from EdoNyland Website
recovered through WayBackMachine Website
A few researchers noticed a relationship with languages in south-east Asia, others saw similarity with the Ostiak and Uralic languages of northern Siberia. The Ainu look like Caucasian people, they have white skin, their hair is wavy and thick, their heads are mesocephalic (round) and a few have grey or blue eyes.
However, their blood types are more like the Mongolian people, possibly through many millennia of intermixing.
The Ainu are a semi-nomadic hunting and fishing tribe but also practice simple planting methods, which knowledge may have been acquired from the newcomers. The invading people, under their Yamato government, called them the Ezo, the unwanted, and forced the Ainu in fierce fighting to retreat north to the island of Hokkaido.
The name Ezo likely is an abbreviation of the Basque word ezonartu (to disapprove of)
Their Jomon pottery is found everywhere; it is characteristic although somewhat clumsy and can be dated from 5,000 B.C. until just before the Christian era. It is very attractive and is distinguished by the fantasy of its shapes with elegant and imaginative cord decorations.
Some of the most striking finds were
the clearly anthropomorphic clay and stone figurines resembling
pregnant females with mask-like faces and protuberant eyes; very
similar to those found in many other parts of the world, especially
Around 300 B.C., Mongolian type people moved in from Korea and aggressively forced the Ainu north onto the large island of Hokkaido where an estimated 17,000 of them are still living.
Some 10 dialects have been recognized, such as those of Sakhalin, Hokkaido and the Kurils, but several are at the point of being lost for ever.
In Hokkaido young Ainu are now making an effort to restore their ancient language and traditions.
The Ainu called their God Kami while the Japanese called him Kamisama. The Aleut and Eskimo word kammi means "ancient thing" or "at the beginning," one of a great many correlations between Ainu and Inuktitut. (The Eskimo people call themselves the Inuit; note the similarity between the names Inuk and Ainu). Bear worship is still part of the Ainu religion and is described in detail by Joseph Campbell in Primitive Mythology.
This Paleolithic bear-worship may date back as far as 200,000 years,
to the days of the Neanderthal people. It appears to have been
practiced world-wide; wherever the bear was not found (mainly in
Africa), its place was taken by similar panther-worship.
But bear-worship has also been reported from Indonesia where languages similar to the Ainu language are still spoken (to be discussed with the Indonesian language).
Could it be that the Ainu were part of the mass migration of "Caucasian" type Sea Peoples who fled the burning Sahara and, among others, became the "Caucasian" looking Polynesians and Maoris?
The following language comparison for the Ainu seems to indicate that this was the case.
For instance the many names beginning or ending with ama (Goddess) are all thought to be of Ainu origin. In 1994 the newly married prince and princess of Japan travelled to the cave of the Goddess Amaterasu to ask her blessings for their marriage.
The name Amaterasu is agglutinated from ama-atera-asu, ama (Goddess) atera (to come out, to appear) asturu (blessings flow): Blessings flow when the Goddess appears.
This name is made up of perfect Basque!
Other well-known names were similarly assembled such as Hokkaido:
The Basques even have a word
for this yodel cry for the Goddess, they call it the irrintzi.
The surprise which came from this comparison was that those words which showed vowel-interlocking were usually associated with fighting and male domination. This appeared to be true all over the Pacific, including Peru and Mexico.
Could this mean that there
were two major migrations, the first one many millennia ago from
Mesopotamia which brought the peaceful people of the Goddess to the
Pacific and a much later one, missionary based, bringing aggressive
male domination and the language-distorting vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV)
formula to these same areas?
A surprise was the Ainu word nok (testicle) which is much like the Basque word noka (familiarity with women). In English slang the same word is used in "to knock up" meaning "to cause a woman to become pregnant." In Indonesian nok means "unmarried young woman," while dénok means "slender, elegant woman."
In Dutch slang the word is slightly altered to neuk (sexual intercourse).
There is little doubt
that the word goes way back to the
Neolithic or even
From the following comparisons it seems clear to me that Ainu and
Basque are genetically related. In comparing Ainu with Dravidian, I
did not find such a relationship, although Dravidian itself is
obviously also related to Basque. Two separate branches of the same
Don't forget that the Basque "s" is pronounced as a soft "sh" and that our sharp "sh" is written as "x" in Basque.
column shows the word number/page number)
To me this comparison is quite convincing: the Ainu language is genetically related to the universal language, Saharan/Basque; the similarities are just too many to be accidental.
Considering that the Ainu have probably been separated from the west for some 7,000 years, if not 8,000, it is not surprising that the language has drifted away from the Neolithic language as it had developed in the Sahara. The fact that so many Ainu words are still clearly recognizable when compared to modern Basque words, this is nothing short of amazing and tells us that the ancient oral traditions had been faithfully maintained since they left the Sahara or Mesopotamia.
The Ainu had no writing
system but memorized their history and legends as yukar, which means
that the poetry and epics were performed by professional memorymen
with elaborate display and ritual. Similarly, in the west, the
universal language was maintained by regular meetings, probably at
the central shrine on Malta, where the bertsolari (professional
memorymen) of all the tribes and regions met to reinforce and
standardize their language and knowledge.
Similar local meeting-islands must have been designated in the,
...but regular contact with the far-away Ainu could hardly have been maintained.
Consequently the formerly universal language drifted and diversified into what we know today as the many languages of the Pacific islands, including those of the Kurils and Aleutians.
Several of the
Pacific languages, such as Japanese and Hawaiian, do not have the
"r". It has been theorized that these languages have lost this
letter over the centuries.
The lost "r" theory may well be correct. It is interesting to note that the name Ainu possibly comes from ain'u, an abbreviation of ainbanatu (to distribute, to scatter all over). Another origin could be the Basque word aienatu (the disappeared, departed).
These astute navigators of the Pacific must also have discovered the west coast of North America at a very early date. The island-chain of the Aleutians was a ready-made pathway to Alaska, which must have been reached well before 6,000 B.C., possibly before the east coast of North America was spotted.
It may have been about the same time that the Eskimos started to spread east into Arctic Canada and Greenland, bringing along a pidgin-type, Ainu-related, Basque to Labrador and Greenland, but I will discuss this with the Eskimo language.
The Ainu must have been great long-distance sea-farers to keep up contact with their home-base which may have been in Mesopotamia.
All over the Pacific this incredible sailing tradition waned fast when the social structure changed after the coming of European or Asiatic domination. Today the Ainu still sail the ocean but mostly on fishing trips.
The complex navigational techniques, acquired over millennia had been the property of a few special families and were never popular wisdom. They are now lost.
The astonishing amount of astronomical knowledge which the members of such navigator families had to memorize was taught them at a very young age and was built up during a lifetime on the ocean. To these highly skilled and proud people the Pacific was no hostile place, the ocean was their life and joy, and an indispensible part of their culture.
Only in the Carolines the ancient spirit, some of the secret navigational
techniques and much astronomical wisdom has been maintained to this
day. All this is described in a wonderful book called,
Navigators by David Lewis.
The Ainu appeared to have been the avant garde of the Pacific migration. The desertification of the Sahara had probably forced these tribes to flee for their lives.
It was then that the name "Africa" was coined:
these displaced tribes sailed around Asia and started to populate
the nearest Pacific islands, all of them speaking the same universal
language and bringing along the same religion.
One tantalizing hint comes from Peru where the patriarchal Incas established a complex civilization, complete with highly evolved Sumerian-type irrigation.
The Incas were living gods and the Basque
word for "God" is ainkoa!