Footnotes
1. This analysis follows the convention established by E. L. Smith (1833, 1851; see also DeFleur, DaTour, and Valladash, 1912; Thompson, 1971; and Mihelić, 1996) of referring to the patchwork of disparate but thematically interconnected source documents first partially compiled by Ficino (circa 1479-1485) under the title
De universi libri antiquorum (Books of the Universes of the Ancients) as though they belong to a singular corpus (see also Kelley, 1590; Dee & Kelley, 1585). This convention allows us to focus on extracting the core data and constructing a cohesive narrative through careful comparison of common narrative elements and other underlying patterns in the texts, despite the fact that the sources themselves are often incomplete, contradictory, and have been gathered from a wide range of cultures and spanning millennia. Novel inferences, translation debates, and alternate interpretations of source artifacts are explored in footnotes throughout this analysis. Please refer to
Appendix A: What are turnings? for an introductory overview.
2. The term translated here as "turning" is also translated in different portions of this text as "era" or "time of..." depending on the context. Other source texts and analyses have selected other translations over the centuries, including but not limited to
universe (Smith & Meliora, 1827; following Ficino, 1479-1485),
epoch (Duhem, 1907), and
युग ("yuga"; Koskikallio, 1994; Patak, 1997; González-Reimann, 2001). The earliest known reference that can be definitively matched with later texts is a Ziczich symbol cluster inscribed on Tablet Nr. 6858, deciphered as an
U̯reku̯ aphorism: "The wheel is infinite, but we [live in] a unique turn." The word for "unique turn" (
óynos wértís) was carried on in descendent languages as a common phrase used to refer to "the unique existence all around us" and later simply "all of existence" (for more detail see
Appendix A, footnote 5). Some mythologists and historians prefer to draw on the etymological connection and translate
uno wer as
universe. We have opted against that translation here, because it obscures an important connotation of the original phrase, i.e. that a
uno wer is simultaneously the entirety of existence for the individuals experiencing it and also just a single "turn" in a longer cycle of time.
3. Each chapter is dedicated to an analysis of a turning, integrating facts and inferences from archeological sources and historical analyses, and matched with current scientific knowledge from archeology, anthropology, and paleomythology. Each chapter includes a summary analysis of the turning's climate and ecology, novel cultural developments, key languages, and gods and myths. The side bar and footnotes contain additional summary information and references with links to additional details, discussions, and sources.
4. One of the most confounding matters of concern for any analysis and discussion of the Book of Turnings is the issue of language and translation. The corpus is composed of stories about the sentient species of the world
7 and their cultures and gods that span more than a hundred millennia. To tell these stories, we need to adopt conventions for refering to places, time periods, and events that transcends time and space. These conventions must be familiar enough for the discussion to be comprehensible to contemporary readers, even when the source material uses language that is situated and embedded in the cultures and languages of varied and diverse source authors. What labels should we use to identify
neander and
denisovan cultures, when both the neanders and denisova were non-verbal? How do we tell the stories of
human cultures in the earliest turnings of the world, when every clan had their own unique language? What is the most authentic way to talk about continents that no longer exist, and that did not have
names when they did? This problem has vexed scholars for centuries, with no clear or satisfying overall solution (for discussions see, e.g., Binford & Sabloff, 1982; Bordes, Rigaud, & De Sonneville-Bordes, 1972; Kadmon, 2007a, 2007b; Woodman, 2009a, 2009b).
5. To establish some consistency, this analysis will adopt the following standard translation and terminological conventions. For events or periods of time that are known to contemporary archeologists, paleohistorians, or mythologists, we generally opt for the commonly-used contemporary name to make this analysis more intuitive and comprehensible for the reader; examples include the Toba Eruption and the Storegga Tsunami. For the same reason, we use the contemporary English names for large geographic regions (e.g.
Iberia,
Arabia). For smaller regions that are strongly associated with a particular indigenous culture, we prefer to use the name given by early indigenous people in the region (e.g.
Kemet,
Birit Narim). Similarly, when referring to contemporary or historical cultural groups or nationalities, we prefer to use endonyms (i.e. the name a group uses to refer to themselves) whenever possible, even when the source artifacts on which our translations and analyses are based use exonyms. This sometimes results in this text using a name
other than the name that most English-speaking readers would recognize. Two examples of this are the
Saĝ-gíg people (instead of "Sumerian") and the
Remenkīmi people (instead of "ancient Egyptian"). Any time this text uses a name or translation that might be unfamiliar or controversial, we make our best effort to call attention to the translation decision, and discuss alternative approaches, in the footnotes.
6. The term "source artifacts" may seem like an awkward construction in English (compared to, for example,
source documents or
source material), and is used to draw attention to the fact that the Book of Turnings has been compiled over millennia from a complex and often only partially-understood web of interlocking sources. The most well-researched elements (i.e. the names and relationships between various gods, the nature of the three sentient species, and the key events of each turning) have all been established by painstaking comparisons across multiple recensions of each of multiple narratives that form an interconnected web that goes back centuries or, in some cases, millennia. The very earliest source materials that refer to stories of turnings are inscriptions on caves and stone structures, although the majority of early sources are clay inscriptions from the Kara'apian Turning that are themselves written accounts of oral histories from the Second Tādhēskō or earlier.
7. This discussion of the cultures, gods, and stories of the "people of the world" is more limited than that phrase implies. The first aggregations and analyses of historical and mythological material into the corpus we now think of as the Book of Turnings emerged in Europe a few centuries ago, and focused their scholarship entirely on ancient texts from Europe, western Asia, and Northern Africa. Although new source artifacts have been discovered and added to the corpus continuously over the centuries, until recently most of this material consisted of copies, recensions, parallel narratives, expansions on, or descriptions of the original source documents aggregated by Ficino (c. 1479-1485) and analyzed by Dee and Kelley (1585). As a result, narratives that have been historically framed as encompassing "world cultures" and "world regions" have systematically excluded events, cultures, and mythologies from northern and eastern Asia and southern and western Africa. These analyses will undoubtedly be enriched by the addition of sources and analyses that can give Book of Turnings history and mythology a more truly global scope, and it is enheartening to know that there are several key research teams actively taking this approach (see, e.g., Yasuda, Fujiki, and Nasu, 2013; Sergusheva, 2020; Bäcker, 2018; Zilhão and Trinkaus, 2006; and Soukopova, 2011).
