Re: Judaism and Christianity is indebted to Zoroastrianism the Heritage of True Aryan
You say that calendrical systems go back 60,000 years ago, so it's not impossible that a people could have tracked their development from 6,000 B.C. onwards, and the oldest portion of Zoroastrian scripture incorporates evidence of a lunar calendar, so their history could have been attested that far back, but not their language according to convention. That much you can agree with correct?
Keeping count of how many days go by, all month long (that is, until the phases of the moon recur); and then of how many months go by, all year long (that is, to know whether the nice weather is a fluke, or means that spring has come back for real) was a vital task, undertaken by humans all over the world since as long ago as humans have been smart enough to count that high (indeed, it seems to have been the primary motivation for counting). Keeping track of how many years go by, for a whole human lifetime, is less vital: not every culture has even bothered to note birthdays and keep track of individuals' ages; where there have been monarchies, counting years by the reign of the king has been common, but each new king starts the count over. Far from monarchies, among the Plains tribes "medicine chiefs" (religious, as opposed to "war chiefs") would keep "chronicle" tepees with a pictogram for each passing year, naming it for a significant event:
Black Elk Speaks notes "The Year of Shot-in-his-Lodge" (a man shot through the skin of his tepee when the firelight cast his shadow giving an enemy outside the target) and "The Year of the Rubbing-Out of Long-Hair" ("Little Bighorn" or "Custer's Last Stand"). But these chronicles were only kept for one man's adult lifespan.
Carrying over a long count of years across multiple life-spans was not seen as vital, and is not always found even in literate cultures. Before writing, it was essentially impossible: an oral recitation like the
Iliad does not, of course, tell us
how many years ago the Trojan War was; how could it, unless it was changed every year? From Mesopotamia we get long king-lists incorporating the reign-lengths, but inconsistencies in handling the partial years at start and end of each reign, and in handling rebellions and usurpations when there were overlapping rival claimants introduce some fuzziness: fortunately, here and there solar eclipses are recorded, and can be pegged absolutely. From Egypt, Manetho's king-list unfortunately does not include reign-lengths, and dynasties are listed sequentially when sometimes they were overlapping in time claiming different parts of the country (so Egyptologists can still get into terrible fights about the details of the chronology).
What do we have from Iranians? Nothing really, prior to the Achaemenid period. The Pahlavi chronicles on which you want to rely can be tested, as to their placements of events which can be dated independently: they are horribly bad, just arbitrary groupings of events into "thousand-year" blocks when the actual intervals were nowhere near so long. The specific year-count from Zoroaster to Alexander looks like better data, because it is not a round number, but it turns out to be too late (putting Zoroaster as a contemporary of the grandfather of Cyrus the Great) and probably refers to the
conversion to Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenid family: when I started this, I just thought that was right, but your sources have persuaded me that Zoroaster has to be somewhat earlier (so, you see, you haven't completely failed with me); however, ~1200 BC really looks like the earliest date that is at all sensible.
"There are the Indo-European languages whose origins can be traced back to a common ancestor that was spoken in Eurasia some 6,000 years ago. We call the people who spoke this ancestral language the Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo-Europeans." - J.P. Mallory, The Search for the Indo-Europeans
We are not in the year 0, we are past 2000. "6000 years ago" means 4000 BC (rounded off from the 3700 BC plus-or-minus a couple centuries which I told you is the consensus), and that is as remote from 6000 BC as Barack Obama is from Augustus Caesar; proto-Indo-European would be as remote from what was spoken in 6000 BC as modern Italian is from classical Latin.
And it was a book called "Before the Dawn" which mentions the use of genetics to trace the origin of Proto-Indo-European to 7000 B.C.
That would be tracing a
biological common ancestor, which is not the same thing as the linguistic common ancestor: Jamaican is a dialect of English, and its linguistic ancestor is Anglo-Saxon; but the biological ancestry of Jamaicans is mostly African. So you see that you have to leave out peoples who have had the languages in question imposed on them by conquest, although their biological ancestors spoke something else entirely. If you want to find a
biological ancestor for "all" the peoples now speaking Indo-European languages (excluding obvious cases like the Jamaicans) you will be going back further than the proto-Indo-Europeans-- to include also related peoples, whose descendants at some ancient time got Indo-European languages imposed on them, although their ancestors were speaking something different from proto-Indo-European, back when proto-Indo-European was a living language.
But, yeah that's true animal Husbandry doesn't quite equate to agricultural revolution. But I see that our earliest evidence that cattle was domesticated in other parts of the world before 4800 BCE according to The Horse the Wheel and Language.
That would be in North Africa; cows have never been suitable for the northern steppes, and the domestication of sheep and goats in the Middle East was later, the diffusion to the steppes later still, about as late as when cows spread as far east as India.
Even the Young Avesta, however, recollects what some perceive to have been an Ice Age, and the last Ice Age was 20,000 years ago.
It speaks of droughts and harsh winters, recalling the climate changes from 2000-1000 BC which made the steppes less hospitable, and drove the out-migration of the Iranians and Indo-Aryans. I have no trouble believing that oral traditions would remember this for a long time: the period when there were severe floodings in the Middle East had been very long ago by the time any accounts were written down.
When it comes to the names all I'm saying at the moment is that to me their appears to be a phonological and semitic relationship between the words Heb. Yahweh and Av. Yatha Ahu Vairya, Yeshua khristos and Av. ishayãs gerezdâ and YAv. Ashvat-Ereta, and Heb. Ha-shem and Av. Ashem Vohu. I'm not denying you're expert judgment on the proposed connections, and I'm not saying I've proved the connections.
You don't understand how the languages work at all, and so you have no grasp on what is and isn't plausible.
However I would like to point out a possible connection between the preparation of the Hom, the Hom Litergy, and the Eucharist. Mary Boyce in "A History of Zoroastrian" has pointed out that Gerezda is associated with the milk (liquid cream?) that was mixed with the Soma juice, and the same practice was used to prepare the Hom juice, and the Hom is associated with the Tree of Immortality similar to how Jesus was associated with immortality.
Interesting.
Right, right, there is no evidence that the Aryan (Iranian) history predated anything Hamitic or Semitic history or even a dead language group whose history no one could lay claim to like Sumerian which is the oldest attested history in the world.
There really isn't. Mitanni burst into the Middle East about 1500 BC around the time the Indo-Aryans are sacking the Harappan cities; prior to that they were just steppe nomads, only starting to get the idea of domesticating animals, leaving no written records and few archaeological traces.
Sorry still a little dislexic, are you basically saying that although there is no evidence of a Akkadian Zoroastrian connection that both cultures came to dedicate the 7th day and quarter-phase day respectively to a god, and God, independently.
No, I am saying the direction of the borrowing is quite clear: FROM the Middle East TO the Iranians.
OK, but Lithuanian preserves some pretty archaic features that make it look similar to Sanskrit too.
Not so that a native Lithuanian speaker could read Sanskrit in transcription. The proto-Indo-Iranian common ancestor of Sanskrit, Avestan, etc. would be centuries before the Vedas or Gathas; and the proto-S'atam common ancestor of proto-Balto-Slavic and proto-Indo-Iranian would be centuries before that.
Moreover it sounds like you're saying that Yaw is an Ugartic form not a Hebrew form.
There isn't a sharp line between the two: there is a continuum between the old Semitic languages as found in Ugarit and Ebla, and the descendant languages later spoken in the region. There was no time when they "stopped" speaking this and "started" speaking that; demarcations are just arbitrary, for convenience in reference.
And all of this has also brought to mind that the Medes themselves are mentioned in Genesis 10:2, which would place the Zoroastrians even further back than you're proposed date for Genesis.
Madai is probably a form of a puzzling root for "league" (no clear etymology in Semitic or Indo-European) found in such tribal leagues as the
Midian (Arabian tribes) and
Mitann (Iranian tribes) as well as the
Mede league (the
-n suffix sometimes found is adjectival, not part of the root). Genesis 10 (the "table of nations") appears to reflect the political situation around the time of Solomon's reign, 10th century BC, so
Madai could indeed be the Medes: who were NOT Zoroastrians, indeed are frequently mentioned as arch-enemies of Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid period.
Ok, so you say that Elohim is plural of respect, but all other evidence so far hasn't pointed to this when it comes to the -im plural ending.
Yes of course it's a plural ending, and most plural words are not used as singulars, but
this one is which is why we distinguish that case as a special usage, the "plural of respect." Compare
shamayim "sky".
And I'm confused about mal'akh YHWH. Does that mean messenger of Yahweh separate of Yahweh
No. I don't know what you're confused about. The answer is no.
All the Parthian- and Sassanian-era additions means is that the Avesta was fixed in writing by then, but the compositions themselves display evidence of a language which is more archaic than Median and Persian, could not have been made up, and was only used for liturgical purposes by then
This is analogous to the "church Latin" of medieval Christendom, which was no longer a spoken language and seriously divergent from the "classical Latin" of the Roman Empire; when we see something in "church Latin" we know perfectly well that it was written in medieval, not imperial, times. Similarly, anything in "Younger Avestan" is certainly later than Achaemenid times.
and contemporary with the language of the Mittani texts
Certainly not. Even the "Older Avestan" of the Gathas is not like the Mitannian, which comes from a time when Indo-Iranian has not yet sharply diverged into Indic and Iranian branches (that is, although Mitannian is from the "Western Iranian" area, it still retained features which would later be dropped in all Iranian languages and found only in the Indic). Avestan is after Iranian has become distinct (Avestan already has the characteristic s-to-h shift which I have kept harping on). Older Avestan is a few centuries later than Mitannian, and Younger Avestan is several centuries later than that.
I told you people from the Eastern Caucuses were in Egypt before the most ancient Egyptian era
The ancient peoples of the Caucasus Mts. (which are half the breadth of Asia away from where you think they are) are the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians etc.) whose languages are rather alien but sometimes thought to be "Nostratic" (that is, sharing a common ancestor with Semitic and Indo-European etc. somewhat over 10,000 years back); the North Caucasic group (Avars, Chechens, Lezghi etc.) whose languages are seriously alien (difficult to relate to anything else); and the Circassians whose languages are freakishly alien (four dozen subtly distinguished consonants, but only one vowel, an indistinct "uh" sound) but maybe distantly akin to the North Caucasic. They
traded with Egypt, but were not "in" Egypt, a long time ago; this has exactly zero relevance to Iranians.
so what evidence do you have of an Egyptian presence in the Avesta?
You were the one who thought there was a connection between late ideas in the Avesta and Egyptian concepts. I don't see enough coincidence to think there needs to be any causal connection, but if there is one, then the one that came first (Egypt) was the cause and the one that came later was the effect, not the other way around.
