Session 14 August 2016

[Matthew]

My crystal set arrived today! I did not realise at first because they came in the early afternoon and I was sound asleep (I am having one of my nocturnal spells). Once I had got up properly I discovered that it was not just my pipe tobacco order but my crystals as well . Chores done I have just opened it all up and have to say that I am very impressed with the booklet and generally how the set is put together with the crystals in their own little 'homes'. They are all now situated where they should be and I am looking forward to starting the relevant recitals tomorrow and giving this thread a good read.

I am so grateful to those of you who were kind enough to do this for me. It was clearly done with love and care .

 

[Ursus Minor]

My crystal set arrived today! (..)
I am so grateful to those of you who were kind enough to do this for me. It was clearly done with love and care .

My crystal set came in today as well! Thank you very much to the team for their efforts...

 

[thorbiorn]

The possibility of the Hurrian connection

Q: (L) I see. Well, maybe we should begin with some of the questions that are from that abstract level since that's where we are. In the course of my recent research, I keep going deeper and deeper and further back following one thread after another. While I have touched on the topic of Zoroastrianism in the past, I had never gone into it as deeply as I recently decided to do. As a consequence, I ended up reading several scholarly tomes on the topic. It seems there are two schools. One school thinks that Zoroaster was a fairly late phenomenon, probably 7th century BC. The other school relies on the linguistics - the philology I guess they'd call it - and they claim that the language of Zoroaster must date back to the second millennium BC - that is, somewhere between 1600 and 1200 BC. That would put Zoroaster in the timeframe of, say, Akhenaten. In brief, Zoroaster claimed to have had a vision, or so the story goes, that revealed to him the One God, Ahura Mazda, and he promoted a religion of almost pure monotheism as well as being more or less the originator of the idea that human beings have the free will to choose good or evil. He also was the first to come up with ideas of messianism, eschatology. It was an apocalyptic religion in the sense of being revealed, but also that there were to be revelations about the end of time - time of course being a very important concept in his religion as it developed. So, I guess the first question I want to know is: Is there any possibility that Akhenaten was influenced by Zoroastrianism? Is that a possibility?

A: Not just a possibility, but a certainty.

Q: (L) If that's the case, how was that possible?

A: The ancient world was quite "well connected".

Q: (L) Okay... Can you get me any closer to a clue here?

A: Check the Hurrian connection.

From the Wiki about the Hurrians

The Hurrians (/ˈhʊəriənz/; cuneiform: 𒄷𒌨𒊑; transliteration: Ḫu-ur-ri; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri or Hurriter) were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurrian language and lived in Anatolia, Syria and Northern Mesopotamia. The largest and most influential Hurrian nation was the kingdom of Mitanni, its ruling class perhaps being Indo-Aryan speakers. The population of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia included a large population of Hurrians, and there is significant Hurrian influence in Hittite mythology. By the Early Iron Age, the Hurrians had been assimilated with other peoples. The state of Urartu later covered some of the same area.[1

The Wiki has a map, and they say you should give a source, so here it is:

By Jolle at Catalan Wikipedia - Not provided, but presumably an original work, CC BY-SA 3.0, File:Orientmitja2300aC.png - Wikimedia Commons

The area, once inhabited by the Hurrians, is where one today find Kurds in high numbers.

To get an idea of how this area connects to countries a little further away, here is a screenshot of a ViaMichelin map. Notice the measure of 200 km in the lower right corner of the image.

The Hurrian connection was suggested in relation to whether "Akhenaten was influenced by Zoroastrianism". The images of the map show that such a
connection was indeed possible, since both Egypt, Caucasus and Iran were reachable from the Hurrian area even on foot.

While on the subject of the Hurrians, the Wiki has about their language:

The Hurrian language is closely related to the Urartian language, the language of the ancient kingdom of Urartu. Together they form the Hurro-Urartian language family. The external connections of the Hurro-Urartian languages are disputed. There exist various proposals for a genetic relationship to other language families (e.g. the Northeast Caucasian languages), but none of these are generally accepted.[2]

From the 21st century BC to the late 18th century BC, Assyria controlled colonies in Anatolia, and the Hurrians, like the Hattians or Lullubis, adopted the Assyrian Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BC. Texts in the Hurrian language in cuneiform have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), as well as in one of the longest of the Amarna letters, written by King Tushratta of Mitanni to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. It was the only long Hurrian text known until a multi-tablet collection of literature in Hurrian with a Hittite translation was discovered at Hattusa in 1983.