THE ALPHABET

Divine Generation of Alphabets

Difficult as it may be to accept, as the old adage runs, seeing is believing: Appendix C shows how the geometric pattern known as the Seed of Life, ratcheted out to thirteen circles, forms the basis of the design which the Bock Saga uses, and it does indeed generate letters. (The poster size colour illustration, from which this is copied, makes this much more apparent).(not existing on this site)The Seed of Life and the Flower of Life designs have been found in Egypt, Celtic Ireland, Turkey, Tibet, and Greece. This generation of letters seems like a kind of magic, and belief in such magic, or the divine origin and character of writing, is ubiquitous, in all eras, among civilized as well as among "primitive" people. The Egyptians called Thoth "the scribe of the gods" and taught that he had given them their writing, which they called the "speech of the gods." Muslims believe that Allah himself created writing, and the Norse saga attributes the invention of the runes to Odin. Hellen, the founder of the Greeks, according to Cassiodorus, "delivered many things concerning the alphabet, describing its composition and virtues, in an exceedingly subtle narration; insomuch that the great importance of letters may be traced to the very beginning of things." The Hindus say that it was Brahma who gave them Sanskrit, which is based on Devanagari, meaning "holy script." [Veta] means to know in Rot, [gana] (naga backwards) is script, the same as Japanese hiragana, so the Vedas are the "knowledge of the Aser."
The Bock Saga then is not at all unique in its claim to be the original source of language or writing; almost all ancient nations had a tradition that they once possessed sacred writings in a long lost language, the Mayans, Japanese and Runic users amongst them. The "urrunen" theory runs parallel to the Saga in that it holds that it is the source of all Mediterranean alphabets, including Phoenician. Studies of the Norse peoples' Runic characters and Celtic symbols have found that the symbols appear to have served sacred and mystical purposes for hundreds of years before there is any evidence of their being used for written language. They are said to have magic powers, and this is supported by the linguistic evidence of the Gothic word runa, meaning secrecy, or mystery. Parallel to this is the oral nature of the Saga - remember, only the Bock family was supposedly cognizant of its origins. In Hebrew rune means a song, or to sing, and the ancient Jews maintained that their Cabala was revealed by God to Moses and was transmitted verbally, it being too sacred to be written. Similarly the Brahmins are not permitted to recite, but only to sing the Vedas. As magic is simply that which is not understood, comprehension of any process removes its numinosity. Could it be that the Bock Saga is a preservation of some form of mathematical or geometrical knowledge that has been lost, but that appeared so spectacular to early mankind that it appeared to be magical?
Certainly, the many Garden of Eden myths found around the world "see mankind, over recent millennia, as having degenerated from root-races and cultures of great spiritual and technological development, which flowered in the Golden Age of antiquity, and were destroyed to be reborn (perhaps many times) in aeons more distant than the limitations of today's science would have us believe." Today, in Japan, there is a Shinto priest called Yoshimi Takeuchi who claims that his family has been the guardian of the Golden Dragon Shrine for over four thousand years. Among the shrine's sacred treasures are various artifacts, allegedly given by the Imperial court, including pottery believed to be 20,000 years old, and documents which he claims: "will prove that the origins of the five races of the world are one and the same." Also he says there are stones, the original tablets of Moses' Ten Commandments, which contain ancient Japanese writings remarkable similar to that of Hebrew. In fact, according to Takeuchi, ancient emperors developed over two hundred sets of characters which are said to be the basis for the ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Sanskrit and Hebrew languages.
These claims are all seemingly incredible, yet research performed over the last few years by Stan Tenen and the Meru Project demonstrates that exactly the same kind of mathematical patterns as generate the Bock Saga and its alphabet dictate the form of the original Hebrew of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, and how both Hebrew, Arabic and Greek letters have a common geometric origin. These points will be dealt with in more detail shortly, but before considering any of these areas of new research, which it must be said, stretch credibility to the limit, it would be instructive to consider some of the background, and to assess current theories on the development of writing.

Development of Writing

There is almost no contention with the idea that speech precedes writing. It seems reasonable to posit that the first writing involved the incision of marks to indicate meaning or concepts, and that it then developed into the representation of sounds. Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis, with its element of auditory internal dialog, adds a twist to this though, for it maintains that consciousness followed the introduction of writing: "... writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events. The latter is meant to tell the reader something he does not know, but the former is primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader already has." Jaynes contends that evolution of ego, or consciousness, paralleled a move towards externalization of knowledge, which became law when it was inscribed in stone, as with the Ten Commandments. It is significant then that the first pictographs were used to label and list and sort. By 2,100 BC writing in Mesopotamia was extensively put to such civil use to record the judgments of the gods, as in the famous laws of Hammurabi. Is it merely coincidence that the word Israel is explained (in its simplest form) in Rot as "the law of Ra from the ice," [is] meaning ice, Ra Bock's son, and [el] law? Certainly there is coincidence of sound; but common sense would say that unless some stronger connections can be made, then it is merely chance.
The Saga's account of the Semitic development of writing says that Moses, who received the laws of Yahweh magically inscribed in stone, was in fact a woman called Murse, one of the daughters of Bock, who came down from Uudenmaa with a new writing system based on one mark for every sound. This system had supposedly been kept in the Bock family and never before disseminated. Prior to this the Saga says that people had used runic scripts, which demand such a prolonged education and understanding that only a select few people had been chosen to learn and understand them, necessitating a more "right brain" associative approach, similar to Jaynes' release of innate knowledge. The new Hebrew system, though, had only twenty two sounds and their marks, so anyone could decipher it easily. This is interpreted by the Saga as having had widespread repercussions on consciousness and evolution. As the Rot language is supposedly generated by natural principles, its sounds are said to be open to immediate confirmation as to verisimilitude. However, with the new externalized Hebrew writing there was no way for the newly literate to distinguish between what was natural and innate, and therefore correct, and what was new or unnatural and wrong, for, by writing, it is also possible to change the meaning by adding or omitting sounds altogether. The Saga's interpretation of this is certainly contentious; it is such a significant paradigm shift that the attribution of female sex to Moses provides something much easier to take exception to, perhaps ignoring the true implications of what is being discussed here. It is worth remembering that this is often how important paradigm changes are greeted.
Most of the early Mediterranean alphabets were inscribed on clay. Further north, where clay was not such a suitable material, stone was usually the most available material. Thus it is no real surprise to find that the English verb write comes from Old Norse rita, meaning to incise runes, or that the Greek graphein has same etymology as the English to carve, whilst both the Latin scribere, and the German schreiben mean to scratch. Certainly the practice of writing is fairly recent, although it predates paper or papyrus, for the earliest writing we know of, Egyptian and Sumerian texts, are all clay tablets into which were notched their symbols. This is dated at about 3,000 BC, before which there are only artifacts which provide a much more nebulous record than writing.
Current linguistic and paleographic theories maintain that there is a traceable lineage of all the ancient phonetic alphabets and that they all developed from pictographic and hieroglyphic symbols. This monogenetic theory of writing has been largely accepted, based on connections between Sumerian, Proto-Elamite and Proto-Indic. It is self-apparent that the development and memorization of thousands of signs for the thousands of words and names existing in any language, plus the never ending problem of creating new symbols for newly acquired ones makes logographic or hieroglyphic writing so impracticable that it has everywhere proved to be of limited life span. Thus the first development of all post logographic writing systems is the movement towards using symbols to represent syllables.
The Sumerians are credited with being the first to implement some kind of phonetization of symbols, and the classification of such proto-syllabic systems, (ones with no word signs at all), usually includes Sumerian, Proto-Elamite, Proto-Indic, Chinese, Egyptian, Cretan and Hittite. The Mayan and Aztec systems are generally not included in this set because even in their most advanced stages they never attained the level of phonographical development of the earliest stages of the Oriental systems. The limitations of these systems are readily apparent: "Even Chinese, the most logographic of all writings, is not a pure logographic system, because from the earliest times it has used word signs functioning as syllabic signs. And what is true of the Chinese system is even more true of other ancient Oriental systems such as Sumerian, Egyptian and Hittite."
The confusion that is generated by such dualistic use of symbols almost inevitably demands simplification, and so the Semitic tribes in Palestine and Syria are found adopting from the Egyptians only the principle of writing monosyllables without indicating any differences in vowels. This occurred around the period of 1,700 to 1,500 BC, a time when cultural changes were favorable to the development of a writing system which was more accessible to a larger number of people. Although almost every country in the eastern Mediterranean area has at one time or another been pinpointed as the origin of the Northern Semitic alphabet, the generally accepted view today is that the Phoenicians were either the inventors, or, more likely, the transmitters, of this alphabet which consists of 22 letters representing consonants only. From this one source can supposedly be traced all the world's alphabets. Those in the East are all supposedly derived from Phoenician through Aramaic: Arabic has 28 consonants, 22 of them from Aramaic through Nabataean; old Persian developed into Brami, the 7th century BC forerunner of Indian scripts which clearly demonstrates Semitic influence, although, of course, there are those who hotly dispute this origin. After that, Brami is said to have developed into Gupta, and from this came Tocharian A & B and Tibetan. Gupta was later spread by Buddhist monks, leading to Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai, Khmer Cham, Vietnamese and Indonesian, which are all semisyllabic. Another offshoot of Aramaic, South Semitic, or Sabaean, formed a 29 letter script which became the basis of Ethiopic, and thus Amharic, Tigré and Tigrina.
In the West, the oddities that are the Runic and the Celtic ogham systems are explained as having developed from this original Phoenician, which was adopted and adapted by Greeks, and thus North Semitic became the ancestor of all the other western alphabets. The letters of the Greek alphabet are without doubt directly derived from the Hebrew system (Appendix D). All the Greeks did, as they freely admit, was to introduce extra symbols to act as pure vowel sounds, and even these symbols were of Hebrew design. The names of the letters of the Greek alphabet are only slightly different from the names of the Semitic letters. It is thus generally accepted that the Greek characters and names followed from the Semitic, with a vowel added at the end of the name in accord with the nature of Greek word structure. Thus aleph became alpha, and beth became beta. The additional letters of phi, chi and psi were adopted later. It was the creation of this Greek alphabet, with a full vowel indication, which first fulfilled the technical definition of an alphabet as a writing that expresses the single phonemes of a language. The key point here is the inner principle of one sound represented by one symbol, and that symbol only representing one sound. Since the creation of the Greek alphabet, there have been hundreds of other alphabets which have been developed throughout the world, but no really significant changes have taken place in the principles of writing. Even today many older languages such as Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic have vowels which are indicated by separate diacritic marks, not by separate symbols. This system has also been adopted to adapt to new sounds, as can be seen with the French cedilla, the German umlaut or the many Eastern European markings.
Opinion is divided as to the exact relationship of the shape of the Semitic letter and its name. One theory is that the sign is derived from pictographics of the object named, e.g. ox = aleph, house = beth. Another is that the names were used as mnemonic devices for relating sound to sign. It is generally agreed that the earliest forms were influenced by Egyptian pictographs, although interpreting many of the Semitic signs as pictorial characters presents insuperable difficulties. It is said that these Eastern Mediterranean scripts derive from even older geometric symbols used throughout the area. A number of Greek letter forms are mirror images, which supposedly relates to the fact that early Greek writing went from right to left, or sometimes from left to right, or both ways alternately, a practice called boustrophedon, describing how an ox drawing a plough turns and comes back. Hebrew is still written in this manner. The Aser wrote from left to right, and many of their words have their syllables transposed back to front when they are translated.
There is almost no argument currently with the paradigm that the alphabet used in writing English is the Roman or Latin alphabet, which was adopted and adapted from the early Greek alphabet, through the Etruscan (Appendix D). The classical letters have been retained as our capital letters, though there have obviously been many changes, mostly caused by needs of penmanship and vowel shifts, to the extent that to a non native speaker, modern English spelling seems almost purely arbitrary. However, to go into any depth of examination of this here would merely be to overload with detail. It is sufficient to note that in this trail of development, the accepted belief has been upheld. "The principle of unidirectional development holds that, in reaching its ultimate development, writing, whatever its forerunners may be, must pass through the stages of logography, syllabography and alphabetography in this, and in no other order. Therefore, no writing can start with a syllabic or alphabetic stage unless it is borrowed directly or indirectly, from a system that has gone through all the previous stages. Natura non facit saltus: nature does not make leaps." This last Darwinian cry of progress insists on development in a logical manner. The Saga's assertion is that this is true in a completely different way, for if there is anything to the claim of a geometrically produced alphabet, then indeed, there are no leaps: all is revealed in one fluent motion by nature herself.

The Rot Alphabet and Recent Geometric Research

The Bock Saga says that the alphabet commonly known as the Roman originated in a completely different place and at a much earlier time. There is obviously much truth in the current paradigm, so is there any way to reconcile all this scholarship and evidence with such a bizarre claim? It is necessary to return to the magical claims and geometrical concepts: "Meru research has reconstructed details of geometries previously lost to modern man, demonstrating a rational basis for ideas that might otherwise be dismissed as poetic or mythological." This geometrical basis is exactly the same as that which underpins the Bock Saga.
For millennia, spiritual teachers of the Jewish religion have claimed that their alphabets are holy letters, given to them directly by God, and that if they are examined with sufficient care they will reveal the ultimate secrets of life in the universe, and the nature and purpose of human consciousness. Such assertions seem to have found some form of validation in the research done by The Meru Project, for they state that: "based on the work accomplished so far, it is the hypothesis of the Meru Project that the structure of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, their shape, and the method of their formation, were specifically created to illustrate the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of the relationship between cosmology and consciousness."
In the same manner as the geometrical explanation of Genesis provides a simple and elegant explanation of creation, so too does the related science of patterns in wavelength allow seemingly irreconcilable opposites to be brought together. Everything is dictated by wavelength; light, sound and matter are merely differences in the frequency of vibration. The differences between red and green, as anyone who is colour blind will confirm, or between, G sharp and D flat, as the tone deaf will readily attest, are ones of perception, of differences only in wave motion. The root of many European words for life is the Latin vibrare, which means to shake. Thought-processes, myths and symbols are no less than different modes of energy, exhibiting patterns which parallel the crystalline forms of nature.

LANGUAGE

All human cultures have developed language. Today there are over five thousand different languages around the globe, all of which have evolved in various degrees over time. However, the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells of a time when the entire world spoke the same language, but humans so offended the gods that they were punished, divided through a confusion of languages. Berossus, writing in the third century BC tells of how the "first inhabitants of the land, glorying in their own strength ... undertook to raise a tower whose top should reach the sky ... but the tower was overturned by the gods and winds ... and the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken the same language." Two hundred years later, Polyhistor also wrote that all men formerly spoke the same language. The Bock Saga claim to be the root of all languages is thus but an echo of this idea, and it is not the only one. The Mayans also claim that their language is the origin of, or has had influence on all languages. Is it merely a coincidence that the word babel in Mayan means confusion? Humbatz Men also points out similarities in Saxon and Mayan syntax and phonetic connections in many other words. In the same vein, there are claims in Japan that their early Emperors brought culture all over the world. Perhaps supporting this, recent discoveries have uncovered both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Asian pictograms at native American Indian sites.

Origins of Language

There is little physical evidence to help discern the origins of language; before writing there are simply no records of the spoken medium, so we are left with hypothesis. Julian Jaynes suggests that the first vocalizations by humans were connected with the development of tools, around 40,000 BC, and that these were modifiers such as "sharper" and "bigger" to facilitate improvements in the manufacture of the tools, and that this was followed by the use of nouns, about 25,000 -15,000 BC. He argues that the first nouns used were probably those for animals, and supports this with the evidence of the synchronicity of cave paintings of animals, contending that this change was reflective of shifts in consciousness. Certainly it is arguable that as people developed greater manual specialization and had more things to do with their hands, they could use them less for communication and had to rely more on sounds. Jaynes' main hypothesis though, is that early man had a completely different mentality from our own, which he describes as a bicameral mind. This is described as a state of mind in which "volition, planning and initiative is organized with no consciousness whatsoever," probably in the section of the right brain known as Wernicke's area, and orders were then transferred to the speech reception areas of the left brain in the form of interior voices or auditory hallucinations, which became recognized as gods. (An archetypal analysis of this contention will be made in a later section). The contention regarding Wernicke's area has been physically corroborated by many researchers' findings on the siting of language ability within the brain, and the general hypothesis is further supported by evolutionary changes evidenced by the human fossil record. 50,000 years ago, there were a number of related changes in human physiology and behaviour. The human brain, which had been expanding in size, lateralized; that is each half of the brain came to specialize in certain activities, and language ability was localized in the left hemisphere of most persons." Dean Falk at the State University of New York at Albany says that fossil brain casts show a well developed language area, whilst Terence Deacon of Harvard goes further and emphasizes the linguistic ability of early man: "Neanderthal's brain was bigger than ours. It was not dull-witted and inarticulate." The recent Kebara cave discoveries in Israel have furnished proof of this in the form of a 60,000 year old hyoid bone. Thus it seems more than likely that early people could and did use language, the question now is whether there was one or many languages.

Proto-Indo-European

The search for a common progenitor of language can be said to date back to Sir William Jones, speaking to 'The Asiatick Society' in Calcutta on February 2nd 1786, who pointed out similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, stating that: "no philologer could examine them without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps, no longer exists." If one examines the most common words in all languages, for example, the English father, one finds startling correlation through many other languages: German vater, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish fater, Dutch vader, Latin pater, Spanish padre, Portuguese pai, Catalan pare, French père, Greek pater, Sanskrit pitar, and Persian pedar. Such similarities in vocabulary, as well as in grammar and phonology soon led to the conclusion that each of the one hundred and forty languages spoken in Europe, except Finnish, Hungarian, Basque and Estonian, were members of the same family, and that their shared characteristics came from a common progenitor called Proto-Indo European. Evolutionary trends in language were confined by parameters such as Grimm's Law, which set limits on how sounds can and do change with time, and delineated how they do, e.g. a Latin "p" becomes "f" in the Germanic family, as in the transition of "piscis" to "fish." Proto-Indo-European was locked into orthodoxy by Saussure, who in classic scientific manner hypothesized the existence of a group of sounds in that language that have not survived into modern languages, the laryngeals, which one can find in Arabic. His claim was evidenced later by Hittite tablets with such sounds and Proto-Indo-European became universally accepted.
Different approaches were taken to explain how languages diverged. Schleicher adopted a tree approach similar to genealogy charts, whilst Schmidt put forward a wave model. The controversy is still ongoing. Essentially though, there are only a few important theories of the origins of Proto-Indo-European. Paul Thieme put forward a radical theory, based entirely on linguistic evidence, which put the Indo-European homeland in Northern Europe, about where Germany and Poland are today. This, of course, is very close to Finland, and would be strong evidence for Bock Saga claims. However, this is murky ground, for in 1926 Gordon Childe, in his book The Aryans, had likewise argued for an Indo-European homeland in the steppe areas north of the Black Sea. This was taken up by the Nazis in an effort to prove that the original Indo-European language had been spoken by a master race of Aryans, and that the Nordic people's superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicle of a superior language. One linguist has put Proto-Indo-European at the North Pole, and another thought it contained sounds of bird calls which could only have come from the Baltic coastal areas. Another strong linguistic argument is based on the names of trees, which are localized in their growth patterns. The birch grows only in northern temperate climates, yet the Proto-Indo-European word for birch appears in six different groups of languages today.
The standard theory, based on both archaeological and linguistic arguments that most scholars find convincing, is that the Indo-European language originated among the Kurgan peoples living near the Ural Mountains about 6,000 years ago, and that this language was then carried west and south by invasion and conquest. Colin Renfrew says "... the traditional view of the spread of the Indo-European languages holds that an Ur-language, ancestor to all the others, was spoken by nomadic horsemen who lived in what is now western Russia north of the Black Sea near the beginning of the Bronze Age. As these mounted warriors roamed over greater and greater expanses, they conquered the indigenous peoples and imposed their own Proto-Indo-European language, which in the course of succeeding centuries evolved in local areas into the European languages we know today."
This begs the question as to where the Kurgan people themselves came from, and thus from where their language originated. However, turning to the culture that they supposedly supplanted, Marija Gimbutas says that between 7,000 BC and 3,500 BC the people of Europe lived in settled agricultural societies that worshipped the Great Goddess. They "delighted in nature, shunned war, built comfortable settlements rather than forts, and crafted superb ceramics rather then weapons." She says their social system was matrilineal, though neither men nor women dominated the other sex. She accepts the standard theory that between 4,000 BC and 3,500 BC this peaceful and harmonious "Old Europe" was shattered by waves of Indo-European invaders on horseback, the Kurgans, who swept out of the steppes and transformed Europe, pushing the Goddess religion underground and into subordinate roles within cultures. She cites the Greek and Roman female deities and the Virgin Mary, harvest customs and animist holdovers regarding springs, trees, rocks and animals. as evidence of this. There is affirmation of Gimbutas' theory from J. P. Mallory , and, based on the evidence of cultivation of wheat and barley and the herding of sheep and goats, it is known that in the seventh millennium BC a novel agricultural economy began to spread across Europe. These grains did not grow wild in Europe, but have been shown to have originated in the Middle East. Except for meli, a ground cereal millet, yewo, a cereal used for fermentation and puro, spelt wheat, there are no well attested Proto-Indo-European words for cereals. However, there are many scholars who are much less sure of Gimbutas' claims. Ruth Tringham at Berkeley says "no other archaeologist would express such certainty." Dr. David Anthony at Hartwick College says the collapse of Old Europe is not understood and that there is no evidence that the migrants caused the collapse rather than followed it. There is also no evidence that women played the central role in either the social structure or religion.
The basis of Gimbutas' theory is that the Kurgan invasion caused the collapse of an agricultural society that was already there and replaced it with herding. One essential feature of the Kurgan invasion theory is the domestication of the horse, as the warriors were supposed to be mounted. However, the word for horse in Proto-Indo-European is not indicative of any sense of domestication, nor had there been any evidence for horses being ridden until about 2,000 BC. However, in 1991 David Anthony and Dmitri Telegin at the Ukranian Institute of Technology discovered a horse skull, dating back to 4,000 BC, with teeth marks indicative of wear caused by a bridle.
An old fashioned theory now gaining popularity with revisionists like Colin Renfrew is that the Indo-European homeland was in Anatolia. Not surprisingly this has been strongly criticized by Marija Gimbutas. Renfrew's model reverses the direction of influence between the steppes and Western Europe and pushes it back to 6,500 BC. Thus the Celtic language would have evolved as part of the same family. David McAlpin of the University of London has shown that Elamite (Khuzistan now) is related to the Dravidian language. This expanded version of the wave of advance model has the effect of situating the ancestral languages of the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian groups together in the Near East about 10,000 years ago. The proposal has been made that these are all related in a super family which has been called Nostratic. This certainly advances the cause of Bock Saga claims.
In 1993 there was a compromise which decided that Renfrew and Gimbutas were both right! Farmers from Anatolia did spread northward over all Europe, replacing the hunter-gatherers who were there before, but the process started about 10,000 years ago (earlier than Renfrew's theory). Then (as Gimbutas argues) about 6,000 years ago the Indo-Europeans swept out of the Urals. Going back 10,000 years raises serious questions of accuracy which will probably never be resolved and forces the consideration of data from other than purely linguistic sources, a situation faced often in this paper. A good place to begin this angle of approach is with the Basques, whose language, it will be remembered, is one of those considered separate from Proto-Indo-European. Indeed, there has been speculation that theirs was the Ur language spoken before the Tower of Babel. Evidence put forward to support this is somewhat thin, and includes elements of stone age derivation. In Basque aitz means stone, and is the root for such words as pick, axe and knife. This is said to tie in with 20,000 year old cave art of Altamira and Lascaux. There are also connections with the Caucasus group of languages and, according to some, with Na-dene.
Another non-linguist who has provided material to further confuse matters here is Zecharia Sitchin, who has been working with the translations of the thousands of clay tablets from Sumer. Based on these tablets, he made some stunning revelations, including accurate predictions of the colour and nature of the planet Uranus, these made before the first cameras from earth flew past. He has also accumulated important genetic evidence regarding the origins of the food plants which form such an important part of the linguists' theories. He says: "scholars remain baffled by the profusion of other plants and cereals basic to human survival: millet, rye, spelt, flax, fruit bearing shrubs and trees - apples, pears, olives, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts," and then proceeds to assert that the earliest records of all of these are Mesopotamian. There is substantial linguistic evidence for this, of which but a few examples are the paths of descent of a few fruits and spices: "apricot in Spanish is damasco, in Latin armeniiaca, derived from Akkadian armanu. Cherry, kerasos in Greek, kirsche in German, originates in Akkadian karshu. Saffron comes from azapiranu, crocus from kurkanu (via krokos in Greek), cumin from kamanu, myrrh from murru." Sitchin's belief is that the first humans of Sumer came originally from the south, which correlates with the latest genetic and archaeological evidence. The work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza provides the same conclusion from a different angle of approach, for he has shown that the Basques have different genes from the rest of the people of Western Europe, perhaps indicative of an ancient European genetic type that resisted invasions from the east.

Other Language Families

Pausing for a moment to consider other language families, the accepted wisdom is of the separate development of all the other major groups. This list is of necessity abridged, but includes the Indo-Iranian, Semitic, Hamitic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, Khoisan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Malayo-Polynesian, Altaic and Uralic families, all of them supposedly having pursued separate but parallel development over millennia. However, a hypothesis positing a common ancestor of many of these can be found. In the 1950's Joseph Greenberg classified all African languages into only three groups; his suggestion was initially rejected but is now commonly accepted. Recently he has also classified all of the thousand or more North American languages into three groups: Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut, and has linked them to three consecutive waves of immigration from Asia over the Bering Strait. He has done this by using typological classification: mass comparison by scanning of hundreds of languages for similarities, rather than the conventional method of pursuing a few step by step transformations. This technique is not without its detractors, nor is his proposition of more than one period of population transfer. Movement over the supposed Alaskan land bridge is conventionally put at one time, 10,000 - 12,000 years ago, but archaeologists are now considering the possibility of migration at 30,000 - 35,000 or even 50,000 years ago. Recent dental research also supports Greenberg's wave hypothesis, as does genetic research by L. Cavalli-Sforza and A. Wilson. So holding in mind that the basis of Greenberg's proposal is similar to his initially rejected, but now accepted African theory, it may be that our ancestors' languages and origins are less diverse than is currently recognized.

Proto World

A few researchers, including Merrit Ruhlen in California, Vitaly Shevoroshkin in Michigan and Vaclav Blazek in the Czech Republic have worked along the same lines with Nostratic, the European counterpart of Amerind, supposed to go back 15,000 years, and now suggest a language they call Proto-World, which they propose began 150,000 years ago! They have even put forward about a few hundred proto-World words, e.g. tik, one; pal, two; tali, tongue; nigi, teeth; ngai, I. However, these are treacherous grounds for researchers, and this suggestion has been met with accusations of sloppy technique and over generalization as well as with scorn, derision and dismissal. One big problem is that 100,000 years ago was supposedly a period before agriculture, and so the one major focus of debate, concrete words for food items, as seen in work accepted on Proto-Indo-European, is removed. It takes a leap of faith to create a language from languages which have themselves been reconstructed and were only spoken, never written. Although deep research on vocabulary is outside the scope of this paper, Appendix B contains a glossary of some of the most important vocabulary items in Rot and Van.

Genetic Correlations

The linguistic debate is not operating in a vacuum. There are major clues being provided by other fields of study and slowly the jig saw puzzle is taking shape. The work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford University and Allan Wilson at the University of California at Berkeley demonstrate that there is a remarkable parallel between the history of genes and that of languages. Cavalli-Sforza has conducted an exhaustive analysis of human genetic data, mostly derived from protein content, and has thus mapped the worldwide distribution of hundreds of genetically different inherited traits. Wilson has examined mitochondrial genes, which are passed to offspring almost exclusively by the mother; both have reached similar conclusions because the longer two populations are separate, the greater their genetic distance is; thus distance in time and space can be used as a mechanism by which to date evolutionary history. The result of their findings can be expressed in a familiar term, the Noah's Ark hypothesis. This is the theory that one small group of modern humans colonized the entire world, one obviously somewhat sympathetic to Bock Saga claims. This can be contrasted with the candelabra hypothesis which states that different races diverged long ago and evolved independently into modern groupings, progressing like the parallel sections of a candelabra.
Cavalli-Sforza's data proposes an African origin of our species, as the genetic difference between Africans and non-Africans is roughly twice that between Australians and Asians, and the latter is more than twice that between Europeans and Asians. The corresponding times of separation suggested by paleoanthropology are in similar ratios: 100,000 years for the separation between Africans and Asians, about 50,000 years for that between Asians and Australians, and 40,000 to 35,000 years for that between Asians and Europeans. Wilson's findings also indicate that human mitochondrial DNA has been evolving for the longest time in Africa, and can be traced back to a single African woman, who lived 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, whom the mass media has inevitably dubbed "the original Eve."
It therefore seems as if genes, people and languages have diverged in tandem, through a series of migrations that apparently began in Africa and spread through Asia to Europe, the New World and the Pacific. There is now a proven close genetic relationship among the speakers of Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian groups. The gene map shows how they have spread out, and there is a remarkable coincidence of genetic and linguistic branching points, suggesting that some of the language theories, like Greenberg's Amerind, Nostratic or Eurasiatic, do indeed have some legitimacy. Recent theories argue that 55,000 - 60,000 years ago there was a wave of emigration of people and language, by boat and raft to every continent. Christopher Stringer of the British Museum states that "in the fossil evidence of Europe and Southwest Asia, the gap between archaic and modern people is very large. The entire skeleton and brain case changed, clearly signaling replacement of the archaic population."
This reconstruction of how Europe was settled has striking parallels with recent classification of languages, particularly the compromise over the Renfrew and Gimbutas theories. Early neolithic farmers brought their genes, culture and Indo-European languages from the Middle East to Europe in a process of slow expansion, and because the Basques' ancestors lived at the far end of that migratory path, they underwent the least genetic admixture with the farmers. When a minority imposes its language on a conquered majority, language replacement is close to complete, but gene replacement is in proportion to the demographic ratio. Hungarians, for example, speak a language from the Urals imposed by the Magyar conquerors of the Middle Ages, but carry a European genetic pattern.
Whether or not these oldest datings are accepted, the 1988 Language and Prehistory conference at the University of Michigan reached a consensus that there had been a mono-genesis of human languages, a mother tongue in a proto-proto stage at a time about 100,000 years ago. But how can this be tied in any way to the Bock Saga claim that man began in Finland? All the genetic and archaeological evidence in this section points to an African origin for man, about 200,000 years ago. Linguistically one is left with evidence for a tribe (or tribes) of ultimately unknown origin, the patriarchal Kurgan, coming out of the steppes to supplant or mingle with another tribe (or tribes) of ultimately unknown origin, (Gimbutas' old Europeans), either one of these, or both, producing Proto-Indo-European. However, despite the many inexplicable loose ends, there seems to be sufficient evidence for a Proto-World language paradigm to operate, but it is essentially without any specific evidence yet for a geographic location. To find something a little more tangible, it is necessary to turn to the alphabet of the Rot language, where recent research has provided more substantial support for the hypothesis of Rot as a potential Proto-World.