Glen wrote
> Why, I can even take John's outright denials of southern influence
in SW
> Anatolia circa 8000 BCE with a grain of salt even despite his
aggravating
> ignorance of quotes obtainable from the Enc.Britt and The Ancient
Near East
> by Charles Burney (1977) which state both architectural and
religious
> influences from nowhere other than the direction of Syria and
Palestine.
Bingo, Glen - you got your reaction!!! Its a long one for you!
Sigh! Glen, I have never denied Natufian influence in Belbasi
culture.
But it was not 8000 BCE, but significantly earlier, following in the
footsteps of the Kebaran culture influence (prior to 10,600 BCE) upon
the Beldibi. Check the posts. It was me who put this to you way
back
when talking of the "out of Africa" theory for the origin of
Nostratic
(that you finally came, kicking and secreaming to accept).
The difference we have Glen is that Kebaran and early Natufian are
far
too early for the Semitic features you keep pointing to. Both of
these were non agricultural Mesolithic cultures, which did *NOT*
practice farming. Natufian came to an end 8,500 BCE, before your
8,000 BCE timeline! They cannot have been responsible for
introducing
names of domesticated animals or grains, or agriculturally based
calendars and counting systems into PIE or anywhere else. These
things *had not been invented* before 8,500 BCE at the very earliest,
or 7,500 BCE to take a more conservative view! Besides, they had all
been discovered by Caucasian speakers who introduced their terms for
agriculture and other farming based systems to the Upper Paleolithic
and Mesolithic cultures with whom they came in contact. And that
includes Semetic, Karvellian, Sumerian, Tyrrhenian and PIE.
Charles Burney is decidedly out of date, and was using even more out
of date primary material. Mellaarts work on Catal Huyuk hardly
received the attention it deserved. Not much architectural and
religious influence from Syria and Palestine, mate, in fact the
religious and cultural influence into Palestine all came from the
diirection of Anatolia, not vice versa as you claim. Architecturally
Palestinian Natufian houses were all round, to the north they were
square. Palestinians eventually dropped their round dwellings and
adopted square ones, which came out of Anatolia. Religious influence
is the same. The spread of the Great Mother, shown faceless and
pregnant, guarded by lions or leopards, did not come from Syria or
Palestine. She appeared first in Catal Huyuk, drawn from Upper
Paleolithic models, and subsequently spread throughout the Middle
East, carried by the Caucasian inventers of agriculture. This great
Mother, known in Anatolia to the Hattic speakers as Hanahanah, became
Innana to the Sumerians and *Ana-t to the Canaanites (eventually
becoming Saint Anne to the Christians). As her veneration moved to
the West, amongst the Pelasgians she was known as Potnia *Ath-ana,
known to classical Greeks as Athene.
I would recommend you check-out any good Archaeology of the Neolithic
Middle East. Your knowledge is as lacking as you accuse my
linguistics.
For instance I quote for you in full the Conclusion of James
Mellaart's "The Neolithic of the Near East" on topics we have been
discussing what must seem like ad nauseam to the tollerant long
suffering members of this list.
"Professor Kramer and other Sumeriologists have pointed out that
there
is good eveidence in Sumerian for a Pre-Sumerian sub-stratum, which
gave the language not only the names for the Twin Rivers, but that of
nearly every Sumerian city, as well as a number of technical (JC
here,
largely agricultural) terms. These, I venture to suggest, were
derived from the earlier, i.e. the Ubaid population, the Neolithic
farmers who first settled on the Mesolotamian alluvium. Pre-Sumerian
in our terms would be a "Neolithic" language....
One final example is perhaps the best documented one: pre-Greek. In
a
recent study ..., E.J.Furnee estimates the number of pre-Greek loan
words in Greek to be between five thousand and six thousand. The
sources from which these words found their way into Greek comprise
the
Aegean basin and Asia-Minor, and one suspects that the major
contribution was made by the pre-Indo-European language of the
Minoans
of Crete. It, as it is now believed, the first Greek speaking
elements entered the Greek mainland in the Early Helladic III period
c2350 BCE (calibrated C14), there would have been a considerable
overlap of Greek and pre-Greek in Crete and the Islands for nealy a
thousand years, which may account for the formidable amount of loan
words the northern 'barbarians' picked up from their more civilised
neighbours. Attempts to isolate a number of topographical names
ending in -assos and -nthos and ascribe these to the Anatolian
Indo-European languages such as Luwian and Hittite (Laroche and
Palmer, followed by myself) have failed to convince most
archaeologists and philologists, as similar names extend into the
Balkans and Italy. They would make much better sense as a
pre-Indo-European substratum, as F.Schachtermeyr was the first to
realise. On this assumption pre-Greek should be earlier than the
arrival of the Greeks in Early Helladic III, beginning c 2350 BCE and
also earlier than the arrival of the Indo-European Anatolians during
the Troy II period (after 2,900 BCE in the calibrated C14 terms) in
Anatolia. It is not known how long the pre-Greek language survived
in
Anatolia, but this fact must be kept in mind in cosidering the
transmission of elements of the older language, as in the case of
Minoan. The non-Indo-European character of pre-Greek is well
established morphologically and its distribution has been charted
from
Anatolia (west of the Euphrates) (brackets Mellaart's) to to Greece,
the Cyclades, Crete, Thrace and Macedonia - the diaspora of the
Anatolian Neolithic, and an area of fairly close cultural contacts
right down to the period of the Indo-European invasions or
infiltrations right down to the Early Bronze Age. This may well have
been an area of more or less linguistic unity as suggested by the
evidence of pre-Greek, and the cultural development, at least in the
more southern parts of the area and especially Crete, shows no
cultural breaks that *must* (emphasis Mellaart's) be associated with
a
change of language since the Neolithic. The basic population of
Neolithic descendents for the most part (the Epipaleolithic element
is
probably numerically insignificant) of Anatolian settlers that
brought
agricultuure to Europe. It is perhaps not surprising that the bulk
of
pre-Greek words that have survived are concerned with an
Anatolian-Aegean environment, its flora and fauna, 'Neolithic'
foodstuffs, artifacts and only vague references to metals. Another
group of words are pejorative, describing attitudes that were not
appreciated (lecherous, boastful, etc); could they have served to
keep
alive a native reaction to the invaders? Theoretically at least the
survival of a Neolithic language over some three to four thousand
years has parallels, and such a possibility cannot be ruled out.
This hypothesis finds further support in the presence of traces of a
similar (Caucasian) (insertion mine) substratum in the Balkans,
Italy,
Southern France, areas beyond the Near Eastern Neolithic diaspora,
but
early centres of secondary Neolithic cultures, influenced by the
Neolithic of Greece, Macedonia and Thrace (eg. Rhaeto-Etruscan,
Ligurian, Pelasgian in Magna Grecia,) (bracketed insertion mine). We
may assume that in these areas local Epipaleolithic groups picked up
the ideas of agriculture from their more advanced eastern neighbours
and with it they may well have carried westwards a number of
technical
and enviironmental terms. To the east also, some of the Caucasian
languages contain words similar to those of pre-Greek, and Furnee
suggests that *THE NUMBER OF PRE-GREEK WORDS USUALLY EXPLAINED AS
SEMITIC WERE BORROWED BY AND NOT FROM THE SEMITIC* (EMPHASIS MINE).
To an archaeologist, then, it would cause no surprise to learn that
pre-Greek may have been introduced into southeastern Europe by
Anatolian Neolithic farmers and the language of Catal Huyuk, Hacilar,
and Can Hasan may have been preserved in Crete well into the Late
Bronze Age, late enough to have been recorded imperfectly, by the
classical Greeks. This is, in my opinion, a phenomenon to which too
little attention has been drawn. Seeing that the earliest farmers of
the Near East were descendents of Upper Paleolithic hunters, as we
know, there may well be a substratum of Upper Paleolithic language
and
vocabulary in languages such as Ancient Egyptian, Pre-Sumerian,
Sumerian, Elamite and pre-Greek, which has not yet been detected.
Alternatively, could these languages have been those of the Upper
Paleolithic, with Neolithic terms added as innovations?" pp.281 - 282
Glen, amongst most reputable archaeologists it is accepted that
Semitish of any kind did not appear with Natufian. How many others
do you want me to quote? The language spoken by the Natufians is any
guess. It may even have been an exitinct version of early Nostratic,
as I hypothesise. Given the detection of a surviving Pre-Semitic,
pre-A-A substratum in Palestine topography, this could have been the
remnants of the Natufians. Most archaeologists today accept that
Semitic arrived in the cultural hiatus after PPNBIII in Palestine,
with the early Pottery period. They arrived across the rift Valley
as hunter-gatherer-farmers. As Mellart says, this period "presents
the same unsettled picture of semi-permanent huts, scoops and silos
(Ghrubba, lower) but the Ghrubba pottery seems far superior to the
Munhata pahse, and to jusge by the published drawings, is quite
different (it shows clear African links)(JC). Either there is far
more phases to this period, or one is dealing with tribal units, each
with a ceramic tradition of its own (again a Capsian African custom,
also found in the North Sahara)(JC). The Munhata phase may be
contemporary with the early part of Byblos neolithic (that does show
Natufian and PPNB III survival)(JC), but it is certainly not related
to it. Painted pottery was always rare on the Mediterranean
littoral,
and the origins of the various 'cultures' or rather groups, of the
Munhata must be sought elsewhere. The lack of domestic animals and
the presence of wild sheep(?) not native to Palestine - seems to
point
to the marginal steppe-lands or hills beyond the Great Rift Valley,
regions from which at a later date the Ghassulians and Amorites were
to invade Palestine." These were the first Semites into the area, no
earlier.
Glen, To have Semitic people in the area before Yarmukian and Munhata
is clearly anachronistic. Semitic was not destinct from Afro-Asiatic
18,500 BCE (the earliest date for the Kebaran - from which Natufian
developed). There is an unbroken clear local cultural development
from this late Paleolithic down to the Munhata and Yarmukan phase,
and
then a clear cultural break, showing the arrival of a new people.
Natufian/Kebarans no more spoke Semitic than did the builders of
Stonehenge speak modern English (the time gap is not as great in the
second example as they are in the first!)
Sigh!
Tired regards
John