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Comment by rtx | Hacker News Reader

That name sounds like something from ancient India. Ashur-Bani-Pal could be translated to Demon-Voice-Protector or Sky-Voice-Protector. I wonder if there were some links between the two cultures.

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Ashurbanipal means something like "Assur Protects Him" in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Mesopotamia.

There were significant contacts with India going back thousands of years, apparently.

Thanks this makes more sense. My father's name is Anil which is another name for God of wind in India. I was surprised to find out Enlil was also god of air in that region. Such an long journey for that word.

'Assur protects him' might actually be a better translation for an earlier Assyrian king, Aššurnaṣirpal, 'Ashur is the protector of the heir.'

Ashurbanipal is the rendering of the king's name from the Hebrew Bible; in the Akkadian it would be more like Aššur‑bāni‑apli, which translates to 'Ashur is the creator of an heir.'

Akkadian names were like full sentences, and make sense when thought of as the joyous exclamations of a parent upon grasping their newborn baby.

Thanks! I was wondering if I had the wrong king there.

Also I've heard in Zoroastrianism asuras are the good guys and devas the bad guys whereas in Hinduism it's the other way around... So ashurbanipal literally means God protects him

Here's one interesting read on how the myths evolved https://videshisutra.com/2013/03/22/hariti-saraswatis-persia...

>in Zoroastrianism asuras

Yes, except that they call them ahura, IIR(ead)C. Similarly, that sacred / intoxicating drink of the Vedas, called soma, was called haoma in Persia, I've read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(drink)

Almost certainly as there were extensive trade links between Harappan society and the Fertile Crescent going back at lease 4,500 years (attested by archeological artifacts). Also of course writing diffused from this region into India.

However I am not sure there would have been any linguistic connection between the regions’ tongues, but who knows?

Considering that they were not too far from each other, geographically, there could be a linguistic connection.

It’s quite possible but nobody knows what the harappan people spoke. I am not an expert in this area but I am not sure there are Semitic fossils in the modern non-PIE-derived languages of the subcontinent.

But I am not an expert so this is simply my surmise. There’s plenty of tantalizing evidence against my guess!

I'd say it's probably Proto-Indo-European roots, although I seem to think the Assyrians were always classed as Semetic in my textbooks.

Yes, Assyrian was a dialect of Akkadian, an East-Semitic language.

Is. Assyrian is still spoken.

Right, but the modern Assyrian is "Neo-Aramaic," not a dialect of Akkadian like the old one.

Giving one language the same name as another language from which it doesn't descend isn't really a good reason to claim that the earlier language is "still" spoken.

Not really; Akkadian is East Semitic and Assyrian is Central Semitic.

It was (at the time).

Gilgamesh was written ~2000 years after PIE's theorized origins. It actually lines up well with the Rigveda, one of the oldest surviving Vedic Sanskrit texts.

I believe it was originally written in Sumerian, a language isolate originally found in southern Mesopotamia.

I should check out the Rigveda.

Yep definitely true. I meant that the original author of Gilgamesh would have lived at a time when certain Sanskrit names may have been heard of in Mesopotamia.

Sumerian and the story of Gilgamesh predated Sanskrit.

We have a similar story in one of the older Sanskrit works.

http://edition-open-access.de/proceedings/7/6/index.html

Your link suggests the Indian story is based on the Sumerian or Akkadian. That would be news to me. It’s certainly possible, but in my personal opinion people often go astray with these methods - there’s little reason to believe many examples couldn’t have evolved independently based on similar real world occurrences or common human archetypes.

You should. It is interesting. I've read it.

If you consider a gap of roughly 700 years to be "lining up well", then sure.

But from a more conventional perspective, the epic of Gilgamesh is much, much, much older than the Rigveda.

The wikipedia article points Ashur to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashur_(god), which could very well influence words in other languages.

In India Ashur is a Demon and gods are called Dev, while in old Persia Devs are demons and Ashur (Ahura) is a God.

Where I work, Devs are considered demons and Ashurance, god.

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