The Book of the Holy Mountain - An Alternate Seminar in Alternate Pre- and Ancient History

Hello everyone,

here is my third timeline.

It is going to be much more limited in content (the framework is a History Class at an alternate institution of higher education which discusses one single source), and at the same time much more insanely divergent from anything we know than any of my previous timelines (Res Novae Romanae and A Different Chalice).

I have the syllabus of our fictitious seminar already planned. Any thoughts and reflections, input and corrections are very welcome, though. If you choose to follow me, we shall embark on a journey into a truly distant world, and such a journey is always fraught with intellectual risks, I`m aware, so please feel free to comment on anything you find questionable or which you have to add to the debate.

The framework of the timeline, as I´ve said, will be that of an alternative History Class (in TTL´s Egypt), which means each installment consists of a segment of the source (which our alternative students are supposed to have read for preparation) and the ensuing seminar discussion between the fictitious students and their fictitious lecturer on said segment of the source. That means, there will be only 12-15 installments. (After my first timeline exploded into all directions under my hands, and my second timeline petered out somehow, I felt this clear and strict frame was necessary to motivate me to begin writing at all.)

This is not intended as some sort of role play, I don`t mean for you to pretend you`re the students of that seminar, and I am most certainly not its lecturer, so please post what in a DBWI thread we`d call “OOC” comments, that is: speak naturally. Both the students and the lecturer of this class are going to be fraught with their own prejudices, interests, cognitive frames, theories. What I´ve aimed at is for at least some of these mindsets to be traceable in part to the divergences I´ve created. I hope it`ll transpire.

Oh, and since this is a timeline dabbling in alternative prehistory, I´ll add quite a few OOC / authorial footnotes for explanation myself. Do let me know if they`re too much, too little, or whatever.

But now, let`s plunge into our alternative academia… (here goes nothing…)


Seminar description:

Course OH2422 The Book of the Holy Mountain

The class focuses on a single source, “The Book of the Holy Mountain”. The text comprehensively comprises the foundational myths of the Amaloxian civilization [1]. Seminar discussion will concentrate on the recent translation by Sofris.


In the shades of the sycamores of the, well let´s call it a university, of Nabwt:

“You`ve got your Old History module completed yet?”

“Nah. Always postponed it. But I guess I´ll have to tackle it this trimester. There`s this class on the Amaloxians by Hadjeamin, I guess I´ll be attending that one. I think they were not that uninteresting.”

“That crazy tyranny of man-hating priestesses? I can see why that sounds fun at first, but I´m not sure if it`s not going to be a big bore in the end, too. Also, you can read those scribblings?”

“Not really. But I hope it´s better than the boring stuff about the First Ten Dynasties that we`ve had a little of in the introductions, and I, for one, don`t find reading Medunetjer [2] all that easy, either, but with them, we`re expected to be rather fluent because, you know, it`s_our_history… a load of bollocks, if you ask me. While with Amaloxian, professors don`t really_expect_you to know it.”

“You go to Hadjeamin and have fun then…! If it´s any good, tell me.”


Lecture 1

[…]

Prof Hadjeamin: "So, now we`ve hopefully sorted out all the formal issues concerning attendance and term papers and credit points [3], let´s turn to our topic – the book of the Holy Mountain, the mythology and history of the Amaloxian civilization.

I´ve prepared bilingual copies of the introductory chant for those of you who haven`t got their Sofris translation yet. Could you please pass them around and take a copy if you need one?”

“Thank you. Now – at first glance, what do you see?”

upload_2017-11-17_11-24-44.png

(Translation) “I am Khepušopiň, and these words are the truth about the beginning of life, and how it awoke in this world, and how everything in this world came into being by the powers of the goddesses and the aid of their consorts.

And it is the truth about the women and men of the early days, and of the Holy Mountains of the old time, of the First Dark Age and of the Holy Mountains which still stood when our great-grandmothers were young.

These words are pure truth, as they were revealed to our foremothers by the Goddess, and as our foremothers told them to their daughters without adding a single world or leaving a single world out, and as their daughter`s daughters told them to my mother, and so I shall tell them to you so that they not be lost and forgotten in our dark and wretched times, when the donkey-men have sat themselves above us and eat our bread and drink our wine and rape our daughters and desecrate that which is holy and sing empty songs in their coarse voices; I shall speak these revealed words to you without adding a single word or leaving a single word out, this I swear to you, for adding a single word would be spreading falsehood, and leaving a single word out would be falsehood, but you know me, I am Khepušopiň and you know I am not a liar and a speaker of falsehoods.”


Student 1: “I see that I can`t read the left column, so I`ll have to look at the translation in the right column.”

(Laughter.)

Prof Hadjeaminr: “Do you happen to know anything about that which you unfortunately can`t read?”

(Embarassing pause.)

Student 2: “I can`t read it, either, but from the topic of our class, I`ll guess that it is Old Amaloxian.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Almost. It´s actually Neo-Amaloxian, but there is a good reason why people could be forgiven for thinking it´s Old Amaloxian. The author, Khepušopiň as she calls herself, uses a lot of symbols from the oldest stock in Amaloxian script here, so many that we must actually assume she does this deliberately. Maybe she attempts to give her text and its tales of the past more credibility this way? Or maybe she believed that these old symbols possessed a sort of magic power? We don`t know – but we can safely assume that what she did here, she did it on purpose. Not only does she choose some of the oldest symbols of Amaloxian – she also uses these symbols most of the time in exactly the way they had been used in Old Amaloxian, that is, as logographemes only.

Look at the third-but-last sign in the first line, for example. It is the sign for “néš”, it can be used to denote this syllable, but usually in Neo-Amaloxian it is used as a grammatical morpheme indicating the aorist tense. In this text, though, a syllabic reading makes no sense, and it is not followed by anything which could be taken as a verb - it is quite simply taken to denote its semantic meaning, which is the same as in Old Amaloxian: “coming into being”.

This is how Old Amaloxian worked.”

Student 2: “But how do we know it`s not Old Amaloxian then?”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Indeed, how do we? The only clue we have are the second and the third signs. If we were to read the first line as Old Amaloxian, it would render the meaning of the symbols as I Assembly house Sick Daughter Speak Life Come into being Awake World All World Goddess Do Male deities Do. While we can make sense of most of this sentence – compare the translation –, the second and especially the third don`t make a lot of sense when read as logographemes. But if we take their syllabic value in one of the languages which used Neo-Amaloxian, namely in Late Tawrixian, then we have a very common female Tawrixian name: “khepu” and “šo” together yield “Khepušo”, and together with the daughter-sign, we have Khepušo`s daughter, or in Tawrixian, Khepušopiň. And so, at once, we also know a lot more about the time and place in which this text was written: it was written on the Tawrix peninsula, at some point between 3,700 and 3,200 years ago.

Does anyone dare to make a more specific guess as to when this text was written?”

Student 3: “I think it must be towards the end of the time frame you gave us. In the text, Khepušopiň says that donkey-men have conquered their lands and committed all sorts of atrocities. That sounds like the Wolgosu invasions at the time of the Bronze Age Collapse.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Excellent! That is absolutely right. Anybody else observed anything interesting?”

Student 4: “The text goes on and on about it being true and who told it to whom and such like.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Yes, it uses various formula to emphasise authenticity and veracity. That fits with our hypothesis about its time of origin, as it was still rather typical, even if slightly archaic, for the period. But our Khepušopiň seems to like ancient traditions… Anything else?”

Student 5: “It puts the female forms of everything first. It`s, the goddess did it, and then, oh, some male gods helped, too, but they were obviously not so important. Also, the story was handed down from mother to daughter. The sons and the fathers seem to be really irrelevant here. And that fits with what we`re on to, too, of course, since the Amaloxians were a matriarchal society, as far as I know.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “You could put it that way, yes. Good! Indeed, that is striking to us Remenkemet [4], the important functions in the culture from which this text stems, as well as in the transcendental cosmos it imagines, are all occupied by females. This is not the case for the culture which appears as Other, here, though: the Wolgosu are not described as “donkey-women”, but as “donkey-men”, and they are presented as doing a cliché male invader thing, namely raping the Tawrixian daughters.

Now, that was a lot we could see in just a few lines. We now know where the text comes from, we know some things about its author – a female Tawrixian named Khepušopiň, who is fond of ancient Amaloxian symbols and other archaisms – and we can assume a few more. She is writing in a situation which she perceives as a cataclysmic catastrophe, and we can assume her contemporary readers viewed things in the same way.

In this context, Khepušopiň writes down what she calls the true history of “the old times” and “the dark ages” and of comparatively more recent times. This is what we`ll be discussing most of the time in this seminar, and when we do it, we had better not forget what we`ve found out so far about the author and the context, and I hope or I´m sure we´ll find out a lot more about them soon. But she also says she`s going to give us an account of her people`s mythology – always an important aspect of any culture – and that is what we`re going to look at next week.

So please read what Sofris in his edition named “Chapter One” in preparation for next week. If you find any striking similarities or differences to our own mythology or any other mythologies you know about, take notes and we can discuss them in class.”


______________
[1] At this point, I won`t reveal just who these Amaloxians are yet. (Speculations are welcome, though. The script may give you a clue.)

[2] Hierogyphs

[3] Some things must stay the same in any possible universe…

[4] Egyptians
 
Btw, the PoD... Will reveal itself in the fourth lecture, but I'd love to hear your speculations: there is one clue in the source...!
 
Glad to hear that! Anything specific that you find interesting so far? Do the signs look familiar to you?
There are too few pre-greek TL here, so I'm quite glad you're here. It's a fascinating period to explore.
The point about the matriarchy is interesting - certainly uncommon. You also talk about Sea People invasions of a peninsula inhabited by those Amaloxians - either Italy, Crimea or the Peloponnese - probably the latter, since AFAIK there was no major civ in Crimea and Italy this early. Beside the script looks similar to Linear B, so some offshoot/hybrid of Minoan and Mycenian civ on the Peloponnese? Though why matriarcal I have no idea.
 
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There are not many TL's that goes back this far, and not even many of those get very far in the future. So hat off to you.
 
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Thanks everyone!
@Roger II now I'm the one who is curious.

So far, nobody has hit the nail on the head yet.

As for Amazonians: neither true nor false; we only know them from Greek myths and can't localise or temporalise them, so our civilization could be them or not.

I mentioned a Bronze Age Collapse, but note that at least the Tawrixian author describes the invaders, which the Egyptians call Wolgosu, not as Sea People but as donkey-men. This, and the circumstance that present Egypt shows significant continuities to Ancient Egypt has something to do with the truly world-altering PoD.
 
Thanks everyone!
@Roger II now I'm the one who is curious.

So far, nobody has hit the nail on the head yet.

As for Amazonians: neither true nor false; we only know them from Greek myths and can't localise or temporalise them, so our civilization could be them or not.

I mentioned a Bronze Age Collapse, but note that at least the Tawrixian author describes the invaders, which the Egyptians call Wolgosu, not as Sea People but as donkey-men. This, and the circumstance that present Egypt shows significant continuities to Ancient Egypt has something to do with the truly world-altering PoD.

Hmm....

The thing is we don't know just what cause the OTL Bronze Age Collapse besides several ideas that work together. If it was not the Sea People, but some donkey horde (If such a thing was possible.) I could only thing they came from maybe the East, over Mesopotamia, and rushing into Egypt, and Hittites, and Mycenaean. And since we don't know anything about the Sea People....

(Also, Amzaoninas was said to be in the Black Sea, so that's something.)
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The script reminds me of Lycian and Carian, but those used scripts derived from early Greek. But then again, it also looks a bit like Linear A... is that what we're looking at here? Some kind of surviving Minoan civilsation, with an early POD? (Or possibly: at successor languages of that Minoan civilisation?)
 
The script reminds me of Lycian and Carian, but those used scripts derived from early Greek. But then again, it also looks a bit like Linear A... is that what we're looking at here? Some kind of surviving Minoan civilsation, with an early POD? (Or possibly: at successor languages of that Minoan civilisation?)
I'm going to freak some people out, but if anything (I'm not committing myself to anything regarding OTL here), we're looking at its predecessor.
 
Here is the next piece of myth text - the seminar discussion on it will follow tomorrow (hopefully):


Chapter One: Birth of Life on Earth

This is the truth about how humans and all life came into being. It was revealed to our foremothers by Apašuň, the One that is Life, their Grand-Mother, and if you do not believe that it has been truthfully preserved from that distant time, then you need only look at the world and how it lives / is alive, and you shall realise that this account is true.

In the beginning, there was only Byax [personal name of the deity, but also: the earth] and Eštaň [personal name of the deity, but also: the sun]. All matter was already in Byax, and there is no single part of a substance that was not part of Byax from the beginning. And Byax shaped itself, forming all the high ridges and the deep oceans. But Byax was all cold; the oceans were frozen and filled with ice, and nothing moved on its own, no river flew and no wind blew; stone and water and air were all still and calm except for when it pleased Byax to change her shape.

Eštaň was wandering across the vast emptiness when he saw Byax for the first time, infinitely far away in the distance. He began to burn with passion when he saw her, and he longed to be nearer to her and see her more closely, so he hurried towards her across the vast and empty void. And Eštaň was fast, but the distance was so long that it took him eons to come nearer. The closer he came, though, the warmer he made Byax. And as Byax received Eštaň`s warmth and was filled with it, she gave birth to the Three: to her first-born daughter, Apašuň, and life came into being on earth, to Čaru, and the winds began to blow and the surface of the earth was spanned by a moving sky, and to Akšiwe, and the waters were no longer calm in their oceanic beds and under the surface of the earth, but they also sprang from the stones and flowed down the curves of Byax in brooks and streams, and united into rivers.

Apašuň was in the weeds which grew and clad Byax in her green robe. Čaru came to her and caressed her, and Apašuň brought forth a large moving being of meat and bones, and Čaru breathed into it, and thus was created Mihalup, the First Cow. And Mihalup was pregnant, her belly as wide as a pond, and she gave birth first to Annax and Zanri, the First Woman and Man, then to all other animals which dwell on earth. But when Mihalup had given birth to all these creatures, she was so exhausted that she fell into a slumber which is close to death, and her sleep lasts thousands of years, and only few have seen her stir and wake for a short time. Annax and Zanri, though, were raised by the One, Apašuň, their grand-mother.

Throughout the time when all this happened, Eštaň was coming closer and closer to his beloved Byax, and as he saw her in her new green garment, he burned even more with desire for her. With the heat of his passion, he warmed Byax so much that the new weeds and grass paled, and the animals and humans sweated and fled from the heat into caves. And Apašuň implored her mother to tell Eštaň to stay at greater distance, for else her offspring, all life on the earth, in the sea and in the sky would perish in Eštaň`s heat. But Byax was so enamoured by Eštaň that she had no ear for Apašuň`s warnings. And so the heat increased, so much that the first fires began to ignite, burning away the plants which Apašuň had spawned.

Then, Apašuň called her brothers Čaru and Akšiwe, to counsel with her, and they agreed what they would do. Akšiwe would send the waters steaming up into the air, and Čaru would blow the steam all across Byax. And so they did it, covering the sky with white and grey clouds, and protecting the earth beneath it from the unrelenting heat of Eštaň`s rays.

But Eštaň was saddened and furious when he could no longer see his beloved Byax, covered as she was under the veil. Now Apašuň made a proposal that would allow him to see her mother again, yet protected all her life-forms from burning to death, and Eštaň agreed. And thus, the sun sets in the evening, leaving the world to cool down in the night, and rises again in the morning to behold the earth in its splendor and fill the sky and the earth and the water and all life with warmth.

Apašuň had negotiated wisely, and life grew and became plentiful in all corners of the earth, in the seas and rivers and lakes, and in the sky. Annax and Zanri had many daughters and sons, too; some wandered down into the rising of the winter-sun along the valleys of the two rivers, others marched towards the noon sun until they reached the Many-Islanded Sea [1], and on towards the Iteru [2], yet others crossed the high ridges on their journey towards the rising summer sun and descended into the steppes and forests of the North, but the Annax`s favourite daughter, Amalox, and her companion built themselves boats and crossed the Many-Islanded Sea until they reached the Tanayan [3] shore, and onwards away from the noon sun until they reached the Middle River [4]. The daughters and sons of Annax and Zanri became many, in all the corners of the world, and they ate from the plants and hunted and fished the animals. But the plants and the animals became many, too, and the plants grew into trees, and the trees formed thick forests, and the earth was all overgrown, and the animals were so many that they were eating each other, yet still they remained hungry all the time, for there were so many of them that they never found enough to eat. And large beasts were attacking women and men, and eating their children. Annax, who had grown seven hundred years old and weary and tired, heaved herself up from where she liked to sit, and went to talk with Apašuň.

Annax told her grand-mother of her worries, and she cried when she spoke of the fear and the hunger and the crowdedness. But Apašuň could not understand her, for to her, all life was good, and she was in all this life, and life must grow and multiply, and so she did. When Annax had finished crying and imploring her, she turned against Apašuň and assaulted her, and caught her by her throat and choked her and shook her, and shouted at her to desist from crowding the face of the earth with too much life. As her own grand-child had turned against her and pressed at her throat, Apašuň was hurt and weakened. She wrestled herself from Annax`s grip and hid away in a deep cave in the mountain.

Annax returned to Zanri. On her way back, she saw how all around her, trees shed their leaves, and grass withered, and animals became tired. Annax herself felt tired and weak and old, too. She realized what she had done, and she was afraid. She returned to the mountain where she had met Apašuň, and she searched for her in the caves and tunnels of the mountain, and when she had found her grand-mother, she implored her to return and to bring back life into the world. Apašuň was deeply hurt, though, and it took much imploring to change her mind even for a little while. She would not come back out of the cave, and she would not bring back the full force of life onto the earth`s surface. But she gave Annax a handful of seeds and told her to instruct all her children to cut down the forests with aching arms, and sow these seeds in the sweat of their brows, so they could harvest at least enough for Annax`s daughters and sons to live on.

Annax travelled to all the corners of the world and told her children and grand-children what Apašuň had said, and imparted the seeds evenly among them. Not all of them would listen to her advice, for some found it too cumbersome to sow and ard and harvest. But Amalox, Annax`s favourite daughter, listened closely to mother`s advice, and her children would know how to placate the hurt Apašuň and they would never suffer from hunger and starvation.



[1] the Mediterranean

[2] Egyptian for Nile (the translator Sofris evidently decided against using the Tawrixian toponym for his home land`s all-important river)

[3] In the context of this timeline, alt-Egyptian for “European”

[4] apparently a literal translation of the Tawrixian word (or Amaloxian symbol value) for Danube
 
Based on the settlement route this update suggests Scythians so perhaps the Sarmatian offshoot?
Well the myth states that Amalox arrived at the Danube by crossing the Mediterranean and then travelling North (away from the noon sun). That clarifies two things: the civilization is on the Danube, if it stays at the place chosen by Amalox, and it considers itself to have come from Anatolia. And it's an agricultural society. That narrows it down in terms of OTL possibilities. The Sarmatians had more of a nomadic pastoralist identity overall, though I don't know where they saw their ancestral homeland.
 
Well Bronze Age Anatolia was a bit of a mix but..
If the Amaloxi are IE related then Arzawa and related peoples.
Else they're related to the nonIE Hatti.
 
Second week - Seminar Discussion on chapter 1:

Prof Hadjeamin: “So, anyone got any thoughts on this week`s text?”

(Long pause.)

Student 3: “You told us to watch out for similarities and differences with mythologies we knew. I´ve noticed quite a few differences. For example, for the Amaloxians, the sky god was male and the earth was female, while we`re used to viewing things the other way round. Also, the most important deity here appears to be earth, like with other Khestiu [1] peoples, while in our own myths, it´s the sun. And in Sungaru [2], it was Enlil, the storm god, while in the Amaloxian myth, this Čaru seems to play a rather minor role.”

Student 2: “I don`t agree. I don`t find it all that different as you make it. It´s all about achieving a balance, a kind of Maat, between heat and cold, between life and death. And it´s quite fascinating how early these Amaloxians knew about physics, like how clouds form through rising vapour. It makes a lot of sense that these people built such magnificent architecture and united such a large empire so early on – they were really a lot like our ancestors!”

Student 3: “Yeah, but they still thought the earth was a flat disc, when the Fenchu [3] already had some basic astronomical knowledge and were figuring out that the earth is a ball.”

Student 2: “But the Amaloxian civilization arose in the [5th millennium BCE, [4]], that is even earlier than the unification of Kemet, and at that time, everyone thought the earth was as flat as it looks.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Wait a second. These are all very interesting observations. But we have to keep in mind that we`re reading a source from around [1200 BCE]. Which parts of this mythology really date back to the [5th millennium BCE] is not always easy to say. We only have to look at our own history to see that it took more than two millennia for the different creation myths of places like Menefer [5], Awanu [6] and Khemenu [7] to blend into each other and for two deities to become one sun god.

What little we know from chunks of Old Amaloxian inscriptions, this myth is a majorly altered neo-Amaloxian tale which tells us more about the ideology of the Late Bronze Age and the times of collapse rather than about Old Amaloxian culture. In Old Amaloxian spirituality, there were a lot more deities, some of whom we might find recognizable, who were worshipped well into the [3rd millennium BCE], for example a bull god, which is something Khepušopiň will polemicise against and describe as deeply un-Amaloxian. And there was even more regional variety than in the culture of Kemet, which shouldn`t surprise us: the Amaloxian civilization spread not only along the Hatumaua [8], but also along its tributaries, which made their territory vast and geographically dispersed when compared to our Iteru-centered geography of Kemet.

But back to your argument. I found one idea particularly interesting – that of an Amaloxian equivalent of “Maat”. What do the others think? Does this creation myth tell of a cosmology similar to our concept of Maat?”

Student 4: “Hm. I don`t think it´s too similar. Maat is about the right order, about justice, and avoiding chaos. Reading something like this into the creation myth of the Amaloxians appears somewhat far-fetched to me. After all, there`s a lot of conflict between the generations here, something that goes deeply against my feeling of Maat.”

Student 2: “Come on, in other ancient mythologies, there`s such a lot of killing involved between the gods; compared to that, I think the Amaloxian story is rather mild.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Maybe there are limits to mapping our own concept of Maat onto a foreign culture, especially one which had only superficially come into contact with Kemetic ideas by the time this text was written. But I thought the idea was worth pursuing: isn`t the principle of Life what is portrayed to be at the universe`s core here? And humankind has inherited both it – and the duty to take care of it. To keep the balance of life in an equilibrium. To the ancient Amaloxians, this might have meant crawling into Apašuň`s mountain and imploring her when there was a draught – but maybe that wasn`t everything. Maybe there`s a hint of an abstract idea at work here which we modern people might call “ecology” – and maybe this notion helped them to survive and adapt to changing climatic conditions and such like over the course of three millennia.

Anyone else got any interesting observations?”

Student 5: “Like in all these ancient myths, they, the Amaloxians themselves, come off as the best of all people. Amalox was the favourite daughter of Annax, and all that stuff.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Sure. Also, note what Amalox does right in the end…”

Student 6: “She sows.”

Prof Hadjeamin: “Indeed! She becomes a peasant. And other cultures who don`t are looked down upon, already here in the creation myth. We`ll read a lot more of that spirit in the following chapters, as this is something which Khepušopiň defines as central to the identity and superiority of the Amaloxians. And here, she may indeed have faithfully summed up a view, a world-view, which characterized both the old Amaloxian civilization, and the neo-Amaloxian empires of the [2nd millennium BCE]: they perceived themselves as civilized agriculturalists at the frontier with uncivilized barbarians, who at first were hunters and gatherers, and later herders. This view strikes me as very similar to some of the oldest and vilest chauvinisms of our culture, and how we perceived of the early Habiru and the Shasu, for example. Maybe we`re still sometimes looking at foreigners through this lens? Either way, when I say that Khepušopiň might have faithfully rendered how Old Amaloxians already viewed themselves and their neighbors, please do not confound this with a statement about the material reality of the Amaloxians. For although proto-Amaloxians had been agriculturalists since their arrival at the Hatumaua in the [7th millennium BCE], hunting, gathering and herding would remain important parts of their own lives and culture, too, until at least the [3rd millennium BCE]. It was not that they did not do these things – they simply viewed them as marginal, although that wasn`t strictly true, and they relegated it, especially the hunting and gathering, to their less privileged: the male gender.

Also note that this Othering, this drawing of a cultural and civilizational frontier, was not as geographically obvious in the Amaloxian case as it was in ours, with the fertile valley and delta of the Iteru surrounded by desert and sea. The Others dwelled always and only in the North and North-East, in the steppes. Their Southern and Eastern neighbors were, in comparison, viewed as similar to them, and they even saw Khestiu as the cradle of humankind. Which, as we of course know, it wasn`t, but again there`s a grain of truth in it. A very literal grain. With the Amaloxian emphasis on agriculture, they were on to something, or there is a collective memory echoing in this myth, if there is such a thing: What we do know to have begun in the Northern part of the Fertile Crescent is the agricultural revolution.

So, here we are, arriving at what this myth perhaps had to do with human history as we know it – and this is what the next chapter is going to focus on. Brace for a very idealized view of the pre-imperial Hatumauan Neolithic, when you read chapter two in preparation for next week!”

_____________
[1] alt-Egyptian for Anatolia and Anatolian

[2] Mesopotamia / Mesopotamian

[3] Western Semitic people living in the Levante / Canananites / alt-Phoenicians

[4] Obviously, an Egyptian student is going to use a different calendar. But which? The old Egyptian calendars would make understanding this timeline a real pain in the butt because you don`t just have to add or subtract years, like with AUC; the Egyptian year, based on the Heliacal rising of Sirius, was also shorter than ours. Throughout the millennia, they might have changed that to something more rational and in sync with Nile floodings without having their months move around in the year. But into what exactly? Anything is possible in a world with a PoD so far back. And torturing you with a calendar I`d have to make up myself and which isn`t even in the focus of the timeline, i.e. the Amaloxian civilization, for their calendar will definitely remain unknown to us, is rather phony, I thought. Therefore, for everyone`s convenience, I´ll just use our calendar and put it in brackets.

[5] Memphis

[6] Heliopolis

[7] Hermopolis

[8] alt-Egyptian for Danube, they literally translated Amaloxian “middle river”

_______________
By now, I hope it transpired what we`re looking at: a surviving Gumelniţa/Cucuteni-Tripolye culture turning into a civilization instead of collapsing and adopting PIE traits.
Thus, the script is derived from the Vinča symbols.

Though this is not yet, strictly speaking, the PoD. The PoD lies even farther back, but it (hopefully) makes the survival of above-mentioned cultures more probable. (Again, speculations welcome.)
 
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