When I moved from that blank space on the map known as Northeast Montana to Thailand in 1963 with a pregnant wife and a three year old daughter, I knew there would be some changes in my life, but I had no idea how great those changes would be and how much the people of Thailand would change my own world view.  I learned to be jai yen (cool hearted), instead of angry or frustrated.  That is the Thai way.  I went as an agricultural advisor to work among theMountain Tribes. This book is about the 33 years I spent roaming the hill country trekking from village to village over the foot trails.  The people I came to teach taught me many things.  I learned about hospitality, descision making by consensus, and how to live with one another.  I shared their shelter, their food, their joys, and their sorrows. 

A New Era of New Beginnings Each article in this book is a portion of Indian prehistory in the Ancient Near East. The gate to this ancient world was opened the day to Professor Cyrus H. Gordon offered his congratulations to me (June 1995) for my discovery of Canaanite words in Bengali and traces of that language in other Indian dialects. I did not anticipate the consequences while toying with these newly discovered Dešì or Native Indian words and matching them against words of ancient Near Eastern texts. These ancient words have been collected, deciphered, transliterated, and published by many scholars, which took many centuries of hard toil. It was astounding to realize how the Egyptian terms of a fourteenth century BC Amarna letter for particular vessels and ornaments and the name of a common Indian spice would crop up as cognates of Dešì words in Bengali (Article 1). A few of them are not only alive in common, everyday language, but all of them are almost intact in form and meaning. After finding out the existence of a massive number of Canaanite and Egyptian words in Bengali, I realized the need to uncover the historical connections. The exploration of ancient ethnic names, names of countries of the mythical cosmology, names of divinities, and their innumerable synonyms and epithets in early Indian literature unleashed a torrent of information. The data was overwhelming, unbelievable, and even traumatic. Everything I learned was against my conventional notions. Confused and terrified, I ran to Professor Gordon. Professor Gordon devoted his precious time to further investigate the Rigveda in an attempt to pave the path for my research. Today, I remain thankful for his short article The Near East Background of the Rigveda (see References), but time did not permit him to do more. After he passed away, I realized that the Rigveda contains many Ancient Near Eastern place names, but they are hidden within the proper names. This characteristic of toponymical names (names containing a place name) is elaborated in each article of this book. These ancient names proved to be the most important tools to decode the geographical settings and historical backdrops of the Epic-Puranic myths, events, and even the context of some hymns of the Rigveda and Atharvaveda. This very tool also helped to reveal the identity of the priest poets of the Rigveda as well as of the ancient Pali writers.

His premise is that civilizations have “life spans,” and the Western civilization that produced America and Europe has been replaced, in our lifetime, and before our very eyes.  To people whose minds were made by the West, the civilization we now find ourselves in often feels wrong, evil even, but we also find ourselves feeling oddly affectionate toward this strange new world.

 

And the more time that passes, the more “normal” the New Civ gets to feel.

 

We sometimes have to “pinch” ourselves to remember that society once had roots in a universe that knew something of moral absolutes, where the horrible behaviors we now read about in every morning newspaper were so rare that one such event in a year would have felt like the world is just about to end.  But these things are what passes for “normalcy” today.  We are still able to be reminded of what we know in our bones, although it gets harder all the time: something has gone terribly wrong.

 

That’s what this book is about.

When I moved from that blank space on the map known as Northeast Montana to Thailand in 1963 with a pregnant wife and a three year old daughter, I knew there would be some changes in my life, but I had no idea how great those changes would be and how much the people of Thailand would change my own world view.  I learned to be jai yen (cool hearted), instead of angry or frustrated.  That is the Thai way.  I went as an agricultural advisor to work among theMountain Tribes. This book is about the 33 years I spent roaming the hill country trekking from village to village over the foot trails.  The people I came to teach taught me many things.  I learned about hospitality, descision making by consensus, and how to live with one another.  I shared their shelter, their food, their joys, and their sorrows. 

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