Ore

And this is why I will never finish my article about Enki 🙂 I was looking for a picture of Tigris and Euphrates river system when I came across the discussion about the etymology of the name Euphrates. 

Apart from a suggestion that the name comes from an "unrecorded substrate language" we also have a suggestion that the origin of the name Euphrates could be Proto-Sumerian *burudu, Sumerian urudu (copper). Which would make Euphrates "The copper river'. 

"Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical" By Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, Vjaceslav V. Ivanov

The explanation for this proposition is that Euphrates was the river by which the copper ore and metal was transported from the rich copper mines in the Maden/Elazığ region where we also find the source of Euphrates...You can read more about these copper mines in "Geochemistry: Earth's System Processes" by Dionisios Panagiotaras

Now this Sumerian word for copper is very very interesting...

"urudu, uruda, urud" (copper, metal). From "ùru" (luminous object), + "dù" (to make, apply, mould, cast)

Now the word "ùru" actually means "watchfire; light; glowing, luminous object, to watch, guard; to protect"

What we are talking about here is the watch fire, the camp fire, made to slowly burn, glow for the night....

The colour of this fire is orange-red-shiny...And so that would mean that the Sumerian word for copper literally means "something made orange-red-shiny"...

Which is basically what copper looks like...

Well if it's found as a pure natural copper...This is the first copper exploited by men. It didn't require any smelting. Just finding it, digging it, and then cold working it into metal objects...

But this type of pure natural copper is very rare...Most copper is found in different types of ores which are not orange-red-shiny. 

They have to be mined, crushed, smelted to be turned into orange-red-shiny copper, which can then be worked into metal objects...

Which means that Sumerians called copper "something we made to be "ùru" (orange-red-shiny)...

Here is the interesting bit: In Slavic languages the word for ore is "ruda" which comes from Proto Slavic word "rudъ" meaning red, which comes from PIE root "h₁rewdʰ-" meaning red (in all its hews from orange to brown) which has cognates in pretty much all IE languages meaning red...Except in Indo-Iranian languages where it means red "metal, copper" 🙂 ...

So Slavic word ruda (ore) literally means orange-red stuff...Why? Why would ore be equal to red? Well because, the first ore (stone mined to be processed by crushing and smelting) was not copper. It was ochre.

Ochre is a natural clay earth pigment which is a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. 

The most popular variant of ochre was "red ochre" which owed it's colour to large amounts of hematite, or dehydrated iron oxide...

Here is what the red ochre looks like when it's found

Iron oxide is one of the most common minerals found on earth, and there is much evidence that yellow and red ochre pigment was used in prehistoric and ancient times by many different civilisations on different continents.

The use of ochre dates to the Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic. 

The earliest evidence of its use by "Modern Humans" in Africa dates to 307,000 years ago.

The earliest evidence of its use by Neanderthals in Europe dates to 250,000 years ago...

Red ochre was mined in mines like this 20,000 years old red ochre mine discovered in Tzines, Greece...

And red was all the rage in Palaeolithic...

Palaeolithic people used red ochre for painting their skin to protect it from the sun and from insects (there are indications that red ochre is an insect and particularly mosquito repellent) and for painting pictures in caves, like this bison from the cave of Altamira in Spain, painted with red ochre between 16,500 and 15,000 BC.

There is even a theory that the red ochre directly contributed to the human evolution...

The second ore mined was cinnabar. 

Cinnabar was mined to make vermilion, the brightest of red pigments...

And red was all the rage in Neolithic...

The first documented use of vermilion pigment, made with ground cinnabar, dates to 8000–7000 BC, and was found at the neolithic village of Catalhoyuk, in modern-day Turkey. Which means that the people of Catalhoyuk were already mining cinnabar somewhere in the area at that time...Cinnabar was mined in Spain beginning in about 5300 BC. Archeologist Miloje Vasić believed that the vast mines of cinnabarite (mercury-sulfide) on Avala were crucial for the development of the Vinča culture, on the banks of the Danube in Serbia circa 5700 BC. In China, the first documented use of cinnabar as a pigment was by the Yangshao culture (5000–4000 BC), where it was used to paint ceramics, to cover the walls and floors of rooms, and for ritual ceremonies.

So the first ore was red-orange and the second ore was red...

No wonder the word for ore in Slavic languages comes from "rud" (red-orange) + da (give) = what gives us red-orange...

Around the same time people in the middle east started mining and processing native metallic copper. A copper pendant was found in northern Iraq that dates to 8700 BC...

So the third ore was orange-red...

Well this is interesting...

Wait, how old are these Indo-European words then? Could they really have palaeolithic or neolithic origin? 

And are they Indo-European at all? Does Indo-European and Non Indo-European even make sense if we are talking about Palaeolithic and Neolithic???

Considering that the Sumerian word for copper comes from "uru" (orange-red) + du (to make)...Should I mention again that Sumerian "urudu" was also spelled "uruda"? Very similar to rud + da, right??? Or was it originally ru + da??? 

Have a look at this. 

There is another Slavic word "krv" which comes from the PIE root "krewh₂-" which means "blood outside the body (as of a wound)"...What is the original red pigment? Well blood of course...

And our ancient ancestors must have had a word for it...I mean when not killing eachother they were killing animals for meat...Blood everywhere...

So logically, "h₁rewdʰ-" (red) and "krewh₂-" (blood) have to be related...Right? 

The common part for both of these PIE roots is "ru" (rew)...

Interestingly we have several Slavic words for red-orange-brown which are all based on "ru":

rud, rus, rujan, rumen...

Now that would provide the link between the PIE words for ore (ruda) and orange-red (rud) with Sumerian words for copper (urudu, uruda) and orange-red (uru)...

But maybe there is no other link here except the fact that both culture mined "the red ores"...Same experience produces the same linguistic links between red and ore without the need for borrowing...

But....

Did you know that the PIE word for blood "krv" is found as a root for some very interesting Semitic words, going all the way to Akkadian, related to sacrifices...I talked about this in my article "kurban"...

So this is very very interesting...Right?