Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4

We went in the first episode from Ireland to the island of Britain. Then we went on to the continent of Europe, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria and into Greece. And see what I’m doing there. Those are all countries most listeners will probably be able to visualise on a map. Although, as my listenership goes beyond Europe and beyond America, I want to perform the same trick in people’s minds.I want to create new mental models, mental geographies, psychogeography if you like, of the area I call Manuland, which is the area where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages, between Ireland and India. And if that sounds a bit like gobbledygook to you, well, by the end of listening to the Atlas series and the orientation series, you will totally understand what I mean by Manuland, and the ambition I have for reworking our mental models of the past 6,000 years: populating our mental models of the past 6,000 years with a lot of different development and evolutionary trajectories, all mainstreaming the linguistic element, but also the cultural, the religious, the migratory, the historical, and so many other dimensions across this geographical area.Populating Our Minds with the GeographySo I also want to populate your minds, our minds, with the geography that for me, before I started this project, was really sketchy. I now realise that we as humans have an amazing capacity to fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we know. And I remember, for instance, meeting and befriending my first real friend from Central Asia. It was, and it is, a real experience for me. Because previously, before I arrived in Ukraine on a January night, around 11 o’clock at night in January 2015, I had a very sketchy view of Ukraine itself. I had seen it from the border in what was then Czechoslovakia, back in the early 90s, when I and a friend had made our way by train to the border. We wanted to see Ukraine. We wanted to see what by then was the former Soviet Union. And then, while I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, obviously my mental model of Ukraine expanded enormously, and my geographical mental model expanded enormously. But really, what was east of the border of Ukraine, between there and the coast of Japan, between there and Afghanistan, was quite sketchy, and still is quite sketchy, I don’t mind admitting to you.However, in this particular episode we are going to be talking a bit about that area of Central Asia. And that is just one example of how Finding Manuland and the Atlas can help expand not just our temporal models of where we come from, but our linguistic models, our understanding of the words we say, the meanings and their evolutionary trajectories from the first Indo-European language speakers, but also about geographies.And when I talk about the places, and visit places, and connect those places with the words and meanings that we use, which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we are exchanging what I call Mana, which is an energy. I could have used another word for it. Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.The second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: the M-N- sound, which is immanent, I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T. And you will notice the M-N- sound is also in immanent. It is immanent in immanent, if you like. One of the three of what I call cryptotypes that we look at. And again, we will explain these terms, and the necessity for them, because I don’t use these fancy words just out of fanciness, trying to make you feel as if you don’t know as much as I do. I arrived at a term, say, cryptotype, because I really needed it. Long-term readers of Finding Manuland, which you will find on powerofmana.net, will note the 2024 post when I first spoke about cryptotypes, because a reader had written to me and said, I think what you are talking about is cryptotypes. I went away to the library and I started reading Benjamin Whorf’s theory of cryptotypes, which he confined to grammar. And I thought, wow, that is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something slightly different, but he is the closest thing to what I’m talking about, the cryptotypes.Ancient Ukraine and the Parity of EsteemSo today, as ever, you might notice I talk about all living Indo-European languages emanating from ancient Ukraine, what the ancients called Scythia. We will call it ancient Ukraine, because if you have read my In Defence of Ancient Ukraine post, and indeed the posts from last year and the year before, on Timothy Snyder and Eurasia, on remaking ancient history, and on illuminating the ancient in the everyday, you will understand why I think and believe that Ukraine and ancient Ukraine deserve a parity of esteem with ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and indeed ancient Ireland, ancient Germany, ancient Armenia, ancient India. These are all emanations of the same community of Yamna, from southern Ukraine, from Zaporizhzhia, on the right bank of the Dnipro River, just across from areas where the Russists today are occupying.And in terms of the great cultures which have managed somehow, through lots of different historical contingencies, to get acceptance as a nation state, which basically, from the international law perspective, demands a seat at the United Nations and recognition as being a state as such: there are, I think, last time I looked, about 184 in my mind, or maybe 194, sovereign states on planet Earth. These are the winners in a race which began when the first human breathed. And at the moment we have this set of great cultures which have become nation states, and behind them, and immanent in them, are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of other great cultures which for one reason or another didn’t make it.But our unit of analysis is in many respects the post-World War II legal order, and Ukraine is just as much a nation state, and deserving of a parity of esteem, as Germany. The first united German state was in around 1870. France has been through several republics. Belgium was founded upon an idea of an ancient past in the 19th century, and so on. So many other of our nation states emanate from this great model for creating a common culture that I have spoken about before, which emanates from Herder’s call in 1777 to unite the ten German tribes. He asked, where is our Shakespeare? Using the example of England, which became an entity and a country and a state from the time the first German migrants arrived there, but really properly using this massive dividend from the wool trade in East Anglia, which takes its name from them.There are many other views of this, but Mannus, son of Tuisto, founded the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, writing around 50 years into the Common Era. And he, Mannus, two Ns, had three sons: Ing, Irmin and Ist. The Ing were the sea-dwelling Germanic community. They were called the Ingaevones, and they worshipped Ing as their founder. And it was from that community that the migrants arrived in East Anglia, in Suffolk and Essex, in a place I visited first. And gradually they took over the whole island. They pushed the Celts, the Celtic dwellers of the island of the Pretani, back towards where, really, they are today, which is in Wales. They basically wiped out the Cornish language. I think the last native Cornish speaker, a Celtic speaker, died out in maybe the 18th or 19th century. Cornish survived Rome, survived the Roman invasion and occupation, but didn’t survive the Angles, or the Ingles, the worshippers of Ing, the Ingaevones.The Three Elements, and the UrgencySo I suppose this episode, really, we are going to focus on, as ever, the exchange of energy, which I am doing right now with you as you are listening to this, with the linguistic element, which is the M-N- sound, which is immanent in almost every sentence we speak, and in the monikers of six of the eight living Indo-European traditions. And also the third element, this travel, this remodelling of our minds, learning about all these different places that perhaps we have never even heard of. Or perhaps, like Turkey, everyone has heard of Turkey. I didn’t know that Turkey was basically dropped on top of Anatolia, where the first attested Indo-European language was spoken. And the Turkic people, the Turkic-language-speaking people, arrived there about 800 years ago and gradually conquered the whole of Anatolia, which is a prime piece of real estate. But it has millennia of attested history, and much of my time, as much time as I can, is spent in Anatolia visiting these amazing museums.The Turkic people are great preservers and conservers and researchers of the traditions that they inherited. I’m thinking of Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler area, and very many other places. There are the great museums, and the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, which I visited and talk about a lot because of the artefacts I saw there. Recently I visited the Istanbul Museum in Istanbul, which has some fantastic artefacts from an area, northern Mesopotamia, in the south-eastern part of Turkey, that I visited in January and talk about a lot. And many other amazing artefacts, which we will get to again.But Finding Manuland also has a very serious aspect to it. And this is just the latest example, but it goes on through history and has gone on since the beginning of the Indo-European world. Marauders come from different territories. In the current time, Russia uses the bogus view of history as an excuse to disarm us, as a community of Westerners, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country. So there is a real urgency about what we do in Finding Manuland, and a meaning to Finding Manuland, which I think in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. But it does today, and I have that sense of urgency.Where to Find MeSo, somewhere on the Iranian plateau. Well, first let me just say: I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mainly at disinfolklore.eu. I also write the Finding Manuland series and do the podcasts, which you will find at powerofmana.net, M-A-N-A, or Google Finding Manuland, and at decodingtrolls.net and disinfolklore.net. These are all connected cultural projects. I also microblog on X at @disinfolklore and @decodingtrolls, but my main site, as I say, is disinfolklore.eu.All these podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms, so just search for Finding Manuland and you will find me. I also podcast once a week with Disinfolklore, and every few weeks on Decoding Trolls. They are based and hosted on the Substack platform, accessible through decodingtrolls.net, disinfolklore.net and powerofmana.net. But they are also available on all major podcast platforms. If you prefer to get your content through words, I also convert these podcasts into text. So I write the scripts, then I speak them, and then I convert them back into text according to the changes which I make in real time.From Paris to the Iranian PlateauSo, somewhere on the Iranian plateau. Let’s place ourselves in Paris, France, and we are moving south and east. I drove recently from Brussels, actually, to Germany, then down through Austria into Serbia, into Bulgaria, over the mountains which Constantine the Great, who was born in Niš in Serbia, would have crossed. It is now a great motorway. I then crossed the border into Türkiye. So see what I’m doing here. Whichever way you are listening to this podcast, I’m trying to bring you on this mental journey into an area which might be a bit sketchy. Maybe you went on holiday on the west coast of Türkiye. Maybe you went to Izmir, which was known in ancient times as Smyrna, where Herodotus, the great historian, was born, or various places along that coast, which I’m really looking forward to visiting soon. And I drove all the way across Türkiye, which is just a giant country. I think it is about 4,000 kilometres across, if you are going from the border with Greece and Bulgaria to the border with Georgia, or down a bit to the border with Iran.So this is where I’m locating us right now. Having whooshed your mental model right across Europe from Paris, which is hopefully somewhere that most listeners can visualise, we are now down by the Iranian plateau. And somewhere on the Iranian plateau lies the ground where the bridge that judges the dead was first described.This bridge is not just analogous to the bridge over the Donets River in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years as a diplomat negotiating many ceasefires and helping people, ordinary people like you and me, cross the bridge from Russian-occupied Ukraine into government-controlled Ukraine, where the people could collect their pensions and then return, hopefully, across the bridge. Part of my job on that bridge was about helping to manage the situation in which the Russian occupiers were acting as bridge trolls. Because of that situation there, and its folkloric resonance, that really has generated, and I tell the story a lot in Disinfolklore, the power and the energy and the meaning for all of my work since.The Chinvat Bridge, and Timothy Snyder’s JourneyAnd the Chinvat bridge, the Chinvat threshold, is from the Zoroastrian religion. If Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, either word works, was a real person, he would have lived around 1400 BCE. So when I talk about rearranging your mental models, it is also the temporal. Geographical, temporal, linguistic and many other dimensions besides. In the temporal aspect, I’m trying to transform your mental models in the same way mine have been, to see that the past 6,000 years really can be populated with many more details than we perhaps might have thought.When I wrote, for instance, about that great American historian, I think he is at Toronto now, Timothy Snyder, I wrote about when he had suddenly rearranged his mental model of the temporal history of Ukraine. He had previously begun his history of Ukraine with the Greek colonies on the coast, the Azov Sea coast and the Black Sea coast and the Crimean coast, where the ancient Greeks had several different colonies around 300 or 400 years before the Common Era. Then suddenly he was clearly on the same journey that I was on, and he realised, whoa, the ancient DNA evidence demonstrates that the forebears of the ancient Greeks are a cultural, a linguistic and a genetic emanation of migrants, Yamna migrants, who left ancient Ukraine, Scythia as the Romans would later call it, over a thousand years before their descendants would return and establish colonies and go, well, this is a nice place, it feels somewhat familiar, I don’t know what it is.And the Scythians themselves, the people the Romans called the Scythians, we now know really were returning migrants from Iran. So the Yamna left Ukraine before 2500 BCE. They travelled up to today’s Kazakhstan, to the Sintashta culture, and then out of the Sintashta culture emanates this Andronovo cline, which brings Indo-European culture, religion and language to Iran, and eventually to India. Then they return the same way a millennium later, as Scythians. And we have this principle in evolution and in migrations: basically, over time, where in one period people travelled from A to B, then we find again and again and again, over the millennia, for different reasons, people without memory travelled the same path.So we have this idea that Ukraine’s relevance in world history begins with the Greek colonies, and there we attach Ukraine to ancient Greece, and some of the magic of ancient Greece gets allocated to Ukraine, and that is how we begin all the traditional histories of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. But Timothy Snyder is on the same journey as I was, and I noted this when he first did this. There are a couple of posts on Finding Manuland about it. Because of course history and historians, and I studied history as an undergraduate, deal with texts, with written sources. Whereas in Finding Manuland we deal not only with written sources, say Greek writers writing about these colonies, or inscriptions found on the Azov Sea coast or the coast of the Black Sea commemorating that this town or that town was an ancient Greek colony. We also look at texts like the Amarna letters, 1400 BCE, in Egypt. We look at Darius the Great’s inscriptions from 600 BCE, from the Achaemenid Empire in Iran. We also look at ancient DNA, and we look at isotopic analysis. We look at the whole range of sources available today to what I call myself, a cultural archaeologist.And Timothy Snyder himself, as a historian who was confined to written sources, is also on this same journey that we are on in Finding Manuland, realising that actually you only get a very partial view of where we come from, and in this narrow case of what Ukraine is, if we confine ourselves to the traditional written sources. What we do in Finding Manuland is surface the peer-reviewed, pukka, archaeological, archaeogenetic, cultural, religious, linguistic and all the other different dimensions of the modern academy in every particular region we go to. And by region I mean geographical region, but also academic region, when we get into Assyriology or biblical studies, or, in this case, ancient Iranian religion, which then pops up, this bridge pops up again, in Islam, because Islam was standardised and articulated via Iranian scholars who created the first Arabic dictionaries. So they had an influence on it which perhaps is not always recognised. This is the kind of thing we do in Finding Manuland. We surface all of these links from all of the different places.Daēnā on the Bridge, and Northern MesopotamiaSo the Chinvat bridge. The Chinvat threshold, in the ancient Zarathustrian religion, is where the soul is met at the crossing by Daēnā. Note that: D-N-. Daēnā, Don, Donets, Dnipro, Dniester, Danube. Daēnā stands on the bridge. Her name is on the bridge. Her name is on the D-N-, which we will talk about a lot in the D-N- cryptotype. And that is where the anti-blood-sacrifice current begins.So, Mesopotamia’s own country: Sumer, Akkad, Babylon. So again, that is northern Mesopotamia. We are in Iran. Now we move across the border, from the Iranian border, into what I call northern Mesopotamia, what was called by 19th-century scholars North Mesopotamia. Gradually Turkey exerted its control over this area where the Kurds ruled, where the Assyrians ruled, where the Armenians ruled, where we have this whole concatenation of different empires: the Hittites, Akkad, Babylon, now the Turkic language speakers. There, the Umman-manda, M-N- in Umman and in Manda, the M-N- horde written down by outsiders. There the great word, the sound of mahā and mégas and magnus, reached the tablets of Sumer as a loan a scholar can date. So mahā, as in Mahayana Buddhism, the great path, the great vehicle. Mega, which MAGA riffs off, but mega meaning big. Magnus. Again, Mannus, that M-N- name, the first name in the Germanic areas. And that reached the tablets of Sumer as a loan a scholar can date, because we have got the libraries, we have got the deconstructed cuneiform texts, which we will get to in later episodes. And there Enki’s deep-water realm sits behind Manannán’s sea and Neptune’s sea.Beyond what Anatolia already gave, the Mitanni, whose rulers were Indo-Aryans, who were Indo-Europeans whose ancestors had emanated from Ukraine, through the Sintashta, through the Andronovo cline, and become the Mitanni. And that waits too: the Hurrian kingdom, where Indo-Aryan gods were sworn into a treaty, part of the contact traffic that reached as far as Egypt. All of it is a road which I have driven a little bit, but will go through on more and more journeys.The Eastern Cline: Sintashta, Andronovo, the Kurgan and the MandalaSo, the eastern cline. Moving back from Iran, up through the Caucasus, up through Armenia, Georgia, into Russia, across into Kazakhstan. That is the kind of area we are in at the moment. East of the homeland, the ancient Ukrainian homeland, runs the measurable chariot gradient, the square-in-circle that runs from the kurgan, the burial mound, which began this journey when property developers in Dnipro were trying to destroy, and did in fact destroy, a kurgan built by the Yamna, revealing a stone circle belonging to the Serednii Stih underneath it. So the square-in-circle that runs from the kurgan to the mandala, and the open question of what the family gave Turkic. An entirely aspirational area. I haven’t spent much time in this area, but gradually, as Russia collapses over the coming time, these areas will become more open and free for all of us to visit.East of the homeland, the family, the Indo-European family, thins out along a gradient you can almost measure. None of it have I yet walked, except intellectually, and I tell the stories. At Sintashta, and out across the Andronovo horizon in the southern Urals, lie the chariot graves that mark the core Indo-European inheritance carried eastward, the founder sound, M-N-, going with the wheel. Further out, at Dashly-3, and the Arzhan kurgan in Tuva, and into the Tarim Basin of China, where the Tocharian people lived and left us an immense number of Buddhist texts written in their Indo-European language, a second, spatial cryptotype surfaces: the square inside a circle that runs from the kurgan to the Buddhist mandala, with the M-N- sage word muni, as in Shakyamuni, who is the Buddha according to the Tibetan tradition, not unlike múinteoir in Irish, meaning teacher. The sage word muni: the sage of the Shakya tribe, which lived in India, on the borders of India and Nepal, around 300 years before the Common Era. They had arrived there from Iran much later than the original Indo-Europeans had arrived in the rest of India, and they brought with them a revised form of the religion, which became Buddhism. In a nutshell, it differs from the Vedic in the sense that in Buddhism one’s subtle energy, which determines one’s karma according to one’s activities in this and all our embodiments’ lifetimes, is open. We are free to determine what our karma is, or becomes. Obviously we cannot have determined what has come before. Whereas in the Vedic, by the time this reform came, you had castes which were set in stone, and your karma was determined by your genetics at birth. The real reform in Buddhism was, and indeed is, that you can free yourself from genetic slavery, from the position that you were born into, according to what you do while you are alive in this life.So Shakyamuni, the sage word, and Manu, the first man in India, riding east alongside it. In Turkmenistan, on the Caspian Sea, the whole Bronze Age of Central Asia is dated from a mound whose name is a sentence: Namazga, the place of prayer, namaz descending from the same reverence word as namaste. The N-M- mirror stamped on the region’s own measuring stick. We will get to what I mean by the N-M- mirror, but for the sake of today, just think M-N- on one end of an axis and N-M- on the other end of the axis. It is a mirror. It is a reversal.Kucha, Tocharian, and XuanzangAt the far end of the road, in the oasis of Kucha, the monks of the Thousand-Buddha caves copied their sutras in Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language ever written, whose word for the moon and the month is one word: meñe. The moon-as-measurer collapse, intact, 5,000 kilometres from Mykhailivka, where they used the term mēnōt. Xuanzang, the great Chinese pilgrim whose seventh-century Record of the Western Regions is the footsteps book of all of Asia, waited two months in Kucha for the passes to clear. He is the traveller I will follow through this whole section of the Finding Manuland Atlas.And of course the idea that China is apart from the rest of the world is quite as enticing and intoxicating as the idea that somehow Russia is different from the rest of the world. But when we understand, for instance, that communism, the archetypal Indo-European emanation from Germany, with all of its fundamental Indo-European elements, which we will get to in later episodes, is of course from the West. That is the party that rules China and identifies itself as communist. Tibetan Buddhism provided the software, the cognitive software, for China over millennia, from Tibet and across the whole of what today they archetype as China. But of course, like Russia, it is actually a hodgepodge of lots of acquisitions and losses and different cultures, which are stamped now with “we are Chinese”.But the other aspect and element, of course, is this Tocharian inheritance, in the place where the Uyghurs today live. Their genetic ancestors, as I understand it, arrived maybe around the sixth century as foreigners. But prior to them being in this area, of Inner Mongolia I think it is, or maybe it isn’t, in the Tarim Basin, were the Tocharian language speakers, Indo-European. And we have this great book, The Tarim Mummies, by the great Indo-Europeanist J.P. Mallory, which we will get to, in which the mummies, preserved in the particular environment there, are wearing tartans quite close to the tartans of Scotland and Celtic Ireland, as one line of evidence, as well as the linguistic and the textual evidence they left of their Buddhism, which is the archetypal Indo-European religion.Osman, the Türk Contact Zone, and a Message of UnityAnd on the Iranian steppe and the Türk contact zone lies the open question I have not yet gone to test on the ground: whether the M-N- and the R-T- sounds inside Türk words are inherited or contact-borne. A melting-pot problem. But the evidence which I will put forward, and which I have already gathered, suggests to me that the M-N- in Osman, who would be the main inheritor of the Turkic-language-speaking peoples’ occupation of Anatolia and transformation into Turkey, the modern state of Turkey, the Osman who emanates from Kazakhstan, and whose name traditional etymology traces to the Arabic. And when you look at the Arabic Uthman, it turns out there is no etymology in Arabic for Uthman, which is the perfect manifestation of what I maintain anyway, for other reasons, is a loan from Indo-European.So the Turkic-language-speaking peoples’ ethnogenesis, the formation of their language and identity, happened about five or six hundred years into the Common Era. So this is 2,600 years after we have evidence, in the form of the Sintashta culture, of Indo-Europeans and Indo-European burials in what would become Kazakhstan. So we have the archaeological, linguistic and cultural evidence that those people who would become the Turkic language speakers, in the area of Central Asia today covered by Kazakhstan, and the Indo-European descendants of the Yamna from Ukraine, were in contact for millennia. And this M-N- sound, which transferred from the Indo-Europeans to call Mongolia Mongolia. And their ruling class, the Bogd class, takes its name from the Iranian word baga, meaning the allocator. Often if you meet a Romanian today, sometimes you meet a Bogdan. I have met many. One of my great Ukrainian friends is called Bogdana. So you have this baga, meaning allocator, which is the source of those names.So the R-T- sound in Türk as well: the R-K, it is a hard K, but R meaning right. That also, I believe, emanates from the Indo-European, and they would not be the first people to be named by outsiders. The Welsh are also. The Armenians call themselves Hayk, but we non-Armenians call them Armenians, with the M-N- in it, and many Armenians are called M-N- names. So we do have this phenomenon, which we will encounter again and again, of outsiders naming peoples and those peoples taking that name onwards. Like the Scots take their name from the Irish migrants into the area now occupied by Scotland, and the original name of Ireland was Scotia, which incidentally is my middle name, Scott, meaning Ireland.So we have this phenomenon of different cultures borrowing outsiders’ names for themselves, and having names for themselves which outsiders don’t use. And I believe that this is, as in all of the Finding Manuland project, a source of potential unification. Up until now, the existence of language families has often been a determinant of division and difference. You say words more funny than I do, and when I take over your land, I stamp it by getting rid of your names of towns and villages, making you feel alienated. But in fact, where it comes to the Turkic language speakers and the Indo-European language speakers, we are both great linguistic cultures with quite distinct histories and geographies, and different achievements and different religions and different ways of viewing. But we have rubbed up, in a positive sense, like a cat rubbing your leg. We have rubbed up against each other for the past 6,000 years, and our forebears have continually. And if I have one message for Finding Manuland, it is a message of unity.The reason I moniker, and I archetype, the area between Ireland and India, including this area, Central Asia, as Manuland, is that until we have a name for something, name, nāman, until we have a name for something, then it is hard for us to capture all of its energy into one, to reify it into one thing, one phenomenon. But once we have a name for it, and the name is recognisable because it covers an area between Ireland and India, it covers an area where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages, but where we also speak Turkic languages, and those Turkic language speakers and us Indo-Europeans have lived together in harmony again and again and again over the millennia, then we can begin to develop the same kind of identity that Herder wanted to create among the ten Germanic tribes, which led 90 years later to a unified German state for the first time in world history.Similar movements went on in Greece, using folklore and ancient Greek lore as a means of uniting a 19th-century culture of disparate areas ruled at that time by the Ottomans. Osman’s name became Ottoman in English, but the M-N- is still there 800 years later. And in Ireland we had the Irish literary revival in the late 19th century, the celebration of Celtic language culture. Then, as the Irish state was established, and became the Free State, and became a sovereign entity, even though it was extremely poor at the time, massive amounts of resources were dedicated to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, upon whose work I rely a lot in mine: the great scholars of Celtic culture in Ireland in the early years, and continuing until today, who took what is now the last and the only nation state which speaks a Celtic language, the remnant of a great culture which, 300 years before the Common Era, ruled and existed and dominated the territory between the Hercynian Forest in Czechia, all the way down to the south of Spain, through parts of Italy, Austria, Germany, all the way across to what would become, under the Romans, Lusitania, as they beat back the Celtic-language-speaking peoples. The whole of the islands of what I call the Irish Sea states: the island of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the island of Mona, which is Anglesey in English, and the island of Britain. These were all Celtic-language-speaking places. And out of that, 2,300 years later, we just have Ireland, and Wales really. Wales, the Welsh: Cymru, Cymraeg, the Cymry, that is the word the Welsh call themselves. Welsh, of course, in Germanic languages means foreigner. So when we talk about the Welsh, we are saying foreigner. That was the perspective of the English, a bit rich coming from them, because they are Germans occupying Celtic lands in England, which were once ruled by those speaking what would be left as Cymraeg, the Welsh language. But anyway, these phenomena recur everywhere, and go in different directions, and switch around, and are just wonderful artefacts of our history, and great little signposts we can carry on. But the main message of Finding Manuland, and of this Atlas, is unity. We’re all one people. We’re unified in our diversity.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe