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| Sunday, 24 July 2005 |
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What Orient and Jerusalem mean - and our future Solemn Thoughts by Wendell Solomons (Continued from last week) It is from that patriarch Abraham, who figures in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions which went westwards to Canaan. All three names Abraham, Sara (his wife) and Hagar (Sarah's handmaiden) can be associated with South Asian rivers flowing at that time: the Brahmaputra (Brahma's offspring), the Saraswati (Brahma's wife) and Hakra (a sub-river of the Saraswati.) The three coinciding Indian names in Mesopotamia would shock mathematical probability if we do not observe the quantum of sea and caravan traffic between the valleys of the Indus and Egypt's Nile (implied by Genesis 25:12-18.) Some linguists tell us that the vocabulary of Kashmir in India still contains some 10% of words related to Hebrew but 'Judea' itself may be linked with 'Yudda' (warrior social estate), a term still widely used throughout South Asia. Name UR in Indian subcontinent We find UR widespread. Nallur, for instance, means `excellent city.' In today's spoken and written Tamil, UR means `village' or 'settlement'. In Sinhala, 'urumaya' indicates `heritage'. Nagpur means `Naga city'. UR travelled east of India and the name of Singapore is derived under the same influence and means `Lion City'. In NAG+PUR and SINGA+PUR, you observe that a `P' slips in. For language, the reason is in the need for clarity of spoken sound. Take the case of modern English where `an' is sounded instead of 'a' before words beginning in `a, e, i, o, u.' The convention avoids merging the sound of indefinite article `a' with a succeeding noun. UR in Greece If you look up the word in Webster you are referred to Greek POLIS, `city' and Sanskrit PUR, `town'. The last term adds the Greek word directly meaning the count of houses for management of the POLIS or PUR. To related statecraft purposes, Sir William Petty - Oliver Cromwell's Surgeon General during the Irish wars - used the term for his year 1683 treatise using numerical methods to provide information on the number and worth of households. Latin URBS or 'city' remains in English URBAN. So could the names Arab, Iraq, Iran and Eire help us fill in the dots between far-flung peoples on the globe. The last country, Ireland, sheltered from Roman centurions, became the western outpost in the 5th Century of the Christianity absorbed by St. Patrick from the ORIENT (the West was the 'auxiliary' and termed the Occident, coinciding still with modern German 'auslander'). So, despite the mists of time that we have encountered, all these names link with Aristocracy, Aryan and also with Aurum, the Latin and chemical name for gold (sourced by Webster's dictionary to the Orient). At 5,500 BC the Kheeveri mountains (in Afghanistan) were an early source for copper and then, man's first bronze implements. The British islands and most of Africa missed the age of copper smelting and the mountains provided us with the second metal's Latin and chemical name Cuprum. When you take the letter W and treat it as a composite vowel (evolving from 'U U' it wasn't present in the Roman alphabet) then you will discover ORIENT (`the location of the UR') links with WORTH. That is consistent with Arta-Sastra, a term used today in South Asia for `economic science' (the suffix `-SASTRA' meant `esoteric knowledge'). Also, ARTA-SASTRA is the very title of a multi-volume work on statecraft for princes attributed to Mauryan counsellor Kautila, contemporaneous with Alexander the Great. WORD (in contrast to `lecture,' or Greek `logos') can be linked with common coin or WORTH. Our future To sum up now on our excursion, we may for brevity's sake place UR, Worth and Aurum on the table. The set suggests that by 2,000 BC, a new social entity, the city, had consolidated. In time, the city found it expedient to use gold for city economic tokens. The city community facilitated education, trade and industry, and served to augment the fruit of human activity. The worth of consolidation wasn't lost, for instance, on the British. In their Empire they began by teaching community to children by giving prominence to sports (therefore most world sports carry English names.) History did not open with 'Me' only. In that connection consider the words of today's lead Western network TV illusion profiler Ayn Rand when the chain-smoker was dying of lung cancer in 1982: "The world is dying - not I." We can't be her victims. The record suggests that our future cannot be
found in conceit, self-adulation and clashes of crass opportunism. A rapid
sequence of events that arose in the post-1997 unipolar situation - ranging
from the attack on Asian currencies, attack on Yugoslavia, attack on
Afghanistan, attack on Iraq and the Indian Ocean tsunami - underscores it:
our future depends on restoring a system of balance in the world city not
profiling us to megalomania using spin doctors for TV. |
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