Aakash ("sky"), an Inexpensive Electronic Android Tablet for the Masses Launched by DataWind: Students in India to Benefit: Sanskrit Sumerian Link

John Terauds -- Terauds means "steel" in Latvian -- at TheStar.com reports at Montreal firm launches world's cheapest tablet: $48 that DataWind is launching an electronic tablet for the masses, at a price almost anyone can afford, writing:

"On Wednesday, Indian Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal introduced the device, developed by DataWind, a Montreal firm founded by brothers Raja and Suneet Singh Tuli.
DataWind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli expects to sell 1 million tablets per month once the Android-powered device goes on sale to the general public later this year.
The first run of 100,000 Aakash tablets (meaning “sky” in Hindi and Gujarati) has been purchased by the Indian government for $48 each. They will be resold to university students for $25....
The commercial version of the tablet is called UbiSlate."

Read the whole article.
___________________________________

The name of the tablet in India as Aakash "sky" has an interesting unintended but potential Sanskrit and Sumerian connection to a posting I made recently at the Ancient World Blog on an ancient symbol from Sumer acknowledged by Sumerologists to depict the sky. Here is an excerpt of my posting about that in Sumer: Land of Light and Red vs. Black: Sumerologists Erred in Calling Sumerians "the Black-Headed People":

"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 is 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 ....
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"."

As we see from the name "Aakash" for the DataWind tablets (meaning “sky” in Hindi and Gujarati), the Sumerian symbol clearly means "sky". Indeed, in Sanskrit AKASH आकाश m Indian means "open space, sky" and aakash means sky in Urdu as well. As noted in the Wikipedia article about the Milky Way:

"In Sanskrit and several other Indo-Aryan languages, the Milky Way is called Akash Ganga (आकाशगंगा, Ganges of the heavens).^[84] The milky way is held to be sacred in the Hindu scriptures known as the Puranas, and the Ganges and the Milky Way are considered to be terrestrial-celestial analogs of each other.^[84][85] However, the term Kshira (क्षीर, milk) is also used as an alternative name for the milky way in Hindu texts.^[86]".

Hence, the sky of Akash refers to the bright stars and not to blackness. And so we see the ancient Indian Sanskrit connection to even the more ancient Sumerian archaic signs and also to the modern DataWind tablet.

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.

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.)

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.

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

People who support patents like to say that you should be able to patent anything under the Sun made by man. But what is new under the Sun?

The outer iPhone design, to which Apple is shamefully trying to obtain exclusive rights in seeking injunctions against the sale of the similarly designed Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, reminds us strongly of the Pharaonic cartouche in which the Ancient Egyptians inscribed the names of their Pharaohs. Indeed, Egyptologists, rightly or wrongly, regard the cartouche of the Pharaoh Snofru to be the first such royal cartouche.

From the image below that we have prepared -- trying to retain the original relative dimensions of the Cartouche of Snofru and the iPhone -- it would appear to us that a good argument can be made that the iPhone was preceded by prior art in the early stages of ancient human writing by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which inscribed royal names inside a so-called "shen ring", signifying eternity. It is a pretty close design match.

The Apple iPhone as conceivably copied in design
from the first Pharaonic Cartouche, that of the Pharaoh Snofru.

The first Pharaoh to allegedly use a cartouche was the Pharaoh erroneously today called Sneferu, Snephru, or Snofru, who was more correctly known in Ancient Greek as Soris, probably an Indo-European variant for Sun (Sol).
The windpipe hieroglyph in the cartouche of Soris is a vocal determinative (so I allege) erroneously transliterated into English by the Egyptologists as NFR (as a consonant cluster corresponding to matching Indo-European terms such as e.g. Latvian aNVAR or aNTVAR, meaning "opening, windpipe").

The windpipe hieroglyph in ancient Egyptian writing in my opinion actually meant a "windpipe sound" rather than standing for the consonant cluster NFR or the "word" for windpipe.

You can compare the windpipe hieroglyph NFR to a comparable hieroglyph-like symbol we might draw for the word BREATH, showing the windpipe, which you would not then read as "Breath" but would rather make a breath sound, e.g. a hieroglyph in English written as Breath-A-R-D would be read "H-A-R-D" and not be read "Breath-ard" or "BRTH". The Egyptologists still don't get this.

In any case, there is nothing new under the Sun in this case. The shape and the relative dimensions of the iPhone are so similar to the first royal cartouche in Ancient Egypt, that this design in the context of a surface for a writing-oriented electronic device can have no claim to originality. Rather, it is the close implementation of an age-old design in the public domain -- for the last 4500 years.

There are few things new under the Sun, and this is the SUN.

Crossposted from LawPundit because of the related ancient world topic.

The Unreliability of Human Perception -- also in the Practice of Science -- as Evidenced by the Problems of Eyewitness Identification in Law Enforcement

Eyewitness Identification is to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time in 34 years, in the case of Perry v. New Hampshire, No. 10-8974, as reported at the New York Times by Adam Liptak in 34 Years Later, Supreme Court Will Revisit Eyewitness IDs.

See Questions Presented.

I was for a short time on the staff of the Project on Law Enforcement Policy and Rulemaking (POLEPAR) at Arizona State University Law School, a joint project with the Police Foundation of the United States. See Gerald M. Caplan, The Case for Rulemaking by Law Enforcement Agencies, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 36, No. 4, Autumn, 1971. Caplan initially headed the POLEPAR project.

Our job was to draft model rules for law enforcement, and one of those model rules was on Eyewitness Identification.

Those model rules are cited e.g. in Gary L. Wells, et seq., Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads, Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 22, No. 6, 1998. Six Model Rules for Law Enforcement by POLEPAR are listed in the Library of Congress Online Catalog, including Eyewitness Identification.

The Model Rules were recently cited (2011) by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the case of Commonweatlh vs. Gerald Eddington (and six companion cases).

I have written ever since this project about the unreliability of the manner in which evidence is viewed and interpreted, not only in the law generally, but also in diverse academic disciplines, where many scholars are not even remotely aware of how much their observation is colored by all kinds of extraneous factors.

Eyewitness and similar personal observation of "facts" can be quite faulty.

"Beauty" may be in the eye of the beholder, but the "truth" may not be.
 

Nature News Newest DNA Data: Neanderthals Interbred With Modern Humans: New DNA Data Throws Your Average So-Called Scientist Into Warp Mode

Only a couple of years ago, the mass of the uncritical academic community was abuzz with all kinds of theories about Neanderthal man and how he had not interbred with modern man. At the National Geographic the absurd and despicable theory was even given credence by publication that Neanderthals had disappeared because the predecessors of modern man had eaten them: Last of the Neanderthals. This was the ridiculous buzz of the many incompetents in the archaeological field, an incompetence which pervades the industry.

We did not join that buzz, because we were certain the theory of non-interbreeding was wrong. We do not just hop on and join the ride of every idiot theory that the mainstream archaeological and anthropological community produces.

The amount of absolute junk that was written about this topic by so-called reputable mainstream scientists would fill volumes. Is there any way to create a database of these people and suggest to them all that they go dig for coal in Siberia rather than clutter the academic journals and online postings with their nonsense?

Nature News at Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history now writes:

"Barely a year after the publication of the genomes of Neanderthals1 and of an extinct human population from Siberia2, scientists are racing to apply the work to answer questions about human evolution and history that would have been unfathomable just a few years ago.

The past months have seen a swathe of discoveries, from details about when Neanderthals and humans interbred, to the important disease-fighting genes that humans now have as a result of those trysts."

[Ancient World Blog note: the new DNA data would have been "unfathomable" only to the uncritical mainstream, who blindly accept everything thrown at them by the oft uninformed authority of their purported but often greatly misled so-called "superiors", who are often nothing more than stuffed shirts in a business suit.]

Ancient Cuneiform Math Tablet Precedes in Designer Prior Art the Design Claims of Apple for the iPad2 by ca. 4000 Years: Columbia University's Plimpton 322

In the previous Ancient World posting -- "Wafer Thin" Writing Tablets of Vindolanda and an Erroneous Modern Claim by Apple to Origination of Thin Tablet Design for the iPad2 -- we showed that wafer-thin writing tablet design preceded the Apple iPad2 by at least 2000 years.

What happens if we go back another ca. 2000 years? Can we find writing tablets of the approximate same aspect ratio as the Apple iPad2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? We can. We can.

There is not that much new in the outer design of tablets in this field.

Let us take the Babylonian writing tablet designated as Plimtpon 322, which is dated to ca. 1800 BC. It is the most renowned mathematical tablet in the world of cuneiform script. People in the computer industry, which has a lot to do with math, should be well aware of it. They known their math. Nicht wahr?

Do we have a match? We do. We do. Plimpton 322 is 13  x 9 cm  or ca. 5 x 3.5 inches, or about half the size of the iPad2. Not only that, but it presents four columns of cuneiform "numbers" (like icons) in 15 rows. The Apple iPad2 also has four columns of "icons". There are only limited possibilities of presenting symbols for legible reading on a tablet. In this regard, Apple claims as its own a tablet design feature already found 4000 years ago.

Below is a photograph of Plimpton 322:

Plimpton 322 is in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University. The image at Wikipedia was copied from http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m446-03/pl322/pl322.html. An academic presentation of Plimpton 322 with image is found at page 12 of Rida T. Farouki, Pythagorean-hodograph curves: algebra and geometry inseparable.

As written at the Wikipedia about Plimpton 322:

"Plimpton 322 is a Babylonian clay tablet, notable as containing an example of Babylonian mathematics. It has number 322 in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University.^[1] This tablet, believed to have been written about 1800 BC, has a table of four columns and 15 rows of numbers in the cuneiform script of the period....

Plimpton 322 is partly broken [LawPundit comment: partly broken at the top left], approximately 13 cm wide, 9 cm tall, and 2 cm thick. New York publisher George A. Plimpton purchased the tablet from an archaeological dealer, Edgar J. Banks, in about 1922, and bequeathed it with the rest of his collection to Columbia University in the mid 1930s. According to Banks, the tablet came from Senkereh, a site in southern Iraq corresponding to the ancient city of Larsa.^[3]

The tablet is believed to have been written about 1800 BCE, based in part on the style of handwriting used for its cuneiform script: Robson (2002) writes that this handwriting "is typical of documents from southern Iraq of 4000–3500 years ago." More specifically, based on formatting similarities with other tablets from Larsa that have explicit dates written on them, Plimpton 322 can be dated to the period 1822–1784 BCE.^[4] Robson points out that Plimpton 322 was written in the same format as other administrative, rather than mathematical, documents of the period.^[5]"

Alas, dear Apple, you are at least 4000 years too late in your design claim for the iPad2 when looking at the historical prior art of flat writing tablets with the same approximate aspect ratio of length and width.

"Wafer Thin" Writing Tablets of Vindolanda and an Erroneous Modern Claim by Apple to Origination of Thin Tablet Design for the iPad2

In the previous LawPundit posting we did not discuss the Apple claim that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringed on the iPad2 because (using our English translation from the original German-language motion): "Tab 10.1 copies the prominent thin profile of the iPad2".

Alas, dear Apple, you are at least 2000 years too late in your design claim for "thin" writing tablets. You were preceded by the "wafer thin" Vindolanda wooden tablets, which are dated to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.

As written at the British Museum and at Wikipedia, quoting the Wikipedia:

"The Vindolanda tablets are "the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain".^[1][2] Written on fragments of thin, post-card sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian's Wall). Although similar records on papyrus were known from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley discovered these artefacts at the site of a Roman fort in Vindolanda, northern England.^[1][3]"

Roman writing tablet from the Vindolanda Roman fort of Hadrian's Wall, in Northumberland (1st-2nd century AD). Tablet 343: Letter from Octavius to Candidus concerning supplies of wheat, hides and sinews. British Museum (London) | Author = Michel wal) | 2008. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

When we look at these 2000-year old tablets, we see that not too much has changed in the shape of the "outer" rectangular design for ""thin" tablet writing that Apple has in fact copied from our forebears and to which it is wrongfully and shamefully trying to claim exclusive rights.

Genetics of Swedish Population in the North Varies from the South. Dalarna is a Special Case of Remote Finnish or Norwegian Ancestry

See Dienekes' Anthropology Blog on Keith Humphreys et al., The Genetic Structure of the Swedish Population.

The Ph.D.: Are Doctoral Dissertations a Waste of Time? PhDs as Cheap Labor: The Economist Analyzes The Disposable Academic

A recent article at the Economist, Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic, alerts us to the fact that:

"PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour."

That knowledge was confirmed already 10 years ago by Chris M. Golde and Timothy M. Dore in At Cross Purposes: What the experiences of today's doctoral students reveal about doctoral education.

There is no doubt: the value of PhD programs and dissertations is questionable and greatly in need of reform.

What has happened to the academic doctorate in our day in age, and is "doctoral research" largely a waste of time?

After all, the more progressive professional doctorates dispensed with the need for research dissertations years ago. Is there any supportable value in terms of academic efficiency to superfluous doctorates copiously and subserviently footnoted to alleged authorities or are they merely drone theses that ultimately simply wind up in the archives, read only by exam referees? As James Frank Dobie (1888–1964) wrote:

"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."

One of the problems is that the historical development of "academic" university degrees is understood by few, and surely not by many Ph.Ds, some of whom ignorantly even tout the superiority of research doctorates to law degrees, showing that human stupidity may be infinite, ala Einstein, who quipped:

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."

We might as an academic "refreshment" consider that the word "doctor" is rooted historically in the Latin docere, meaning "to teach".

Indeed, doctorates as university degrees all started with the law:

"In Europe the first academic degrees were law degrees, and the law degrees were doctorates. The foundations of the first universities were the glossators of the 11th century, which were schools of law [in a specific sense]. The first university, that of Bologna, was founded as a school of law by four famous legal scholars in the 12th century who were students of the glossator school in that city [The Four Doctors of Bologna: Bulgarus, Martinus Gosia, Jacobus de Boragine and Hugo de Porta Ravennate -- see also Glossators, with a connection to ecclesiatical usages, such as Canon Law, the law of the Church].

Furthermore, as things progressed:

"The naming of degrees eventually became linked with the subjects studied. Scholars in the faculties of arts or grammar became known as "master", but those in theology, medicine, and law were known as "doctor". As study in the arts or in grammar was a necessary prerequisite to study in subjects such as theology, medicine and law, the degree of doctor assumed a higher status than the master degree. This led to the modern hierarchy in which the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), which in its present form as a degree based on research and dissertation is a development from 18th and 19th Century German universities, is a more advanced degree than the Master of Arts (M.A.). The practice of using the term doctor for Ph.Ds developed within German universities and spread across the academic world."

Law led, the rest followed. Nothing has changed.

African Megaliths, Canoes & Seafaring

Catherine Acholonu informed me about a canoe excavated in Nigeria dated to ca. 7700 years ago. See Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Cultural Sensitization and Exhibition on the 8000 Years Old Dufuna Canoe, at http://www.nigerianmuseums.org/dufuna.htm.

Nigeria is of course rightly proud of this archaeological discovery, showing a high level of culture in the Neolithic era.

However, I remain extremely skeptical about "seafaring" Africans (outside of Pharaonic Egyptian culture) in the megalithic era ca. 3000 BC.

Yes, dugout canoes of tree logs are surely an ancient basic water travel technology found throughout the world -- also in Nigeria, but dugouts are still quite an extended technological distance from the kind of boats found at Abydos in Egypt.

I have nothing personal against dugouts. Estonia was the last European country to continue to build them, and my ancestors come from the border region of Estonia and Latvia.

However, the Baltic peoples -- as opposed to the Scandinavians -- never seem to have gotten much beyond that stage, I think because it was not necessary for them economically. The only ancient peoples in the Baltic who continued to build primitive boats clear into the modern era were the Livs viz. Livonians (relatives of the Finns) and they used them for fishing.

Scandinavian seafaring on the other hand has culminated in the world's largest ferries traveling e.g. between Kiel, Germany and Oslo, Norway:

"Color Line's Kiel-Oslo ships (and the world's largest ferries) COLOR FANTASY and COLOR MAGIC...."
http://maritimematters.com/2011/06/poesia-of-the-north-atlantic-part-one/.

The megaliths in Senegambia, Nigeria and even Bouar to some degree are near a major river by which the subsequent megalithic area was accessed by the megalith makers, so my argument.

In Senegal and Gambia, this was the Gambia River.
In Nigeria it was the Cross River.
For the Central African Republic it was the Sanaga River, the next large river south of the Cross River.

"The Sanaga River is a river of South Province, Cameroon, Centre Province, Cameroon, and West Province, Cameroon.... The Sanaga River forms a boundary between two tropical moist forest ecoregions. The Cross-Sanaga-Bioko coastal forests lie to the north between the Sanaga River and the Cross River of Nigeria, and the Atlantic Equatorial coastal forests extend south of the river through southwestern Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Cabinda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo."

Jaap van der Waarde, Integrated River Basin Management of the Sanaga River, Cameroon writes at http://www.internationalrivers.org/files/IRBM Sanaga.pdf:

"The Sanaga River is the largest river in Cameroon.... It flows for 918 km from its source on the Adamawa Plateau.... The main tributaries in Adamawa are the Lom to the South and the Djerem to the North."

The Electricity Development Corporation, Republic of Cameroon, in Lom Pangar Hydroelectric Project: Environmental and social assessment (ESA), Executive summary, March 2011 writes:

"Lom originates at the foot of Ngaou Ndal [Ngaou "mountain" and Ndal "throne", Mont Ngaoui in Google - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Ngaoui] in the Central African Republic at the south-eastern boundary of the Adamaoua, around elevation 1,200 m, 70 km east of Meiganga...."

Mont Ngaoui is only ca. 100 km (60 miles) as the crow flies from Bouar, Central African Republic, where we find the megaliths marking the center of Africa in the ancient land survey system.

I do not know to what degree such rivers were anciently navigable by flat boats like those found at Abydos (as was the case for the more modern ancient Vikings, such boats were surely pulled along the shore in areas where not navigable). It remains a speculation that the ancient megalith makers navigated these rivers to get close to locations which they required for their land survey. However, it seems significant to me, as in the above quotation from the Wikipedia that the Sanaga River and Cross River are the major dividing rivers for these two tropical African ecoregions, and it is near these rivers that we find the Nigerian and Central African megaliths.

In any event, we are not going to resolve the issue of origins now, and surely much more research will be required until some element of certainty surfaces as to who the originators of megalithic culture actually were. If things were certain, there would be no need of discussion.

Africa, Ancient Megaliths and Seafaring Surveyors

I have been corresponding briefly with Professor Catherine Acholonu (see http://www.carcafriculture.org/), who nominated the Nigeria megaliths to the WMF [World Monuments Fund] and who suggested the corrected date of ca. 4500 BC for them based upon her finding of "two Pre-Cuneiform letters of Sumer on the monoliths, namely the letters KI and SHI."

I have not seen the megaliths in question so I must reserve judgment about them for the time being, but it is all very interesting in terms of megalithic origins.

Here is what I wrote about her important work on the Nigerian megaliths and their possible origin:

Africa, Ancient Megaliths and Seafaring Surveyors

I am in accord with the "out of Africa" hypothesis for initial human migration to other parts of the world -- see my posting at http://humanmigrations.blogspot.com/2009/03/human-migrations-and-principles-of.html but that was much earlier than the megaliths, as the initial human migration "out of Africa" appears to have started ca. 60000 BC or so, if I understand DNA studies correctly.

A megalithic origin in or near the heart of Africa, on the other hand, is unlikely because those peoples in the megalithic era lacked the seafaring technology necessary to transfer that technology across water to other countries. Evidence for ancient seaworthy boat-building is not found in regions such as Senegambia, Nigeria or the Central African Republic, where megaliths have been found. We do have such evidence in Africa, albeit in Egypt, as discussed below.

One group that is a candidate for being the ancient surveyor seafarers in question is mythical Jason and his Argonauts, who were so-called Minyans by origin -- more on this below.

In days before writing, people encompassed their history in oral accounts which later became myths and legends. Hence, it is possible that the legend of the Argonauts dates back to a true quite ancient event.

Legend also relates that the names of the Argonauts were subsequently inscribed in the stars of the heavens (e.g. Hercules), because the Argonauts used these stars for navigation, and, as I allege in Stars Stones and Scholars, also used those same stars to triangulate their land surveys of Earth (the full extent of such land survey(s) can be debated -- it may have been limited only to Europe and Africa originally).

The Book of Enoch relates as follows http://ftp.fortunaty.net/com/sacred-texts/bib/boe/boe064.htm:

"CHAPTER LXI of the Book of Enoch: Angels go off to measure Paradise:

1. And I saw in those days how long cords were given to those angels, and they took to themselves wings and flew, and they went towards the north.

2. And I asked the angel, saying unto him: 'Why have those (angels) taken these cords and gone off?' And he said unto me: 'They have gone to measure.'"

"Paradise" of course was the "heaven" of stars and Enoch gives us clear evidence that they were measuring land by cords (as in ancient Egypt) and "flew" , i.e. perhaps a bad translation for sailed by the wind and/or rowed on the waters.

In Hebrew the word Minyan means "counter", "numberer" so that the Minyans conceivably took their name as the "counting" viz. "numbering" surveyors.

A current mainstream theory is that the Minyans originally came from Greece (Boeotia), but it is not really clear to this day where the Proto-Greeks originally came from, what their relation to e.g. the seafaring Phoenicians was, and one could even suggest that the argonautic Minyans may have came from pre-dynastic viz. early dynastic Pharaonic Egypt and/or the far North (Scandinavia), or even from the Ancient Near East.

I am thinking here particularly of the ships, the so-called "royal boats" (14 thus far) found buried at Abydos and dated to ca. 3000 BC (See http://www.abc.se/~pa/mar/abydos.htm). Such a great number of boats buried royally -- as if in honor of a common event -- might indicate that the Abydos royal boats were the boats that returned from the Minyan survey expedition. See here for more about Egypt and ancient shipbuilding: http://www.bible-history.com/links.php?cat=24&sub=364&cat_name=Ancient+Egypt&subcat_name=Naval.

Even assuming that the ancient seafaring land surveyors came from predynastic or early dynastic Pharaonic Egypt, i.e. Africa, the culture to which these seafarers originally belonged is thereby not necessarily clear. Ancient seafaring keeps being pushed further and further back by the archaeologists -- see http://www.archaeology.org/9703/etc/specialreport.html.

One argument against the ancient seafaring surveyors coming from early dynastic Pharaonic Egypt is that there does not appear to be the presence of writing carved in stone on these megaliths, which one would expect from a literate culture or civilization. When writing is found today, it is painted on the stone, and that is surely a later development on original, older megaliths. Hence, if the ancient seafaring surveyors came from Egypt, then it could only have been in an era where ancient writing was not yet discovered or perhaps was only in its scribal infancy.

Newly Discovered Nigeria Megaliths Confirm Ancient Earth Survey

The substance of this posting was first posted at LexiLine yestserday, among other things pointing out that:

the recently surfaced Nigeria Ikom megaliths are at ca. 6 degrees latitude, i.e. the same ca. 6 degrees of latitude as the megaliths of Bouar, Central African Republic.

THIS IS ANOTHER CONFIRMATION OF MY ANCIENT LAND SURVEY HYPOTHESIS.

As someone who during college days worked in the field for the Nebraska State Surveyors Office, I have some experience in land survey.

Archaeologists, unfortunately, know next to nothing about land survey, and are often incompetent to judge these matters, which has kept them from understanding the megaliths.

In my book, Stars Stones and Scholars, based on the evidence I had collected up to its publication -- evidence I continue to collect -- I allege a land survey of the Earth was performed in ca. 3000 BC by ancient seafarers (who also moved somewhat land inwards along rivers and seas, if needed), and they sighted and sited their "marker stones", the ancient megaliths, by astronomy. Later surveys are also possible, of course, and can not be excluded.

Part of the ancient alleged land survey in ca. 3000 BC includes not only Europe, but also Africa, and in Stars Stones and Scholars I specifically mention the megaliths of Axum, Gambia, Senegal, and the Central African Republic.

See the maps of Europe and Africa and the ancient land survey at
http://www.megaliths.net/africa.htm.

At the time that I wrote Stars Stones and Scholars, I was unaware of any megaliths in Nigeria.

I came upon the Nigeria megaliths just a few days ago in seeking to answer a reader's private email question about megalithic radiocarbon dating of the Gambia and Senegal megaliths.

Here are my resulting thoughts on the African megaliths:

Original radiocarbon dating by Nicholas David in 1982 of the Bouar megalithic site in the Central African Republic (ca. 6 degrees latitude) gave inter alia dates of ca. 3140 and 3110 BC (before Christ, plus or minus 90 years), as then reported by Etienne Zangato (for which I am VERY THANKFUL) in Etude du megalithisme en Repubique centrafricaine Nouvelles decouvertes de monumnets a chambre dans le secteur de Ndio, originally found at www.bondy.ird.fr/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_4/sci_hum/10006239.pdf (no longer found at that URL)

Zangato has, however, published another article which is now found at éditions monique mergoil viz.
http://www.editions-monique-mergoil.com/index.html?menu=57509a&bchercher_auteur=113071
as ZANGATO Etienne - Les Occupations néolithiques dans le Nord-Ouest de la République Centrafricaine, (Préf. Ch. Bonnet), 2000, 124 p., 70 fig., 35 tabl.

Here is the abstract of the article, which I have just ordered online (28,00 € plus 6,00 € postage) but have not yet read (from éditions monique mergoil ):

"Following on from the publication in 1999, by the same author, of the results of 12 years of archaeological research in the Bouar region in the north-west of the Central African Republic, this volume comprises an archaeological study of Neolithic sites, both buried and surface. The period is characterized by a lithic industry producing waste flakes and struck tools in quartz and quartz sandstones, predominantly arrow heads, scrapers and other implements. This industry is associated with coiled and decorated ceramics demonstrating a wide range of manufacturing techniques. This material culture remained virtually unchanged between 5100 and 2700 BP, but between 2750 and 2700 BP a number of polished axes and megalithic monuments of a non-funerary nature made their appearance.

The abundance of data and of archaeological structures in the Bouar region, as well as the wide variety of ceramics dating to these phases, makes this volume rich in detailed information about a time when Neolithic societies in Central Africa were moving from a pre-megalithic phase (5090 to 2920 BP) to a megalithic one (2920-2750 BP)."

As one can see, Zangato chooses to call the period in Bouar starting 5090 BP (before the present) as "pre-megalithic". This is an assessment with which I disagree strongly, since there is radiocarbon material at Bouar to indicate that this period was by no means "pre-megalithic" but in fact "megalithic", just as the megalithic culture in Europe in the same era. Of course, megaliths that we see today may ALSO be copies or restorations of older more original stones, or one may be carving later in time on the surface of original "older" stones. It is also conceivable that stones have been moved for one reason or another, as we also find in Europe. However, one can not simply ignore the older radiocarbon dates, otherwise the evidence of the older radiocarbon data is ultimately shoved under the rug over time and lost.

As I have previously written online about the standing stones of Senegal and Gambia at http://www.megaliths.net/africa.htm ,

"Many of the stones [of Gambia and Senegal] appear to be of more recent origin than the original megaliths in Senegal and Gambia, or they have been moved or restored from original positions."

As written online at the Wikipedia under "Stone circle ":

"Dates and archaeology of European Megalithic stone circles
All experts agree that stone circles are of pre-Christian date, but beyond that stone circles have proven difficult to date accurately. Radiocarbon dating has produced a wide range of dates at different sites. This is at least partly due to an inadequacy of materials suitable for radiocarbon dating that can be reliably obtained from the sites. The diversity of radiocarbon evidence may also suggest that stone circles were constructed over a very long period, or were sometimes reconstructed at later dates. It is often not clear when building started. A further obstacle to dating is that there are generally no other archaeological artifacts associated with the stone circles. 'Traditional' archaeological artifacts, such as pottery shards, bones, etc., are not often found at the sites, and when found are frequently of a later date than the associated stone circle."

A similar case in point are now the recently discovered megaliths of Ikom, Cross River State, in Southern Nigeria (at ca. 6 degrees latitude, as at Bouar). AFP writes (see also Megalithic.co.uk ):

"[T]he first archeologists to study the monoliths in a neighbouring village used carbon dating to put their age at around 2000 years.
More recent studies, [the chief] said, also using carbon dating, have estimated the age of the stones at Alok at 4500 years - that is roughly as old as the Egyptian pyramids....
WMF [World Monuments Fund] says the stones date from 2000 BC, but it is not clear whether the Fund is using a number supplied by the Nigerian government or whether it has dated the stones independently."

It is quite clear to me as someone who has been in the field to survey land, that finding extensive megalithic sites in Africa -- in Nigeria and in the Central African Republic -- at virtually the same latitude is arguably not chance, and that the original megaliths at both sites stem from the same megalithic era, i.e. what I claim to be ca. 3000 BC. That local tribes have continued a megalithic tradition in both regions since that era appears to be obvious, but says nothing about megalithic era origins.

How do the two sites, Ikom and Bouar, now relate in terms of survey to the Senegal and Gambia (Senegambia) megaliths? I am looking into that.