Re: Goliath and Uriah the Hittite as IE

Sabine writes:

There is a gigantic hero of the Anatolian coast even, called 'Anax' (a word supposedly going back to an original 'wanax', documented in Mycenaean Greek/Lin.B as wa-na-ka). He was the son of Uranos and Ge (heaven and earth) and autochthonic (inborn) king and eponymos (name-giving person) of Anaktoria, later Miletus (Caria, today western Turkey), father of (one of the kings by the name of) Asterios, also king in Miletus, who was killed by Miletos (son of Apollo with a Cretan goddess) and fled to Caria to conquer the town that then got his name. Asterios was buried on a small island near Lade (that's just outside Miletus, then in the sea, now silted up and a hill). His skeleton was supposed to have been at least ells long (when it was found in antiquity). Cf. Robert Graves, Greek myths, 88/b and /3, where he also makes the connection with the Anakim of Genesis).

I don't have my copy of Graves in front of me as I write, but he speaks of another such burial -- that of Great Ajax. The tumulus is still there, just north of the plain of Troy. He records somewhere in his notes about the Trojan War,  where he deals with Ajax's suicide I think it is, that a great storm wrecked the tomb and exposed the bones during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. These bones too were those of a giant. Hadrian had the remains re-interred the the tomb repaired.

When speaking of ancient 'giants', some perspective is needed. By ancient standards, all of us here are probably on the gigantic side. When you look at mediaeval suits of armor, or at life-size portraits dating from the Renaissance, you realize what a bunch of midgets our ancestors were -- or rather, what a bunch of giants their descendants have become, the result of several generations of hypernutrition and the miracles of modern medicine. I'm six feet, and don't think of myself as particularly tall, but by ancient standards, I'm a giant.

Tall men have always been prized by armies, if only for the show value. Even in this century, you hear of families where grandpa fled the old country because the king or kaisar or czar would have forcibly drafted them for show regiments. Other times, tall youths happily served in such regiments;  when we find ancient tombs with 'giants', you are seeing the ancient version of this. These are not representatives of a 'race of giants', but rather, the iron age version of National Basketball Association superstars.

[...]

As for the etymology of 'wanax' (usually translated as king but still under debate, see the discussion of specialists on AEGEANET, summer 1999) there is an interesting hypothesis by E. Brown in the article I mentioned in my earlier mail on Luvian in Troy (Linear A on Trojan Spindlewhorls etc.). I cite: "the pre-forms of Greek γυνή ('gynH') and Luvian 'wana-' with its extended form 'wanatti-' (syncopated 'unatti-'), whose meaning is 'woman' or 'lady', have a common Indo-European root." the he continues in a footnote: "For the Luvian preforms, PIE and Proto-Anatolian (*gwnéh2-, *gweneh2-, *gwóná-), see Melchert 1994 (Anatolian Historical Phonology, Amsterdam and Atlanta), 264 and 1993 (Cuneiform Luvian Lexicon. Chapel Hill) 36-37 with bibliography there. /.../ The very notion that we might one day succeed in showing Linear A to have been created at a stage in the evolution of Luvian when the initial voiced labiovelar of Proto-Anatolian *gwona- had become /w/ but before /o/ had become /a:/ in 'wana-' must be relegated to a footnote. Yet the idea that the Mycenaeans must have borrowed their signary at a substantially earlier date than their first preserved writings is not new and helps explain the still unschematized form in which some of the Linear B signs became fixed, forms more archaic in fact than their Linear A counterparts."
& nbsp;

I'm not really competent to comment on this except in general terms, but it's interesting. I gather this is to suggest Linear A represents an IE language, probably Luvian. By my understanding, this cannot be. There would have to be some traces of IE grammar present (case endings, verb inflections), and so far as I've read (most recently, Emmett L. Bennett in Daniels and Bright's The World's Writing Systems (Oxford, 1996), Linear A remains a huge mystery. Perhaps I've not heard the good news yet.

Luvian is written in syllabic hieroglyphs, which constitute a 'logosyllabary' to use Peter Daniel's terminology. There is also some material in the Hittite archives written in cuneiform.

So (w-)Anax 'Lord' (in a sacral context!) probably goes back to Anatolian 'wana-' Lady! And people using this name (theonym?) once may have been those who lived e.g. in Miletus where myth still tells us about them, in this case historically referring either to Mycenaean or Minoan times (hardly any other traces there), if the latter, then clearly using an Anatolian-based language similar to Luvian but written with Linear A signs (Minoan?).

Very interesting indeed.
Sabine