CATTI OR HITTITES THE EARLY BRITONS 9 hitherto been known no earlier than about 2000 B.C.,1 or still later." I had long observed that amongst the most cherished ancestral possessions which the Indian branch of the Khattiyo Ariyo Barats had brought with them from their old homeland to their new colony in India, like Æneas in his exile jealously bringing with him his "rescued household gods" from his old Trojan homeland, were their treasured traditional lists of their ancestral Aryan kings, extending back continuously to the first Aryan dynasty in prehistoric times. FIG. 5.-Phoenician Coin of Carthage inscribed "Barat." Note the winged Sun-horse (Asva of the Catti Briton coins) and on obverse Those treasured ancestral Aryan King Lists they embedded in their great epic the Maha Bārata in summary; but in their "Older Epics" (the Purana) they religiously preserved them in full detail. There they cover many hundreds of pages, recording in full detail the main line and numerous branch line dynasties from the commencement of the Aryan period down to historical times; and specifying the names and titles of the various kings, reproduced with scrupulous care, and citing in regard to the more famous of them their chief achievements, thus making the record something of a chronicle of the kings as well. These traditional Aryan kings are implicitly believed by all Brahmins and modern orthodox Hindus to be the genuine lineal ancestors of the present day ruling Indo-Aryan caste in 1 G.L.H., 52. S.H. 16 and H.N.E. 199. Virgil Eneid 1. 382. India. And often I observed, in my travels through the country, groups of villagers listening with wrapt attention and reverence as one of them read out the narrative of great achievements by some of these traditional early Aryan kings, who are confidently believed to be the genuine historical kings of the Early Aryans and the ancestors of the purer Aryan ruling princes in India to-day, some of whom trace their ancestry back to them. But modern western Vedic scholars, without a single exception as far as I am aware, have summarily rejected all this great body of Epic literary historical tradition as mere fabulous fabrications of the Brahmin priests and bardsjust as modern writers on British history have arbitrarily rejected the old traditional Ancient British Chronicles preserved by Geoffrey and Nennius. The excuses offered by Vedic scholars for thus rejecting these ancient epic traditional records are twofold. Firstly, they say that, as these voluminous King-Lists are not contained in the Vedas, and only a very few of the individual kings therein are mentioned in the Vedas, which books they assume to be the sole source of ancient Aryan tradition, these King-Lists must be fabulous. In making such an objection, they entirely overlook the patent fact that the Vedas are merely a collection of psalms, and not at all historical in their purpose, so that one would no more expect to find in them systematic lists of kings and dynasties than one would expect to find detailed lists of kings and prophets in the "Psalms of David." The second argument of Vedic scholars for rejecting these ancient Epic King-Lists is, as they truly say, that no traces whatever of any of these Early Aryan Kings can be found in India. But this fact is now disclosed by the new evidence to be owing to the very good reason that none of these Early Aryan Kings had ever been in India, but were kings of Asia Minor, Phoenicia and Mesopotamia centuries and millenniums before the separation of the Eastern branch to India. Picking up these despised traditional Epic King-Lists of the Early Aryans, thus contemptuously rejected by Vedic scholars, I compared the names of their later main-line INDO-ARYANS WERE KHATTI OR HITTITES II dynasties with the names of the later historical Hitt-ite kings of Asia Minor, as known from their own still extant monuments, as well as from the contemporary Babylonian and Assyrian records, and I found that the father of the first historical Aryan king of India (as recorded in the MahaBarata epic and Indian Buddhist history) was the last historical king of the Hitt-ites in Asia Minor, who was killed at Carchemish on the Upper Euphrates on the final annexation of that last of the Hitt-ite capitals to Assyria by Sargon II. in 718 B.C. And I further found that the predecessors of this Hitt-ite king, as recorded in the cuneiform monuments of Asia Minor and in the Assyrian documents, back for several centuries, were substantially identical with those of the traditional ancestors of this first historical Aryan king of India as found in these Indian Epic King-Lists.1 Thus the absolute identity of the Indian branch of the Aryans with the Khatti or Hitt-ites was established by positive historical proof; and at the same time the Khatti or Hitt-ites were disclosed to be Aryans in race, and of the primary Aryan stock; and the truly historical character of the Indian Epic King-Lists was also conclusively established. On further scrutinizing the earlier dynasties of these Epic King-Lists, I observed that several of the leading kings of the earlier Aryan dynasties in these lists bore substantially the same names, with the same records of achievements, and in the same relative chronological order as several of the leading kings of early Mesopotamia-the so-called "Sumerians" and "Akkads," as recorded in their own still extant monuments and in the fragmentary ancient chronicles of that land. Still further, I observed that isolated early kings of Mesopotamia, who are only known to Assyriologists from their stray inscribed monuments as solitary kings of unknown dynasty and unknown origin and race, were mostly recorded in my King-Lists in their due order and chronological succession in their respective dynasties with full lists of the Aryan Kings of these dynasties 1 Full Details, with proofs, in my forthcoming Aryan Origins. who had preceded and succeeded them. It thus became obvious that these Indian Epic King-Lists supplied the key to the material required for filling up the many great blanks in the early history of Ancient Mesopotamia in the dark and "prehistoric period" there. Not only did these Epic King-Lists lighten up the dark period of Early Mesopotamian history, but they shed a similar illuminating light upon the dark period of Early Egyptian history and pre-history as well, and disclosed the wholly unsuspected fact that Menes and his "pre-dynastic civilizers of Early Egypt were also of this race of Khatti or Hitt-ite" White Syrians" or Aryans. The Phoenicians also were now disclosed to be Aryans in race and Khatti Arri or " Hitt-ite Aryans " by these new historical keys thus placed in my hands. This, therefore, corroborated the fact found by anthropologists from the examination of Phoenician tombs that the Phænicians were a long-headed race, like the Aryans, and of a totally different racial type from the Jews, to whom they have hitherto been affiliated on merely linguistic arguments by Semitists. This eastern or Indian branch of the Aryans, the Khattiyo Ariyo Barats, call themselves in their epic, the Mahā Bārata, by the joint clan-title of Kuru-Panch(āla),—a title which turned out to be the original of "Syrio-Phoenician." These Kuru and Panch(-āla) are described as the two paramount kindred and confederated clans of the ruling Aryans; and they are repeatedly referred to under this confederate title in the Vedas. Now" Kur," I observed, was the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian name for "Syria" and Asia Minor of the Hitt-ites or "White Syrians"; and it was thus obviously the original of the Suria of the Greeks, softened into" Syria by the Romans. Whilst "Panch(-āla)" is defined in the Indian Epics as meaning" The able or accomplished Panch," in compliment, it is there explained, to their great ability— 3 " "Suria (or "Syria ") was the name of Cappadocia in the time of Herodotus (1.72 and 76). And the Seleucid dynasty, which inherited Alexander's eastern empire called their Asia Minor Empire, extending from Ephesus on the Ægean to Antioch on the Levant, Suria" on their coins. Compare B.H.S., ii, 115f; E. Babelon Les Rois de Syrie. " " PHOENICIANS WERE ARYAN HITTITES 13 also an outstanding trait of the Phoenicians in the classics of Europe. This disclosed" Panch" to be the proper name of this ruling Aryan clan, whom I at once recognized as the Phanic-ians," the Fenkha or Panag or Panasa sea-going race of the eastern Mediterranean of the Ancient Egyptians,1 the "Phoinik-es" of the Greeks, and the Phanic-es of the Romans. This "Panch" ruling Aryan clan was celebrated in the Vedas as the most ardent of all devotees of the Sun and Fire cult associated with worship of the Father-god Indra, as in the Vedic verses cited in the heading, and we shall see that the Hitto-Phoenicians were especial worshippers of the Father-god Bel (also called by them "Indara ") who was of the Sun-cult, and whose name is recorded in the early Briton monuments to be examined later on. The" Panch" Aryan clan was also significantly the foremost sea-going Aryan people of the ancient world in the Vedas, in which most, if not all, of the many Aryan kings, celebrated in the Vedic hymns as having been miraculously rescued from shipwreck by Indra or his angels, were kings of the Panch Aryan clan, and “a ship of a hundred oars" is mentioned in connection with them." These Panch Aryan are also sometimes called “Krivi " in the Vedas, which word is admitted by Sanskritists to be a variant of "Kuru," which we have seen means "of Kur" or "Syria." This confederate Vedic title for them and their kinsmen, the later Syrians, namely "Kuru-Panch(-āla)," is thus seen to be the equivalent of the later title for these two confederate Aryan ruling clans, the Syrians and Phoenicians, which is referred to in the New Testament as "Suro-Phoiniki" and Englished into "SyrioPhoenician."5 Further, I found that the Early Phoenician dynasties in Syrio-Phoenicia or "The Land of the Amorites" of the Hebrews, as well as in Early Mesopotamia on the shores of the Persian Gulf (where Herodotus records that the Phoni 1 See later for the references to these names in Egyptian texts. R.V. i. 116. 5. Numerous Vedic and Epic references to these Aryan "Panch" (or Phoenicians) as the foremost seamen of the Ancient World will be found later on. R.V. viii, 20, 24; viii, 22, 12. M.K.I. i, 166f. Mark vii, 26. |