Re: [tied] Targitaos, "father of all Scythians"

From: george knysh
Message: 10645
Date: 2001-10-27

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Some of the names mentioned so far cannot be
> connected with
> Middle Eastern fish goddesses in any way. Hittite
> Tarhu- (=
> Luwian Tarhunt-, Lycian Trqqa-) was a storm god,
> often
> identified with Hurrian Teshub. The name may be
> Hattic
> (Taru), but might also be derived from or at least
> secondarily associated with the verb root tarh-
> 'win, be
> powerful'. There's nothing female or fishy about
> this deity.

*****GK: Simplifications are always useful. My only
source for this Hittite "Tarkhu" as = Dea Syria etc.
was a webnote. So we can scratch TARKHU and the
Hittites. Apparently this Hittite deity was also
associated with agriculture (+fertility)which may have
confused some investigator of deities into putting up
the webnote..*****

> The connection between Tirgatao and Mitannic
> Tirgutawija is
> offered on the basis of "general resemblance"
> without a
> detailed analysis, and therefore difficult to
> discuss.

****GK: Here I can offer nothing more than what I got
from Cyril Babaev's article. The only "links" are
geographical (apart from the fact that the names both
appear in "Indic" contexts). TIRGATAO lived on the Don
r. next door to the Scythians in the late 5th c. BC
and is reported by a Greek author (Polemon).
TIRGUTAWIYA is about one thousand years older,
garnered from Hittite archives, and referring to a
society next door to where "Dea Syria" eventually
emerges.*****

The
> orthography of the latter form does not
> differentiate
> between voiced and voiceless stops, so one it free
> to
> interpret it in a number of ways.
>
> Names are hard to etymologise if analysed in
> isolation. When
> we have a number of similarly formed names, clear
> patterns
> usually emerge and recurrent elements can be
> identified.
> Even if we can't determine their meaning, some kind
> of
> combinatorial analysis becomes possible.

*****GK: What can you do with:
[a]T/D*/-(i,a)-R-G/K*/-(a,i,u,e)-T- (ao,a,a-os,o,is).
It is absolutely clear that the differences between
the Syrian, Mitannian, Pontic Indian, "Greek", and
Herodotan names refer to the same name in different
cultural contexts. The distinction between T and D,
and G and K doesn't matter hermeneutically (it is
obvious that Philistine Derketo and Syrian Tirgata are
the same Fish-Goddess. So this leaves you with some
variable vowels (*) and endings (&) and a solid core [
T-*-R-G-*-T-& ]of identical consonants. What language?
What meaning?****
>
> Piotr
>
>


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