benbreen

Very interesting, have you written this up anywhere? Curious if these add up to new historical knowledge or if they are more just conveying information we already knew. At a certain point as we gather more finds like this I suspect it will tip from the former to the latter.

I’m currently at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Was just thinking of this post ten minutes ago when I saw what the plaque described as a “humanoid-lion hybrid creature” from the Neo-Hittite empire in 9th century BCE. In fact lion-men of various sorts are everywhere in the more ancient parts of the museum. Makes me wonder about potential continuity, as distant as this is.

My daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.