Page 1. ALGONQUINS, EGYPTIANS, & UTO-AZTECS IF ALGONQUINS DESCEND from Paleo-Indians past many-millennia gaps, Morris Swadesh 12,000-15,000 years later could not have recognized the language they brought with them as genetically related to Indo-European, which spread from the "nuclear zone"--West Zagros Mts. to East Turkey meadows--with agriculture in the ritual language of the regulating Goddess-religion and could not have reached America until long after a Bering land bridge went under. We have to relinquish our taboo against ancient sea passage but by no means Paleo-Indian chase of mammoths and mastodons during the last glacier--or before. Blocking downcoast passage, the glacier guided amblers to central Canada before they could feasibly turn south. Two Sichuan exploration teams, one tracing mountains, the other rivers, took that route all the way to Central America or farther, traditionally c.2210-2180 B.C. before and during the "legendary" Xia Dynasty that preceded the "legendary" Shang. Language remembers more than its speakers. We can still sort out Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, French, Latin, and Greek in English, plus loans from Nahuatl, Hawaiian, ad inf., aware of centuries' infusions. Algonquin designates a tribe but oftener multi-tribe language--an evolved multiple of elements brought across both Pacific and Atlantic, its dialect dispersion traced only beginning with Roger Williams' Key into the Language of New England 1643 (noting Greek sound & syntax), John Eliot's Primer 1654, Bible 1661, '63, Indian Grammar 1666, interlineated Logick Primer 1672, etc. (Eliot called the language Niantic, Indian, or "of Massachusetts," not Algonquin), and William Penn's 1682 word-list of Shawnee. Silas Rand's 1875 primer and 1888 dictionary of Micmac Algonquin (noting Greek roots) marks a major advance. Algonquin Cree has received most attention since 1700. While distinguishing strata and loans in Algonquin and it from other language-families, we extend Paul Radin's 1919 linkage of native New-World tongues to each other and Old-World ancestors. Cree was and is spoken from forests of central Quebec to Manitoba including shores of Lake Superior in Ontario and Lake-Winnepeg region to Hudson Bay, across Saskatchewan prairies into East Alberta, northern Montana, and North Dakota. Buff Parry and associates analyzed it into three unrelated strata: a baffling "oldest," an Arabic middle, and a European "latest." The great linguist/historian Ethel Stewart of Ottawa detected #1 [1995] probably early-1st-millennium-A.D. NE Tibetan from the vicinity of Khri Lake, as the Koko-nor caravan depot was called of yore. Edward Curtis [1928] noted niwuk in a French term for Cree, Kenisteniwuk, contracted iyiniwuk, "people," the usual Cree suffix for group names. Ethel saw the commoner French fur-trader name Kristenaux combined lake and tenaux, Little Yuchi plural of Ten or (after 9th-century Uighur conquest of Turfan oases and Kutcha) Den, thus "Khris People." Late Asian stamp CREES ASSOCIATED with Algonquin Assiniboin (Turkish for "people who boil water with heated stones") of Manitoba and Minnesota who had spun off from Sioux--Xiong-nu Zeu (Tseu), "Slave" (of Mongolian Xiong-nu, Chinese for "Slaves") 1st millennium B.C. [Stewart 1991]; with Algonquin Blackfeet (also called Slaves) of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana; and with Algonquin Ojibways of Ontario, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, & Montana. The Assiniboin retained a legend of ocean-crossing, understanding Ireland their antecedent in an obviously hybrid heritage. Algonquin's Celtic component could have derived from either or both Ireland and Central Asia. Cree and Assiniboin fur-traders informed the French-Canadian commander Sieur de La Verendrye 1734 of "white Indians" in North Dakota. At their nine villages above the site of Bismarck, N.D. 1738 he noted recurrent gray eyes, domed tholoi, grid streets, and Welsh vocabulary. The valorous painter George Catlin 1832 at their remaining two villages, removed 100 miles north following Sioux massacre to the mouth of the Knife River, recognized a dying Welsh language within an Indian language, the 40-60' domed wigwams Welsh peasant-houses (but also approximating domed Mongol houses), canoes Welsh coracles, Welsh blue beads, the very name Mandan Welsh "red dye" and Maho-Peneta (Great Spirit) Welsh Maur-Panaethir. Un-European Mandan lifestyle resembled Sioux. He had no basis for recognizing Egyptian holdovers in secret rites or of Mongolian/Central-Asian warrior rites. Archaeologists traced Mandan villages back to c.1100 A.D. between southern South Dakota and the Little Missouri in North Dakota but could not trace a migration to South Dakota (by traceless rivers) and Mandans could remember no earlier than their flight from the nine villages where La Verendrye had found them. They believed themselves remnants of a flood. Lewis & Clark reached them 1804 at their refugee pair of Knife villages. Sacajawea, an Idaho Shoshoni, joined at the villages with her French-trapper purchaser/husband. (Enemies had captured and sold her.) She led the expedition to her own people 1805. Sacajawea is conventionally etymologized "Bird Woman," but Saca/Shaka was a Yuchi Bear clan that in the Tarim had been the dominant Yuchi tribe, known as Asii, and Sa-cu (Dun-Huang) a polyglot major fortified Xi-Xia Tibetan city far NW of Kokor Nor (Khri Lake), far ENE of Shan-Shan/Navadjo. Aztecs held sacred the Dragon Spirit of the Beautiful Woman Spring near Sa-cu [Stewart 1991]. The very name Dene, which Athapaskans call themselves, is Celtic "Of the People," a Tarim Little-Yuchi genitive. Ethel linked Cree Stratum #3 to Xiong-nu displacement of Yuchis from Kansu, when a Little Yuchi branch who spoke an Italo-Celtic dialect settled among Tibetans at Khri Lake c.176 B.C. SHE CONNECTED preponderant Arabic roots of Parry's middle stratum to outvying Arabs with their center-to-center compounds on the Silk Road which Han China opened 125 B.C. Dene knowledge of the Tower of Babel she attributed to ubiquitous Arabs and Jews. The four-plus centuries' war throughout China and Central Asia following 220-A.D. Han collapse would have impelled overseas migration, she adjudged, aware that commerce during previous stability could also have motivated. Past Feudal-States and Qin disjunctions of Confucian Jo from Daoist Han, scholars forgot that Shan hai jing Far-East books applied to "the beautiful continent" Fu-sang. Hwui Shan and fellow Afghan Buddhists nevertheless knew or rediscovered the route when fleeing Southern-Song persecution 458 A.D. Hwi returned an old man 499 and described Hohokam Arizona and Teotihuacan Mexico to the Southern Liang court 502. The great Tang poet Du Fu (712-770) in Shensi regretted he had not traveled to Fu-sang, whose fu-sang tree, imagined by Han times in China as something like mulberry, evidently was a cornstalk, confused in some Shan hai jing reports with organ-pipe cactus. AFGHAN BUDDHISTS (Kushan subjects if not ethnically Yuchi) having made the appalling land journey to Changjo on the Yuan Ho (in the Nanjing vicinity NW of Shanghai 50-60 mi. SW of the Southern Song capital Chenjiang) points up the power of religious mission but also Silk-Road egress from the withering Kushan heart. As late as the 3rd century A.D. that now-desert heart--Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan--flourished a garden whose dense towns along the lower Oxus (Amu Dar'ya), lower Jaxartes (Syr Dar'ya), Helmand, and gigantic canal system off them supported a large population in contact with Persia and the Roman Empire west and China east. Desiccation that set in that 3rd century and accelerated severely the next two centuries brought starvation, panic, and exodus. Yuchi legend of fire from three directions on an island which drove the tribe asea matches medieval Asian legend of fire-winds from all directions that depopulated a thousand cities of the Golden Island--Shakadvipa (lit. Shaka or Scythian Island)--referring to this vast urban garden, today reduced to Sistan Oasis (still enormous for an oasis). Sassanid Persians were prevailing over the waning Kushan Empire, thus blocking westward. South by Indus to sea offered one refugee route which, however, Sassanids wrested, while the open Silk Road east presented a natural, familiar escape. Exodus of Kushan Yuchis east, together with disintegration of their Silk-Road-controlling empire, exacerbated Central and East-Asian turmoil 4th-7th centuries. If we wonder how Uto-Aztecs reached the Ohio Valley we must equally wonder how Yuchis reached it, but we should not be surprised that Yuchis, used to supervising an empire that for a few centuries dominated Central Asia, continued to exercise a supervisory role in the Algonquin Shawano Confederation (Empire?) or that, infiltrating, they adopted Egyptian/Aegean traditions and ritual language without giving up their own tongue which had gained international currency in Asia, reflecting Sogdian, Persian, Tibetan, Chinese, and Indus complexity. In America, Kushan Yuchis deliberately did not teach their language to non-Yuchis; which partly explains dialectical nonproliferation despite dispersion of Yuchis in many other tribes. ETHEL'S DIAGNOSIS of a 1st-millennium-A.D. derivation for both Strata #1 and #3 of Algonquin Cree--also possibly Arabic #2 from Asia--suggests #1 and #3 if not also #2 comprised a single stratum that creolized late or last--at least after the Mediterranean/Atlantic composite of three separate periods, before Norse. OUR PREEMINENT EPIGRAPHER Barry Fell of New Zealand, Harvard, & San Diego extracted [1976,'80] Egyptian, Greek, Celtic, Semitic, & Norse from Algonquin and assumed them fused with an unknown primeval tongue that Algonquins were already speaking. He noted an additional language in west-Algonquin dialects, presumed Siberic. After Ethel recognized "Siberic" Central Asiatic--and "unknown" Stratum #1 also--we could say Egyptian/Libyan/Punic/Greek/Celtic/Numidian/Latin comprised #1, obliterating a rudimentary native tongue, as Indo-European had obliterated in Neolithic West Asia & Europe. (Fell subsumed Libyan in Egyptian, did not yet differentiate Numidian from Libyan, and missed Latin.) Then compare divergences two ages later within Indo-European, when the language of prevailing Roman religion and government supplanted less-developed Celtic in Gaul, then less-developed Frankish German in Gaul and less-developed Visigothic German in Spain, but not higher-developed Greek in the eastern half of the Empire. This imposition of Latin may compare with imposition of creolized Mediterranean & Atlantic-European lingua franca on eastern North American Indians. Rapid disparity of Latin dialects at collapse of central Roman authority may compare with the disparity of Algonquin dialects after collapse of its imperial confederation, when states regressed to chiefdoms and they to nomadism, repeating Near-Eastern Neolithic & Bronze cycles. Arabic which Fell, Ethel, and Parry recognized, could have accompanied the displacing Mediterranean mix or later Central-Asiatic or both. SIOUX (by a different tribal name) gradually migrated far northwest so thoroughly Algonquinized that they kept speaking Algonquin even after close interaction with Xiong-nu changed their lifestyle and name. They did not adopt Mongolian speech because their own was already highly or higher developed. Moving beyond forests, Sioux adopted Xiong-nu nomadism. Fell's "Siberic" would be Mongolian Turkish of prairie Sioux. J.E. Edkins had identified the Algonquin Dakota dialect Mongol at the turn of the 19th century. WHAT FELL TOOK for a basal primal tongue was, then, likely Tarim-Basin Uto-Aztec which preceded the 1233-A.D. Athapaskan fugitive-voyage from the sea-otter trading-depot at the mouth of the Amur (site of Vladivostok) via the Kamchatka Current past Aleutians to Alaska Peninsula, whence tribal bands strewed downcoast and inland, Ethel detailed definitively 1991. A branch of the Silk Road led to Tungus tepee villages on the Amur, where Sogdian/Yuchi & Korean/Yuchi agents (factors) dwelt and Na-Dene (Haida & Tlingit) from beyond the Gobi Desert had already taken refuge, Genghis Khan having conquered Outer Mongolia before Xi-Xia.