Before the Presocratics

Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, vols 23-24 (2009-2010), nos 1-2

EDITORIAL Since early 2009, when the last three annual volumes (XX, XXI, XXII, 2006, 2007, 2008) of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie were published, our journal has gone through a bumpy patch. The same year saw the end of the five-year hospitality agreement between this journal and the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands. The Editor had negotiated this agreement in 2004 (as the only successful outcome of a long series of international applications for subsidy), and though it had failed to bring the secretarial and administrative assistance so badly needed, it had at least paid for printing and postage. We take this opportunity to thank the African Studies Centre for its loyal support over these five years. Against the background of the international financial crisis from 2008 onward, revenue from subscriptions, sale of back issues, and reprint fees dwindled, and costs of printing, web design, hosting and postage were mounting. Meanwhile Quest was enjoying ever greater popularity on the part of established and junior contributors, and also the quality of the articles submitted went from strength to strength. Under those circumstances the Editorial Board saw no alternative but to sit back and wait until the financial situation would clear up sufficiently to produce, dispatch and host new annual volumes. In 2012 the felicitous reprint of three Quest articles in the Eboussi Boulaga Festschrift, and the fees secured in that connection through the good services of Professor Valentin Mudimbe (Member of the Advisory Editorial Board) seemed to bode better times for our journal; but then the Editor went down with serious illness (2011-2012). By the end of 2012, these medical hurdles had finally been taken, and three new annual volumes are now lined up for publication before the middle of 2013 one under the guest editorship of Professor Thaddeus Metz from South Africa. A cheaper production process yet more attractive format were meanwhile initiated, of which the present volume is the first implementation. Rather than already bringing out these three volumes, we decided that we should first devote the present combined annual volume XXIII-XXIV (20092010) to a long-standing book project of the Editor, in honour of his 65th birthday, and in recognition of his contributions to Quest and to the sake of African philosophy over the past decade. The books anti-hegemonic, anti-Eurocentric approach to long-range transcontinental philosophy from an African perspective is a fitting expression of the spirit of Quest, and a significant contribution to the global history of philosophy.

ISSN 1011-226X

QUEST
An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie
vols 23-24 (2009-2010), nos 1-2 special issue published on the occasion of the journal Editors 65th birthday

Before the

Presocratics
Cyclicity, transformation, and element cosmology: The case of transcontinental pre- or protohistoric cosmological substrates linking Africa, Eurasia and North America

by Wim M.J. van Binsbergen

Affiliated Researcher, African Studies Centre, Leiden Emeritus Professor of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam Life member of the Kwame Legwane Traditional Association of Botswana

 2012 Wim M.J. van Binsbergen ISBN / EAN 978-90-78382-15-7 Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie (ISSN 1011-226X)
published by Shikanda Publishing House, Haarlem, the Netherlands

For details on front cover illustration, see Fig. 4.3 below, p. 127; back cover illustration: Man as dwelling at the bottom of the sky (thought to represent Empedocles, in an apparent Renaissance print of doubtful authenticity published by Camille Flammarion, late 19th c.)

Alleen die in zijn engte de elementen telde Buigend bevend als geselslagen geeft het laatste geluid Het lied heeft het eeuwige leven. Lucebert (2002)
[Only he who, in his anguish, counted the elements Like a scourge bending, trembling, offers up the last sound Song has life eternal]

To the memory of Douwe G. Jongmans (1922-2011), my beloved teacher of ethnohistorical and ethnographic field research

Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, vols 23-24 (2009-2010), nos 1-2: 1-398

Chapter 0. Preface, acknowledgments, and overall orientation

0.1. Background of this book in the context of the authors research

This argument, while coming from an author who is an Africanist anthropologist by training and an Africanist intercultural philosopher by profession, yet is rooted in my life-long fascination with the Presocratics and with cosmology in general, but was particularly prompted by a number of specific intellectual adventures.1 In the late 1960s I did my first ethnohistorical and ethnographic fieldwork, on popular religion in the highlands of Northwestern Tunisia under the greatly inspiring supervision of (among several others to whom I am almost equally indebted) the North Africanist Douwe Jongmans, to whose memory the present book is dedicated; in preparation I studied introductory Arabic with Muammad Sucudi, and sufficiently acquainted myself with the intellectual world of Islam to recognise and track its traces when, much later, I came across the latter in Southern Africa. In 1972, while teaching theoretical sociology at the University of Zambia, South Central Africa, I inherited the Golden Retriever dog Leeza from one of my Indian colleagues departing for Australia; a domestic servant who was conversant with the dogs ways came with it, and this was the haphazard, in hindsight scandalous, beginning of my productive ethnoIn order not to burden already the beginning of this book with the excessive and regrettable self-referentiality that yet is very difficult to avoid given both the pioneer nature and the sustained, accumulative nature of my research over the past two decades, I have largely refrained from referencing this Preface. The bibliography at the end of this book gives a chronological overview of my publications in question.
1

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

graphic and ethnohistorical collaboration, and soon close fictive kin relationship as adoptive brothers, with Mr. Dennis Kawangu Shiyowe of the Nkoya people of Western Zambia. Together we have intensively explored, over the next four decades, the ethnography and history of the Nkoya. Here I came across a complex clan system, whose apparently muddled and contradictory nature presented puzzles which no living Nkoya could elucidate and which only the present books argument will solve to at least my own satisfaction. Then again, in 1988, during ethnographic fieldwork on globalisation and culture in the booming town of Francistown, North-eastern Botswana, Southern Africa (but I never gave up on the Nkoya), I was introduced (first as a researching outsider, soon as a practicing insider) to one of Southern Africas major divination systems. Known as Dithlaola (Tswana) or Hakata (Shona), it is based on four tablets which, when cast (and given the fact that they are marked to be different from one another, and to have different fronts from backs) can assume 24 different configurations, each named and each to be interpreted by reference to an extensive, multidimensional (but orally memorised) divinatory catalogue. I soon learned that very similar systems existed elsewhere, in West Africa, in Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, throughout the Indian Ocean realm, and in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, while the prototype of this proto-globalised, geomantic family of divination systems appeared to derive, under the names of KL MOP cilm al-raml (Sand Science) or MOP RST at//t/ al-raml (Sand Line, Sand Calligraphy) from late first-millennium, Islamic Iraq.2 Early
In the present study, as in my other recent work, an effort is made to render the worlds specific cultural / intellectual traditions, as much as possible, in their original form including their original script, if any. This is not in order to pretend a philological competence I do not possess (in fact, I am aware that my adopted practice is prone to serious error disqualifying the argument in the eyes of regional specialists), but, on the contrary, to remind the reader in the best anthropological fashion of the fact that all regional traditions deserve to be met on their own terms; that all transcontinental rendering involves massive translation and interpretation and therefore is inherently uncertain and distortive; and that the habitual equation of global scholarship with a North Atlantic, early-21st-century-CE perspective amounts to a gross error of ethnocentrism. As a rule, the non-European original script will only be given the first time a name or term is being used. In this connection, the rendering of personal proper names from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome presents special problems due to the habit, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon contexts, of adopting rather distortive versions of the original names in Modern scholarly and popular discourse; thus Isis instead of Ast, Chemmis instead of A-bt, Horus instead of r (Ancient Egyptian); Hephaestus
2

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on, I was struck by the parallels in notational system and internal formal structure, between these systems and the famous, Taoist Chinese Y Jng (I Ching) system of wisdom divination, to which my elder sister Else Oeseburg-Broers, an experienced practitioner, had introduced me and which was becoming popular in the North Atlantic region on the wings of the esoteric and New Age movement, from the 1970s CE on. The determination to trace the antecedents of Southern African geomantic divination in space and time was to dominate my empirical research from 1990 on. The 1990s were the time when the Black Athena debate, as initiated by Martin Gardiner Bernal, reached its culmination. By the same time we saw the coming of age of Afrocentrism, which had been among Bernals inspirations in addition of the Egyptological fascination he had inherited from his grandfather (i.e. Alan H. Gardiner; along with the latters library). Finally, in that decade, globalisation seemed to offer a new paradigm for the re-organisation and rethinking of regional studies which until then has been on a strictly one-continent footing. Having traded my chair in the anthropology of ethnicity (Free University, Amsterdam) for one in the foundations of intercultural philosophy (Erasmus University Rotterdam), I came to focus my attention at the epistemology and global knowledge politics of interculturality, and repeatedly using the geomantic case as an empirical illustration at first believed that Strong Afrocentrism could be a leading paradigm in this field; until sustained theoretical and empirical reflection, notably as first co-author of a massive book on Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (2011), in addition to affording me empirical and methodological experience with genetic and long-range linguistic analysis indispensable for the present book, brought home to me the limitations of the Afrocentrist perspective. The Francistown fieldwork introduced me not only to geomantic divination but also (at the moment of my graduation to the full status of sangoma diviner-healer) to leopard-skin symbolism; the world-wide puzzles this introduction presented to me brought me in close and prolonged contact with the recent movement to revive comparative mythology initiated by and subsequently led by the prominent Sanskritist Michael Witzel of the Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies, Harvard Univerinstead of Hephaistos or better still Hefaistos, Achilles instead of Achilleus (Ancient Greek); Ovid instead of Ovidius, Homer instead of Homerus or Homeros (Latin). The present author is not to be blamed for the gross inconsistencies springing from this cultural practice; further see the Index of Proper Names at the end of this book.

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

sity, Cambridge MA, USA. It has been in the context of this collaboration, and as a founding member of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, that I came to formulate an Aggregative Diachronic Model of World Mythology, towards whose consolidation my study of Flood myths world-wide has occupied an increasingly central role. It was in this context that I accidentally hit on the indications of a cyclic transformative system contained in North American Flood myths. In 2007 I drafted a first rough version of the present argument, concentrating on cyclic transformative element cosmologies, and attempting to bring together the Nkoya, geomantic, Taoist, Flood-myth, and *Borean, data. In the following years, I sought to complement my study of element cosmologies from Asia, Africa and North America, with a return to Presocratic philosophic texts and their Ancient commentators in an attempt to lift the present argument above its transcontinental empirical limitations, and make it more directly recognisable as a contribution to the History of Philosophy. Meanwhile my contacts with, and field trips to, East, South East and South Asia greatly intensified, and my ongoing research concentrated on transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, especially those between sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. As so often in my life as a scholarly author, one additional Chapter (devoted to the transcontinental mechanisms that might have produced the empirical distributions of element cosmologies) tyrannically grew out of its original context and scope, and spawned several major articles, a draft book, an international conference, and another book based on that conference enough to unburden the present book from that detailed transcontinental argument, to which instead only passing reference is made now. However, a recently drafted Chapter on West Asia and Y Jng reflects the same research orientation, and was the last to be added to the present books argument. This argument, then, seeks to contribute to the study of the global history of human thought and philosophy. It calls in question the popular, common perception of the Presocratic philosophers as having initiated Western philosophy, and particularly of Empedocles as having initiated the system of four elements as immutable and irreducible parallel components of reality. Our point of departure is the puzzling clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa, which turns out to evoke a cosmology of six basic dimensions, each consisting of a destructor, some8

Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, vols 23-24 (2009-2010), nos 1-2: 1-398

thing that is being destroyed, and a third, catalytic agent. This is strongly reminiscent of the East Asian correlative systems3 as in the Y Jng cosmological system of changes based on the 64 combinations of the eight trigrams4 taken two at a time; and particularly of the five-element cosmology of Taoism in general, in which the basic relations between elements are defined as an unending cycle of transformations by which each element is either destructive or productive of the next. Further explorations into Ancient Egypt, India, sub-Saharan Africa and North America suggest, as a Working Hypothesis (1) that such a transformation cycle of elements may be considered a prehistoric substrate, possibly as old as dating from the Upper Palaeolithic, informing Eurasian, African and North American cosmologies. However, immediately an alternative presents itself: (2) that the transformation cycle of elements is only as recent as the Bronze Age, and was transmitted transcontinentally only in (proto-)historical times. With our Working Hypothesis (1) and our Alternative Working Hypothesis (2) our argument turns to the Presocratics and especially Empedocles, whose thought is treated in some detail. Here we find that the transformative and cyclic aspects of the putative substrate system also occasionally surface in the work of these philosophers and in that of their commentators (especially Aristotle and Plato), but only to be censored out in later, still dominant, hegemonic and Eurocentric interpretations. This then puts us to a tantalising dilemma: (1) Can we vindicate our Working Hypothesis and argue that the Presocratics have build upon, and transformed (as
Cf. Fiskejo 2000; Graham 1986. The fundamental idea of a correlative system is that each of its constituent parts can be considered in terms of a number of dimensions at the same time (kinship term; direction of the compass; profession; fortune; social status; colour; the animal world, etc.), in such a way that the parts correlate systematically with one another along each of these dimensions, e.g. A = brothernorthwest butchersmall misfortunelow statusredhyena, parallel to B = fathersouthpriest great fortunehighest statusgoldenlion, etc. (the example is fictitious), etc.
4 3

Trigram: in a notational system, an item consisting of three basic graphic elements; thus also hexagram: an item consisting of six basic graphic elements.

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

well as misunderstood!), a cosmology (revolving on the cyclical transformation of elements) that by their time had already existed for a dozen millennia or (alternatively) at least for several millennia? Or (2) must we altogether reject our Working Hypothesis, give up the idea of very great antiquity and transcontinental distribution of a transformative element system as an Upper Palaeolithic substrate of human thought, even reject our Alternative Working Hypothesis, and revert to a Eurocentric position, where the attestations of element systems world-wide are primarily seen as the result of the recent transcontinental diffusion of Greek thought? These alternatives will be considered, in the light of an attempt to define important steps in the development of human though procedures since the Upper Palaeolithic thus challenging the widespread5 tacit assumption that these faculties have remained essentially unaltered since the emergence of Anatomically Modern Humans, in Africa, 200 ka BP. Typologically, but with considerable linguistic and comparative mythological support, our argument then identifies essential consecutive steps (from range semantics to binary oppositions to cyclical element transformations and dialectical triads), in humankinds trajectory from Upper Palaeolithic modes of thought towards Modern6 forms of discursive thought. It is here that the present argument seeks to make a substantial contribution to the theory and method of studying the prehistory of modes of thought worldwide. On the one hand we will present considerable linguistic and mythological arguments for the claim of great antiquity of the most rudimentary forms of element cosmology. On the other hand, we
5

Yet far from universal. Several psychologists and students of literacy (e.g. Jaynes 1990 / 1976; Vroon 1992; Ong 1982) have claimed massive changes in thought processes and even brain structure as a result of literacy and other socio-political conditions emerging during or even after the Bronze Age. However, their time perspective appears to be much too shallow to be credible. In recent decades, the reflection on the long-term evolution of human thought faculties has become a major branch of palaeoanthropology, cf. Aitchison 1996; Anati 1999; Bednarik 1995; Carruthers & Chamberlain 2000; Chase & Dibble 1987; Corbey & Roebroeks 1997; Donald 1991; Harrod 2004; Lewis-Williams 2002; Marshack 1972; Mithen 1996; Noble & Davidson 1996; Oakley 1981; Renfrew & Zubrow 199; Robb 1998.
6 In this book, I use Modern (and Early Modern) in the technical sense of: Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophical, cultural and political expressions in the North Atlantic region and, eventually, world-wide; and modern in the everyday sense of relating to the last few centuries. Anatomically Modern Humans constitute the sub-species to which all humans now alive belong, and which arose in sub-Saharan Africa c. 200 ka BP (ka = kilo years = millennium; BP = Before Present).

10

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will apply linguistic methods to identify the origin, in West Asia in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, not of the postulated substrate system as a whole, but at least of part of the nomenclature of the Chinese Y Jng system. The region indicated constitutes a likely environment from where the cross model as a mechanism of Pelasgian expansion7 might allow us to understand subsequent spread over much of the Old World and part of the New World including the presence of the transformative element cycle among the Nkoya. However, towards the end of the argument a strong alternative case will be presented: that for direct, recent demic diffusion8 from East or South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa in historical times. We shall argue that this is not a matter of either / or, but that three complementary mechanisms have contributed to the distribution pattern of element cosmologies we are perceiving in historical times: one substrate going back to the Upper Palaeolithic, another, Pelasgian one to the Bronze Age, while the rest which is the most conspicuous part goes back to transcontinental transmissions in recent centuries. Exit, apparently, the Presocratics as unprecedented philosophical innovators of genius.

0.2. Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Quest for celebrating my 65th birthday with the publication of the present book. This book is a greatly revised and expanded version of my paper presented at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Kokugakuin Shinto University, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009 (van Binsbergen 2009). I hope to publish the specific Japanological argument elsewhere (van Binsbergen, forthcoming). I am indebted to Michael Witzel and to
7 Cf. van Binsbergen 2010a and in press (a); van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 372 f; and below, p. 36 f., 46 f. 8 The archaeological expression demic diffusion designates the common phenomenon in cultural history, that cultural traits may travel as a result of geographical displacement of a population segment possessing these traits. Since culture is not transmitted genetically but is per definition obtained through a learning process based on social communication with other humans, demic diffusion is by no means the only way in which cultural traits may travel much diffusion of culture has taken place through communication, without any, or hardly any, population movement being involved.

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Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

the Harvard Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA, for inviting me to participate in this conference and to a series of related annual events in the USA, Asia and Europe since 2004, without which I would never have been able to expand my Africanist and anthropological specialties into the fields of Asian Studies (even though as a student I extensively studied Modern Asia under Wim Wertheim and his staff) and comparative mythology Michael Witzel also took me on a tour along major Buddhist shrines in the Chinese interior in 2006; to my Japanese hosts Professors Inoue Nobutaka , Hirafuji Kikuko and Kazuo Matsumura , for the charm with which they have accommodated the original, highly deficient version of my argument; to these Japanese colleagues, and moreover to Michael Witzel, Steve Farmer, Klaus Antoni, Nick Allen, Vclav Blaek, Li Anshan (with whom I have shared over the years an interest in Africa-China relations), Haifang Lui, Wei Cuiping (who also introduced me to Taoist and Lamaist scenes in Beijing), Shigeru Araki (who with his students introduced me to divination, Zen convents and shrines in Kyoto), Peter van der Mede, Ineke Suijkerbuijk, Hannah van Binsbergen, and Arthur Eaton, for discussions on the topic of this argument; to my first wife, Henny van Rijn, and our daughter Nezjma van Binsbergen, for sharing with me the traumatic first spell of Nkoya fieldwork (with fourteen deaths in our immediate Nkoya network within as many weeks) during which the seeds for the present argument were laid, in the early 1970s; to Patricia van Binsbergen-Saegerman, my wife since 1984, for creating and sustaining, over the decades, the context of our love and family as the ideal place from which to conduct these researches, and to contribute to the various field trips since 1983 intellectually, socially and financially; to the African Studies Centre (ASC), Leiden, in the person of its Director Ton Dietz, for generous support of my transcontinental explorations over the decades even when the immediate Africanist relevance seemed in doubt and for providing the financial means and organisational support (through my colleagues Marieke van Winden and Gitty Petit) towards the International Conference Rethinking Africas Transcontinental Continuities in Pre- and Protohistory, thus making that event an unforgettable celebration of my formal retirement from the ASC after 35 years; to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, and to my fellow members of the Study Group on Ancient 12

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Mesopotamian Religion and Magic, 1994-1995 it is in this context that much of the data, bibliography, readings, ideas and methodologies were explored without which the present study would have been impossible moreover, this book, although still impossible to conceive on the basis of my limited knowledge and skills at the time, is in fact the end product of the book project I hoped to realise at NIAS within one academic year; to the Department of Philosophy of Man and Culture, the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, for offering an environment where these explorations, although far removed from the present-day North Atlantic middle-class experience which largely captivates that departments research and thought, could at least be fertilised by Modern philosophical discourse; to Fred Woudhuizen, with whom I explored in the context of our massive joint work on Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (2011) the theoretical and methodological requirements for the kind of transregional protohistorical analysis as offered in the present study; to my colleagues and friends Richard Werbner, Ren Devisch and Sjaak van der Geest, who kindled and reinforced my interest in African divination over the years; to Matthew Schoffeleers and Terence Ranger, who greatly stimulated and promoted my long-range explorations into African religion; to Mma Elizabeth Shakayile, Mma Rosi Ndlovu, and Rra Smarts Gumede, my teachers of the Southern African geomantic oracle, and of sangomahood and herbalism in general, in Francistown, Botswana, in 1988-1991; and most of all, to the Nkoya people of Zambia, for welcoming me and making me one of them, and specifically for introducing me, over the decades, to a clan system that had become an enigma even to themselves, and that brought home to me the reality of a transformative element cosmology in other parts of the world than East Asia and Ancient Greece. In connection with my Nkoya research, I am greatly indebted to the University of Zambia and its Institute for African Studies (now Institute for Economic and Social Research), Lusaka. In exploring the Nkoya world, my adoptive elder brother Dennis Shiyowe, my adoptive father his Royal Highness Mwenekahare Kabambi, Davison Kawanga, M.M. Malapa, her Royal Highness Princess Mary Nalishuwa, Stanford Mayowe, the Kazanga Cultural Society and its Executive, and numerous others, made indispensable contributions for which I here express my deepest gratitude. During multiple supervision trips my students Pascal Touoyem, Stephanus Djunatan and Pius Mosima extensively introduced me to important sections of the postulated Sunda 13

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

trajectory in Cameroon and Java, Indonesia, and thus inspired my longrange imagination. Earlier I investigated other parts of West Africa with an eye on divination and therapy: the Casamance region of Southern Senegal (intermittently, in the years 1981-1983), the Manjaco people of Guinea-Bissau (during three field trips instigated and facilitated by the psychiatrist Joop de Jong, 1981-1983), and rural and urban Benin (with the aid of the diviner-healer Fagbemissi, and the non-governmental organisation Afrika Cultures et its director Vizir Olofin II Olofindji Akand). I explored other Sunda-relevant settings in Thailand, Malaysia, Bali, Sri Lanka, India and New Zealand, with emphasis on divination and healing; here special mention should be made of the medium Keerthi, Unawatuna, Sri Lanka, who over a number of days patiently introduced me to his cultic practices. These Asian trips helped create a personal context in which the Hinduist and Buddhist traces in sub-Saharan Africa could be much better appreciated by me. Robert Papstein was a good friend and intellectual sparring partner when we were both engaged in ethnohistorical fieldwork in Zambia in the 1970s, but his main contribution to the present argument lies in the fact that, with his privileged access as a photographer commissioned by the Navaho Nation Health Department, New Mexico / Arizona, USA, he afforded me a first experience of Native American life later to be augmented by equally short excursions elsewhere in the USA and British Columbia, Canada. Shigeru Araki and his students of the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, introduced me to ritual and divinatory aspects of present-day Kyoto, Japan; and Hirafuji Kikuko as well as Kazuo Matsumura did the same for me in regard of Tokyo. The African Studies Centre, in addition to the most generous general support and the specific assistance towards some of these Asian exploratory trips, and other contributions indicated above, financed two trips to Les Eyzies de Tayac, France, in 1999 and 2000, where with the generous help of the staff of the Muse National de la Prhistoire I studied engraved blocks from the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. I am moreover indebted to the Assyriologist W.W. Hallo, the Semitist Peter Broers and the anthropologist Mary Douglas, for enlightening conversations on the Urim and Thummim as an Ancient Israelite divinatory device. I am likewise indebted to Michael Rappenglck for stimulating my archaeoastronomical and prehistoric research in various ways over the past decade, with decisive impact on Chapter 7 below. With P. Vrin I had 14

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enlightening conversations, Leiden 1994, on Malagasy sikidy as a possible link between Asian and African geomancies. Shaul Shaked directed me to Peter Kingsleys innovative although controversial work when we were colleagues at NIAS, and generously extended to me his own Hebraeist and other philological skills, introducing me to Ibn Ezras geomancy as found in the Cairo Geniza. Roughly half a century ago, and to my lasting gratitude, my teachers of Latin, Greek, (introductory) Arabic, Nkoya and General Linguistics equipped me with some of the linguistic skills which, even if demonstrably rusty by now, yet made the present study possible. By roughly the same time, in the 1960s, my brilliant teachers of anthropology / sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and principally Andr Kbben (who also launched me as a WOTRO Fellow, 1974-1975), throughout the generous seven years full-time which then were required for a complete course of study in that field, instilled in me a disciplinary identity in ethnography, ethnohistory, and cross-cultural studies, even though I have meanwhile played havoc with their presentist, localist and fragmented paradigm of bounded cultures that, allegedly, were only to be approached through a researchers personal fieldwork within the most limited horizons of space and time; but also in this book I have taken their lessons to heart, in that the puzzles of Nkoya clan organisation as brought home to me during many years of standard participatory fieldwork, are at the root of the argument, even though my teachers would recognise little else in it, and appreciate even less. Among these teachers, Bonno Thoden van Velzen was only a junior lecturer when he taught me my first anthropology seminar in 1964-1965, but throughout my subsequent career, he was a major positive force behind nearly every decisive move, and a loyal ally in the conflicts which my insistence on independence, quality, unboundedness and originality engendered. This argument incorporates, and takes further, extensive sections (e.g. the discussion of Nkoya clans) from a 1998 book draft provisionally entitled Global Bee Flight and written in response to Martin Bernals Black Athena thesis. The present study thus testifies to the enormous stimulus Bernal has had on my work since the mid-1990s, despite our substantial disagreements on facts, interpretation, and on what constitutes appropriate and ethically supportable strategies in the global politics of knowledge. My elder brother Peter Broers set me on the trail of the Presocratics some 55 years ago when he gave me de Raedemaekers (1953) and van 15

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Melsens (1949; cf. 1941) books as precocious birthday presents, and a quarter of a century later took the lions share in our joint writing of a computer programme that has indexed my books ever since. For more than ten years, my eldest son, Vincent van Binsbergen, managed my computers so as to meet my excessive and ever increasing demands. The publication of this book sustained a delay of half a year in 2011 and again half a year in 2012 due to the authors serious illness. I am indebted to my wife and children, to other close relatives and friends, to my family physician Joost Laceulle MD, and to my teachers of the Southern African healing practices, for guiding me, over the decades, to a frame of mind where I could see this period through as another transformation cycle. My thanks are also due to the medical and paramedical staff of the Urology Department, Leiden University Medical Centre, and the Home Health Care services and various pharmacies, Haarlem, the Netherlands, for slowly but surely effecting both catalytically and directly the transformation that is now bringing me a new lease on life, and even this new book.

0.3. Afrocentrism: There and Back Again?9

What is the orientation of the present argument within the global politics of knowledge? This books attempt to reach, beyond Eurocentric myth, for global pre- and protohistoric reality is reminiscent of Afrocentrism, and both my Afrocentrist friends, and their intellectual enemies, deserve to know where I currently situate myself. Afrocentrist revisions of mainstream, Eurocentric versions of the history of philosophy have been around for decades, e.g. Jamess (1954) with the obsolescent title Stolen Legacy: The Greeks Were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, But the People of North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians (cf. Lefkowitzs critique, 1994); another, more mainstream example is Preus 1992. My own position, while invariably sympathetic to Afrocentrism,10 is somewhat different. There cannot be a contradiction between the interest of Africa / Africans and the interest of humankind as a whole, and that
9

Cf. Tolkien 1975; van Binsbergen 1979. van Binsbergen 1997a, 2000a, 2000b, 2005a, 2011a, 2011d.

10

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interest is best served, not by ephemeral Political Correctness, but by the determination (even if ultimately failing as, no doubt, in the present book) to produce good scholarship, by sound methods, using broadly collected, balanced data, and keeping an open mind. This means: taking Afrocentrism seriously where we can, and wholeheartedly pursuing alternatives where the network of facts, methods and theories leads us away from Afrocentrism. When I set out on the intellectual adventure that produced the present book, I honestly believed to have found, with the evidence of a transformative cycle of elements hidden in the clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa, the clues to a prehistoric, substrate cosmological system that originated in sub-Saharan Africa and from there had spewn philosophy world-wide. When in 1997 I drafted my abortive book Global Bee Flight, using much the same material, I worked from the same Afrocentrist perspective, with which I was then enamoured. A totally revised version of Global Bee Flight has now been cut up into other, published arguments (foremost van Binsbergen 2010a, but also Chapter 3 of the present book) that, for reasons of my increased empirical knowledge and deepened theoretical reflection over the years, no longer bear the hallmarks of Strong Afrocentrism; yet they still come from an Africanist who, as a formula for Weak Afrocentrism, considers Africa, home (Robert Sobukwe). The present books argument reflects the same process, as I became ever more aware of the impact of West Asia on the course of global cultural history since the Neolithic. But this is not quite the West Asia of Assyriologists, Hebraeist and Biblical scholars, but one that, in its cultural and linguistic diversity, includes uninvited guests: linguistic, ethnic and cultural traits that, according to current paradigms used by the regional studies concentrated on that region, should not be there. It is a West Asia (cf. van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 372 f.) with a high occurrence of the so-called Pelasgian traits which we will discuss below, and which include, among dozens of others, a Sun cult, sea and boat symbolism, male genital mutilation, amphiktyony (a more or less acephalous twelve-league), metal-working, bee and reed symbolism, the spiked wheel trap, the mythical unilateral being, the mythical Cosmic Egg, mankala board games, geomantic divination, etc.; where unexpectedly the oldest attestation of Bantu as a major branch of the Niger-Congo macrophylum is found; where, among its high genetic diversity, some highly pigmented population segments are found; and from where such impact on sub-Saharan Africa emanated from the Bronze Age on (as part 17

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

of the more general Back-to-Africa movement; cf. Fig. 1.1, below) that we may almost speak, paradoxically, of West Asian proto-Africans carrying a proto-African culture into sub-Saharan Africa. And although not purely and strongly Afrocentrist in method, scope or paradigm, the present book follows in the best Afrocentrist and Black Athena traditions by evoking, beyond the established historic milestones constitutive of European, and by extension North Atlantic, hegemonic identity, the stretches of thousands of years and thousands of miles of indebtedness without which these milestones could never have been erected in the first place. My argument suggests that Presocratic philosophy arose, not as proverbial lightning in a clear sky, not as Fire from Heaven (cf. Renault 1969) in an exclusively Indo-European speaking context, but as the local, radical misinterpretation, in backwaters (Ionia and Graecia Magna) of the great Asian and African civilisations, of a long and widely established system of cosmological thought. This does not diminish the Presocratics merits, but puts them in proper transcontinental and historical perspective just like Western Philosophy at large, which is supposed to start with the Presocratics. If I have distanced myself in recent years from Strong Afrocentrism (while retaining pet Afrocentrist ideas notably the emphasis on West Asian Blacks), it has been on factual and theoretical grounds, leaving intact my identification with the African continent and its inhabitants. This leaves me with a tantalising dilemma which the present argument scarcely addresses and certainly does not solve. In a transcontinental perspective of global cultural history, Africa is usually presented as showing a tendency to be on the receiving side, even though humankind was born there a few million years ago, while also the cradle of Anatomically Modern Humans is now generally assumed to have stood in Africa, c. 200,000 years ago. The present argument was initiated by the thought inspired by decades of intimacy with the Nkoya people of South Central Africa that fundamental cosmologies, with an enormous impact on human society worldwide and on the emergence of the Modern world, may well have had an African origin. However, Modern global culture can no longer, as under Strong Afrocentrism, be claimed to exclusively or primarily derive from sub-Saharan Africa during the Holocene (the last 10 ka). My sustained research ultimately compelled me to revise such 18

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ideas, while leaving a substantial role for West Asian, highly pigmented, proto-Bantu speaking, proto-Africans.11 Before we start lamenting this outcome and accuse its author of a relapse into Eurocentrism, let us realise that exactly the same claim of indebtedness ought to be made for Europe, and in the best Black Athena tradition is in fact made in this book. Yet, more important than the petty book-keeping of gives and takes between continents is our current insight into the genetic, cultural and linguistic unity of Anatomically Modern Humans, an insight as crucial for the imminent future of humankind as central to the present argument. The title, though not the contents, of this book has been inspired by famous or notorious, more or less path-breaking examples that promised to disclose hitherto unsuspected secrets: Henri Frankfort et al. (1957 / 1946) Before Philosophy, where the main perspective in continuity with the post-Kantian philosophical foundations laid by Cassirer (1946 / 1925, and 1953-1957 / 19231929) is the supposed transition away from myth, not the rise of element cosmology; ironically, in this book, following in the wake of Michael Witzel (2001, 2012), I have used myth, in addition to reconstructed prehistoric lexical forms, as our main window on the cosmologies whose reconstruction is at the heart of this book. Colin Renfrews (1976) Before Civilization, where the West Eurasian Neolithic and Bronze Ages are central, like in the present book, but constituting a classic anti-diffusionist text against such long-range mechanisms of transmission in space and time as are highlighted in the present book;12
11

But let us not underplay Africas contribution to World culture, not only in our Age of Globalisation (where much of global expressive culture music, dance, therapy has a recent African origin), but also in transcontinental cultural exchanges along the multidirectional, multicentred maritime network which, as I propose in Chapter 2, was established in Neolithic times. Since most of Africa went without writing until Early Modern times, our data tend to give far more weight to literate Asias impact on Africa, than the other way around. The Egyptologist / Indologist Stricker (1963-1989: V, Conclusion) claims that Hindu culture is simply a continuation of Ancient Egyptian religion, and my own extensive observations in Tamil Nadu temples confirm this. Although in recent centuries cults of affliction tend to have travelled from South and South East Asia to Africa, there are indications that their protoforms travelled in the opposite direction, before the Common Era (cf. van Binsbergen 2012c, 2012d, 2012f).

12

Renfrew, like Gordon, apparently has a predilection for sweeping Before titles, cf. Renfrew 1991, on linguistic diversity whose emergence, after the Flood, is

19

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

Cyrus Gordon (1962) Before the Bible: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations an exploration of Pelasgian continuities avant la lettre; Denise Schmandt-Besserat (1992), Before Writing; Michael A. Hoffman (1991) Egypt before the Pharaohs; Heidi Knecht et al. (1993), Before Lascaux; numerous are the Before title variants around Columbuss discovery of America (e.g. Gilmore & McElroy 1998; Davies, n.d. [ 1976 ]), including an Afrocentrist one: Van Sertima (1976), and another title by Cyrus Gordon (1971), whose well-earned fame as a prominent Semitist never deterred him from undertaking risky explorations beyond his field of established competence but hear who is talking; classics titles playing on commonly accepted historic milestones, e.g.: Cornford (1962), Before and after Socrates; Forsdyke (1957), Greece before Homer; Scoon (1928), Greek Philosophy before Plato. My hope is not so much to emulate and equal these writers but at least to follow their example in evoking and exploring the unexpectedly rich world that lies behind the unimaginative, established, restrictive canons of mainstream scholarship. Yet, admittedly, the argument I am presenting here is an impossibly ambitious one. In writing it I am, as so often in recent years, trespassing beyond my areas of competence, into some fields for which I have neither specialist training nor authority. As the massive bibliography, author index and explanatory index of proper names at the end of this book indicate, no single person can confidently command all the specialist fields involved in the present study; therefore, before it was written no team of specialists could possibly be persuaded to take a collective interest and contribute their expertise on a more than incidental basis. While I hope that the specialist feedback I have incessantly sought will prove to have somewhat reduced the extent of my blundering, I am solely responincidentally a strikingly recurrent theme in Flood myths world-wide. Renfrews Before Babel title was subsequently picked up in a BBC (1992) broadcast on prehistoric language reconstruction. In this connection I may point out that a boast by an ambitious Assyrian king-scholar may be considered to stand at the cradle of this genre of Before titles it also yielded the title of a recent scholarly collection I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11 (Hess & Tsumura 1994).

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sible for such gross errors as my argument will no doubt turn out to contain. I can only plead that the exciting long-range vistas it opens up will somewhat compensate for these manifest shortcomings. If this study has a claim to any saving grace, it would be that it is another attempt to steer away from Eurocentrism, and particularly to study sub-Saharan Africa as an integral part of global intellectual history, while bringing to life the modes of though of pre- and protohistory, worldwide, with imagination wed to careful, transcontinental empirical research, avoiding both consciousness-raising Political Correctness, and hegemonic condescension and exclusion. In addition to situating the Presocratics, and Western philosophy, in a long-range context of space and time (continents, not regions; and millennia, not decades) that highlights the immense contributions of Africa, Asia, the New World and Oceania to global cultural history, two cardinal lessons are learned: yes, we can in principle retrieve the modes of thought of the very distant past methodically, and thus intersubjectively; and yes, the fundamental unity of humankind lies not just in its emergence from a common origin a few million years ago, but particularly, demonstrably, and in ways eminently relevant for our common present and common immediate future (or should I say: short-term chances of survival?), in our intensively shared and interwoven, multicentred and multidirectional transcontinental cultural and philosophical history of the last dozen millennia. To make these points which are eminently dear to me, I have been prepared to stick my neck out, and to have my head chopped off.

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Table of contents

Chapter 0. Preface, acknowledgments, and overall orientation .......................................................................................................... 5

0.1. Background of this book in the context of the authors research ....................................................................................................... 5 0.2. Acknowledgements ............................................................................. 11 0.3. Afrocentrism: There and Back Again................................................ 16

Table of contents ............................................................................................. 23 List of Figures .................................................................................................. 27 List of Tables.................................................................................................... 30 Chapter 1. Introduction and theoretico-methodological orientation......................................................................................................... 31 Chapter 2. Inspiring data and transcontinental comparative method: Case study I. The pre- and protohistory of mankala board-games and geomantic divination ................................................... 41
2.1. In search of inspiring data and a transcontinental comparative method....................................................................................................... 41 2.2. Mankala .............................................................................................. 54 2.3. Geomancy........................................................................................... 65 2.3.1. Geomancy: Distribution............................................................ 65 2.3.2. Distribution of geomancy: Discussion....................................... 67 2.3.3. Geomancy in Africa.................................................................. 69 2.4. Where do we go from here?................................................................. 82

Chapter 3. Case study II. The puzzling clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa: A triadic, catalytic transformation cycle of elements in disguise? ........................................ 87 23

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

3.1. Nkoya clans ........................................................................................ 87 3.2. Interpreting the array of Nkoya clans: (1) In terms of complementary opposition ......................................................................... 91 3.3. Interpreting the array of Nkoya clans: (2) As evidence of a cycle of transformations consisting of triads............................................... 95

Chapter 4. Long-range, transcontinental manifestations of a transformation cycle of elements ............................................................. 109

4.1. Element cosmological systems worldwide......................................... 109 4.2. The transformation cycle of elements in East Asia: Two classical Chinese correlative systems ....................................................... 118 4.3. Intermediate forms between the full transformation cycle and the system of four immutable categories .................................................. 123 4.3.1. Indications of element systems in sub-Saharan Africa............. 123 4.3.2. Indications of an element system in Ancient Egypt ................. 130 4.3.3. The recognition of an element system in North America ........................................................................................... 142

Chapter 5. The Presocratics in Western Eurasia: Four immutable elemental categories as the norm throughout Western Eurasia for the last two millennia........................................... 149
5.1. The Presocratics ................................................................................ 149 5.2. Empedocles....................................................................................... 157 5.2.1. Empedocles: Introduction ....................................................... 157 5.2.2. Remarks to Table 5.1 (Empedocles doxology)....................... 159 5.2.3. Empedocles evocation of the elements to be interpreted as a transformation cycle ................................................ 164

Chapter 6. Exploring the long-range pre- and protohistory of element cosmologies: Steps in the unfolding of human thought faculties ............................................................................................................ 179
6.1. Explorations into the Middle Palaeolithic prehistory of element cosmologies................................................................................ 179 6.2. Indications of a four-element cosmology in the painted cave at Lascaux, France, in the Upper Palaeolithic ........................................... 183 6.2.1. Introduction ............................................................................ 183 6.2.2. Analytical step 1. Assuming, for heuristic purposes only, that the Lascaux scene belonged to a *Borean-speaking environment ..................................................................................... 191 6.2.3. Analytical Step 2. Situating the Lascaux scene in a

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proto-Sino-Caucasian environment................................................... 197 6.3. Element systems in the African Palaeolithic? .................................... 200 6.4. Between the *Borean-speaking Upper-Palaeolithic and the Late Bronze Age: The transformation cycle of elements as a mode of thought ................................................................................................ 204

Chapter 7. Y Jng and West Asia: A partial vindication of Terrien de Lacouperie................................................................................. 215
7.1 Introduction........................................................................................ 215 7.2. The stature of Terrien de Lacouperies scholarship............................ 217 7.3. Terrien de Lacouperie on a wholesale West Asian origin of the Chinese people ................................................................................... 220 7.4. Recent support for the view of a West Asian origin of Y Jng ........... 225 7.5. Rashidis Afrocentrist perspective concerning the origin of Y Jng .......................................................................................................... 228 7.6. Trying to identify the cradle of the Old World transformation cycle of elements on the basis of the nomenclature of the pa gua (eight trigrams) ........................................................................................ 234 7.6.1. Comparative historical linguistics of the eight-trigrams nomenclature.................................................................................... 234 7.6.2. Notes to Table 7.2................................................................... 238 7.6.3. Discussion .............................................................................. 239 7.7. Transcontinental relationships and periodisation: China and West Asia ................................................................................................ 239

Chapter 8. Further discussion of transcontinental relationships with a view of assessing our overall Working Hypothesis....................................................................................................... 255
8.1. Vindicating our two Working Hypotheses ......................................... 255 8.2. Could the transformation cycle of elements be shamanic in origin and thus date back to the Upper Palaeolithic?................................. 256 8.3. Are the Nkoya-East Asian parallels to be explained by (a) Upper-Palaeolithic Back-to-Africa migration (b) Pelasgian transmission in the Bronze Age (c) East Asian intrusion into Africa during historical times? ................................................................. 260 8.3.1. Upper-Palaeolithic Back-to-Africa migration.......................... 260 8.3.2. Pelasgian transmission in the Bronze Age: Vindicating our Alternative Working Hypothesis ................................................ 275 8.3.3. East Asian intrusion into Africa during historical times?............................................................................................... 278

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Chapter 9. Conclusion: Diachronic varieties of the transformation cycle of elements, and their global distribution ..... 285
9.1. Recapitulating our indications of the distribution and history of element systems worldwide since the Middle Palaeolithic.................... 285 9.2. Conclusion ........................................................................................ 290

Bibliography................................................................................................... 297 Index of authors cited .................................................................................. 353 Explanatory index of proper names other than authors cited ........ 363

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1. Back-to-Africa movement of specific haplo groups................................... 33 Fig. 1.1a. Examples of Pelasgian links between the Mediterranean and subSaharan Africa ............................................................................................... 37 Fig. 2.1. Diagrammatic representation of the Pelasgian Hypothesis ........................... 48 Fig. 2.2. Global distribution of the spiked wheel trap (as typical of Pelasgian distributions ................................................................................................... 53 Fig. 2.3. Mankala: Distribution of the various types................................................... 55 Fig. 2.4. Two-row mankala: Distribution ................................................................... 56 Fig. 2.5. Two-row mankala: Tentative historical reconstruction................................. 57 Fig. 2.6. Three-row mankala: Distribution ................................................................. 57 Fig. 2.7. Three-row mankala: Tentative historical reconstruction .............................. 58 Fig. 2.8. Four-row mankala: Distribution................................................................... 59 Fig. 2.9. Four-row mankala: Tentative historical reconstruction................................. 59 Fig. 2.10. Kuba carving styles, Congo, 17-19 c. CE................................................... 61 Fig. 2.11. Distribution of the dara game..................................................................... 64 Fig. 2.12. Neolithic mankala boards from West Asia ................................................. 65 Fig. 2.13. Geomancy: Distribution............................................................................. 67 Fig. 2.14. Comparing geomantic notational systems worldwide................................. 68 Fig. 2.15. Trade routes in West Africa, second half of second millennium CE ........................................................................................................ 71 Fig. 2.16. The distribution of Flood and Tower myths in Africa................................. 72 Fig. 2.17. A proposed intercontinental, multicentred, multidirectional maritime network from the Early Bronze Age onward ................................... 78 Fig. 2.18. Proposed reconstruction of the world history of geomancy ........................ 79 Fig. 3.1. The clan triad: Lavwe, Sheta, and Shikumba[wuyuvu] illustrated. ............... 96 Fig. 3.2. Ancient Egyptian representation of the GmG-wt ............................................. 98 Fig. 3.3. The bark hive as a potentially triadic icon.................................................. 103 Fig. 4.1. Basic transformations in the classic Taoist cycle of elements ..................... 120

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Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

Fig. 4.2. The Taoist five-element transformation cycle according to Needham with Ling ..................................................................................... 121 Fig. 4.3. A drawing by the Zulu lightning doctor Laduma Madela ........................... 127 Fig. 4.4. An element system underlying the Heliopolitan cosmogony of Ancient Egypt.............................................................................................. 130 Fig. 4.5. Indications of a four-element system in Ancient Egypt: Four Sons of Horus....................................................................................................... 131 Fig. 4.6. The Ancient Egyptian feline goddess Bastet with a foursome of kittens, possibly an evocation of a four-element cycle of transformation, Late Period, c. 664-630 BCE............................................... 132 Fig. 4.7. Indications of a four-element system in Ancient Egypt .............................. 132 Fig. 4.8. A rudimentary transformation cycle of elements: Seth and Horus .............. 133 Fig. 4.9. Navaho sand painting arguably suggestive of a four-element transformation cycle .................................................................................... 144 Fig. 4.10. Anasazi wall painting from New Mexico, ca. 16th c. CE ......................... 144 Fig. 4.11. Revolution on the celestial axis, or evidence of transformation cycle of elements, as depicted in Lower Pecos River Art, Texas, USA, 3rd-2nd mill. BCE.............................................................................. 145 Fig. 5.1. The birth of Athena as an instance of the transformative cycle of elements ...................................................................................................... 154 Fig. 5.2. Distributional aspects of the global comparative mythology of divine tears .................................................................................................. 162 Fig. 5.3. Campbells (2004-2005) rendering of Empedocles Cosmic Cycle ............ 168 Fig. 5.4. Global distribution and tentative historical reconstruction of the mytheme of the Cosmic Egg ........................................................................ 170 Fig. 5.5. Peithinos rendering of Thetis metamorphoses, kylix, 6th c. BCE. ............ 172 Fig. 6.1. The famous dead man scene from Le Puits, Grotte de Lascaux................ 184 Fig. 6.2. Analytical Step 1: *Borean applied to Lascaux .......................................... 196 Fig. 6.3. Lascaux unicorn (Lucas 2006) ................................................................ 200 Fig. 6.4. Possible candidates from African prehistory for an iconographic analysis in terms of element cosmology ....................................................... 204 Fig. 6.5. Recursion in a Nkoya statuette used in a cult of affliction .......................... 206 Fig. 6.6. Large room-dividing screen from the Tlingit of Alaska.............................. 207 Fig. 6.7. Global distribution of triads in mythology ................................................. 210 Fig. 6.7a. A typical triad: Osiris, Isis and Horus depicted in gold (Osorkon II, first half 9th c. BCE, now at the Louvre, Paris, France) ............................ 211 Fig. 7.1. An Early Modern representation of Dagon / Oannes, loosely based on Ancient Graeco-Roman and Biblical sources........................................... 222 Fig. 7.2. Layered ethnico-linguistic complexity of the Bronze Age

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Mediterranean.............................................................................................. 233 Fig. 8.1. Linguistic and comparative-ethnographic reconstruction of the emergence of the ritual use of leopard skins as an aspect of shamanism................................................................................................... 257 Fig. 8.2. Dendrogram setting out the relative positions of the *Boreanassociated linguistic macro-phyla in relation to Bantu and Khoisan.............. 262 Fig. 8.3. A cult place for Heitsi Eibib in Namibia .................................................... 263 Fig. 8.4. Divination tablets from Western Zambia ................................................... 269 Fig. 8.5. A present-day shamanic apron from the Tlingit, North West Coast, Alaska, c. 1860 CE ...................................................................................... 271 Fig. 8.6. Divination: Continuities in space and time................................................. 276 Fig. 9.1. Diachronic varieties of the transformation cycle of elements: Global distribution ....................................................................................... 286 Fig. 9.2. Comparing Old World formal systems through cluster analysis, provisionally bringing out the unexpected clustering of African nomenclatural material with Chinese and Babylonian material, clustering away from Ancient Egyptian and Greek material ......................... 288 Fig. 9.3. Tentative historical reconstruction for Fig. 9.1........................................... 289

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List of Tables

Table 2.1. Narrative Complexes identified in sub-Saharan African cosmogonies as collected in historical times................................................... 50 Table 2.2. Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation (CITIs) in the global history of Anatomically Modern Humans mythology ............... 52 Table. 2.3. Alternative random generators in geomancy............................................. 66 Table 3.1. Nkoya clans .............................................................................................. 91 Table 3.2. Complementary opposition in the nomenclature of two joking clans in Western Zambia, nineteenth and twentieth century CE...................... 93 Table 3.3. Nkoya clan nomenclature as evocative of a triadic cycle of transformations ............................................................................................ 104 Table 3.4. Nkoya clan nomenclature as evocative of a triadic cycle of transformations, with Nkonze and Mvula accommodated............................. 104 Table 4.1. Four or more elements in various Eurasian traditions .............................. 118 Table 4.2. General overview of Y Jng as a correlative system ................................ 122 Table 4.3. The Aristaeus myth analysed as a reflection of Early Dynastic Egyptian history, and as an esoteric text on the transformation cycle of elements .................................................................................................. 139 Table 5.1. The four elements according to Empedocles ........................................... 159 Table 6.1. The divinatory and element-cosmological significance of the reconstructed mythological contents of Pandoras Box, Africa, 8060 ka BP and earlier..................................................................................... 181 Table 6.2. Example of a global etymology: The complex earth / bottom / human ........................................................................................................ 187 Table 6.3. Searching for Sino-Caucasian reflexes of the *Borean roots indicated in Fig. 6.2 ..................................................................................... 199 Table 7.1. King Wns trigrams............................................................................... 235 Table 7.2. Proposed etymologies of the names of the pa gua (eight trigrams) .......... 237 Table 8.1. Proposed relations between professional castes and their animal totems in Vedic India ................................................................................ 282

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Chapter 1. Introduction and theoreticomethodological orientation

This argument seeks to contribute to the study of the global history of human thought and philosophy. It calls in question the popular, common perception (cf. Heidegger 1979; Gadamer 1968, 1996, 1999) of the Presocratic philosophers as having initiated Western philosophy, and particularly of Empedocles as having initiated the system of four elements as immutable and irreducible parallel components of reality and in doing so, as having effectively laid the foundation for Modern science and technology, and the Modern World System at large. Our point of departure is the puzzling clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa, which turns out to evoke a cosmology of six basic dimensions, each of which consists of a destructor, something that is being destroyed, and a third, catalytic agent. This is strongly reminiscent of the East Asian correlative systems as in the Y Jng cosmological system of changes based on the 64 combinations of the eight trigrams two taken at a time; and a fortiori of the five-element cosmology of Taoism in general, in which the basic relations between elements are defined as an unending cycle of transformations by which each element is either destructive or productive of the next. The central theme of my argument is not the elucidation of the East Asian correlative systems as such for which I lack the knowledge and the authority but the contextualisation of the African system as found among the Nkoya, and to probe, on that basis, into ancient modes of thought going back to the Palaeolithic in the process subjecting the hegemonic Eurocentric view of the Presocratics to transcontinental criticism. Before we set out on our long and arduous journey, a methodological, 31

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

theoretical and knowledge-political point needs to be made and it should be made much more elaborately than space allows here. Modern scholarship is predicated on the division between regional specialties and between disciplines. The study of Empedocles four-element system could blissfully remain the privileged domain of historians of Western philosophy and science, as long as diffusionism remained in the discredited state it had entered with the rise of classic, fieldwork-centred anthropology in the second quarter of the 20th century CE, and as long as the divisive colonial-imperialist geopolitics survived that had assigned a separate, and usually subordinate, cultural history to each continent, creed, nation, and language phylum. Globalisation of the Modern world through new technologies of information and communication (which have also greatly facilitated trans-disciplinary and trans-regional exchanges of scientific knowledge), as well as the rise of a vocal counterhegemonic trend in scholarship all over the world,13 have ushered in a new era, where the transcontinental continuities of the present invite us to investigate transcontinental continuities in the past, and to overcome such divisiveness as hegemonic interests of earlier decades and centuries have imposed on our image of the world and of the cultural history of humankind. In a quest to empirically assert the fundamental unity of humankind, and to help free Africa from the isolated and peripheral position that has been attributed to that continent in the present-day World System, I have engaged in such counter-hegemonic, transcontinental research for over twenty years now, long enough to realise some of its pitfalls (e.g. the fact that interdisciplinary and interregional research inevitably means that one blunders into the specialist domains of others, and risks to make a fool of oneself there with a tendency to reduce the other discipline to its obsolete positions of a generation ago; no doubt all these shortcomings also adhere the present book), but perhaps also long enough to begin to produce heuristically meaningful if in themselves still ephemeral results. The extensive genetic, archaeological, linguistic, comparative ethnographic and comparative mythological empirical, methodological and theoretical background for such a view14 I have extensively discussed

13 E.g. Asad 1973; Copans 1975; Bernal 1987-2006; Said 1978; Diop 1948 / 1996, 1967; Mudimbe 1987; Fanon 1952; Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1987. 14

This view is indebted to the work of Martin Bernal and Michael Witzel, among

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elsewhere;15 that background cannot be set out in any detail here for limitations of space, but includes the following empirically-supported theoretical perspectives: 1. the Out-of-Africa Hypothesis (Forster 2004, with references), according to which Anatomically Modern Humans (the sub-species to which all humans living today belong) emerged in sub-Saharan Africa c. 200,000 year BP, and subsequently spread to other continents in the Out-of-Africa Exodus, 80-60 ka BP.

after Underhill 2004 Fig. 1.1. Back-to-Africa movement of specific mtDNA16 haplo groups.

2. The Back-to-Africa Hypothesis17 according to which there has

others; Bernal 1987; Witzel 2001, 2012.
15 16

van Binsbergen 2003, 2010a, 2011a; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011.

mtDNA: specific mitochondrial hereditary protein constitutive of the human genome and situated in the cells mitochondria, which results in intergenerational transmission in the female line only. Its analysis is an important tool in genetics today. The major groups found among Anatomically Modern Humans are identified by the letters of the alphabet.
17

Hammer et al. 1998; Cruciani et al. 2002; Coia et al. 2005; Underhill 2004; also cf.

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been a substantial return migration from Asia into Africa from c. 15 ka BP bringing to Africa not only genes evolved in Asia since the Out-of-Africa Exodus, but also the cultural and religious transformations and innovations that on the basis of the common preOut of Africa heritage (what I have called Pandoras Box) had developed inside Asia, since the Out-of-Africa Exodus. 3. Starostins and Flemings *Borean Hypothesis, claiming that nearly all languages spoken today retain, in their reconstructed protoforms, substantial traces of a hypothetical, reconstructed language arbitrarily named *Borean and supposed to have been spoken in Central Asia, perhaps near Lake Baikal, in the Upper Palaeolithic (c. 25 ka BP).18 4. Stephen Oppenheimer Sunda Hypothesis,19 according to which considerable demic diffusion of cultural traits took place from South East Asia to Western Eurasia (and by implication to Africa) as the South East Asian subcontinent was flooded (resulting in its present-day, insular nature) with the melting of polar ice at the onset of the Holocene (10 ka BP). Oppenheimer has not explicitly considered the implications of his hypothesis for the African continent, but here his hypothesis is seconded by that of the history writer Dick-Read (2005, 2012) and the anthropologist Tauchmann (2010), a South East Asia specialist. In Tauchmanns opinion, prior to the Bantu expansion in East and South-East Africa, pre- and proto-historic migrations from South East Asia (such as have long been recognised to have populated Madagascar and given it its distinction cultural and linguistic characteristics) had given rise to a considerable Austronesian genetic and linguistic presence in those parts of Africa.

haplogroups M1 and U6 in my Fig. 1.1).

18

Starostin 1999; Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008; Fleming 1991, 2002. Dolgopolsky 1998 shows the heuristic value of Illich-Svitychs Nostratic / Eurasiatic Hypothesis, of lesser scope than the *Borean Hypothesis and confined to the Old World; Kaiser & Sheveroshkin (1988) count Niger-Congo as a branch of Super-Nostratic

19

Oppenheimer 1998; Tauchmann, personal communication, cf. van Binsbergen 2012e, and also 2012c and 2012d.

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Such Asian presence on African soil is a moot point. Of course, Dick-Reads and Tauchmanns cultural claims match nicely the geneticists recent discovery of the Back-to-Africa migration, although the geneticists time scale not only displays very extensive error distributions, but also is rather longer (up to 15 ka) than the typical time span of comparative ethnographic research. The historian Kent (1970) who claimed extensive Sunda kingdoms on the East African coast was not taken seriously. In recent years African-Asian transcontinental continuities have dominated my research, and despite my dismissal of Oppenheimers claims specifically in the field of comparative mythology (his Special Sunda Hypothesis; van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008) I am yet finding his General Sunda Hypothesis to be of considerable heuristic value for an understanding of Africas pre- and protohistory. There is also some linguistic support. A presumed Sunda presence in Africa would have to be detectable in the form of an Austronesian (< Austric) substrate in Eastern and Southern Bantu languages: a phenomenon already suggested albeit for only a few East and South-eastern African languages, notably Makuwa, and the Sotho-Tswana cluster by the sometime Leiden Professor of African Linguistics Thilo Schadeberg (personal communication 1994). Moreover, as I will set out in detail in Table 6.2, below, the eponymical root ntu, human of the widespread Bantuspeaking sub-phylum is virtually identical with protoAustronesian *taw, human (Adelaar 1995) and both belong to a worldwide etymological ramification of a very old, *Borean root *TVHV (V = unspecified vowel), whose semantics hinges on earth, bottom, human. The statistical lexical affinity between the protoforms of Austric and Niger-Congo (and Amerind!) which I established through cluster analysis20 and which I attribute to the disintegration of *Borean in the Asian Upper Palaeolithic, might also be attributed to an Austric substrate influence on Niger-Congo exerted within
20

van Binsbergen 2011a and in press (b); van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 77 f.; Fig. 8.2, below.

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the African continent.21 5. My Diachronic Aggregative Model of the world history of mythology, according to which Pandoras Box contained a limited number of more or less discernible basic mythemes (Narrative Complexes), which after the Out-of-Africa Exodus were transformed and innovated, especially inside Asia, and in further ramifications and transformations spread world-wide so as to produce the dazzling complexity and variation of todays global mythology. Some of these Asian themes (e.g. the unilateral mythical being, the Cosmic Egg,22 the separation of Heaven and Earth the latter now being the dominant pre-Modern cosmology throughout the present world) subsequently entered Africa on the wings of the Back-toAfrica migration and made for the considerable continuity between Eurasian and African mythologies. 6. My hypothesis of a succession, in the Eurasiatic Upper Palaeolithic, of two rival cosmogonies: one hinging on the Separation of Water and Land (hence: Flood myths as a cataclysmic mythical return to the pre-cosmogonic state), largely supplanted by one hinging on the Separation of Heaven and Earth. 7. My Pelasgian Hypothesis (see Fig. 2.1, below), according to which a significant package of cultural traits and achievements23 (arbitrarily, and I admit confusingly, la21

On these important transcontinental questions, an International Conference was held at the occasion of my retirement from the African Studies Centre, Leiden; my views on these matters were provisionally presented there and are now being finalised for publication (van Binsbergen, 2012c, 2012d, 2012e, in preparation (a) and (d)).

In earlier formulations of my Aggregative Diachronic Model of Global Mythology i.e. an attempt to systematically identify humankinds oldest common heritage of mythology before the Out-of-Africa Exodus (c. 80-60 ka BP) and to account for its subsequent development until historical times I still equated the mytheme of the Cosmic Egg with that of the Lightning Bird and included both in Pandoras Box. A more detailed re-analysis (van Binsbergen 2011b, see Fig. 5.4, below) now has convinced me that the Cosmic Egg is a much more recent idea which rather belongs to the Pelasgian complex probably originally so, or perhaps (Oppenheimer 1998; but cf. van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008) as a result of cultural expansion (Sunda) from Early Holocene South East Asia having penetrated the Pelasgian realm.
23

22

Including (overlapping with the above list): Sun worship; sea and boat symbolism;

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belled Pelasgian by me) emerged in Neolithic West Asia, spread West towards the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age (largely on the wings of horse-riding and chariot technology invented in Central Asia 2000 BCE) ), and from the Late Bronze Age spread further in all four directions along what I have called the cross-model: easterly along the Steppe belt all the way to Korea, Japan, South and South East Asia,24 and Oceania; westerly into the Mediterranean and Western Europe; northerly into the Uralic area; and finally southerly into sub-Saharan Africa along various routes (the

(a) (b) (c) (a) One of the many chariot depictions in Saharan rock art since the Late Bronze Age; (b) Pardivesture (wearing of leopard skins) at Neolithic Tassili nAjjer (Breuil et al. 1954); (c) Pygmies fighting cranes on the Greek Aryballos crater, 570 BCE. Fig. 1.1a. Examples of Pelasgian links between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.

the amphiktyonic socio-political organisation form of a league of a dozen or so more or less acephalic ( = without formal leaders) socio-political units; male genital mutilation; the skull complex particularly the drinking from slain enemies skulls; the literary / mythical theme of deadly rivalry between a ruler and that rulers sibling of the opposite gender; the cognate theme of an artificial woman constructed to inflict harm, and deployed as a weapon in such rivalry; the cosmogonic theme of a world origin in an original reed clump; the simple hunting implement known as the spiked wheel trap; the mythical unilateral being; the mythical Cosmic Egg; mankala board games; geomantic divination. But many more examples could be given. A list of 80 items, with rough indications of their distribution, is presented by van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen (2011: 372 f.). These continuities in space and time are no longer fantasies of diffusionists or New Age adepts, but solid empirical facts.
24 As Witzel (2009) amply demonstrates, comparative mythology is an excellent way to demonstrate trans-Steppe continuities between West Asia (the Indo-Iranian world), South Asia (the Vedic scriptures), and Japan.

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Western Sahara, the Nile valley, and the Indian Ocean). From the Late 1st mill. BCE to modern times, the Silk Road ensured that these transregional connections were sustained and constantly renewed. The Ancients use of the term / Pelasgi / Pelasgians is, like all ethnonyms, protean and inconsistent,25 and it can only serve to name the Pelasgian Hypothesis if we redefine Pelasgian analytically, allowing for overlap, but not identity, with the muddled Ancient use. Even so it is significant that Herodotus (Historiae, I, 56-58) considers the Ionians Pelasgians, and if a protohistorical transformation cycle of elements has been attested among them and among their direct intellectual heirs in Graecia Magna, I submit this is because such a cosmology was in the first place Pelasgian, originating in West Asia in the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, and subsequently distributed widely into the Mediterranean, Asia, and Africa. Tracing the history of philosophical thought is an empirical study, based on the methodologically-underpinned and theoretically informed examination of philosophical expressions against the background of an overall understanding of the language, culture and society in which they emerged and circulated. In principle the same applies to the reconstruction of preand protohistoric thought, as in the present argument. Most historians of such forms of philosophy as were produced in historical periods, belong to philosophical faculties, and write for philosophers in a predominantly philosophical discourse. Dealing with historical philosophers and their writings, e.g. the Presocratics and their commentators including Aristotle and Plato up to the present day, our argument will partly remain in this familiar vein. However, since we insist on going back Before the Presocratics, we also have to use the exploratory and often conjectural methods of pre- and protohistory and its many ancillary sciences (genetics, archaeology, comparative ethnography), resulting in a text that is not only critical of certain time-honoured claims in the history of philosophy, but whose style and methods also differ considerably from the discourse habitually used among historians of philosophy.

25

van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 372 f. and passim; van Binsbergen, in press (a).

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Let one, in the present context highly pertinent, example suffice to indicate the orientation of the overambitious tour de force that constitutes the present argument highlighting the kind of transcontinental continuities the above theoretical perspectives allow us to perceive and take seriously:
MYTHICAL WAGTAILS AT TWO ENDS OF THE OLD WORLD. In a Western Zambian myth (Jacottet 1899-1901: II, 116 f.; Bouchet 1922: 22 f.; Mackintosh 1922: 367 f.; van Binsbergen 2010a: 180) the creator god Nyambi (with widespread West African counterparts and near-namesakes), when still walking on earth, feels threatened by the First Man, named Kamunu (Man Person), and flees to heaven. (Incidentally, according to the Jacottet version26 Nyambi, and in that case not the creator god but a demiurge, had been thrown out of heaven to begin with which makes him (with his spider / solar connotations), in this respect at least, akin to Hephaestus,27 to the Finnish Iron god,28 and to the South Asian war god Skanda who was too hot to grow up in a normal way but had to be hatched by Ganga and nurtured by the Pleiades or Krittika29 also cf. Kagutsuchi, the Japanese god of Fire, to whose destructive force even the birth channel of his mother Izanami was not safe). In his flight to heaven Nyambi is attended to not only by a spider (which has remained Nyambis implicit animal identity) but also by a wagtail bird (Motacilla capensis). This opens up an interesting comparative angle. In the main Japanese creation myth virtually the same bird (Motacilla grandis) showed the first creatures Izanami and Izanagi how to engage in sexual intercourse by the suggestive, incessant up and down movements of its tail, after which it is named wagtail ( Kojiki, cf. Philippi 1968; van Binsbergen 2009 and forthcoming). It is as if the wagtail in the Western Zambia story signals that, implicitly, we are in the presence of the invention of sexuality as if not the First Mans insolent attitude towards Nyambi, but his sexual discovery of his own wife, chases God from earth. And in fact, many Flood stories And also according to a myth I collected among the Nkoya in 1973 from the prophet / witch hunter / headman Lubumba, Njonjolo valley, Kaoma district, Zambia. Here the demiurge is kicked out of heaven for the invention of sorcery, but his name is not disclosed. Since missionary influence from the early 20th century CE has led to the adoption of the name Nyambi for the Christian creator High God, it would have been difficult for Lubumba to implicate a mythical character by the name of Nyambi in such a diabolical capacity.
27 26

Homer, Iliad, I, 568 f., 18, 136 f.; Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, 310 f.; Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica, II, 549 f.; Plato, Republic, 378 d; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, I, 19; cf. Atsma 2000-2008, s.v. Hephaestus. Note that, in the Kalevala, the parallel revolves on the birth, not of Fire but of the conceptually related Iron (Lnnrot 1866; Tamminen 1928). Also in Yoruba religion, West Africa, the God of Iron, Ogun, is considered the first to come to Earth from Heaven, but in that context the move is not a punitive expulsion. Dowson 1928 s.v. Skanda, pp. 152, 300 and passim; Keith 1917; Willis 1994: 84.

28

29

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world-wide30 reiterate the theme of the Flood being caused by the discovery of sexuality or they reverse the account and introduce the discovery of sexuality (often of an incestuous or bestial nature, even the mating with plants is recorded) as the only solution to repopulate the earth.

We hit here upon a controversial but logical, and crucial, implication of the idea of transcontinental continuities: if the latter can be taken for a fact, then in principle well-attested, studied and understood symbolic relationships in one location and period may be used to illuminate less explicit similar relationships in another location and period belonging to the same complex, even though in another continent - not just on the basis of a formal analysis and a generalised appeal to inherent convergent properties of the mind of Anatomically Modern Humans, but on the basis of real historical cognateship. This methodological principle is basic to my work in the field of comparative mythology, geomantic divination, transformation cycles of elements, astronomical nomenclature etc. It will guide us in the following Chapters. We will now further prepare out conceptual and methodological tools for our complex and ambitious argument in this book. Therefore we will turn to Case Study I, on the pre- and protohistory of two widespread formal cultural systems, notably the mankala board-games and the form of divination known as geomancy.

30

Isaak 2006; van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008; van Binsbergen 2010a, 2010e.

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Chapter 2. Inspiring data and transcontinental comparative method: Case study I. The pre- and protohistory of mankala board-games and geomantic divination

2.1. In search of inspiring data and a transcontinental comparative method

While this book is being published in the philosophical context of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, it explores and presents historical and transcontinental-comparative prolegomena to an ontological philosophical argument on cosmology and the structure of reality, rather than offering such an argument in its own right. For centuries, Western philosophers have assumed that the history of their discipline started with the emergence of the Presocratic philosophers in the then Greek-speaking regions of West Anatolia (Ionia) and Southern Italy (Graecia Magna) in the 6th century BCE. Comparative historians of human thought perceived, over half a century ago, that this emergence of systematic detached thought in the European periphery of West Asia more or less coincided with similar major mutations of regional thought systems by such Asian thinkers and religious innovators as Gautama Buddha (North India near or Allen 2002 on the Nepalese border), Zarathustra (Iran; Bidez & Cumont 1938; Boyce 1975), Lao Tze and Kng Fz / Confucius, in China (Fung Yu-lan 1952) bringing to completion a process of innovation that, at least typologically, had been foreshadowed. in North-eastern Africa and Syro-Palestine many centuries earlier, by A n -tn / Achnaton and Mosis / Moshe / Moses, and foreshadowing, in their turn, the spiritual innovations by Jesus of Nazareth and Muammad, many centuries later again. For this seething of 41

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

innovation, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1993 / 1949) proposed the notion of Achsenzeit / Axial Age (mid-1st mill. BCE). Despite the reproach of implicit Eurocentrism (Bernal 1987; cf. my argument in the present book) this concept has exerted great influence on historical sociology in the last few decades.31 The authors in question have further developed Jasperss approach and reflected on its theoretical significance as a crucial step in the unfolding of human thought faculties (notably the concept of transcendence) and their social, economic and political implications. But even so we need to be cautious of the concept of the Axial Age. It draws attention to the maturation, in the course of the first millennium BCE, of virtualising transcendent thought (van Binsbergen 2012a) in a context shaped, already during a few millennia then, by the converging forces of writing, the state, organised religion, emergent science, and an emergent money economy. Such maturation was, in hindsight, predictable rather than miraculous. The wide spatial distribution of its manifestations, from the Aegean via Iran and Northern India to China, loses all of its apparently miraculous nature once we realise that that context is not one of total regional isolation but, on the contrary, one of protoglobalisation, much facilitated by the spread of horse-riding, chariot, and nautical technology from the third and second millennium BCE, all across Asia and along the navigable waters surrounding that continent. Numerous examples of this proto-globalisaion could be cited, and some actually feature in our present argument, e.g. the demonstrable spread of shamanism from Northern and Central Asia into Mesopotamia and Egypt in the mid-2nd millennium BCE;32 the spread of specialised astronomical and astrological notions; the spread of basic forms of divination including geomancy; the emergence of triads as advanced forms of logical and

31 Cf. Schwartz 1975a, Eisenstadt 1982, 1986, 1987-1992, 2011; Silber 2011; Michalowski 2005 and other contributions in Arnason et al. 2005; Bellah & Joas 2012. Also relevant in this connection is Weber 1922: 185 f. on innerweltliche Askese. Jasperss approach hinges on a specific conception of transcendence, which is critically discussed in Kunz 1957 (cf. van Binsbergen 2012a).

There is a long-standing claim (Karst 1931a; Eliade 1968 / 1951) that the term shaman generally used in connection to Uralic- and Altaic-speaking peoples of Northern Eurasia (a standard description being Harva 1938), in fact derives from the Buddhist religious term sramana, and thus could hardly be older than the foundation of that world religion in the 1st mill. BCE. In Chapter 8 we shall return to this question and provisionally situate the emergence of shamanism as an institution in the Upper Palaeolithic.

32

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symbolic thought, etc. Our itinerary in the present argument will start with the Axial Age in the Western periphery of Asia, but will explore far greater stretches of space and time than the analysts of the Axial Age have braved, and thus constitutes an attempt to chart intellectual terra incognita, especially when coming, like in the present case, from an Africanist scholar whose main formal training was in the analysis of regional cultural domains through ethnographic and ethnohistorical fieldwork. But more important, the very attempt to study apparently regional intellectual achievements as part of broad cultural processes that span entire continents and even extend between continents, is counter-paradigmatic (cf. van Binsbergen 2003: especially Ch. 15): even with the spate of globalisation studies in the last few decades, the accepted units of cultural history are still individual cultures, not continents, let alone the global space as a whole. This reflects the way academic knowledge production and transmission is organised through university departments, specialist journals, publishing houses, funding agencies etc.; and specialist standards of research and reference are so high that very few scholars could pretend to make meaningful contributions to the study of more than just one culture, let alone more than just one continent. The present study seeks to trace the extent, globally as far as the spatial dimension is concerned, and all the way from the Upper Palaeolithic as far as the time dimension is concerned, of a particular intellectual cultural complex characterised by such features as cyclicity, transformation and element cosmology. So what we need at the beginning of such a project is to re-assure the reader that such extreme continuity through space and time, counter-paradigmatic as it may be, yet has a very tangible grounding in solid data and intersubjective methodology and theory. As compared with the highly presentist and localist perspectives prevailing in social anthropology ever since the classic, fieldwork-centred tradition in that field was established in the 1930s-1940s (on the ruins of the diffusionism and evolutionism that preceded it), my own early work in such fields as the anthropology of North African popular religion and South Central African religious structures and processes with special emphasis on cults of affliction i.e. spirit possession and their cultic healing (van Binsbergen 1971, 1980a, 1980b, 1981, 1985a, 1985b), was 43

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already relatively comparative and historical. However, my approach remained within the established framework of regional and intracontinental specialisation, until my new fieldwork in Francistown (Botswana, from 1988 on) brought me in intensive contact (van Binsbergen 1995b, 1996a, 2003, 2005c) with a local divination system whose formal structure and symbolic content, with very little manifest grounding in local historic cultures, clearly derived from an Islamic astrologicallybased divination system that was established in Iraq around 1000 CE, and that in the meantime spread not only to Southern Africa but also to the entire Indian Ocean region, West Africa, and even Medieval and Renaissance Europe, where it subsequently survived as a peasant self-help divination system until modern times. Thus I was introduced, in a periphery of the Old World, to geomancy: a widespread family of divination systems, based on the systematic generation (by locally standardised stochastic methods involving man-made random generators) of formal configurations (usually consisting of a number of superimposed lines, where each line can take either of two values, e.g. broken or unbroken, one dot or two dots; see Table 2.3 and Fig. 2.14 below); the nature and combination of such configurations is then interpreted in divinatory terms by reference to a conventionalised catalogue of meanings (cf. van Binsbergen 2005b, with extensive references cited there). Contrary to the assumptions of classic fieldwork-based anthropology and the structural-functionalism that constituted its main theory, and rather in line with the approaches of diffusionism especially its more recent branches such as Frobeniuss Cultural Morphology and with deep-seated parallels in archaeology, apparently there exists a class of formal cultural systems that are not very closely associated with the specific local and regional cultures in which these formal systems find themselves, formal systems that cannot meaningfully be considered products of that narrow environment in space and time, but that on the contrary ramify across cultural and temporal boundaries, in such a way as to more or less preserve and transmit their original structure and orientation even though they are at the same time, inevitably, involved in processes of localising transformation. In addition to geomantic divination systems and other such diagnostic and therapeutic systems, this class of formal systems includes other rituals, games, folklore, stories, myths, religious beliefs, cosmologies, language forms, writing systems, and other forms of sym44

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bolism. Having devoted the first quarter of a century of my academic life to an analytical paradigm where (in accordance with classic social anthropology) peoples socio-politico-economic strategies within a local horizon were considered to be the source of all cultural meaning, by the end of the 1980s I became alive to a much less reductionist perspective that affirms the vital capability of symbols to persist in space and time and to endow the human life world with meaning whose source is not local but lost in distances of space and time. Over the years, I have continued to study African divination systems in their transcontinental backgrounds and ramifications, but gradually I have added several others of the formal systems enumerated above: animal symbolism especially in relation to the leopard and its spotted skin; myths; and games, of which the mankala family has captivated my attention from the mid-1990s on. Mankala is the academic name for a widespread board-game, played on two or more rows of holes, over which the players distribute and redistribute tokens (stones, nuts, etc.) according to intricate rules. In the meantime the decolonisation of the global political space, and of scholarly production, gave rise to a critical re-assessment of anthropological positions in the global politics of knowledge, to the emergence of cultural relativism as anthropologys main gift to World Culture, and also to a fundamental reconsideration of the cultural indebtedness between continents. These orientations surfaced in the African and North American Afrocentrist movement,33 the South Asian Postcolonial Theory (cf. Spivak 1990; Bhabha 1992; Rattansi 1994), and (in the narrower field of Mediterranean Bronze Age studies and Egyptology) the Black Athena debate as initiated by the British / American Sinologist and political
On Afrocentrism, cf.: Asante 1990; Diop 1959, 1962/1989; Dubois 1976; Obenga 1973. Highly critical of Afrocentrism yet a leading figure in the Prsence Africaine movement which formed a bedding for Afrocentrism, and starting out from a kindred global politics of knowledge: Mudimbe, especially 1988. Reasonable but by and large dismissive introductions to Afrocentrism include: Fauvelle-Aymar et al. 2000; Howe 1999, the latter critically discussed in van Binsbergen 2011c. Ever since I traded, a quarter of a century ago, my specialist Africanist blinkers for critical self-reflection as a producer of global knowledge, I have had as detailed in Chapter 0 , and vocally expressed, great sympathy for Afrocentrism, even though over the past decade I have become convinced that, as a perspective on global cultural history from the Bronze Age on, the Political Correctness it tends to entail obscures our view of the actual, complex, intercontinental interplay of cultural exchanges towards the shaping of the Modern world.
33

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scientist Martin Bernal in the 1980s. When in 1997 I published my collection Black Athena Ten Years Later (a critical but constructive reassessment of Martin Bernals Black Athena thesis) as a special issue of the archaeological journal TAANTA (van Binsbergen 1997a), my principal empirical contribution to that volume consisted of a long article entitled Rethinking Africas contribution to global cultural history: Lessons from a comparative historical analysis of mankala board-games and geomantic divination (van Binsbergen 1997b). In the fifteen years that have passed since the TAANTA collection was published, I have continued to grapple with mankala, geomancy, the Black Athena debate, and transcontinental continuities in fact, these themes have come to dominate my research. When an expanded and updated version of the TAANTA collection was published (van Binsbergen 2011a), my 1997 analysis was reprinted there in its original form and, for technical reasons, could not be updated. After a critical assessment of the notion of Africa, and after presenting a typology of varieties of mankala and of geomancy, I presented the most important data on the global distribution of these formal cultural systems, and proceeded to interpret these distributions in the light of a tentative historical reconstruction. At the time I was (like Bernal himself) much enamoured with Strong Afrocentrism as a theory that considers Africa the origin of crucial phenomena of cultural history, not only in the very remote past when humankind originated in that continent several million years ago, and in the slightly less remote past of the Upper to Middle Palaeolithic when Anatomically Modern Humans (the subspecies to which all humans alive today belong) emerged in Africa c. 200 ka BP and from c. 80 ka BP began to spread to othercontinents, but even in the relatively recent past of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, only a handful of millennia ago. Meanwhile, it has become time for a thorough update of my 1997 argument, in line with my overall criticism of Bernals Black Athena thesis, and with the alternative model (the Pelasgian Hypothesis) which I have meanwhile developed. In terms of data and method I cannot think of a better way to introduce the argument, types of data, and methods of analysis of this book as a whole. However, it will hardly be a pleasure for the reader to have to 46

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plod through the unfamiliar and philosophically barren distributional data that will be among our principal analytical tools for developing and underpinning an argument, however exciting ultimately, that presents a most comprehensive view of cultural history, advocating the possibility of methodical retrieval of modes of thought from the distant past, stressing the transcontinental dimension and the important role of Africa in that connection, and exploding the Eurocentric and hegemonic myth that philosophy started in Europe in historical times. The history of philosophy is an empirical field of study, and without understanding our data and methods, our intended contribution will remain suspended in the air, and will eventually be futile. I must therefore ask the reader to bear with me soon, via the unexpected complexity of an African clan system, even the philosophical reader will reach the more comfortable and familiar shores of comparative philosophical analysis, will ponder over Greek texts from the flower of Ancient thought, and after that, the unfolding worldwide vistas on pre- and protohistoric modes of thought will simply be breath-taking, vertiginous precisely because they have enough of an empirical and comparative basis to convince.

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Fig. 2.1. Diagrammatic representation of the Pelasgian Hypothesis.

I have already referred to my Pelasgian Hypothesis; an overview is offered in Fig. 2.1. In the present Chapter, I will limit myself to presenting and interpreting from a historical point of view the distributional world maps for the two formal systems of mankala and geomancy. The bibliographic references for the specific attestations / data points, and for the wider analytical and theoretical context may be found in the 1997 article; here I only give those references that specifically inform the update. The present analysis makes reference to several concepts from my Diachronic Aggregative Model of Global Mythology (van Binsbergen 2006a, 2006b, 2010a), which seeks to trace and explain the unfolding of world mythology since the emergence of Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa c. 200 ka BP; a short summary of that model therefore also features in this Chapter. There are substantial indications (notably in the existence of a long list of present-day cultural universals; cf. Brown 1991) that when leaving Africa, Anatomically Modern Humans had at their disposal a package, not only of common genes (by which geneticists could trace their emergence in Africa and their subsequent global dispersal), but also of common socio-cultural traits, developed inside Africa and subsequently, as a result of the Out-of-Africa Exodus, spread all over the world: universals such as marriage, the idea of a kinship system, divina48

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tion, etc. This socio-cultural package I have called Pandoras Box. However, it is far from being immediately conspicuous as a package. As expressions of humans freedom of association and invention, unhindered by the limitations of space, time and logic to which more practical endeavours are subjected, myths, like other literary, artistic and religious products of the imagination, exist in a dazzling, ever proliferating variety. Therefore, in order to create the conditions for comparability in the field of comparative mythology, we need to distinguish a quite limited number of types and themes, and domesticate our data accordingly. In my approach I have drastically reduced (hence Aggregative) the variety of myths to a few dozen Narrative Complexes or NarComs, each of which covers, inevitably, a vast and rather heterogeneous domain of implications and associations. This enabled me to identify, for instance, twenty different NarComs in an extensive corpus of African cosmogonic myths (creation myths) on the basis of which I formulated my Model in the first place. Out of these initial twenty NarComs (to whose number I have had to make some additions when I applied the Model of other research questions and corpora of data, e.g. Flood myths; cf. van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008), through a complex though explicit analytical strategy of triangulation, distribution analysis, close reading, etc., I isolated a handful which, I argue, already made part of Pandoras Box. Moreover, I have maintained that the post-Out-of-Africa transformation and innovation of mythical themes originally contained in Pandoras Box, took place, not continually and at random, but in concentrated settings in space and time, which I have called CITI: Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation. These settings may be identified, more or less, not so much by looking for prehistoric mythologies (which outside rock art and mobile art left few direct traces), but by tracing the emergence and ramifications of new modes of production (both within and beyond hunting and gathering), and of new linguistic macrophyla, which under the *Borean and *Nostratic Hypotheses (Starostin, Fleming, Illich-Svitych, etc.) constitute the largest language groups for whose emergence and ramification we now have sophisticated methods at our disposal: qualitative historical-comparative linguistic methods, and multivariate analysis.

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1 Separation of Heaven and Earth 2 Reconnection of Heaven and Earth 3 What is in heaven34 4 Lightning bird and World Egg 5 Mantis 6 Rescue from ogre 7 From the mouth 8 The stones 9 The Moon 10 The Earth

11 Primal waters and the Flood 12 From the tree 13 Cosmic rainbow snake 14 Duality Two children Twins 15 Spider and feminine arts 16 Shamanism / bones 17 Speckledness / granulated surface texture / leopard 18 Honey bees, (honey-)beer 19 Cosmogonic virgin and her lover-son 20 Contradictory messengers bring death

Source: van Binsbergen 2010a: Table 9.1 Table 2.1. Narrative Complexes identified in sub-Saharan African cosmogonies as collected in historical times.

CITI

proposed Narrative Complex (no. and description) in space

mtDNA type remarks

linguistic context

in time

I. Pre- SubOut-of- Saharan Africa Africa Middle Palaeolithic 80 ka BP and earlier

Pandoras Box: the L (L1, L2, original mythical L3) package, perhaps containing: 4. The Lightning Bird (and the World or Cosmic Egg) 8. The stones (as earth; under CITI VI revised as the stones as connection between heaven and earth) 9. The Moon 10. The Earth as primary (10 was subsequently revised towards cattle, in the Neolithic) 12. From the Tree (in subsequent CITIs diversified into 12a The world and humanity from the tree, and 12c the leg-child) 13. The Cosmic / Rainbow Snake 15. The Spider (subse-

The emergence of ProtoAnatomically Modern Human Humans as a biological mutation? Africas soil carrying capacity, even for hunting and collecting, is the lowest in the world, mainly due to geological conditions that predate the appearance of humans by hundreds of millions of years, so it is possible that there was a push out of Africa The emergence of myth as constitutive of a new type of human community: self-reflective, coherent, communicating, engaging in hunting and collecting, and creating coherence, through the narrative and ritual management of symbols,

Further analysis suggests this NarCom an analytical construct, like all other NarComs to be an unfortunate contamination of nos. 4 (cf. Rain), 13, and 19.

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quent transformed into the feminine arts in CITI VI)

leading to articulate language. If this last point is plausible, then the earliest phase in the overall process is in itself myth-driven N and / or M Leaving Africa and venturing into West Asia is likely to have produced new challenges and to have given access to new opportunities; possibly Neanderthaloid influence

II. Middle Palaeolithic, c. 80 ka BP

West 5. The Mantis Asia, and from there to Australia and New Guinea

III. West Middle Asia Palaeolithic, c. 35 ka BP

6. Rescue from the Ogre A and B (out Neanderthaloid influence? of N)

IV. Central 11. The Primal Waters Upper Asia and the Flood Palaeolithic, c. 20 ka BP V. Central 1. The separation of Upper Asia Heaven and Earth Palaeo16. Shamanism, bones lithic, c. 15 ka BP

B (out of N)

Installation of the cosmogony of the Mother / Mistress of the Primal Waters, and the Land

*Borean

N (H, A, B)

The separation of Heaven and Earth as central cosmogonic theme; shamanism associated with naked-eye astronomy (for hunters, later agriculturalists). The shamans (belief of) travelling along the celestial axis to underworld and upper world, created (the idea of) a politico-religious social hierarchy on which more effective forms of socio-political organisation could be based.

Peripheral and Central branches of *Borean have separated

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Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

VI. protoNeolithic c. 12 ka BP

Extended Fertile Crescent

2. The Re-Connection of R and M1 Heaven and Earth (after separation) 19. The Cosmogonic Virgin and her Son / lover 14. Twins

Neolithic food production through agriculture and animal husbandry; Neolithic arts and crafts such as pottery, spinning, weaving; male ascendance; complex society, the emergence of writing, the state, organised religion, and science; incipient metallurgy Masculinisation and mythical hysterical displacement of procreative functions, from groin to mouth and head transcendentalism as triggered by writing, the state, organised priesthood, and science further reflection needed

Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic separate

VII. Neolithic or Bronze Age c. 5 ka BP

Extended Fertile Crescent

7. From the Mouth

too recent and too limited in scope to be interpreted in terms of mtDNA type

VIII. Neolithic to Iron Age c. 3 ka BP

Extended Fertile Crescent

14a. Twins, Two Children, Duality

Source: van Binsbergen 2010a: Table 9.2 Table 2.2. Contexts of Intensified Transformation and Innovation (CITIs) in the global history of Anatomically Modern Humans mythology.

As we have seen, in addition to the Out-of-Africa Hypothesis, recent genetic research has also formulated the Back-to-Africa Hypothesis, according to which there has been a substantial population influx from Asia (both West and East Asia) into Africa in the last 15 ka. It stands to reason that such a population movement also meant, to a considerable extent, demic diffusion of culture traits owned by these Asian populations trickling back into Africa. Basically there would be two main routes or mechanisms for from such an Asian feed-back influx into sub-Saharan Africa: 1. via North Africa, across the Sahara: along the time-honoured caravan routes and the Nile Valley 2. via the Indian Ocean, either crossing into Africa from the Arabian peninsula, or further South via the Swahili coast, Madagascar, or around Cape of Good Hope, to the Atlantic West coast, even all the 52

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way to the Bight of Benin and West Africa.

for sources of the data points: see van Binsbergen 2010b; Lindblom 1935 inset (obscuring a part of the world map where there are no attestations): modern spiked wheel trap from the Acholi people, Southern Sudan (Sparks 2006). Fig. 2.2. Global distribution of the spiked wheel trap (as typical of Pelasgian distributions.

A conspicuous example of mechanism (1) is the distribution of the spiked wheel trap (Fig. 2.2), which I am arguing elsewhere to constitute an index fossil of Pelasgian transcontinental cultural influx into the Mediterranean, the rest of Europe, Africa, East and South East Asia, and ultimately Oceania. Mechanism (2) would be brought out by the many instances35 of South, South East and East Asian influences on present-day African socio-cultural traits, e.g. in the kingship, ecstatic cults, divination, language (notably the Austric affinities in Bantu) etc. on which my research has been concentrating over the last decade, and which will play and increasingly important role as this books argument develops. Stephen Oppenheimers (1998) term Sunda would be an acceptable, overall term for the effects of mechanism (2), as long as we realise that in the context of transcontinental interaction this is merely an umbrella term,

Cf. Dick-Read 2005; van Binsbergen 2003: Ch. 8, 2005c, and my work in the context of the 2012 Leiden conference. The analytical groundwork for the transcontinental, multicentred and multidirectional maritime network is to be found particularly in my recent paper exploring the protohistoric links between Africa and China (van Binsbergen 2012f).

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denoting not only (as the term suggests) specifically Indonesian / South East Asian influence, but also East and South Asian influence, notably upon Africa. That is not necessarily a one-way process; rather than speaking of Sunda influence it would be appropriate to recognise, even from as early as the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, a transcontinental maritime network that is both multicentred and multidirectional, in the sense that persons, goods and ideas may travel in any direction between any two points on the network. While the distribution maps presented in this Chapter are directly dictated by empirical data, the tentative historical reconstructions based on these maps are not, of course such historical reconstructions involve a complex act of interpretation, where different analysts have the inherent freedom to come to different conclusions (Quine 1981; Harding 1976). The interpretations I arrive at reflect the experience gained in the handling of many such prehistoric distribution maps over the past decade, in many consecutive attempts to formulate and improve my Aggregative Diachronic Model applying that model to specific analytical situations at hand, e.g. the Bronze Age Mediterranean, the continuity between African and Eurasian mythologies, and the formulation, in that connection, of my Pelasgian Hypothesis. The aim of our exercise in this chapter is to develop a method of longrange analysis based on empirical distributions; and to prepare the ground for the analysis of geomancy, that is to play a major role throughout this book. While I flatter myself that in the process I have developed a certain feeling for the patterns and theoretical implications as suggested by the distribution maps, the historical reconstructions presented here are merely provisional, and widely open to debate. Meanwhile, regrettably, it would take us too far to discuss, here, every data point and every step made in the tentative historical reconstruction the reader is only presented with the result.

2.2. Mankala
The mankala family of board games (Murray 1952) comes in a handful of major types, defined by the number of rows (two, three or four) along which the games vital redistribution holes are being arranged. The oldest archaeological attestations of (what is commonly regarded as) mankala 54

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boards hail from the West Asian Neolithic,36 and are of the simplest tworow type. The world distribution is mapped in the following Figure:

Neolithic mankala; 2-row mankala;

uncertain; 3-row mankala; 4-row mankala

Fig. 2.3. Mankala: Distribution of the various types.

Considering the world distribution of mankala, we come to the following suggestions: The New World attestations are clearly associated with recent forced demic diffusion (Atlantic slave trade) in Early Modern times; this indicates that mankala as a trait is not in Pandoras Box (a conclusion also suggested by the absence of attestations in New Guinea37 and Australia), and not even in the later CITIs whose traits have made it to the New World. The few Neolithic attestations of mankala (and there are no older
Rollefson 1992; Kirkbride 1966; cf. Fig. 2.12, below. More controversial attestations of considerable antiquity but unplayable because they are vertical or suspended high in the air are from Ethiopia and Ancient Egypt: Parker 1981 / 1909: 587 f.; Jensen 1936: 207. However, Raabe n.d. reports a mankala board from Arduni Island, Sepik New Guinea, no doubt under Indonesian influence. She stresses that the mankala board is mainly known in Islamic Indonesia, as well as in Africa. This corroborates the general opinion in the literature that Islam, and forced migration of Africans as slaves, have been largely responsible for the spread of this board-game.
37 36

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ones) that were known to me in the 1990s are all in West Asia and adjacent Northeast Africa. Research in the last 10 years has further explored Chinese forms of mankala, but has not adduced (to my knowledge) new archaeological evidence from East Asia that would challenge the primacy of the West Asia / Northeast African attestations. For a good view of the distribution of the 2-, 3- and 4-row varieties of mankala as attested in historical times, it is best to consider the distributions separately, as in the following Figures. For proper time perspective, the Neolithic attestations are included in each Figure. The global distribution specifically of two-row mankala is presented in the following diagram:

: Neolithic mankala;

: uncertain;

: 2-row mankala attested in historical times

Fig. 2.4. Two-row mankala: Distribution.

The global distribution of two-row mankala is provisionally interpreted in historical terms in Fig. 2.5. Here, the tilted oval marks what I propose to call the Neolithic Extended Fertile Crescent the narrow but long belt of Neolithic innovation all across the Old World, from the still fertile Sahara (only later to turn into a desert) to China, corresponding with CITI VI in Table 2.2. The hatched oval with hatched arrows emanating from it, indicates the extent of the Back-to-Africa movement. Transatlantic black arrows indicate the effect of forced migration in the recent centuries of the slave trade. 56

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VI

: Neolithic mankala;

: uncertain;

: 2-row mankala

VI

CITI VI, proto-Neolithic

Extended proto-Neolithic Fertile Crescent (Sahara-China);

The tilted oval marks the Neolithic Extended Fertile Crescent; The hatched oval with hatched arrows emanating from it marks approximately the extent of the Back-toAfrica movement. Fig. 2.5. Two-row mankala: Tentative historical reconstruction.

For a discursive discussion of this reconstruction, see p. 60 f., below. The fairly restricted global distribution of three-row mankala is presented in the following diagram (Fig. 2.6):

Neolithic mankala; uncertain:

; 3-row mankala:

Fig. 2.6. Three-row mankala: Distribution.

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Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

: Neolithic mankala;

: uncertain;

: 3-row mankala;

Fig. 2.7. Three-row mankala: Tentative historical reconstruction.

For a discursive discussion of this reconstruction, see p. 60 f., below. Although the Neolithic Extended Fertile Crescent again appears in Fig. 2.7, the remarkable distribution with its two centres of concentration, one in Northeast Africa and the other in West Africa, seems to indicate a dilemma which we will encounter, further down in this Chapter, in relation to other formal cultural systems (e.g. Flood myths and Tower myths; geomantic divination) and transcontinental influences: was the connection maritime, around the Cape of Good Hope, on the wings of the transcontinental ocean trade thus part of the postulated Sunda network (indicated in dotted lines in Fig. 2.7, and despite the more fundamental awareness that such a maritime network would have been multidirectional and multicentred provisionally postulated to have run from West Asia (Persian Gulf / Red Sea famous, well-documented haunts of the ancient mariners in Phoenician and Graeco-Roman times) around the Cape, to West Africa but the opposite movement is also to be considered (and has been, in the work of the Afrocentrist writer Clyde Winters although not in specific relation to mankala)? or was it overland, across the Sahara, and on the wings of the Arab caravan trade after all it was in an Arabian context that the first written mention of mankala has been attested? The data on this point are sufficient to raise the question, but not to answer it. Let us therefore proceed to a consideration of the global distribu58

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tion of four-row mankala, which is presented in the following diagram (Fig. 2.8).

Neolithic mankala; uncertain:

4-row mankala

Fig. 2.8. Four-row mankala: Distribution.

Here again the distribution is geographically limited, and virtually confined to the eastern half of the African continent, the Arabian peninsula, and Madagascar. In fact, four-row mankala is the standard type associated with the African Indian Ocean seaboard. For the historical reconstruction of the connections involved this leaves us little room for manoeuvering (Fig. 2.9).

Neolithic mankala; uncertain:

4-row mankala

Fig. 2.9. Four-row mankala: Tentative historical reconstruction.

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It would theoretically be possible to postulate an original epicentre for four-row mankala somewhere in the East African interior, and see the coastal forms as secondary but against the comparative background of the other forms, especially the three-row variety, and of the Neolithic West Asian attestations, our best bet would be to postulate, once more, a Sunda mechanism bringing the four-row variety from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea all the way along the African Indian Ocean coast, and from there into the East African interior. The distribution maps and the associated tentative historical reconstructions suggest the following: The two-row variant is the standard. It is the minimum required number of rows to make sense of the rules of the game. This is also the form of the Neolithic mankala boards. These may be taken to constitute prototypes from which two-row forms in Africa, Asia and the New World are derived. Developed in West Asia, mankala may then be supposed to have entered sub-Saharan Africa as if the latter then constituted an open cultural niche, with no rival mathematical games resisting its local introduction another example of Pelasgian transmission Southward in accordance with the crossmodel. Three-row and four-row forms of mankala are relatively recent regional variants. The patchy distribution of three-row mankala includes West Africa, Northeast Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. All these locations are near seashores. An overland diffusion is unlikely for it would have resulted in a less patchy and localised pattern and more interior attestations. I take it 3-row mankala was developed in Northeast Africa or the Arabian peninsula (near the oldest Neolithic attestations of 2-row mankala) and from there spread by seaborne trade, i.e. the Sunda intercontinental maritime network although in this case there is no suggestion of any direct Southeast or South or East Asian involvement. The parallel with geomancy, and the reasons discussed there, weakly suggest a spread from East to West around Cape of Good Hope, rather than the other way around, but as we shall see, the argument is as yet unconclusive. We can only guess as to the time frame involved, but I suggest that 60

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this variant is less than three millennia old; in fact, its spread to West Africa may have occurred in the second millennium CE.

left: courtesy Parrinder 1967; right: authors collection (a) carving representing King Shamba of the Bushong Kuba holding a mankala board; (b) king with fly switch and neck ring note the conical headdress, the facial expression and the body posture all reminiscent of South East Asian Buddhist sculpture of the 2nd mill CE. Fig. 2.10. Kuba carving styles, Congo, 17-19 c. CE.

The distribution of four-row mankala is quite similar to that of the three-row variant. However, for four row-mankala there are no West African attestations, whereas the East African attestations are far more numerous and over a far more extended area including the African interior. The presence of the four-row variant on Madagascar (where it is the dominant form of mankala) suggests a Sunda link in the narrower sense of the word, but the interior African attestations could only be explained in Sunda terms if we accept extensive Sunda inroads into the interior. For this, there are both genetic and comparative-ethnographic indications for the Mozambican-Angolan corridor (which is one of the areas where four-row 61

Wim van Binsbergen, Before the Presocratics

mankala reaches deep into the interior). Similar corridors into the interior may be postulated for West Africa (the Cameroonian Western Grassfields), and for Central Africa, e.g. the well-known Bushong-Kuba sculpture of King Shamba holding a mankala board (Fig. 2.10a) does show signs of a Sunda-related, ultimately Buddhist-influenced sculptural style, especially if compared to another such sculpture (2.10b). The genetic distributional data indicative of such inroads are brought together by Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994 and discussed, in their specific application to sub-Saharan Africa, in some of my recent work.38 Again the distribution brings us to propose an epicentre of origin in Southwest Asia (Arabian peninsula, Persian Gulf) or Northeast Africa, and a time frame not extending further back than the beginning of the Common Era. The distribution of two-row mankala is more extended and more complex than that of the three- and four-row variants. This suggests greater antiquity for two-row mankala. Taking the oldest, Neolithic attestations in Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa as rough indications of the epicentre of origin (although this is, admittedly, a risky procedure), we may discern the following phases in our historical reconstruction: 1. Extended proto-Neolithic Fertile Crescent (Sahara-China), CITI VI. As I have argued extensively in the specific context of board games (van Binsbergen 1995a, 1996b, 1997b), the Neolithic management of game and crops is mirrored in the players manipulations during the mankala game; there also appears to be a link with the management of fluids, for which an irrigation context comes to mind. 2. The Back-to-Africa movement from 15 ka BP onward, carrying something of the genetic and cultural context as under (1) into West Asia and Africa. This effect may be conspicuous in the case of the Namibian ||hs game (Townshend 1976-1977), the remote ancestors of whose Khoisan-speaking players may well have brought the game from Central or West Asia, where (at least, so claim Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994) some of their ancestors apparently still lived 10 ka BP.
38

In the context of the 2012 Leiden conference.

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3. From the eastern end of (1), mankala appears to be diffused into Southeast Asia. Since this is a relatively late development (< 2 ka BP) into regions already fully populated by Anatomically Modern Humans, this appears to be cultural rather than demic diffusion. Contrary to, for instance, certain other NarComs (for instance e.g. the oldest Flood myths, which I have suggested to be subject to demic diffusion into Southeast Asia and Oceania in association with the owners of mtDNA type B), there is no indication that the spread of mankala into Southeast Asia is specifically associated with any genetic type. If it were associated with mtDNA Type B, mankala would be far more widespread in Southeast Asia, and would not be virtually absent (with only one New Guinea attestation) in Oceania and Australia. On the other hand, mankala in South East India and on Ceylon appears to be only a few centuries old, and associated with the advent of African slaves and soldiers (de Voogt 2000; an impression confirmed by my own fieldnotes, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka). 4. From the northern end of (1), mankala is sporadically diffused into Central and North Asia, again probably not through demic diffusion but on the wings of other relatively recent cultural currents, such as the spread of Buddhism and of Islam world religions which have been known to be instrumental in the spread of other cultural traits, e.g. musical instruments, musical styles, styles of dress and ornamentation, ecstatic cults, etc. Let us not forget that our oldest documentary source on mankala is the Arabic Kitb alA ni by Abul Faraj (897-967 CE).39 5. Even though mankala has been known for more than a century as the national game of Africa (Culin 1896), and even though many authors have followed Culin in considering the game as primordially African, the presence of mankala in sub-Saharan Africa may be mainly due to the same Pelasgian mechanism (see above) as that which seems to have brought the spiked wheel trap to Africa, overland via Northeast Africa and across the Sahara, from a West Asian source. Probably, however, there was also the Indian-Oceanbased, Sunda, cultural influence from West, South, South East

39

Murray 1952: 165; another relatively early mention of mankala is: de Flacourt 1661: 108 f.

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and East Asia: possibly along the Mozambican-Angolan corridor, and even more probably in West Africa, where Sunda traits abound (specific food crops, xylophones, ecstatic cults, kingship, etc.). My recent research into Africas transcontinental continuities suggests that Sunda-associated, Buddhist-orientated states were established in Southern and South Central Africa around the turn of the second millennium (Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe are cases in point, cf. the Venda with Hakata tablets and divination bowls but it looks as if there were also extensions to the north, the Zambezi and Lualaba regions), and the distribution pattern of four-row mankala in these parts of Africa is suggestive of Sunda influence. 6. We have already dealt with the isolated New Guinea case. 7. Finally, from West Africa 2-row mankala spread to the New World in the context of the forced demic diffusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Similar to the mankala game, and sometimes discussed in that context, is the dara game, whose attestations in historical times are given in Fig. 2.11. There has been a tendency to consider the game associated with Arabs or Bedouins, and to see the Sahara as its original home. However, the fact that its attestations are predominantly coastal, and all over Africa, suggests that dara, too, may reflect Sunda maritime influence.

: dara game attested in historical times

Fig. 2.11. Distribution of the dara game.

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Left: from Rollefson 1992; right: from Kirkbride 1966 Fig. 2.12. Neolithic mankala boards from West Asia

2.3. Geomancy
2.3.1. Geomancy: Distribution To a considerable extent, the history of geomancy is the history of its random generators and notational systems. The following Table 2.3 gives an impression of the various random generators used in the extensive distribution area of geomancy.

MOP darb alraml hitting the sand with a stick (Islamic cilm alraml)40

throwing of sticks chim (East Asia)41

throwing of coins (East throwing of wooden Asia)42 temple-blocks chiao pai (East Asia) (authors collection)

40 41 42

el Tounisi 1845. Michael 1999-2008. Laurel 2001-2009.

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geomantic dice (India, Africa)43

clockwork emulation throwing of cowries of the geomantic (West Africa) (auprocess: an Islamic thors collection) divinatory machine of the early 2nd millennium (Hosken n.d.)

throwing of a kpelle divining chain (West Africa) (authors collection)

throwing of half-shells of mungongo (Schinziophyton rautanenii) or other nuts (West Africa, Southern Africa)44

four ivory or wooden tablets (Southern Africa) (authors collection); note the circle-dots on the ivory items

Table 2.3. Alternative random generators in geomancy.

43 44

Cf. Pirzada 2011. Robbins & Campbell 1990; Rodrigues de Areia 1985; with kola nuts: Nassau 1904: 207f ; Bosman 1967 [ 1704 ] : 152 f.; Dennett 1968 [ 1910 ]: 149. The coin is included for size comparison only although often random generators, including coins, are mixed in divinatory usage.

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: Sikidy of Madagascar/Comores; : Ifa, 16 cowries;

: Ramlaastra of India; : I Ching;

: Arabian and European geomancy : simple geomancies of African interior

: Hakata (Four Tablets);

Fig. 2.13. Geomancy: Distribution.

2.3.2. Distribution of geomancy: Discussion As compared with the mythical themes that have an antiquity of several, often tens of millennia (some even go back to Pandoras Box), and even with mankala for which we have Neolithic archaeological attestations, geomancies as highly specific formal systems have a much shallower time depth, and their high degree of formal specificity makes us reluctant to consider the worldwide variants as mere parallel inventions much more likely, they are scions of the same tree. The oldest textual and iconographic attestations of the Chinese geomantic representational apparatus (the 8 trigrams , , , , , , , , and the 64 hexagrams of Y Jng e.g. etc.), go back to the late 1st millennium BCE at the 45 very earliest. The oldest Arabian geomantic attestations, under the name of cilm
Frobenius (1923: 114) reminds us that the symbolism of broken and unbroken lines, as in Y Jng (which he mentions explicitly there), also has a South Asian counterpart: in India three parallel horizontal lines, unbroken, are said to denote the North / male, while the same pattern with broken lines would denote the South ./ female. To this I may add that in Hindu ritual contexts, the pattern of three horizontal lines (North / male?) particularly evokes the god Shiva; in Balinese villages, Shiva is associated with the West, the cemetery, and death (fieldnotes). A guiding thought of Frobenius book is the pendulum sling movement between East and West, which, in the light of the present books argument, is particularly appropriate as an icon of the global history of geomancy, and of element cosmologies.
45

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al-raml or a al-raml, date from the late 1st millennium CE; considering the semantic, symbolic and representational correspondences, these appear to share a common cultural environment, perhaps a common origin, with Y Jng. Given the extensive Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and throughout the Central Asian interior, under the Tang dynasty (end of 1st millennium CE) (also and especially in philosophical and medical life), one might suppose that cilm al-raml, which emerged in Islamic Iraq, same period, was directly derivative from Taoist Chinese prototypes, notably Y Jng. However, while such influence cannot be excluded and is also detectable in other intellectual domains of Iraqi and Iranian culture around 1000 CE, there are indications that West Asian Muslims were all the more ready to adopt and transform a Chinese geomancy, because they were already familiar with an older proto-geomantic OldWorld divinatory substratum that did not exclusively or predominantly derive from China, and that may have had ramifications into Africa (hence the North African connotations (cf. Steinschneider 1864, 1877) of the classic geomancy, that of ay Muammad alZant yz{|OP ~M (c. 1200 CE; cf. al-Zant 1923, 1995).

Pythagoras tetractys

(see below, Chapter 5) and the Ancient Israelite tetra-

grammaton are shown as early expressions of a four-element system foreshadowing proto-geomancies in Mediterranean Late Antiquity Fig. 2.14. Comparing geomantic notational systems worldwide.

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Rather than Sino-Tibetan cultural affinities of the Y Jng symbolism, some Sinologists (as we shall see in Chapter 7) have, rightly, stressed Y Jngs Indo-European affinities which turn out to be specifically Luwian-Hittite, i.e. West Asian. Hebrew, Greek (Byzantine) and Latin attestations of geomancy are several centuries younger than the Arabic versions, and are evidently derived from pre-existing Arabian prototypes; this entire ensemble constitutes (as Ibn aldn already argued, 1377 / 1980) an adulteration of astronomically based astrology. Indian ramlaastra, up to its very name (contrary to astra, knowledge, ramla has no Indo-Aryan etymology, but cf. the Arabic terms for geomancy cited above), is clearly derived, in the course of the second mill. CE, from an Arabian prototype. Pre-Modern African attestations are both recent and very rare the oldest I know of date from the 16th century (documentary) and the 17th century (archaeological).46 The attestations in the New World very clearly have a transAtlantic origin and spring from forced demic diffusion at the time of the slave trade (second half of the second millennium CE). 2.3.3. Geomancy in Africa The African attestations are puzzling in their complexity: Early students of African geomancies47 readily spotted the continuity between Malagasy sikidy, West African Ifa, and the Arabian c ilm al-raml. I have meanwhile demonstrated that the Southern African family of geomantic divination belongs to the same field of continuity (van Binsbergen 1996a). The influence of the Arabian geomantic system on the Indian Ocean coast has been widely accepted by scholars. Some scholars, especially African ones, and among them espe46

This is the Latin report of the execution of the first Christian martyr in Zimbabwe (Father Gonalo de Silveira, 1561) after having been found guilty by the consultation of a four-tablet oracle (dos Santos 1901 / 1609: VII, 190), written half a century after the event; and divining tablets from the Khami ruins, cf. Robinson 1959: Plate V.

Burton 1893 / 1864: I, 330 f., and 1987 / 1856, 55n-56n; Steinschneider 1877, 1956 / 1904; Ferrand 1891-1902: I, 73-101; Trautmann 1939-1940; Maupoil 1943a, 1943b.

47

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cially those of an Afrocentrist persuasion, have denied the indebtedness of the West African systems to the Arabian systems. When a few years ago I presented the compelling evidence on geomancys origin outside Africa, to the members of the Afrocentrist discussion group Ta Seti, I was rewarded with general scorn, and accusations of betrayal and ignorance. Although nomenclature and symbolism are similar, the pattern of overland trade routes (Levtzion & Hopkins 1981, from which my Fig. 2.15 derives; I owe this point to Dick-Read 2005) suggests that a direct influence from the Arab world onto the Bight of Benin may not be the most plausible explanation for the massive occurrence of geomancies in that region we are perhaps persuaded to consider the detour from the Indian Ocean along Cape of Good Hope (the same detour which musical instruments (notably the xylophone and the royal orchestra), other ritual and organisational traits of the institution of kingship, cowries, ecstatic cults, bananas, taro, other food crops, and even one Roman coin found near Buea, Cameroon (Dick-Read 2005; Bovill 1958: 41n), appear to have taken on their way to West Africa, and from there into the Congo Basin, South Central Africa and possibly Southern Africa. However, the case is not so clear-cut as suggested by Dick-Read. In the first place there is considerable evidence of an Arab / Muslim undercurrent in West African geomancy, more specifically in Ifa. Haillot (1936) decribes a West African form of geomancy where the configurations have the names of Islamic prophets: Issa / cAssa, No / N, etc. The most obvious explanation would be that in this case Islam was in fact the vehicle of trans-Saharan transmission, and that there is no need to invoke transmission from the Indian Ocean across the Cape of Good Hope. Also Maupoil, author of one of the most comprehensive studies of African geomancy (Maupoil 1943), and more recently Peel (1990), insist on an Islamic transmission, suggested to be trans-Saharan. African academic authors such as Traor (1979) and Kassibo (1992) passionately and as a matter of course present geomancy as inherently and originally African, although Kassibo is not blind to the wider transcontinental ramifications:
Hadj Kamballah (1976 [ cf. 1947 WvB ] : 22) tablit, dans un parallle saississant, la parent entre les idogrammes gomantiques et les trigrammes chinois appels pakoua et certaines critures uniques scandinaves [ = runes WvB ], commes les tifinars, qui sont les caractres de la langue tamachque [ = Touareg WvB ] . Il conclut leur origine antique et souligne leur caractre

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hautement mtaphysique. (Kassibo 1992: 542).

We cannot use the parallels noted by Kassibo and Kamballah as ground for the assumption of a circum-Saharan origin of geomancy, even though there is convergence with cultural practices in the same region as described by Pques (1964) and Fad (1966). Although raised on an esoteric pedestal by (Post-)Modern occultism, North European runes and Touareg sign systems are simply parallel borrowings from the Phoenician alphabet,48 and reinforce the West Asian and trans-Saharan connection that is at stake here.

Fig. 2.15. Trade routes in West Africa, second half of second millennium CE. Source: Dick-Read 2005: 166 after Levtzion & Hopkins 1981. The point is that trade
48

I am indebted for this point to the Assyriologist / Semitist Frans Wiggermann; cf. Diringer 1996 / 1968.

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may not have brought North African Islamic influence all the way to the Bight of Benin, so Ifa may have an Indian Ocean, circum-Cape background.

Recapitulating: Dick-Read suggests, for several transcontinental African borrowings so by implication also for geomancies, a detour around Cape of Good Hope and maritime transmission from an ultimate origin in the Indian Ocean region. The relative weakness of this position also becomes apparent when we consider the distribution of Flood and Tower myths in Africa (Fig. 2.14a). The locus classicus for such myth is Genesis 6-11, and close parallels were brought out by early Assyriology, but these myths have a much wider distribution than the Ancient Near East, and particularly abound in South East Asia. The occurrence of Flood myths in Africa has long been denied on the authority of Frazer (1919) but my insistence on this point has brought even the doyen of comparative mythology, Michael Witzel (2010), to re-examine the facts.

Fig. 2.16. The distribution of Flood and Tower myths in Africa. 1. Tower myths (broken outline = uncertain); 2. Flood myths (hatched symbol =

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uncertain); 3 and 4, extent of distribution of 1 and 2, respectively; 5. apparent distributional gap between sub-Saharan African and Ancient Near Eastern / Ancient Egyptian distribution. After van Binsbergen 2006a, with new data added. Sources of data points: Abrahams 1983; Budge 1989; Courlander 1996; Eliot 1976; Faulkner 1994; Feldmann 1963; Frazer 1919; Gaster 1969; Isaak 2006; Kahler-Meyer 1988 / 1971; Kelsen / 1943; Parrinder 1982 / 1967; van der Sluijs n.d. [ 2004 ]; van Binsbergen 2010a; Vitaliano 1973.

What puzzled me for a long time when examining the distribution of such myths in Africa, was the apparent large gap between the Ancient Near East / Ancient Egypt on the one hand, and sub-Saharan Africa on the other. I took this as an indication that, as stressed by Dick-Read, there has been no direct influence from the Middle East onto sub-Saharan Africa. The increasing unpopularity of the Hamitic Thesis in the second half of the 20th c. CE added plausibility to this view. (According to the Hamitic Thesis, launched in the early 20th century by Seligman e.g. 1913, 1934 and his contemporaries, sub-Saharan Africa owed much of its advances in culture to the civilising influence of medium-pigmented pastoralist from West Asia, bringers also of the Afroasiatic or Hamitic linguistic macrophylum. The implied colonial racialism of this position has meanwhile been amply exposed. There is an apparent approchement between the Hamitic Thesis and my Pelasgian Hypothesis; I discuss and refute this appearance in van Binsbergen 2011d.) The universal distribution of Flood myths world-wide, and their apparent African concentration near the Atlantic coast, are compatible with the hypothesis of South or South East Asian, in other words Sunda, seaborne provenance of these myths in Africa. On the other hand, the Flood myths among the East African Masai and neighbouring peoples are remarkably close to those attested from the Ancient Near East including the Bible. Moreover, the massive and undeniable Ancient Egyptian traces, not only (as we have seen) among the Nkoya but throughout West and East Africa,49 and the very successful inroads of Islam in West and East Africa, convey a message of trans-Saharan continuity. The case is clinched, in my opinion, by the recent research of Dierk Lange (2004, 2009, 2012), who established beyond any
49

Meyerowitz 1960; Wainwright 1940, 1949, 1951; overview: van Binsbergen 2011c.

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doubt (e.g. by parallel king lists) direct Assyrian influence upon West Africa by the end of the Assyrian empire (c. 600 BCE) and passing through Egypt which at the time was under Assyrian rule. However, this Assyrian influence was one and a half millennia before the invention of cilm al-raml in Iraq. I suggest that the gap of Fig. 2.15 reflects not so much paucity of trans-Saharan contacts and influence, but simply the open vastness of the Sahara. A combination of mainly Indian Ocean / Sunda influence around the Cape of Good Hope, with a measure of Arab influence directly across the Sahara, seems to best account for the details of geomancy in West and Southern Africa. Intermediate or simple geomancies have been attested all over the African interior, but the formal correspondences between the Arabian, West African, Malagasy and Southern African systems are too numerous and too specific than that these various elaborate African geomancies might conceivably derive from the simpler African forms; much more likely, the latter are adulterations of the more elaborate, originally literate forms, for which an ultimate origin outside Africa is the most likely. It is therefore even extremely unlikely (pace the Afrocentrist claims of many African writers on geomancy) that these simpler African geomancies, rather than being mere local adulterations, are the ultimate primal source of geomancies worldwide. Even if we could see these simpler forms as survivals from a substrate proto-geomantic system extending over much of Africa and possibly all over the Old World, and thus as the basis of the Y Jng symbolism and of cilm al-raml, what we find now in the form of simpler geomancies exists clearly in the periphery of the more elaborate forms from (Early) Modern times Meanwhile we are struck by the extensive continuities that appear to exist between Chinese, Southern African and West African divinatory apparatus employed for the application of geomancy. Divination bowls from the Venda and from West Africa are very similar to, 74

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and even claimed to be continuous with, those of Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece (Davis 1955); Meanwhile the Venda and West African divination bowls appear to be local appropriations, either of Chinese divinatory bowls with a 36-item zodiacal rim, or of Chinese nautical instruments (van Binsbergen 2012c, 2012d, with extensive literature). Also the influence of Chinese geomantic landscape symbolism upon Malagasy sikidy is obvious from the accounts available in the literature (e.g. Vrin & Rajaonarimanana 1991). Attestations of geomancies are concentrated in only part of the Old World, and absent in New Guinea, Australia, Oceania and (with the exception of clearly Africa-derived borrowings in the latest centuries) in the New World. Also the European attestations (geomancy was a major divination form in Medieval and Renaissance occult sciences, and from there adulterated into a popular and peasant divinatory art) are manifestly borrowings from West Asian forms in Islamic trappings; Arabic texts on Islamic occult sciences, including geomancies and other forms of divination, were among the first to be translated into (Byzantine) Greek and especially Latin in the course of the European translation frenzy of the 11th and 12th centuries (Steinschneider 1956 / 1904; Carmody 1956; dAlverny 1982; Thorndike 1923-1958). All this makes it crystal-clear that in the case of geomancy we have to do with a relatively recent and local development that can make no claim to inclusion in Pandoras Box (CITI I), and that can neither have belonged to the early post-Out-ofAfrica CITIs whose products made it all the way to the New World. This brings me to suggest that, rather like the mankala case, the specific forms and interrelations of the African geomancies are best explained by the following accumulative factors: while admitting a certain cross-Saharan Arab influence, yet mainly a general East-West seaborne movement around the Cape of Good Hope formally in line with Oppenheimers (1998) postulated Sunda westbound cultural and genetic expansion but rather, more recently, and more specifically applied to Africa 75

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(about which Oppenheimer remains, understandably, silent). The reports of the Phoenician Hannos circumnavigation of Africa (c. 500 BCE) lend some further credibility to this proposed trajectory (Lacroix 1993; Illing 1899; Schoff 1913; Falconer 1797; Cory 1828). So does the history of cowries as an unmistakable trace of Indian Ocean trade (probably not all of it Early Modern and in West European hands) in Atlantic Africa and, as said, of such foodstuffs as banana, mango and taro Conceived as specifically related to Indonesia, therefore in the narrower sense, the Sunda model proposes major cultural and genetic inroads, from South East Asia, into the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mozambican-Angola corridor, and the Bight of Benin, whilst producing the highly Austronesian population of Madagascar, either directly from Indonesia, or via an intermediate stay at the East African mainland.

With the exception of the Red Sea region, all these regions loom large in the distribution of geomancies, and if we adjust Oppenheimers very long time scale and reduce Sunda influence upon sub-Saharan Africa to a relatively recent phenomenon (Mediterranean Bronze Age and later in other words the latest three millennia), the pattern of the distribution of geomancies might fit the Sunda model, with this proviso that 1. we have to extend Sunda so as to include, beside seaborne influences from insular South East Asia, also such influences from East and South Asia, and 2. that we qualify the suggestion of one coherent, identifiable, ethnically distinct culture which subsequently spreads monodirectionally through seaborne demic diffusion. Instead, what we have is 76

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rather an intercontinental maritime network for trade and cultural exchange (Fig. 2.17), in which attested items may primarily be seen to travel from East to West, but traffic (also of ideas and formal systems) in the opposite direction cannot in the least be ruled out (but, being counter-paradigmatic, may be overlooked or suppressed both in Modern scholarship and in ancient Asian sources!). Black African slaves were so common in Tang China that the phenomenon gave rise to an entire literary genre featuring a Black trickster hero (Irwin 1977; cf. Chang Hsing-Lang 1930; Wilensky 2002). During West European mercantile expansion, i.e. in Early Modern times, substantial Black African communities were established in India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, and these are likely to have spread African socio-cultural traits in Asia some authors (e.g. Barnes 1975) even attribute the remarkably limited attestations of mankala in that region to this factor. The Afrocentrist educationalist and linguist Clyde Winters (1980a, 1980b, 1980c, 1981, 1983a, 1983b, 1984, 1985, 1988) has repeatedly stated the claim of extensive pre- and protohistorical West African influence on South and East Asia, and not surprisingly, considering both the world politics of knowledge and the obscurity of his publication venues has attracted less main-stream support than he deserves. (Incidentally, the connections which Winters (1984, 1985) claims to exist between Sumerian, Manding, Elamite and Dravidian remind us of the close links which also the prominent linguists Igor Diakonoff (1997; pace Bengtson, and Bomhard), and Paul Rivet (1929), saw between Sumerian and Austric (specifically, Munda), and on which I recently hit (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 372) when looking for a plausible Austric etymology for the name of the Sumerians paradisiacal island Dilmun; apparently neither Winters claim of affinities, nor the Sunda trajectory in Figs. 2.17 and 2.18, below, are totally chimerical Winterss affinities, spanning the huge range from West Africa, West Asia to South Asia, could be explained as traces of Sunda / Austric influence.) For the Early Modern Asian distribution of geomancy, a similar argument could be made as for mankala (perhaps Africa-derived, but more likely spread from West Asia under Islamic conditions), especially since the earliest documentary attestations of fully-fledged geomancy (not counting dubious protoforms from Mediterranean Late Antiquity) have all been in the Islamic / Arabic context. 77

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Fig. 2.17. A proposed intercontinental, multicentred, multidirectional maritime network from the Early Bronze Age onward. Source: van Binsbergen 2012c and in preparation (a), in preparation (d). The solid, thick black lines indicate the proposed outlines of the Sunda network; lesser density of hatching indicates lesser certainty. For sections of the proposed network, solid grey is used to indicate interior regions of suspected Sunda influence: the Mozambican / Angolan corridor, the Bight of Benin / Western Grassfields corridor, and the Mediterranean connections with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, all of which obviously are not maritime trajectories yet appear to have a marked Sunda association.

Yet it is remarkable that one of the earliest of these Arabic attestations (the use of the word a in the sense of divination, in al-Djais (c. 776868/9 CE) Kitb al ayawn, IV 369 (1988; cf. Pellat 1969 / 1967) comes from a medieval Islamic writer with established African (Ethiopian) antecedents, whereas al-Zant (cf. 1923, 1995), author of what was to become the most influential Islamic geomancy throughout the Indian Ocean and African regions, also derives from a North African Berber milieu (possibly with a fair element of Jewish influence, for which the Zanata tribe is well-known), continuous with the geomancy-orientated Sahara and West Africa. This allows us to tentatively reconstruct the history of geomancies in the Old World along the following lines (Fig. 2.18):

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Reference is made to Fig. 2.13 (distribution map) and to Figs 9.1 and 9.3, below (Upper Palaeolithic element cosmology) Fig. 2.18. Proposed reconstruction of the world history of geomancy.

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A. Admittedly, we cannot confidently reconstruct the transcontinental prehistory of geomancies before the Upper Palaeolithic, yet below, Table 6.1) an attempt in that direction will be made; ultimately the idea of divination by the earth (the literal meaning of geomancy) seems to derive from the NarCom the earth as primary, which was already in Pandoras Box in pre-Exodus Africa. B. We may postulate an Extended proto-Neolithic Fertile Crescent (from Sahara-to China) as a proto-geomantic substratum, emanating from CITI VI (proto-Neolithic) c. 15 ka BP. This protogeomantic substratum was gradually carried West and South, into sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, as part of the Back-to-Africa movement, from Central Asia 15 ka BP onwards: mtDNA types R and M1. Hence it is not really contradictory that we may suspect proto-geomancies to have existed both at the eastern (China) and at the western (Sahara) end of the Extended Fertile Crescent. In all probability, an element-based cosmology emerged within this worldview, which moreover was informed by the emergence of shamanism in conjunction with naked-eye astronomy C. Probably more important, certainly more tangible, than this Upper Palaeolithic / proto-Neolithic complex, was the crystallisation of themes of cyclicity and transformation within the already widely established element cosmology. These themes became part of the emergent Pelasgian socio-cultural package, which, emerging in West Asia in Neolithic times, during the Bronze Age spread into the Mediterranean and, while being transformed and innovated, subsequently spread in all four directions (my so-called cross model), including East to China, South Asia, South East Asia and even to some extent to Oceania and South to sub-Saharan Africa, either via North Africa or via the Indian Ocean route. Whatever its pre-Bronze Age antecedents, geomancy thus became a prominent Pelasgian trait distributed over many parts of Asia and Africa. D. From this common Bronze Age / Pelasgian substrate, we can trace a number of parallel developments to be explored in subsequent Chapters: In Western Eurasia, in ways which we will examine in detail in 80

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the next few Chapters, a formal and explicit four-element cosmological system develops at least a millennium before the Presocratics, but it is by explicit reference (notably in Plato and especially Aristotle) to the mid-1st millennium Greek Presocratic philosophers that the four-element system becomes standard in that region, and that proto-geomancies begin to be sporadically and tentatively formulated on its basis for instance in the neo-Pythagorean and Talmudic contexts. In China, under (as we shall see in Chapter 7) arguable West Asian influence during the 1st -2nd millennium BCE, the basic symbolism of trigrams and hexagrams is developed as a general wisdom cosmology which allows for a divinatory application and which, given the regional cultural and political dominance of China, also comes to inform the cosmologies of Korea, Japan, Tibet, and continental South East Asia. In cAbbd Iraq, by the end of the first millennium CE, and under peripheral Chinese influence (maritime trade, Silk Road, Tang political expansion), the Pelasgian geomantic substrate develops into cilm al raml. From there it spreads, over land and by sea, to India as ramlaastra, and also to Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, engendering the sikidy divination system. Subsequently, it follows the Sunda Old-World maritime network, reaches Southern Africa where it surfaces as Hakata divination with divination tablets and Venda divination bowls. Rounding, like the Sunda phantom voyagers (Dick-Read 2005) that are its presumed agents of spread, Cape of Good Hope, and following the Atlantic African coast, this Iraq-derived geomancy reaches West Africa, where it is substantially localised as Ifa and Sixteen Cowries, without however dropping the tell-tale details of its notational system, its 2n-based interpretational catalogue, and the latter specific lists of meanings and associations. The geomantic dice prevalent in ramlaastra consist of four cubes (preferably ivory), marked on four sides with dotted geomantic configurations, pierced, and strung upon a rigid pin around which they can freely revolve so as to produce one of the sixteen configurations at every throw; of this system, the geomantic kpelle strings (consisting of four tassels ending in coins or other tokens capable to taking two different values) and 81

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the Southern African Hakata divinatory tablets (four detached, marked tablets made of ivory or wood, and thrown so as to produce any of the 16 configurations) may be considered straightforward, systematic transformations (see Table 2.3). Meanwhile the Arabian geomancy spread, via Persia, Byzantium, and via Arabian and Jewish intellectuals at Southern European courts (Islamic, Sicilian, Norman, Spanish, Portuguese etc.) and other centres of learning, to European medieval secret sciences, to develop in Renaissance magic of Northwestern Europe, and finally to end up as parlour games and peasant divination (Punktierkunst) in West and Central Europe. From West Africa, geomancy spread to the New World in the context of trans-Atlantic forced demic diffusion at the time of the slave trade And today, both West Africa (foremost Nigeria and Benin) and the New World (Cuba, and the Southern USA) are major centres for the further spread of African geomancy among people of African and European extraction, particularly via the Internet and quasi-touristic apprenticeships.

2.4. Where do we go from here?

Neither for geomancy, nor for mankala, can we maintain a sub-Saharan African origin, now that (aided by search facilities greatly enhanced in the last two decades of the Internet and the digitalisation of academic libraries worldwide), we have added fifteen years of focused data collection to our 1997 analysis, having refined the analytical and conceptual tools to approach the distributional analysis of formal cultural systems rather more rigorously and methodically; meanwhile recent developments in genetics, comparative linguistics and comparative mythology have actually provided the models against which to situate the historical interpretation of the distribution maps of specific cultural traits. What remains is the realisation so beautifully brought out by the complex histories of mankala and geomancy that Africa is very much a part of the wider world and has always been just that, culturally, genetically, and linguistically. 82

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What was not yet clear to me in 1997, is that we must combine a number of greatly disparate phases in order to account for the African involvement in the wider world: 1. Out of Africa, 80-60 ka BP; until then Pandoras Box was fully African. 2. Back-to-Africa movement from c. 15 ka BP onwards, and intensified and particularised by the Pelasgian movement from the Late Bronze Age, which brought back into Africa many traits that had meanwhile (ever since the Out-of-Africa migration) percolated, transformed, been innovated, and added to within the Asian continent. 3. The forced demic diffusion from Africa in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 4. Very recent globalisation of the last hundred years or less, which resulted in a worldwide percolation of cultural traits and initiatives, in which African traits (music, dance, rites, therapies) were particularly successful in intercontinental transmission and reception. Ironically, none of these four movements tallies with Bernals Black Athena thesis, and in fact, that thesis secondary, Afrocentrist reformulation (inspired by a combination of (3) and (4)) grosso modo goes against (2). Bernal has been cited, and has sometimes flattered himself, as an amazing case of being right for the wrong reasons. At the 2008 Warwick international conference on his work (Orrells et al. 2011), his Black Athena thesis was more or less canonised as a part of mainstream cultural history. However, when significant Dutch contributions to the debate including my own were reprinted in 2011 under the carefully chosen title Black Athena Comes of Age, this was intended to question such canonisation. The more I think about Bernals Black Athena thesis (total socio-cultural dependence of Ancient Greece upon Ancient Egypt, and in the later Afrocentrist reformulation, total dependence of Ancient Egypt upon prehistoric sub-Saharan Africa), and the more I reap the benefits of the magnificent inspiration it has given me and other scholars over the past twenty-five years, the more I yet realise that, when all is said and done, 83

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Bernal is also sometimes a case of simply being wrong for the wrong reasons amongst which loom large: a passion for ideology and for adhominem arguments; the reliance on a sociology of knowledge of his own invention, from which he subjectively derives the right to claim a superior, privileged insight over anyone disagreeing with him (as if he himself could escape the structural implications of his own intriguing position within the World System); and the determination (in the shadow of the towering intellectual figures that crowded his childhood, including Joseph Needham, Alan H. Gardiner, Meyer Fortes, and his father John Desmond Bernal) to make a lasting imprint on the history of ideas. However, as an overarching framework for the present books argument these details of fact and interpretation are less important than the realisation that, for long-range global cultural history, that which separates the continents is less important than that which unites them. The common insistence on the distinct identity of continents, and their specific geographical definitions, reflects, not immutable facts of humans cultural history over the past score millennia, but the vicissitudes of geopolitics of the past few hundred years with special emphasis on the global history of European expansion, and more regionally on the redefinition of the Mediterranean region from a complex unitary state (that of the Muslim Ottoman empire) straddling vast expanses of both the northern and the southern shore, to a patchwork quilt of northern expansionist Christian states imposing (19th c. CE) their military, administrative and economic power on the southern shore. Given humankinds incessant drive towards migration and towards interaction and exchange (however unequal and violent at times) between its constituent parts, and given the strong genetic and linguistic indications of Anatomically Modern Humans common origin in as recent a period as the Middle Palaeolithic, it is unlikely that the cultural history of crucial advances in human thought could be analysed and understood from a regional or uni-continental perspective alone. Instead, a transcontinental perspective seems far more appropriate. This will be one of our main guiding principles in the next Chapters. Moreover, the examples of mankala and geomancy have given us important clues as to the methodological strategies that may lead us to greater insight in the emergence and spread of cyclicity, transformation and element cosmology as crucial steps in the intellectual history of human-

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kind ultimately leading, among other things, to the Modern natural science that has fathomed our universe and that has conceptually and technologically reshaped our life world. Like in the case of mankala and geomancy, let us begin with typological and conceptual analysis, then project our typologically re-arranged data onto the world map, then interpret the resulting distributions historically in the light of such additional genetic, linguistic, archaeological, comparative-ethnographic and comparative-mythological evidence as is available. Admittedly, if this investigative process makes us conclude that humankinds cultural history is coherent and continuous across the continents, this can hardly count as an independent research finding since our very method is predicated on the assumption of such coherence and continuity. However, in the humanities and social sciences, however painstaking our research and however rigorous our methodologies, not definitive proof but merely enhanced plausibility is the best result we may hope for in regard of our hypotheses. What we gain in the process is not only greater subjective (therefore potentially deceptive, ideologically distorted!) insight in the pattern of the past, but also greater awareness of the factors of particularist, sectional interest (of geopolitical and class elites within the World System) and of ideology that produced earlier pictures of the past, and that had to be deconstructed before a more convincing picture of the past could emerge as a result of our research endeavours, however imperfect. Here the original inspiration of Bernals Black Athena thesis remains unabated. As I shall argue below, the Presocratics did not invent the fourelement cosmology, but have to be understood as the peripheral receivers, and distorters, of a transcontinental element-based cosmological system that, at the onset of the Axial Age in the first millennium BCE, had had a long and complex history to which the Ancient Greeks had contributed so little that they do not deserve the pride of place granted to them in official accounts of the history of philosophy. The Presocratics and their allegedly unique contribution to the history of human thought constitute another hegemonic myth, intended to deny the massive transcontinental indebtedness of Ancient Greek civilisation (and by implication, their selfappointed heirs, Modern North Atlantic civilisation) to older and more original Asian and African traditions, whose main defect has been that the regions associated happened to be in the clutches of European colonial domination by the nineteenth century CE. Deconstructing that myth, and replacing it by a better founded, less hegemonic account stressing the 85

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transcontinental complementarity of the intellectual achievements of us, Anatomically Modern Humans, in the course of millennia, is the purpose of the present book. If we wish to understand the seedbed out of which Western philosophy has grown, we need to look Before the Presocratics, and adopt a stance that is both long-range in time, and transcontinental in space. The specialist philosophical reader, meanwhile, may wonder why, of all possible philosophical themes and topics, divination has to be our guideline when tracing the antecedents of the Presocratics back into prehistoric times, and transcontinentally. After all, whereas the Stoics have been known for their sympathy for divination (e.g. Cicero 1975), and also, subsequently, Neoplatonics often dabbled in magic, there is scarcely any evidence of a Presocratic interest in divination on the contrary, the mainstream interpretation of their intellectual movement has been in terms of a move away from, not towards, magic (e.g., Thales predicted a solar eclipse through astronomy, not divination), and this is among the main reasons why they are held to have initiated (Western) philosophy. After constituting part of the European academic curriculum until well into the 18th c. CE, astrology subsequently was rejected, and despite its popular revival from the late 19th-century on in the North Atlantic region, most philosophers today consider, with Popper, what once was the Queen of Sciences, a mere pseudo-science (for discussion and references, cf. van Binsbergen 2003: Ch. 7, 2005b/2013). However, divination (a recognised universal of Anatomically Modern Humans; Brown 1991) is the structured interrogation of the supernatural on existential questions, in the light of a coherent, collective world-view and thus simply the most widespread repository of elementary / rudimentary philosophical thought imaginable. Let us freely explore this repository, regardless of the importance we attach to the outcomes of divination, wherever and whenever. Having thus cleared, with our Case Study I, our building site and laid out our principal conceptual and methodological tools, let us now turn to Case Study II, in which the theme of cyclicity, transformation and element cosmology comes back in totally unexpected forms, not in the Ionian and South Italian trappings of the famous Presocratics, but in the unfamiliar and internally contradictory complexities of an African clan system, that of the Nkoya people of Zambia.

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Chapter 3. Case study II. The puzzling clan system of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa: A triadic, catalytic transformation cycle of elements in disguise?

3.1. Nkoya clans

In South Central Africa, the Nkoya people are among the inhabitants of the wooded plateau of western central Zambia on the Zambezi / Kafue watershed. Their history, socio-political organisation and religious forms have constituted major topics of my work ever since the early 1970s. The people who today, after an intensive ethnicisation process in the course of the 20th century, ethnically identify as Nkoya, and who speak dialects of what they recognise as the Nkoya language, had been organised in fragmentary small states, under more or less powerful rulers (Myene, sing. Mwene), for several centuries at least before they became tributary to the Luyana / Lozi / Barotse kingdom in the Zambezi Flood Plain to the west. Thus, with their recent Lozi overlords, they became incorporated (1900) into the colonial state of Northern (initially North-western) Rhodesia, which in 1964 gave way to the postcolonial state of the Republic of Zambia. Ever since political incorporation, Nkoya Myene have acted as members of the Lozi ruling aristocracy, which however did not prevent them from constant and serious friction, throughout the 20th century, with the Lozi Paramount Chief and with aristocrats of more unambiguously Lozi extraction. Nkoya formal political organisation has retained the remnants of an elaborate ceremonial court culture even after incorporation in the political system of the Lozi, who historically have much in common with the Nkoya anyway.

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Nkoya clans are named sub-national groupings, of which less than two dozen can be identified in contemporary social life and in Rev. J. Shimunikas compilation of Nkoya oral traditions, entitled Likota lya Bankoya. Clan membership is ambilineally inherited. Clans are not necessarily exogamous. There are indications that clans used to be rather localised, subdividing the extended Nkoya territory among them and managing its natural resources both economically and ritually. Each clan has a hereditary ruler whose title is now integrated, as that of a (usually junior) Mwene, into the overall Nkoya political organisation. In the pre-colonial, especially the pre-statal, period, clan leaders were ritual rather than political authorities, and often were women. Plausibly clan leadership was transformed into the institution of kingship, Wene, under influence of external conditions such as the rise of long-distance trade, the violent encroachment of neighbouring states, and the arrival of new, presumably Sunda-influenced, models of political culture. Nkoya traditions situate the origins of clans (mikoka, plur.; mukoka, sing.) at the very origin of society; their myth of the origin of kinship is in fact a story of a contest between clans (Likota lya Bankoya 3 and 4). The restricted number of only six clans being mentioned in the cosmogony of Chapter 3 of Likota differs strikingly from the nearly two dozen that appear in the rest of that Chapter and in contemporary Nkoya social life. Apparently this inconsistency is accounted for by considering each of the six cosmogonic clan names to be triple in that each clan has two nicknames (myahi) in addition to its real name, and this is certainly how contemporary Nkoya interpret the situation; however, below we will come to a different and obviously better interpretation. There are other inconsistencies. Whereas the informants of Table 3.1 distinguished between Shungu and Kale as different clans (possibly paired if Shungu is Barbel Fish and Kale is understood as Fish Spear), the tradition reflected in Likota lya Bankoya considers Shungu and Kale as identical. Moreover, of the ten clans that are associated each with a royal title (van Binsbergen 1992: 195), only six feature in Likotas cosmogony. Two of the most prominent kingships of the twentieth-century Nkoya scene are owned by clans not featuring in the cosmogony. This is for instance the case for the kingship of Mutondo. However, the central myth of the origin of kingship, as related in Likota, is in fact an aetiology of Mutondos 88

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associated clan name, Sheta i.e. Turner, paired with the Nkonze, Lickers, who likewise do not feature in the cosmology. Neither does the kingship of Kabulwebulwe feature in the clan list however, from extensive archival sources dating from c. 190050 it is clear that the Kabulwebulwe title, although considered senior once incorporated into the colonial state (and surviving because it was too far East to be under the suffocating Lozi influence), was at the time that of a mere Big Man seeking to establish himself as royal an outsider to the time-honoured traditional system, in other words. The identity of Kale and Kahare which is stressed by many informants and also by Smith & Dale (1920), is not borne out by my specific informants of Table 3.1, who see the Kale clan as associated with Mwene Yuvwenu, but the Nyembo clan with Mwene Kahare. An interview I had with the present Mwene Yuvwenu in Kaoma, Zambia, in July 2011 could not throw light on the matter. The clan name Kale is a particularly puzzling element. In accordance with Manchester School51 conventions, and duly acknowledged in my edition of Likota, I have omitted the plural personal prefixes Ba- in the English rendering of the names of social groups. Clans are also social groups, but their names in true totemic fashion tend to be composed of a lexical root designating an animal species (or other items in the natural world), prefixed by Ka-, the singular personal prefix. The list of Table 3.1 reads KaLavwe, KaMbunze, etc. in the original Nkoya. By the same token, the proper name Kale as an alternative name for the KaShungu clan came to be interpreted as composed of Ka+Le, where Kais the common personal singular prefix, and -Le might be interpreted either as deriving from ku-le-nga, to create (-nga as iterative suffix), or from mu-li-nga, spear: some interpret the Nkoya clan name Kale as fish spear. In actual fact, however, the name Kale does not follow the syntactic productivities of Nkoya as a Central Bantu language, but is a
50

Especially: reports of the Gielgud-Anderson expedition to the Hook of the Kafue, 1900, Zambia National Archives: files BS1/93 and KTJ 1/1 outletters Mumbwa.

The Manchester School was a movement within social anthropology, initiated and for decades led by the Oxford / Manchester anthropologist Max Gluckman, and particularly dominant in the field of South Central African studies (present-day Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi); in this connection many standards and conventions of research methodology and ethnographic reporting were established. In the first quarter century of my career I worked mainly within the Manchester paradigm, which earned me a Simon Professorship at Manchester. Cf. van Binsbergen 2007a.

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totally foreign element, with not a Bantu but presumably an IndoEuropean, Afroasiatic or Austric etymology. Meaning Black One, the name Kale is frequently found all over the extensive Old World distribution area of Gypsies; this area does extend to Africa, where iron-working Gypsy groups have been studied e.g. by Bernhard Streck (1995) in Sudan, predictably in the domain of the scrap iron industry. In the Nkoya context, as well as among their eastern neighbours the Ila the name Kale occurs as an alias for Kahare / Kahale, one of the principal royal titles of the Nkoya (and, not by accident, the one closest, in culture and geographical association, to the Ila region). The oral traditions associated with the Kahale title stress the original Kahales association with a foreign origin, iron working, Conus shell ornaments, and the introduction of a new type of xylophone-centred royal music enough to suggest that the Kahare title may ultimately derive from some transoceanic offshoot of a South Asian itinerant trading and metal-working group with special interest in music the general Gypsy pattern. The fact that the Kale clan does not feature among the cosmogonic clans is another indication of the foreignness of the Kale name. Karst (1931a: 533f) was among the first to reconstruct a considerable influx of Bantuids from South Asia, partly in the form of peoples broadly associated with the Gypsy stock; my ongoing research into African-Asian continuities in pre- and protohistory adduces empirical evidence to the same effect. Meanwhile, iron working and royal orchestra also attend the other South Central African kings of the savannah (Vansina 1966), and I think that also in those cases the Gypsy / South Asia link must be seriously considered.

How to interpret the dazzling complexity of this Nkoya array of clans? I will present two interpretative models, one in standard theoretical terms of the anthropology of complementary opposition, the other in terms of an element cycle of transformations consisting of triads.
name (Nkoya) Kale Langu52 Lavwe, Shihondo name (English) fish spear? bell goat name (Nkoya) Nyembo Nzovu Sheta name (English) sparkler (honeycomb? drone?) elephant turner, dizzy one, bull roarer, tether, peg, fire-

52

The actual clan name as recorded is Langu-Nkwehe, bell-hawk.

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Makanga Mbunze Mukuni Mvula Nkomba Nkonze Nkwehe Ntabi Nyembo

guinea fowl buzzard, fish eagle firewood rain mushroom antbear?, licker hawk spear-hunter bee, drone

Shihombo Shikumba Shilombe Shimunziko Shungu Tumbwa Wishe Nyembo Nzovu

bore tinderbox beehive milombe tree: wood suitable for carving especially of royal drums kindling (out of mushroom) barbel fish vulture smoke sparkler (honeycomb? drone?) elephant

The arrangement in two columns is only for economy of space and does not imply, here, any pairing of specific clans appearing on the same line. A sparkler is a small metal thong within a tinder-box, which when scraped against a piece of flint produces the spark that sets linted mushroom kindling afire. It is fitting that the Nyambo clan is also called Kamanisha, the finisher, in implied recognition of its catalytic function. Table 3.1. Nkoya clans.53

3.2. Interpreting the array of Nkoya clans: (1) in terms of complementary opposition
In Les formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse mile Durkheim (1912) argued (on the basis of early ethnographic data on Aboriginal Australian societies he himself had never visited) that strong links exist between any one social group, conceived as a religious congregation, and its objects of worship. These objects (in the Australian case designated totems by the ethnographers and analysts) are claimed, by Durkheim, to be arbitrarily chosen and to ultimately symbolise the social as such. Durkheims analysis (like Freuds struggle with similar questions round about the same time in Totem und Tabu; Freud 1915) was limited to just one theoretically conceived social group, and did not involve the social and political interaction between several groups, each with their own objects of
According to a Group Interview with Mwene Mutondo Royal Council, Shikombwe Royal Establishment, Kaoma District, October 18, 1977, continued October 19 and 20, 1977; most senior headmen were present but not the king himself, Mwene Mutondo Kalapukila, who on October 20, 1977 granted me a formal audience in the presence of all senior headmen, cf. van Binsbergen 1992: 195, 478; for a comprehensive study of precolonial Nkoya society with emphasis on the economy, see van Binsbergen 2012b.
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veneration. These two authors exemplify an intense industry of totemism studies around 1900. The decisive step towards a consideration of totemism as involving the interplay between several groups was set by Claude Lvi-Strauss (1962a and especially 1962b). His illuminating re-analysis of totemism showed how the juxtaposition of social groups in a traditional context takes the form of the juxtaposition of the respective groups object of veneration. Each totemic group is identified with a particular vegetal or animal species from the natural world, and observes special taboos vis--vis that species which do not apply to the other sections of society. This special relationship, Lvi-Strauss argues, is based not on some irrational, animistic propensity towards nature worship including the belief that animals are truly Mans ancestors; neither on the fact that these species (as Malinowski would have it; cf. Worsley 1967) represent individual Mans selective interest in nature, in other words are good to eat; neither on the fact that they mark, with an overload of anxiety, the situations which are particularly crucial for the perpetuation of society as a whole as in Radcliffe-Browns view (Malinowski 1954; RadcliffeBrown 1952; cf. Homans 1941). Lvi-Strauss claims instead that the species are selected for simple rational economy: because pairs of such species are the most ready expressions of both the opposition and the complementarity which exist simultaneously between the two groups thus identified, in other words, because these particular species are eminently good to think about. The two groups involved are not only contrasted (by names and symbolism), and thus presented as in opposition to one another; they also complement each other, uniting by reference to a shared underlying aetiological principle which explains the pairing up of the two natural species.

species clan A Nkomba, Mushroom Shimunziko, Kindling

54

clan B Wishe, Smoke Wishe, Smoke

aetiological principle smoke is a sign of consumption of the mushroom wick in the tinderbox smoke is a sign of consumption of the kindling smoke is a sign of consumption of the wood when the tree is hollowed out in preparation of the drum

Mukuni ba Shilombe, Wishe, Smoke Wood of the Shilombe tree (of which royal drums are made)

54

The idea of a (probably indirect) East Asian borrowing, of this conception of Wood

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Nyembo, Bee, Drone Nyembo, Sparkler

Wishe, Smoke Shihombo, Tinderbox

smoke chases the bees so that their honey can be collected the sparkler ignites the tinderbox

Table 3.2. Complementary opposition in the nomenclature of two joking clans in Western Zambia, nineteenth and twentieth century CE.55

Now the Nkoya clans are all linked in pairs of complementary opposition. The situation is rendered complicated since each clan is said to have a number of nicknames in addition to its official name; this results in a kaleidoscopic optionality in naming clans and adds extra fun to the joking process. Table 3.2 makes the complex underlying structure of clan names, nicknames and reasons for punning transparent for a number of interlocking clans, most of them arranged around the smoke theme. It is the aetiological principle (i.e. a specific reference to a concrete domain of social, productive or reproductive local practice) which explains the meaning behind a particular pair of nicknames, and which sets the tune for the jokes to be improvised between the members of the two clans involved. The clans see each other as having intermarried in the distant past, in the context, or at the conclusion, of violent conflicts which have been reconciled but remain encoded in the joking relationship expressing both inter-clan conflict and sociable complementarity between the paired clans (cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1940, 1949; Wilson 1957). It is the nicknames which bring out the special relationship between two clans and thus provide a never-ending source of inspiration for jokes between joking clan partners.

and Fire, into Nkoyaland comes up when we realise that in Giles Chinese biographical dictionary (1898: 210, entry 525) we find that the Chinese Fire god Chung Li (lit.: Heavy Black) is often represented as two separate personages (brothers), ruling over the elements Wood and Fire, and entrusted with the administration of Heaven and Earth, respectively. However, wood has been humankinds most obvious fuel throughout history from the Lower Palaeolithic onwards, so this particular similarity between China and Nkoyaland may be purely accidental. However, below we will encounter many more such similarities, to an extent that we will eventually propose a relatively recent (1st or 2nd mill. CE) East Asian cultural intrusion into South Central Africa, possibly via South Asia.
55

Modified after: van Binsbergen 1992. The clans mentioned under A tend to be regarded as royal.

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Naming and ritual (i.e. tabooed) practices serve to identify specific social groups and to articulate special relationships of complementary opposition such as exist between specific groups without pervading the entire society. They constitute a formal structural scheme. The members of the culture in question may themselves be conscious of the aetiological principle (they clearly are in the case of Nkoya clan joking, which largely consists of citing, and punningly varying, the very contents of the aetiological principle): bee and smoke in the practical context of bee-keeping; smoke and mushroom in the practical context of fire-making, etc. However, the aetiological principle linking two clan names may also go lost under the free play of jocular, linguistic and mythological free variation, and in the context of new socio-cultural conditions which over the years have replaced those which originally informed the specific articulation of complementary opposition encoded in a myth, rite etc. If clan names like the Nkoya ones would survive in contexts (like twentieth-century Zambian capital cities) where firewood and honey are no longer freely collected and have been largely replaced by purchased charcoal and manufactured sugar, a researcher of the twenty-second century CE might still be able to trace the oppositions involved but she or he would need a lot of additional historical information before hitting on the practical aetiological principle that would make sense of both the names and their pairing. The structuralist method in the anthropological analysis of formal cultural products such as myths, rites, ceremonies, arts, decoration patterns, although not the universal paradigm it was once claimed to be, accords us at least a theoretical perspective on these situations; occasionally this method even allows us to tentatively reconstruct such underlying aetiological principles as have gone lost to consciousness. The argument in this subsection stresses, in classic structuralist fashion, that Nkoya clan nomenclature might be understood as a collection of binary oppositions manifesting what below we will call a recursive structure. There is however evidence of a more complex and more dynamic structure of threesomes that transcends recursive repetition. This we will now explore, since it offers an insight clearly superior to, more illuminating and more convincing than, that in terms of binary oppositions, and provides, at long last, the real stepping-stone towards our transcontinental argument on element cosmologies.

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3.3. Interpreting the array of Nkoya clans: (2) As evidence of a cycle of transformations consisting of triads
During my forty years of research among the Nkoya, I have often been struck by inconsistencies in the twentieth-century treatment of clans by otherwise highly knowledgeable Nkoya informants. There is a constant tension between two modalities: bundles consisting of two, three or more clan names are frequently cited, but whereas for one informant these multiple names are just synonyms for one and the same clan, for others they are opposites reminiscent of complementary oppositions and therefore refer to different clans. Moreover, if all clans can be paired to most other clans, through a pair of meaningful opposites (in the manner set out in the preceding section) inviting joking and punning, the result is kaleidoscopic but conducive, not to cohesive social structure, but to sociopolitical fragmentation and incoherence. Finally, it appears as if there is often, or always, an implied third party when two clans are in complementary opposition: Smoke chases the Bees when honey is collected, but this is predicated on the presence of a third party, Fire; and the same argument may be made for other binary aetiologies applied to Nkoya clan names. Yet there must be some more definite structure, for joking ties between clans regulate important aspects of socio-ritual life such as defining a set of people who are a persons institutionalised burial agents, whereas in life the same set of people features as a last but unfailing resort in the, far from rare, situation that the appeal to matrilateral and patrilateral kinsmen (for food, shelter, protection against witchcraft, support, contributions to bride wealth to be paid) has all been in vain. Clearly, much depends on the meaning of the obscure word myahi, which occurs only once in the text of Likota, and which is not a common word in contemporary spoken Nkoya either. The interpretation as nickname suggest that in the threesome Nyembo or Shihombo Shimunziko Wishe we are really dealing with one clan Bee / Drone / Sparkler (alias Tinderbox) which also has two other names: Kindling and Smoke. Social practice among contemporary Nkoya however shows that this is a total misreading. In a given situation one may find two people jokingly insulting each other: 95

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You, you are nothing, you are mere Kindling, and we are the Tinderbox that puts you afire and annihilates you.

Or alternatively:
You may be the Sparkler, but the only test of your force lies in us, Smoke.

In reality, behind the formula Nyembo or Shihombo: Shimunziko and Wishe three very different clans are implied, which stand in a relationship of causation, destruction, or catalytic action. That this is the correct interpretation is clear from the otherwise enigmatic statement in Likota Ch. 3:
The mwahi Shimunziko has the following meaning. When these people wanted to get honey they had to make a fire to scare away the bees; because of burning their hands every time and having smoke in their eyes they were called Kindling and Smoke.

By the same token, the alternative name of the Nyembo (Bee, Sparkler) clan as Kamanisha, The Finisher, also suggests that this clan plays (a) the destructor role in a threesome with (b) a destroyed and (c) a catalytic element. Let us take a closer look at one particular clan triad: Lavwe, Shihondo, Sheta, and Shikumba[wuyuvu]. This triad is more difficult to interpret because it involves a semantic twist (Fig. 3.1):

not explicitly stated by my informants, this schema is based on my own interpretation, cf. the Louvain School methodology (van Binsbergen 2003: 516, 2011g) Fig. 3.1. The clan triad: Lavwe, Sheta, and Shikumba[wuyuvu] illustrated.

Here we find the clan: as the passive element, the destroyed, the goat (Lavwe) tethered to a pole; as the active restrainer ( = destructor) a string of bark rope (Shikumba) serving as tether; 96

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and finally as catalyst (finisher / Kamanisha / Sparkler / Shihondo) remaining passive but providing anchorage for the tether, the pole, which is the Turner (Sheta). Although domestic goats have become rare in the Nkoya villages in Kaoma district they once were part of Nkoya life. Bark rope makes up the usual binding material for a great variety of purposes, from house building (walls are formed in that the loam or dagga remains suspended in coils of bark rope twisted between a row of vertical poles, hence pole and dagga for traditional village architecture in this part of the world) to packaging elephant meat for bicycle dispatch from the bush to the village. Implicitly the vertical pole56 that serves as the Turner around which destructor and destroyed turn around is a cosmological image of the celestial axis throughout the Old World and the New World, going back to a common fount of Upper Palaeolithic hunters astronomy (cf. Rappenglck 1999). The phenomenon of diurnal rotation of visible stars around the celestial pole is manifest to the naked-eye for anyone caring to gaze up to heaven more than once within the time span of a night. Given the generally high
56

There is an interesting parallel to the formal structure of the Nkoya goat-centred triad, and the Ancient Egyptian portable shrine of the GmG-wt / imiut associated with Anubis, the ancestral cult, sexual reproduction, and at the same time offering a condensed image of the world (Stricker 1963-1989: 493 f., 502 f.; Khler 1975). The shrine consists of a bowl containing a fluid (often sacrificial blood of domestic animals), a pole (most probably a conscious evocation of the celestial axis, whose function corresponds with the Ancient Egyptian god w / Shu standing in that bowl, and an animal skin (preferably speckled or variegated, e.g. a leopards) hanging from the top of the pole. The skin stands both for a churn and for the star-spangled vault of heaven especially the region around the northern celestial pole revolving on the celestial axis (the vertical pole). Sve-Sderbergh 1945, in another version of the Ancient Egyptian story of The Two Brothers, mentions an imiut involving a blackand-white (i.e. by an almost globally distributed symbolism shamanic, divinatory, liminal) cow-hide dripping with blood. Recent interpretations of early dynastic representations of the imiut (T. Wilkinson 2001) believe to see evidence of human sacrifice. Under that assumption the bowl would have been filled with human blood. One might even read a rudimentary three-element doctine in this liturgical arrangement. There are very ancient shamanic resonances here: a widespread shamanic belief is that, on behalf of the community or the individual client, the shaman moves, along the celestial axis, up to Heaven and down to the Underworld for information and medicine; in Northern Eurasia and elsewhere, shamans mantles and aprons tend to be adorned with representations of the stars and luminaries; also cf. Fig. 8.5., below.

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development of Nkoya astronomy which allows the expert Nkoya hunters to orientate by night, and the veneration of white, debarked vertical poles in the regions prophetic movement of Mupumani (1914-1915) and, to this day, in the Bituma cult (for both, cf. van Binsbergen 1981), I have little doubt that also for the Nkoya the vertical pole once evoked the celestial axis, but I have made no specific enquiries on this point.

(a, left) portable shrine, Deir el Bahari, New Kingdom; source: Anonymous, n.d. [2005]; (b, right) from The Book of the Dead of Lady Cheritwebeshet (here the feline is a serval) Fig. 3.2. Ancient Egyptian representation of the GmG-wt.

The semantic twist in the interpretation of the Lavwe, Sheta, and Shikumba[wuyuvu] triad now comes in, when the destructor is called, not Shikumba (bark), but Shikumbawuyuvu, Bark Do You Hear? This goes back to a story involving Luhamba and Katete, a mythical twin of opposite sex, whose male component, Luhamba, is remembered as the first, legendary, male king of the Nkoya people, the first Nkoya Mwene to turn royal power to a military use in order to ward off the war threat from the side of the Humbu people (myth acknowledges the initial preponderance of female kings, and there are strong indications that male kingship could be seen as usurpation of a female prerogative by men engaging in warfare and long-distance trade; van Binsbergen 1992).

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ABOUT THE SHIKUMBAWUYUVU CLAN THE PEOPLE OF THE BARK CONTAINER WHICH COULD HEAR 1 When Luhamba and Katete were being hidden by the Mbunze Luhamba in a bark container, Katete in a mat 2 the Humbu came to the village of Lyovu lya Mbuwa and asked: Tell us if there is any Sheta here? The Mbunze answered: There are no Sheta left alive. 3 This is what we are saying and if the bark container had been a person it would have heard. Do you hear, Bark Container? Also, if the reed mat had been a person it would have heard. Do you hear, Reed? The Humbu heard these words of Lyovu lya Mbuwa. 4 They left and camped on the Miluzi, a tributary of the Lalafuta, and then went along the Lushimba, a tributary of the Lufupa. Thus the Humbu war came to an end. (Likota, Ch. 7).

Luhamba is here addressed by the name of the container that protects him, and Katete by her own name. The name Katete however consists of the stem -tete (reed), preceded by the personal singular prefix: Mr or Mrs Reed. A similar play on Luhambas name was not possible in English translation: it is derived from a lexical root -hamba, to travel, with a prefix lu-, for royal things, singular. Incidentally, many hydronyms in South Central Africa also begin on the element lu-. This would lead to Royal Travelling Thing as the puzzling meaning of Luhambas name, or possibly Water course for Travelling. Some more light is cast on this name by comparative evidence from the Mwinilunga region on the Congo-Zambezi watershed, which is the ancestral home of many of todays inhabitants of the Nkoya region, going back only a few centuries. Here Victor Turner (!) described57 the Chihamba cult, with the same travelling lexical element, which then becomes very clear, for in this context Chihamba, the White Spirit, in close similarity with the Bituma cult among the Nkoya,58 is the god of a foreign food crop (known to the outside world to be originally American), killed but venerated so that the cults adherents may consume it safely. Symbolically there is continuity, over a very vast area extending from the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean to West and South Central Africa and across the Atlantic to Meso America, and even Japan and Indonesia, of such intimately inter57 58

Turner 1962. Incidentally, that authors name translates a Nkoya clan name.

Cf. van Binsbergen 1981. The Malawian Mbona cult is another case in point; cf. Schoffeleers 1992; van Binsbergen 2011g.

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twined themes as the dying vegetation god, Gods Child, food crops as Gods greatest gift to humankind,59 and the Celestial / Paradisiacal Twins, often but not invariably of opposite gender. The Paradisiacal Twins evoke a Flood theme (van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008), and it is no accident that in many Flood stories the gift of crops is a standard post-Flood occurrence (e.g. Genesis 8:21 f.). Whether (a) a historical fact of the second half of the second millennium CE in South Central Africa, or (as we suspect) (b) merely a symbolic theme stressing gender complementarity in the face of such male dominance as trade and warfare would generate, in both cases male usurpation of kingship, like kingship itself (which in itself is much older, in Africa, than half a millennium), is a symbolic innovation that relates perpendicularly to the traditional clan-based cosmology and symbolism. It therefore appears as if the reconstructed original clan triad Lavwe, Shihondo, Sheta, and Shikumba as illustrated in Fig. 3.1, was transformed into a statement mythically legitimating male kingship. The bark rope Shikumba tethering the Lawve clan becomes a bark container concealing the prospective male royal incumbent Luhamba Royal Travelling Thing.

The field of comparative mythology shows transcontinental continuities relating to Neolithic conditions of food production. All over the world we find the myth of the dying junior god or goddess whose body turns into food crops. This mytheme is attested (Mackenzie 1923; Bierhorst 1988) in Meso and North America (whence many of the worlds present-day food crops derive). Also sub-Saharan Africa has several cases interpretable in these terms, as mentioned above. Relevant for Africa in this connection are also the phytogeographical studies by Jeffreys, especially 1971, which claims direct trans-Atlantic transmission of maize from the New World to West Africa. Another cluster of such myths is found in the Ancient Mediterranean: Jesus of Nazareth, Thammuz / Dumuzi, Attis, the child Dionysus torn apart by the Titans, Osiris killed by Seth (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride; Frazer 1914 (with Ancient sources); Jacobsen 1970 (with Mesopotamian sources). Further attestations of this mytheme are from Japan ( Ukemochi-na-kami / Ogetsu; Anesaki 1964; Willis 1994: 114) and South East Asia (Dewi Sri, Hainuwele; Willis 1994: 117). This global distribution pattern is suggestive of a multicentred, multidirectional global maritime network of which I believe to see many other empirical traces (van Binsbergen 2012c, and especially with an extensive theoretical discussion 2012f; cf. this book, Fig. 2.17). Given the fact that the origin of the African food crops in question is in the Americas, one is tempted to hypothesise that not only the food crops but also their attending myths crossed over from the New World into Africa, and not necessarily (as claimed by Dick-Read 2005) via the Pacific / Indian Ocean detour, but directly across the Atlantic.

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And by this association, the link with the goat and the pole symbolism is eclipsed by other symbolic complexes similar to the clan triads but not in themselves part of the original, pre-statal clan structure: 1. Katete, Reed Person, Royal Princes, the Twin Sister who legitimates the male exercise of kingship by her brother Luhamba Royal Travelling Thing; one might be tempted even though our Pelasgian cross-model would suggest that much wider connectivities are involved here than just Egyptian ones to make an Egyptological connection at this point, and stress the similarity between the Nkoya mythical royal twins Katete and Luhamba, on the one hand, and two central royal pairs (constituting two of the five principal Ancient Egyptian royal titles from the First Dynasty onward: 2. She of the Reed and the Bee (nswt-bGt, in hieroglyphic writing ),60 where the reed (Earth) element in very clear in Katete, whereas the Bee61 (Air / Heaven) although more conspicuous in the Nyembo clan title could well be accommodated with the name of Luhamba Royal Travelling Thing. The connotations of long-distance displacement inherent in Luhambas name, and in the extreme geographical expanse of the symbolic

60 Both nswt-bGt and nbty have been extensively attested in the First Dynasty texts as compiled by Kaplony 1966.

In the Ancient Egyptian context, the bee is most prominently associated with the kingship of Lower Egypt, with the temple of the goddess Neith at Sas (pr bGt, House of the Bee), and with the legendary birth place and hiding place of orus at Chemmis A bGt,Horizon of the Bee in the Delta swamps. Ray (2003) reminds us that also the Sky god Nun is associated with the bee, but Egyptian gods tend to merge both in name and in associated characteristics. As a Bronze Age form of the Mother of the Waters, Neith in principle controls both the Waters Above (Heaven, in a later cosmology), and the Waters Below (the Ocean, and the Chaotic Abyss); in the myth of Horus trial Neith appears emphatically as holding sway over the Sky threatening to let it fall down if the verdict is not in favour of Horus (Gardiner 1932: 43a, 5.10a). Meanwhile the Egyptian cosmological symbolism helps us to understand an otherwise enigmatic third character mentioned in the same Likota passage, Lipepo, Royal Person Wind: he seems to be the Air / w / Shu, which connects Heaven and Earth, thus completing the triad. In the Nkoya context, the standard image of a viable human group (e.g. in wedding songs, in regard of the bride-takers) is that of a bees swarm or hive, and Mwene Lipupe, the first royal ancestress, is conceived as a Queen Bee.

61

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complex indicated in footnote 61, makes a connection with Ancient Egypt not totally preposterous especially against the extensive converging evidence of Egyptian survivals in subSaharan Africa already referred to above. , i.e. the Ancient Egyptian god3. The Two Ladies, nbty, desses WAdt / Wadjet / Uto and Nbt / Nekhbet, the kings protector goddesses in cobra and vulture shape respectively, often interpreted as signifying Upper and Lower Egypt. It is not only the twin and twinned nature of these goddesses, nor the occurrence of the vulture among Nkoya clan names (as well as the prominence of Mwene Shihoka, Snake, in Likotas mythical accounts!), but particularly the fact that in the conventional iconography as shown here, both goddesses are depicted in baskets that may have been the prototypes of the reed wrapping (so closely reminiscent of the Ancient Egyptian royal titles) and bark hive in which Katete and Luhamba were said to hide.62 4. The bark hive in which Luhamba (as if he were a bee, i.e. Nyembo) took refuge, has its own story of a triad to tell, as becomes clear from Fig. 3.3 and it is here that the triadic structure of Nkoya clan names comes particularly to the fore.

Reed wrapping (again with an Ancient Egyptian parallel, cf. Goneim 1956: Plate 8, between pp. 80 and 81, burial of a Libyan lady) also appears to have been a traditional royal burial custom among the Nkoya. When chased, a few centuries ago, from the Zambezi Flood Plain by the Lozi, the Nkoya allegedly carried their reed mats on their backs probably containing royal relics; the image is so intimately connected with Nkoya identity that when King Kahare Kabambi posed for a state photograph in 1977, he insisted on holding a rolled-up reed mat in his hand. In this connection it is relevant to remind ourselves that reminiscences of the nbty name in sub-Saharan Africa are not limited to the Nkoya. The kingdom of Mpororo, South West Uganda has a clan structure similar to that of the Nkoya, cf. Denoon 1972; Uzoigwe 1975. This kingdom was reputedly ruled by two queens, high priestesses of the god Niawingi; they were carried about in baskets (cf. Delme-Radcliffe 1905), and these were in the most literal sense living illustrations of the nbty hieroglyphic sign . My attention was drawn to this information by van der Sluijs 2005.

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Fig. 3.3. The bark hive as a potentially triadic icon.

In order to produce the kind of bark hive that one frequently finds in the vicinity of Nkoya villages, one makes two horizontal incisions and one vertical one in the bark of a thick tree trunk, then peels off the bark (2) from the trunk. A bark string (4) is attached to it, and it is suspended in the top of a tree. While here the bark hive is clearly the destroyed, one could argue whether the destructor is the axe (1) or the bark rope (4), and whether the catalyst is the original tree trunk (3) from which the bark is taken, the bark string, or again, the tree in which the hive is finally suspended. These points are only of secondary importance for the image of the bark hive is not actually used to produce the triadic logic of clan symbolism it only emulates that logic.

Table 3.3 demonstrates that nearly the entire nomenclature of Nkoya clan can be easily and convincingly cast in terms of such causally linked threesomes. The table follows the order of clans as given in the cosmogonic passage in Likota Ch. 3. Since 20th-century CE Nkoya actors have lost all awareness that in Nkoya clan nomenclature we are dealing with a transformation of an implied six-element system, the identification of the various cosmological elements involved (Table 3.3, right-hand column) is merely a reconstruction and wrought with uncertainty and ambiguity in some cases; yet the overall pattern is strikingly convincing, in my opinion.
no. destructor 1 controls the proposed aetiology process (catalyst) Shikumba [Lavwe, Sheta the bark rope conwuyuvu] Shihondo63 strains the goat but bark rope Goat (tethered Turner the pole reaches into [bark hive, see on a bark the sky text] rope); destroyed proposed element Aether or Wood

63

However, the word shihondo is generally considered to be obscure.

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Langu Bell Tumbwa Vulture, Fish Eagle Ntabi Spear Hunter

Nkwehe Hawk

Mbunze Buzzard

the bell chases the hawk but it is owned by the royal buzzard The fish eagle snatches the barbel fish but leaves the guinea fowl alone the elephant is the king of the earth yet the bottom-dwelling human kills it with his spear

Air

Shungu / Kale Makanga Barbel Fish Guinea Fowl

Water

Nzovu Elephant

Mulinga Spear

Earth

Nkomba Mushroom, Snuffbox

Mukuni Firewood

Shilombe Mulombe Wood From Which Royal Drums Are Made, so that they are immune to lightning Nyembo / Shihombo Sparkler Or Tinderbox

the fire consumes the dried mushroom in Wood or the tinderbox, but not Fire the wood from which royal drums are made

Wishe Smoke

Shimunziko Kindling

the kindling is transformed into smoke, but not the metal sparkler in the tinderbox

Fire or Metal

Table 3.3. Nkoya clan nomenclature as evocative of a triadic element cycle of transformations.

With Table 3.4, we inspect two clan names that have not been accommodated in Table 3.3: Nkonze and Mvula. These could be incorporated in the same overall schedule by adding a seventh element, even though the residual, secondary, and late nature of this seventh element is underlined by the latters hybrid and superfluously repetitive nature:
no. destructor 7 Nkonze Licker destroyed Mvula Rain catalyst Sheta Turner proposed aetiology proposed element

The junior kings get their share of Rain, but the senior kings Aether, who are the connecSky, Rain tion between Heaven and Earth control the process

Table 3.4. Nkoya clan nomenclature as evocative of a triadic cycle of transformations, with Nkonze and Mvula accommodated.

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In the Nkoya myth of the Cauldron of Kingship (Likota, 4; with close Eurasian reminiscences especially in the Celtic and Mongolian domain; cf. van Binsbergen 2010a) the Turners obtain the kingship by going around the boiling Cauldron containing the Game Meat of Kingship, but the Lickers get their share by licking the plates after the Turners meal, and the entire operation is concluded with the falling of beneficial Rain Mvula, the demiurge from heaven, child of the High God, and the pronounced origin of Kingship. Admittedly, this royal extension requires us to use the Sheta / Turner element twice, for it already features in the first element: Lavwe / Sheta / Shikumba[wuyuvu] in Table 3.3. This is certainly an irregularity that should not pass without comment, for it is (just like the inclusion of the linguistically and conceptually foreign onomastic element Kale) another indication that, although the clan structure can be taken to have been the basis out of which the royal structure has been largely shaped, the domain of kingship is yet essentially discontinuous with that of clanship. In other words, kingship encompasses alien elements that do not systematically spring from the Nkoya pre-statal symbolic system such as enshrined in the clan nomenclature. Such a conclusion should not surprise us: in an earlier study (van Binsbergen 1993 / 2003b) I demonstrated in a comprehensive itemised analysis the same fundamental discontinuity between the values and practices of Nkoya village life in the 19th and 20th century CE, on the one hand, and those of Nkoya royal courts in the same period, on the other. Whereas the village communities are pacifist, based on reciprocity, productive, and publicly (!) abhor sorcery the royal courts are violent, more or less openly engage in sorcery, reject reciprocity, and tend to be not productive but usurpatory. This means that the seventh clan triad I have added by means of Table 3.4 cannot be taken as the recovery of an initially lost or overlooked integral part of the original traditional clan structure. It must be seen as a specific aberration testifying to the attempt to account for an essentially alien conception of kingship yet in terms of a pre-existing model of six clan triads. The story of the Cauldron of Kingship (Likota Ch. 4, as cited above) restates the same seventh clan triad in narrative, mythical form. 105

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We have three more steps to go, before we have brought the Nkoya clan system within the transcontinental orbit of the transformation cycle of elements. In the first place, it is now clear that the term myahi, which at the lexical level we have already identified as clans that are associated with one another as joking partners, at the cosmological level means as much as systematic transformations in a logic of cyclic causation. Secondly, what the cosmogonic section of Likota (Ch. 3) appears to call the six original clans (mikoka), are in fact elements of phases, in the sense these terms are used to describe the w xng, five phases or five primal units in the Taoist five-element system (see below, next Chapter), or the primal units in Presocratic (roots, in Empedocles Fragments 6, later a similar idea re-occurred as stoicheion, irreducible element especially (according to Burkert 1959) in the mathematical and linguistic sense, but by implication also in reference to the composition of matter.64 The Nkoya system of triadic clan nomenclature is in fact a system of the cyclic transformation of six elements, each of which may take three characteristic shapes or values. The difference however with the Taoist and Presocratic views is that the Nkoya system is no longer understood by the local actors at the conscious level, but instead has exploded into aberrant multiplicity. In the Taoist system the same five elements always play, in turn, the role of destructor, destroyed, and catalyst, but in the Nkoya system these roles have become disconnected hence the number of elements, or clans, has multiplied from six to eighteen. This also suggests (and we shall come back to this point towards the end of this book) that the Nkoya system of clan nomenclature is not anything near the historical origin of what we may postulate, as a Working Hypothesis, to be an underlying Old World transformation cycle of elements: what the Nkoya have is a peripheral local elaboration, no longer governed by its initially informing logic, hence gone berserk. Thirdly, despite the apparent erosion of the Nkoya system, we must realise that it is far from unique, but in fact presents very striking resem-

Cf. Cook & Rosemont Jr 1984: 68, n. 7, where it is argued that the expression five phases is much to be preferred to five elements to render the Taoist conception.

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blances with the cycle of transformations that is at the heart of classic Chinese Taoism. We are here in the presence of an immanentalist logic of transformation that seems to have informed quadruple pairs of cosmogonic beings in Egyptian cosmology, many other similar applications of an element system in Africa, North America, India and Japan, and even four-element theories in early Greek philosophy. All these cosmologies will be discussed in greater or lesser detail below. Time for us to leave the Nkoya and South Central Africa behind for a while, and to embark on our long-range exploration, in space and time, of element cosmological systems.

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Chapter 4. Long-range, transcontinental manifestations of a transformation cycle of elements

4.1. Element cosmological systems worldwide

It is a widespread idea that the entire universe is composed of a handful of essences, which are combined and dissociated so as to produce the myriad concrete manifestations of reality. As we shall discuss in greater detail below, four elements65 were identified by the Presocratic Greek philosopher / shaman Empedocles of Acragas / Agrigentum in Graecia Magna / Southern Italy (fifth c. BCE). In the Western tradition Empedocles has been regarded as the inventor worldwide of an element-based cosmological scheme. The model was subsequently reformulated and divulged by Plato and especially Aristotle, and became the very cornerstone of Western natural science, astrology, medicine, psychology, literary and artistic symbolism and iconography66 including colour symbolism,67 until well into Early Modern times.68 It entered deeply into the

65

This concept has gained a new lease on life in the works of Deleuze and Guattari (1972; Guattari 1989); cf. Macauley 1998; van Binsbergen 2008.

In Western alchemical writings the four elements tend to be represented by conventional symbols, e.g. triangles standing on their base or top, intersected or not by a horizontal line. Chevalier & Gheerbrant (1994, s.v. lment) claim that there are basic line patterns to represent each of the four elements, e.g. wave, zigzag, log band which is interesting because these very patterns dominate the iconography of the Southern African divination tablets used in four-tablet divination a divinatory practice which forms one of the principal empirical referents in this book.
67

66

Cf. Lyle 2006, listing the four colours black, red, white and yellow as a basic IndoEuropean scheme, without however making the obvious connection with the four elements. Note the projection onto geography, where seas of all these four colours have been distinguished (albeit not unambiguously) since Ancient times. Also note

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esoteric traditions of mystery cults (Eitrem 1926-1927), Hermeticism,69 the Ancient Sabaeans of Yemen, the Qarmatians (Massignon 1974), alchemy, Islamic occult sciences (cf. Nasr 1964; Ullman 1972; Fad 1966), even surfacing in Post-Modern, globally distributed digital media and games such as Avatar, etc. However, this present argument will explore the Working Hypothesis that, in his Western (South Italian) periphery of a Greek world that had always been highly indebted to adjacent West Asia (regardless of possible connections further afield, in Asia and Africa), Empedocles may have merely codified, and corrupted, a thought system which, in various local variants, had been circulating throughout Eurasia a dozen millennia since the Upper Palaeolithic; or, according our Alternative Working Hypothesis, for a much shorter period but still since the Bronze Age (5-3 ka BP). As the authorities on the Sabaeans indicate,70 among this ethnic group the planets were known as Fathers, the elements as Mothers an interesting background to Islamic geomancy, where the initial set of four broken or unbroken lines, on which the entire divinatory procedure is based (cf. the six lines, one above the other, out of which each of the 64 hexagrams of Y Jng consists: , etc.), is also called Mothers. The same situation obtained in the most likely original milieu of Islamic geomancy, that of the I un al-af of Iraq c. 1000 CE (de Boer 1921: 90). These scholarly contexts were all highly indebted to Platos Timaeus, in which the symbolism of the mother as primal matter plays an important role (Timaeus 52b; cf. Johnson 1973; Plato 1975a). In Western astrology, the reference to mothers goes back at least to Vettius Valens.71 The latter distinguishes some twelve topi, artificial astropractically the same colours in Fig. 4.3 (also front cover) from Southern Africa. As late as the middle of the 19th c. CE, the London professor of chemistry Thomas Griffiths (1851) was honoured to explain to Queen Victoria of England the principles of Modern chemistry in the, then still eminently familiar, terms of the four elements of Empedocles.
69 Virgin 1885; Klein Franke 1973; Quispel 1992; Corpus Hermeticum 1945-54; Yates 1964; Waite 1893. 70 71 68

Carra de Vaux 1974; Shahrastani 1859; Chwolson 1968; de Boer 1921: 90, 1967.

Vettius Valens (c. 120 c. 175 CE; cf. Tester 1989: 47; no reference to mothers in this sense or in related senses is to be found in Bouch-Leclercqs monumental study of Greek astrology; although primal matter appears here in an Empedoclean sense as mre universelle, Bouch-Leclercq 1899: 13, while Earth features as mother of gods

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logical points on the horoscope, many of whose names resonate with the Arabic and Greek names of the sixteen basic configurations in geomancy which was to emerge nearly a millennium later; nonetheless, a detailed analysis (van Binsbergen 1996c) brings out that it is primarily other astrological concepts than the topi which inspired these geomantic configuration names. In West African Ifa divination, the expression mothers has been preserved to indicate the sixteen basic configurations (Ellis 188; Dennett 1968 / 1910: 149). Having examined the extent of Presocratic influence on a particularly influential alchemical text, the Turba philosophorum,72 Peter Kingsley (who from the 1990s has stressed rightly, but much to the dislike of mainstream classicists and historians of philosophy and of natural science Empedocles identity as a shaman besides that of a philosopher) states:
And yet behind these similarities of form and content lies something much more fundamental. Underneath the accretions of Islamic, alchemical and also Gnostic ideas, genuine teachings of the Presocratic philosophers are preserved at the very core of the Turba tradition. Elsewhere ( () [ Kingsley 1995a ]: chs 5, 15-24) I have outlined the route followed by these Presocratic teachings before they surfaced at Akhmim in Upper Egypt during the tenth century AD; the subsequent course of transmission as they penetrated eastwards as far as Iran; and last but not least the significance of the way that teachings which originally owed so much to the East eventually returned to the East. (italics added) (Kingsley 1994b).73

Although unwelcome to some classicists (Bremmer, for instance, rejects the very idea of the shamanistic roots of Greek poetry, including that of Empedocles; Bremmer 1993: 1993: 25), Kingsleys emphasis on the shamanic side of Empedocles is well-taken. His ideas form merely the culmination of a process, throughout the second half of the 20th c. CE, in which the specialists came to realise the impact of Asian shamanic thought on what until then merely appeared to constitute Greek rationality. The signs of this shamanic influence on classic Greek civilisation have been manifest to those who could read them. For instance, as Jasons companion, Medeia (significantly a Colchian, i.e. West Asian,
and of Heaven, e.g. pp. 31, 75n, 92.
72 73

Cf. Gratarolo / Waite 1896; Plessner 1954.

On the same East-West reverberations or pendulum-swing movement, cf. Frobenius 1923: passim, and Needham with Ling, 1961, Vol. I.

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princess) engaged in the dismemberment and cooking of her brother and of king Pelias (Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica); this is clearly reminiscent of shamanism, where reviving of the dead by the proper arrangement of their bones is a common theme right through to the sangoma cult in Southern Africa, where those making animal sacrifices meticulously collect the bones and guard them, for fear that enemies would get hold of these bones and undo the sacrifice. Once recognised in their proper identity, shamans (usually set apart as alien and bewildering) turn out to abound in the classical Greek tradition: Pythagoras, Abaris, Empedocles, Orpheus, Aristeas, Epimenides, Hermotimus, Parmenides. Among these, Empedocles is not the only one to be canonised as a Presocratic philosopher, in the first place. The position is summarised by MacLennan:
It is now well established that ancient Greek philosophy had roots in the shamanic practices common to many cultures (e.g.. Dodds 1951: Ch. 5; Butterworth 1966: Ch. 4, 1970; Kingsley 1994[c], 1995: Ch. 15). The Greeks learned these techniques from the Scythians when they colonized the north shore of the Black Sea in the seventh century BCE and from the Thracians and Persian Magi, who also knew north-Asiatic shamanism (Hornblower & Spawforth 1996: 1375; Kingsley 1995[a]: 226-227). These practices are reflected in the stories of Orpheus, who exhibits many of the features of a great shaman (Dodds 1951: 147; Eliade 1964: 391-392); of Aristeas (8th-6th cents. BCE). whose soul could leave his body in trance and accompany Apollo as his raven; of Abaris (7th-6th cents. BCE). the healer-sage (iatromantis) who traveled on a magic arrow (a typical shamanic wand), which he later gave to Pythagoras; and of the semi-historical Epimenides (7th-6th cents. BCE). who purified Athens (596 BCE) and was also known for leaving his body while in a trance state (Avery 1962, s.v.; Dodds 1951: 140-142; Hornblower & Spawforth 1996, s.v.). They all exemplify many of the characteristics of shamanic practice, as presented by Eliade (1964 especially Ch. 11), and were closely associated with Hyperborean Apollo (reflecting, again, the northern connections). Evidence of shamanic practice is also apparent in ancient biographies of historical figures, such as the pre-Socratic philosophers Pythagoras (572-497 BCE), who descended into the underworld and claimed to have the soul of Hermotimus, an ancient shaman, and whose followers venerated the Orphica and sometimes wrote under the name Orpheus (Dodds 1951: 141, 143-145); Parmenides (fl. 495). whose poem, with its progress from the illusory world of duality to The One, has many of the hallmarks of a shamanic journey (Kingsley 1999, 2003); Empedocles (c. 495-435), a magical healer who boasted that he could control the weather and retrieve souls from Hades (Dodds 1951: 145-147; Kingsley 1995): and other less well-known figures. They all combined the still undifferentiated functions of magician and naturalist, poet and philosopher, preacher, healer, and public counsel[l]or (Dodds 1951: 146) and bore the distinguished title healer-seer (iatromantis). as a good term as any for a shaman. (MacLennan 2006)

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The Greeks contact with the world of shamanism usually refers to the elusive ethnic category of the Hyperboreans, about whom considerable information was circulating, as evident from the following extensive passage from Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca Historica, 1933, II, 47 1-2):
47. Now for our part, since we have seen fit to make mention of the regions of Asia which lie to the north, we feel that it will not be foreign to our purpose to discuss the legendary accounts of the Hyperboreans.74 Of those who have written about the ancient myths, Hecataeus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts75 there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island, the account continues, is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who arc called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind (Boreas) blows; and the island is both fertile and productive of every crop, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces two harvests each year. Moreover, the following legend is told concerning it: Leto76 was born on this island, and for that reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo, after a manner, since daily they praise this god continuously in song and honour him exceedingly. And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds. The Hyperboreans also have a language,
74

There seems good reason (see R. Hennig, Die Anfnge des kulturellen und Handelsverkehr in der Mittelmeerwelt, Historische Zeitschrift, 139 (1928), 1-33) to see in this people who live beyond the north wind as their name signifies, an early acquaintance of the Greeks, through the medium of the Celts, with Britain and its inhabitants. In this chapter Apollo would be the Celtic Sun-god Borvon, and the sacred precinct of Apollo would be the famous Stone Age remains of Stonehenge. [ translators original footnote ] i.e. Gaul. [ translators original footnote ] The mother by Zeus of Apollo and Artemis. [ translators original footnote ]

75 76

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we are informed, which is peculiar to them, and are most friendly disposed towards the Greeks, and especially towards the Athenians and the Delians,77 who have inherited this good-will from most ancient times. The myth also relates that certain Greeks visited the Hyperboreans and left behind them there costly votive offerings bearing inscriptions in Greek letters. And in the same way Abaris,78 a Hyperborean, came to Greece in ancient times and renewed the goodwill and kinship of his people to the Delians. They say also that the [M]oon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished; and for this reason the nineteen-year period is called by the Greeks the year of Meton.79 At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes. And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreadae, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family. 48. But now that we have examined these matters we shall turn our account to the other parts of Asia which have not yet been

Some specialists would rather see the shamanic influences in Ancient Greece as coming from the North East, from Siberia, in line with present77

The island of Delos was from the earliest period of the Greek civilization a centre of the worship of Apollo. [ translators original footnote ]

Abaris is apparently a purely mythical figure, who in some authors sailed on his arrow, as on a witchs broomstick, through the air over rivers and seas. [ translators original footnote ] The Metonic Cycle is described in Book 12. 36. The cycle of Meton, which was introduced in Athens in 432 B.C., was designed to reconcile the lunar and the solar year, the latter being reckoned at 365 5/19 days. That this nineteen-year cycle was actually inaugurated at this time has been maintained, most recently, by W. B. Dinsmoor, The Archoas of Athens in the Hellenistic Age (1931), pp. 320-1 and passim. [ translators original footnote ]
79

78

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day associations. It is from there that, for instance, Guthrie (1954: 309 f.; echoing a basic distinction made by Nietzsche)80 derives the power of Apollo as an rational influence mitigating and balancing the untamed version of ecstatic religion associated with Dionysus. We have seen that shamanic influences surfaced in the Ancient Near East and in Egypt already a millennium before the Presocratics rocked the archaic Greek world. Ancient Iranian and Mesopotamian Magi, as well as Scythians and Thracians, are now seen as intermediaries in the transmission process of shamanism to the Aegean (cf. West 1983: 146 f.). We came to Kingsleys view on Empedocles as a shaman when examining the application of (what has generally been considered) the latters four-element to alchemy. Now, the link between alchemy and the fourelement system has received ample attention from the psychiatrist Jung.81 In the alchemical context (specifically Zosimos Visions) the four elements are compared with the human body, and their separation with the tearing apart of that body. The latter, incidentally, is a common image in Antiquity, from the genitors body supposed to be torn apart in conception according to the embryological views of Ancient Egypt and several other ancient civilisations (Stricker 1965-1989) to the god Dionysus body being torn apart by the Titans in Ancient Greek cultic and mythological notions and may also resonate in the global mythology of dying vegetation gods referred to above. Also in the four-based geomantic divination of the Islamic world, Africa and Medieval to Early Modern Europe, the four basic lines (the mothers) are seen as head, trunk, legs and feet the medieval geomancer Zunbul explicitly admits that the four geomantic lines stand for the four elements (Klein Franke 1973: 31); the latter author who shows himself as ignorant of basic astrology as he proves to be unheedful of argumentative logic explicitly suggests a link with Empedocles, but in fact the link is more indirect, the four-element doctrine having been absorbed into Greek astrology and thus passed on to Islamic geomancy, the latter being, as we have seen, adulterated astrology.

80 81

Cf. Nietzsche 1972 / 1872; Benedict 1946 / 1934.

Jung 1944, 1946, 1987: 91 n. 25 (with references to Berthelots standard works on the early history of chemistry, 1888 and 1893).

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Local variation of element systems may be distinguished along a number of dimensions: 1. Number of elements. 2. Nature of the difference between elements. a) full transformation cycle elements change into each other according to strict rules b) Intermediate forms between (a) and (c) c) immutable categories without transitions or transformations from one into the other. As far as the number of elements in the transformation cycle is concerned, Empedocles four-element system presents the lowest number of elements among fully established element systems although in passing we will encounter inchoate forms with only three, two and even one element. Throughout Greek and Roman Antiquity a five-element system would appear to have been the standard one, adding a fifth element (literally: quintessense) to Empedocles famous series of: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Nor are literate, formal element systems limited to the West. As Table 4.1 indicates, a five-fold partition is found in many parts of Eurasia, including in Hinduism and Buddhism, Japan,82 China (cf. Durkheim & Mauss 1901: 67-80), and in the Bn religion of Tibet. It was also found among the Daisanites (the followers of Baraisan of Edessa, who according to Ibn al-Nadims Fi rist by the 10th c. CE had scattered, from their original swamps of Southern Iraq, into Khurasan and China.83 And whereas in Southwestern Asia, Africa and Europe a foursome-based geomantic divination became the rule from the end of the first millennium CE on, exceptionally also a five-some geomancy is found, for instance in the forged or simply pseudo-epigraphical Napoleons Book of
An earlier version of this books argument started out with a long description and analysis of the extent to which the Japanese cosmogonic myth on Izanami giving birth to Fire and was destroyed in the process, should be read as another application of the transformation cycle of elements, under the strong classical Chinese cultural influence prevailing in Japan in the early 8th century CE, when the Taoist system had been in existence for over a millennium; cf. van Binsbergen 2009 and forthcoming.
83 82

Drijvers 1966. Their series of elements has a somewhat Chinese ring (in line with West Asian / Chinese continuities to be discussed in Chapter 7, below): Fire, Wind, Water, Light, Darkness, and above these God on high. Southern Iraq was also, of course, the cradle of cilm al-raml, the Islamic form of geomantic divination.

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Fate (Parker 1988).84

No. Tradition85 Ancient Mesopotamian86 Greek Latin Hindu and Earth Earth Earth Earth Earth Water Sea Water Water Water ap Air Wind / Sky Air Air Air marut Fire Fire Fire Fire Fire agni Aether / Idea Quintessence Aether / N/A N/A 5th (Quintessence) Other

2 3 4

84

Throughout this book, the names of elements will be capitalised, except in original quotations when such capitalisation may mean the imposition of a one-sided interpretation.

Given the severe limitations of my specialist knowledge my rendering of Eurasian traditions in Table 4.1 must inevitably remain based on secondary sources. For many details of this scheme I am indebted to Anonymous 2008; from a more recent version of that text I have inserted the Ancient Mesopotamian entry (cf. Rochberg 2002), but not the Egyptian one; instead, I have inserted Diops and my own view of the Ancient Egyptian system, see below, Section 4.3.2. I have suppressed, as a recent eclectic artefact, a line Neo-Paganism (more or less coinciding with the New Age movement of the later 20th c. CE). For similar reasons I have omitted from this table a line Seven Chakras philosophy (combining Hindu and Buddhist themes), for which the following entries were specified in the original source: Sahasrara, Crown: Thought / Space; Aja, Third Eye: Light / Dark; Vishuddhi, Throat: Ether / Sound; Anahata, Heart: Air; Manipura, Navel: Fire; Svadhisthana, Sacral: Water; Muladhara, Root: Earth. I.e. Sumerian and Babylonian; although differing in period and linguistic affiliation, the ritual and mythological system of both civilisations was largely continuous; cf. Lambert 1975; Kramer 1959: 79, where the four (not yet five) Sumerian principal gods appear almost as elements. Specialists attribution of element concepts in the Ancient Mesopotamian context is somewhat uncertain and arbitrary: elsewhere, the same leading Assyriologist Lambert (1980) speaks of three primal elements: Water, Earth and Time.
87 The pancha mahabhuta, or five great elements of Hinduism; the mahabhuta (great elements) or catudhatu (four elements) of Pali / Early Buddhist literature are Earth, Water, Fire and Air. Also cf. Lusthaus 2011; Gnther 1996: 115 f. The aggregates of the five elements, in other words the actual forms of appearance of things, are called skandha in Buddhist esoteric literature a concept to which we shall return below in the Nkoya context. The Caraka Samhita, a major source for the South Asian Ayurveda system of medicine, speaks (IV.v.2-5) of six elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Ether, and the unmanifested Brahman. However, with Kakar (1983: 229 f.) this number is reduced to the first five. Given the strong Hellenistic influence exerted on Central and South Asia from the late 1st millennium BCE onwards (Banerjee 86

85

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Buddhist87

khsiti or bhumi Earth chi Earth t

or jala

or pavan (air or wind); Wind fu, kaze N/A89

or tejas

Japanese: Godai Chinese Wu Xing Five Phases88 Bn (Tibet) Ancient Egypt

Water sui, mizu Water shu

Fire ka, hi Fire hu

Sound and byom or akasha (aether) Void / Sky / Heaven () K, sora Void

Consciousness Metal jn, Wood m N/A Sky, Aether

7 8

Earth Earth

Water Water

Air Air

Fire Fire

Space

Table 4.1. Four or more elements in various Eurasian traditions.

In addition to these Eurasian data, and in considerable and surprising continuity with them, systems reminiscent of a transformation cycle of elements may be found in sub-Saharan Africa and North America, to which I shall devote a separate discussion below.

4.2. The transformation cycle of elements in East Asia: Two classical Chinese correlative systems
The wisdom systems we find in classic, literate East Asian civilisations are known as correlative systems:90 reality is subdivided into a limited number of named symbolic domains, and each of these domains systematically takes on a specific value on a number of cosmological and hu1981), also very conspicuous in the realm of wisdom systems, cosmologies and divination (cf. Pingree 1978), probably the Hindu and Buddhist listings in Table 4.1 are far from independent inventions, but instead are indebted to the Greek fourelement system attributed to Empedocles, which had become the general Greek norm by Hellenistic times. This is also the view I shall adopt in the concluding Chapter, 9.
88

Cf: Fung Yu-lan 1952: II, 13; Needham 1975; Needham c.s., II, 260 ff; Maciocia 2005; Eberhard 1993 / 1986: 93, 105, 309 and 1933.

89 We note that Air is not a Chinese classical element, although the concept of Qi / Chi comes close.

Needham c.s. 1956; Fiskejo 2000; Carus 1898; cf. footnote 3, above. Gadd 1966 makes clear that from the very beginning (early 2nd mill. BCE) the two queens of Babylonian science, the extispicium and astrology, constituted correlative systems.

90

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man-existential dimensions (the heavens, minerals, animal life, plant life, kinship, politics, colours, music, topography etc.) so that the entire cosmos can be subsumed in a matrix whose columns define symbolic domains and whose rows define cosmological / existential dimensions (cf. Table 4.2). Correlative systems are, however, not limited to East Asia. A familiar example of a correlative system is Ancient Greek astrology (Bouch-Leclercq 1879, 1899; Tester 1989; Pingree 1978) which developed in the middle of the first millennium BCE under Mesopotamian and Egyptian influence, and subsequently greatly influenced divination, arts and belles lettres in Europe, the Islamic world and South Asia. Correlative systems are powerful, comprehensive and tautological cosmological statements, conducive to argued meaning and connections in personal and societal affairs, and therefore an inexhaustible source of inspiration for divination. At the heart of Taoism as a wisdom philosophy of transformation with divinatory applications, is most clearly a transformation cycle. Earth, Water, Fire, Metal and Wood constantly produce each other and work upon each other in a complex cycle that shows how the specific nature of each element at each moment in each specific situation is ephemeral and incidental, giving way to another element phase under specific circumstances. Fig. 4.1 renders, as a special case, the Taoist, classic Chinese transformation cycle in its simplest form (cf. Needham c.s. 1956; Fiskejo 2000). Destruction and Production are the two basic relations between elements in this proto-historic transformation cycle. Derived from Production and Destruction are the secondary relations Furtherance / Blessing and Hindrance / Insult, respectively. This is essentially a rendering of the formula given by Needham with Ling (1956: II, 260f):
Wood destroys (conquers()) Earth, but Metal controls () the process Metal destroys (conquers ()) Wood, but Fire controls () the process Fire destroys (conquers ()) Metal, but Water controls () the process Water destroys (conquers ()) Fire, but Earth controls () the process Earth destroys (conquers ()) Water, but Wood controls () the process

with this proviso that in addition to the destruction relations, I have also 119

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shown the productive relations. This cycle of transformation essentially defines three roles: the Destructor, the Destroyed, and the Catalyst (Fig. 4.2). Even more elaborate versions have been published, in which the cycles shown here are complemented by other cycles. The essence of the Chinese Taoist transformation cycle of elements is that the difference between each element is accidental and situational, and that each of them may turn into all others in one or two steps. Constituting a particular element is an accidental and incidental condition, not an ontological given. Since the distinctions between the elements are ephemeral and non-essential, there is no fundamental difference between them absolute, transcendental differences are absence from the Taoist system, which is geared to a constant flow of immanentalism, in other words, which is an expression of a worldview that at no point needs to take recourse to the idea of an order of Being that is radically and absolutely different from the natural experiential order of the here and now, in which the human experience evolves itself.

2009 WvB

In attenuated form, the relationships of Production and Destruction as indicated may also be conceived as furtherance, friendship and praise (for Production), and hindrance, enmity and insult (for Destruction), respectively. Fig. 4.1. Basic transformations in the classic Taoist cycle of elements.

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In fact, however, the model is much more complicated, because for each relation between two elements that produce or destroy each other, there is a third element that controls the process as some sort of catalyst. Against this background we can also situate the famous Y Jng system of changes, whose dynamic logic resides in the systematic ways in which superimposed pairs of trigrams (, , , , , , , : all the 23 = 8 three-item permutations that can be made of broken and unbroken lines, are combined into 26 = 64 named hexagrams, i.e. six-item configurations, e.g. etc.); between these hexagrams, and between the aspects of reality to which they are held to refer, systematic transformations are supposed to exist, whose generation and interpretation is the basis of Y Jng as a cosmological, divinatory and psychological system revolving on systematic transformations, the subject of numerous comments in the West, by Legge, Wilhelm, Jung, etc. These two classical Chinese correlative systems largely set the scene as far as East Asia is concerned. Let us now review the intermediate forms defined in Section 3.1.

Fig. 4.2. The Taoist five-element transformation cycle according to Needham with Ling.

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The translation of the trigram names in column V mainly derives from R. Wilhelm (1924, 1931; cf. Jung 1974; Wilhelm & Cary 1951). Table 4.2. General overview of the Y Jng as a correlative system.

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4.3. Intermediate forms between the full transformation cycle and the system of four immutable categories
In this section we shall deal with some intermediate forms between the two extremes a) full transformation cycle b) discarded transformation cycle with elements as fixed immutable positions, in sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and North America. Before we set out on this comparative exercise, let us remind ourselves of one mytheme which has very wide distribution and that seems intimately related to the conception of a transformation cycle of elements: this is the combat myth, studied in detail in an impressive cross-cultural study by Fontenrose (1980), and also found in many Flood myths worldwide (Isaak 2006). In 2009 I proposed to interpret the combat theme as the destructive phase of the transformation cycle of elements, which suggests a very wide applicability of this concept, including North America, possibly going back, in some early form, to the Upper Palaeolithic. 4.3.1. Indications of element systems in sub-Saharan Africa Traces of an element system with four or more categories may be found in sub-Saharan Africa. The most elaborate and convincing case to my knowledge is that of the clan nomenclature of the Nkoya people of Western Zambia, which I discussed in Chapter 3 above. But other examples may be found. Although complicated by the presence of an overarching Sky god Olorun and of a demiurge Obatala, the pantheon of Yoruba gods does have strong reminiscences of the Hesiodic and Egyptian cosmology, with an implied transformation cycle of elements:
Their principal gods are: 1. Olorun, the [S]ky-god [AETHER?], who is the personification of the firmament; he is the equivalent of the Nyan-kupon of the Tshis, Nyonmo of the Gas, and Mawu of the Ewes. The Egyptian equivalent

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was Pet ().91 The Yorubas, like the Egyptians, believed the [S]ky to be a solid body, which curved over the earth so as to cover it like a vaulted roof. (). Olorun is too distant, or too indifferent, to interfere in the affairs of this world. He has no images, symbols, priests or temples, and is only invoked in times of calamity when the lesser gods will not answer their worshippers. 2. Obatala, who was made by Olorun, and manages the heavens and the earth for him. He is a [S]ky-god with human attributes. He made the first man and woman out of clay, and his equivalent among the gods of Egypt is Ptah, whom we see at Philae fashioning a king on a potters wheel. As a judge he possesses some of the attributes of the Egyptian god Osiris. [AIR?, AITHER ?] 3. Odudua, the wife of Obatala, is always represented as a seated woman nursing a child; in this respect she resembles the Egyptian goddess Isis, but as the patroness of love her Egyptian equivalent is Hathor. 4 and 5. Odudua bore her husband a boy and girl called Aganju and Yemaja, who represent Land [EARTH] and Water [WATER] respectively. The brother and sister married, and their son was called Orungan, i.e., the Air. [AIR] The following gods were the fruit of the unlawful intercourse of Orungan with his mother Yemaja: Dada, a vegetable god [WOOD]; Shango, lightning god [FIRE?]; Ogun, god of iron [METAL]92 and war; Olokun, sea-god; Olosa, lagoon-god; Oya, Nigergod; Oshun, river-god; Oba, river-god; Orisha Oko, god of agriculture; Oshosi, god of hunters; Oke, god of mountains; Aje Shaluga, god of wealth; Shankpanna, smallpox-god; Orun, the Sun [FIRE?]; and Oshu, the [M]oon. Oshumare, the rainbow, is a servant of Shango, and his messenger Ara is the thunderclap; his slave is Biri, the darkness [CHAOS]. Shango hanged himself, but did not die, for he went into the earth and there became a god (orisha).93 6. Ifa, god of divination, who causes pregnancy, and presides over births. 7. Elegba, a phallic divinity; his symbol is a short knobbed club, which was originally intended to be a representation of the phallus. Circumcision and excision are connected with his worship. 8. Ogun, the war-god. The priests of Ogun take out the hearts of human victims, dry and powder them, mix them with rum, and sell them to people who wish to acquire great courage. (Budge 1911: 372 f., summarising Ellis 1887: 1-69, my bracketed insertions WvB).

In Togo, a traditional story featuring les quatres fils de la veuve (the widows four sons) is a thinly disguised evocation of the four elements (Prilop 1985). What is a widow? An adult woman without a husband we may consider ourselves to be in the presence of a transformation of

91 92

I.e. pt

, the common Ancient Egyptian designation of Heaven WvB.

At this junction I may point out that notions of transformation are detectable in Niger-Congo speaking, especially Bantu-speaking Africa, in the context of metallurgy; e.g. De Maret & Gosselain 1993; Herbert 1993.
93

It is a clich of New Age writing to point out the shamanic parallel between Shango and Odinn (who according to Havamal, Edda (de Vries 1980) hung upside down from the world tree for nine days and thus acquired esoteric knowledge e.g. of the runes). Dumzil (1979 / 1959: 53 f.) minimises the shamanistic strand in Odinn.

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the cosmogonic virgin Mother of the Waters, or of a terrestrial equivalent of that concept (where the four sons could be, not just the four elements, but also the for directions a common ambiguity throughout the comparative study of element systems). By the same token, Nommo, the culture hero / creator of the Dogon of Mali, was supposed to have woven the four elements together (Griaule 1948; Griaule & Dieterlen 1965). A further indication of a four-element system in Africa may be seen in the fact that the West African ohene king is seen as the incarnation of four deities although this could just be a reflection of the ubiquitous theme of the four directions, whilst Wescott (1961), applying what I have elsewhere called Fairmans dilemma,94 interprets it as a sign of Ancient Egyptian continuity in latter-day West Africa. In his influential book At the back of the black mans mind: Or, Notes on the kingly office in West Africa, the well-informed trader Dennett (1906: 166 f.) writes, with reference to the Lower Congo region, of the divine name Nzambi (with slight variations widely distributed throughout West and Central Africa):
The name for God is NZAMBI and its literal meaning is the personal essence (IMBI) of the fours (ZIA or ZA = four). What then are the fours? They are the groups each of four powers called BAKICI BACI [basic elements].

Foursomes feature prominently in Dennetts ethnography: four great estates, four winds, four days of the week, four walls of the Yoruba kingdom, and a divine foursome Shango / Oya / Oba and Oshun. Remarkably, also the Zambian Nkoya situate some primordial foursome (mavuma an, the four wombs / matrilineal descent groups; wun, the four[some]) near the beginning of history (Likota lya Bankoya, Ch. 38), and several other fundamental aspects of their politico-mythical organisation are presented in terms of foursomes (van Binsbergen 1992: passim), yet no present-day informant could explain the cosmological significance of this emphasis to me.
94

Fairman 1965: similarities between (a) Ancient Egypt and (b) sub-Saharan Africa can be attributed to (a)s influence on (b), but also to (b)s influence on (a); cf. van Binsbergen 2011c.

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Dennett also pays some attention (1906: 269 f.) to geomantic divination on the basis of such a foursome, in line with the fact that we see an insistence on foursomes in all African geomantic divination systems (e.g. Bohannan 1975), from four-tablet divination in Southern Africa to the four symbols making up a geomantic unit in West Africa (also cf. Sixteen Cowries (Bascom 1980) as a geomancy-derived divination system, where the mathematical properties of four tokens that are clearly distinguished from one another and that can each take two positions up or down have been replaced by 16 identical tokens notably cowries). Possible traces of an 8-element model (cf. the Nkoyas six-element model) transformed into clan names may be found among the Congolese Bushong people (Cotterell 1989: 190; cf. Werner 1916 / 1964: 144). Here the creator is called Bumba, a white and anthropomorphic being with many parallels in Central Africa (e.g. Luchele among the Bemba; the cults of Chihamba among the Ndembu and of Bituma among the Nkoya venerate not creator spirits, but nonetheless a white being that is a demiurge, sent by the Supreme God, and associated with food crops). Bumbas first work of creation produced eight creatures: beetle, crocodile, eagle, fish, goat, heron, leopard, tortoise very possibly an ancient list of clans, fewer in number, yet reminiscent of, the Babylonian and Chinese zodiacs, Moon stations (South Asia: nakshatra) and constellations, and of the Nkoya clan names, although we still ought to ascertain whether these eight names were still clan names among the Bushong in historical times. It is very rare for African clan names to imply a transformative, cyclical and catalytic element system in fact the Nkoya one is my only example. Meanwhile, individual clan names such as Mushroom, Vulva, Crocodile have a very wide geographical distribution throughout sub-Saharan Africa. They may have been an independent invention from that region. However, for other clan names transcontinental continuity is obvious. Among the Ashanti twelve different clans are distinguished (Stricker 1963-1989; Rattray 1927, 1930); this reminds us, not only of the zodiac, but particularly of the twelve different tribes attributed to Ancient Israel, and of similar 12-based socio-political arrangements in Ancient Etruria, Ancient Greece, modern North Africa, and even Ancient China a pattern for which often the term amphiktyony is used,95 and which I propose
95

van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 112n with extensive references. For the wide

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should be counted among the Pelasgian traits emerged in West Asia and from there spread in all four directions according to the cross-model. Identification as West Asian and Pelasgian suggests a possible link with the putative West Asian highly pigmented proto-Africans, so that we may have our African cake and eat it at the same time, but the solution seems too uncertain and far-fetched to convince.

Fig. 4.3. A drawing by the Zulu lightning doctor Laduma Madela. Aus dem geborstenen Ei der Mnengischlange erscheinen zwei mnnliche und distribution of zodiacal notions all over North and West Africa, perhaps as a further indication of an underlying amphiktyonic pattern, see Pques 1964 which at the same time may serve as an indication of the spread of the four-element system in circum-Saharan Africa.

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zwei weibliche Schlangenkpfe (...): berschrift: Oho! Das Ei der Mnengischlange brach auf. Siehe, es bricht an vielen Stellen auf. Inschrift unten: Siehe, es kommen vier Kpfe heraus, zwei von Mnnern, zwei von Frauen.96 Beachte die Kopfringe (der Mnner), beachte die Haartrme der Frauen. Wenn das Ei geborsten ist, heit es, die Buben sollen die Ziegen holen und rasch heimbringen. Wenn sie da sind, ergreift man eine Ziege und wirft sie in die Grube mit dem Wasser, wo das Ei drin ist. Oh, sofort frbt sich das Wasser vom Blut der Ziege, die von der vielkpfigen Schlange gettet wird. Diese Schlange hat ihr Gutes und ihr Bses. Sie ist ein Werkzeug der Medizinmnner, besonders der onyangamtha-kathi und der ohodoba, die tten und wiederauferwecken (...).

Also Southern Africa offers hints at a four-element system. For many years the German anthropologist Katesa Schlosser worked together with the Zulu lightning doctor Laduma Madela, South Africa, in order to record his complex esoteric knowledge. Fig. 4.3 renders one of his drawings (Schlosser 1992: Farbtafel II, Abbildung 6, pp. 42-43), with an explication (in Zulu) in Madelas own handwriting. The figure is strongly reminiscent of the Cosmic Egg from which four elements emerge and of Western alchemical symbolic drawings, for that matter. A case apart in the African context is Madagascar. Here we find, in the locational augury system reminiscent of Chinese feng shui , strong emphasis on four elements.97 Beaujard, one of todays leading authors on Madagascar culture, interprets this in terms of Indonesian influence. However, since over the past two millennia the literate, scholarly traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam have exercised a considerable influence upon Indonesia, I submit that this Indonesian link should not be considered in its own right but as an expression of South and West Asian

96

It is characteristic of the Mnengis snake that it has several heads. Its name is derived from mingi, many. original footnote. Schlossers explanation of the name is probably a mere popular etymology (WvB).

97 Cf. Berthier 1913; Beaujard 1988; Ferrand 1908. Also, a well-studied ArabianMalagasy astrological text (Ferrand 1905) sets out the Malagasy variant of geomantic divination called sikidy, offering a discussion of illnesses linked to specific days, of sacrifices, and of destinies always with reference to a foursome consisting of Winds, Lands, Waters and Fires in other words, the four-element system. Meanwhile, scholarship (Steinschneider 1877, 1956 / 1904; Trautmann 1939-1940; Hbert 1961; van Binsbergen 1996a) has firmly established the continuity between Malagasy sikidy geomantic divination, West African Ifa, and Southern African Hakata four-tablet divination, and their common origin in Islamic cilm al-raml from Southern Iraq near 1000 CE cf. Ch. 2, above.

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element cosmologies, thus brought to Africa via South East Asia, i.e. the Sunda connection (cf. Oppenheimer 1998; Dick-Read 2005), in which also East Asian components may have been assimilated. My current research98 explores the extent, direction and periodisation of transcontinental influence in Africas pre- and protohistory. Strong indications have been found of traits (e.g. specific genetic markers; musical instruments such as the xylophone, gong and breast harp; Ancient Roman currency; cowry currency; geomantic divination; Buddhist influence in kingship and ritual including ecstatic cults) of Sunda influence travelling from the Indian Ocean, rounding Cape of Good Hope, ending up in West Africa, and from there spreading again into Central and South Central Africa. This Sunda connection might offer a partial explanation of the fourelement attestations in West Africa besides trans-Saharan Assyrian, Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, and Arab influence. Below we shall see that the Nkoya case, with strong indications not only of Upper Palaeolithic and Bronze Age substrates but, exceptionally, also of Asian intrusions in recent centuries, is rather comparable with that of Madagascar. Above we referred to the claim of a four-element system among the Dogon. Griaules Dogon ethnography, however eagerly appropriated and wildly interpreted by a great variety of authors with a New Age tendency, cannot be taken at face value (cf. van Beek 1991; Clifford 1988; we come back to this point in Chapter 7). Yet the Dogon and other groups in the African savannah have been recognised (Willis 1994) as a cluster with a mythology that is strikingly rich and elaborate as compared with the rest of sub-Saharan Africa including the Bantu-speaking region. To some extent, the Back-to-Africa migration from c. 15 ka BP onward, and the Pelasgian cross-model from the Late Bronze Age onward, constitute likely mechanisms to account for the very extensive cosmological, mythological and symbolic (even linguistic) continuities between sub-Saharan Africa on the one hand, West and Central Asia, and Europe, and even the Americas, on the other hand, from the Upper Palaeolithic onward.99 Yet I am inclined, just like in the Nkoya and the Madagascar case, to invoke for the Dogon case another, rather more recent influence, stemming from the Ancient Near East including Egypt in the last millennium BCE, and
98 99

My work in connection with the 2012 Leiden conference. For an application of these ideas to African mythology, see van Binsbergen 2010a. Brown 1926: 110 f. implies great Mediterranean continuities in the Tswana pantheon.

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intensified in the course of the second millennium CE under Arab influence. 4.3.2. Indications of an element system in Ancient Egypt In various Egyptian cosmogonies from the Old Kingdom,100 personalised and narrative, mythical evocations of a classification scheme can be detected which, in effect, look like a four- or five element system. Claims to this effect were already made by the pioneer Afrocentrist writer Cheikh Anta Diop (1991: 377f; cf. Padr 1980) but were ridiculed under the impact of Eurocentric hegemonic ideology even though Diop, a physicist and Egyptologist, was eminently placed to appreciate the naturalscience implications of the Egyptian proto-scientific classification. A case in point is Fig. 4.4, which shows that the Heliopolitan cosmology of the Old Kingdom may be read as an element system.

Fig. 4.4. An element system underlying the Heliopolitan cosmogony of Ancient Egypt.

100 Third millennium BCE, two thousand years before Empedocles; these cosmogonies are attested in numerous iconographical representations, although some of their most important textual attestations e.g. the Shabaka Stone, are much more recent, dating from the Egyptian Late Period (Breasted 1901; van den Dungen 2010).

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By contrast to this cosmogony of Heliopolis, there is the Hermopolitan Ogdoad eightsome consisting of four gendered pairs representing primordial waters (Naunet and Nu, -t being the feminine suffix), Air or invisibility (Amunet and Amun), darkness (Kauket and Kuk), and eternity or infinite space (auet and u). This unmistakably constitutes a quasi-Empedoclean four-element system; there is considerable affinity with the Ancient Greek cosmogonic scheme in Hesiods Theogonia. In the Old Kingdom, the nine gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead (Atum > Shu and Tefnut > Isis, Nephthys, Seth, Osiris, Horus > Horus the Younger) could be construed as referring to element positions (as indicated in Fig. 4.4). Although mixed with other personified mythical elements, the themes Water / Air / Earth / Fire can be clearly identified here. In the Hermopolitan cosmogony, we find the original beings as four pairs of amphibian beings of complementary gender, springing from the original chaos. Also the foursome of the sons of Horus (associated with the Canopian vessels in which a mummified persons viscera are kept (Fig. 4.5) are suggestive of a four-element concept. Many more examples could be adduced, for instance the feline goddess Bastet being depicted wielding her sistrum (a rattling instrument) and holding an aegis-like object (cf. the Greek goddess Athena, also with Egyptian parallels in Neith) and with her four kittens nicely arranged and sitting in attention in front of her (Ronnberg c.s. 2011: 300-301): our Fig. 4.6.

Fig. 4.5. Indications of a four-element system in Ancient Egypt: Four Sons of Horus. The four sons of Horus represented as lids on the four Canopian Vases containing the

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viscera of pharaoh Tut-cAn-Amon (early 14th century BCE, XVIIIth dynasty, New Kingdom), now in the British Museum, London, United Kingdom. In their iconography we recognise the elements Air (falcon), Water (crocodile), Land (jackal), and Fire (a human with a red face).

Fig. 4.6. The Ancient Egyptian feline goddess Bastet with a foursome of kittens, possibly an evocation of a four-element cycle of transformation, Late Period, c. 664630 BCE.

Fig. 4.7. Indications of a four-element system in Ancient Egypt. Four goddesses guarding the viscera of pharaoh Tut-cAn-Amon (early 14th century BCE, 18th dynasty, New Kingdom), now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. The foursome may be interpreted as, among other associations, evoking a four-element

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system: Neith / Nt (Water), Selket / srqt (scorpion goddess, Fire), Nephthys (as spouse of Seth / Swt she governs the desert fringe, but as Mistress of the House, Nbt-wt, she may be associated with the Air as the House of the Sky god Horus, cf. t-r / Hathor), and Isis / Ast (Earth, impregnated by Osiris / Wsr who is often equated with the River Nile). Photograph: Araldo de Luca, in: Bongioanni & Sole Croce 2001: 303, with thanks.

Wsr (Osiris) / Water (Earth?) Nt (Neith / Water (Air)

Swt (Seth) / Fire

Ast (Isis) / Earth (Air?)

kills/destroys/rapes tries to kill/destroy/ rape produces / gives birth to

r (Horus) / Air (Water?)

acts as catalyst catalytic effect

Fig. 4.8. A rudimentary transformation cycle of elements: Seth and Horus. Although the details are admittedly inconsistent, indications of a transformation cycle of elements may certainly be discerned in the most cherished and sacred mythological narrative of Ancient Egypt, that of the conflict between Seth and Osiris, Isis conception from the dead Osiris, her production of Horus, and the latters struggle with Seth with physical including sexual violence, which eventually, through the intervention of the ancient goddess Neith (identifying as Sky goddess threatening to bring down the Sky, but in fact as Mother of the Waters including those Above i.e. the Sky), resulted in Horus victory and judicial vindication. However, that here we have to do with a highly imperfect form of the transformative element cycle, is clear from the fact that various values (Water, Earth, Air) might be attributed to Osiris (often equated with the river Nile), Isis and Horus (whose domain, as a falcon-shaped god, is the Sky) whereas Horus rapes not only Seth but also his mother Isis (which suggests that she is primarily Earth and Horus primarily Heaven, cf. Ancient Greek, Yoruba and Oceanian mythology101 where the pre-cosmogonic contact between Heaven and Earth is one of The Maori myth of the primal gods Papa and Rangi locked in intercourse (Grey 1855: 1 f; Cotterell 1989: 244; my fieldnotes); the Nigerian primal gods Obatala and Odudua (Heaven and Earth), similarly engaged (Ellis 1894: Ch. II. 3; Scheub 2000); the Ancient Greek myth of Uranus and Gaia, whose unending embrace was violently disturbed by their son Cronus emasculating his father and opening the way for cos101

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incessant intercourse); cf. Hopfner 1940-1941: II, 175; Plutarch 1934-1935, De Iside et Osiride; Fairman 1935; Gardiner 1944.

Ancient Egyptian stories are also full of transformations which on closer scrutiny might well turn out to be narrative renderings of a transformation cycle of elements, e.g. the Story of the Two Brothers:
Bata, Anubis brother, flees after a Potifar-like incident [ cf. Genesis 37:36 f. WvB ], to Syria, where the Ennead has a wife for him made by Chnum. This wife is almost violated by Sea. Bata has emasculated himself and has hidden his heart in a pine tree. Etc. Bata becomes a bull, then an avocade tree, then a piece of furniture, whose plinter kills the bad woman. Bata ends up as king. (Willis 1994: 53).102

Fontenrose briefly refers to the story as an Egyptian instance of his cherished combat myth (1980 / 1959: 190-192, 207, 258) but he misses the possible element implications. This is all the more regrettable because these implications are particularly compelling in Batas case:
Now all the main characters in this story are gods: Anpu is Anubis, and Bata is a god who is conceived in serpent form, or rather, mixed form the Bata snake had four human bodies and four pairs of human legs at each end of his body. (Fontenrose 1980 / 1959: 192; cf. Fig. 4.3 from Southern Africa!)

What does emerge in Fontenroses treatment is that Bata belongs to a class of gods or heroes whose destruction is caused by a female partner. This of course corresponds with the destruction phase in the transformation cycle of elements, which I have suggested (van Binsbergen 2010e) to be at the root of the combat myth with its near-global distribution. Fontenrose, who sees parallels between the Bata and Humbaba / Gilgamesh narratives (1980: 192) identifies Deianeira103 and Delilah (Samsons partner in the Biblical book of Judges 16:4 f.) as equivalents of Batas wife while Fontenrose also indicates the parallel with Potiphars wife.
mogony: Hesiod (1914), Theogonia, 133 f. For the full story, the original hieroglyphic text, and extensive commentary and interpretation, cf. Moldenke 1898; Hollis 1990. The story is also included in various collections of Ancient Egyptian stories. The wifes rape is comparable to that of Isis by Seth and by Horus (see above) and that of Orpheuss wife Eurydice by Aristaeus (see below), which will be demonstrated to be a transformation of Ancient Egyptian themes.
103 Deianeira, wife of the Greek deified hero Heracles; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, IV 36; Sophocles, Trachiniai, 555; Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 201; Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus, 196; Pausanias, Descriptio Graeciae, X, 38 1. 102

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But many more instances could be cited. In Nkoya mythology, King Shihoka Nalinanga meets his doom through sexual intercourse with an artificial woman (cf. Batas wife) that was created by his envious sister Likambi (van Binsbergen 1992, 2010a). Perhaps there is an echo here (I have identified more such echoes) of the Celtic King Arthur meeting his doom through Morgana and Mordred, and of another Celtic mytheme, that of the mermaid-like Melusine (Higley 1999); also note that it was Pandora, engineered by Hephaestus at Zeus request, that brought disaster over humankind (Hesiod, Theogonia, 560 f.). In the Hebrew tradition the proverbial evil woman is Lilith, alleged to have been Adams original wife and implied to be the source of his destruction (Patai 1990). As Highley points out, Melusine and Lilith are akin to the Lamia figure which also features extensively in Fontenrose (1980). Further afield, but relevant to our intercultural argument, is that it is as an artificial woman in the shape of Gautamas wife Yasodhara, that Mara (Delusion) seeks to seduce the Buddha (Musaeus-Higgin 2000: 237). As for the interpretation of the Bata figure specifically, the parallels with Heracles (whose Levantine equivalent is Melqart, City King, cf. Marduk as the solar chief god of Babylon), Gilgamesh and Samson (cf. Proto-Afroasiatic *am- Sun; Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008, Afroasiatic etymology) suggest that his underlying identity is that of Sun / Light / Life, as opposed to Night / Darkness / Death (cf. Anubis, Humbaba). Fischer (1975) claims that the name Bata may be associated with a verb meaning beating on the ground, which not only structurally evokes the beaming and setting Suns down-directed action, but also brings to mind multi-layered features of the geomantic symbolism. This does not even exhaust the potential of myths to inform us on the existence, or absence, of a transformative element cycle in Ancient Egypt. Myths can often be seen to cross geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries, and given the tremendous impact Egypt has had on the Mediterranean region during three millennia, we may even expect Graeco-Roman mythical traditions to illuminate us on Egypt. One of the points on which Bernal was attacked by classicists was his claim that Ancient Greek myths were considerably indebted to Ancient Egypt. In one of my early contributions to the Black Athena debate I joined in this chorus, arguing that specifically the myth of Hephaestus and Athena had Central Mediterranean and Anatolian echoes, rather than Egyptian ones. I 135

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later expanded this argument into a full-size book draft, revising it completely, and turning my critical attention from Bernal to Blaek and his Hephaestus < Pta etymological proposal (van Binsbergen 1997d, in preparation (b)). Meanwhile, my detailed analysis of the Aristaeus myth as found with Ovid and Virgil was proving me wrong and Bernal right: here the clues for an Egyptianising reading were overwhelming, even though the myth is principally attested, not even from Greek but from Latin sources. We find ourselves here in a position comparable to that of Bruno Stricker (1967-1989): Ancient Greek and Roman writers texts turn out to be so close to the Egyptian world view that the former may convincingly be used to elucidate otherwise obscure aspects and implications of the latter. A summary and Egyptianising reading of the Aristaeus myth is here presented in Table 4.3, columns A and B. With the same stone we can kill another bird that is far more relevant in the context of the present book: if read against an Egyptological background, the Aristaeus myth turns out to reveal an elaborate evocation of an element transformation system (Table 4.3: right-hand column) even though we have to admit that (as is to be expected when the transmitters of the myth no longer perceive its element cosmology background) the identification of elements and their specific transformations and catalysts does not come out totally consistently. As a peasant farmer, more specifically as a culture hero inventing such homely achievements as cheese-making and bee-keeping, Aristaeus104 is a principal agricultural god in the Graecianising Roman tradition. He may be considered an evocation of the Neolithic, early Pelasgian, modes of production which, as Woudhuizen and I argue in detail elsewhere105 was also strong in proto-historical Italy, partly but certainly not entirely due to the Etruscan influx. There was also another Aristaios:106 one of the Gigantes who fled the primal Battle with the Gods and was hidden by his mother Earth in the Island Sicily in the shape of a dung beetle; also for Aristaios-2 there is an unmistakable Ancient Egyptian parallel showing
104

Sources: Ovid (1838), Fasti, 1, 363 f.; Virgil (1886), Georgica, 4, 281 f.; Atsma 2000-2008, s.v. Aristaeus (1).

van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: passim, see that books Index of Proper Names, s.v. Pelasgia(n(s)); van Binsbergen, in press (a ). See: Suidas (1853), s.v. Aristaios and Aitnaios kantharos; Atsma 2000-2008, s.v. Aristaeus (2).
106

105

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Table 4.3. The Aristaeus myth analysed as a reflection of Early Dynastic Egyptian history, and as an esoteric text on the transformation cycle of elements

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that underneath this pathetic figure lurks a demoted major god: as a sympr, represented as a dung beetle, is one of bol of eternity and rebirth, the principal Ancient Egyptian gods, with Horus a manifestation of Rc.107 Like the Nestis theonym we will discuss below, the Aristaeus myth is another argument for substantial Egyptian influence on Italy in protohistorical times. Viewed from an Egyptological perspective, the Aristaeus myth can be interpreted as a reflection of the legendary struggle in Early Dynastic times enshrined in the notion of the Unification of the Two Lands by cAha or Menes between108 Neith / theocratic / female-centred / West Asian- orientated / Pelasgian-orientated Lower Egypt, and the Horus / male-centred, bureaucratic, African-orientated Thinite state of Upper Egypt The argument on the Aristaeus myth as an esoteric text on the transformation cycle of elements is extensively given in Table 4.3 and need not be repeated here. By and large, the Egyptian expressions reminiscent of an element system are rather too ornate and too narrativised to suggest the very origin of such a system in the Nile Delta in the Early Bronze Age. If we take the view that some rudimentary transformative cyclical element system could be a Pelasgian trait, then its origin should be sought rather in West to Central Asia. However, from its very beginning in the Early Bronze Age, dynastic Egypt has undergone considerable West Asian influence: West Asian gods such as cnt / Anat, qd / Qadesh, rf /
107

Aristaeus thus has the trappings, not only of a culture hero, but even of a cosmogonic god. As a (inevitably late, and distorted) compromise (son) between the postulated two successive cosmogonic forces, Primal Waters and Heaven, Aristaeus has something of the framework or matrix out of which reality is being made; cf. the biblical Nua (Hebrew Rest / Egyptian Horizon of the Primal Waters / of the Primal Waters Above), who also functions (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Ch. 6) as such a matrix (and, again, even as a cosmogonic god) in regard of his sons (Japhet, am and em) whose names as argued ibidem have similar connotations: Heat, Heaven, etc.
108

Cf. Wilkinson 2001; Edwards 1971; Emery 1961; Kemp 1989.

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Reshef and pt / Ptah, chariots, Hyksos kings; shamanic influences in leopard-skin symbolism (as on the 1st-Dynasty Nrmr tablet) and in the royal diadem (as in Tut-cAn-Amons tomb); even Neiths name (although a surprising Austric etymology is available) may have an Uralic etymology exemplifying the general continuity between Delta culture and West Asia.109 Egypt has displayed, and like Syro-Palestine has been recognised in Antiquity to display, many Pelasgian traits. It is therefore quite likely that (like the bee and reed themes), also the Egyptian element themes discussed here constitute a predynastic Pelasgian heritage. Is it conceivable that the Presocratic four-element system is a late adulteration of the Ancient Egyptian element theology? This is an attractive thought. My proposals, below, to read, in the Empedoclean doxology, Nestis as Neith, and to equate, ibidem, Zeus and Hera with w / Shu and Tfnt / Tefnut, are cases in point. In the few centuries before the emergence of Presocratic philosophy there was an intensive traffic between the declining and fragmented pharaonic state, and the Aegean, the latter being a source of mercenaries and traders thus continuing an established Bronze Age pattern. Many Greek thinkers of the Classical Age are reputed to have visited Egypt in their quest for learning. If, as we have suggested in connection with Table 4.3, Egyptian influence was strong in Italy, Empedocles could have picked up the Egyptian inspiration even at home. And there is another parallel example of Egyptian prototypes being appropriated and adapted into a formal system, that became a world-wide success: the alphabet, based on the acronymic principle available in the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, and worked (mainly by the Phoenicians and Aramaeans) into an alphabetical concept that conquered much of Eurasia (Diringer 1996; Gardiner 1916; Naveh 1982). Whereas these Egyptian attestations refer to Bronze Age contexts, the many extensive references to a specifically four-element system in the Egyptian Hermetic literature (especially the text Kor Kosmou / Virgin of the World; Virgin 1885), briefly referred to above, are much more recent (early centuries on the Common Era), and certainly cannot be considered independent from the Presocratic usage.

van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Table 28.4, pp. 370 f., Table 4.4, p. 87, and passim, and references there.

109

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4.3.3. The recognition of an element system in North America Let us now turn to an examination of indications of an element system in the New World. The possibility of cultural borrowing from the Old World to the New World across the Pacific cannot be ruled out, considering the long-standing and high quality of East and South Asian navigation, and the numerous studies claiming trans-Pacific transmission with regard to other cultural items. The continuity between Sino-Caucasian, a dominant linguistic macrophylum in East and North Asia, and the Na-Den cluster is another indication of such transcontinental relationships. By the same token, the possibility of a trans-Atlantic transmission of Bronze Age, relatively developed, element systems is suggested by continuities in the fields of comparative mythology (e.g. in regard of agricultural gods producing crops from their dying body), ethnography (incidental cases of circumcision) and population genetics (high incidence of the RH*cde both in Europe among seafaring groups (Basque region and Baltic), and on the mouth of the St Lawrence River (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994: appendix distribution maps, RH*cde, no. 88). We find a six-element system (although articulated in terms of directions rather than elements, with Up and Down added to the usual four direction North, East, South and West) among the NaDen-speaking peoples especially the Zui,110 and neighbouring peoples such as the Sia (Parsons 1936), Pueblo (Parsons 1929), and Hopi (Fewkes 1900). Alexander (1916), in his authoritative overview of North American mythology, dedicates an entire chapter to what he calls the gods of the elements, but he mainly uses the word element in the modern North Atlantic sense of the manifestations of the weather wind, rain, ice and snow; and when he uses the word element in a physico-cosmological sense, he seems to project onto the North American material notions borrowed from the four-element system as ingrained in North Atlantic culture in the course of the last 2.5 millennia. Even so, we find traces of an element system reminiscent of the East Asian cyclical systems dis110 Cf. Li An-Che 1937; Parsons 1916; Judd 1947; Swann 1994. The closely related Navaho are now often claimed to distinguish six directions, which has become an icon of Native American popularised cosmology, but the older ethnographic literature more often attributes only four directions to the Navaho.

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cussed above:
The tribal circle of the Omaha was divided into two groups, the Sky-People occupying the northern, and the Earth-People the southern, semi-circle. The Sky represented the masculine, the Earth the feminine, element in nature; the human race was supposed to be born of the union of Earth-People and SkyPeople; and in the tribe marriage was not customary within either of these two groups, but only between members of Earth clans and members of Sky clans. Each group also had its own chieftain and ceremonial, so that the whole tribe possessed a dual organization, corresponding to the great dualism of nature. J. O. Dorsey111 found a similar scheme prevalent throughout the Siouan stock, and this scheme he generalized by the figure of a quartered circle. The quarters of one half, which was the side of peace, were devoted respectively to Earth and Water; the quarters of the masculine, or Sky half, which was the side of war, were sacred to the spirits of Fire and Air. Powers of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air formed the great groups of the elemental gods. (Alexander 1916: 97 f.).

The iconographic and mythological evidence suggesting the existence of a four-element transformative system in Native North America could be augmented ad libitum, for instance with the pattern of four, apparently cosmogonic, frogs near a water pool, in Wilito Wilsons 1942 Navaho sand painting rendered here as Fig. 4.9. Like in Ancient Egypt, frogs with their amphibian ambiguity between water and land, seem to evoke the pre-cosmogonic state of boundary-less chaos, to be resolved, at the moment of cosmogony, by the Separation of Water and Land, or (by a typologically later cosmology), by the Separation of Heaven and Earth; in the local emic explanation however, the reference is not cosmogonic the frogs at the level of the actors consciousness represent maize-eating humans transformed into amphibians (Ronnberg c.s. 2011: 191 after Haile & Wyman 1957: 193). Another pictorial indication of what could be a cycle of elements, is found in the rock art of the Lower Pecos River, Texas, USA, attributed to the 2nd-3rd millennium BCE (Fig. 4.11).

J.O. Dorsey, missionary and ethnographer, writing in the 1880s-90s, his publications on the Siouan tribes are listed in Alexander 1916: 321 WvB.

111

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Fig. 4.9. Navaho sand painting arguably suggestive of a four-element transformation cycle.

Fig. 4.10. Anasazi wall painting from New Mexico, ca. 16th c. CE.

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Fig. 4.10 demonstrates that even in the absence of indigenous texts, images can present clues as to ancient thought systems. An element cosmology appears to be represented, as is clear from the accompanying scholarly description:
ABB. 29 - Wandgemlde, Kuaua, N. M. In dem hier gezeigten Ausschnitt aus einer greren Szene, die mit Aussaat, Regen und Fruchtbarkeit zu tun hat, sind, von links beginnend, folgende Figuren zu sehen: Eine Wildgans [AIR], aus deren Schnabel Regen [WATER] strmt. Eine menschliche Figur, mit Maske und Federkrone geschmckt, die einen Stab in der Hand hlt und wahrscheinlich den Blitzmacher [FIRE] wiedergeben soll. Ein Fisch [WATER], von dem aus einerseits Regen [WATER] herniederfllt, andererseits ein Regenbogen [AIR] zu einem schwarzen Adler [AIR] geht, in dessen Schnabel er sich mit einem Blitz [FIRE] und einem zur Erde [EARTH] fallenden Strome von Samen vereinigt. In dem Samenstrom fliegt [AIR] eine Pfeilspitze [AIR] oder eine Fledermaus [AIR], die wieder Regen [WATER] verteilt. Feuchtigkeit [WATER] geht auch von dem unter dem Adler [AIR] befindlichen Topf aus, aus dem ein Blitz [FIRE] aufsteigt. Ganz rechts sind Fuspuren [EARTH], Pfeilspitzen und rote Steine [EARTH] zu sehen, die mit einem zeremoniellen Wettlauf [CYCLICITY?] zu tun haben. Stilistisch lt sich das Gemlde nicht mit denen des Jeddito-Tales in Verbindung bringen. Layer G-26, Sdwest-Ecke, Kiva III, Kuaua, N[ew M[exico], Ca. 16. Jh., Regressive-PuebloPeriode, Anasazi-Tradition... (Haberland 1965: 97 and Fig. 29; my bracketed insertions WvB).

Original painting by Forrest Kirkland. Photo scans courtesy of the Texas Archaeological Research Library, the University of Texas at Austin; cf. Turpin 1990. Fig. 4.11. Revolution on the celestial axis, or evidence of transformation cycle of elements, as depicted in Lower Pecos River Art, Texas, USA, 3rd-2nd mill. BCE.

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In addition to these iconographic indications, there is the mythological evidence of a transformation cycle of elements in North America in the form of Flood myths. In native, ideal-typically pre-conquest North America, some Flood myths, at one of the several possible levels of interpretation, appear to revolve on permutations within the transformation cycle, with Flood being simply the Water element dramatised, while a divine trickster in animal shape tends to both activate, and efface, all boundaries and systematics at the same time.112 Cases in point are the following:
FROM THE SALISHAN-SPEAKING SKAGIT PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON, USA: The Creator made the earth and gave four names [FOUR ELEMENT SYSTEM?] for it for the Sun,[FIRE?] waters,[WATER] soil [EARTH] and forests [WOOD].113 He said only a few people, with special preparation for the knowledge, should know all four names, or the world would change too suddenly. After a while, everyone learned the four names. When people started talking to the trees [WOOD] the change came in the form of a Flood. [WATER] When the people saw the Flood coming, they made a giant canoe and filled it with five people and a male and female of all plants and animals. Water covered everything but the summit of Kobah and Takobah (Mts. Baker and Ranier). The canoe landed on the prairie. Doquebuth, the new Creator, was born of a couple from the canoe. He was told to go to a lake (Lake Campbell) and swim and fast to get his spirit powers, but he delayed. Finally he did so after his family deserted him. The Old Creator came to him in dreams. First he told Doquebuth to wave his blanket over the water [WATER] and the forest [WOOD] and name the four names of the earth; this created food for everyone. Next, at the direction of the Old Creator, he gathered the bones of the people who lived before the Flood, waved the blanket over them and named the four names, and made people again. These people couldnt talk, so he similarly made brains for them from the soil. [EARTH] Then they spoke many different languages, [CONFUSION OF LANGUAGES AFTER THE FLOOD] and Doquebuth blew them back to the places they lived before the Flood. [WATER] Someday, another Flood [WATER] will come and change the world again. (source: Clark 1953: 139-141, via Isaak 2006; bracketed insertions mine). FROM THE (ORIGINALLY PROBABLY HOKAN-SPEAKING) SHASTA PEOPLE (NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INTERIOR, USA): Coyote [ a widespread trickster figure ] encountered an evil water spirit [WATER] who said, there is no wood [WOOD] and caused water to rise until it covered Coyote. After the water receded, Coyote shot the water spirit with a bow and ran away, but the water followed him. He ran to the top of mount Shasta; the water followed but didnt quite reach the top. Coyote made a fire, [FIRE] and all the other animal people swam to it and

The question whether these North American Flood myths could be considered derivations from the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, I have considered elsewhere and answered, grosso modo, negatively (van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008).
113

112

This is unmistakably a series of four elements Fire, Water, Earth and Wood.

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found refuge there. After the water receded, they came down, made new homes, and became the ancestors of all the animal people today. (source: Clark 1953: 12, via Isaak 2006; bracketed insertions mine).
FROM THE MENOMINI / MENOMINEE PEOPLE (WISCONSIN-MICHIGAN BORDER, USA, ALGONKIAN-SPEAKING): Manabush [ a trickster figure ] wanted to punish

the evil Manidoes, the Ana Maqkiu who had killed his brother Wolf. He invented the ball game and asked the thunderers to play against the Ana Maqkiu, who appeared from the ground as Bears. After the first day of play, Manabush made himself into a pine tree [WOOD] near where the Manidoes played. When they returned the next morning, the Manidoes were suspicious of the tree, so they sent for Grizzly Bear to claw it and Serpent to strangle and bite it. Manabush withstood these attacks, allaying their suspicion. When the ball play took everyone else far away, Manabush shot and wounded the two Bear chiefs with arrows and then ran away. The underground [EARTH] Ana Maqkiu soon came back, saw the wounded Bear chiefs, and called for a Flood [WATER] from the earth. Badger hid Manabush in the earth [EARTH], so the Ana Maqkiu gave up the search just as the water [WATER] was starting to fill badgers burrow. The underground people took their chiefs to a wigwam and sent for an old woman to heal them. Manabush followed, took the old womans skin and disguised himself in it. He entered the wigwam, killed the two chiefs, and took the bear skins. The Ana Maqkiu at once pursued; water poured out of the earth [EARTH] in many places. Manabush climbed a great pine tree [WOOD] on the highest mountain. When the waters [WATER] still rose to threaten him, he commanded the tree to grow. This he did four times, but the waters still rose. He called to Kisha Manido for help, who commanded the waters [WATER] to stop. Seeing water everywhere, Manabush called to otter to dive down and bring up some earth [EARTH]. Otter tried but drowned before reaching bottom. [EARTH-DIVER THEME] Mink failed similarly. Then Manabush called on Muskrat, who also returned drowned but had some mud in his paw. Manabush blew on Muskrat to return him to life. Then he took the earth [EARTH], rubbed it between his hands, and threw it on the water [WATER], thus creating a new earth. Manabush told Muskrat that his tribe would always be numerous. He gave the skin of the Gray Bear chief to Badger and kept the skin of the White Bear chief. (source: Judson 1914: 21-25, via Isaak 2006; bracketed insertions are mine WvB).

Especially in the last story it is evident that the elements are distinguished and that they are systematically invoked as producing or destroying (or furthering or constraining, respectively) each other as in a transformation cycle of elements. While in the above North American mythological cases the presence of an element system has to be inferred through interpretation, the situation is rather more conspicuous though not less puzzling in Ancient Mexico, where the anthropologist Nuttall claimed to find the following parallels with the Old World: 147

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In the Old and the New World alike, are found, in the same close association, (1) the purple industry and skill in weaving; (2) the use of pearls and conchshell trumpets; (3) the mining, working and trafficking in copper, silver and gold; (4) the tetrarchial form of government; (5) the conception of Four Elements; (6) the cyclical form of calendar. Those scholars who assert that all of the foregoing must have developed independently will ever be confronted by the persistent and unassailable fact that, throughout America, the aborigines unanimously disclaim all share in their production and assign their introduction to strangers of superior culture from distant and unknown part (Nuttall 1909: 383 as quoted in Smith 1929: 11).

We shall return to Nuttalls work in Chapter 8. Meanwhile, let us proceed to Western Eurasia, where in the last two millennia a correlative system of four immutable categories has established itself as the norm until it was supplanted, in turn, much less than two centuries ago, by Modern sciences atomic theory of numerous categories that are mainly immutable but many of which have in fact turned out to be mutable under conditions of radioactivity. Time to consider, at the Western end of the Eurasia, the Presocratic nature philosophers.

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Chapter 5. The Presocratics in Western Eurasia: Four immutable elemental categories as the norm throughout Western Eurasia for the last two millennia

5.1. The Presocratics

Western philosophy and natural science are commonly held to have begun in Ancient Greece, with the Presocratic philosophers each seeking to identify the nature of primal matter: Thales (Water), Anaximenes (Air), Heraclitus (Fire), Xenophanes (Earth) and Empedocles (Water, Air, Earth, Fire) all flourishing in the middle of the 1st mill. BCE. The distinction between Greek philosophy before and after Socrates was introduced around 1800 CE by Hegel and Schleiermacher; the Presocratics had a considerable influence on European Romantic poets such as Hlderlin, whereas the designation Presocratics (always begrudged by Modern scholarship) was coined by Nietzsche.114 The extensive corpus of sources on Presocratic philosophy was first systematically brought together by Diels115 and subsequently considered in a vast literature.116 In this corpus, Aristotle takes pride of place. He represents the Presocratics, notably Empedocles, in a way that as we shall see still could be read

114 Nietzsche 1923 (1873); cf. Huehn 2001, who also points out critically alternative designations. 115 116

Diels 1960 / 1903, cf. 1899; also cf. Burkert 1999.

The vast literature on the Presocratics includes, among much else: Allen & Furley 1975; Bakalis 2005; Barnes 1979; Bernab 2001; Buchheim 1994; Burnet 1934; Capelle 1935; Cornford 1962; Fairbanks 1898; Grnwald 1991; Guthrie 1978; Kirk et al. 1983; Lami 1991; Macauley 1998; Mansfeld 1983-1987; Snell 1955.

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to imply the cyclical nature of the system. It was mainly Aristotles version of Empedocles four-element doctrine (but deprived of its implicitly cyclical character) that was subsequently enshrined in Graeco-Roman, Arabic, Indian and European natural science, astrology,117 other forms of divination, medicine, iconography, etc. as one of the central paradigms leading to Modern science and Modern thought. Whereas the Taoist system is one of an unending transformation cycle, at the other extreme of the spectrum we find the use to which the Empedoclean system has been put in the ontologies of Graeco-Roman Late Antiquity, medieval Byzantine, Arabic and Latin science, and their Early Modern derivates e.g. in the four humours doctrine of Galenus, in the Hebrew high priests ephod claimed to symbolise the four elements and containing the cleromantic apparatus of the Urim and Thummim (Cooper 1988, s.v. vestments), in classic Arabian cud-(i.e. lute-)centred musical theory (Howard 1993), in geomancy (cilm al-raml), which emerged in Iraq at the end of the 1st millennium CE in the context of the philosophical movement of the I un al-af. All these later interpretations combined to produce an orthodoxy where the four elements had become a rigid, conventionalised classification system in which all notion of a transformation cycle had been lost. In view of the enigmatic, unspecified nature of the Urim and Thummim as pre-Exilic Israelite ritual divination apparatus, and the enormous literature on this topic, Coopers suggestion as to an Empedoclean background must be treated with suspicion. The went goes in disuse after the Babylonian Exile, a century before Empedocles. A traditional translation of the Hebrew terms is lights and perfections, respectively (cf. Strong 1989: 1058, 1093; Dahlby n.d.), but their plural Hebrew morphology has been found puzzling (Kitz 1997), perhaps suggestive of superficial localisations of words from other languages than Hebrew, e.g. Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, or Greek; or, within the Hebrew domain, relating to other roots than those usually adduced, e.g. t-hom, abyss (Genesis 1:2). By analogy with an Assyrian form of divination, Horowitz & Hurowitz (1992) suggest an interpretation in terms of psephomancy i.e. divination by means of pebbles, thus setting a standard for two decades now and bringing the Urim and Thummim procedure close to divination methods
Pingree 1978 splendidly offers an overview of the transcultural connections involved.
117

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including geomantic ones in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Southern Africa. (Cf. Coon 1977: 136 f., where on the basis of the unreliable Trilles (1932) a Pygmy hunting divination rite is described comparable to the Urim and Thummim). Many authors (e.g. Reiner 1960: 25; Rowley 1956: 28 f.; Vriezen 1963: 74) claim a mechanical, one-bit yes / no function for the Urim and Thummim oracle, but if that were true it would not make sense to have more than one element (stone, gem, stick) involved a single element falling in two different positions, e.g. facing up or down, is already sufficient to produce yes-no answers. Hence Mary Douglas insistence (1999) that more complex answers must have been possible (I Sam. 28:6 reports a neutral outcome, for instance, in addition to mere yes / no), and that the positions where the elements end up in a imaginary astronomical or astrological grid may influence the outcome in the sense of the microdramatics that the anthropologist Werbner (1989) sees involved in Southern African cleromantic divination, which also applies to the bones oracles and basket oracles of Southern and South Central Africa, and which, in the Ancient Mediterranean region, moreover underlies the casting of dice on the calibrated so-called Tabula Bianchini, for adulterated astrological purposes (Bouch-Leclercq 1899: 213, 227). Such microdramatics are entirely absent in the geomantic fourtablet oracles of Southern and West Africa and of the Indian Ocean, where the outcome is entirely determined by the stochastic production of any of the 2n combinations, as interpreted in the light of a fixed, abstract oracular catalogue. Therefore it is interesting that Greek gods whose shrines have a cleromantic function, especially those of Heracles, are claimed to have Levantine / Phoenician connotations.118 In the same Phoenician direction point suggestions that the Urim and Thummim are associated with the alphabet (Robertson 1961; Auerbach 1953). The topic is of considerable interest to our present argument, especially because, in the sphere of divination, it might be suspected to provide a missing link between (a) the Aegean, (b) the more specifically Pelasgian realm of West Asia, and (c) the proposed West Asian cosmological continuities between West Asia and China (see below, Ch. 7, on Terrien de Lacouperie). Such continuity, at least, is the opinion of the Sinologist Carus
118

E.g. Levy 1934; Van Berchem 1967. The Levantine claim implies that these gods and shrines hail from the region associated not only with West Semitic speakers but also with Pelasgians. That both identities may be found within one and the same regional community is the point of Fig. 7.2, below.

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(1911, cf. 1898 / 1902 and 1907), who sees close parallels between the Urim and Thummin on the one hand, and Chinese Lo Pan / lu pn divination on the other; and who stresses Sumerian / Chinese continuity. Similarly the Sinologist Walters 1992: 131:
What the Urim and Thummim were can only be guessed at, but it is entirely probable that they were similar to the two ancient traditional methods that are still found being used in Chinese temples today. These are the two blocks of wood called chiao pai and the bundle of sticks known as chim.

Perhaps as an unreferenced echo from Terrien de Lacouperie, Karst (1931a: 464, 1931b: 93 f.) suggested a pre-Semitic or pre-Semitic background for these divinatory instruments, no doubt on comparativelinguistic grounds which however are not made explicit. Nor does the above exhaust the applications of an element system in the Greek, and by extension Indo-European, context. It has long been recognised by classicists that the rudimentary outlines of a four-element system can already be found in Homer and Hesiod, dated to the 8th-7th c. BCE (cf. Fontenrose 1958: 213, 221f; Cerri 1998; Longrigg 1976). For example (it is Poseidon who speaks):
We were three brothers whom Rhea bore to Saturn Jove, myself, and Hades who rules the world below. Heaven and Earth were divided into three parts, and each of us was to have an equal share. When we cast lots, it fell to me to have my dwelling in the sea for evermore; Hades took the darkness of the realms under the earth, while air and sky and clouds were the portion that fell to Jove; but earth and great Olympus are the common property of all. (Homer, Iliad, XV, 184f; English tr. Samuel Butler.) From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry

, . , : , , : .

k Ceoj d Erebj te mlain te Nx gnonto Nuktj d at/ Aqr te ka `Hmrh xegnonto, oj tke kusamnh Erbei filthti migesa. Gaa d toi prton men genato son aut Orann sterenq\, na min per pnta kalptoi, fr eh makressi qeoj doj sfalj ae.

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Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. (Hesiod, Theogonia, 116 f. (English translation Hugh G. EvelynWhite)

A further case in point is the Homeric struggle of Achilles (hero before Troy, a sea god in the Black Sea region, but119 structurally to the equated with Earth), aided by Hephaestus, i.e. Fire, at the instigation of Athena ( = Air?), against the River Scamander (Water) (Homer, Iliad XX, 74 f., XXI, 136 f.). In a recent paper Nick Allen (2010) drew attention to the unmistakable parallels between this account and the struggle between the rainstorm god Indra (Water) and the water-absorbing snake Vtr (Earth). Hephaestus is a key figure in this connection.120 There is a parallel in Nordic mythology: the rain god Freyr on the day of Ragnarok (the Nordic Apocalypse) will battle without weapons (for he gave his sword away to
119

For reasons beyond our present scope; briefly, as son of a sea goddess, Achilles structurally (under the Separation-of-Water-and-Land cosmogony) corresponds with Land, hence Earth.

120 My recently drafted extensive study, with the rather too epigonistically-Bernallian, working title Black Vulcan (van Binsbergen, in preparation (b); written to contest my friend Blaeks (2010b) claim that the name Hphaistos [ Hephaestus ] should be considered a reflex of the Ancient Egyptian theonym Pt [ Ptah ]) casts further light on the extensive, and early (8th century BCE as the oldest date for the composition of the Homeric poems) applicability of the transformation cycle of elements in the Ancient Greek context and its regional antecedents in West Asia, where the Hephaestus cult is said to originate. Interestingly, Fire is an exceptionally capricious and destructive case as compared to the other elements, not just in Ancient Greek mythology also cf. the disasters attending the descent from Heaven of the non-personified Fire in the hands of Prometheus, and (for further comparative significance) inside a reed stalk or narthex, of all possibilities but also in Uralic mythology (where Canto II of the Kalevala may be read as a narratised transformation cycle of elements, and the birth of Iron, cf. Fire, in Canto IX creates dramatic conditions comparable to those attending Hephaestus childhood; Lnnrot 1866, Tamminen 1928), and on the other end of the Eurasian Steppe belt, the Japanese gods Fire / Kagutsuchi and Storm / Rain / Ocean Susanowo, with comparable destructive impestuousness. I suspect a case could be made (it has been made, but not yet on solid grounds) for Fire being among a more original, smaller set of elements than four, five, six or eight, perhaps paired with Water and later augmented and systematised with the addition of Earth, Wood, Metal, Air, etc. Fire, and to a lesser extent Water (but see what it does to Fire!) are much more obviously aggressive and destructive than the other elements, and the cycles of destruction and production (insult and blessing) in transformation may have been primarily inspired by Fire and Water.

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Skirnir), and will be the first to be killed by the formidable Surt (a Fire Giant) again enacting the same scheme of Water being destroyed by Fire.121 Vlastos (1955: 74) and Stokes (1962-1963: 33) suggest that in archaic Greek thought, Chaos / Tartarus, as an element in its own right, was considered the origin of the three elements Air, Earth and Water / sea (Longrigg 1976: 426f). Also the well-known Greek myth of the birth of Athena, adult and fully armed, from the head of her parthenogenetic father Zeus,122 while the divine blacksmith Hephaestus splits the head open with his hammer, could be considered an incomplete evocation of a transformative element cycle.

Source: Majer 1687: 67, cf. Seligmann n.d.: 133 Fig. 5.1. The birth of Athena as an instance of the transformative cycle of elements.

Thus the narrative of the birth of Athena seems to amount to the follow121 By further comparison, in the Nkoya narrative of king Shihoka Nalinanga and his sister who is his main enemy, the dry / wet opposition is applied in several ways. The kings name means Snake, Child or Parent of Drought, and although producing boats, he lives in the forest, while his counterpart lives in the open Flood Plain, as the structural exponent of the Mother of the Waters, who in vain claims her privilege of supremacy, after her position has already been redefined from intergeneration (Virgin Mother and Only Child, who becomes her lover) to intrageneration Elder Sister / Younger Brother with further humiliation in stock for the Elder Sister. The opposition between Rain and Drought is, however, not just a binary cosmological opposition, but may be interpreted as part of a transformation cycle involving, besides Fire and Water, also Earth, Air, Metal, and possibly other elements such as Aether.

Cf. Hesiod, Theogonia, 886 f., 924 f., 929a f.; Pindar (1865), Olympian Ode, 7, 33 f.; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, 1, 20; Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, 2, 27; Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, 6, 19; Atsma, Theoi, s.v. Athena.

122

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ing element transformative formula:

Zeus Athena / with Hephaestus as catalyst Air (Earth? ) Water123? / with Fire as catalyst
Note, however, that the logic of the transformation cycle of elements is rather misunderstood in Fig. 5.1 (a late-17th c. fanciful alchemical rendition of the Greek narrative: Hephaestus / Vulcan appears with all the insignia of his identity as Fire (the smithy in the background, with blazing furnace, thongs, hammer in the foreground) but Zeus / Jupiter also holds fire in his right hand in mythology his main emblem is the thunderbolt. In the background, where (as during Zeus visit to Danae) it rains gold, note an apocryphal couple (Sol with Aphrodite / Venus) making love under a canopy under the encouraging eye of Eros / Cupid, while a narcissistic Apollo poses on a pedestal, holding his bow. The title of the copper-plate (Aurum pluit, dum nascitur Pallas Rhodi, & Sol concumbit Veneri) refers to gold-making: the birth of Athena (with Sun making love to Venus in the back) evokes the liberation of gold from its surroundings, and the triumph of mind over matter. If the Ancients had been totally unaware of the notion of a cyclical transformation of elements, one could not understand a major, widely received text like Ovids Metamorphoses (cf. della Corte 1985), many stories in which could be read as illustrations of the transformative element cycle. Another indication of the Ancients implicit awareness of a transformative element cycle, with the idea of elements seeking to dominate each other, may be read into the Allegoriae Homericae by Heraclitus Ponticus (388-315 BCE):
Thus the chaining of Hera (Iliad, III, 277) is explained as the union of the elements (); the hurling of Hephaestus through the air (Iliad, I, 592) signifies the earthly fire, which is weaker than the heavenly flame (Geffken 1908: 329).

123 Whatever the transformations which Athena has undergone so as to become the (Pelasgian-associated) principal patroness of Athens and of arts and crafts, her prime identity is that of an aquatic goddess, for reasons which I set out in van Binsbergen 2011d ultimately, she (and the same applies to her cognates Neith, Anat, Anahita, Nyambi etc.) may be seen as a late manifestation of the putative, prehistoric Mother of the Waters.

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The four elements then appear, in the established later use, as fixed ontological positions, which have their own immutable inherent characteristics. The world is composed, not of an unending systematic cycle of transformations in which one substance constantly transforms into another, but of the varying amalgamation of four fundamentally different substances which each remain constant in the process. The idea of such absolute differences appears to owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the logic of writing and of a writingbased formalised science. Letters are like immutable elements, texts their permutations; both letters and elements were called stoicheion in Greek, (cf. footnote 133, below). A four-element system is no longer a merely oral nature philosophy capable of underpinning the practical cosmologies of illiterate peripheral peoples on the contrary, it is the literate, articulate science that belongs to a life world in which writing, the state, science and organised religion have totally altered the shape of culture and of society, in a general application of notions of transcendence that are the opposite of the immanentalist transformation cycle of Taoism. However, we must not exaggerate this effect of writing ands the state, for also Taoism, with its emphasis on cyclical transformation, is a product of a literate state with priests and proto-science.At the far end of these transcendental, immutable distinctions lies Early Modern natural science, Modern atomic theory, and Modern physics and chemistry in general. The great French historian of science Gaston Bachelard has written poetical-philosophical analyses of all four Empedoclean elements (Bachelard 1938, 1942, 1943, 1946, 1948) in a bid to articulate their essence in terms that are still acceptable to natural science and philosophy today, stressing the importance of the thinkability of scientific and pseudo-scientific representations. A closer look at Empedocles, Aristotle and Plato suggests that the discarding of the transformation cycle and the fixing of elements in immutable, parallel ontological positions may have occurred not in classical Greek civilisation but only in later centuries, and that this later reading has then been projected back into the emendation, understanding and reception of classical sources. In 2005 James Butler challenged mainstream Empedocles interpretations by stressing the latters concept of effluvia over that of rhizomata, thus 156

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evoking an image of fluidity that may well be in line with that of a transformation cycle of elements. In Butlers words (2005: 215),
Taking as a guiding theme his [Empedocles] claim that there are effluvia from all things that have come to be (D[iels & ]K[ranz] B 89), the author presents a reading of Empedocles that stresses the central role of effluvia in his natural philosophy. In presentations of Empedocles, the tradition has usually emphasized the importance of the elements Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Love, and Strife. But as an alternative to that tradition, the author here argues that one must bring to the forefront the role of the effluvia, which give to Empedocles cosmology a fluid, viscous character. The history of western natural science has been dominated by a mechanics of solid bodies following, however indirectly, in the tradition of the atoms and void of early Greek atomism. Empedocles represents a forgotten exception to that history, and the present argument attempts to return to his philosophy, unearth its fluid mechanical foundations, and presents a challenging alternative to the dominant physical paradigm.

5.2. Empedocles
5.2.1. Empedocles: Introduction There exists an enormous literature on the Four Elements in the GraecoRoman tradition, and specifically on Empedocles.124 Most of this literature (up to the late 20th century CE) tends to ignore the wider, global ramifications of element systems, and to see Empedocles as the unprecedented inventor of the foursome. Already in the light of the Homeric and Hesiodic passages cited above, this seems untenable. Moreover, we already see the nucleus of a four-element doctrine when another Presocratic philosopher, Anaximenes, nearly a century before Empedocles, considered Air the original element, which however turns into Fire through thinning, and then into Water, Earth and Stone. In the most recent decades the Empedoclean corpus was augmented by a

124

The literature on Empedocles includes, among many other publications: Baltzer 1879; Barnes 1982; Bidez 1884, 1896; Bis 1969; Bollack 1965-1969; Burkert 1962, 1975; Classen 1970; Cornford 1926; Diels 1880, 1898; Dumont et al. 1988; Ferwerda 1997; Feshbach 1988; Kingsley 1995a; Lambridis 1976; Leonard 1908; Lommatzsch 1830; Macauley 1998, 2005; Millerd 1908; OKeefe 1969; Osborne 2000, 2005; Parry 2005; Primavesi 1998a, 1998b; Tiedemann 1781; Trpanier 2004; Vtek n.d.; Wagner 2000; Wright 1995, 1997.

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few new papyri finds. These new Strassbourg fragments125 are rather uncertain and their importance for Empedocles studies is widely considered to have been exaggerated by their editors (Vtek 2004; Laks 2001). Even so, they seem to suggests that Empedocles left only one combined physical / moral-purification text, not two separate texts (Campbell 20042005). However, it may go too far to suggest, with Osborne (1987: 48f; 2005) that Empedocles envisaged in the first place to propound, not a cosmology, but a moral philosophy to regulate the lives of humans. The received reading of Empedocles has been that, for him, reality consists of an ever varying mixture of immutable elements (rhizomata ), which were conceived of as minute discrete particles but not necessarily as atoms (Longrigg 1976: 437f). This compromise between mutability and immutability is considered to be Empedocles answer to Parmenides paralysing ontological claim of total immutability (cf. Heidel 1906). Finkelberg (1997) argues that this aspect of Empedocles theory originates in Xenophaness theory of the mixture of original bodies. In this light we might also view Empedocles theory of element interaction (cf. Acri 1870): the small divisible parts of each element are supposed to enter the pores of each other element during the maximum dominance of Strife one of the two phases (the other being Love) the cosmological process of the world goes through in a perpetual cycle (Solmsen 1965). Table 5.1 presents the core of Empedocles doctrine.

Greek
6. / / () , . / 7 , 8. () / , , / / ,

English 6. And first the fourfold root of all things: hear! White gleaming Zeus, Life-bringing Here Dis, And Nestis whose tears bedew mortality. 7. Uncreated 8 But when in man, wild beast, or bird, or bush, / These elements commingle and arrive

identification

Fire Air Earth Water

Curd 2002; Janko 2004; Martin 1998; Martin & Primavesi 1998b; van der Ben 1999.

125

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. 9. [] / / , [] / , / [] , ./ 10. . . . . / 11. , / / . / 12. / / , .

9 The realms of light, the thoughtless deem it birth; / When they dispart, t is doom of death; and though / Not this the Law, I too assent to use. / 10. Avenging Death. / 11. Fools! for their thoughts are briefly brooded oer. / Who trust that what is not can eer become, / Or aught that is can wholly die away. / 12. From what-is-not what-is can neer become; / So that what-is should eer be all destroyed, / No force could compass and no ear hath heard / For there t will be forever where t is set.

Source: Leonard 1908, based on Aetius Placita Philosophorum I, 3; Doxographi Graeci 287 Diels 1879 Table 5.1. The four elements according to Empedocles.

5.2.2. Remarks to Table 5.1 (Empedocles doxology) Since Antiquity, scholars have been in disagreement (Kingsley 1994a) as to the specific interpretation of the four theonyms in terms of the four elements enumerated by Aristotle (Meteorologica (339a 15-19 and 36-b2; for Greek text see six pages down). Wellmann (1905) sums up the major disagreements:
Solcher Grundstoffe oder Elemente, die er noch nicht Elemente (stoicea) nennt, sondern Wurzeln (izmata) von allem, nimmt er nun vier an, nmlich Feuer. Luft, Wasser und Erde, oder, wie er sie mythologisch bezeichnet. Zej, Hrh, Aidwnej, Nstij. ber die Bedeutung dieser Benennungen gab es spter zwei verschiedene Ansichten: nach der einen, die sich auf Theophrast zurckfhren lt, ist unter Here die Luft, unter Aidoneus die Erde zu verstehen, nach der anderen, die schon Krates von Mallos vertreten zu haben scheint, bedeutet Here die Erde und Aidoneus die Luft. Darber, da mit Zeus (fr den auch Hephaistos oder Helios eintritt) das Feuer und mit Nestis das Wasser gemeint sei, herrschte im Altertum kein Zweifel. Die neueren Gelehrten halten Theophrasts Auslegung fr die richtige, nur Thiele [(...) (1897)] meint Zeus, msse die Luft, Here die Erde bezeichnen.

Some have interpreted Hera as Earth, which however leaves Air unac-

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counted for.126 On the basis of the transcontinental methodological principle cited at the end of Chapter 1, we are justified to look to other manifestations of element systems elsewhere for arguments in favour of a particular attribution. Since Zeus is both the god of thunder (an aspect apparently implied here by Empedocles) and of the clear Sky and in the latter capacity equivalent to Ancient Egyptian w (Shu), his sister and spouse would be homologous to Tfnt (Tefnut), i.e. Moisture, Mist, Air in line with Theophrastus view. Meanwhile, nonetheless, the disagreement continues over the element interpretation of Empedocles theonymic doxology (Thiele 1897; Wellmann 1905; Snell 1943; Kingsley 1994a). Kingsley, however, was severely criticised by Mansfeld (1995) and OBrien (1998):
Kingsley seeks to revive the nineteenth-century thesis that Aidoneus, an alternative name for Hades, god of the underworld, is fire, that Zeus (the rival candidate for fire) is air, and that Hera (the rival candidate for air) is earth. (OBrien 1998; the same interpretation of Aidoneus is followed in the Dutch translation of the Fragments (Ferwerda 1997); on Platos view that Hera is equal to Air and not to Earth, cf. Sprague 1972).

According to Longrigg (1976) Empedocles himself did not attach great value to the identification of the theonyms with specific elements. The name that is here used for Dis / Hades, is often equated with the Hebrew expression Adonai Lord, as a designation of the High God. The identification and interpretation of Nestis here pose considerable problems and have been considered by several scholars.127 The once leading classicist Von Wilamowitz-Mllendorff (1931: 20) considered Nestis verschollen, unheard of, and denies her name a Greek etymology. Vlastos (1947) calls the name so inconsequential that its very identity remains in doubt. Yet Nestis comes back elsewhere among Empedocles Fragments, I, 96 (Leonard 1908: 45):128
126

Chitwood (1986) speaks, with reference to the same passage, of bright-shining Hera, unconvincingly applying (bright, as lightning) to her and not to lightning-throwing Zeus. The most authoritative Greek-English dictionary (Liddell & Scott 1901: s.v. ) translates Empedocles expression as fire. Sedley 1999; Barnes 1998: 461; Kingsley 1995a: 359; Picot 2004; Sheppard 1996.

127 128

Fairbanks (1898: 183) gives a substantially different translation: And the kindly earth in its broad hollows received two out of the eight parts of bright Nestis [i.e. Water WvB], and four of Hephaistos [i.e. Fire WvB], and they became white

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Kind Earth for her broad-breasted meltingpots, Of the eight parts got two of Lucid Nestis, And of Hephaest[u]s four. Thence came white bones, Divinely joined by glue of Harmony.

Some scholars have assumed, on the basis of the Empedoclean attestations alone, that Nestis was a water goddess in Southern Italy. For Kingsley (tacitly following Leonard 1908: 68, who in turn refers to van ten Brink and Heyne as discussed by Zeller 1881: II, 117 f.) she appears as a Sicilian cult name of the underworld goddess Persephone / Proserpina which does not seem to tally with the probable underworld connotations of Aidoneus, listed as a distinctly different element evocation if Nestis is the underworld / Earth, what is Aidoneus still doing in this summing up? However, perhaps a more satisfactory identification of Nestis (also in view of the Egyptian undercurrents attending the identification of Hera, above) is Neith (Ancient Egypts major goddess of the waters throughout the dynastic period), with the possibility of a Neith cult in Southern Italy. Already Karst (1931a, 1931b) concluded to considerable Ancient Egyptian influence on the Capitolinus cult of earliest Rome. Egyptian archaeological finds from Southern Italy have been abundant (Lambrou-Phillipson 1990), but so was the case in many parts of the Early to Middle Iron Age Mediterranean. Another approach to Nestis would be via the comparative mythology of divine tears. Of this, Fig. 5.1 presents the global distribution, showing that the mytheme of divine tears producing humans is so rare that a common origin may be suspected for the individual attestations even though distributed (probably as a result of Pelasgian transmission) across the three continents of the Old World. However, the mytheme divine tears produce other major aspects of reality than humans, especially waterrelated ones is rather more common, and links Northern Europe via the Mediterranean to the Middle East and (by a strange parallelism which we have already noticed) to Oceania.

bones, fitted together marvellously by the glues of Harmony.

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divine tears produce humans (or angels); divine tears bring about destruction,

2012 added 2012 added

divine tears produce other major aspects of reality, espec. rivers, rain, dew, etc.; divine tears bring about destruction, notably the Flood; uncertain;

2012 added

Fig. 5.2. Distributional aspects of the global comparative mythology of divine tears.

Most data point in this diagram have been adequately presented and referenced elsewhere (van Binsbergen 2010a: 197 f.). The present discussion allows me to add a few extra data, identified as such in the Figure, and to be accounted as follows. From GraecoRoman mythology, several more cases than I recognised in 2010 can be cited about surface waters created by divine tears, e.g. the Cygnean Lake (Ovid 1815, Metamorphoses, VII, 371 f.). From the tradition of Judaism we may add that the Tears of the Archangel Michael produced the Cherubim (a class of angels), and those shed at the death of Abraham produced precious stones (Davidson 1967, s.v. Michael). Moreover, Rabbinical wisdom speaks of the channel whereby the tears of God flow downward into the world (Fishbane 2003). Also in the Taino culture, Jamaica, in Early Modern times, divine tears were equated with rain (Ronnberg c.s. 2011: 357). Among the many stories worldwide where human mortals tears give rise to surface waters or cause the Flood, some may be singled out because their protagonist may be suspected to be a god in human disguise featuring in a transformed Flood myth; thus a case from Halmaheira, Indonesia, involving a variety of the unilateral being known as Luwe or Mwendanjangula in Africa but also

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widespread elsewhere.129 Although my Egyptological references in 2010 were correct and fairly complete, the picture could be further refined; notably as regards the precise identity indicated for the weeper (which for instance could be the Earth god Geb, whose
tears filled the seas and his semen fertilized the Sky goddess, Nut, who produced Isis, Osiris, Seth, and Nephthys; Andrews 2000: 80; Ions 1983).

The Egyptian mytheme humans from divine tears is usually (e.g. Pinch 1994: 68) attributed to punning on Ancient Egyptian , remt people and remj , tears. In some contexts the tears produce not humans but bees. Moreover, it is specifically in the Coffin Texts, from the late 3rd mill. BCE on (de Buck 19351961: VII, 465a; Faulkner 2004), that the oldest attestation is found of mankind springing from the tears of the Suns (Rcs) eye. The Ancient Greeks attributed the inundation of the Nile to the tears of Isis when violated by her brother Seth or her son Horus.130 Isis violation is described, among other places, in the Papyrus Harris VII, 10 (12th c. BCE). Still in Ancient Egypt, all substances used in embalming were supposed to derive from the tears which the gods shed at the death of Osiris (Anonymous, Osiris cult). There is meanwhile a most interesting connection between this divine tears produce humans complex, leopard symbolism (the leopard skin is spotted / sprinkle as if caused by rain), and the inexhaustible subject of the Pleiades the latter widely connected with tears and rain through various aetiological myths and calendrical events marking the onset of the planting season (occasionally with promiscuous sexual rites) and, months later, the remembrance of the dead. Throughout the Old World there seem to have been periods when (as suggested by ancient string figures) the Pleiades were considered the most important stars in heaven; and in this respect China, West Asia, Africa, North America, and the European Upper Palaeolithic show remarkable convergence just as there is a general and ancient tendency, with unmistakable shamanic overtones, to
von Sicard 1968-1969: 793; Bezemer 1904: 385; the global distribution of the mytheme of the unilateral being is given in Fig. 9.10 of van Binsbergen 2010a: 199.
130 129

Hopfner 1940-1941: II, 175; Plutarch 1934-1935, De Iside et Osiride); Frankfort 1948: 179.

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interpret the Milky Way as the road of the soals, to Heaven or to the Underworld. The persistent symbolism of seven or six dots can be encountered from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age; in Ancient Mesopotamia it was particularly marked, and we cannot rule out the possibility that it is in the Pleiades featuring prominently in the context of ancient cosmologies that the initially notational system of geomancy in the form of either open or filled dots (another application of the ubiquitous theme of the dark / light opposition) finds its specific origin (Carus 1911 reminds us that, in Y Jng, the system of broken and unbroken lines was only introduced after the invention of the writing brush; thus also Legge 1993: 363 f.). However, fuller treatment of the Pleiades would require a book in its own right.131 Equating Nestis with Neith would take us down to an ancient layer implied in Egyptian mythology, where Neith, as the Mother of the Waters, is still the goddess of Heaven (Waters Above) as well as of the surface waters and even of the Waters Below, the Abyss thus revealing her preRec kinship with Tiamat, T-hom and Leviathan. Thus Nestis tears may be assumed to be related to the tears of Rc out of which humankind was supposed to have found its origin (another possible link between South Italy and Ancient Egypt), but also to the tears of Mvula / Rain, the demiurge whom the Nkoya people of South Central Africa consider to be the child of the High God Nyambi, and thus (especially in view of the lifebringing nature of rain) the connection between Heaven and Earth (cf. van Binsbergen 1992, 2010a). 5.2.3. Empedocles evocation of the elements to be interpreted as a transformation cycle Especially from lines 8 f. in Table 5.1 it is clear that even for Empedocles the four elements constitute primarily a transformation cycle. This is also how Aristotle has read the Empedoclean heritage, although many later readers have tended to see the four elements as fundamentally different and disparate ontological categories. Aristotle stresses that the four ele-

131

Cf. Bates 1914: 179; Baudouin 1916a, 1916b; Cavaignac 1959; Harva / Holmberg 1938; Miller 1988; Rappenglck 1997, 1999; Elliot Smith 1919: 212 f.; Stanley 1926; van Buren 1939-1941 (but see Goff 1963); Walters 1989: 75.

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ments constantly transform into each other.132

tettrwn dntwn totwn, purj ka roj ka datoj ka gj, t men totoij psin pipolzon enai pr t d fistmenon gn: do d, prj at totoij nlogon cei, r men gr purj ggtata tn llwn, dwr de gj ...four bodies (somata, ) are Fire, Air, Water, Earth; Fire occupies the highest place among them all, Earth the lowest, and two elements correspond to these in their relation to one another, air being nearest to Fire, Water to Earth (Aristotle, Meteorologica, 339a15-19; initial capitals interpreted WvB)

This Aristotle quote already demonstrates that that philosopher conceived of the four elements, not as totally separated, parallel ontological givens, but as hierarchically ordered along one dimension, from Fire on top, via Air and Water, to Earth. Michelinis 1993 argument The Dance of the Elements: Fragment B 17 of Empedocles might be read in a similar vein. Contrary to the received post-classical conception of the four-element doctrine, there can be no doubt that for Aristotle, the elements would constantly change into each other, as steps in a transformation cycle:
famen d pr ka ra ka dwr ka gn gnesqai x lllwn, ka kaston n kst prcein totwnn dunmei, sper ka twn llwn oj n ti ka tatn pkeitai, ej nalontai scaton. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, we assert, originate from one another, and each of them exists potentially in each, as all things do that can be resolved into a common and ultimate substrate. (Aristotle, Meteorologica, 339a36-b2; capitals WvB)

Already in Plato (cf. OBrien 2003) we find resonances of these Empedoclean ideas but in a vaguer form:
[48b] , , . : ,

[48b] and taking once again a fresh starting point suitable to the matter we must make a fresh start in dealing therewith, just as we did with our previous subjects. We must gain a view of the real nature of Fire and Water, Air and Earth, as it was before the birth of Heaven, and the properties they had before that time; for at present no one has as yet declared their generation, but we assume that

However, like the later Stoics, Aristotle adds a fifth element, Aether, to the four familiar ones of Empedocles.

132

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men know what fire is, and each of these things, and we call them princi 133 , ples and presume that they are ele-

ments of the Universe, although in truth they do not so much as deserve to be likened with any likelihood (Plato, Timaeus, 48b; capitals WvB).

If the cyclical transformation of elements is at all recognised by modern scholars in the Greek four-element system, it is mainly as a secondary interpretation of Empedocles by Aristotle and Plato.134 Thus the Nobelprize winning chemist Arrhenius (who also credits Empedocles with the discovery of the Law of Conservation of Matter; 1907: 14) wrote:
As far back as about 500 b.c, Empedocles had already introduced the notion that everything consists of four elements; Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. These elements of antiquity correspond more nearly to what we now call states of aggregation, if we except fire (which is equivalent to hot gases). Consequently Plato and Aristotle asserted that the elements might be converted one into the other. For instance, we read the following passage in Timaios: We believe from observation that water becomes stone and earth by condensation, and wind and air by subdivision; ignited air becomes fire, but this, when condensed and extinguished, again takes the form of Air, and the latter is then transformed to mist, which resolves into water. Lastly, rocks and earth are produced from water. To put it more simply, it had been observed that by cooling hot gases (fire) cool gases (air) were obtained, and that by condensation of moist Air one got water-drops, which might be united to give ordinary water. On the other hand, out of water were deposited solid substances, which had formerly been suspended or dissolved in the water. The ancient philosophers evidently only considered the qualities of the bodies, and therefore the hypothesis of the transformation of one element into another was a natural consequence. This hypothesis dominated the alchemistic view of the nature of substances. Again, the [P]hlogiston135 [H]ypothesis is only a variety of the

on, stoicheion, here applied to physical element, was the regular term for letter of the alphabet; Cf. Theaet. 203 B f., Rep. 402 A f. The basic meaning appears to be item in a series, calibration point, item determining rank order (van den Es 1896, s.v.; Liddell & Scott 1901, s.v.). Especially in Platos Republic (1975b), there is much emphasis on the number four, and one even believes to encounter, especially in Book VIII, some of the specific symbolic personages associated with the sixteen configurations of geomantic divination as if the latter was conceived under direct influence of Plato. Contrary to common belief, it was Plato, not Aristotle, who dominated Islamic philosophy in the late 1st millennium CE, when cilm al-raml was invented.
135 Phlogiston refers to Joachim Bechers 17th-c. CE hypothesis, soon to be discarded, that matter contains an enigmatic substance, without weight, extension, colour, taste etc., which is evicted through combustion WvB. 134

133

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[T]ransformation [H]ypothesis. (Arrhenius 1907: 12f)

Around the turn of the 20th century it was a popular idea among historians of science and philosophy that Empedocles, as the supposed author of the four-element system, arrived at his insight by a simple extension of the observable aggregation states of matter. Thus the once leading historian of philosophy berweg (1891: 40):
The triad: fire (including air), water, earth, corresponds with the three aggregate states of matter (as they are now called); Empedocles (), separating air more distinctly from fire, first arrived at the distinction of the four socalled elements.

Although the Western Empedocles reception was largely dependent on Aristotles rendering of the formers thought, Aristotles Empedocles reading has been severely and convincingly criticised for centuries (Cudworth 1678; Leclerc 1712: 78 f.). This debate still goes on, for instance, Longrigg (1976) takes exception with Aristotles view that Empedocles came to his four-element doctrine simply by adding the element Earth to the other three elements already circulating in Presocratic thought; and in the light of the world-wide parallels discussed in the present argument, Aristotle was certainly wrong on this point.136 Not all modern commentators agree on the immutability allegedly ascribed to Empedocles rhizomata by Aristotle. Thus Osborne (1987: 44):
Aristotle does not say that Empedocles denied that the elements could lose and gain their differentiae; in fact he specifically attributes to him the doctrine that they do lose and gain their differentiae in changing into and out of the one. () What Empedocles is supposed to have denied is that one element might lose its own differentiae and gain those of another; a part which was earth before ought only to become earth again after it leaves the one. Aristotles criticism goes home only on his assumption that the elements lose not only their actual characteristics but also their potential differentiae, a distinction which Aristotle does not import here though he might have done. On his view no part of the sphere can be distinguished, even by having the capacity to become earth rather than water or vice versa. Thus so far from suggesting that

Meanwhile, also Longrigg (1976: 44; cf. Lloyd 1964) is to be faulted for claiming, with the majority of commentators (e.g. Campbell 2004-2005), that Empedocles originality consisted in the latters insistence on the four elements being unchangeable and irreducible. Such insistence, in my opinion, only emerged in the subsequent reception of Empedocles.

136

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Empedocles one [ sic ] is a mixture, Aristotle envisages it as an absolute unity from which all distinctions, actual or potential, have been eliminated.

Although Western scholarship has generally failed to recognise the extent to which the Empedoclean cosmology can be seen as an element transformation cycle,137 yet it is increasingly becoming aware of the central cyclical element in that cosmology,138 even if this expresses itself in a different way than the cyclical transition of one element into another.

Fig. 5.3. Campbells (2004-2005) rendering of Empedocles Cosmic Cycle.

137 That underneath the four-element system of the Presocratics lures a five-element one, is suggested by the symbolic reading of the Pythagoraeans sacred symbol, the Pythagoraean tetractys (Meier-Oeser 1998 with full references),

where the foursomes that dominate the figure are raised to a five-some by highlighting the one central dot and subsequently the five-some is interpreted as the five senses, and equated with Wood, the one element in which the Chinese set differs from the Presocratic one (Graves 1988: 189).
138 Cf. dos Santos Gomez 2004; Graham 1988, 2005; Laks 2005; Long 1974; Minar 1963; Mugler 1953; OBrien 1967, 1969; Pierris, 2005; Primavesi 1998b, 2005; Sedley 2005; Trpanier 2003; van der Ben 1984.

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While many modern commentators have acknowledged the cyclical nature of Empedocles worldview (cf. Mugler 1953: 30f), this is usually taken to mean, not a transformation cycle of elements, but a cyclical progression from a state (the cosmic Sphere) where all elements are totally fused under the all-dominant influence of Love, to the disintegration of that Sphere down to the element level under the all-dominant influence of Strife, and so on ad infinitum. Campbell (2004-2005) offers a useful diagram (my Fig. 5.3) of this process (also cf. Wilcox 2001 and Empedocles Sphere). Moving from perfect fusion of the elements in some sort of primordial globe / sphere, via total separation and fragmentation, back to perfect fusion, Empedocles is essentially a cyclical cosmology in Franklins words (2002) it:
is a self-governing, self-balancing, cyclical system and is in fact depicted as a wheel,

which, when all is said and done, comes quite close to the idea of a transformation cycle of elements. Another way in which some substrate underlying Old World transformation cycle of elements can be seen to surface in Empedocles work, is in the central role he attributes to two paramount principles: Love (fila Philia; Aphrodite) and Strife (nekoj Neikos).139 Although lacking the sense of one element transforming into another under the positive or negative catalytic influence of a third element, one may still recognise here the two basic functions of production versus destruction (cf. Fig. 5.3). Love (or Fusion) and Strife (or Separation) are incessantly involved in a universal cycle, taking the world from (a) being a Sphere of totally fused elements, via (b) a state of total separation of the elements, back to (c) the Sphere of totally fused elements (cf. Brown 1984).
139

Aristotle Physica, 8. I, 15, de Anima I. 2, 10; Brun 1966; Campbell 2004-2005; Hershbell 1974; Pierris 2003; Solmsen 1965; Todoua 2005; Wada 1997.

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From a viewpoint of comparative mythology, Empedocles Sphere is another variant of the Cosmic Egg,140 a major theme in cosmogonies distributed over mainly Eurasia and Oceania (van Binsbergen 2011b, see Fig. 5.4 another example of Pelasgian distribution over time) and represented in the Ancient Greek world with the Dioscuri and their sisters Helena and Clytemnaestra, born from the eggs of Leda as a swann impregnated by Zeus in similar disguise.

mytheme of cosmic egg attested (or merely implied, or uncertain:

proposed region of origin ( ), Eurasian Neolithic proto-Pelasgian realm (A); the latters subsequent transformation constitutes the Bronze Age Pelasgian realm (B) 8 proposed spread from Late Bronze Age onward

Fig. 5.4. Global distribution and tentative historical reconstruction of the mytheme of the Cosmic Egg For details and sources of data points see: van Binsbergen 2011b141
140 In addition to notions apparently derived (via Orphic cult milieus) from the mytheme of the Cosmic Egg, and probably as we shall see the very notion of a transformation cycle of elements, there may yet be other non-Hellenic, essentially Pelasgian features that have entered Ancient Greek science, for instance the deviant ferdariae order of planets, which is also found with Apollonius of Tyana; cf. Tester 1989: 169. 141 Although the proposed historical reconstruction appears to me the most plausible, and tallies with that of scores of other supposedly Pelasgian traits (cf. van Binsbergen 2010a, and in press (a); van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 372 f.), it is only fair to indicate an alternative interpretation, in terms of Oppenheimers (1998) Sunda Hypothesis situating the origin of the mytheme of the Cosmic Egg in South East Asia, and assuming it to have spread, not only north and east into East Asia and Oceania, but also west, on the wings of the postulated Sunda maritime expansion in the course of the first half of the Holocene. Oppenheimer claims that the core mythologies of the

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With a lapse into misplaced concreteness (Whitehead 1997: 52, 58), Campbell (2004-2005) claims that, for Empedocles, the four elements
correspond closely to their expression at the macroscopic level of nature, with the traditional quadripartite division of the cosmos into earth, sea, air, and the fiery aether of the heavenly bodies: these four naturally occurring elements of the cosmos clearly represent a fundamental natural division of matter at the largest scale. This division at the macroscopic level of reality is applied reductively at the microscopic level to produce a parallelism between the constituents of matter and the fundamental constituents of the cosmos, but the reduction of the world into four types of material particles does not deny the reality of the world we see, but instead validates it. Empedocles stresses this parallel between the elements at the different levels of reality by using the terms Sun sea and Earth [ sic ] interchangeably with fire, water and earth. Of the four elements, although Empedocles stresses their equality of powers, fire is also granted a special role both in its hardening effect on mixtures of the other elements and also as the fundamental principle of living things.

Did Empedocles personally invent t h e v e r y n o t i o n o f e l e m e n t ? The comparative perspective in the present argument suggests otherwise the idea of a elementary form of Being implied in all manifestations of the visible world, was in the air in the Greek Presocratic world, and was anticipated by Orphic (ultimately Pelasgian) notions of the Cosmic Egg, Night, Chaos, Time, or Earth and Water as primary givens.142 Stauffer (1986) reminds us of the parallels between the Ionians view of Water and Earth, and the mythology of the Ancient Near East. Also Kingsley (1994c, 1995a) traces the extensive background, in space and time, within which Empedocles ideas emerged as much less than totally original. In a more extended transcontinental perspective, in terms of our two Working Hypotheses, the widespread parallels to Empedocles system suggest that the notion of element had already been commonly accepted for one or two millennia when Empedocles formulated his doctrine.
Ancient Near East including the Bible thus have a prehistoric Sunda origin. I have elsewhere argued why specifically in regard of Ancient Near Eastern myths this is very implausible (van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008), although as a general hypothesis of transcontinental influence Oppenheimers model has, as admitted above, considerable value especially for the study of Africa so much so that in the context of the 2012 Leiden conference I presented (2012e) a paper setting out the genetic, comparative religious, archaeological and ethnographic evidence in favour of what I have come to designate as the OppenheimerTauchmannDick-Read Hypothesis.
142 Freeman 1948: 51 f.; on the link between the Presocratics and the Orpheus complex, also cf. Burkert 1968; on the World Egg and the innumerable worlds derived from it, cf. Cornford 1934: 16.

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Once we have been alerted to the possibility of a transformation cycle of elements to be implied in relatively archaic Ancient Greek expressions, from Empedocles time and even before, we may look at Hellenic iconography with a different eye. For instance, aquatic gods are known for their shape-shifting Proteus (thought to dwell near the island of Pharus off the Egyptian coast, near Alexandria) and Scamander being cases in point. In this light the four stages which the sea goddess Thetis struggles through in her attempt to escape from her shameful marriage with a mortal, Peleus,143 have all the appearances of a transformation cycle of elements: Fire, Water, Lion and Snake (my Fig. 5.5; from Ronnberg c.s. 2011: 773, with thanks).144

Fig. 5.5. Peithinos rendering of Thetis metamorphoses, kylix, 6th c. BCE.

143

Peleus was to be Achilles father; as noted before, Achilles was venerated as a sea god in his own right, especially in the Pontic region.

144 By the etymological punning on earth / snake to be discussed below (footnote 159), we may confidently interpret snake as Earth here, which leaves lion to be interpreted as Air perhaps by analogy with the Sun, to which often a lionine nature is attributed in ancient cosmologies. Another, somewhat suspect, indication of a fourelement transformation cycle is to be found in the following quotation from Graves 1988 / 1948: 415, probably (the statement is unreferenced; notoriously, Graves considers himself above bibliographical diligence) paraphrased from the 5th-c. CE Latin writer Macrobius (1848), Saturnalia, I, 18f:

the oracle of Colophon, one of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor, gave the nature of the transcendent God Iao as fourfold. In the Winter he was Hades, or Cronos; in the Spring, Zeus; in the Summer, Helios (the Sun); in the Autumn, Iao, or Dionysus.

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Such suggestions of a nearly world-wide ancient substrate element system are intriguing and find much support in our ethnographic overview in the preceding Chapter. Yet, given the state of proto-globalisation that prevailed in many parts of the world from well before Empedocles, it just remains remotely possible that all these apparent element systems throughout the Old World and North America were, in fact, indebted to Presocratic thought. Towards the end of this argument, in Figs. 9.1 and 9.3, we will come back to this question and answer it. Did Empedocles p e r s o n a l l y i n v e n t t h e f o u r - e l e m e n t d o c t i n e ? This question has been considered repeatedly in the literature. Thus Longrigg (1963: 171 f. n. 16):
the suggestion has been made that there is evidence of the four element theory before Empedocles. O. Gigon (Untersuchungen zu Heraklit [Leipzig 1935-1 p. 99) writes: Man kann kaum Frg. 126 fr Heraklit beanspruchen und zugleich die Vier-Elementenlehre ihm absprechen and uses this fragment as evidence for accepting air as Heraclitean in Frg. 76. K. Reinhardt (Parmenides [Bonn 1916] p. 223) even goes so far as to hold that since no one can have known of the four elements as early as the traditional date of Heraclitus, this date must be wrong and the latter was actually younger than Parmenides. [ Thus assuming, in fact, that Empedocles was the author of the four-element doctrine; however, we have seen that one excursion to Egypt under the New Kingdom, or even Old Kingdom, would have been enough to learn about the elements many centuries before Heraclitus, let alone Empedocles WvB ] G.S. Kirk, however, rightly points out (Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments [Cambridge 1954] pp. 342-44) that the mention of air in Frg. 76 is almost certainly due to Stoic influence and that Frgs. 31 and 36 show sufficiently clearly that Heraclitus held that there were three, not four, world masses.

Aristotle145 presents Empedocles as the inventor of the four element doctrine. Longrigg (1976) however rightly stresses that Empedocles was not the only one to have a four-element doctrine but that such a doctrine was a general characteristic of the entire Milesian school:
In claiming that his elements are of fundamental importance in the physical world, Empedocles presents a theory which is in accordance with traditional belief. As C.H. Kahn has pointed out,146 it is clear from the evidence which has survived of Milesian cosmology and cosmogony that their conception of the natural world contained, in potential form, a view of earth, water, air and

145 Aristotle, Metaphysics 985aS2 [Diels-Kranz 31A37]. 984a8 and 988a20 f.; De generatione et corruptione 329a. 146

Kahn 1960: 149; reference in the original.

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fire as members or portions of the cosmos. Simplicius, in a passage where he is closely following Theophrastus, actually defines Anaximanders doctrine by reference to the four-element theory and concludes: It is clear that having observed the change of the four elements into one another, he did not think fit to make any one of these the material substrate, but something else besides these. A similar interpretation is given by Aristotle when he records the opinion of those who say that there is a single simple infinite body . . . besides the elements, from which they generate the latter. (It is generally agreed that Aristotles reference here is to Anaximander.) Although it is just as much of an anachronism to project back to the sixth century the four-element theory as it is to ascribe to Anaximander the Aristotelian material cause, the beliefs here described may be accepted as Milesian, for, as has been seen above, Anaximander explains the phenomena apparent on and around the earth by interactions of fire, air, and terrestrial water. In like manner a speaker in Cicero credits Anaximenes with what resembles a four-element theory... (Longrigg 1976: 425)

Gigon (1935: 99) sees not Empedocles but Heraclitus as the originator of the four-element system, but Longrigg (1976: 44) finds this unconvincing. Yet, with his general emphasis on movement and change, it is Heraclitus, more than any other Ancient Greek philosopher, who has retained an awareness of the transformation cycle that links the elements in the underlying, Pre-Hellenic, presumably Pelasgian conception. Patrick (1889: 14, 26) even credits Heraclitus with the notion that the elements are continually passing into one another. Little of this awareness, however, has been retained in the general Modern reception of the Presocratics. Even regardless of the question as to Empedocles originality vis--vis the Ionian philosophers, it is central to our present argument to ask whether the Presocratic four-element doctrine was a Greek invention, or was merely the surfacing, in Western Eurasia, of a much more widespread and much older cosmological substrate. The latter view, of course, is the one advocated by our two Working Hypotheses. But this argument does not stand on its own. Partly under the influence of the Black Athena debate as initiated by Martin Bernal (1987), but also as a direct result of painstaking specialist research into the intellectual ramifications in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity147 there has been, in recent decades, a

147

West 1971; Dodds 1951: 145-156; Bhme 1989: 29-41; Bidez & Cumont 1938.

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trend148 to stress Empedocles characteristics as a magician and shaman conversant with West Asian initiatory traditions, and to play down his qualities as a philosopher. This trend was foreshadowed already in the 19th century (Gruppe 1887; Gladisch 1858).149 Unfortunately, the passionate criticism of this trend often seems to be triggered by the critics Eurocentrism, considering the idea of an original, antecedent-less, incomparable Greek philosophy the cornerstone of their European identity. Long before it was vocally exposed by Bernal 1987, this Eurocentric if not racist prejudice was already discarded by the scholarly Ex Oriente Lux (Light Comes from the East) movement (Ball 1899; Lepsius 1903; Winckler 1905; Szemernyi 1974 in addition to a German scholarly journal for Ancient History, the expression Ex Oriente Lux has also formed the title for the leading Dutch journal and scholarly association in this domain from the 1930s onward). There is also a typological and ideological problem here: while the identity construction of Europe and the North Atlantic region as a whole, via--vis the rest of the world, has often stressed alleged European rationality versus non-European obscurantism, there can be no doubt that decisive early intellectual achievements during the Bronze Age were made in West, South and East Asia and in North Eastern Africa (Egypt), only to reach South-eastern Europe (the Aegean) subsequently, the latter constituting an economic and cultural periphery. Reconstructing continuities between the European and non-European historic cultural achievements therefore should be seen as an admonition to thankfulness on the part of Europeans, and not as an historical insult. But while thus inclined to play down the exalted position North Atlantic specialists have accorded Empedocles, we end up with the paradox that the four-element system, deprived of such aspects of cyclical transformation as it may initially have had in the Middle to Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Aegean and West Asia, still proved to be eminently successful and a path-breaking achievement on the road to Modern, global
148

Bis 1968, 1969; Kingsley 1995a, 1995b, the latter much criticised in the scholarly literature; e.g. Mansfeld 1995; OBrien 1998; Picot 2000.
149

Gladisch 1858 was dismissed by a principal present-day Empedocles bibliographer as a very fantastic and improbable identification of Empedoclean teaching with Egyptian beliefs (Vtek 2004), yet this appears in a different light once we take into account the strong indications (see Chapter 4) for a four-element doctrine in Ancient Egypt.

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natural science and medicine. One might ask whether the number four is really all that arbitrary as a basis for a world-view. Ever since Empedocles until quite recently the Western tradition of thought has distinguished four elements. This conception cannot be separated from the image widespread in Eurasia including South East Asia, as well as in Africa and the Americas, and hence probably of great antiquity of the world as supported by the four corners or pillars of the directions. The latter foursome is directly connected with the specific anatomy of the human body and therefore of the human gaze: left / right symmetry combined with front / back symmetry yields four basic orientations. I submit that the emphasis on four, and the trend toward immutable, clearly demarcated categories between which no continuous transition takes place, is due to interference from the concept of four directions / the earths four corners. However, there may be other sources for the preoccupation with four, as suggested in the Assyriologist Gadds statement in 1966:
There is indeed nothing original or peculiar in making the primitive distinctions of up, down, right, and left, to which these regions [S[outh], N[orth], W[est], E[ast]; Akkad, Subartu, Amurru, Elam] conformed, but it was surely a legacy of Chaldaean astrology first, to make these directions identical with a geographical scheme, and second, to transfer this scheme to the heavens. The zodiac and its signs is known to be a later development, but still in the ambit of Chaldaean astrology, and the geographical arrangement applied to these signs gave rise to a division into what were afterwards called the four trigons. In later oriental and western conceptions the four trigons of the zodiac had their differing natures, like the original countries of the Babylonian world, and found their counterparts in the four elements, the four humours of the body, and notions concerning four ages of man, and the four cardinal virtues; associations of ideas and a common derivation is clear enough in all these.

When Kammerzell (1994), in his approach to leopard symbolism of the Ancient Near East and especially Ancient Egypt, suggests that according to his not uncontroversial etymology this species appears as the four animal, he attributes this to the four toes out of which the ripping claw is composed; however, more general foursomes lurk behind here, e.g. the four directions, and the four components out of which the panther skins design is composed (white, black, red-brown, in rosettes; van Binsbergen 2004 / 2013). Also the elaborate mantle with which the priestking (or god) of Mohenjo-Daro is depicted in a well-known statue, is evidently a transformed leopard skin (still retaining traces of red) with the rosettes rendered as a foursome (a three-leaved clover with a central dot). 176

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Numerous significant foursomes occur in the symbolism and iconography of many peoples150 only a few examples are: the four trigons of the zodiac (significantly named after the four elements); the four humours of Galenus (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm); the four ages of man (Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron); the four virtues justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance of Plato (in his Meno; Plato 1962) but also of the Chinese philosopher Meng-Tze (Mencius; probably no relation of Meno); the four noble truths of Buddhism (life means suffering; the origin of suffering is attachment; the cessation of suffering is attainable; the specific path to the cessation of suffering); the four horsemen of the Apocalypse; the four different suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades) of the deck of cards; the four modalities of al-cud in classical Arabian musical theory; the paired foursomes of the Hermopolitan cosmogonic myth in Ancient Egypt; the four principal characters in classical Chinese opera; the four tonalities of Middle Chinese; the four principal castes of India; the four Books each in four Parts of the Veda; the four interlocking worlds of the Kabbalah; the four Archangels; the Four Lights of Gnostic mysticism. Many of these foursomes may ultimately be predicated on the four-element system; others are unlikely to be so. There are even indications to the effect that the number four plays a special role in the world order even regardless of the agency of human subjectivity, for instance: physicists distinguish between four basic interactions in nature which for the time being have not yet been subsumed under one unifying theory (gravity, electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force); the four-colour problem in mathematics (why is four the minimum number of colours one needs to colour a political world map while avoiding that adjacent countries have the same colour?) has only recently been solved; quantum mechanics limits to four the
150 Cf. Frobenius 1923: 81: Sepp, Pott, Brinton und vielen anderen fiel es schon auf, da bei ganz bestimmten Vlkern die 4 eine besondere Rolle spielt. However, Frobenius elaboration of this point is very different from mine. Given to something like geographical mysticism, it is his impression (1923: 94 f.) that different continents are dominated by different numbers: the peripheral remnant cultures of the Extreme South = 2; Africa and Asia = 3; South Asia, Oceania and Meso-America = 4. Frobeniuss characterisation, arbitrary and sweeping though it may sound, might be a very faint echo of what I reconstruct in the present book as an Upper Palaeolithic fourelement system, which Frobenius with his usual perceptiveness then may have picked up intuitively.

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number of sub-shells (within each principal shell) in which electrons may find themselves, in such a way that each electron can be described with four quantum numbers at least, to the extent to which we may limit the description to electrostatic interaction between electron and nucleus; each DNA and RNA protein turns out to be composed of a combination of four amino-acids; stability of carbon atoms in a compound requires the absorption or emission of four electrons (hence the tetraeder molecular model), and as a result carbon could become the fundamental building brick of life on the planet Earth. Did Empedocles, after all, hit on one of the most significant aspects of the architecture of the world? Or, rather, to the extent to which he was merely replicating a four-element system that may already have been around for millennia, had humankind already discovered the number four as a major key to reality at a very early stage? Is that why two, four and eight are the only numerals reconstructed for *Borean? And what might have given putative prehistoric proto-philosophers the idea of such a fourbased key (the human bodys two-fold symmetry? the almost universal gender duality of Nature? the four phases of the Moon? divine or extraterrestrial inspiration)? Or have even the Modern scientists formulating these four-based recent theories, unconsciously still been influenced by Empedocles? Must we discard our Working Hypothesis of a transcontinental, Upper Palaeolithic substrate element system, even give up our Bronze-Age Alternative Working Hypothesis, and join those singing the praises of Empedocles as a unique genius who (much in line with the myth of the Greek genius in general, as rightly challenged by Bernal 1987) allegedly invented his shockingly insightful theory out of the blue, without historical antecedents? We have still several steps to go before this particular question can be satisfactorily answered. Let us now, in the next Chapter, leave GraecoRoman Antiquity, and turn to the Palaeolithic, in order to explore such antecedents as (in terms of our Working Hypothesis) may have prepared the ground for the Presocratics.

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Chapter 6. Exploring the long-range preand protohistory of element cosmologies: Steps in the unfolding of human thought faculties

6.1. Explorations into the Middle Palaeolithic prehistory of element cosmologies

Can we say something about the oldest forms of the transformation cycle of elements, and estimate their antiquity? Recent reconstructions in the field of comparative mythology allow us a glimpse into the remote past of human thought. We have seen that the various element cosmologies studied above have often been used for divination. We shall now probe into the joint history of element cosmologies and divination, seeking to delve even deeper than the Upper Palaeolithic, if possible. Unexpected indications concerning the antiquity of element systems come to light when we manage to plausibly reconstruct some of the mythological contents of Pandoras Box.151 Starting with a sample of African cosmogonic myths recorded in historical times, I have presented a distributional argument tentatively identifying the mythemic nuclei (Narrative Complexes) in these African myths, and attempted to trace their prehistoric trajectory through space and time after the Out-of-Africa Exodus; the reconstruction method is a form of argued distributional triangulation, and has so far been executed and written up entirely without any explicit or conscious reference to divination. If a Narrative Complex occurs in sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, Australia,

151

van Binsbergen 2006a, 2006b; Table 6.1 below, cf. Tables 2.1 and 2.2 above.

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it is likely to have found itself in Pandoras Box, because for reasons of ecological adaptation Anatomically Modern Humans, in their first sallies Out of Africa, c. 60-80 ka BP, initially seem to have kept close to the Indian Ocean shores until reaching New Guinea and Australia (which before the Early Holocene global rise of the sea level by 200 m could have been completed with dry feet except for a 70 km patch of open sea South of Timor proof of humans early nautical abilities; cf. Bednarik 1997, 1999), but without populating the other continents yet. Meanwhile Table 6.1 suggests that divinatory patterns as recorded in historical times, and their implications in terms of element systems, so unmistakably echo the specific reconstructed contents of Pandoras Box, at the onset of the Middle Palaeolithic, that we may persuade ourselves to see continuity between the two periods, and thus acquire an inkling of what may have been a surprisingly rich divinatory life in the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic, in Africa as well as in other continents where Anatomically Modern Humans gradually took the, element-relevant, contents of Pandoras Box. This step is admittedly not without risks: even if the complex reconstruction underlying Table 6.1 was executed without any conscious thought of divination and element systems, still the same author who processed these data and compiled the Table has been so preoccupied with divination and element systems over the past quarter of a century, that it cannot be ruled out that that domain of empirical analysis inadvertently seeped into the comparative mythology domain, rendering the results somewhat dependent upon one another. However, that is a risk I am prepared to admit, and yet to take.
Narrative Complex (NC) (nuclear mytheme) reconstructed to have been in Pandoras Box Narrative Complex no. proposed use of this mytheme in Middle and Upper Palaeolithic proto-divination as suggested by divinatory patterns in historical times152 lightning as omen fowl as divinatory aniproposed element in transformation cycle

The Lightning Bird (and the World Egg)

Air, Aether; Fire

152 The literature on the numerous forms of divination through space and time is enormous, and cannot be adequately represented here. I limit myself to a minimum selection per item. Rich source on the comparative study of divination are: Hastings 1908-1921: IV, 775-830; Le Scouzec et al. 1965. 153

Hastings 1908-1921, II, 55, iv. 820-826 (Roman divination); III, 697 (cock omen).

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The Stones (as Earth; in the Late Palaeolithic / protoNeolithic probably revised to become 8a. The Stones / Meteorites as Connection between Heaven and Earth) The Moon The Earth as primary (apparently, NC 10 was subsequently revised towards The Earth as the Source of Cattle, in the Neolithic) From under the Tree (probably subsequently diversified into 12a The world and humanity from the tree, and 12c The Leg-Child) The Cosmic / Rainbow Snake The Spider (probably subsequently transformed into 15a The Feminine Arts in protoNeolithic times )

mal153 psephomancy (divination by pebbles);154 divination from stones and rocks155

Earth; Aether, Air; Metal (e.g. sidereal iron)

9 10

Moon as omen,156 protoastrology earth omens, protogeomancy

? Earth

12

divination by trees, branches, twigs;157 cleromancy with wooden tablets etc.158 snake as divinatory animal, snake omens159 spider as omen and divinatory animal160

Wood

13 15

Aether, Air; Earth ? (Aether, Air)

Table 6.1. The divinatory and element-cosmological significance of the reconstructed mythological contents of Pandoras Box, Africa, 80-60 ka BP and earlier.

Apparently, the element-cosmological classification systems which exerted a major influence upon literate divination systems of the postNeolithic period already had some detectable roots in Pandoras Box, at
154 155 156 157 158 159

Horowitz & Hurowitz 1992. Hastings 1908-1921: XI, 866-867. Hastings 1908-1921: XII, 64-65. Hastings 1908-1921: II, 832, XII, 455b-457. See above, Chapter 2 and passim.

Hastings 1908-1921: I, 526b-527, and XI, 406. Confusion with Earth possible because of homonomy: Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008, Indo-European etymology note that proto-Indo-European: *dghem- earth (Pokorny 1959-69: I 662 f.; Buck n.d.: 16) is [h]ard to distinguish from the reflexes of *ghem- #3258. All Italic forms (Lat[in] humus, etc.) may in fact belong there; the reference is to proto-IndoEuropean *g(h)em-, *g(h)my- snake, worm (Pokorny 1959-69: I, 790).
160

Hastings 1908-1921: I, 528.

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least 60 ka earlier. The only major element missing out in Table 6.1 is Water; and the only NarCom left without a suggested element association is the Moon. Realising that in many cosmologies, as well as in most astrologies of the Old World, the Moon tends to be associated with water, we may readily fill this gap. Needless to remind the reader of the prominent role water, and its mirroring surface, plays in divination through space and time (cf. Hastings 1908-1921: XII, 707). On distributional grounds (notably, consistent association of Flood myths with groups characterised by mtDNA Type B, which emerged in Central Asia c. 30 ka BP), I have tended (van Binsbergen 2006b, 2010a) to situate the emergence of a water-centred Narrative Complex (Flood myths!) much later than Pandoras Box, but perhaps the systematics of Table 6.1 should bring us to reconsider such an argument now. Witzel (2010, 2012) suggests that Flood myths should be placed in Pandoras Box. Above I referred to my hypothesis of a succession of two distinct types of cosmogony in the Upper Palaeolithic: (a) revolving on the Separation of Water and Land; (b) revolving on the Separation of Heaven and Earth. Here, too, we may detect indications of an incipient element cosmology. If conceived in that light, (a) would be about the emergence of the proposed primary (proto-)elements Water and Earth, whereas (b) could be revolving on the separation of the (proto-)elements Earth and Fire ( Sun) after a transformation that resulted in a down-playing of the watery connotations of the Sky (as Waters [Above]), and, with the emergence of naked-eye astronomy, the luminaries growth into more important aspects of the Sky than the latters Water associations. Given the striking paucity of *Borean reconstructed lexical items for Sky and Moon (only: HVKMV and TVLKV, respectively) against as many as seven for Sun (CVWV, HVKV, KVMV, NVJV, NVRV, PVCV, TVNV), dating this transformation to post-*Borean times would put us on even more slippery ground than usual in the course of my admittedly conjectural argument. Another advantage of operationalising the presence of element cosmologies through their use in divination is that element cosmologies in them182

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selves patently do not leave any archaeological traces, whereas divination systems may, albeit infrequently. The archaeological case for Upper Palaeolithic divination is theoretically quite plausible, yet it has remained empirically thin the only truly convincing case being two engraved bones from the Remouchamps caves in Belgium (Dewez 1974), to which we shall return below (Fig. 8.6). We have to proceed to the Neolithic period, less than 14 ka BP, in order to find archaeological evidence whose interpretation in terms of divination is likely to stand up to further scrutiny: the Early Neolithic of South Eastern Anatolia (from c. 14 ka BP) including the once prototypical atal Hyk161 (now supplanted by much older finds in the region Badisches Landesmuseum 2007); and China towards the end of the Neolithic (Nai 1963; Li et al. 2003).

6.2. Indications of a four-element cosmology in the painted cave at Lascaux, France, in the Upper Palaeolithic
6.2.1. Introduction But archaeology does not totally leave us in the dark. One way of establishing the likely existence of a four-element system in the Upper Palaeolithic is by seeking to intersubjectively interpret the iconography which that period has left us abundantly. This takes us to the painted caves, notably those of the FrancoCantabrian region in South-western France and Northern Spain.162 It is here that Leroi-Gourhan (1958) has found convincing indications, not so much of an element cosmology, but of a gendered cosmology, i.e. with male and female as the dominant opposition. Michael Rappenglck (1999), a German archaeoastronomer, interpreted one of the most famous scenes of the painted cave of Lascaux (Fig. 6.1) as an astronomical statement, in a splendidly documented and referenced comparative and struc161 162

Hodder 2007: 111, by analogy with belaboured skulls from Neolithic Palestine.

The literature on the Lascaux painted cave is enormous. For an introduction, see: Allain & Leroi-Gourhan 1979; Clottes & Lewis-Williams 1996. It would be very much in the spirit of the present argument to try and lend an African extension to my explorations in Palaeolithic iconography with a view of identifying element cosmologies; some possible elements towards such an extension will be adduced further down in this Chapter.

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turalist argument which earned him a doctoral degree from Munich University in 1998. Let us look closely at this scene. Apart from a short, apparently hooked, line below the, apparently, lying man and another, longer line crossing the behind of the large animal painted at the right side of the scene, it renders four items: an (apparently ithyphallic) man lying with extended arms a bird on a stick a woolly rhinoceros to the left, and a bison to the right. Four items depicted in a dramatic scene which seems to involve the death of a human it is not impossible that a four-element cosmology is being depicted here, but the number four in itself is hardly sufficient reason to jump to such a conclusion.163

Communaut Montignac, Dpartement Dordogne, Rgion Aquitaine, France. Fig. 6.1. The famous dead man scene from Le Puits, Grotte de Lascaux.

163 There is also a horse depicted near the Lascaux picture (Rappenglck 1998: 61), but this is inconspicuous and at some distance; by an enormous stretch of the imagination, it might be interpreted as an evocation of Aether the horse is the most frequently depicted animal in Eurasian rock art, and (by anachronistic analogy with the horses of Poseidon, Helios, Demeter and Hades) often seems to have the connotation of Waters Above and Below, i.e. Heaven, Ocean, Underworld.

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If the scene does evoke a four-element cosmology, could we try to be more specific and identify the four elements, possibly retrieve their names across the seventeen millennia that separate us from the time of origin? Here we have nothing than informed conjecture to go by, but against the massive comparative proto- and prehistoric evidence adduced in the present book, the attempt is justified. The remarkable, global convergence in that evidence also seems to justify the idea that the most likely elements to be expected are Air-Water-Earth-Fire, so that our task would be, in the first place, to find grounds for attributing any of these four elements to the four items in the scene. A hint as to which item represents Earth derives from a long debate concerning the etymology of the Greek theonym Athena, and of the Greek word nthrpos, man, in the sense of human.164 The converging evidence leads to a so-called global etymology (on this concept, cf. Bengtson & Ruhlen 1994) semantically revolving on earth / bottom / human, as if humans were primarily conceived as those on the ground, those dwelling at the bottom. Here we can benefit from the *Borean Hypothesis. In my recent analyses of African comparative mythology and Mediterranean Bronze Age ethnicity I have demonstrated the considerable heuristic power of Starostins and Flemings views, extensively using their *Borean Hypothesis and its proposed results. I have traced the earth / bottom / human complex in the following terms:165
The root -ntu / -nto human, person, although only one of hundreds of reconstructed proto-Bantu roots (cf. Guthrie 1948, 1967-1971: *-nto, Guthrie no. 1789; Meeussen 1980:*-ntu), is found in many or all languages of the large Bantu family (a division of the Niger-Congo or Niger-Kordofan phylum). It was so conspicuous in the eyes of Bleek (1851 the first European linguist to subject these languages to thorough comparative study), that he named them Bantu languages after that root (ba- being a common form of the plural personal nominal prefix). However, -ntu / -nto is not exclusive to the Bantu family. This is already clear from proto-Austronesian *taw, human, raw (Adelaar 1995). Looking for an etymology of the puzzling Greek word nthrpos human, the Dutch linguist Ode (1927) had the felicitous inspiration to see this word as a reflex of what he claims to be proto-Indo-European *-nt, under (cf. the

164 Ode 1927; Bernal 1987, 2001, 2006; Lefkowitz & McLean Rogers 1996; and references there. 165

van Binsbergen 2010c; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 78 f.

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more consensually established proto-Indo-European: *ndho under, Pokorny 195969: I, 323) thus proposing an underlying semantics of humans as ground or underworld dwellers. This, incidentally, also offered Ode an interesting etymology of the long contested Ancient Greek theonym Athena as an underworld goddess.166 Along this line, many more possible (pseudo-?)cognates from many language phyla come into view. The background assumption in this kind of historical linguistic reconstruction is that standard methods of historical and comparative linguistics allow us, with intersubjective scientific plausibility, to reconstruct progressively older levels of parent forms, right up to the oldest possible reconstruction, *Borean; nearly all linguistic macrophyla spoken today contain, among an admixture of forms of unidentified provenance, also reflexes from *Borean. Against this background, (pseudo-?) cognates of Bantu -ntu / -nto seem to be proto-Afroasiatic *tV, a kind of soil (cf. Old Egyptian t: / t A, earth, e.g. T Awy the Two Lands = Upper and Lower Egypt, with cognates in Central and East Chadic and in Low East Cushitic), from *Borean *TVHV, earth; a reflex of this root is also found in Sino-Caucasian notably as Chinese t (modern Beijing Chinese), th (Classic Old Chinese), land, soil, Karlgren code: 0062 a-c, suggested to be of Austric origin: notably proto-Austronesian *buRtaq earth, soil, proto-Austroasiatic *tj earth, Proto-Miao-Yao *Ctau (cf. Bengtson & Ruhlen 1994: 60, tak, however the latter two authors according to Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008 Long-range etymologies s.v. *TVHV, earth seem to confuse the reflexes of *Borean *TVHV with those of *TVKV ). Considering the incidental similarities between Southern and Eastern African Khoisan, and North Caucasian,167 one should not be surprised that also some Khoisan language families seem to attach to the very old and very widespread earth / human complex which we have identified here: South Khoisan (Taa): *ta^, *tu^, person; North Khoisan (proto-Zhu) * u , person Central Khoisan has *khoe, etc. person, which might well be a transformation of *u . (Note that here, too, like in Bantu, it is the word for human that produces the ethnonyms Taa, Zhu and Khoe / Khoi, or Khoekhoe / Khoikhoi) Further possibilities are contained in the reflexes of another *Borean root *TVHV, bottom, which however is both semantically and phonologically so close to *TVHV earth (however, in *Borean reconstructions, the vowels, indicated by *-V-, had to remain unspecified and therefore could differ) that we may well have to do with one and the same word: thus proto-Sino-Tibetan *dilH bottom (e.g. Chinese *tj bottom Karlgren code 0590 c; *tj, root, base, Karlgren code 0590 d) from proto-SinoCaucasian *dVHV , bottom; from the same *Borean root *TVHV, bottom, also Afro-

For alternative etymologies, of the name Athena, cf. Hrozn 1951: 228; Fauth 1979a; Bernal 1987 (contested by Jasanoff & Nussbaum 1996, Egberts 1997; van Binsbergen 1997c / 2010a); and Blaek 2007.
167

166

Which the geneticists Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994 have sought to explain by suggesting that todays Khoisan speakers are a hybrid African-Asian population which had still ancestors in West Asia 10,000 years ago they are another possible example of the Back-to-Africa movement. I will come back to this point in Chapter 7.

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asiatic *du-, low (e.g. Egyptian: d (21) low, East Chadic: *dwaHdaH- down) as well as proto-Austroasiatic *d uj (also *tuj tail, vagina), proto-Miao-Yao *t[o]i.B tail, Proto-Austronesian: *hudi buttocks (not in Proto-Austronesian B) (also *udehi last, behind the latter, Austric forms being predicated on a semantics of lower part of the rump, cf. English bottom) (cf. Peiros 1998: 157, 165; Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008). Table 6.2. Example of a global etymology: The complex earth / bottom / human.

Against this elaborate background the identification of the reclining human in our Lascaux scene with a putative element Earth seems not too far-fetched. This identification (to which the Underworld aspect of death lends further credibility e.g., the Neolithic Mother goddess, and her apparent descendants Athena and the latters Egyptian counterpart Neith, have been extensively discussed as death goddesses; cf. Gimbutas 1981, 1991, Bernal 1987; Ode 1927) reinforces our suspicion that the scene is a depiction of the four familiar elements. So our next step would be to recognise the bird on a stick as a possible evocation of the element Air. This leaves the other items, the bison and the woolly rhinoceros, to be identified as evocations of Water / Fire, not necessarily in that order. In the last few years, in my approaches to prehistoric meaning I have tended to rely on semantic reconstructions based on Starostin and Flemings *Borean Hypothesis, and this approach I will apply again in order to try and throw light on the intriguing Lascaux scene. But research is an intersubjective undertaking. So just like we let ourselves be guided by existing scholarly literature which suggested to us the interpretation of the reclining man in terms of the proto-element Earth, let us have a brief glance at the literature on the bison in Palaeolithic contexts, before applying our own idiosyncratic method. After the horse, the bison is about the most frequently depicted animal in Upper Palaeolithic iconography, which suggests that it was important both as food and as symbol. Some of the oldest three-dimensional sculptures in the history of art were in fact figures of bisons (from mammoth ivory, at Vogelherd, Germany; from clay, at Tuc dAudoubert Charet 1948; moreover bison representations feature on spear throwers). Perhaps bison imagery even predated Anatomically Modern Humans in Europe: 187

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the life-long explorer of prehistoric thought James Harrod (2010) suggested that the stone block that covers the burial of a Neanderthal child at La Ferrassie, c. 60 ka BP (cf. van Binsbergen 2000c with extensive references), had been deliberately given the specific shape of a bison calf. The suggestion is appealing, considering that the first professionally excavated and published Neanderthal skeleton (from La-Chapelle-aux-Saints; Farizy & Vandermeersch 1997 with references) was surrounded with broken bones of both bison and woolly rhinoceros two animals in our Lascaux image. The popular mythographer Joseph Campbell (1992: 73 f.) somewhat over-confidently claims continuity between the bison myths and rites of Plains Native Americans in historical times, and the bison images of the European Upper Palaeolithic. Yet a plausible case could be made for continuity, through space and time, between the bison astragals used for gambling and divination among Native Americans (Dewez 1974; Culin 1898: 828 f.), the symbolic significance of bison in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, and the reliance on astragals for divination both in GraecoRoman Antiquity, East and Central Asia, and Southern Africa. Breuil (1909) has suggested a zodiacal analogy between the bisons depicted in the Upper Palaeolithic (although the stupendous Lascaux cave was only to be discovered, decades later, in 1940), and the oldest documented constellations from the Ancient Near East. And in fact, both in Ancient Mesopotamia and in Ancient Egypt was Heaven represented by bovines, e.g. the celestial cow in the Gilgamesh Epic, and numerous Egyptian representations from Early Dynastic times on rendering Heaven as a cow.168 But to the limited extent to which we may identify the dots as prehistoric representations of stars there are also other suggestions of the stellar connotations of Upper Palaeolithic bisons: they are surprisingly often associated with dots, in one case (the Marsoulas cave, France) even entirely made up of dots. Peyrony (1934: 76 f., with references) cites several more specific cases from the Franco-Cantabrian region (the caves of Font de Gaume, Pindal, Castillo, Niaux) of the same bison / dots association. Above, reference was made to my hypothesis of an Upper Pa168 Houlihan 1996; Germond 2001; Hendrickx 2002; de Liagre Bhl 1958; Kovacs 1985; Nrmr pallette. Also in the Archaic Greek context, with Homer (e.g. Odyssey, I, 8), the Sun god / Sky owns cattle, to the detriment of Odysseus companions.

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laeolithic Mother Goddess as Mother of the Waters, parthenogenetically producing Land and being subsequently fertilised by the latter; in this respect she may have been the Mother of the Waters Above, in other words mistress of a still dimly conceptualised Heaven. This may explain why so many Upper Palaeolithic bison representations involve women: the Venus of Laussel holding a bison horn calibrated for thirteen lunar months; and representations of pregnant women or women giving birth near or on bisons (the sites of La Madeleine, Angles-sur-lAnglin, and LAbri du Facteur at Tursac; Delporte 1968; Straffon 2007; Soetens 2008). Palaeolithic bison / Goddess connections were also recognised by Kelley Hays-Gilpin (2003: her Fig. 3.4). We will soon see how excellently all this tallies with the interpretation of the prehistoric bison as emanating from my *Borean-inspired linguistic approach to the Lascaux scene: as the element Water. Although called to question by Conkey (1984), who rejects the idea of a standard and repetitive mythogram allegedly reflecting regionally widespread cultural premises, and by Groenen (e.g. 1990), who chides LeroiGourhan for inconsistency and incompleteness, yet our present perspective is greatly reinforced by what Bouissac (2006) summarises as
Leroi-Gourhans theory (1967) according to which Pyrenean hand configurations [ hand contours stencilled on the rock face WvB ] would encode the four basic animal symbols (bison, horse, ibex and deer) and recreate, in a sort of hand language, the distinctive collocations of these zoomorphs in other caves in the same broad cultural area. [ italics added WvB ]

In other words, already nearly half a century ago a leading prehistorian recognised the bison as one of a foursome with widespread symbolic significance which implies an element cosmology although the other members of the foursome were defined differently from what we seem to find at Lascaux. Let us now try and use the same state-of-the-art, long-range, comparative linguistics which led us to identify the reclining human as Earth, in order to determine which of the pair bison / woolly rhinoceros might be Water and which Fire, and add further credibility to our identification of the bird on a stick as Air. Given the fact that no direct speech material has been transmitted to us from the Upper Palaeolithic, our tentative answer to this

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virtually unanswerable169 question will have to be in stages. In the first stage, and merely for the sake of the argument and in our groping for a method, we will act on the basis of the simplifying, not to say erroneous, assumption that the language of the Lascaux Upper Palaeolithic environment was identical with *Borean, reconstructed for Central Asia perhaps 8 ka earlier in the Upper Palaeolithic, around 25 ka BP. This heuristic point of departure will prove fruitful in that it brings out a number of unexpected linguistic aspects of the Lascaux scene which can hardly be attributed to chance170 suggesting, on the contrary, that it is certainly a felicitous guess to approach the Lascaux scene with the idea of an element cosmology, and attributing to it a linguistic environment akin to that reconstructed for *Borean. These linguistic results, however preliminary and based on somewhat anachronistic assumptions, will be listed and analysed in Table 6.3. In the second stage we will correct the reductive artificiality of the first step with the more realistic assumption that, c. 17 ka BP, we find ourselves in a linguistic environment characterised by the early disintegration of *Borean, which, in Western Eurasia at the
169

Provided we do not lose sight of the great uncertainty implied in the word conjecture, we will let ourselves be led by Thomas Brownes (1658) adage which also inspired Graves (1988 / 1948) in his visionary though un-methodological and controversial reconstruction of several millennia of poetic myth: what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.

Not to chance, yet perhaps there is an inherent circularity built into my method here: hoping to find a familiar four-element system, that is what I set out to find, and what, predictably given my experience in the handling of the *Borean vocabulary, I do find A similar circularity might be said to underlie Table 6.1. This does not greatly alarm me, since methodological problems of this nature are the rule rather than the exception in the humanities and social sciences to which also the study of preand protohistorical thought systems belongs. In learning a foreign life world, one initially blunders into a fragmentary and partial understanding of one small symbolic complex, then erroneously one generalises its putative meaning for much larger complexes and for the life world as a whole, and then in a painful process of trial and error in constant feed-back from the raw data at hand (which is why nothing can beat participatory fieldwork as a heuristic strategy, despite all its limitations: then the host population constantly offers feedback that cannot be ignored, often in the form of ridicule and rejection), through constant re-triangulation, one gets nearer to a proper understanding and to the proper scope of that understanding.

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time, is likely to have led to the dominance of *proto-SinoCaucasian as one of the proposed offshoots of *Borean.171 The Sino-Caucasian linguistic macrophylum today has its region of concentration in East Asia (the Sino-Tibetan phylum), but besides has been proposed to include North Caucasian (in the Caucasus region of Western Central Eurasia), Yenisseian (Northern Eurasia), and the small surviving language isolates of Basque (FrancoCantabrian region) and Burushaski (Pakistan) whereas the NaDen languages of North America (Tlingit, Athabascan-Eyak, the latter including Southern Athabascan languages such as Navaho and Apache) are generally considered to be close to SinoCaucasian. It is the Sino-Caucasian macrophylum, particularly, that has been proposed for the artists of the Franco-Cantabrian archaeological complex of the painted caves (cf. Bertranpetit & CavalliSforza 1991; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). Our above application of the *Borean linguistic reconstruction implied a distortion of c. 8 ka off in time and thousands of kilometres too far to the West, in space. Meanwhile, however, the erroneous *Borean possible identifications of the names of the proposed four elements at the Lascaux scene, hint at more plausible, but related, names from *protoSino-Caucasian. After these steps, which will occupy the rest of this Chapter, we can conclude that there is considerable and converging evidence to suggest that, indeed, a four-element cosmology existed in the Upper Palaeolithic Western Eurasian and can be seen to be depicted at Lascaux. 6.2.2. Analytical step 1. Assuming, for heuristic purposes only, that the Lascaux scene belonged to a *Borean-speaking environment As a first step, let us peruse the reconstructed vocabulary of *Borean
171 Cf. McCall & Fleming 1999; Starostin 1989. In van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 77 f. a statistical analysis is presented (based on van Binsbergen, in press (b) and reproduced here as Fig. 8.2) that suggests this disintegration to begin by 25 ka BP, first leading to a split between a Central group with Eurasiatic / Nostratic, AfroAsiatic and Sino-Caucasian, and a Peripheral group consisting of African languages except Afro-Asiastic, Amerind (probably without the Na-Den cluster), and Austric.

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(Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008), and list all reconstructed *Borean terms that could be applied to any of the four proposed elements, Earth / Air / Water / Fire. What determines the eligibility of any of the 1153 reconstructed *Borean lexical items for such application? In principle, we are looking for the intersection between two sets of *Borean lexical items: 1. those that on purely semantic grounds could correspond to Earth / Air / Water / Fire; 2. those that would apply semantically to the four depicted items human / bison / bird / woolly rhinoceros. Let us realise, once more, that the link between any of the four items in (1) and any of the four items in (2) is by and large arbitrary and not intrinsic. Durkheims (1912) famous thesis of the arbitrary nature of (religious and cosmological) symbols should guide us here, even though Peter Worsley (1967) has already reminded us, above rightly, but not devastatingly that the abstract, Kantian / Cartesian rationalism that underlies Durkheims and Lvi-Strauss approach does not quite take into account the economic and nutritional value of the totemic animals for the Australian Aboriginals whose ethnography inspired these two French authors. We are dealing here with primitive (in the sense of early) forms of classification (cf. Durkheim & Mauss 1901), where items in the natural, especially animal, world are pressed into symbolic service not for any intrinsic features which these items may have, but for their ability to guide our thought, and ultimately once human thought has already reached the level of systematic, consistent binary opposition, beyond range semantics and recursion (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 147 f.; and below, pp. 204 f.) to serve as pegs on which to hang the binary oppositions that together constitute a cosmology. Just like in our analysis of Nkoya clan nomenclature in Chapter 2, we ought to heed Lvi-Strausss (1962a, 1962b) famous words, reiterating Durkheims view on the arbitrary, superimposed nature of symbols: animals are used as symbols not because they are good to eat, but because they are good to think. The juxtaposition of human and animal, in the Lascaux scene, can be said to revolve in the first place on the binary opposition of spatial freedom / spatial boundedness: birds can move in three dimensions and be free from 192

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the earth, and thus move in the Air humans can move in only two dimensions, remaining (at least by Palaeolithic technological conditions prevailing until Early Modern times brought the Montgolfier air balloon) tied to the Earth. The juxtaposition between bison and woolly rhinoceros is less directly apparent to our Modern thought, preconditioned as the latter is by the scientific classifications of universalist-orientated, global biological science. Both species can be said to be horned the bison head having two horns perpendicularly straddling the length axis of its body, the woolly rhinoceros having likewise two horns but situated along the length axis, and closer to the mouth. By Modern scientific classification, both bison and woolly rhinoceros are ungulates, but the bisons slender legs and feet, and its general bovine appearance, convey its ungulate / hoofed nature much more clearly than the woolly rhinoceros does. Why bison and woolly rhinoceros should be symbolically associated with Water and Fire is not immediately clear from their natural features, feeding habits and habitat both are herbivores at home in the relatively dry savannah, and while both are huge, formidable and intimidating by human standards hence qualify as evocations of Fire, neither lives in or near the Water. Perhaps their elemental association depends on an aetiological myth to which we have no longer access, or which if surviving among mythical materials recorded and published in historical times would be very hard to recognise as stemming from Upper Palaeolithic element mythology. Another possibility, which we can to some extend explore with the reconstructed prehistoric lexical material at our disposal, lies in the apparent polysemy of *Borean lexical items. While comparative historical linguistics now claims to be able to reconstruct the consonant structure of words, resulting in the extensive reconstructed *Borean vocabulary as revolving on two or sometimes three consonants (C1, C2, C3), it is still impossible to reconstruct the vowel structure. Since many combinations of vowels (V1, V2, .Vn) can fill the same skeletal consonant structure C1[V]C2[V], *Borean words that look unitary on paper, e.g. *T[V]K[V], in fact imply a whole series of what we could call consonantal homonyms: *T[V1]K[V1], *T[V1]K[V2], *T[V1]K[V3], *T[V1]K[V4], *T[V2]K[V1], *T[V2]K[V2], etc. in short: *T[V1n]K[V1n], each with its specific vowel structure and semantics (here

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T and K are actual, specific consonants, and V is an unspecified vowel). If

the structural opposition between bison and woolly rhinoceros remains minor and if we lack any aetiological myth to elucidate that opposition, we might still act on the assumption that bison and woolly rhinoceros have been selected as animal symbols not in their own right but because of punning, i.e. because some consonantal homonyms of the *Borean words directly applicable to bison and woolly rhinoceros, in fact have a specific association with either Fire or Water. In the light of the comparative evidence of how early cosmologies are composed and work, this is a weak but acceptable assumption, and, with all the unmistakable uncertainties attached, it will yet prove very productive. It is simple to scan the list of *Borean lexical reconstructions for Earthrelated lexical items. We should cast our net fairly widely, so as to include in our analysis items in which the earth semantics is merely implied, e.g. *HVMGV, dust, earth and *PVNV, clay, mud. For Air the situation already becomes more complicated. In the reconstructed vocabulary of *Borean, only one lexical item has been identified that could be equated with Air: *HVKMV, Sky, cloud. This should not greatly surprise us: the high tide of *Borean can be argued to coincide with the period of the earliest emergence of shamanism and of naked-eye astronomy Heaven was still in the process of being discovered (Mulisch 1992), invented, and therefore the dominant cosmogony, as far as we can make out through the mists of time, was still that of the Separation of Land and Water, and not yet that of the Separation of Heaven and Earth. Of course this is ultimately a reason to leave Step 1 behind and proceed to Step 2 which is c. 8 ka more recent. However, as long as we pretend to dwell at Step 1, we will have to make shift with other lexical items whose semantics comes close enough to Air. This is in the first place *NVPV, smoke / cloud. Further the *Borean terms for bird ( / fly) or for specific birds.172 From the bird vocabulary it is only a small
172 Few *Borean bird names can be identified by family or even species: only crane, goose, duck, and gallinaceous birds (such as partridge, quail, and hen, which are heavy-bodied, feed on the ground, and scarcely given to flying). Here it is remarkable that goose and duck, especially if white-feathered, appear in the Bronze Age as symbols of a postulated mythical female creator for which I have proposed the generic term Mother of the Waters and which probably goes as far back as the Upper

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step to feather, which also in other context (e.g. Ancient Egypt: w / Shu) represented Air. And finally we could look at a cluster of words with the semantics to blow, winnow and to stand, rise up. The reconstructed *Borean vocabulary does not contain specific lexical items for bison and woolly rhinoceros. Again we have to approximate the possible *Borean term by taking semantically akin words such as bovine, hoof, ungulate the first two of which at least distinguish the bison from the woolly rhinoceros. At Lascaux the bisons horns are emphatically depicted, aiming at the reclining man, but unless the Upper Palaeolithic perception of the rhinoceros is completely different from our Modern one horn or horned is also a concept applicable to the rhinoceros, i.e. the animal that carries a horn on its nose. Here the *Borean lexicon hints, through a series of consonantal homonyms, at an association of the bison with Water, and in the same indirect and conjectural way of the woolly rhinoceros with Fire. For, of the *Borean terms applicable to the bison in terms of above discussion, as many as three combine a bison-semantic aspect (hoof, ungulate) with a liquid semantic aspect (liquid, wet): *CVTV, *LVWV, *MVRV. Only two potentially bison-applicable terms also contain a Fire aspect among their consonantal homonyms (*HVRV, with light, burn; *PVRV, with burn), whereas the semantics of some of the consonantal homonyms of *TVKV, potentially apply to bison / Water, but also to Fire, Earth and Air. In regard to the woolly rhinoceros the same situation obtains: the semantics of the potentially applicable *Borean terms turn to a combination of rhinoceros features (horn) with burn, with some but little overlap with the bison / Water semantics. While realising that applying *Borean to Lascaux is an anachronism, we end up with a cosmology in which the four items of our Lascaux scene can be fairly unequivocally be interpreted as follows: (continued p. 197)

Palaeolithic; whereas the gallinaceous birds have all the characteristics to qualify as symbols of the Land or Earth (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 354 f.), where I propose that a major Upper Palaeolithic cosmogonic myth started out with a virgin Mother of the Waters who gave birth to her only son, the Land, and then was impregnated by the latter so as to produce all other aspects of reality. The *Borean bird vocabulary, selectively specifying only a few birds that are relevant in terms of this cosmogonic myth, suggests that that myth was already building up in *Borean times.

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Fig. 6.2. Analytical Step 1: *Borean applied to Lascaux.

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Earth: human Air: bird Fire: woolly rhinoceros, Water: bison.

These provisional, admittedly somewhat anachronistic identifications are displayed in Fig. 6.2. 6.2.3. Analytical step 2. Situating the Lascaux scene in a proto-Sino-Caucasian environment If we now correct the anachronism and dislocation on which Step 1 was predicated, and return to the Franco-Cantabrian region c. 17 ka BP, we may use the provisional results of Step 1 and transfer them to the protoSino-Caucasian environment that supposedly existed at that place and time. We do this by ascertaining whether the *Borean etymons identified (with enormous uncertainty, I cannot repeat it too often) in Step 1, have any detectable reflexes in proto-Sino-Caucasian. If they do not, we are up a dead alley, and should retrace our steps. If they do, and if the attending semantics are still compatible with a four-element cosmology, that would be encouraging, although nothing more than that. The results of Step 2 are listed in Table 6.3. They may be summarised as follows: in a proto-Sino-Caucasian reflex environment, *TVRV loses its bird / Air nature and in Step 2 could only apply to Earth; in a proto-Sino-Caucasian reflex environment, *CVLV may retain its combined Earth / Air connotations, as in Step 1; in a proto-Sino-Caucasian reflex environment, *KVRV loses its Fire nature, as well as that of a gallinaceous bird (with implied Earth connotations), but its general bird / Air connotations may be retained in Step 2; in a proto-Sino-Caucasian reflex environment, *HVRV loses its ungulate nature (presumably associated with Water), yet retains its liquid / Water nature as well as its light, burn / Fire nature the polysemic ambiguity of Step 1 is retained; in a proto-Sino-Caucasian reflex environment, *PVRV may retain its horned animal, calf, bull and spring, flow / Water nature, but loses its burn / Fire nature in other words, the association with Water / bison as found in Step 1 is confirmed for Step 2.

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in a proto-Sino-Caucasian reflex environment, *TVKV loses the connotation bone, horn, but it retains all other connotations which makes it potentially an overarching name for all four elements Earth / Air / Water / Fire.

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Table 6.3. Searching for Sino-Caucasian reflexes of the *Borean roots indicated in Fig. 6.2.

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Source: Lucas 2006 Fig. 6.3. Lascaux unicorn.

It is my contention that by these two steps, however stumbling, the presence of a four-element cosmology at Lascaux is rendered highly plausible.173

6.3. Element systems in the African Palaeolithic?

Although it is a legitimate and obvious question, in the context of the present book, to ask if there is any prehistoric iconographic evidence from sub-Saharan Africa that could be convincingly interpreted in terms of an element cosmology, I am not ready at this time to try and provide an answer. Some of the iconographic material may be at hand. What we would be looking for is

Another image from Lascaux possibly relevant from a point of view of element cosmology and transformation cycle, is displayed in Fig. 6.3. The prominent French prehistorian Rigaud (1988) described it in the following terms: creature of imagination has the hind end of a bison, the belly of a pregnant mare, the front paws of a feline, a mottled [ speckled!] hide, and two straight hornsthe profile of a bearded man

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a fairly compact arrangement involving a series, i.e. a limited number of systematically different items (or clusters of identical items) shown in some kind of order or interaction against the background of an reasonably well document iconographic, linguistic, mythical and archaeological material that would make the interpretation in terms of an element system more than simple wishful thinking. A number of candidates come to mind for further exploration (but that will have to be outside the present book), four of which I present in Fig. 6.4: 1. The incised Blombos Cave red ochre block, South Africa, Middle Palaeolithic (c. 70 ka BP),174 which although not quite meeting the above minimum specifications still offers about the oldest attestation world-wide of a systematically varying repetitive geometrical arrangement; elsewhere (van Binsbergen 2011f) I have interpreted, with reference to extensive circumstantial evidence, the pattern as an evocation of the rainbow or rainbow snake, which in itself is a natural phenomenon meeting our above requirements (seven distinct colours constituting a series), while colour symbolism of the elements is widespread in historical periods. (In this connection it is worth remarking that in a cave at Tsodilo Hills, North-western Botswana, a giant three-dimensional, pocked snake representation was found from the same period; Coulson et al. 2011). 2. A richly worked Middle Palaeolithic engraved stone plaque from the Kalinien (cf. Chavaillon 1997) archaeological complex, Angola. Janmart (1946) describes this small plaque and its signs in the following terms:
La pierre perfore. La perforation a t faite avant la gravure, comme le prouvent certains traits du dessin qui y pntrent. Lorifice a t fait par piquetage. Seule la partie la plus troite a t galise en y faisant tourner un morceau de bois ou une pierre allonge. La fig. () montre la nature des dessins, qui semblent avoir t excuts au moyen dun clat trenchant de roche cure. Jy distingue: une figure humaine couvre-chef empenn (1) une vulve (2), une figure Cf. Henshilwood et al. 2001, 2002; Watts 2009. Image: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Art/BlombosOchre.jpg, with thanks .
174

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oblongue allure gomtrique (3), un phallus (4) en partie creus dans la plaque, un schma dhomme assis (5) ct dune personne de sexe non indiqu (le graveur sest amus creuser la partie du zig-zag qui touche lorifice), un zig-zag multiple (6), dont les lments ne sont pas trs rectilignes, figure que lon interprte habituellement comme un groupe de femmes assises, un petit ovale auquel sont accoles des lignes droites (7), figure que jinterprte comme un homme debout, un poing sur la hanche et, enfin, diverges lignes droites et courbes sintersectant pour crer des dessins divers.

One must suppress, at this stage, the temptation to try and assign element connotations to these seven items and to critique Janmarts interpretation; without elaborately constructed context that would be futile. 3. A rock painting near Harare, Zimbabwe, which meets our above requirements but is much younger than the other two examples, probably only a few ka BP (Frobenius 1931: Fig. 31, p. 315). Against an impressive review of Bantu-speaking astronomical myths, von Sicard (1968) interprets this image in terms of a Bantuspeakers astronomical myth: the hero (marked by crescents in his hair) and two companions cross Ntandes bridge [equated with the celestial axis ]; the eared elongated creature in the upper righthand quadrant is interpreted as the Milky Way, gwara raKuruvi, the Path of Luwe Luwe is a name for the widespread unilateral mythical character we have encountered passim in the present book (von Sicard 1968; van Binsbergen 2010a). Such a reading assumes that realistic (river crossing) and symbolic elements (Milky Way as snake) mix freely in this kind of representation. It also assumes that, across more than 1000 km the Luba (Congo) spiderlike mythical character Ntande, with his legendary bridge, may be invoked to explain a rock painting in Zimbabwe. Considering the emphasis, in recent decades, on the trance interpretation of Southern African and Franco-Cantabrian rock art,175 we might drop the idea of a river crossing and interpret the figures progress, on all fours, along Ntandes bridge as standard shamanic progress along the celestial axis. But even so, the arrangement of seven or eight (2n) anthropomorphic figures bottom left, a snakelike image top right, specifically hatched fields reminiscent of a bee swarm,
175

Cf. Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988, 1989; Clottes & Lewis-Williams 1996.

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water etc., and the vague parallels with more recent iconography which we have considered in the course of our argument, makes further exploration of this image promising. 4. One of the most elaborate and best preserved painted panels of San rock art in Zimbabwe is to be found at Makoni, and has probably a similar age as (3). Garlake, the specialist on Zimbabwe rock art, to whom we owe this figure, interprets (1995) the large reclining figure as an archetypal trancer, his body full of white dots marking potency. His face has the markings of a sable antelope (elsewhere in Garlakes work this suggests a divine, rather than human nature). The vertical emphasis in the image has shamanic overtones, as is the case in (3). But whatever the merits of these interpretations, the complexity of the scene and the clusters of various types of characters make it a candidate for a future analysis of African prehistoric element systems. Further than this we cannot go at present as far as the African prehistoric indications of element systems are concerned.

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Fig. 6.4. Possible candidates from African prehistory for an iconographic analysis in terms of element cosmology.

After this exploration in the Upper Palaeolithic, let us return to Bronze Age Eurasia, and see if we can cast more light upon the history of correlative systems in that period.

6.4. Between the *Borean-speaking Upper-Palaeolithic and the Late Bronze Age: The transformation cycle of elements as a mode of thought
Although we have no direct documentary evidence on prehistoric modes of thought, comparative linguistics, archaeology, comparative mythology and comparative ethnography offer us increasingly perceptive methods to retrieve ancient thought from pre-literate contexts. In a recent attempt to reconstruct, in space, time and modes of thought, the (probably remotely prehistoric) contexts (probably going back to remote prehistory) to which the mythology of the Flood hero Noah and his sons belongs (Genesis 5 to 11), I have extensively used such methods, and forged some new ones 204

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(van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 142-153). I cannot reiterate here the data and analysis for limitations of space, but let me summarise the main results. In the first place, close scrutiny of the more than thousand reconstructed lexical roots for *Borean enabled me to identify, for Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic, a peculiar mode of thought which I have termed range semantics:
*Borean reconstructed roots are mainly of the form *CVCV, where C is a specifically reconstructed consonant, V an unspecifiable vowel. Now looking at the *Borean repertoire for wet and dry, we see to our amazement that many reconstructed words which have the same specific consonantal structure (although, admittedly, the underlying vowel structure remains undefined), in their semantics relate to both wet, intermediate, swampy, and dry. It is as if the *Borean words (or, to be more precise, the vowel-unspecified word cluster with the same consonantal structure) had a meaning that is not calibrated at one specific point in the semantic range between wet and dry, but that indicates the entire range, leaving it to context to determine which position on this range is meant. Such range semantics, as a general characteristic of *Borean, reveals a mode of thought that is very different from the triadic mode often found in the literate Eurasian civilisations from the Bronze Age on, and even (because of the fluid range semantics which implies an absence of firm juxtaposition) from the dyadic, binary oppositions which Lvi-Strauss (1962a, 1962b, 1969-78) thought [ apparently erroneously ] to be a human universal and even the very basis of human culture. (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 142).

Thus in *Borean, a particular lexical root may indicate not so much either wet or dry, penis or vulva, dark or light, but any specific variable value in the ranges degree of wetness / dryness, genital of either genders, degree of lightness / darkness. Firm, sustained, consistent, absolute logical distinctions would thus appear to be post-*Borean. Their emergence and installation, ultimately to become standard, should in the first place be regarded as a result of intensified use of articulate language176 (and of the socio-organisational, productive and ritual practices facilitated by, and engendering, articulate language) since the Upper Palaeolithic. It might then be correct to say that the subsequent, increasArticulate language can be claimed to have been humans principal context, and tool, for learning to generate and to handle immensely subtle and complex distinctions by the phonological principle of distinctive features (Jakobson et al. 1952), the distinction and use of phonemes and other language elements entirely depends on the dextrous management of binary oppositions.
176

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ing dominance of such binary distinctions in human culture was largely brought about by the pivotal role of increasingly precise and technical language in the context of the post-Neolithic package of writing, the state, the money economy, proto-science, and organised religion.

I top their twin children: Kapi and Mbuyu, or Katete and Luhamba

II Ncunguni (snake mermaid) Kanohaha (fish mermaid)

III their twin children: Kapi and Mbuyu, or Katete and Luhamba

IV MwendaNjangula Kaluwe

V=I their twin children: Kapi and Mbuyu, or Katete and Luhamba

bottom

Cf. van Binsbergen 2011e Fig. 6.5. Recursion in a Nkoya statuette used in a cult of affliction.

Clearly, it was difficult for Upper Palaeolithic thinkers speaking *Borean to make the kind of clear-cut binary oppositions out of which, under the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 4.4), our formal, and especially our scientific, discourse consists in modern times. Even so, the *Borean-speakers approach to reality was a strongly dyadic one: the only *Borean numerals convincingly reconstructed were 2, 4 and 8 for it were the names of these numbers only that left traces in the (likewise reconstructed) proto-vocabularies of historic language families. Handicapped in her or his binary thinking, the *Borean speakers approach to the worlds complexity appears to have been in terms of recursion, in other words:

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the situation in which a class of objects or methods [is] defined by a simple basic case and where specific rules derive from, and reduce to, this basic case all other cases. In iconography, repetitive patterns of ornamentation () [ notably accumulations or concatenations of two twosomes ] constitute examples of recursion. In social organisation, segmentation, the segmentary lineage, and the genealogy represented as a dendrogram also amount to recursion. (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 147n).177

This large room-dividing screen from the Tlingit of Alaska offers, in its repetition and nesting of the eye motif, excellent examples of recursion (Haberland 1965: Fig. 14) Fig. 6.6. Large room-dividing screen from the Tlingit of Alaska.

177 Thus the complementary opposition model applied above in Section 3.2 in order to tackle Nkoya clan nomenclature, is a recursive model; little wonder that it does not satisfy, for the transformative element cycle that I show to be the key of the Nkoya clan system in Section 2.3 operates at a far more advanced and recent level of triadic logic which, towards the end of this book, will be a reason to consider this triadic model among the Nkoya a recent transcontinental intrusion.

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It is the ethnomathematician Ron Eglash (1997, 1998, 2005; cf. Fitting 1981) who in his studies of African formal systems of divination and ornamentation, following common mathematical usage, has discussed, under this heading of recursion, the endless repetition, through bifurcation of the same phenomenon at successive levels, like a binary dendrogram unfolding infinitely fractalwise. Here the apparent (and structuralists following Lvi-Strauss should heed this point) binary opposition is not a genuine one, because it is neither conclusive nor stable in itself but as if for fear of the absolute difference implied in the real binary opposition it keeps endlessly repeating itself, it is merely an invitation to further and further bifurcation. However, out of modes of thought like range semantics and recursion, more complex and precise modes must have evolved, for towards the end of the Bronze Age we find, in a narrow belt stretching from Iceland to South Asia and China (our Fig. 6.7), cosmologies, pantheons, sociopolitical arrangements (Dumzil 1958, 1969) and other formal systems organised in terms, not of more or less thwarted binary opposition, but of triads.
The triadic format therefore stands out as a regional Neolithic or Bronze Age innovation, underneath of which apparently much older twosomes and foursomes persist. One can hardly overestimate the revolution that a triadic system constitutes as compared to a classification system based on powers of 2 and therefore on recursion: whereas recursion reproduces, fractal-wise, the same set of relationships over and over again at an ever increasing or decreasing scale, triads introduce the Heraclitean / Hegelian dynamics of dialectics, where the relationship between each two components is essentially shifting and unstable, and informed by the third component; on a formal logical level one can very well understand why a cultural setting dominated by triads has become, from the Neolithic onward, the main growth region for the revolutionary package of writing, state, organised religion, and (proto-)science. The Triadic Revolution consists in the acknowledgement of a third element in addition to the two that had hitherto constituted the two poles between which the worldview was organised. Typically, therefore, that third element takes the form of a mediator or connection between Heaven and Earth, such as the aether, air, a demiurge, a Child from Heaven descending on Earth (e.g. in the form of food crops: Osiris, Dionysus, Jesus), the celestial pole, lightning, rain, etc. One might also look for intermediate forms between Land and Water (the mythically charged Flood land Boeotia seems to be a case in point.), but the worldview informed by the cosmogony of their separation was in fact already obsolete when, during the Bronze Age and mainly in its literate polities, the Triadic Revolution established itself as standard. Whereas the binary opposition is static in that it, in endless recursion, can only copy its underlying juxtaposition, the triad is immensely dynamic in that, perhaps for the first time in

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global cultural history, it offers the mode of thought capable of handling movement, escape from the original juxtaposition, and transformation into something totally new and unexpected the dynamics of dialectics, such as fathomed, in the history of Western philosophy, first by Heraclitus (Diels [ 1960 / ] 1934-1937), formalised more than two millennia later by the end of the 18th century CE for the first time (Kant), subsequently given a central position in Hegels ternary logic, and popularised in Chalybaeus well-known three-stage operation Thesis Antithesis Synthesis (Chalybaeus 1860; Hegel 1807 / 1977, 1822-31 / 1992; Kant 1781 / [ 1983 / ] 1964). (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 149 f.).

The emphasis on twosomes and foursomes, in *Borean, as well as in North American and sub-Saharan African formal systems (including divination, mythology, and social organisation) in historical times, contrasts strikingly with the very conspicuous, Dumezilian emphasis on cosmological and mythological threesomes / triads throughout the Ancient Near East (including Egypt), South Asia, and Europe, in protohistorical and historical times. The triadic format stands out as a regional Neolithic innovation (also cf. Kaul 2005), underneath of which apparently much older dyadic formats persist, for instance such as inform the Ancient Egyptian Hermopolitan cosmology, the Empedoclean (I submit: Pelasgian) element system of Greek Antiquity, etc. From this point of view, then, the four-element system of Empedocles, based on 2n recursion and without the triadic element which the catalyst provides in the Taoist transformation cycle of elements (Figs. 3 and 4), is markedly more archaic and less advanced than the Taoist one, and than triadic systems in general. In their present form, African 2n-based divination systems (Hakata, Ifa, Sikidy; cf. Chapter 2) unmistakably have one major, recent background in the South West Asian divination system cilm al-raml, whose astrological overtones inevitably were informed by Hellenistic, ultimately Ancient Near Eastern astral divination where triadic transformations groups of three zodiacal signs called triplicities of element foursomes (!) play a considerable role (Bouch-Leclercq 1879, 1899; Tester 1987; Pingree 1978; Gadd 1966), each again with three specific planets as astrological rulers. More important however seems to be that, in a longer time perspective, cilm al-raml in turn was informed by, or has a common origin with, the East Asian correlative system of Y Jng, and that both, along with the African 2n-based systems, appear to continue an Upper Palaeolithic Old World standard pattern. 209

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Triads seem to be restricted to literate Eurasian mythologies; from: van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Fig. 6.5, with referenced data points, p. 152; 1 = triad attested Fig. 6.7. Global distribution of triads in mythology.

Thus, although first attested in Egyptian and Mesopotamian documents from the Early Bronze Age, the non-cyclic, non-transformational element systems described in the preceding sections follow an archaic pattern reminiscent of modes of thought reconstructed for the Upper Palaeolithic. This raises the question as to how the transition was made from the range-like logic implied in *Borean reconstructions, to the firm, absolute binary oppositions that today, world-wide, govern our lives, technologies, and specialist, academic knowledge production. In my opinion the binary opposition came to be installed as the norm, in the first place as a result of articulated speech becoming the absolute norm for human communication (which Ferdinand de Saussure was right (de Saussure 1968 / 1916) is predicated on binary opposition between phonemes), and subsequently and even more formidably, as a result of the package of post-Neolithic civilisation, containing writing, the state, money, organised religion and proto-science, that has raised domesticated, binary thought to the norm and has banished undomes-

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ticated thought178 to the (fortunately still very extensive) nonspecialised, non-academic, non-formal domains of everyday life. The capability of transcendent thought is also implied in binary oppositions. In a logic based on range semantics, no firm binary opposition and no genuine transcendence can be thought. It is my contention (van Binsbergen 2012a) that not transcendentalism, but immanentalism is the default option of the world-view of Anatomically Modern Humans. Only occasionally, under very specific historical and statal conditions which happened to be met in sections of the Extended Fertile Crescent since the Early Bronze Age, does immanentalism give way to transcendentalism. The typical implication of immanentalism is repetition, when it is fundamentally impossible to escape from the here and now, and all appearances to the contrary are ultimately a disguise of the idea of an Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Nietzsche 1973a, 1973b; Eliade 1954 / 1971). As one essential further step, the transformation cycle is also intermediate between range semantics and the binary opposition, but it is far more advanced than recursion. Note that the Old World correlative systems discussed in Chapter 4, tend to combine recursion in the form of reliance on 2n, with a cyclic structure of elements. In a transformation cycle of elements, an ontological position is still not totally fixed: the element may be Fire, and as such it is fixed in a number of unmistakable and unique characteristics or attributes, but being Fire is only a more or less ephemeral state, and may under specific conditions give way to e.g. being Earth,

Fig. 6.7a. A typical triad: Osiris, Isis and Horus depicted in gold (Osorkon II, first
178 Lvi-Strauss pense sauvage / savage mind, which is the common, everyday, nonspecialist form of thinking, and not specifically the thinking of savages the latter being an impossibly obsolete term anyway.

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half 9th c. BCE, now at the Louvre, Paris, France); source: http://www.puc-rio.br/louvre/images/iependen.jpg, with thanks

just as it may have resulted from an earlier state e.g. being Wood. It is the powerful combination of a well-defined ontological state, and the ephemeral, transient nature of that state, which makes the transformation cycle a great improvement upon sheer recursion, yet still greatly falling short of firm, genuine binary opposition. Meanwhile, the hints at triads contained in the Taoist and Nkoya versions of the transformative element cycle reveal the relatively recent nature of these systems: they date from the very last few millennia, when the triad as civilisational norm had already established itself. We may now pinpoint what the peripheral miscomprehension of the Presocratics consisted in, and why it was essentially felicitous after all: unable to appreciate any more the cyclical nature of the elements, they essentialised them into frozen, discrete, parallel ontological states, applying the logic of binary opposition (which by that time had become a standard tool) to a much older mode of thought. Let us consider once more my Cosmogonic Hypothesis claiming, for the Upper Palaeolithic during the period of the disintegration of *Borean, a succession of two rival cosmogonies: that of the Separation of Land and Water, supplanted, within a few millennia, by that of the Separation of Heaven and Earth. The scanty, and scattered, empirical evidence for this hypothesis cannot be presented in the present scope. Suffice it here to note that these cosmogonies may well be considered true revolutions of human thought, in the sense that they are on the one hand, far more effective exercises in thinking binary oppositions than had been possible under range semantics, and on the other hand, in that they are indications that in learning to effectively think binary oppositions, cosmological thinking in terms of the succession of one element by another proved to be of considerable importance: the cosmogony of the Separation of Land and Water (even if cast in the likely narrative shape surviving well into literate Ancient times of the Mother of the Primal Waters parthenogenetically producing her only Son, Land, who subsequently became her lover) is a meditation on the interaction between Earth and Water as proto-elements, while (to the extent to which the Sky is to be

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equated with Air and / or Fire a confusion which can still be noted at the level of the Presocratics) the cosmogony of the Separation of Heaven and Earth is a meditation on the interaction between Earth and Air, or Earth and Fire. Having thus explored (mainly typologically, but also empirically by taking recourse to comparative mythology, comparative religion and comparative ethnography) crucial steps in the pre- and protohistoric unfolding of human thought faculties, we are in a much better position to take a closer look at West Asia in the Bronze Age. Let us now try and assess whether the striking, though partial, parallels between the Presocratics and East Asian correlative systems may have derived from mere independent parallel development, or instead are to be attributed to tangible and demonstrable historic connections between these two ends of the huge Asian continent; and, if in fact cultural borrowing took place resulting in these attested thought systems, whether such borrowing was from East to West Asia, or the other way around. It was the FrenchBritish Sinologist A.E.J.-B. Terrien de Lacouperie (c. 1845-1894) who by the end of the 19th century made the case for actual historic indebtedness of China to Ancient Mesopotamia, in a way now almost completely discarded by recent scholarship often for the Politically-Correct reason that Terriens claim today appears not so much counter-intuitive, but potentially hegemonic and (to the extent to which Greek and Modern North Atlantic civilisations ultimately may be seen as continuous, in considerable part, with Ancient Mesopotamia) Eurocentric. The present books argument so far would seem to favour such Political Correctness, but as an essentially ideological position we should not take it at face value. Let us therefore carefully re-assess the case of Terrien de Lacouperie, in the next Chapter.

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Chapter 7. Y Jng and West Asia: A partial vindication of Terrien de Lacouperie

7.1 Introduction
Throughout our argument so far we have come back to Y Jng, a classic Chinese wisdom text, the focus of a correlative system that contains a comprehensive cosmology addressing all aspects of human society and the universe, and that is expressed, in the first place in eight trigrams (figures consisting of three superimposed lines, each line broken or unbroken), each with their own multidimensional meanings, and in the second place 64 combinations of two trigrams superimposed one upon the other the hexagrams (figures consisting of six superimposed lines), with complex and dynamically shifting (changing) correlative meanings. When a random generator (a material apparatus producing highly specific and discrete chance outcomes, e.g. coins that are thrown, or numbered yarrow stalks that are cast) is coupled to a particular algorithm to translate the chance outcome into specifically one of the 64 combinations, and is interpreted by reference to a catalogue of divinatory meanings, Y Jng may be used as a powerful oracle, which during most of Chinas recorded history has compelled immense respect. Y Jng became known to Europe (cf. Smith 2012) as a result of the communications of Jesuit Christian missionaries working in China from the late 16th century onwards. The famous German mathematician and philosopher G.W. Leibniz (16461716 CE; Leibniz 1984), on the basis of Jesuits reports from China, was the first to recognise the systems binary numerical implications. The idea of an Ancient Mesopotamian origin of the Chinese people179 and
According to Terrien this postulated people linking Ancient Mesopotamia to China, was named Bak Sing the attested (Cantonese) Chinese expression
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of Y Jng was launched, both in well-received lectures before the Royal Asiatic Society, London, and in numerous publications,180 by the distinguished French-British Sinologist A.E.J.-B. Terrien de Lacouperie, who at the time of his untimely death from typhoid fever was professor of Indo-Chinese linguistics at University College London, one of the principal institutions of higher learning in the United Kingdom. In the present Chapter, after vindicating the stature of Terriens scholarship and situating it in its own time and age, I will summarise his theory as to the Western origin of the Chinese people and of the Y Jng in Ancient Mesopotamia, consider its weaknesses, and dismiss his reductionist view
which until then was interpreted as meaning the [ foundational ] Hundred Families of Ancient China (cf. de Harlez 1895, where po-hsing). Terriens proposal has been greatly ridiculed, yet its underlying principle is sound, and has a considerable comparative and theoretical foundation (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Ch. 2): when ethnonyms and toponyms travel, they are likely to be altered in accordance with the local phonology of the destination where they end up, and to be reinterpreted by popular etymology there (so one of the great challenges of ethnic history is to decipher the resulting puzzles). A strong indication that this is what happened lies in the fact that in the Bronze Age, the lexical equivalent of would have been pronounced differently from Bak Sing (rather as prk ses, Preclassic Old Chinese, cf. Starostin & Starostin, 1998-2008, Chinese characters and Sino-Tibetan etymology). The Armenologist Karst (1931a: 287) proposed to identify Terriens (otherwise unattested) Bak (Sing) with the attested Central Asian names Ketshi, Kets, Kotchi, Ktsch. In passing, note the assonance with the personal name / ethnonym / place name Kush (according to Genesis 10 a son / division of am, and although am in that connection is mainly associated with the African continent significantly associated with Mesopotamia as the father / overarching unit of Nimrod the hunter, first king and (through his tower) challenger of Heaven. (Incidentally, Nimrod is the Mesopotamian counterpart of the Nkoya legendary king Kapesh whom we shall meet below, but the Nkoya name seems unrelated to the Central Asian cluster of names.) In such languages as Schrift-Oiratisch of Western China, in Tuvan, and in Kalmuk, kets occurs with the meaning of hard, bold (Poppe 1964: 204; Bayarma Khabtagaeva 2009: 43), from proto-Altaic *k`t`, with the same meaning, and with reflexes in Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchu, Korean and Japanese (Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008, s.v. Altaic etymology). In Japanese, moreover, kets, means blood and also stands for a particular form of identitary rhetoric. These semantics may produce plausible ethnonyms. Below we will find indications that the Terriens postulatded ethnonym may have belonged to a protoBantuoid-speaking cluster of West Asian Blacks, and if this makes sense, the *original name may be analysed as [*ba-]-*Ksing, with *ba- as plural personal prefix (as in Common Bantu), and *Ksing close enough to Ketshi, Kets, Kotchi, Ktsch. Werner (1984 / 1922: 13), while rejecting the identification of with any similarly-sounding West or Central Asian ethnonym, accepts the possibility of an Akkadian or Khotan origin of Chinese civilisation. 180 Terrien de Lacouperie 1880, 1882, 1887a, 1887b, 1888a, 1888b, 1890, 1892a, 1892b, 1894, 1897. For provisional bibliographies, cf. Anonymous 2012.

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of the wholesale origin of the Chinese. However, I will also maintain that his point concerning the Western origin of Y Jng grosso modo still stands, adducing new material to that effect.

7.2. The stature of Terrien de Lacouperies scholarship

Apparently unfamiliar with the meaning of University College in the London / United Kingdom context, the Japanese scholar Yoshihiro (2003) makes of Terrien an obscure scholar in the fringes of academic life [ a mere college? WvB ], allegedly only publishing in his own journal, i.e. Babylonian & Oriental Record.181 Concerning Terriens theory of decisive Mesopotamian influence on the rise of Chinese civilisation, and specifically of Y Jng, Yoshihiro gives the impression that it has long been refuted. Characterisations such as fancyfull [ sic ], fantasist, obscure, infamous, a failure, invented the Bak Sing tribes, speculative extremes, too sanguine speculation, ingenious but indigent [ = poor ], etc. are also found in other, cursory reviews of Terrien as author of an external theory of the rise of Chinese civilisation.182 More to the point and less anachronistic is the assessment by Blagden (1913), of Terrien as highly imaginative and brilliant, but not always reliable. Such unusually passionate qualifications do not sound as if their object is getting a fair deal rather, as if the speakers have, in terms of ideology and self-interest, a chip on their shoulder. The truth is that Terrien, considering the relatively short span of his academic life, had an amazing output, and both phenomenal and surprisingly lasting success. Among his achievements we may count pioneering work in general linguistics, Chinese historical syntax, the identification of pre-Chinese languages of East
181 I am touchy on this point because similar accusations could be, and have been, levelled at myself. Of course, publishing in scholarly journals that one does not directly or (via old-boy ties) indirectly control, allows ones work to be objectively and critically assessed in the light of current standards of scholarship. For interdisciplinary and pioneering work this is not always an adequate solution. Moreover, we must avoid anachronisms on this point: the peer-reviewed scientific journal, instead of the book, only emerged as a dominant, even compelling, standard of scholarly quality in the second half of the 20th century, way after Terriens time. What is more, publishing in ones own journal is sometimes a means to contribute to that journals quality and continuity. Finally, looking at Terriens enormous productivity I suspect, on the basis of personal parallels, that he chose the quickest publication venue with the least hurdles, simply to get things over and done with, and to have his hands free for the next challenge and the next text.

Cordier 1895; Andrews 1925; Yetts 1925; Girardot 2005; Kroeber 1940; Armstrong 1945; Levenson & Schurmann 1969: 9; Rutt 2002 / 1996: 72; Leibold 2011.

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Asia, decisive systematic work on East Asian numismatics, important contributions to the history of Buddhism and of South Asian, Central Asian and East Asian writing systems and scriptures, the ethnography and linguistic description of Formosa, the archaeology of Korea, explorations in Assyriology, and the first recognition of the striking similarities between the Indus valley and Easter Island (pseudo-)scripts. Famous and soon, posthumously, notorious183 for his theory of the Ancient Mesopotamian indebtedness of Chinese civilisation, this was by no means his principal contribution to scholarship. No informed scholar would expect the fruits of Sinology and Assyriology from the 1880s to survive the confrontation with present-day knowledge, methods, and resources. However, quite unusual for linguists that have been dead for nearly 120 years, Terriens pioneering work in the linguistic classification of the Sinosphere, and other scholarly achievements, continue to reverberate in authoritative specialist works of a later date, up to the present.184 Beyond the sphere of Western scholarship, and rather uniquely, and deservedly in recognition of Terriens non-hegemonic worldview, his West Asian theory of Chinese origins (in other words, his theory of common origins shared by the Chinese and European civilisations) was eagerly received by influential Chinese scholars writing around 1900, and as a result the debate on, and with, Terrien de Lacouperie is still continuing in China, Japan, and Thailand to this very day,185 while in the West his name has long been reduced, undeservedly, to mainly that of a bogeyman of pan-Babylonism avant la lettre. With its predilection (very conspicuous in Martin Bernal, who prides himself in this trait) for now obscure authors once championing causes
For dismissive references to Terrien, cf. Brinton 1895; Cordier 1920: 21 f.; Bushell 1905 merely maintains that Terriens theory has not been proven which strictly speaking may be said about all theories circulating in any of the humanities and social sciences. Approving citations of Terrien have appeared with the following authors: Pinches 1912; Hopkins 1916; Corney 1917; Charpentier 1919; Hopkins 1922; Maspero 1926; Ayrton & Silcock 1929 / 2003: 3 (one authority (...) now somewhat discredited); Yetts 1931, although Yettss 1925 assessment of both Terrien and Ball was dismissive; de Hevesy 1938; Wiens 1949: 14; Hamilton 1954; Bartel 1958; and especially note the following recent positive citations: Jettmar 1983; West 1988; Egerod 1991; DeLancey 2010, 2012; Blench 2010.
185 184 183

Cf. Nakamura 1947; Diktter 1990; Dufourmont 2006; Li Fan 2005, 2008; Hon 2007, 2010; Kyong-McClain 2010; Lin 1999; Feng 2005; Fong 2009.

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that have meanwhile become counter-paradigmatic and potentially antihegemonic (e.g. Leo Frobenius), Afrocentrism has also identified Terrien de Lacouperie as a partisan (Rashidi 1988), transforming the latters thesis in the following terms:
One of the oldest oracles of antiquity, the I-Ching was constructed by the Black Akkado-Sumerians of Elam-Babylonia and is dated circa 2800 BCE.

Brinton (1895) claimed that de Harlez, in Schlegels [journal] Archives d Orient (more likely Toung Pao is meant, cf. de Harlez 1896), had totally demolished Terriens theory by exposing a faulty etymology and by adducing the alleged fact that
presence of the true Mongolian race in the Euphrates valley in protohistory is fantasy.186

This false claim of utter rejection has ever since been adopted by an increasing number of scholars, leading to the unverified, unreferenced truism it has become today. However, while rejecting Terriens reductionist view of the wholesale Western origin of the Chinese people, we shall see that Terrien still has a point as far as Y Jng is concerned. Moreover Rashidi like so often in the case of Afrocentrism has more of a point than one would be inclined to give him credit for, even though his expression the Black Akkado-Sumerians of Elam-Babylonia does unmistakable violence to Terriens original, and probably also to ethnic and somatic realities in West Asia in the Early Bronze Age and yet deserves to be taken seriously.
186 Brintons tirumphalist claim is ironic for a number of reasons. Shamanism, most probably transmitted on the wings of Uralic, Altaic and Indo-European speakers horse-riding and chariot technology hailing from West to Central Asia, did penetrate Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE, and below (footnote 252) we shall indicate some of its apparent traces. A claim of West Asian influence, even provenance, for the Chinese people (or rather: for a minute population fragment contributing to the massive and heterogeneous Chinese people) does not mean presence of any true Mongolian race (an obsolete misconception anyway by todays genetics standards, which reject the concept of race wholesale; Brace et al. 1993; Montagu 1974) in Mesopotamia, but merely the transfer of cultural traits from West to East for which, again, the Steppe has been providing excellent opportunities for millennia (Witzel 2009) as well as for the counter-movement East-West (cf. Needham with Ling 1961, vol. I). As we have seen above, Sino-Caucasian may be considered a macrophylum massively spoken in West Asia and the Mediterranean (including the Franco-Cantabrian region) into the Bronze Age. And so strikingly Mongoloid were some of these West Asian presences that early scholarly studies of the Hittites attributed a Turanic / Mongoloid nature to them on the basis of their iconographic selfdepictions in stone (Conder 1898, 1909, 1915). Turan is a name for Central Asia.

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7.3. Terrien de Lacouperie on a wholesale West Asian origin of the Chinese people
Terrien wrote in the shaky formative decades of Assyriology, and a quarter of a century before the establishment of pan-Babylonism, i.e. the short-lived scholarly theory (no doubt in part inspired by Terrien) according to which all civilisation world-wide originated in Ancient Mesopotamia (cf. Winckler 1903, 1907). Terriens main arguments were: more or less superficial correspondences (also cf. Ball 1913) between formal characteristics of isolated script signs in China and Mesopotamia but meanwhile both Assyriology and Sinology have progressed tremendously, and the oracular bones and other archaeological sources have yielded much older forms, apparently of local origin, of Chinese script than available to Terrien and Ball; onomastic parallels which are notoriously multi-interpretable; mythological parallels e.g. concerning the Flood but Flood myths are globally so widespread187 that they do not prove much of a specific Mesopotamian-Chinese connection; his personal reconstruction of (what appeared) a trans-Asiatic migration from West to East Asia by an unattested Bak Sing ethnic group, linking up with the tradition of Chinas Hundred Families largely vindicated in note 179, above; and also what should still count as impressive in the eyes of Modern scholarship: correspondences between Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Chinese king lists.188 As far as specifically Y Jng is concerned, Terrien rejected the dominant tradition (in the Western scholarship of his time represented by James Legge) that considered the Y Jng and its extensive commentaries to
187 188

E.g. Dundes 1988; Witzel 2010; van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008.

Modern scholarship still greatly relies on the matching on king lists, e.g. this is a major argument for Dierk Lange (2009, 2012) when claiming major and direct Assyrian influence upon West Africa, c. 600 BCE.

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constitute one unified corpus. Thirty years later the prominent Sinologist H.A. Giles (1915: 5 f.) summarised Terriens argument in the following terms:
The foreign student is disappointed when he comes to a study of the Canon of Changes [ = a literal rendering of the title Y Jng ]; partly because of the exaggerated value set upon its contents by native scholars of all ages, and partly from an inability to penetrate its labyrinthine mysteries and seize the hidden spirit of the book. It has been alleged by Chinese enthusiasts that, if you have only the wit to seek, you will find in the Canon of Changes the germs of all the great scientific discoveries; on the other hand, it was reserved for two foreign students (Sir R. Douglas [ cf. Douglas 1893 WvB ] and Terrien de Lacouperie) to put their heads together and publicly announce that this work, regarded in China as based on a divine revelation, is nothing more than a vocabulary of an obscure Central Asian tribe [ sc. the Bak Sing WvB ] so obscure indeed that to this day it remains unlocated and unknown. A translation of the Canon of Changes was made by Dr Legge,189 the greatest Chinese scholar of modern times at the day of his death. Dr Legge thought that he had found the key, but it is doubtful if anyone else has ever shared with him that opinion. (my italics WvB)

The most nuanced present-day negative assessment of Terriens wholesale thesis is perhaps that of oracle-bone specialist D.N. Keightley (Keightley & Barnard 1983: x f.; cf. Keightley 1978), who rather than denouncing Terriens impressive scholarship, advances a number of reasons why the latters theory should be rejected: a) lack of archaeological support; b) excessive trust in late Chinese texts ; c) reliance on the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc (B followed A in time therefore A is the cause of B); d) inability to distinguish between proper genetic connection and coincidence, and e) an exogenous, external, instead of endogenous and spontaneous, conception of cultural innovation. Still, even though negative, this is very far from conclusive. While con-

189 Legge 1882, where the signs of his controversy with Terrien de Lacouperie are to be found at p. 18 f. The latter had declared that Legges was not a translation but a mere paraphrase. Legge in his turn retorted that Terrien showed no understanding whatsoever of the m e a n i n g of Y Jng, implying that an attempt like Terriens, to re-contextualise that sacred Chinese text in West Asia i.e. outside the habitual realm of the Sinosphere, can only amount to a destruction of its original, inherent meaning.

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ceding (b) (the short oracle-bone texts on which Keightleys own research focused were at least one millennium older than anything available to Terrien), we note

Source: Seligmann n.d.: Fig. 11, p. 32; Kircher 1652-1655 Fig. 7.1. An Early Modern representation of Dagon / Oannes, loosely based on Ancient Graeco-Roman and Biblical sources (the Mesopotamian sources had not yet been explored at the time)

that it is a gross distortion of facts to deny (Keightleys point (a)) all archaeological support for Terriens thesis. In this connection we may point to such standard textbook examples as: the Neolithic and Bronze Age continuity, across the Eurasian Steppe, of pottery, agricultural implements (Leser 1928), animal style art (Rostovzev 1929), spoked chariot,190 the Altaic linguistic phylum covering the entire Eurasian Steppe region from Anatolia to Korea and Japan, the comparative study of divination,191 and mythological concepts (e.g. snake-footed divine figures such as Fu Xi, N Wa, Ancient

190 191

van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 382 and passim, with references. Cf. Oppenheim 1966: 37, to whom we shall return below.

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Greek Cecrops and Erichthonius,192 and apparently cognate fishtailed figures such as Oannes with cognates Basque Basojaun, Italic Janus, Indian Ganesh mentioned by the Hellenistic writer Berossus.193 There is, in other words, the evidence in favour of continuity not only from archaeology but also from fields not mentioned by Keightley: linguistics, comparative historical ethnography and iconography, and comparative mythology);194 also see the next sections of the present Chapter.195
The controversial Assyriologist Temple (1976) seeks the missing link, in space and time, between Erichthonius and Fu Xi in the Sumerian mythical figure Oannes, likewise alleged to combine an aquatic nature with the status of culture hero. Temple invokes the intervention of an extraterrestrial civilisation to account for the (late!) myth of Oannes as bringer of the Sumerian civilisation (attested only in Hellenistic times), and for the alleged superior knowledge of the Dogon people of Mali concerning the composite nature of the star Sirius ( Canis Major A, B) the Dogons alleged knowledge is probably a total artefact, based on Griaule & Dieterlens (1965) mishandling of Dogon ethnography and mythology, and its subsequent New Age misappropriation. Knowledge of the composite nature of Sirius goes back to Wilhelm Bessel and his contemporaries towards the middle of the 19th century, and among the Dogon could easily be attributed to terrestrial European civilisation, given the existence, between 1850 and 1930, of astronomical expeditions into West Africa, and the general circulation of astronomical knowledge among educated Europeans visiting that part of the world. A further argument for my dismissive claim is the number of satellites that, in the same kind of argument, is spuriously attributed to the prodigious astronomical knowledge of West Africans: nearly a dozen, which does not reflect the actual number (of several dozens) now upheld by state-of-the-art astronomy, but merely reflects the consensus among North Atlantic professional astronomers around 1900. Cf. Thomas et al. 1983; Soderblom & Johnson 1982; Hamilton 1995-2011. Also cf. 18th-century authors struggling with the identification of only a handful of Saturnine satellites: Pound 1753; Herschel 1790. I am indebted to a conversation with V.Y. Mudimbe, Leiden, 3rd January 2005, for challenging me to develop this point.
193 Schnabel 1923; Jacoby 1923-1927: Fragment 680; Cory 1828; Burstein 1978; Verbrugghe & Wickersham 1996. 194 Also in comparative mythology the Mesopotamian / Chinese link has been backed up: Mori Masako 1995, 2009, cf. p. 243, below; moreover, I found that West Eurasian leopard-skin themes around the Greek god Dionysus have parallels in Ancient Chinese army ranks and the royal chariot (I am indebted to Dr Haifang Lui, Institute of West Asian and African Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences IWAAS, Beijing, for retrieving this information for me from Chinese historical sources). 192

An additional line of argument could be the following. There is a marked dualism underlying Y Jng, both in its mathematical structure (like in the case of other geomancies, the number of its basic configurations is 2n) and in the implied reliance on the Yin / Yang distinction. Schmidt (1933) proposed to interpret this as an echo

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that (c), the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc, although admittedly risky and patently insufficient to build a fully-fledged theory upon, is an obvious and ubiquitous first step in the formulation of historical hypotheses although, admittedly, never the final step in their substantiation; while (d) (the distinction between proper genetic connection and coincidence) and (e) (the distinction between exogenous, external, instead of endogenous and spontaneous, conception of cultural innovation) inevitably spring, not directly from the quality of the available evidence nor from the quality of a specific theory at hand, but depend on something far more optional and transient, notably: the wider, overarching paradigmatic framework in the light of which a particular theory is being judged these two points of criticism, therefore, are matters of scholarly appreciation and opinion, and therefore cannot be counted as errors but must simply be considered points of scholarly disagreement. In other words, although there is an unmistakably quixotic element involved in my present attempt to defend Terrien de Lacouperie as the respectable scholar he was, and to take up the case of his external theory once more, we need to treat with the greatest reservation the present-day contention that his theory of a West Asian origin of the Chinese system has been conclusively refuted. The problem with claims of transcontinental continuities is that they tend to be taken too literally and too

of Persian dualism, anciently in the form of the opposition between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, and in Late Antiquity most conspicuous in the teachings of the Irani-Syriac prophet Mani (Flgel 1862; Ort 1967; Reeves 1992; Runciman 1969; Scheftelowitz 1922; Widengren 1961, 1965). Various authors (Widengren 1949; Lieu 1994) have stressed Manis continuity, not only with Ancient Iran but also with Ancient Mesopotamia. Interestingly, Clermont-Ganneau (1900) cites a 9th-c-CE Syriac work claiming Pythagoras and Empedocles as Manis predecessors. The battle between light and darkness plays an important role in shamanism (as for instance expressed in shamanic clothing; Willis 1994: 108), and particularly in Iranian religion, Judaism around the beginning of the Common Era (where the struggle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness is a major theme), an early Manichaeism (Woschtz et al. 1989; Stuip & Vellekoop 1989), from where it exerted a considerable influence on Islam and medieval Christianity. This reminds us that, as we have seen above, in the oldest forms of Y Jng notational system, black / filled and white / open circles took the place later taken by broken and unbroken lines in implied reference to the wellknown symbolism of Yin / Yang: .

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comprehensively, in a winner takes all way: as if the mere claim A has had some specific influence upon B, were identical to the claim that B has been totally determined by A and by A alone.196 One thing that comes through in our most recent endeavours to map and interpret transcontinental continuities of a different kind, notably those between Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,197 is that they may be considered part of a multi-centred and multidirectional prehistoric and protohistoric system of exchanges (cf. Fig. 2.17, above), in which an emerging global maritime network played an increasing role. In other words, transcontinental continuities influences may be complex, may come from different directions, and may operate in more than one direction. One-factor totalising theories of transcontinental continuities (including Terriens) therefore may never be adequate. But that does not mean that at the level, not of wholesale pronouncement about a total people and its culture, but at the level of the analysis of specific individual traits, all thoughts of transcontinental continuities (e.g. Terriens intuition of letting Y Jng come from West Asia) have to be banned as automatically, inherently, spurious.

7.4. Recent support for the view of a West Asian origin of Y Jng
I was still largely unaware of the work of Terrien de Lacouperie except for his 1882 Letter to the Editor, and apparently an echo of his work in
196 The Biblical Exodus story is a case in point: unmistakably there has been such massive Ancient Egyptian cultural and religious influence upon Ancient Israel (Grg 1997 and his entire, multi-volume series Fontes atque pontes: Reihe gypten und Altes Testament, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) that the idea of some (probably very limited) population migration from Egypt north to Palestine, possibly led by an Egyptian prince / magical specialist by the purely Egyptian name of Mosis, is quite plausible; but that is a very different proposition from the nave Jewish and Christian perception of the Early Iron Age population of Palestine, and of the edifice of Israelite religion in that period, as largely or even totally deriving from such a migration. 197

Cf. the International Conference Rethinking Africans transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, Leiden, African Studies Centre 2012, and my various texts presented in that connection.

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my personal communications with the Sinologist Martin Bernal (1996) concerning the possible Indo-European etymology of the fundamental eight trigram names in Y Jng,198 when I, too, ended up with Giles puzzle: if there was to be claimed continuity between West Asia and China, then who specifically has been involved, which West Asian ethnic group? situated where? speaking which language? With the aid of long-range historical linguistics, I will be able (in the manner set out in detail in Section 7.6, below) to suggest an answer for at least one of the trigram names: kun , earth (belonging to the trigram ), without obvious Sino-Tibetan etymology, is likely to derive from some Indo-European source which I have meanwhile identified as proto-Hittite or protoGreek spoken in the Aegean-Anatolian region in the Early to Middle Bronze Age: not exactly Ancient Mesopotamia but still West Asia and a region that has been recognised to have been influenced, in many ways (religion, mythology, science, technology), by Ancient Mesopotamia and by West Asia in general. As already indicated in footnote 186,above, the apparent truism that no Mongolians ever lived in West Asia must not be taken at face value, either. Initial appearances, although ultimately mistaken, already suggested otherwise: Prior to Hroznys decipherment (1917) of the Hittite script and language as Indo-European,199 on the basis of their self-images
198 In my first extensive treatments of the transcontinental connections of geomancies and mankala board games (van Binsbergen 1995a, 1997b), written when I was still barely aware of such long-range approaches in linguistics, genetics, archaeology, mythology and ethnography as were then already gaining momentum in the international literature but for which nothing in my formal training at the University of Amsterdam had prepared me, let alone the attending methodologies, I was impressed by Martin Bernals remark, in his original capacity of Sinologist (personal communication, 1996), to the effect that kn (cf. Table 7.1, below), the eighth trigram in Y Jng, commonly interpreted as the receptive field, the earth, had no Sino-Tibetan etymology and had been equated, by one [unspecified] author now obsolete, with Ancient Greek thn, likewise meaning Earth, thus conveying the suggestion of a non-Chinese, possibly Indo-European origin of the Y Jng system as would be compatible with the discovery, a century ago, of Tocharian A and B as far eastern extensions of the Indo-European language family. As we shall seein the course of this Chapter, Bernals observation was probably an unreferenced reflection of Terrien de Lacouperies work; more important, Terriens idea as mediated by Bernal was able to stand the test of state-of-the-art long-range comparative linguistics.

Which, of course, says little about the Hittites somatic and genetic makeup. Cf. the fact that, as a result of Tsarist Russian expansion in the 18th-19th c. CE, many

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in iconography the Hittites tended to be identified as Chinese or Turanic, especially in the context of Bible studies.200 The Armenologist Karst (1931a) believed to perceive such extensive influence of Chinese on West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean that he proposed a Chinese etymology for the place name and ethnonym Ethiopia(n) very common in the Mediterranean Bronze Age.201 This is all totally obsolete scholarship now. However, we are on more secure ground when in a recent synthesis prominent linguists claimed extensive Sino-Caucasian (conceivably including Sino-Tibetan < Chinese) presence for the Northern shore of the Mediterranean up to the Late Bronze Age (McCall & Fleming 1999). Of course, archaeological and epigraphical work of the last hundred years has led to the recognition of the non-mythical nature of the earliest Chinese dynasties, which therefore have become roughly contemporary to the early dynasties of Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Like present-day scholars in India and Japan, and Africa, and in emulation, mutatis mutandis, of an inveterate, Eurocentric European tradition, modern Chinese scholars now prefer a predominantly endogenous model for the origin of their national and regional civilisation; they are no longer flattered like leading Chinese intellectuals were a hundred years ago to be granted, in Ancient Mesopotamia, a common cultural prehistory with the West a thought whose obvious anti-hegemonic implications their present-day Chinese counterparts seem to overlook,202 or which they are tempted to
Asians of widely different somatic and genetic makeup now speak the Indo-European language of Russian as their mother tongue; and a similar argument can be made for South Americans speaking Spanish, or sub-Saharan Africans speaking English, French or Afrikaans all of them Indo-European languages.
200 Bible scholars took an interest because, in the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity, repeated reference is made to Hittites, which name therefore was adopted for the people and polity associated with the name atti and the location of Boazky, Anatolia. Genesis 10, moreover, contains several mentions of the enigmatic Sinim, which some scholars have identified as Sinoid in the present-day sense, cf. van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Ch. 11, passim, see that books Index of Proper Names.

Albeit, regrettably, on the basis of modern Chinese forms hai tng sea island, and not the proper archaic ones sm th (Preclassic Old Chinese; Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008, Chinese characters); thus, Karsts suggestion as to the Chinese etymology of Ethiop- clearly turns out to be spurious.
202

201

What could be more anti-Eurocentric than the admission that the Western colonial-

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replace by their own implicitly hegemonic regional chauvinism of today, and of all times. Anyway, regardless of these considerations of hegemony in the politics of the production of history, in a scenario that makes Chinese origins contemporary to those of Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (and that, moreover, recognises the Bronze Ages state of proto-globalisation hence massive multidirectional and multicentred transregional contacts), there is, admittedly, no longer room for Terrien de Lacouperies thesis that Chinese civilisation derived lock, stock and barrel from Ancient Mesopotamia as we have come to know it since the mid-19th c. CE. But, again, that does not rule out the likelihood of more limited transmissions of knowledge in the course of the Bronze Age, when horse and chariot technology, and nautical technology, presented the material conditions for extensive transcontinental exchanges and when the results of such exchanges are emphatically clear from the correspondences between formal cultural systems in these various regions. On the basis of the extensive empirical material and analysis presented in Section 7.6 below, there is certainly some truth in Terriens point stands that Y Jng, and its constituent symbolism of eight named trigrams ( pa gua), may have been among such eastbound transfers from West Asia.

7.5. Rashidis Afrocentrist perspective concerning the origin of Y Jng

This brings us to Rashidis Afrocentrist point. It should be enough to offer a controversial partial vindication of Terrien de Lacouperies controversial theory concerning the West Asian origin of Y Jng, and I should be content to leave the matters at this. However, and once again, the perception of transcontinental continuities depends not so much on proper data, but on an overarching paradigm admitting or denying the possibility of such transcontinental continuities. Scholarly paradigms reflect power relations between regions, classes, ethnic groups, within the World System. Shifts in such paradigms often reflect shifts in these
ists and imperialists share crucial cultural origins with the Asian populations that were the object of the formers expansionism, and that those origins were not even located in Europe but in Asia? Here a reading of the Sinologists Bernals Black Athena (1987) would still be illuminating.

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power relations. Since the 1990s I have repeatedly championed the cause of Afrocentricity. This was not (pace Amselle 2001) in order to curry favour with my African friends and colleagues (although it did in fact endear me with them). Nor was it an attempt at Political Correctness, verbally compensating Africans as recognised and self-acclaimed victims of recent global history, by offering them the mere illusion of a glorious past. My defence of Afrocentricity also had to do with my awareness that once peripheral, subjugated or excluded groups with whom I, admittedly, do identify, by birth, choice, and adoption may have preserved, in their own specific worldviews, knowledge of historical facts and relationships which otherwise have been expelled from collective consciousness by the hegemonic paradigms of dominant groups in the World System. Until yesterday these were the dominant, White, educated inhabitants of the North Atlantic region; and today and tomorrow these may well be Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian elites. Therefore, in the final stages of my twenty-years research project to bring to light the submerged history of geomantic divination, in Africa, East Asia (where it manifests itself as Y Jng), and globally, I think I should take the risk of alienating my readers still further, and take the following step. I suggested that Afrocentricity may contain and reveal dissimulated facts surreptitiously preserved in particularist group memory, while otherwise eclipsed from global memory under the influence of dominant, eliteassociated paradigms. One such fact appears to be the existence, in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, of a highly pigmented ethnic cluster in West Asia, displaying many cultural traits (including proto-geomancy, early metallurgy, a fire cult, solar cult, and a rudimentary element cosmology, etc.) and some genetic traits, which I have provisionally designated as Pelasgian,203 and apparently surfacing to historical attestation or attribution in widely distant contexts, including: the Caucasus (Herodotus, Historiae, IV.140; Armayor 1978, 1980; Jairazbhoy 1985), Ancient Mesopotamia (Nimrod as displaced son (situated not in North East Africa but in Mesopotamia) of Kush son of am; Gene-

For a list of these traits and a provisional overview of their distribution, see van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 374 f.

203

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sis 10;204 South Asia (Dravidian speakers usually considered, like Sinhalese, to have a West Asian origin and further perhaps Vedda, Semang, possibly also continuous with population elements in New Guinea and Australia some of which are traced to South Asia); isolated parts of the Mediterranean (Homers Sinties, Iliad I, 594, XVIII, 394; Odyssey VIII, 294 their close association with the Fire and metallurgical god Hephaestus (whose name probably205 derives from *proto-Berber *hifau, fire) suggest them to be early iron workers, reminiscent of their latter-day namesakes the Sinti (and Roma) known also by the outsider-imposed name of Gypsies; here particularly attention is called to another outlying cluster, like Kush, associated, in Genesis 10, with am: Ludim (Lydians / Carians / Lycians), as descendants of the Mizraim (Egyptians),206 as descendants of am, for it is from a volcanic spot in Lycia that the cult of Hephaestus is claimed to originate;207 perhaps also Ligurians and Elymians; Sergi 1901), possibly also the Maghreb, and the Mesolithic Eastern Iberian peninsula (rock paintings of honey collecting, and microliths, suggesting Khoisanoid presence; cf. Bandi & Maringer 1952); Ancient Ireland (Black Irish, Fomorians); blacksmiths throughout the western Old World, as outsiders associated not only with magical power and fire but also with high levels of skin pigmentation, in other words blackness. probably South Central Africa where they are associated with the Bantu sub-phylum of the Niger-Congo phylum, traces of which have been detected in the West Asian specifically Palestinian Bronze Age (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 81 f.); as well as South West Asia and isolated pockets in East Africa (Khoisan speakers, Hadza, Sandawe), where populations are found

204 Van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Ch. 6 analyses Genesis 10 from an ethnic studies perspective; Karst (1931a) shows a Cushitic substrate in European toponyms. 205 Cf. van Binsbergen, in preparation (b); contra Blaek 2010. 206 The Egyptian link with South West Anatolia was not only acknowledged in Genesis 10, but also played an important role during the Sea Peoples episode of the Egyptian New Kingdom, when grain transports from Egypt were to quench a famine on the other side of the Mediterranean, in defiance of Hittite control of Anatolia. Cf. Barnett 1953, 1987. 207 Maximus Tyrius 1804: II, 194, Dissertatio 38.

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that are only moderately pigmented and whose admittedly great genetic distance from other present-day populations (Patterson 2010) does not preclude Cavalli-Sforzas point (based however on classic genetic markers and not on state-of-the-art molecular biology) that part of their ancestors still lived in West Asia 10 ka BP (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; pace Vigilant et al. 1989, 1991). The West Asian Pre-Pottery Neolithic constitutes a part of the world and a period where, I submit, archaeological signs of their presence can be picked up (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 85 f.) in the form of a prehistoric depiction of elongated labia minora,208 perhaps ostrich shell beads,209 round-plan dwellings soon to be replaced (Hawkes c.s. 1977: 59), in the archaeological record, by square-plan ones. Both the Sumerian (Kramer 1959: 72 and passim) and the Chinese selfidentification ( l mn) was in the puzzling terms of the blackheaded people another indication of the plausibility of an attenuated version of Terriens claim, to the effect of some Chinese-Mesopotamian continuity but moreover with the added value of drawing our attention to unexpected Chinese / Mesopotamian / Black / African connections. Despite Rashidis failure to substantiate his claim by proper scholarship (as is so often the case with Afrocentrists), his suggestion to situate the origin of the Y Jng system in this largely forgotten or dissimulated
208 Depicted at the site of Gbekli Tepe, Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, Anatolia (88008000 BCE), Landesmuseum 2007; cf. discussion in van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 84 f. Whether natural or as a result of deliberate and prolonged stretching as a cultural practice (specialists are not yet in agreement on this point; cf. Montagu 2010), the Khoisan apron of elongated labia minora has been associated with Khoisanspeaking populations of Southern Africa ever since these attracted the Western scientific gaze. As a result of this cultural practice and not of genetic disposition, the adult female genitals of many Bantu-speaking groups in Southern and South Central Africa have taken the same shape. Outside Africa, the practice is rarely recorded. Yet the idea of a prehistoric West to Central Asian origin is suggested given the reconstructed dispersal pattern of human populations out of Africa since the Middle Palaeolithic by the fact that the winged or butterfly vulva is a recognised, sporadic trait in China and Japan, while the concept is even attested (as a verbal insult) among Native Americans; cf. van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 85 f. and references there. 209

However, these artefacts have such a long history since the Middle Palaeolithic that contrary to common belief they are not enough to archaeologically identify Khoisan speakers by; cf. Bednarik 1993.

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cluster of West Asian Blacks reminds us of the fact that simple protogeomancies are found throughout the Pelasgian realm, in whose westerly extension (towards the Mediterranean) a significant role appears to be played by highly pigmented West Asians, associated with at least some of the constituents elements towards the Bantu linguistic sub-phylum including the oldest attestation of *proto-Bantu (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 83 f.). This may sound promising, but an important objection would of course be that, if at least part of the trigram names in Y Jng are considered to be reflexes from some Indo-European, notably proto-Hittite or proto-Greek Anatolian root, it is not clear how a widely dispersed, highly-pigmented population originating from West Asia and associated with *proto-Bantu and perhaps other African linguistic macrophyla such as Khoisan, could be held responsible for transmitting such lexical elements to East Asia. Here a closer look at the layered ethnico-linguistic situation in the Mediterranean / West Asia in the Bronze Age (Fig. 7.2)210 may provide the answer. Contrary to common belief the ethnic and linguistic situation in that part of the world during the Bronze Age was according to Karsts 1931a somewhat dated reconstruction, which I have tried to update and develop not characterised by clearly demarcated, ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population groups. It already displayed traits of proto-globalisation in that, both in the eastern and in the western parts of the Mediterranean, populations were ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, in a layered way that reflected the local (pre-) history of the succession of ethnico-linguistic specificities the older layers, also somatically more highly pigmented, being relegated to the lowest social status, the most recent layers, composed of Indo-European and Afroasiatic speakers, constituting an aristocratic exploitative class. Our postulated cluster of West Asian Blacks appears to have been associated not only with one or more of the earliest trigram names (of Indo-European provenance but circulating throughout the heterogeneous local population cluster) but also with metallurgy, and conceivably the trigram names were part of a correlative cosmology that enshrined the secrets of early blacksmiths where they spread their craft throughout the Old World.

210

From van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Fig. 4.8, p. 96.

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linguistic (macro-) phylum

Constituent ethnico-linguistic groups Western Mediterranean Eastern Mediterranean 1b. Secondary (Illyro-) Pelasgians (including preIsraelite Pherisites, Secondary Philistines, Numidian Persae) Secondary Leleges, Caphthor / Caslukhim (with a partly IndoAryan ruling class) Carians, Alarodians (= Caucasian speakers) 2b. Secondary Leleges. NB. In so far as Cushitic, this Afroasiatic element is often 3rd millennium i.e. older than 3. (proto-) Basquoid 3b.Eastern Mediterranean: Liguroid or Eastern Basquoid Leleges

remarks

aristocratic top layer this layer manifests itself particularly as that of a semiIndo-European language form associated with a local dominant class

From: van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Fig. 4.8, p. 96; source for tabulation and diagram: Karst 1931a Fig. 7.2. Layered ethnico-linguistic complexity of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

Secondary Pelasgians are typically found in this row Primary Pelasgians are typically found in these rows

1. IndoEuropean (a) satem group; (b) kentum group

1a. Secondary Ibero-Ligurians, Caphthor / Caslukhim (with an Indo-European speaking ruling class) in Spain, Sicanians, Tyrrheno-Tuscans, protoIllyrians

2. Afro2a. Jaccetani, Rhaetians, asiatic (Hamito- Rasenna, Rutenu i.e. AfroasiatiSemitic / cised Sicanians Hamitic) 3. (proto-) Basquoid 3a Western Mediterranean: Basquoids, Ibero-Sicanians 4a. In the Western Mediterranean this layer is inconspicuous, its place seems to remain largely occupied by 5. Complex substrate of Ligurian: Liguroid pre-Euscarian groups: Opici, Opsci, Sicani, Ausci, protoBasques

4. Caucasian

4b (Eastern Mediterranean). Abkhazoids (pre-Leleges, Teleges, Telchines, Tubal peoples)

if interpreted in the light of the state-of-the-art *Borean Hypothearchaic popular 5. Complex sis (which was not yet available to Karst), this layer comprises bottom layer / substrate fragmented presences of Sino-Caucasian, and of branches of of Ligurian Eurasiatic / Nostratic notably Uralic, Altaic and Dravidian; and substrate also of Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo / Bantu

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The idea of a submerged, collectively denied substratum of excluded, discarded Black people (ultimately expelled to the fringes of the Old World: sub-Saharan Africa, Southernmost South Asia, and Australia / New Guinea?) may also come some way towards explaining why an inveterate, old and widespread racialism appears to be a major factor in the obliteration of transcontinental continuities, not only between Africa and Asia but also (like in the present case of Y Jng) across Eurasia: such continuities imply association with, even cultural indebtedness to, Blacks with whom the (lowly pigmented, increasingly Indo-European-speaking) groups dominant in Eurasia during the last few millennia did not and do not wish to be identified. The idea, admittedly, smacks enough of Political Correctness to arouse suspicion. Yet it has enough empirical plausibility not to be smothered in prejudice.

7.6. Trying to identify the cradle of the Old World transformation cycle of elements on the basis of the nomenclature of the pa gua (eight trigrams)
7.6.1. Comparative historical linguistics of the eight-trigrams nomenclature A substantial scholarly literature has built up which throws light on the many parallels between the Presocratic four-element system from Ionia / Graecia Magna (Southern Italy), and the cosmologies of other Eurasian regions. Several authors have stressed the continuities with West Asia, foremost Kingsley (1995a, 1995b). Already Przyluski (1938) has brought out the parallels between Empedocles and what he claims to be the Zoroastrian pattern. Kaliff (2007) has opened an Indo-European perspective connecting the Ancient Scandinavian cosmological and ritual system (hinging on Fire, Water, Heaven and Earth) with the entire IndoEuropean world, including the Presocratics but also West and South Asia. Still from an Indo-European-Studies point of view, Franklin (2002) has stressed the continuity between Empedocles and Indo-Iranian cosmology in both the concept of harmony is crucial (cf. Lambropoulou 1998). A similar Iranian influence was detected by Burkert (1963) in Anaximander. By the same token, Empedocles receives considerable attention in McEvilleys (2002: 67 f., 106 f., 304 f.) comparative studies of Greek and Indian philosophy. In the light of such recent sympathy for a long-range approach to Empedocles four-element doctrine, the dismissive attitude of early-20th century editor of Empedocles Fragments, W.E. Leonard: 234

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In Chinese philosophy the elements are supposed to conquer one another according to a definite law. We are told that wood conquers earth, earth conquers water, water conquers fire, fire conquers metal, and metal conquers wood.211 But there is nothing in E[mpedocles]s thought that seems to correspond. (Leonard 1908: 72)

now seems to have little meaning beyond being characteristic of classics scholars time-honoured reluctance to admit to any foreign influence upon their cherished domain an attitude that largely triggered the Black Athena debate. It is in East Asia that the most conspicuous and elaborate forms of the transformative element cycle have been attested, but that does not necessarily mean that element systems originated there. Going back to at least the first millennium BCE, and surfacing in various parts of the Old World and of the New World, element systems could have originated anywhere.

Note that my long-range linguistic analysis here is based on a particular, widely accepted but not unanimous reading of the Y Jng. Legge (1882) offers the trigrams according to King Wn, where Earth appears as khwn, with might have led to a rather different etymological analysis. Table 7.1. King Wns trigrams.

I will now present a linguistic attempt to identify the Taoist systems origin more closely, starting with Y Jng, and tracing the etymological antecedents of the names of its trigrams to their languages and language phylas *proto-forms (i.e. proposed earliest *forms, systematically reconstructed by reference to accepted sound laws and explicit correspondence tables), if possible all the way back to *Borean. The data are presented in Table 7.2:
211

Original reference to Carus 1898 / 1902: 47.

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(a), (b) etc. refers to numbered Notes in Section 7.6.2. Table 7.2. Proposed etymologies of the names of the pa gua (eight trigrams).

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7.6.2. Notes to Table 7.2. 212

a) Starostin & Starostin (1998-2008) remark on this point: perhaps: be [ sic ] associated with the forces of Heaven. Old Chinese *ghar is also used as the name for the 1st hexagram in Yijing [ sic ] (Heaven). Middle Chinese gen is not quite regular in this series (one would rather expect Middle Chinese gn). For *gh- cf. Xiamen khian2, Chaozhou khie2, Fuzhou khie2. Another frequent (and archaic) reading of the character is Old Chinese *kr, Middle Chinese ka^n Fan Qie ), Mandarin gn to be dry whence, possibly, Vietnamese cn dry, shallow; on land, on shore (although the tone is rather strange and a chance coincidence is not excluded); khan hoarse, husky, raucous; anhydrous. Note that regular Sino-Vietnamese for Middle Chinese kn is can. Here and below I have expanded the originals acronyms: OC becoming Old Chinese, etc. b) Also read *(h)ts (Middle Chinese thwa^j, Peking ti) id.; *(h)ts glad (Later Zhou). c) Also used for homonymous words: *raj to fasten in a net, get tangled, caught in a net (obviously related to *rj bird-net, *raj hedge; sometimes written with another character, which, however, has also a metaphoric meaning trouble, anxiety, sorrow < drag into, involve); *raj be hanging down; in the die-sheng *ru-raj horned owl. For Old Chinese *r cf. Min forms: Xiamen, Chaozhou li2, Fuzhou lie2. There also exists a qu-sheng reading *raj-s, Middle Chinese l (Fan Qie ) to separate. Regular Sino-Vietnamese is ly. Vietnamese also has ri be separated, separate - probably a more archaic loan from the same source. d) Sagart 1999: 51 (Chin.-AN). e) Chinese: *khm, *khm pit. Tibetan: gjam a shelter, a grotto. Lushai: km a hollow in the ground, kuam a valley, a hollow, a depression. Comments: Possibly two roots, but hard to distinguish from each other.213 f) Chinese: *kr dry (cf. also *ghn drought, dry). Burmese: kanh to dry up, khanh to be dried up, exhausted as liquid. Kachin: ka2 be dried up (?). Comments: Matissoff 2003: 180; Luce 1981: 52. Loss of final consonant in Jinpho is not clear (Matissoff cites the form as kan2, which is probably Jinpho kan2 coagulated, see *kn). Cf. also Gurung *khar, Kaike khar-pa, Rourou ka.44, Bugun gau dry. g) Burmese: hrajh to make an opening through a crowd by dispersing and scattering on both sides; to part forever Kachin: gran3 to divide, distribute, (H) mran, pran to separate, ran be apart, separated. Lushai: rel to escape, steal with away (cf. also rl from a distance, rol go into seclu-

212 Sources for both Table 7.2 and Section 7.6.2s Notes to that Table: Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008, Long-range etymologies, Sino-Tibetan etymologies, and Chinese characters. These Notes render Starostin & Starostins text verbatim, with thanks.

Could the enigmatic pit semantics of one of the Nkoya clan names, be connected with this?

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sion into jungle). h) Chinese: *trs shake; fear; clap of thunder. Tibetan: dar to tremble, shiver, quake. Burmese: tun to tremble, shake, shiver, fear. Lepcha: tir, tjir, tjr to move, to shake, to curl, as in contempt; to shake, as earth, house. i) North Caucasian: *gwndV ( --,--) . Sino-Tibetan: *khmH. Yenisseian: *kd(g-,--,--). Comments and references: Cf. *gwVtV . For Sino-Tibetan cf. rather Burushaski qam / qom hole, cave, grave. j) proto-Austric: *tVr shake; proto-Austroasiatic: *tVr tremble; proto-Austronesian: *eter, *terter shake, vibrate, tremble. References: Peiros 1989.

7.6.3. Discussion With state-of-the-art long-range linguistics, we now have the tools available to check Bernals suggestion, and it proves most valuable. According to the authoritative Tower of Babel etymological database,214 the eight trigram names with the exception of qin (the creative, heaven) and zhn (the arousing, thunder) have no etymologies beyond the SinoTibetan realm, and as many as four (notably: du the joyous, swamp, xn the gentle, wind, wood, gn keeping still, mountain and
kn, the receptive, field) even seem to lack a proto-Sino-Tibetan ety-

mology. On the other hand, Greek thn is generally accepted to derive (cf. Pokorny 1959-1969: I, 662 f.; Buck 1949: 16) from proto-IndoEuropean: *dghem-, earth. Of the many reflexes of this etymon in IndoEuropean languages only Hittite: tekan, taknas earth, dagan, tagandown, on the ground (Friedrich 1932: 204, 220), and Greek thn- come anywhere near Chinese kn, whereas the geographically best qualified languages, Tocharian A and B, remain at a greater distance with A tkam and B kem (Adams 1999: 192; note the n / m problem).

7.7. Transcontinental relationships and periodisation: China and West Asia

The outcome of our etymological detective work lends credibility to Bernals suggestion and hence to Terriens thesis, but also creates further puzzles. If kn, and perhaps some of the other trigram names, constitute Anatolian
214

With Sino-Tibetan etymology, and treatment of Chinese characters, compiled by the late lamented Sergei Starostin; cf. Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008.

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words, was it because the trigrams originated in West Asia and from there diffused to East Asia; or was proto-Hittites original home much more to the East? I have drawn attention to the fact that, before Hroznys decipherment of Hittite established the Indo-European nature215 of that language, its speakers were commonly regarded as Turanic, and even as downright Chinese. Movement back and forth across the Asian Steppe along an East-West axis has a very long history, and intensified even greatly after the invention of horse-riding and the chariot. Both the Tocharian language and the recently found Tarim mummies (Mallory & Mair 2000) suggest that exchanges (both linguistic, and cultural) between Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan may have taken place far East on the Steppe (cf. Tsung-tung Chang 1988). On the other hand, the linguist Karst (1931a) suggested albeit, as we have seen, on the erroneous basis of far too modern Chinese language forms that the realm of Sino-Tibetan may have extended into West Asia in the Bronze Age thus foreshadowing recent, more systematic explorations into the continuities between Basque, Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Den by such longrange linguists as Starostin, Fleming, Bengtson, etc. As a result, presentday scholarship no longer limits the Bronze-Age western extension of the Sino-Caucasian macrophylum to the Caucasus area (although as a part of West Asia this would already suit our argument), but would also include the Northwestern Iberian peninsula, part of the Northern shore of the Mediterranean, possibly also Sardinia.216 In addition to exchanges in a
215 The affinity and interpenetration of the Sino-Tibetan and the Indo-European language phyla has constituted a persistent theme in scholarship. The immense Steppe environment in combination with horse-riding and chariot technology and the migratory patterns of extensive animal husbandry created favourable conditions for language contact. The above exercise concerning the probable origin of the Chinese word kn has several more authoritative counterparts, e.g. Pulleyblank 1966; Ulving 1968-1969; Tsung-tung Chang, 1988; Blaek 2010a. In addition to horizontal borrowing, there is a strong argument for a genetic relationship. Under Flemings and Starostins *Borean Hypothesis, the macrophyla to which the Sino-Tibetan and IndoEuropean phyla respectively belong, Sino-Caucasian and Eurasiatic, are both branches of the *Borean trunk, and as I will indicate below (Fig. 8.2) there are strong statistical indications that their separation only took place in the Uppermost Palaeolithic (van Binsbergen, in press (b); van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 77 f.) so that even when allowing for phonological and semantic drift we would still expect a fair degree of lexical overlap as in fact has been found.

McCall & Fleming 1999; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: passim, see that books Index of Proper Names.

216

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contact area where the two language groups and their distinctive cultures more or less share a habitat, we may reckon with the simple displacement of people, linguistic elements, and ideas across the great distances of the Steppe. Needham with Lings path-breaking study (1961 / 1954) gives a long list of East-West technological and intellectual exchanges. In the preceding decades there was a tendency217 to see astronomical and astrological knowledge as travelling West-East in (proto-) historical times, i.e. from West Asia to China, by long-range spatial transfer. Let us review this case briefly. Already the 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher, enlightened by the flow towards Europe of valid Sinological knowledge from Jesuit missionaries, but despite all his efforts unable yet to read Ancient Egyptian texts, claimed that the Chinese civilisation was largely dependent on Egypt. Under the then prevailing Jesuit Figurism, his older contemporary Bouvet equated the Chinese mythical emperor and culture hero Fu Xi with such heroes of the Western (including Islamic) esoteric tradition as Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Enoch and Noah (Walker 1972; Leibniz 1994: 98). The idea however was more than just a vindication of Christianity in disguise, for a long-range look at some of these culture heroes reveals that they have much in common (e.g. as White Gods of creation or Second Creation) and are likely to have an antiquity that goes back to the proto-Neolithic if not further back.218 Terrien de Lacouperies (1882, 1892a, 1892b) claim, now partly vindicated in this Chapter, of a Mesopotamian origin for Y Jng was contested by Legge 1891 / 1988: xix; but Warrington Eastlake (1880) made a similar claim. We have already seen how Carus claimed a close parallel between between the Urim and Thummim oracle of Ancient Israel, and Lo Pan (lu pn) divination of Ancient China. Many scholars around 1900 entertained similar ideas,219

Partly based on now obsolete paradigms (including pan-Babylonism), but partly also inspired by a long-range awareness which (initially based on Western Assyriological and Sinological knowledge that was far below todays standards) was to become increasingly counter-paradigmatic in the course of the 20th century CE.
218 219

217

van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Ch. 5, especially pp. 136 f.

Kugler 1900: 79f; Bezold 1919 (surprisingly sophisticated and apparently little dated); Ungnad 1932-; Carus (1911; 1902, 1907; also cf. Ball 1891, for which see Anonymous 1909). Not every scholar joined this choir, e.g. Eberhard (1949) rejected (probably unjustifiedly so) Dubs (1946) theory of Zoroastrian influence on Taoism

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and extended them to the Mesopotamian (Sumerian, Akkadian) forms of divination that make up a considerable part of the Assyriological corpus and that had been closely studied by 1900. Much later the same opinion was, more systematically, expressed by the great Assyriologist Oppenheim 1966: 37):
Divination is applied in Mesopotamia on two distinct levels the popular or folklore level and that of elaborate scholarly amplification and specialization. Both constitute a trans-Asiatic culture trait. Evidence for this is available from the Mesopotamian region across Asia to China, with Japan in the East and Etruria in the West as outposts. In Egypt, divination remains conspicuously absent up to the last dynasties, when a good deal of Asianization took place. There is a wide range in the media and the techniques of divination, conditioned by time and region. These variations only underline the deepseated and lasting need for this type of communion with the supernatural, whatever specific methods of observation and interpretation are applied. (...) Wherever in Asia either the observations or the predictions related to divination have been preserved in writing, or where this optimum happened only in Mesopotamia both aspects of this science are available to us, we are given the opportunity to look deep into such a civilization. From the oracle bones of Anyang in northern China and the earliest liver models found in Mari to the elaborate horoscope of yesterdays India, we have an overwhelming abundance of information well able to take us on a grand tour through space and time, exploring much of the intellectual history of Asia. Like currents which move across the entire immense continent, central Asiatic divination practices reach the Euphrates (extispicy) and become there the object of scholarly endeavors from the early second millennium B.C. onward, and Mesopotamian astrology and other divination methods penetrate eastward through India, Tibet, and into China during the first half of the first millennium A.D. To trace these lines of contact will be the task of several generations of scholars from many disciplines. (Oppenheim 1966: 37; italics added)

A study in its own right could be written on the correspondences, and perhaps historical continuities, between Sumerian m e , Greek logos
,

and Chinese Tao to say nothing of Ancient Egyptian macat

all of which convey the sense of cosmic, societal and personal order. We have already seen, in passing, how in addition to astrology and other divinatory ancient sciences, also mythological iconography could have played a role in bringing out East-West continuities across Eurasia. Now, primal gods and culture heroes with snake-like legs are to be found in the West, in Ancient Greece as, presumably, a Pelasgian heritage (once more,
also cf. Schmidt 1933 and my above cursory notes on Manichaeism (p. 224n).

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Cecrops and Erichthonius, associated with pre-Hellenic Athens), and in China as Fu Xi and N Wa; and how Temple (1976) sees the connection between these extremes, in space and time, in the Sumerian mythical figure Oannes, likewise alleged to combine an aquatic nature with the status of culture hero. Also the Ancient Mesopotamian water god Ea / Enki has the same serpentine features. The debate on Chinese-West Asian continuities has been waged since the times of G. Schlegel (second half 19th c. CE), and has acquired Afrocentrist overtones in recent decades with the work of Clyde Winters, to whom we already referred in an earlier Chapter.220 Archaeologically, the continuity between West Asia and China in Neolithic times in terms of ceramics, food production (agricultural implements, names of domestic animals) and weaponry was found to be remarkable, perhaps with an overall tendency towards West-East movement. Scholars who took Terrien de Lacouperies theory seriously, tended to interpret the expression Bak Sing / Hundred Families as referring to immigrants into Chinese lands specifically from Central Asia (Sogdiana, Bactria etc.), where Hellenistic and Mesopotamian influence was considerable. In recent work reflecting todays scholarly standards, these viewpoints have largely been discarded, yet similar ideas have replaced them and for very good reasons, e.g. in Witzel 2009 (where, with a focus on Japan, he lists the many trans-Steppe Eurasian mythological continuities); and in Mori Masako (1995, 2009), where the specific claim is made that the mythical archer Hou Yi one of the most popular figures of Chinese mythology goes back to a Mesopotamian prototype and is cognate to Graeco-Roman Heracles / Hercules. The uncontested expression black(-headed) people reminds us of the fact that a postulated prehistoric Black presence in Eurasia constitutes a cherished Afrocentrist theme (Van Sertima 1985, which collection contains one of Martin Bernals first statements on his Black Athena thesis): from the extreme West of Eurasia (the so-called Black Irish of popular ethnic classification, and of myth) to South Asia (the highly pigmented Dallit, once designated Untouchables, who have been claimed to be continuous with the population of sub-Saharan Africa; Winters (1988)
220

Cf. Winters 1980a, 1980b, 1981, 1983a, 1983b, 1985, 1988a, 1988b.

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also throws in the Tamil ethnico-linguistic cluster); to even East Asia, where Winters (1983, and many recent discussions on the Internet) claims that the Xia and Shang dynasties were founded by Black Africans. In my own research of transcontinental connections I have repeatedly stumbled upon uninvited guests, i.e. linguistic and cultural varieties that appeared to be out of place from the perspective of prevailing theoretical and geopolitical paradigms. Thus I found indications of a *proto-Bantu-speaking presence in the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean, as one of the linguistico-ethnic components of what stood out as the Pelasgian complex. This, in combination with archaeological and ethnographic evidence of now mainly African traits in West Asia (elongated labia, round house plan, spiked wheel trap, mankala games, the belief in a unilateral mythical being, etc.) and of my claim of a substantial *Borean and temperate-zone background for the Niger-Congo phylum of which Bantu is a major branch221 and indications222 of an early association between Bantu-speakers and metallurgy (even though these cannot be claimed to have been the very earliest metalworkers; Alpern 2005) brought me to propose (with now discarded predecessors such as Trombetti) a rather different early history of the Bantu sub-phylum: from West, South, South East or East Asia, into Africa, where despite specialists claims of an origin c. 8 ka BP near Lake Chad, true Bantu expansion is only considered to date from the second half of the 1st mill. BCE as can be very well accommodated within my proposal. These counterparadigmatic linguistic and cultural considerations are well compatible with the Afrocentrist idea of a highly pigmented population segment preceding the spread of lowly pigmented populations in Eurasia. Theoretically it is conceivable that both Chinese kn and the superficially similar Greek and Hittite forms derive not from one another but from a common ancestral form, which then (between Indo-European < Eurasiatic / Nostratic, and Sino-Tibetan < Sino-Caucasian), could only be situated at
221 222

van Binsbergen 2011d, and in press (b). van Binsbergen in press (b).

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the *Borean level. This however turns out not to be the case: there is undoubtedly a genetic relationship, but it cannot have produced kn in the Sino-Tibetan context, since in the latter macrophylum, the *Borean root in question, *TVKV (cf. Table 6.2) did not produce the reflex kn but instead *proto-Sino-Caucasian *dVKwV.223 The etymology of the Indo-European words in question is not controversial. Via proto-Indo-European *dghem- or *dhhem-, earth they derive from Eurasiatic: *DVG-, earth, which has also yielded proto-Altaic: *t`go [+ Tungus-Manchu *tuka(la)?] dirt, dust, clay; no reflexes in Japanese); Kartvelian: *diq-, clay, earth; Dravidian: *TK-, earth; and Eskimo-Aleut: *ta- ( --) ? black(cf. Illich-Svitych 1965 / 1967: 342, 1971-1981: I, 220; Dolgopolsky n.d.: 551, 2331, 2347). Ultimately, Eurasiatic *DVG- may be claimed to derive from *Borean (approx.): *TVKV,224 earth, which appears in other linguistic (macro-)families as follows. proto-Afroasiatic: da-, clay; proto-Sino-Caucasian *[t]VQV, whence Starostin 1989 proto-Sino-Tibetan: *dhk, clay, mire (with Chinese: *dhk, *thks, clay, clayey not even remotely reminiscent of kn, proto-Tibetan: dag, clay; cleaving, adhering, proto-Lushai:
diak, mud, mire), proto-Yenisseian: *tq-, proto-Burushaski: *toq; Aus-

tric: proto Austronesian *bitak, *-tak, *litek, mud; earth, ground?, protoAustroasiatic *tVk, sticky; Amerind (misc.): *tVk-, dirt; African (misc.): Bantu *-tk, soil; cf. (Illich-Svitych 1965 / 1967: 342; Bengtson & Ruhlen 1994: 42). It would constitute a future project in comparative historical linguistics in its own right to ascertain whether the remaining three apparently exotic trigram names, du, xn, and gn, could likewise be argued to have an Anatolian / Greek background. Meanwhile, we may now safely assume that at least one of the eight trigram names, kn, has an Anatolian / Greek language origin, which also allows us to date that name to 2nd-3rd mil223 224

Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008: Long-range etymologies.

Cf. Table 6.2, above, which largely deals with the reflexes of *Borean *TVHV, with similar semantics.

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lennium BCE. Remarkably, the traditional Chinese account of the origin of the trigrams has been that the legendary ruler / culture hero Fu Xi, mythically dated to the early 3rd millennium BCE, first perceived the eight trigrams on the back of a mythical animal (dragon-horse225 or turtle) emerging from the River Lu , with which also the invention of the lu sh magic square is connected. Conventionally depicted (e.g. by the Song-dynasty painter Ma Lin; early 13th c. CE) as wearing a leopard skin and / or deer skin, the character of Fu Xi not only has shamanic and Steppe connotations but is especially continuous with iconographic patterns attested in Neolithic Anatolia,226 classical Greece,227 and,
Another well-known Chinese myth (from the Shjng Classic of History) also shows evidence of a transformation cycle of elements: Kun / Gun, in the shape of a white horse tries to control the Primal Waters, but he is killed by the Fire-god; in
225

Kun / Gun grows his son [Da] Yu, a dragon who does succeed in taming the waters with the help of N Wa, who only appears in the literature fairly late (350 BCE). So we have the rather familiar schema: X [ White Horse ] seeks to control Water Fire kills X X produces Y [ Earth ? ] Y control Water, with N Wa (Air?) as catalyst. As a Flood heroine (which, of course, means that N Wa cannot be Water since she is threatened by Water), N Wa is particularly associated with Air it is she (also under the name of N Kwa) who mends the holes in the Sky and thus stops the Flood (Werner 1984 / 1922: 225; Vitaliano 1973: 163). Incidentally, note the parallels with the West Eurasian birth of Athena mytheme as discussed around Fig. 5.1. In the footsteps of Karst 1931a, I have proposed (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 105n; van Binsbergen 2011a: 334 f.) a Central to West Asian origin for Athena, as well as for Poseidon / Fu Xi with whom she seems to form a post-Flood sibling / twin pair (proposing a *Borean etymology for the latter name that suggests both its extreme antiquity, and its original semantics in terms of womb, female genital a transformation of the Mother of the Waters). In corroberoation, Athena is considered (Suidas) inventor of the chariot, which we know was invented in Kazakhstan, 2000 BCE. Her birth at Laco Tritonis in Ancient Libya, often identified with the salt lake ott al-Jerd (South Tunisia), would then be a common toponymical East-West displacement, supported (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Chapter 2) by the wide East and West distribution of the name Libya in the Ancient world. Similarly, the transformation cycle of elements is implied in the common stories of the Chinese god of Fire locked up in a cage but upon his release causing a Flood as brought out in a Yao / North Vietnamese Flood myth (Dang Nghiem Van 1993: 326 f.; Isaak 2006). 226 Cf. the famous site of atal Hyk; Mellaart 1967; Kammerzell 1994. 227 Besides the heroes Jason, Menelaus and Diomedes, the god Dionysus was especially connected with the leopard skin; Dionysus was mythically associated with long-

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probably not unrelated (Vandenbroeck 2000), in the Neolithic Sahara, where likewise leopard skin clothing has been depicted (Breuil et al. 1954), and where an apparent proto-script largely built of horizontal lines and dots has been attested, i.e. reminiscent of geomantic notation (Lhote 1954). The Anatolian / Black Sea region to which we take recourse here, has long been recognised as exceptionally innovative, among the earliest regions of Neolithic domestication of crops and animals and of metallurgy, and arguably the homeland of at least one major language family (Indo-European), at the same time skirting the Sino-Caucasian and the Afroasiatic distribution areas, and recognised as a major region for the innovation and subsequent diffusion of mythical materials e.g. Flood myths.228 We have now found serious indications that it was also in the Anatolia / Black Sea region, in Neolithic times, that the very ancient heritage of a 2n based counting, classification and divinatory system came to be greatly developed and formalised into a protoform of the transformative element cycle. The latter subsequently found its way to China to produce the Taoist element cycle and Y Jng; much later it came to Mesopotamia in c Abbd times (late 1st mill. CE) and (most probably under further Chinese feedback) became cilm al-raml. It also came to North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa: certainly after 1,000 CE as a form of diffusion of the then recently formulated cilm al-raml, but possibly (and this would accommodate Afrocentrist insistence that geomancy is not a recent import but is genuinely at home in Africa) already several millennia earlier; after all, al-Zants Berber name just might suggest that he formalised a system already in use in the Saharan environment where it is still widely attested.229 Feuchtwang (1974) is one of the few authors to present, berange eastward expansion, and his manifold leopard connotations seem to reappear in the military ranks and the adornment of the Chinese Emperors chariot.
228 229

Aksu et al. 2002; Haarmann 2005.

However, like several other North African groups the Zanta tribe is known for its extensive Jewish influence, and Zanati may simply have relied on Hebrew geomancies, such as have been in existence at least since Ibn Ezra ( 1092/31167 CE) his geomancy was found at the famous Cairo geniza). When the Geniza specialist Saul Shaked (cf. Shaked 1964; Schaefer & Shaked 1994) read Ibn Ezras geomancy with me at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, 1994-1995, it turned out to be an unmistakable emulation of Arabic prototypes (cf. Fad 1966; Skinner 1980; Jaulin 1966).

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yond a mere philological argument, a cultural-anthropological analysis of Chinese geomantic divination, and to explore its similarities and differences vis--vis the African forms; he acknowledges Hberts (1961) comparative analysis of African geomancies (for which already Steinschneider (1877) demonstrated the background in Arabian cilm al-raml), but rejects (probably rightly) Hberts reference to Greek philosophy as a possible substrate underlying the African forms, and stresses the differences between African and Chinese geomancies:
Missing altogether from African geomancy, however, is the elaboration of time cycles and the whole dynamic flux [apparently is meant: the transformational and cyclical aspect WvB] and change so essential to Chinese geomancy and horoscopy (Feuchtwang 1974: 231).

Nonetheless, Feuchtwang admits (cf. Oppenheim 1966: 37) the continuity between Chinese and Etruscan augury echoing the view that sees Ancient Chinese and Imperial Romans (whose elite women wore Chinese silk) as each others mirror image. But when we realise that the Pelasgian socio-political system of confederations consisting of twelve named groups has a Eurasian distribution from Tyrrhenia / Etruria / Tuscany, Ancient Greece, Syro-Palestine and North Africa, possibly also NigerCongo speaking Africa, and all the way to China,230 we are tempted (and Feuchtwang admits as much, 1974: 224 f.) to view also the transformation cycle of elements as Pelasgian, to attribute a Bronze Age West Asian origin to it, and to regard the formal similarities as indications of underlying genuine cultural continuities. In the field of global cultural history, recent decades231 have made us strongly aware of the potentially Eurocentric and hegemonic implications of hypotheses claiming a European / West Asian origin for such major cultural achievements as e.g. Neolithic food production (now modified by the claims of African and Chinese contributions to the Neolithic revolution). Having participated in this debate, I am rather loath to conclude, for the Chinese versions of the transformative element system, a West Asian, Indo-European-speaking, origin. Yet there is so much converging corroborative evidence from adjacent knowledge fields such as astrology and
230 von Vacano 1955: 46; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 392, 112n, and references there. 231

Bernal 1987-2006; Needham with Ling, 1956, 1961, vols I and II; Diop 1991.

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the zodiac that such an apparently Eurocentric conclusion yet appears inevitable. Already a century ago, the great specialist on the history of astronomy and astrology Boll (1912) gave many reasons why the Chinese twelve-animal zodiac (found all over Central and Eastern Asia from Turkestan to Japan) must be considered to have an origin in Hellenist Egypt incidentally, an intellectual milieu where, by Hellenistic times, Empedocles four-element system had undoubtedly been accepted as central cosmology. Necessary transformations of details occurred in the process sketched by Boll: the Egyptian ibis became the Chinese fowl, the crocodile became the dragon. Also the prominent Sinologist Chavannes (e.g. 1906) claimed that the twelve-animal-zodiac (applicable to periods of 12 years, days, and hours) travelled from West Asia to China via Turkestan, with the Greek-Hellenist kingdom of Bactria as the obvious bridge. A similar continuity was claimed by Leopold de Saussure (1923).232 Elliot Smith (1919: 49), once the epitome of British diffusionism and knighted for his great achievements in (brain) anatomy, but (somewhat like myself) little more than an amateur in global cultural history (cf. Davies n.d. / 1976), makes the claim in his characteristic sweeping manner:
In my last Rylands Lecture I referred to the probability that the essential elements of Chinese civilization were derived from the West. I had hoped that, before the present statement went to the printer, 1 would have found time to set forth in detail the evidence in substantiation of the reality of that diffusion of culture. Briefly the chain of proof is composed of the following links : (a) the intimate cultural contact between Egypt, Southern Arabia, Sumer, and Elam from a period at least as early as the First Egyptian Dynasty; (b) the diffusion of Sumerian and Elamite culture in very early times at least as far north as Russian Turkestan and as far east as Baluchistan; (c) at some later period the quest of gold, copper, turquoise, and jade led the Babylonians (and their neighbours) as far north as the Altai and as far east as Khotan and the Tarim Valley, where their pathways were blazed with the distinctive methods of cultivation and irrigation; (d) at some subsequent period there was an easterly diffusion of culture from Turkestan into the Shensi Province of China proper; and (e) at least as early as the seventh century B.C. there was also a spread of Western culture to China by sea.

According to Giles (1898: 811) the theory of the interaction of the five

232 Such spread need not have depended on state agencies; itinerant diviners and magicians may have been in part responsible for it (Needham with Ling 1961; Burkert 1983).

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elements is attributed to Wang Chi, who lived during the Sung dynasty (960-1279 CE). This is about one and a half millennium after Empedocles, and might conceivably, though indirectly, have been influenced by the latter. However, another author on the Five Elements mentioned by Giles (1898: 773) was Tsou Yen, of the 4th c. BCE one century after Empedocles (c. 490-430 BCE), so possibly still independent from the latter. Let us grant that important ingredients towards Y Jng probably came from West Asia / Northeast Africa. But could we take one further step and postulate that these ingredients travelled East after the Presocratics had given them a decisive shape not of a transformative cycle of element, but of four parallel, immutable ontological element states? We have here in essence the same postulated West-East transmission that is at the heart of Terrien de Lacouperies hypothesis concerning the West Asian origin of Y Jng. Could we postulate that the East Asian correlative systems have been derived, after all, from the Presocratics, via the intermediary of Hellenism specifically Hellenist Egypt? Certainly not. In the first place, the central features of the East Asian correlative systems are cyclicity and transformation, and these are far from central among the Presocratics. It is not credible that cyclical transformation which was already a declining feature when attested in Presocratic thought, but attested for instance in Ancient Egypt, was picked up under Presocratic influence, and thus brought to fruition in East Asia. In the second place, our linguistic detective work suggests that the East Asian correlative systems did owe a considerable debt to West Asia, but their nomenclature betrays a proto-Hittite lexical form that must be at least a thousand years older than the Presocratics, who preceded Hellenism by several centuries again. On the basis of the flimsy evidence available, the best fitting model would be one according to which the transformation cycle of elements was invented in West Asia in the 2nd millennium BCE, was from there transmitted to East Asia, but also lingered on locally (for instance in the Indo-Iranian fire cult, whose oldest attestations go back to the same period; or in the Lycian cult of the Fireand-metallurgy god Hephaestus), and in good time inspired the Ionian philosophers and their followers in Graecia Magna, in the middle of the 250

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first millennium CE but only to lead them to formulate an element system that considerably played down the cyclic and transformational format then already around for a thousand years or longer; in fact, played down so effectively that it was soon lost in the European reception of the Presocratics in Late Antiquity and after. One of my methodological principles has been that, if long-range transcontinental connections are to be taken seriously, this implies that conditions at one end of a chain of transcontinental connections may also apply at the other end, even if this means at thousands of kilometres and thousands of years distance. In the Skagit Native Americans version of a North American element system, knowledge of the system was stressed to be secret. This suggests that the element system is originally esoteric, secret knowledge, to be transmitted in initiation cults such as bestow on new, young members of society the local worldview and mythology, or such as are likely to have attended the early millennia of metallurgy (Eliade 1962; McNaughton 1988). The well-known imperviousness of such cults to change may be one argument for our two Working Hypotheses the great antiquity and transcontinental spread of these systems. The secrecy element may also go some way to explain the enigma surrounding the transformation cycle of elements in the Empedoclean context: detectable in Empedocles, more or less implicitly affirmed by such great authorities as Aristotle and Plato, yet entirely ignored by their successors in the history of Western science and cosmology. In fact, Empedocles and the other Presocratics searching for one or more materiae primae do certainly present something of an enigma: considered as a group it is clear that they could work on the basis of knowledge of a four-element cycle of transformations from which each took his pick until Empedocles enlisted all four elements; the additional evidence such as the Homeric struggle of Achilles (Earth) and Hephaestus (Fire) against Scamander (Water) already alluded to above, and the very frequent mythological evocations of transformations or metamorphoses (again, Ovids delightful Metamorphoses is entirely devoted to them) reveals that such knowledge probably had been available in the Greek world since at least the early Iron Age. Here and in many other oral and epic expressions of the transformation cycle of elements world-wide (cf. the North American

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Flood stories we considered above) the typical formal relationships defined within the transformational system (notably: to kill or destroy vs. to produce, give birth to, and the attenuated forms of hindrance vs. assistance) dictate the interactions between hero protagonists and explain the futility of victory and the relative nature of defeat (van Binsbergen 2010e). This is a solid foundation to build upon, for a Presocratic philosopher. And yet the dynamism of the transformative element cycle, although clearly stated, was scarcely elaborated by Empedocles, and despite Platos and Aristotles affirmative commentaries scarcely played a role in the Empedoclean reception in later centuries. Meanwhile the above transcontinental analysis leaves us somewhat uneasy. Scholars like Boll and Chavannes wrote at the high-tide of European colonialism, when it was common even for scholars to underestimate the cultural initiative and achievements of peoples outside the North Atlantic European tradition. While admitting some West-East flow, half a century later Needham with Ling (1961) present a long list of more than 70 items (including the four cardinal ones: paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder) where the flow of cultural indebtedness was unmistakably East-West. The Hellenistic time perspective evoked by Boll and Chavannes is suspiciously shallow, when we realise that ever since the invention of horse-riding and chariot technology, in Central Asia 3,000-2000 BCE, many centuries before Hellenism, the Eurasian Steppe has been an open corridor through which all sorts of cultural achievements have constantly travelled in both easterly and westerly directions. But do we need transcontinental transmission at all to explain the vicissitudes of element systems in Eurasia? Certain prominent scholars today claim that we can do without. Based on the inspiration from neurobiology, a new, typically Post-Modern light is thrown upon these transcontinental connections by the work of Steve Farmer et al. (2000), in their contribution to a collection of papers (Fiskejo 2000) on correlative cosmologies with special emphasis on East Asia. For these authors, the many formal correspondences between the correlative cosmologies we have considered in Table 4.1, are not in the least indicative of actual historic borrowing. Instead, they argue that within every literate religious tradition, specialists are constantly at work to reconcile, through ever more convoluted compromises, the contradictions that arise when their own tradition encounters, or is influenced by, an adjacent tradition with, origi252

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nally, a totally different formal structure and contents. These (largely hypothetical) procedures of textual reconciliation are claimed to produce converging forms of layered complexity, which might even be predicted with a purely formal algorithm so even if the initial input of original, local systems was absolutely unrelated and disparate, the end result, after many centuries, will show very marked similarities regardless of any real exchanges of content. This view would render the hypothesis of a common origin in some proto-historical or prehistoric substrate, superfluous under Occams Razor. In an illuminating critical discussion of an earlier version of the present argument, Steve Farmer added to this point of layered text traditions the related point that the claim of any cyclical transformation cosmology spanning more than a few millennia is unrealistic, and advocated a much shallower time scale. While the eminent Asianist specialists co-signing Farmers 2000 argument are sufficient warranty to take it seriously, it is my view that these postulated mechanisms of convergence explain only a relatively small part of the similarities and convergencies we see in the written evidence, whilst due weight must be given tot the pre- and protohistorical, long-range continuities. On the basis of the comparative data presented in this book, I can see Farmers point as far as the Upper Palaeolithic is concerned (the Working Hypothesis with which we started out in Chapter 0), but I beg to differ in relation to the Bronze Age (our Alternative Working Hypothesis). Whence the unique position accorded in this book to West Asia? At the crossroads of the Old World, in the centre of the Sahara-to-China Extended Fertile Crescent (the Neolithics cradle), with high genetic and linguistic diversity, surplus production and population increase must have created favourable conditions both for technological (metallurgy, chariot), cultural (transformation, triads, Separation of Heaven and Earth), and political innovation (state formation), and for the demic-diffusion export of the latters results, which, under the newly arisen forms of socio-political inequality, may often have taken the form of expulsion, to the East, West and South, of somatic and linguistic outsiders, e.g. highly pigmented locals speaking not proto-Eurasiatic or proto-Afroasiatic but Khoisanoid and Bantoid languages) by regionally dominant groups. We now have enough data and analyses in hand to try and assess our two Working Hypotheses. 253

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Chapter 8. Further discussion of transcontinental relationships with a view of assessing our overall Working Hypothesis

8.1. Vindicating our two Working Hypotheses

We have formulated, as our initial Working Hypothesis for the present argument, that the Presocratics may have adopted, transformed and adulterated the worldview of a transformation cycle of elements that, by their time, had already been widely available for millennia, since the Upper Palaeolithic. Now that our argument draws to a close, it is time to return to this Working Hypothesis and ascertain whether we can uphold it, or must reject it, in the light of the extensive empirical data and theoretical arguments presented so far. Once we have assessed our Working Hypothesis, we shall also be in a position to explain the presence of the traces of a transformation cycle of elements among the Nkoya of South Central Africa. Meanwhile we should heed our Alternative Working Hypothesis, which still appeals to a transformation cycle of elements as background for the Presocratics, but situates it not in the Upper Palaeolithic but in the Bronze Age. Our linguistic discussion of West Asian, 2nd mill. BCE antecedents of at least part of the nomenclature of the East Asian transformation cycle of elements demonstrates that we can consider our Alternative Working Hypothesis to be substantiated: the transformation cycle of elements was available in West Asia in the 2nd mill. BCE, and the Presocratics adopted it in a highly attenuated form, so that its features of cyclicity and transformation remained largely implied and ultimately came to be rejected in the Western intellectual tradition even though the major founding icons of that tradition, Plato and Aristotle, indicated that they were still aware of these transformative and cyclical features. 255

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If we can uphold our Alternative Working Hypothesis for the West Asian Bronze Age, can we perhaps project it much further back into the past, and claim it as part of the Upper Palaeolithic near-global communalities that we also find as a result of the disintegration of *Borean? Can we thus confirm our initial Working Hypothesis?

8.2. Could the transformation cycle of elements be shamanic in origin and thus date back to the Upper Palaeolithic?
Perhaps the very notion of a transformation cycle of elements is shamanic in origin, and, like shamanism as an institution, could be argued to go back to the Upper Palaeolithic of West to Central Asia (c. 20-15 ka BP). This implies two questions: 1. what was the origin of shamanism is space and time? and 2. can element thinking, cyclicity and transformation be argued to be inherent aspects of shamanism? The first question can be answered provisionally, although it would be the work of a lifetime to substantiate the answer satisfactorily. It is a widelyheld view that shamanism already existed in Upper Palaeolithic Eurasia (e.g. Clottes & Lewis-Williams 1996; Layton 2001). Likewise, in the course of my world-wide comparative research into leopard-skin symbolism (often associated with shamanism), I developed (van Binsbergen 2004 / 2013) a typological argument suggesting that (the leopard-skin associated form of) shamanism emerged in West to Central Asia 10-20 ka BP (Fig. 8.1).233 There are other indications that shamanism dates from the disintegration of *Borean: the basic shamanic movement up and down the celestial axis presupposes the development of naked-eye astronomy, yet against a profusion of terms to denote Earth and Water (e.g. van

233 Unfortunately, my analysis at the time did not yet extend to include the macrophyla of Nilo-Saharan, Austric and Amerind, and was still based on the idea (Bomhard 1984; Bomhard & Kerns 1994), rejected by the Moscow school of long-range linguistics (e.g. Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008), that Afroasiatic rather than constituting a macrophylum in its own right should be subsumed under Nostratic / Eurasiatic. Also, an extensive argument is required in order to justify how in this Figure specific (macro-)phyla are suggested to originate in specific parts of the Old World. In the final, published version (2013) these questions will be addressed.

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symbols indicating aspects of shamanism: 1. speckled nomenclature for leopard 2. speckled nomenclature for other species 3. ecstatic cult 4. therianthropy (humans posing as animals) attested 5. leopard therianthropy 6. leopard-skin symbolism attested 7. Exalted Insider 8. Sacred Outsider 9. Mother goddess

letters indicating linguistic macrophyla: A. proto-Nostratic / Eurasiatic B. proto-[Dene]-Sino-Caucasian C. other members of the Nostratic / Eurasiatic macrophyla except IndoEuropean D. proto-Khoisan E. proto-Nilo-Saharan F. proto-Niger-Congo G. proto-Afroasiatic H. proto-Indo-European I. Khoisan in Southern Africa today

Source: van Binsbergen 2004 / 2013 Fig. 8.1. Linguistic and comparative-ethnographic reconstruction of the emergence of the ritual use of leopard skins (pardivesture) as an aspect of shamanism. Clearly, the shields setting out the combination of traits per (macro-)phylum are

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hovering above the geographical plane (which is a map of the Old World), this also applies to the reconstructed Indo-European / Afroasiatic proposed origin of pardivesture, which would be not in Western Europe but in West Asia. The broken oval suggests what, after comparison of the nine trait packages, emerges as the presumable context in which pardivesture emerged as a particular, relatively late variant of shamanism notably at a point in time and space when, within the disintegrating *Borean stock, Afroasiatic and Eurasiatic (which in a few millennia was to produce Indo-European as one of is branches) had already split from Sino-Tibetan but not yet from one another: Central to West Asia 10-15 ka BP.

Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 142f, 406 f.), reconstructed *Borean has, as we have seen, just one term for Sky so it appears as if Heaven as a transcendent concept had scarcely been invented by *Borean times, nor could it have, in the light of my discussion, above, of modes of thought, transcendence and absolute distinctions (Section 6.3). That we are dealing here with a very ancient and essentially unitary package of ideas is also suggested by the fact that an obvious cognate of the common Bantu term for healing, nganga, was also claimed by Dolgopolsky (1998) for Eurasiatic / Nostratic (one of the linguistic macrophyla into which *Borean was supposed to disintegrate), with the widespread magical and healing semantic notion of tying. We are reminded once more that Niger-Congo was counted as part of what they called Super-Nostratic by Kaiser & Sheveroshkin 1988. It is the second question that gives us real problems. Can element thinking, cyclicity and transformation be argued to be inherent aspects of shamanism? If the answer is affirmative, this would mean that the cyclicity and transformation are the default values of element thinking, and that where these features are absent, we have an adulterated, eroded, typologically late form. Typologically, such features can hardly be upheld as central to shamanism although, admittedly, much depends on the definition of that protean institution that is so widespread in space and time. Central to shamanism appears to be the emerging notion of transcendence:234 in a ritual setting a specialist, on behalf of his or her client or more typically of the community at large, leaves the here and now in

234

For my extensive recent argument on this topic, cf. van Binsbergen 2012a.

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order to sally forth to an ordinarily inaccessible realm of existence (Heaven, or the Underworld; perhaps the fringes of the life world in a more horizontal worldview but the vertical image of the world is typical of shamanism which is therefore associated with the Upper Palaeolithic emergence of naked-eye astronomy) where otherwise unattainable benefits (information, medicine) may be obtained, and he or she returns with these benefits to let them have a positive impact on everyday life. A rudimentary cyclicity is implied in leaving and returning, but the element and transformation features do not seem to be implied. A further step in our argument against a transformative element cycle in the Upper Palaeolithic would be our above analysis of prehistoric modes of thought from (a) *Borean range semantics, via (b) element thinking, to (c) triadic dialectics with the transformation cycle of elements considered to be a form of (c). In this scheme, the transformation cycle of elements is clearly the more advanced typological format of modes of thought, which can hardly be claimed to have the near-universality of Upper Palaeolithic traits (e.g. *Borean), but must remain restricted to the much more confined space of Bronze Age civilisations according to a distribution that may well match that we mapped in Fig. 6.7 for triads as a related mode of thought. Therefore, we have to reject our initial Working Hypothesis. The transformation cycle of elements cannot be projected further back than the Bronze Age, and cannot safely be postulated to have informed modes of thought in the Upper Palaeolithic. As a result we retain and affirm our Alternative Working Hypothesis. Therefore, whenever the transformation cycle of elements surfaces in sub-Saharan Africa (the Nkoya case) and in North America (e.g. the Skagit case), we cannot invoke some Upper Palaeolithic / *Borean substratum to explain the attestation, but must resign ourselves to either of the following two explanations: 1. the attestation can be explained as an effect of Pelasgian transmission from the Late Bronze Age onward 2. the attestation is the result of an even more recent (1st-2nd mill. CE) intrusion coming directly from East Asia, where the transformative element cycle has been at home in historical times. For North America, where many culturo-linguistic intrusions from Eura259

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sia and from historical times have been attested (Jett 2002), these are readily acceptable explanations. For the Nkoya however, such explanations can only be accepted with reluctance, as we shall see in the following Section 8.3.

8.3. Are the Nkoya-East Asian parallels to be explained by (a) Upper-Palaeolithic Back-to-Africa migration (b) Pelasgian transmission in the Bronze Age (c) East Asian intrusion into Africa during historical times?
The elaborate Nkoya clan system turns out to reveal a six-element cycle with catalytic element, and with unsystematic adaptations towards the institution of kingship. The comparative evidence from Eurasia, coupled with the recent genetic discovery of the Back-to-Africa movement and corroborative evidence from comparative mythology and ethnography along such lines, makes it very unlikely that the Nkoya system should be viewed in isolation. There are close parallels to the Nkoya system in the Taoist transformation cycle, including the insulting / joking element between the elements. Now to understand these transcontinental similarities, in principle three different models could be invoked: (a) Upper-Palaeolithic Back-to-Africa migration (b) Pelasgian transmission in the Bronze Age (c) East Asian intrusion into Africa in historical times. Let us consider them on by one. 8.3.1. Upper-Palaeolithic Back-to-Africa migration In the Upper Palaeolithic period before the trans-Bering migration and the Back-to-Africa migration, (the South-eastern part of) Central Asia still harboured cultural traits that were to end up in North America and subSaharan Africa respectively. The evidence of such a transcontinental common heritage is rapidly expanding, and so far includes: Girls puberty rites especially among the NaDen speaking peoples (whose languages have recently been clustered into one linguistic phylum, Sino-Caucasian, along with Sino-Tibetan, Caucasian lan260

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guages and Basque!), which are very similar to those of NigerCongo speaking (including Bantu-speaking) Africans.235 Gaming and divinatory tokens, which both in South Central Africa and throughout North America come in foursomes and are often indistinguishable between both regions, while also at least one connecting attestation from Upper Palaeolithic Eurasia is available (cf. Fig. 8.6, below). Other forms of material culture (basketry, fishing implements, house building, etc.) that show a considerable affinity between Central Asia (Mongolia), North America, and (especially Bantuspeaking) sub-Saharan Africa. Comparative mythology reveals a considerable affinity between the myths of sub-Saharan Africa and those of the Americas a point repeatedly made in the recent work of the comparative mythologist Yuri Berezkin, and also emerging from my research in progress on Flood myths world-wide.236 The truly massive linguistic evidence subsumed under the heading of the *Borean Hypothesis (Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008) suggests genetic links between most languages now spoken, including the African macrophyla Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo (> Bantu > Nkoya), Eurasiatic (> Indo-European etc.), SinoCaucasian (with Na-Den as its North American affiliate), Austric, and Afroasiatic. Multivariate analysis237 suggests that *Borean first

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Cf. Sapir 1913; Driver et al. 1950; Tika Yupanqui 1999. From among many other traits I mention: the pubescent girl is usually initiated alone; by a non-kin adult woman who becomes her intimate fictive kin; in a community rite that lasts through the night and ends with the girls solo dancing performance in the morning; when she is surrounded and encouraged by her close kin; in a dancing costume whose adornments imitate the rustling sound of rain. Despite the Upper Palaeolithic frame of reference implied in the long-range comparison of Amerind (or Na-Den) speakers and Niger-Congo speakers, one is tempted to anachronistically interpret the rite, both in the Old World and in the New World, as a rudimentary evocation of element transformation: under the light of sunrise (Fire), the uninitiated girl with rain symbolism (Water) is transmuted into another element, perhaps Air (her elevated status as adult woman) or Earth (prospective mother). Van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008; van Binsbergen 2010a and in preparation (c). Van Binsbergen, in press (b). The logarithmic scale was experimentally determined so as to fit an estimated age for *Borean of 25 ka (proposed date of the split separating the African-Amerind-Austric macrophyla from the Eurasiatic-Afroasiatic-SinoCaucasian macrophyla), and, as a benchmark, the dissociation between Afroasiatic

236 237

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disintegrated into: a peripheral branch comprising Austric, Niger-Congo and Amerind, and a central branch comprising Eurasiatic, Afroasiatic, and Sino-Caucasian.

Source: van Binsbergen 2011d: 315 f., with extensive discussion and references; also van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 77 f.; van Binsbergen, in press (b). Fig. 8.2. Dendrogram setting out the relative positions of the *Borean-associated linguistic macro-phyla in relation to Bantu and Khoisan

and Eurasiatic at 12.5 ka BP (under the Natufian hypothesis cf. Militarev 1996, 2002; Militarev & Shnirelman; Turner 2008; and references cited there) according to which Afroasiatic emerged in Syro-Palestine in the context of the Mesolithic Natufian culture, c. 14.5 11.5 ka BP; and moreover assuming that the middle of the Natufian period marks the dissociation of Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic). The relative length k of each scale unit of 2.5 ka is given by: k = 1 / (a+b*rlog(c*q+d)) = 1 / 10log(0.476*q), where q is the inversed rank of that scale unit, counting from the origin. Other choices for the parameters (the constants: c, here 0.476; a and d, here 0; b, here 1; and r, here 10) would produce a similar logarithmic scale but with lesser or greater acceleration of rate of change towards more recent millennia. The present parameter choice (scale A) gives a greatly accelerated rate of change from the Mesolithic onward. Stipulating a very high rate of acceleration for the most recent millennia, scale A situates the node splitting Austric from the African / Amerind macrophyla at c. 24 ka BP; the node splitting the Eurasiatic / Afroasiatic from the Sino-Caucasian macrophyla at c. 23 ka BP; and the node splitting African macrophyla from Amerind at c. 20 ka BP. These are excessively high dates, which can be brought down by assuming the split between Eurasiatic and Afroasiatic to have occurred several ka later, and adjusting the parameters accordingly as in scale B, with which I am more comfortable (c = 0.666).

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Presumably, the peripheral branch disintegrated c. 20 ka BP in Central Asia, from there feeding the linguistic makeup of both North America and sub-Saharan Africa.238 However, if on this linguistic basis we expect the present-day Mongolians to retain remnants of some postulated Upper Palaeolithic element system, we end up with a disappointment. The Mongolian system (Mostaert 1969) revolves on the foursome Fire, Water, Earth and Air, to which occasionally (cf. the Taoist system) Wood and Metal may be added. In West Eurasia (Ancient Egypt, Greece) the four-element system appears, as we have seen, as standard from the Middle Bronze Age on.

Source: http://www.klausdierks.com/images/Namibia_Damara_Brandberg_Hungorob _4.JPG with thanks. Fig. 8.3. A cult place for Heitsi Eibib in Namibia.

Probably a red herring is the name Wounded Knee a historically

238 Starostin & Starostin 1998-2008 for *Borean, Amerind and Khoisan, with selected Niger-Congo; more specifically, for Niger-Congo > Bantu within the *Borean context, van Binsbergen, 2010a, 2011d, and in press (b), van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011. Also see Fig. 8.2.

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charged toponym in South Dakota, USA, North America (scene of a major USA massacre of Native Americans, 1890), but in Southern Africa Wounded Knee is the name of the principal Culture Hero (Heitsi-Eibib) of the Khoisan speaking peoples, whose possible Asian ancestry we touched on above. Amazing continuities, meanwhile, link Heitsi Eibib to the rest of the Old World and especially to Western Eurasia. His main cultic manifestation is the herm or stone pile such as found throughout Eurasia from Atlantic European and North African megalithic arrangements to the betyls of the Levant and the stone piles of Mongolia and Tibet. Designated by a West Semitic word subsequently adopted into West European intellectual discourse, the betyl / baitylia (house of a god) is a class of West Asian and Mediterranean shrines whose main or only feature is a rock. They have been described by various scholars, both for the Ancient Mediterranean239 and much further afield.240 Ducie (1888) describes three so-called mare [ i.e. female horse ] stones, megaliths, one of which is adorned with human teeth; a megalithic shrine likewise called mare stone (hasharet al-fras) was identified by me, among many others featuring as minor Islamic shrines, in the highlands of North-western Tunisia (van Binsbergen 1971, 1985a, 1985b). The link with psephomancy (divination by means of pebbles) and geomancy is, among other indications, brought out by the fact that many divine and heroic shrines in the Ancient Graeco-Roman world operated cleromantic oracles (cf. Farnell 18951909, 1921; Graves 1964; Bouch-Leclercq 1879); and also by the ancient report according to which Eurytus, a pupil of Philolaus, used pebbles so as to form geometric figures representing animate beings (Delatte 1936: 582 n. 2). One suspects a further link with the pierres graves of the Azilien (Latest Upper Palaeolithic) (Breuil 1955). In Africa, stones are particularly conspicuous in the context of rain-making (e.g. Simonse 1992). In Southern Africa prehistoric bored stones abound and have been repeatedly treated in the scholarly literature (van Riet Lowe 1941; Goodwin 1947-1952); they are probably just weights to enhance the striking power of early agricultural implements. In South Asia, elongated stones are abundantly associated with the lingam, Shivas procreative instru-

Schmidt 1893; du Mesnil du Buisson 1966; Rose 1935; Fauth 1979b; Suhr 1967; Marwitz 1979.
240

239

The Sahara, North Africa, Tibet and Central Asia; cf. Lhote 1955; Cadenat 1955 mention of a betyl in the shale of a human head; David-Neel 1970; Hedin 1934.

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ment. In the Ancient Egyptian context, meteorites are singled out as stones with ritual significance, and associated with lightning and with the god ithyphallic god Min; associated representations are recorded for Togo (Balfour 1903). Meteorites were similarly venerated in Ancient Arabia (cf. the Holy Ka caba shrine), while one stage of the Islamic hajj pilgrimage has been the pilgrims throwing of stones in defiance of demons. In addition to these, admittedly heterogeneous and multidimensional, stone aspects of Heitsi Eibib, even his affliction of the lower extremities may reflect transcontinental continuities, after all: the wobbling gait as a result of ritual mutilation of the lower extremities (i.e. wounded knee) or the groin in the context of initiation especially initiation into royal office (Graves 1964, 1988), constitutes a recurrent feature of Eurasian cultures and may well be originally a Pelasgian trait; a case in point is, again, Erichthonius or Erechtheus, the first Athenian king, who had to be carried around in a basket241 because just like the Chinese culture hero Fu Xi and (by some interpretations) the legendary Mesopotamian culture hero Oannes he was snake-feeted. Could we invoke the same kind of Upper Palaeolithic, transcontinental connections to explain the traces of a transformation cycle of elements among the Zambian Nkoya? One of the most cherished regularities perceived by linguists, folklorists, and comparative mythologists is that the periphery of a cultural domain has the tendency to retain archaic forms which have already been supplanted by newer ones at the centre of the domain, where subsequent innovation has been more intensive. Do we have something similar here? If the Nkoya rudimentary transformation cycle of elements had to be explained in this light, we would expect a large number of other attestations of that transformative element system both in sub-Saharan Africa and in North America. For North America, this expectation is not convincingly confirmed. Admittedly, we did adduce, in Chapter 4, a number of instances that seem to betray a transformative element cycle from a handful of North American ethnic groups. Now, the cultural and linguistic diversity of North
241 Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 552 f.; Hyginus (1872), Fabulae, 166; Pausanias, Descriptio Graeciae, I, 24, 7; Herodotus, Historiae, VIII, 41. Note the remarkable parallel with the Ugandan queens, which I discussed above (p. 102n) with reference to the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic sign nbty.

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America is proverbial. The selected cases that appeared to manifest a transformative element cycle, have no recognised common cultural or linguistic affinity vis--vis one another, and neither case belongs to the Na-Den linguistico-cultural cluster whose affinities with the SinoCaucasian linguistic macrophylum of the Old World is now fairly widely accepted.242 If we wish to explain the North American presence of traces of an element system they so unmistakably display, it can hardly be by exclusive reference to a common Amerind substratum going back to the Upper Palaeolithic. Instead, the attempted explanation should rather include reference to what is now an accepted model in pre-Columbian transoceanic studies (Jett 2002): an unsystematic, much more recent trickle of demic diffusion (people on the move, bringing both their genes and their cultural and linguistic baggage) from the Old World (even from identifiable Sino-Tibetan and Afroasiatic provenances). Any transformation cycle of elements which these splinter groups on the move may have brought to North America, would ultimately have originated (possibly via illiterate, more or less acephalous, derived intermediate stages) from literate Eurasian cultures that have developed or adopted a transformative cycle of elements system. A case apart is that of the Pacific coast of Mexico.243 We have seen how Nuttall claims a four-element system for Ancient Mexico, with several other Old-World continuities. We should not just take the antiquated anthropology of Nuttalls 1909 article at face value (however, for a fuller study see Nuttall 1901). From the pioneer British anthropologist Tylor to the diffusionist Thor Heyerdahl (1952, 1988) and the Afrocentrist Van Sertima (1976), claims have been made as to extensive trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cultural exchanges in pre-Columbian times, and they have been passionately contested (e.g. Ortiz de Montellano 2000), even though the accumulated evidence in their favour is now overwhelming.244
Cf. Ruhlen 1998; Renner 1995; Shevoroshkin 1991; Drr & Renner 1995. Persistent though generally rejected claims of South Asian influence on MesoAmerica might create a background against which to interpret the appearance of foursomes in the latter part of the world, for instance the tetrarchical form of government, and the conception of the four elements. Nuttall 1909; Elliot Smith 1929: 10f; Also cf. Tylor 1879, 1880, 1896, on board games. 244 Cf. Jett 2002; Needham & Lu 1985; Sorenson & Raish 1996; Sorenson & Johannessen 2004. Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994 even adduce some genetic evidence in support of Heyerdahls hypothesis of demic diffusion from Peru to Polynesia (although not for the postulated transmission from Western Eurasia to Peru).
243 242

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Among the correspondences listed by Nuttall, the Mexican purple industry (cf. Pankonien 2008) suggests Phoenician connections after all Phoenicians were major navigators not only for their own account but also in the service of the great states of Antiquity, and their mediating role in the transformation and transmission of art, knowledge, and the alphabet has been duly recognised. In fact, however, the case need not be specifically Phoenician: the purple snails in question are widely distributed along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts of both Europe and Africa. Significantly, meanwhile, the Mexican purple industry is situated on the Pacific, not the Atlantic, coast. Let us briefly consider Nuttalls other arguments in favour of transcontinental borrowing to Pacific Mexico: the round calendar, weaving, pearl fishing, shell trumpets and mining for precious metals. As renderings of an annual cycle, calendars may have a general tendency to be round, but the round calendars of the Maya appear to have counterparts especially in Ancient China. Weaving, probably an Upper Palaeolithic invention, is widely distributed over the Old and the New World, and therefore hardly suitable to pinpoint transcontinental connections. Pearl fishing especially refers to the Indian Ocean and its extensions (Red Sea, Persian Gulf two regions traditionally associated with Phoenician origins and activities) including its South Chinese Sea fringe, but is also common throughout the Pacific so again inconclusive. Conch shell trumpets are conspicuous in Oceania as well as in South and Central Asian Buddhism, but they are also known from the Ancient Mediterranean Ovids Flood is introduced by the sea god Triton blowing one (Metamorphoses, I, 449f). Mining for copper, silver and gold has likewise been a fairly ubiquitous affair since the Early Bronze Age, although Meso America may have had in common with subSaharan Africa extensive Indian and possibly Chinese intrusions and initiatives in this field. Tylor suggested, on the basis of striking continuities in colour symbolism and board games, a link between South Asia and Meso-America, trans-Pacific rather than trans-Atlantic. This is also the model one would be inclined to adopt if one might be prepared to jump to conclusions on the basis of Nuttalls mixed bag of reminiscences concerning the four-element system in Ancient Mexico.245 Our conclusion
245 Interestingly, attention could be drawn to another indication of South Asian provenance apparently penetrating, perhaps not all the way to the Americas, but at least deeply into the Pacific. When discussing Terrien de Lacouperies work we had occasion to remark that he was the first to recognise the uncanny similarities between

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should be that Nuttalls case on West Asian Bronze Age penetrated to Mexico remains weak but plausible (also cf. Heyerdahl 1952: Part V, pp. 219-345, on alleged pre-Columbian Caucasian, i.e. West Asian,intrusion in South America) while other South and East Asian candidates for such intrusion seem to offer a better case and they might easily have transmitted a cyclical element cosmology. Returning now to Africa we must admit that the elaborate Nkoya system is rather at variance with the other element systems in Africa. Particularly the transformative aspect and the presence of a catalyst, so striking in the Nkoya system and so strikingly similar to Taoism, both seem to be lacking in the other African systems reviewed in Section 4.3.1. Also in North America, attestations of the transformation cycle of elements, although not totally lacking, are far more sporadic than we would expect in the case of an Upper Palaeolithic substrate trait. At this junction it may be useful to adduce again, to the consideration of the South Central African Nkoya case, evidence from another major strand of my Africanist research, that of Southern African divination (Table 2.3). In my ongoing research into the African geomancies in their transcontinental environment from 1988 onward, I have tended to see the emergence of the fourtablet oracle in South Central and Southern Africa as the projection of a pre-existing divination system (based on an interpretative catalogue with 2n distinct categories), onto a new type of random generator: no longer the chance hitting of the ground with a stick, as in the Islamic form; nor the throwing of sticks or coins, as in the East Asian form; nor the throwing of special geomantic dice, as in the relatively recent and derived South Asian form, counterparts of which are also sporadically found in Africa; nor the throwing of cowries or divining chains as in the West African forms including Ifa; nor the throwing of half-shells of mungongo nuts as in Southern Africa and West Africa; or so-called temple-blocks, chiao pai, and the bundle of sticks
Indus Valley apparent scriptural signs, and those of Easter Island. In this connection we may also mention Lessas (1969) attestation of the Chinese trigrams in Micronesia.

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known as chim, as in the East Asian form; nor the clockwork emulation of the geomantic process as in Islamic divinatory machines of the early 2nd millennium CE;

(a) divining tablets in the possession of the storekeeper at Igwenia and considered to be from Lealui, Barotseland, NorthWestern Rhodesia (now Zambia), 1900 (Garbutt 1909a: 546, Fig. 4); largest dimension c. 5 cm

(b) two sets (note the circle-dots) of four divining tablets of the Toka, Totela and Leya ethnic groups, North-Western Rhodesia, now Zambia (Garbutt 1909b: 61, Plate 5); in both the upper and the lower register the named tablets have been arranged in the same order, from left to right: Kanakosi or Chinongosi, Insanga, Karumi, Kuami variants of names occurring throughout Southern Africa (cf. van Binsbergen 1995b, 1996a), and carrying connotations of both gender and seniority: junior male junior female senior male senior female; largest dimension ca. 8 cm

Fig. 8.4. Divination tablets from Western Zambia.

but by a random generator consisting of four ivory or wooden tablets, each marked to be distinguished from the other three, and moreover marked so as to distinguish between front and back. Such tablets allow for 24 = 16 different names / configurations when thrown together, and the divination process consists in the production and 269

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interpretation, in close collaboration with the client, of a specific series of these configurations, by reference to a written or oral interpretative catalogue listing all possible configurations, and assigning meanings to them and to their sequence. Against the background of the other random generators listed, and of the proven convergence of the geomantic interpretative catalogues underlying all these forms of divinations listed, continuity of the underlying system but change of random generator is a plausible explanation of the Southern African tablet cleromantic oracle. I studied this system in the first place in Southern Africa. However, in the light of the emphasis, throughout the present book, on the ethnography of the Nkoya people of South Central Africa, it is relevant that divination tablets continuous with the Southern African types have also been occasionally recorded for the wider region in which the Nkoya are situated (i.e. Barotseland, now Zambias Western Province), even though during my four decades of fieldwork among the Nkoya (1972-2012) I have never encountered any. In the second quarter of the 19th century the so-called Mfecane ethnic migratory turmoil brought the Sotho-speaking Kololo offshoot of the Nguni ethnico-linguistic cluster of South Africa all the way to the Upper Zambezi region, where they redefined the existing Luyana state into the Kololo state, and greatly expanded it, so as to include Nkoyaland among other parts. Apparently Southern African diviners and their tools were introduced in that connection. The documentary evidence on the Barotseland divining apparatus is puzzling. One missionary who spent many years in Barotseland, reported various divination methods with bones (Bouchet 1922: 32) but remained very unspecific as to their material description. Another missionary there described many divinatory methods but nothing that could be positively identified as the four-tablet oracle (Jacottet 1899-1901: 157 f.). The mungongo nuts that are elsewhere in Southern Africa used for divination, have been recorded as mankala tokens in use in Barotseland (Chaplin 1956: 168). Frobenius 1931 (Karte 8, p. 45) sees the Hakata (the Shona generic name for the Southern African four-tablet oracle) as limited to the region between the Zambezi and the Limpopo, so outside Barotseland. Garbutt, however, in two partially overlapping publications from 1909, is unequivocal in his description and depiction of four-tablet oracular sets from Barotselands indigenous capital Lealui (Garbutt 1909a: 546, fig. 4, and 1909b: 61): square tablets 270

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with a circular appendix on one side (Fig. 8.4).

Source: Ronnberg c.s. 2011: 549. Note the frayed material surfaces, lavishly hung with bone elements that are decorated with circle-dots and that are often indistinguishable from the divination tokens used in Southern Africa in historical times Fig. 8.5. A present-day shamanic apron from the Tlingit, N.W. Coast, Alaska, c. 1860 CE.

Although such a circular element is reminiscent of the eye symbol that appears on many Southern African tablets, the Barotse tablets are without striking parallels in Southern and South Central Africa, especially where the circular appendix is concerned; however, Northeast African / West Asian parallels could be suggested for them, from Ancient Mesopotamia (notably Farber 1987 New Assyria, whose penetration into West Africa c. 600 BCE is now an established fact due to Dierk Langes work 2009, 2012), Ancient Egypt (which incidentally was under Assyrian occupation in the 7th c. BCE), and Bronze Age Cyprus. In these Ancient contexts the winged solar disk was a central symbol, as was also the case in Ancient Israel and Ancient Iran.246 In addition, Garbutt (1909a: 539) reports more usual Hakata from the Southern periphery of Barotseland,
246

Cf. Mayer 1984; Parayre 1987, 1990; Anonymous, winged [S]un; Sergi 1901: 30; for Cyprus: Ohnefalsch-Richter 1899; and for Africa: Jeffreys 1951.

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among such peoples as the Toka, Totela and Leya, who (Brelsford 1965 / 1956) have strong cultural and political affinities with the Nkoya. I am not in the least suggesting a direct and exclusive link between Ancient Mesopotamia and Barotseland. Rather, one is tempted to see a shamanic substrate surfacing here. There is a striking similarity with the ornaments on the shamanic apron shown in Fig. 8.5, from the Tlingit of British Columbia. Distinctive features here are the elongated tooth shape (not uncommon in Southern African divination pieces, but not including the Barotseland ones of Fig. 8.4) and especially the circle-dot incisions. The circle-dot is a simple pattern whose very wide distribution in space and time need not point to a common origin. In prehistoric contexts the circle-dot and related dotted signs (cf. cupmarks, such as abound worldwide in megalithic contexts; and leopard-skin symbolism) is often interpreted as an evocation of potency,247 although in certain contexts (as we have seen with regard to the Pleiades) specific reference to stars and constellations may be involved.248 In historical times, the circle-dot motifs regions of concentration have included sub-Saharan Africa, especially Southern Africa (Segy 1953; Nettleton 1984) but also Madagascar (Linton 1933: 77); the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of North America;249 and Ancient West Asia.250 In Egypt (with echoes elsewhere in the Ancient Mediterranean, e.g. among the Ancient Etruscans; von Vacano 1961: 75) the circle-dot was the hieroglyph N5 denoting the Sun, Rc 251 whose veneration appears to be a Pelasgian cultic theme gaining

E.g. Middleton 1994; Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988; Clottes & Lewis-Williams 1996; Garlake 1995.
248

247

Thus a Chinese astronomical disc shows an arrangement of circle-dots arranged according to a grid (Anonymous [ Marseille, Jacques ] 1994: 102).

249 Jenness 1961: Plate XI, on unnumbered page preceding p. 837: the Items 4, 11, 13 show circle-dots; so does the text illustration on p. 844. 250 251

Gurney 1952: Plate b opposite p. 128; Hrozny 1951: 169, after E.J.H. MacKay.

Meuli (1975: 863) stresses, following Eduard Schwarz, that also Siberian shamans venerate the Sun as a deity interpreting extensive mendicant tours as emulating the Suns course through many countries. Perhaps this should be read as an indication that the shamanic influence reached Egypt already well before the second millennium. When the Greeks came into contact with this cult among the Scythians, they interpreted it as directed at Hyperborean Apollo. The position of the Sun in the Greek pantheon remains puzzling: the Indo-European gods are male and celestial, but not in

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momentum in Egypt only from the 5th dynasty on. Like so much in the Egyptian Old Kingdom, this is suggestive of West Asian continuities, and by the same token we may note the surfacing of traits suggestive of shamanism in Ancient Mesopotamia252 and Egypt where a pardivested shaman is claimed to appear in the person of the t official on one of the earliest written documents (the Nrmr / Narmer cosmetic palette) from the very outset of the dynastic period, but where also major theonyms, as well as the New Kingdom tomb of Tut-cAn-Amon, turned out to contain suggestions of shamanism and Uralic / Altaic elements including what looks like a shamans crown.253 As an Upper Palaeolithic substrate going back to the disintegration of *Borean with its suggestion of a Peripheral cluster of macrophyla including Amerind, Austric and the African macrophyla Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, and / or as a result of much later Pelasgian transmission from the Late Bronze Age on, these motifs even though simple enough to allow independent parallel invention yet may well have found their way into sub-Saharan Africa from a common Eurasian origin, and surface in Africa in the context of divination. Another intriguing comparative ethnographic fact relating to the Southern African divinatory foursomes is, meanwhile, that they are strikingly similar to sets of four tablets or sticks used in Native American games and forms of divination in North America, which most probably follow a pre-Columbian tradition (Culin 1975 / 1902-1903; cf. Fig. 8.6 below). Under the Back-to-Africa Hypothesis this may be seen as much more than mere coincidence notably, as a sign that a four-based element cosmological system was already available in Central Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic, and from there was transmitted to both sub-Saharan
the first place solar; and Helios, although around at least since Homeric times, is, as a Titan, rather an outsider. Bernals identification of Apollo as pr, rising Sun suggests that the Greeks derived part of their religious perception of the Sun, from Egypt, and that this was an indirect way in which shamanic / Asian influence was transmitted to the Aegean during the Bronze Age. E.g. in the art of the traditional healer, and in mythical motifs e.g. the Descent of Inanna which among other dimensions, cf. Buccallati 1982 recounts a shamans descent into the underworld; Ritter 1965; Jacobsen 1976; van Binsbergen & Wiggermann 1999. Oppenheimer (1966: 37) also sees extispicy as part of the 2nd mill BCE intrusion of shamanism in the Ancient Near East. Cf. Helck 1984; van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 18, 93, Fig. 4.6 and 4.7, and p. 370 f., Table 28.4.
253 252

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Africa, and North America just like the linguistic macrophyla of NigerCongo, Khoisan and Amerind under the *Borean Hypothesis. As we have seen, the general thesis claiming historical, generic continuity between speakers of Niger-Congo and Amerind is now well supported by linguistic and comparative ethnographic data: female puberty rites, mythology, basketry, etc. In the specific field of divination, there is some slight archaeological support for the postulated, Upper Palaeolithic link between sub-Saharan Africa and North America in that a pair (not four, alas) of extensively worked bone artefacts, rather resembling the North American divination and gaming tablets as well as Southern African divination tablets, have been unearthed in Upper Palaeolithic Western Europe (Dewez 1974; van Binsbergen 2005b; see Fig. 8.6). All this then constitutes additional, yet still weak, support for the suggestion that a fourbased cosmology probably revolving on the idea of elements existed in the Upper Palaeolithic Old World, more than 10,000 years before Empedocles. Yet our discussion of prehistoric modes of thought makes it very unlikely that this Upper Palaeolithic system was already both transformative and cyclical. The long-range connections which thus manifest themselves in the context of divination have been spotted before by others. Above we already noted Trilless account of Pygmy divination, and Coons reflection upon it. Similarly, Baumann, Westermann & Thurnwald in their classic Vlkerkunde von Afrika (1940), where ample attention is paid to divination forms, identify a cleromantic oracle whose basic opposition is that between male and female, as characteristic of the Steppe-hunter culture. Such a characterisation has obvious Upper Palaeolithic implications (before Neolithic times hunting and gathering constituted the universal mode of production!), but also has echoes in the gendered conception of the present-day oracular tablets in Southern Africa, and of Yin / Yang as the underlying dichotomy informing the 2n configurations of Y Jng. However, for the above typological and historical reasons such a rudimentary prehistoric system would still lack the crucial features of the Nkoya clan system: transformation, and catalytic action in triads. This renders it impossible, despite the above discussion, to explain the Nkoya clan system in its totality as the surfacing of an transcontinentally widespread Upper Palaeolithic substrate cosmology. Let us now assess whether the Pelasgian Hypothesis brings us further on this point. 274

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8.3.2. Pelasgian transmission in the Bronze Age: Vindicating our Alternative Working Hypothesis My Pelasgian Hypothesis identifies Neolithic Bronze-Age West Asia as seething with cultural initiatives, resulting in an extensive package of cultural traits percolating through that region, expanding into the Mediterranean, and from the Late Bronze Age being transmitted in all four directions including, via the Steppe, to East, South and South East Asia and even into Oceania; moreover (along the Sahara and the Indian Ocean) into sub-Saharan Africa; and perhaps occasionally, via unrecorded so merely postulated trickles of demic diffusion, to North America. Above we have seen indications of the existence of a transformative element cycle in West Asia and Egypt during the Bronze Age, and it is quite conceivable that this system, as part of the Pelasgian expansion, ended up in South Central Africa. Many of the c. 80 Pelasgian traits which I identified and whose distribution I traced grosso modo (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: Table 28.5, p. 374 f.) are actually found in subSaharan Africa, not least among the Nkoya, so the overall framework for Pelasgian transmission of the transformative element cycle certainly seems to apply there. Ancient Egypt is a region where our dozens of Pelasgian traits are particularly well-attested, and if there are manifestations of Egyptian traits in sub-Saharan Africa, this would prepare us for the possibility that also the transformative element cycle followed the Pelasgian route South as well as, by the same token, being transmitted transcontinentally in the other three directions of the cross-model. As we have seen (p. 73), Egyptian manifestations in sub-Saharan Africa are in fact abundant, also among the Nkoya. That the postulated cross-model creates astounding parallels between subSaharan Africa and East Asia we have already seen in the Introduction, with the case of the mythical role of the wagtail (Motacilla) (p. 39 f.). Let us cite another case, of a specific Nkoya-Japanese parallel. Rather to my surprise, the primal Nkoya mythical character Katete Reed Person (which I argue to relate, with her counterpart Luhamba, to the Ancient Egyptian royal title nswt-bGt , She of the Reed and the Bee; van Binsbergen 2010a and above, p. 101).

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a1

b1

c1

a2

c2

b2 a3

(a) Recent southern African divination tablets, authors collection (a1, commercially acquired wooden set, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 1989; a2, item from a commercially acquired set of four, ivory, bought in Limpopo Province, South Africa, 1994, courtesy Gina Buys; note the circle-dots); a3, set (the authors of a four wooden tablets (with one cowry and one goats foot bone as peripherals), cut in a sangoma lodge, Francistown, Botswana, 1989; (b) possible divination tablets from Remouchamps Cave, Belgium, Upper Palaeolithic: b1 excavated in 1902 (68.8 mm); b2 excavated in 1970 (72 mm) (both after Dewez 1974); (c) c1, c2, 19th century gaming / divining tablets from North America (Culin 1902 / 1975). Fig. 8.6. Divination: Continuities in space and time.

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has a literal counterpart in the Japanese god Umashi-ashi-kabi-hiko-ji-no-kami sweet reed-shoot prince elder, of the first generation of gods in the Japanese classic Nihongi. This could be sheer coincidence, despite at least one other such coincidence: that of the wagtail. However, the Japan-Nkoya reed parallel takes on a different significance once we realise that, at various parts of the putative Pelasgian periphery (if we take its epicentre to be in West Asia) great cosmogonic importance is attributed to reed: Ancient Egypt, Yoruba, unspecified Bantu-speakers, the Nkoya, the Zulu, and Ancient Japan. Emphasis on reed is also found in North American Flood myths. The Pelasgian Hypothesis proves to be an illuminating perspective. In my study of transcontinental resonances in Nkoya mythology254 I noted a number of surprising Scythian and Mongolian correspondences with the South Central African case. The Altaic language family to which Turkic, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese belong, dominated the Eurasian Steppe before modern times, and Scythians are considered to belong to either that language family or to Indo-European. But this belongs to a period many millennia after the disintegration of *Borean. The Nkoya / Scythian-Mongolian parallels cannot all be convincingly be attributed to a common Upper Palaeolithic substratum but must, in large part, be attributed to much more recent intrusions, during or after the Bronze Age, either as a result of direct Pelasgian, cross-model expansion into subSaharan Africa, or as a result of indirect mediation of ScythianMongolian traits via South Asian or East Asian penetration during the Common Era, into South Central Africa, and via India, Ceylon, China, Korea, or Japan. In my most elaborate published discussion of the Pelasgian Hypothesis so far (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 372 f.) I provisionally listed255 80 proposedly Pelasgian traits, and indicated that several dozens of these traits also obtained among the present-day Nkoya, who therefore are

254 van Binsbergen 2010a; where also cross-cultural references to reed in comparative mythology may be found at p. 177 f. 255 van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 374 f.; this tabulation was still only provisional in the sense that full references to all the 80 entries had to wait till the more definitive publication in van Binsbergen, in press (a).

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clearly part, at least typologically, of the Pelasgian realm. Moreover, the cross-model transmission of Pelasgian traits in all four directions of the compass is suggested by me to start in the Late Bronze Age (13th -11th c. BCE), which is half a millennium before Empedocles, but after the time when, according to my reconstructions above, the West Asian correlative system had been invented. Conceivably, therefore, the Nkoya clan system with its transformational and catalytic overtones could derive from the Pelasgian heritage, but we have only very slight and circumstantial evidence to back up such an explanation. 8.3.3. East Asian intrusion into Africa during historical times? Given the severe limitations of the Pelasgian explanation in the case of the Nkoya clan system, we must consider the obvious alternative: recent East or South Asian intrusion into South Central Africa in historical times. In recent centuries, Africa and Africans have been pushed to the periphery of the World System and to the bottom of a global scale of prestige and power resulting in their appearance as the outsiders par excellence. To counter this unfortunate and historically distortive situation, I have cherished, for decades now, the idea of Africas continuity with the other continents, even if this means that the intra-continental cultural initiatives and achievements to be attributed to Africa appear in a more relative light of transcontinental exchanges and common origins, thus blurring what Strong Afrocentrists have claimed to be Africas inalienable contributions to global cultural history, e.g. geomancy. Now, although I have often expressed my sympathy for the Afrocentrist perspective, the painstaking analysis of empirical data as in the present argument yet brings me to admit that Africa has always been an integral part of global cultural history at large, but hardly, since the Upper Palaeolithic (30-12 ka BP), with the decisive, pan-continental impact Afrocentrists have claimed for the African continent. (For the Out-of-Africa Exodus, 80-60 ka BP, such an impact goes without saying.) Now, apart from an effect of the Back-in-Africa overland migration flow from Central or West Asia which started in the Upper Palaeolithic, and from the Pelasgian transmission from the Late Bronze Age onward, could the presence, among the Nkoya, of apparent Central and East Asian themes, such as traces of a transformation cycle of elements, be accommodated by direct, much more recent transoceanic influences, effected 278

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from the far end (Korea, Japan) or from a Southern branching (South Asia) of the Steppe and its culture? There has been considerable critical debate doubting the presence of Malagasy / Austronesian kingdoms beyond Madagascar on the African mainland (Kent 1970). Likewise, there have been extensive claims of a historic Japanese Buddhist influence on Madagascar (Raison-Jourde 1994); but also these claims were dismissed as mythical. Yet a strong case is currently building up, largely in and around my recent work but with great initial stimulus from the OppenheimerTauchmannDick-Read Hypothesis on a considerable demographic and cultural influx from South and South East Asia on subSaharan African soil, for a considerable South and South East Asian, especially Buddhist presence in South Central Africa in the last two millennia.256 In Southern Africa, the archaeological complexes of Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe,257 from the late 1st and early 2nd millennium CE, have been widely258 recognised to incorporate Asia-derived elements. It is my contention, now backed up by extensive empirical evidence and elaborate arguments, that other Asian state complexes had a more or less precarious and short-lived existence in South Central Africa and along the African Atlantic coast in the first and second millennium CE, where the prevalence of the name Mbedzi / Mbetsi259 (common Bantu: Moon; but also, in Asia, a widespread designation of the Buddha; name of a major ethnic cluster among the Venda of Transvaal; and also of an apical ancestor in the Douala region, Cameroon) reminds us of them, as do numerous institutional traits surrounding the kingship, popular ritual, (second) burial (e.g. among the Bamileke of Cameroon), reincarnation beliefs,

Cf. Dick-Read 2005, 2012; Thornton 2012; Hromnik 2012, cf. 1981; and my work in connection with the 2012 Leiden conference.
257

256

E.g. Garlake 1973; Huffman 1984, 1987; Vogel 1994; Caton-Thompson 1931; Bent 1892 / 1969; Fouch & Gardner 1937-1940; Schofield 1937; Huffman 2000.

Widely recognised, but not universally so. There is a widespread tendency in African Studies to insist that things African must be uniquely explained by reference to Africa an unfortunate form of Political Correctness, which, if applied to the study of European cultural history (where much of the constitutive culture, religion, script, probably also languages, initially derive from outside Europe) would immediately reveal its ideological, identitary, in short false, overtones. Cf. Ralushai & Gray 1977; Frobenius 1931; van Binsbergen 2003: 300 f.; Dolisane-Eboss Nyamb 2005; Birkeli 1936.
259

258

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kinship (e.g. the institution of the paramour; Tauchmann 2010), cults of affliction, etc.260 There is also considerable genetic evidence for such South Asian and East Asian intrusions into sub-Saharan during the last few millennia (van Binsbergen 2012e). Among the Nkoya, specifically, a South Asian element is suggested by many details of social life especially the kingship. In Nkoya royal circles, personal names circulate that have scarcely a Bantu etymology and that appear to have come straight from South Asia (e.g. Shikanda, cf. Skanda, the South Asian god of war or , skandha, element, especially in the Buddhist context; and Mangala, the South Asian god presiding over the planet Mars, and as such equivalent to Skanda. Moreover, in court culture and protocol, ceremonial arrangements, royal control over natural resources, paraphernalia and regalia, the royal orchestra, layout of the capital, royal historical traditions, royal burial practices, we find a remarkable number of close parallels with Indonesia, Buddhist South East Asia and Buddhist South Asia (from the first millennium CE onward) which constitute the topic of my ongoing research into African-Asian continuities. The Nkoya king, although in an intact South Asian tradition he (but the Nkoya ruler is often a queen) would have to be assigned to the Kshatriya warrior caste, yet looks in many ways like an exalted Brahmin, secluded and pure, and unable to receive food from others. Nkoya royal traditions trace their origin to an enigmatic, distant land to the North East, Kola, which some informants situate in Central Africa near the CongoZambezi watershed (cf. the toponym Angola) but which may well be in South, South East or East Asia.261 Among the Nkoya and surrounding
However, the alternative possibility is that we, reversely, attribute the AsianAfrican parallels to early African sallies into Asia, as suggested by Winters (1981, 1983, 1988). 261 Munda-Kolar(-ian) is an Austro-Asiatic (< Austric) language group around the Gulf of Bengal. Repeated Tamil invasions in Sri Lanka have been associated with the C[h]ola dynasties. In a generally dismissed late book, the famous decipherer of Hittite, Hrozny (1951: 196), claims that in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions, the name Kode (<*Kole?) is used for the peninsula Kathiavar south of Sindh, South West Asia. Karst (1931a: 241) mentions for the Dravidian region the toponyms Kurukh, Koroi, Kurru, Kora; Sanskrit kula translates, among other meanings, as group, people (Monier-Williams 1960 / 1899, s.v., pp. 294 f.; Karst 1931a: 538), which would suggest a wide range of applicability for that word as an ethnonym. Kola as a toponym has a wide geographical distribution also beyond South Asia (e.g. Northern Europe on the White Sea and in East Anatolia), cf. Table 2.1. in van Binsbergen &
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peoples the name Kapesh ka-Mununga-Mpanda (Kapesh Who Joined Forked Poles) appears as a dynastic apical ancestor associated with a Tower (and by implication Flood) myth the name has no proper etymology in Central Bantu, but compare (de Vries 1958 s.v. gaffel) *ghabasti, proto-Indo-Iranian for forked gable, chariot pole a nearly perfect match both semantically and phonologically. By the same token, one of the principal regalia among the Nkoya is the hourglass drum, mukupele again a common Nkoya word without a proper Bantu etymology, but cf. Sinhalese (Sri Lankan) mahabela, big drum. Elsewhere (2012d) I have argued how the Tower myth of hubris and destruction surrounding the Nkoya king Kapesh seems to have considerable historical roots in the Sri Lankan episode around king Kasyapa of the towering Sigiriya rock, in the 1st millennium CE, in addition, of course, to the Biblical Nimrod (Genesis 10-11). Several other South Asian references cluster around the Kapesh name: Kashapa, originally a pre-Vedic god, became a most prominent Hindu sage (Rishi) to whom even the Buddha paid hommage262 and who is counted as the father of Garuda (Vishnus mount), Aruna (Dawn), the Nagas (serpent lords), Apsaras (vegetation gods), etc. and pseudo-epigraphical author of the Kashap Samhita, a classical Ayurvedic medical text. The historical person Mahakasyapa was a prominent disciple of the Buddha. All these parallels between South Central Africa, and South Asia, are too close and too specific than that they could be convincingly attributed to remote and diffuse transmission processes several millennia or longer back. Against this extensive South Asian background among the Nkoya dating from historical times, we are justified to propose a recent Asian background also for the Nkoya clan nomenclature. One major hurdle then still to be taken is that most of the Asian traces in South, South Central and West Africa have South and South East Asian connotations rather than East Asian ones, while the opposite is true for correlative systems displaying our central features of cyclicity, transformation and element cosmology. Element-cosmological aspects are implied in certain aspects of South Asian mythology, icono-

Woudhuizen 2011: 43. Considering the remarkable Scythian and Mongolian traits among the Nkoya (van Binsbergen 2010a), we should also consider, as an etymon of Kla, Krea (at the Eastern end of the Eurasian Steppe), which of course is an alienimposed designation yet goes back to the Goryeo (Korean: ) dynasty (918-1392 CE) in terms of transcontinental contacts a plausible periodisation. 262 Vinaya Pitaka, Mahavagga, I, 249; Rhys Davids & Oldenberg 1988 / 1881-1910.

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graphy and ritual (e.g. the homa fire ritual and its Vedic protoform; Staal et al. 1983), and were listed as such in our Table 4.1, but it would require a specialist argument in its own right (for which I lack the Indological competence) to ascertain whether South Asian cosmological expressions can be said to revolve on cyclicity and transformation. Meanwhile, for Vedic India a system of caste nomenclature has been described where each professional group, in totem-like fashion, is identified with an animal species, and which is strikingly reminiscent of Nkoya clan nomenclature:263
castes professional status wheelwright, weaver smelter, trader, turner, blacksmith, trader merchants clerk turner young buffalo tiger, rhinoceros, buffalo, elephant, antelope rhinoceros, antelope elephant, beehive species

Table 8.1. Proposed relations between professional castes and their animal totems in Vedic India.

Although most of the species mentioned in Table 8.1 are not highlighted in the Nkoya clan context, elephant and beehive are, and the turner element that is so conspicuous among the Nkoya (Sheta), is encountered here in a different light. Even though there is no evidence yet that a transformation cycle underlies the South Asian caste names, yet the proximity of East Asia and the many contacts e.g. through Buddhism and seafaring make more specific Taoist influences quite possible.264 I suggest that these observations, if they can be substantiated systematically, have a wider applicability than just the Nkoya case. They point to
The unauthoritative source of Table 8.1 is: Anonymous, Language; however, a further background for the association between animals and castes is offered by Michelutti 2007; Deshpande 2001; Smith 1991, 1994. 264 Around the major sea port of Bara, where Chinese ships abounded at the time (Chau Ju-Kua 1911; Sauvaget 1948; Tibbets 1971) and which also received part of the Silk Road trade, Taoist influences are conspicuous at the end of the first millennnium CE, for instance among the important intellectual movement of the Iun al-af / Brethren of Purity, and include the adoption of Taoist medicine e.g. reading the pulse (Needham c.s. 1961, Vol. I), while the notational system of the divination system of cilm al-raml, decisively developed in this milieu, appears to be indebted to the later Chinese notation of Y Jng, i.e. broken and unbroken lines of course, after the original open or filled dots had given way to lines with the invention of the writing brush.
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the presence, in addition to a) the postulated results of Upper Palaeolithic continuity and of b) Pelasgian transmission, of c) a massive Asian substrate, resulting from the more recent phases of the Back-to-Africa migration i.e. from the last two millennia, and informing to a greater or lesser extent a wide variety of cultural expressions we have so far been used to cherish as typically or uniquely African. If our point (c) here can be substantiated, it means that we are well on our way to liberate ourselves from the essentialisation of African identity and of the African past, and begin to accept that Africas cultural history within the wider world has been very similar to that of Europe: sometimes taking historic initiatives, but often receiving the initiatives from elsewhere, and turning them into something local and vital in a creative process of adaptive localisation.

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Chapter 9. Conclusion: Diachronic varieties of the transformation cycle of elements, and their global distribution

9.1. Recapitulating our indications of the distribution and history of element systems worldwide since the Middle Palaeolithic
We are now finally in a position to sketch the diachronic varieties of the transformation cycle of elements in their global distribution (Fig. 9.1). The affinity between East Asia (China, Japan), on the one hand, and South Central Africa, on the other, is striking: these are the only instances where a fully-fledged catalytic transformation cycle has been attested so far. The Nkoya / Taoism continuity can hardly be explained by the Pelasgian Hypothesis let alone by the Back-to-Africa model or by the *Borean Hypothesis: whereas a simple, recursive element system (including Empedocless) is likely to be a Pelasgian trait, the world distribution of the transformative element cycle is too restrictive than that it can be taken to be transmitted by any of these three models which combine a perspective of several or many millennia with the concomitant, wide distribution on the world map. Around 2000, when I was only beginning to perceive, still very dimly, the transcontinental continuities which dominate the present argument and much of my other recent work, I was struck (van Binsbergen 2002) by a similar rapprochement between East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa in the field of formal cultural systems: animal symbolism underlying astronomical classifications, divination systems, clan systems, and toponymical systems (notably the nomenclature of the Ancient Egyptian nomes). I wondered if such systems might have enough in common to treat them 285

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Fig. 9.1. Diachronic varieties of the transformation cycle of elements: Global distribution.
a. Globally distributed substrate ingredients towards element cosmologies presumably

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dating back to Middle Palaeolithic Africa, before the Out-of-Africa Exodus (80-60 ka BP) (this book, Table 6.1) b. Intermediate element systems lacking a transformative and cyclical nature: Z Zui and neighbouring peoples; S Skagit; Sh Shasta; Mn Menomini; Y Yoruba; T Togo; B Bushong; C Lower Congo; Z Zulu; L Lascaux (Upper Palaeolithic) c. Fully-fledged correlative element systems attested in historical times, and estimated to go back to 2nd millennium BCE: transformation cycles with a limited number of elements: from this book, Table 4.1: 1 Ancient Mesopotamia 2 Greek; 3 Latin; 4 Hindu and Buddhist; 5 Japanese: Godai; 6 Chinese Wu Xing; 7 Bn; 8 Ancient Egypt; only by implication and analogy: 9 Nkoya; 10 Madagascar; 11 Dogon; 12 Mongolians; 13 circum-Saharan zodiacal lore (Pques 1964). Of these, 5, 6 and 9 are cyclical, transformational, and catalytic. d. The no-longer-transformative, rigid four element system of Late Antiquity, medieval Western Eurasia, and Early Modern times.

as belonging to one corpus whose internal patterns of coherence could be subjected to statistical cluster analysis. Then already I found close affinity between the Nkoya clan nomenclature (and other African systems of animal symbolism), on the one hand, and the Chinese zodiac and Chinese lunar mansions, on the other hand whereas Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Greek series of animal symbolism (astronomical, topographical and as attributes of gods) turned out to cluster only at much greater distances from each other and from the African and Chinese material. At the time, I was so enamoured with Afrocentricity that I could not think of a better explanation than a common, African origin for all these systems, which origin then would have to be situated in the Upper Palaeolithic. I am now aware that the catalytic transformation cycle of elements is typologically very advanced, and therefore can only be a few millennia old. The affirmation of Chinese influence on Africa has been the subject of numerous studies,265 and the circulation of material objects and forms of symbolism reminiscent of East Asian specifically Taoist divination (di-

E.g. Duyvendak 1949; Snow 1988; Li Anshan 2000; Neville et al. 1975; Davidson 1959; and my work in connection with the 2012 Leiden conference. Moreover, I recently reviewed in detail much of the literature on Chinese global maritime explorations from an Africanist perspective (van Binsbergen 2012f). Numerous studies also have been devoted to Indonesian influence across the Indian Ocean, see Solheim II 2000 and references cited there; and with special attention to Africa, Dick-Read 2005, 2012.

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vining tablets, numerical symbolism, divining bowls etc., and Buddhism) makes it quite conceivable that such recent East Asian influence resulted in the South Central African clan nomenclature as a catalytic transformation cycle of elements in disguise.
DISTANCE METRIC IS NORMALIZED PERCENT DISAGREEMENT WARD MINIMUM VARIANCE METHOD DISTANCES 0.00 200.00 CHOKBAS(4) -----------------------+- C 70.83 CHILUNA(8) ----------------| | +------| 50.00 TSWACLA(6) ----------------| +- B -87.50 CHIZODI(7) --------| | +----| | 27.08 ANIMDEM(1) --------| | | +--| | 42.36 NKOYCLA(5) -------------- | | | +--| | 49.31 BABSTAR(9) ----------------- | | | +----- D | 60.42 MODCON(10)-------------------| +-------- 105.81 EGYPGOD(3) --------------------| +----| 62.50 EGYPNOM(2) --------------------| | +---- A -76.39 GREEKMYT(11)--------------------------

1. Old World animal demons ANIMDEM; 2. Ancient Egyptian nome names EGYPNOM; 3. Ancient Egyptian gods EGYPGOD ; 4. Chokwe divining basket items CHOKBAS; 5. Nkoya clan names NKOYCLA; 6. Tswana clan names TSWACLA; 7. Chinese zodiac items CHIZODI; 8. Chinese Moon stations CHILUNA; 9. Babylonian star names BABSTAR; 10. Modern constellation names MODCON; 11. Attributes of gods in Ancient Greek mythology GREEKMYT.266 Fig. 9.2. Comparing Old World formal systems through cluster analysis, provisionally267 bringing out the unexpected clustering of African nomenclatural material with Chinese and Babylonian material, clustering away from Ancient Egyptian and Greek material.

These considerations lead to the following tentative reconstruction of historical relationships as in Fig. 9.3:

266

Source: van Binsbergen 2002. These eleven distributions (numbered as in Figure 9.2) are each derived from a considerable literature, from which I here list only a small selection: 1. Fontenrose 1980; 2. Roeder 1952; 3. Bonnet 1971; 4. Rodrigues de Areia 1985; 5. authors fieldnotes and van Binsbergen 1992; 6. Schapera 1952; 7, 8. Walters 1989; 9. Walker & Hunger 1977, Hunger & Pingree 1989; 10. Moore 1984; 11. Smith 1880, Graves 1964. These results are provisional in that recently, in anticipation of final publication, the analysis has been replicated with some additional material and with closer attention to the specific mathematical requirements for cluster analysis on this kind of (dichotomised) data. The results, though, have remained the same.

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Fig. 9.3. Tentative historical reconstruction for Fig. 9.1. Legend: as Fig. 9.1. The proposed historical sequence of the four types a-d appears bottom left. Upper Palaeolithic lines of influence and transmission have not been indicated. Broken lines give proposed Pelasgian / protohistorical transmissions from

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the Late Bronze Age on note the cross model of transmission in four directions. Question marks indicate particularly uncertain instances of proposed transmission. Unbroken lines give proposed transmission in historical times (last two millennia, especially the most recent millennium).

In Chapter 5 I posed, in passing, the question whether perhaps all of the worlds element systems could be considered to descend from Empedocles four-element system. By now we have accumulated enough data and insight to persuade us to limit the extent of massive Empedoclean influence to those parts of the world where Hellenic and subsequently Hellenistic civilisation effectively penetrated, i.e. the Western Old World (Europe, the world of Islam, South Asia, and North and circum-Saharan Africa) even though it remains possible that the South, South East and East Asian overseas influence conveyed to sub-Saharan Africa, transmitted some of that Empedoclean orientation to more Southerly parts of Africa, and there, with its emphasis on foursomes, contributed to the shaping or reshaping of the four-tablet oracle and Ifa.

9.2. Conclusion
Having taken glances at numerous instances of element cosmologies from all over the world, we are now in a position to argue their historical connectivity against a broad canvass informed by recent long-range genetics, linguistics, comparative mythology and comparative ethnography. We started out with the Working Hypothesis that element cosmologies, even those with cyclic, transformational and catalytic features, are globally widespread and have a great antiquity, going back to the Upper Palaeolithic. This Working Hypothesis was vindicated in so far as the global distribution and antiquity of element systems per se are concerned, but had to be utterly rejected: cyclicity, transformation and catalytic dimensions turn out to be much more recent and local than the Upper Palaeolithic. Our analysis reveals that element cosmologies were not an invention of the Presocratics in Ionia and Graecia Magna in the middle of the 1st mill. BCE. Careful reconstructions of prehistoric modes of thought reveal that the first, minute vestiges of element thinking can already be traced to the pre-Out-of-Africa common heritage of Anatomically Modern Humans, to the contents of Pandoras Box where mythical prototypes of the most prominent elements circulating in historic element 290

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systems can already be reconstructed. Subsequently, simple cosmologies of a handful of elements, but still without the features of cyclicity and transformation, may be reconstructed for the Upper Palaeolithic, on a global scale. However, it was not until the Bronze Age, and specifically in West Asia, that out of these time-honoured ingredients of element cosmology, a fully-fledged transformational and cyclical element system was constructed. The present-day distributional ramifications of the cosmology of the transformative element cycle, as well as etymological research of the Y Jng terminology, suggest that this transformative system has a distinct and traceable history going back to Bronze Age West Asia, third or second mill. BCE perhaps in a context that may be related to early metallurgy (on the assumption that it is metallurgy that would bring local specialists to consider perhaps in order to manage and hand down as secret initiation formulae detailed notions of element transformation, especially if one of the elements thus identified is metal). From these putative West Asian beginnings, the early transformative element cycle may readily have been communicated towards Central and East Asia on the spur of dramatically increased communications with the Central Asian invention of the chariot,268 with the Scythian-Korean-Japanese connection ensuring that the system ended up in Japan as well as in Shang China (implying therefore, contrary to popular belief, but in line with Terrien de Lacouperie, that the system is not indigenous in China). Subsequently, the transformative element cycle spilled over into at least one region of now Bantu-speaking sub-Saharan Africa (the Nkoya of South Central Africa), probably as a result of direct transmission from East or South Asia, in a process of recent cultural and probably also even demic diffusion across the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the transformative element cycle was also introduced into the New World, again probably269 not on the basis of Upper Palaeolithic,
Kazakhstan, 2000 BCE; for references, once more, see van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 382 f. with extensive literature. Tacitly we are operating here on the common assumption (also often applied, mutatis mutandis, to sub-Saharan Africa) that North America can only have been the destination, and never the origin, of cultural innovations in prehistoric times. For North America, this view is based on the assumption that that continent was peopled in an eastbound influx from the West, across Beringia or otherwise across the Pacific
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*Borean continuities (for which the system seems to be far too recent), nor of Pelasgian transmission, but through the trickle of transcontinental migrations which recent research (cf. Jett 2002) has brought to light for periods long after a major wave of peopling the Americas via the Bering Strait route took place. Let us finally consider the implications of the scholarly affirmation, in the present argument, of an immensely widespread and seminal, Upper Palaeolithic element system, with a Bronze Age West Asian reformulation in terms of cyclicity and transformation. It amounts, in the first place, to a further corrective of now rapidly obsolescent, Eurocentric views as to the Presocratic origin of philosophy and science.270 The Presocratics search, in the middle of the first millennium BCE, for the prima materia has throughout the history of Western thought, and especially during the past two centuries, been acclaimed by Western historians of science as the very beginning of philosophy and rational thought. Now we can perceive how their search, however fruitful ultimately in some of its results, in the first place appeared to be based on the regressive misinterpretation (reification, compartmentalisation, and immobilisation), in a remote Western backwater peripheral to the Asian and African centres of civilisation, of a profoundly dynamic cyclical transformation system of elements that by the time of the Presocratics was already at least a thousand years old. We are compelled to add at least one millennium to the starting date of philosophy, and to move its place of origin further into West Asia, instead of continuing to situate it in Ionia, Ancient Greece (now Western Turkey) and Graecia Magna, i.e. Southern Italy. Traces of the transformation cycle of elements may also be found with
perhaps with a slight trickle from Western Eurasia and Africa. However, recent genetic research has demonstrated that there have also been population movements across Beringia from East to West, into Eurasia, 10-15 ka BP (Tamm et al. 2007, with illuminating diagram). Elsewhere (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen 2011: 125, 156 the later page presents the diagram from Tamm c.s.) I discuss this finding in the context of the possible American origin of a particular type of Flood myth and Flood hero, in the light of similar suggestions emerging from my multivariate analysis of Flood myths (van Binsbergen with Isaak 2008). It is therefore not totally unthinkable that the four-element cosmology was the gift of Americas early inhabitants, to humankind as a whole. Cf. the Black Athena debate initiated by Martin Bernal (1987-2006); also van Binsbergen 1997a / 2011a.
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Aristotle, Plato, and even Empedocles himself. Meanwhile the recursive, more archaic, system (lacking cyclicity, transformation, and catalytic action) remained dominant, and to the detriment of more dialectic, dynamic and flexible instruments of thought it was this that, in Western thought, set the norm for element cosmologies until today. The Presocratics were active in an environment where already c. 1,000 years earlier a transformative element cosmology had been in circulation, probably as sacred, esoteric innovation of a much older, widespread, recursion-based simple element system. The presumably secret nature of the transformation cycle of elements (probably in metalworking contexts) might explain why it did not massively surface except in East Asia from the late 1st millennium BCE onward with a recent offshoot into South Central Africa, and a trickle into the New World where it was occasionally captured in Flood myths. Given the fragmentation, heterogeneity and often relatively recent provenance of Native American groups from the Old World or perhaps Oceania, the presence of traces of (even transformative and cyclic) element systems in the New World should be allowed to add further detail and precision to our overall analysis but cannot alter or refute it fundamentally. So it turns out that the message of this book reaches even beyond the specific point of the Presocratics pre- and protohistorical antecedents. For, in addition, three more general points are being made, which I consider of the greatest importance, and towards whose substantiation my specific long-range argument on the Presocratics goes a long way: 1. We can reconstruct thought systems of the remote past in some detail and with some reliability. 2. Such reconstruction is predicated on the fundamental unity of (Anatomically Modern) humankind and the relative, porous nature, therefore, of cultural boundaries; and in its turn confirms the validity of such a point of departure. 3. This particularly means that sub-Saharan Africa has been part and parcel of global cultural history to a much greater extent than that part of the world is usually given credit for. Meanwhile these global perspectives should not obscure the fact that, as far as the Presocratics proper are concerned, setting their long-range context in space and time does answer many questions of established 293

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Presocratics research, but also initiates a wide range of new questions, of which only a few are answered here. We understand now why the various Presocratic philosophers take turns in naming the identity of Primal Matter, selecting their answer from a very limited series that happens to coincide with what our present research has shown to be the longestablished, West Asian element cycle of transformations. One question, however, that we could not give the attention it deserves is the following. If the Presocratics were so unmistakably indebted to this wider background of thought in terms of elements, transformation and cyclicity, what precisely compelled them, from their peripheral and apparently second-hand perspective, and especially (since, as we have seen, traces of transformation and cyclicity can still be found in Presocratic element thinking), what compelled their successors who, from Classical Antiquity onwards received their thought, to drop the cyclical and transformative element and to end up with a system of a handful of immutable, parallel ontological positions (Earth, Fire, Water, Air, and a Fifth One)? Was it something in the setup of Hellenic city states and their Hellenistic successors, during the second half of the 1st millennium BCE (e.g., the shift from monocracy or oligocracy to democracy? the growth of a money economy specifically in the Greek world? the decline of Ancient religion?) that was incompatible with cyclicity and transformation? Was such incompatibility perhaps brought about by the very demise of the city state in the Hellenistic world, in favour for much more comprehensive, centralised and undemocratic state systems in violent competition, ultimately to be smothered under the Pax Romana, and against the background of a further growth of proto-globalisation? Did such conditions not impose a more or less immutable hierarchical socio-political order, in which the idea of a constant changing of position and identity as between equals the implied basis of cyclicity and transformation could no longer be entertained? Was it the political and economic demise of West Asian and Northeast African states (first atti, half a millennium later Egypt and Assyria, then the Persians, finally the Parthians and Meroe), that rendered their cyclical, transformative element cosmology obsolete in the eyes of inhabitants of the Aegean and the Central Mediterranean regions? Was dropping of cyclicity and transformation the price which West Asian and Northeast African worldviews had to pay when in the historically familiar way of the ritual and cosmological systems of vanquished peoples they subsequently penetrated the Roman Empire as decontextualised, 294

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eroded and redefined, globalised exotic religions, such as the Isis cult, the cult of Mithras, and Christianity? Was there perhaps an ethnic factor, in the sense that cyclicity and transformation, as manifestations of an ultimately democratic and acephalous, segmentary conception of socio-political life and of the world as a whole, and as such fitting in the Pelasgian tradition, were implicitly perceived as archaic, rustic and unsophisticated, possibly with Black and barbarian overtones (the echoes of Homers metal-working, primitive, potentially Black Sinties, Latin evocations of alienness in the figures of Silenus and Pan, etc.), and therefore had to be suppressed from consciousness? Cleansing Europe from Blackness / non-Indo-European speech / nonChristian religion has been an inveterate, and most regrettable, undercurrent of European popular ideology for two millennia,271 right through to the near-extermination of Roma and Jews in the gas chambers of the Third Reich but, beyond the proverbial outsider position of blacksmiths throughout the Western Old World, I have so far (fortunately) no concrete evidence to support these sweeping and tendentious ethnic suggestions in the specific relation of transformative, cyclic element cosmologies. Along such and similar lines, I submit, the nature of the immensely productive and significant misinterpretation of the West Asian cosmology of cyclical transformation of elements may be better understood, but the substantiation or refutation of such hypotheses should be undertaken by proper specialists in the intellectual history of Imperial and Late Antiquity, and not by me, and not in the present book. Another question upon which future research is hoped to throw more light is that of the apparent historical paradox: while the transformative cycle with catalytic third agent could (at least, according to my analysis here) only have emerged with the triadic thinking tools of the Late Bronze Age, and while the resulting cosmology (especially in its radical Empedoclean redefinition) had a demonstrable impact not only on the West but also on South Asia and further afield, I have demonstrated that simpler element notions have been very widespread, across the continents, and go back to the Upper Palaeolithic. Hence for a proper apprecia271 273

van Sertima 1985; Bernal 1987; but also see Snowdon 1970, 1989; and Keita 1993. van Melsen 1941, 1949; Strathern 2000; Weeks 2003; Hooykaas 1935; etc.

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tion of the cosmology found in South Central and Southern Africa in historical times, we need to appeal to a layered model comprising (a) Upper Palaeolithic, (b) Bronze Age, and (c) recent historical components, each with their own transcontinental history, part of which we have been able to reconstruct. How truly comparable are all these element cosmologies since the Upper Palaeolithic? And what were the specific factors bringing about the Triadic Revolution in the Bronze Age? Is it enough to appeal to the emergence of writing, the state, the money economy, organised religion, and proto-science? Surely, a more subtle and detailed empirical and theoretical argument is required on this point but while the present argument allows us to phrase the question in such novel and focussed terms, its answer, again, should be left to specialists of Bronze Age political, social, economic and religious organisation. Finally, I see new questions arising in the field of the history of Modern, global science and technology. I have adduced comparative and historical data on the strength of which the long-range, global contexts, spanning a dozen millennia and more, may be reconstructed against whose background Presocratic thought emerged as a peripheral, radical mutation. Establishing these pre- and protohistoric antecedents of the Presocratics proved to be a sufficiently taxing undertaking, wrought with numerous pitfalls (many of which I have fallen into, no doubt), and I have so far refrained from projecting in detail my new, contextualised understanding of the Presocratics onto the subsequent historical steps that led from them to Modern science and technology. Numerous are the histories of science organised as a discussion of (proto-)scientific element thinking.273 These histories, spanning the last two millennia of one of the greatest adventures of humankind (i.e. the emergence of natural science), tend to be tacitly conceived within an implied Eurocentric and Empedoclean framework,274 and one wonders if, and how, they should be rewritten in the light of the present books long-range, transcontinental inspiration. Nor is this all. The world image emerging from the present study and from much of my work of the last two decades, counters cultural, identitary and political fragmentation, and reminds us world-wide of our deepseated unity. Could there be a more timely and important message?
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Harding 1991, 1993, 1997; van Binsbergen 2007b.

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Paul International, pp. 189-224. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1985b, The cult of saints in north-western Tunisia: An analysis of contemporary pilgrimage structures, in: Gellner, E., ed., Islamic dilemmas: Reformers, nationalists and industrialization: The southern shore of the Mediterranean, Berlin / New York / Amsterdam: Mouton, pp. 199-239. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia, London / Boston: Kegan Paul International. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1993, Geef hem dan maar aan de krokodillen: Staatsvorming, geweld en culturele discontinuteit in voor-koloniaal Zuidelijk Centraal Afrika, special issue on State Formation, Dahles, H., & Trouwborst, A., eds, Antropologische Verkenningen, 12, 4: 10-31, 1993; English version: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Then give him to the crocodiles: Violence, state formation, and cultural discontinuity in west central Zambia, 1600-2000, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., with Pelgrim, R., ed., 2003b, The dynamics of power and the rule of law: Essays on Africa and beyond in honour of Emile Adriaan B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, Berlin / Mnster / London: LIT for African Studies Centre, Leiden, pp. 197-220. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1995a, Divination and board-games: Exploring the links between geomantic divination and mancala board-games in Africa and Asia, paper read at the 1995 international colloquium Board-games in Academia, Leiden, 9-13 April 1995, revised version at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/gen3/mankala.html. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1995b, Four-tablet divination as trans-regional medical technology in Southern Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, 25, 2: 114-140. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1996a, Transregional and historical connections of fourtablet divination in Southern Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, 26, 1: 2-29. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1996b, Time, space and history in African divination and board-games, in: Tiemersma, D., & Oosterling, H.A.F., eds, Time and temporality in intercultural perspective: Studies presented to Heinz Kimmerle, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 105-125. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1996c, The astrological origin of Islamic geomancy, paper read at The Society for the Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science / Society of Ancient Greek Philosophy 15th Annual Conference: Global and Multicultural Dimensions of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and Social Thought: Africana, Christian, Greek, Islamic, Jewish, Indigenous and Asian Traditions, Binghamton University, New York, Department of Philosophy / Center for Medieval and Renaissance studies; at: http://shikanda.net/ancient_models/BINGHAMTON%201996.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997a, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp, Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue of Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, vols. 28-29; revised reprint as van Binsbergen 2011a. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997b, Rethinking Africas contribution to global cultural history: Lessons from a comparative historical analysis of mankala boardgames and geomantic divination, in: van Binsbergen 1997a: 221-254; reprinted in van Binsbergen 2011a: 219-252. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997c, Black Athena Ten Years After: Towards a constructive re-assessment, in: van Binsbergen 1997a: 11-64; reprinted in van Binsbergen 2011a.

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van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997d, Alternative models of intercontinental interaction towards the earliest Cretan script, in: van Binsbergen, 1996-1997: 131-148; reprinted in van Binsbergen 2011a. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2000a, Le point de vue de Wim van Binsbergen, in: Autour dun livre. Afrocentrisme, de Stephen Howe, et Afrocentrismes: Lhistoire des Africains entre Egypte et Amrique, de Jean-Pierre chrtien [ sic ], Franois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et Claude-Hlne Perrot (dir.), par Mohamed Mbodj, Jean Copans et Wim van Binsbergen, Politique africaine, 79: 175-180. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2000b, Dans le troisime millnaire avec Black Athena?, in: Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrtien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., Afrocentrismes: Lhistoire des Africains entre gypte et Amrique, Paris: Karthala, pp. 127-150. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2000c, Cupmarks, stellar maps, and mankala boardgames: An archaeoastronomical and Africanist excursion into Palaeolithic worldviews; provisional version at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/gen3/starmaps_3_2000/cupmarks_0.ht ml. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2002, From an African bestiary to universal science? Cluster analysis opens up a world-wide historical perspective on animal symbolism in divine attributes, divination sets, and in the naming of clans, constellations, zodiacs, and lunar mansions, prepublication version at http://shikanda.net/ancient_models/animal.htm. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin etc.: LIT. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2004, Long -range mythical continuities across Africa and Asia: Linguistic and iconographic evidence concerning leopard symbolism, paper presented at the Round Table on Myth, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 8-10 May, 2004; at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/leopard_harvard/leopardwww.htm; in press as: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2013, The leopards unchanging spots: A pictorial account of comparative research on the transcontinental history of leopard-skin symbolism, shamanism, and African agency, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005a, An incomprehensible miracle: Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbes Tales of Faith, in: Kresse, Kai, ed., Reading Mudimbe, special issue, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 17, 1: 11-65. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005b, Divination through space and time, key note address, International conference, Leiden, National Museum for Ethnology, revised version at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/divination_keynote_leiden2005/web%2 0pages/keynote_divination_leiden_2005.htm; in press (c) as: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., African divination across time and space: The typology, intercontinental connections, and intercultural epistemology of sub-Saharan mantics, in: van Beek, Walter E.A., & Peek, Philip, eds, Realities revealed: Divination in sub-Saharan Africa, Berlin / Munster / Boston: LIT, 2013. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005c, We are in this for the money: Commodification and the sangoma cult of Southern Africa in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Geschiere, Peter L., eds, Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities: T h e s o c i a l l i f e o f T h i n g s revisited, Berlin etc.: LIT, pp. 319-348 + bibliogra-

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phy pp. 351-378. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2006a, Mythological archaeology: Situating sub-Saharan African cosmogonic myths within a long-range intercontinential comparative perspective, in: Osada, Toshiki, with the assistance of Hase, Noriko, eds, Proceedings of the Pre-symposium of RIHN [ Research Institute for Humanity and Nature ] and 7th ESCA [ Ethnogenesis in South and Central Asia ] HarvardKyoto Roundtable, Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), pp. 319-349. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2006b, Further steps towards an aggregative diachronic approach to world mythology, starting from the African continent, paper read at the International Conference on Comparative Mythology, organized by Peking University (Research Institute of Sanskrit Manuscripts & Buddhist Literature) and the Mythology Project, Asia Center, Harvard University (Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies), May 10-14, 2006, at Peking University, Beijing, China; in press in: Duan Qing & Gu Zhenkun, eds, Proceedings of the International Conference on Comparative Mythology, Beijing; preprint at: http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/Further%20steps%20def.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2007a, Manchester as the birth place of modern agency research: The Manchester School explained from the perspective of EvansPritchards book T h e N u e r , in: de Bruijn, M., Rijk van Dijk & Jan-Bart Gewald, eds, Strength beyond structure: Social and historical trajectories of agency in Africa, Leiden: Brill, pp. 16-61. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2007b, The underpinning of scientific knowledge systems: Epistemology or hegemonic power? The implications of Sandra Harding's critique of North Atlantic science for the appreciation of African knowledge systems, in: Hountondji, Paulin J., ed., La rationalit, une ou plurielle, Dakar: CODESRIA [Conseil pour le dveloppement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique] / UNESCO [ Organisation des Nations Unies pour lducation, la science et la culture ], pp. 294-327, van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2008, The eclectic scientism of Flix Guattari: Africanist anthropology as both critic and potential beneficiary of his thought, in: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, 21, 1-2, 2007, special issue on: Lines and rhizomes - The transcontinental element in African philosophies, pp. 155-228. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2009, Izanami giving birth to Kagutsuchi / Fire: Evidence for a widespread proto-historic cosmology revolving on an element transformative cycle, in Japan, Africa, throughout the Old World, and in the New World as a step in the world-historic development of modes of thought, paper presented at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009, at: http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/paper_Japan_final.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010a, The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: General theoretical models, and detailed comparative discussion of the case of Nkoya mythology from Zambia, South Central Africa, in: van Binsbergen & Venbrux 2010: 143-225. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010b, The spiked wheel trap as a cultural index fossil in African prehistory: An exercise in global distribution analysis based on Lindbloms 1935 data, pre-publication version at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/spiked_wheel_trap.pdf.

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van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010c, Africas splendid social technology of reconciliation, and the political sociology of its under-utilisation at the national and international level, in: Tagou, Clestin, 2010, ed., The Dynamics of Conflict, Peace and Development in African Societies: From local to international, Yaounde: Presses des Universits Protestantes dAfrique, pp. 63-120. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010d, Short note on Kings as tears of the Rain and Mankind as tears of the Sun: Excerpt of The case of kings as Tears of Rain (Nkoya, Zambia) / humankind as Tears of Re (Ancient Egypt), i-Medjat: Papyrus lectronique des Ankhou: Revue caribenne pluridisciplinaire dite par lUnit de Recherche-Action Guadeloupe (UNIRAG), 4, fvrier 2010: p. 7. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010e, The heroes in Flood myths worldwide: Seeking to capture prehistoric modes of thought by means of quantitative contents analysis, paper delivered at the 4th Annual Meeting, International Association for Comparative Mythology, Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 8-9 October 2010, at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/binsbergen_flood_heroes.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011a, ed., Black Athena comes of age, Berlin etc.: LIT. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011b, Cosmic egg and Pelasgian realm: A distributional study in Comparative Mythology, at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/Cosmic%20egg%20by%20Wim%20van%20Bins bergen%202011.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011c, Is there a future for Afrocentrism despite Stephen Howes dismissive 1998 study? in: van Binsbergen 2011a: 253-282. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011d, The limits of the Black Athena thesis and of Afrocentricity as empirical explanatory models: The *Borean hypothesis, the Back-into-Africa hypothesis and the Pelasgian hypothesis as suggestive of a common, West Asian origin for the continuities between Ancient Egypt and the Aegean, with a new identity for the goddess Athena, in: van Binsbergen 2011a: 297-338. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011e, A unique Nkoya statuette associated with cults of affliction (Western Zambia) (pre-publication copy), at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/Mwendanjangula_final.pdf van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011f, Shimmerings of the Rainbow Serpent: Towards the interpretation of crosshatching motifs in Palaeolithic art: Comparative mythological and archaeoastronomical explorations inspired by the incised Blombos red ochre block, South Africa, 70 ka BP, and Nkoya female puberty rites, 20th c. CE., prepublication version at: http://shikanda.net/ancient_models/crosshatching_FINAL.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011g, Matthew Schoffeleers on Malawian suitor stories: A perspective from comparative mythology, in: Nthenda, Louis, & Mphande, Lupenga, eds, The Society of Malawi Journal, Special Memorial Edition, 64, 3 (supplementary electronic edition), 2011: A Tribute to the Life of Fr. Matthew Schoffeleers (1928-2011): Malawianist, Renaissance man and free-thinker, pp. 76-94. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011h, Existential dilemmas of a North Atlantic anthropologist in the production of relevant Africanist knowledge, in: Devisch, Ren, & Nyamnjoh, Francis B., eds, The postcolonial turn: Re-imagining anthropology and Africa, Bamenda (Cameroon) / Leiden (the Netherlands): Langaa / African Studies Centre, pp. 117-142.

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van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012a, Spiritualiteit, heelmaking en transcendentie: Een intercultureel-filosofisch onderzoek bij Plato, in Afrika, en in het Noordatlantisch gebied, vertrekkend vanuit Otto Duintjers O n u i t p u t t e l i j k i s d e W a a r h e i d , Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Studies and Transcontinental Comparative Studies. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012b, Production, class formation, and the penetration of capitalism in the Kaoma rural district, Zambia, 1800-1978, in: Panella, Cristiana, ed., Lives in motion, indeed: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Social Change in Honour of Danielle de Lame, Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities 174, Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa, pp. 223-272. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012c, Key note Rethinking Africas transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, paper presented at the International Conference Rethinking Africas transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 12-13 April 2012, at: http://www.shikanda.net/Rethinking_history_conference/wim_keynote.pdf; revised version forthcoming in: van Binsbergen, in preparation (a). van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012d, The relevance of Buddhism and Hinduism for the study of Asian-African transcontinental continuities, paper presented at the International Conference Rethinking Africas transcontinental continuitiesin pre- and protohistory, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 12-13 April 2012, at: http://www.shikanda.net/Rethinking_history_conference/wim_leiden_2012.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012e, A note on the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann-[DickRead] thesis on extensive South and South East Asian demographic and cultural impact on sub-Saharan Africa in pre- and protohistory, paper presented at the International Conference Rethinking Africas transcontinental continuitiesin preand protohistory, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 12-13 April 2012, at: http://www.shikanda.net/Rethinking_history_conference/wim_tauchmann.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012f, Towards a pre- and proto-historic transcontinental maritime network: Africas pre-modern Chinese connections in the light of a critical assessment of Gavin Menzies work, preview at: http://www.shikanda.net/topicalities/menzies_africa_final.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press (a) Towards the Pelasgian hypothesis, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Studies. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press (b), Cluster analysis assessing the relation between the Eurasian, American, African and Oceanian linguistic macro-phyla: On the basis of the distribution of the proposed *Borean reflexes in their respective lexicons: With a lemma exploring *Borean reflexes in Guthries ProtoBantu, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press (c), see 2005b. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., forthcoming, Giving birth to Fire: The Japanese cosmogonic myth of Izanami and Kagutsuchi in transcontinental perspective; prepublication preview, at: http://shikanda.net/topicalities/kagutsuchi_2011.pdf. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in preparation (a), ed., Rethinking Africans transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, Leiden: Brill for African Studies Centre, Leiden. van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in preparation (b), Black Vulcan?: A long-range comparative mythological and linguistic analysis of the complex relations between the Greek god Hephaistos and the Egyptian god Pt Exploring the Pelasgian realm

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Index of authors cited

The entries take the form of bibliographical references, exhaustively listing all authors and co-authors referred to in this book. An author may be listed both as single author and as first author in a list of co-authors. An author listed as co-author only has an entry in her or his own right only if also first author of another publication cited. Surnames preceded by a prefix such as de, von, van appear under that prefix. Some authors (marked with *) also appear as entries in the Index of Proper Names. Persons whose name appears in this book but whose works, although in existence, are not cited, only appear in the Index of Proper Names. Ancient Greek philosophers have been treated as authors even if mainly or exclusively attested in secondary sources. Due to last-minute text additions a few page references may be off by 1. Abrahams, Roger D., 73 Abul Faraj, 63 Acri, F., 158 Adams, Douglas Q., 239 Adelaar, A., 35, 185 Aetius, 159 Aitchison, J., 10n Aksu, A.E., Mudie, P.J., Rochon, A., Kaminski, M.A., Abrajano, T., & Yaar, D., 247n al-Djai, Abu cUthman c Amr b. Bar, 78 Alexander, H. Burr, 142143, 143n Allain, J., & LeroiGourhan, A., 183n Allen, Charles, 41 Allen, Nick, 12, 153 Allen, R.E., & Furley, D.J., 149n Alpern, Stanley, 244 al-Zanati, Muammad, 68, 78, 247, 247n Amselle, J.-L., 229 Anati, E., 10n Anaximander, 174, 234 Anaximenes, 149, 157, 174 Andrews, F.H., 217n Andrews, Tamra, 163 Anesaki, M., 100n Apollodorus, 39n, 154n Apollonius of Tyana, 170n Apollonius Rhodius, 112 Aristotle*, 81, 109, 149150, 159, 164-168, 173174, 206, 251-252, 255, 293, 165n-166n, 169n, 173n Armayor, O. Kimball, 229 Armstrong, E.A., 217n Arnason, J.P., Eisenstadt, S.N., & Wittrock, B., 42n Arrhenius, S., 166-167 Asad, T., 32n Asante, M.K., 45n Atsma, Aaron J., 39n, 136n, 154n Auerbach, E., 151 Avery, C.B., 112 Ayrton, M., & Silcock, A., 218n Bachelard, Gaston, 156 Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, 183, 231n Bakalis, Nikolaos, 149n Balfour, H., 265 Ball, Charles James, 175, 220, 218n, 241n Baltzer, Eduard, 157n Bandi, H.G., & Maringer, J., [ following a concept by Hugo Obermaier ], 230 Banerjee, G.N., 117n Barnes, Jonathan, 149n, 157n, 160n Barnes, R.H., 77 Barnett, R.D., 230n Barthel, Thomas, 218n Bascom, W., 126 Bates, O., 164n Baudouin, Marcel, 164n Baumann, H., Thurnwald, R., & Westermann, D., 274 Bayarma Khabtagaeva, 216n

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BBC [ British Broadcasting Corporation ], 19n Beaujard, P., 128, 128n Becher, Joachim, 166n Bednarik, Robert G., 180, 10n, 231n Bellah, R.H., & Joas, H., 42n Benedict, Ruth, 115n Bengtson, J.D., 77, 240 Bengtson, J.D., & Ruhlen, M., 185-186, 199, 245 Bent, J.T., 279n Berchem, D., 151n Berezkin, Yuri, 261 Bernab, Alberto, 149n Bernal,* Martin Gardiner, 7, 15, 19, 42, 46, 83-85, 135-136, 138, 174-175, 178, 187, 218, 226, 239, 243, 32n-33n, 153n, 185n-186n, 226n, 228n, 248n, 273n, 292n, 295n Berossus, 223 Berthelot, Marcellin, 115n Berthier, H., 128n Bertranpetit, J., & CavalliSforza, L.L., 191 Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 223n Bezemer, T.J., 163n Bezold, C., 241n Bhabha, H., 45, 32n Bidez, Joseph, 157n, 174n Bidez, Joseph, & Cumont, Franz, 41, 174n Bierhorst, John, 100n Bis, Jean, 157n, 175n Birkeli, E., 279n Blagden, C.O., 217 Blaek, Vclav, 12, 136, 153n, 186n, 230n, 240n Bleek, W., 185 Blench, Roger, 218n Bohannan, P., 126 Bhme, Angelika, 174n Boll, C., 249, 252 Bollack, J., 157n Bomhard, A.R., 77, 256n Bomhard, A.R., & Kerns,

J.C., 256n Bongioanni, A. & Sole Croce, M., 133 Bonnet, H., 288n Bosman, W., 66n Bouch-Leclercq, A., 119, 151, 209, 264, 110n Bouchet, J., 39, 270 Bouissac, P., 189 Bovill, E.W., 70 Boyce, M., 41 Brace, C.L., Tracer, D.P., Yaroch, L.A., Robb, J., Brandt, K., & Nelson, A.R., 219n Breasted, J.H., 130n Brelsford, W.V., 272 Bremmer, J., 111 Breuil, H., 188, 264 Breuil, H., Lhote, H., & Brenans, le Col., 37, 247 Brinton, D.G., 219, 177n, 218n-219n British Broadcasting Corporation, see BBC Brown, D.E., 48, 86 Brown, Geoffrey, 169 Brown, J.T., 129n Browne, Thomas, 190n Brun, Jean, 169n Buccellati, Giorgio, 273n Buchheim, Thomas, 149n Buck, C.D.,181n, 239 Budge, E.A. Wallis, 73, 124 Burkert, Walter, 106, 234, 149n, 157n, 171n, 249n Burnet, John, 149n Burstein, Stanley Mayer, 223n Burton, R.F., 69n Bushell, Stephen W., 218n Butler, James Eric, 152, 156-157 Butler, Samuel, 152 Butterworth, E.A.S., 112 Cadenat, P., 264n Campbell, Gordon, 158, 168-169, 171, 167n, 169n

Campbell, Joseph, 188 Capelle, Wilhelm, 149n Carmody, F.J., 75 Carra de Vaux, B., 110n Carruthers, P., & Chamberlain, A., 10n Carus, Paul, 151, 164, 241, 118n, 235n, 241n Cassirer, E., 19 Caton-Thompson, G., 279n Cavaignac, Eugne, 164n Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Piazza, A., & Menozzi, A., 62, 142, 191, 231, 186n, 266n Cerri, Giovanni, 152 Chalybaeus, Heinrich Moritz, 209 Chang Hsing-Lang, 77 Chaplin, J.H., 270 Charet, J., 187 Charpentier, J., 218n Chase, P.G., & Dibble, H., 10n Chau Ju-Kua, 282n Chavaillon, J., 201 Chavannes, E., 249, 252 Chevalier, J., & Gheerbrant, A., 109n Chitwood, Ava, 160n Chwolson, D., 110n Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 86, 174 Clark, Ella E., 146-147 Classen, Carl Joachim, 157n Clermont-Ganneau, C., 224n Clifford, J., 129 Clottes, Jean, & LewisWilliams, David, 256, 183n, 202n, 272n Coia, Valentina, Giovanni Destro-Bisol, Fabio Verginelli, Cinzia Battaggia, Ilaria Boschi, Fulvio Cruciani, Gabriella Spedini, David Comas, 33n

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Conder, Claude Reignier, 219n Confucius / Kng Fz, 41 Conkey, M.W., 189 Cook, Daniel J., & Rosemont Jr, Henry, 106n Coon, C.S., 151, 274 Cooper, J.C., 150 Copans, J., 32n Corbey, R., & Roebroeks, W., 10n Cordier, Henri, 217n-218n Corney, B.G., 218n Cornford, Francis Marion, 20, 149n, 157n, 171n Cory, Isaac Preston, 76, 223n Cotterell, Arthur, 126, 133n Coulson, Sheila, Staurset, Sigrid, & Walker, Nick, 201 Courlander, Harold, 73 Crates of Mallos, 159 Cruciani, F., Santolamazza, P., Shen, P., Macaulay, V., Moral, P., Olckers, A., Modiano, D., Holmes, S., DestroBisol, G., Coia, V., Wallace, D.C., Oefner, P.J., Torroni, A., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Scozzari, R., & Underhill, Peter A., 33n Cudworth, Ralph, 167 Culin, S., 63, 188, 273, 276 Curd, Patricia, 158n dAlverny, M.-T., 75 Dahlby, F., 150 Dang Nghiem Van, 246n David-Neel, Alexandra, 264n Davidson, Basil, 287n Davidson, Gustav, 162 Davies, N., 20, 249 Davis, S., 75 de Boer, T., 110n de Buck, A., 163,

de Flacourt, E., 63n de Harlez, C., 219, 216n de Hevesy, G. [ von Hevesy, Wilhelm ], 218n de Liagre Bhl, F.M.Th., 188n De Maret, P., & Gosselain, O.P., 124n de Raedemaeker, F., 15 de Saussure, Ferdinand 210 de Saussure, Leopold, 249 de Voogt, A., 63 de Vries, Jan, 281, 124n DeLancey, Scott, 218n Delatte, A., & Delatte, E., 264 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F., 109n della Corte, Francesco, 155 Delme-Radcliffe, C., 102n Delporte, Henri, 189 Dennett, R.E., 111, 125126, 66n Denoon, Donald, 102n Descartes, R., 192 Deshpande, A., 282n Dewez, Michel C., 183, 188, 274, 276 Diakonoff, Igor, 77 Dick-Read, Robert, 34-35, 70, 72-73, 81, 129, 53n, 100n, 279n, 287n Diels, Hermann, 159, 209, 149n, 157n Diels, Hermann, & Kranz, W., 149n, 173n, 157n Diktter, F., 218n Dinsmoor, W.B., 114n Diodorus Siculus, 113, 134n Diop, Cheikh Anta, 130, 32n, 45n, 117n, 248n Diringer, D., 141, 71n Dodds, Erik R., 112, 174n Dolgopolsky, A., 198-199, 237, 245, 258, 34n Dolisane-Eboss Nyamb, Ccile, 279n

Donald, M., 10n Dorsey, J.O., 143, 143n dos Santos Gomez, Mrcio, 168n dos Santos, J., 69n Douglas, Mary, 14, 151 Douglas, R.K., 221 Dowson, John, 39n, 202n, 272n Drijvers, H.J.W., 116n Driver, Harold Edson, Riesenberg, S.H., & Curry, H.J., 261n du Mesnil du Buisson, Robert, 264n Dubois, W.E.B., 45n Dubs, H.H., 241n Duchesne-Guillemin, J., Ducie, Earl of, 264 Dufourmont, Eddy, 218n Dumzil, G., 208-209, 124n Dumont, Jean-Paul, with Delattre, Daniel, & de Poirier, Jean-Louis, 157n Dundes, Alan, 220n Durkheim, E., 91, 192 Durkheim, E., & Mauss, M., 116, 192 Drr, Michael & Renner, Egon, 266n Duyvendak, J.J.L., 287n Eberhard, W., 118n, 241n Edwards, I.E.S., 140n Egberts, A., 186n Egerod, Sren, 218n Eglash, Ron, 208 Eisenstadt, S.N., 42n Eitrem, Samuel, 110 el Tounisi, Mohammed ibn Omar, 65n Eliade, M., 112, 211, 251, 42n Eliot, Alexander, 73 Elliot Smith, see Smith Ellis, Alfred Burdon, 111, 124, 133n Emery, W.B., 137-138, 140n

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Empedocles*, 4, 8-9, 3132, 106, 109-112, 115116, 131, 141, 149-150, 156-161, 164-176, 178, 209, 234-235, 249-252, 274, 278, 285, 290, 293, 295-296, 110n, 118n, 130n, 157n, 160n, 165n, 167n, 175n, 224n Evelyn-White, Hugh G., 153 Fad, T., 71, 110, 247n Fairbanks, Arthur, 149n, 160n Fairman, H.W., 125, 134, 125n Falconer, Thomas, ed. and transl., 76 Fanon, F., 32n Farber, W., 271 Farizy, C., & Vandermeersch, B., 188 Farmer, Steve, 12, 253 Farmer, Steve, Henderson, J.B., & Witzel, M., 252253 Farnell, L.R., 264 Faulkner, Raymond O., 73, 163 Fauth, W., 186n, 264n Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrtien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., 45n Feldmann, Susan, 73 Feng, W., 218n Ferrand, G., 210, 69n, 128n Ferwerda, Rein, 160, 157n Feshbach, S., 157n Feuchtwang, S., 247-248 Fewkes, J. Walter, 142 Finkelberg, Aryeh, 158 Fischer, H.G., 135 Fishbane, Michael A., 162 Fiskejo, Magnus, 119, 252, 9n, 118n Fitting, Melvin, 208 Flammarion, Camille, 4 Fleming, Harold C., 34, 49, 185, 187, 227, 240,

34n, 191n, 240n Flgel, Gustav, 224n Fong, J., 218n Fontenrose, J., 123, 134135, 152, 288n Forsdyke, John, 20 Forster, Peter, 33 Fouch, L., & Gardner, G.A., 279n Frankfort, Henri, 19, 163n Frankfort, Henri, Frankfort, H.A., Wilson, J.A., Jacobsen, T., & Irwin, W.A., 19 Franklin, J.C., 169, 234 Frazer, James G., 72-73, 100n Freeman, Kathleen, 171n Freud, Sigmund, 91 Friedrich, Johannes, 239 Frobenius, Leo, 44, 202, 218, 270, 67n, 111n, 177n, 279n Fung Yu-lan, 41, 118n Gadamer, H.-G, 31 Gadd, C.J., 176, 209, 118n Galenus, 150, 177 Garbutt, H.W., 269-271 Gardiner, Alan H., 7, 84, 134, 141, 101n Garlake, Peter S., 203, 272n, 279n Gaster, Theodor H., 73 Geffken, Joh., 155 Germond, P., 188n Gigon, A., 173-174 Giles, Herbert Allen, 221, 226, 249-250, 93n Gilmore, Donald Y., & McElroy, Linda S., 20 Gimbutas, M.A., 187 Girardot, Norman, J., 217n Gladisch, August, 175, 175n Goff, Beatrice L., 164n Goneim, M. Zakaria, 102n Goodwin, A.J.H., 264 Gordon, Cyrus H., 20, 19n Grg, M., 225n

Graham, A.C., 9n Graham, Daniel W., 168n Gratarolo, Guglielmo, ed. Waite, Arthur Edward, 111n Graves, Robert, 264-265, 168n, 172n, 190n, 288n Grey, George, 133n Griaule, Marcel, 129 Griaule, Marcel, & Dieterlen, G., 125, 223n Griffiths, Thomas, 110n Groenen, Marc, 189 Grnwald, Michael, 149n Gruppe, Otto, 175 Guattari, F., 109n Gnther, Herbert V., 117n Gurney, O.R., 272n Guthrie, Malcolm, 185 Guthrie, William Keith Chambers, 115, 149n Haarmann, H., 247n Haberland, Wolfgang, 145, 207 Haile, Berard, & Wyman, Leland Clifton, 143 Haillot, J., 70 Hamilton, C.H., 218n Hamilton, Calvin J., 223n Hammer, M.F., T. Karafet, A. Rasanayagam, E.T. Wood, T.K. Altheide, T. Jenkins, R.C. Griffiths, A.R. Templeton & S.L. Zegura, 33n Harding, S., 54, 296n Harrod, James B., 188, 10n Hart, G., 138 Harva (Holmberg), U., 42n, 164n Hastings, James, with Selbie, J.A., & Gray, L.H., 182, 180n-181n Hawkes, Jacquetta, with Trump, David, 231 Hays-Gilpin, Kelley, 189 Hbert, J.C., 248, 128n Hecataeus, 113

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Hedin, Sven, 264n Hegel, G.W.F., 149, 208209 Heidegger, Martin, 31 Heidel, William Arthur, 158 Helck, W., 273n Hendrickx, S., 188n Hennig, R., 113n Henshilwood, C., dErrico, F., Marean, C., Milo, R., & Yates, R., 201n Henshilwood, C., Sealy, J., Yates, R., CruzUribe, K., Goldberg, P., Grine, F.E., Klein, R.G., Poggenpoel, C., van Niekerk, K., & Watts, I., 201n Heraclitus of Ephese, 149, 173-174, 208-209 Heraclitus Ponticus, 155 Herbert, E.W., 124n Hermes Trismegistus, 241 Herodotus, 38, 229, 265n Herschel, William, 223n Hershbell, Jackson P., 169n Hesiod,* 131, 135, 152153, 157, 134n, 154n; and Egyptian, 123; cf. Theogonia Hess, Richard, & Tsumura, D.T., 19n Heyerdahl, Thor, 266, 266n Heyne, C.G., 161 Higley, Sarah L., 135 Hodder, I., 183n Hoffman, M.A., 20 Hlderlin, Friedrich, 149 Hollis, S. Tower, 134n Holmberg, see Harva Homans, G., 92 Homer / Homerus,* 20, 152-153, 155, 157, 230, 251, 295, 7n, 39n, 153n, 188n, 273n Hon, Tze-ki, 218n

Hooykaas, R., 302n Hopfner, T., 134, 163n Hopkins, L.C., 218n Hornblower, S., & Spawforth, A., 112 Horowitz, Wayne, & Hurowitz, Victor, 150, 181n Hosken, Larry, 66 Houlihan, P.F., 188n Howard, W., 150 Howe, S., 45n Hromnik, C., 279n Hrozny, B., 226, 240, 186n, 272n, 280n Huehn, H., 149n Huffman, Thomas N., 279n Hunger, H., & Pingree, D., 288n Hyginus, 265n Ibn al-Nadim, 116 Ibn Ezra, 15, 247n Ibn Khaldn, 69 Illich-Svitych, V.M., 49, 198-199, 245, 34n Illing, Karl Emil, 76 Ions, Veronica, 163 Irwin, G.W., 77 Isaak, Mark., 73, 123, 146-147, 40n, 246n, Jacobsen, Thorkild, 100n, 273n Jacoby, F., 223n Jacottet, Emile, 39, 270 Jairazbhoy, R.A., 229 Jakobson, R., Fant, G., & Halle, Morris, 205n James, G.G.M., 16 Janko, Richard, 158n Janmart, J., 201 Jasanoff, J.H., & Nussbaum, A., 186n Jaspers, Karl, 42, 42n Jaulin, R., 247n Jaynes, J., 10n Jeffreys, M.D.W., 100n, 271n Jenness, Diamond, 272n Jensen, A.E., 55n

Jett, Stephen C., 260, 266, 292, 266n Jettmar, K., 218n Johnson, H.J., 110 Judd, Neil M., 142n Judson, Katharine B., 147 Jung, Carl G., 115, 121122, 115n Kahler-Meyer, Emmi, 73 Kahn, C.H., 173, 173n, 173 Kaiser, M., & Shevoroshkin, V., 258, 34n Kakar, S., 117n Kaliff, Anders, 234 Kamballah, Cheikh Hadji, 70-71 Kammerzell, F., 176, 246n Kant, Immanuel, 209 Kaplony, P., 101n Karlgren, B., 186, 236 Karst, J., 90, 152, 161, 227, 232-233, 240, 42n, 216n, 227n, 230n, 246n, 280n Kassibo, B., 70-71 Kaul, Flemming, 209 Keightley, David N., 221223 Keita, S.O.Y, 295n Keith, A.B., 39n Kelsen, Hans, 73 Kemp, Barry J., 137, 140n Kent, R., 35, 279 Kingsley, Peter, 15, 111112, 115, 159-161, 171, 234, 157n, 160n, 175n Kircher, Athanasius, 222, 241 Kirk, G.S., 173, 149n Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E., & Schofield, M., 149n Kirkbride, D., 65, 55n Kitz, Anne Marie, 150 Klein Franke, F., 115, 110n Knecht, H., Pike-Tay, A., & White, R., 20 Kbben, Andr J.F., 15 Khler, U., 97n

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Kovacs, M.G., 188n Kramer, S.N., 231, 117n Kroeber, A.L., 217n Kugler, F.X., 241n Kunz, Hans, 42n Kyong-McClain, J., 218n Lacroix, W.F.G., 76 Laks, Andr, 158, 168n Lambert, W.G., 117n Lambridis, Helle, 157n Lambropoulou, Voula, 234 Lambrou-Phillipson, C., 161 Lami, A., 149n Landesmuseum, see Badisches Lange, Dierk, 73, 271, 220n Lao Tze, 41 Laurel, Fredda, 65n Layton, R., 256 Le Scouzec, G., Larcher, H., & Alleau, R., 180n Leclerc, Jean (Clericus Ioannes), 167 Lefkowitz, Mary R., 16 Lefkowitz, Mary R., & MacLean Rogers, G., 185n Legge, James, 121, 164, 220-221, 235, 241, 221n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 215, 241 Leibold, J., 217n Leonard, William Ellery, 159-161, 234-235, 157n Lepsius, J., 175 Leroi-Gourhan, Andr, 183, 189, 183n Leser, P., 222 Lessa, W.A., 268n Levenson, Joseph Richmond, & Schurmann, Franz, 217n Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 92, 192, 205, 208, 211n Levtzion, N., & Hopkins, J.F.P., 70, 72 Levy, G.R., 151n

Lewis-Williams, J. David, 10n Lewis-Williams, J. David, & Dowson, T.A., 202n, 272n Lhote, H., 247, 264n Li An-Che, 142n Li Anshan, 12, 287n Li Fan, 218n, Li, X., Harbottle, G., Zhang, J., & Wang, C., 183 Liddell, Henry George, & Scott, Robert, 160n, 166n Lieu, S.N.C., 224n Lin, X., 218n Lindblom, Gerhard, 53 Ling, Wang, 119, 121, 241, 252, 111n, 219n, 248n-249n; cf. Needham Linton, R., 272 Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard, 167n Lommatzsch, Bernhard Heinrich Carl, 157n Long, A.A., 175, 168n Longrigg, James, 152, 154, 158, 160, 167, 173174, 167n Lnnrot, Elias, 39n, 153n Lucas, Phillip, 200 Luce, G.H., 238 Lucebert, 4 Lusthaus, Dan, 117n Lyle, Emily, 109n Macauley, David Mark, 109n, 149n, 157n Maciocia, G., 118n MacKay, E.J.H., 272n Mackenzie, D.A., 100n Mackintosh, Catharine Winkworth, 39 MacLennan, B.J., 112 Macrobius, Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius, 172n; cf. von Jan Majer[i], Michael[is], 154 Malinowski, B., 92 Mallory, J.P. & Mair,

Victor H., 240 Mani, 224n Mansfeld, Jaap, 160, 149n, 175n Marseille, Jacques, 272n Marshack, A., 10n Martin, Alain, 158n Martin, Alain, & Primavesi, O., 158n Marwitz, H., 264n Maspero, H., 218n Massignon, L., 110 Matissoff, J.A., 238 Maupoil, B., 70, 69n Maximus Tyrius, 230n Mayer, R., 271n McCall, Daniel, & Fleming, Harold C., 227, 191n, 240n McEvilley, Thomas, 234 McNaughton, P.R., 251 Meeussen, A.E., 185 Meier-Oeser, S., 168n Mellaart, J., 246n Meng-Tze, 177 Meuli, K., 272n Meyer, A., & Esterhuizen, Laura Valerie, 84 Meyerowitz, E.L.R., 73n Michael, Lawrence, 65n Michalowski, P., 42n Michelini, Ann N., 165 Michelutti, L., 282n Middleton, K., 272n Militarev, A.Y., 262n Militarev, A.Y., & Shnirelman, V.A., 262n Miller, Roy, 164n Millerd, Clara Elizabeth, 157n Minar, Edwin L., 168n Mithen, S., 10n Moldenke, Charles Edward, 134n Monier-Willams, 280n Montagu, M.F. Ashley, 219n, 231n Moore, P., 288n Mori Masako, 243, 223n Mostaert, A., 263

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Mudimbe, V.Y., 32n, 45n, 223n Mugler, Charles, 169, 168n Mulisch, Harry, 194 Murray, H.J.R., 54, 63n Musaeus-Higgins, Marie, 135 Nai, H., 183 Nakamura, H., 218n Naso, Publius Ovidius, see Ovid Nasr, S.H., 110 Nassau, Robert H., 66n Naveh, J., 141 Needham, J., 84, 118n Needham, J., in collaboration with Ling, W., 119, 121, 241, 252, 111n, 219n, 248n-249n, 282n Needham, J., & Lu, G.D., 266n Nettleton, Anitra C.E., 272 Neville, H., Chittick, H.N., & Rotberg, R.I., 287n Nietzsche, Friedrich W., 115, 149, 211, 115n, 149n Noble, W., & Davidson, I., 10n Nuttall, Z., 147-148, 266267, 266n OBrien, Denis, 160, 165, 168n, 175n OKeefe, M.D., 157n Oakley, K.P., 10n Obenga, Theophile, 45n Ode, A.W.M., 185-187, 185n Ohnefalsch-Richter, M.H., 274n Ong, J.W., 10n Oppenheim, A.L., 242, 222n Oppenheimer*, S.J., 3435, 53, 75-76, 129, 34n, 36n, 170n-171n, 273n Orrells, Daniel, Bhambra,

Guminder, & Roynon, Tessa, 83 Ort, L.J.R., 224n Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard, 266 Osborne, Catherine, 158, 167, 157n Ovid* [ Publius Ovidius Naso ], 136, 162, 251, 7n, 134n, 136n, 265n; s Flood, 267; s Metamorphoses, 155 Padr, J., 130 Pankonien, D., 267 Pques, V., 71, 287, 127n Parayre, D., 271n Parker, B., 117 Parker, H., 55n Parmenides*, 112, 158 ; cf. Reinhardt Parrinder, Geoffrey, 61, 73 Parry, Richard, 157n Parsons, Elsie Clews, 142, 142n Patai, Raphael, 135 Patrick, G.T.W., 174 Patterson, Nick, 231 Pausanias, 134n, 265n; also see *Descriptio Graeciae; Frazer Peel, J.D.Y., 70 Peiros I., 187, 198-199, 239 Pellat, C., 78 Peyrony, D., 188 Philippi, D.L., 39 Philolaus, 264 Philostratus the Elder, 154n Picot, Jean-Claude, 160n, 175n Pierris, Apostolos L., 168n-169n Pinch, G., 163 Pinches, T.G., 218n Pindar / Pindarus, 154n Pingree, D., 119, 209, 118n, 150n, 288n Pirzada, Ali, 66n

Plato*, 9, 20, 38, 81, 109110, 156, 160, 165-166, 177, 251-252, 255, 293, 39n, 166n Plessner, M., 111n Plutarch, 134, 100n, 163n Pokorny, J., 186, 239, 181n Poppe, N.N., 216n Popper, K., 86 Pott, A.F., 177n Pound, J., 223n Preus, A., 16 Prilop, G., 124 Primavesi, Oliver, 157n158n, 168n Przyluski, Jean, 234 Publius Vergilius Maro, 136, 136n Pulleyblank, E.G., 240n Pythagoras, 68, 112, 224n Quine, W.V.O, 54 Quintus Smyrnaeus, 39n Quispel, G., 110n Raabe, Eva, 55n Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 92-93 Raison-Jourde, F., 279 Ralushai, N.M.N., & Gray, J.R., 279n Rappenglck, Michael A., 14, 97, 183, 164n, 184n Rashidi, R., 218-219, 228, 231 Rattansi, A., 45 Rattray, R.S., 126 Ray, J., 101n Reeves, John C., 224n Reiner, E., 151 Reinhardt, Karl, 173 Renault, Mary, 18 Renfrew, Colin, 19, 10n, 19n Renfrew, Colin, & Zubrow, E.B.W., 10n Renner, Egon, 266n Rhys Davids, T.W., & Oldenberg, H., transl., 281n Rigaud, Jean-Philippe,

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200n Ritter, E.F., 273n Rivet, Paul, 77 Robb, John E., 10n Robbins, L.H., & Campbell, A.C., 66n, 247n Robertson, Edward, 151 Robinson, K.R., 69n Rochberg, Francesca, 117n Rodrigues de Areia, M.L., 66n, 288n Roeder, G., 288n Rollefson, G.O., 65, 55n Ronnberg, Ami, with Martin, Kathleen, 131, 143, 162, 172, 271 Rose, H.J., 264n Rostovzev, M.I., 222 Rowley, H.H., 151 Ruhlen, Merritt, 185-186, 198-199, 245, 266n Runciman, S., 224n Rutt, Richard, 217n Sagart, Laurent, 238 Said, E.W., 32n Sapir, E., 261n Sauvaget, J., 282n Sve-Sderbergh, T., 97n Schadeberg, Thilo, 35 Schaefer, P., & Shaked, S., 247n Schapera, I., 288n Scheftelowitz, F., 224n Scheub, Harold, 133n Schlegel, G., 219, 243 Schleiermacher, F., 149 Schlosser, Katesa, 128, 128n Schmandt-Besserat, D., 20 Schmidt, B., 264n Schmidt, P., 223n, 241n Schnabel, P., 145, 223n Schoff, Wilfred H., ed. & transl., 76 Schoffeleers, J.M., 13, 99n-100n Schofield, J.F., 279n Schwartz, Benjamin I., 42n

Schwarz, Eduard, 272n Scoon, Robert Maxwell, 20 Seaton, R.C., see *Argonautica; Apollonius Rhodius Sedley, David, 160n, 168n Segy, L., 272 Seligman, C.G., 73 Seligmann, K., 154, 222 Seneca the Younger, 134n Sepp SJ, Fr., 177n Sergi, Guiseppe, 230, 271n Shahrastani: Muammad ibn cAbd al-Karim, 110n Shaked, Shaul, 15, 247n Sheppard, Anne, 160n Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, 258, 34n, 266n Shimunika, Rev. Jehosaphat, 88 Silber, Ilana F., 42n Simonse, S., 16, 264 Simplicius, 174 Skinner, S., 247n Smith, Brian K., 282, 282n Smith, E.W., & Dale, A.M., 89 Smith, G. Elliot, 148, 249, 266, 164n, 266n Smith, R.J., 215 Smith, William, 288, 288n Snell, Bruno, 160, 149n Snow, P., 287n Snowdon, F.M.S., Jr, 295n Sobukwe, Robert, 17 Socrates*, 20, 112, 149 Soderblom, Laurence A., & Johnson, Torrence V., 223n Soetens, Katinka, 189 Solheim II, W.G.I., 287n Solmsen, F., 158, 169n Sophocles, 134n Sorenson John L., & Johannessen, Carl L., 266n Sorenson, John L., &

Raish, M.H., 266n Sparks, Rachael, 53 Spivak, G.C., 45, 32n Sprague, Rosamond K., 160 Staal, Frits, Somayajipad, C.V., Itti Ravi Nambudiri, & De Menil, Adelaide, 281 Stanley, G.A.V., 164n Starostin, Sergei A., & Starostin, George, 34, 49, 135, 185-187, 192, 198, 238, 245, 261, 34n, 181n, 216n, 227n, 238240n, 245n, 256n, 263n Stauffer, Alice Lee, 171 Steinschneider, M., 68, 75, 248, 69n, 128n Stoics*, 86 Stokes, M.C., 154 Straffon, Cheryl, 189 Strathern, P., 296n Streck, Bernhard, 90 Stricker, Bruno H., 115, 126, 136-137, 97n Strong, J.H., 150 Stuip, R.E.V., & Vellekoop, C., 224n Suhr, E.G., 264n Suidas, 136n, 246n Swann, Brian, 142n Szemernyi, O., 175 Tamm, Erika, Kivisild, Toomas, Reidla, Maere, Metspalu, Mait, Smith, David Glenn, Mulligan, Connie J., Bravi, Claudio M., Rickards, Olga, Martinez-Labarga, Cristina, Khusnutdinova, Elsa K., Fedorova, Sardana A., Golubenko, Maria V., Stepanov, Vadim A., Gubina, Marina A., Zhadanov, Sergey I., Ossipova, Ludmila P., Damba, Larisa, Voevoda, Mikhail I., Dipierri, Jose E.,

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Villems, Richard, & Malhil, Ripan S., 292n Tamminen, Maya, 39n, 153n Tauchmann, Kurt, 34-35, 280, 34n Temple, R.F.G., 243, 223n Terrien de Lacouperie, A.E.J.-B., 151-152, 213, 215-222, 224-225, 228, 231, 239, 241, 243, 250, 291, 215n-218n, 221n, 226n, 267n Tester, S.J., 119, 209, 110n, 170n Thales, 86, 149 Theophrastus, 159-160, 174 Thiele, Georg, 159-160 Thomas, P., Veverka, J., Morrison, D., Davies, M., & Johnson, T.V., 223n Thorndike, L., 75 Thornton, R., 279n Tibbets, G.R., 282n Tiedemann, Dieterich, 157n Tika Yupanqui (Tracy Marks), 261n Todoua, Maa, 169n Tolkien, J.R.R., 16n Tower of Babel, 239, see: Starostin & Starostin Townshend, P., 62 Traor, M.L., 70 Trautmann, R., 69n, 128n Trpanier, Simon, 157n, 168n Trilles, le Rv. Pre, 151, 274 Trobetti, A., 244 Tsou Yen, 250 Tsung-tung Chang, 240, 240n Turner II, Christy G., 262n Turner, Victor W., 99, 99n-100n Turpin, Solveig A., 145

Tylor, E.B., 266-267, 266n berweg, Friedrich, George Silvester Morris, Henry Boynton Smith, Noah Porter, & Vincenzo Botta, 167 Ullman, M., 110 Ulving, T., 240n Underhill, Peter A., 33, 33n Ungnad, A., 241n Uzoigwe, G.N., 102n van Beek, Wouter E.A., 129 Van Berchem, D., 151n van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., passim van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., with Mark Isaak, 35, 49, 100, 36n, 40n, 146n, 171n, 220n, 261n, 292n, van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Wiggermann, F.A.M., 273n van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Woudhuizen, Fred C., 17, 77, 137, 192, 205, 207, 209-210, 230-231, 233, 258, 262, 275, 277, 11n, 33n, 35n, 37n-38n, 126n, 136n, 140n-141n, 170n, 185n, 191n, 195n, 216n, 222n, 227n, 229n-232n, 240n241n, 246n, 248n, 263n, 273n, 277n, 280n-281n, 291n-292n van Buren, Elizabeth, 164n van den Dungen, Wim, 130n van den Es, A.H.G.P., 166n van der Ben, Nicolaus, 158n, 168n van der Sluijs, Marinus Anthony, 73, 102n van Melsen, A.G.M., 16,

296n van Riet Lowe, C., 264 van Sertima, I., 20, 243, 266, 295n van ten Brink, J., 161 Vandenbroeck, P., 247 Vansina, J., 90 Verbrugghe, Gerald P., & Wickersham, John M., 223n Vergil, Virgil, see Publius Vergilius Maro, 136, 136n Vrin, P., & Narivelo Rajaonarimanana, 75 Vettius Valens, 110, 110n Vigilant, L., Pennington, R., Harpending, Henry, Kocher, T.D., & Wilson, Allan C., 231 Vigilant, L., Stoneking, M., Harpending, H., Hawkes, K., & Wilson, A.C., 231 Vitaliano, Dorothy B., 73, 246n Vtek, Tom, 157n, 175n Vlastos, Gregory, 154, 160 Vogel, J.O., 279n von Jan, Ludwig, 172n von Sicard, H., 202, 163n von Vacano, O.-W, 272, 248n von WilamowitzMoellendorff, Ulrich, 160 Vriezen, T.C., 151 Vroon, P., 10n Wada, Toshihiro, 169n Wagner, F.D., 157n Wainwright, G.A., 73n Waite, Arthur Edmund, 110n-111n Walker, C.B.F., & Hunger, H., 288n Walker, D.P., 241 Walters, D., 164n, 288n Wang Chi, 249 Warrington Eastlake, F.,

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241 Watts, I., 201n Weber, Max, 42n Weeks, Mary Elvira, 296n Wellmann, Eduard, 159160 Werbner, Richard P., 13, 151 Werner, A., 126 Werner, E.T.C., 216n217n, 246n Wescott, R.W., 125 West, Martin Litchfield, 115, 174n West, S., 218n Whitehead, A.N., 170 Widengren, G., 224n Wiens, H.J., 218n Wiggermann, Frans, 71n, 273n Wilcox, J., 169 Wilensky, J., 77 Wilhelm, R., 121-122, 236 Wilhelm, R., & Cary, F.B., translators, 122 Wilkinson, T.A.H., 137, 97n, 140n Willis, Roy, 129, 134, 39n, 100n, 224n Wilson, M., 93 Winckler, H., 175, 220 Winters, Clyde Ahmad, 58, 77, 243-244, 243n, 280n, 243n Witzel, Michael, 7, 11-12, 19, 72, 182, 243, 32n33n, 37n, 219n-220n Worsley, Peter M., 92, 192 Woschtz, Karl Matthus, Hutter, Manfred & Prenner, Karl, 224n Wright, Maureen Rosemary, 157n Xenophanes, 149, 158 Yates, Frances A., 110n Yetts, W.P., 217n-218n Yoshishiro, Ishikawa, 216-217 Zarathustra / Zoroaster,

241 Zeller, Eduard, 161

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Explanatory index of proper names other than authors cited

Exhaustive listing of all proper names other than those of authors cited. For names marked with ** also see Index of Authors Cited. Some entries have underlying concepts explained under q.v. (quod videre, see there); for many other entries this index seizes the opportunity of explaining details that could not be accommodated in the main text. When a book title is listed, it appears in italic, followed by the authors name (if any) between parentheses. Only capitalised text has been processed thus e.g. Catalyst is listed but not the many occurrences of catalyst, catalytic, etc. Due to last-minute text additions a few page references may be off by 1. identity, 53 Achsenzeit, see Axial Age Acragas, 109; cf. Agrigentum Adam, Biblical figure, 135 Adonai, Lord, 160; cf. Aidoneus Aegean, Sea and region, 115, 141, 151, 175, 294, 273n; -Anatolian, 226 Aether, 103-104, 117-118, 130, 137-139, 152, 180181, 154n, 165n, 184n; Aether and Day, children of Night, 152 Africa(n(s)), sub-Saharan, 8-9, 11, 14, 17-18, 20, 33, 37, 48, 50, 52, 60, 62-63, 70-71, 73-77, 80, 82-83, 102, 118, 123, 126, 129, 137, 140, 151, 179, 200, 209, 225, 232, 234, 243, 247, 259-261, 263, 265, 267, 272-275, 277, 279-280, 285, 287, 290-291, 293, 10n, 100n, 102n, 125n, 127n, 216n, 227n, 291n; Assyrian traces in , 129; Arab influence on subSaharan , 75; and Ancient Near East, 73, 129; and North America, 9, 118, 265, 274; and Europe, 80; and East Asia, and Asia, 35, 90, 275, 280, 186n; West Africa, 74, 268, 281; Central Africa, especially South , 5, 8, 1718, 31, 43, 62, 64, 70, 87, 90, 99-100, 125-126, 129, 151, 164, 230, 261, 268, 270-275, 277-281, 285, 288, 293, 296, 89n, 93n, 109n, 231n; North , 264n; Northeast , 294; cf. Nkoya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ndembu; Southern Africa, 5-7, 13, 16, 44, 64, 66, 69-70, 74, 81, 112, 126, 128, 151, 188, 202, 264, 268-274, 279, 296, 109n, 231n;

Abaris, Ancient Greek shaman, 112, 114, 114n Abkhazoids, linguisticoethnic cluster in the Ancient Mediterranean, 233 Aboriginal Australian, 91, 192; cf. Durkheim** Abraham, Biblical figure, 162 Abri du Facteur, Upper Palaeolithic site, 189 Abyss, Abysmal, 122, 164, 236, 101n; cf. Underworld, Apophis, Chaos, Leviathan, Tiamat, T-hom, Neith, Mother of the Waters Achilles, Achilleus, 153, 251, 7n, 153n, 172n, 190n Achnaton, Ancient Egyptian royal religious innovator, 41; cf. Mozes Acholi, East African language and ethnic

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emphasis on two and four in sub-Saharan African formal systems, 209; South-East Africa, 34; cf. Out-of-Africa, Back-to-Africa African Linguistics, 35 African macrophyla (i.e. Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan), Amerind and Austric, as Peripheral branches in the disintegration of *Borean, 261n; cf. Peripheral African Studies Centre, Leiden, 12, 14, 36n, 225n African Studies, Africanist, 5, 12, 17, 43, 268, 45n, 287n Afrika Cultures, nongovernmental organisation, Benin, 14 Afrikaans, creolised Dutch spoken in Southern Africa, 227n Afroasiatic, linguistic macrophylum, 52, 73, 90, 135, 186, 232-233, 237, 245, 247, 257-258, 261-262, 266, 191n, 256n, 261n-262n; Proto, 135, 198-199; and Eurasiatic, 257-258; and Sino-Caucasian, 191n; Afroasiaticised Sicanians, 233 Afrocentricity, Afrocentrism, Afrocentric, Afrocentrist(s), 16-18, 20, 45-46, 58, 70, 74, 77, 83, 130, 218-219, 228-229, 231, 243-244, 247, 266, 287, 45n; Strong , 7, 17-18, 46, 278; Weak or Attenuated , 17; North American , 45; African , 45; cf. Black Athena, Van Sertima, Winters,

Bernal, Obenga Aganju and Yemaja, personified Land and Water in Nigerian cosmogony, 124 Aggregative Diachronic Model of World Mythology (van Binsbergen), 8, 36, 48-49, 54, 36n Agrigentum, Acragas, Ancient city in Graecia Magna, birthplace of Empedocles, 109 Ahura Mazda, Iranian deity; and Ahriman, 224n Aidoneus, Ancient Graeco / Levantine divinity, used by Empedocles as element name, 159-161; as Air, 159; as Earth, 159; cf. Adonai Air, element, 101, 104, 116-118, 123-124, 130133, 137-139, 143, 145, 149, 153-155, 157-160, 165-166, 180-181, 187, 189, 192-199, 212-213, 263, 101n, 117n-118n, 153n-154n, 172n, 246n, 261n; and Water, 165; and Fire, 116 Air-Water-Earth-Fire, 185 Aither, 124, 137 Aitnaios kantharos, mytheme, 136n Aje Shaluga, Yoruba god, 124 Aja (Third Eye): Light / Dark, 117n Akhmim, location in Upper Egypt, 111 Akkad(ian(s)), 150, 176, 242, 216n; AkkadoSumerians, 219; cf. Mesopotamia, Babylonia Alarodian(s), North East Caucasian languages and their speakers, 233

Alaska, USA state, 207, 271 Alexandria, ancient city in Egypt, 172 Algonkian, North American language cluster, 147 Allegoriae Homericae (Heraclitus Ponticus), 155 Altai, mountain range, 249 Altaic, branch of Eurasiatic / Nostratic, 48, 222, 233, 236, 245, 273, 277, 42n, 216n, 219n; proto, 216n; and IndoEuropean, 219n; and Dravidian, 233 Alternative Working Hypothesis, of this book (notably: the transformative cycle of elements goes back, not to the Upper Palaeolithic but to the Bronze Age), 9-10, 110, 178, 253, 255-256, 259, 275 f.; cf. Working Hypothesis, Hypotheses America(n(s)), 3, 8-9, 14, 20, 45, 48, 99, 107, 118, 123, 142-143, 146-148, 163, 173, 188, 191, 209, 251, 259-261, 263-268, 272-277, 293, 100n, 142n, 146n, 227n, 231n, 291n-292n; Flood myths, 8, 146, 251, 277; Afrocentrist, 45; North America(n(s)), 3, 8-9, 173, 266, 100n; Flood myths, 8; mytheme of dying god becomes crop, 100n; (transformation cycle of?) elements in , 107, 118, 123, 142-148, 173, 251, 259, 265 (negative), 268; Pleiades and Milky Way star lore, 163-164; languages, 191, cf.

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Amerind; emphasis on two and four in formal systems, 209; cultural transmission to from Central Asia, 260-264, 273-274, with European Upper Palaeolithic parallels, 274, 276; circle-dot motif, 272; games and divination, 273; Pelasgian influence in , 275; reed symbolism, 277; not only as destination but perhaps also as source of transcontinental transmission, 291n-292n; South America(n(s)), 227n; cf. USA, Canada Americas, North and South, 129, 176, 261, 292, 100n, 267n; cf. North America, South America, USA, Canada Amerind, main branch of American languages, 35, 245, 262, 266, 273-274, 191n, 256n, 261n-263n; Proto- , 198-199; and Khoisan, 263n Amsterdam, city in the Netherlands, 7, 15, 226n Amun, primal Ancient Egyptian divinity, 131, 141; cf. Amunet Amunet and Amun, Air and Invisibility, primal Ancient Egyptian divine pair, 131 Amurru, ethnic category in the Ancient Near East, 176 Ana Maqkiu, Menomini mythical evil-doers, 147 Anahata, Heart, Air, element, 117n Anahita, Ancient West Asian goddess, 155n; cf. Neith, Athena, Nyambi Anasazi Tradition, ar-

chaeological complex, New Mexico, USA, 144145 Anat, Levantine goddess in Ancient Egypt, 140, 155n; cf. Anahita, Neith, Athena, Nyambi Anatolia, 41, 135, 183, 222, 232, 245-247, 227n, 230n-231n, 280n; , Korea and Japan, 222; cf. Luwian, Hittite, West Asia Anatomically Modern Humans, 10, 18-19, 33, 40, 46, 50, 52, 63, 84, 86, 180, 187, 211, 290, 293, 10n, 33n; in Africa, 48 Ancient Near East, 72-73, 99, 115, 129, 171, 176, 188, 209, 20n, 171n, 273n Ancients, intellectual producers in GraecoRoman Antiquity, 38, 155 Angles-sur-lAnglin, Upper Palaeolithic site, 189 Angola((n)s), country and inhabitants, 78, 201, 280 ANIMDEM, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Aja, element, 117n Anpu, Ancient Egyptian literary character, 134; cf. Anubis, Bata Antiquity, Graeco-Roman, 68, 77, 115-116, 141, 159, 174, 178, 188, 209, 251, 267, 287, 294-295, 224n; Late , 150; and Bible World, 222; cf. Ancient(s) Antithesis, see Triadic Dialectics Antoni, Klaus, 12 Anubis, Ancient Egyptian god of the dead, 134-

135, 97n Anyang, Ancient Chinese capital and archaeological site, 242 Apache, North American language and ethnic identity, 191 Aphrodite, Ancient Greek goddess of Love, 155, 169; cf. Venus, Love Apocalypse, Biblical book, 177; Nordic 153 Apollo, Ancient Greek god of sunlight and arts, 112-113, 115, 137, 155, 39n, 113n-114n, 272n273n Apophis, Ancient Egyptian abysmal being, 138 Apsaras, S and SE Asian nature spirits, 281 Aquitaine, French region, 184 Ara, Yoruba thunder god, 124 Arabia, Arab(s), Arabic, region, ethnic identity and language, 5, 15, 52, 58-60, 62-64, 67, 69-70, 74-75, 77-78, 82, 111, 129-130, 150, 177, 237, 148, 249, 265, 247n; and Latin, 150; and Greek, 111; and Judaism, 82; and Malagasy, 128n; cf. Islam Araldo de Luca, photographer, 133 Aramaeans, ethnic group and language from the Eastern Mediterranean, which in Seleucidic times assumed administrative functions deep into Asia, 141; cf. Bible Archangel, mythical senior ccelestial messenger in the Judaic / Christian tradition, 177; Michael, 162

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Archives dOrient, 219 Archoas of Athens in the Hellenistic Age, (Dinsmoor), 114n Arctic, and sub-Arctic, concentration of circledot motifs in decoration, 272 Arduni Island, Sepik, New Guinea, 55n Argonautica (Apollonius Rhodius), 112 Aristaeus, Aristaios, name of two Graeco-Roman mythical figures, 136139-140, 134n, 136n, 140n; and Neith, 138; and Noah, 139 Aristeas, shaman in the Ancient Greek context, 112 Aristotle**, 81, 109, 149150, 159, 164-168, 173174, 206, 251-252, 255, 293, 165n-166n, 169n, 173n; also see Physica, Meteorologica; and Plato, 9, 38, 156, 166, 251 Arizona, USA state, 14 Armenia, Armenian language, Armenology, 227, 216n; cf. Karst** Arousing, Chinese trigram name, 122, 236 Artemis, Ancient Greek goddess, 113n Arthur, King, 135; cf. Morgana, Mordred, Shihoka Aruna, South Asian mythical figure, son of Kashapa, 281 Aryballos, name associated with famous Ancient Greek vessel, 37 ASC, see African Studies Centre, leiden Ashanti, ethnic group in West Africa, 126

Asia(n(s)), 7-9, 11-15, 1719, 21, 31, 34-39, 41-43, 45, 48, 51-56, 58, 60-65, 68-69, 71-73, 75-77, 7981, 83, 85, 90, 110-114, 116, 118-119, 121, 126129, 137, 140-142, 151, 163, 175-176, 182, 188, 190-191, 208-209, 213, 215, 216-22, 224-232, 234-235, 239-244, 248250, 252, 255-261, 263264, 267-269, 271-273, 275, 277-283, 285, 287288, 290-293, 36n-37n, 67n, 92n-93n, 100n, 117n, 153n, 170n, 172n, 177n, 186n, 219n, 221n, 223n, 226n-228n, 231n, 246n, 266n-267n, 273n, 280n; Steppe, 240; Minor, 172n; cf. Anatolia; and Africa, 15, 18, 34, 62, 80, 85, 110, 175, 285, 292, 280n; in the Neolithic, 38, 55, 80; in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, 11, 213, 219, 232, 240; Bronze Age, 268; and the Mediterranean, 227, 264, 219n; and Europe, 12; and Egypt, 275; Asianisation, i.e. transmission of culture traits to Ancient Egypt, 242; and Ancient Greece, 13; and Oceania, 48, 170n; and the New World, 60; and Meso-America, 267; Muslims, 68; Buddhist, 61; Blacks, 18, 232; and Pelasgian, 127; South Asia(n(s)), 8, 11, 54, 80, 295, 37n; war god Skanda, 39; Postcolonial Theory, 45; counterparts of Yi Jing and geomantic nota-

tional system, 67; and Sunda transcontinental links, 76, 77; origin of Gypsies, 90; proposed to have contributed to Bantuids, 18-19, 90; recent intrusion into South Central and Southern Africa, 278290, 93n notably among the Nkoya, 280282, 291, 280n; Ayurveda medical system, 117n; Hellenistic influence in , 117n; Greek astrology as influence upon , 119; nakshatra moon stations, 126; navigational standards, 142; dominated by specific number symbolism? (Frobenius) 117n; in triadic belt, 208-209; studied by Terrien de Lacouperie, 217; West , 18, 220, 216n; IndoIranian cosmology continuious with that of Presocratics; Shiva stones, 264-265; influence on Meso America? 267, 266n; influence on Pacific, 267n-268n; geomantic dice, 268; possible channel for transmission of Scythian-Mongolian traits to sub-Saharan Africa, 277; reception of Empedoclean fourelement system, 290, 295; trans , 220; East , 220; Southeast Asia, 60; and Oceania, 63; and Africa, 19n; and Western Eurasia, 33-34, 37, 53-54, 61, 72-73, 76, 80-81, 129, 176, 275, 279-281, 295, 36n, 100n, 170n, cf. Sunda; Central

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Asia, 34, 51, 63, 68, 80, 129, 140, 182, 188, 190, 217, 221, 243, 252, 256261, 263, 278, 291, 117n, 216n, 219n, 227n, 231n, 246n, 264n; Buddhism, 267; Neolithic, 37; West Asia, proposed global focus of innovation, 253, 257258, 246n Asian Postcolonial Theory, 45 Asian Studies, Asianist(s), 12, 253; and Assyriologists, 17 Asiatic, see Asian Askese, innerweltliche (Weber) 42n Assyria(n(s)), 74, 129, 150, 271, 19n, 220n Assyriology, Assyriologist(s), 14, 17, 72, 176, 217-218, 220, 242, 294, 71n, 117n, 223n, 241n; and Sinology, 220; cf. Sumer, Akkad, Ancient Near East, Bible, Temple**, Oppenheim**, Lambert**, Wiggermann**, Gadd** Athabascan, language cluster; Southern , 191 Athabascan-Eyak, North American language cluster, 191 Athena, Ancient Greek goddess, 15, 18-19, 85, 131, 153-155, 185-187, 154n-155n, 186n, 228n, 246n; cf. Black Athena, Pallas, Neith, Anahita, Poseidon, Laco Tritonis, Mother of the Waters Athens, Athenian(s), Greek city, 112, 242, 265, 114n, 155n; and Delians, 114 Atlantic, North, world region encompassing

Europe and North America, 86 Atlantic, one of the three world Oceans; Africa, 76, 81; Europe and North Africa, 264; Transatlantic, 48, 56; Transatlantic to Meso America, 99; cf. North Atlantic Attis, vegetation god of the Ancient Mediterranean, 100n; cf. Dumuzi, Dionysus, Chihamba, Bituma Atum, Ancient Egyptian primal god, 131, 139; cf. Hidden One Aurum, Gold, 155 Ausci, ethnic group, Ancient Western Mediterranean, 233 Austin, city in Texas, 145 Australia(n(s)), 5, 55, 63, 75, 91, 179-180, 230, 234; Aboriginals, 192 and q.v.; and New Guinea, 51 Austric, linguistic macrophylum, 35, 53, 77, 90, 141, 186-187, 199, 237, 239, 245, 261-262, 273, 191n, 256n, 262n, 280n; Proto- , 198-199; and Africa, 273; and Niger-Congo, 35; and Amerind, 256n; cf. Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Munda, Sumerian Austroasiatic, 186-187, 239, 245, 280n; Proto, 198-199; cf. Austric Austronesian, 34-35, 76, 185-186, 237, 239, 245, 279; Proto- , 187, 198199; cf. Austric Autumn, 172n; cf. Spring Avatar, North Atlantic fantasy motion picture, ca. 2010 CE, 110

Axial Age (Jaspers), 4243, 85 Ayurvedic, South Asian therapeutic system, 281, 117n Azilien, Epipalaeolithic archaeological complex, 264 Babel, Biblical toponym associated with the confusion of languages (q.v.), 20n; cf. Flood, Renfrew**, Kapesh, Nimrod, Tower of , Flood and Tower myths BABSTAR, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Babylon, Babylonia(n(s)), 135, 176, 217, 219, 249, 288, 117n-118n; Babylonism as the claim that all civilisation derives from the Ancient Near East, 218, 220, 241n; Babylonian and Chinese, 126; cf. Elam, Terrien de Lacouperie, Afrocentrism Babylonian and Oriental Record, 217; cf. Terrien de Lacouperie Back-to-Africa, 18, 35-36, 56-57, 62, 79-80, 83, 129, 260, 278, 283, 285, 186n; Back-to-Africa Hypothesis, 33, 52, 273 Bactria, Central Asian region, connecting Western and Eastern Eurasia, 243, 249 Badger, mythical being North America, 147 Bak, Bak Sing, hypothetical Asian ethnic group and language (Terrien de Lacouperie) 217, 220, 243, 215n-216n; cf. Hundred Families, Ktsch, Terrien de Lacouperie**

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Baker, Mt, 146 Bakici Baci, basic elements, Lower Congo, 125 Bali, Indonesian island, 14, 67n Baltic, North European sea and region, 142 Baluchistan, Central Asian region, 249 Bamileke, ethnic group and language, Cameroon, 279 Bantu, major branch of Niger-Congo, 17, 19, 34-35, 53, 89-90, 129, 185-186, 198-199, 202, 230, 232-233, 237, 244245, 258, 261-262, 277, 279-281, 291, 124n, 231n, 263n; Common , 216n; Bantoid, 253; Bantuids, 90; and Khoisan, 262; in West Asia, 17, 19, 230, 232233, 244, 216n; from South Asia (Karst), 90 Barbel, Nkoya clan name, 104; and Kale, 88 Bardaisan of Edessa, prophet in Late Antituity, 116 Bark, 97-99; Container Which Could Hear, Shikumbawuyuvu, Nkoya clan name, 99; Do You Hear, Nkoya clan name, 98 Barotse(land), region, polity and people in Western Zambia, 87, 269-272; cf. Lozi, Nkoya Basojaun, Basque god, 223; cf. Ganesha, Janus, Oannes Basque(s), language and ethnic group, 142, 191, 223, 237, 240, 261; Basquoids, 233; preEuscarian Liguroid

ethnic and linguistic groups, Ancient Mediterranean, 233; cf. Basojaun Bara, port on the Persian Gulf, 282n; cf. Iuan alafa, cilm al-raml Bastet, Ancient Egyptian mythical figure, apparently evocation of fourelement system, 131-132 Bata, Ancient Egyptian mythical figure, 134135; and Humbaba, 134 Battle with the Gods, 136; cf. Gigantes; cf. Combat Myth BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation**, 19n Bears, mythical beings in North America, 147; cf. Ana Maqkiu Becher, Joachim, 166n; cf. Phlogiston Bedouins, ethnic group in Arabian / Islamic context, 64 Bee, 15, 17, 93, 95-96, 101, 137, 275, 101n; cf. Queen Bee, She of the Reed and the Bee, Luhamba. Libupe Before Babel (Renfrew), 19n Before Civilization (Renfrew), 19 Before the Bible: the Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (Gordon), 20 Beijing, city in China, and language variant, 12, 186, 238, 223n Being, 120, 171 Belgium, country, 183, 276 Bell, Nkoya clan name, see Langu, 104 Bemba, Central African

ethnic identity and language, 126 Benin, West African country, 14, 53, 82 Berber, branch of Afroasiatic and ethnic identity, North Africa, 78, 198, 230, 237, 247 Bering Strait, 260, 292 Beringia, region around the Bering Strait, scene of land bridge before the Holocene, 291n-292n Bernal, John Desmond, 84; cf. Bernal, Martin** Best, meaning of name Aristaeus, q.v., common epithet of several major Greek gods, 137 Bible, Biblical, 17, 20, 73, 134, 222, 227, 281, 171n, 225n, 227n; cf. Nimrod, Exodus, Jesus, Noah Bibliotheca (Apollodorus), 39n, 134n, 154n Bibliotheca Historica (Diodorus Siculus), 113 Bight of Benin, sea gulf between Nigeria and Cameroon, 70, 72, 76, 78; and West Africa, 53 Binary Value, of Chinese trigram, 122, 236; Logic of Binary Opposition, 212; cf. Triadic Revolution Biri, Yoruba mythical figure, 124 Bituma, cult of affliction in Western Zambia, 9899, 126, 100n Black Africans, 77, 244; cf. West Asia, Pelasgians Black Athena Comes of Age (van Binsbergen), 83 Black Athena Ten Years Later (van Binsbergen),

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46 Black Athena, I-III (Bernal**, q.v.), 7, 19, 45-46, 83, 135, 174, 235, 243, 292n Black Irish, 230, 243 Black One, see Kale Black Sea, 112, 153, 247, 172n Black Vulcan (van Binsbergen), 153n Black, 295; AkkadoSumerians of ElamBabylonia, 219, 295; cf. Bantu in West Asia Blacks, West Asian, 18, 232, 234, 216n; cf. Chung Li Blessing and Hindrance, element relations, 119 Blombos Cave, Middle Palaeolithic site, South Africa, 201, 201n Body, meaning of Chinese trigram, 122 Boeotia, Ancient Greek region, 208 Bonn, German city, 173 Book of Changes, see Y Jng Book of the Dead of Lady Cheritwebeshet, 98 Boreadae, class of aristocrats in Ancient Europe, 114 *Borean, reconstructed Upper Palaeolithic, Old World language form, traces of which have been claimed for all present-day linguistic macrophyla, 8, 34-35, 49, 51-52, 178, 182, 185-187, 189-199, 204206, 209-210, 212, 233, 235-236, 244-245, 256259, 261-262, 273-274, 277, 285, 292, 34n, 190n, 194n-195n, 240n, 245n-246n, 261n, 263n;

and Lascaux, 195; in Asia in the Upper Palaeolithic, 35; *Borean Hypothesis, 34, 185, 187, 233, 261, 274, 285, 240n; cf. Starostin**, Fleming** Boreas, Graeco-Roman god of the North Wind, 113-114 Borvon, Celtic sun god, 113n Botswana, country, 3, 6, 13, 44, 201, 276; cf. Tswana Bouvet, Joachim, Early Modern Jesuit in China, 241 Brahman, Hindu primal god, 117n Brahmin, Hindu priestly caste, 280 Brazil(ian(s)), 229 Brethren of Purity, 282n; cf. Iwan al-afa British Columbia, 14, 272 British, 14, 132, 216, 249, 266, 272; BritishAmerican, 45; Britain, 113n; cf. England Broers, Nettie, 16 Broers, Peter, 14-16 Bronze Age, 9, 11, 17, 3738, 47, 52, 78, 80, 83, 110, 129, 137, 140-142, 205, 208, 210-211, 226228, 232, 240, 253, 255, 259-260, 263, 267, 273, 275, 277-278, 290-292, 295-296, 10n, 45n, 101n, 194n, 216n, 219n, 273n; and Iron Age, 48, 175; Eurasia, 204; West Asia, 248, 291-292; Mediterranean, 37, 54, 233, 244; Cyprus, 271; Late , 37, 204 Buddha, Gautama, 41, 135, 279, 281 Buddhism, Buddhist, 12,

14, 61, 62-64, 116-118, 128-129, 177, 217, 267, 279-280, 282, 287-288, 42n, 117n-118n; and South East Asia, 280; and South Asia, 217, 280; and Islam, 63, 128 Buea, town in Cameroon, 70 Bugun, branch of SinoTibetan, 238 Bulawayo, city in Zimbabwe, 276 Bumba, creator god among the Bushong, 126 Burmese, branch of SinoTibetan, 238 Burushaski, language isolate proposed to attach to Sino-Caucasian, 191, 237, 239, 245 Bushong, ethnic group in Congo, division of the Kuba, 61-62, 126, 287 Buys, Gina, 276 Buzzard, Nkoya clan, 104 Byzantium, Byzantine, Medieval empire, Eastern Mediterranean, 69, 75, 82, 150 c Aha, First-dynasty Egyptian ruler, 140 Cairo, town in Egypt, 132, 247n; Geniza, q.v. c Aissa, see Issa California, USA state, 146 Cambridge MA, town in USA, 8, 12, 173; cf. Harvard University Cameroon(ian(s)), country and inhabitants, 14, 70, 279; Western Grassfields, 62; and Indonesia, 14 Canada, country, 14 Canis Major, asterism, 223n Canon of Changes, see Y Jng

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Canopian Vases, Ancient Egyptian funerary equipment, 131-132 Cantonese, variety of the Chinese language, 216n Cape of Good Hope, 52, 58, 60, 70, 74-75, 81, 129 Caphthor, Ancient Mediterranean ethnicolinguistic group, 233 Capitolinus, Roman cult, 161; Egyptian influence claimed, 161 Caraka Samhita, 117n Carians, identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, 230, 233 Cartesian, reflecting the thought of Ren Descartes**, 192 Casamance, region in Southern Senegal, 14 Caslukhim, ethnic group in the Ancient Mediterranean, 233 Castillo, Upper Palaeolithic site, 188 atal Hyk, Neolithic archaeological site, 183, 246n Catalyst, role in the most developed version of the transformative cycle of elements, 120 Cattle, 181 Caucasus, mountain range, 191, 229, 240 Cauldron of Kingship, Nkoya (Celtic, Mongolian, q.v.) mytheme, 105 Cecrops, mythical figure in Early Athenian history, 222-223; and Erichthonius, 223, 242; cf. Erechtheus Celts, Celtic, 48, 105, 135, 113n; cf. Arthur, King; and Mongolian, 105 Ceylon, see Sri Lanka

Chung Li, Chinese Fire god, 93n Chadic, branch of Afroasiatic, 186-187, 198, 237; Central , 237; Central and East , 186 Chaldaean, ethnic and ritual-professional designation referring to the late period of the Ancient Near East, and its proto-globalised traits, 176 Chaos, primal protoelement, 124, 152, 154, 171, 101n Chaozhou, branch of Sino-Tibetan, 238 Chemmis, location in Ancient Egypt, 6n, 101n; cf. Horizon of the Bee Cheritwebeshet, Lady, 98 Cherubim, class of mythical celestial messengers in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, 162 Chihamba, cult of affliction, NW Zambia, 99, 126; and Bituma, 100n Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 224n CHILUNA, variable in cluster analaysis, 288 China, Chinese, region, language and people, 7, 11-12, 41-42, 56, 67-68, 74-75, 77, 80-81, 107, 116, 118-122, 126, 128, 151-152, 163, 177, 183, 186, 208, 213, 215-221, 224, 226-229, 231, 235236, 238-245, 247-249, 253, 265, 267, 277, 285, 287-288, 291, 53n, 93n, 116n, 118n, 168n, 215n216n, 219n, 221n, 223n, 226n-227n, 231n, 239n240n, 246n, 268n, 272n,

282n, 287n; Sinoid, 227n; Preclassic Old language, 236, 216n, 227n; Classic Old language, 186; Sea, 267; Fire god, 93n; Emperor, leopard / Dionysian motifs in embellishment of s chariot, 246n; West , 216n; and Mesopotamia, 220, 231; and Babylonia, 288; and European, 218; and Etruscan, 248; and Imperial Romans, 248; and Nkoyaland, 93n; and Japan, 231n; cf. Y Jng, Wu Xing, Taoism, Terrien de Lacouperie**, Cantonese Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 223n, also see IWAAS Chinongosi, see Kanakosi CHIZODI, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Chnum, Ancient Egyptian creator god, 134 CHOKBAS, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Chokwe, South Central African language and ethnic identity, 288 Chola, South Asian dynastic with influence on South Central Africa, 280n Christianity, 241, 295, 224n, 227n; nonChristian religion, 295; cf. Judaism, Islam, Jesus, Jesuits Chukchee-Kamchatkan, linguistic phylum, 236; cf. Eurasiatic Circle-dot, cf. Arctic Circumcision, 124 CITI, see Context of Intensified Transforma-

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tion and Innovation City King, see Melqart Classic of History, see Shjng, 246n Clytemnaestra, Ancient Greek legendary figure, 170; cf. Helen, Dioscuri Coffin Texts, 163 Colchis, Colchian, region on Ancient Black Sea, 111 Colophon, Ancient Greek city, 172n Columbus, Early Modern explorer, 20 Combat myth (Fontenrose), as evocation of the cyclical transformation of elements, 123, 134 Common Era, 62, 141, 277, 19n, 224n Comoro Islands, 6, 81 Confusion of Languages after the Flood, mytheme, 146 Congo Basin, 70 Congo(lese), River and two countries in Central Africa, 61, 125-126, 202, 287; Basin, 70; Bushong, 126; Zambezi watershed, 99, 280; Lower Congo, 125, 287; cf. Zia Consciousness, element, 118 Context of Intensified Transformation and Innovation, in longrange history of global mythology, 49-50, 52, 55, 75 Conus shell, regalium in South Central Africa, 90 Corpus Hermeticum (Hermes Trismegistus), 110, 110n Correlative system, 119; cf. Y Jng Cosmic Egg, 17, 36, 50,

128, 170-171, 180, 36n37n, 170n-171n; in South East Asia, 170n Cosmogonic Hypothesis (van Binsbergen), postulates a succession, in the Upper Palaeolithic, of two cosmogonies: first the Separation of Land and Water, subsequently the Separation of Heaven and Earth, 212 Cosmogonic Virgin and her Son / Lover, primal Narrative Complex, 50, 52, 212 Coyote, North American trickster figure, 146 Crocodile, widespread African clan name, 126 Cronus, Kronos, Greek primal god, 133n, 172n Crown, element, 117n Cuba, island and country, 82 Culture Hero, 264 Cupid, see Eros Cushitic, branch of Afroasiatic, 186, 233, 230n; Low East , 186, 237 Cyclicity, 3, 145 Cygnean Lake, 162 Cyprus, island, 271 Cyrene, Ancient Mediterranean region and mythical figure, 137139; cf. Aristaeus Dada, Yoruba deity, 124 Dagon, Ancient West Asian god, 222; cf. Oannes Daisanites, followers of Bardaisan, q.v., 116 Dallit, see Untouchables Danae, Graeco-Roman mythical figure, visited by Zeus in the shape of a golden rain, mother of Perseus (Apollodorus,

Bibliotheca, II, 26 and 34), 155 Dance of the Elements: Fragment B 17 of Empedocles (Michelini), 165 Darkness, proto-element, 135, 116n, 224n Dawn, see Aruna Day, proto-element, 152; cf. Aether de Anima (Aristotle), 169n de Iside et Osiride (Plutarch), 134, 100n, 163n de Jong, Joop. 14 Death, implied protoelement, 135, 159 Deianeira, Graeco-Roman mythical figure, 134, 134n; and Delilah, 134; cf. Heracles Deir el Bahari, Ancient Egyptian site, 98 Delilah, Biblical figure, 134; cf. Samson Delos, Delians, Aegean island and inhabitants, 114, 114n Delta, Northernmost Egypt, 140-141, 101n; cf. Chemmis, Neith, Sas Delusion, see Mara Demeter, Ancient Greek earth- and vegetation goddess, 184n Den-Sino-Caucasian, 47, 257 Department of Philosophy of Man and Culture, Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 13 Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies, Harvard University, 7, 12 Descent of Inanna, mythical motif in Ancient Near East, 273n Descriptio Graeciae

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(Pausanias), 134n, 265n Desert and Fire, realm of Seth, q.v. Desert Fringes, realm of Nephthys, q.v., 130 Destruction, action between elements, 119120, 137-139; and Production, 119; of element Earth, 139 Devisch, Ren, 13 Dewi Sri, agricultural goddess SE Asia, 100n, Diachronic Aggregative Model of Global Mythology (van Binsbergen), 8, 36, 48, 54, 36n Die Anfnge des kulturellen und Handelsverkehr in der Mittelmeerwelt (Hennig), 113n Dietz, Ton, director, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 12 Dilmun, legendary Sumerian location often identified as Barayn, 77 Diomedes, Graeco-Roman mythical figure, 246n Dionysus, Ancient Graeco-Roman god, 115, 208, 100n, 172n, 223n, 246n Dioscuri, Graeco-Roman mythical figures, 170; cf. Helen, Clytemnaestra, Leda Dissertationes (Maximus Tyrius), 230n Dithlaola, Southern African designation for cleromantic divination set, 6 Djunatan, Stephanus, 13 DNA, genetically vital protein, 33, 50, 52, 7980, 178, 33n; mt [ mitochondrial ] DNA Type B, 63, 182; and RNA,

178 Dogon, West African ethnic group, 125, 129, 287, 223n Doquebuth, Native American Creator figure, 146 Dordogne, region in France, 184 Douala, town in Cameroon, 279 Down, extra dimension added to four directions so as to obtain six elements, 142; cf Up Doxographi Graeci (Diels), 159 Dravidian, branch of Eurasiatic, 77, 230, 233, 237, 245, 280n Drone, Nkoya clan name, 93, 95; cf. Bee Drought, see Shihoka; cf. Water, Earth Duality, see Twins Dumuzi, Thammuz, Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamian mythical figure, 100n Dutch, see Netherlands Eagle, 145; Nkoya clan, 91, 104 Early Modern, 6, 55, 74, 76-77, 109, 115, 150, 156, 162, 193, 222, 287, 10n, 19n Early-Dynastic, see Egypt Earth, mainly as element, 36, 50-52, 101, 104, 116-121, 124, 130-131, 133, 136-139, 145-147, 149, 152-155, 157-161, 163-167, 178, 181-182, 185, 187, 189, 192-199, 208, 211-212, 234-235, 251, 256, 39n, 93n, 101n, 110n, 133n, 153n154n, 172n, 181n, 195n, 226n, 246n, 261n; , Water, Fire and Air,

143; and Air, 195, 212-213, 263; and Fire, 182, 212-213; and Stone, 157; and Time, 117n; and Water, 143, 154, 171, 212; and Wood, 146n; as the Source of Cattle (Neolithic), transformation of the Narrative Complex the Earth as Primary, 181; and Horus, 133; Earth and Sicily, 136; People and Sky-People, 143; Kind (Empedoclean expression), 161 Earth-diver mytheme, 147; cf. Mink Easter Island, 217, 268n East-West, pendulumswing influence, 75, 240-242, 252, 111n, 219n, 246n East, West, North and South cultural transmission since Late Bronze Age, proposed crossmodel, 253 Eaton, Arthur, 12 Edda, Nordic classic mythical text, 124n Edessa, town in Ancient Mesopotamia, 116 EGYPGOD, variable in cluster analysis, 288 EGYPNOM, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Egypt before the Pharaohs (Hoffman), 20 Egypt(ian(s)), Ancient, 9, 16, 20, 42, 73-74, 83, 98, 101-102, 107, 111, 115, 118-119, 123-125, 129141, 143, 150, 160-161, 163-164, 172-173, 175177, 186-188, 195, 198, 209-210, 227-228, 230, 241-242, 249-250, 263, 265, 271-273, 275, 277, 285, 287-288, 294, 6n,

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55n, 97n, 101n-102n, 117n, 124n-125n, 134n, 153n, 175n, 225n, 230n, 265n, 272n-273n, 280n; , Upper, 137, 139-140; and Lower , 102, 138139, 186, 101n; Early Dynastic, 137-138; Old Kingdom, 273; New Kingdom, 230n; Late Period, 132; Egyptianising, 136-137; Egyptian Horizon of the Primal Waters, possible etymology of the name Noah, 140n; Hermetic, 141; Dynastic, 249; and Mesopotamia, 210; and Greek, 288; cf. Hermopolis, Isis, Horus, Neith, Rec, and other Egyptian deities listed, Aristaeus, Mizraim, Two Lands Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt, 132 Egyptology, Egyptologist, Egyptological, 7, 45, 101, 130, 136, 140, 163 Elam(ite), region, language, ethnic identity in Ancient Near East, 77, 176, 219, 249; and Dravidian, 77 Elder Sister / Younger Brother, 154n Elegba, West African phallic divinity, 124 Elephant, Nkoya clan, 104 Elymians, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 230; cf. Ligurians Empedocles,** 8-9, 3132, 106, 109-112, 115116, 131, 141, 149-150, 156-161, 164-176, 178, 209, 234, 249-252, 274, 278, 285, 290, 293, 110n, 118n, 130n, 157n, 160n, 165n, 167n, 175n,

224n; Sphere, 169-170; Fragments, 106, 160, 234; Cosmic Cycle, 168; Empedocles and IndoIranian, 234 England, English, 89-90, 99, 152-153, 158, 187, 110n, 227n; AngloSaxon, 6n; cf. FrenchEnglish, United Kingdom, British Enki, Ancient Mesopotamian deity, 243 Enlightenment, period in intellectual history of Europe / North Atlantic region 10n; cf. (Early) Modern Ennead, Ancient Egyptian group of primal beings, 131, 134, 139; Bull of the , 139; cf. Heliopolis Enoch, Biblical and Islamic figure; and Noah, 241 Epimenides, Greek shaman, 112 Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3, 7, 13 Erebus, Graeco-Roman primal mythical figure, 152 Erechtheus, snake-feeted Graeco-Roman mythical figure, 265; cf. Erichthonius Erichthonius, snake-feeted Graeco-Roman mythical figure, 223, 242, 265, 223n; cf. Erechtheus; Fu Xi, and Oannes, 223n Eros, Greek mythical figure, 155; cf. Love Eskimo-Aleut, language phylum, 245; cf. Eurasiatic Ether, element, 117n Ethiopia(n(s)), Ancient region and identity, 78,

227, 227n; and Ancient Egypt, 55n Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen), 7, 13 Etruscan(s), Etruria, language, ethnic identity, and region, 126, 136-137, 242, 248, 272 Euphrates, River, 219, 242; cf. Mesopotamia Eurasia(n), i.e. Asia and Europe together, 9, 3334, 36-37, 54, 80, 105, 110, 116, 118, 141, 148149, 174, 176, 190-191, 204-205, 210, 234, 242244, 248, 256, 259-261, 263-266, 273, 287, 42n, 97n, 117n, 184n, 223n, 246n, 292n; Upper Palaeolithic, 205; Neolithic and Bronze Age, 19; Steppe, 37, 222, 252, 277, 153n; and Africa, 36; and Oceania, 170; and North America, 3 Eurasia, Western, 33, 80, 148-149, 174, 190, 264, 287, 266n; and Africa, 292n Eurasiatic, linguistic macrophylum, 16, 52, 233, 236, 244-245, 257258, 261-262, 191n, 240n, 256n, 262n; Proto, 198-199; Upper Palaeolithic, 36; Hypothesis, 34n; and Afroasiatic, 262n; , Afroasiatic and SinoCaucasian, 261n Eurocentric, Eurocentrism, 9-10, 16, 19-20, 31, 42, 47, 130, 175, 213, 227, 248, 292, 296, 227n Europe(an(s)), 6, 12, 18-

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19, 37, 41, 44, 47, 53, 71, 75-77, 80, 82, 84-86, 115-116, 119, 129, 142, 149-150, 161, 185, 209, 215, 218, 227, 241, 248, 251-252, 258, 264, 274, 283, 290, 295, 6n, 223n, 228n, 279n-280n; Upper Palaeolithic, 163, 188; European Romantic poets, 149; and the North Atlantic region, 175; and Africa, 267 Eurydice, Broad Justice, Graeco-Roman mythical figure, 137-138, 134n; cf. Orpheus, Aristaeus Eurytus, pupil of Philolaus, 264 Ewe, West African ethnic group, 123 Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Nietzsche), 211 Ex Oriente Lux, Light from the East, 175 Exalted Insider, 257; cf. Sacred Outsider Exile, Babylonian: preExilic Israelite, 150 Exodus, Bible book, 225n Exodus, Out-of-Africa, q.v. Extended Fertile Crescent, Neolithic, 47, 52, 56-58, 62, 79-80, 211, 253 Fabulae (Hyginus), 265n Fagbemissi, 14 Fan Qie, Chinese pronunciation device, 238, 218n Fasti (Ovid), 136n Fathers, epithet for planets, 110; cf. Mothers Feminine Arts, the, Narrative Comples, 181; cf. Spider Fertile Crescent, 79; see Extended Fertile Crescent Field, Chinese trigram

name, 122, 236 Figurism, see Jesuits Finisher, Nkoya clan, 96 Finn, Finland, Finnish, Iron as mythical figure, 39 Fire, 18, 39, 95, 104, 116121, 124, 130-133, 137, 139, 143, 145-146, 149, 153-155, 157-159, 165166, 172, 180, 182, 187, 189, 192-199, 211-213, 230, 234, 250-251, 263, 39n, 93n, 116n-117n, 146n, 153n-154n, 160n, 246n, 261n; Giant, 154; and Water, 137, 153n-154n; and Air, 137, 143, 117n; Fires, as part of foursome, 196, 128n, cf. Wind etc.; Firegod, 246n; Fire, Water, Lion and Snake, apparent transformation cycle of elements, traversed in narrative of Thetis seeking to avoid marrying Peleus, 172 Firewood, Nkoya clan, 104 Fish Eagle, Nkoya clan, 104 Fish Spear, Nkoya clan, 88 Five Phases, Chinese elements, see WuXing Flood Plain, Zambezi, 87, 102n, 154n Flood, mytheme, 8, 36, 39-40, 49-51, 58, 63, 7273, 100, 123, 146-147, 162, 182, 204, 208, 220, 247, 251, 261, 267, 277, 293, 19n, 146n, 246n, 292n; and Tower myths, 72, 281; cf. Confusion of languages Fomorians, mythical ethnic group, Ancient Ireland, 230

Font de Gaume, Upper Palaeolithic site, 188 Fontes atque pontes: Reihe gypten und Altes Testament (series on Ancient Egyptian / Ancient Israelite continuities, ed. Grg, M.), 225n Force, Chinese trigram name, 122, 236 Formosa, see Taiwan Fortes, Meyer, 84 Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Chair, Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3 Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Die (Jacoby), 223n Fragments (Empedocles), 106, 160, 165, 173, 234 Fragments (Heraclitus), 173 France, French, language, country and ethnic identity, 14, 156, 183-184, 188, 192, 212, 216, 200n, 227n; -British, 213, 216 Francistown, town in NE Botswana, 6-7, 13, 44, 276 Franco-Cantabrian region, in Southern France / Northeastern Spain, with high concentration of Upper and Meso Palaeolithic sites, 183, 188, 191, 197, 202, 219n Freyr, Nordic mythical figure, 153 Fu Xi, Chinese mythical figure, 222, 241, 243, 246, 265, 223n, 246n; and N Wa, 243 Furtherance, between elements, 119 Fusion, Empedoclean theme, 169; cf. Love,

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Strife Fuzhou, division of SinoTibetan, 238 Ga, ethnic group, West Africa, 123 Gaia, Graeco-Roman mythical figure, Earth, 133n Game Meat of Kingship, Nkoya mytheme, 105; cf. Cauldron Ganesh, elephant-shaped Hindu god, 223 Ganga, South Asian mythical figure representing the River Ganges, 39 Garuda, mythical figure S and SE Asia, 281; cf. Vishnu Gaul, region coinciding with present-day France and N Italy, 113n Gautama, see Buddha Geb, Ancient Egyptian Earth god, 130, 138, 163 Genesis, Bible book, 72, 100, 134, 150, 204, 229230, 281, 19n, 216n, 227n, 230n Geniza, storeroom of a synagogue, notably at Cairo, Egypt, 15, 247n Gentle, Chinese trigram name, 122, 236 Geomancy, geomantic, 65, 67; in Africa, 69; further see cilm al-raml, Hakata, Sixteen Cowries, Ifa, Y Jng, Sikidy, Punktierkunst Georgica (Vergil), 136n German(y), Germans, 42, 90, 128, 175, 183, 187, 215 Giant, 154; cf. Gigantes Gielgud-Anderson Expedition (1900 CE) to the Hook of Kafue, todays Central Zambia, 1900,

89n Gigantes, Graeco-Roman mythical figures, 136 Gilgamesh, 134-135; Gilgamesh Epic, 188; and Samson, 135 Global Bee Flight (abortive earlier draft of the present book; van Binsbergen), 15, 17 Gluckman, Max, 89n Gnostic(ism), 111, 177 Goat, Nkoya clan, 103 Gbekli Tepe, Neolithic archaeological site, Anatolia, 231n God, 39, 100, 105, 125126, 160, 162, 164, 39n, 116n, 172n; of Iron, 39n; Iao, 172n; s Child, 100; Supreme , 126 Godai, Japanese name for element, 118, 287 Gonalo de Silveira, Fr., martyr in Zimbabwe, 69n Gorge, Chinese trigram name, 122, 236 Goryeo dynasty, Korea, 281n; cf. Kola Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan, 14 Graecia Magna, South Italy, 18, 38, 41, 109, 234, 250, 290, 292 Gray Bear, mythical figure, North America, 147 Great Britain, see British Great Zimbabwe, archaeological site, Zimbabwe, 64 Greece, Greek(s), language, ethnic group, region, 10, 13, 15-16, 20, 37, 41, 47, 69, 75, 81, 83, 85, 107, 109-117,

119, 126, 131, 133, 135138, 149-152, 154-160, 163, 166, 170-172, 174175, 178, 185-186, 209, 213, 222, 226, 232, 234, 239, 242, 244-246, 248, 251, 263, 287-288, 292, 294, 7n, 110n, 113n114n, 118n, 133n-134n, 153n, 170n, 188n, 223n, 226n, 272n-273n; Archaic , 188n; Philosophy, 20, cf. Presocratics, Stoics, Aristotle, Plato etc.; Classical Age, 141; and Indian, 234; and Hittite, 244; -Anatol ian, 232; GraecoRoman, 58, 116, 129, 135-136, 150, 157, 162, 178, 188, 222, 243, 264, 6n; Graecianising Roman, 136; -English, 160n; cf. Graecia Magna, Descriptio Graeciae, Doxographi Graeci, Hellenism, Antiquity, Presocratic; cf. Hellenic GREEKMYT, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Grizzly Bear, mythical figure, Menomini people, North America, 147 Ground, 122, 236; cf. Earth Guinea Fowl, Nkoya clan, 104 Guinea-Bissau, country, 14 Gulf of Bengal, 280n Gumede, Mr Smarts, 13 Gun, Chinese element God in the shape of a White Horse taming the Waters, personification of an element, 246n Gurung, branch of SinoTibetan, 238

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Gypsies, 90, 230; cf. Kale, Sinties Haarlem, town in the Netherlands, 4, 16 Hades, Greek underworld, 112, 152, 160, 172n,184n Hadza, Khoisanoid East African language cluster, 230 Hainuwele, SE Asian agricultural goddess, 100n Hakata, South Central African geomantic (q.v.) divination system, 6, 64, 81-82, 209, 270-271, 128n Hallo, W.W., 14 Halmaheira, island, Indonesia, 162 am, Biblical figure, 216n Hamitic Thesis, 73, 233 Hamito-Semitic, 233; see Afroasiatic Hanno, Phoenician admiral and explorer, 75 Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, 202 Harmony, Empedoclean concept, 161 Harrassowitz, publishing house, 225n Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA, 7, 12 Hasharet al-Fras, Mare Stone, shrine, NW Tunisia, 264 Hathor, House of Horus, Ancient Egyptian goddess, 124, 133 atti, polity in Bronze Age Anatolia, 294; cf. Hittite, Hausa, branch of Afroasiatic, 198; Standard , 198 Havamal, part of the Elder Edda, 124n

Hawk, Nkoya clan, 104 Heat, meaning attributed to the name of one of Noahs sons, 140n Heaven, celestial, 18, 5052, 100-101, 118, 137, 143, 152-153, 164-165, 181-182, 188-189, 194, 212, 238, 258-259, 39n, 97n, 111n, 124n, 140n, 153n, 184n, 216n; Mesopotamian , 216n; and Earth, 36, 51, 104, 133, 152, 164, 181, 208, 234, 93n, 101n, 133n Heavy Black, see Chung Li Hebrew, 20, 69, 135, 150, 160, 140n, 247n; Studies / Hebraeist(ics), 15; and Biblical, 17; cf. Judaism Heitsi Eibib, SW African culture hero and trickster, 263-265; cf. Wounded Knee Helena, Ancient GreacoRoman mythical figure, 138; and Clytemnaestra, 170 Heliopolis, Heliopolitan, Ancient Egyptian city of On, 130-131, 138-139; Ennead, 131, 139 Helios, Helius, GraecoRoman sun god, 159, 172n, 184n, 273n; cf. Sol, Sun, Fire Hellenic, also see Greek, 172, 242, 290, 294, 170n; Athens, 242; Pre- , 174 Hellenism, Hellenist, Hellenistic (Greek / Eastern syncretism from Alexander the Great onwards), 209, 223, 249, 252, 290, 294, 114n, 117n-118n, 223n; Mesopotamia, 243;

Egypt, 249-250; cf. South Asia Hephaestus, Hephaistos, 39, 135-136, 153-155, 159, 161, 230, 250-251, 6n-7n, 39n, 153n, 160n; and Athena, 135 Hera, Greek goddess, 141, 155, 159-161, 160n; cf. Life-bringing Here Heracles, Ancient Greek hero, 135, 151, 243, 134n; cf. Deianeira Heraclitus, as proposed author of four-element doctrine instead of Empedocles, 173 Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments (Kirk), 173 Hercules Oetaeus (Seneca), 134n Hercules, see Heracles Here, see Life-bringing Hera Hereditary Prince, proposed meaning of name Orpheus, 138 Hermes Trismegistus, 241; Hermeticism, 110; Hermetic, 141; cf. Corpus Hermeticus Hermopolis, Hermopolitan, 139, 177, 209; Ogdoad, 131, 139 Hermotimus, Greek shaman, 112 Hidden One, 130, see Atum Hindrance, between elements, 119, 138 Hindu(ism), 14, 116-118, 128, 281, 287, 67n, 117n-118n; and Buddhist, 14, 116-118, 287, 117n-118n Hirafuji Kikuko, 12, 14 Historiae (Herodotus), 38, 229, 265n Historische Zeitschrift, 113n

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Hittite(s), language and ethnic group, 226-227, 232, 239-240, 244, 250, 219n, 226n-227n, 230n, 280n Hokan, language in North America, 146 Holocene, geological period spanning the last 10,000 years, 18, 34, 180, 170n; South East Asia, 36n Homer**, Homerus, 20, 152-153, 155, 157, 230, 251, 7n, 39n, 153n, 188n, 273n; Homer and Hesiod, 152, 157; s Sinties, 230; cf. Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, Allegoriae -ica Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, 39n Hook of the Kafue, location, Central Zambia, 89n Hopi, North American ethnic group, 142 Horizon of the Bee, location in Egyptian Delta, 101n; cf. Chemmis Horizon of the Primal Waters, possible Egyptian etymology of the name of Noah (q.v.), 140n Horus, r, Ancient Egyptian god, 130-133, 138, 140, 163, 211, 6n, 101n, 134n; Sons of , 131; the Younger, 131; Eyes of , Sun and Moon, 138 Hou Yi, Chinese mythical archer, 243 House of the Bee, 101n; cf. Sas House of the Sun, 137 Humbaba, Levantine

mythical monster, 134135 Humbu, South Central African ethnic group, 98-99 Hundred Families, concept in Chinese Ancient history, 220, 243, 216n; cf. Bak Sing Hyksos, Asiatic dynasty in Egypt and elsewhere in the Ancient Mediterranean, 141 Hyperborean(s), 112-114, 272n; Apollo, 112, 272n Hypotheses = Working Hypothesis and Alternative Working Hypothesis, q.v., guiding this books argument, 171, 174, 251, 253, 255, I Ching, 7, 219; see Y Jng I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11 (Hess & Tsumura), 19n I un al-af, Brethern of Purity (q.v.), 150, 282n Iao, fourfold (Levantine) god as attested in Ionian context, 172n Iberia(n(s)), 230, 240; Ibero-Sicanians, 233; Ibero-Ligurians, Secondary (q.v.), 233 Iceland, Nordic island state; South Asia and China, extent of triadic belt, 208 Idea, element, 117; cf. Aether Ifa, West African geomantic divination, 69-70, 72, 81, 111, 124, 209, 268, 290, 128n; and Sixteen

Cowries, 81 Igwenia, community, early colonial Southern Africa, 269 Ila, ethnic group in Zambia, 90 Iliad (Homer), 152-153, 155, 230, 39n Illyria(n(s)), Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, language and region, 233 c ilm al-raml / a al-raml, Arabian form of geomancy, 6, 65, 67-69, 74, 81, 150, 209, 247-248, 116n, 128n, 166n, 282n; in Iraq, 74 Imagines (Philostratus the Elder), 154n Imbi, personal essence (Kongo), 125 Inanna, Ancient Mesopotamian goddess, 273n; cf. Descent India(n(s)), 5-6, 9, 12, 14, 41-42, 66, 77-78, 81, 107, 150, 177, 223, 227, 229, 234, 242, 275, 282, 67n; Ganesh, 223; and European, 150; and Japan, 107, 227; Indology, 282; cf. Vedas Indian Ocean, 6, 38, 44, 52, 59-60, 63, 68-70, 72, 74, 76, 80, 129, 151, 180, 267, 291, 100n, 287n; and the Persian Gulf, 68; and Africa, 78; cf. Comoro Isl. Indo-Aryan, 69, 233 Indo-Chinese, 216; cf. Terrien de Lacouperie Indo-European, 18, 69, 90, 152, 185-186, 226, 232234, 236, 239-240, 244245, 247-248, 257-258, 261, 277, 109n, 181n, 219n, 226n-227n, 240n, 272n; and Sino-Tibetan,

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240; and Afroasiatic, 232; Studies, 234; nonIndo-European languages, 295 Indo-Iranian, branch of Indo-European (q,v,), 234, 250, 281, 37n Indonesia(n(s)), 14, 54, 76-77, 99, 128, 162, 280, 55n, 287n Indra, South Asian god, 153 Indus Valley, 268n; and Easter Island, 217 Inoue Nobutaka, 12 Insanga, a name for the junior female tablet in Southern African divination, 269 Institute for African Studies, UNZA, Lusaka, Zambia, 13 Institute for Economic and Social Research, UNZA, Lusaka, Zambia, 13 Institute of West Asian and African Studies (IWAAS), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China, 223n Insult, between elements, 119 International Association for Comparative Mythology, 8 International Conference Rethinking Africas Transcontinental Continuities in Pre- and Protohistory, 12, 36n, 225n Internet, 82, 244 Ionia(n(s)), 18, 38, 41, 86, 171, 174, 234, 250, 290, 292, 172n; and Graecia Magna, 18; as Pelasgians, 38; cf. Presocratics Iran(ian(s)), 41-42, 68, 111, 115, 234, 271;

Irani-Syriac, 224n; and Mesopotamian Magi, 115; and Northern India to China, 42; cf. Persia(n(s)) Iraq(i), 6, 44, 74, 81, 110, 116, 150, 116n, 128n; and Iran(ian), 68 Ireland, Irish, 230, 243; cf. Black , Fomorians Isis, Ast, 124, 130-131, 133, 163, 211, 6n, 134n; and Nephthys, 138; and Horus, 133; cult in Roman empire, 295 Islam(ic), 5-6, 44, 63, 6566, 70, 72, 75, 77-78, 82, 110-111, 115, 119, 128, 241, 264-265, 268-269, 290, 116n, 128n, 166n, 224n, 282n; Iraq, 6, 68; Indonesia, 55n; Ottoman , 84; in West and East Africa, 73 Israel(ite), Ancient, 14, 68, 126, 150, 233, 241, 271, 225n; and Ancient Iran, 271; cf. Bible, Hebrew, Judaism Issa / cAissa, Islamic prophet, identical with Jesus, 70; cf. Jesus Italy, Italic, Italian, 41, 109-110, 136-137, 140141, 161, 164, 223, 234, 292, 181n; and Ancient Egypt, 164 IWAAS, see: Institute of West Asian and African Studies Izanagi, Japanese primal god, 39 Izanami, Japanese primal goddess, 39, 116n Jaccetani, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Jamaica, island and country, 162 Janus, Ancient Italic god,

223; cf. Ganesha, Oannes, Basojaun Japan(ese), country, language and identity, 11-12, 14, 37, 39, 81, 107, 116, 118, 216, 218, 222, 227, 242-243, 245, 249, 285, 287, 291, 37n, 100n, 116n, 153n, 216n, 231n; Buddhist, 279; Japanology, 11; Nkoya, 277; and Etruria, 242; and Indonesia, 99 Japhet, Biblical figure, 140n Jason, Ancient Greek hero, 111, 246n; cf. Medeia Java, Indonesian island, 14 Jeddito valley, rock art site, USA, 145 Jesuits, Society of Jesus, Roman Catholic clerical order, 215, 241; Figurism, 241 Jesus of Nazareth, 41, 208, 100n; cf. Christianity, Issa / cAissa Jew(ish), see Judaism Jinpho, branch of SinoTibetan, 238 Jongmans, Douwe G., 4-5 Judaism, Jew(ish) 78, 82, 162, 295, 224n-225n, 227n, 247n; and Christianity, 225n, 227n; , Christianity and Islam, 146n; cf. Exile, Babylonian, Hebrew, Bible, Israel(ite) Judges, Biblical book, 134 Jupiter, Jove, see Zeus Kabambi, Mwene, Nkoya King, 13; cf. Kahare, Kale Kabbalah, esoteric complex of Judaism, 177 Kabulwebulwe, Nkoya

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royal title, 89 Kacaba, main Islamic shrine, 265 Kachin, branch of SinoTibetan, 238 Kafue River, Central Zambia 87 Kagutsuchi, Japanese Fire god, 39, 153n Kahare, Kahale, Mwene, Nkoya royal title, 13, 89-90; Kabambi, 13, 102n Kaike, Sino-Tibetan language, 238 Kalapukila, mid-20th c. CE incumbent of the Mutondo kingship among the Nkoya, 91n Kale, variant of Nkoya royal name Kahare, 8890, 104-105 Kalevala ( [ Lnnrot, E.** ] ), 39n, 153n Kalinien, Middle Palaeolithic archaeological complex, Angola, 201 Kalmuk, Central Asian group, 216n Kaluwe, Nkoya deity, 206; cf. Luwe, Mwendanjangula Kamanisha, Nkoya clan, 91, 96-97 Kamunu, first human in Western Zambian mythical accounts, 39 Kanakosi, a name for the junior male tablet in Southern African divination, 269 Kanohaha, Nkoya deity, 206 Kantian, 19, 192; cf. Kant** Kaoma, district and district capital, Western Zambia, 89, 97, 39n, 91n Kapesh ka Mununga Mpanda, the Kapesh

Who Joins the Forked Poles, mythical ruler in South Central Africa, 281, 216n; cf. Kasyapa, Nimrod, Mahakashapa Kapi, conventional twins name, Nkoya, 206; cf. Mbuyu Kartvelian, branch of Eurasiatic, 245 Karumi, a name for the senior male tablet in Southern African divination, 269 Kashap Samhita, Ayurvedic text, 281 Kasyapa, Sri Lankan king, 281; cf. Kapesh Katete, Reed Person, 9899, 275; and Luhamba, 101-102, 206 Kathiavar, peninsula, SW Asia, 280n Kauket and Kuk, primal divine pair of Darkness, 131 Kawanga, Davison, 6, 13 Kazakhstan, Central Asian region, 246n, 291n Kazanga Cultural Society, Nkoya neo-traditional organisation named after the revived Kazanga festival, 13 Keeping Still, Mountain, meaning of Chinese trigram name gn, 122, 236 Keerthi, Sri Lankan cult leader, 14 Ketshi, 216n, cf. Ktsch Kets, 216n, cf. Ktsch Khami, Zimbabwean archaeological site, 69n Khanty, see Ostyaks Khoe, Southern African language and people, 186 Khoekhoe, Southern African language and

people, 186 Khoi, Southern African language and people, 186 Khoikhoi, Southern African language and people, 186 Khoisan, macrophylum and genetic cluster, now confined to Southern Africa, 62, 186, 232233, 257, 261-262, 264, 273-274, 186n, 231n, 263n; Khoisanoid, 230, 253; and Amerind, 274; Central , 186; and North Caucasian, 186; cf. Khoi, Khoikhoi, Khoekhoe, Khoe; cf. Bantu Khotan, Central Asian region and Middle Iranian language, 69, 216n; and the Tarim Valley, 249 Khurasan, Central Asian region, 116; and China, 116 Kindling, Nkoya clan name, 92, 104; and Smoke, 95-96 Kirkland, Forrest, copyist of Lower Pecos River art, 145 Kisha Manido, High God among the Menomini of North America, 147 Kitb al ayawn (alDjai), 78 Kitb al-Ani (Abul Faraj), 63 Kobah, Mt, 146 Kbben, A.J.F., 15 Kode, see Kole, Kola Kojiki (Ancient Japanese text), 39 Kokugakuin Shinto University, Tokya, Japan, 11 Kola, Kole, transcontinen-

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tal toponym, 280, 280n281n; cf. Korea, Munda, Chola, Angola Kololo, Southern African ethnic group and language invading Upper Zambezi region in second quarter of 19th c. CE, 270 Kon Tiki, 266n; cf. Heyerdahl** Kora, see Kurukh Kor Kosmou, see Virgin of the World, 141 Korea(n(s)), 37, 81, 217, 222, 277, 279, 216n, 280n-281n; and Japanese, 277, 216n Koroi, see Kurukh Kotchi, 216n; cf. Ktsch Krittika, see Pleiades Kshatriya, warrior / royal caste in South Asia, with proposed extension to SC Africa, 280 *Ksing, [ *ba-], 216n; cf. Ktsch, Bak Sing Kuami, a name for the senior female tablet in Southern African divination, 269 Kuaua, location in New Mexico, 145 Kuba, Congolese ethnic group, 61 Kuk, darkness, Ancient Egyptian primal deity and proto-element, 131; cf. Kauket Kun (1) personal name, see Gun (2) kun, trigram name Earth, q.v. Kurru, see Kurukh Kurukh, Dravidian toponym, 280n Kuruvi, the Path of Luwe, South Central African conception of the Milky Way, 202 Kush, ethnic and

toponimical cluster in the Ancient and Bible World, 229-230, 216n Ktsch, ethnic group in Central Asia, which Karst proposes to identify as Terrien de Lacouperies Bak Sing, 216n; cf. Hundred Families Kwame Legwane Traditional Association of Botswana, 3 Kyoto, city in Japan, 12; Kyoto University, 14 La Ferrassie, Middle Palaeolithic site, France, 188 Laceulle MD, Joost, 16 La-Chapelle-aux-Saints, 188 Laco Tritonis, in Ancient Libya, 246n; see o alJerd; Central Asian location suggested, 146n; cf. Athena Laduma Madela, lightning sorcerer, Southern Africa, 127-128 Lake Baikal, 34 Lake Campbell, 146 Lake Chad, 244 Lalafuta, river in Nkoyaland, 99 Lamaist, variety of Buddhism, 12 Lamia, destructive mythical figure, 135 Land, mythical being, 36, 51, 124, 130, 132, 143, 182, 189, 194, 208, 212, 153n, 195n; as Earth, 130; Earth and Water, 124, 208; cf. Water, Mothern of the Waters Langu, Nkoya clan, 90, 104; Langu-Nkwehe, 90n Lascaux, Upper Palaeolithic site, France, 20,

183-184, 187-192, 195197, 200, 287, 183n184n, 200n Latin, Ancient and Medieval language, 15, 69, 75, 117, 136, 150, 287, 295, 7n, 69n, 172n, 181n; cf. Rome Laussel, Upper Palaeolithic site, France, 189 Lavwe, Nkoya clan, 89, 90, 96, 98, 100, 103, 105 Law of Conservation of Matter (Lavoisier), 166 Le Puits, Grotte de Lascaux, France, Upper Palaeolithic site, 184 Lealui, Barotse capital, 269-270 Leda, Graeco-Roman mythical character, 170 Leg-Child, mythical character born outside normal human birth channel, 181 Leiden, 3, 12, 15-16, 35, 36n, 53n, 62n, 129n, 171n, 223n, 225n, 279n, 287n; Leiden University Medical Centre, 16; Leiden 2012 conference, see Rethinking Africas transcontinental Leipzig, town in Germany, 173 Leleges, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, Secondary (q.v.), 233 Lepcha, Sino-Tibetan language, 238 Les Eyzies de Tayac, town in France, 14 Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse (Durkheim), 91 Leto, Graeco-Roman goddess, 113 Letter to the Editor (Terrien de Lacouperie), 225

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Levant(ine), Eastern Mediterranean region, 135, 151, 264, 151n; cf. Syro-Palestine, Phoenicia, Anatolia, Cyprus Leviathan, mythical aquatic figure of Ancient Israelites, 164; cf. Tiamat, Neith Leya, ethnic group Southwestern Zambia, 269, 272 Libya(n(s)), 102n, 246n; Neith, 137 Lickers, Nkoya clan, 89, 104-105 Life-bringing Here [Hera], Empedoclean expression, 158; cf. Hera Light, 135, 116n-117n, 224n; , Gnostic, 177; Light Comes from the East (Ex Oriente Lux), 175; cf. Darkness, Sun Lightning Bird, primal Narrative Complex, 50, 180, 36n; cf. World or Cosmic Egg Lightning, 50, 145, 180, 36n; cf. Bird, Laduma, Fire Liguria(n(s)), Ancient Mediterranean language and identity, 230, 233; pre-Euscarian Liguroids, 233; and Elymians, 230 Likambi, Nkoya legendary female ruler, 135; cf. Shihoka Likota lya Bankoya (Shimunika), 88-89, 9596, 99, 102-103, 105106, 125, 101n Lilith, mythical female figure in Judaism, 135 Limpopo Province, South Africa, 276 Limpopo River, 270 Lion, see: Fire, Water,

Lion and Snake; cf. Sun Lipepo, Royal Person Wind, Nkoya mythical figure, 101n Lipupe, Mwene, Nkoya legendary royal ancestress, 101n London, English city, 132, 216, 110n Lord, epithet for divinity in Ancient Mediterranean region, 160; cf. Adonai Louvain School of anthropology, 96 Louvre, Paris Museum, 212 Love, Empedoclean concept, 157-158, 168169 Lower Pecos River, 143, 145; art, 145 Lozi, ethnic group and language, Western Zambia, 89, 102n; Paramount Chief, 87; cf. Barotse, Nkoya, Kololo, Luyi, Luyana Lualaba River, South Central Africa, 64 Luba, ethnic group, South Central Africa, 202 Lubumba, Nkoya headman and prophet / witchfinder, 39n Luchele, mythical White figure among Bemba and related peoples, South Central Africa, 26 Ludim, Biblical / Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 230; cf. Lydia(n(s)), Caria(n(s)), Lycia(n(s)) Lufupa, stream in Nkoyaland, 99 Luhamba, Royal Travelling Thing, Nkoya mythical figure, 98-102, 206, 275; and Katete,

98-99 Lui, Haifang, 12, 223n Lu, River, 246 Lusaka, capital of Zambia, 13 Lushai, branch of SinoTibetan, 238, 245 Lushimba, stream in Nkoyaland, 99 Luwe, mythical unilateral being, 162; Path of , Milky Way, 202; cf. Mwendanjangula, Kaluwe Luwian-Hittite, Anatolian language cluster, 69 Luyana, pre-Kololo Barotse polity and ethnic group, Western Zambia, 87, 270; cf. Nkoya, Lozi, Barotseland Luyi, see Lozi Lycia(n(s)), Ancient Mediterranean region and inhabitants, 230, 250 Lydia(n(s)), Ancient Mediterranean region and inhabitants, 230 Lyovu lya Mbuwa, Nkoya legendary figure, 99 Ma Lin, medieval Chinese painter, 246 Madagascar, Malagasy, island and language cluster, 6, 15, 34, 52, 59, 61, 69, 74-76, 81, 128129, 272, 279, 287, 128n; and the Comoro Islands, 6, 81; and Southern Africa, 74; cf. Nkoya, sikidy Madela, see Laduma Madeleine, La, Upper Palaeolithic site, France, 189 Maghreb, Western North Africa, 230 Magi, Ancient Mesopotamian ritual specialists, 112, 115; cf. Chaldaean

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Mahakasyapa, discipline of the Buddha, 281 Mahavagga, 281n; cf. Vinaya Pitaka Makanga, Nkoya clan, 91, 104 Makoni, archaeological site in Zimbabwe, 203 Makuwa, East African language, 35 Malagasy, see Madagascar Malapa, M.M., 13 Malawi(an), Southern African country, 89n, 99n-100n Malaysia, country in SE Asia, 14 Mali, West African country, 125, 223n; cf. Dogon Mallos, Ancient Anatolian city, 159 Manabush, Menomini trickster figure, North America, 147 Manchester School, of social anthropology, 89, 89n Mandarin, variety of Chinese, 238 Manding, West African language and ethnic group, 77 Man-faced Ox-creatures, see Ox Mangala, planet Mars, 280; cf. Skanda, Shikanda, Nkoya Manichaeism, 224n, 242n; cf. Mani** Manidoes, Manido, Menomini mythical evildoers,147 Manipura (Navel): Fire, 117n Manjaco, ethnic group in West Africa, 14 Mankala, board-game, 45, 54-59 Mantis, primal Narrative

Complex, 50-51 Maori, ethnic group, New Zealand, 133n Mapungubwe, archaeological site, Southern Africa, 64, 279 Mara, Delusion, Buddhist concept, 135 Marduk, solar chief god of Babylon, 135 Mari, Bronze Age culture, Eastern Mediterranean, 242 Mars, planet and deity, 280; cf. Skanda, Shikanda, Mangala Marsoulas Cave, Upper Palaeolithic site, France, 188 Masai, East African ethnic group, 73 Masculinisation, process through which female deities turned into male ones in the Old World during the Bronze Age, 52; cf. Athena, Poseidon, Atum, Rec Matsumura, Kazuo, 12, 14 Matter, 166 Mawu, High God, Ewe people, West Africa, 123 Maya, South American ethnic group, 267 Mayowe, Stanford, 13 Mbetsi, Mbedzi, moon or Buddha, and mythical ancestor,Douala, Cameroon, 279 Mbona, Malawian and mythical figure, 100n Mbunze, Nkoya clan, 89, 91, 99, 104 Mbuyu, conventional twins name, Nkoya, 206; cf. Kapi Medeia, lengendary Colchian princess turned sorceress, 111; cf. Jason, Pelias, Colchis

Mediterranean, Sea, and region, 36-38, 47, 53-54, 76-78, 80, 84, 135, 151, 174, 230, 232-233, 240, 244, 264, 272, 275, 294, 100n, 113n, 129n, 219n, 230n; Bronze Age, 45, 76, 185, 227; protohistory, 7, 13; Late Antiquity, 68, 77; and Western Europe, 37; and the Atlantic Ocean, 267; and West Africa, 99; and South Central Africa, 99; and Middle East, 161 Melqart, city god, 135; cf. Heracles Melusine, European mythical figure, 135; and Lilith, 135 Mencius, Meng-Tze, 177; parallel with Meno. q.v. Menelaus, hero before Troy, 138, 246n; and Helena, 138; and Diomedes, 246n Menes, legendary FirstDynasty Egyptian king, 140; cf. cAha Meno (Plato), 177 Menomini, Menominee, ethnic group in North America, 147, 287 Meroe, polity in NE Africa in beginning of Common Era, 294 Meso-America, 48, 99, 267, 100n, 177n, 266n Mesolithic, 230; Natufian, 262n; Eastern Iberian, 230 Mesopotamian, Ancient, 12-13, 42, 75, 115, 117, 119, 138, 164, 188, 210, 213, 216-218, 220, 222, 226-229, 231, 241-243, 247, 265, 271-273, 287, 100n, 117n, 215n-216n, 219n, 223n-224n, 282n;

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and Ancient Egypt, 75, 119, 188, 227-228, 273, 287; and Ancient Greece, 75, 287; and Barotseland, 272; and China, 220, 216n Metal, element, 104, 118121, 124, 137-138, 181, 263, 153n-154n Metamorphoses (Ovid), 155, 162, 251, 267, 134n, 265n Metaphysics (Aristotle), 206, 173n Meteorites, 181, 265; cf. Stones Meteorologica (Aristotle), 159, 165 Meton, Metonic Cycle, Greek astronomical concept to reconcile the lunar and solar calendar, 114n Mexico, Mexican, 14, 144, 147, 266-268; cf. New Mexico Mfecane, violent upheaval in Southern Africa, first quarter 19th c. CE, 270 Miao-Yao, East Asian ethnic group and language, 187; Proto- , 186 Michael, Archangel, see Tears Micronesia, part of the Pacific Ocean, 268n Middle Ages, Medieval, 115; and Early Modern Europe, 115; and Renaissance, 44, 75; and Early Modern Europe, 6 Miletus, Milesian, Ancient town in Ionia, 173-174 Milky Way, 164, 202; cf. Luwe, Kuruvi, Pleiades Miluzi, river in Nkoyaland, 99 Mining, 267 Mink, North American

mythical figure, 147 Mist, 160; cf. Tfnt Mistress, of the Waters Below, 138; of the Waters Above and Below, 137; of the Primal Waters, 51; of the House, 133; cf. Nephthys Mithras, oriental cult in Roman Empire, 295 Mizraim, Egyptians, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic cluster, 230 MmaNdlovu, Rosi, 13 MmaShakayile, Elizabeth, 13 Mn, see Menomini Mnengi snake (Zulu representation), 128, 128n MODCON, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Modern, 6, 10, 12-13, 1819, 31-33, 40, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 63, 71, 76-77, 84-86, 109, 115, 148150, 156, 162, 174-175, 178, 180, 187, 193, 195, 211, 213, 220, 222, 287288, 290, 293, 296, 6n, 10n, 33n, 45n, 110n, 220n; World System, 31; North Atlantic region, 85, 213; Asian, 12, 77; Pre-Modern 36; Pre-Modern African, 69; cf. Early Modern, PostModern, Enlightenment Mohenjo-Daro, Bronze Age archaeological site, Indus valley, Pakistan, 176 Moisture (meaning of Ancient Egyptian theonym Tfnt, q.v.), 130, 160 Mongolia(n(s)), language, ethnic group and territory, 105, 219, 226, 261,

263-264, 277, 287, 216n, 281n; and Tibet, 264; Mongoloid, 219n Montgolfier Bros, inventors of hot-air balloon, 193 Montignac, location of Lascaux Cave, France, 184 Moon, 50, 114, 124, 138, 178, 181-182, 279; Moon stations, nakshatra, 126, 288; cf. CHILUNA, Mbetsi, Eyes of Horus Morgana, Celtic legendary figure, 135; and Mordred, 135; cf. Arthur Moscow, Russian city, 256n Moses, Mosis, Moshe, Biblical figure, 41, 225n Mosima, Pius, 13 Motacilla, wagtail bird, 39, 277 Mother, 51, 125, 133, 164, 187, 189, 212, 257, 101n, 154n-155n, 194n195n, 246n; s, as elements (against planets as Fathers), and as geomantic basic configurations, 110; Mother of the (Primal) Waters, 125, 133, 164, 189, 212, 101n, 154-155n, 194n-195n, 246n; cf. Mistress Mouth, From the, Narrative Complex, 52; cf. Masculinisation Mozambique, 78; Mozambican-Angolan corridor, in Sunda transmission in Africa, 61, 64, 76 Mpororo, Ugandan kingdom, 102n Mukuni, Nkoya clan name, 91-92, 104 Muladhara (Root): Earth,

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117n Mulinga, Nkoya clan name, 104 Mulombe (Nkoya), Wood From Which Royal Drums Are Made, Nkoya clan name, 104 Mumbwa, town in Central Zambia, 89n Munda-Kolar, branch of Austro-Asiatic, 77, 280n Munich, German city, 184; University, 184 Mupumani, Ila prophet, Zambia, 98 Muse National de la Prhistoire, Les Eyzies de Tayac, France, 14 Mushroom, Nkoya clan, 92, 104 Mushroom, widespread African clan name, 126 Muskrat, North American mythical figure, 147 Muslim, see Islam Mutondo, Mwene, Nkoya royal title, 88-89; Kalapukila, 91n; Royal Council, 91n Mvula, Nkoya: Rain, deity and clan, 91, 104-105, 164 Mwendanjangula, unilateral mythical being in South Central and Southern Africa, 162, 206; cf. Luwe, Kaluwe Mwene, see Myene Mwenekahare, see Kahare Mwinilunga, location in NW Zambia, 99 Myene (kings) / Mwene (king), 87-89, 98, 102, 91n, 101n Mythology, 8, 11, 39, 48, 135, 36n; Yoruba and Oceanic, 133; Mythical Wagtails at two ends of the Old World, 39; cf. Diachronic Aggregative

Model Na-Den, North American language cluster, 142, 191, 240, 260-261, 266, 191n, 261n Nagas, 281; cf. Snake Nalishuwa, Princess Mary, 13 Namibia(n(s)), 62, 263 Napoleons Book of Fate (Parker), 116-117 NarCom, see Narrative Complex Narmer, Nrmr, EarlyDynastic ruler, Egypt, a famous cosmetic pallette bears his name, 141, 273, 188n; cf. Menes, c Aha Narrative Complex, 36, 49-50, 80, 179-180, 182, 50n, basis unit of longrange mythological analysis; cf. Diachronic Aggregative Model Natufian, Mesolithic archaeological complex in Syro-Palestine, 262n Nature, cosmological concept, 178 Naunet, Ancient Egyptian goddess of primary waters, 131; cf. Nu Navaho Nation Health Department, New Mexico / Arizona, USA, 14 Navaho, language and identity in USA, 14, 143-144, 191, 142n; and Apache, 191 Navel, element, 117n Nazareth, town in SyroPalestine, see Jesus Ncunguni, Nkoya aquaticserpentine female deity, 206 Ndembu, language and ethnic identity, NW Zambia, 126 Neanderthal, prehistoric

branch of Homo Sapiens, 188; Neanderthaloid, 51 Neikos, see Strife Neith / Nt, Ancient Egyptian goddess of the Waters, of warfare, and of domestic arts, 133, 138; cf. Athena, Nestis Nekhbet, Nbt, Ancient Egyptian vulture goddess, 102; cf. Two Ladies, Wadjet Neolithic, 11, 17, 19, 3638, 46-47, 50, 54-58, 62, 65, 67, 79-80, 136, 181, 206, 208-210, 241, 243, 246-248, 253, 100n; PrePottery Neolithic B, 231n; and Bronze Age, 46, 54, 222, 229, 275; to Iron Age, 52; Anatolia, 183, 246; West Asia, 36, 60; Sahara, 247; Palestine, 183n; Mother goddess, 187; cf. Extended Fertile Crescent Neo-Paganism, 117n Neoplatonics, school of philosophers in Late Antiquity, 86; cf. Plato** Nepal(ese), country etc., 41 Nephthys, Ancient Egyptian goddess, 130-131, 133, 138, 163 Nestis, aquatic goddess mentioned by Empedocles, identified as Neith, 140-141, 158-161, 164, 160n; Lucid , 161; cf. Neith, Water Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Wassenaar, 12-13, 15, 247n Netherlands, the / Dutch,

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country, language and identity, 4, 12, 16, 83, 160, 175, 185 New Guinea, 51, 63-64, 75, 179-180, 234, 55n; and Australia, 55, 180, 230 New Mexico, USA state, 145 New World, the continents of N and S America combined, 97, 235, 261n; cf. pre-Columbian, Americas, North America, South America New Zealand, 14; cf. Maori Nguni, ethnic and linguistic cluster in Southern Africa, 270 Niaux, France, Upper Palaeolithic site, 188 Niawingi, god in Mpororo kingdom, Uganda, 102n; cf. Two Ladies Niger, river and god in West Africa, see Oya Niger-Congo / NigerKordofan, linguistic macrophylum now confined to Africa, 17, 35, 185, 230, 244, 248, 257258, 261-262, 273-274, 34n, 124n, 261n, 263n; and Nilo-Saharan, 48, 233, 261, 273; and Amerind, 262, 274 Nigeria(n(s)), country and inhabitants, 133n; and Benin, 82 Niger-Kordofan, see Niger-Congo Night, element, 135, 152, 171 Nihongi, Japanese classic text, 277 Nile, River, 38, 52, 133, 163; Water, 130; Valley, 52; Delta in the Early Bronze Age, 140;

cf. Osiris Nilo-Saharan, linguistic macrophylum, 199, 257, 273, 256n; and NigerCongo, 48, 233, 261 Nimrod, Biblical figure, 229, 281, 216n; cf. Flood and Tower myths, Kapesh, Kasyapa Njonjolo, stream in Nkoyaland, 39n Nkomba, Nkoya clan, 9192, 104 Nkonze, Nkoya clan, 89, 91, 104; and Mvula, 104 Nkoya, ethnic group and language, Western Zambia, 6, 8, 11-13, 15, 1718, 31, 73, 86-91, 93-95, 97-99, 101-107, 123, 125-126, 129, 135, 164, 192, 206, 212, 255, 259261, 265, 268, 270, 272, 274-275, 277-278, 280282, 285, 287-288, 291, 39n, 91n, 97n, 99n, 101n-102n, 117n, 154n, 207n, 216n, 238n, 281n; and Madagascar, 129; and South Central Africa, 107; and Japan, 275; and East Asia, 260; Nkoyaland, 270, 93n; see Mwene / Myene, Likota NKOYCLA, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Nkwehe, Nkoya clan, 91, 104 Noah, Nua, Biblical figure, 139, 204, 241, 140n; cf. Egypt, Flood, Horizon Nobel prize, 166 No, 70, see Noah Nommo, Dogon mythical figure, 125 Nordic mythology, 153; Apocalypse, loose refer-

ence to eschatological notions in Ancient Germanic mythology, 153; cf. Odinn, Ragnarok, etc. Norman, Nordic ethnic group; Medieval kingdom on Sicily, 82 North Atlantic, i.e. Western Europe, USA and Canada, 7, 13, 18, 85, 142, 175, 213, 229, 252, 6n, 10n, 223 North Caucasian, linguistic phylum, 186, 191, 198-199, 233, 237, 239240, 260; cf. SinoTibetan, Khoisan Nostratic, 233, 244, 257258, 34n, 191n, 256n; Hypothesis, 49; Super-, 258, 34n; also see Eurasiatic Ntabi, Nkoya clan, 91, 104 Ntandes Bridge, South Central African evocation of celestial axis, 202; cf. Kuruvi N Kwa, N Wa, Chinese primal goddess, 222, 243, 246n; cf. Fu Xi, Noah, Flood Nu, male member of Ancient Egyptian Ogdoad representing primordial waters, 131; cf. Naunet Numidian Persae, ethnic group Ancient Mediterranean, 233 Nun, Nwt, Nut, Ancient Egyptian sky god, 130, 137, 163 Nyambi, West and South Central Afican High God, 39, 164, 39n, 155n; in Christian context, 39n; cf. Neith, Anat, Athena, etc. Nyambo, Nkoya clan, 91

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Nyan-kupon, Tshi / Twi sky god, 123 Nyembo, Nkoya clan, 8991, 93, 95-96, 101-102, 104 Nyonmo, sky god of the Ga people, 123 Nyx, Night (q.v.), GraecoRoman god, 152 Nzambi, West African High God, 125; cf. Nyambi Nzovu, Elephant, Nkoya clan, 90-91, 104 Oannes, mythical aquatic figure situated at origin of Sumerian civilisation, 222-223, 243, 265, 223n Oba, Nigerian god, 124125; forms divine foursome with Shango, Oya and Oshun, 125 Obatala, Nigerian primal god, 123-124; and Odudua, 133n Occam, William of, s Razor. 253 Ocean, see Pacific , Indian , Atlantic; cf. Susanowo, 153n Oceania, Oceanian, continent comprising Pacific islands and Australia, 21, 37, 48, 53, 63, 75, 80, 133, 161, 170, 267, 275, 293, 170n, 177n; and MesoAmerica, 177n; and Australia, 63 Odinn, Ancient Germanic god, 124n Odudua, Nigerian primal goddess, 124, 133n Odyssey (Homer), 230, 188n; Odysseus, protagonist of , 188n; cf. Homer** Oeseburg-Broers, Else, 7, 16 Ogdoad, eight-some of

Ancient Egyptian gods, 131, 139 Ogetsu, 100n; see Ukemochi-na-kami Ogre, see Rescue from Ogun, Nigerian god of iron, 124, 39n Oke, Nigerian god, 124 Oko, Nigerian god, 124 Old World, the continent Africa, Asia and Europe combined, 68, 81, 137, 139, 253, 266, 290 Olofin II Olofindji Akand, Vizir, 14 Olokun, Nigerian god, 124 Olorun, Nigerian god, 123-124 Olosa, Nigerian god, 124 Olympian Ode (Pindar), 154n Olympus, Mt, mythical abode of the GraecoRoman gods, 152 Omaha, North American ethnic group, 143 Opici, ethnic group, Ancient Mediterranean, 233 Oppenheimer** Tauchmann**DickRead** Hypothesis, 279, 171n Oppenheimer, Stephen, Sunda Hypothesis, 34, 53 Opsci, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Orisha, divine manifestation, Yoruba, 124; Oko, 124 Orpheus, Orphic cult, 138139, 171, 134n, 170n171n; Orphica, 112; cf. Eurydice, Aristaeus Orun, Nigerian god, 124 Orungan, Nigerian god, 124 Oshosi, Nigerian god, 124 Oshu, Nigerian god, 124

Oshumare, Nigerian god, 124 Oshun, Nigerian god, 124125 Osiris, Ancient Egyptian god, 124, 130-131, 133, 139, 163, 208, 211, 100n Osorkon II, Egyptian Pharaoh, Late Period, 211 Ostyak, branch of Uralic, 236 Otter, North American mythical figure, 147 Ottoman empire, 84; cf. Turkey, Islam Out-of-Africa, 48-49, 75, 290; Hypothesis, 33, 52; Pre- , 50, 80; Exodus, 33-34, 36, 48, 179, 278, 287, 36n; CITIs (q.v.), 75 Ovid** [ Publius Ovidius Naso ], 136, 162, 251, 7n, 134n, 136n, 265n; s Flood, 267; s Metamorphoses, 155 Ox-creatures, man-faced, Empedoclean concept, 168 Oxford, location in England, 89n Oya, god of River Niger, West Africa, 124-125 Pacific Ocean, 142, 266267, 100n, 267n, 291n; Mexico, 267 Pakistan, country, 191 Palaeolithic, 9-11, 14, 31, 34-36, 43, 46, 50-51, 7980, 84, 97, 110, 123, 129, 163-164, 178-183, 187-191, 193, 195, 200202, 204-206, 209-212, 253, 255-256, 259-261, 263-268, 273-274, 276278, 283, 285, 290-292, 295-296, 42n, 93n, 113n,177n, 183n, 194n195n, 231n, 240n, 261n;

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Lower , 93n; art, Southern African and Franco-Cantabrian, 202; Africa, 287; cf. Upper Palestine, 183n, 225n; Palestinian Bronze Age, 230 Pali, South Asian language, 117n Pallas Rhodi, Early Modern corruption of Ancient Graeco-Roman mythical figure, 155; cf. Athena Pan, Ancient GraecoRoman god, 152, 241, 295 Pandora, 135; s Box, Anatomically Modern Humans common cultural heritage from Middle Palaeolithic Africa, 34, 36, 49-50, 55, 67, 75, 80, 83, 179-182, 211, 290, 36n Papa, Oceanian mythological character, 133n; cf. Rangi Papstein, Robert, 14 Papyrus Harris VII, 163 Paramount Chief, of the Lozi, Western Zambia, 87 Paris, city in France, 212 Parmenides (Reinhardt, K.), 173; cf. Parmenides** Parthians, West Asian people and polity in Imperial Roman times, 294 Pecos, see Lower Pecos River Peithinos, Ancient Greek vase painter, 172 Peking, see Beijing Pelasgian(s), Pelasgi, 11, 17, 20, 37-38, 46-48, 5354, 60, 63, 79-81, 83, 101, 127, 129, 136-137,

140-141, 151, 161, 170171, 174, 209, 229, 232233, 242, 244, 248, 259260, 265, 272-275, 277278, 283, 290, 292, 295, 36n, 151n, 155n, 170n; Secondary (q.v.), 37, 4748, 233; Realm, 79; Hypothesis, 36-38, 46, 48, 54, 73, 274-275, 277, 285; Lower Egypt, 137, 140; Primary , 37, 47, 233 Peleus, father of Achilles, 172, 172n; cf. Thetis Pelias, King, victim of Medeia (q.v.), 112 Peoples Republic of China, 12; cf. China Peripheral cluster of macrophyla, in Upper Palaeolithic, 52, 273, 191n; and Central luster, 52; cf. *Borean, disintegration of Persephone, Ancient Greek-Roman underworld goddess, 161; cf. Proserpina Persia(n(s)), 68, 78, 82, 112, 267, 294, 224n; cf. Iran(ian(s)), Numidian Persae Persian Gulf, 58, 60, 62, 76, 267 Peru, South American country, 266n Pet, Ancient Egyptian god, 123 Petit, Gitty, 12 Pharus, Pharos, island in front of Alexandria, Egypt, 138, 172; cf. Proteus Pherisites, pre-Israelite , Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Philae, Ancient Egyptian location, 124; cf. Ptah Philia, see Love

Philistines, Secondary (q.v.), Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3, 13 Phlogiston, hypothetical fire stuff, 166n; Hypothesis, 166 Phoenicia(n(s)), region, language and identity, 71, 75, 151, 267; and Graeco-Roman, 58; and Aramaeans, 141; cf. Hanno Physica (Aristotle), 169n Pindal, France, Upper Palaeolithic site, 188 Placita Philosophorum I (Aetius), 159 Plains Native American(s), 188; cf. America, North America Plato**, 9, 20, 38, 81, 109-110, 156, 160, 165166, 177, 251-252, 255, 293, 39n, 166n ; Timaeus, 110; and Aristotle**, 252, 255 Pleiades, constellation, 39, 114, 163-164, 272 Political Correctness, 17, 21, 213, 229, 234, 45n, 279n Polynesia, easternmost part of Oceania, 266n Pontic, see Black Sea Portugal, Portuguese, country, language, people, 82 Poseidon, Ancient Greek god, 152, 184n, 246n; cf. Athena, Mistress, Mother of the Waters Postcolonial Theory, 45; cf. **Bhabha, **Spivak Posthomerica (Quintus Smyrnaeus), 39n Post-Modern, 71, 110, 252; cf. Modern

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Potiphar, Biblical figure, 134 pre-Columbian New World, 266, 273 pre-Euscarian, see Basque Prsence Africaine, 45n Presocratic(s), 1, 3, 5, 8-9, 11, 15, 18, 21, 31, 38, 41, 81, 85-86, 106, 109, 111-112, 115, 141, 148149, 157, 167, 171, 173174, 178, 212-213, 234, 250-251, 253, 255, 292296, 149n, 168n, 171n; in Western Eurasia, 149; reception in Late Antiquity, 251; in Ionia and Graecia Magna, 290; and Orpheus, 171n; and East Asian correlative systems, 213; cf. Asia (South and West, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Thales, etc. Primal Matter, 294 Primal Waters, and the Flood, primal Narrative Complex, 50-51, 212, 246n; and the Flood, Narrative Complex, 5051; and Heaven, 140n; Primal Waters Above, 140n; cf. Mother of , ,Flood Prometheus, GraecoRoman mythical figure, 153n Proserpina, GraecoRoman underworld goddess, 161; cf. Persephone Proteus, Graeco-Roman aquatic god, as evocation of cyclical transformation, 138, 172 Proto-, prefix referring to reconstructed early forms of a language or language cluster Proto-African(s), pro-

posed to be partly from West Asia, 198-199; cf. Bantu-speaking Proto-elements, Fire, 198199; Earth, 198; Air, 198 Proto-Human, postulated earliest language form of humans, 51 Ptah, Pt, Ancient Egyptian god, 124, 136, 141, 153n; cf. Hephaestus Pueblo, see RegressivePueblo Punktierkunst, adulterated geomancy in Modern Europe, 82 Pygmy, African ethnic groups of diminutive size, 37, 151, 274 Pyreneans, mountain range separating France from Spain, 189 Pythagoraeans, NeoPythagorean movement, 81, 168n; and Talmud, 81; see Pythagoras** Qadesh, qd, Asian god in Ancient Egypt, 140 Qarmatians, Shiites of eastern Arabia, 110 Qi, Chinese element, comparable to Air, 118n Queen Bee, 101n Queen of Sciences, obsolete epithet of astrology, 86 Queen Victoria of England, 110n Queen, Souvereign, 137; see Cyrene Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, 1, 3, 41 Quintessence, element, 117 Rabbinical, 162; cf. Judaism Ragnarok, Nordic eschatological representation,

153 Rain, 145, 50n; Nkoya god, 104-105, 164, 154n; Japanese god Susanowo, 153n; and Drought, 154n; cf. Water, Mvula Rainbow, 145; Snake, 50, 181 Range Semantics, 10, 192, 205, 208, 211-212, 259; cf. Triadic Revolution, Recursion, Binary Ranger, Terence O., 13 Rangi, Oceanian primal god, 133n; cf. Papa Ranier, Mt, 146 Rasenna, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Rc, Rc, Re-Atum, Ancient Egyptian primal (sun) god, 130 Reconnection of Heaven and Earth, 50, 52 Recursion, mode of thought based on selfreferential repetition, 192, 206-212, 293; cf. Triadic Revolution, Range Semantics, Binary Red Sea, 58, 60, 76, 267; and the Persian Gulf, 78 Reed, 99, 101, 137, 275, 102n; Person, 101; and the Bee, 101, 275; cf. Katete, nsw-bGt Regressive Pueblo, archaeological period, N America, 145 Remouchamps Caves, Belgium, 183, 276 Renaissance, intellectual and artistic movement in Europe, middle 2nd mill. CE, 4, 44, 75, 82 Republic, the (Plato), 166n Rescue from the Ogre, primal Narrative Com-

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plex, 50-51 Reshef, Asiatic god in Ancient Egypt, 140-141 Rest (Hebrew), proposed meaning of name Noah, 140n Rethinking Africas Transcontinental Continuities in Pre- and Protohistory, Leiden conference, 2012, 12, 46, 225n RH*cde, genetic marker, 142 Rhaetians, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Rhea, Ancient Greek primal goddess, 152 Rhodesia, obsolete name for Zimbabwe, and earlier for the Federation of Rhodesia ( = Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia (q.v.), and Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe (q.v.)) and Nyasaland, now Malawi (q.v.)), 87, 269 Rhodi [ sic ], Pallas Athena, who according to Suidas (s.v. Hippeia Athena) was a daughter of Poseidon and Polyphe, the latter a nymph from the isle of Rhodes, 155; cf. Pallas, Athena Rishi, Hindu sage, 281 RNA, genetically essential protein, 178 Roma, ethnic group and language, 230; cf. Sinti, Gypsies Romantic(ism), Early Modern intellectual movement in Europe, 149 Rome, Roman(s), Ancient city and empire, 70, 116, 129, 136, 161, 294,

180n, 248, 6n; Pax Romana, state of order in Roman empire, 294; cf. Latin; Imperial, 248; cf. Greece Root, element, 117n; cf. Earth Rotterdam, city in the Netherlands, 3, 7, 13 Rourou, Sino-Tibetan language, 238 Royal Asiatic Society, 216 Royal Drums, of the Nkoya, 104 Royal Person Wind, see Lipepo, 101n Royal Travelling Thing, Nkoya mythical figure, 99-101 Ruler of Lower Egypt, [nswt-] bGt, 137; cf. She of the Reed and the Bee Russia(n), Turkestan, 249, Tsarist, 226n Rutenu, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233; cf. Sicanians Rylands Lecture, 249 Sabaeans, Ancient ethnic group and kingdom, Yemen, 110 Sacred Outsider, 257; cf. Exalted Insider Sahara, 37-38, 52, 56, 58, 62-64, 74, 78, 80, 247, 253, 275, 264n; to China, extent of Extended Fertile Crescent, q.v., 62 Sahasrara (Crown): Thought / Space, element, 117n Sas, Delta town in Ancient Egypt, 101n; cf. Neith Salishan, North American language, 146; cf. Skagit Samson, Biblical figure, 134-135 I Samuel, Bible book, 151

San, ethnic group and language, Southern Africa, 198, 203 Sand Calligraphy, 6; see c ilm al-raml Sand Line, 6; see cilm alraml Sand Science, 6; see cilm al-raml Sandawe, Khoisanoid ethnic group and language, East Africa, 230, Sanskrit, 12, 280n; Sanskritist, 7 Sardinia, Mediterranean island, 240 Saturn, Roman god (Greek Kronos), 152; planet, and moons, 223n Saturnalia (Macrobius), 172n Scamander, River and god, 153, 172, 251 Scandinavia(n(s)), European Nordic ountries (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden) and their inhabitants, 234 Schinziophyton rautanenii (mungongo nut), 66 Schrift-Oiratisch [ Written Oiratic ] of Western China, 216n Scythian(s), language and ethnic group, 112, 115, 272n; and Thracians, 115; and Mongolian, 277; -KoreanJapanese, 291; and Nkoya, 277, 281n; cf. Celts Sea Peoples, ethnic and military movement in the Mediterranean Late Bronze Age, 230n Secondary, quality attributed by Karst in the context of Ancient Mediterranean ethnicity, when a pre-existing

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ethnonym has been projected onto a new, unrelated group replacing the former; cf. Philistines, Pelasgians, Leleges, Ibero-Ligurians Sedge, see reed Selket, srqt, Ancient Egyptian goddess, 133 Semang, SE Asian ethnic group, 230 Semitic, language phylum, 152, 198, 237, 264, 151n Semitology, Semitist, 14, 20, 71n; cf. Broers, P., Wiggermann**, Gordon** Senegal, country, 14; cf. Casamance Separation of Heaven and Earth, 36, 50, 143, 182, 194, 212-213, 253; cf. Cosmogonic Hypothesis Separation of Water and Land, 36, 50, 143, 182, 194, 212, 153n; cf. Cosmogonic Hypothesis Separation, as Strife (Empedocles), 169 Sepik, region and culture, New Guinea, 55n Serpent, see Snake Seth, Swt, Ancient Egyptian god, 130-131, 163, 100n, 134n; and Osiris, 133; and Horus, 133; cf. Isis Seven Chakras philosophy, 117n Shabaka Stone, Late Ancient Egyptian document containing Old Kingdom cosmology, 130n Shamba, 17th-c. CE King of the Bushong Kuba, 61-62 Shang, Chinese dynasty, 244, 291 Shango, Yoruba god, 124-

125; and Odinn, 124n Shankpanna, Yoruba god, 124 Shasta, North American ethnic group, 146, 287 She of the Reed and the Bee, nswt-bit, Ancient Egyptian royal title, 101, 275 Shensi Province, China, 249 Sheta, Nkoya clan, 89-90, 96-100, 103-105, 282 Shigeru Araki, 12, 14 Shihoka Nalinanga, legendary Nkoya royal figure, 102, 135, 154n Shihondo, Nkoya clan, 9091, 93, 95-97, 100, 103104 Shikanda, Nkoya royal name, 280; cf. Skanda Shikombwe Royal Establishment, one of the Nkoya royal capitals, 91n Shikumba, Shikumbawuyuvu, Nkoya clan, 91, 96, 98-99, 100, 103, 105 Shilombe, Nkoya clan, 9192, 104 Shimunziko, Nkoya clan, 91-92, 95-96, 104; and Wishe, 96 Shinto, Japanese religion, 11 Shiva, South Asian god, 264, 67n Shiyowe, Dennis Kawangu, 6, 13 Shona, Zimbabwean ethnic group and language, 6, 270 o al-Jerd, salt lake, Tunisia, 246n; cf. Laco Tritonis, Athena Shu / w, Ancient Egyptian god of Aair, 130131, 137, 141, 160, 195, 97n, 101n; and Tefnut,

131, 137, 141 Shungu, Nkoya clan, 89, 91, 104; and Kale, 88 Sia, North American ethnic group and language, 142 Siberia(n), Asian region, 114, 272n Sicani, Sicanians, Ancient Mediterranean ethnic group, 233 Sicily, Sicilian, 82, 113, 161; where Earth hid her child Aristaeus (2), 136 Sigiriya, Sri Lankan rock fortress, 281; cf. Kasyapa Sikidy, Malagasy divination system, 209; cf. geomancy Silenus, alien rustic mythical figure in Graeco-Roman imagination, 295 Silk Road, 37, 81, 282n Silver, one of the four Ages of Man, 177; cf. Gold, Bronze, Iron Simon Professorship, social anthropology, Manchester, 89n Sindh, South West Asian region, 280n Sinhalese, Sri Lankan language, branch of Indo-Iranian, 230, 281 Sinim, Ancient Mediterranean / Biblical ethnonym, 227n; cf. Chinese? Sino-Caucasian, linguistic macrophylum, 142, 186, 191, 198-199, 227, 233, 237, 239-240, 244-245, 260-262, 266, 191n, 219n, 240n, 262n; , Proto- , 186, 191, 197199, 245, 257; and Afro-Asiatic, 247; and Eurasiatic, 240n; cf.

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Den-Sino-Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Basque, Burushaski Sinology, Sinologist, 45, 69, 151-152, 213, 216, 220, 226, 241, 249, 226n, 228n, 241n; cf. Walters, Bernal, Chavannes, Carus; and Assyriology, 218 Sinosphere, 218, 221n Sino-Tibetan, branch of Sino-Caucasian, 69, 186, 191, 199, 226-227, 236237, 239-240, 244-245, 257-258, 260, 216n, 226n, 238n-240n; Proto , 199; and IndoEuropean, 240n; and Afroasiatic, 266; cf. Sino-Caucasian Sino-Vietnamese, SinoTibetan language; Regular , 238; and Middle Chinese, 238 Sinties, Sinti, Ancient Mediterranean metalworking ethnic group, 230, 295; cf. Hephaestus, Roma, Gypsies Siouan, North American language, 143, 143n Sirens, Graeco-Roman aquatic mythical figures, 190n Sirius, composite star, 223n; cf. Dogon, Temple** Sister, possible entry in correlative system, 101, 154n; cf. Elder Sister Sixteen Cowries, West African divination system and scholarly study of that title (Bascom, W.), 126 Skagit, North American language and ethnic group, 146, 251, 259, 287

Skanda, Indian war god, 39, 280, 39n; also term for element, 280; cf. Shikanda Skirnir, Ancient Germanic god, 154 Sky, 104, 117-118, 123124, 130, 133, 143, 160, 163, 182, 194, 212, 246, 258, 101n, 188n; SkyPeople, 143; cf. Air, Heaven, Horus, Neith, Nephthys, Nut, Nyambi, Waters Above, Mother of the Waters, Helios, Sun, N Wa, Olorun, Smoke, Nkoya clan, 9293, 95-96, 104 Snake, 50, 102, 147, 172, 181, 154n; Snake, Child or Parent of Drought, see Shihoka Nalinanga, 154n; cf. Fire, Water, Lion and Snake, Tsodilo Snuffbox, Nkoya clan name, 104 Socrates**, Ancient Greek philosopher, largely a literary character created by Plato, 20, 112, 149 Sogdiana, Central Asian region, 243 Sol, 155, see Sun; with Venus, 155; cf. Helios Song, Chinese dynasty, 246 Sotho-Tswana, language cluster, 35; Sotho, 270; Sotho-speaking Kololo, 270 Sound, element, 117-118, 117n South Dakota, USA state, 264 Sovereign Queen, meaning of Cyrene, 137 Space, element, 118, 117n Spain, Spanish, country and inhabitants, 82, 183,

233, 227n Sparkler, Nkoya clan, 93, 95-97; or Tinderbox, 104 Spear Hunter, Nkoya clan, 104 Spear, Nkoya clan, 88, 104 Sphere, Empedoclean concept, 168-170 Spider, Narrative Complex, 50, 181; cf. Nyambi, Neith, Athena, Feminine Arts Spring, item in apparent four-element system, 172n Sri Lanka, country and island, 14, 63, 77, 277, 281, 280n Sri, see Dewi Sri St Lawrence River, 142 Steppe, 37, 222, 240-241, 243, 246, 252, 275, 277, 279, 37n, 153n, 219n, 240n Steppe-hunter, 274 Stoics**, school of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, 96, 173, 165n Stolen Legacy: the Greeks Were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, But the People of North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians (James), 16 Stone Age, see Palaeolithic Stone, element, 157; Stones, The / Meteorites as Connection between Heaven and Earth, primal Narrative Complex, 181 Stonehenge, archaeological site, England, 113n Storm, 153n; cf. Susanowo, Wind(s), Air,

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Water, Rain Story of the Two Brothers, 134 Strassbourg, town in France, 158 Strife, Empedoclean central concept, 157158, 168-169 Study Group on Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Magic, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, 1994-1995, 12-13, 247n Subartu, kingdom, Ancient Near East, 176 Sucudi, Muammad, 5 Sudan, country and region, 53, 90 Suijkerbuijk, Ineke, 12 Sumer, Sumerian, language and civilisation in Ancient Near East, 77, 152, 231, 242-243, 223n; and Elamite, 249; and Babylonian, 117n; and Austric, 77; cf. Mesopotamia Summer, 172n; cf. Spring Sun, 17, 36, 113, 124, 135, 137-138, 146, 155, 171, 182, 272, 172n, 188n, 272n-273n; and Moon, 138; cf. Helios, Sol, Borvon, Apollo, Orun, Light, Life, Night, Fire, Rc, Apollo, Sunda, Sunda Hypothesis (postulated cultural flow from SE Asia to Western Eurasia; Oppenheimer**, q.v.) 13-14, 34-35, 53-54, 58, 60-64, 73-79, 81, 88, 129, 36n, 170n-171n; General Hypothesis, 35; Special Hypothesis, 35 Sung, Chinese dynasty,

249 Supreme God, see God Surt, Ancient Nordic mythical figure, Fire Giant, 154 Susanowo, Japanese Storm and Ocean god, 153n; cf. Storm Svadhisthana (Sacral): Water, 117n Swahili, language and ethnic identity, East Africa, 52 Swt, see Seth Synthesis, see Triadic Dialectics; cf. Hegel, Kant, Chalybaeus Syro-Palestine, Syria, Syriac (language and script), 41, 134, 141, 224n, 262n; and North Africa, 248 Toung Pao, Orientalist journal, 219 Ta Seti, Afrocentrist Internet discussion group, 70 Taa, branch of Khoisan, 186 Tabula Bianchini, Ancient Roman divinatory device, 151 Taino, ethnic group in Jamaica, 162 Taiwan, island and country, 217 Takobah, Mt, 146 Talmud, wisdom compilation of Judaism, q.v., 81 Tamil Nadu, state in India, 14, 63 Tamil, South Asian ethnic group and language, 243, 280n Tao, central concept of Taoism, 242 Taoism, Taoist, 7-9, 12, 31, 68, 106-107, 119121, 150, 156, 209, 235, 247, 260, 263, 268, 282,

285, 287, 106n, 116n, 241n, 282n; and Lamaist, 12; and Presocratics, 106; and Nkoya, 212; cf. Lao Tze Tarim Valley, Central Asia, 240, 249 Tartarus, 154 Tassili nAjjer, Saharan rock art site, 37 TAwy, the Two Lands, 186; cf. Upper and Lower Egypt Tears of the Archangel Michael (and other divine tears), 162; cf. Water, Rain Telchines, Ancient Mediterranean ethnonym, 233 Teleges, Ancient Mediterranean ethnonym, 233 Texas Archaeological Research Library, 145 Texas, USA state, 143 Tfnt, Tefnut, Ancient Egyptian goddess, 130, 131, 137, 139, 141, 145, 160; cf. Moisture Thailand, 14, 218; Tai, Thai, South East Asian language and identity, 199 Thammuz, see Dumuzi Theaetetus (Plato), 166n Theogonia (Hesiod), 131, 135, 153, 134n, 154n Theoi (Atsma), 154n There and Back Again (Bilbo Baggins / Tolkien), 16 Thesis, see Triadic Dialectics Thetis, Ancient GraecoRoman goddess, 172;cf. Achilles, Peleus Thinite, i.e. Egyptian Early Dynastic, 137, 140 Third Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative

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Mythology, 11 Third Eye, element, 117n Third Reich, Germany under Hitlers Nazionalsozialismus, 295 Thoden van Velzen, Bonno, 15 T-hom (Hebr.), abyss, 164; cf. Abyss Thought, 7-Shakra element, 117n Thracia(n(s)), region, language and ethnic group N of Greece, 115; and Persian Magi, 112 Throat, 7-Shakra element, 117n Thummim, see Urim and Thummim Tiamat, Ancient Mesopotamian primal being, 164; cf. Neith, Leviathan, etc. Tibet, Tibetan, language, country, and identity, 81, 116, 118, 238-239, 242, 245, 264, 264n Timaeus (Plato) 110, 166 Timaios, see Timaeus Time, element, 171, 117n Timor, Indonesian island, 180 Tinderbox, Nkoya clan, 93, 95-96, 104 Titans, Greek mythical figures, 115, 100n, 273n Tlingit, ethnic group and language in British Columbia and Alaska, 191, 207, 271-272 Tocharian, A and B, 239240, 226n; and Khotan, 69 Togo, West African country, 124, 265, 287 Toka, ethnic group Southwestern Zambia, 269, 272 Tokyo, Japanse city, 11, 14

Totela, ethnic group Western Zambia, 269, 272 Totem und Tabu (Freud), 91 Touareg, Saharan ethnic group and language, 7071 Touoyem, Pascal, 13 Tower of Babel, etymological database, 239; cf. Starostin & Starostin** Tower, 58, 72-73, 281, 216n; cf. Flood and Tower myths Trachiniai (Sophocles), 134n Transformation Hypothesis (Arrhenius), 167 Transformation, 49, 52, 167 Transvaal, 279 Triadic Dialectics, Thesis Antithesis Synthesis (Chalybaeus; Hegel; Kant), 209 Triadic Revolution, 208210, 295-296 Triton, sea god, 267 Troy, Ancient city in the Aegean region, 153 Tshis, see Twi Tsodilo Hills, 201 TSWACLA, variable in cluster analysis, 288 Tswana, Southern African language and identity, 6, 288, 192n; cf. Botswana Tubal, Biblical figure and associated ethnicoprofessional cluster, 233 Tuc dAudoubert, archaeological site, France, 187 Tumbwa, Nkoya clan name, 91, 104 Tungus-Manchu, Central Asian language, 245, 216n Tunisia(n), North African

country, 5, 264, 246n Turan(ic), obsolete designation for C Asia, 227, 240, 219n Turba Philosophorum, 111, 159 Turkestan, C Asian region, 249 Turkey, country, 292 Turkic, language cluster, 277, 216n Turners, Nkoya clan name, see Sheta, Tursac, location of lAbri du Facteur, France, 189 Tuscany, region, Italy, 248 Tut-cankh-Amon, New Kingdom Pharaoh, 132, 141, 273 Tuvan, Central Asian language, 216n Twi, ethnic and linguistic cluster, Ghana, 123 Twins, primal Narrative Complex, 50, 52, 100; Sister, 101; Paradisiacal , 100 Two Children, see Twins Two Ladies, the, Ancient Egyptian royal title, 102, 138; cf. Nekhbet, Wadjit Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt, 140; Unification of the , q.v.; see Egypt, TAwy Tyrrhenia, Central Italy, 248; Tyrrheno-Tuscans, ethnic group associated with , 233 Uganda, 102n, 265n; Queens, 265n Ukemochi-na-kami, Japanese vegetation goddess, 100n Umashi-ashi-kabi-hiko-jino-kami, Japanese reed goddess, 277 Unawatuna, location, Sri Lanka, 14

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Underworld, 164, 187, 259, 97n, 184n; cf. Hades Unification of the Two Lands (Ancient Egypt), 139-140, 186 United Kingdom, see British United States of America, USA, 8, 12, 14, 82, 143, 145-147, 264; cf. Americas, North America University College London, 216 Untersuchungen Zu Heraklit (Gigon, O), 173 Untouchables, South Asian ethnico-social category, 243; cf. Dallit UNZA, see University of Zambia Up, see Down Upper Palaeolithic, 9-11, 14, 34, 43, 51, 79-80, 97, 110, 123, 129, 178-180, 182-183, 187-190, 193, 195, 204-206, 209-212, 253, 255-256, 259-260, 263-268, 273-274, 276278, 283, 287, 290-292, 42n, 177n, 194-195n, 240n, 261n; Upper to Middle Palaeolithic, 46; Eurasia, 191, 256, 261; West to Central Asia, 256; Europe, 188, 274; and Bronze Age, 129, 164; Mother Goddess, 189; *Boreanspeaking, 204 Uralic, linguistic phylum, 37, 48, 141, 233, 236, 273, 153n, 219n - and Altaic-speaking, 42n Uranus, 133n; and Gaia, 133n Urim and Thummin, priestly cleromantic divination device of Ancient Israel, 14, 150-

152, 241 Urology Department, Leiden University Medical Centre, 16 USA, see United States of America Uto, see Wadjit / WAdt Van Binsbergen, Hannah, 12, 16 Van Binsbergen, Nezjma, 12, 16 Van Binsbergen, Sarah and Dennis, 16 Van Binsbergen, Vincent, 16 Van BinsbergenSaegerman, Patricia, 12, 16 van der Geest, Sjaak, 13 Van der Mede, Peter, 12 Van Rijn, Henny, 12 Van Winden, Marieke, 12 Vapour, 137; cf. Water, Fire Vedas, Vedic, 177, 281282, 37n; pre-Vedic, 281 Vedda, ethnic group and language, Sri Lanka, 230 Venda, ethnic group in Southern Africa, 64, 7475, 81, 279; and West African divining apparatus, 75 Venus, 155, cf. Aphrodite; of Laussel, 189 Victoria, Queen, of England, 110n Vietnamese, language, culture and country, 238, 246n; Flood myth, 246n Vinaya Pitaka, 281n Virgin Mother and her only Child, basic Narrative Complex, 52, 154n Virgin of the World, 141, 110n Vishnu, South Asian primal god, 281 Vishuddhi (Throat): Ether

/ Sound, 117n Visions (Zosimos), 115 Vita Apollonii (Philostratus), 154n Vogelherd, Upper Palaeolithic site, Germany, 187 Void, element, 118 Vlkerkunde von Afrika (Baumann, Westermann & Thurnwald), 274 Vulcan, 155, 153n; cf. Hephaestus, Black Vulcan Vulture, Nkoya clan, 104 Vulva, widespread African clan name, 126 Wadjit / WAdt, Ancient Egyptian goddess, royal protectrix, 102, 138 Ward Minimum Variance Method of cluster analysis, 288 Warwick, town in United Kingdom, 83 Washington, USA state, 146 Wassenaar, town in the Netherlands, 12, 247n Waters, element, 36, 51, 99, 104, 116-121, 124125, 128, 130-133, 137138, 143, 145-147, 149, 153-155, 157-159, 164166, 171-172, 182, 187, 189, 192-199, 208, 212, 234, 236, 251, 258, 263, 101n, 116n-117n, 128n, 140n, 146n, 153n-155n, 160n, 184n, 194n-195n, 246n, 261n; Below, 164, 101n; Above, 164, 182, 101n; Above and Below, 137, 184n; Wood Fire Metal Earth and , 120-121; and Fire, 193, 128n; and Earth, 171, 182; Water to Air, 137; cf. Primal Waters, Fire-WaterLion-Snake

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Wei Cuiping, 12 Wene, Kingship (Nkoya), 88 Wertheim, Wim, 12 West-East, pendulumswing movement across Eurasia, 241, 243, 250, 252 Western Grassfields, region in Cameroon with many apparent traces of Sunda influence, 62, 78 Western Philosophy, 18, 86 White Bear, mythical figure, Menomini people, North America, 147 White Gods, cosmogonic, 241 White Horse, shape adopted by Chinese mythical figure Gun (q.v.), 246n White Sea, 280n White Spirit, Chihamba (NW Zambia), 99 White, epithet of Zeus (q.v.) as Fire, 158 Whites, ethnic group somatically marked by low pigmentation, 229 Wide Justice, Eurydice (q.v.), 137 Wiesbaden, German city, 225n Wilito Wilson, Navaho ritual painter, 143 Wind, element, 117-118, 101n, 116n-117n Winds, Lands, Waters and Fires, foursome constitutive of Malagasy cosmology, 128n Winter, 58, 172n; cf. Spring Wisconsin-Michigan border, USA, 147 Wishe, Nkoya clan, 91-93, 95-96, 104 Wood, element, 92, 103-

104, 118-121, 124, 137, 139, 146-147, 181, 212, 263, 92n-93n, 146n, 153n, 168n; of the Shilombe tree (Nkoya), 92; and Metal, 263 Working Hypothesis, of this book (notably: the transformative cycle of elements goes back to Upper Palaeolithic), 910, 106, 110, 171, 174, 178, 251, 253, 255-256, 259, 275, 290; cf. Alternative Working Hypothesis World Culture, 45 World Egg, see Cosmic Egg World System, 32, 84-85, 228-229, 278 WOTRO [ Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek in de Tropen ], Tropical wing of NWO, the Netherlands Research Foundation, 15 Woudhuizen, Fred, 13; cf. van Binsbergen & Woudhuizen** Wounded Knee, mythical designation in SW Africa, perhaps with parallel in North America, 263-264 Wsr, see Osiris Wu Xing, Five Phases, Chinese elements, 118, 287 Xia, Chinese dynastry, 244 Xiamen, branch of SinoTibetan, 238 Yang, paired cosmological concept, 274, 223n224n; cf. Yin Yao, ethnic group and language, North Vietnam, 246n Yasodhara, Gautamas

wife, 135 Yemaja, Nigerian mythological character, 124 Yemen, Southern part of Arabian peninsula, 110 Yenisseian, North Asian language and identity, 191, 237, 239, 245 Y Jng, Book or Classic of Changes, Ancient Chinese wisdom text, 7, 9, 11, 31, 67-69, 74, 110, 121-122, 164, 209, 215217, 219-221, 225-226, 228-229, 231-232, 234235, 238, 241, 247, 250, 274, 291, 67n, 221n, 223n-224n, 226n, 282n; and West Asia, 215254 Yin / Yang, Chinese fundamental duality, 274, 223n-224n Yoruba, ethnic group and language, Nigeria, 123125, 133, 277, 287, 39n Younger Brother, see Elder Sister Yu, Da (Great) Yu, Chinese mythical character, 246n Yuvwenu, Mwene, Nkoya sub-ruler, 89 Za, see Zia Zambezi River, 64, 87, 102n; Flood Plain, 87, 102n; Upper , 270 Zambia National Archives, 89n Zambia(n(s)), country and inhabitants, 5-6, 13-14, 39, 86-87, 89, 93-94, 123, 269-270, 39n, 89n, 100n; Nkoya, 125, 265; s Western Province, 270; cf. Nkoya, Barotse, Lozi, Ila, Bemba Zanata, North African ethnic group, 78; cf. al-

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Zant** Zarathustra**, Zoroaster**, Ancient Iranian religious innovator, 41, 234, 241n Zen, variety of Buddhism (q.v.), 12 Zeus, Jupiter, GraecoRoman primal god, 135, 152, 154-155, 158-160, 170, 113n, 160n, 172n; and Hera, as Shu and Tefnut, 141 Zhou, Later, Chinese dynasty, 238 Zhu, branch of Khoisan, 186 Zia, Four, cosmological foursome, Lower Congo, 125 Zimbabwe, Zimbabwean, 64, 202-203, 276, 279, 89n; Christian, 69n Zoogony, Counter-world , 168 Zoroastrianism, see Zarathustra Zulu, ethnic group and language in South Africa, 127-128, 277, 287; cf. Nguni Zunbul, cAli, Medieval Islamic geomancer, 115 Zui / Zuni, ethnic group and language, North America, 142, 287; cf. Navaho, Hopi

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