Friday, September 30, 2011

The Self, The Eye and Color Word Origins: Languages, Meaning, Letters, Syllables, Phonetics


Marguerite Hafeman <ceylon101@...> wrote in LexiLine@yahoogroups.com that:
"[T]here does not seem to be a B- syllable chart included in the wonderful series you sent out recently. Is this because B- sounds derived from P- sounds?  Otherwise, is not the Egyptian word Ba as symbolic for higher consciousness or the soul, of fairly ancient origin? Also very interested in the roots of Ba-Lil. -Marguerite"

My answer to that is as follows:


The main difference between B and P -- linguists call this "voicing contrast" --  is that B is a so-called voiced labial plosive or stop and P is a so-called unvoiced labial plosive or stop, which is simply linguistic jargon for the fact that the B sound is made by using the lips to expel air and at the same time vibrating the vocal chords whereas the P sound is made by using the lips to expel air but not using the vocal chords at the same time.


It appears by and large for the most ancient scripts and languages that the MORE GUTTURAL consonants (i.e. those deeper in the throat) were both voiced and unvoiced in ancient days-- e.g. the sound "K" (unvoiced, as in "kind", where your vocal chord use only starts at the "i") and the sound "G" (voiced, as in "go" or "grind"). We see the difference in "crab" and "grab".


"K" can be a bit confusing because if you say "this is the letter K" it sounds like you are voicing the K, but you are actually voicing the following A in "Kh-AY". The unvoiced nature of K is clear in a word like seeK (see-kh) and you can whisper the initial K-sound in "cat" without using your vocal chords. Whispering "goal" on the other hand is difficult without using your voice and without it sounding like "coal".


Voicing is also the main difference in English between "chin" and "gin" where the "ch" sound is unvoiced and the "g" (dzh) sound is voiced.


The closer you get to the front of the mouth the more it appears that the ancient scripts and/or languages did not distinguish the voiced and unvoiced sounds made there, either because they did not distinguish the sounds, or, more likely, because one form or the other prevailed predominantly.


The Cypriot Syllabary, e.g., allegedly did not distinguish T and D. Linear B allegedly did not distinguish P and B (I do have one B-example for it). I tend to think that they COULD distinguish these sounds but perhaps in their particular language dialect, the one or the other form was so pervasive that it dominated.

An example of this is found e.g. in The American Heritage College Dictionary (3rd ed.) where words in English beginning with the unvoiced S run from page 1197 to 1378, i.e. ca. 80 pages, whereas for words beginning with the voiced Z, the entries run only from page 1566 to 1571, i.e. ca. 5 pages. We "recognize" the sound Z but do no use it much in English at the beginning of words. How different in English is the case for B and P, where B runs from page 98 to page 194, i.e. about 95 pages, and where P runs from page 978 to page 1116, i.e. nearly 140 pages.


When I deciphered the Phaistos Disk more than 30 years ago, I FIRST did statistics on Ancient Greek letter and syllable frequencies, and discovered that the consonant P at the beginning of words was the most frequent consonant (12% of dictionary pages according to the dictionary I used), and found that of that 12%, 25% was accounted for by the syllable "PA" and 31% was accounted for by the syllable "PR". Hence, to get a possible start on the decipherment, I assigned a PARA value to the most frequent combination on the Phaistos Disk. I reasoned if the Disk were written in a form of Ancient Greek -- that was my theory -- and if the letter distribution were typical, then the warrior-plus-round disk had to be a PARA sound, and, indeed, it is, it is! That was a bit of luck to start out, for sure. Once I had the two syllables PA-RA, the rest of the decipherment was basically a matter of due diligence in applying my statistical syllabic data. Maybe the proto-Greeks did not much distinguish P and B.


In analyzing voiced and unvoiced letters, it is instructive also to look at osbtruents and sonorants.


For the obstruents the Wikipedia writes :
"An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract, such as [k], [d͡ʒ] and [f]. In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants.

Obstruents are those articulations in which there is either a total closure of the vocal tract, or a partial closure, i.e. a stricture causing friction, both groups being associated with a noise component.

Obstruents are subdivided into stops (with total closure followed by an "explosive" release of air – hence the equivalent term plosive), affricates (with at first a stop-like total closure, followed by a more controlled, fricative-style release, i.e. a stricture causing friction), and fricatives (with only limited closure, i.e. no more than a steady stricture causing friction)....

Consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless. Some voiced phonemes of English are /b,d,g,v,z/. Each of these obstruents has an unvoiced counterpart, /p,t,k,f,s/." [emphasis added]
For sonorants the Wikipedia writes :
"In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract: fricatives and plosives (for example, /z/ and /d/, respectively) are not sonorants. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/. Other consonants, like /d/ or /s/, restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and so are non-sonorant. In addition to vowels, phonetic categorizations of sounds that are considered sonorant include approximants and nasal consonants. In the sonority hierarchy, all sounds higher than fricatives are sonorants. They can therefore form the nucleus of a syllable in languages that place that distinction at that level of sonority; see Syllable for details....

A typical sonorant inventory found in many languages comprises the following: two nasals /m/, /n/, two semivowels /w/, /j/, and two liquids /l/, /r/.

English has the following sonorant consonantal phonemes: /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /ɹ/, /w/, /j/[2]."
As one can see from the obstruents and sonorants, there is nothing obscure about the sounds that we make in speaking. In fact, many of the meanings that we assign to sounds, especially in the history of language, emanate from the nature of those very natural sounds.

The simplest examples are onomatopoeic words, which sound like the concept they are assigned to, e.g. a cat MEOWS, ducks QUACK, frogs CROAK, etc. That concept can be extended further.


When we refer to OURSELVES as the SELF in words such as the English "I", German "ICH", Latin EGO or Latvian "ES", the sounds are more internally directed in our mouth. INTERNAL "me". EXTERNAL "thou", "the".


When we refer to OTHERS in words such as English "you", German "DU" or Latvian or French "TU", the sounds are more externally directed in our mouth, so that there is also a definite phonetic component to meaning as well. THERE is more outer-directed than HERE as a combination of sounds.


In Latvian and surely also for Lithuanian, as the two most archaic still spoken Indo-European languages, the above principle can easily be applied to whole series of words and concepts to show their ancient, primitive origin.


ES ESU in the Central Dialect of the Latvian of my ancestors means "I am", i.e. "being" is simply an extension of "the self". ES ESMU is the variant used by the linguists today and is already a more modern dissimilated form. It is more comparable to Latvian MĒS ESAM "we are".


"Eating", in Latvian ĒST i.e. "to eat", is sustenance, i.e. a type of SELFING, which again has the SELF, Latvian ES as the root.


"Seeing", in Latvian ACS means "eye" and is a particular form of SELFING by viewing what is seen INTERNALLY. Going from that which is SEEN by the SELF, a whole host of words for THAT SEEN have developed.


ACĪ (in Latvian that which is IN THE EYE, i.e. SEEN, is pronounced ATSĪ, but since the A is voiced it sounds nearly like ADZĪ).

What was "visible" around one led to the words for "life" and "living things", i.e. that which was "SEEN".
ES - ACĪ - ATSĪ - ADZĪ led to the following terms:


Latvian:
ES "I"
ESU "am"
ĒŠana "eating" ACĪšana "eying"
DZĪVe "life"
DZĪVošana "living"
DZĪVs "alive"
DZĪVnieks "animal"
ZIVs "fish"

Classical linguists alleged this was all borrowed from Latin and Greek. Right. And more Alice in Wonderland tales. The truth of things is far different.


That which was "seen" "in the eye" ACĪ "pronounced ATZĪ" then gave rise to the names for the COLORS  of nature, which as one would expect in archaic Latvian, are not very dissimilated as words one from the other and all can surely  be traced back to a form *ADZĪ(L) based on Latvian ZIL "blue", ZAL "gray", DZELtens "yellow", ZELts "gold" and even ZILumas "grey" (in Lithuanian). All Latvian "color words" are nearly identical. Only "red" as Latvian SARkans with the root SAR- shows greater dissimilation:
ZIL- "blue" in Latvian, also the word for "pupil" of the eye and the blue-grey "forest"
ZAL- "green" in Latvian, also the word for grass
ZEL- "gold, yellow-colored" in Latvian
DZEL- "yellow" in Latvian
ZILumas - "grey" in Lithuanian
AZUL- AZUR- "blue" in many languages
ZELenyj "green" in Russian
ZELtyj "yellow" in Russian
ZAIRita "yellow" in Avestan
CAERULeus "blue" in Latin
SAR- "red" in Latvian

SU [RED] in Sumerian su4; šu4; sa5; su; sa; su13; su4-su4; si5; su2 "(to be) red, brown " Akk. pelû; sāmu
SORt "black" in Danish
SVARt "black in Swedish
KR- "color" in Latvian
GRey in English
KELainos"black, dark color"

Greek and in Old Hindic KALA "black"
GALanos "blue" in Greek

but in Lithuanian GELtonas "yellow"
XILos - "grass", XL- "green"

CHR- as in CHRoma "color" in Greek
Latvian KRĀSAINS "colored" finds its cognates
Sanskrit KRSNA
"black, dark"
but Russian KRASNYJ "the color red"
and Old Church Slavic KRASINU, Latvian KRĀSNS  "beautiful".
The KR- root is found in English CL- (CoLor), i.e. the conversion R//L
but the KR- forms have already lost the interceding vowel.
It is quite clear from the above examples that many of these terms derive from a single "color" root-word which was then adapted in various only slightly dissimilated forms to distinguish the varies shades of "color" in the "color-system".

Compare to the above terms the African Bantu terms for "red":
Bemba kùlà
Lega kʊ̀là 
My linguistic analysis of colors corresponds to the color discussion by Reinhard Blutner in Languages of the World: The typology of color term, where he has the following image showing how color terms develop from left to right, with fuzzy divisions according to language between the individual colors:


Citing to Kay & McDanie (1978), Kay, Berlin, Maffi & Merrifield (1997) and Kay & Maffi (1999), Blutner writes that there are "only six salient perceptual landmarks": black, white, red, green, yellow and blue.
 
The great German thinker Goethe wrote in his Color Theory about the color-perception of the ancients:
"Their denominations of colours are not permanently and precisely defined, but mutable and fluctuating....Their yellow, on the one hand, inclines to red, on the other to blue; the blue is sometimes green, sometimes red; the red is at one time yellow, at another blue.... If we take a glance at the copiousness of the Greek and Roman terms, we shall perceive how mutable the words were, and how easily each was adapted to almost every point in the colorific circle."
Note also that the white-black-grey (brownish, bluish) system of black and white color has a different root. The Root BL- viz BR- gives:
PELEKS "grey" in Latvian
duBLI "mud" in Latvian

whence Old Irish DUB "black" (DUB- Sumerian "tablet")
BLACK in English
BLUE in English
BLONDE in English and

BALINATS "white, bleached" in Latvian
BRown in English

Sumer: Land of Light and Red vs. Black: Sumerologists Erred in Calling Sumerians "the Black-Headed People"

The entire issue of colors is significant to our appreciation of the age and origin of any ancient culture.

Take a look at these terms from the ePSD Sumerian Glossary: 

kalam [LAND] N (623x) . wr. kalam; ka-na-aŋ2; ka-naŋ; kakalam; kalam-ma "the Land (of Sumer)" Akk. mātu
kalgug [CLAY] N . wr. imkal-gug; imkal-ku8-ku7 "a reddish clay" Akk. kalgukku
The idea that "land of Sumer" means "red" fits well with the origin of the term Canaan, which, according to the Mercer Dictionary of the Bible is said to derive from the Akkadian word kinahhu meaning "red dye" or "red purple", hence "the land of purple". Yôḥānān Aharônî writes in The Land of the Bible: a historical geography :
"From the Hurrianizied Nuzi inscriptions (fifteenth century B.C.) it has been shown that a word kinahhu had the meaning, "purple". Between the spelling of this word and the Akkadian spelling of Canaan in the Amarna letters (Kinahna, Kinahhr) there is no significant difference. The consonant h in these documents serves as the reflex for ayin which does not exist in Akkadian script. Since the extraction of purpose from sea shells (Murex) was one of the established vocations on the Phoenician coast and fine garments coloured with this valuable dye were in great demand throughout the ancient east, there must be some connection between the name Canaan and this special term. Therefore, it was suggested that the Phoenician coast was called "the land of the purple" by the Hurrians and that this name became accepted along with the term Hurru, at first only a name for the Phoenician coast, though in time its significance was broadened. We see a similar development in the name Phoenicia, which is derived from the Greek word phoinix "purple"."
In fact as we can see from the variants ka-na-aŋ2 and ka-naŋ as names for Sumer red is the more likely originally color. 

The very fact that the Akkadians wrote the name of the Sumerians as šumerû and not as the erroneously transliterated ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga -- which is the phrase that allegedly means "the black-headed people" --  should have given the  linguists in Sumerology cause for deeper analytical thinking and not just parroting what someone wrote previously.

The Wikipedia writes at Sumer, repeating the erroneous results of mainstream Sumerology as follows:
"The term "Sumerian" is the common name given to the ancient non-Semitic inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia, Sumer, by the Semitic Akkadians. The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga, phonetically uŋ saŋ giga, literally meaning "the black-headed people".[3] The Akkadian word Shumer may represent the geographical name in dialect, but the phonological development leading to the Akkadian term šumerû is uncertain.[2][4] Biblical Shinar, Egyptian Sngr and Hittite Šanhar(a) could be western variants of Shumer.[4]"
Why would the Akkadians call the Sumerians šumerû if the linguists had correctly deciphered the Sumerian signs as uŋ saŋ giga?

SU
in Sumerian means "red", not black, and
merû means "land".

Uh-oh. Sumerology has a problem.

The answer is that the linguists screwed up the sign reading totally. The often-cited source cited for the nonsensical notion that the Sumerians were black-haired viz. "black-headed" can be traced primarily to William H. Hallo  and William Kelly Simpson  in their totally  forgettable book, The Ancient Near East, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971, p. 28, in which, for example, it is written, and as we know today to be totally false from places like the Orkneys, Malta and Göbekli Tepe:

""Thus we can trace almost 3,000 years of history in the Near East before we can speak of any real history in the rest of Asia, Africa, and Europe, let alone in the rest of the world."".
Frankly, the authors of that book erred greatly in what they were talking about and hordes of uncritical commentators have simply copied their errors.

Because of more recent archaeological findings at places like Göbekli Tepe,
Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program, is quoted as saying:

"Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."
Among those wrong theories are theories about the origins of the allegedly black-headed Sumerians. 

As written at the Wikipedia, "Dr. Vicki Leone contrasts this in her book Uppity Women of Ancient Times, noting that the Sumerians paintings and mosaics depict a people possessing dark blue eyes.[4] "  The scholars just ignore this, which is foolish. 

The world in ancient times was very color conscious, and still is, even though it is not politically correct in our modern day to say so.


Patrick C. Ryan in discussing Sumerian archaic sign #770 says that according to Jaritz that sign allegedly shows the dome of the sky and "falling rain", but it could of course also be the sections of stars of a night sky underneath the firmament of heaven and their rays of light. In any case, "firmament" it is.

 


Sometimes the sign is read GIG2, or GI6 viz. GE6 ) according to Ryan and Jaritz. That allegedly is then to be read as giggi [BLACK] V/i (191x) . wr. giggi; gi6-gi6; gig2-ge; gig2-ga; gi-gi "(to be) black"
(see the ePSD Sumerian Glossary)

which in turn is allegedly comparable to Akkadian ṣalmu "black".

But salmi here does not necessarily mean "black".

There are alternative readings in Akkadian, so that
sāmu is read as "red" and šamu as read as "sky".

Hence, a reading of the sign as GIG "black" is not required.

Here is the answer to this Sumerology reading problem.

The Sumerian archaic signs 501 (458+648) and 770 in combination are currently read gissu in Sumerian, allegedly meaning "black".

Archaic sign 770, as suggested above and as seen below, shows the firmament of heaven and is a determinative for "sky" and not for "black", so that we must take the meaning from sign 501.

501 is made up of signs 458+648:

Archaic Sign 458 is  read alternatively by Sumerologists as
ba4,
eSda, lidda, Sita, udug2 (458+561)
ga2
luga (560+458)
ma3
pisan
rig/rik/riq3
rihamun (721+458)

Archaic Sign 648 is read alternatively by Sumerologists as
dar5
enna (453+832+648)
igi2
isimu/a (101+648)
sa7
samag5
si12
sig7
sura (212+648)
Samag (648)
zur2 (213+648)
zur3 (212+648)

Archaic Sign 770 is read alternatively by Sumerologists as
adama (112+770)
dugud2
e9
ega (949+770+949)
gi/e6
gig2
gissu (501+770)
ku10
kuku
kukku2 (770+770)
luhummu (571+770)
me2
mi
salim
s.il2
Sambilla
ubilla2 (561+770)

One alternative reading of Sumerian archaic signs 501 (458+648) and 770 in combination is thus ga2 ("gai" ?) for Jaritz #458 and samag5 for archaic sign #648 which gives the word gai-sma i.e. gaisma, which in ancient proto-European e.g. Latvian means "light", which is why it is combined with the "firmament" sign #770 as the determinative for "sky" to give this meaning.

Patrick Ryan in ProtoLanguage Monosyllables says that Jaritz #648 is the seeing "eyeball with optic nerve" in the reading sa7" ("sweet" ?), whereas of course this is correctly "ACS" (eye") so that the reading in such a case would be gai-š which in ancient proto-European e.g. Latvian gaišs means "bright".

Sumerian gissu (Latvian gaiss "air", i.e the outdoors in that sense) therefore should be read as gaisma viz. gaišs ("light, "bright") and thus instead of "black" should rather be read "light". 

That now confirms a corrected reading of  Sumerian uŋ saŋ gigaas comparable to later Hebrew and Aramaic saggi ne hora
which means "rich of light" to describe the obviously lighter hair color of the Sumerians so that the mer- in the Akkadian term for Sumer is like Hebrew NER or NIR "light" as THE ABSENCE OF DARKNESS.

See http://www.jstor.org/pss/544206  for the Hebrew and Aramaic.

We read at Yahoo! Answers by Yabash:
"Hebrew, the word "ohr" (אור) means "light" as in the absence of darkness. This is the Light created by G-d on the First Day: vayomer elohim yehi ohr vayehi ohr (and G-d said "let there be light", and there was light).


The Hebrew word "ner" (נר) means "light" as in a lamp (emitter of light). The phrase "ner tamid" means "eternal light", and the root of the word "menorah" is "ner". Another form is "nir" (ניר), which can be found in 1 Samuel 3:3.


Related to "ner" are the Aramaic "noor" (נור) and "nahoor" (נהור). There is also the Aramaic "nahir" (נהיר), but its meaning leans towards "clear/bright".
How could the Sumerologists make such a serious blunder!?

Stonehenge in Laser-Scanned 3D: New Stonehenge Model Unveiled by English Heritage

STONEHENGE Unveiled!

Graphic and Photograph by Andis Kaulins © 2005

Sounds like a new Dan Brown thriller, but it is actually the headline from English Heritage at 3D Stonehenge Model Unveiled, where they write:
"A detailed survey of every stone that makes up Stonehenge using the latest technology, including a new scanner on loan from Z+F UK that has never before been used on a heritage project in this country, has resulted in the most accurate digital model ever produced of the world famous monument."
Read the whole story about the 3D laser scan by the Greenhatch Group together with Atkins Mapping and Archaeo-Environment Ltd. and see a video glimpse of the new model at English Heritage.

After generations of archaeologists have spent most of their careers more or less denying any anthropomorphic or other figures on ancient megaliths such as we "unveiled" and explained in Stars Stones and Scholars, English Heritage now reports that:
"With resolution level as high as 0.5mm in many areas, every nook and cranny of the stones' surfaces is revealed with utmost clarity, including the lichens, Bronze Age carvings, erosion patterns and Victorian graffiti." [emphasis added]
Are the archaeologists beginning to understand what I have been writing about for decades, that many of megaliths of the world are carved with figures and cup marks, purposefully so in ancient days, and that they represent the astronomy of our forefathers?

Let us hope that they are least making a beginning.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Update for Geoglyphs of the Middle East as Astronomy: Auriga as the Anatomical Heart and Vernal Equinox Point in ca. 3450 BC

The portion of the sky shown by the Jordan Kite deciphered in our previous posting at Geoglyphs of the Middle East as Astronomy: Auriga as the Anatomical Heart and Vernal Equinox Point in ca. 3450 BC is shown in the image below as clipped from a "white sky" screenview setting using Starry Night Pro 3 (set at the year 3450 B.C.)




Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Ancient Rectangular Mirrors With Rounded Corners as Image Inventions Precede the iPad by Thousands of Years: Apple Did Not Invent These Basic Designs

User interfaces on modern machines such as televisions, mobile phones and digital tablets present IMAGES on the plane surface of a display panel enclosed by a frame or bezel (retaining outer rim) of some kind.

When we talk about prior art for the design of mobile phones or tablets, we need to look at how images have generally been presented on a plane surface in the past, not just to similar modern devices.

We already posted that the Apple iPhone is almost identical in basic design to an ancient Pharaonic cartouche as a means of enclosing symbols, and that is definitely one aspect of icon presentation on the iPhone -- see The Apple iPhone as a Design Copy of the First Pharaonic Cartouche of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt: A Design in the Public Domain as Prior Art for 4500 Years.

The same holds true for the iPad as a device that presents images on a plane surface. As shown already in the previous posting, the Apple iPad is virtually identical in its basic design to a rectangular mirror with rounded corners used in modern correctional facilities. Such a mirror is also a device that displays images on its surface, just like the iPad, and it has the same design.


There is virtually NOTHING unique about the iPad in its design and the Apple company registration of an EU "design" on a rectangle with rounded corners is a legal abomination that can not be allowed to stand unchallenged and should never have been accepted by the German courts in their recent foolish limited-jurisdiction injunction against the Galaxy Tab on the grounds of an alleged infringement of an alleged Apple design which has prior art reaching back thousands of years.


The human "invention" of the mirror may have begun with the observation of image reflection in water, followed by the observation that images were also reflected on fixed surfaces as well, such as stones, the flatter and more polished the better. That led to the development of the first stone mirrors, followed by metal, and then glass -- the latter still being a common display surface for many electronic devices.


For example, a "cosmetic palette" (viz. tablet) made of polished stone is a basic human "imaging" tool that goes back thousands of years and its basic design is not an invention of the company Apple.

 As written at MirrorHistory.com:
"The ... earliest manufactured mirrors ... found in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) have been dated to around 6000 BC. Polished stone mirrors made in Central and South America date from 2000 BC onwards. Mesopotamians crafted mirrors of polished cooper from 4000 BC, and ancient Egyptians made this kind of mirrors from around 3000 BC. Chinese manufactured bronze mirrors from around 2000 BC."
In Egypt, as written by Barbara O’Neill in Reflections of Eternity: The Mirror in Ancient Egypt: An Overview from Prehistory to the New Kingdom, as published on Egyptological, June 30th 2011, Edition 1:
"The term most often used for ‘mirror’, “ankh”, also means “life”, with perhaps a play on words ‘reflected’ in the mirror’s role in preserving the image in a state of continual existence, (Bird, 1986)."
The first mirrors were cosmetic stone palettes like this one currently on sale at Christies.com (here enlarged) and dating to the Predynastic days of Egypt ca. 3200 B.C.:




The stone palettes of old were essentially ancient "tablets", here framed by multiple lines at the top, bottom and sides. The general design of the iPad has not changed much. The ancient Egyptians even had a stone plektron of sorts, a cosmetic stone brush, and note the rounded corners. Nothing new.


Below is the back of a mirror, today in the Louvre, in framed four-sided shape with symbols in rows of 4, just as on the iPad or the iPhone. Note the rounded corners. The mirror is dated to Seljuq, Iran in the 12th century:




12 Zodiac symbols around the perimeter and four identical squares in the middle

Four columns of symbols, emphasized by Apple as a "design" future for its products, have been used "as prior art" since antiquity because that permits symbols or "icons" to be a size which can easily be discerned by the human eye while making optimal use of the space available on a plane surface. I.e this "design" has been "pleasing to the eye" since antiquity.


The only thing that Apple has done is to apply ancient designs to its electronic products and that is neither an invention nor an original design of any kind. It is merely commercial exploitation of the designs of antiquity for modern selfish monopolistic profit.

That legislators and courts support this kind of intellectual property theft from the legacy of mankind is something we do not understand.

Why should ONE company profit from designs that were actually created long ago by "humanity"?


Crossposted from LawPundit.


Most Popular Posts of All Time

Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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