Summary

The assumption that words are iconic rather than arbitrary and conventional signifiers lead to an entirely new perception of ancient texts. There is abundant evidence for this assumption in modern words. A collection of words sharing letters and meaning may identify sememes represented by individual letters or letter combinations. Families of non-cognates that share letters also share sememes. For example, flood and flail are semantically quite distant – they are not typical cognates in the current sense of the term – but do share the sememe of forth and back movement in the letters F and L.

Similarly, following Egyptian and more ancient practices, the letters of the original Phoenician or later Semitic abjads were given the names of the most iconic and familiar objects representing the sememes for which the letters were designed. For instance, the name mēm (water) was given to the letter M representing an up-down movement like a wave. Thus, the name of a Phoenician letter provides a first approximation of the semantic value of the letter. This value may be refined, expanded, and diversified by observing the use of a letter in other words of which the meaning has been established (training set of words).

Having collected a list of sememes associated with each letter, we may recombine these sememes in the order dictated by the letters of new words. We may thus reconstruct the meaning of other words with established meaning for validation (validation set). Once validated, the sememes may be agglutinated in the order dictated by the letters of words that are not well understood (test words) to generate predictions about the meaning of such words. The generated predictions can be tested against poetical and mythological ontologies stating the relations between the target proper names and toponyms (who is who, from where, and did what). This method was applied here to predict the meanings of proper names and toponyms from ancient Greek poetry and mythology with astonishing results. This application was ‘manual’ and verbose, suited to discourse about proof of principle. However, it is foreseeable that automated artificial-intelligence algorithms can be applied to much more excellent training, validation, and test sets of words soon.

It turns out that Zeus is principally the thunder rain and, metaphorically, life or survival. His wife Hera is the house, or the forest, and, metaphorically, expansion by procreation. The rest of the Olympian gods, the top aspirations, are objects or processes tightly associated with survival in prehistoric Greece. Atlantis is a water distribution network, and its kings are devices and procedures that made that technological achievement possible. Knossos is pottery. Minos is the manual work, the Minotaur is the working ox, the stress of work, and the cost or tax of labor. A labyrinth is a plowed field and any construction that presents a pattern. Ariadne is the headland and the road, and Theseus is the paid service, the urban worker, or the cheap labor. Hesiod’s Theogony[1] is all about technological inventions describing materials and production methods and classifying the products according to structure, form, and function. Hesperides are the oil lamps, and Heracles, a simple tree-branch used as a torch among its many other uses.

Each poet and mythographer treat the same old stories, one inspired by the others. Atlas and Atlantis are mentioned by Homer, Hesiod, and Solon. The poets strive to make up new, more expressive names and join them with more dramatic ontologies. Still, the themes are familiar: those from the primitive Paleolithic techniques through the Neolithic revolution, agriculture, mining, shipping, commerce, to urban development. Chimera and Bellerophon are consecutive versions of the metallurgist’s bellows, the latter featuring a valve called Pegasus. Aphrodite is the sand. Sand is the female prototype because metallurgists pour molten metals into it. The Trojan War was a struggle among market forces to determine the right price for manufactured, traded, and distributed goods. Achilles is the trowel; if it does represent a human entity, this is the class of builders. Helen of Troy is the sand hourglass. I have found no traces of religious spiritualism or superstition in Greek mythology so far.

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[1] The author of Theogony, I should say; but I will continue to use the name Hesiod for simplicity despite my doubt that the poetic persona corresponds to the physical writer of the poems.

The proto-language hypotheses

According to etymology's state of the art, words may be classified into four categories. First, words of which the etymology is explicitly unknown or missing. Second, words for which a couple of folk or pseudo-scientific speculations have been made, frequently by anonymous thinkers; such etymologies, although amusing they may be, are otherwise useless. Third, words for which a list of cognates from existing and/or extinct languages has been prepared. Forth, words for which a hypothetical root in some unattested proto-language has been worked out (reconstructed) by comparative linguistics. The most valuable etymologies are third categories because they wave the need to search for cognates. Those etymologies also provide a range of meanings within which our query word may fall and lead to an approximate understanding, provided that we understand the meaning of the cognates. The fourth category does not add any value. On the contrary, it may discourage further research on the false premise that etymology has already been worked out.

Apart from the interest that one may find in phonetic research, a hypothetical root in a proto-language does not improve our understanding of the word or the social and historical circumstances where the word was created. In the best case, projection of cognates onto a proto-language only adds a hypothetical cognate, the hypothetical root. Still, it does not guarantee that this root was the first, de novo form of a word. The question of origin remains. For example, why PIEs would call the water *wod-or, from the root *wed- (wet)? Why not the other way round (*wed from *wodor)? Why there were two words for wet and water? Where did *wed- come from? If it was created from scratch, why did PIEs choose those three sounds, in that combination, to express the notion of water? And why do other populations choose a different combination? Why did Proto-Semitic populations choose to call the water *maʔ-/*may-, of something like that? Is there any relation between *wed and *may? Suppose both descend from a proto-proto-language, and we were to reconstruct the hypothetical common ancestor of proto-roots. In that case, we will logically finish with a combination of fewer than 3 phonemes. Would that be an acceptable solution? If not, we would be forced to admit that words – if not languages – arise spontaneously at different parts of the world and have no common ancestor. But such a conclusion would defeat the purpose of searching for common roots and for proto-languages. Phonetics may explain the evolution of words once they are created but does not explain the origin of the words.

My main objection concerns the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption behind a proto-language hypothesis and the associated comparative reconstruction methods that language is a genetic trait. The theory appeared roughly as Darwin's evolutionary theory and developed parallel with genetic theory. There is, however, a fundamental difference between language and genetic traits. The latter are inherited vertically from parents to children and cannot be transmitted horizontally, say from teacher to pupils (except for some viruses). Language is not a genetic trait. We are born with the ability to hear and reproduce a range of sounds but without any words. Language is transmitted horizontally only. This is an absolute principle without exceptions. Children do not inherit a language from their parents in the biological sense, but they learn it. Thus, language is an acquired trait, like every other bit of knowledge and skill. Even when the first teachers are the parents, the transmission is still horizontal. Obviously, inheritance and genetic segregation laws do not apply in linguistics. As a language unit, a word can be created de novo by anybody, anywhere, like a piece of pottery. If a word is sufficiently fit and given some chance, it can spread throughout the globe within the same generation, like a virus. Take the word Google or any modern scientific term as typical examples. With the assumption that horizontal transmission is the only mechanism of language propagation, which sounds obvious to me, we may expect that languages evolve independently from genetics. They can cross genetic barriers between populations, particularly geographically close populations and constantly interacting. Genetics would be a reasonably reliable predictor only in culturally isolated populations.

One implication of the horizontal transfer principle is that language does not reflect a population's genetic composition and origin. If, for example, Modern Greek consists of x% Ancient Greek words, y% Turkish words, and z% Germanic words, one cannot expect to find similar proportions of DNA polymorphisms of corresponding origins in the Greek population. The figures would instead reflect the relative strength and duration in the history of social interactions of the Greeks with the corresponding nations. The Greek language had a vastly disproportional impact on humanity with Greek genotypes.

Another implication is on the estimates of the distance in the past when languages split. Instead, these distances would represent the intensity of interaction between neighboring populations or lack of it. This is not to claim that a proto-language hypothesis is useless. Language does look like a genetic trait overall because it is transmitted from parents to children most of the time. However, such factors may strongly bias the search for the roots of individual words. 'Genetic' roots may only be assumed when the horizontal transfer has been excluded. In other words, comparative methods should not be applied to a particular group of languages but should include all the potentially interacting languages simultaneously.

The ichnography theory waives the assumptions about the transmission mechanism of the words. The same author may create different words for the same thing and may arbitrarily attach different meanings to pre-existing words. Greek words may look and sound Semitic simply because, at the origin, Greeks used a Semitic alphabet. At the end of the day, this text is less about the authors' identity and more about the successful transition of words. Most important is what the words tell us about their authors and the societies in which they lived.

 

Drawbacks

Certainly, ichnography itself is not an exact scientific method. Like its subject matter, it belongs to the realm of literature rather than to natural science. Words may change look and meaning in space and time as people use different alphabets and their cultures evolve – compare, for example, the words sophos and sense (section Wisdom). For this reason, we need dictionaries, which, most of the time, need to give several lines of explanation to transfer the meaning of a word from language to language in a comprehensive manner. For the same reason, scientists need to fix their terms by convention. The word cholesterol, for example, varies very little from Japan to Hawaii, through Europe, and from Siberia to Chile. Homo sapiens also refers to the same species and varies not at all. Mathematical and chemical formulas are also universal by convention. We are not allowed to touch their ichnography.

The interpretation of words by ichnography is, to a certain extent, arbitrary. Due to its intrinsic plasticity, ichnography may create the same word for more than one independent meaning and different words for the same meaning, hence the homonyms and the synonyms. A legitimate criticism may, therefore, arise. For example, the ichnogram MHSTΩR was interpreted as horse harness when Mestor was the twin brother of Elasippus (the driven horse). Still, it could well have been interpreted as a Ω-lidded water pipe in another context. One of the mythological MHSTΩRs (there are 4 of them) was the son of Perseus and Andromeda. Perseus being interpreted, for example, as a hydraulic device like a tap and Andromeda, the bad habit of drinking water directly from the tap, their sons are unlikely to be related to horse dressing. Perseus and Andromeda’s MHSTΩR should instead be interpreted as a water-related object.

I had to revise my interpretations in several rounds during this research as I encountered more cases. I am sure many of them can still be improved. How can we say that ATLAS is pipe-bifurcation-bend-pipe and not ox-trimmed-tail-ox? Well, out of context, ATLAS may curry either of those two meanings or innumerable other meanings. Taking ATLAS as a symbol of work, one could see some coherence with GADEIRA, the pond converted into a harbor. But this was as far as I could have gone with the interpretation of the rest of Atlas’ family. A coherent interpretation of the entire family could only be achieved when considering the ichnography of the entire phrase: EYHNΩR-LEYCIPPE-CLEITΩ-POSEIDΩN-ATLAS-GADEIROS-AMPHERHS-EYAEMΩN-MNESEYS-AYTOChThΩN-ELASIPPOS-MESTΩR-AZAHS-DIAPREPHS and in the precise order given by Solon and Plato.

This is not surprising. Take again the analogy of the amino acids that constitute the proteins. Each of the 20 amino acids will be found in every protein; combinations of two amino acids, perhaps. From a certain length onwards, however, amino-acid sequences become specific. A given combination of 5-6 amino acids will be found only in a few proteins and begins to acquire some specific structural and/or functional meaning. Longer sequences are unlikely to occur by chance in any given species. Or, if they do, we consider them as sequences conserved during the evolutionary process, hence, having a vital function. A sequence of 10 amino acids will only occur in a single protein or in a family of similar proteins sharing a structural/functional domain. A sequence of 100 amino acids is improbable to occur in more than one protein unless the proteins are highly similar, i.e., coded by the same gene or by homologous genes. The longer the sequence of letters we examine, the more specific becomes our interpretation. Within the sequence of 10 kings plus 3 progenitors, ATLAS could not have been interpreted as ox-trimmed-tail-ox, or it would be incongruous, abortive. Likewise, when we want to identify some conserved meaning of small combinations of letters, like for a digraph, we need to examine their presence in a sufficiently large number of contexts, i.e., in independent words. Once established, the meaning of digraphs, diphthongs, and longer combinations of letters, is more specific and stable than that of single letters and should assist the interpretation of longer words. Some examples have been examined here, like EU, AI, KI, FL, MY, NY, HL, DN, or FT. Perhaps, the semantics of Greek, English, and kin languages are essentially syllabic, but the current syllable theory needs to be thoroughly revised in the light of ichnography.

As written language continued to develop, some small, stable combinations attained their own meaning and became diphthongs, articles, particles, morphemes, etc. As the complexity increases, even entire words are uninterpretable on their own. Take ‘written.’ Written what? Written language, love letter, political speech, contract, archeological record, ‘written’ destiny? The concept of ‘written’ is as abstract as the concept of a letter in a primordial word. But each contemporary word, like each ancient letter, narrows the possibilities of interpretation until we reach a perfectly sensible and precise message.

Consequences

Etymology: The most apparent impact of the ichnography theory, to the extent that this is validated, is historical linguistics. The notion of cognates should not change but be enlarged to accommodate semantic stems represented in common letter combinations. For example, the Greek 'goddess' Hera and the English pronoun her may be considered semantic cognates under the ichnography hypothesis, although they are not so today. Another example is that of flood and flail. In contrast, the importance of phonetic similarity may diminish. Except for cases where variation is obviously and only phonetic while the spelling is strictly equivalent, words written differently are probably not precisely cognates. At one extreme, the European words for a scientific term, say cholesterol, are semantically fixed and present only phonetic variation while their spelling is precisely equivalent. The words for cholesterol vary solely because not every language has the sound [k^h] and different languages have different letters. There is no apparent reason for phonemes to mutate at the other extreme. In the case of the Latin plovere or the French il pleut (verb pleuvoir), to rain, it rains, compared with the English flood – all supposedly related to PIE *pleu-[1] – the P/F variation may not be purely phonetic. Romans and French speakers can pronounce F as easily as English speakers pronounce P. There is no convincing phonetic reason, in this case, why F would have mutated to P while expressing the same sememe.

Moreover, both letters exist in both alphabets. It is more likely that the mutation is ichnographic, iconic. If P stands for the mouth, it likely expresses the idea of rain being drinkable water rather than the in-and-out movement of a flood rendered by FL. Those words are probably not cognates as it is currently suggested. This type of error is widespread among current etymological theories. Ultimately, the PIE theory, based solely on phonetics, may have to be thoroughly revised if not abandoned.

Poetry and mythology: An ichnographic reading is expected to turn Greek poetic and mythological texts from beautiful surreal nonsense, in the best case – or religious texts, in the worst – to perfectly sensible accounts of prehistory, para-history[2], and meta-history[3]. A general theory of words as iconic signs may expand this prediction to the poetical and mythological corpora within, and perhaps also outside, the IE world. Cross-validation of these accounts from different authors, perhaps also in different languages, should give an accurate historical timeline of technological evolution, at least in relative time, and a picture of the various versions of the evolving objects. Mythology is not a religion but literature. It should be perceived in the sense of the Greek term logotechnia (literature): technē (art) of logos (thought, reason, speech; hence writing); the art of writing including word-making, i.e., poetry.

We may conclude, for the moment, that the three poets leading this analysis, Homer, Hesiod, and Solon through Plato, roughly dealt with the same themes. These were humanity's social, economic, and technological history, presumably to their times. Plato explicitly compares Solon to the other two, implying that they are comparable. He also tells us in his way that, like Solon, Homer and Hesiod wrote about the history of their ancestors. Homer concentrated the Iliad on the forces driving the market. Perhaps it would not be too misplaced to predict that the Iliad treated some notions of economics as we know them today. The Odyssey described the development of water distribution networks. Solon treated the same theme of water distribution technology but concentrated on a specific application occurring in the Bronze Age in an archipelago with the prominent bull culture of which one island flooded out of the map. The two related dialogs by Plato give us an idea of what poetry was about and how it was done. Hesiod wrote a kind of comprehensive natural and social history of his world, describing physical and biological phenomena and the structure of human society.

This analysis is, however, by no means conclusive. Here, we only get a faint idea of the meaning of the very top heroes. We can only guess the main themes of the poems. But there are perhaps thousands of proper names, toponyms, and common nouns or verbs yet to be understood. Only then will we be able to transcribe the poems and list the things and ideas that existed at the poets' time.

A note of linguistic interest is that the three poets use the same names for the same things but, for other objects, they also make their own words. The word Atlantis, for example, must have existed and have been known to all of them. Because they all use this word in one form or another. In contrast, there are objects, like the plow or the bellows, for which different words and mythemes are used. Indeed, the poetic license may explain a lot. But it is also possible that some objects had still no generally accepted names by that time. Many later mythographers treated the subject of Heracles, for instance, telling different stories about the hero but always using his established name. That was not always the case with the first three, Homer, Hesiod, and Solon, who lived simultaneously. By comparative analysis of myths and names about the same objects, we may identify de novo terms created by the poets themselves or by their close linguistic environment. Such comparative analysis would be invaluable for understanding the mechanism of creation and evolution of words in general.

One crucial question may arise: do we really want and have the right to deconstruct our mythological heritage? Mythology stands on its own feet and has nothing to fear. A poem would not lose its artistic value – it would gain more – if an analyst discovered what the poet had in mind. Deconstruction would result in a parallel narrative of scientific value. Comparison of the scientific, philosophical, and artistic versions of poetical stories will reveal the full beauty of mythology and the unbelievable skills of those early writers. But we may also ask: what is wrong with our brain and education? How could we be fooled for so long? Who diverts the meanings and why?

Concerning Atlantis, we still have no direct proof that such a place existed (do we have proof for anything else in science?). However, we can tell that the three poets told coherent stories referring to a unique water distribution system of their antiquity using the same or similar terms. We know that Atlantis was not a myth, but it was a true story at the heart of various myths. I consider that we now have much more linguistic evidence for a 'water-network country' located at the South Aegean than we have historical and archeological evidence, put together, for the toponyms of Troy, Mycenae, or Knossos. The Platonic word Gadeirus indicates that the barbarian language Solon translated into Greek was Phoenician and that Atlantis, if an island at all, should be a Phoenician territory.

History and archeology: As far as ancient historians are concerned, the questions to answer are if they believed in their myths (Veyne 1983) and if they understood them. The sophistication in the poetic methods used by some authors, like Homer, Hesiod, and Solon, would suggest that they knew what they were talking about. It is less clear why they didn't say it more transparently. Could that be due to the immaturity of written expression in their time? Or, as Müller (Müller 1885) would call it, a disease of language? What is clear is that later authors like Plato, Aristotle, Euhemerus, etc., who were not mythographers themselves, did not understand the language of their ancestors. Could that be because mythological terms were coming from a pre-Greek substrate and were incomprehensible to Greeks? Could it be that Greek evolved too fast between Homeric and Classical times? Further analysis of the poems and myths should provide answers to such questions.

<Figure 158.1>

Linear B inscriptions (Fig. 158.1) is another case of a language, like in Greek poetry and mythology, where untranslated words such as proper names and toponyms appear at excessive rates, far beyond the expected in a regular, even fictional, narrative. Today, it is widely accepted that those inscriptions are lists of people, from places, offering to gods or other places; it may well be so. However, it may also be the case that in Linear B, like in Greek poetry and mythology, we simply classify into the bin of 'proper names' and of 'toponyms' everything we do not quite understand. Proper names and toponyms need not be translated. We create the illusion that the texts where such words appear are understood and that they are mere 'lists'; we so discourage further effort for understanding. Linear B should be re-read letter by letter, syllable by syllable, and re-interpreted in the light of the ichnography theory.

Advances in the understanding of written records will undoubtedly redirect archeologists towards objective evidence instead of searching for the ghosts of Troy (the market), Knossos (the pottery industry), or Tartessos (the foundations of a house), for the tomb of Helen (the timing of consumption) in Sparta (the distribution of goods), for the Pillars of Hercules (the door) in Iberia (the house) or for other such geographic nonsense. We do not need to change the names of prehistoric sites or islands, such as Ithaca (the toilet) or Erytheia (type of oil lamp). Such names are charming and represent millennia of unfortunate research. We can keep them as we keep the names of city streets. But we should no longer fool ourselves into believing the slightest relation to mythological characters and places. Tourist guides should be enriched with true prehistorical stories and the associated legends. There is a tremendous amount of work yet to be done.

Evolutionary linguistics: a question to which ichnography may substantially contribute is what came first, oral or written language. Current linguistic theory is based on phonetics and suggests that language was only oral for many centuries. PIE populations, for example, had a mature oral PIE language which was only written down after the invention of writing. No explanation is provided for why any proto-linguistic group of people would choose a particular sound combination rather than another to call a particular need, object, or concept. The characterization of such choices as arbitrary and conventional bypasses the need for a genuinely scientific, falsifiable explanation.

In contrast, the theory of ichnography suggests that words are primarily created in written and pronounced afterward. Once a word is created and written down, it may evolve orally. Still, its original conception comes as an iconic/ichnographic representation of forms and concepts put together on a solid support.

Ultimately, single letters represent a handful of primordial objects or phenomena (circle, stone, movement, etc.). Letters have been purposely designed by ancient populations and perfected by the Phoenicians to create words. Before drawing images or letters, people communicated with their universal body language. That natural language, still in use today, included movements of the tongue and mouth, which incidentally produced sounds. However, complex combinations of sounds would only be systematically pronounced after writing and learning. Written words survived much longer because they could be transmitted unchanged at much longer distances in space and time. Culture and speech owe their development to written language, not vice versa. The first abjads and alphabets gave them both a strong push forward. If we didn't have written language, we would still be able to communicate with basic sounds and body gestures, but we wouldn't have speech or culture as we perceive them today.

Religion has been not the writing of poets and mythographers but our reading. Perhaps, it is now time for analysts to launch their own linguistic war to translate the thousands of proper names and toponyms of Greek poetry and mythology left untranslated for so long. The promise is that we will discover a lot of historical information about prehistory, prehistoric tools, procedures, and their evolution. The ichnography theory and the methods exemplified here may be an excellent tool to start this combat.

References

Müller, Friedrich Max. 1885. Lectures on the Science of Language. 6th ed. Vol. 1. London: Longmans Green and Co.

Veyne, Paul. 1983. Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Essai sur l’imagination constituante. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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[1] '*pleu' in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary; online at https://www.etymonline.com/word/*pleu-?ref=etymonline_crossreference, accessed 8 October 2018

[2] History, written in a creative, artistic way

[3] A collective artistic interpretation of historical events

Epilogue

Linguistic signs are not arbitrary. There is sufficient evidence that words are most often iconic representations of visual forms. If something is arbitrary or erroneous in linguistic signs, this is the phonetic transcription of words.

The theory of ichnography provides no mathematical formula for interpreting ancient words. Intuition and hard work are still needed. Longer sequences of words in a text and longer sequences of letters in a word, alike, are more specific and easier to interpret. Particular help is found by identifying semantically stable digraphs or longer stems and syllables. After all, Greek and English appear to be syllabic, agglutinative languages, like Linear B is thought to be. However, their syllables, morphology, properties, and evolution must be re-defined on a graphic rather than phonetic basis.

In no instance did any existing phonetic etymologies help interpret the examined ancient words. This is no surprise. Phonocentric historical linguistics seems to develop to support one or another theory about human population origins and migrations rather than better understanding words. Etymologies need to be revised. Linear A and B scripts are probably also ichnographic rather than phonetic scripts, and they should be revisited as such. Phonetics remains an invaluable field of research in the domain of spoken language.

The theme of water collection and management appears to be a significant source of inspiration for all three poets. Also prevalent are the economy and market laws. Words used by all three poets are likely pre-existing and known to all three. One such example is the word Atlas with its derivatives. Words used by only one of the poets are probably de novo creations. There is no religion or metaphysics in the first Greek poems and myths. Demystification will highlight the beauty of this literature restoring its original shine.

Perhaps the most important prediction of this theory is that written language precedes the spoken one. Pronunciation is an attempt to reproduce the meanings of the letters using mouth topology. If S means protrusion, its pronunciation consists in showing the teeth.