What’s the Power of Mana Podcast?

About What’s the Power of Mana Podcast?

Finding Manuland takes us on mental journeys across the space between Ireland and India. Finding Manuland moves us across time from 4,000 BCE until the present. Our mental models of how the past and the present interact expand, through Finding Manuland. We begin around 4,000 BCE with the Yamna community who lived between the Don and Dnipro rivers of Ancient Ukraine. These Yamna created the first Indo-European language. They buried their dead, covered in ochre, with their knees flexed, in the hundreds of thousands of mounds that still remain in the lands between Ireland and India - Manuland. Today, over half of humanity uses sounds and meanings first forged on the Ukrainian steppe. Immanent in the genome of most humans who live in Manuland is the mitochondrial DNA of our Yamna ancestors. Everyone who can understand these words in an Indo-European language, is the cultural descendant of this community of migrants who spread so successfully east and westwards across the Steppelands from Ancient Ukraine. Decoding Trolls is the first to discover that immanent in almost every sentence we speak or think through an Indo-European language is an M-N- sound coupled with meanings that were first forged by our Yamna forebears. This might just be a coincidence. Or the M-N- sound might be THE fundamental cryptotypic semantic signalling system undermining the matrices of metaphors through which we communicate today. M-N- might well be a permanent monument, remnant and reminder of the Yamna and indeed Mana - the Subtle Energy we exchange with humans and animals - anchored in almost every thought we have. In any event, Mana, Woden, Nous, Holy Spirit, Prana, Ch’i, Ki, Libido, Mungo, Synchronicity, Anima Mundi, Orenda, Manitu, Wong, Tondi, … are all manifestations of the same phenomenon that was present in the minds of Yamna, as in all ancient and contemporary humans. If only we can connect again to Mana, and harness it to impact positively every interaction we have inside our communities. Such are the ideas that Finding Manuland elucidates located in the space, time, and culture of Manuland. So our story emanates from Ancient Ukraine, and terminates in the questions: Why is this M-N- sound and its associated meanings so immanent in Indo-European culture? Can we know what this immanence means? If Mana is what remains of us in others when we leave them, then, there is Mana. Mana's permanent. Let's communicate positive Mana. And Finding Manuland will help remind you of this, in every interaction you experience today with other sentient beings. www.powerofmana.net (https://www.powerofmana.net?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Decoding Trolls

Category

arts · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Sept 2024

Latest episode

18 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Oct 2026

   Podcast | India’s gods before India

   The gods before the Veda So, we go to the crossroads, in the middle of the second millennium before the common era. The great power of upper Mesopotamia was a kingdom called Mitanni. The M-N- is in Mitanni. Its people spoke Hurrian, a tongue that is, as the handbooks put it, “neither Indo-European nor Semitic.” But the Mitanni kingdom was ruled, and this is the thing, by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy. Indo-Aryan here means, in effect, Indo-European. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology says it without fuss: the Mitanni Hurrians “were themselves ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy with some allegiance to Indian deities.” This is 1400 BCE. The Rigveda was properly systematised around 1200 BCE. It was not written down for centuries after that, and was carried in song and prayer. So from the Mitanni we have a treaty of around 1400 BCE. The earliest writing from India comes centuries later. The best guess we have is that the Indo-Europeans reached the Indian subcontinent around 1200 or 1300 BCE. So the Mitanni Hurrians left written artefacts, which I have seen with my own eyes in the museum in Istanbul, a hundred or two hundred years before the first Indo-Europeans reached India. Parity of esteem The Oxford Companion calls the gods named in that treaty Indian gods. Yet our evidence that these gods are Indian comes from a later period. People sometimes tell me I am being anachronistic when I call Proto-Indo-European ancient Ukrainian. The Yamna, the community from which all living Indo-European languages come, lived six thousand years ago in Mykhailivka, in what is today Ukraine. Linguists call the language they spoke Proto-Indo-European. I say we can now carry the proper name back: ancient Ukrainian (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/should-we-call-ancient-ukrainians). We do that for ancient Greek and ancient Indian. People say, that is anachronistic, you cannot do that. Well, here is the Oxford Companion to World Mythology doing it. It carries a category back onto deities we know the Mitanni worshipped, because they swore oaths on their names, centuries before India became India. So it is legitimate to carry a name back this way. It may be anachronistic. I will not quibble with the Oxford Companion when it calls these Indian deities. But I will explain, as I just have, what it is doing. It is an anachronism. It calls these gods Indian centuries before India existed, before the first Indo-Europeans reached India and set up their culture there. Some Indo-Europeans may have reached India earlier. But we know from the genetic evidence, in a 2019 paper in Science, that a group associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture brought steppe ancestry into the aristocracy there. They became the Brahmins, who systematised the Rigveda and finally wrote it down. We have written evidence of these gods’ names from the Mitanni long before any of that, long before India became India. So parity of esteem demands this. If the Oxford Companion to World Mythology may call those gods Indian centuries before they became Indian, when we have this treaty from before then, then strictly we should call the Indian deities Mitanni deities. That would be ridiculous, because they truly caught fire in India. They gave their name to India: the N-D-, the Indra in India. We will come back in future episodes to that N-D- sound, the reversal of the D-N- in the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. By the rule of first attestation in writing we could even call these Indian gods Hurrian gods. Of course we do not. Like Timothy Snyder (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/timothy-snyders-move), we have learnt that many lines of evidence besides writing help us understand our past, our identities, the origins of our language and culture, and why we say what we say today. So we will not call them Hurrian. But parity of esteem demands this much. If you may do it for Indian deities, then at the very least we may use the name ancient Ukraine for Proto-Indo-European. That is all I ask there. I leave aside, modestly and humbly, the fact that all of these emanations, Indian, Irish, Celtic, Germanic, and the Mitanni gods themselves, come from the steppe, from this Yamna community. So a fortiori, we should be allowed to speak of ancient Ukraine. That is a theme that runs through Finding Manuland. The objection usually comes from people whose mental models have not yet caught up with the latest archaeogenetics, linguistics and history. They have no mental model of Ukraine, because they have not listened to Finding Manuland. I had no mental model of Ukraine either, until by accident I came across that Yamna burial mound in Dnipro, removed by property developers in May 2021. I tell the story in my first Finding Manuland episode (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i). So I blame nobody for not knowing. I myself knew nothing of Ukraine and all of this until around my fiftieth year. I am doing my best to bring it into our awareness. So when I use the term ancient Ukraine, I am not just trying to provoke you, or to provoke thought. I am giving the parity of esteem that great cultures owe to others who have achieved statehood. Chariots off the steppe The Mitanni war-nobility, the chariot-fighting caste named in the treaties as the maryannu, drove the same light spoked chariot the steppe had made. I have seen those treaties with my own eyes. The M-N- is in maryannu too, though that may be a coincidence. I am calling this a crossroads, but it also radiates out like a wheel, from Van down to Mardin and along to Urfa. The wheel is a metaphor I use in Finding Manuland. It is also a central metaphor in all Indo-European languages. It became solid in the chariots and carts found on the steppe. I have seen those carts with my own eyes in the Dnipro museum, and in the photographs of the Sintashta community in today’s Kazakhstan, from whom the Iranian, the Indian and the Mitanni deities would have come. So we have the one road I have spoken about, from the lower Volga through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and across to Arslantepe. I have visited there too and we will go again. The museum in Malatya should reopen soon after the earthquake, and I really want to go back. That road becomes the Hittites. The other road runs from Mykhailivka, in Kherson Oblast, on the Dnipro. I will use the World Labs model to help us picture it. It goes from there up to the Sintashta (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/trope-of-self-sacrificing-first-monarch) community. In the Sintashta graves, the setting out of horses’ heads and the remains of the funeral feast match the account in the Rigveda exactly. The Sintashta date from about 2000 to 1900 BCE. So they took around two thousand years to go from ancient Ukraine to there. It then took them several centuries more to reach the Indian subcontinent, where the songs of the Rigveda describe exactly the rites we have physical evidence for at Sintashta. Centuries after that, the Rigveda was first written down. In the Sintashta graves we have actual chariots, so we know the chariot was there. Among the Hurrian-speaking Mitanni we have accounts of chariots. The maryannu, their chariot-fighting caste, drove the same light spoked chariots the steppe and the Sintashta had made, and we have the archaeological evidence for them. Their kings, their rex, their raja, bore Indo-Aryan names. Their gods were the gods of the Rigveda. So they were Indo-European. The treaty We know this because of a treaty. Around the middle of the fourteenth century BCE the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma made a pact with Šattiwaza of Mitanni. Remember that the Hittites came by the road from the Volga, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and Arslantepe. They brought the Indo-European languages that became Anatolian, all of which died out. Hittite was the language of Tarmana, whose contract to buy a slave, from around 1900 BCE, I saw in the Ankara museum (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-pops-up-3924-years-ago). I also visited the site of his house at Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri. So the Hittites come from that strand. The Mitanni come from the sister strand, the Yamna of Mykhailivka in Kherson Oblast. We can trace them up to modern Kazakhstan, two thousand years later, at Sintashta. Over the following centuries they brought their Indo-European gods into this Hurrian-speaking community. These things are written down in cuneiform that we can read today, and that I have seen. At the end, where a treaty calls its gods to witness, the Mitanni king swears by a line of names that any reader of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, will know at once. The translation of the cuneiform reads: “the gods Mitra(-ššil), the gods Uruwana(-ššil), the god Indar, the gods Nashatianna.” Notice the N-D- in Indar. It is the reversal of the D-N-, and it means force. It is in Alexander, and in Indra. This N-D-, of boundedness and binding, will come back. It matters a great deal. So: Mitra, the god of contracts. Varuna, a god of the magico-religious realm. Indra, whose name means force, who embodies both the warrior and the magico-religious. And the Nāsatya, the divine twins the Veda calls the Aśvins. These are not look-alikes. They are the same gods, in the same order the Veda pairs them. They are named as the guarantors of a king’s word in Mesopotamia, centuries before a single hymn of the Rigveda was set down in India. The usual story cannot hold what that means. We are taught that Indo-Aryan civilisation begins in India, with the Veda. But here are its gods, four hundred years early and two thousand miles north-west of the Ganges. They were carried there not by missionaries, and there is the M-N- in missionaries, but by a ruling family of charioteers. They came, like everyone in Finding Manuland, off the steppe, the Ukrainian steppe. The Indo-Aryans were a Near-Eastern power before they were an Indian one. India is where they ended up, and where they kept the most. It is not where they began. What is old here, and what is new There is more in that treaty than the gods’ names. It is worth being precise about what is ancient here and what is new. That Indra’s earliest datable appearance in writing is this Mitanni oath is not my discovery. The oath is older, as a text, than any surviving writing in India, where the hymns were carried by the Brahmins’ voices for centuries before they were set down. It is one of the oldest settled facts in the field, a field of which Finding Manuland is only the latest, ultra-modern emanation. It was fixed the moment the cuneiform tablets of the treaty were read, and made canonical by Paul Thieme and Thomas Burrow generations ago. I lean on it because it is bedrock, a foundation stone. A fact that old and that agreed cannot be knocked over. Some people may be deep in one alleyway that leads off this crossroads. A great Assyriologist need know nothing about the Yamna. In Finding Manuland we look beyond that. We spread our mental models across six thousand years and across a far wider stretch of the earth than the Assyrians ruled. The crossroads does include Assyria. At times the Assyrians ruled this very area. They too would agree that the Indra of the Mitanni treaty is his first appearance in any text we have. What I add sits on top of that: what the oath shows about the sounds the family carried. None of this impugns the integrity of the people who wrote before the archaeogenetics, the linguistics and many of the findings I set out in Finding Manuland were known. Each of us in this field goes on a journey of working out the chronology and the pattern. Many Wikipedia articles and books will muddle which came first, Manu or Mannus. They will say India came first, and try to prove that people carried language from India to Ireland. Decades ago, who could have argued otherwise? The evidence was not there. What I add is this. Take all of the modern evidence into account, and you can trace the chronology scientifically. Go back to my Which came first, Manu or Mannus (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ep-1-using-m-n-to-determine-which) podcasts to look into that more deeply. The two sounds in the oath So in Finding Manuland I look at the oath in the Mitanni treaty for what it shows about the sounds the Indo-European family carried. Two of them stand together in it. One is the sound of force. Indra is the war-god, the smiter. His name, I-N-D-R-A, rides what Finding Manuland calls the N-D- sound-meaning bundle, the family’s sound of might. It is there in Alexander, and in Greek andrós, “of a man, of might.” The other is the sound of order, the R-T-, of writ, rule and right. It surfaces in Sanskrit as ṛta, truth and cosmic order, and in Iranian as arta, the cosmic and moral order. The Iranian was first written on the rock at Behistun by Darius the Great, between 500 and 600 BCE. He was the great king of the Achaemenid Empire, and the M-N- is in Achaemenid too. Behistun is very close to the crossroads. Arta is opposed by the druj, the lie, with its T-R-, its D-R-. The usurper. The order-word runs west into Latin rectus, R-T-, into German Recht, and into our own right, rite and rule. In its softer nasal dress it runs on into reign, into French reine, queen, and into regina. You will have seen old inscriptions to Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina. That is the R-N- form of the same root, and it sits under every European crown. You can read more on the order-word in The Archaic Origins of Archetyping (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-archaic-origins-of-archetyping). Both sounds, the N-D- and the R-T-, are in that oath. They are not only in the gods but in the men who swore it. The Mitanni king whose name heads their line is Artatama. That is Ṛta-dhāman, R-T-A, then D-H-A-M-A-N. You will find the proper spellings here, in the text of this podcast. I am not very good at pronouncing these names. You have probably noticed. I do my best, but I am pretty rubbish at it. Ṛta-dhāman means “the abode of cosmic order.” Ṛta is cosmic order. Dhāman means abode, home, as in mansion, as in domain. So the R-T- of ṛta, cosmic order, is built straight into Artatama’s name, and his name heads the Mitanni line of kings. Another of their kings, Tušratta, with the R-T- in it, is Tveṣa-ratha. Think of Tuesday, deus, Zeus. I have done a podcast on the meaning of Tuesday (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/double-deity-meaning-of-tuesday). Go back to it. We use these sounds every time we say day: deus, Zeus Pater, Dyaus Pitar in India, Jupiter in Latin, in the Italic branch. So Tušratta is Tveṣa-ratha, “he of the charging chariot.” In south Dublin, where I grew up, we have Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham. This is what I mean by illuminating the ancient in the everyday. A rath is a round, a ring. The crossroads, my metaphor of a wheel with spokes, comes back where the Mitanni name their king for the ratha, the chariot. The wheel made the chariot possible. It began as the big, heavy wooden wheels you see on some of the first carts in human culture. You can see them preserved in the great museum in Yerevan. You can see one in the great museum in Dnipro, which you will be able to visit freely as soon as the Ruschists withdraw. One of the oldest carts in human culture is on display there. When I first visited, knowing none of this, I walked straight past it. It turns out to be one of the first carts in human culture. The R-T- is in cart too, with its sense of right, straight and moving round. The same metaphor runs through Buddhism: the turning of the wheel, when the Buddha gave his teaching at Vulture Peak, near Rajgir. I have been there, and we will go again, as part of Finding Manuland on the Ganges, at Varanasi. That was one of the turnings of the wheel. The metaphor is immanent in one of the great Indo-European religions. Happily it was kept in a non-Indo-European language, Tibetan. It has now been brought back into Indo-European by some of the great scholars alive today, and by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his patronage. So back to the Mitanni king Tušratta: Tveṣa-ratha, he of the charging chariot. Ratha is the chariot-word, R-A-T-H-A, an R-T-. Its R-T- is kept in chariot too. That is what I mean by sound-meaning bundles. They travel through words across different branches of the Indo-European languages and keep the same meaning. Chariot, ratha and cart keep the same meaning. A sound-meaning bundle travels from Mitanni Indo-Aryan into English, a Germanic language, thousands of years apart. These are the cryptotypes, the stock in trade of Finding Manuland. They are new. As far as I know, nobody else has noticed them and focused on them as I do, nor on my extension of the cryptotype to the signifier. That idea was brought to my attention by an early reader and listener of my Finding Manuland work. Go back to my episode on the meaning of meaning (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-as-linguists-holy-grail), about two years ago, where I announced the discovery. So here is another instance, in Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham: wheel, round, circle. The chariot-word is itself an R-T-. The very form stands word for word in the Rigveda, at 5.61.13. Look up Rigveda 5.61.13 and you will see what I mean. And Varuna, sworn in the same breath as Indra, is in the Veda the keeper of ṛta, cosmic order itself. So the force-sound and the order-sound stand side by side in one Bronze Age document. That is centuries before the Brahmins reached India, before steppe ancestry entered their genes, and before the Painted Grey Ware entered what became the archaeological sites of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Before we had the archaeogenetics, we had no evidence that the Yamna’s descendants reached India by way of Sintashta. So: Indra’s N-D- among the witnesses of the Mitanni treaty. Ṛta‘s R-T- in the names of the kings, and in the god beside him. The M-N- in the foundation There is even a third sound hiding in that first king’s name. It is one Finding Manuland has been chasing elsewhere. Ṛta-dhāman. The second half, dhāman, means abode, dwelling, domain, home. It is the home-and-foundation word. It carries the M-N-, worn down to “-tama” on the surface, in Artatama. The M-N- sound is immanent in it even though you cannot see it. The nasal, the N, drops out of sight. It is the same disappearing act the maternal M-N- performs in mother, M-T-R on the surface, only to reappear in maman. Go back to my piece on the moon, the menses and the maternal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal) and you will see what I mean. It is a member of the sound-family hidden by ordinary wear, recoverable once you know to look for it. That the masked word here should mean foundation is a small gift. The M-N- is the foundation-sound of the whole system: the ground, the matter, the abode. Matter, from mater, the Latin for mother, with the M-T- and the M-N- immanent in them. The rivers in a god’s name Indra’s N-D- carries one last thing into the domain of our mansions. It is the D-N- turned back to front. The right way round, that sound names the great rivers of the homeland, ancient Ukraine: the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. Where the D-N- is the flowing water, the N-D- is the force, and the ground the water divides. Indra is exactly the god of force who shatters the enclosure to set the rivers free. The god sworn at the crossroads carries, in the two consonants of his name, the mirror of the sound that names the waters of the country he ultimately came from. I mentioned Isidore of Seville, the Wikipedia of the ancient world. It is Isidore who sets down that the Tanais, the Don, marked the edge of Europa’s realm, and that east of the Don lay Asia. So that is the weight of the Don, the D-N-, and the Donets. They marked the border of where the writ, the jurisdiction, of Indo-European Europa ran. So the crossroads holds, in one clay tablet, the Mitanni treaty, more than a set of surprisingly early gods and sound-meaning bundles. It holds the Indo-European family’s deep sounds caught in the act. The force that moves. The order that binds, with the N-D- in binds. Three and a half thousand years ago, in writing, before either was written in the East, in India. And it carries them, by ṛta and by reign, R-E-I-G-N, alike, into the words you and I still use today when we say: this is right. The treaty sealed under the moon Now the sound that lies under all the others. That treaty was sworn under a moon-god. It is the one with Indra and Mitra and Varuna in it, and the R-T- of order in the names of its kings. A few days’ ride west of the Mitanni heartland stood Harran. Its “age-old association with the Mesopotamian moon-cult,” the archaeologists who dug it write, “has never been in doubt.” Its god was Sîn, the moon, called Nannar in the old inscriptions. Remember my Enheduanna, the Moon, and Me (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/enheduana-the-moon-and-me). She was a priestess, wedded to the moon-god Nanna. Harran lies a few hundred miles north of where she came from. Sîn’s emblem was the disc and crescent. That is also the emblem of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, founded in 1350 to train civil lawyers after the Black Death had killed so many of them. It is in the flag of Türkiye. And, as I have spoken and written about before, you can see it on the bench with the painted boar, which I saw in the Urfa museum. It was excavated at Göbekli Tepe, another place I visited and recorded a podcast from (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli), also around this crossroads. So we see the disc and crescent from around 9000 BCE. Much later we see it as the emblem of the god Sîn. Soon I will go to the temple of Mēn in western Anatolia, and I cannot wait to record an episode there. So the emblem of the moon-god is the disc and crescent that the excavators say is “known to be that of the Moon-God of Harran,” at the crossroads. His temple there, Ehulhul, the “house of rejoicing,” was rebuilt by king after king across a thousand years. I drove past Harran’s massive, long walls as night fell that evening. We will go back. We will try to find Ehulhul, to pick up the energy there, and to pass it on through the sound-meaning bundles we use to talk to one another, in sound and text, in this ultra-modern world. And here is the join. The moon-god of Harran “was considered a suitable guarantor for political treaties.” A well-known study notes that he was invoked by Šuppiluliuma of Hatti, the Hittite, and Mattiwaza of Mitanni. The very pact that names the Indo-Aryan, Indo-European gods was sealed in the presence of the moon. The founder-sound’s own sky-body and the founders’ gods meet, literally, in one document. I knew none of this when I formed my hypothesis of the moon-based semantic signalling system. I first wrote about it on Twitter, in December 2022, when I worked it out. The moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system was the best hypothesis I could find for why the M-N- sound-meaning bundle had become so entrenched in English, a Germanic language. I traced it back across all the branches of the Indo-European languages. It appears in six of eight founder names, which is beyond chance. It also appears in almost every sentence we speak, for meanings that are uncannily similar: Mana, energy, and meaning itself. Then I searched for a hypothesis. I found one, and I announced it publicly. In the language of modern science, I preregistered it. We will come back later to the linguistic test I have since been able to run, using state-of-the-art frontier models. The founder-sound’s own sky-body and the founders’ gods meet, literally, in one document, the Mitanni treaty. How long the moon held Harran The moon held that ground for an astonishingly long time. The earliest mention of Sîn’s temple at Harran is on a clay tablet from around 2000 BCE. That is the very moment the Sintashta were cooking up what would become India, Hindi and the Rigveda. They were cooking up the names of the Indo-Aryan gods. They were cooking up what would become Iranian and Zarathustra, and the words carved into the cliff at Behistun by Darius the Great, of the Achaemenid Empire, in the sixth century BCE. Here you can see what I am doing in stretching your mental model of time and place. We run from Sintashta, in modern-day Kazakhstan. It is a tiny site. Across Kazakhstan there are countless burial mounds, Yamna and others, but a few of them hold the origin of the whole of Indian and Iranian culture. That is an amazing finding. So, 2000 BCE. Picture yourself on Google Maps, flying all the way from Kazakhstan into central Anatolia, to Kültepe. That is the moment of Tarmana’s contract to buy a slave, which I saw in the Ankara museum. It is around this same time. At that very moment, at Harran, there is a clay tablet from 2000 BCE that mentions the temple. The Babylonian king Nabonidus, two and a half thousand years ago, rebuilt the ruined Ehulhul because, he says, the moon-god came to him in a dream. He wrote in cuneiform: “Sin to the kingship called me; in the night season he caused me to behold a dream.” And long after Babylon and Rome had fallen, the people of Harran, whom the Arabs called the Sabians, were still keeping the moon-cult alive, into the eleventh century of our own era. Harran lies on the plain below Urfa. I drove across it many times on my way to the Tektek Mountains, looking for mounds and archaeological sites I will talk about later. Arabs, a Semitic-speaking people, have lived in this area for thousands of years as well. They called these people the Sabians. Think of Sabina, a name from the Roman tradition. The Sabians kept the moon-cult alive into the eleventh century of our common era. So 2000 BCE is the first written evidence of the temple, which a Babylonian king rebuilt because the moon-god came to him in a dream. Then you flash forward three thousand years to the eleventh century of our era. That is not long after the first Turkic-speaking peoples arrived in Anatolia. One ground, not two proofs A discipline is owed here. Sîn is not an Indo-European god. His moon-cult is not an independent witness that the moon was foundational to the moon-based semantic signalling system. That system is the story I tell of why the M-N- is there. What we know empirically is that it is present. It is immanent in almost every sentence we speak. It is immanent in the founders’ names of six of the eight living Indo-European mythological traditions. That is our starting point. Then we trace it backwards through every discipline we can find, linguistics, history, archaeology and cultural archaeology, and we try to work out how the M-N- sound could be there. I do not believe it is magic. I found that the Proto-Indo-European word for the moon was mḗh₁n̥ōt. Then, in December 2022, I worked out that light shining through the moon might explain the illumination. The M-N- is in illumination, and the L-U- in illuminate means bright light, in Nostratic. That is a possible explanation. The Yamna used the word mḗh₁n̥ōt for the moon. At that moment the choice of mḗh₁n̥ōt was entirely arbitrary. The sign and the signified are entirely arbitrary. I do subscribe to that thesis of Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. The M-N- is in Yamna too, of course. But once the Yamna had chosen this word for the instrument they used to measure time and weeks, semaine in French, to plant their crops by, and to arrange their days and months, it became entrenched. The M-N- is in instrument, too. Once they used the moon for that metaphor, all the other words that grew from it, mind, moon, measure, human, carried it forward. So six thousand years later we still use a word with the M-N- in it in almost every sentence. After that moment it was no longer arbitrary. That you end up with the M-N- is beyond the realm of chance. This is an innovation in modern linguistics, and we will come back to it. So Sîn is not an Indo-European god. His moon-cult is not an independent witness that the moon was foundational in Indo-European communities. That would be to count the same thing twice. The reading Finding Manuland holds is the other way round. The moon recurs at the crossroads, in the Semitic Sîn and in the language of the Indo-Aryan incomers alike, because these were never sealed-off worlds. They were a single field of contact and shared substrate. One thing in passing, because we will return to it. All living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna at Mykhailivka. The Yamna community itself, around 4000 BCE, was a product of two main strands. Modern geneticists can see both parts in the Yamna genome. One is the Eastern European hunter-gatherer strand, known by various names. The other is variously called Levantine, Mesopotamian or Iranian. There is a principle that runs through all of this work. If people migrated along a certain road in one period, you will often find migrations along the same road at other times, in both directions. So one part of the Yamna at Mykhailivka came from this very area of the crossroads. Then they came back, with Yamna genes inside them and with their language, by way of Sintashta. That is why I say these were never sealed-off worlds. The moon mattered to both the Semitic-speaking and the Indo-European-speaking parts of this world. They were a single field of contact and shared substrate, over thousands of years. So this is not the Indo-Europeans copying moon-worship from the Semitic peoples, mḗh₁n̥ōt and the M-N-. Nor is it the Semitic peoples borrowing Sîn from the Indo-Europeans. It is a soup. What the crossroads shows is not two proofs but one ground. The moon is the deep common currency. We see it in the crescent on the bench with the painted boar, from around 9000 BCE at Göbekli Tepe. The moon mattered enough to be one of the few signs carved in stone. The moon is the deep common currency, the common money, of the place where the different families meet and from which they spread: Hurrian, Indo-European and Semitic. It is a crossroads of these languages. They did not meet only once. They met layer upon layer: Iranian, Armenian, the Indo-European element in Turkic, Anatolian. We have this layering in all our cultures across Europe and in the lands between Indo-European India and Ireland. It is not one meeting from which everything flows. It is layer upon layer upon layer, like one of those cakes. Mēn There is a lighter echo of this at the western edge of the same upland. That is where we are going next, and I am so excited about it. In Roman Asia Minor, the west of today’s Türkiye, people worshipped a god called simply Mēn. I have posted the ancient statue of Mēn that you find at the far end of the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. It is a great statue of Mēn with crescents rising from his head. I will try to put a picture of it with the text of this podcast. Asia Minor is a name scholars sometimes use for Anatolia. I usually say Anatolia, for the land of the modern state of Türkiye, and the crossroads is its eastern part. Crescents rise from his shoulders. It is the sound itself, worn by a god of the moon: M-E-N. Whether the name is the old moon-word is my reading, and Finding Manuland’s. It is not any other scholar’s report. So I leave it where it belongs. It is my hypothesis. Even if you do not believe it, I hope you will stay for the journey, and for all the wonderful things that are not my hypothesis. One is the Nature paper which determined that all living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna community (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/yamnaya-and-ancient-ukraine) at Mykhailivka. That has the status of science. The archaeogenetics demonstrated it. Menua at Ararat North of all this, around the great lake at Van, rose the kingdom of Urartu. Its name is one we all already know, though in disguise. Urartu was what the Assyrians called it. The Semitic-speaking Assyrians’ writ ran as far as Van at different times. So again, it is a crossroads. The Hebrew Bible took the same name and, with its later vowels, turned it into Ararat. The mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest is the kingdom by Lake Van. The king who built that kingdom up was named Menua (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua). The reference works call him “a prodigious builder,” whose “surviving inscriptions dedicating temples, storehouses, and fortresses outnumber those of all other Urartian rulers.” When you walk into the great museum in Van (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-road-to), Menua’s name is the one you see. The Turkish state, which organised the museum, put it there. So when I say Menua is a founder of Urartu, and ultimately of the Armenian people, it is not only me saying it. Modern Turks celebrate their link to the ancient peoples of the land they live in today. Of all the Urartian monarchs they could have chosen to honour at the entrance to the great museum in Van, they chose Menua, Minua. The Hebrew record catches the pairing in a single verse. When Jeremiah summons the northern kingdoms against Babylon, he calls up Ararat and Minni together. The M-N- is in summons, too. Minni, M-I-N-N-I, is Mannea, the highland’s other kingdom. It lies south and east of Lake Urmia. On any map of Anatolia, ancient or modern, you will see three lakes to the east. Van is one. Urmia is another, and I am not sure which of the two is bigger. Both are salt water. The third is Lake Sevan, in modern-day Armenia. So Mannea, the other kingdom of the highlands by the crossroads, lies south and east of Lake Urmia, in today’s Iran, around what is now Saqqez, S-A-Q-Q-E-Z. You can find it in the Bible, at Jeremiah 51:27. The identification is settled, and it is not mine. It is not my hypothesis. It is settled by other scholars, by the field. The Encyclopaedia Iranica gives Mannea as “Neo-Assyrian Mannāyu, Old Testament Minni.” The standard Hebrew lexicon says the same. Diakonoff and Kashkai’s gazetteer of Urartian geography files it there. Minni is a hapax. It occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, in this verse, Jeremiah 51:27. And its ground matters twice over. Mannea’s country runs up against Ardini-Muṣaṣir, the holy city from which Armen Petrosyan, the great Indo-Europeanist of contemporary Armenia, whom I cite a lot, derives Urartu’s royal line. A kingdom whose name carries the M-N- frame sits next to the region that produced the dynasty whose founder’s name, Menua, carries it too. R-R-T, Ararat and Urartu, beside M-N-. In a Semitic tongue, from a prophet, Jeremiah, with no stake in either the Indo-European family or the Assyrian. The names the outsiders kept set the two frames, M-N- and R-T-, side by side in scripture. Three founders, one sound The Urartian language, like Mitanni’s, was a relative of Hurrian, neither Semitic nor Indo-European. The founder-sound does not need the speakers to be Indo-European, only the name to ride the field. And a serious scholar has put that name where this search would put it. By this search I mean the one I record in Finding Manuland. The N-D- is in finding, and the M-N- is in Manuland. The N-D- is a bound sound-meaning bundle: bound, ground, boundary. So there is the D-N- of the rivers, the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. Then there is its reversal, the N-D-: the end, the boundary, the ground. And sound itself. The Armenian comparatist Armen Petrosyan reads Urartian Minua, Menua, as one with Greek Minyas, the eponym of the Minyans, the tribe of the Argonauts. Following Paul Kretschmer, he reads him as one with the Cretan Minos too. He traces the whole cluster to the Indo-European root manu-, “man,” the root, he writes, that “names the first man in certain Indo-European myths.” The first man. The first human. Manu, in the early Indian texts, survived the flood. Minos judged the dead. And Menua built his realm at the foot of the mountain where Noah’s flood ended. I have stood at the foot of Ararat. Three founders, one sound, drawn together by a published, living comparative philologist. He cites Lincoln, and J. P. Mallory too. I have corresponded with Mallory. He is the author of the foundational text, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, where mḗh₁n̥ōt appears. So the founder-sound, the M-N-, is here in the rock too. It is a few days north of the tablet where Indra’s N-D- and ṛta‘s R-T- were pressed into clay. That tablet became the Mitanni treaty, which survives to this day, found in the imperial archives of the Hittite Empire (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/mount-hazzi-the-hittites-mount-olympus) at Boğazköy. At the crossroads the sounds, the M-N-, the N-D-, the R-T-, are not scattered across a family and a hemisphere. They are within a week’s ride of one another. A week’s chariot ride. Where the sounds cross Hold all this against the usual map. We file the deep origins of the West under Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the deep origins of Indian religion under the Veda. We keep them in separate rooms. The crossroads knocks the wall down. It does it not with one striking fact but with a convergence, a plethora of facts, in one small upland, within a few centuries and a few days’ travel by horse. Here, at the meeting-place of the roads, the sounds of the whole system meet as well. The founder’s M-N- stands in the rock at Ararat, in the name of Menua, a scholar’s line drawn straight from him to Minos and to Manu. The force of the N-D- is pressed into the treaty-tablet in the name of Indra, his earliest datable appearance anywhere on earth. The order of the R-T- is in the names of the kings who swore it. Ṛta-dhāman, the abode of cosmic order. Tveṣa-ratha, as in Rathmines and Rathfarnham. And in Varuna, beside Indra. The rivers’ D-N-, reversed, is the very sound of Indra’s force. Indra, with the N-D-. Indra releases the waters, the rivers. His name is the mirror of the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube that water the Indo-European homeland he set out from, stopping at Sintashta along the way. And the moon is under all of it, in Sîn of Harran, who guaranteed the oath and outlived every empire that swore by him. Five deep sounds of one family, caught together, in writing, three and a half thousand years ago. Before there was a Rigveda. Before there was a Greece, before there was a Rome, to carry any of them west. The thread that ties them is not Mesopotamia, and it is not India. It is the steppe, the ancient Ukrainian steppe. It is the same homeland by the Dnipro that sent Manu east, and Manannán west to become Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity. The same river sent Érimón west to become the first high king of all Ireland. Here it sent one branch south, into the richest meeting-ground of the ancient world. There it left, all in one place, its gods, its chariot, its founder-name, and the sounds of force and order and the rivers. They are on the record a thousand years and more before the textbooks let the Indo-European family begin. Mesopotamia is the amazing host civilisation, and the Hurrians its deep and gifted people. The moon-cult of Harran is Semitic ground the incomers met and honoured, not a trophy taken. The point is only that the Indo-Europeans were there, at the crossroads, sooner and more centrally than we were taught. They are not a footnote to the Near East but one of its ruling powers. They carried a whole system of sound-meaning bundles that had set out long before from a grass country by a Ukrainian river. That river is the Dnipro, and the village is Mykhailivka. It lies almost opposite Enerhodar, where the Russians are doing their best to blow up, by accident, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. For now, the mighty Dnipro divides it from the forces of the Ukrainian government. The order, in one line At the crossroads where Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran and Armenia meet, the Indo-Aryan kings of Mitanni swore by Mitra and Varuna and Indra in the fourteenth century BCE. It was the height of the Hittite Empire, the first Indo-European empire. It is the oldest datable writing of those gods anywhere, around 1400 BCE. Their own names carried the R-T- of ṛta, the cosmic order, the order-word. The T is the hard sound, and it is in word too. Indra’s name carried the N-D- of force that mirrors the D-N- of the homeland’s rivers. D-N- reverses to N-D-. The oath, the bond, the binding, with the N-D- in those words too, was sealed under Sîn, the moon-god of Harran, whose cult outlasted every empire near it. A few days north, at Ararat, a monarch named Menua, whose name Armen Petrosyan reads as one with Minos and with Manu, built his kingdom in stone. And he built the canal I stood beside, which still draws water from the great Armenian highlands, past the lowlands, to grow the vegetables and the tomatoes I ate when I was there, and on into Lake Van, to sweeten its salt water. Menua’s Canal. The steppe inheritance did not only go east to India. It reached the crossroads of the world. In one upland, and on one tablet, the Mitanni treaty, it left the whole family of its sounds: founder, force, order, river and moon. There they have been waiting, together, to be read, and to be carried through this work into your mind. If you pay for my work, you are doubly amazing. You are in my mind, immanent in it. We exchange your Mana through your money, and it inspires me. It gives me the resources and the time to do the research and to visit these places. If you do not pay, I will always try to keep my work free and open to everyone, because I want us all to know all of this. It is so amazing. I’ll be back with you soon.The gods before the Veda So, we go to the crossroads, in the middle of the second millennium before the common era. The great power of upper Mesopotamia was a kingdom called Mitanni. The M-N- is in Mitanni. Its people spoke Hurrian, a tongue that is, as the handbooks put it, “neither Indo-European nor Semitic.” But the Mitanni kingdom was ruled, and this is the thing, by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy. Indo-Aryan here means, in effect, Indo-European. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology says it without fuss: the Mitanni Hurrians “were themselves ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy with some allegiance to Indian deities.” This is 1400 BCE. The Rigveda was properly systematised around 1200 BCE. It was not written down for centuries after that, and was carried in song and prayer. So from the Mitanni we have a treaty of around 1400 BCE. The earliest writing from India comes centuries later. The best guess we have is that the Indo-Europeans reached the Indian subcontinent around 1200 or 1300 BCE. So the Mitanni Hurrians left written artefacts, which I have seen with my own eyes in the museum in Istanbul, a hundred or two hundred years before the first Indo-Europeans reached India. Parity of esteem The Oxford Companion calls the gods named in that treaty Indian gods. Yet our evidence that these gods are Indian comes from a later period. People sometimes tell me I am being anachronistic when I call Proto-Indo-European ancient Ukrainian. The Yamna, the community from which all living Indo-European languages come, lived six thousand years ago in Mykhailivka, in what is today Ukraine. Linguists call the language they spoke Proto-Indo-European. I say we can now carry the proper name back: ancient Ukrainian (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/should-we-call-ancient-ukrainians). We do that for ancient Greek and ancient Indian. People say, that is anachronistic, you cannot do that. Well, here is the Oxford Companion to World Mythology doing it. It carries a category back onto deities we know the Mitanni worshipped, because they swore oaths on their names, centuries before India became India. So it is legitimate to carry a name back this way. It may be anachronistic. I will not quibble with the Oxford Companion when it calls these Indian deities. But I will explain, as I just have, what it is doing. It is an anachronism. It calls these gods Indian centuries before India existed, before the first Indo-Europeans reached India and set up their culture there. Some Indo-Europeans may have reached India earlier. But we know from the genetic evidence, in a 2019 paper in Science, that a group associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture brought steppe ancestry into the aristocracy there. They became the Brahmins, who systematised the Rigveda and finally wrote it down. We have written evidence of these gods’ names from the Mitanni long before any of that, long before India became India. So parity of esteem demands this. If the Oxford Companion to World Mythology may call those gods Indian centuries before they became Indian, when we have this treaty from before then, then strictly we should call the Indian deities Mitanni deities. That would be ridiculous, because they truly caught fire in India. They gave their name to India: the N-D-, the Indra in India. We will come back in future episodes to that N-D- sound, the reversal of the D-N- in the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. By the rule of first attestation in writing we could even call these Indian gods Hurrian gods. Of course we do not. Like Timothy Snyder (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/timothy-snyders-move), we have learnt that many lines of evidence besides writing help us understand our past, our identities, the origins of our language and culture, and why we say what we say today. So we will not call them Hurrian. But parity of esteem demands this much. If you may do it for Indian deities, then at the very least we may use the name ancient Ukraine for Proto-Indo-European. That is all I ask there. I leave aside, modestly and humbly, the fact that all of these emanations, Indian, Irish, Celtic, Germanic, and the Mitanni gods themselves, come from the steppe, from this Yamna community. So a fortiori, we should be allowed to speak of ancient Ukraine. That is a theme that runs through Finding Manuland. The objection usually comes from people whose mental models have not yet caught up with the latest archaeogenetics, linguistics and history. They have no mental model of Ukraine, because they have not listened to Finding Manuland. I had no mental model of Ukraine either, until by accident I came across that Yamna burial mound in Dnipro, removed by property developers in May 2021. I tell the story in my first Finding Manuland episode (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i). So I blame nobody for not knowing. I myself knew nothing of Ukraine and all of this until around my fiftieth year. I am doing my best to bring it into our awareness. So when I use the term ancient Ukraine, I am not just trying to provoke you, or to provoke thought. I am giving the parity of esteem that great cultures owe to others who have achieved statehood. Chariots off the steppe The Mitanni war-nobility, the chariot-fighting caste named in the treaties as the maryannu, drove the same light spoked chariot the steppe had made. I have seen those treaties with my own eyes. The M-N- is in maryannu too, though that may be a coincidence. I am calling this a crossroads, but it also radiates out like a wheel, from Van down to Mardin and along to Urfa. The wheel is a metaphor I use in Finding Manuland. It is also a central metaphor in all Indo-European languages. It became solid in the chariots and carts found on the steppe. I have seen those carts with my own eyes in the Dnipro museum, and in the photographs of the Sintashta community in today’s Kazakhstan, from whom the Iranian, the Indian and the Mitanni deities would have come. So we have the one road I have spoken about, from the lower Volga through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and across to Arslantepe. I have visited there too and we will go again. The museum in Malatya should reopen soon after the earthquake, and I really want to go back. That road becomes the Hittites. The other road runs from Mykhailivka, in Kherson Oblast, on the Dnipro. I will use the World Labs model to help us picture it. It goes from there up to the Sintashta (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/trope-of-self-sacrificing-first-monarch) community. In the Sintashta graves, the setting out of horses’ heads and the remains of the funeral feast match the account in the Rigveda exactly. The Sintashta date from about 2000 to 1900 BCE. So they took around two thousand years to go from ancient Ukraine to there. It then took them several centuries more to reach the Indian subcontinent, where the songs of the Rigveda describe exactly the rites we have physical evidence for at Sintashta. Centuries after that, the Rigveda was first written down. In the Sintashta graves we have actual chariots, so we know the chariot was there. Among the Hurrian-speaking Mitanni we have accounts of chariots. The maryannu, their chariot-fighting caste, drove the same light spoked chariots the steppe and the Sintashta had made, and we have the archaeological evidence for them. Their kings, their rex, their raja, bore Indo-Aryan names. Their gods were the gods of the Rigveda. So they were Indo-European. The treaty We know this because of a treaty. Around the middle of the fourteenth century BCE the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma made a pact with Šattiwaza of Mitanni. Remember that the Hittites came by the road from the Volga, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and Arslantepe. They brought the Indo-European languages that became Anatolian, all of which died out. Hittite was the language of Tarmana, whose contract to buy a slave, from around 1900 BCE, I saw in the Ankara museum (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-pops-up-3924-years-ago). I also visited the site of his house at Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri. So the Hittites come from that strand. The Mitanni come from the sister strand, the Yamna of Mykhailivka in Kherson Oblast. We can trace them up to modern Kazakhstan, two thousand years later, at Sintashta. Over the following centuries they brought their Indo-European gods into this Hurrian-speaking community. These things are written down in cuneiform that we can read today, and that I have seen. At the end, where a treaty calls its gods to witness, the Mitanni king swears by a line of names that any reader of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, will know at once. The translation of the cuneiform reads: “the gods Mitra(-ššil), the gods Uruwana(-ššil), the god Indar, the gods Nashatianna.” Notice the N-D- in Indar. It is the reversal of the D-N-, and it means force. It is in Alexander, and in Indra. This N-D-, of boundedness and binding, will come back. It matters a great deal. So: Mitra, the god of contracts. Varuna, a god of the magico-religious realm. Indra, whose name means force, who embodies both the warrior and the magico-religious. And the Nāsatya, the divine twins the Veda calls the Aśvins. These are not look-alikes. They are the same gods, in the same order the Veda pairs them. They are named as the guarantors of a king’s word in Mesopotamia, centuries before a single hymn of the Rigveda was set down in India. The usual story cannot hold what that means. We are taught that Indo-Aryan civilisation begins in India, with the Veda. But here are its gods, four hundred years early and two thousand miles north-west of the Ganges. They were carried there not by missionaries, and there is the M-N- in missionaries, but by a ruling family of charioteers. They came, like everyone in Finding Manuland, off the steppe, the Ukrainian steppe. The Indo-Aryans were a Near-Eastern power before they were an Indian one. India is where they ended up, and where they kept the most. It is not where they began. What is old here, and what is new There is more in that treaty than the gods’ names. It is worth being precise about what is ancient here and what is new. That Indra’s earliest datable appearance in writing is this Mitanni oath is not my discovery. The oath is older, as a text, than any surviving writing in India, where the hymns were carried by the Brahmins’ voices for centuries before they were set down. It is one of the oldest settled facts in the field, a field of which Finding Manuland is only the latest, ultra-modern emanation. It was fixed the moment the cuneiform tablets of the treaty were read, and made canonical by Paul Thieme and Thomas Burrow generations ago. I lean on it because it is bedrock, a foundation stone. A fact that old and that agreed cannot be knocked over. Some people may be deep in one alleyway that leads off this crossroads. A great Assyriologist need know nothing about the Yamna. In Finding Manuland we look beyond that. We spread our mental models across six thousand years and across a far wider stretch of the earth than the Assyrians ruled. The crossroads does include Assyria. At times the Assyrians ruled this very area. They too would agree that the Indra of the Mitanni treaty is his first appearance in any text we have. What I add sits on top of that: what the oath shows about the sounds the family carried. None of this impugns the integrity of the people who wrote before the archaeogenetics, the linguistics and many of the findings I set out in Finding Manuland were known. Each of us in this field goes on a journey of working out the chronology and the pattern. Many Wikipedia articles and books will muddle which came first, Manu or Mannus. They will say India came first, and try to prove that people carried language from India to Ireland. Decades ago, who could have argued otherwise? The evidence was not there. What I add is this. Take all of the modern evidence into account, and you can trace the chronology scientifically. Go back to my Which came first, Manu or Mannus (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ep-1-using-m-n-to-determine-which) podcasts to look into that more deeply. The two sounds in the oath So in Finding Manuland I look at the oath in the Mitanni treaty for what it shows about the sounds the Indo-European family carried. Two of them stand together in it. One is the sound of force. Indra is the war-god, the smiter. His name, I-N-D-R-A, rides what Finding Manuland calls the N-D- sound-meaning bundle, the family’s sound of might. It is there in Alexander, and in Greek andrós, “of a man, of might.” The other is the sound of order, the R-T-, of writ, rule and right. It surfaces in Sanskrit as ṛta, truth and cosmic order, and in Iranian as arta, the cosmic and moral order. The Iranian was first written on the rock at Behistun by Darius the Great, between 500 and 600 BCE. He was the great king of the Achaemenid Empire, and the M-N- is in Achaemenid too. Behistun is very close to the crossroads. Arta is opposed by the druj, the lie, with its T-R-, its D-R-. The usurper. The order-word runs west into Latin rectus, R-T-, into German Recht, and into our own right, rite and rule. In its softer nasal dress it runs on into reign, into French reine, queen, and into regina. You will have seen old inscriptions to Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina. That is the R-N- form of the same root, and it sits under every European crown. You can read more on the order-word in The Archaic Origins of Archetyping (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-archaic-origins-of-archetyping). Both sounds, the N-D- and the R-T-, are in that oath. They are not only in the gods but in the men who swore it. The Mitanni king whose name heads their line is Artatama. That is Ṛta-dhāman, R-T-A, then D-H-A-M-A-N. You will find the proper spellings here, in the text of this podcast. I am not very good at pronouncing these names. You have probably noticed. I do my best, but I am pretty rubbish at it. Ṛta-dhāman means “the abode of cosmic order.” Ṛta is cosmic order. Dhāman means abode, home, as in mansion, as in domain. So the R-T- of ṛta, cosmic order, is built straight into Artatama’s name, and his name heads the Mitanni line of kings. Another of their kings, Tušratta, with the R-T- in it, is Tveṣa-ratha. Think of Tuesday, deus, Zeus. I have done a podcast on the meaning of Tuesday (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/double-deity-meaning-of-tuesday). Go back to it. We use these sounds every time we say day: deus, Zeus Pater, Dyaus Pitar in India, Jupiter in Latin, in the Italic branch. So Tušratta is Tveṣa-ratha, “he of the charging chariot.” In south Dublin, where I grew up, we have Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham. This is what I mean by illuminating the ancient in the everyday. A rath is a round, a ring. The crossroads, my metaphor of a wheel with spokes, comes back where the Mitanni name their king for the ratha, the chariot. The wheel made the chariot possible. It began as the big, heavy wooden wheels you see on some of the first carts in human culture. You can see them preserved in the great museum in Yerevan. You can see one in the great museum in Dnipro, which you will be able to visit freely as soon as the Ruschists withdraw. One of the oldest carts in human culture is on display there. When I first visited, knowing none of this, I walked straight past it. It turns out to be one of the first carts in human culture. The R-T- is in cart too, with its sense of right, straight and moving round. The same metaphor runs through Buddhism: the turning of the wheel, when the Buddha gave his teaching at Vulture Peak, near Rajgir. I have been there, and we will go again, as part of Finding Manuland on the Ganges, at Varanasi. That was one of the turnings of the wheel. The metaphor is immanent in one of the great Indo-European religions. Happily it was kept in a non-Indo-European language, Tibetan. It has now been brought back into Indo-European by some of the great scholars alive today, and by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his patronage. So back to the Mitanni king Tušratta: Tveṣa-ratha, he of the charging chariot. Ratha is the chariot-word, R-A-T-H-A, an R-T-. Its R-T- is kept in chariot too. That is what I mean by sound-meaning bundles. They travel through words across different branches of the Indo-European languages and keep the same meaning. Chariot, ratha and cart keep the same meaning. A sound-meaning bundle travels from Mitanni Indo-Aryan into English, a Germanic language, thousands of years apart. These are the cryptotypes, the stock in trade of Finding Manuland. They are new. As far as I know, nobody else has noticed them and focused on them as I do, nor on my extension of the cryptotype to the signifier. That idea was brought to my attention by an early reader and listener of my Finding Manuland work. Go back to my episode on the meaning of meaning (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-as-linguists-holy-grail), about two years ago, where I announced the discovery. So here is another instance, in Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham: wheel, round, circle. The chariot-word is itself an R-T-. The very form stands word for word in the Rigveda, at 5.61.13. Look up Rigveda 5.61.13 and you will see what I mean. And Varuna, sworn in the same breath as Indra, is in the Veda the keeper of ṛta, cosmic order itself. So the force-sound and the order-sound stand side by side in one Bronze Age document. That is centuries before the Brahmins reached India, before steppe ancestry entered their genes, and before the Painted Grey Ware entered what became the archaeological sites of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Before we had the archaeogenetics, we had no evidence that the Yamna’s descendants reached India by way of Sintashta. So: Indra’s N-D- among the witnesses of the Mitanni treaty. Ṛta‘s R-T- in the names of the kings, and in the god beside him. The M-N- in the foundation There is even a third sound hiding in that first king’s name. It is one Finding Manuland has been chasing elsewhere. Ṛta-dhāman. The second half, dhāman, means abode, dwelling, domain, home. It is the home-and-foundation word. It carries the M-N-, worn down to “-tama” on the surface, in Artatama. The M-N- sound is immanent in it even though you cannot see it. The nasal, the N, drops out of sight. It is the same disappearing act the maternal M-N- performs in mother, M-T-R on the surface, only to reappear in maman. Go back to my piece on the moon, the menses and the maternal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal) and you will see what I mean. It is a member of the sound-family hidden by ordinary wear, recoverable once you know to look for it. That the masked word here should mean foundation is a small gift. The M-N- is the foundation-sound of the whole system: the ground, the matter, the abode. Matter, from mater, the Latin for mother, with the M-T- and the M-N- immanent in them. The rivers in a god’s name Indra’s N-D- carries one last thing into the domain of our mansions. It is the D-N- turned back to front. The right way round, that sound names the great rivers of the homeland, ancient Ukraine: the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. Where the D-N- is the flowing water, the N-D- is the force, and the ground the water divides. Indra is exactly the god of force who shatters the enclosure to set the rivers free. The god sworn at the crossroads carries, in the two consonants of his name, the mirror of the sound that names the waters of the country he ultimately came from. I mentioned Isidore of Seville, the Wikipedia of the ancient world. It is Isidore who sets down that the Tanais, the Don, marked the edge of Europa’s realm, and that east of the Don lay Asia. So that is the weight of the Don, the D-N-, and the Donets. They marked the border of where the writ, the jurisdiction, of Indo-European Europa ran. So the crossroads holds, in one clay tablet, the Mitanni treaty, more than a set of surprisingly early gods and sound-meaning bundles. It holds the Indo-European family’s deep sounds caught in the act. The force that moves. The order that binds, with the N-D- in binds. Three and a half thousand years ago, in writing, before either was written in the East, in India. And it carries them, by ṛta and by reign, R-E-I-G-N, alike, into the words you and I still use today when we say: this is right. The treaty sealed under the moon Now the sound that lies under all the others. That treaty was sworn under a moon-god. It is the one with Indra and Mitra and Varuna in it, and the R-T- of order in the names of its kings. A few days’ ride west of the Mitanni heartland stood Harran. Its “age-old association with the Mesopotamian moon-cult,” the archaeologists who dug it write, “has never been in doubt.” Its god was Sîn, the moon, called Nannar in the old inscriptions. Remember my Enheduanna, the Moon, and Me (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/enheduana-the-moon-and-me). She was a priestess, wedded to the moon-god Nanna. Harran lies a few hundred miles north of where she came from. Sîn’s emblem was the disc and crescent. That is also the emblem of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, founded in 1350 to train civil lawyers after the Black Death had killed so many of them. It is in the flag of Türkiye. And, as I have spoken and written about before, you can see it on the bench with the painted boar, which I saw in the Urfa museum. It was excavated at Göbekli Tepe, another place I visited and recorded a podcast from (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli), also around this crossroads. So we see the disc and crescent from around 9000 BCE. Much later we see it as the emblem of the god Sîn. Soon I will go to the temple of Mēn in western Anatolia, and I cannot wait to record an episode there. So the emblem of the moon-god is the disc and crescent that the excavators say is “known to be that of the Moon-God of Harran,” at the crossroads. His temple there, Ehulhul, the “house of rejoicing,” was rebuilt by king after king across a thousand years. I drove past Harran’s massive, long walls as night fell that evening. We will go back. We will try to find Ehulhul, to pick up the energy there, and to pass it on through the sound-meaning bundles we use to talk to one another, in sound and text, in this ultra-modern world. And here is the join. The moon-god of Harran “was considered a suitable guarantor for political treaties.” A well-known study notes that he was invoked by Šuppiluliuma of Hatti, the Hittite, and Mattiwaza of Mitanni. The very pact that names the Indo-Aryan, Indo-European gods was sealed in the presence of the moon. The founder-sound’s own sky-body and the founders’ gods meet, literally, in one document. I knew none of this when I formed my hypothesis of the moon-based semantic signalling system. I first wrote about it on Twitter, in December 2022, when I worked it out. The moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system was the best hypothesis I could find for why the M-N- sound-meaning bundle had become so entrenched in English, a Germanic language. I traced it back across all the branches of the Indo-European languages. It appears in six of eight founder names, which is beyond chance. It also appears in almost every sentence we speak, for meanings that are uncannily similar: Mana, energy, and meaning itself. Then I searched for a hypothesis. I found one, and I announced it publicly. In the language of modern science, I preregistered it. We will come back later to the linguistic test I have since been able to run, using state-of-the-art frontier models. The founder-sound’s own sky-body and the founders’ gods meet, literally, in one document, the Mitanni treaty. How long the moon held Harran The moon held that ground for an astonishingly long time. The earliest mention of Sîn’s temple at Harran is on a clay tablet from around 2000 BCE. That is the very moment the Sintashta were cooking up what would become India, Hindi and the Rigveda. They were cooking up the names of the Indo-Aryan gods. They were cooking up what would become Iranian and Zarathustra, and the words carved into the cliff at Behistun by Darius the Great, of the Achaemenid Empire, in the sixth century BCE. Here you can see what I am doing in stretching your mental model of time and place. We run from Sintashta, in modern-day Kazakhstan. It is a tiny site. Across Kazakhstan there are countless burial mounds, Yamna and others, but a few of them hold the origin of the whole of Indian and Iranian culture. That is an amazing finding. So, 2000 BCE. Picture yourself on Google Maps, flying all the way from Kazakhstan into central Anatolia, to Kültepe. That is the moment of Tarmana’s contract to buy a slave, which I saw in the Ankara museum. It is around this same time. At that very moment, at Harran, there is a clay tablet from 2000 BCE that mentions the temple. The Babylonian king Nabonidus, two and a half thousand years ago, rebuilt the ruined Ehulhul because, he says, the moon-god came to him in a dream. He wrote in cuneiform: “Sin to the kingship called me; in the night season he caused me to behold a dream.” And long after Babylon and Rome had fallen, the people of Harran, whom the Arabs called the Sabians, were still keeping the moon-cult alive, into the eleventh century of our own era. Harran lies on the plain below Urfa. I drove across it many times on my way to the Tektek Mountains, looking for mounds and archaeological sites I will talk about later. Arabs, a Semitic-speaking people, have lived in this area for thousands of years as well. They called these people the Sabians. Think of Sabina, a name from the Roman tradition. The Sabians kept the moon-cult alive into the eleventh century of our common era. So 2000 BCE is the first written evidence of the temple, which a Babylonian king rebuilt because the moon-god came to him in a dream. Then you flash forward three thousand years to the eleventh century of our era. That is not long after the first Turkic-speaking peoples arrived in Anatolia. One ground, not two proofs A discipline is owed here. Sîn is not an Indo-European god. His moon-cult is not an independent witness that the moon was foundational to the moon-based semantic signalling system. That system is the story I tell of why the M-N- is there. What we know empirically is that it is present. It is immanent in almost every sentence we speak. It is immanent in the founders’ names of six of the eight living Indo-European mythological traditions. That is our starting point. Then we trace it backwards through every discipline we can find, linguistics, history, archaeology and cultural archaeology, and we try to work out how the M-N- sound could be there. I do not believe it is magic. I found that the Proto-Indo-European word for the moon was mḗh₁n̥ōt. Then, in December 2022, I worked out that light shining through the moon might explain the illumination. The M-N- is in illumination, and the L-U- in illuminate means bright light, in Nostratic. That is a possible explanation. The Yamna used the word mḗh₁n̥ōt for the moon. At that moment the choice of mḗh₁n̥ōt was entirely arbitrary. The sign and the signified are entirely arbitrary. I do subscribe to that thesis of Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. The M-N- is in Yamna too, of course. But once the Yamna had chosen this word for the instrument they used to measure time and weeks, semaine in French, to plant their crops by, and to arrange their days and months, it became entrenched. The M-N- is in instrument, too. Once they used the moon for that metaphor, all the other words that grew from it, mind, moon, measure, human, carried it forward. So six thousand years later we still use a word with the M-N- in it in almost every sentence. After that moment it was no longer arbitrary. That you end up with the M-N- is beyond the realm of chance. This is an innovation in modern linguistics, and we will come back to it. So Sîn is not an Indo-European god. His moon-cult is not an independent witness that the moon was foundational in Indo-European communities. That would be to count the same thing twice. The reading Finding Manuland holds is the other way round. The moon recurs at the crossroads, in the Semitic Sîn and in the language of the Indo-Aryan incomers alike, because these were never sealed-off worlds. They were a single field of contact and shared substrate. One thing in passing, because we will return to it. All living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna at Mykhailivka. The Yamna community itself, around 4000 BCE, was a product of two main strands. Modern geneticists can see both parts in the Yamna genome. One is the Eastern European hunter-gatherer strand, known by various names. The other is variously called Levantine, Mesopotamian or Iranian. There is a principle that runs through all of this work. If people migrated along a certain road in one period, you will often find migrations along the same road at other times, in both directions. So one part of the Yamna at Mykhailivka came from this very area of the crossroads. Then they came back, with Yamna genes inside them and with their language, by way of Sintashta. That is why I say these were never sealed-off worlds. The moon mattered to both the Semitic-speaking and the Indo-European-speaking parts of this world. They were a single field of contact and shared substrate, over thousands of years. So this is not the Indo-Europeans copying moon-worship from the Semitic peoples, mḗh₁n̥ōt and the M-N-. Nor is it the Semitic peoples borrowing Sîn from the Indo-Europeans. It is a soup. What the crossroads shows is not two proofs but one ground. The moon is the deep common currency. We see it in the crescent on the bench with the painted boar, from around 9000 BCE at Göbekli Tepe. The moon mattered enough to be one of the few signs carved in stone. The moon is the deep common currency, the common money, of the place where the different families meet and from which they spread: Hurrian, Indo-European and Semitic. It is a crossroads of these languages. They did not meet only once. They met layer upon layer: Iranian, Armenian, the Indo-European element in Turkic, Anatolian. We have this layering in all our cultures across Europe and in the lands between Indo-European India and Ireland. It is not one meeting from which everything flows. It is layer upon layer upon layer, like one of those cakes. Mēn There is a lighter echo of this at the western edge of the same upland. That is where we are going next, and I am so excited about it. In Roman Asia Minor, the west of today’s Türkiye, people worshipped a god called simply Mēn. I have posted the ancient statue of Mēn that you find at the far end of the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. It is a great statue of Mēn with crescents rising from his head. I will try to put a picture of it with the text of this podcast. Asia Minor is a name scholars sometimes use for Anatolia. I usually say Anatolia, for the land of the modern state of Türkiye, and the crossroads is its eastern part. Crescents rise from his shoulders. It is the sound itself, worn by a god of the moon: M-E-N. Whether the name is the old moon-word is my reading, and Finding Manuland’s. It is not any other scholar’s report. So I leave it where it belongs. It is my hypothesis. Even if you do not believe it, I hope you will stay for the journey, and for all the wonderful things that are not my hypothesis. One is the Nature paper which determined that all living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna community (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/yamnaya-and-ancient-ukraine) at Mykhailivka. That has the status of science. The archaeogenetics demonstrated it. Menua at Ararat North of all this, around the great lake at Van, rose the kingdom of Urartu. Its name is one we all already know, though in disguise. Urartu was what the Assyrians called it. The Semitic-speaking Assyrians’ writ ran as far as Van at different times. So again, it is a crossroads. The Hebrew Bible took the same name and, with its later vowels, turned it into Ararat. The mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest is the kingdom by Lake Van. The king who built that kingdom up was named Menua (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua). The reference works call him “a prodigious builder,” whose “surviving inscriptions dedicating temples, storehouses, and fortresses outnumber those of all other Urartian rulers.” When you walk into the great museum in Van (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-road-to), Menua’s name is the one you see. The Turkish state, which organised the museum, put it there. So when I say Menua is a founder of Urartu, and ultimately of the Armenian people, it is not only me saying it. Modern Turks celebrate their link to the ancient peoples of the land they live in today. Of all the Urartian monarchs they could have chosen to honour at the entrance to the great museum in Van, they chose Menua, Minua. The Hebrew record catches the pairing in a single verse. When Jeremiah summons the northern kingdoms against Babylon, he calls up Ararat and Minni together. The M-N- is in summons, too. Minni, M-I-N-N-I, is Mannea, the highland’s other kingdom. It lies south and east of Lake Urmia. On any map of Anatolia, ancient or modern, you will see three lakes to the east. Van is one. Urmia is another, and I am not sure which of the two is bigger. Both are salt water. The third is Lake Sevan, in modern-day Armenia. So Mannea, the other kingdom of the highlands by the crossroads, lies south and east of Lake Urmia, in today’s Iran, around what is now Saqqez, S-A-Q-Q-E-Z. You can find it in the Bible, at Jeremiah 51:27. The identification is settled, and it is not mine. It is not my hypothesis. It is settled by other scholars, by the field. The Encyclopaedia Iranica gives Mannea as “Neo-Assyrian Mannāyu, Old Testament Minni.” The standard Hebrew lexicon says the same. Diakonoff and Kashkai’s gazetteer of Urartian geography files it there. Minni is a hapax. It occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, in this verse, Jeremiah 51:27. And its ground matters twice over. Mannea’s country runs up against Ardini-Muṣaṣir, the holy city from which Armen Petrosyan, the great Indo-Europeanist of contemporary Armenia, whom I cite a lot, derives Urartu’s royal line. A kingdom whose name carries the M-N- frame sits next to the region that produced the dynasty whose founder’s name, Menua, carries it too. R-R-T, Ararat and Urartu, beside M-N-. In a Semitic tongue, from a prophet, Jeremiah, with no stake in either the Indo-European family or the Assyrian. The names the outsiders kept set the two frames, M-N- and R-T-, side by side in scripture. Three founders, one sound The Urartian language, like Mitanni’s, was a relative of Hurrian, neither Semitic nor Indo-European. The founder-sound does not need the speakers to be Indo-European, only the name to ride the field. And a serious scholar has put that name where this search would put it. By this search I mean the one I record in Finding Manuland. The N-D- is in finding, and the M-N- is in Manuland. The N-D- is a bound sound-meaning bundle: bound, ground, boundary. So there is the D-N- of the rivers, the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. Then there is its reversal, the N-D-: the end, the boundary, the ground. And sound itself. The Armenian comparatist Armen Petrosyan reads Urartian Minua, Menua, as one with Greek Minyas, the eponym of the Minyans, the tribe of the Argonauts. Following Paul Kretschmer, he reads him as one with the Cretan Minos too. He traces the whole cluster to the Indo-European root manu-, “man,” the root, he writes, that “names the first man in certain Indo-European myths.” The first man. The first human. Manu, in the early Indian texts, survived the flood. Minos judged the dead. And Menua built his realm at the foot of the mountain where Noah’s flood ended. I have stood at the foot of Ararat. Three founders, one sound, drawn together by a published, living comparative philologist. He cites Lincoln, and J. P. Mallory too. I have corresponded with Mallory. He is the author of the foundational text, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, where mḗh₁n̥ōt appears. So the founder-sound, the M-N-, is here in the rock too. It is a few days north of the tablet where Indra’s N-D- and ṛta‘s R-T- were pressed into clay. That tablet became the Mitanni treaty, which survives to this day, found in the imperial archives of the Hittite Empire (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/mount-hazzi-the-hittites-mount-olympus) at Boğazköy. At the crossroads the sounds, the M-N-, the N-D-, the R-T-, are not scattered across a family and a hemisphere. They are within a week’s ride of one another. A week’s chariot ride. Where the sounds cross Hold all this against the usual map. We file the deep origins of the West under Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the deep origins of Indian religion under the Veda. We keep them in separate rooms. The crossroads knocks the wall down. It does it not with one striking fact but with a convergence, a plethora of facts, in one small upland, within a few centuries and a few days’ travel by horse. Here, at the meeting-place of the roads, the sounds of the whole system meet as well. The founder’s M-N- stands in the rock at Ararat, in the name of Menua, a scholar’s line drawn straight from him to Minos and to Manu. The force of the N-D- is pressed into the treaty-tablet in the name of Indra, his earliest datable appearance anywhere on earth. The order of the R-T- is in the names of the kings who swore it. Ṛta-dhāman, the abode of cosmic order. Tveṣa-ratha, as in Rathmines and Rathfarnham. And in Varuna, beside Indra. The rivers’ D-N-, reversed, is the very sound of Indra’s force. Indra, with the N-D-. Indra releases the waters, the rivers. His name is the mirror of the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube that water the Indo-European homeland he set out from, stopping at Sintashta along the way. And the moon is under all of it, in Sîn of Harran, who guaranteed the oath and outlived every empire that swore by him. Five deep sounds of one family, caught together, in writing, three and a half thousand years ago. Before there was a Rigveda. Before there was a Greece, before there was a Rome, to carry any of them west. The thread that ties them is not Mesopotamia, and it is not India. It is the steppe, the ancient Ukrainian steppe. It is the same homeland by the Dnipro that sent Manu east, and Manannán west to become Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity. The same river sent Érimón west to become the first high king of all Ireland. Here it sent one branch south, into the richest meeting-ground of the ancient world. There it left, all in one place, its gods, its chariot, its founder-name, and the sounds of force and order and the rivers. They are on the record a thousand years and more before the textbooks let the Indo-European family begin. Mesopotamia is the amazing host civilisation, and the Hurrians its deep and gifted people. The moon-cult of Harran is Semitic ground the incomers met and honoured, not a trophy taken. The point is only that the Indo-Europeans were there, at the crossroads, sooner and more centrally than we were taught. They are not a footnote to the Near East but one of its ruling powers. They carried a whole system of sound-meaning bundles that had set out long before from a grass country by a Ukrainian river. That river is the Dnipro, and the village is Mykhailivka. It lies almost opposite Enerhodar, where the Russians are doing their best to blow up, by accident, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. For now, the mighty Dnipro divides it from the forces of the Ukrainian government. The order, in one line At the crossroads where Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran and Armenia meet, the Indo-Aryan kings of Mitanni swore by Mitra and Varuna and Indra in the fourteenth century BCE. It was the height of the Hittite Empire, the first Indo-European empire. It is the oldest datable writing of those gods anywhere, around 1400 BCE. Their own names carried the R-T- of ṛta, the cosmic order, the order-word. The T is the hard sound, and it is in word too. Indra’s name carried the N-D- of force that mirrors the D-N- of the homeland’s rivers. D-N- reverses to N-D-. The oath, the bond, the binding, with the N-D- in those words too, was sealed under Sîn, the moon-god of Harran, whose cult outlasted every empire near it. A few days north, at Ararat, a monarch named Menua, whose name Armen Petrosyan reads as one with Minos and with Manu, built his kingdom in stone. And he built the canal I stood beside, which still draws water from the great Armenian highlands, past the lowlands, to grow the vegetables and the tomatoes I ate when I was there, and on into Lake Van, to sweeten its salt water. Menua’s Canal. The steppe inheritance did not only go east to India. It reached the crossroads of the world. In one upland, and on one tablet, the Mitanni treaty, it left the whole family of its sounds: founder, force, order, river and moon. There they have been waiting, together, to be read, and to be carried through this work into your mind. If you pay for my work, you are doubly amazing. You are in my mind, immanent in it. We exchange your Mana through your money, and it inspires me. It gives me the resources and the time to do the research and to visit these places. If you do not pay, I will always try to keep my work free and open to everyone, because I want us all to know all of this. It is so amazing. I’ll be back with you soon.The gods before the Veda So, we go to the crossroads, in the middle of the second millennium before the common era. The great power of upper Mesopotamia was a kingdom called Mitanni. The M-N- is in Mitanni. Its people spoke Hurrian, a tongue that is, as the handbooks put it, “neither Indo-European nor Semitic.” But the Mitanni kingdom was ruled, and this is the thing, by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy. Indo-Aryan here means, in effect, Indo-European. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology says it without fuss: the Mitanni Hurrians “were themselves ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy with some allegiance to Indian deities.” This is 1400 BCE. The Rigveda was properly systematised around 1200 BCE. It was not written down for centuries after that, and was carried in song and prayer. So from the Mitanni we have a treaty of around 1400 BCE. The earliest writing from India comes centuries later. The best guess we have is that the Indo-Europeans reached the Indian subcontinent around 1200 or 1300 BCE. So the Mitanni Hurrians left written artefacts, which I have seen with my own eyes in the museum in Istanbul, a hundred or two hundred years before the first Indo-Europeans reached India. Parity of esteem The Oxford Companion calls the gods named in that treaty Indian gods. Yet our evidence that these gods are Indian comes from a later period. People sometimes tell me I am being anachronistic when I call Proto-Indo-European ancient Ukrainian. The Yamna, the community from which all living Indo-European languages come, lived six thousand years ago in Mykhailivka, in what is today Ukraine. Linguists call the language they spoke Proto-Indo-European. I say we can now carry the proper name back: ancient Ukrainian (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/should-we-call-ancient-ukrainians). We do that for ancient Greek and ancient Indian. People say, that is anachronistic, you cannot do that. Well, here is the Oxford Companion to World Mythology doing it. It carries a category back onto deities we know the Mitanni worshipped, because they swore oaths on their names, centuries before India became India. So it is legitimate to carry a name back this way. It may be anachronistic. I will not quibble with the Oxford Companion when it calls these Indian deities. But I will explain, as I just have, what it is doing. It is an anachronism. It calls these gods Indian centuries before India existed, before the first Indo-Europeans reached India and set up their culture there. Some Indo-Europeans may have reached India earlier. But we know from the genetic evidence, in a 2019 paper in Science, that a group associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture brought steppe ancestry into the aristocracy there. They became the Brahmins, who systematised the Rigveda and finally wrote it down. We have written evidence of these gods’ names from the Mitanni long before any of that, long before India became India. So parity of esteem demands this. If the Oxford Companion to World Mythology may call those gods Indian centuries before they became Indian, when we have this treaty from before then, then strictly we should call the Indian deities Mitanni deities. That would be ridiculous, because they truly caught fire in India. They gave their name to India: the N-D-, the Indra in India. We will come back in future episodes to that N-D- sound, the reversal of the D-N- in the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. By the rule of first attestation in writing we could even call these Indian gods Hurrian gods. Of course we do not. Like Timothy Snyder (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/timothy-snyders-move), we have learnt that many lines of evidence besides writing help us understand our past, our identities, the origins of our language and culture, and why we say what we say today. So we will not call them Hurrian. But parity of esteem demands this much. If you may do it for Indian deities, then at the very least we may use the name ancient Ukraine for Proto-Indo-European. That is all I ask there. I leave aside, modestly and humbly, the fact that all of these emanations, Indian, Irish, Celtic, Germanic, and the Mitanni gods themselves, come from the steppe, from this Yamna community. So a fortiori, we should be allowed to speak of ancient Ukraine. That is a theme that runs through Finding Manuland. The objection usually comes from people whose mental models have not yet caught up with the latest archaeogenetics, linguistics and history. They have no mental model of Ukraine, because they have not listened to Finding Manuland. I had no mental model of Ukraine either, until by accident I came across that Yamna burial mound in Dnipro, removed by property developers in May 2021. I tell the story in my first Finding Manuland episode (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i). So I blame nobody for not knowing. I myself knew nothing of Ukraine and all of this until around my fiftieth year. I am doing my best to bring it into our awareness. So when I use the term ancient Ukraine, I am not just trying to provoke you, or to provoke thought. I am giving the parity of esteem that great cultures owe to others who have achieved statehood. Chariots off the steppe The Mitanni war-nobility, the chariot-fighting caste named in the treaties as the maryannu, drove the same light spoked chariot the steppe had made. I have seen those treaties with my own eyes. The M-N- is in maryannu too, though that may be a coincidence. I am calling this a crossroads, but it also radiates out like a wheel, from Van down to Mardin and along to Urfa. The wheel is a metaphor I use in Finding Manuland. It is also a central metaphor in all Indo-European languages. It became solid in the chariots and carts found on the steppe. I have seen those carts with my own eyes in the Dnipro museum, and in the photographs of the Sintashta community in today’s Kazakhstan, from whom the Iranian, the Indian and the Mitanni deities would have come. So we have the one road I have spoken about, from the lower Volga through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and across to Arslantepe. I have visited there too and we will go again. The museum in Malatya should reopen soon after the earthquake, and I really want to go back. That road becomes the Hittites. The other road runs from Mykhailivka, in Kherson Oblast, on the Dnipro. I will use the World Labs model to help us picture it. It goes from there up to the Sintashta (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/trope-of-self-sacrificing-first-monarch) community. In the Sintashta graves, the setting out of horses’ heads and the remains of the funeral feast match the account in the Rigveda exactly. The Sintashta date from about 2000 to 1900 BCE. So they took around two thousand years to go from ancient Ukraine to there. It then took them several centuries more to reach the Indian subcontinent, where the songs of the Rigveda describe exactly the rites we have physical evidence for at Sintashta. Centuries after that, the Rigveda was first written down. In the Sintashta graves we have actual chariots, so we know the chariot was there. Among the Hurrian-speaking Mitanni we have accounts of chariots. The maryannu, their chariot-fighting caste, drove the same light spoked chariots the steppe and the Sintashta had made, and we have the archaeological evidence for them. Their kings, their rex, their raja, bore Indo-Aryan names. Their gods were the gods of the Rigveda. So they were Indo-European. The treaty We know this because of a treaty. Around the middle of the fourteenth century BCE the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma made a pact with Šattiwaza of Mitanni. Remember that the Hittites came by the road from the Volga, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and Arslantepe. They brought the Indo-European languages that became Anatolian, all of which died out. Hittite was the language of Tarmana, whose contract to buy a slave, from around 1900 BCE, I saw in the Ankara museum (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-pops-up-3924-years-ago). I also visited the site of his house at Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri. So the Hittites come from that strand. The Mitanni come from the sister strand, the Yamna of Mykhailivka in Kherson Oblast. We can trace them up to modern Kazakhstan, two thousand years later, at Sintashta. Over the following centuries they brought their Indo-European gods into this Hurrian-speaking community. These things are written down in cuneiform that we can read today, and that I have seen. At the end, where a treaty calls its gods to witness, the Mitanni king swears by a line of names that any reader of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, will know at once. The translation of the cuneiform reads: “the gods Mitra(-ššil), the gods Uruwana(-ššil), the god Indar, the gods Nashatianna.” Notice the N-D- in Indar. It is the reversal of the D-N-, and it means force. It is in Alexander, and in Indra. This N-D-, of boundedness and binding, will come back. It matters a great deal. So: Mitra, the god of contracts. Varuna, a god of the magico-religious realm. Indra, whose name means force, who embodies both the warrior and the magico-religious. And the Nāsatya, the divine twins the Veda calls the Aśvins. These are not look-alikes. They are the same gods, in the same order the Veda pairs them. They are named as the guarantors of a king’s word in Mesopotamia, centuries before a single hymn of the Rigveda was set down in India. The usual story cannot hold what that means. We are taught that Indo-Aryan civilisation begins in India, with the Veda. But here are its gods, four hundred years early and two thousand miles north-west of the Ganges. They were carried there not by missionaries, and there is the M-N- in missionaries, but by a ruling family of charioteers. They came, like everyone in Finding Manuland, off the steppe, the Ukrainian steppe. The Indo-Aryans were a Near-Eastern power before they were an Indian one. India is where they ended up, and where they kept the most. It is not where they began. What is old here, and what is new There is more in that treaty than the gods’ names. It is worth being precise about what is ancient here and what is new. That Indra’s earliest datable appearance in writing is this Mitanni oath is not my discovery. The oath is older, as a text, than any surviving writing in India, where the hymns were carried by the Brahmins’ voices for centuries before they were set down. It is one of the oldest settled facts in the field, a field of which Finding Manuland is only the latest, ultra-modern emanation. It was fixed the moment the cuneiform tablets of the treaty were read, and made canonical by Paul Thieme and Thomas Burrow generations ago. I lean on it because it is bedrock, a foundation stone. A fact that old and that agreed cannot be knocked over. Some people may be deep in one alleyway that leads off this crossroads. A great Assyriologist need know nothing about the Yamna. In Finding Manuland we look beyond that. We spread our mental models across six thousand years and across a far wider stretch of the earth than the Assyrians ruled. The crossroads does include Assyria. At times the Assyrians ruled this very area. They too would agree that the Indra of the Mitanni treaty is his first appearance in any text we have. What I add sits on top of that: what the oath shows about the sounds the family carried. None of this impugns the integrity of the people who wrote before the archaeogenetics, the linguistics and many of the findings I set out in Finding Manuland were known. Each of us in this field goes on a journey of working out the chronology and the pattern. Many Wikipedia articles and books will muddle which came first, Manu or Mannus. They will say India came first, and try to prove that people carried language from India to Ireland. Decades ago, who could have argued otherwise? The evidence was not there. What I add is this. Take all of the modern evidence into account, and you can trace the chronology scientifically. Go back to my Which came first, Manu or Mannus (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ep-1-using-m-n-to-determine-which) podcasts to look into that more deeply. The two sounds in the oath So in Finding Manuland I look at the oath in the Mitanni treaty for what it shows about the sounds the Indo-European family carried. Two of them stand together in it. One is the sound of force. Indra is the war-god, the smiter. His name, I-N-D-R-A, rides what Finding Manuland calls the N-D- sound-meaning bundle, the family’s sound of might. It is there in Alexander, and in Greek andrós, “of a man, of might.” The other is the sound of order, the R-T-, of writ, rule and right. It surfaces in Sanskrit as ṛta, truth and cosmic order, and in Iranian as arta, the cosmic and moral order. The Iranian was first written on the rock at Behistun by Darius the Great, between 500 and 600 BCE. He was the great king of the Achaemenid Empire, and the M-N- is in Achaemenid too. Behistun is very close to the crossroads. Arta is opposed by the druj, the lie, with its T-R-, its D-R-. The usurper. The order-word runs west into Latin rectus, R-T-, into German Recht, and into our own right, rite and rule. In its softer nasal dress it runs on into reign, into French reine, queen, and into regina. You will have seen old inscriptions to Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina. That is the R-N- form of the same root, and it sits under every European crown. You can read more on the order-word in The Archaic Origins of Archetyping (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-archaic-origins-of-archetyping). Both sounds, the N-D- and the R-T-, are in that oath. They are not only in the gods but in the men who swore it. The Mitanni king whose name heads their line is Artatama. That is Ṛta-dhāman, R-T-A, then D-H-A-M-A-N. You will find the proper spellings here, in the text of this podcast. I am not very good at pronouncing these names. You have probably noticed. I do my best, but I am pretty rubbish at it. Ṛta-dhāman means “the abode of cosmic order.” Ṛta is cosmic order. Dhāman means abode, home, as in mansion, as in domain. So the R-T- of ṛta, cosmic order, is built straight into Artatama’s name, and his name heads the Mitanni line of kings. Another of their kings, Tušratta, with the R-T- in it, is Tveṣa-ratha. Think of Tuesday, deus, Zeus. I have done a podcast on the meaning of Tuesday (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/double-deity-meaning-of-tuesday). Go back to it. We use these sounds every time we say day: deus, Zeus Pater, Dyaus Pitar in India, Jupiter in Latin, in the Italic branch. So Tušratta is Tveṣa-ratha, “he of the charging chariot.” In south Dublin, where I grew up, we have Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham. This is what I mean by illuminating the ancient in the everyday. A rath is a round, a ring. The crossroads, my metaphor of a wheel with spokes, comes back where the Mitanni name their king for the ratha, the chariot. The wheel made the chariot possible. It began as the big, heavy wooden wheels you see on some of the first carts in human culture. You can see them preserved in the great museum in Yerevan. You can see one in the great museum in Dnipro, which you will be able to visit freely as soon as the Ruschists withdraw. One of the oldest carts in human culture is on display there. When I first visited, knowing none of this, I walked straight past it. It turns out to be one of the first carts in human culture. The R-T- is in cart too, with its sense of right, straight and moving round. The same metaphor runs through Buddhism: the turning of the wheel, when the Buddha gave his teaching at Vulture Peak, near Rajgir. I have been there, and we will go again, as part of Finding Manuland on the Ganges, at Varanasi. That was one of the turnings of the wheel. The metaphor is immanent in one of the great Indo-European religions. Happily it was kept in a non-Indo-European language, Tibetan. It has now been brought back into Indo-European by some of the great scholars alive today, and by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his patronage. So back to the Mitanni king Tušratta: Tveṣa-ratha, he of the charging chariot. Ratha is the chariot-word, R-A-T-H-A, an R-T-. Its R-T- is kept in chariot too. That is what I mean by sound-meaning bundles. They travel through words across different branches of the Indo-European languages and keep the same meaning. Chariot, ratha and cart keep the same meaning. A sound-meaning bundle travels from Mitanni Indo-Aryan into English, a Germanic language, thousands of years apart. These are the cryptotypes, the stock in trade of Finding Manuland. They are new. As far as I know, nobody else has noticed them and focused on them as I do, nor on my extension of the cryptotype to the signifier. That idea was brought to my attention by an early reader and listener of my Finding Manuland work. Go back to my episode on the meaning of meaning (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-as-linguists-holy-grail), about two years ago, where I announced the discovery. So here is another instance, in Rathgar, Rathmines and Rathfarnham: wheel, round, circle. The chariot-word is itself an R-T-. The very form stands word for word in the Rigveda, at 5.61.13. Look up Rigveda 5.61.13 and you will see what I mean. And Varuna, sworn in the same breath as Indra, is in the Veda the keeper of ṛta, cosmic order itself. So the force-sound and the order-sound stand side by side in one Bronze Age document. That is centuries before the Brahmins reached India, before steppe ancestry entered their genes, and before the Painted Grey Ware entered what became the archaeological sites of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Before we had the archaeogenetics, we had no evidence that the Yamna’s descendants reached India by way of Sintashta. So: Indra’s N-D- among the witnesses of the Mitanni treaty. Ṛta‘s R-T- in the names of the kings, and in the god beside him. The M-N- in the foundation There is even a third sound hiding in that first king’s name. It is one Finding Manuland has been chasing elsewhere. Ṛta-dhāman. The second half, dhāman, means abode, dwelling, domain, home. It is the home-and-foundation word. It carries the M-N-, worn down to “-tama” on the surface, in Artatama. The M-N- sound is immanent in it even though you cannot see it. The nasal, the N, drops out of sight. It is the same disappearing act the maternal M-N- performs in mother, M-T-R on the surface, only to reappear in maman. Go back to my piece on the moon, the menses and the maternal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal) and you will see what I mean. It is a member of the sound-family hidden by ordinary wear, recoverable once you know to look for it. That the masked word here should mean foundation is a small gift. The M-N- is the foundation-sound of the whole system: the ground, the matter, the abode. Matter, from mater, the Latin for mother, with the M-T- and the M-N- immanent in them. The rivers in a god’s name Indra’s N-D- carries one last thing into the domain of our mansions. It is the D-N- turned back to front. The right way round, that sound names the great rivers of the homeland, ancient Ukraine: the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. Where the D-N- is the flowing water, the N-D- is the force, and the ground the water divides. Indra is exactly the god of force who shatters the enclosure to set the rivers free. The god sworn at the crossroads carries, in the two consonants of his name, the mirror of the sound that names the waters of the country he ultimately came from. I mentioned Isidore of Seville, the Wikipedia of the ancient world. It is Isidore who sets down that the Tanais, the Don, marked the edge of Europa’s realm, and that east of the Don lay Asia. So that is the weight of the Don, the D-N-, and the Donets. They marked the border of where the writ, the jurisdiction, of Indo-European Europa ran. So the crossroads holds, in one clay tablet, the Mitanni treaty, more than a set of surprisingly early gods and sound-meaning bundles. It holds the Indo-European family’s deep sounds caught in the act. The force that moves. The order that binds, with the N-D- in binds. Three and a half thousand years ago, in writing, before either was written in the East, in India. And it carries them, by ṛta and by reign, R-E-I-G-N, alike, into the words you and I still use today when we say: this is right. The treaty sealed under the moon Now the sound that lies under all the others. That treaty was sworn under a moon-god. It is the one with Indra and Mitra and Varuna in it, and the R-T- of order in the names of its kings. A few days’ ride west of the Mitanni heartland stood Harran. Its “age-old association with the Mesopotamian moon-cult,” the archaeologists who dug it write, “has never been in doubt.” Its god was Sîn, the moon, called Nannar in the old inscriptions. Remember my Enheduanna, the Moon, and Me (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/enheduana-the-moon-and-me). She was a priestess, wedded to the moon-god Nanna. Harran lies a few hundred miles north of where she came from. Sîn’s emblem was the disc and crescent. That is also the emblem of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, founded in 1350 to train civil lawyers after the Black Death had killed so many of them. It is in the flag of Türkiye. And, as I have spoken and written about before, you can see it on the bench with the painted boar, which I saw in the Urfa museum. It was excavated at Göbekli Tepe, another place I visited and recorded a podcast from (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli), also around this crossroads. So we see the disc and crescent from around 9000 BCE. Much later we see it as the emblem of the god Sîn. Soon I will go to the temple of Mēn in western Anatolia, and I cannot wait to record an episode there. So the emblem of the moon-god is the disc and crescent that the excavators say is “known to be that of the Moon-God of Harran,” at the crossroads. His temple there, Ehulhul, the “house of rejoicing,” was rebuilt by king after king across a thousand years. I drove past Harran’s massive, long walls as night fell that evening. We will go back. We will try to find Ehulhul, to pick up the energy there, and to pass it on through the sound-meaning bundles we use to talk to one another, in sound and text, in this ultra-modern world. And here is the join. The moon-god of Harran “was considered a suitable guarantor for political treaties.” A well-known study notes that he was invoked by Šuppiluliuma of Hatti, the Hittite, and Mattiwaza of Mitanni. The very pact that names the Indo-Aryan, Indo-European gods was sealed in the presence of the moon. The founder-sound’s own sky-body and the founders’ gods meet, literally, in one document. I knew none of this when I formed my hypothesis of the moon-based semantic signalling system. I first wrote about it on Twitter, in December 2022, when I worked it out. The moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system was the best hypothesis I could find for why the M-N- sound-meaning bundle had become so entrenched in English, a Germanic language. I traced it back across all the branches of the Indo-European languages. It appears in six of eight founder names, which is beyond chance. It also appears in almost every sentence we speak, for meanings that are uncannily similar: Mana, energy, and meaning itself. Then I searched for a hypothesis. I found one, and I announced it publicly. In the language of modern science, I preregistered it. We will come back later to the linguistic test I have since been able to run, using state-of-the-art frontier models. The founder-sound’s own sky-body and the founders’ gods meet, literally, in one document, the Mitanni treaty. How long the moon held Harran The moon held that ground for an astonishingly long time. The earliest mention of Sîn’s temple at Harran is on a clay tablet from around 2000 BCE. That is the very moment the Sintashta were cooking up what would become India, Hindi and the Rigveda. They were cooking up the names of the Indo-Aryan gods. They were cooking up what would become Iranian and Zarathustra, and the words carved into the cliff at Behistun by Darius the Great, of the Achaemenid Empire, in the sixth century BCE. Here you can see what I am doing in stretching your mental model of time and place. We run from Sintashta, in modern-day Kazakhstan. It is a tiny site. Across Kazakhstan there are countless burial mounds, Yamna and others, but a few of them hold the origin of the whole of Indian and Iranian culture. That is an amazing finding. So, 2000 BCE. Picture yourself on Google Maps, flying all the way from Kazakhstan into central Anatolia, to Kültepe. That is the moment of Tarmana’s contract to buy a slave, which I saw in the Ankara museum. It is around this same time. At that very moment, at Harran, there is a clay tablet from 2000 BCE that mentions the temple. The Babylonian king Nabonidus, two and a half thousand years ago, rebuilt the ruined Ehulhul because, he says, the moon-god came to him in a dream. He wrote in cuneiform: “Sin to the kingship called me; in the night season he caused me to behold a dream.” And long after Babylon and Rome had fallen, the people of Harran, whom the Arabs called the Sabians, were still keeping the moon-cult alive, into the eleventh century of our own era. Harran lies on the plain below Urfa. I drove across it many times on my way to the Tektek Mountains, looking for mounds and archaeological sites I will talk about later. Arabs, a Semitic-speaking people, have lived in this area for thousands of years as well. They called these people the Sabians. Think of Sabina, a name from the Roman tradition. The Sabians kept the moon-cult alive into the eleventh century of our common era. So 2000 BCE is the first written evidence of the temple, which a Babylonian king rebuilt because the moon-god came to him in a dream. Then you flash forward three thousand years to the eleventh century of our era. That is not long after the first Turkic-speaking peoples arrived in Anatolia. One ground, not two proofs A discipline is owed here. Sîn is not an Indo-European god. His moon-cult is not an independent witness that the moon was foundational to the moon-based semantic signalling system. That system is the story I tell of why the M-N- is there. What we know empirically is that it is present. It is immanent in almost every sentence we speak. It is immanent in the founders’ names of six of the eight living Indo-European mythological traditions. That is our starting point. Then we trace it backwards through every discipline we can find, linguistics, history, archaeology and cultural archaeology, and we try to work out how the M-N- sound could be there. I do not believe it is magic. I found that the Proto-Indo-European word for the moon was mḗh₁n̥ōt. Then, in December 2022, I worked out that light shining through the moon might explain the illumination. The M-N- is in illumination, and the L-U- in illuminate means bright light, in Nostratic. That is a possible explanation. The Yamna used the word mḗh₁n̥ōt for the moon. At that moment the choice of mḗh₁n̥ōt was entirely arbitrary. The sign and the signified are entirely arbitrary. I do subscribe to that thesis of Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. The M-N- is in Yamna too, of course. But once the Yamna had chosen this word for the instrument they used to measure time and weeks, semaine in French, to plant their crops by, and to arrange their days and months, it became entrenched. The M-N- is in instrument, too. Once they used the moon for that metaphor, all the other words that grew from it, mind, moon, measure, human, carried it forward. So six thousand years later we still use a word with the M-N- in it in almost every sentence. After that moment it was no longer arbitrary. That you end up with the M-N- is beyond the realm of chance. This is an innovation in modern linguistics, and we will come back to it. So Sîn is not an Indo-European god. His moon-cult is not an independent witness that the moon was foundational in Indo-European communities. That would be to count the same thing twice. The reading Finding Manuland holds is the other way round. The moon recurs at the crossroads, in the Semitic Sîn and in the language of the Indo-Aryan incomers alike, because these were never sealed-off worlds. They were a single field of contact and shared substrate. One thing in passing, because we will return to it. All living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna at Mykhailivka. The Yamna community itself, around 4000 BCE, was a product of two main strands. Modern geneticists can see both parts in the Yamna genome. One is the Eastern European hunter-gatherer strand, known by various names. The other is variously called Levantine, Mesopotamian or Iranian. There is a principle that runs through all of this work. If people migrated along a certain road in one period, you will often find migrations along the same road at other times, in both directions. So one part of the Yamna at Mykhailivka came from this very area of the crossroads. Then they came back, with Yamna genes inside them and with their language, by way of Sintashta. That is why I say these were never sealed-off worlds. The moon mattered to both the Semitic-speaking and the Indo-European-speaking parts of this world. They were a single field of contact and shared substrate, over thousands of years. So this is not the Indo-Europeans copying moon-worship from the Semitic peoples, mḗh₁n̥ōt and the M-N-. Nor is it the Semitic peoples borrowing Sîn from the Indo-Europeans. It is a soup. What the crossroads shows is not two proofs but one ground. The moon is the deep common currency. We see it in the crescent on the bench with the painted boar, from around 9000 BCE at Göbekli Tepe. The moon mattered enough to be one of the few signs carved in stone. The moon is the deep common currency, the common money, of the place where the different families meet and from which they spread: Hurrian, Indo-European and Semitic. It is a crossroads of these languages. They did not meet only once. They met layer upon layer: Iranian, Armenian, the Indo-European element in Turkic, Anatolian. We have this layering in all our cultures across Europe and in the lands between Indo-European India and Ireland. It is not one meeting from which everything flows. It is layer upon layer upon layer, like one of those cakes. Mēn There is a lighter echo of this at the western edge of the same upland. That is where we are going next, and I am so excited about it. In Roman Asia Minor, the west of today’s Türkiye, people worshipped a god called simply Mēn. I have posted the ancient statue of Mēn that you find at the far end of the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. It is a great statue of Mēn with crescents rising from his head. I will try to put a picture of it with the text of this podcast. Asia Minor is a name scholars sometimes use for Anatolia. I usually say Anatolia, for the land of the modern state of Türkiye, and the crossroads is its eastern part. Crescents rise from his shoulders. It is the sound itself, worn by a god of the moon: M-E-N. Whether the name is the old moon-word is my reading, and Finding Manuland’s. It is not any other scholar’s report. So I leave it where it belongs. It is my hypothesis. Even if you do not believe it, I hope you will stay for the journey, and for all the wonderful things that are not my hypothesis. One is the Nature paper which determined that all living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna community (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/yamnaya-and-ancient-ukraine) at Mykhailivka. That has the status of science. The archaeogenetics demonstrated it. Menua at Ararat North of all this, around the great lake at Van, rose the kingdom of Urartu. Its name is one we all already know, though in disguise. Urartu was what the Assyrians called it. The Semitic-speaking Assyrians’ writ ran as far as Van at different times. So again, it is a crossroads. The Hebrew Bible took the same name and, with its later vowels, turned it into Ararat. The mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest is the kingdom by Lake Van. The king who built that kingdom up was named Menua (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua). The reference works call him “a prodigious builder,” whose “surviving inscriptions dedicating temples, storehouses, and fortresses outnumber those of all other Urartian rulers.” When you walk into the great museum in Van (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-road-to), Menua’s name is the one you see. The Turkish state, which organised the museum, put it there. So when I say Menua is a founder of Urartu, and ultimately of the Armenian people, it is not only me saying it. Modern Turks celebrate their link to the ancient peoples of the land they live in today. Of all the Urartian monarchs they could have chosen to honour at the entrance to the great museum in Van, they chose Menua, Minua. The Hebrew record catches the pairing in a single verse. When Jeremiah summons the northern kingdoms against Babylon, he calls up Ararat and Minni together. The M-N- is in summons, too. Minni, M-I-N-N-I, is Mannea, the highland’s other kingdom. It lies south and east of Lake Urmia. On any map of Anatolia, ancient or modern, you will see three lakes to the east. Van is one. Urmia is another, and I am not sure which of the two is bigger. Both are salt water. The third is Lake Sevan, in modern-day Armenia. So Mannea, the other kingdom of the highlands by the crossroads, lies south and east of Lake Urmia, in today’s Iran, around what is now Saqqez, S-A-Q-Q-E-Z. You can find it in the Bible, at Jeremiah 51:27. The identification is settled, and it is not mine. It is not my hypothesis. It is settled by other scholars, by the field. The Encyclopaedia Iranica gives Mannea as “Neo-Assyrian Mannāyu, Old Testament Minni.” The standard Hebrew lexicon says the same. Diakonoff and Kashkai’s gazetteer of Urartian geography files it there. Minni is a hapax. It occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, in this verse, Jeremiah 51:27. And its ground matters twice over. Mannea’s country runs up against Ardini-Muṣaṣir, the holy city from which Armen Petrosyan, the great Indo-Europeanist of contemporary Armenia, whom I cite a lot, derives Urartu’s royal line. A kingdom whose name carries the M-N- frame sits next to the region that produced the dynasty whose founder’s name, Menua, carries it too. R-R-T, Ararat and Urartu, beside M-N-. In a Semitic tongue, from a prophet, Jeremiah, with no stake in either the Indo-European family or the Assyrian. The names the outsiders kept set the two frames, M-N- and R-T-, side by side in scripture. Three founders, one sound The Urartian language, like Mitanni’s, was a relative of Hurrian, neither Semitic nor Indo-European. The founder-sound does not need the speakers to be Indo-European, only the name to ride the field. And a serious scholar has put that name where this search would put it. By this search I mean the one I record in Finding Manuland. The N-D- is in finding, and the M-N- is in Manuland. The N-D- is a bound sound-meaning bundle: bound, ground, boundary. So there is the D-N- of the rivers, the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. Then there is its reversal, the N-D-: the end, the boundary, the ground. And sound itself. The Armenian comparatist Armen Petrosyan reads Urartian Minua, Menua, as one with Greek Minyas, the eponym of the Minyans, the tribe of the Argonauts. Following Paul Kretschmer, he reads him as one with the Cretan Minos too. He traces the whole cluster to the Indo-European root manu-, “man,” the root, he writes, that “names the first man in certain Indo-European myths.” The first man. The first human. Manu, in the early Indian texts, survived the flood. Minos judged the dead. And Menua built his realm at the foot of the mountain where Noah’s flood ended. I have stood at the foot of Ararat. Three founders, one sound, drawn together by a published, living comparative philologist. He cites Lincoln, and J. P. Mallory too. I have corresponded with Mallory. He is the author of the foundational text, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, where mḗh₁n̥ōt appears. So the founder-sound, the M-N-, is here in the rock too. It is a few days north of the tablet where Indra’s N-D- and ṛta‘s R-T- were pressed into clay. That tablet became the Mitanni treaty, which survives to this day, found in the imperial archives of the Hittite Empire (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/mount-hazzi-the-hittites-mount-olympus) at Boğazköy. At the crossroads the sounds, the M-N-, the N-D-, the R-T-, are not scattered across a family and a hemisphere. They are within a week’s ride of one another. A week’s chariot ride. Where the sounds cross Hold all this against the usual map. We file the deep origins of the West under Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the deep origins of Indian religion under the Veda. We keep them in separate rooms. The crossroads knocks the wall down. It does it not with one striking fact but with a convergence, a plethora of facts, in one small upland, within a few centuries and a few days’ travel by horse. Here, at the meeting-place of the roads, the sounds of the whole system meet as well. The founder’s M-N- stands in the rock at Ararat, in the name of Menua, a scholar’s line drawn straight from him to Minos and to Manu. The force of the N-D- is pressed into the treaty-tablet in the name of Indra, his earliest datable appearance anywhere on earth. The order of the R-T- is in the names of the kings who swore it. Ṛta-dhāman, the abode of cosmic order. Tveṣa-ratha, as in Rathmines and Rathfarnham. And in Varuna, beside Indra. The rivers’ D-N-, reversed, is the very sound of Indra’s force. Indra, with the N-D-. Indra releases the waters, the rivers. His name is the mirror of the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube that water the Indo-European homeland he set out from, stopping at Sintashta along the way. And the moon is under all of it, in Sîn of Harran, who guaranteed the oath and outlived every empire that swore by him. Five deep sounds of one family, caught together, in writing, three and a half thousand years ago. Before there was a Rigveda. Before there was a Greece, before there was a Rome, to carry any of them west. The thread that ties them is not Mesopotamia, and it is not India. It is the steppe, the ancient Ukrainian steppe. It is the same homeland by the Dnipro that sent Manu east, and Manannán west to become Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity. The same river sent Érimón west to become the first high king of all Ireland. Here it sent one branch south, into the richest meeting-ground of the ancient world. There it left, all in one place, its gods, its chariot, its founder-name, and the sounds of force and order and the rivers. They are on the record a thousand years and more before the textbooks let the Indo-European family begin. Mesopotamia is the amazing host civilisation, and the Hurrians its deep and gifted people. The moon-cult of Harran is Semitic ground the incomers met and honoured, not a trophy taken. The point is only that the Indo-Europeans were there, at the crossroads, sooner and more centrally than we were taught. They are not a footnote to the Near East but one of its ruling powers. They carried a whole system of sound-meaning bundles that had set out long before from a grass country by a Ukrainian river. That river is the Dnipro, and the village is Mykhailivka. It lies almost opposite Enerhodar, where the Russians are doing their best to blow up, by accident, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. For now, the mighty Dnipro divides it from the forces of the Ukrainian government. The order, in one line At the crossroads where Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran and Armenia meet, the Indo-Aryan kings of Mitanni swore by Mitra and Varuna and Indra in the fourteenth century BCE. It was the height of the Hittite Empire, the first Indo-European empire. It is the oldest datable writing of those gods anywhere, around 1400 BCE. Their own names carried the R-T- of ṛta, the cosmic order, the order-word. The T is the hard sound, and it is in word too. Indra’s name carried the N-D- of force that mirrors the D-N- of the homeland’s rivers. D-N- reverses to N-D-. The oath, the bond, the binding, with the N-D- in those words too, was sealed under Sîn, the moon-god of Harran, whose cult outlasted every empire near it. A few days north, at Ararat, a monarch named Menua, whose name Armen Petrosyan reads as one with Minos and with Manu, built his kingdom in stone. And he built the canal I stood beside, which still draws water from the great Armenian highlands, past the lowlands, to grow the vegetables and the tomatoes I ate when I was there, and on into Lake Van, to sweeten its salt water. Menua’s Canal. The steppe inheritance did not only go east to India. It reached the crossroads of the world. In one upland, and on one tablet, the Mitanni treaty, it left the whole family of its sounds: founder, force, order, river and moon. There they have been waiting, together, to be read, and to be carried through this work into your mind. If you pay for my work, you are doubly amazing. You are in my mind, immanent in it. We exchange your Mana through your money, and it inspires me. It gives me the resources and the time to do the research and to visit these places. If you do not pay, I will always try to keep my work free and open to everyone, because I want us all to know all of this. It is so amazing. I’ll be back with you soon. Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 5 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 6 Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe (https://www.powerofmana.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   11 Oct 2026

   Podcast | The Crossroads

   The first of the Atlas journeys I introduced you to the Atlas series of Finding Manuland in five podcasts (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep), published over the last while. This is the very first of the Atlas journeys proper. I saved one of the best for it. Radiating out of this one is a series of pathways through the Anatolian side of Manuland. We will use them to show the method, the linguistics and the organising focus for the journeys still to come. Someone posted on Substack today that their mind was being blown by this series. That is a wonderful thing to hear. My own mind is, frankly, blown by it too. Today I also gained beta access to one of the first world models open to early adopters. I saw a month or two ago that it would come out in beta, and that people were invited to send in their use cases. I made mine about Finding Manuland and the Atlas papers. A world model is a neural network that builds spatial images and camera-controlled video, up to a minute long, from photographs, films or drawings. The very first proper vision network depended on ImageNet. The creator of ImageNet is the person behind this new world model, made by World Labs. I am very excited about it. Over the weekend I will play with it. The first thing I will try is a journey around Mykhailivka, the village on the Dnipro from which all living Indo-European languages set out. I have the archaeologists’ drawings of the excavations there, and I will test World Labs on them. There are conditions attached to the beta, so I will have to be careful about what I post. But we will see what I can do. So stay tuned. Where the crossroads is So, the crossroads. Bring your mind to the modern state of Türkiye. Many of you will have been there on holiday, probably on the westernmost coast, near Smyrna, or Kaş. I spent two wonderful weeks camping down in Cilicia, opposite Cyprus. That is not where we are going. We are going east. You may not have a mental model of this part of the world. I certainly did not, before I began all of this work a few years ago. So if you have a chance, now or later, open Google Maps or Apple Maps, or an atlas if you have one in your library. Look at Türkiye and go east. You will find Lake Van. It is always big on the map, on any depiction of Anatolia from ancient times onwards, because it is a huge saltwater lake. Just below it is the place I am calling the crossroads. Each episode of Finding Manuland has three parts. There is the M-N- sound. There is the linguistics. And there is the journey, the itinerary. Calling these episodes an Atlas does not mean giving up any of the three. The roads that cross The Ukrainian Yamna steppe inheritance did not only run east, to India or to Tajikistan. Picture a wheel with spokes radiating out of it. At the great crossroads of the ancient world, just south of Lake Van, the Indo-European family’s deepest sounds crossed too. This is where a treaty swore the Vedic gods centuries before the Rigveda. The Rigveda is the oldest surviving holy book in Indo-European culture. Modern scholars believe its poems, songs and prayers were settled into their form around 1200 BCE. Centuries before that, we have this treaty, sworn under the moon-god of Harran. I visited Harran last January. I had to hurry through it, unfortunately. It was late in the day, and I had been in the Tektek Mountains looking for another ancient shrine to the moon-god. We will return to Harran, on the podcast and on the ground. This is also where a monarch named Menua (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua) built his realm, at Ararat. Its own people called it Biainili. It was based at the modern city of Van. You may remember the video I filmed there (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-finding-manuland-hunt) last January, on an amazing blue-sky, snowy day. I was the first to go up to Van Castle that morning. In biblical times the Biainili people were known as Urartians. Menua, with the M-N- in his name, was the son of one of its founders and a founding figure himself. Just south of Van is Menua’s Canal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep-5ed), still called by his name today. That is where the crossroads begins, the roundabout this episode is about. And all of these things are caught together on one clay tablet, before the East had written any of them. By the East I mean Iran, and India. In earlier episodes (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep-1f0) I followed the road east to India and Iran. We will travel that road again. This road turns south-west, to the place where all the roads cross. It is the upland where Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the steppe and Iran all meet. It is the country of Van (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-road-to) and Mardin, of Urfa, the modern city of Şanlıurfa, glorious Urfa, and of Harran. I have stood in all of those places. And that area holds something that ought to be on the first page of every history of the West, and somehow never is. Selling the inheritance down the river This week the US Secretary of State made a video, and an appalling speech, in front of the Acropolis. He was trying to tie his undergraduate course on Western civilisation to the beginning of Greece. Those of us who have listened to Finding Manuland know that what we now call Western civilisation began in ancient Ukraine. Marco Rubio and his administration are trying desperately to sell Ukraine down the river. In doing so they are selling the very inheritance they claim to promote. The Nazis did something similar. They went in search of the homeland of the Indo-Europeans, and assumed it was up in Norway, in the Nordic countries. All the while they occupied the very ground around the modern city of Dnipro, the Dnipro River and Zaporizhzhia, which the Russians are relentlessly bombing now. Rubio and his MAGA adherents are promoting the surrender of Ukraine under this peace troll, which they have inherited from their communist and Russian hypnotisers. They could have befriended Ukraine. They could have helped Ukraine drive the Russians out of all of its territory, as will inevitably happen. Instead they are trying to troll Ukraine into defeat. They are not only losing their own country. They are losing the very germ of the civilisation they claim to promote. And in Finding Manuland we know that germ has a place on the map. Two roads to the crossroads The Yamna made a journey to Anatolia around 3600 BCE. It was matched by the journey of the Yamna’s brother and sister culture, which established the first Indo-European languages there. I have said this before, and I will say it again because it matters so much. The first attested Indo-European language is Anatolian, Hittite. You may remember my visits to Kültepe (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/first-writing-in-any-indo-european), near the modern city of Kayseri, where the earliest Indo-European writing was found. I have also brought you my discovery in the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. It is among the first Indo-European writing anywhere: a contract in which Tarmana bought a slave (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-pops-up-3924-years-ago), set down in cuneiform on clay. It shows that the M-N- sound, Mana, the sound of energy and charge, is immanent even in the earliest Indo-European writing. So the M-N- sound was not only present among the Yamna in eastern Ukraine. Tarmana’s ancestors had come by another road, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, from the upper Volga and the Volga bend. These are parallel tracks. All living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna at Mykhailivka. The dead Indo-European languages, attested first, came by the other road. They include Anatolian, and we have the Hittite libraries of Boğazköy. I visited there in late September and October 2023, an amazing visit. So the journey to the crossroads has two starting points, as far as modern archaeogenetics can tell. One is by the Dnipro, where I spent four years as a diplomat, from 2018 to 2022, and where the Finding Manuland story began. The other road comes from the lower Volga bend. It crosses lands where everyone spoke Ukrainian until the Ruschists murdered, genocided and destroyed their culture, and occupied them. Ukraine is relentlessly striking those lands today. Today it hit the loading bay of the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery, in Rostov. Everyone there spoke Ukrainian until very, very recently. From that area came the dead Indo-European languages known together as Anatolian. So here is the first meaning of the crossroads in this episode. The Anatolians arrived in this area through the Areni-1 cave. The first of them would have come not long after 4000 BCE. Six thousand years in the mind Every episode of Finding Manuland tries to plant a new spatial model of the Indo-European world, from Ireland to India. It also tries to plant a model of time, as I have been doing in my own mind. That model runs from around 4000 BCE to today. Six thousand years. Most of us had another model installed while growing up, as I did in Western Europe. Ancient Egypt flows into Judaism, into Christianity, into Greece and Rome, and somehow this flows into our own culture and language. That was the model available three centuries ago. It came before archaeogenetics, before the amazing archaeology of recent times, before modern linguistics. In Finding Manuland I fuse those disciplines together: history, archaeology, genetics and linguistics. Some of you will remember the episode where I celebrated Timothy Snyder’s move (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/timothy-snyders-move). The brilliant former Yale historian’s lectures on Ukraine used to begin with the Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast. Then, at a moment I marked in a couple of Finding Manuland posts, someone clearly got to him. They explained what I explain to you in these podcasts. All living Indo-European languages, Greek included, come from the Yamna, on the lands we now call Ukraine. Ancient Ukraine, as I call it for short. So Timothy Snyder began to move his model of Ukraine’s history back a thousand years before the Greek colonists reached its coast, around 1000 BCE. They had come to the land of their ancestors without knowing it. When Apollo travels to the Azov Sea coast on two swans, those who told and wrote the story did not know it. Homer and Pindar, on the west coast of Anatolia and beyond, did not know that their genes and their culture came from there. Their language was an evolution of the language spoken by the Yamna in Mykhailivka. That is the village I will have the World Labs model picture for us. So we can watch, in real time, even an amazing historian like Timothy Snyder stretching his mental models of time and place. I was trained first as a historian, before I became a lawyer, a diplomat and a cultural archaeologist. For a historian, it is all about sources, about texts. Where we have no texts, before the first Greek colonists on the coast of Ukraine, we now have archaeogenetics. This week the Ruschists are removing the stelae in Greek that mark the Greek heritage of Mariupol, which they are temporarily occupying. There are many Greek villages and towns along that coast. The Ruschists have destroyed them and forced out those who identified as Greek. Some may descend from the first colonies, though most were settled in more modern times. Timothy Snyder is not only widening his model of Ukraine, which he has spent his life studying. He is widening his model of history itself, a discipline founded in the nineteenth century, before archaeogenetics and before modern archaeology. A highly disciplined orthodox historian is supposed to set aside genetic or linguistic evidence that complements or contradicts the texts. But you cannot set it aside if you are trying to get to the truth, as he is. So even his idea of what history is grows. That is a small version of what has happened to me, and of what I am trying to help happen in your mind. We widen our mental models (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/our-expanding-mental-model-of-history) of space. So here we are at the crossroads, just south of Lake Van, by Menua’s Canal. You can look it up and find pictures of it. We also stretch our sense of time back six thousand years, then fill in the stretches between then and now. That gives us a different temporal structure from the conventional one of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity, which the linguistic and other evidence now contradicts. Mardin by night So this is the upland where Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the steppe meet. Two roads came from the steppe. One brought the ancestors of every living Indo-European language. The other, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, brought the ancestors of the now-dead Anatolian languages. And Iran meets them too, south of the saltwater Lake Van. It is the country of Van and Mardin. Mardin is the most amazing place. You see it from a distance, lights above an escarpment, a sort of small mountain. I was heading to Mardin knowing nothing about it. I went because of the name. It has the D-N- in it and the M-N- in it, and I thought, that sounds interesting, let me check it out. As night fell I was driving towards it, after quite a journey. I came through what would have been named Kurdistan, had the Kurds attained statehood. I crossed mountain ranges in the snow. Google Maps kept sending me down roads too full of snow, so I had to take other turns. I was never sure I would get there. Eventually I found my way up the mountains and down again. Then I saw the first road sign for Mardin, about thirty kilometres away. I am going to make it tonight, I thought. I am going to make it by nightfall. In the distance I saw a small mountain with lights on it. There was no archetype in my mind for anything like it. At first I thought it might be a statue lit up in the distance, a cross or an Islamic monument. Gradually it resolved itself. It was big. There were lights all the way across the top of it. I will put up a picture so you can see what I mean. Oh my gosh, I thought, this is where I am going. How amazing. And then I got there. If you ever have the chance to go to Mardin, please do. You must. If you ever have the chance to visit the crossroads I am describing today, you must. It is amazing. That is the third element of each Finding Manuland episode. I am trying to whet your appetite to visit these places. Urfa, Abraham and Harran Then there is Urfa, Şanlıurfa, glorious Urfa. The historical Abraham of biblical fame, a founder of the Abrahamic religions, is believed to have been born there around 2000 BCE. That gives you something to hang the new mental model on. 2000 BCE is two thousand years after the first Indo-Europeans set out and eventually reached Anatolia to found the Anatolian languages. It is also around two thousand years after the Yamna community at Mykhailivka began to cook up what would become all the living Indo-European languages. It took another thousand years for the stories of Abraham’s time to cook into the ethnogenesis of the Jewish community, which grew out of the Semitic-speaking community Abraham belonged to. Around 1000 BCE we have the historical King David and the historical King Solomon. The stories of Abraham in the Old Testament began to be written down in the first millennium before the common era. That is the richness of a city like Urfa. Some say Abraham came from Ur, which I have written about in the context of Enheduanna (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/enheduana-the-moon-and-me), the first named author in human culture. Others say Urfa. I have filmed there too (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli). And then Harran. Into the historical era, the community there worshipped the moon-god. My hypothesis is that the M-N- sound comes from the word the Yamna at Mykhailivka, in Kherson Oblast, used for the moon. I call it the moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i). So in a series about the M-N- sound you might forgive me for being very keen to visit Harran. I was just too tired that day. I will return. So use those four places as your rough idea of the crossroads. Van, just below the lake. Mardin. Urfa. Harran. Iraq is just over the border from Mardin. You wake up there on your first morning, look out from the top of the escarpment, and see Iraq in the distance and the whole flat land of Mesopotamia. Move westwards to Urfa and Harran, and Syria is over the border. This was northern Mesopotamia in ancient times. Today it is part of the modern state of Türkiye. One community from India to Ireland This whole area ought to be on the first page of every history of the West. Somehow it never is. One of my long-term goals with Finding Manuland is to change more than my own mental model of time and place. More than yours, too. I want to change it across our whole culture, from India to Ireland, and to introduce the idea of Manuland as one community. That includes Turkic-speaking people, though it is mainly the Indo-European-speaking peoples. And we can unite behind that idea. That is my ambition, for this podcast and for the whole project. So: the gods of the Veda, written down in a treaty in the fourteenth century BCE. Not in India, but here at the crossroads, four hundred years before there was a Veda to write them in. The Rigveda was settled into songs and only written down long after this treaty. The treaty has been known for a century, and I will lean on it hard here. But the crossroads holds more than the names of the gods. It is where the roads of the whole Indo-European family cross. The Anatolian road crosses here, and so does the road of the part of the family we all belong to. If you can understand these words in any Indo-European language today, you are an emanation of the Yamna at Mykhailivka, on the Dnipro. Most of us between Ireland and India are, genetically, to one extent or another. All of us are, culturally. If you speak the lingo, your words and the way you think come from there, even in your second, third or fourth language. Maybe you speak many Indo-European languages. Then your brain is really pickled in what the Yamna of Mykhailivka became. The Rigveda is still kept today by the Brahmin priests, in the Brahmanas, and arranged in Mandalas, which are books, or worlds. Monde. The M-N- is there in Brahman, in Mandala and in monde. So this is the first of the Atlas journeys after the five introductions. At the crossroads the deepest sounds cross. There is the founder-sound, the M-N-, the sound of force, Mana, energy, charge. There is the sound of order: right and writ, and its reversal, T-R-, the trickery of the druj, the lie. There is the sound of the homeland’s rivers, the D-N-. The Donets, where I worked for three years from 2015 to 2018, in Stanytsia Luhanska. The Dnipro, where I worked for the following four years as a diplomat, from 2018 to 2022. The Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube are all D-N- rivers (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ancient-ukraines-don-sounding-rivers) in the homeland. That is one of the reasons Mardin caught my eye. And the moon is under all of them. The M-N- sound under all of them, caught together in one place, the crossroads. At its centre is one document. If you want to see the Finding Manuland system whole, before India or Greece or Rome had written a word of it, the crossroads is where to look. The sound, and where it comes from The thing Finding Manuland follows is a small recurring sound. M, a vowel, N. It sits under the names of the founder-figures across the Indo-European family. India’s founder is Manu, the first human and lawgiver. The Germani have Mannus, M-A-N-N-U-S. You may remember my podcast series Which came first, Manu or Mannus (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/ep-1-using-m-n-to-determine-which). Feel free to go back to it, to read it or to listen if you prefer. Iran has Aryaman. Crete has Minos. Wales has Manawydan. Ireland has the pre-eminent deity of pre-Christian Ireland, a sea-god to some and sovereign of the Otherworld, son of Lir: Manannán. And it has Érimón, the first high king of all Ireland after the fall of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the death of his brother Donn. Donn and Danann. The D-N- again, as in the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. At the very crossroads this episode is about stands the Urartian king Menua. In a seventh branch the sound runs reversed. At Rome it is N-M-, Numa. The mythological founder of the Latin, Italic branch is Numitor, grandfather of Romulus and Remus. Numa succeeded Romulus as the lawgiver. So, Numa, N-M-. In Ireland there is Nemed too, in the mythological record. He came from Scythia, long before the Tuatha Dé Danann and before Donn, one of the sons of Míl, the third wave to take the island. In that record every one of these waves comes from Scythia, an ancient name for Ukraine. Donn, as I often mention, is the grandson of the son of Scythia. So, long before any of the evidence I speak about, the archaeogenetics and the linguistics that helped convince me, the monks who wrote down Ireland’s mythological record knew this. They set it down in the Book of Invasions, kept in the Book of Ballymote. It was kept, too, in the Book of Druim Snechta, which is lost. Apparently the last copy was swapped for a copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. We have billions of copies of that. It was the Wikipedia of its time. The Irish monks who made the swap made a real mistake. But I suppose they needed their Wikipedia. So we have the M-N- in the founder names of six of the eight living branches, and its reversal, N-M-, in a seventh. A single match would be a coincidence. Six branches carrying the same founder-sound is inheritance, not chance. Later we will come to how I was able to test this, and to show that it is far beyond chance. So the system is old. It is not borrowed late. The proof is the comparative method’s own gold standard, practised at full strength by a friend of this podcast, Bruce Lincoln, whom I talk about a lot. In his 1975 study of the first-man myth, a feature is shared by the far Indo-Iranian east, which lies very close to the crossroads, and the far Celtic west. Manu in India and Manannán in Ireland cannot have crossed the gulf between them by hand. It came down to both from the common source. That is one community of pastoralists, the Yamna (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/yamnaya-and-ancient-ukraine), at Mykhailivka on the lower Dnipro, around 3600 BCE. The archaeogenetics now traces every living Indo-European branch to them. Why that sound So why the M-N- sound under the founders’ names, passed down to us through so many mythological traditions from Ireland to India? My hypothesis, throughout Finding Manuland, is the moon. It has the status of a hypothesis. Modern linguists have reconstructed around a thousand words used by the Yamna, working backwards from all the living and dead Indo-European languages. The settled view among Indo-European linguists is that the Yamna’s word for the moon, the Proto-Indo-European word, was mḗh₁n̥ōt. It has two parts, meh₁-, measure, and a suffix. The moon was named for its work as a measurer. The moon is a dark body that holds light and gives it back. It is the one thing in the night sky in which the invisible becomes visible, as your mind becomes visible in your body. That made it the figure for what tells a mind from a body, a living thing from a stone. Suppose you were one of the Yamna, wanting to say: this is a stone, but this is a living being, another human. You might use the metaphor of the moon, of light shining through it, as through a vessel. It is the first body anyone watched die and return, month after month. Month, of course. So the lit-through, the measuring and the minding words gather the M-N- sound. That is my hypothesis. The linguist Allan Bomhard sets out the family of the men- root, to think. It surfaces as Sanskrit manas, Greek menos, Old High German minna, love, and Old Norse munr. That pattern is what I call a cryptotype. The word is Benjamin Lee Whorf’s, for a category a language carries without marking it on the surface. Flicker, flutter, glimmer and glow feel like one family of light-play, though no grammar files them as such. Manu and Menua ride the M-N- founder field by that covert kind of membership. Here is the thing to carry through the rest of this podcast. The M-N- is not the only such sound family our languages keep. Others shadow it. There is a sound for force, a sound for order, a sound for the great rivers. Each is a cryptotype (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal) in its own right, and each usually surfaces alone, in different words, in different centuries. What makes the crossroads extraordinary is that here they surface together. Mens rea Take a word this podcast has been circling without naming. Mens, M-E-N-S, the mind. And behind a deed, the mens rea. I studied criminal law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Its device, from its foundation in 1350, is the moon, a crescent. For there to be criminal liability for an act, there must be the mens rea, the intention. There is the actus reus, the act itself. But there must also be an intention, a Mana, an energy in it, which is projected back onto the person being judged liable or guilty. So mens rea carries the M-N-. It is a Latin formula, now English, and it means the guilty mind. A court must find it before it can convict. It is used countless times a day, in common law systems like English or American law. What a law needs is not a measurement of the act but the charge inside it. It is the intention that animated the hand that supposedly committed the crime. Animated, with the N-M-, the reversal of M-N-, inside it. Mana is exactly that charge. In the Power of Mana (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/m-n-sound-as-linguists-holy-grail) it is the energy in us, “the well from which all our intentions / motivations / attitudes / Mens Rea flows.” That is what the M-N- sound keeps carrying, wherever it surfaces under these founders’ names. Mana is the subtle energy in Buddhism and in Indo-European religion. It is also the subtle energy in words: their meaning. The M-N- is the subtle energy that turns mere matter into mind. It is the thing that tells a person lit from within from a stone. The moon is only the means of picturing this metaphor, and it carries the M-N- too. Light shines through the moon the way that charge, that energy, that Mana, shines through a thing, an object or a human. The way a meaning shines through the word that holds it. Around the crossroads, where the Hittites also reigned, people gave a divine energy to almost every living and non-living thing around them. The Romans did the same in early, archaic Roman religion. This idea of Mana, of energy in things, was deified. It animated the minds of Indo-Europeans on both strands. The Hittites came on the Anatolian strand, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, with the M-N- in it too. The Romans came from the Italic branch. As far as expert linguists can tell today, the Italic, Celtic and Germanic branches came out of a long meeting, over hundreds of years or more, between the Yamna and the Usatove people. That happened in a place we will visit again: Chornomorsk. A leap in linguistics from Chornomorsk Chornomorsk is south-east of Odesa. I usually say east, but I have looked at a map, and it is really south-east. It is a big port, and the Russians are bombing it relentlessly at the moment, so nothing is moving from there. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, was born in Chornomorsk. His name probably comes from it, though he is now thoroughly American. I think he left when he was around four years old. Claude Code is yet another world-changing technology that many listeners may never have heard of. It lets anyone give a computer commands in natural English. So anything a computer controls can now be controlled through ordinary spoken English. A massive leap in linguistics, from the same place. So, measure is the moon’s quieter job, as a keeper of the calendar. It keeps the moon-word provable. We know that mḗh₁n̥ōt comes from the Yamna community, as the word for the moon. I started from noticing the M-N- sound in so many founder names and words. Then I tried to work out what was going on. There is a certain energy, a certain Mana, common to moon, measure, mind, human, carmen and a heap of other words. What could be behind it? My hypothesis is that they can all be read as emanations, and there is the M-N- again, of the moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system. I was looking through those thousand Proto-Indo-European words. When I saw the moon, mḗh₁n̥ōt, among them, I thought: wow. Maybe this is not just an interesting phenomenon. Maybe the ubiquity of the M-N- sound, in the founders’ names and in almost every sentence we speak, comes from this foundational moon-based system. As far as I know, I am the first researcher to look for an answer to the question of the M-N- sound’s ubiquity. And I am the first to propose that it comes from mḗh₁n̥ōt and the moon-based semantic signalling system. You do not have to accept any of this as true. Put brackets around it and use it as an organising focus. Maybe all you will get from these podcasts is a way to pass the time while you cut the grass or walk the dog, or distract yourself from some pain in your life. Or maybe you will take it as the inspiration for a journey to Mardin. Spend a week there. It may change your life, as it changed mine, as so many places have that I found by searching for the patterns beneath the M-N- sound. The noise and the tune The sound itself is only so much noise. It is bound to come round again and again, in any language, by accident. What no accident accounts for is that the meaning follows the noise. So I talk about sound-meaning bundles. I am not talking about the sound M-N- by itself. I am talking about the bundle. The M-N- in mḗh₁n̥ōt carries a meaning, and you hear it in meaning itself. A signifier tells you that one word has a meaning you can express in other words, so the two are connected. The light of one word’s meaning shines through another word, and we say: X means this. That is the sound-meaning bundle travelling across time and space, from the Yamna at Mykhailivka over six thousand years into my mind, and through mine into yours, as I talk to you on Finding Manuland. And there it is, immanent in almost every sentence we speak. It arrives over and over in this sense of light, or Mana, or energy, shining through particular words. It is the charge that turns matter into mind. That steadiness, over six thousand years, is the thing to explain. And it is the evidence. In Part Two we go into the crossroads itself: the Mitanni treaty, the gods sworn in it before the Veda, the moon-god of Harran, and Menua at Ararat. Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe (https://www.powerofmana.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   13 Sept 2026

   Podcast | Finding Manuland: The Atlas, Episode Five

   The Harness Logic: Journeys and Papers Feed Each Other The journeys and the papers in the Finding Manuland Atlas series (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep) feed each other, and the Atlas grows out of the exchange: Atlas Intro Episode 2 (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep-fac), Episode 3 (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep-5ed), and Episode 4 (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/podcast-finding-manuland-atlas-ep-1f0). A journey grounds a paper. A real place, object or photograph gives the M-N- argument something tactile to stand on. The Sura crossing, on the outskirts of Dnipro, where those property developers tried to destroy that Yamna mound so they could build a fancy house on top of it, but instead found a stone circle, which prevented them from building the fancy house, and which lies by the Sura River. The 64 stones of that stone circle. Menua’s canal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua), which I have stood by, on the great saltwater lake of eastern Turkey, which was the capital of the Urartian Empire, and of Armenia, until the Russians gave this part of Armenia to the Turks, the Turkic language speakers. The crescent on the Göbekli Tepe (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli) bench, which I have written about and will write about again, the moon crescent on the bench which bore the painted boar that was found last year, and had lain under the stones which had buried the Göbekli Tepe site near Urfa, Şanlıurfa, in eastern Turkey, in part of northern Mesopotamia, since 9,000 years before the Common Era. The son of Manu that I saw on a column at Edessa, modern name Urfa, or Şanlıurfa, with its great, great museum, if you ever have the opportunity to visit. The museum at Urfa, where the oldest depiction in statue form of a human-sized human, with his obsidian eyes, is the first thing that strikes you as you enter this incredible museum, where many of the treasures from Göbekli Tepe rest. And the signage photographed at a site becomes primary-source corroboration in its own right, the museum’s own label stating the case. We must, and we do in Finding Manuland, balance the scholarship from the great universities of Tübingen, of Oxford and Cambridge and Dublin and Yale and Penn and all of those places. But we also don’t ignore the archaeologists who work in place in Türkiye. So if they state something, then we use that as weighty evidence. The papers, once finished, feed all of this Atlas in their turn. Each becomes a part of the frame the next journey grows from. Each is at once a finding and a seed, so every one is held to the same grounding bar. And this, I hope, will inspire you too, because Finding Manuland is also an iterating itinerary of infinite journeys, and as long as I live, I hope I will continue on these journeys. I have many hundreds of journeys to report to you as of today, and I hope that in the future I will have many hundreds, perhaps thousands more. And that they will inspire you, if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit places, or you have spare time, or you are just divorced, or you are looking for somewhere to bring the children in the summer. You are looking for a theme for a holiday. You don’t want to spend two weeks on a beach. You want to explore. If you want to learn about the sounds and the meanings in the words you use in your everyday world, then I am going to help guide you to the places where these words lived, live, and, as long as there is an Indo-European culture, will live. To India with the Rig Veda So then, if you can get your mental model from... So, we were in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, moving across Tuva, Afghanistan, and the route which those Sintashta migrants took all the way to India. And we know this because of the Rig Veda, which was standardised around 1100 years before the Common Era, and is traditionally cited as the oldest book in an Indo-European language, and the holiest book in an Indo-European language. Slightly complicated, because Zarathustra was probably three centuries before that, but the Zoroastrian corpus had to be reconstructed much later. We will get to all of these complications later. But in the Sintashta culture we have, and this was only discovered a couple of decades ago, the burial customs, for instance the placement of horses’ heads and the remains of funereal feasts, which match exactly what is in the Rig Veda. We know now, with genetic evidence, that the Yamna, who travelled from Ukraine, established the Sintashta culture, ran through these burial customs and buried their chariots, and their descendants would end up in India. India is really where this project was seeded, in some respects. The family’s root it is not, despite 19th-century people, and a lot of people who have this kind of sketchy view: oh, Sanskrit was the first Indo-European. But India is a parallel branch, the founder sound, M-N-, arriving there from the Dnipro, or here from the Dnipro. Imagine I am in India right now. We will go there again. I have been there a lot in the past. Arriving with the language and the chariot. And India kept manas, mind, at the very centre of its archive. So we have the Brahmin, who are the priestly caste, like the flamen. Again, M-N- in flamen, M-N- in Brahmin. The Brahmanas, which are the holy songs, are in the Rig Veda, and they are sung by the Brahmin, and they are arranged in mandalas, M-N- in mandalas as well, in the Rig Veda. I travelled in India in the 90s, and learned, probably from a guidebook, that India’s first man was called Manu, and it was the coincidence with the Germanic first man, Mannus, with two Ns, one N in Manu, and that is the Manu of Manuland. Though, as listeners will know, I actually took the word Manuland from the side of a shed near Maing (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i) in eastern France. It was the coincidence with the Germanic first human, Mannus, that first set this inquiry going. Earlier still, six months across India and Nepal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was visiting schools. They all became a part of me as I worked for a charity, trying to identify poor and clever, and mainly female, children, and put into place systems that could identify them, to qualify for scholarships paid for by a very munificent English couple. The Himalayan North: Ulaanbaatar, Spiti, Dharamsala The Himalayan north is where the sound and the moon-mind come back together, in places I have actually stood. And once, far north of the Himalaya: in January 2014, in Ulaanbaatar, I spent 14 freezing days keeping hypothermia at bay by mimicking the pilgrims’ circuits around the Gelug temple, the Gelug being the Dalai Lama’s tradition, spinning the maṇi prayer wheels. A nun there led me to practice on the sixth of January, and I encountered the figure of Yama, the death twin, for the first time, in that warm temple in Ulaanbaatar. In the autumn of 2019, in the Spiti Valley near Tibet’s border. The Spiti Valley, I have spoken about it before, but I will just remind you, is in the Himalayas, and it is the extent of Indo-European India. It is where, on one side of the valley, you have got Indo-European, and on the other side you have got Tibet, now occupied by China. When you visit Spiti, as I have a few times, and you look really carefully, you will see how people often are ethnically Indo-European, so they look like me, they have just got slightly darker skin, but culturally they are Tibetan. They have got Tibetan names, they speak Tibetan, they act with the same body language as Tibetans, and they worship in Tibetan Buddhist temples there. So it is a wonderful melting pot of the Indo-European with the Tibetan. But of course the Tibetan Buddhist memory is Indo-European itself. The Sanskrit tradition of Buddhism was solidified over eight centuries in the great monastic university of Nalanda, in Bihar in India, ending around the 11th or 12th century into the Common Era. That intellectual and religious inheritance had begun in the Sanskrit around 300 BCE with Shakyamuni Buddha and Ananda, his last disciple and the name of my cat, Ananda. That tradition was lost, really, in India until lately, and transmitted into a different linguistic family, into the Tibetan, the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, and preserved and elaborated and perfected by Tibetan Buddhists in their own language. And now it is being converted back into Indo-European languages. Just in the past couple of decades, under the patronage of the 14th Dalai Lama, who is my direct teacher, much of this Indo-European inheritance has now been translated back into an Indo-European language, and we have it again, available to Indo-Europeans. So that is very much part of our Finding Manuland Atlas, and where we range around. And in the autumn of 2019, in the Spiti Valley near Tibet’s border, near Mane village, M-A-N-E, not to be confused with Maing village, M-A-I-N-G, in north-eastern France, where Finding Manuland all began. In Mane village, under Manirang mountain, the Man- sounds thick in that contested borderland, where parts are occupied by China today, and you need to get a special pass to travel through certain parts of the Spiti Valley because of the military element, I photographed a Yama-like painting in a monastery there. In Dharamsala, on the 16th of June 2016, I heard the Dalai Lama teach on emptiness and the Heart Sutra, and was initiated into Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ, the M that closes the Oṃ. Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ. I have also spent time near Bengaluru, on the Dravidian line, which is where Indo-European India essentially ends and goes into Dravidian, the pre-Indo-European remnant of India, where the Indo-Europeans didn’t manage to convert them. This is where the M-N- meets a language family not its own. The Plain of the Ganges: Manu’s Own Country The Indian journeys still to come, in the future, are the ones I have thought about longest, because my own note on India is a single line: the sacrifice manuals of the Rig Veda are the texts closest in time to the Yamna, as indeed, I believe, are the esoteric texts of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The plain of the Ganges waits for Finding Manuland’s visit. Manu’s own country, the Yamuna, a river that runs through Delhi, and it waits with an address. Manu’s law book bounds a holy land by two named rivers, the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, and sets Kurukshetra beside it. And a thousand years later, the pilgrim Xuanzang found the people of that same district calling it the land of religious merit. So: me-, meaning measure, and rit, meaning right. The measure of your right, your merit. Upon your merit depends your karma, and your karmic propensities and karmic trajectories. So even in an English-language word, merit, we have two of the core fundamental Indo-European sounds: me-, meaning measure, as in mēnōt, meaning moon, the measurer, as the Yamna called it 6,000 years ago, and rit, the R-T- sound, the R-T- cryptotype, which is the second cryptotype, to complement the D-N- and the M-N- and their respective axes, which we will get to. Alexander Cunningham traced Xuanzang’s route mile by mile in the 1870s, and founded Indian field archaeology doing it. I want to follow both of them. Under the mounds of that plain lies the Painted Grey Ware culture, the archaeological horizon most scholars set beside the Vedic tribes, the footsteps of the first Indo-Europeans in India. So before we had ancient DNA evidence, it is the grey ware, the grey pottery, that manifests the existence of the first Indo-Europeans in India, at Hastinapura and across the Doab. And in the mountains I already love, a town wears the founder’s own name: Manali, read in tradition as the abode of Manu, with the temple to Manu himself in the old village, close by the hot springs of Manikaran. The far valleys hold the family’s last living twin cult. In Nuristan, within living memory of 1896, the supreme god was Imra, whose name descends from Yama-rajan, King Yama, the death twin, worshipped under his own name until the year the axes came, recorded by the British visitor who lived a year among the worshippers just before the end. The neighbouring Kalasha valleys keep the last unconverted corner of that world. Two Indian journeys I have named the longest. Kolkata, in Bengal, where comparative philology itself was born when a Welsh judge, Sir William Jones, sat down to translate the founder name Manu and heard the family in it. We will go there, and find the Man in the land. We will see where he did this. We will try to visit Sir William Jones’s garden, where he lived his last years. And Lake Manasarovar, below Mount Kailash, the highest great freshwater lake on earth, whose Sanskrit name means the lake of the mind, formed, the tradition says, from the mind of Brahma. The one great lake on our planet literally named Mind. Pilgrims of four religions walk around it, including the Buddhists. The Furthest Reaches: China, Polynesia, Egypt The family’s outer rim, the Indo-European family’s outer rim, and the non-Indo-European shores it touched. Almost all of it we will visit. Mongolia, walked in 2014, is the exception. At the rim, the discipline tightens to a single rule: where the sound turns up beyond the family, its recurrence is transmission, never an independent vote. China waits along three roads east I have not yet travelled, though I have been to China. The first is the Tarim mummies and the Tocharian tongue. The second is the Buddhist route through Nalanda, that great monastic university I just spoke about, that carried the sage word muni, and the moon-mind meld, manas meeting the heart-moon of the eastern texts. The third is the 20th-century road of Marx. Polynesia waits across the other ocean, where mana itself sits. The great early Buddhist scholar Atisha visited Indonesia incessantly, and a great account of this is in several texts. The concept of a contagious sacred charge, mana, energy, is a genuine human universal, and that is a fundamental hypothesis underneath the entire Finding Manuland thesis. So M-N- is the archetypal Indo-European sound-meaning of energy. But this is just one signifier for what different Indo-European and non-Indo-European traditions have been writing about for millennia. I catalogued over a hundred of them in The X-Factor, including Spiritus Mundi, which The Police sing about, Synchronicity, which The Police also sing about, and chi, ki, carmen, all monikers for what is essentially something immanent in energy, prana, breath. So the word is really the question. The one dated channel runs east from India to the western islands. The Indian traders did go to Indonesia. We know that, with many accounts of it. The Malay world. And the remote Pacific leg has no evidence under it yet. The archaeogenetics do not support the idea that mana in Polynesia emanates from India. It is held as a lead, leg by leg. So Egypt, with Amun, Amun-Ra, the great god, and the Amarna letters. M-N- again. Egypt waits, the missing neighbour, reachable through the Mitanni, the Indo-European-led people I mentioned earlier, and Amarna, where a great trove of texts from 1400 BCE was discovered in the late 19th century, and which is the evidence that Indo-European kings and monarchs were present and ruling in Canaan and Judea in 1400 BCE. So 400 years before the Jews’ ethnogenesis and the historical King David and King Solomon, a millennium before the Old Testament was basically solidified, and 1,400 years before the Roman, the Indo-European Roman, occupation of Judea gave us a self-sacrificing, culture-founding monarch, Jesus Christ. And the story of Jesus’ self-sacrifice was handed down to us in an Indo-European language, Greek. His self-sacrifice as a culture-founding king mirrors Odin’s own sacrifice. Wodan, Wednesday. Odin, who is the great All-Father in the Germanic tradition, who hung himself on a tree near the royal mounds in Uppsala, Sweden, and the account of which in the Hávamál says he gave himself to himself: I gave myself to myself, the old father. Just like Donn, again, another great self-sacrificing deity. Yima and Yama. All of these Indo-European first self-sacrificing monarchs performed the same role as culture-founding, self-sacrificing, leading all of the living along with them on the path of the dead, as indeed Jesus Christ did. Which is a clue which we will use and follow up. So Amun-Ra at the far end of a contact line in ancient Egypt. The North: Uppsala, Lejre, Møn, Sápmi and the Baltic The North awaits us with its own appointments. Scandinavia first: Odin’s mounds at Uppsala, where Máni is the moon-measurer, and Mannus, with two Ns, the founder, and Ymir the same Yemo twin as everywhere else. A world that made itself, and is in fact a downstream branch of the Dnipro. In Denmark, D-N- in Denmark, and R-K, the R-T- with the hard stop, at Gammel Lejre, the hall-town of the kings in Beowulf’s own background, the ploughland has yielded real sixth-century great halls, and, in 2009, a thumb-sized silver figure of a seated god between two birds, read as Odin enthroned with his ravens, one of them Muninn, whose name is Memory. Off Zealand lies the chalk island of Møn, one bare M-N- syllable of a name, its etymology an open question, where the folklore collectors of the 1820s recorded a hidden king inside the white cliffs whom they read as Odin in disguise. In Sápmi, the far north, the moon crossed the family’s frontier and kept its name: North Sámi mánnu, moon and month, borrowed from the Germanic world, so thoroughly taken in that every Sámi month name ends in it. Like every day ends in day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Dies, deus, Jupiter, Jupiter, Jupiter, Zeus, Zeus, Dyēus, dies, which is the root meaning sky. And when we say that people die, we are really just saying they are going to the sky. The first Indo-Europeans, the first progenitors of all living Indo-Europeans, called the sky Dyēus. He has gone to the sky. So we have this phenomenon again, even in our days of the week, if we pay attention to it. And every Sámi month name ends in mánnu. In 1692, an elderly Sámi drum keeper named Anders Poulsen stood in a Norwegian courtroom and explained his confiscated drum figure by figure, and named a round circle in the fourth row Manna, the Moon. He died in custody, as dominated people often do. The drum survives, in the museum at Karasjok, and we will go there. I want to stand in front of that circle and speak to you about it. Because the mana and energy of me being there, conveyed through my voice, the timbre of my voice, even across these WAV or MP3 files, wherever you are in the world, whatever you are doing, that mana is an energy exchange between you, me, and Anders, who stood in that Norwegian courtroom in 1692 and explained his confiscated drum figure by figure. And the Baltic, the forest country that travelled least and kept the moon word, mėnuo, nearly whole. Where my ancestors come from: Polish Lithuania, as they are registered as coming from on the documents when they entered America. Even before the end of the Soviet Union, I always knew that my family came from Lithuania, and I visited their village in Lithuania in 2015 and met my cousins there. And so mėnuo, nearly whole, keeps the moon’s own story in the Baltics. In the songs collected by Liudvikas Rėza in 1825, the Moon is a bridegroom who wed the Sun in the first spring and strayed, and was cut with a sword for it. The waning moon as the wound. Rėza was born on the Curonian Spit, in a village the sand dunes later swallowed whole. His memorial stands on the dune above his buried birthplace, and the moon-wedding song can be read aloud over it. And the Isle of Man itself waits, of course, Manannán’s island. And other greats. Maria Gimbutas, the great American Lithuanian scholar, worked out by looking at the archaeology and the linguistics, before ancient DNA demonstrated it, that these archaeological breaks, the break in the archaeological record, for instance that 95 per cent of idols in household altars all across Europe are female forms until this big break, where a patriarchal society burying one monarch under a mound emanates from Ukraine and moves westwards across Europe with the Yamna. She worked this out decades ago, but of course, because she was a woman in a male trade, archaeology, no one listened to her. Except the great J.P. Mallory, and many other greats, it must be said. And now Finding Manuland has the advantage of not only seeing this M-N- sound where we see it, but also of these giants, including Maria Gimbutas and J.P. Mallory and others, who have dedicated their intellectual lives to unpacking what it means for us to be Indo-Europeans and part of the same culture. It is often said, and we will look at this in detail, that Lithuanian and some of the Baltic languages are the closest languages we have today to Proto-Indo-European, the least changed. The Conceptual Spine: The Shared Floor Beneath the map of Finding Manuland runs a floor of work that anchors to no site, because it belongs to all of them. Some of it is the sound tested and measured: a blind corpus test, the M-N- behaving as a real, Indo-European-specific attractor and not a trick of the eye. The sound shapes of the Indo-European family’s oldest vocabulary, the M-N- amongst them, turn up in the surnames of roughly one in three people in traditionally Indo-European communities, about 48 million people in the United States alone. A 1970s list of about 90 of the world’s names for an invisible life force gives the sound its first test outside the family, and the test’s discipline is that most of them carry no M-N- at all: a small signal in a handful of zones that never met, held as checkable. And, with a straight face, the pattern reappears inside the very language of statistics we use to check it. The craft grew from what Galton first called reversion to the mean. M-N- in mean. Mean, measure. It is a measurement, a form of measurement, meaning average. And mean, and moon, and the M-N- are the same small handful of sounds and meanings, meaning measure. So a sound-and-meaning bundle emanating from the M-N- in mean, and mean, and moon. Mean: I intend, I mentally intend. Mens rea in English criminal law, which I studied at the University of Cambridge. Mean as in measure. Angra Mainyu, the mean spirit in ancient Iranian religion. Mean: you are mean to me, oh, you are so mean. Mean as in meant, as in signifier, as in meaning, which is the light of one word, the light of one meaning of one word, shining through another, connecting them. And mean and moon and the M-N- are the same small handful of sounds. Some of it is the method’s own pedigree and birth: the old art of reading the consonantal skeleton beneath the word, from Vico to Saussure. There are the greats who circled this cryptotype, the M-N- cryptotype, and stopped just short. And there is the novel I wrote beside the Dnipro, where the noticing actually started. Some of it is the architecture of founders and mirrors. M-N- against its reversal, N-M-. Manu against Numa. Manas against nāma. Namo gurubhyaḥ, namo buddhāya, namo dharmāya, namo saṅghāya. The founder names read as household offices. M-N- older than Logos, which is the word in the Greek Bible, the first Bibles. And the elided female third who belongs beside the twins. And some of it is the light-and-mind mechanism itself: the light that shines through the moon standing for the mind that shines through the body, corroborated in the roots for shining and for mind. There is mana as a contagious essence, in cultural psychology, sympathetic magic, which I have written about in my Disinfolklore project. There is the R-T- rule turning into its D-R- reversal: drama, druj, deception. And there is the project keynote, Reversion to the M-N-, which noticed the founder names first, and only afterwards reached for the moon as the reason they might all be there. The Skeleton Is Ready for the Next Vertebra The Atlas, the Finding Manuland Atlas, is what receives them. The skeleton is already standing. And in this form, this is the fourth of my introductory speeches. This is the skeleton of the entire project, so that each new visit is a vertebra slotting in rather than a new spine starting from scratch. So the eastern edge stays open on purpose: Harran and its moon god, which I visited in January, the cliff at Behistun in today’s mullah-led Iran, the Danube road, the Tarim road, the plain of the Ganges, the mounds of Uppsala, the sea god’s own island. All of them wait as anticipation, unwalked, and the frame is built to take them. This is the frame, these four Atlas introduction papers. This is what makes this an atlas, not a memoir. It is lifelong by design. One core re-laid at every stop, and one new bone added, a frame for as many journeys as a lifetime allows across Manuland. Every time I travel to a new place connected to the M-N- sound, whole new vistas open up, which is why I think Finding Manuland is one project I will continue for the rest of my life. We have several years’ worth of podcasts and publications to make, and a lot of travels to come. I am very glad you are on this journey with me. The road runs on east, and the skeleton is ready for the next vertebra. First in series: Episode 2: Episode 3: Episode 4: Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe (https://www.powerofmana.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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