Ancient Languages & Linguistics

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"Poetry, linguistic expression, and music are identical as far as I am concerned."....(Trungpa: 1983..pg xx)

English Arabic......CANDLE شَمْعَة SAM"A.....(شمعة) shamatun, noun, pl. (شمعات) sham’a_tun

Sanskrit...... bhala ...... javelin or spear

Elevated/raised is Persian bala and sham is Persian candle.

Umm-al-belad...ummm el-bilad

Shamash (Akkadian Šamaš "Sun"), was a native Mesopotamian deity and the sun god in the Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian pantheons. Shamash was the god of justice in Babylonia and Assyria, corresponding to Sumerian Utu. Akkadian šamaš is cognate to Syriac šemša or šimšu Hebrew שֶׁמֶשׁ šemeš and Arabic شمس šams.

Shams is the Arabic word for "sun" (شمس). The word has roots that go back to at least the time of the writing of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which references the Akkadian deity called Shamash.

Balkh, near modern Mazar-e Sharif, is known as "the mother of cities" (Umm al Bilad) because it maintained its status as an important center of learning and culture through different historical epochs.

"Vairocanavajra wrote several commentaries that have been preserved in the Tengyur. However Kagyupas of all the different schools to this day treasure above all else his translations of the dohas from the original Apabhramsha, a thousand-year-old North Indian vernacular language that is sometimes called ‘proto-Bengali.'....http://www.treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Vairocanavajra/13066

Zarathushtra brought a new element into the picture from the northeast. Linguistically, he happened to be "h" speaking in opposition to the Indic "s" speaking as in haptah versus saptah for week, or hvar versus svar for the Sun. ....http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/connections/Vedic-Iran.php

As far as archaeologists can tell, humans began expressing themselves with symbols and signs in cave art and rock carvings as early as 30,000 years ago. The Sumerians, from what is now southern Iraq, are credited as the first to convert picture-writing into true writing more than 5,000 years ago. At first, the Sumerians used it mainly for accounting, but they were writing poetry by the era of the Anau Seal...a tiny stone object inscribed with symbols thought to be the writing of an obscure desert culture from 4,000 years ago is more of an enigma than ever.

"The Bactrian language is an Iranian language of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of the Indo-European family...... Bactrian was probably spoken by the local populations of Bactria when Alexander the Great invaded the area around 323 BCE, inaugurating a two-century period of Hellenistic rule by the Seleucid Empire and the then the Greco-Bactrian kingdom......Bactrian seems to have been, together with Greek, the official language of the Kushans, descendant of the Yuezhi, and was used in their coins and inscriptions. In 1993, the Bactrian Rabatak inscription was discovered, recording that under the Kushan king Kanishka (c. 120 CE), use of the Greek language was officially discontinued. The territorial expansion of the Kushans helped propagate Bactrian to Northern India and parts of Central Asia, as far as Turfan where Buddhist and Manichean inscriptions in Bactrian can be found....During the first centuries of the Christian era, Bactrian could legitimately have been ranked amongst the world's most important languages. As the language of the Kushan kings, Bactrian must have been widely known throughout a great empire, in Afghanistan, Northern India and part of Central Asia. Even after the collapse of the Kushan empire, Bactrian continued in use for at least six centuries, as is shown by the ninth-century inscriptions from the Tochi valley in Pakistan.".....http://lukferi.webs.com/

MAGADHI......"The original language of the sutras seems to have been Magadhi, which Shakyamuni used in preaching. .....The ancestral language, Magadhi Prakrit, is believed to be the language spoken by the Buddha, and the language of the ancient kingdom of Magadha. ......It was once mistakenly thought to be a dialect of Hindi, but has been more recently shown to be descendant of and very similar to the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family.

If this is indeed an early form of writing, as its discoverer has suggested, it is strong evidence for a previously unknown civilization that began about 2300 B.C. across much of modern Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

Yung Drung Bon flourished throughout Zhang_Zhung and Tibet. Out of his many students, six become great scholars who translated the teachings of Yung Drung Bon into different languages: Mutsa Tahe and Guhuli Paraya translated Yung Drung Bon into the language of Tagzig. Tritok Partsa translated Yung Drung Bon into Zhang Zhung. Letang Mangpo translated Yung Drung Bon into Chinese. Lhadag Ngadro translated Yung Drung Bon into Indian language, and Sertok Chezam translated Yung Drung Bon into the language of Trom.....http://www.olmoling.org/contents/bon_bonpo

The Greco-Bactrians were so powerful that they were able to expand their territory as far as India.... The Greco-Bactrians used Greek language for administrative purposes, and the local Bactrian language was also Hellenized, as suggested by its adoption of the Greek alphabet and Greek loanwords. In turn, some of these words were also borrowed by modern Pashto, the language of Afghanistan.

Newly-discovered ancient writings found in Afghanistan reveal that the Middle Iranian Bactrian language written in Greek script was not brought there by the Hephthalites, but was already present from Kushan times as the traditional language of administration in this region.

At Balkh, the Bactrian language is an extinct Eastern Iranian language which was spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria. Linguistically, it is classified as belonging to the middle period of the East Iranian branch. Bactrian was closely related to the medieval Middle Iranian languages Sogdian, Khwarezmian and Parthian and shared similarities with the modern Eastern Iranian languages Pashto, Yidgha, and Munji. Because Bactrian was written predominantly with the Greek alphabet, Bactrian is sometimes referred to as "Greco-Bactrian", "Kushan" or "Kushano-Bactrian".

The Indo-European languages fall into two general branches. At some time in the distant past, the original Indo-European speakers migrated westward and eastward from a location north of the Middle East. We can trace those migrations by looking at vocabulary in each language, and gradually seeing the sound changes that took place over time as the tribes drifted further apart. The Indo-European tribes that migrated westward tended to pronounce words with hard /k/ sounds--a velar stop. On the other hand, those that migrated eastward pronounced similar words with /s/ or /sh/ sounds--a fricative sound.

The territorial expansion of the Kushans helped propagate Bactrian to Northern India and parts of Central Asia. Sites at which Bactrian language inscriptions have been found are (in North-South order) Afrasiab in Uzbekistan, Kara-Tepe, Airtam, Delbarjin, Balkh, Kunduz, Baglan, Ratabak/Surkh Kotal, Oruzgan, Kabul, Dasht-e Navur, Ghazni, Jagatu in Afghanistan, as well as Islamabad, Shatial Bridge and Tochi Valley in Pakistan. Of eight known manuscript fragments in Greco-Bactrian script, one is from Lou-lan and seven from Toyoq, where they were discovered by the second and third Turpan expeditions under Albert von Le Coq. One of these may be a Buddhist text. One other manuscript, in Manichean script, was found at Qočo by Mary Boyce in 1958. Among Iranian languages, the use of the Greek alphabet is unique to Bactrian. The Greek alphabet is however not ideal for representing Iranian languages.

LANGUAGE..."From my earliest childhood in Tibet, I was always fascinated with language. During my studies at Oxford, I was fascinated by the way the Oxonians spoke." (Trungpa: First Thought: 1983..pg xx)

The teachings of Tonpa Shenrab, already set down in writing in his own time or in the subsequent period, are said to have been brought at a later time from Olmo Lungring in Tazik to the country of Zhang-zhung in Western and Northern Tibet where they were translated into the Zhang-zhung language. Zhang-zhung appears to have been an actual language, distinct from Tibetan, and appearantly related to the West Himalayan Tibeto-Burman dialect of Kinauri.

Pāṇini (Sanskrit: पाणिनि, IPA: [pɑːɳin̪i]; a patronymic meaning "descendant of Paṇi") was a Sanskrit grammarian from Pushkalavati, Gandhara, in modern day Charsadda District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan (fl. 6th century BCE).....Pāṇini's grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so Pāṇini by definition lived at the end of the Vedic period.

The Magahi language (Magadhi) is a language spoken in India. The ancestor of Magadhi, from which its name derives, Magadhi Prakrit, is believed to be the language spoken by the Buddha, and the language of the ancient kingdom of Magadha. Magadhi is closely related to Bhojpuri and Maithili and these languages are sometimes referred to as a single language, Bihari. These languages, together with several other related languages, are known as the Bihari languages, which form a sub-group of the Eastern Zone group of Indo-Aryan languages. Magadhi has approximately 13 million speakers.

The Gandharan Buddhist texts are both the earliest Buddhist and South Asian manuscripts discovered so far. Most are written on birch bark and were found in labeled clay pots. Panini has mentioned both the Vedic form of Sanskrit as well as what seems to be Gandhari, a later form (bhāṣā) of Sanskrit, in his Ashtadhyayi. Gandhara's language was a Prakrit or "Middle Indo-Aryan" dialect, usually called Gāndhārī. Texts are written right-to-left in the Kharoṣṭhī script, which had been adapted for Indo-Aryan languages from a Semitic alphabet, the Aramaic alphabet. Gandhāra was then controlled by the Achaemenid dynasty of the Persian empire, which used the Aramaic script to write the Iranian languages of the Empire. Semitic scripts were not used to write South Asian languages again until the arrival of Islam and subsequent adoption of the Persian-style Arabic alphabet for New Indo-Aryan languages like Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri. Kharosthi script died out about the 4th century. However, the Hindko and the archaic Dardic, Kohistani dialects and Pothohari dialect, derived from the local Indo-Aryan Prakrits, are still spoken, though the Afghan Pashto language is the most dominant language of the region today.

"The Lord of Speech" refers to the use of concepts as filters to screen us from a direct perception of what is. The concepts are taken too seriously, they are used as tools to solidify our world and ourselves." (Trungpa: 1973..pg 6)

"Synchronizing mind and body is looking and seeing directly beyond language." (Trungpa: 1984..pg 53)

INDO-IRANIAN....Two ancient Iranian languages: Avestan (Northeastern Iran: 6th Century BC). Old Persian: (Southwestern Iran)....Median is also an ancient Iranian Language. Old Persian is the language of teh Achaemenian Court. Middle Persian is the language of the Sasanian court.Their earliest literature is the vedas, sacred hymns to the Aryan deities. The most archaic Sanskrit is the Vedas (1500-1200 BC)...

OLD PERSIAN..."The kings themselves and their Persian (ie: SW Iranians) subjects spoke Old Persian." (Wiesehofer: 1996..pg 8)...

PROTO-INDO-ARYAN...Refers to that stage of the language existing before the migrations into India and after the separation from Iranian. The Proto-Aryan Period was 2000 BC at the latest. (Burrow: 1973...pg 125)

SANSKRIT....(Tibetan: legs sbyar gyi skad)...Sanskrit appears about 2000-1500 BC in India with the migration of the Indo-Aryan branch of speakers into northwest India. The nearest relative of Indo-Aryan is Persian.

INDO-IRANIAN...."These 's-peoples' who spoke an Indo-Iranian dialect using the hard sibilant 's', were driven south by kindred peoples who changed the hard sibilant 's' to 'h'. The 's-people' went to India. The 'h-people' stayed in Iran. Example: Asura and Ahura." (Sambala and Shambhala) (Burrow: 1973...pg 133)...

MAHABHARATA...consists of 100,000 couplets. Close affinity to the Iranian Avesta. The Sanskrit dramatists had little regard for the three classical unities of space, time, and action. (Ency Britannica)

MAGACHI.....Sakyamuni Buddha taught in the Magachi language. Sanskrit, the more cultured language was favored by the educated elite.

"In the language of the gods of the Yungdrung (phywa sans mu rgyal ad phyod gsal)" (Francke: 1950..pg 163)...

DAKINI CODE....Code languages (brda skad)

ALTAI...."the Altaic language is related to Mongolian and to the Tungus language spoken in other parts of Siberia. The ancient Turkic languages also belong to the Altaic language family."(Kharatidi: 1996..pg 203)...

MASANG..."tha language of the Masang, a class of semi-divine beings of the Theurang" (Norbu: 1995..pg 15)

Drung, Deu and Bon ..... By: Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche.... Drung, Deu and Bon offers a rare opportunity to explore pre Buddhist Tibetan culture, presented within the three categories commonly described as the foundation of the kingdom of Tibet- drung (narrations), deu (symbolic languages), and the Bon tradition..... In this important work, Professor Namkhai Norbu begins by investigating the epic poems and legends of Tibets secular culture. He then turns his attention to the mysteries of the ancient symbolic languages that conveyed wisdom inexpressible in conventional terms; and he concludes by elucidating the complexities of the pre-Buddhist Bon religion in the context of its 12 lores or sciences.

"the lore of the deu made use of secret languages to transmit knowledge. Deu (lde'u) is an ancient Tibetan term, possibly from the language of Shang-Shung."(Norbu: 1995..pg 21)

UIGHUR SCRIPT...."With the Manichean religion, the Uighurs took over the Soghdian alphabet, derived from Syriac, and developed it into the famous Uighur script." (Knobloch: 1972..pg 224)

SHANG SHUNG...Until the 7th century, an independent, non-Tibetan kingdom, with its own language and history..... Especially the Zhang-zhung terms: WER RO (king), NYI RI (sun), SHE TUN (heart)(Kvaerne: 1996).... The Zhang-zhung dialect is somewhat related to Tibetan, but it is closer to the modern Kanauri language of the western Himalayas. (Reynolds:1996)..."The Tibetan script U-Med is based on the ancient script of Zhang-Zhung. This script is called sMar-yig or Lha-bab-yi-ge, which means "script descended from the heavens" and is possibly 3000 years old. (Ngakpa:1986..pg 178)

KALACHAKRA....."the 1047 verses of the Kalachakra Tantra used today (the original is 12,000 verses) was composed by the eighth King of Shambhala, the first Kulika (Kalki), Jampal Trakpa. The original 12,000 verses have never been translated into Tibetan." (Kongtrul: 1995..pg 271)..."The Kalachakra is one of the last Sanskrit works to have been written in a Central Asian land." (Geoffrey Hopkins: 1985..pg 60)..."King Sucandra wrote the 12,000 verse root text to the Kalachakra in an unknown tongue called the 'twilight language.' (Bryant: 1992..pg 68)..."Sixteen translations of the Sri Kalachakra from Sanskrit to Tibetan appeared between the 11th and 14th centuries." (Bryant: 1992..pg 71)...

The Zhang Zhung language......A handful of Zhang Zhung texts and 11th century bilingual Tibetan documents attest to an Zhang Zhung language which was related to Old Tibetan, although it included words of Kinnaur origin. The exact relation to Old Tibetan is subject to dispute. The Bönpo claim that the Tibetan writing system is derived from the Zhang Zung alphabet, while modern scholars consider the question open. Given the rarity of text samples, another possible explanation is that the 11th century Bönpo, struggling for legitimacy as Kadampa and Nyingmapa sought to marginalize Bön, resorted to creating an artificial ancient writing system.

Modern-day Zhang Zhung speakers......A language called Zhang Zhung is still spoken by approximately 2,000 native speakers in the Sutlej Valley of Himachal Pradesh. It is not clear if this language, of the Himalayish family of the Tibeto-Burman family, derives from the language spoken by the Zhang Zhung, or if they are the descendants of the Zhang Zhung as claimed, although this is quite plausible.

CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS...."70 different languages are spoken in the Caucasus Highlands. Many various tribes. (Le Strange: 1966..pg 180)...

Zhangzhung language......A handful of Zhangzhung texts and 11th century bilingual Tibetan documents attest to a Zhangzhung language which was related to Kinnauri. The Bonpo claim that the Tibetan writing system is derived from the Zhangzhung alphabet, while modern scholars recognize the clear derivation of Tibetan script from a North Indian script, which accords with non-Bon Tibetan accounts. A modern Kinnauri language called by the same name (pronounced locally Jangshung) is spoken by 2,000 people in the Sutlej Valley of Himachal Pradesh who claim to be descendants of the Zhangzhung

MANTRA...."The followers of Bon believe that mantras, words of power, are the keynote (key-note) to any particular body of atoms, and that each organism has its own vibratory rate, though it may be the sun, a rain cloud, or a mountain. When this rate of vibration is known, the organism can be disintegrated or even created. The ancient Greek theory of music appears similar to this Tibetan conception." (Clark: 1954..pg 354)..."the great mystery of how mind can create matter."..(Kongtrul: 1995..pg 41)..."In Shinto, there is a belief, called the working of the 'koto-dama' (the mysterious spiritual force believed to exist in words)."..(Jinja:1958..pg 28)....."In ancient Persia, the 'mathra' was a magic spell which caused things to expand. The utterance of the sovereign sky-god was compressed into a formula so potent it could banish one from the world of darkness to the world of light."..(Campbell: 1968..pg 101)...

SEED SYLLABLES...(t= tsik...Sk= bija)..."The six syllables representing the six classes of living beings are: THU-hell, TRI-tormented spirits, SU-animals, NA-humans, KA-demigods, SO-gods." (Kvaerne: 1985..pg 16)....Every deity has its essence or seed in a certain vibration or sound. From this sound comes the deity. (Allione: 1984..pg 129)...thugs srog: spiritual life force; seed syllable in the heart..."A is the final letter of the Tibetan alphabet, inherent in all the consonants; it is a phonetic symbol of Primeval or Absolute Reality." (Kvaerne: 1996..pg 29).....SO SO (BSWO BSWO) is a characteristic exclamation found in the ancient ritual texts. (Norbu: 1995..pg 178)..."In her right hand she holds the heroic letters of the "Five Seeds" (Hoffman: 1979..pg 105)..."Five heroic syllables: A, OM, RAM, HUM, DZA" (Kvaerne: 1985..pg 22)..."these seed syllables are not only written characters, or symbolic representations, but living beings endowed with motive power. Not only the name of fire, it is the seed of fire. (David-Neel: 1931..pg 202)..."The ancient Persian idea that the creation of the world was by a word uttered by a sky-god appears not only in the first chapter of Genesis, but elsewhere in the cosmologies of the ancient east." (Campbell: 1968..pg 100)...

ARAMAIC......" Jesus probably did have a knowledge of Hebrew, but he didn’t speak it. The language spoken by Jesus (and the apostles) was Aramaic. Aramaic is a semitic language and it was the day-to-day language of Israel from 539 BC – 70 AD. In fact, contrary to popular belief, some parts of the Bible were never written in Hebrew – but rather Aramaic – chiefly Daniel and Ezra. It is also likely that Jesus was fluent in Greek as this was the secondary language of the region and it was the language of the common version of the Bible used by the Jews at the time. Even one of the most well know sayings of Jesus upon the Cross is Aramaic: “Eloi Eloi lema sabachthani?” meaning “My God, my God, for what have you forsaken me?”...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_of_Jesus

ARYAN LANGUAGES...."Peoples of Ancient India and Iran spoke Aryan languages. This is basically a linguistic concept denoting the closely related Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages which form that branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of the historical languages is called Proto-Aryan. The Vedic, Avestan, and Old Persian show remarkable similarities. (Old Indo Aryan: arya...Old Persian: ariya...Avestan: airiia). The linguistic history indicates that the Aryans originally formed a single people until the beginning of the 2nd millenium BC when the Indian Aryans and the Iranian Aryans went separate ways." (Yarshater: 1987..pg 684)...

SOGDIAN...."linguistic affinity between Old Persian (a Southwest Iranian language) and the Northeast-Iranian Sogdian language. (Yarshater: 1987..pg 685)...

SOMA....Indo-Iranian: Sauma...Vedic: Soma...Avestan: Haoma

TOKARIC...."the most ancient form of Indo-European in Siberia." (Sykes: 1958..pg 97)...

KALA..(Castle)...Kilat or Kalat in Persian....Qalaq in Armenian...Kal'ah or Kal'at in Arabic...(Le Strange: 1966..pg 395)...

Remarks on Elocution.....Trungpa Rinpoche:.....Language is language. If there were no human beings, there wouldn't be language. Each word that we speak should be regarded as a gem. When we speak or talk, we should regard words as tangible rather than as pure sound.......If you are talking to a bank manager or a lawyer, they will believe you if you speak properly. If a policeman is about to give you a speeding ticket, if you speak to him properly, he might not give you a ticket! ....Language is our human heritage. Other creatures bark or neigh, but we have a very special gift known as language. So language is a very important gift that human beings have developed. Thank you......CTR, 21 January 1984.........Remarks to the Karma Dzong Community

"Languages develop from clan language to tribal language to folk language to national language." (Rudenko: 1970..pg 226)...

HERODOTUS..."Anyone who does business with the Scyths (Sakae) needs seven interpreters speaking seven languages. Sharp divisions among the pastoral tribes has to be recognized." (Rudenko: 1970..pg 226)...

"The Kushan Empire was a region of intense linguistic contact between the Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages." (Gafurov: 1968..pg 172)...

"The Aryan terms for deity are borrowed from fire and light. For example, 'deva' is from the root 'div' which means 'to shine'. In old Sanskrit, 'Athar' is 'fire'."..(James: 1963...pg 79)...

DIONYSIAC FESTIVAL.....Ritual cry of "euhai...euhoi" (Burkert: 1987...pg 172)...

"Lha gyalo"...'the gods are victorious'...(Born in Tibet...pg 209)

" The linguistic history indicates that the Aryans ("Indo-Europeans"....."Iran"....) originally formed a single people until the beginning of the 2nd millenium BC when the Deva worshipping Indian Aryans and the Asura worshiping Iranian Aryans went separate ways." (Yarshater: 1987..pg 684)... ... The Kalachakra discusses the expulsion of the Deva worshippers from Shambhala and refers to the Rigden kings as Asura...... "

Shambhala .... "Iranian origins"......the mostly extinct Avestan Iranian tradtions of pre-Buddhist/pre-Islamic Persian Central Asia of which the Tibetan Bon, Zorastrian, and MANICHAEISM are quite interesting.......

"Appreciation" of the DRALAS of Western Europe and North America....."Who are these Gods...these Dralas?"...MITHRA... the Greek and Roman warrior gods...the Avestan Asura......their rituals and ceremonies....their costumes and uniforms........where do they abide....their power spots.....their sacred dances...the songs of the Asuri .....

Shiva (in Tibetan, Lha Chen) also plays an important role; in fact his god-realm is called Shambhala.

Drala is actually a transliteration for two different Tibetan terms. Therefore it stands for two slightly different kinds of deity. One is spelled sgra bla, and the other is spelled in Tibetan, dgra lha. The first one with the element, sgra refers to a kind of energy; it is a vibrational entity. The second (dgra-) word ends in the syllable lha, and it is a kind of god.....Jamgon Kongtrul the Great used a third spelling .....

Drala spelt sGra bla begins with the syllable sgra which means sound, and continues with la that here means "a type of individual energy that is endowed with protective functions" (Norbu 1995.) For example, seng- ge'i sgra means the lion's roar. It is also possible to write and hence, refer to sgra'i lha since sGra means a sound or cry, but using lha here instead of la conveys the meaning of a sound deity.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists recovered from oases in the Tarim Basin a number of manuscripts written in two closely related but previously unknown Indo-European languages. Another text recovered from the same area, a Buddhist work in Old Turkic, included a colophon stating that the text had been translated from Sanskrit via a toxrï language, which Friedrich W. K. Müller guessed was one of the newly discovered languages. Müller called the languages "Tocharian" (German Tocharisch), linking this toxrï with the ethnonym Tókharoi (Ancient Greek: Τόχαροι, Ptolemy VI, 11, 6, 2nd cent. AD) applied by Strabo to one of the Scythian tribes that overran the Greco-Bactrian kingdom (present day Afghanistan-Pakistan) in the second half of the 2nd century BC. This term was itself derived from Indo-Iranian (cf. Old Persian tuxāri-, Khotanese ttahvāra, and Sanskrit tukhāra), the source of the term "Tokharistan" usually referring to 1st millennium Bactria, as well as the Takhar province of Afghanistan. The Tókharoi are often identified by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan empire. These people are now known to have spoken Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language that is quite distinct from the Tocharian languages, and Müller's identification is now a minority position among scholars. Nevertheless "Tocharian" remains the standard term for the languages of the Tarim Basin manuscripts and for the people who produced them.

Ancient relationships ... the ancient Bon Kingdom of Shang Shung which was located at the base of Mt Kailas, the dwelling place of Shenlha Okar and the 360 WERMA Deities.....the Avestan/Aryan traditions of pre-Islamic Iranian Central Asia and their influence the secret ..MITHRAIC.. Lodge ceremonies of Pre-Christian Western Europe.... and the ceremonial rituals and dances of Sotuknang, of the Hopi Tradition, whose face is brilliant like a bright star and whose body is the nature of crystal.....

Pictographs are Native American paintings on rocks whereas petroglyphs are carvings into rock. The petroglyphs are made with stone tools and the symbols have withstood the length of history and can be easily viewed in many areas around the world.

The earliest alphabet—from which all other alphabets in the world are derived—was invented in Canaan in the late 18th or early 17th century B.C. This alphabet consisting of pictographs is referred to by scholars as the proto-Canaanite alphabet.

The oldest petroglyphs are dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, other writing systems such as pictographs and ideograms began to appear. Petroglyphs were still common though, and some less advanced societies continued using them much longer, even until contact with Western culture was made in the 20th century. Petroglyphs have been found in all parts of the globe except Antarctica with highest concentrations in parts of Africa, Scandinavia, Siberia, southwestern North America and Australia.

Avestan is an East Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. Its area of composition comprised – at least – Arachosia/Sīstān, Herat, Merv and Bactria.The Yaz culture has been regarded as a likely archaeological reflection of early East Iranian culture as described in the Avesta. Its status as a sacred language has ensured its continuing use for new compositions long after the language had ceased to be a living language.

A few common Greek words were adopted in Sanskrit, such as words related to writing and warfare:
"ink" (Sankrit: melā, Greek: μέλαν "melan")
"pen" (Sanskrit:kalamo, Greek: κάλαμος "kalamos")
"book" (Sanskrit: pustaka, Greek: πύξινον "puksinon")
"bridle", a horse's bit (Sanskrit: khalina, Greek: χαλινός "khalinos")
"center" (Sanskrit: kendram, Greek: κέντρον "kentron")
"siege mining", (Greek: υπόνομος "hyponomos", with the meaning of undermining fortifications, in order to enter behind an enemy line, or, just to pull down the enemy's wall)
"syringe" (Sanskrit: surungā, Greek: σύριγξ-σύριγγα "syrinx-syringa")
"barbarian, blockhead, stupid" (Sanskrit: barbara, Greek: βάρβαρος "barbaros")

"Originally the word Bonpo meant someone who invoked the gods and summoned the spirits. Thus a Bonpo was an expert in the use of mantra and magical evocation. Mantra or ngak (sngags) is sound and sound is energy. Mantra is the primordial sound that calls the forms of all things into being out of the infinite potentiality of empty space which is the basis of everything. Sound or word has a creative power. But this term Bonpo in ancient times appeared to cover a number of different types of practitioner, whether shaman, magician, or priest. Here there seems to be a strong parallel of the role of the Bonpo in ancient Tibet with that of the Druid in ancient pre-Christian Europe. Just as the Druidic order was divided into the three functions of the Bards, the Vates, and the Druids, who were singers, soothsayers, and magicians respectively, so the ancient pre-Buddhist kingdom of Tibet was said to be protected by the Drung (sgrung) who were bards and singers of epics, the Deu (lde'u) who were soothsayers and diviners, and the Bonpo (bon-po) who were priests and magicians. Another archaic term closely related to Bonpo was Shen or Shenpo (gshen-po), and this term may have originally designated the shaman practitioner in particular. The Shen system of practice was transmitted through family lineages, especially in Western and Northern Tibet, then known as the country of Zhang-zhung, so that Shen also came to designate a particular ancient clan or tribe.".....http://vajranatha.com/articles/traditions/bonpo.html?start=1

"Darius left a tri-lingual monumental relief on Mount Behistun which was written in Elamite, Old Persian and Babylonian between his coronation and his death. The inscription begins with a brief autobiography with his ancestry and lineage. To aid the presentation of his ancestry, Darius wrote down the sequence of events which occurred after the death of Cyrus the Great."....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_I

"Darius chose Aramaic as a common language, which soon spread throughout the empire. However, Darius gathered a group of scholars to create a separate language system only used for Persis and the Persians, which was called Aryan script which was only used for official inscriptions.".....Shahbazi, Shapur (1996), "Darius I the Great", Encyclopedia Iranica, 7,

"Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to 2600 BC. It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes the adapted cuneiform script could represent either (a) Sumerian logograms (i.e. picture-based characters representing entire words), (b) Sumerian syllables, (c) Akkadian syllables, or (d) phonetic complements. However, in Akkadian the script practically became a fully fledged syllabic script, and the original logographic nature of cuneiform became secondary. However, logograms for frequent words such as 'god' and 'temple' were still used. For this reason the sign AN can on the one hand be a logogram for the word ilum ('god'), and on the other signify the god Anu, or even the syllable -an-. Additionally the sign was used as a determinative for divine names.".....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language

History of the Persian language:
Proto-Iranian (ca. 1500 BC)...Southwestern Iranian languages
Old Persian (c. 525 BC - 300 BC)....Old Persian cuneiform script
Middle Persian (c.300 BC-800 AD)....Pahlavi script • Manichaean script • Avestan script
Modern Persian (from 800 AD)...Perso-Arabic script

Dzong-kha, a Tibetan dialect in Bhutan, contains several grammatical items similar to those in Old Zhangzhung.....Dzongkha is no doubt a dialect of Tibetan. The majority of its lexical items find their origins in Old Tibetan. However, Dzongkha shows grammatical forms -i and ni, which are not found in other Tibetan dialects and are characteristic to both Dzongkha and Zhangzhung".....The Present Stage of Deciphering Old Zhangzhung Tsuguhito Takeuchi and Ai Nishida...........http://ir.minpaku.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10502/4236/1/SES75_010.pdf

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Email....okarresearch@gmail.com

Northern New Mexico….November 2012

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