Re: Juvenile fooleries (was Re: Neanderthal and PIE (Long!))

Selon Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:

>
> Atlantis seems to be really required content in juvenile fantasies.
Seems to be. I have mine as well ;) . OK, this seems to have become a long post
as well, you are warned!

> My Atlantids also were interplanetary. And I traced their history
> back to more than 30,000 years BP. They definitely could have met the
> Neanderthals - and did, according to my still readily readable notes.
>
My Atlandids called themselves Dhastem (or Ddastem, depending on the
transliteration scheme I used). They were humans, more advanced than we are now,
but not starfaring. Their technology was also quite different from ours, with
more advances in chemistry and biology than what we have right now, but in
physics they were only slightly more advanced than us. They didn't have the
global communication network we have, for instance, which might be because they
mainly kept to their island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

I know they called their language Astou, although I don't remember how they
called their continent (it's somewhere in my notes). Unlike other Atlantis(es?),
the history of the Dhastem can be traced no further than 10,000BC, and they were
still around when Ancient Greece began using the Greek alphabet. Indeed, the
only examples of Astou we have are artefacts found in Greece, and the language
is written with an archaic form of the Greek alphabet. It seems the Dhastem
thought their own writing system was somehow sacred, and wouldn't use it outside
their island. On the small Dhastem colonies they had on other continents, they
would only use indigenous writing systems to write their language, usually
adapting them more or less efficiently (they didn't need perfect transliteration
systems).

The island of the Dhastem was destroyed somewhere around 700BC, a cataclysm
suffered by the whole world (and probably the origin of various Flood legends).
It was not moral corruption that destroyed the island, nor failed Dhastem
experiments. The Dhastem were certainly imperialistic, and felt themselves
superior to the primitive cultures around them, but they were not morally
corrupt as such. They just thought it was their duty to protect the primitive
people around them. And they did, against another technologically advanced
civilisation based on a continent in the middle of the Pacific ocean, which I
called Mu, for lack of a better name. The people of Mu were technologically
advanced humans like the Dhastem, but through history they became a theocracy,
which slowly began to take a turn to the fanatic, the xenophobic, until they
started attacking the Dhastem who they considered sinners that were soiling the
world and prevented it to reach true perfection. The Dhastem defended themselves
with better technology than Mu had expected, and for decades a Cold War
followed. Small battles happened here and there, but mostly the continents of
the Dhastem and of Mu were spared. The "primitive" civilisations on the other
continents could only watch, and many considered the Dhastem and Mu to be some
kinds of gods anyway, and battling gods was not considered unusual, as we can
see in various legends around the world.

The Cold War was broken when Mu unleashed a weapon of unknown nature against the
home continent of the Dhastem. Reason would have made clear that Mu was signing
its own death warrant that way, but by that time people on Mu were so fanatic
that the few people that tried to warn of their impending doom were attacked and
slaughtered as infidels. The Dhastem knew Mu was developing such a weapon early
enough, and knew very quickly what it could do, as they had developed something
similar but had refused to use it, but their cover attempts to prevent Mu from
using it failed. When they detected the weapon being used, it was already too
late. As I wrote earlier, the Dhastem had this belief of superiority, and never
even considered that their continent could ever be targeted itself by a weapon
that couldn't be stopped by their defences. They had no recourse. Their
continent, which was already straddling the Atlantic riff and wasn't the most
stable place to live, was completely and utterly destroyed, and sank into the
ocean. Only one small bit stayed above water level, once everything settled:
Iceland, which unfortunately was completely uninhabited at the time of the
Dhastem (being the top of a mountain too high for humans to inhabit it). The
cataclysm caused giant tsunamis to sweep over the coasts of Europe, Africa and
America. Shock waves across the Earth woke up volcanoes and caused earthquakes
everywhere. Those shock waves ended up concentrating themselves on the opposite
point of the Earth, which was where the continent of Mu was situated. They
created a kind of super earthquake that shattered the continent and made it sink
as well. Mu destroyed itself when they tried to destroy the Dhastem.

It took months before things settled. Very few Dhastem survived (the very few of
them who lived in colonies, a few hundreds at maximum). Even fewer Mu people
survived (Mu was very centralist and didn't have colonies). The colonies didn't
use much technological items (they didn't want them to fall into the hands of
the "primitive people" around them), and certainly didn't keep many books (since
they refused to have anything with their original writing system anywhere except
on their own continent). So their technology slowly faded and the survivors
themselves ended up mixing with the people around them, over the course of
centuries, so that by the time of the Roman empire all that was still known
generally were distorted legends. Some "secret societies" kept some artefacts
that were miraculously spared, as well as some knowledge, and a few books
written in that Astou transliterated using the Greek alphabet, and that's the
only thing that reached us and allows us to know the Dhastem existed at all.

I'll need to recheck my notes. I especially like the Astou language, which
features an Indo-European-like morphology for nouns, but a more
South-American-like morphology for the verbs.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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