Greek Druid Interaction

(July 9, 2022) The word "Athena" is Akkadian meaning "motion powers." This begins to show just how much the Greeks borrowed from the Neolithic farming culture.

The top figure shows the earliest style of coins minted by Athens. This coin began to be minted around 512 BCE and continued to be minted for another 60 years. These coins were characterized by their thick, compact planchets. They were introduced by the Athenian king Hippias and supported by a seemingly limitless supply of silver from the newly discovered silver mines at nearby Laurium. The wealth produced by this silver is what made Athens.

Around 450 BCE, Athenian coinage improved in quality in an era known as the early Classical period of Greek art. This resulted in the classical era coin shown in figure 40. This style of coin would be minted through the rest of the 400’s BCE.

The classical era coin better shows the letters used on both coins which are Aleph, Ayin, and He or "A'e" which is the Akkadian word for “motion powers” in which /e/ is the suffix used indicating the divine entity is a power and not a person. (Olmsted Jan. 1, 2022).

Consequently, the owl shown on this Athenian coin either represents the astrological (Hu’u) owl mentioned in other Alphabetic Akkadian texts. Astrological owls were the mechanism which pushed winds/breaths/emotions in various directions as directed by the motions of the planets. As such it was the omen of change.

Despite using an Akkadian word, the ancient Athenians did not speak Akkadian but instead spoke Indo-European Greek. This is shown by the fact that Greek tradition reads these letters as “A.th.e” as an abbreviated form of Athena despite the fact that the central letter is not a theta (Theta has a cross and not a central dot).

So why did the Athenians use an old ancestral language? In this they were like the later Americans who placed Latin words on their coinage like “E pluribus Unum” meaning “out of many one.” Americans considered Roman Pagan culture to be ancestral to their nation. We can assume the Athenians thought the same way about Alphabetic Akkadian.

That this central letter is really an Ayin (‘) and not a teth or theta (Th or Ṭ) is shown by the calf-bearer inscription in the figure below from the same place and time. The calf-bearer inscription was found on the base of a statue on display on the Athenian Acropolis (Olmsted, Jan 14, 2021). The theta in that inscription has a cross inside it while the Ayin has a dot like shown on the coin.

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