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Cherokees Spoke Greek and Came from East Mediterranean
DNA Consultants ^ | 17 June 2010 | Donald N. Yates

Posted on 07/07/2010 6:22:09 AM PDT by Palter

Possum Creek Stone and Anomalous Cherokee DNA Point to Eastern Mediterranean Origins

In memoriam Gloria Farley

Donald N. Yates

DNA Consultants

Keynote address for Ancient American History and Archeology Conference, Sandy, Utah, April 2, 2010

SUMMARY  Three examples of North American rock art are discussed and placed in the context of ancient Greek and Hebrew civilization. The Red Bird Petroglyphs are compared with Greek and Hebrew coins and the Bat Creek Stone. The Possum Creek Stone discovered by Gloria Farley is identified as a Greek athlete’s victory pedestal. The Thruston Stone is interpreted as a record of the blending of Greek, Cherokee, Native American, Egyptian and Hebrew civilization. Keetoowah Society traditions, as captured in The Vision of Eloh’, are adduced to confirm a general outline of the origins of the Cherokee people in a Ptolemaic Greek trans-Pacific expedition joining pre-arriving Greeks, Jews and Phoenicians in the Ohio Valley around 100 c.e.  Recent DNA investigations showing Egyptian, Jewish and Phoenician female lineages and the Y chromosome of Old Testament Priests among the Cherokee are also touched upon. Greek words and customs in the Cherokee are reviewed as time permits. Slide projector requested.

A cave entrance overlooking the Redbird River, a tributary of the South Fork of the Kentucky River in Clay County, Kentucky in the Daniel Boone National Forest, has inscriptions which according to Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati display a nineteenth-century example of writing in the Cherokee syllabary. A local resident (Burchell) recognizes Greek writing in one inscription (called Christian Monogram #2) but his reading is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Evaluation by experts in Greek and Semitic epigraphy identifies two distinct inscriptions, one in Greek and one in Hebrew.  They appear to be contemporaneous with the Bat Creek Stone unearthed in the 1889 excavation of a tomb in East Tennessee by Cyrus Thomas of the Smithsonian Institution.

Another record of Greek-speaking people in ancient America is the Possum Creek Stone, discovered by Gloria Farley in Oklahoma in the 1970s. It is discussed by her in Volume 2 of In Plain Sight as proof that the man history knows as Sequoyah did not invent the Cherokee syllabary.  The inscription can be read as Greek, HO-NI-KA-SA or ‘o nikasa, i.e. “This is the one who takes the prize of victory,” a common inscription for the pedestal upon which victors were crowned at athletic games.  The use is Homeric, and the spelling Doric.

A third piece of evidence helps fill in the background of the arrival of Greeks and their intermarriage with Asiatic and other Indians in North America. In 1870, an engraved 19 x 15 inch limestone tablet was uncovered in a mound excavation on Rocky Creek near Castalian Springs in Sumner County, Tennessee (see Ancient American, vol. 12, no. 77). Dating to an earlier time than its Mississipian Period context, it commemorates a peace treaty between the Cherokee and Shawnee. The Cherokee chief wears a horse-hair crested helmet and carries the spear and shield of a Greek hoplite. His Shawnee adversary clasps hands in a wedding ceremony with a Cherokee woman who bears wampum belts as a pledge of peace, has her hair in a maidenly bun, wears a Middle Eastern-style plaid kilt, and displays a large star of David. In the Red Record or Walam Olum, we learn that before crossing the Mississippi, somewhere along the south bank of the Missouri, the Algonquians or Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indians), who are later allied with the Cherokee, encounter a foreign tribe they call the Stonys. Cherokee legends about Stone-coat demonstrate that the original Cherokee had metal armor and weapons. DNA studies confirm a mixture of “anomalous” East Mediterranean mitochondrial lineages such as Egyptian T, Greek U and Phoenician X with “standard” American Indian haplogroups A, B, C and D in the Cherokee and certain other Eastern Woodlands Indians.

To sum up, the Red Bird Petroglyph is a Greek inscription from the 2nd to 3rd century c.e., not a crude Cherokee scratching of around 1800 as announced recently by the Archeological Institute of America and the New York Times. It occurs above what is, in all likelihood, an inscription in Maccabean-era Hebrew. The Sequoyan syllabary for which these Greek and Hebrew inscriptions were mistaken originated in the Greek world of the Bronze Age along with other syllabaries like Linear A, Linear B and Cypro-Minoan. The Cherokee language, which today is Iroquoian, is the result of a relexification process in the distant past. It contains many relics of words of Greek origin, especially in the area of government, military terminology, mythology, athletics and ritual. Cherokee music also reflects Greek origins.  The Cherokee Indians are, quite literally, the Greeks of Native America.

Possum Creek Stone and Anomalous Cherokee DNA Point to East Mediterranean Origins (PPT)

Greek Words and Customs in Cherokee

Greek

Meaning
Cherokee
Meaning

alomenoi
dakos
dasis

tynchana
etheloikeoi*
gennadas
huios Dios
illo, illas*
kakotechneo

kanon
karanos
kateis*
kerux
mona*
neika*

Ogyges
ouktenna
oulountata
skia
stix
tanawa*

(hoi en) telei
theatas*
theatron
Thrax
typho

wanderers (in a hopeless sense)
noxious, devouring beast, whale
hairy, shaggy like a beast
things that befall
volunteer settlers

noble
Son of Zeus (title of Herakles)
wrap, twist; rope
base arts, perjury, fraud
straight-edge used by athletes
a chief

assembly
herald
stopping place, way-station
contest
titan of Greek mythology
one not killed

declared healthy
ghost, shade
abominable
astronomical instrument
those in authority
spectator in a play

theater, assembly
 Thracian
raise a smoke, make sacrifice

eloh’; elohi

dakwa
dachi
tikano
eshelokee
kanat(i)
Su-too Jee

kilohi
kaktunta
kanuga
Koranu**
cahtiyis
skarirosken**

mona
anetcha
Ootschaye
Uktena
oolungtsata
atchina

Stichi
Tchlanua
tilihi
tetchata
tetchanun
tchaskiri**

Tathtowe,
  Tistoe
migrants, wanderers; earth
mythic great fish

hairy water monster
history
Cherokee; original people
doctor, hunter
mythic strong man
twisted hair clan (cf. Hawaiian hilo)

taboo regulation
scraper used by ballplayers
war chief title
assembly house
speaker, herald
land where the Elohi tarried

ballplay
rival of Sutoo Jee (Herakles)
name of a dragon or serpent
divining crystal for health
ghost; cedar
name of dangerous serpent

Great Hawk
brave, warrior
Playful Cherokee fairy
ceremonial enclosure
sorcerer, Stoneclad
ceremonial title; firecracker  (smoke) bringer (Santa Claus)


TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: batcreekstone; cherokee; clovis; cloviscomet; decalogue; dna; epigraphyandlanguage; gloriafarley; godsgravesglyphs; greek; hebrew; inman; israel; kennethtankersley; lds; loslunas; mormon; possumcreekstone; preclovis; redbirdpetroglyphs; tencommandments; thrustonstone
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To: tlb

Oh Pocahontas sailed here from Aotearoa...

O Kaaaay


41 posted on 07/07/2010 9:38:11 AM PDT by Tennessee Nana
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To: Palter

My apologies for what I’m about to say, but this is pure foolishness, and this “scholar” ought to be ashamed of himself. I’m no linguist, but I have a few years of Greek under my belt, and I also right now am studying Iroquoian languages—of which Cherokee is a member.

Their grammars are COMPLETELY different. As in COMPLETELY. Greek is, like the other Indo-European languages, an inflected language with a root stem on which suffixes are then added: anthropos, anthropoi, anthropou, etc. Cherokee, on the other hand, is an agglutinative language, where the root is buried in the middle of the word. I had difficulty learning Mohawk (which is distantly related to Cherokee) precisely because it wasn’t anything like the Latin/Greek/Italian/French grammars I was used to. It’s a completely different paradigm. Take something as simple as the subject/object of a verb. Greek marks the subject of verbs with a suffix—the object takes a separate word entirely. Iroquoian does it with a huge system of prefixes which have not only the subjects but also the objects embedded in them.

Second, I *guarantee* you, with a corpus of 10000 words between two languages—no matter what those languages are—you will find a few dozen words that look similar and have similar meanings. But he barely even did that: “ouktenna = something not killed” vs. “Uktena name of a dangerous dragon or serpent”? Astronomical instrument and Great Hawk? No serious linguist would take such comparisons seriously.

To prove common descent, you need much much more than a few look-alike words. You need regular variation with established sound laws: like N in one language regularly shows up as T in the other language. Moreover, you have to show it in the most basic, elementary words that are least likely to change as time goes on. Like numbers. Pronouns. Sun, moon, mouth, eye, man, woman, water. Show me comparisons with those words, with regular sound laws. Show me a similar grammar, and then we can talk about common descent.

If Cherokee was descended from Greek, we’d see much much more similarity between them. There is actually very very little. English and Sanskrit are way closer to Greek than Cherokee is.

In short, this article is dead wrong.


42 posted on 07/07/2010 9:38:53 AM PDT by Claud
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To: bert

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I live in East TN...

some of my grandchildren are Cherokee...

but they were born in Ohio...


43 posted on 07/07/2010 9:41:01 AM PDT by Tennessee Nana
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To: reaganaut; colorcountry; Colofornian; Elsie; FastCoyote; svcw; Zakeet; SkyPilot; rightazrain
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44 posted on 07/07/2010 9:42:08 AM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously... You'll never live through it.)
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To: nutmeg

bookmark


45 posted on 07/07/2010 9:42:21 AM PDT by nutmeg (Another "smartass" for lower taxes)
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To: Palter

And their DNA has been linked to Asia.
So this proves what?

I thought Mr. Yates would want to prove there was a link to Hebrew.

His last name is a common one in Utah. I’m just guessing by his ridiculous supposition that he is indeed one.

Any bets?


46 posted on 07/07/2010 9:46:29 AM PDT by cruise_missile
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To: Vendome

Figures. Nice find.


47 posted on 07/07/2010 9:46:38 AM PDT by Claud
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To: SWAMPSNIPER
I went to school with a guy that was half Cherokee..and half Potawatomi...

We called him Potty-chair.....

True story..

48 posted on 07/07/2010 9:59:45 AM PDT by Osage Orange (MOLON LABE)
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To: stinkerpot65

Funny thing is they didn’t much like “red savages” either.................


49 posted on 07/07/2010 10:01:52 AM PDT by Osage Orange (MOLON LABE)
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50


50 posted on 07/07/2010 10:14:50 AM PDT by svcw (True freedom cannot be granted by any man or government, only by Christ.)
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To: Palter
Cherokees Spoke Greek and Came from East Mediterranean

SURE they did!


51 posted on 07/07/2010 10:50:13 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Palter
His latest book, Old Souls in a New World, is about an expedition of Greeks, Jews and Egyptians that inadvertently founded the Cherokee Indian nation in the third century B.C.

SURE they did!


52 posted on 07/07/2010 10:53:46 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Claud

So says “Chief King Gyros” ... ;) I have two years of Koine greek myself, I call bunk.


53 posted on 07/07/2010 11:00:24 AM PDT by Scythian
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To: Cheburashka
Language is not a reliable marker of ethnic origin, since a new language is easily learned, and an old language forgotten within two or three generations.

So language is NOT a good indicator of heredity.

54 posted on 07/07/2010 11:04:20 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: wardaddy
This is ironic coming from a Jewish Indian..lol


55 posted on 07/07/2010 11:07:22 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: cruise_missile
His last name is a common one in Utah.

Anglisized from GOETZ as was said in one of the links I followed...

No comment on where the :PANTHER comes from.

But... does he live in Pheonix? or Santa Fe??

56 posted on 07/07/2010 11:10:47 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Elsie
It's amazing how the Jews got around all over the place.

May the Schwartz be with you!

57 posted on 07/07/2010 11:53:37 AM PDT by colorado tanker
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To: Elsie

That’s Goofy....LOL


58 posted on 07/07/2010 12:24:48 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously... You'll never live through it.)
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To: Palter
Did the Greeks come from America or visa versa?

Or perhaps they were both descendants of a more ancient culture? Atlantis?

59 posted on 07/07/2010 12:25:18 PM PDT by wolfcreek (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsd7DGqVSIc)
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To: svcw

you cheated....LOL


60 posted on 07/07/2010 12:53:14 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously... You'll never live through it.)
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