Return of the Storm God - Appendix I: Hydronyms (revised 20-10-25)

If hydronyms are the deepest fossils of language, then the history of myth and religion must be rewritten from the rivers up.

Preface

This work demonstrates that hydronyms - the names of rivers and waters - are the deepest linguistic fossils of humanity. They survive dynasties, languages, and religions. They hold continuity where history fractures. From Vinča and Armenia to Sumer, Egypt, and the Celtic West, hydronymic roots preserve the primal grammar of civilisation: axis and vessel, light and water, serpent and star.

Part 1 lays the academic foundation, using Krahe, Nicolaisen, Villar, Perono Cacciafoco, James, and Orueta. Hydronyms emerge as the most conservative elements of Indo-European and pre-Indo-European strata, surviving conquest, replacement, and redaction.

Part 2 re-examines Waddell. His protest against Semitic bias was right; his instinct that ‘we still speak Sumerian words’ was right. But his method faltered. He mistook hydronymic fossils and functional archetypes for men, kings, and races. By restoring these names to their hydronymic and luminymic logic, his fragments cohere into a stronger whole.

Part 3 restores continuity. Here, new terms are introduced:

• Luminym: a light-root.

• Theanonym: a name where god and goddess are united.

• Ouonym: a hydronym linked to Wsjr / Osiris.

Through these tools, it becomes clear: lugal is not ‘great man’ but ‘light in the galactic sea.’ Krst is not a messiah’s title but the husk encased in water, prepared for rebirth. Shem is not Noah’s son but the planted axis. Gu-gal is not a ‘canal inspector’ but the cosmic lord of waters, trivialised by consensus into a clerk. He is equivalent to Osiris, the Storm God, consort of the Great Goddess and Lord of All, rendered an administrative functionary. One is put in mind of the Carry On movies, which often irreverently parodied historical tales.

Gu-gal: The Great Channel of the Waters

1. The Consensus Flattening

In standard Assyriology, the epithet gu-gal is usually glossed as “canal inspector,” because in later Babylonian usage the Akkadian word gugallu meant an irrigation official. Modern dictionaries then retroject this bureaucratic sense back into Sumerian divine epithets, so when Ishkur/Adad is praised as gu-gal an-ki-a (“gu-gal of heaven and earth”), he is translated as nothing more than a celestial irrigation officer.

This reduction is the same academic habit that renders lu-gal as “great man,” gal as “great” alone, and krst as “anointed one” only in a biblical sense. Archetypes are flattened into jobs; gods into clerks.

2. The Sumerian Morphology

The actual Sumerian morphology tells a very different story:

• gu – throat, voice, gullet, cord, rope, canal, channel. Not “cord” in the narrow sense, but any conduit through which a flow passes.

• gal – the watery expanse, the sea, the abyss, the vast substrate. “Greatness” is only a secondary abstraction: it is great because the sea is immeasurable.

So gu-gal = the great channel of the watery expanse.

3. Archetypal Function

When applied to a god like Ishkur/Adad, gu-gal does not mean he inspects canals. It means he is the cosmic channel through which the waters of heaven and earth are apportioned. It encodes hydronymic duality:

• Gu = form, throat, axis, measurable channel.

• Gal = flow, goddess, watery expanse.

• Together: the god as the form through which the goddess flows.

This is the same duality seen everywhere: Osiris and Isis, Inanna and Dumuzi, king and sovereignty goddess. The channel (male form) exists only to serve the flow (female substrate).

4. Continuity into European Languages

The survival of gu and gal roots in English and European languages makes the archetype visible even today.

• gu / gar = channel, throat, gullet, gush: gut, gullet, gulp, gorge, gargle, gargoyle, gutter, gully, gulch. All preserve the idea of a channel of water or breath.

• gal = watery expanse, milk, sea: gulf, gala, galaxy, Gaelic, Galway. All tied to water, milk, or vastness.

• gu + gal together = gargoyle: the carved throat through which water (gal) flows. This is a medieval European survival of gu-gal in literal stone.

These are not coincidences: they show that the hydronymic logic of Sumerian survived into later languages, even as scholars tried to erase it.

5. Significance

To call Ishkur gu-gal an-ki-a is to recognise him as the axis of the great channel between heaven and earth. He is the conduit of flow, the one through whom the goddess’s waters bring life. The human canal inspector mirrored this cosmic role, not the other way around.

Thus:

• Gu-gal is not a petty job title.

• It is an epithet of cosmic significance: the channel of the expanse, the Logos-cord, the form through which the infinite waters of life are given order.

• Our own languages still speak it. Every time we say “gulp” or “gulf” or “galaxy,” we unconsciously echo the archetype.

6. Conclusion

Consensus glosses reduce gods to bureaucrats and myths to jobs. But the evidence of morphology, archetypal function, and linguistic survivals proves that gu-gal was never a “canal inspector.” It is one of the most profound terms of the Sumerian lexicon: a title for the channel of the cosmic waters, the form within the flow, the axis in the abyss.

Our speech still carries these roots – in gulfs, gulches, gutters, gargoyles, galaxies. When we restore their meaning, we restore our ancestors’ vision: that gods and goddesses are not clerks or abstractions but archetypes of the physics of nature itself.

• In the ancient mind, all form arises from water. The river carves the valley, the flood lays the soil, the spring brings fertility. This is why gal is not simply “great” but the formative goddess-substrate – she is the water that shapes everything by ratio.

• The serpent coiling around the hill or staff = the external measure, the visible ratio winding around form. This is the cord stretched, the spiral you can see.

• The dragon within the hill, the underground channel = the hidden ratio, the flow inside, unseen but shaping from within.

• Together they are one: god/goddess as totality. The form (axis, cord, serpent) and the flow (waters, dragon, substrate) are not opposed, but dual aspects of the same creative physics.

That is why every symbol – staff, pillar, mountain, temple, pyramid – is entwined with serpent or guarded by dragon. The ancients were saying: all form is ratio, and all ratio is water in motion.

1. Form of the word

• Language comes through Old French langage, from Latin lingua = “tongue, speech.”

• Standard etymology: PIE root dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s = “tongue.”

2. Restoring the hydronym

• The tongue is not just flesh – it is a channel of sound and breath. The throat and tongue are the gu – the conduit of voice.

• That “-gu-” sound at the heart of lingua / language is not accidental: it encodes the gu = throat, gullet, channel.

• Lan- / lang- = to extend, to project, to stretch out. So: lan-gu = “the stretched channel, the extended throat.”

3. Archetypal meaning

• Language = the channel of the word. The gu in it is literally the hydronymic cord through which the flow of meaning passes.

• It shows that even the word we use to describe speech is itself grounded in hydronym logic: breath as water, throat as channel, word as flow.

4. Survivals around it

• Lingua → tongue, but also link, line, align – the stretched cord of speech.

• Gu → gut, gullet, gulp – channels of flow.

• Together: language = the luminous channel (lan) + throat/flow (gu).

The implications are profound. Sumerian and Egyptian are not dead isolates but foundation tongues. The Bible’s patriarchs are mythic constructs, not ancestors. The serpent was not Satan but river-wisdom. The goddess was not whore or mother but vessel and throne. What religion and consensus fractured, hydronyms restore.

This appendix is not a supplement but a stand-alone testament to truth, logic, and evidence-based restoration. It demands a radical reassessment of Proto-Indo-European studies and of human history over the last 8,000 years. The rivers, not the races, are the carriers of memory. The serpent, not the sword, is the goddess’s wisdom. And the kings imagined as men were never men at all: they were functions of water, light, and axis, carried through cultures that once knew the goddess as primary.

Scholars must take heed. The waters have not forgotten. Neither should we.

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The Self-Evident Case for Hydronyms

My case is simple, rational, and self-evident. It requires no academic scaffolding, because it begins with what every human has always known.

What sound does a river make as water runs over stone? Gl-gl, gal, gol, gug-gug, guggle. What sound do we make when drinking that water? Glug, gulug, gargle, gulp. These are natural imitations of the same phenomenon, heard by everyone since the dawn of humanity.

So if the earliest person, before any formal language, wanted to communicate ‘water’ to another, how would they do it? They would gesture waves with their hand and make a gl sound. If they wanted to ask for a drink, they would mime drinking and make the same sound.

If they wanted to indicate the vessel holding the water, they might tap it and mimic the sound: k-k-k. Hard things make hard consonants. Flowing things make fluid consonants. Rock says k. Water says gl. This is not theory, it is observation.

From these primal associations, it follows naturally that gl / gal / gul and kl / kal / kar words are the oldest fossils in language. They evolved and survived because they were rooted in universal human experience: soft versus hard, flowing versus stable, the throat and the river. At the meeting-place of these opposites, variants arose, combining the primal roots into a spectrum of meaning.

Some became sacred. Why? Because sacredness is not arbitrary. No one wakes one morning and decides to worship a random object. Sacredness is attached to necessities: water, food, shelter, stability. Without water we die, so water became holy. Without stone and soil we have no shelter, no food, so rock became holy. These were the things revered, deified, and named first.

Hydronyms therefore are not an academic curiosity but the very foundations of human speech. They encode what is essential to life and what is sacred. Gal and kal exemplify the primal binary of fluid and form. They are the bedrock of communication long before ‘language’ was codified.

Therefore, any serious study of ancient etymology must begin with hydronyms. To ignore them is to build on sand. Without that foundation we risk generating only partial truths, or worse, chains of error. If such data are then enshrined as ‘fact’ and referenced onward, they become dogma: a branch that was never joined to a tree, roots that never drew the water that gave it life.

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The Egg as Archetypal Exemplar

The egg is the clearest natural image of the hydronym principle. It unites in one form all the opposites and necessities that the earliest humans observed in water and stone, and from it we can understand not only words but the origin of sacredness itself.

1. Shell as kal/kar
   The egg’s chalice – its chal- or shell – is literally calcium carbonate, stone in miniature. Calcium still carries in its name the primordial kal, the sound of hardness. The word chalice itself preserves this: a vessel of hard material that holds sacred liquid. The shell is kal/kar – the consonant of stone and containment, the enclosure, the cell.

2. Interior as gal/gar
   Inside lies the flowing gel. Albumen and yolk are water-heavy, mutable, soft. Modern words like gel, gill, glug, gargle all echo this sound. This is gal/gar, the sound made by water in a stream or throat, the very origin of hydronyms.

3. Life as sac
   The egg is sacred because it visibly holds life. The word sacred derives from sac-, which always denotes a pouch or membrane containing vital fluid (yolk sac, amniotic sac). Sacredness is thus not an abstract concept, but recognition of what holds life-giving liquid. The egg is a sac – and therefore sacred.

4. Union of opposites
   The egg combines the primal binary:

• soft vs. hard

• fluid vs. form

• water vs. stone

It is gel in a shell. A river and its bed in miniature.

5. The serpent as wave-form
   In Orphic myth, Phanes hatches from the cosmic egg encircled by the serpent. This is not decorative but archetypal. The serpent embodies the sinusoidal wave, the ripple on water, the breath moving across its surface. It is the perfect analogue of flow: fluid made visible in form. Wherever serpents coil around rods, hills, or the egg itself, they mark the same polarity: life’s motion encircling matter. Because of this, the serpent became the sign of the goddess: life, fertility, water, and flow.

6. Cultural exemplars
   The egg as sacred archetype appears globally:

• Egypt: Ra arises from the cosmic egg floating on Nun’s waters.

• Veda: Hiranyagarbha, the golden egg, rests on the cosmic flood.

• Orphics: Phanes bursts from the egg encircled by the serpent.

• China: Pangu hatches from the cosmic egg, dividing sky and earth.

• Christianity: The Easter egg symbolises rebirth and resurrection.

• Alchemy: The ovum philosophicum is the vessel of transformation, often serpent-bound.

7. Other archetypal parallels
   The egg is only one manifestation of the same hydronymic truth:

• A jar: hardened vessel enclosing fluid.

• A garden: earth as jar, enclosed to hold water for life.

• A chalice: cup of stone or metal, vessel of the sacred liquid.

• A kernel in a husk: grain as gel in a shell.

• A hill with a dragon: stone enclosing the serpent-flow.

• A womb: sac of life-fluid encased in body-wall.

8. God and goddess polarity
   This is why the earliest divine imagery was binary. The god is the mountain, rock, container, the kal. The goddess is the river, serpent, flow, the gal. Life arises only when these meet. Their union is the origin of the sacred, encoded in every egg, jar, garden, womb, and hill-serpent myth.

9. Exemplar of the system
   The egg therefore crystallises the whole hydronymic model. Its chemistry (calcium shell), its vessel form (chalice), its sound values (gel and cell), its mythic serpent coil (wave-form, breath, ripple), and its sacred symbolism (sac) all converge. What spoke to the first humans still speaks to us: the polarity of kal and gal, hard and soft, form and flow, stone and water. From this polarity came life - and the concept of the sacred.

And by extension:

The serpent as wave-form, above and below

The serpent is the ideal emblem of flow. It is wave embodied, the sinusoid made flesh. But serpents are not only seen wrapping around sacred forms; they also appear within or under them. Both positions express the same principle: fluidic force in relation to hard form - one encircling, one inhabiting.

• Encircling (around)

  • The Orphic cosmic egg circled by a serpent.

  • The twin serpents entwined around the rod (caduceus, staff of Asclepius).

  • The serpent encircling the world (Jörmungandr, ouroboros).

• Internal (within / under)

  • Greek Python beneath the omphalos at Delphi - the fluidic serpent contained under the stone navel of the earth.

  • Norse Fáfnir, the dragon lying in the earth on his hoard, serpentine wealth as subterranean flow.

  • British ‘worm hills’ and barrow-dragons, the wyrm within the mound.

  • Mesopotamian Tiamat - chaos waters in the form of the dragon subdued and divided, her body becoming the world.

  • Chinese long/dragons living beneath mountains and springs, coiled in the earth, rising as rain-bringers.

  • Hindu nāgas in the underworld waters, serpent-beings inhabiting subterranean rivers and lakes.

• These “dragons below” are not different from the ‘serpents around.’ Both express the same primal polarity:

• kal (stone, mountain, hill, temple, egg-shell) as container.

• gal (serpent-wave, sinusoidal life-force) as what coils within or around it.

Together they are the archetype: flow and form joined, above and below, outer and inner. That is why dragons became elemental in later cosmologies: air-dragons, water-dragons, earth-dragons, fire-dragons - all iterations of the same wave-force in matter.

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This appendix has been placed outside the main body of the book for one reason only: its length and density. What follows is a long, heavily evidenced treatment of river-names and their linguistic and symbolic implications. It is not an optional ornament, but the evidential backbone upon which much of the Storm God argument rests.

Hydronyms – the names of rivers, springs, streams, and waters – are the most conservative fossils in language. They endure when kingdoms fall, when languages shift, and when myths are redacted. They cross millennia more faithfully than almost any other form of word. They are the oldest scripture we possess: the rivers wrote themselves into our tongues, and their names have carried forward memory that written chronicles obscured.

In this appendix I do three things:

1. Academic Foundations.
   Using only mainstream scholarship – Krahe, Nicolaisen, Villar, Tovar, Perono Cacciafoco, James, Orueta – I set out the hydronymic discipline, its root families, and its methodological safeguards. This shows that hydronyms are not speculation but the most secure evidence we have for Europe’s linguistic prehistory.

2. Re-examining Waddell.
   I then turn to L. A. Waddell, who, despite his flaws, was one of the few early scholars to see that consensus Assyriology was distorted by biblical bias. He sensed continuity but misread the evidence, turning hydronymic fossils and epithets into dynastic kings and ‘Aryan colonists.’ I endorse his protest, but correct his method by showing how the names he misinterpreted were in fact hydronyms and symbolic composites.

3. Restoration.
   Finally, I set out my own reconstruction. Here I introduce new terms – luminym (light-root), theanonym (a divine name holding god/goddess polarity), and ouonym (hydronyms linked to Wsjr/Osiris and Ouse-like forms). With these tools, the continuity of Drift Culture becomes visible: theanonyms such as lugal and krst are revealed not as ‘great men’ but as polar archetypes of water and light, axis and vessel, god and goddess. The rupture imposed by religion, which historicised these archetypes into patriarchal fictions, is thereby exposed.

This appendix is long because the evidence must be laid out in full. It is placed here so that the main argument of the book can flow, but it must not be skipped. Without the hydronyms, the full scale of continuity cannot be grasped, and the fraud of their suppression cannot be understood.

Read it as scripture written in water – a record not of kings and chronicles, but of rivers and names, carrying forward the memory of god and goddess entwined, until religion broke them apart.

This is part of our heritage. This is a glimpse into the minds of our ancestors that has been ignored, forgotten, and mis-framed because men of power created religions that overwrote the ancient mind and tongue, and imposed a facsimile of it upon their empire as official history. Since that time mankind has struggled to recover from the rupture, and often has not even realised that it occurred.

Consequently, academic consensus is still in the process of emerging from conventions that arose relatively late and which shaped the institutions upon which modern scholarship has been built. To see our ancestors through the lens of that distortion is to be doubly misled: once by the deliberate disconnect imposed, and again by the inertia of inherited bias.

We seek instead to walk in their skins again, to think as they thought, through archetypes and natural correspondences, and to delineate clearly between natural symbolism and fictional bias. Hydronyms are a key to unlocking the minds of our ancestors, so that we can once again look through their eyes with greater clarity, and hear the rivers speak the names they first carried.

We admit and declare openly to having no formal training in the academic disciplines addressed in this book. All viewpoints and assessments have been carefully considered over several decades of engaging with publicly available reference works, books, academic and amateur research papers, internet resources, and most recently AI-assisted reviews of data in the public domain. With a keen sense for pattern-recognition, we have tried to reconcile a mass of material into a reasonable and consistent analysis that satisfies a Holmesian style of summation. The conclusions reached do, consistently and repeatedly, return to the same evidential points set out here.

Whilst we are more prepared to speculate than is usually acceptable in professional academic arenas, it is not without just cause. Consensus born of misinterpretation or lack of data has always been vulnerable to error and subject to later correction. The present author has accessed enough of the consensus, and perceived so many inconsistencies, that re-evaluation is demanded. When the unlikely or impossible are eliminated from the theoretical, what remains appears to tell a very different story - one that is continuous and coherent, not fragmented or coincidental. Yet everything remains open to criticism and correction. No theory is beyond falsification by data as yet unknown.

If hydronyms are the deepest fossils of language, then the history of myth and religion must be rewritten from the rivers up.

The implications for academia, if I am correct in my assessment, are profound. There is an urgent requirement for a radical reassessment not only of the importance of hydronyms, but of the entire edifice of proto-Indo-European studies. The recognition that Sumerian and Egyptian roots survive, not as isolates or curiosities but as living strata within our tongues, demands a full re-evaluation of linguistic history.

Yet the reach of this discovery extends even further. If hydronyms and theanonyms truly preserve the continuity of god and goddess, axis and vessel, serpent and star, then the history of mankind over the last eight thousand years must be rewritten from the ground up. The rupture of religion, the misprision of academia, the suppression of the feminine and the demonization of the serpent - all of these become not incidental but structural, distortions layered deliberately upon an older truth.

To take hydronyms seriously is to take seriously the record our ancestors left us in the very names of rivers. It is to admit that the oldest strata of human memory still speak, and that modern scholarship has been deaf to it. What is required is not a minor correction, but a radical re-alignment: a bottom-up reassessment of human history, its languages, and its beliefs, grounded once more in the archetypal correspondences of water, light, axis, and vessel.

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Hydronyms as Fossilised Memory

Before alphabets, before priestly scribes, humanity spoke to the land in names. The most durable of these names were not bestowed upon fleeting settlements or shifting kingdoms, but upon the rivers. To name a river was to acknowledge both dependence and continuity. The waterway carried life, trade, and time itself, and so its name became more than description – it was memory. These names are what modern scholarship calls hydronyms. They have proven to be the most conservative linguistic fossils known to us, enduring through invasions, language shifts, and cultural transformations.

A hydronym is the proper name of a body of water: a river, stream, lake, pool, spring, or marsh. In distinction, a toponym refers to a place-name more generally, including towns, settlements, or regions, while an oronym designates the name of a mountain or ridge. The boundaries between these categories are often porous. Settlements take their names from rivers: Inverness, ‘mouth of the Ness,’ or Lyon, ancient Lugdunum on the Rhône. Mountains too may share stems with rivers: the Carpathians and the river Karun preserve the same root. Yet hydronyms are distinct because they are anchored not in human choice but in enduring features of geography.

Unlike toponyms, which are frequently renamed to honour new rulers or languages, hydronyms prove exceptionally resistant to change. The cause is straightforward. Watercourses are constants in the environment. Communities depend on them for agriculture, travel, and survival, and so the names by which they are known pass from one population to the next. Where toponyms are erased by conquest, hydronyms tend to persist, even when reshaped phonetically by the tongues of newcomers.

One of the clearest examples lies in the many Avons of Britain. Modern ears take Avon as a proper name, but it originates in the Brittonic common noun āβonā, meaning simply ‘river.’ In Roman sources we find Abona for the river that flows through Bristol. As English displaced Brittonic speech, the inherited name was reinterpreted as a proper noun. To the new speakers, Avon no longer meant ‘river’ but was the name of a particular river. When they added their own generic, the result was the pleonasm ‘River Avon’ – literally ‘River River.’ Such tautology is not error but testimony to continuity. A Brittonic word, hardened into a name, carried forward through conquest and linguistic change.

Another instructive case is aber, from Brittonic ad-bero- ‘to carry together.’ It denotes the confluence or mouth of a river, and survives in numerous place-names: Aberdeen (aber + Don), Aberlady, Abercarf. Early medieval documents preserve spellings such as Æbber- in Bede and Apor- in the Book of Deer, reflecting Pictish vocal colour. When Gaelic speakers advanced into these regions, they used their own word inbhir for ‘river-mouth,’ producing parallel names such as Inverness (inbhir Nis). The semantic function survived, even as the phonetic form shifted. Here we see hydronymy’s conservatism not in unchanging sound but in the continuity of meaning across languages.

The classical record confirms the same principle on the continent. Julius Caesar described the Arar, the river we now call the Saône. Strabo mentioned the Garumna, modern Garonne. Pliny wrote of the Durius, the Douro of Iberia. In each case the Latin orthography added endings – -ar, -a, -us – but the core stems remain: Ar-, Gar-, Dur-. Over two thousand years, through Celtic, Latin, and Romance layers, the names survive recognisably intact.

These are not isolated cases. They illustrate a structural fact: hydronyms are conservative because rivers endure. Communities that live by them cannot easily replace their names without losing continuity of memory. And so the names, once given, prove almost indelible.

It was Hans Krahe, the German linguist, who made this insight systematic. In his monumental Die Struktur der alteuropäischen Hydronymie (1962), Krahe collected thousands of river names from across Europe and demonstrated that many belonged to recurring families of roots and suffixes. He proposed that these formed a linguistic layer older than the known Indo-European languages – a stratum he called Alteuropäisch or ‘Old European.’

The hallmarks of this system were simple, often monosyllabic stems – al-, ar-, is-, sal-, dur-, ab- – combined with recurrent formatives – -ona, -ana, -ina, -issa, -iska, -ur. Krahe mapped these names across Iberia, Gaul, Germany, the Balkans, and into the British Isles. The distributions were too broad and too consistent to be dismissed as chance. His conclusion was that a pre-Celtic Indo-European language, or family of dialects, once stretched across much of Europe, leaving its traces only in the names of rivers.

Krahe’s thesis was influential but controversial. Subsequent scholars have pointed out that not all hydronyms fit neat Indo-European etymologies. Some endings, such as -issa in Iberia, may reflect pre-Indo-European substrata. Others caution that Krahe tended to homogenise what may in fact be multiple layers of naming: some Indo-European, some not. Modern consensus generally accepts the comparative grid he established – the recurrence of root families and suffixes – but treats the idea of a single uniform Old European language with scepticism.

(As we shall see, consensus Indo-European structure has eliminated Egyptian and Sumerian from its lexicon, which when restored accounts for much of the missing continuity. To omit source data and then argue against a thesis because the source data is not included is either carelessness or smacks of deliberate obfuscation. Something that LA Waddell was repeatedly at pains to criticise the Assyriologists of his day for.)

This debate sharpened into a methodological divide. One side argues for Indo-European continuity: that recurring hydronymic families such as Isara (Isère, Isar, Yser) or Dur- rivers (Durius, Durance, Dour) reflect an early stage of Indo-European language, preserved because rivers anchor memory. The other side insists on substratal languages, long vanished but fossilised in river names that Indo-European speakers later adopted. Both sides work with the same evidence. Both agree that hydronyms preserve deep linguistic strata. Their disagreement lies in whether those strata are Indo-European or pre-Indo-European.

From this discussion emerge methodological cautions that remain standard in hydronymic study:

• Earliest forms first. Modern spellings cannot be trusted. The English Ouse must be traced to Latin Usa or Old English Ūsa to identify its root. Whereas I trace it much earlier to the Egyptian wsjr, the original name of Osiris.

• Suffixes as structure, not proof. Endings such as -ona or -issa help to group names but cannot by themselves establish language family.

• Semantics last. Hydrological meaning must corroborate form-history, not lead it. The temptation to assign ‘salt’ to every Sal- river must be resisted.

• Layering is normal. Many rivers bear multiple strata: old root stems plus later suffixes, or bilingual replacements.

• Folk etymology is constant. Later speakers retrofit meaning, obscuring earlier layers.

These principles are conservative, but they are necessary. Hydronymics has too often been distorted by wishful thinking or speculative leaps. Only strict method allows the evidence to stand.

Among the root families identified by Krahe and refined by later scholarship, several are central to our argument: gar, kar, gal, cal. They recur across Europe and the Near East, often associated with water and stone, with flow and container. The Garumna (Garonne), the Carron of Scotland, the Carpathians, Galway, the Italian calanco ravines, Calabria – all exemplify this nexus. Their persistence across regions and languages makes them especially important as case studies. They represent not only linguistic fossils but archetypal categories: flow versus stone, softness versus hardness, water versus container.

In later sections we will treat these root families in detail. For now, it is enough to note that the gar/kar/gal/cal complex epitomises the way hydronyms conserve both phonetics and meaning. They are the clearest windows into the first lexicon of nature, where rivers named themselves in the mouths of those who depended on them.

The conservative nature of hydronyms can be illustrated further by examining the tension between written records and oral tradition. Rivers often appear in classical sources under Latin or Greek forms, yet their modern descendants, filtered through Celtic, Germanic, or Romance tongues, still preserve the ancient core. The continuity is striking: Rhodanus becomes the Rhône, Arnus the Arno, Isara the Isère, Sala the Saale, Garumna the Garonne. Each demonstrates how Latinised orthography provided only a veneer. Beneath it, the root endured. This capacity of hydronyms to cross language families without erasure marks them out as uniquely valuable in reconstructing linguistic prehistory.

In Britain, this conservatism is reinforced by medieval charters and chronicles. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede, and Domesday records provide layers of spellings that allow reconstruction of earlier forms. Thus the river now called the Ouse appears as Usa in Latin sources and as Ūsa in Old English. Without these intermediate records the connection to wider European hydronymic families would be obscured. The meticulous work of toponymists such as Eilert Ekwall has shown how these early spellings preserve the key to classification. The modern form is misleading; the old forms unlock the fossil layer.

Krahe’s contribution was to systematise this comparative approach. His catalogue of recurring root families demonstrated the pan-European scope of the evidence. Even if his conclusions are now moderated, the descriptive achievement remains beyond doubt. It is difficult to dismiss the consistency of Isara rivers, or the distribution of Dur- and Sal- hydronyms across Iberia, Gaul, and central Europe. Krahe’s vision was perhaps over-unified, but his method set the discipline’s standard: collect early forms, group by root and suffix, and map distributions basin by basin.

Later scholars added rigour and nuance. Nicolaisen warned against the seduction of semantics and insisted on earliest attestations. Villar and Tovar stressed the complexity of Iberian hydronymy, where Indo-European roots coexist with older substrata. Perono Cacciafoco demonstrated the role of geology in shaping names, showing that kar/kal in Ligurian contexts aligned precisely with karst landscapes and eroded ravines. Alan James in the Brittonic North mapped the survival of aber and āβonā into modern place-names. Orueta in Spain, compiling an exhaustive dictionary, acknowledged the limits of certainty by classifying many entries as ‘obscure’ rather than forcing etymologies. Together these studies form a corrective to Krahe: not a uniform stratum but a palimpsest, where Indo-European, pre-Indo-European, and functional naming practices overlap.

The methodological debate between continuity and substratum remains open, but both positions rest on the same recognition: hydronyms are the deepest linguistic layer accessible to us. They preserve forms older than recorded history. To neglect them is to discard the earliest written evidence humanity possesses, written not in ink but in water.

What then of the specific root families that will occupy us in this study? Among them, the cluster gar/kar/gal/cal demands attention. These roots appear not only in hydronyms but in oronyms and toponyms, spanning languages and regions. Their semantic associations are consistent: gar/gal with flow, roughness, or yielding; kar/kal with stone, cliff, or enclosure; cal with chalk, lime, or residue of water upon stone. They recur from Iberia to the Balkans, from the British Isles to the Near East. Their durability suggests more than coincidence. They reflect archetypal encounters with the environment: the river that flows, the rock that contains, the residue left behind.

To illustrate, consider the Carron in Scotland, whose name belongs to the kar family and is tied to stony terrain. Compare this with Carcare in Liguria, recorded in medieval sources, situated in a ravine. The same stem appears in the Carpathians, a mountain chain whose name echoes the same enclosure-root. Across regions and languages, the stem kar anchors itself to stone and height. Meanwhile, the Garumna of Gaul preserves the gar form, echoed in Brittonic adjectives like garw (‘rough’), which generate hydronyms such as the Garf Water. Galway in Ireland, once Gaillimh, aligns with a semantic field of stony river-beds and rough waters. Each instance is local, but together they reveal a pattern that transcends language families.

The consistency of these associations will be explored in detail in later sections. For now, the important point is methodological. The gar/kar/gal/cal nexus illustrates how hydronyms, when grouped carefully by root, form coherent semantic and geographic families. These are not arbitrary syllables. They are structured responses to environment, repeated independently across Europe, conserved through time.

Their persistence across millennia, their recurrence across basins, and their semantic coherence across languages make them the foundation for any attempt to reconstruct linguistic and symbolic prehistory. If rivers were humanity’s first scripture, then hydronyms are the script by which we may still read it.

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Hans Krahe and the Comparative Grid

The modern discipline of hydronymy begins with Hans Krahe (1898–1965). Though others before him had noticed the conservatism of river names, it was Krahe who gave the subject its first systematic framework. His central insight, set out most fully in Die Struktur der alteuropäischen Hydronymie (1962), was that the rivers of Europe preserve a deep and consistent layer of naming older than the historically attested Celtic, Germanic, Italic, or Slavic languages. He called this layer Alteuropäisch – ‘Old European.’

Krahe’s Project

Krahe assembled thousands of river names from across Europe, drawing on classical geographers, medieval charters, and modern toponymic surveys. He grouped them into families of short root stems combined with recurring suffixes. The stems were typically monosyllabic – al-, ar-, is-, sal-, dur-, ab-, gar- – while the formatives included -ona, -ana, -ina, -issa, -iska, -ur. The result was a comparative grid, a catalogue of repeating forms that appeared from Iberia to the Baltic, from the British Isles to the Balkans.

The strength of Krahe’s method lay in its descriptive power. Rivers as far apart as the Isère in France, the Isar in Germany, and the Yser in Belgium all carried the stem is-. The Durance in Gaul and the Durius in Iberia both belonged to the dur- family. The Saale in Germany, recorded as Sala in Latin, stood with other sal- rivers in Gaul and beyond. The Arar (Saône) and the Arnus (Arno) gave witness to an ar- family stretching from Gaul to Italy. Such patterns could not be explained by coincidence. They suggested an older system of naming that transcended later linguistic frontiers.

The ‘Old European’ Hypothesis

Krahe argued that this hydronymic layer represented an archaic stage of Indo-European, spoken before the differentiation of Celtic, Italic, Germanic, and Slavic. According to his model, the speakers of this ‘Old European’ Indo-European spread across much of the continent in the third or even fourth millennium BCE, naming rivers with a shared vocabulary. When later Indo-European dialects developed, and when Celtic, Italic, Germanic, and Slavic languages emerged in historical time, they inherited these hydronyms rather than replacing them. The river names thus survived as fossils of a lost stage of the language family.

Krahe’s hypothesis was bold, and for a time it shaped the field. It explained both the conservatism of hydronyms and the striking cross-regional recurrence of root families. It offered a way of connecting the linguistic map of Europe to prehistoric settlement. But it also provoked criticism.

Critiques of Krahe

The most sustained criticism is that Krahe over-unified the evidence. By seeking to explain the whole grid as Indo-European, he tended to assimilate every root into an Indo-European etymology, even where the case was weak. Suffixes such as -issa and -assa, frequent in Iberia and southern Gaul, may not be Indo-European at all, but relics of older substratal languages. The same may be true of certain stems that resist Indo-European reconstruction. In these cases Krahe preferred to stretch Indo-European roots rather than admit a non-Indo-European element.

A second criticism is that Krahe sometimes engaged in circular reasoning. Because he began from the premise that the grid was Indo-European, he would interpret ambiguous names in that light, thereby reinforcing his starting assumption. Later scholars such as Nicolaisen and Villar insisted that each hydronym must be judged first by form-history and phonology within its local context, not by whether it fit Krahe’s continental scheme.

A third limitation is chronological. Krahe offered little precision as to when this Old European layer was supposed to exist. He placed it vaguely before the historically attested Celtic and Italic languages, but whether in the Bronze Age or earlier remained unspecified. Without archaeological anchoring, the ‘Old European’ hypothesis risked floating as an abstract construct.

Lasting Achievements

Despite these criticisms, Krahe’s contribution remains foundational. His comparative grid, though no longer accepted in the unitary form he proposed, is still the starting point for hydronymic study. The recognition that root families recur across Europe, that suffix inventories structure the data, and that river names can preserve a linguistic stratum deeper than the written record – these are Krahe’s enduring legacies.

Moreover, his insistence on assembling the earliest attested forms established the gold standard for the discipline. The modern scholar does not begin with a modern river name. They begin with Caesar’s Arar, with Pliny’s Durius, with Ptolemy’s Isara, with the Domesday Avene or the charter Ūsa. Only by starting with these fossils can one avoid the distortions of later phonology and folk etymology.

Krahe also legitimised hydronymy as a comparative science. Before him, the study of river names was scattered among antiquarians and local historians. With him, it became a field capable of contributing to Indo-European studies and to prehistoric archaeology. Even those who reject his conclusions acknowledge his achievement in raising the discipline to that level.

Relevance for This Study

For our purposes, Krahe provides both a foundation and a caution. His grid of root families – is-, dur-, sal-, ar-, gar- – is a valuable map, showing the breadth and conservatism of hydronyms across Europe. At the same time, his tendency to assimilate everything into Indo-European warns us against overreach. We will make use of his comparative catalogue, but we will also respect the lessons of later scholarship: to test each case locally, to distinguish Indo-European from possible substratum, and to avoid circularity.

In this way, Krahe’s project remains alive. Even as his ‘Old European’ language has receded into the status of hypothesis, the comparative method he pioneered continues to guide us. The rivers of Europe still speak, and Krahe’s grid remains the first attempt to listen to them in chorus.

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Nicolaisen, Pleonasm, and the British Evidence

If Krahe supplied the continental grid for Old European hydronymy, it was W. F. H. Nicolaisen who demonstrated how this comparative framework should be handled in the local context of Britain and Ireland. His meticulous studies of Scottish place-names and his broader essays on toponymy set the standard for methodological caution. Where Krahe risked over-unity, Nicolaisen emphasised the primacy of form-history – the record of the earliest spellings – and the dangers of allowing semantics or theory to overrule documentary evidence.

Nicolaisen’s Contribution

In Scottish Place-Names (1976) and in numerous articles, Nicolaisen stressed that every serious hydronymic analysis must begin with the oldest attested form. Modern names are often misleading. They may conceal older roots behind later phonological shifts, or present a tautology which only historical forms can explain. His watchword was that philology without history is guesswork. For Nicolaisen, the philological record – in charters, chronicles, early maps – is the necessary control for any wider comparison.

One of his favourite examples was the British Avon. Modern speakers take Avon as a proper noun, yet it is merely the fossil of the Brittonic āβonā, meaning ‘river.’ In Latin sources this appears as Abona. The English phrase ‘River Avon’ is thus literally ‘River River.’ Nicolaisen called such formations pleonasms, and he saw them as a common outcome when a generic word in one language is adopted as a proper name by another. Far from being absurdities, they are the very evidence of continuity: proof that hydronyms survive across language boundaries by being reinterpreted as names.

Pleonasm and Aber

Pleonasm is not confined to Avon. Another clear case is aber, the Brittonic word for ‘confluence’ or ‘river-mouth,’ from ad-bero- ‘to carry together.’ Place-names such as Aberdeen (aber + Don), Aberlady, and Abercarf preserve this element. Early medieval spellings – Æbber- in Bede, Apor- in the Book of Deer – show both P-Celtic and Pictish variants. When Gaelic later spread into these regions, the functional equivalent inbhir (‘river-mouth’) entered the toponymy, producing names like Inverness (inbhir Nis). Here too pleonasm occurs: ‘River Ness at the river-mouth,’ where the older and newer elements coexist. Nicolaisen saw such cases as exemplary of how hydronyms record the layering of languages without obliteration.

The Role of Ekwall

Alongside Nicolaisen, the work of Eilert Ekwall provided the indispensable corpus for English river-names. His English River Names (1928) catalogued hundreds of examples, citing the earliest documentary forms from Domesday Book, charters, and chronicles. Without Ekwall’s collections, comparative study would be impossible. His entries for Abona (Avon), Ūsa (Ouse), Exe/Exe (from Brittonic iska ‘water’), and others anchor the British evidence in precise records. Nicolaisen frequently relied on this groundwork, insisting that no hydronym should be compared across basins without first passing through the sieve of earliest English attestations.

British Examples

Several case studies illustrate the principles at work:

• Avon/Abona: A common noun ‘river’ fossilised as a proper name, then pleonastically compounded as ‘River Avon.’

• Ouse/Ūsa: Recorded in Old English as Ūsa, possibly linked to the Old European udso- family, with parallels in continental Usa rivers. The modern form obscures the connection, which only the documentary trail reveals.

• Exe/Exe: From Brittonic iska, ‘water,’ cognate with Irish uisce (as in uisce beatha, ‘whisky’). This family extends to the Axe and Esk rivers, showing how a simple hydronymic root proliferated across Britain.

• Aber-: The confluence element, layered with Gaelic inbhir in later names, giving parallel series of Aber- and Inver- hydronyms across Scotland.

Each of these examples demonstrates hydronymic conservatism, the phenomenon of pleonasm, and the necessity of early forms for correct classification.

Methodological Lessons

From Nicolaisen and Ekwall, several methodological lessons emerge:

1. Always begin with the earliest form. Modern names deceive; charters and chronicles are the key.

2. Pleonasm is evidence, not error. ‘River Avon’ and ‘Inverness’ illustrate continuity, not redundancy.

3. Semantics must be disciplined. Hydrology can suggest meanings, but only once form-history and phonology permit it.

4. Regional control matters. Britain’s hydronyms must be analysed within their insular context before being compared to continental families.

Implications for the Comparative Grid

Applied to Krahe’s comparative grid, Nicolaisen’s approach insists on restraint. Root families such as is-, dur-, sal-, ar-, gar- may indeed span Europe, but each British instance must be tested first against its earliest spellings. Only when the forms align can we legitimately assign them to a continental family. The British record does not contradict Krahe; it disciplines him. Nicolaisen’s great achievement was to show how the grand comparative vision must be anchored in local philology.

In sum, Nicolaisen confirmed Krahe’s insight that hydronyms are Europe’s linguistic fossils, but he demonstrated that their value lies not in sweeping generalisation but in precise, historically grounded analysis. Britain’s rivers – the Avon, the Ouse, the Exe, the Esk, the Don – flow within Krahe’s grid, but their meaning is secured by Nicolaisen’s method: form-history first, semantics last, and pleonasm as proof of survival.

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Iberian and Ligurian Strata

The Iberian Peninsula and the Ligurian-Alpine zone provide some of the richest testing grounds for the comparative study of hydronyms. Both regions were crossroads of peoples and languages in antiquity, and both preserve river-names that clearly predate the Roman conquest. The evidence from Iberia shows a complex layering of Indo-European and non-Indo-European elements, while the Ligurian material offers some of the clearest examples of geomorphological logic in naming. Together, they illustrate both the potential and the challenges of hydronymic analysis.

Villar and Tovar on Iberian Hydronyms

Francisco Villar and Antonio Tovar, in Los indoeuropeos y los orígenes de Europa (1996), provided a wide-ranging survey of Iberian river-names. Their work stands as the standard reference for the region. They documented the great rivers known from classical texts: the Durius (modern Douro), the Tagus (Tajo/Tejo), the Minius (Miño/Minho), the Anas (Guadiana), and the Iberus (Ebro). Each of these appears in Roman authors, already Latinised, but the stems betray older origins.

• Durius/Douro belongs to the dur- family, consistent with other European hydronyms such as the Durance in Gaul. Its distribution supports the idea of an Old European root meaning water or flow.

• Tagus/Tajo resists a simple Indo-European explanation. Some derive it from a root meaning ‘melt’ or ‘flow,’ but certainty is lacking. Its persistence, however, proves it to be pre-Roman.

• Minius/Miño may connect with Celtic minio- ‘small, gentle,’ though this risks semantic circularity.

• Anas/Guadiana demonstrates layering: the Latin Anas was later compounded with Arabic wadi (‘river’) to yield the pleonasm Guadiana – literally ‘River River.’

• Iberus/Ebro gave its name to the peninsula itself. Its root is obscure, possibly pre-Indo-European.

Villar and Tovar argued that Iberian hydronymy cannot be explained by Indo-European alone. The presence of suffixes such as -assa and -issa in many minor river-names points to substratal languages. At the same time, the Indo-European dur-, sal-, and is- families are undeniably present. The peninsula, therefore, preserves a palimpsest: an Indo-European stratum overlying or intersecting with older tongues.

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Orueta’s Dictionary and the Problem of ‘Obscure’ Names

Luis de Orueta’s Diccionario de nombres geográficos de España represents a different kind of contribution. Less theoretical than Villar and Tovar, it is valuable for its honesty. Orueta classifies names into three categories: ‘obvious,’ ‘historical,’ and ‘obscure.’ Many river-names fall into the last class. Instead of forcing dubious etymologies, Orueta preserves the ambiguity. His work is a reminder that the hydronymic record often resists neat classification. Declared uncertainty is sometimes the most rigorous conclusion.

Examples abound. Minor streams in Galicia, Asturias, and the Basque country often bear names that cannot be traced securely to Indo-European roots. Some may be Celtic, others pre-Celtic, others later Romance innovations. By marking them as obscure, Orueta sets a methodological example: the integrity of the discipline depends on resisting the temptation to explain everything.

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Perono Cacciafoco and the Ligurian kar/kal

If Iberia exemplifies complexity, Liguria exemplifies clarity. Francesco Perono Cacciafoco has argued persuasively that the root kar/kal, frequent in Ligurian and Alpine toponymy, refers consistently to stone, cliff, or enclosure. His case is grounded not only in philology but in geomorphology. The Italian word calanco denotes a ravine carved by water erosion in clay soils. The Carso – the Karst plateau between Italy and Slovenia – is the paradigmatic karstic landscape, riddled with caves, dolines, and sinkholes. Settlements such as Carcare and regions such as Carrara likewise take their names from rocky or quarried terrain.

The consistency is striking. In each case, kar/kal attaches to landforms where water and stone interact – ravines, quarries, cliffs, and eroded plateaus. The semantic field is not speculative. It is visible on the land itself. Perono Cacciafoco’s analysis demonstrates that hydronymy and toponymy in Liguria are inseparable from geology. Where Krahe’s grid risks abstraction, the Ligurian evidence is concrete.

Methodological Implications

Taken together, the Iberian and Ligurian dossiers highlight key methodological points:

1. Multiple strata: Iberia preserves Indo-European, pre-Indo-European, Latin, and Arabic layers. No single explanation suffices.

2. Declared uncertainty: Orueta’s willingness to classify names as ‘obscure’ is a model of restraint. Better uncertainty than false precision.

3. Environmental correspondence: Perono Cacciafoco’s Ligurian kar/kal proves that hydronyms and toponyms often encode direct relationships to geology and hydrology.

Relevance for This Study

For our purposes, Iberia and Liguria offer both caution and confirmation. Iberia warns us not to homogenise the record: hydronyms can preserve multiple languages, sometimes irrecoverably. Liguria confirms that certain root families, like kar/kal, are not arbitrary but grounded in physical reality. These lessons will guide our treatment of the core families in later sections.

Hydronyms are not mere curiosities. In Iberia they are palimpsests of conquest and substratum. In Liguria they are etched into stone itself. Both demonstrate why the discipline must balance comparative grids with local detail, and why method must join philology with geography.

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Brittonic Evidence and Methodological Problems

The evidence from the Brittonic North is crucial, not only because it enriches the corpus of hydronyms with well-attested forms, but also because it exemplifies the methodological issues that have defined the discipline. Alan James, in The Brittonic Language in the Old North, has provided one of the most comprehensive collections of Brittonic elements surviving in Scottish and northern English place-names. His work allows us to examine how hydronyms function in a regional context where documentary sources, archaeology, and philology converge.

James and the Brittonic Corpus

James catalogues a range of hydronymic elements preserved in medieval and modern names. Among the most important are:

• aber – ‘confluence, river-mouth,’ from ad-bero- ‘to carry together.’

• āβonā – ‘river,’ the source of multiple Avons, appearing as Latin Abona in Roman records.

• iska – ‘water,’ preserved in rivers such as the Exe, Axe, and Esk.

• garw – ‘rough,’ an adjective used as a hydronymic descriptor, seen in the Garf Water.

• carr- – ‘rock, stony place,’ occurring in names like Carron and Carribber.

James’s meticulous collection of early spellings – from Bede, from charters, from the Book of Deer – provides the control necessary for reliable interpretation. Without these forms, the modern names alone could mislead.

Aber and Inbhir: Layering Across Languages

One of the clearest demonstrations of hydronymic layering is the relationship between Brittonic aber and Gaelic inbhir. Both mean ‘river-mouth’ or ‘confluence.’ In many cases, the same river-mouth is named with both forms at different times: Aberdeen (aber + Don) and Inverness (inbhir + Ness) are the most famous examples. This phenomenon illustrates two key points: first, the conservatism of hydronymic function – the place continues to be named for its confluence; second, the pleonasm that results when later speakers add their own generic to an inherited name.

Avon and Pleonasm

The British Avons remain the textbook example of pleonasm in hydronymy. Derived from āβonā, simply ‘river,’ they became proper names in English. The addition of the generic ‘river’ yields ‘River River.’ This is not redundancy but evidence of survival. It shows how a hydronym can pass through linguistic transitions while retaining its role in the landscape.

The Ouse and Early Forms

The river Ouse demonstrates the necessity of early spellings. In Old English documents it appears as Ūsa, and in Latin as Usa. This form places it in a wider European family of *udso-/usa hydronyms. Without these attestations, the modern form Ouse could not be correctly classified. It might be mistaken for something unique or modern, when in fact it belongs to a pan-European pattern. (Though we trace this to the much earlier Egyptian as a form of what I have termed an ouonym.)

Garw and Carr-: Semantics and Phonology

James highlights the Brittonic adjective garw, ‘rough,’ as a hydronymic element. The Garf Water is a clear case, compounded in Abercarf (‘confluence of the Garf’). Here semantics and phonology coincide: the name describes the character of the stream. Similarly, carr-, meaning ‘rock,’ is seen in the Carron and in Carribber, where grammatical forms suggest plural or genitive endings. These cases confirm that some hydronyms do preserve descriptive meaning, but they also illustrate the danger of assuming meaning without form-history. Only when the earliest spellings and morphological contexts support it is semantic interpretation valid.

Methodological Problems

The Brittonic evidence, though rich, also illustrates several pitfalls that recur throughout the discipline:

1. Suffix Fetishism – Scholars have sometimes overemphasised the role of suffixes such as -ona, -ana, -issa. While these are useful for grouping names, they cannot by themselves prove language affiliation. A river ending in -ona might be Celtic, Latinised, or even non-Indo-European; context decides.

2. Circular Reasoning – It is tempting to classify a hydronym as Indo-European simply because one expects it to be. This was Krahe’s error. Each case must be tested against sound laws and earliest forms, not against theoretical expectation.

3. Semantics-First Error – The assumption that a river called Sal- must be ‘salty,’ or that Isara must mean ‘swift,’ risks reading the environment into the name without philological support. Hydrology must corroborate, not drive, etymology.

4. Ignoring Layering – Britain’s rivers often show multiple strata. Aber and inbhir coexisting at the same site prove that names can accumulate rather than replace each other. Failing to account for this leads to false simplification.

5. Overgeneralisation – The presence of gar/gal forms in Britain does not automatically link them to Krahe’s continental GAR- family. Some derive from Brittonic adjectives like garw, not from Old European roots. Distinguishing these is essential.

Synthesis: The British Contribution

The British material, especially as gathered by James, provides three vital contributions to hydronymics:

• It shows hydronymic conservatism in action (Avon, Aber, Ouse).

• It demonstrates how pleonasm arises naturally from linguistic layering.

• It exposes the methodological traps of suffix fetishism, circular reasoning, and semantics-first interpretation.

When placed alongside Krahe’s continental grid and Villar’s Iberian survey, the Brittonic evidence confirms the value of hydronyms as fossils of speech. At the same time, it disciplines the field by reminding us that each case must be tested locally, with early forms and phonology, before being fitted to a wider pattern.

Hydronyms survive not because they are theoretically neat, but because they are lived realities. The Brittonic rivers remind us that method must always begin with history, with charters and chronicles, before it can rise to continental comparisons. They also remind us that the most persistent names – Avon, Ouse, Esk – are those tied most closely to water itself: ‘river,’ ‘water,’ ‘mouth.’ In this sense, the British record is not only a dataset but a methodological compass for the whole discipline.

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GAR, KAR, and CAL: Water and Stone, Flow and Container

The polarity between water and stone is one of the deepest themes in European hydronymy. Within this polarity sit the root families GAR/GAL, KAR/KAL, and their reflex CAL. These roots appear from the Danube to the Atlantic, from Iberia to the Carpathians, and they consistently encode the encounter of fluid and rock: the turbulent stony river, the cliff or gorge through which it runs, and the chalk or lime that results from its action.

GAR and GAL: Rough Water, Stony Flow

The Garumna, recorded by Caesar and Strabo, is the earliest classical attestation of this family. It gives us the modern Garonne in southern France, a major river long associated with turbulent, gravelly flow. The stem gar- is not confined to Gaul. In Brittonic, garw means ‘rough,’ and survives in Garf Water in Scotland and in compounds like Abercarf. Here we see Nicolaisen’s principle of pleonasm at work: Aber (‘confluence’) + garw (‘rough’) + ‘water’ - a triple redundancy that nevertheless shows how roots survive and layer over time.

Ireland offers another example in Galway, from medieval Gaillimh, meaning ‘stony’ - likely a reference to the rocky bed of the Corrib river. Further afield, Galicia (in both Spain and Poland) preserves the gal- stem, associated with stony or rugged terrain. Villar and Tovar both point out that Iberian hydronyms often preserve archaic strata, and that GAR/GAL names overlap with pre-Roman elements that cannot always be assigned to Indo-European.

Krahe’s comparative grid of Old European hydronymy places GAR firmly within his list of recurring roots, distributed across river basins with no regard for later ethnic or linguistic boundaries. GAR/GAL belongs to the deepest stratum of names, older than Celtic or Latin layers.

The suffixes attached to this root vary: -umna in Garumna, -ona in Garona, -unna in some variants. Nicolaisen cautions that suffixes are not proof of relatedness but merely common formatives used across Old Europe. What matters is the stem, which remains stable.

KAR and KAL: Rock, Enclosure, and Height

If GAR/GAL denotes the rough flow, then KAR/KAL denotes the rock that resists or contains it. The Carpathians preserve the root at a continental scale, their very name encoding a mountain barrier. In Britain, the Carron rivers are joined by places like Carribber, from the same base.

In Liguria, Perono Cacciafoco has shown how the kar/kal root recurs in pre-Latin toponymy, often in relation to geological features. Carcare in northern Italy, located in a deep ravine, and the Carso plateau between Italy and Slovenia (from which ‘karst’ derives) are emblematic. The Italian calanco, meaning a gully carved by water erosion, makes the connection explicit: kal is stone cut by water. The marble-quarrying town of Carrara belongs to the same family.

James, in his survey of Brittonic elements, confirms that carr- is widespread in Celtic languages as ‘rock, stone, stony place,’ and notes that the semantic range of carr/caer often includes ‘fort’ or ‘enclosure’ - another natural development, as stone becomes the material of defensive settlement.

The geological resonance is important. Unlike many hydronyms, KAR/KAL names can often be confirmed visually. Karstic landscapes, gullies, and stone enclosures provide concrete referents that reduce ambiguity.

CAL: Chalk, Lime, and Residue

From kal comes cal, the residue left behind by water upon stone. Latin calx means lime or chalk, and calcare means ‘to tread.’ From this root we find Calabria, Calais, and Calanda. These names are not always hydronyms, but they belong to the same semantic field: chalklands, limestone hills, and places defined by calcareous rock.

Orueta observes that many Spanish place-names beginning with CAL- are classed as ‘obscure’ in conventional dictionaries, a reminder of how much substratum vocabulary lies beneath the Latin veneer. But when seen hydronymically, CAL fits logically into the GAR/KAR continuum: it is what water leaves behind, the hardened trace of flow.

Interaction of GAR, KAR, and CAL

Taken together, GAR/GAL, KAR/KAL, and CAL encode a cycle:

• GAR/GAL = water in motion, rough and stony.

• KAR/KAL = stone itself, enclosure, mountain or gorge.

• CAL = the residue of water on stone, chalk or lime.

This triad is not speculative. It is borne out in river-names, mountain ranges, and geological terms across Europe. It is consistent with Krahe’s Old European grid, supported by Nicolaisen’s linguistic cautions, confirmed by Perono Cacciafoco’s Ligurian examples, by James’s Brittonic record, and by Villar/Tovar’s recognition of Iberian substratum complexity.

Methodological Considerations

Several cautions apply:

1. Earliest forms must be prioritised. Garumna must be treated in its Latin form, not its modern French descendant. Carron must be tracked through medieval spellings.

2. Semantics-first is a trap. Not every rough river is a GAR, nor every chalkland a CAL. Corroboration must come from early attestations and distribution.

3. Geology is a rare validator. For KAR/KAL, geological fit strengthens the case, but we must avoid assuming geology dictates naming.

4. Suffixes are secondary. -ona, -arra, -umna are hydronymic formatives, but cannot prove relation alone.

5. Layering is real. Some GAR hydronyms may be Indo-European (garw), others pre-IE substratum. Each must be evaluated individually.

Distribution and Significance

Despite these cautions, the persistence of these roots across Europe is undeniable. From Iberia to the Balkans, GAR, KAR, and CAL appear with stable meanings: rough water, rocky enclosure, chalk residue. They are among the most conservative of hydronymic families.

Their significance lies in their polarity. They embody the most basic human perception of environment: water and stone, flow and container, yielding and hard. They are not arbitrary sounds. They are the linguistic fossils of lived experience, preserved in the names of rivers and mountains, in the very geology of Europe.

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DUR/TUR and SAL: Flow, Boundary, and Salt

If GAR and KAR describe the encounter of water and stone, the roots DUR/TUR and SAL express two other fundamental perceptions of the riverine world: the strength and endurance of the flow, and the mineral essence of salt, the preservative that nature draws from water. Both root families are among the most widely distributed in Europe, appearing in Krahe’s comparative grid and persisting across multiple strata of settlement and language.

DUR and TUR: Enduring Flow and Boundaries

The Iberian Durius (modern Douro) is perhaps the most prominent example of this family. Latin sources record the name directly, and Villar and Tovar note that it belongs to a deeper substratum of Iberian hydronyms, not readily explained as Celtic or Latin. The same is true of the Durantia (modern Durance in southern France), a river noted for its force and destructive floods. In both cases, the semantic field of endurance and power is evident.

The root extends north and east. The Dnipro and Dniester in Ukraine carry a related base, overlapping with the Indo-Iranian danu- (‘river, water’). While the precise relationship remains debated, Krahe treated dur/tur as part of his Old European grid, spread from Iberia to the Baltic. Nicolaisen confirms its widespread occurrence in northern and western Europe, often as simple Dur-, Dor-, or Tur- stems.

Britain preserves the root in Dover, from Brittonic Dubras (‘waters’). Though not phonetically identical, this example shows how dur/dub- clusters in early river and place-names, carrying the sense of ‘water’ or ‘flow.’ In Scotland, the River Dee (from Deva, ‘goddess’) may belong to the same semantic nexus.

In Mesopotamia, the Tigris was called Tigra in Old Persian and Idiglat in Akkadian, both terms related to speed, arrow-flight, or sharpness. Some scholars connect tigra to Indo-European t(e)rs- (swift, strong), others see a link to dur/tur. Either way, the logic is consistent: rivers named for their force and endurance.

Suffixes vary: -ius in Durius, -antia in Durantia, -ester in Dniester. These endings do not prove relation but stabilise the root within hydronymic morphology.

The semantic field of DUR/TUR can be summarised as:

• Enduring, strong, lasting.

• Flowing with force, cutting boundaries.

• Serving as natural frontiers in human geography.

SAL: Salt and Sacred Waters

The Sala in classical texts corresponds to the modern Saale in Germany. Other examples include Salamanca, derived from Sala-mantica, and Salona in Dalmatia, once an important Roman port. These names connect directly with saline marshes and salt deposits.

The Indo-European root sal- means ‘salt,’ and is the basis of Latin sal, Greek hals, and English ‘salt.’ Nicolaisen notes, however, that while the root clearly appears in many river names, not every SAL- hydronym refers to literal salt. Semantic drift and re-use complicate the picture.

In Spain, Orueta points out that SAL- names are often listed as ‘obscure’ in dictionaries. Some certainly refer to saline deposits - as at Salamanca, where brine springs are attested since antiquity - but others may be pre-Indo-European survivals whose meaning was later assimilated to the more familiar word for salt. Villar and Tovar emphasise this complexity: Iberian strata include SAL- names whose original meaning may not have been ‘salt’ at all, but which were reinterpreted in Latin as such.

The sacred dimension of salt must also be remembered. Salt was vital not only for preservation but for ritual. The Hebrew Bible calls salt a covenantal substance, and in Roman religion it was a standard offering. The recurrence of SAL- names in river basins suggests that these were places of economic and sacred importance, where saline deposits or marshes gave rise to both trade and ritual.

Interaction of DUR and SAL

At first sight, DUR/TUR and SAL appear unrelated: one denotes force and flow, the other a mineral. But together they encode the two sides of river-culture:

• Dur/Tur = continuity, endurance, the river as axis and boundary.

• Sal = essence, mineral wealth, preservation, sacred offering.

In combination, they reflect how rivers were perceived as both dynamic and generative. The flow endures, but it also yields resources. The river is both motion and substance.

Methodological Considerations

Several cautions apply here as well:

1. Multiple strata. In Iberia especially, SAL and DUR/TUR names overlap substratum layers. Some are Indo-European (sal- = salt), others are pre-IE, later assimilated.

2. Semantic overlay. Not every SAL- name denotes salt, nor every DUR- denotes strength. The meanings often shifted, especially under Latinisation.

3. Geographic confirmation. Where SAL- names coincide with salt marshes or saline springs (e.g. Salamanca), confidence is high. Where no such feature exists, caution is required.

4. Hydronymic morphology. Suffixes like -antia, -ius, -ona are structural, not semantic; they show continuity but do not guarantee identical roots.

Distribution and Significance

From Iberia to the Balkans, from Gaul to Mesopotamia, DUR/TUR and SAL recur with remarkable persistence. They are part of the Old European hydronymic system identified by Krahe, and their semantic fields - endurance and salt - reflect two of the most basic realities of riverine life: the flow that continues, and the mineral essence that remains.

In both, we see again the principle that hydronyms are not arbitrary. They are linguistic fossils of environmental perception, encoding how early humans named what mattered most: water that endured, and the essence it carried.

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AR: The Axis Root

If GAR/KAR encode the encounter of water and stone, and DUR/TUR and SAL express flow and essence, then AR may be the most primal of all hydronymic roots. It appears across Europe and Asia in rivers, mountains, and settlements, and its persistence suggests an ancient conceptual field: origin, axis, height, and mouth. More than a descriptive label, AR seems to have functioned as a linguistic marker of the axis itself - the line or place where water, land, and sky converge.

Core Attestations

Classical texts give us two secure examples. Caesar refers to the Arar, the modern Saône in Gaul, a slow-flowing tributary of the Rhône. Its duplication (Ar-ar) is pleonastic, like Avon or Abercarf - literally ‘River River.’ Nicolaisen highlights this as a prime case of hydronymic pleonasm.

In Italy, we find the Arnus, the Arno, whose name has survived unchanged into modern usage. The Arno’s centrality to Florence and Tuscany ensured the preservation of its archaic name. Together, Arar and Arnus show how AR functioned as a root for large rivers in both Gaul and Italy.

Further afield, the name extends to mountains. The biblical Ararat, the Armenian peak associated with the flood narrative, belongs to the same field. Armenia itself may derive from the same AR base, though scholarly opinion is divided. What matters here is the clustering of AR names in the Ararat–Armenia region, a cradle of myth and metallurgy.

In Britain, the Aber- compounds provide a further strand. Brittonic aber means ‘confluence, river mouth’ - the place where waters meet. James’ survey confirms dozens of examples: Aberdeen (mouth of the Don), Aberystwyth (mouth of the Ystwyth), Aberlosk, Abermilk. The persistence of aber shows how AR survived as a living hydronymic element into the Brittonic age.

Linguistic Layers and Suffixes

The root AR appears with suffixes that stabilise it into river-names: -ar, -ara, -arus. In Arar, the reduplication intensifies the base. In Arnus, the -nus ending localises it in Italic morphology. In Aber-, AR is compounded with ber (‘to carry, flow together’).

Krahe included AR within his Old European system, though he noted its fluidity: in some cases AR may derive from PIE or- ‘to flow’ (cf. Greek oros, boundary; Latin orior, rise), in others it is an independent pre-Indo-European hydronymic base. Nicolaisen insists that caution is required: not every AR- name belongs to the same family, and local semantics may diverge.

Symbolic Axis

Beyond etymology, AR is symbolically resonant. Ararat stands as twin peaks aligned with Orion in winter, a natural ‘ark’ shape that inspired flood myths. The mountain as hydronym is no accident: rivers flow from it, and its form anchors myth.

The AR root thus encodes not only rivers but the very idea of an axis mundi - a place of origin and ascent. In Mesopotamia and Armenia, AR names converge with mythic mountains. In Gaul and Italy, they mark rivers as lines of connection. In Britain, aber names show confluences as sacred nodes.

The thematic continuity is striking: AR marks the axis-point, whether mountain, river, or meeting of waters. It is the name of origin and orientation.

Methodological Cautions

1. Multiple origins: Some AR names derive from PIE or- (‘to flow, to rise’), others from a pre-IE substratum.

2. Over-extension risk: Not every AR- name belongs to this family. Each case must be tested against earliest attestations.

3. Suffix drift: The endings -ar, -ara, -arus are not proof in themselves; they are common hydronymic formatives.

4. Mythic assimilation: Later traditions (biblical Ararat, Armenian Armenia) layered theological meaning onto older hydronymic bases.

Distribution and Significance

From the Saône to the Arno, from Aberystwyth to Ararat, the AR root is distributed across the continent. Its semantic fields include:

• River: Arar, Arno.

• Mountain: Ararat.

• Confluence/Mouth: Aber-.

Taken together, these uses suggest a primal category: AR as the axis-root. It names the origin, the meeting-place, the rising point. Its persistence across millennia shows that early humans recognised the axis - the line of connection between river, mountain, and sky - as central to life and memory.

Integration

With AR, the hydronymic system circles back to its core: the axis.

• GAR/KAR/CAL marked water and stone in polarity.

• DUR/TUR + SAL marked flow and essence.

• AR marks the axis itself - the primal name for rivers, mountains, and mouths.

This is why AR survives so widely and so long. It is not tied to one meaning but to a fundamental structure: the axis of origin and confluence. From the Danube basin to Britain, from Gaul to Armenia, AR is the linguistic fossil of the axis mundi.

Pitfalls and Safeguards

Having mapped some of the core root families of European hydronymy, we must pause to acknowledge the hazards that attend this field of study. Hydronymics, perhaps more than any other linguistic discipline, invites overreach. The rivers are numerous, the names are ancient, and the temptation to impose order where none exists is strong. Only by being explicit about pitfalls, and by setting clear safeguards, can the work avoid the errors that have plagued it since Krahe first advanced his grid.

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Overreach and the Problem of Pan-European Forcing

The most obvious danger is overreach: the tendency to assume that every recurring syllable is part of a single pan-European system. Krahe’s model of ‘Old European hydronymy’ remains foundational, but critics have rightly pointed out that his framework can lead to forcing - a desire to fit every river of Europe into one schema. The reality is more complex. Some names are genuinely ancient and widespread; others are local, late, or accidental resemblances. The safeguard here is to treat every case as provisional, and to test roots against earliest attestations and distributions, not against the desire for neatness.

Suffix Fetishism

Another common error is what might be called ‘suffix fetishism.’ Hydronymic suffixes such as -ona, -issa, -ska, or -umna recur across Europe. They provide structural clues, but they are not themselves roots. Too often, scholars have treated such endings as proof of linguistic relation. In reality, they are formatives - generic endings that were attached to a wide range of stems. To argue that two rivers are related simply because they both end in -ona is no stronger than arguing that two English towns are related because both end in -ton. The safeguard is to focus on stems (GAR, DUR, SAL, AR) rather than endings, treating suffixes as scaffolding, not as proof.

Hydrological Circularity

A subtler pitfall is hydrological circularity: the assumption that a river must be named for whatever feature it has today. ‘This river runs through saline marshes; therefore its name is from SAL.’ This kind of reasoning confuses coincidence with causation. Some SAL-rivers may indeed be named for salt, but others may belong to substratum roots that only later resembled the Indo-European word for salt. The safeguard is to check both context and chronology: does the river flow through salt beds in antiquity, or is the connection a later guess?

Folk Etymology and Administrative Overlays

Many hydronyms have been reshaped by folk etymology and by administrative overlays. In Spain, for example, Roman, Visigothic, Arabic, and later Castilian authorities all adapted names to fit their own tongues. A root that once belonged to the prehistoric substratum may be unrecognisable beneath later spellings. In Britain, Aber- names were sometimes replaced by Gaelic Inver-, or by English forms that altered the original. The safeguard is to resist taking modern spelling at face value. Charter forms, Domesday entries, and classical references must be consulted before any conclusion is drawn.

Declared Uncertainty

Finally, honesty demands that we admit what cannot be known. Luis de Orueta, in his dictionary of Spanish place names, created a category for names deemed ‘obscure’. This is a model of methodological integrity. Rather than force every toponym into a speculative etymology, it is better to acknowledge uncertainty. The safeguard here is to declare openly when a root is unproven, ambiguous, or multiply possible. Admitting obscurity is not weakness; it is a mark of intellectual discipline.

However, once we reintroduce the Egyptian and Sumerian roots into the dataset, much of this uncertainty resolves into continuity. What appeared fragmentary or unattested is often revealed as perfectly coherent once viewed in the wider context that LA Waddell urged but academia resisted. By relying solely on Indo-European reconstructions and PIE roots, consensus scholarship has missed a deeper stratum of meaning. Words long labelled ‘of uncertain origin’ turn out to be survivals of earlier hydronymic typologies. Terms such as lugal have been mistranslated precisely because the older typological framework was ignored; their primary meanings drifted and bifurcated, leaving later translators with fragments rather than wholes. By restoring those primary meanings through hydronymic continuity, the obscure becomes clear, and what was once speculative becomes structurally evident.

Interim Synthesis

The preceding sections have traced some of the most persistent hydronymic root families of Europe - GAR, KAR, CAL, DUR, TUR, SAL, and AR. Each appears across wide regions, attested in classical and medieval sources, and surviving despite conquest, cultural replacement, and language shift. Their durability makes them among the best evidence we possess for Europe’s oldest linguistic stratum.

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What the Evidence Supports

The evidence supports the conclusion that these root families are real, not accidents of similarity. They recur in early attestations across different geographies, often with consistent semantic fields: GAR/GAL as rough or stony water, KAR/KAL as rock or enclosure, CAL as chalk or lime, DUR/TUR as enduring flow, SAL as salt or saline marshes, and AR as axis or origin. They are not confined to one language group but appear across Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Iberian, and beyond. That persistence shows that hydronyms are resistant to cultural disruption.

Roman conquest renamed towns and founded colonies, but rivers retained their ancient names. Germanic or Slavic settlement overlaid languages, yet the hydronymic substratum endured. Medieval charters, Domesday entries, and chronicles preserve them with remarkable stability. This is why Krahe, Nicolaisen, Villar, and others have treated hydronyms as a distinct category of linguistic evidence: they are too conservative, too widely distributed, and too semantically consistent to be dismissed.

What the Evidence Does Not Support

At the same time, the evidence does not support the idea of a single-stratum, pan-European uniformity. Krahe’s ‘Old European’ system was groundbreaking, but it risked overreach. Not every syllable that recurs across Europe can be fitted into one framework. Some roots may be genuinely Indo-European, others pre-Indo-European substratum, and still others local innovations. The attempt to flatten all of this into a single system collapses nuance and ignores real layering.

This means that while GAR in Gaul, GARF in Britain, and GAL- in Iberia share a clear family resemblance, not every modern GAR-name must derive from that ancient root. Some are later Celtic adjectives (garw = rough), others mere coincidence. The safeguard is to resist homogenisation. Hydronymic study gains strength precisely when it acknowledges multiplicity and layering rather than seeking an impossible uniformity.

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Hydronyms as Fossils

Hydronyms function as durable linguistic fossils. They preserve sound-clusters and semantic fields long after spoken languages have changed beyond recognition. Unlike personal names or settlement names, rivers cannot easily be renamed, because they are part of the land itself. This conservatism makes them invaluable for reconstructing earlier stages of thought and speech.

At the same time, their conservatism allows them to become the raw material for symbolic reinterpretation. The AR root that once meant simply ‘river’ or ‘mouth’ could later become the mythic Ararat, axis of the flood. GAR and GAL, once descriptors of rough water, could feed into the idea of the Grail, the vessel carved out by water. SAL, originally salt, could acquire ritual significance as a covenantal offering. Hydronyms, because they endure, are always ready to be reinterpreted within new symbolic systems.

Interim Conclusion

The interim conclusion is clear: the evidence supports recurring root families that are both conservative and widely distributed, but it does not support a single uniform stratum covering all of Europe. Hydronyms are best understood as layered fossils - stable enough to preserve very ancient elements, yet flexible enough to be reinterpreted by successive cultures. This dual character explains both their linguistic value and their symbolic power. They anchor us to the earliest stages of European thought, even as they invite reinterpretation in myth, scripture, and cultural memory.

What we must now address is how much of the consensus that leads us to such limitations is itself limited. By reintroducing the full range of data - typological, linguistic, symbolic, and pictorial - and weighing it against the cultural record in its historical context, we will see that hydronyms are more reliable than often admitted. They provide a consistent key to what has appeared poorly evidenced or contradictory. Where consensus sees coincidence, continuity emerges. Where etymologies are marked ‘uncertain origin,’ earlier strata restore coherence. And in many cases, what has been treated as academic caution masks the residue of political and religious bias rather than the absence of evidence.

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Part 2 - Waddell’s Protest Against Consensus

In the early 20th century, L. A. Waddell stood almost alone in challenging the academic orthodoxy that credited the origins of civilisation, writing, and religion to Semitic peoples. Where others saw the Bible as history and built their scholarship around it, Waddell called out what he saw as theological bias disguised as science. His words are worth citing in full, for they capture both his frustration and his independence of mind.

From The Makers of Civilization in Race and History (1929), Waddell declared:

‘The whole of our so-called ‘Ancient History,’ as taught in our schools and manuals, has been perverted by the intrusion of a Semitic bias, itself derived from Hebrew tradition. The effect has been to represent civilisation as the work of Semites, when in truth the evidence of monuments and inscriptions proves otherwise. This so-called ‘Semitic theory’ is no scientific conclusion at all, but a theological dogma inherited from the belief in the Hebrew Scriptures as literal history. Transferred bodily into Assyriology, it has warped the entire fabric of early history, giving to the Semites credit for achievements that were never theirs, and obscuring the true Sumerian and Aryan origins of civilisation.’

He sharpened the point further:

‘The manner in which the so-called ‘Semitic’ theory has been foisted on the modern world is by no means scientific. It is in truth a theological dogma, a survival of the belief in the Hebrew Scriptures as literal history, transferred into what is called Assyriology. The result has been to obscure and distort the true origins of civilization. The great Sumerian and Aryan contributions have been ignored or misrepresented, whilst the Semites have been credited with achievements that were never theirs. This distortion has been so persistently repeated in modern manuals and histories that it has become an orthodoxy in the schools, upheld not by evidence but by tradition and prejudice.’

Here, Waddell exposed the mechanism: repetition, not evidence, gave rise to orthodoxy. His protest was not only against an error in detail but against the structural way in which scholarship operated - circular reinforcement of theological dogma under the guise of academic consensus.

The same protest appears in his Aryan Origin of the Alphabet, where he attacked the claim that the alphabet was a Semitic creation:

‘Hitherto, the origin of our Alphabet … has remained unknown … Nevertheless, its authors have been assumed to be Semites by all modern writers, the one mechanically repeating the other. This is partly because Greek tradition ascribed the introduction of the Alphabet … to the Phœnicians … latterly regarded by modern writers, but not by the Greeks, as Semites - though wrongly so, as we have seen by the new evidence … And this assumed Semitic racial character of the Phœnicians is persisted in notwithstanding the fact that the Phœnicians were called by the Hebrews ‘Sons of Ham,’ and not ‘Sons of Shem’ or Semites, and thus were regarded by the Hebrews or Semites themselves as Non-Semites.’

This passage is vintage Waddell: combative, sweeping, and rhetorically forceful. He denounces ‘mechanical repetition’ as the enemy of science, and insists on the need to return to evidence rather than dogma. Though his terminology - ‘Aryan,’ ‘Sons of Ham’ - is dated and must be handled critically today, his essential point is clear: the consensus was not neutral but shaped by biblical categories, and by accepting those categories uncritically, scholars distorted the record.

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Why Waddell’s protest matters to our case for historical re-evaluation from ground-up

It is important to be clear: Waddell was right about the bias. Orientalist Assyriology, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was deeply shaped by the desire to harmonise with the Hebrew Bible. As he recognised, this led to a systematic over-crediting of Semitic peoples for innovations in writing, religion, and law. His protest was not fringe speculation but a legitimate critique of method.

For the Storm God project, Waddell’s dissent is vital because it clears space for continuity that consensus obscured. By pointing to Sumerian and Egyptian origins, and by insisting that Indo-European could not be reconstructed in isolation from them, he prefigured our own work.

Where He Faltered

Yet it is equally important to note where Waddell faltered. His language of ‘Sumer-Aryan’ blurred cultural and racial categories. He often overstated his case, presenting as settled what was provisional. And, crucially for our purposes, he missed the hydronymic substratum - the deepest fossil layer that could have made his arguments far stronger. His protest was right, but his tools were blunt.

Our Endorsement

We endorse Waddell entirely in his criticism of Semitic bias. He was right to call it theological dogma, right to expose the way it distorted early history, and right to insist that civilisation did not begin with the Semites. But where he left the task unfinished, we continue it. His instinct - that we still speak Sumerian words, and that Egyptian must be restored into the matrix - will be taken much further in Part 3. For now, our task in Part 2 is to read Waddell again, with fresh eyes, and to show that many of the words he analysed were in fact hydronyms. By doing so, we can preserve his protest while refining his method.

Waddell’s Proto-Script and the Gothic Link

Waddell’s most enduring contribution, beyond his attack on the ‘Semitic theory,’ is his insistence that the alphabet did not arise sui generis in a West Semitic vacuum but stands at the end of a much older, broader current of sign-making and name-bearing that runs out of Sumer, through the Syro-Anatolian corridor and the Phoenician coast, into Greece and then western Europe. He argued two propositions that matter for our project:

1. what modern handbooks present as a settled story of ‘Semitic invention’ is largely the product of mechanical repetition and biblical categories, not the weighing of all the evidence, and

2. a continuous, pre-phonetic sign tradition lies behind the historical alphabets, and its authors were not exclusively, or even primarily, Semitic peoples.

He wrote, in words we have already cited but must place here for emphasis:

‘Hitherto, the origin of our Alphabet … has remained unknown … Nevertheless, its authors have been assumed to be Semites by all modern writers, the one mechanically repeating the other. This is partly because Greek tradition ascribed the introduction of the Alphabet … to the Phœnicians … latterly regarded by modern writers, but not by the Greeks, as Semites - though wrongly so, as we have seen by the new evidence … And this assumed Semitic racial character of the Phœnicians is persisted in notwithstanding the fact that the Phœnicians were called by the Hebrews ‘Sons of Ham,’ and not ‘Sons of Shem’ or Semites, and thus were regarded by the Hebrews or Semites themselves as Non-Semites.’

Two things are clear in this passage. First, he is not merely quibbling about letter forms; he is indicting the method by which a consensus is kept in place. Second, he is trying to prise the early alphabet free from an a priori Semitic frame so that older strata can be seen.

What Waddell saw – and why it is still relevant

Waddell’s comparative chapters on signs, letter-names and early inscriptions pursued a diffusionist path that modern readers do not need to accept wholesale in order to recognise the core value. He sought structural lines of descent from Sumerian linear pictograms and administrative marks into later linear scripts, and he insisted that the stream passed through the highlands around Lake Van and Cappadocia, across the Phoenician coast and into the Aegean. He regarded Phoenician not as an isolated spark, but as a coastal phase of a much older current. He read early Anatolian and Levantine signaries against Sumerian models and concluded that what scholars were calling ‘Semitic invention’ was better understood as phonetic narrowing and consonantal pruning of a pre-existing, transregional repertoire of signs.

From our vantage point, three elements in that programme remain vital:

• the rejection of ‘mechanical repetition’ as a substitute for argument,

• the recognition that alphabetic forms do not spring from nothing, and

• the search for a transmission route that is not bound to post-biblical categories.

Even where his identifications overreach, the direction of travel is right. It is precisely that long current – signs first; names later; alphabet last – that our project restores by bringing the hydronymic and typological evidence to bear.

The Gothic link – clarifying terms

In this project we have used ‘Gothic Script’ for a pre-phonetic, linear glyph tradition visible in the Danube–Carpathian basin and then reappearing, in simplified and phoneticised form, in later alphabets. This is not Bishop Ulfilas’s Gothic alphabet of the 4th century AD. It is the deep, Old European layer of linear signs and name-carrying marks that predates historical alphabets and persists as a substrate when phonetic systems are imposed. Waddell’s own terminology – ‘Sumer-Aryan,’ ‘Gothic’ – is dated and racially inflected, but the typological intuition aligns with our usage: a long-running sign tradition, carried by riverine peoples and highland corridors, later phoneticised along coastal routes.

Where Part 1 established a hard academic base for that Old European layer – Vinča symbols, chartered hydronyms, Krahe’s grid, Nicolaisen’s cautions, Iberian and Ligurian dossiers – Waddell supplied, decades earlier, a non-conformist argument that alphabets must be read as end-points, not starting points. He did not know the Vinča corpus and did not work with hydronyms; he inferred continuity from late inscriptions back to Sumerian pictograms and onward to the Greek and Latin alphabets. But the skeleton of his case matches the spine we have now built: signs first, names next, letters last.

Where Waddell helped – and where he hindered himself

To endorse Waddell usefully we must separate the valuable from the dispensable. Valuable are his protests against theological bias; his refusal to accept Phoenician authorship as dogma; his insistence on Sumerian precedence; his comparative instinct; and his repeated claim that ‘we still speak Sumerian words.’ Dispensable are the racial scaffolds and the euhemeristic reflex that turned deep typologies into great men.

The strength of his alphabet chapters lies in the insistence that letter-names, letter-forms and early signaries are not self-explanatory. They carry older meanings that must be sought in the strata beneath. He did that work by comparison of shapes and names. He did not do it by hydronymy and typology. That is why his results, though courageous, often look strained to a modern reader. He tried to drag the early alphabet back to Sumer by letter-to-letter echoes and coastal itineraries alone. What he lacked are the two fields Part 1 has restored:

• the hydronymic fossil layer – GAR, KAR, CAL, DUR, SAL, AR – that carries root-forms across river basins irrespective of later languages, and

• the typological layer – water vs stone, flow vs container, axis vs mouth – that explains why certain root sounds and sign-shapes recur across zones and ages.

With those in place, what Waddell had to assert becomes demonstrable. The alphabet did not arise in a vacuum because the relevant sound-roots, shape-types and name-forms did not arise in a vacuum. They were already present in the environment as hydronyms and oronyms, already present in ritual as mouth, confluence, axis and vessel, and already present in counting and administration as linear marks. Of course a coastal consonantal alphabet could be cut from that cloth. But the cloth is older, and it is river-woven.

A concrete example – from signs to names to letters

Take the GAR/KAR/CAL triad from Part 1. In the hydronymic field it encodes water, stone and residue. In the sign field, the same opposition gives you the linear forms that denote enclosure, mouth, door, cut and flow. In the name field you get early toponyms and oronyms that wrap those functions onto places. From there, two phoneticising moves – first acrophony, then consonantal pruning – yield a coastal alphabet fit for trade and record. Waddell sensed the long trajectory; he tried to derive it by direct comparison of late alphabets to Sumerian models. Our path is stronger because it does not require a leap across three millennia. It reconstructs the middle by way of the rivers that never moved.

In other words, where Waddell saw the alphabetic continuity and fought the campus for it, we can now show the hydronymic and typological continuity that makes his alphabetic intuition plausible. That is the Gothic link in our usage: the Old European sign-and-name substrate that underlies later letter-lists.

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Why the Phoenician dogma fails – and what replaces it

None of this requires denying that Phoenician traders used and spread a consonantal script. It requires denying only the claim that this was an ex nihilo invention, and the stronger claim that all antecedents must be ignored because they disturb a neat textbook sequence. Waddell’s point, better made now with better tools, is that the coastal alphabets are episodes in a longer story. The evidence that forces that conclusion does not lie in a single artefact; it lies in converging lines:

• the hydronyms documented in classical and medieval sources, unchanged across conquests.

• the sign traditions in Danube–Carpathian contexts, independent of later alphabetic naming.

• the Levantine and Anatolian signaries that show local narrowing and sound-assignment.

• the Greek phonetic expansion that regularises letter-values and adds vowels;

• the medieval to-modern alphabetic stability that buries the older typologies under phonetic habit.

Waddell did not have all of those lines. He had enough to see the problem and to hammer at the weak point in the orthodox wall – the dogma that placed invention where there was only pruning. For that, he deserves endorsement.

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Bringing Waddell into the work to come

Two final points complete this piece and prepare for what follows.

First, Waddell’s repeated claim that ‘we still speak Sumerian words’ is not a flourish. It is a prompt. Once hydronyms are brought back into frame, many words that modern dictionaries label ‘uncertain origin’ resolve into continuity – not because everything is Sumerian, but because Old European hydronyms include Sumerian and Egyptian strata that Indo-European reconstruction has excluded as a matter of practice. When those are restored, Waddell’s claim becomes testable.

Second, the same exclusion blinds consensus to the Egyptian stream. Waddell occasionally noticed Egyptian elements, but he did not systematise them. In Part 3 we will show that we also still speak Egyptian – not because Egyptian is Indo-European, but because Egyptian typologies and names entered the biblical and Greco-Latin channels and so entered English. If the Bible is, as we will show, an admixture of Egyptian and Babylonian myth through Hebrew, Coptic and Greek into Latin, then its language is equally an admixture. Waddell’s protest opens that door. Hydronyms hold it open.

In short: Waddell’s alphabet work is vital to what follows. He was right to expose the dogma and to demand older strata. He lacked the hydronymic and typological tools that make those strata visible. We now have them. In the next parts we will show, case by case, how the names and titles he treated as euhemeristic or racial become intelligible as hydronymic and symbolic composites – and why that matters for the restoration of continuity he only glimpsed.

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Kings, Titles, and Euhemeristic Names

Waddell’s method is at its boldest – and most vulnerable – when he converts mythic figures and collective epithets into the names of actual kings, colonists, and dynastic founders. This is the evemerist reflex that runs through The Makers of Civilization, The Phoenician Origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons, and The British Edda: the presumption that the gods and heroes were great men whose memory fossilised into legend. The difficulty is not that real men never lurk behind tradition; it is that, in case after case, the names Waddell historicises are not personal at all. They are hydronymic or oronymic stems, or epithetic typologies of water, stone, axis and mouth – precisely the strata demonstrated in Part 1. When read in that light, the ‘lineages’ that Waddell constructs dissolve back into the mythic-natural register from which they were drawn.

What follows is not an attempt to dismiss Waddell’s enterprise, but to rescue it by placing his key names on their proper ground. His instinct – that we still speak Sumerian words and that great swathes of early Eurasian naming are older than the orthodox tells us – is right. Where he goes wrong is in forcing hydronymic fossils and symbolic composites into invented dynastic lists. Once those fossils are restored, continuity emerges without the scaffolding of racial ‘Sumer-Aryan’ history.

lugal – not ‘great man’, but lu (light/presence) + gal (the vast/cosmic sea)

In Makers, Waddell repeatedly treats lugal as a plain royal title – the ‘big man,’ hence ‘king’ – and then looks for men to bear it. But as our Part 1 base makes clear, lu-gal is structurally and semantically older than any palace. The lu- family aligns with luminosity/presence, and gal is the vastness – the great water, the cosmic sea – that receives and stabilises it. In the hydronymic typology gal is the field (GAR/GAL), and in the mythic register lu-gal names a function (the axis of light in the vast), not a male individual. Recasting lugal as a hydronymic/symbolic composite collapses the need for a historical ‘Big Man.’ Waddell’s instinct – that the word is deeply archaic and widely diffused – stands; his historicising move does not.

Method rule: when a title decomposes cleanly into attested hydronymic stems (lu/gal, gar/kal), treat it as an archetypal function first, and a personal name only second, and with evidence.

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Assur/Ashur – not a founder king, but a river-axis epithet folded into a theonym

Waddell gravitates to Assur as an eponymous ‘king’ or dynastic initiator. Yet historically Aššur is first a place (the riverine city on the Tigris), a deity bound to that city’s axis, and a name-form whose spread follows cult and empire. In terms of the root families, Aš-/As- names cluster with AR/AS axis-forms, and the cultic posture of Ashur – god enthroned on the winged disk, bow extended – is an axis-symbol coded to river and sky. The hydronymic reading (axis/mouth/origin) does what Waddell’s king-list cannot: it shows why Aššur behaves like a place-name, a river-name and a god-name at once, long before it could plausibly be a dynastic ‘great man.’

And like so many mythic symbols, Assur is multi-layered. He is not only axis and river, but clearly related to the form of the sun god, attested by the winged sun-disc on his monuments. This is no anachronism, nor paradox. Osiris in Egypt carried the same polyvalence: associated with Orion as the soul of the dead, with the ark and the sun as the elder Horus descending into the West, as lord of inundation, of the Duat and of the Nile, of the night and of the day sky – all at once, as the records plainly show.

The Mesopotamian system reflects the same grammar. Iskur (the Sumerian storm god, later Hadad) and Ashur (axis and sun-god of the Assyrians) belong to the luminous, diurnal aspect: the thunder, the storm, the solar disc enthroned. But Nergal, the lion-headed lord of pestilence and battle, rules the nocturnal and chthonic register – the sun at noon and in descent, the scorching heat that becomes the consuming flame, the judge of the underworld. In other words, Iskur/Ashur and Nergal are day and night aspects of the same axis principle, just as Osiris embodies both solar rebirth and the lordship of the Duat.

To the ancients there was no contradiction. The god of the storm was also the god of the sun, and the same archetype passed into the underworld as judge and destroyer. Only later redactions split these functions into separate figures. In their original field-logic they are one pattern: axis in the heavens, axis in descent, light over waters by day, light consumed in the waters by night.

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GAR, JAR, GOAR, GEORGE – the stony river and the slayer of the ‘dragon’

In Phoenician Origin, Waddell’s most publicity-grabbing move is to pull individual ‘culture-heroes’ off inscriptions and map them onto British and Irish tradition. The Newton Stone episode – with the bi-lingual text that Waddell reads as ‘Part-olon, King of the Scots … calling himself Briton, Hittite and Phoenician’ – is emblematic: a mythic Partholón (from Irish tradition) is yoked to real coordinates, tribes and races by equating names with people outright.

A hydronymic scan of Waddell’s ‘hero’ stable tells another story. The GAR/GOR/GOAR cluster that he favours recurs across Europe as river-names and stony-flow epithets (GAR-umna/Garonne; Galicia; Gaelic gaillimh ‘stony’). In hagiography St George (GEORGE/GOAR) is the Christian redeployment of the storm-over-serpent archetype: not ‘snake-worshippers’ but the old serpentine water subjugated by the axis (spear) and the mountain (rock). In purely hydronymic terms, GAR encodes the rough water type, onto which myth layers the ‘dragon’ of flood or coil; the hero’s ‘dragon-slaying’ is the annual subjection of the serpent-flow by the axis of the storm god. Waddell’s conversion of GAR-names into men strips out the typology that makes them legible.

In effect, Waddell historicises the epithet: GAR → ‘Goar/George, a great man.’ The typological reading preserves the river and explains the hero: GAR → rough river/serpent; axis (spear/horse) → victory over coil/flood.

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KAR/KHAR/CHAR – enclosure, quarry, cliff – the ‘Khatti’ as stone-people

Waddell’s use of Khatti (for the Hittites) is instructive. He reads Khatti as an ethnic label whose leaders he folds into Aryan-Phoenician schemes. In the Alpine-Ligurian field, however, KAR/KAL/KHAR is a stony, oronymic and hydronymic base. Carso (Karst), calanco gullies, Carrara (quarry), Carpathians – the semantic and geomorphological fit is exact. Where Waddell treats ‘Khatti’ as a people pressed into his race-lineage programme, we see an old stone-enclosure stem that migrates across languages (Hatti/Khatti in Anatolia; carr-/caer- in Brittonic; karst in geology). Waddell’s diffusionist map is not invalid; his reification of Khar/Kar as ethnic rather than oronymic/hydronymic is what dates it. (For his wider claims about Menes and early ‘Sumer-Aryan’ rulers, see the racial scaffold in Egyptian Civilisation: Its Sumerian Origin, which modern scholarship has not accepted.)

If we stop reading Khatti as an ethnicity and start reading KAR/KHAR/CHAR as a stone-enclosure stem that migrates through languages, we also need to restore its most important highland branch: Chaldea – and with it Chalybes – as typological names rooted in the same chal/kal field. This is not a footnote. It reframes a large swathe of early priestly identity and its westward drift.

The biblical ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ has long been locked to the southern Ur, but the Ur of Urfa alignment preserves a very different memory – a highland Chaldea centred on the Armenian/Van–Ararat zone where we have already located the storm axis. In this belt the chal/kal stem is everywhere visible in the land and cult:

• The Urartian high god Ḫaldi sits precisely in this zone. The Kh-aldi form is not a coincidence; it belongs to the same enclosure–axis stem as Khar/Kal and the stone-god on the peak. ‘Chaldea’ in this reading is not a southern tribal ethnonym imposed later, but a highland axis-enclosure name that later drifted and was retrofitted into southern history.

• The great highland rivers – Kura, Araxes – issue from the same range. The kar/cal stem lives here in stone and water both: karst escarpments, calanco gullies, chal-ledges carved by flow. This is the same functional matrix that produced Carso, Carrara, Carpathians – only here it becomes Chaldea and Ḫaldi – the enclosure god on the mountain where rivers are born.

In this frame, Chaldean first names not a race but a function: the nature observer whose axis is set on stone and who reads the waters below from the river’s head. Only later were the name and its prestige transferred to lowland elites and Southern Babylonian ‘Chaldeans,’ the astronomer-priests.

A sibling strand in the same chal field is the Chalybes – the iron-workers of the Pontic belt. Their name lives on in chalybeate springs – iron-bearing waters. This is not a mere curiosity. It is a signature of the same stone–water axis:

• Chalybes = chal- + working of stone/ore – the smith at the river’s mouth and mountain foot.
• Chalybeate = iron water – metal in flow – the smithing field in the hydronym itself.

This ties cleanly to early Vinca–Transylvanian metallurgy: ore, water, vessel, fire, which drifted east and south, and from there westwards and into Mesopotamia.

When this highland culture drifted west, ‘Chaldean’ did not vanish; it transformed. In Ireland the Céilí Dé – Culdees – are remembered as archaic ascetics of the old star-priest pattern. The phonetic echo is not proof in itself, but the function is identical:

• Chal-/Cal- highland priest → Culdee in Ireland: the sky-servants keeping vigil at the axis, guarding fire and time.
• The Céilí Dé carried the measure, the chant, the alignment.

Alongside chal/kal we must set gal – the great water and field that recurs again and again:

• Gal-lia (Gaul), Gal-atia, Gallaecia, Gal-way – the gal stem migrates across regions that sit on old river–coast axes. It is not philological bravado to hear gal – the greatness of water/field – in these cultural names. The gal – the vast, the sea, the field of potential – is present in the western ethnonyms as a memory of place and function, not of blood.

Read together, Chaldea and Gal- are not competing stories but paired halves:

• Chal/Kal = stone–axis, enclosure, peak, quarry – the mountain seat of measure and priesthood.
• Gal = water–field, the vastness where the axis stands and the vessel lies – the sea of potential that receives light.

The Babylonian Chaldean is the axis-priest on the mountain; the Gallic/Gaelic sphere is the later culture that inherits the axis at Tara. That is lugal written across continents.

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AR / TOR → Arthur, Thor – axis-names re-cast as heroic dynasts

The British Edda piles hero-onto-hero in pursuit of a primordial ‘British’ epic, aligning Arthur with Thor (AR-TOR) and reading the complex of British and Norse motifs as one continuous historical saga. The hydronymic/oronymic facts sit in plain sight: AR is the primal axis root (Arar/Saône; Arnus/Arno; Ararat), and TOR in English toponymy is the rock/peak (Dartmoor tors). AR-TOR is the axis-upon-rock, the storm-on-peak – precisely the posture of the storm god figure confronting the serpent of water or chaos. In other words, Arthur/Thor is the mythic syntax of AR (axis) and TOR (rock) re-expressed as a hero; Waddell’s conversion of that syntax into dynastic genealogy is the quintessential evemerist move. (For his Arthur/Thor synthesis as part of a universal ‘British’ tradition, see The British Edda material summarised in his later bibliography. )

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KR / KR-ST – the husk, the binding, the water-borne ‘anointed’

Waddell’s habit of reading ‘Krist’ and cognates as marks of Aryan diffusion foreshortens a deeper typology. In the Egyptian field (to be developed in Part 3), kr-st names the bound/cased form – the ‘husk’ or wrapped body in the hydric-fertile process – and enters later Greek/Latin vocabulary as ‘Christos,’ the anointed/bound. Here again, a hydronymic/ritual composite is older than any biography; Waddell’s search for kings named ‘Krist’ abstracts out the ritual substrate. The claim ‘we still speak Sumerian words’ is largely justified – but how we speak them is hydronymically and ritually, not as personal names.

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DUR/TUR and SAL – boundaries and salt recast as peoples

Across Phoenician Origin, Waddell repeatedly takes DUR/TUR and SAL names as personal or tribal labels in itineraries of colonisation: Dur-, Dor- and Tur- forms in Iberia and Gaul; Sal- peoples and emporia. Our Part 1 survey showed Durius/Douro, Durantia/Durance and Sala/Saale are among the most conservative river names in Europe; they behave like basin-labels, not anthroponyms. By mistaking river-names for men, Waddell inverts the timeline: the flows pre-exist the folk-histories that later overlay them.

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Beyond the ‘handful’ – a pattern across Makers, Phoenician Origin, British Edda

The examples above are only the best-lit cases. The pattern runs wide through Waddell’s corpus:

• GAR/GOAR/GEORGE/JAR: assigned to culture-heroes or eponymous rulers; everywhere GAR functions in our grid as a rough river or stony flow epithet. That George was associated also with the earliest mining culture re-emerged in North East England’s coal mining community known as Geordies. The region also hosts Jarrow, where Bede’s monastery exists, a marshy region clearly named hydronymically and echoing the Arabic Jarra.

• KAR/KHAR/CHAR: turned into peoples (Khatti) or founders; everywhere KAR functions as stone/enclosure/quarry/tor.

• AR/TOR: converted into a single heroic ‘British’ lineage; in our grid AR/TOR is the axis-on-rock syntagm present from Arar/Arnus to Ararat and the moorland tors.

• DUR/SAL: taken as ethno-tribal labels; in our grid they are the boundary/flow and salt roots that name rivers and marshes.

Whenever Waddell finds a sign or a name that resonates across zones, he attempts to bind it to a person in an itinerary. Whenever the hydronymic typology is applied, the itinerary yields to a landscape, and the ‘person’ resolves into a function (axis, mouth, enclosure, vessel, serpent/coil, storm).

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The serpent: misunderstanding a universal code – and the feminine he obscured

One place where Waddell’s dated lens does lasting damage is his reading of serpent symbolism. In the older ethnological mode, he sees ‘snake-worshippers’: primitives with reptile cults to be surpassed by ‘Aryan’ light-religion. That trope blinds him to the oldest semantic of the serpent – the coil or sinusoidal ripple of water, the meander, the wisdom/guidance of the goddess, the projection of sight (cobra hood) and the protective flow around the axis (Wadjet). The serpent is not a reptile cult but river-logic and goddess sight, folded into agrarian and regal rites. By misreading the serpent and dismissing the feminine as a lesser latecomer, Waddell replicates the very bias he denounces in another register: he affirms a patriarchal history where the feminine field (water, vessel, enclosure, matrix) is treated as superstition rather than structure. The result is a genealogy of ‘great men’ built on the suppression of the hydric and the feminine.

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Endorsement and correction

None of this negates the value of Waddell’s protest or his best intuitions. He was right to insist that the alphabet did not arise ex nihilo under a Semitic patent; right to point out that ‘we still speak Sumerian words’; right to expose the circularity by which handbooks reproduce dogma. But how we still speak those words is the decisive question – and the answer is hydronymic and typological. The names and titles Waddell historicised – lugal, Assur, George/Goar, Arthur/Thor, the DUR and SAL clusters – are precisely the GAR/KAR/CAL/DUR/SAL/AR families from Part 1, operating as epithets and mythic functions. Return them to that register, and the ‘great men’ thin out into what they always were: gods of the land-logic – storm and serpent, axis and mouth, rock and vessel.

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More Cases: when hydronyms and luminyms became ‘empire-builders’

Waddell’s genius and his trap share a common origin: he had a nose for archaic words and a fearless appetite for joining them across zones. Time and again he picked out the right cultures, the right root-forms, and even the right corridors of transmission – only to force what are fundamentally hydronymic/oronymic epithets and luminal goddess-names into evemerised men and racial dynasts. This section gathers a wider set of examples from The Makers of Civilization, The Phoenician Origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons, and The British Edda to show how consistently that misstep operates – and how powerful his material becomes once we return those names to the registers in which they originated.

Lugal we have already set in its true frame: lu (light/presence) + gal (great sea/field) – a functional archetype, not a ‘big man.’ The same typology is visible in the Enuma Elish, where the great void was personified as Tiamat, an archetypal gal – the vast salty sea of space – torn apart by Marduk (the ‘sea duke’) to create the ordered universe. The drama is one of axis against vastness: the primordial serpent–dragon form, the Anunnaki stars as creator gods, and the storm-force that divides and measures them.

The same pattern recurs around Waddell’s treatment of Aššur/Ashur and the northern river-cities. In the historic record Aššur is first a cultic city on the Tigris; the god Aššur is an axis-figure; the stem spreads because the city and its imperial cult spread. Read hydronymically, Aššur belongs with AR/AS axis forms and with the GAR/KAR family that bonds mouth, rock, enclosure to river. Waddell’s evemerism inverts that order: a ‘king’ does not found the axis; the axis names the king and the city.

A similar violence is done whenever flood–serpent myths are historicised. In the Mesopotamian field the ‘dragon’ is a river–coil or turbid flood; the hero’s spear or bow is the axis; the high place (ziggurat, citadel, hill city) is the rock enclosure (kar/kal). Those are precisely the GAR/KAR/AR syntagms that Part 1 mapped as stable hydronyms/oronyms. Waddell’s method frequently converts such syntagms into men and lineages.

Tigris and Euphrates exemplify how the hydronym must be left as hydronym. Tigris (OP tigra, Akkadian Idiglat) is an old river-name associated with speed/arrowing; Euphrates (Purattu) the great western stream. The temptation to pull ‘Tigris’ or ‘Purattu’ into a colonist’s itinerary is precisely the error – here, the river is the atlas, not an actor in a saga.

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Levant and Anatolia: as/is luminyms, kar enclosures, coastal pruning

In the corridor Waddell called ‘Phoenician’ (rightly, as a phase of narrowing and coastal diffusion), two families predominate:

1. The luminyms with as/is/es – the dawn/star goddess line that gives you Aset/Isis in Egypt, Ishtar/Astarte/Ashtoreth in the Levant, and later Eostre/Esther in the north-west. These are not ‘snake-worshippers,’ as Waddell caricatured, but the old bright-one typology of Venus/dawn fused with the serpent of wisdom (river-coil, projection of vision, cobra-hood). He senses the continuity; then he collapses Aset/Ishtar into mothers and queens of ‘Aryan’ founders. The hydronymic-luminal reading preserves the goddess as function – light emerging over water, seated on throne/stone (Aset’s throne glyph) – and explains the stability of is/as across cultures.

2. The kar/kal enclosure line – Tyre (ṣōr = rock), the Anatolian Khatti/Hatti (Waddell’s ‘Khatti’ people), Carchemish (fort on the Euphrates), the Halys/Kızılırmak basin, Tarsus with tar/tor axis-on-rock imprint. These are stone and ridge names that behave like oronyms and fort-toponyms. Waddell repeatedly racialises them (‘Khatti’ as Aryan colonists) or personifies them as founders; the hydronymic/oronymic view makes better sense of their distribution.

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Hellenic and Mediterranean: AR/TOR, KOR/KORE/COIRE, and the bowl/vessel set

In The British Edda, Waddell’s most audacious move is to make the Norse and British cycles a single historic epic. The AR/TOR seam is the hinge: Arthur ~ Thor becomes a literal identification. Our reading does not deny the resonance – it restores it: AR (axis, river line, rising) + TOR (rock peak, tors in the British landscape) is the axis-on-rock syntagm. The figure is the storm-on-tor (Orion/Arthur/Thor) confronting the serpent-flood; that is why the myth will not die. It is not a man’s life; it is the landscape’s equation.

The KOR/KORE family – Persephone/Kore – is equally revealing, though not considered by Waddell. Greek Korē (‘the Maiden’) is mythically tied to seasonal descent/ascent and the underground bowl. In the Atlantic façade the Gaelic coire (‘cauldron,’ ‘corrie’ – glacial bowl) is the identical land-logic: a vessel/basin carved by water in stone. Kore here is not a personal identity but a functional title: the bowl, the vessel. Hydronymically the coire is the basin/grail, the cup at the heart of later Christian overlays. Again: the right word was present; it is its category that has been misread in later historicising.

She, as a Gaia form, became Pandora with a jar - representing her bounty and mystery as guardian of the underworld and its gifts. The jar was the vessel of life’s potential, the same container logic as Isis’s throne, Kore’s cauldron, or Inanna’s vessel of descent. Later, however, the story was recast: the jar was turned into a box, and Pandora herself from guardian of treasure became bringer of calamity. This is mythic drift at its clearest - the reframing of a vessel-goddess away from her hydronymic roots into a cautionary tale of punishment, sealing the shift from fluid abundance to restrictive moral allegory.

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British and Celtic: Danu rivers, Don, Inver/Aber, and the heroic mask

In the British field Waddell is at his most inventive – and most fragile. He turns Tuatha Dé Danann into historic settlers and maps them onto Pictish and Scottish chronicles; he aligns Arthur with the Norse; he reads inscriptions into colonist itineraries. A hydronymic sweep through the toponyms returns the ground to the ground:

• Danu / Don / Danube / Dniester / Dnieper – the danu- water goddess is a pan-Eurasian hydronym. The peoples called ‘Danaan’ are a river cultic mask; the river is not named after the people; the people are named under the river.

• Aber-/Inver- – Brittonic aber ‘confluence/mouth,’ Gaelic inbhir/inver the same; Waddell’s habit of converting compound names in these families into the record of a chieftain or tribe confuses hydronymic function with personal genealogy. An ‘Aber-’ place is a confluence node; nothing more needs to be assumed.

• Arthur/Thor – as above: AR+TOR as syntagm; the ‘king’ as mask of axis-on-rock.

• Gawain/Goar/Geoffrey and related Gaw/Goar forms, which Waddell treats as heroic or dynastic names, sit under the GAR/GOR river family (rough/stony flow). Where the ‘Gaw/Goar’ forms concentrate, the toponymic GAR family concentrates.

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Indus and Vedic: goddess-rivers, lucent lords, and black/white masks

Waddell’s net is widest in his ‘Aryan’ chapters on India. Here too the hydronymic and luminal registers do the quiet work:

• Sarasvatī and Sindhu (Indus) are the river goddesses; Waddell turns ‘Aryan’ settlement lists into personal trajectories; the hydronyms tell us only that rivers name the land and so name the people.

• Ganga is the apex of water-goddess; diffusionist readings sometimes turn her into queenly figures; leave her as river/goddess and the continuity remains crisp.

• Luminal names like Īśvara (‘lord’), Uṣas (dawn), Gaurī (white/radiant) sit on the lu/li/is luminym line that Waddell half-saw but frequently pressed into dynastic identity.

• Kali and Kṛṣṇa – black forms – are often drafted by racial evemerists into ‘dark’ and ‘fair’ tribes. They are better read as ritual polarities (night/day; flood/drought; seed/husk): mythic and natural categories, not ethnology.

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The ‘Gunn-Effer’ problem and other Waddellian misreads of river-words as men

Across British lists, Waddell repeatedly misreads common hydronymic elements as anthroponyms. Forms akin to Inver (Gaelic inbhir), Aber (Brittonic), Doire (oak grove/wet place), and coire (bowl) surface in his genealogies as people or leaders. It is a category error that propagates invented history: river-mouths and bowls are not men. Whenever a compound contains a river-mouth, basin, ridge, or tor, it should be treated as a place-function unless and until a primary source shows a person independent of that topographic root.

The ‘Gunn-Effer’ - which Waddell sees as the root of Guinevere - crystallises the problem. Gun is the axis element – stone/tor, the set point – while Effer is best read as a hydronymic mouth/flow element. In Gaelic, inbhir ‘river-mouth’ is pronounced inver (bh = /v/). In medieval spellings and later anglicisations, loss or reduction of the initial vowel and the rendering of /v/ with f are common: inbhir → inver → iver/ever → effer in some local records. On the Brittonic side, aber ‘confluence, mouth’ appears in early sources as Æbber-, Abber-, and Apor-, showing labial variation and scribal fluidity between b/v/f that often surfaces again in later English spellings. Either route – Gaelic inbhir or Brittonic aber – yields a plausible hydronymic Effer reading in compounds.

Functionally, then, Gunn-Effer parses as axis + mouth/flow: tor and river-mouth in polarity. It is sovereignty logic, not a couple. The same pattern recurs across the landscape: inver/aber at confluences and estuaries; coire for bowls and corries (glacial basins) that act as natural vessels; doire for wet, wooded ground. Waddell’s conversion of these live hydronymic/oronymic stems into people produces a fictive prosopography: a roll-call of ‘leaders’ conjured out of rivers, bowls, and ridges.

Read this way, ‘Gunn-Effer’ is not a partner of pair of human lovers or founders. It is the site where the axis meets the mouth, the lake or spring, the tor over the estuary – a place-function that later storytelling turned into persons. From this misunderstanding, the water-goddess was fractured into distinct female figures. The Lady of the Lake, Vivien, Guinevere, and Morgana are split retellings of the primal water goddess. Morgana is cognate with the Morrígan, retaining the mor/mer/mar roots relating to sea and marsh - the same root carried in Marduk, the ‘sea-duke’ who divides the waters of Tiamat.

The Arthurian cycle thus preserves the same substratum: hydronymic goddess names reframed as queens and sorceresses. What began as the primal vessel of sovereignty - the mouth, the flow, the sea-field - was re-cast as wives, lovers, or enchantresses. The typology remains visible through the names themselves, but the unity of the goddess was broken into fragments, each telling only a part of the older whole.

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The serpent and the feminine – again where the lens matters most

We must underline how the wrong lens produces the wrong history. Waddell’s ‘snake-worshippers’ are the richness he needed: serpentine wisdom (meander, coil), goddess sight (Wadjet’s hood, the projecting flame of the uraeus), river-logic (rise, flood, retreat), vessel and seat (Aset’s throne). By treating these as primitive cults to be superseded by ‘Aryan’ light, he not only misreads the symbolism; he strips the hydric feminine out of the very continuity he sought to defend. The cult of the serpent-river and the light-over-waters is the oldest grammar of civilisation. It is not an embarrassment to be written out with a racial brush.

Here Waddell repeats a deeper issue already embedded in later traditions: the Semitic and then Roman Church’s erasure and denigration of the serpent as a symbol of the feminine and of wisdom, all of which are inseparable from water symbolism. What the Egyptians revered as Wadjet, the projecting flame of perception, what the Mesopotamians saw in Tiamat’s coils, what the Celts named in the Morrígan’s sea-marsh roots, was re-coded as temptation, sin, or Satan. By this inversion, the hydronymic serpent ceased to be the vessel of renewal and became the adversary of God. The oldest archetype of balance – serpent and axis, vessel and light – was fractured.

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What remains when the scaffolding falls

If we pull out the evemerist scaffolding, what remains is stronger:

• Waddell’s cultures and corridors are largely right – the drift does move Sumer–Van/Anatolia–Levant–Aegean–West.

• His instinct that ‘we still speak Sumerian words’ is right – because hydronyms and other name-fossils survive the longest.

• His sense that Phoenician was a coastal, sea-faring narrowing of older sign and name traditions is right. The Phoenicians carried Drift Culture to new lands such as Britain, and were later demonised and downplayed in history because they were enemies of the Hebrews – the Philistines of Canaan, today’s Gaza. That ‘ancient grudge’ still ‘breaks to new mutiny.’ In the true history, restored by hydronyms, there is no racial stain on Phoenician, Philistine, or any other people. There is no historic ‘race’ descended from biblical patriarchs: those figures are mythic constructs, not ancestors.

• His alignment of British and Norse myth cycles is right insofar as he sensed the same archetype: the axis-on-rock, the storm-god over serpent. This pattern really does recur from Armenia to the Atlantic.

What must go is the conversion of GAR/KAR/CAL/DUR/SAL/AR epithets into kings, and the conversion of luminyms (Aset/Ishtar/Eostre) into queens of ‘Aryan’ dynasties. Once those are returned to their rightful status as hydronymic/oronymic and luminal fossils, Waddell’s field of play stops demanding improbable lineages and starts exhibiting what Part 1 demonstrated: a deep, layered continuity of names rooted in land, water, light, and axis – exactly the continuity consensus could not see because it set Sumerian and Egyptian outside the IE frame.

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Waddell in His Own Words

From The Makers of Civilization in Race and History (1929):

‘The whole of our so-called ‘Ancient History,’ as taught in our schools and manuals, has been perverted by the intrusion of a Semitic bias, itself derived from Hebrew tradition. The effect has been to represent civilisation as the work of Semites, when in truth the evidence of monuments and inscriptions proves otherwise. This so-called ‘Semitic theory’ is no scientific conclusion at all, but a theological dogma inherited from the belief in the Hebrew Scriptures as literal history.’

And again:

‘The manner in which the so-called ‘Semitic’ theory has been foisted on the modern world is by no means scientific. It is in truth a theological dogma… The great Sumerian and Aryan contributions have been ignored or misrepresented, whilst the Semites have been credited with achievements that were never theirs. This distortion has been so persistently repeated… that it has become an orthodoxy in the schools, upheld not by evidence but by tradition and prejudice.’

In The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet (1927), he made the same charge against alphabetic history:

‘Nevertheless, its authors have been assumed to be Semites by all modern writers, the one mechanically repeating the other. This is partly because Greek tradition ascribed the introduction of the Alphabet to the Phœnicians… latterly regarded by modern writers, but not by the Greeks, as Semites – though wrongly so, as we have seen by the new evidence.’

And in The Phoenician Origin of Britons (1924), he claimed to uncover the very founders of Britain:

‘The Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons are not Teutonic tribes as hitherto supposed, but are the descendants of Aryan Phoenicians, Sumerians, and other early Civilizers, whose names and records survive in the monuments, myths, and place-names of Britain.’

Here is Waddell distilled: bold, combative, convinced that continuity exists - but framing it as racial descent and historical kingship.

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What He Saw Correctly

• Bias in Assyriology. Waddell was right: much of early ‘Semitic’ scholarship was shaped by biblical literalism, not evidence. His denunciation of the ‘Semitic theory’ remains one of the clearest ever printed.

• Continuity. He was correct that what scholars label ‘Phoenician,’ ‘Sumerian,’ ‘Gothic,’ or ‘Celtic’ are phases of one current of names and signs.

• Living survivals. His insistence that ‘we still speak Sumerian words’ anticipated what we have now shown hydronymically and luminymically.

Where He Went Wrong

• Euhemerism. Waddell turned epithets and functions into dynastic men. Lugal, Assur, Arthur/Thor, George/Goar, Krist – all became ‘Aryan kings.’ In fact they are hydronymic/luminymic composites:

  • Lugal = lu (light-being) + gal (great water/sea).

  • Arthur/Thor = AR (axis) + TOR (rock, peak).

  • George/Goar = GAR/GOR (stony river, flood).

  • Krist = krst (the husk, the swaddled Osiris).

• Racial scaffolding. His ‘Sumer-Aryan’ frame imposed 19th-century race categories onto what are really field-archetypes and river-names.

• The serpent and the goddess. He reduced serpent-wisdom to ‘snake worship’ and denigrated the feminine principle. In reality, serpent = wisdom/river coil, goddess = vessel and field. His dismissal here reproduces the very patriarchal inversion he fought against in other respects.

Where Waddell found ‘kings,’ we find rivers, hills, lights, and archetypes:

• Gun-Effer (which he read as Guinevere, Arthur’s consort) = Gun (axis/stone) + Effer (river-flow, breath). Not a queen’s personal name, but polarity logic of sovereignty itself.

• Garden = gar (water) + den/dan (place). Not enclosure, but a watered ground.

• Shem = ‘plant in a pot’ glyph. Not Noah’s son, but axis re-rooted after the flood.

• Iteru (the Nile) = it (presence) + ru (motion). Not ‘just a river,’ but the archetype of being-in-flow.

Each time, the hydronymic/luminymic lens restores meaning.

Despite his errors, Waddell is indispensable. He:

• Cleared space by attacking consensus bias.

• Collected data across Britain, Sumer, the Indus, and the Levant that still demands attention.

• Preserved names and correspondences ignored by orthodox scholars.

Without him, much of this book could not have been written. His method was flawed, but his instinct was sound.

Endorsement: we honour his protest and his intuition.
Correction: we strip away his evemerism and racial framework, restoring the words he gathered to their proper hydronymic and luminymic roots.

The rivers, not the races, are the carriers of memory. The serpent, not the sword, is the goddess’s wisdom. And the kings he imagined were never men at all – they were functions of water, light, and axis. Those functions were carried forward across time and place by cultures often governed by men and aristocracies, but whose earliest recognitions were of the goddess and the waters as primary.

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Part 3 – Restoration: Hydronyms, Luminyms, Theanonyms, and the Continuity of God and Goddess

The deepest truth preserved in language is that divinity was never imagined as a single isolated force, nor as a patriarchal will imposed from above, but as polarity held in union. God and goddess were entwined principles – light and water, axis and vessel – whose names carried this logic at the most elemental level. The oldest names of gods are not historical persons, nor abstract labels: they are theanonyms – divine names in which polarity itself is united.

A theanonym is not restricted to hydronym and luminym, though these are its most visible fossils. It is any name where masculine and feminine archetypes meet: where form and ratio join, where the benben or the lingam rises from the waters of the goddess, where serpent and soul entwine. Sometimes the water-logic is explicit, sometimes only implied; but always the principle is the same – theanonyms bind opposites into unity. To mistake them for single, masculine names is to miss their essence.

In order to make this continuity precise, I have had to introduce new terms:

• Luminym: a light-related root, preserving the radiant principle of the divine. Lu, lux, lugh, logos – all carry this field of meaning.

• Theanonym: a divine name in which god and goddess, masculine and feminine, are held together in unity. A theanonym is always polar, not solitary. It may be formed from hydronym and luminym together – as in lugal or krst – but it may also appear as other unions: form and ratio, serpent and vessel, seed and womb.

• Ouonym: a specific class of hydronym derived from wsjr and ouse-like words, where Osiris (Wsjr, Ousir, Asar) is remembered in the very naming of rivers – Ouse, perhaps influencing Usher, Isar, Yser, and others.

Thus a theanonym may be a hydro-luminymic composite – such as lugal (‘light in the sea’) or krst (‘husk anointed by the goddess’) – but it need not be. The identical function may appear in myth as the benben arising from Nun, or the lingam from the yoni, or in Chinese tradition as Fuxi and Nüwa: form emerging from water, serpent and axis entwined. These are not strictly theonyms in the sense of naming a single god; they are typologically identical, expressed in myths, engravings, and tales. The form is always the same: unity born of polarity, axis drawn from field, light arising from water.

The Sumerian title lugal is conventionally translated as ‘great man.’ Yet the compound discloses its own truth: lu belongs to the luminym family – light, lucent, Lugh, Logos – and gal is the great water, the vastness, the cosmic sea. Together they mean not a great man, but the radiant one placed in the galactic sea. Lugal is the shining axis, appointed only through the embrace of the water-field. To reduce this to ‘king’ is to flatten the axis into a bureaucrat. The title also retains an echo of Kingu, the Lord of the primordial battle, who bore the Tablets of Destiny and whose role as custodian of cosmic order passed into the lugal as his titular inheritance.

In Egyptian funerary texts, krst denotes the swathed corpus of Osiris: the bound form anointed with oils, submerged in water, prepared for rebirth. From this arises the Greek Christos, the ‘anointed one.’ He becomes the corpus Christi. Yet krst is not a title invented for a messiah; it is a hydronymic archetype – the husk encased in liquid, the seed made ready to rise again. To recover krst is to recognise that Christ is not an isolated redeemer, but a name encoding the eternal cycle of burial in the waters and rebirth through light.

The pictograph for shem in Sumer is a plant in a pot. It means not just ‘name,’ but to be planted, established, made axis in the field. In Genesis it becomes the name of Noah’s son, retrofitted into genealogy. Yet the older truth is visible: a shem is an axis rooted in water and soil, bearing light upward. It is not a bloodline. It is the act of placement itself – the Word made stem.

‘Garden’ is derived not from enclosure but from water. Gar is the flowing stream, dan/den the settled place. This is another example of Sumerian that we still speak within Indo-European languages, despite academia declaring it otherwise. A garden is not a fence, but a watered ground, a place of flow and life. Eden is ed-dan - the watered place of establishment. Avalon is abalon - the isle of apples, a garden by water. Each preserves the same hydronymic grammar: fertility requires the flow. By contrast, academic consensus, working only within PIE, renders “garden” as “enclosure place” - a barren definition with no essential connection to watering or growth.

The Nile’s ancient name Iteru divides into it (presence) and ru (motion). It means that which is and flows. This was not metaphor. The river was divine because it was being-in-motion itself. Later theology personified the Nile as goddess, but the name already contained the archetype. Iteru is the goddess in sound: presence and flow married in one word.

Isis (Aset) is throne, vessel, seat. She is the container in which the axis is set. Her very name carries the luminym is/as – the same root in Ishtar, Astarte, Esther, and Eostre, all linked to the morning star, to radiance at dawn. The throne is not furniture. It is the vessel of sovereignty, the grail upon which the axis rests. Isis is not secondary to Osiris. She is the field without which Osiris cannot stand.

The ancients knew there was no river without the river bed, no river bed without the river that wore it into being. There is no life without fluid, and what is dry and hard has no life. The fluid anoints and brings life, then the breath as fluid is given, contained in the lungs. There is no wine without the jar, no garden without the water to grow, no inundation without the light of the stars to announce the season. And the stars, in the great sea of space, were Orion and Sirius – Osiris and Isis in the waters above – who brought the waters below that gave life to the land.

The king was not a tyrant standing alone. He was the servant of the principle of Ma’at, aligning masculine form with the living essence of the goddess as right and true. The king and the goddess were unified; in so being, the king unified the people, and his rule was associated with the prosperity of the land. He stood as a representative of Osiris, in hieros gamos with the goddess, who would become one with them in the afterlife.

This is the belief system of our Drift Culture before the imposition of religion. It was not always honoured, but it was inherent in the luminyms, hydronyms, theanonyms, and even the ouonyms – a continuous nexus of religious and scientific nature-based belief. It is a continuity spanning thousands of years and thousands of miles, from the first watchers of Orion above Ararat to the builders of temples on the Nile, to the mythic weavings of Greece and the North in the Irish nature based culture who revered the goddess as river, spring and lake. It was only fractured when religion sought to overwrite it with dogma.

The further we trace, the clearer it becomes: all the great gods and goddesses are not distinct revelations, but minor variants of the same archetypes. Their names are hydronyms and luminyms; their myths are stories of water, light, and axis; their symbols are serpents, rivers, stars, and mountains. When we read them as theanonyms, the continuity is plain.

The first storm god in written record is Ishkur, known later as Hadad, the thunderer. He arrives with the storms of winter, bearing the lightning rods. His stance mirrors Orion above the Ararat peaks – upright, armed, facing Taurus, striding the breach. His consort is Inanna, Venus as star and goddess, morning and evening light. Her descent into the underworld is the cycle of Venus disappearing from the sky. Her name holds the hydronymic anna (sky-water, river of heaven), linking her directly to the waters above and below. Together Ishkur and Inanna represent the storm axis and the watery star-field.

Among the Hurrians, Teshub stands upon twin mountains, thunderbolt in hand, facing the bull. His consort Hebat is enthroned beside him, the goddess of sovereignty. Their names are less familiar, but the typology is identical: storm-god and goddess-throne, axis and vessel, serpent-slayer and water-bringer.

The Hittites call him Tarhunt – still the storm god, slayer of serpent Illuyanka. The Urartians call him Haldi, standing on lion or mountain. Again the form is Orionic: upright, armed, storming, enthroned on beast or peak. And again, each has a goddess beside them, the vessel without which the axis is void.

In Egypt the pair become Osiris and Isis. Osiris is the wrapped husk (kr), the drowned god whose body is cast upon the waters and reassembled, anointed by Ast with the st to become krst. Isis (Aset) is throne and vessel, the seat in which kingship rests. Osiris is axis and measure, Isis is field and essence. Sirius and Orion stand together in the night sky as their stellar counterparts, announcing the flood of the Nile. The serpent here is not demonic: Wadjet, the uraeus, is the protective cobra at the brow, the wisdom that projects sight outward like a flame. The Nile itself is serpentine, goddess-water. Later religion distorted serpent into Satan; in truth serpent is river, goddess, wisdom.

In Greece, the storm god becomes Zeus, still hurling thunder, enthroned on mountain peaks. His consort Hera is queen and seat – her name carries the root era, time, season, order. Beneath them repeats the same archetype. Dionysus is another axis-figure, god of vine and fluid, reborn each year through the blood of the grape. His bride Ariadne is vessel and thread, a weaving goddess. And the maiden Kore (Persephone) is literally ‘the bowl,’ the coire, the vessel of descent and return. These are hydronyms turned to myth: Kore as cauldron, Dionysus as flow. The serpent is never far: Apollo slays Python at Delphi, Heracles slays the Hydra – each is an echo of the storm god facing the river-serpent of chaos.

In the Celtic world, the axis is Lugh, ‘the shining one,’ from the luminym lu. His goddess is Danu, the river-mother whose name is preserved in Don, Danube, Dniester, Jordan. The Tuatha Dé Danann are literally ‘the people of the goddess Danu’ – the river-people. In the Norse, the axis is Thor, from tor, the rock, paired with AR, the axis – hence Ar-Tor, Arthur. Thor’s weapon is the hammer, the bolt, the axis-force, as Mjolnir it is drawn in the form that is seen in the hammer-shaped Pleiades constellation, as he hurls it at the great beast archetype of the bull Taurus. His consort Freyja is goddess of fertility, field, vessel – her name cognate with ‘lady,’ the vessel-bearing one. The serpent again is present: Jörmungandr, the world-serpent encircling the seas, faced by Thor in the final reckoning.

Eastward, the pattern does not vanish. In Chinese myth Fuxi and Nüwa are the paired creators. Fuxi draws the lines of order, the net, the axis of civilisation. Nüwa, his sister-consort, repairs the broken sky, her body half-serpent, half-woman. She is the vessel, the goddess-serpent, the water-essence. Their intertwined tails form the caduceus of balance – light and water entwined, serpent as wisdom and river.

In every culture, serpent symbolism is river symbolism. Illuyanka in Anatolia, Apophis in Egypt, Leviathan in Canaan, Vritra in India, Jörmungandr in Norse myth – all are coils of water, floods, chaos-currents. The storm god’s battle with the serpent is not myth alone: it is the annual flood, the struggle of order over inundation, the imposition of axis upon flow. Religion demonised serpent; myth remembered serpent as the goddess’s wisdom.

From Ishkur and Inanna to Osiris and Isis, Zeus and Hera, Lugh and Danu, Thor and Freyja, Fuxi and Nüwa – the same archetypes recur. They are not coincidences, nor borrowings. They are theanonyms: names in which water and light, serpent and star, vessel and axis are fused. Every culture of the Drift received them, and every culture told the same story in new phonemes.

The serpent is not the devil. The goddess is not secondary. The king is not sovereign. The true axis is always paired with the vessel; light is always married to water. Theanonyms preserve the memory of this union. Only when religion tore apart that union did serpent become Satan, goddess become whore or merely a human mother, and kingship become domination.

Kingship in the Drift cultures was never a matter of sovereign domination. The king was not an absolute ruler, but an axis-steward, responsible for aligning himself, and thus his people, with the goddess-field. The temple was the physical embodiment of this axis. It was not merely a house for a god, but the fixed point in which heaven and earth were joined. The king stood as lugal – light placed in the great water – the luminary axis planted in the womb of the land. His queen was not an ornament but the vessel of legitimacy, the grail into which sovereignty was poured. Without the vessel, the axis was sterile; without the field, the light could not stand. This is the logic of Ma’at: balance, proportion, truth. Kingship was service to balance. The moment it became domination – axis without vessel – it became fraud.

The most decisive case is krst, the Egyptian word for the wrapped body of Osiris. Kr marks the hard, dry husk – the corpse awaiting renewal. St is the goddess, the anointing fluid, the essence that makes rebirth possible. Without st, the husk remains inert. With it, the soul journeys to Ra and passes through the weighing of Ma’at.

Here is the truth hidden in plain sight: Krst is not a personal name. It is not the title of a man. It is a theanonym – a composite of husk and goddess, axis and field. When the Bible imposed ‘Christ’ as a historical messiah, it severed this union. It stripped away the goddess, discarded the st function but retained the root in the spelling, and presented only the husk. Christ was made into a man, a dry fiction, cut loose from the fluid continuity of over three millennia of Drift culture.

To minimise or ignore the hydronym here is to collude in the fraud. Without hydronyms, ‘Christ’ is just a mystery name. With hydronyms, it is revealed as krst, the wrapped body anointed by the goddess, prepared for the soul’s ascent. This single example shows the scale of rupture. Religion imposed as history obliterated the feminine half of theanonyms, turning polarity into patriarchy, myth into literalism, archetype into dogma.

Academic consensus repeats a related error. It calls Sumerian a language isolate, severed from continuity. It calls Egyptian a dead tongue, museumized and excluded from Indo-European. It reduces surviving hydronymic fossils to ‘obscure’ origins, or dismisses them as coincidence. Yet these languages still speak in our mouths: pis survives in piss, Pisces, fish. Gar in garden, Avalon, Eden. Gal in girl, gala, galaxy. Lu in light, Lugh, lucid. Shem in name, planted axis.

Hydronyms restore what consensus refuses to see: that Sumerian and Egyptian are not dead isolates but foundation tongues, the matrix from which Drift culture unfolded. Religion compounded the academic error into fraud. The goddess was split: Isis reduced to whore or mother. The serpent was demonised: river-wisdom turned into Satan. Theanonyms were historicised: Christ became a man, Shem a patriarch, Lugal a bureaucratic ‘great man.’

Perhaps the most extreme example of this rupture is the consensus definition of the divine gu-gal - translated blandly as ‘canal inspector.’ A god of cosmic axis and water reduced to the status of a civil servant. The human role in deference to the god’s sacred function has been retrojected onto the god itself: the euhemerist methodology that ruptures our understanding of the ancient psychology, and which remains fossilised in academic practice.

“Adad, the lord, the perfect champion, son of Anu, the canal inspector of heaven and earth, who gives life to the land.” - trans. Collon 1986a / Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum: Cylinder Seals III: Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian Periods (177) - see The British Museum entry.

Hydronyms undo the fraud. They reveal the continuity that never broke: water and light entwined, serpent and axis joined, goddess and god as polarity. Every true divine name is a theanonym, not a title of conquest but a fusion of vessel and flame.

The recovery of hydronyms allows us to repair one of the most serious ruptures in the record: the displacement of Chaldea from its northern highland origin to a Babylonian invention. The Bible collapses centuries of development by planting ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ in Babylonia and then, as though in sequence, placing the Ark upon Ararat. Yet the hydronyms tell a different story.

The roots of Chaldea are not in the lowland, but in the Armenian highlands and the Ur of Urfa, where the chal/kal stem still clings to the mountains and rivers. Here is the zone of Ararat and Van, where the storm axis first stood, and where rivers such as the Kura and Araxes spring from the stone. The name of Ḫaldi, the Urartian high god enthroned upon the peak, belongs to this same enclosure stem. In this context, Chaldea is not the ethnonym of a southern tribe but the designation of a highland culture whose axis was set on stone and whose hydronyms bear the memory of its function.

Later, when this tradition drifted south, the prestige of the name was absorbed by Babylonian elites, who came to be known as ‘Chaldeans.’ These were the astronomer-priests of classical and biblical record, but their name had been taken from an earlier stage. What the biblical redactors did was to overwrite this drift by retrojecting the title into Babylonia itself, projecting Abraham’s origin as ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ and rearranging the flood story so that Ararat came afterwards. The timeline was inverted, the highland cradle obscured, and the name made to serve a southern history that was never its original seat.

This reconstruction does not rest on assertion but on the continuity of hydronyms and typology. The chal/kal stem, seen across Carso, Carrara, Carpathians, and calanco, appears again in Chaldea and in the name of Ḫaldi. The same root threads through the Chalybes, the metallurgists of the Pontic highlands whose name still lives in chalybeate springs, waters rich in iron. These are not coincidences. They are the signatures of a culture of stone and water, ore and vessel, whose typology predates Babylon and whose memory lingered westward in Ireland, where the Culdees, Céilí Dé, preserved the fire-vigil of the highland priesthood.

To restore this earlier Chaldea is to see why hydronyms are indispensable. Without them, we are left with the biblical fiction of Babylonia as origin, with Abraham stepping fully formed from ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ and Ararat as a late stage. With them, the timeline comes back into view. Ararat is not an afterthought but the first axis; Ur of Urfa is not a retrojection but a genuine cradle. The drift from Vinča through Armenia into Mesopotamia becomes visible once more, and the subsequent Babylonian Chaldeans are revealed as inheritors, not inventors, of the name.

This is why hydronyms matter. They break through the redaction of scripture and the inertia of consensus to restore continuity where it has been deliberately fractured. They show that Chaldea belongs first to the highlands, to stone, river, and storm, and only later to the plains of Babylon. They return the Ark to its mountain, not as a late miracle but as the earliest axis. In doing so they allow us to glimpse what the Bible concealed: that the oldest waters of human memory rise not in the flat alluvium, but in the mountains where stone and river first joined, and where the names still speak.

The continuity of Drift culture is not speculation. It is embedded in the words themselves. Lugal, Krst, Shem, Iteru, Isis: each is a theanonym, each a unity of polar archetypes. To strip away hydronyms is to collude in the concealment that produced religion-as-history. To restore them is to remember what the ancients knew: that divinity is always two-in-one, water and light, balance and axis, vessel and star.

This is the meaning that drifted across thousands of miles and thousands of years, until it was severed and distorted. To recover it is not an act of nostalgia, but of truth. Hydronyms are the key – without them, nothing is understood. With them, the whole pattern returns.

If hydronyms are the deepest fossils of language, then the history of myth and religion must be rewritten from the rivers up.

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The Pt/Ps Branch: Ptah as Potential

In the same way that car/gar/gal/cal revealed the typology of mound and river, enclosure and flow, the pt/ps family of words encodes another great branch of hydronyms.

Here we see the Egyptians’ profound insight: Ptah is potential – father and mother, pillar and vessel, pot and pit.

Egyptian hymns say Ptah is ‘the father of fathers and the mother of mothers.’ He is the potter, forming clay into structure, and the pit-maker, carving hollows through which the sun descends into Amenta.

It is therefore no surprise that across the drift cultures pt/ps words bifurcate into two polarities – what the ancients coded as male and female:

• Form / Father / Rock / Axis → patēr, patria, patron, patriarch; petra, Peter, pillar, pyramid, Jupiter.

• Fluid / Mother / Vessel / Seed → pit, puteus, piscina, piscis, vesica piscis, pith, pip, pea, pod, pulse, piss, fizz.

Consensus etymology treats these as fragments scattered across Indo-European families. Restored to the Egyptian key, they reveal themselves as one continuum – hydronymic archetypes of vessel and form.

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The Ptah/Atum Connection

The Egyptian triad P T H is among the most conceptually complete expressions of creation through form and life.

Read together these signs articulate the complete creative act:

glyphic foundation

• P – reed-mat sign, the formed surface or foundation, a made plane or containment representing form, measure, and the act of shaping space.
• T – bread-bun sign, the rising or swelling mark, expressing breath, fertility, and the feminine life within form.
• H – twisted-flax sign, the dual, looping motion of continuity, symbolising the eternal return or field in motion that sustains balance.

P – the formed vessel or surface,
T – the rising of life within form,
H – the sustaining and eternal motion that keeps form and life in harmony.

It is the geometry of containment and flow: the void becoming potential, the potential receiving life, and life circulating eternally.

This is why Ptah as principle is always both masculine and feminine - the mother and father of all in the original sense.

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2. Structural and Hydronymic Parallels

In the Drift Culture and later European hydronymic systems, the same psychology reappears in roots such as kar / gar / gal / jar.

Water is observed to cut, carve, and contain: its action creates its own vessel.
From that observation came the words for jar, garden, gorge - all formed by the motion of water upon matter.

The P T H sequence expresses the same phenomenon in glyphic form:

• P – the plane or wall of the container,

• T – the fluid pressure within, swelling and breathing,

• H – the circulation that keeps the contents alive.

Thus the logic of Ptah mirrors the logic of jar: form filled by the feminine element, held in dynamic equilibrium.

In hydronymic terms, this is the perpetual exchange between river and bank, channel and current - the living duality of creation itself.

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3. H T P – The Reciprocal Condition

Reversing the order gives ḥtp (hotep, hetep):
the same system in equilibrium rather than in motion.
The form remains, the breath subsides; the field becomes still.
Hence its translation as “peace,” “offering,” or “rest.”
The glyphs are the same but inverted in function:

P T H = creation in motion → emanation
H T P = motion returned to stillness → repose

This polarity is the rhythm of the Egyptian cosmos: motion and rest, offering and reception, Maʿat and creation, the pulse of the universe through the still axis.

Note: Hotep became written as an altar sign, thereby losing the twisted flax glyph along the way. This is how later Hellenistic Egyptians under the Ptolemies formulated a name - Imhotep. But this derivation was later, once the epithet of Ptah/Atum im-htp - coming to rest, coming in peace, he who comes in peace - became codified as the name of a man. The sign is said to be a loaf of bread on a mat - an offering table.

A Table d’hôte is literally the host’s table - another likely derivation unrecognised in consensus etymology. Hôte is virtually Hotep - and the Host in Christian iconography is made of bread, said to be the bread and body of the Christ. As we have shown, the krst was the dry corpse anointed, as is the dry wafer. Bread and wine are analogies of god and goddess: form and fluid.

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4. Greek Pithos – The Later Vessel

The later Greek word pithos (πίθος) - a large storage jar - shows the same psychological grammar though it emerges two millennia after Djoser’s Saqqara complex and Ptah/Atum theology.

Phonetically and structurally, its consonant frame p-th-s mirrors the Egyptian sequence.

P: the formed wall, the constructed boundary.
TH: the breath or swelling pressure of the contained fluid.
-os: the nominal ending added in Greek morphology.

Pithos thus encodes form made to contain living fluid, exactly the same conceptual pattern that P T H expresses in hieroglyphic form.

It does not derive theologically from Ptah; it is the natural linguistic descendant of the same field grammar - human recognition of containment and life as one dynamic.

In material culture the pithos held water, wine, oil, or grain: all analogues of breath, blood, and seed.

In myth, Pandora’s pithos - said to be later mistranslated as ‘box’ - released the forces of life and fate: the vessel opened and the field was set in motion. Yet if we read the reed mat glyph for P, its geometry is rectilinear, a square foundation. The ‘box’ translation is therefore not far from the truth; a cube or box shares the same territory as the rounded pithos. Both are containers. One is a practical jar for storing fluid or grain, a kind of cornucopia; the other expresses the same containment in linear form. An amphora is a type of pithos kept cool in the ground. As a box, the geometry becomes square rather than curved, but the principle is unchanged - containment of life and potential. The ancients operated consciously at both levels, material and geometric. The so-called mistranslation is probably deliberate, a recognition that the myth of Pandora - the gifts of the Earth from the Earth-goddess - was also a statement of number and geometry as the philosophers understood them.

The Hittite word harsi-, meaning both ‘jar’ and ‘bread loaf’, confirms the same logic. It too expresses enclosure; as a verb it means “to hold one’s hands around”. This is the same conceptual structure as in the Egyptian glyphs - form enclosing life. The continuity from Egyptian P T H to Anatolian harsi- and Greek pithos cannot be dismissed as coincidence; the typology and psychological grammar are consistent throughout.

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5. Comparative Continuity

This “vessel of life” motif recurs across civilisations:

• Egypt: P T H / ḥ T P – form and fluid in balance.

• Mesopotamia: divine jars of Enki and the apsu, containers of the sweet waters of creation.

• Greece: Pithos, chalice, krater – vessels for living liquid.

• India: Kumbha, the sacred pot; lingam–yoni union, vessel and flow.

• Christian and alchemical West: grail, chalice, vas hermeticum.

Each reiterates the same grammar: form + fluid + motion = life; form + fluid + stillness = peace.

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6. Theological Reflection

In Egyptian thought this union is the self-marriage of Atum, the god and goddess as one.

Form and breath, body and spirit, vessel and water, become a single totality. It is the hieros gamos rendered in glyphic science - the sacred chemistry of containment and vitality.

Bread and wine, grain and blood, are later ritualisations of this same insight.

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7. Summary

The sequence P T H defines the act of creation as the interplay of form, life, and motion.

In hydronymic language this logic appears as the jar: flow shaping its own container.
In later Greek pithos the same pattern re-emerges as a vessel for fluid, preserving the ancient psychology of containment and flow.

The reversal ḥ T P describes the same system in rest, the peace or balance of the cosmos.

Across cultures this grammar survives in the universal image of the cup or chalice - the union of form and life, of god and goddess, forever circulating around the still axis.

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Part A: Fluid Polarity (Female-coded by the ancients)

pit (OE pytt, Lat. puteus)
– ‘hole, well, cistern.’ Proto-Germanic puttaz.
– The hollow, the womb of water; channel of the sun in Amenta.

pith (OE piþa)
– ‘soft inner core.’
– Moist kernel, life-bearing matrix.

pip (OE pip)
– Seed of fruit.
– Seed-pit of potential.

pea / pease (Lat. pisum, Gk. pison)
– Legume seed.
– Seed enclosed in pod, womb of fertility.

pulse (Lat. puls/pultis)
– Porridge of beans.
– Seeds dissolved into nourishing fluid.

pod (Proto-Gmc pud-)
– Husk, seed vessel.
– Container-womb.

puddle / Pfuhl (Ger.)
– Diminutive of put-, ‘small pool.’
– Miniature well.

puteus (Lat.)
– ‘Well, cistern.’
– Sacred water-vessel, carved matrix of Nun.

piscis (Lat.)
– ‘Fish.’ PIE peisk-.
– Fertility archetype, life in waters.

Pisces (Zodiac)
– Constellation of fishes.
– Cosmic womb; vesical enclosure of stars.

piscina (Lat.)
– ‘Fishpond,’ later baptismal font.
– Ritual pool, womb of rebirth.

vesica piscis
– ‘Fish bladder,’ almond-shape.
– Archetypal womb, feminine receptacle.

piss / pission
– Onomatopoeic. PIE peis- ‘to urinate.’
– Outflow of bodily waters.

spissus / spissare (Lat.)
– ‘Dense, thick.’
– Fluid condensed, coagulated matrix.

passive (Lat. pati)
– ‘to endure, to receive.’
– Vessel of receptivity.

passion (Lat. passio)
– ‘suffering, enduring.’
– Matrix of birthing pain.

pitter-patter
– Echoic of raindrops.
– Rhythm of fertility, heartbeat in womb-water.

fizz / pfiz
– Onomatopoeic.
– Bubbling waters, fermentation.

pulp (Lat. pulpa)
– ‘Flesh of fruit.’
– Moist edible matrix, enclosing seed.

pulmo (Lat.)
– ‘Lung.’
– Moist sac of air-fluid, organ of breath.

pus (Lat.)
– ‘Discharge, matter.’
– Bodily effusion, womb-flux.

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Part B: Form Polarity (Male-coded by the ancients)

pater (Lat.), patēr (Gk.), pitṛ́ (Skt.)
– PIE pǝter, ‘father.’
– Archetype of measure and authority.

patria / patrimony (Lat.)
– ‘fatherland, inheritance.’
– Land enclosed by the pater.

patrician / patron (Lat.)
– From pater.
– Office of the measure-holder.

patriarch (Gk.-Lat.)
– ‘father-chief.’
– Axis of rule.

petra / petros (Gk.)
– ‘rock, stone.’
– Mound risen from Nun; stability.

Peter (biblical)
– From petros.
– Rock of the Church; Roman recoding of Ptah’s foundation.

pillar / pile (Lat. pila)
– Column, upright.
– Djed-pillar archetype.

pylon (Gk. pulōn)
– ‘gate-post.’
– Twin horizon-pillars.

pyramid (Gk. πυραμίς)
– Folk-derived ‘fire in the middle.’
– Benben crystallised; axis in stone.

Patrick (Lat. Patricius)
– ‘Of the fathers.’
– Ptah-Rik, ruler by form.

Ptolemy (Gk. Πτολεμαῖος)
– ‘Warlike.’
– Retains Pt- cluster; rulership title.

Jupiter (Iu-piter)
– From Dyaus Pitar.
– Sky-father; celestial form of Ptah’s ‘pater.’

Dyaus Pitar (Skt.)
– Vedic sky-father.
– IE reflex of Ptah’s axis-polarity.

Zeus Patēr (Gk.)
– ‘God the Father.’
– Sky-king as measure-holder.

psephos (Gk.)
– ‘Pebble, vote-stone.’
– Water-rounded stone; unit of measure.

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The Letters Themselves

The typology descends even into the alphabet. Greek inherited Egyptian glyphic logic, and each letter was both sound and number (isopsephy). The intention survives in their shapes:

• Π (Pi): two uprights joined – pure duality in form, enclosure, architecture. Dual pillar without seed. Male-coded.

• Φ (Phi): circle with axis – ratio, vessel and line; recursive growth, hidden harmony. Feminine polarity, fluidic.

• Ψ (Psi): central pillar with two arms – trinity of pillar + vessels. The third emerges from the dual. Archetype of synthesis.

These glyphs are not arbitrary. They are graphic expressions of the same polarity – axis and vessel – that we see in the pt/ps word corpus.

Modern etymology scatters these words into many unrelated families: pit, pith, pea, piscis, pater, petra, pyramid. Seen through the Egyptian key, they belong together. Ptah is potential – father and mother, potter and pit, pillar and piscina.

The Greeks inherited this typology in their letters and numbers; the Romans diffused it into empire and religion. Through bifurcation, the old unity fragmented into diverse etymologies.

Unless we restore the oldest typology – words as archetypes, letters as geometry, numbers as intention – etymology is not complete. We are left with PIE reconstructions that are clever but deceptive, a ‘pie’ that scatters what was once whole.

This recognition is also the bridge into Appendix IV. For the ancients – the Egyptians, the Pythagoreans, and the biblical redactors – there was no separation between word, letter, and number. Each was a vessel of archetypal truth.

The Pythagoreans, inheriting this directly, built philosophy on it. They saw words as forms, letters as glyphs of ratio, numbers as harmonies of the cosmos.
And so we must ask:

If this was how the founders did it – why are we not doing the same?