The Die Heart Trilogy (3): Macroamnesia

When peoples are forgotten

If individuals forgetting their previous stance is microamnesia and entire peoples forgetting is mesoamnesia, then forgetting peoples even existed is macroamnesia.

I suspect the vast majority of peoples have been forgotten. So forgotten we don’t even know their names.

Who built Göbekli Tepe almost twelve thousand years ago in what is now Turkey? Nobody knows.

Wikimedia photograph of Göbekli Tepe by Teomancimit licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

But I’m certain that the name Göbekli Tepe ‘Potbelly Hill’ - or Girê Mirazan ‘Wish Hill’, its local name in Kurdish - would be alien to the builders. Neither Turkish nor Kurdish - or their Turkic or Indo-European ancestors - were spoken there when Göbekli Tepe was built. (I am assuming the late Colin Renfrew [never saw what he looked like until tonight!] is wrong about Indo-European originating from Anatolia about nine thousand years ago, but even if he is right, the ancestor of IE could have moved there after Göbekli Tepe was founded.)

Who built Stonehenge five thousand years ago? (Do I have to upload a picture? LOL. I’ve never seen Göbekli Tepe before tonight, but I’m sure everyone knows what Stonehenge looks like.) Celtic may have reached Britain only about three thousand years ago, two millennia after Stonehenge.

The descendants of the builders of Stonehenge presumably adopted the language and culture of newcomers who “were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from Gaul” - whose Celtic speakers were later Romanized.

Anatolia is macroamnesia central. It went through many waves of -izing, with Turkish being merely the latest layer atop a stack going way back to Göbekli Tepe. And maybe many of the Göbekli Tepe people used to be someone else.

Who are ‘we’? A sampling of answers from Anatolia. Hattic has no living relatives, and uš-, strictly speaking, isn’t a word ‘we’ but one of three prefixes (aš-, eš-, uš-) indicating the first person plural. (I made this image years ago before I was aware of the other prefixes. The similarity of uš- to English us is coincidental [long story].) Hittite and Greek are Indo-European: wēs is cognate to English we, and Greek hēmeĩs ‘we’ is cognate to English us (long story). Turkish biz ‘we’ isn’t cognate to any of the above. Hattians became Hittites who became Greeks and finally Turks. The background map is by Dbachmann and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Macroamnesia is everywhere, and almost everyone on Earth has it.

Including me. Before my ancestors were Japanese, they were … I don’t know. The Chinese 三國志 Records of the Three Kingdoms describes multiple lands in what is now Japan (and Korea) in the third century AD. Some names sound Japanese - the most famous being 邪馬壹 Yæmæ’it (in an approximation of third-century Chinese pronunciation), thought to be an error for 邪馬臺 Yæmædə which sounds like Yamatə, the Old Japanes name for Japan - and others are alien like 狗奴 Konɔ (spelled phonetically with the Chinese characters for ‘dog slave’!). The details are few, but it’s clear that the now ‘homogeneous’ lands of Japan and Korea were highly diverse at the start of the first millennium.

The Ainu are the only non-Japanese people left in Japan (not counting modern immigrants and their descendants) who remember who they were. It’s possible that some of my ancestors were Ainu and maybe even Konɔ - ‘dog slaves’! Woof. But no one in my family remembers being anything but Japanese due to macroamnesia.

All our ethnic conflicts only involve the last layer because no one remembers the earlier ones.

Nobody in Turkey today cares who is or isn’t descended from the Hittites, much less the Hattians.

Being a Kurd is relevant in Turkey today, but who were the Kurds before they adopted an Iranic language, a distant relative of our own?

Macroamnesia is a global phenomenon - a process that occurs throughout history - yet I never encountered the concept in my history classes and had to make up a word for it. Why don’t we know that we don’t know who our ancestors were?