararat and Armenia. Maryannu is also another name of the state Mitanni, the country of Mitra/Mithra, where the king Mita, who has given the etymology of Mythology, comes from. Everything is connected.

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Transformation

In this I am saying that there is connection in a much higher level than you in the first place should think it is, and that this connections is involved with Armenia and the craddle of civilization – that we need to build a just, free, peaceful and sustainable society before it is too late, which maybe it is allready.

The war in Syria, and what else is going on in the region, is crucual for humanity. We can simply not afford this war, or what else which find place in this region these days. This is written in all our holy scriptures, all religions and philosophy.

We are on the verge to destroy our conditions here on earth, both by killing species of animals, destroying nature, going to all the time more wars, have overproduction and overconsumption and still let people die of hunger and thurst, by making the gap between the rich and the poor all the time greater, by worshipping money and not higher spiritual values, as for example justice, freedom, peace and sustainability.

We simply have to change!

It has to do with the beginning of farming, the domestication of animals, the first Megalithic temples and the first cities, the first religion and mythology, the knowledge of the stars, astrology and astronomy, the beginning of writing and mathematics.

We had a lot of knowledge about how we should live, and this you can see because of different common words and ways to think about things. These words can give an insight about the wisdom people had at that time.

But since we left the Armenian highland, or Eden/Ekur, we have forgotten a lot of this wisdom. The people at Portasar is digged the Megalithic stone temples under hundreds of tons of soil, maybe because of a purpose. Maybe they taught that developing this kind of civilization could become our destiny. But it was too late.

People spread from the highland and brought with them knowledge and technologies. Where these people came they developed new civilizations. The modern world got created. In the south the Semitic culture got created and in the north the Japhetic. Hamoukar was crushed and destroyed. It was the first large scale war as we know of.

We started to change the nature as we made irrigation systems, and because of overproduction we started to specialized us in different fields. Work specialization was born. With it came private property, the making of social hierarchies and the suppression of women.

The thing is that we have developed a sick civilization, a civilization which is about to destroy us. We have already ruined cultures, enslaved people and led them into our civilization, which is no longer sustainable.

Yes, something new was born at Ararat. And the Armenians, at least until quite reasonly, must have known about it. This you can tell by the different names given to places and our way of thinking. The Armenians have spread far and wide and brought with them different kinds of knowledge.

In mythology you can really go into a whole world of different ways of understanding things, and you can see how things have changed over time by looking at the development of religion and mythology. This is because the different gods have different qualities.

The goddess, representing the women, represents the world we are living in. The god, representing the man, represent the sky or the sea, the abstract way of thinking. At first the goddess got supressed, just like what happened to the women, then the god changed with another god – the Jeish god, who in this way expanded his realm.

The world is connected now, and there is no more god – people trust money and worship money instead of the gods/God. All this could be find if we had not forgotten the wisdom of how to live and what to do we brought with us. If you have read the Bible you will recognize a lot of this stuff, and then you will also know that we got a last chance to live on this planet at Ararat, before known as Aratta.

In fact very much of the Bible have been written in Babylon, today’s Iraq, and very much of it is copied from Sumerian texts, including the story about the flood, Noah and the garden of Eden.

According to the Sumerian texts the gods created the humans, but saw it as a failure and wanted to get rid of them again. But, as with Noah, we got one last chance. I think we, the human race, are misusing this chance and that the result will be very harsh.

To survive we have to change our society according to the scriptures, or what we now know about the ecological system we are a part of. In other words we need to develop a sustainable society. This will not be done by the people in power.

I have written thousands of pages about the people in power, both the politicians and the capitalists, or the Oligarcs which they are called, and the system they have created, and it is terrible, and it is even going to get worse. The people in power are the worst kind of criminals and they are developing new technologies to be able to control and suppress us even more.

Armenia was once the greatest of all the nations here on earth, and developed the civilization we have today. But for a long time now the Armenians have suffered from suppression, destruction and genocide.

I fear that behind a lot of this, and what is happening today, are a greater force, a force which is a kind of arch enemy of the Armenian nation. Armenia is very much connected with Arta/asha, which simply means truth and right(eousness),order and right working.

This might be much older than the Zoroastrian religion. Aratta, or Arta, is at least 6000 years old, and might even be much older. It was the super ego of Uruk, but was conquered by Uruk, who then moved the worship of Inanna from Aratta to Uruk.

The Armenian, also known as Hurrians and Urartians, used to live in different parts of SW Asia, but many became Semitified, a language developing in Africa. The Assyrians have tir roots in the ancient city of Ashur, which existed long time before the Assyrians.

In fact the name of the Assyrians and the Armenians share their etymology, because ash and ar mean the same. Both names have their etymological origin in Urartu, or Ararat, the state that by the Persians later became known as Armenia, which is also the same name as the one the German have. Both of the names points to the zodiac sign of Aries, which used to be the first zodiac sign. Aries is called Væren in Norwegian.

I don’t like what I see in the world just know, and it gives me fear because I don’t want anything bad to happen, but unfortunately there are already too many signs who tells me that something is really bad. The ongoing war and destruction in SW Asia, both in Iraq and Syria, is a sign of something much more serious. It has to do with our moral standard. I am afraid that the situation in this area will spread.

Considering the issues already mention which we already are confronted with, crises in our social, economical and ecological systems, we really do not need a full scale WW III scenario. The situation in SW Asia have destroyed very much of our cultural heritage, there has in fact been a cultural genocide, people have been killed, been raped or been sold as slaves.

I have chosen to see our cradle of civilization as something good, and there are signs that shows that it is, while I see the forces fighting for imperialism and suppression by the way of death and destruction as something bad, druj or lie, which is the opposite of Arta/asha. I also fare that this forces will destroy Armenia.

The goddess Urash and An got mixed together and Inanna and Ereskigal were created. Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld, was taken to the underworld against her own will. She is the older sister of Inanna, representing Venus. I think Ashur and Urartu is connected with this name. At the same time Haik, or Khaldi, is the same as Hel, which is the same as Ereshkigal.

Either Ereshkigal or Hel was bad in the start but both became queens of the underworld, called Arkalla in Sumerian and Hell in Norwegian. it is said that Inanna, or Nanna as she is called in Norwegian, is just a part of Ereshkigal and Hel.

Hel is known to be divided in the middle, having one living and light side, and the other one representing death and darkness. It seems that Ereshkigal was left with death and destruction, the darkness and the season of autumn.

In a mythological way you can then understand the name of Armenia, also called Hayastan, as developing as the first country, and the first Christian country too, but conquered (not only at the time of Aratta, but at later times too) and suppressed.

I might not be very religious or spiritual, whatever that means, but I am interested in history and the development of our civilization and I see different things which I find important. One of them is the role of Armenia and the Armenians, and their future, which should concern all of us.

As Lord Byron once said “God must have spoken in Armenian”, whatever he meant with that. However I feel that the Armenians have suffered too much and I fear for their future. I see the battle in the world happening right now, and fear something very bad is about to happen. This is what I want to focus on. Not just for fun, but because I think it can be important. We need to develop a culture and society based on justice, freedom, peace and sustainability!

Israeli airstrikes hit near Damascus airport – Syrian state TV

Today there are no laws and regulations when it comes to Syria. The international justice system, if there is any at all, are set aside. However who wants to are free to attack Syria without risking the harm of the international society – at least not from the West.

Israeli airstrikes have hit targets near Damascus International Airport and in the town of Dimas near the Lebanon border, Syrian state TV reports.

“The Israeli enemy committed aggression against Syria by targeting two safe areas in Damascus province, in all of Dimas and near the Damascus International Airport,” the report said, adding that there were no casualties.

The airstrikes targeted an arms depot, a source in Syrian army’s Joint Staff told Sputnik news agency on Sunday. “The Israeli Air Force have conducted airstrikes on an arms depot, which caused huge blasts near the [Damascus] International Airport,” the source said in a phone conversation.

In historical legal systems, an outlaw is declared as outside the protection of the law. In pre-modern societies, the criminal is withdrawn all legal protection, so that anyone is legally empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system. In early Germanic law, the death penalty is conspicuously absent, and outlawing is the most extreme punishment, presumably amounting to a death sentence in practice. The concept is known from Roman law, as the status of homo sacer, and persisted throughout the Middle Ages.

Syrian officials demanded the UN impose sanctions on Israel after Tel Aviv conducted airstrikes near Damascus Airport. They say the attack was a heinous crime against their sovereignty by a country which doesn’t hide its policy of supporting terrorism.

Tel Aviv committed a heinous crime against Syria’s sovereignty, said Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Ministry in two identical letters to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and to the Chair of the UN Security Council, SANA news agency reported.

The attack aimed to support armed terrorist groups in Syria, especially after Damascus made some progress in the cities of Deir Ezzor, Aleppo and Daraa, say Syrian officials.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry called for UN officials to impose sanctions on Israel, whose authorities “don’t hide their policies in supporting terrorism.” Damascus also urged UN to take all necessary procedures to prevent Israel from repeating such attacks in accord with UN Charter.

The letter asserts that Israel is trying to divert the world’s attention from the collapse of its own coalition government, which continues “its occupation of the Arab territories and violates the international legitimacy.”

Despite the Israeli attacks, Damascus will not stop its efforts to combat terrorism in all its forms, types and tools and on Syrian soil, added the letter.

Russia has demanded an explanation from Israel about air strikes in Syria on Sunday that the Syrian government attributed to Israel

“Moscow is deeply worried by this dangerous development, the circumstances of which demand an explanation,” Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.

In a letter to the United Nations, Russia complained about Israel’s “aggressive action” and demanded that such attacks should not happen again, the spokesman said.

​‘Heinous crime’: Syria urges UN to sanction Israel over Damascus airstrikes

Russia demands Israeli explanation of air strikes in Syria

Outlaw

According to Tacitus’s Germania (98 CE), Tuisto (or Tuisco) is the divine ancestor of the Germanic peoples. The figure remains the subject of some scholarly discussion, largely focused upon etymological connections and comparisons to figures in later (particularly Norse) Germanic mythology.

Tacitus relates that “ancient songs” (Latin carminibus antiquis) of the Germanic peoples celebrated Tuisto as “a god, born of the earth” (deum terra editum), Autochthon (ancient Greece).

These songs further attributed to him a son, Mannus, who in turn had three sons, the offspring of whom were referred to as Ingaevones, Herminones and Istaevones, living near the Ocean (proximi Oceano), in the interior (medii), and the remaining parts (ceteri) of the geographical region of Germania, respectively.

Tacitus’s report falls squarely within the ethnographic tradition of the classical world, which often fused anthropogony, ethnogony, and theogony together into a synthetic whole.

The succession of father-son-three sons parallels occurs in both Germanic and non-Germanic Indo-European areas. The essential characteristics of the myth have been theorized as ultimately originating in Proto-Indo-European society around 2,000 BCE.

According to Rives (1999), the fact that the ancient Germanic peoples claimed descent from an earth-born god was used by Tacitus to support his contention that they were an indigenous population: the Latin word indigena was often used in the same sense as the Greek autochthonos, meaning literally ‘[born from] the earth itself’ (from – chthōn “earth”).

Lindauer (1975) notes that, although this claim is to be judged as one made out of simple ignorance of the facts on the part of Tacitus, he was not entirely wrong, as he made the judgement based on a comparison with the relatively turbulent Mediterranean region of his day.

The sequence in which one god has a son, who has three famous sons, has a resemblance to how Búri has a son Borr who has three sons: Odin, Vili and Vé. The same tradition occurs with the Slavs and their expansion, in the legend of Lech, Čech and Rus.

In 1498, a monk named Annio da Viterbo published fragments known as “Pseudo-Berossus”, now considered a forgery, claiming that Babylonian records had shown that Tuiscon or Tuisto, the fourth son of Noah, had been the first ruler of Scythia and Germany following the dispersion of peoples, with him being succeeded by his son Mannus as the second king.

Later historians (e.g. Johannes Aventinus) managed to furnish numerous further details, including the assertion by James Anderson that this Tuiscon was in fact none other than the biblical Ashkenaz, son of Gomer.

Albania (Latin: Albānia, Greek: Albanía, in Old Armenian: Ałuankʿ (Aguank), Parthian: Ardhan, Middle Persian: Arran; Georgian: Rani); usually referred to as Caucasian Albania for disambiguation with the modern state of Albania, is a name for the historical region of the eastern Caucasus, that existed on the territory of present-day republic of Azerbaijan (where both of its capitals were located) and partially southern Dagestan. The kingdom’s capital during antquity was Qabala (Kapalak).

The name of the country in the language of the native population, the Caucasian Albanians, is not known. Aghuank (Old Armenian: Ałuankʿ, Modern Armenian: Aġvank’) is the Armenian and the most historically referenced name for Caucasian Albania.

Armenian authors mention that the name derived from the word “ału” («աղու») meaning amiable in Armenian. The term Aghuank is polysemous and is also used in Armenian sources to denote the region between the Kur and Araxes rivers as part of Armenia. In the latter case it is sometimes used in the form “Armenian Aghuank” or “Hay-Aghuank”.

The Armenian historian of the region, Movses Kaghankatvatsi, who left the only more or less complete historical account about the region, explains the name Aghvank as a derivation from the word ału (Armenian for sweet, soft, tender), which, he said, was the nickname of Caucasian Albania’s first governor Arran and referred to his lenient personality.

Movses Kaghankatvatsi and other ancient sources explain Arran or Arhan as the name of the legendary founder of Caucasian Albania (Aghvan) or even of the Iranian tribe known as Alans (Alani), who in some versions was a son of Noah’s son Yafet.

James Darmesteter, translator of the Avesta, compared Arran with Airyana Vaego which he also considered to have been in the Araxes-Ararat region, although modern theories tend to place this in the east of Iran.

In pre-Islamic times, Caucasian Albania/Arran was a wider concept than that of post-Islamic Arran. Ancient Arran covered all eastern Transcaucasia, which included most of the territory of modern day Azerbaijan Republic and part of the territory of Dagestan. However in post-Islamic times the geographic notion of Arran reduced to the territory between the rivers of Kura and Araks.

Around the first centuries BC and AD the land south of the Greater Caucasus and north of the Lesser Caucasus was divided between Kolchis in the west, Caucasian Iberia in the center and Caucasian Albania in the east. To the southwest was Armenia and to the southeast Atropatene.

Originally, at least some of the Caucasian Albanians probably spoke Lezgic languages close to those found in modern Daghestan; overall, though, as many as 26 different languages may have been spoken in Caucasian Albania.

After the Caucasian Albanians were Christianized in the 4th century, parts of the population was assimilated by the Armenians (who dominated in the provinces of Artsakh and Utik that were earlier detached from the Kingdom of Armenia) and Georgians (in the north), while the eastern parts of Caucasian Albania were Islamized and absorbed by Iranian and subsequently Turkic peoples (modern Azerbaijanis). Small remnants of this group continue to exist independently, and are known as the Udi people.

The pre-Islamic population of Caucasian Albania might have played a role in the ethnogenesis of a number of modern ethnicities, including the Azerbaijanis, the Armenians of the Nagorno-Karabakh, the Georgians of Kakhetia, the Laks, the Lezgins and the Tsakhurs of Daghestan.

According to Armenian medieval historians Movses Khorenatsi, Movses Kaghankatvatsi and Koryun, the Caucasian Albanian (the Armenian name for the language is Aghvank, the native name of the language is unknown) alphabet was created by Mesrob Mashtots, the Armenian monk, theologian and translator who is also credited with creating the Armenian. This alphabet was used to write down the Udi language, which was probably the main language of the Caucasian Albanians.

Koryun, a pupil of Mesrob Mashtots, in his book The Life of Mashtots, wrote about how his tutor created the alphabet: Then there came and visited them an elderly man, an Albanian named Benjamin. And he (Mesrob Mashtots) inquired and examined the barbaric diction of the Albanian language, and then through his usual God-given keenness of mind invented an alphabet, which he, through the grace of Christ, successfully organized and put in order.

The Pashtun people (Pashto:‎ Pax̌tānə, Pakhtun in the northern dialects), historically known as Afghans (Persian:‎ Afġān), and Pathans in Hindi-Urdu (Paṭhān), are an Indo-European ethnicity from the subgroup of Eastern Iranians, with populations primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern and western parts of Pakistan.

They are typically characterised by the usage of the Pashto language, an Eastern Iranian language, and practice of Pashtunwali, which is a traditional set of ethics guiding individual and communal conduct.

Their origin is unclear but historians have come across references to various ancient peoples called Pakthas (Pactyans) between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC, who may be the early ancestors of the Pashtun people.

Often characterised as a warrior and martial race, their history is mostly spread amongst various countries of South and Central Asia, centred on their traditional seat of power in medieval Afghanistan.

The ethnonym Afghan has been used in reference to Pashtuns. The name Afghanistan (Afghan + -stan) is a derivation from the ethnonym Afghan, originally in the loose meaning “land of the Pashtuns” and referred to the Pashtun tribal areas south of the Hindu Kush.

The name Afghānistān is believed to be as old as the ethnonym Afghan, which is documented in the 10th-century geography book Hudud ul-‘alam. The root name “Afghan” was used historically in reference to the Pashtun people, and the suffix “-stan” means “place of” in Sanskrit.

Therefore, Afghanistan translates to “land of the Afghans, originally an ill-defined territory which did not include many parts of the present state but did comprise large districts now within the boundary of Pakistan. The Constitution of Afghanistan states that “[t]he word Afghan shall apply to every citizen of Afghanistan.”

In the 3rd century, the Sassanids mention a tribe called Abgân, which is attested in its Arabic form (Afġān) in the 10th century Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam. It probably derives from a Sanskritic tribal name, Aśvaka, used in reference to the Kambojas in antiquity. Since the Middle Ages, the term Afghan has been used by various writers as a synonym for Pashtun.

The earliest mention of the name Afghan (Abgân) is by Shapur I of the Sassanid Empire during the 3rd century CE, which is later recorded in the 6th century in the form of “Avagānā” by the Indian astronomer Varāha Mihira in his Brihat-samhita. It was used to refer to a common legendary ancestor known as “Afghana”, grandson of King Saul of Israel.

The etymological view supported by numerous noted scholars is that the name Afghan evidently derives from Sanskrit Aśvakas, q.v. the Assakenoi of Arrian. This view was propounded by scholars like Christian Lassen, J. W. McCrindle, M. V. de Saint Martin, and É. Reclus, and has been supported by numerous modern scholars.

In Sanskrit, the word ashva (Iranian aspa, Prakrit assa) means “horse”, and ashvaka (Prakrit assaka) means “horseman”, “horse people”, “land of horses”, as well as “horse breeders”.

Pre-Christian times knew the people of the Hindukush region as Ashvakas (horsemen), since they raised a fine breed of horses and had a reputation for providing expert cavalrymen. The 5th-century-BCE Indian grammarian Pāṇini calls them Ashvakayana and Ashvayana.

Mahabharata mentions them as Ashvaka(na). Classical writers, however, use the respective equivalents Aspasioi (or Aspasii, Hippasii) and Assakenoi (or Assaceni/Assacani, Asscenus) etc.

The Aspasioi/Assakenoi (Ashvakas = Cavalrymen) is stated to be another name for the Kambojas of ancient texts because of their equestrian characteristics. Alexander Cunningham and a few other scholars identify these designations with the modern name Afghan.

The Indian epic Mahabharata speaks about Kambojas among the finest horsemen, and ancient Pali texts describe their lands as the land of horses. Kambojas spoke Avestan language and followed Zoroastrianism. Some scholars believe Zoroastrianism originated in land of Kambojas.

The former Aspins of Chitral and Ashkuns (Yashkuns) of Gilgit are identified as the modern representatives of the Pāṇinian Aśvakayanas (Greek: Assakenoi); and the Asip/Isap (cf. Aspa-zai > Yusufzai) in the Kabul valley (between the rivers Kabul and Indus) are believed to be modern representatives of the Pāṇinian Aśvayanas (Greek: Aspasioi) respectively.

I. W. Bellew, in his 1891 An Inquiry into the Ethnography of Afghanistan, believes that the name Afghan comes from Alban which derives from the Latin term albus, meaning “white”, or “mountain”, as mountains are often white-capped with snow (cf. Alps); used by Armenians as Alvan or Alwan, which refers to mountaineers, and in the case of transliterated Armenian characters, would be pronounced as Aghvan or Aghwan. To the Persians, this would further be altered to Aoghan, Avghan, and Afghan as a reference to the eastern highlanders or “mountaineers”.

Michanovsky suggests the name Afghan derives from Sanskrit Avagana, which in turn derives from the ancient Sumerian word for Badakhshan – Ab-bar-Gan, or “high country”.

Concerning the genesis of modern humanity, there are two primary theories that receive credence in anthropological circles. One is the “Out of Africa” hypothesis, which argues that today’s humans are the evolved descendants of a primitive race of hominids that, 70,000 years ago, departed its homeland in Africa and spread across the globe. Upon entering Asia and Europe, these archaic humans displaced the indigenous Neanderthals through violent conflict and higher birthrates. They then adapted to their environments and gradually morphed into today’s human races through a process called localized evolution.

The other theory is “Divergent Evolution,” which posits that the various races of mankind were spawned out of continuous admixtures between the different proto-humans (Homo-erectus, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, etc.) many millennia ago. The countless hybrid amalgams then underwent localized evolution like the single ancestor of the “Out of Africa” process.

While these hypotheses are considered to be at loggerheads, they are united by one key concept: the idea of progress. While each gives a different origin to mankind, both proceed from the assumption that as time goes on, mankind has become better. Although evolutionary theory does not imply that superior adaptations are also superior in terms of intelligence or beauty, this notion is particularly hard to shake with regard to human evolution.

Radical Traditionalism rejects the modernist assumption of progressive human evolution, regarding it as the exact opposite of how the universe functions. For Traditionalism, all things begin at their zenith and gradually degenerate, through a series of stages, into mere shadows of their former glory, a pattern no less true of human beings. The purpose of this essay is to explain how this rule has applied to mankind, who has not risen to mastery of the world from the lowly origins of some apelike ancestor, but rather has fallen from godhood into his current, all-too-human condition.

To do so, it will first be necessary to describe the Radical Traditionalist understanding of history. Like all tenets of Traditionalism, this conception of history is held to be a revealed truth passed down through a chain of initiation. What recommends the Traditionalist outlook to the non-initiate is its coherence and explanatory power. In the following essay, I show that Traditionalism explains archaeological and historical records and harmonizes with ancient myths as well. The modern empiricist will likely disregard such myths as the fancies of primitive imaginations, but that begs the question, for it is just another version of the progress thesis that Traditionalism rejects.

Man’s devolution across cycles: Radical traditionalism on anthropogenesis

Michael Bell