Oh how amazing that you got to work on that!

Thanks for watching!

Thank you :)

Thank you kindly!

Wow, thank you!

Thank you and welcome! 😊

😂

😂

LOL. Ebro < Iberus < Iber/Ibar = river bank in Basque. There is at least another Ibar in Kosovo, another Ebro in Greece and Bulgaria (where it's called Maritsa however) and IMO it's plausible that Tiberis (Tiber) also comes from the same root plus the Etruscan article ty- before and an Indoeuropeanizing -is at the end (same as the -us of Iberus). Related words: ibai (river in Basque), ibón (glacial lake in Aragonse, surely from Basque as well, spoken in the Central Pyrenees well into the Middle Ages and maybe even early Modern Age). Anyway the important part is that it'd rather be like "(h)ey bro!"

Good! You will certainly baffle those future archaeologists. 😄

Cat Litter is an ancient deity

Very interesting. Thank you.

PS - Second thought on ottiran: could it be Otsailan = February (lit. "month of cold")? The Basque calendar retains some months named unconventionally like this one, names that could be extremely old (Azaroa = time of cabbages = November, for instance).

Good to see you on here, Luis! I was wondering what you would think of my view of the words: I took eŕaukon to be related to old Nafarroan zeraukon, still used olerkarien hitzetan (in poets' words) from time to time today. Now over a year later, their paper comes out with the same idea. I had a few ideas about "tenekebeekiŕateŕe[n]" whose first syllable, apparently, these researchers now feel is more likely to be "ku" than "te." I thought "deneke" could be an old future or future potential tense of the copula "da," in keeping with its use in other moods, "liteke" and "daiteke." I believe I have seen in Trask that it is still used in some other contexts Euskalki batzuetan (in some Basque dialects) with the sense of the future, but I forget the details. It could also be "denek" "all (erg.)," as they likely need to pick a vowel in the orthography (such as e) to denote a word-final consonant. "beekiŕateŕe[n]" to me is by far most likely either "begiratu" or "egin," IMO more likely the former. "begiratu" was erroneously claimed to have come from Lat. "vigilō, vigilatus" a while back. The record was corrected on this quite a while ago, but the idea still persists in the minds of some, unfortunately. I believe that "begira(tu)" comes quite transparently from "begi," which means "eye" and in turn bears the all-encompassing body-part fossilized prefix "be," which shows up e.g. in "belarri" "ear." *If* the root was "egi," then the unprefixed word could be related to "egia" "truth," which semantically is a very common link for languages., and this could explain the long "e" in ancient Basque "beegiŕateŕe[n]." I imagine the ending of this periphrastic verb form would be related to modern Basque "begiratzea" which is the noun form, and could in fact *be* (at least morphologically equal to) the genitive of this noun form "watching," since as we know the all-purpose article "-a" is actually a rather recent innovation, perhaps only 1000 years old. I'm with you on ottirtan; I checked dictionaries and Ortzi and Otxin came up best. The character Miel-Otxin is of course said to derive from the 8¢ moneda from Old Spanish, but as with so many things it could simply be because of a coincidence, phonological similarity, that this concept got lumped onto him. I'm with you on ezeakarri: I thought of the "humid" connection as well, but perhaps modern "ez" "not" has an ancient counterpart "eze," or "ekarri" could have been "eakarri." This seems to me to be somewhat semantically more likely. An apotropaic bestowing on those who view it something auspicious, and in particular something not to be brought away. At least, I feel I'm close.

@@danielbriggs991- Hi there, Daniel. The "ŕ" character is distinct from the "r" one, both in Basque (old style of writing, now "rr" is used instead) and in Iberian script transcriptions. These are thrill vs tap, two totally different "r" variants, which are NEVER confused, they can't, they do not evolve into each other in any single instance ever recorded. Erre is not ere, irri is not iri, urra is not ura. Thus I don't think it can be "zeraukon". And for the same reason I can't see "begira" in what you discuss later but rather begi + (e)rrate (I picked "be egi" instead but "begi" is indid possible). If instead of "arrate", as I suggested, would be "errate", then a possible interprteation could be an old/dialectal form of "erratzen" (esaten = said). Notice that Iberian script does not easily lend itself to Basque T-sibilants such as tx (ch), ts and tz, as well as tt, so some "t" characters may hide a more complex pronunciation (sometimes I've considered that RS/RZ in other Iberian texts could also be there to indicate our modern TS/TZ). I agree that begira(tu) is a natural Basque word from begi = eye (+ -ra = to, towards), lit. "to(wards) eye". I even think that -tu ending verbs are probably quite old in Basque but unsure. Some theory claimed that only verbs in -n and -i were, that -tu is a more modern development; if correct, we should expect the precursor of "begiratu" to be something like "begiran"... and that's interesting bc there are several -n ending words that could be interpreted this way maybe (??). "Deneke" is also interesting because, as you write it at least, it may be dene (dena, either as "all" or as "da+en+a" = "that which is", subordinate sentence) plus "ke" (Iberian "and", probably fossil in Basque as the "-ka" of "hamaika" = "abar-ke-ban" in Iberian, modern "eta" is clearly of Latin roots instead). But unsure. I can't find this word in the text anyhow, unless it's the 2nd line start "guneke". Anyway remember that k/g and t/d are indistinct in Iberian script (b/p doesn't seem the case: there was just no /p/ whatsoever, all is /b/, in Ibero-Jonian texts), so it could be kunege, gunege, kuneke... not that it helps IMO but just for the record. As for "oTin", I'm unfamiliar with the Miel-Otxin character but I just found the rare word "otsein", very similar, which means "servant". In general the issue is not IMO if it's Basque (or close to Basque, as happens with many Iberian texts) but if it's possible to properly read (interpret) such a short text with the sole help of evolved modern Basque. "Auza, han dago gauzak, baino inork ezin du har". (Auza, a legendary and real cave site, there are things there but nobobody can get them).

Fascinating, Basque just seems so complicated to me. You know, augury was also practiced in Canaanite traditions. It seems very likely those practices have roots in the very practical observation of natural cycles and could easily develop independently. For instance, Canadian Geese show up on my lake in the early spring. Where I am they could be seen as a fortunate, seasonal food source and also a sign of the nearing of spring. An understanding of migratory fowl in that region at that time, as patterns may have changed, may help bring context to the inscription on this item. Could the term you are translating as wet or humid/humidity be an ancient term for rain as in asking heaven for rain?

@@rehoboth_farm - I don't know: it's all very tentative: heze (or eze, the "h" is silent in all southern dialects, only aspired in the North) is definitely a very old word, which seems cognate with the common toponym and otherwise fossil word "iz-" with the meaning of "water", present for example in *izaso > itsaso = the sea or the ocean, izurde = dolphin (lit. "water boar"). It's also common in European river names like Issere and the like and it almost certainly produces the English word "ice" (compare Basque "izotz" = cold water, with the archaic form of "iz" for water). Many years ago I came to the conclusion that Nubian languages might be the closest living thing to Basque (maybe via a common origin or intense sprachbund in Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic?) with a large list of apparent cognates, including some very intriguing "oblique" and obscure ones, among them this eze - iz element. I quote from my old blog: "é:zhi (water) - heze (wet) [also archaic particle *iz-, meaning "water" by all accounts: itxaso = sea, izurde = dolphin, izotz = ice, and common in Vasconic river toponymy]". Search for an article titled "Vasco-Nubian?" at "For what they were... we are" blogspot blog if interested on the whole thing. Of course it's not fully clear in this text: ez/iz produce other quite basic words: ez = no, not (maybe cognate of Greek 'okhi'?) and izan = to be (apparently correlated somehow with Indoeuropean "is" and "es", same meaning) and related izen = name. So it's all but simple and straightforward to interpret these texts, and say "these" plural because the Iberian text corpus definitely has a lot of texts or fragments of texts that totally sound Basque-like but are quite hard to fully translate anyhow. Some of the easiest ones are the ones written in Iberio-Jonian (a barely modified form of the Greek alphabet), I remember showing a transliteration I made of the lead of El Cigarralejo to a Basque native speaker friend of mine like 20 years ago and he reacted half-jokingly saying: "it's not from Ondarru (his hometown) but could be from Lekitto (the nearby and sometimes rival town, where they speak "weird")". This highlights the issue of dialects and their evolution, because there was never before the 20th century a Basque standard language, yet we know that ancient Iberians were genetically "identical" to modern Basques and a lot of advances have come from studying ancient Iberian, in spite of the limitation. For example the Iberian numerals are now well understood from 1 to 20, 9 excepted, and they are very much Basque-like, not identical but even those differences illuminate obscure Basque forms like "hamaika" (11, also "a lot"), which is best understood comparing it to Iberian "abar-ke-ban", which shows that "ke" (Basque "ka" surely) was the original "and" and not "eta" (Latin or Romance derived) or "eta abar" (etcetera, lit. "and ten" but using the Iberian form "abar" instead of the Basque form "hamar"). Again, if interested in more details, look up "Iberian numerals" in my old blog. Ideally there would be not one but several living Vasconic languages that could be compared and thus produce a "proto-Vasconic" reconstruction. In reality Basque is the only living survivor and all the rest we have is Iberian texts, lots of toponimy, lots of borrowings in Western Indoeuropean languages (but poorly understood and often contested, largely out of ignorance or arrogance) and maybe distant "Neolithic" connections with other families, incl. some interesting coincidences with proto-Indoeuropean and the somewhat unexpected but intriguing possible Nubian connection I already mentioned. The fact that most linguists don't speak any Basque and that those who do (Basque ones) are generally not interested in unraveling these mysteries of the deep origins, connections and influences of the Vasconic family (surely the one brought to Europe by the mainline Neolithic of Anatolian roots, what means that Vasconic languages were spoken in most of Europe some 6000 years ago), doesn't help. In the end, if all the tools you have are Indoeuropean, all linguistic problems seem to be solved by some sort of Indoeuropean abracadabra. That's definitely not the right approach.

No, not ready anything about it. Will have a look.