"Astronomical Decipherment of the Megaliths of the Holy Land".
I have made a small revision to an important part of that decipherment and have uploaded it as the file holylandmegaliths.png (the graphic below)to our LexiLine files:
The revision has to do with that area of my map of the Holy Land in holylandmegaliths.png which represents today's Lebanon and Syria .
In researching the origin of the name of the city of Aleppo , the second largest city in modern Syria (after Damascus), I learned that the Arabic name for Aleppo was HALAB, which the linguists say was allegedly related to Aramaic HALABA meaning "white", which has led to all kinds of fanciful etymologies that Aleppo takes its name from the white marble in the region, or the white color of the soil, or, as written in the Wikipedia, that the name Halab means "gave out milk," coming from the ancient tradition that Abraham gave milk to travelers as they moved throughout the region" and hence, to continue at the Wikipedia: "The colour of his cows was ashen (Arab. shaheb), therefore the city is also called "Halab ash-Shahba'" (he milked the ash-coloured).
The name of Lebanon (Arabic LBN) is also thought to derive from that same concept of "white" or "milk".
Of course, those cited etymologies are absurd, and so I set out to see if my astronomical decipherment of the megaliths of the Holy Land could provide an explanation - and that is indeed the case.
The German version of the Wikipedia article about Aleppo writes that the Akkadian name of Aleppo was Halab or Halap (also written Hallaba, Halba, Halbi, Halpa). Egyptian sources write hlp, in Ugaritic and Aramaic it is hlb, in classical times Halpa, and in the Seleucid Empire suddenly it was called Beröa, and it is that last name which provided me with the idea for the riddle's solution of the origin of both the name of Aleppo as well as the name of Lebanon.
In my astronomical megalithic decipherment of the Holy Land, I assigned the area of Lebanon to Spica (this of course we now can see is retained as ash-Shahba).
But as I have now discovered in Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names (page 171), the stars of COMA BERENICES just above Virgo and Spica were called AL HALBAH in Arabic.
Accordingly, Aleppo and Lebanon in fact do take their name from HALBA, but HALBAH was named for the stars of the constellation of Coma Berenices, and not for the concept of "white" or "milk". That we see through the Seleucid renaming of Aleppo as BERÖA, which is simply a short form for BERE-nices.
This of course is then also the origin of the name of Beirut, Lebanon's capital and largest city, whose history goes back about 5000 years, falsely thought by the linguists to originally mean Bêrūt "The Wells", as allegedly rooted in a Phonenician word so meaning.
In fact, Coma Berenices is affiliated in legend with Syria (we quote the Wikipedia under Coma Berenices):
"Coma Berenices has been known as a distinct asterism since ancient Greek times. Eratosthenes referred to it as both "Ariadne's Hair" and "Berenice's Hair". Ptolemy referred to it as "the lock" (of hair); however, he did not list it as one of his 48 constellations, considering it as part of Leo. For many years, Coma Berenices was considered usually as the tuft in Leo's tail, or sometimes as part of Virgo. [emphasis added by LexiLine - Virgo was the Female, the Furrow, and above it Coma Berenices was the bush - this description probably goes back into prehistory. Indeed, according to Al Biruni, Al Hulbah, "the Bristle" applied to Virgo.]
During the 16th century, a few maps that were made of the sky pictured two new constellations, including Coma Berenices. Tycho Brahe, who is usually given credit for the creation of the constellation, listed it as a distinct constellation in his star catalogue of 1602, and it appeared in Johann Bayer's Uranometria of 1603.As for the name of SYRIA and ASSYRIA, it was then marked in the hermetic astronomical system as Virgo or the "Girdle of the Virgin", in Babylonian Sa-Sha-Shiru (see Richard Hinckley Allen, p. 468), which gave that country its ancient name, ASHUR, as derived from ISHTAR, who, according to the Britannica, was affiliated, inter alia, with Virgo. The linguists tell us that the alleged origin for ASSYRIAN is the Semitic SIRYON, but then of course, ZARIJAN is the name of the star beta-Virginis, also known in Babylonian as NIN-SAR.
Even though this constellation is a modern constellation, it is associated with a charming legend. It is one of the few constellations (with Scutum) to owe its name to a historical figure, in this case Queen Berenice II of Egypt, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes (fl. 246 BC-221 BC), the king under whom Alexandria became an important cultural center.
Circa 243 BC, the king undertook a dangerous expedition against the Syrians, who had murdered his sister. Berenice swore to the goddess Aphrodite to sacrifice her famous long hair, of which she was extremely proud, if her husband returned safely. He did, and she had her hair cut and placed it in the goddess' temple.
By the next morning the hair had disappeared. To appease the furious king and queen (and save the lives of the temple priests), the court astronomer, Conon, announced that the offering had so pleased the goddess, that she had placed it in the sky. He indicated a cluster of stars that at the time were identified as Leo's tail, but which have since been called Berenice's Hair. (Cf. Gaius Julius Hyginus, Astronomica 2.24)"
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Marian Marchidanu wrote:
First, I want to excuse me for my bad english.
Aleppo is also the name for the first letter in alphabet: Aleppo= Alpha
ALB= WHITE in romanian
LAPte= Milk in romanian
SYRIA= SURIAnu - old name for SOARE = SUN in romanian,
so, SYRIA= Country of the Sun.
A theory for origin of "white men civilisation" is in Danubiu Valley and Balkan and north Black See Plains.
More at "www.bosnianpyramid.com" and "www.dacia.org"
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Andis Kaulins replied:
Thank you for your comments. Your English is understandable and that is the main thing.
1. I think that the first letter of the alphabet originally meant "breath", which is ELPA viz. ALPA, for example, in Latvian. Romanian should have a similar word. Early written alphabets pictured ALPHA as a steer - this in Latvian is LUOP- (applied to beasts of burdens or animals of that nature), and there should be a similar word for animal or beast of burden in Romanian. In Greek this is the term ELAPHI meaning "deer," a term perhaps related to the word cloven (cloven hoof) with the hypothetical Indo-European root *gleubh-" (cleaved). The reason that they used the LUOP- animal symbol in ancient days is because it is homophonic (same sounding) to ELPA viz. ALPA "breath" and the animal can be easily rendered as a symbol and a breath not.
2. You are right of course about ALB-. I do not dispute that there are many words in Indo-European -see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alba - in the form ALB- that mean white (Latin albus, and ALBA is the Gaelic name for Scotland, which was also applied to the whole of Great Britain). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alba
In Latvian the L and B are reversed as BAL(t) for the term white, which I think is the more archaic form, with ALB formed by metathesis from BAL-. We see a good example of this in the Maltese words for white: Maltese: abjad m., bajda f where the L has become a J and where we see the development of the word to include a preceding vowel in the male form of the word.
The mainstream linguists allege that ALB- words have a proto-Indo-European origin of *alb- meaning "mountain" (whence "Alps"), an etymology which is highly questionable - as if peoples could not distinguish the mountains from the white snow upon them, and as if they did not have a word for white in areas of no mountains, for the Indo-Europeans did not originate in the mountains. See all of the BL- forms of words for white in European languages at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white . The alb- forms are in the minority and yet the linguists posit a root of *alb- rather than *bal- because that is what they find in Latin, a relatively young language. We do have the cognate lavan in Hebrew, where the original b or p has become a v.
In Malayalam (a Dravidian language spoken in Kerala, in southern India) the word for white is veLuppu, showing the ve- element at the front and the LP viz. LB element of the word at the back. In the African Bantu languages we find for example Basaa púßá, Bemba lòßà, and Koyo púas words for "white" and Bemba ßéélè, Bukusu ßèèlè Lega bélèas as words for "milk". Obviously, the BL- form for white and milk is the more archaic form. The root of words meaning "white" is very old and has nothing to do with mountains - the mainstream linguists have not done their homework, otherwise, they would look to other world languages, as I do, to check their theories (see http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/bantu/word.php?v=424 ). The colors are exceedingly important words in any languages and if *albho- were actually a proto-Indo-European root, then it would be vastly widespread in words for white and words dervied from that - which is simply not the case.
Bantu also explains why a term like alp- for mountain is so close to terms for white and milk in Indo-European. Bantu Bemba uses the prefix ùlù plus the radical root pìlì as their term for a mountain or hill. The prefix ùlù can be compared to french use of LE in front of words. When prefix and root are glued together then one gets ùlùpìlì i.e. a word similar to alp "mountain" and that is probably how the Alps were named. The ROOT of the word is something like PIL-, which, for example, in Latin is pile "pillar", in Latvian pils "castle" and which we find in Romanian as stalp (st-alp) "pillar" or in Slavic generally as stolp (st-olp) meaning "tower". The Alps were thus logically named as "towers" of stone and not for the color of the snow upon them.
3. There is no reason to have named Lebanon for the concept of white and that kind of an etymology is just nonsense by the linguists.
4. I myself used to think that Syria took its name from the Sun, i.e. as worshippers of the Sun rather than the Moon, so that I think this idea of yours is very good, but I no longer think that the Sun was involved in the naming of Assyria. The evidence is pretty good that the name goes back to Ashur and Ishtar, and this is clearly the "goddess" Virgo, i.e. an astronomical origin.
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