Gordian Knot Unbound by Anthony Ambrozic Published by Cythera Press, Toronto, Canada.

Available from the author:

Anthony Ambrozic

8 Lafayette Place

Thornhill, Ontarion L3T 1G5

Canada

Telephone 905-881-2636

Preface

It was not until the 1970s that serious work on Phrygian inscriptions began. With the exception of American excavations at Gordium in the 1950s and a publication in 1966 of an adventurous work by Otto Haas (Phrygische Sprachdenkmäler), there had been little progress until the decade of the 70s.

It was the advent on the scene of a giant that broke the lull. Aided by the Asia-Minor-inscription terrain expert, Claude Brixhe, it was Michel Lejeune who brought his genius and expertise to bear on the subject matter.

Having organized the cooperation of the French Institute of Archeology at Istanbul, the University of Pennsylvania excavation team at Gordium, and a variety of museums in Turkey, they systematically proceeded to prepare, examine, and review each inscription individually. By joint accord they established a definitive redaction which in 1984 was published in Paris as Corpus des Inscriptions Paléo-Phrygiennes.

My interest in the Old Phrygian inscriptions was aroused two years ago when I was searching for Anatolian toponymic traces left behind by the tribe of Volcae Tectosages. I was intrigued by the seemingly Slavic toponymy encountered over a much wider area of the plateau than that settled by the Tectosages. I pursued the matter to the point of tracking it down to the work on the Old Phrygian inscriptions by Lejeune and Brixhe. A cursory perusal, however, persuaded me that any possible division and translation of the inscriptions would prove to be a daunting task. Since I was in the process of putting the final touches on Journey Back to the Garumna, I was quickly induced to postponing any work on the Old Phrygian passages to a less pressing time.

And so it remained for a year. Then, I received a letter from Mr. Anton Skerbinc of Boswell, British Columbia, who in 1999 had translated portions of Adieu to Brittany into Slovene. At the behest of Professor Aleksandar Donski of Shtip, Macedonia, who had sent him an artistic rendering of the front segment of Old Phrygian inscriptions M-01a, M-01b, M-02, and all of G-105, Mr. Anton Skerbinc asked me to look into the possible Venetic connection to the inscriptions. Since I had previously translated the inscription from Plumergat in Brittany, now attached as Appendix E, for him and Giancarlo Tomezzoli of Munich, Germany, I heeded his intuition.

The letter was a timely prod for me to get on with the Old Phrygian passages in earnest. The fact that six inscriptions from Dura-Europos had also been Venetic was a fair intimation of possible success. It was, in fact, the Venetic passages from Dura-Europos that caused me to devote much of my spare time to the endeavor of locating other Venetic colonies from the era of the post-Alexander Seleucid Empire. Ever since Adieu to Brittany had come out, Dr. Charles Bryant-Abraham of San Diego, California (to whose work in the area, incidentally, I had also been introduced by Mr. Anton Skerbinc), and I have been trying to find non-Greek, pre-Hellenic-Age inscriptions from Macedonia. So far, unfortunately, in vain. However, the division and successful translation of the Old Phrygian inscriptions in this book go a long way in alleviating our frustration on that front.

Dr. Charles Bryant-Abraham's statement in Appendix D that the "Venetic inscriptions from Dura-Europos lend weighty if still circumstantial evidence that Alexander and his Macedonian people may very well have been Veneti" is now being upheld by the compelling lapidary testimony from the Anatolian plateau.

Significance of Inscriptions

In respect to the linguistic provenance of the inscriptions, the guarded none committal expressed by the Encyclopedia Britannica should be noted in vol. 4th page 437, it states "Gaulish is attested by inscriptions from France and Northern Italy. Modern knowledge of the vocabulary and sounds of Gaulish is slight, and its exact relation to the Celtic language of Britain and Ireland is not clear." It continues in an expanded article: "In the territory of ancient Gaul, now occupied by France, about 60 stone inscriptions in the language known as Gaulish were found. The date from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD. For the older inscriptions, the Greek alphabet was used, for the more recent, the Roman characters of the Imperial period."

The erroneous assumption that the Slavenetic inscriptions fall within the Celtic ambit have caused nothing but frustration for four generations for Celtic linguists. As recently as 1980, the famous Celtic scholar, Léon Fleuriot, devoted much of the year to the decryption and translation what is known as the Lezoux-Plate inscription without the finest scintilla of success. Parts of the plate having broken off and vanished, we only have a portion of the inscription. But, I hope I do not exaggerate when I say that, of what remains, the average Slovene would be able to make substantial sense of the import of the passage without too much difficulty. What appears on the back of the plate are the do's and don'ts addressed to the family's young son. Readily recognizable are such phrases as: "JES TI AN KON' (you eat a horse), "GOR JO SED" (sit up), "SAMO BIJ MOLATUS" (only say your prayers), "PAPEJ BOVDI, NE TE TU (TAM) (eat here, not there, here (and yonder)), "NUGNATE NE DAMA GUSSOV" (we do not give you kisses), "VE ROV NE CURRI" (do not leak into the ditch), "SIT BIO, BER TO" (when you are full, read this).

Of some seventy-five-odd inscriptions heretofore called Gaulish, only about a dozen appear to be Celtic. Prominent among them is the purportedly Druid Calendar of Coligny (Text Inscription 53 of Dottin's La Langue Gundoise). Of the remainder, 65 are unquestionably Slavenetic. Of these, 44 have been translated in my books Adieu to Brittany and Journey Back to the Garumna. I will now review the rest. An explanatory parsing appears in Appendix B.

Here is a reprint of the first few paragraphs of the Conclusions:

The march of centuries has not been kind to the toil of the Phrygian stonemasons of ancient Anatolia. Barely one sculpted inscription for each elapsed century has survived undamaged into our time. Unweathered sufficiently for us to cull the import of their glyphs only some twenty-four have outlived the predatory surge and ebb of time. Yet, these are enough to give us a sense of the people who cultivated the ancient land, who built the fortified towns, and over time organized themselves into an empire. They are enough to give us insight into the ethos of their culture and the spirituality which guided it. Above all, cast in stone, the passages give us an unadulterated imprint of the Old Early Slavic spoken on the Anatolian plateau 3,200 years ago.

It is to this latter that this work has been addressed. For the claim to have been posited at all, the Slovene literary and dialectical counterparts have been juxtaposed beside the Old Phrygian. Guideance for this has come from the principles of the so-called comparative method. Although some of its refinements have in the past led to over-complication and logistic inflexibility resulting in inevitable paralysis, on the whole, the method appears to have outlived its competitors, over a century of scrutiny.

Its claim that derivational affinity between two languages is the more credible the more often one finds repeated agreements between them in the speech-sound sphere and in the word-meaning area has manifest logic. One is almost tempted to say that its obvious commonsense simplicity contains elements of the precept of res ipsa loquitur. Plainly speaking, show me and let the logic of the matrix speak for itself. Place the paired words side by side and let the comparison speak for them.

And that is exactly what has been done.