Are Persians and Norwegians related?

[sh]

Years ago, while living in Scandinavia, I first heard that Norsemen are descended from the Ariyans.

At the time I thought the proposition was absurd. I thought, how could blue-eyed, blonde-haired Scandinavians and brown-haired, brown-eyed Persians/Indians possibly be related?

A while ago I thought I'd try to learn a little bit of the Old Persian language. (circa. 2500BC) The language of the Achaemenids.

I quickly came upon something inexplicable. The word for "wolf" in Old Persian is "varka."

When I first saw this I thought there must be some mistake, because the Old Norse word for wolf is "varg."

Now, linguistically, the idea of 'wolf' is probably among the oldest things that we have a word for. People living in temperate climates have been encountering wolves since time immemorial.

Another example of this is the word "cow" which in modern Farsi is "gaw." (pronounced ga-uv) This could be taken as proof that modern English and Farsi are both descended from a single people who lived at a time when the idea of 'cow' was first named.

One more example will suffice, I think.

There is a month in the modern Iranian calendar named "Tir." It is named after a god of the pre-Islamic era. Tir also means arrow in modern Farsi.

The Norse god "Týr" is also associated with a symbol that looks just like an arrow.

I have some more of these if anyone is interested, but I think the point has been made.

We know that Persians and Scandinavians haven't had much contact historically. Certainly no cultural exchanges or intermarriages of any great significance have occured in the last 2500 years.

Who would even expect such a thing? The two countries are quite a ways apart.

So how are they linked?

Apparently, the Norse gods came from a place called "Asgard." Some people have identified Asgard as Asia. More specifically, the central Asian steppes; the alleged homeland of the Ariyans.

And on a separate (probably unrelated) note, the Aztecs of Central America claimed to have come from a place called "Aztlán."

What does all this mean? Who knows.

-f

[sh]

Could it be possible that the Ariyans were never a race, the way we understand the word today?

The Ariyans may very likely have been the Proto-Indo-Europeans. People who spoke a certain language.

But how could the same language have been spoken by people who look so different and are obviously descended from different ancestors?

I definitely see something very mysterious going on here. Something about the origins of language.

I just can't put my finger on it or define it.

-f

[sh]

Ok here's my theory based on the available facts.

Let's assume that in a time pre-history, there was a population of men and women living somewhere in the steppes of Central Asia. And let's also assume that these people, who I will here refer to as the Ariyans, were a relatively small society of civilized people.

Let's further assume that in the greater geographical area surrounding these people, there were only scattered wild men and women.

These wild people may have either had no linguistic abilities at all, or extremely primitive ones as required by their wild, probably solitary existence.

At this point, my contention is that these wild men (and women) were the survivors of an upheaval that had destroyed human society. Or perhaps they were the descendents of those survivors.

I think it's possible to account for a solitary lifestyle by the fact that cannibalism would be a certainty under the conditions described.

The Ariyans then, may have been another group of survivors, who unlike some people who had reverted to a wild state, were able to maintain some degree of their previous civilization(s).

They probably had all kinds of artifacts, books and technology saved from their destroyed world.

I am betting that these people spoke a language that we know today as "Proto-Indo-European."

At some point the Ariyans must have ventured outside of their area. This probably happened once they were able to achieve a certain degree of stability, security and proficiency.

So these civilized men (and women), probably well-armed and masters of reason, found the wild men (and women) who were scattered all about. They may or may not have introduced themselves as gods and either enslaved or civilized these men and women, depending on who you ask.

They gathered the wild men (and women) into tribes and taught them the Ariyan language. Then they taught them "rules of conduct." They basically prescribed behavior for the wild people.

It seems like the gods taught some of the people how to become gods, while others only to be slaves.

And so each new "tribe" thus formed was isolated.

Some grew and conquered others. Others were conquered and disappeared.

As the generations came and went, the language which had been the same at first became a whole family of languages derived from the common source.

I realize there is an enormous amount of speculation here. But I personally see this scenario as very likely to happen one more time, soon.

I may be wrong, but that doesn't matter really. If I'm right then it couldn't hurt to know beforehand what to expect so you don't go wild.

-f

[sh]

Furthermore, the word for "god" in modern Farsi is "khoda."

"Khoda" is the corrupted plural form of "khod," which means self.

In Old Persian the word for "self" is "adam."

In modern Farsi "adam" means human being.

Another word for human being in English is "Man."

In Farsi "man" means "myself."

My contention is that the Ariyans had introduced themselves as "them selves" to differentiate between them and the wild men (and women) who probably no longer possessed any significant degree of self-awareness or a self-image, when the Ariyans found them.

I believe it is our self-awareness that makes us human. We are aware of being human.

We could have been aware of being camels, but we aren't.

-f

[sh]

I could probably construct the exact same scenario for the Nahuatl speaking peoples of Central America, who were civilized by the Toltecs.

I believe the word Toltec is derived from tol + tecatl which roughly translated means "people who know."

-f

[sh]

Oh! And I almost forgot..

The Ariyans, it seems, were very fond of their hallucinogenic drink, the divine Soma/Hauma.

The Toltecs on the other hand had a whole bunch of "somas." Most notably a hallucinogenic drink, the "holy Ayahuasca."

-f

[sh]

Karla, (you don't mind if I call you Karla, do you?)

You inspired this. I hope it meets the criteria.

It's as doomsday as can be. And I think it's the most outrageous story I've ever concocted.

So, if this fits the bill, let me know and I'll try to edit it. And if it's no good, please tell me what's wrong with it, and be as strict and severe as you can possibly be ok?

-f

[karlsie]

Sh, i think you met the "criteria" for our counter-cultural views a long time ago, and i'm completely supportive of the article you'd like to present from your musing. Either you are psychic, or you are simply on the same wave length as my little gang of philosophers. My daughter and i were in a discussion just today while i was visiting her house for our Christmas celebration; and the discussion was around racial features.

It began when she first remarked that though the Greeks, during their civilization heights, presented in their sculptures and art, was of a tall, blonde, light skinned people, when in fact, said she confidently, the average Greek at the time was as small and dark skinned as they are now. In fact, if you look at detailed ancient history, nearly all the indigenous people were small and dark, with a taller, lighter ruling class. The Vikings, the Huns, the Saxons, were all invading people, with the Vikings as the only exception to the power of rule, as they simply conquered and left.

Here are a few more curiosities for you to mull over; in an area of anthropological history i feel much safer in discussing. I spent ten years among the Mayans, Aztecs and Zapotecans of Southern Mexico and Central America. The Aztecs admit to having been the most barbaric tribe. They were fierce and warlike. They conquered the more peaceful, civilized Mayans and imitated their architecture, culture and religion, much in the manner the Romans imitated the Greeks, but with no real understanding of the spirit that had shaped their culture. This i learned straight from the Aztecs, and not the anthropologists who still are trying to depict the Mayans as an ancient, barbaric race with an astounding grasp of mathematics.

The modern day Mayan is not barbaric by any stretch of the imagination. They are intelligent, adept at any skill they apply themselves to, and spend a great deal of time deciphering and translating their ancient scripts, to nobody's great appreciation except their own. The Mayans, however, say the Zapotecans are a much older race, and though they coexisted peacefully through all the vast centuries, the Zapotecans rejected most of Mayan technology, much as they resist modernization now.

The Zapotecans say they have always been here and are the cradle of civilization; at least for the Americas. Their god is two headed; both male and female; and their society is matriarch; setting the groundwork for a matriarch society in all the Native American tribes.

I visited a lot of pyramids, sometimes on psychedelics; which can have a devastating effect; and sometimes not, but one of the most chilling experiences was a very ancient pyramid, believed to be Mayan, although it had not been confirmed, because in order to finish the excavation, they would have to remove a church placed there by a seventeenth century monk who designated the mound holy ground. They had exposed enough of the pyramid to reveal two corner walls. Sitting half way up the steps of the pyramid, resting, my attention was caught by some indents in the mortar my fingers were automatically tracing. As has been done since time memorial, citizens had not been able to resist writing graffiti in the still soft mortar. The thing was though; the letters were not hieroglyphs, but cuneiform, more specifically those of Latin/Anglo based languages.

While this is an oddity in itself, the Zapotecan tongue is even more intriguing. Although the meanings of the words are different, the inflection and rhythm of the Zapotecan language is much like English.

The Inuit, or Eskimo as they don't mind being called, despite the insistence of the politically correct, are quick to say their ancestors are Asian. The US Government plan to use Inuit as scouts into the Himalayan mountains in order to invade Mongolia failed because the Inuit said they would not make war on their cousins. However, they also say they are not related to the Native American (Indian), that these people had come up from the south.

Recent anthropological studies confirm this. The Athabascan, which extend to the outer rim of the Arctic Circle, are directly related to the Navajo of New Mexico. The Navajo are a tribe of the Hopi. The book of the Hopi is almost identical to the book of the Mayan, describing in the same detail a major calamity that changed the world.

Do we go through the same heights of technical development every twelve thousand years or so, only to be slammed back to square one because of our mistakes? I think it's highly possible. The Hopi and the Mayan both state that those who survived did so by "opening their third eye" (sound familiar?) I suppose if the Mayan are right, we'll learn soon enough.

If this has helped you in focusing your speculations, i'm glad. I think you're taking off from a very good premise; actually one of my pet topics. Challenge the anthropological evidence, collected mainly from the Biblical view of a nomadic tribe of people whose stories, after all, were only their perception of history.

[sh]

Karla,

Your encouragement means the world to me. Thank you so much!

And that pyramid you mentioned, were you by any chance talking about Cholula? aka Tlachihualtepetl?

I'd really like to go see that big hill one day.

Did you know that in modern Farsi, "tepe" (pronounced tap-peh) means hill, whereas in Nahuatl "tepetl" means mountain!?

And here's something from Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods, might interest you.

An artificial language

Another possible legacy of Tiahuanaco, and of the Viracochas, lay
embedded in the language spoken by the local Aymara Indians—a
language regarded by some specialists as the oldest in the world.21
In the 1980s Ivan Guzman de Rojas, a Bolivian computer scientist,
accidentally demonstrated that Aymara might be not only very ancient
but, significantly, that it might be a ‘made-up’ language—something
deliberately and skillfully designed. Of particular note was the seemingly
artificial character of its syntax, which was rigidly structured and
unambiguous to an extent thought inconceivable in normal ‘organic’
speech.22 This synthetic and highly organized structure meant that
Aymara could easily be transformed into a computer algorithm to be used
to translate one language into another: ‘The Aymara Algorithm is used as
a bridge language. The language of an original document is translated
into Aymara and then into any number of other languages.’23
Was it just coincidence that an apparently artificial language governed
by a computer-friendly syntax should be spoken today in the environs of
Tiahuanaco? Or could Aymara be a legacy of the high learning that legend
attributed to the Viracochas? If so, what other legacies might there be?
What other incomplete fragments of an old and forgotten wisdom might
be lying scattered around—fragments which had perhaps contributed to
the richness and diversity of many of the cultures that had evolved in this
region during the 10,000 years before the conquest? Perhaps it was the
possession of fragments like these that had made possible the drawing of
the Nazca lines and enabled the predecessors of the Incas to build the
‘impossible’ stone walls at Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman?

20 Ibid.
21 Evan Hadingham, Lines to the Mountain Gods, Harrap, London, 1987, p. 34.
22 ‘Aymara is rigorous and simple—which means that its syntactical rules always apply,
and can be written out concisely in the sort of algebraic shorthand that computers
understand. Indeed, such is its purity that some historians think it did not just evolve,
like other languages, but was actually constructed from scratch.’ Sunday Times, London,
4 November 1984.
23 M. Belts, ‘Ancient Language may Prove Key to Translation System’, Computerworld,
vol. IX, No. 8, 25 February 1985, p. 30.

I don't speak Aymara and I don't know anyone who does, so I can't verify if what he is claiming is actually true. But it's very interesting nonetheless.

-f

[sh]

I think it's possible that long before this previous hypothesized upheaval, another much more devastating one had occured.

I see a global civilization of men (and women) who all spoke a single language.

The same thing that happened with the Proto-Indo-European language, may have occurred on a much bigger scale at an earlier time.

I believe all the human languages of today are without a doubt descended from a single language.

It's absurd to think that a thing as complex as language, the expert use of syntax, could have sprung up on separate occasions in isolated tribes of hunter-gatherers.

It is however, very possible for a single language to branch off into a family over time.

Given the extreme state of degeneration we are currently in, I'm convinced that our species has faced extreme calamities on more than one occasion.

-f

[sh]

Considering how weak we currently are, we may even be facing total extinction this time.

I really don't see how we could sink any lower than we are now.

I don't believe we could "regress" back to being animals. At this point we are worse than animals.

To become more like other creatures on this planet would be a step up for us, really.

-f

[sh]

I think the proof that we are in fact in a state of degeneration is the fact that we know so little.

We don't know where we came from.

We don't know why we're here.

We don't know where we're going.

And we may be on the eve of extinction, yet we're totally unaware.

How did we become so clueless?

-f

[sh]

And I think the ultimate irony is that our scientists are probably the most clueless of all.

So entangled by the material world, they vehemently deny the existence of anything else.

Then they pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for being critical thinkers, and of sound mind.

I'm going to say this once more. The physical world is an interpretation of sensory data from an organism.

To think that what a monkey perceives is all that exists is the dumbest stand one can possibly take.

Dear scientists of the world: You are the dumbest people ever. Congratulations!

-f

P.S. Thank you for Prozac, CFCs and the atom bomb.

[sh]

I hate to rant like this but..

I think people today are absolutely clueless. They simply don't realize the magnitude and gravity of the situation.

It's not just what we've done to the earth, which is in my opinion a reflection of our disordered spirit.

But, we are missing out on the most extraordinary thing ever. We are missing out on life. We don't realize what a tremendous chance we have.

We treat our lives as if it were the most worthless, boring thing possible.

I'm sorry, but WTF!?

We repeat a bunch of worthless routines for the entire duration of our existence.

We are convinced we know what life is. We are also convinced that we know the world.

I tell you, we don't know the world and we don't know what life is. If we did, we wouldn't be living like a bunch of idiots.

Most people find this offensive, and I'm genuinely sad and concerned for them.

To feel offended by the truth is beyond preposterous.

-f

[sh]

And I'm really embarrassed for using your forum as my personal rant space.

I'm terribly rude.

-f