preferring to translate the lines as “Ehemals hatte ich die ummān-mandu-Truppen mit
der Waffe zurückgeschlagen.” If the revised reading is correct, this would be by far
the earliest known reference to Manda-troops.
39 Raulwing 2009, p. 7, reports that Wolfram von Soden “was able to identify hippological
Indo-Aryan terms in the archive of Nuzi (the modern Jorgan Tepe near Kirkuk in Iraq)
which indicate colour or age of horses.”
40 See Martirosyan 2013. A Greek-Armenian subgroup was first proposed in 1924 and
1925 by Holger Pedersen and Antoine Meillet. For a brief Forschungsberichton the
relationship of Greek to Armenian see Clackson 1994, pp. 28–29.
41 See Rexová, Frynta and Zrzavy 2003, pp. 122–123: after performing three analyses,
the authors state that “all results indicate... that Armenian and Greek languages are
close to one another (however, they may form a paraphyletic assemblage).” See also
Ringe, Warnow and Taylor 2002, pp. 102–103.
42 See Clackson 1994, pp. 201–202:
However, the morphological evidence which suggests that Greek and Armenian
stem from neighboring Proto-Indo-European dialect areas connects them as
closely to the Indo-Iranian languages, and we have also discussed in Chapter 4 a
number of possible lexical agreements between the three language groups, which
might augment the list of lexical agreements between the languages presented by
Porzig and others. Scholars have also observed the close relationship between the
morphological systems of Greek and Indo-Iranian, and a few exclusive
agreements, between Armenian and Indo-Iranian especially, in vocabulary. These
various factors all support the reconstruction of a dialectal group of the parent
language comprising the speech forms which later developed to give the
Armenian, Greek and Indo-Iranian languages, as has recently been argued by K.
H. Schmidt and others. In my opinion there is not sufficient evidence to suppose
any closer link between Greek and Armenian than between either language and
Indo-Iranian, and the reconstruction of a Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian dialect area
is sufficient to account for these agreements.43 Watkins 1995, pp. 170–171, developing an argument briefly suggested by Karl Schmidt,
concluded that “sharp-winged eagle” should be regarded as “a probable inheritance
from the common poetic language of Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian.” Because
“Indo-Iranian, Greek and Armenian constitute a dialect area on independent grounds
(augment, prohibitive negation, stem formation of denominative verbs),” Watkins sees
the parallel noun-and-adjective epithets “as an inheritance from the poetic proto-
language of the same dialect area.”
44 Watkins 1995, Chapter 15: “An Indo-European theme and formula: Imperishable
fame,” pp. 173–178, provides a full study of this formula.
45 Watkins 1995, p. 176 (the italics are his).
46 Hawkins 2010, p. 215. Some 300 inscriptions in Paleo-Phrygian have been found (only
two have more than a few words), dating from the 8th to the middle of the 5th century
BC, and another hundred in Neo-Phrygian from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
47 See Steph. Byz. 437,
Armenia. A land near the Persians’ land. It is named after Armenos, a Rhodian,
as Antipatros says in the third book of his On the Rhodians. The inhabitants are
called Armenians, as Eudoxos says in the first book of his Description of the Earth:
“The Armenians are a genosfrom Phrygia, and in their speech they Phrygicize a
lot (πολλά φρυγίζουσι).”... Also, Armenia is a feminine gender (adjective) in
Xenophon.48 For several examples of the relationship of Phrygian to Greek see Lubotsky 1988.
Kortlandt 1990, p. 4, agrees with Lubotsky that “Phrygian was rather closely related
The question of origins 233