Three, Four and Five islands!

While Glen Gordon has been spending a lot of time on ancient geographical names, I thought I'd 'expand' on this series in an interesting way.

There are three Greek islands that you can nicely follow in a line from Crete, along the currently Turkish coast. Namely: Crete, Kos and Samos. All three of these names do not have an obvious etymology.

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Picture was taken and edited from Wikipedia. I attempted to sort of get it in the colour scheme of my blog, not sure if it worked.

Anyway. Now that we have pointed this out, let us look at the Masculine numeral system of Tashelhit Berber.

1	yan
2	sin
3	kraḍ
4	kkuẓ
5	səmmus
6	sḍis
7	sa
8	ttam
9	ttẓa
10	mraw

 

(Is that readable? or should I switch to Black layout like before?)

The point I'm trying to make is maybe as absurd as it is obvious. Looking at the words for Three, Four and Five you can't help but conclude that these look a lot like the names of these three Islands.

Of course I am not implying that the Tashelhit speaking Berbers roamed the seas of Greek, it's just that only Tashelhit and Touareg properly retained the numeral system and the possible relation is more obvious in Tashelhit. The words for three four and five in Touareg are kəraḍ, okkoẓ and səmmus respectively.

Obviously this idea has big repercussions. If one were to believe it, it would mean that there was a seafaring Berber people that would travel and trade along the Islands of Greece.

There's also a problem. Where are the islands 'Ian' and 'Sin'? As it wouldn't make much sense to give numbers to islands of your trade route starting from three.

I have no idea what to make of this data. It is a very nice fit, but it would teach us something very new about ancient history. And how realistic is it to call islands of a trade route by number?

As much as I would like to say that this is all my idea, I have to admit it isn't at all. My current Middle Atlas Berber teacher Harry Stroomer told us a story of him once visiting a very old Morrocan professor (whose name I have sadly forgotten) who pointed out this strange correspondence.

As Glen was currently working on place names, I thought it would be fun to add this to make a start of a multiblog series!

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this correspondence. Does it mean something? Is it pure coincidence?