Podcast | Finding Manuland: The Atlas, Episode Five

The Harness Logic: Journeys and Papers Feed Each OtherThe journeys and the papers in the Finding Manuland Atlas series feed each other, and the Atlas grows out of the exchange: Atlas Intro Episode 2, Episode 3, and Episode 4. A journey grounds a paper. A real place, object or photograph gives the M-N- argument something tactile to stand on. The Sura crossing, on the outskirts of Dnipro, where those property developers tried to destroy that Yamna mound so they could build a fancy house on top of it, but instead found a stone circle, which prevented them from building the fancy house, and which lies by the Sura River. The 64 stones of that stone circle. Menua’s canal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua), which I have stood by, on the great saltwater lake of eastern Turkey, which was the capital of the Urartian Empire, and of Armenia, until the Russians gave this part of Armenia to the Turks, the Turkic language speakers. The crescent on the Göbekli Tepe (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli) bench, which I have written about and will write about again, the moon crescent on the bench which bore the painted boar that was found last year, and had lain under the stones which had buried the Göbekli Tepe site near Urfa, Şanlıurfa, in eastern Turkey, in part of northern Mesopotamia, since 9,000 years before the Common Era. The son of Manu that I saw on a column at Edessa, modern name Urfa, or Şanlıurfa, with its great, great museum, if you ever have the opportunity to visit. The museum at Urfa, where the oldest depiction in statue form of a human-sized human, with his obsidian eyes, is the first thing that strikes you as you enter this incredible museum, where many of the treasures from Göbekli Tepe rest. And the signage photographed at a site becomes primary-source corroboration in its own right, the museum’s own label stating the case. We must, and we do in Finding Manuland, balance the scholarship from the great universities of Tübingen, of Oxford and Cambridge and Dublin and Yale and Penn and all of those places. But we also don’t ignore the archaeologists who work in place in Türkiye. So if they state something, then we use that as weighty evidence. The papers, once finished, feed all of this Atlas in their turn. Each becomes a part of the frame the next journey grows from. Each is at once a finding and a seed, so every one is held to the same grounding bar. And this, I hope, will inspire you too, because Finding Manuland is also an iterating itinerary of infinite journeys, and as long as I live, I hope I will continue on these journeys. I have many hundreds of journeys to report to you as of today, and I hope that in the future I will have many hundreds, perhaps thousands more. And that they will inspire you, if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit places, or you have spare time, or you are just divorced, or you are looking for somewhere to bring the children in the summer. You are looking for a theme for a holiday. You don’t want to spend two weeks on a beach. You want to explore. If you want to learn about the sounds and the meanings in the words you use in your everyday world, then I am going to help guide you to the places where these words lived, live, and, as long as there is an Indo-European culture, will live.To India with the Rig VedaSo then, if you can get your mental model from... So, we were in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, moving across Tuva, Afghanistan, and the route which those Sintashta migrants took all the way to India. And we know this because of the Rig Veda, which was standardised around 1100 years before the Common Era, and is traditionally cited as the oldest book in an Indo-European language, and the holiest book in an Indo-European language. Slightly complicated, because Zarathustra was probably three centuries before that, but the Zoroastrian corpus had to be reconstructed much later. We will get to all of these complications later. But in the Sintashta culture we have, and this was only discovered a couple of decades ago, the burial customs, for instance the placement of horses’ heads and the remains of funereal feasts, which match exactly what is in the Rig Veda. We know now, with genetic evidence, that the Yamna, who travelled from Ukraine, established the Sintashta culture, ran through these burial customs and buried their chariots, and their descendants would end up in India.India is really where this project was seeded, in some respects. The family’s root it is not,