Evidentiary Archaeology - LexiLine Journal 355

In the previous post I referred to the idea that the materials in LexiLine and elsewhere posted by this author stem from the school of evidentiary archaeology, of which I am the founder, rather than from the schools of cultural history, processual archaeology or postprocessual archaeology.

We can illustrate the principle of evidentiary archaeology with a simple hypothetical example.

Let us presume that a people X initially lived in country A and that in the course of history this people moved to country B. Many thousands of years later, in the written records of people X, we find detailed accounts of the ancient magnificent reigns and exploits of their many early kings, for which, however, we find no archaeological record in country B. At the same time, we find extensive archaeological evidence of magnificent reigns of kings in country A.

Which answer below is more probable as a logical matter?

1. The kings referred to in the ancient written records of people X could be the kings of country A.
2. The kings referred to in country B actually existed in country B but somehow disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving no archaeological record.
3. The written records are a monumental fiction, for whatever purpose.

The obvious, logical answer is number 1. The kings referred to in the ancient written records of people X could be the kings of country A.

This hypothetical question actually repeats the actual real-life situation with respect to the Hebrew records of their ancient kings. The Hebrews were first in Egypt and then moved to Israel, according to the Biblical account. The Old Testament is full of detailed accounts of the reigns and exploits of many kings. Rather than examining alternative 1, however, mainstream archaeology, caught in the traps of cultural history, and processual and postprocessual archaeology, has selected option 2 (with some persons even opting for option 3). How stupid is that?

What amuses about option 2, which is the prevailing option in mainstream archaeology, is that it would also mean that people X had lost ALL memory of their sojourn in country A and the kings that ruled that country, writing only about country B. How likely is that?

For all of their fancy titles, the cultural historians and processual and postprocessual archaeologists appear to be intellectual simpletons who are unable to examine the most logical alternative, that the kings referred to in the Old Testament are those of Egypt, with all of the ramifications that such an analysis has for the history of civilization.

Why is option 1 above not being examined by mainstream archaeology?

The first major reason is the fact that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were only recently deciphered (and this has been done only partly). Prior to that time, no connection was seen between Egypt and the Hebrews, who had their own known language and their own known country.

The second major reason is that it was thus assumed that the Hebrew account of the exploits of kings applied to Israel, and not to the country which the Hebrews occupied prior to Exodus, i.e. Egypt.

This assumption was demonstrably false.

I can only shake my head in disbelief at the nonsense being churned out in mainstream archaeology in this regard and continue to point at the evidence, which clearly indicates the kings of the Old Testament are the kings of Egypt.

The Goddess and the Bull, Catalhoyuk [Çatalhöyük, Catalhuyuk, Çatalhüyük, Çatal Hüyük, Catal Huyuk, Catal Hoyuk] - LexiLine Journal 354

As a graduate of Stanford Law School (class of 1971), I regularly recieve the Stanford Lawyer, which I always read cover to cover, including the class notes of all Stanford Law graduation years, for this latter especially gives me a sound perspective on life.

The Stanford Lawyer Spring 2005 issue which I just received has an interesting commentary by Stanford Law class correspondent Malcolm H. Furbush (class of 1949) which I would like to share with you since it applies directly to our major theme, the history of civilization.
Furbush writes:

"In the spring of 2000 I accompanied my friend Dr. Johan Hultin to visit the area where agriculture began (about 9,000 B.C.) with the domestication of einkorn wheat in the Karacadag Mountains of southeast Turkey near the city of Diyarbakir. The wild einkorn wheat is still growing in some patches in the mountains.... We had heard of the reactivation of large-scale excavation activity at Catalhoyuk (near Konya, Turkey) believed to be the earliest city. The current excavations are directed by Ian Hodder, a Stanford professor.... The purpose of this brief personal account is to introduce a new book, The Goddess and the Bull, Catalhoyuk: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization, by Michael Balter. M. Balter writes about the individuals currently participating in the excavations at Catalhoyuk, their many different fields of expertise, and how they are all adding to a comprehensive understanding of the material uncovered by excavation by following the conceptual approach of post-processual archaeology of which Ian Hodder can be said to be the chief architect. For those of us who have been archaeology buffs for as long as we can remember, this is a fascinating book."

The book looks interesting, but of special interest for us was the use of the concept of post-processual archaeology about which the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-processual_archaeology writes:

"Postprocessual archaeologists state that personal biases inevitably affect the very questions archaeologists ask and direct them to the conclusions they are predisposed to believe."

How true. How true.

Read more about culture history, and processual and postprocessual archaeology here:

AbsoluteAstronomy.com - http://snipurl.com/ggug viz. http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/c/cu/cultural-history_archaeology.htm
About.com - http://archaeology.about.com/od/pterms/g/postprocess.htm
Origins.net - http://www.originsnet.org/moremeth1.html

We would like to think that our own work at LexiLine and elsewhere is the dawn of a new archaeology which we call "evidentiary archaeology" - i.e. the past is what the evidence tells us it was and not what the professors tell us it was. I am sure that evidentiary archaeology would be a revolutionary approach for many archaeologists of any of the above schools.

Incompetence in Mainstream Linguistics - LexiLine Journal 353

A reader recently wrote me an e-mail suggesting that my connection of archaic Latvian to proto-Indo-European construction was "tribal", which is nonsense. Here is what I wrote to him:

"I personally do not really care whether Latvian or Lithuanian is more archaic as a language. If I find something more archaic in Lithuanian than in Latvian, I use it, of course. There is no question that Lithuanian is also very archaic, as is Latvian.

The question of provenance is critical however to an accurate reconstruction of Indo-European. If you assume Lithuanian is in general more archaic, then you prevalently use Lithuanian rather than Latvian for Indo-European reconstruction. Obviously, if the premise that Lithuanian is more archaic is not true, then you are getting prima facie incorrect results - and that is my major point.

The linguists' reliance on Lithuanian - more or less ignorning Latvian - has led to some mainstream linguistic theories about Indo-European which in my opinion are simply false, based on my native knowledge of Latvian.

Let me take the example of case forms. Lithuanian is regarded to be older than Latvian for example because it has MORE rather than fewer case forms than Latvian, whereas my logic tells me that the more archaic a language is, the less complex its grammar should be, and the less case forms it should have. Differentiation of any kind results from the process of development of a language. An example is Latin, a much younger language, which has a bevy of case forms which developed over time - far many more case forms than exist in Lat(v)i(a)n.

Moreover, if certain case forms are allegedly more archaic, then it is up to the linguists to explain how other languages have lost such case forms or to show remnants of them in such languages. This the linguists do not do.

In Latvian, for example, locative case is shown simply by lengthening the end vowel of a word - and this is not always the same vowel. So that seems to me to be a very archaic - indeed, a more "primitive" method as it were - of showing location than a language which has become standardized and more differentiated in its formal structure of grammar.

Take a look at the following website page at LexiLine:

http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi16.htm

There you see the near grammatical identity of modern Latvian case forms with ancient Luwian Hittite (a language spoken and written nearly 4000 years ago) for the word "water". However, the linguist involved in writing the cited book on Hittite does not even mention Latvian once in his book. He is writing without competent knowledge of his field and is relying on sloppy research to boot.

Moreover, if the Lithuanian hypothesis were correct, then Lithuanian forms would have to be shown to be older than these Hittite forms, and that in my opinion can not be done.

This is just one example of many. It has nothing to do with tribal competition as you suggest, but is a simple matter of the evidence.

When you can find me a mainsteam linguist who can explain the Latvian-Hittite evidence on that website page to my satisfaction within current linguistic theory, let me know. Up to now, I have found no one.

Quite the contrary, the linguists stick to their false version of the nominative form for Hittite "water" i.e. "u-i-da-ar or u-wi-ti-ar", allegeging that this was a U-R form whereas all the other case forms in that same Hittite language were allegedly U-N forms, which is basically impossible. This is incompetent linguistics at its peak.

The reason for this stupidity is simply Western bias toward "water"-form words ending in R, whereas all the evidence in the East - for example, the names of rivers - clearly indicates that the prevailing ancient "water" form in nominative case ended in N.

e.g. Latvian UDEN- = "nominative form for water" whence

DON, TANais, DAN-UBE (UDEN-UPE - the words in Latvan mean "water-
river"), DN-IEP-(er). The older N form is widely prevalent in the
East.

The less archaic form is found in the West and it is an R-form for "wat-ER", i.e. U-R rather than U-N.

WAT-ER, OD-ER (rather than UD-EN), WASS-ER, WES-ER, AD-ER, HYDRO- etc.

Consummate stupidity is then found as a result in the linguists' reconstruction of the Indo-European root for "water" which is alleged to be *wed- with examples given by them of the suffixed o-grade form *wod-or ir the suffixed zero-grade form *ud-ro.

This would mean that the 4000-year old Hittite *wod-on forms were less archaic than say English WAT-ER or German WASS-ER which of course is simply idiotic as a matter of the proven development of Indo-European from the East to the West.

We see this confirmed in the Germanic language, where the old Germanic god ODIN is not WOTAR or ODAR but rather WOT-AN or OD-IN. The N form is older.

Mainstram linguists do not understand the conceptual origin of language. The ancients did not start with a modern-like "abstract" concept for something that was "wet" - "wet" with what?? but rather derived their water-words from the SOURCES of water.

Rivers flowed in river beds - this is VADIN- (vein, duct, canal, river bed) in Latvian = UDEN = one variant form for water in flowing sources.

Other waters were found in wells whence Latin AQUA was the Latvian AKA "well".

Other waters were used for drinking, in Latvian IEDZER means "drink in" = EZER "lake".

The Latvian AVOT- "spring" looks very close to "WET- etc. etc.

Hence, the linguists have to contend with the fact that the word for "wet" in Latvian is NONE of these but is the words SLAPS which is identical with the word for "thirst".

If the Indo-European term for "water" actually derived from an abstract concept for "wet", then Latvian would have remnants of this visible in its very archaic language - but there is not a trace of this origin. Indeed, the concept of "wet" has nothing to do with the origin of terms for water, which is why "wet" in German is e.g. the unrelated NASS, etc.

The average linguist understands nothing of this. I have no quarrel with the Lithuanians or any other ancient tribe or group, but I do have a quarrel with the modern linguists, from whatever nation they may come. Most of them are incompetents.

Taiwan and the Polynesians - LexiLine Journal 352

The New Scotsman has an article by science correspondent Ian Johnston at http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=738032005 about a DNA study just published in the journal PLoS Biology finding that the indigenous population of Taiwan was genetically similar to Polynesians.

This is surely true. Unfortunately the study makes far-reaching and unwarranted conclusions not supported by the actual evidence, writing carelessly that:

"Analysis of DNA sequences in this study reveals the presence of a
motif of three mutations ... [which are] shared among aboriginal
Taiwanese, Melanesians and Polynesians. No mainland East Asian
population has yet been found to carry lineages derived from these
three [DNA] positions.

This suggests that the motif may have evolved in populations living
in or near Taiwan at the end of the late Pleistocene period [more
than 10,000 years ago]. The time element ... requires that we adopt a
model according to which the origin of Austronesian [including the
Polynesian] migration can be traced back to Taiwan."

That kind of erroneous thinking and poor logic has no place in science, even if it is partly made in Baltic Estonia, a country to which I am positively partial (the report is an interesting joint effort by scientists at the Transfusion Medicine Laboratory in Taiwan and Estonia's Biocentre).

Obviously, if the original Taiwanese did not come from the mainland, then they could only have reached Taiwan from somewhere else by boat and hence it was obviously the boatbuilders who reached Taiwan AFTER they discovered making boats elsewhere who first discovered Taiwan and not before they discovered making boats.

Do we need to give courses in logic to the mainstream scientists??

To find the original aboriginals of Taiwan you first have to find out where the boat-builders originally came from, and that issue is as yet undecided.

Korea Japan China Ancient Astronomy - LexiLine Journal 351

To our files at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LexiLine/files
for Korea, Japan and China I have added the following files:

karasukiboshi.png [the graphic below]

(Japan and China, Orion's Belt, Karasuki Boshi, the 3-Pronged Plow, which
helps identify the subsequent Yuri Dolmen Taegu of Korea as the stars of Orion's Belt)

yuridolmentaegu.png [the graphic below]

(Korea, Yuri Dolmen ChangRyong Taegu, Orion's Belt)

Here we see a wonderful mesh of the astronomy of China, Korea and Japan in identifying the Yuri Dolmen at the ChangRyong megalithic site near Taegu, Korea as marking the stars of Orion's Belt in the ancient megalithic survey of Korea. This megalithic site now gives us
a firm, fixed orientation for the Korean megalithic sites.

A new page on Korea will be uploaded soon to http://www.megaliths.net/....