Sunday, October 29, 2006

Who Put the Ari- In Arizona?

Lingustics scholar Gene D. Matlock recently wrote: " Lately, the Turks, who still call themselves Ari (Aryan, Turanian, and Kurustan) are coming out of the closet and claiming to be the parents of all civilizations--even of Egypt." I am particularly interested in this term Ari, and how it got in the name Arizona.

Considering the prefix Ari-, we readily think of Ariel, the powerful spirit of air and earth in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, Ari-el is an appellation for the city of Jerusalem and literally means “Lion of God.” In Ezekiel the word refers to the “Hearth of God,” or the altar upon which burnt offerings were made.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a 1599 reference for the word “zone” from T. Hill’s Schoole of Skil has the following meaning: “The constellation named Zone or the gyrdle of Orion.” In other words, a constellation within the larger constellation, or his belt. Following Aristotle’s usage, the Latin poet Ovid refers to “Zona” specifically as the three central stars of Orion. Thus, in the name Arizona is hidden the fiery belt of Orion emblazoned upon the sacred navel of the world, in this case the three Hopi Mesas located on the high desert of the southwestern United States. (For an overview of the Arizona Orion Correlation, see my article on the Graham Hancock Forum:

The first usage of “Arizona” appears to have been written by one Padre Ortega sometime before 1754, when he referred to the “Real of Arizona.” The Spanish word real means “military encampment,” but the adjective form meaning “royal” is also implied. In addition, the Spanish term arisco can mean “churlish, surly” or even “vicious,” while ariete means “battering ram” (reminding one of the constellation Aries near Orion) and arimez means “projection”— all traditionally active, masculine, and violent attributes in keeping with the archetypal Orion. Furthermore, the Spanish word zona refers to “belt” or “girdle” as well as to “zone.” Alternate spellings for Orion include “Arion,” “Oarion,” “Aorion,”so the prefixes Ari- and Ori- might have been interchangeable. The Greek aristos, as in “aristocracy,” means “best” or “noblest,” while the related Sanskrit word arya, as in “Aryan,” means “of high rank” or “noble.” The Italian word aria also means “air” (as in “arid”) or “melody.” In light of all these etymologies, perhaps the padre was merely recording what was already established in the region we now know as Arizona.

If we lend credence to diffusionism rather than to the more academically accepted isolationism, it is plausible that Indo-European speaking Aryans such as the Nagas did at one time travel to Arizona (i.e., Ary-zona), where they shared linguistic concepts phonetically with the Hopi.

For instance, the Hopi suffix -sona refers to “one who relishes” while tsoona means “he’s forward, not shy, or having fun exuberantly,” all of which suggest characteristics of Orion. In addition, the term orai (homophone of the first two syllables in “Orion”) means “Rock on High” or “Round Rock,” after which Oraibi was named, one of the initial Hopi Mesa villages. Furthermore, the Hopi word soona means “germ, kernel, edible part of any seed, or heart of a tree.” Like the center of the constellation Orion, this could be a reference to the heart of Hopiland, whence sprouts the sustenance of the sacred corn or other agricultural mainstays.

Because of all these linguistic "coincidences," I believe that this semantic nexus was tranoceanically transported from the Middle East and northern India here to the high desert of Arizona.

Gary A. David
Chino Valley, Arizona (The Orion Zone)