What's in a Name?

 

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

 

By Lewis Turco

 

 I. IL TURCO IN TRINACRIA

 

In August of 1961 I was a Poetry Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, which was directed then by the late John Ciardi. The Conference is held annually in the hills above Middlebury College, on its own summer campus where I was walking one day when I was approached by a woman named Elizabeth Guarnaccia. She introduced herself as one of the two curators at the Harry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.

Ms. Guarnaccia asked if I were Lewis Turco, and when I replied that I was, she asked me if I knew the derivation of my last name. I said, “Yes, I do.”

“What is it,” she asked, smiling.

For as long as I can remember I have known that my last name in Italian means what it says: “Turk,” and that’s what my friends have always called me. It dates, I understand, from the period of Arab rule of “Trinacria,” the ancient name for Sicily, from the ninth to the tenth centuries CE. It is not an uncommon name in Sicily where my father was born and raised, and where he was recruited to be a participant in the Turco-Italian War, fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy from September 29, 1911, to October 18, 1912.

I didn’t go into that much detail with Ms. Guarnaccia, of course, but she nodded in agreement with what I had replied, said I was correct, and went on her way. Many years later I would discover a great deal more about my family name including the fact that there was no such country as “Turkey” until the thirteenth century; therefore, the word means simply “Arab” or “Moor,” not someone from a particular place. According to Halbert’s, a Turco family coat of arms can be found in Rietstap Armorial General,¹ and the shield is described as “Silver with a Turk, facing front, dressed in a blue tunic and red pantaloons; wearing a red turban on his head, holding in his right hand a silver scroll, and in his left hand a silver scimitar trimmed gold.” People with my background were members of the Syrian cavalry in classical times.

In the mid-nineteen-forties, when I was a fifth or sixth-grader living on North Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut, I was enthusiastic about prehistory, as I have been ever since.  One day I walked down to Ciotti's sundries store a couple of blocks away, on West Main Street, and I purchased a pamphlet about cavemen.  As usual, I walked back home with my nose buried in the booklet, and soon I was standing in front of the house where we rented a flat, showing it to Bob Strauss, my friend from across the street, who looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages.  Shortly we came across the drawing of a Neanderthal, the species of early man that disappeared after the advent of Cro-Magnon, the first version of our species, Homo Sapiens. The drawing was a reconstruction of what Neanderthal man must have looked like with his strong-featured face displaying its heavily-ridged brow, a bit like the brow-ridge I have myself and that I have observed on others.

As Bob and I stood before my two-storied home reading, we happened to glance at my upstairs neighbor, old Mr. Longo, who was leaning over the second-floor porch railing.  To say we were startled is to understate, for the picture in my book could have been a photograph of our neighbor.  Bob and I stood comparing the man with his likeness for several minutes. There was no doubt about it -- the man and the reconstruction were practically identical. From that moment I felt certain I knew what had happened to Neanderthal man: he had not been exterminated by Cro-Magnon, he had been absorbed into the general population of our ancestors. But who were the Cro-Magnon men and women?  What had happened to their contemporaries, the brutish-looking, yet intelligent race called Neanderthal man that in fact had brains that were slightly larger than ours? 

For decades paleoanthropologists and other sorts of scientists had been denying that our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, and the Neanderthals had ever interbred. In July of 1993 there was an essay in The New York Times Book Review² that discussed three new books on the subject: Did Cro-Magnon destroy Neanderthal, or did he die out naturally, cataclysmically, because of some inherent flaw in his constitution? Over the years I had grudgingly grown more and more persuaded that these unbelievers were correct and I was wrong. However, over this interval, human DNA was studied, isolated, and sequenced; finally, in the May 2010 issue of Science,³ Green et al. reported that a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals had been compared with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. described a method for sequencing target regions of Neanderthal DNA. A News Focus podcast segment and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neanderthal-related discoveries provided additional context for their findings. Neanderthal man had not entirely died out, for two to four percent of his genome continues to exist in European and Asian human beings, though not in those Africans who never left the continent.

Hence, it turns out that a sixth-grader living in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1946, judging from the picture projected from partial skeletons of a Neanderthal in a popular pamphlet and from the heavy ridge that boy himself had on his brow, turned out to be correct and the academic Homo-Sapiens living in the interim between then and 2010, turned out to be wrong.

This interbreeding did not, however, take place as I and others assumed, for the two races did not meet in Europe and simply combine. Rather, Neanderthal, who had left Africa first and spread into Europe, apparently was driven back into the Middle East by an ice age, and it was there that the two species interacted, living in the same caves at different times, perhaps, but in the same geographical locations simultaneously. This must have been the case because Neanderthal's genes in Homo Sapiens are found not only throughout Europe, but throughout Asia as well, where the Middle Eastern modern humans spread, but it is not found in African strains of our race, in peoples who never left the African continent in ancient times and thus never lived in the Middle East. 

II. THE MAN HUNTERS

Was there a historical Garden of Eden?  Were there two people named Adam and Eve?  Did Genesis take place?  Was there an actual Exodus?  Whether or not mankind is able to answer these questions with any degree of certainty or faith, we know logically that there had to be a first human being somewhere in the dim past; there had to be the First Mother (now called “genetic Eve”) and the First Father (“genetic Adam”) of the race, and they existed in an environment that was conducive to their survival…or two environments, rather, because they lived at different times and in different places, but it was their DNA (YDNA in the case of the male, and mitochondrial MTDNA in the case of the female) that survived and spread throughout the living species of Homo Sapiens.

I have remained interested in the subject of mankind's origins all my life since my friend Bob Strauss and I identified old Mr. Longo as a contemporary avatar of Neanderthal Man.  We know that the race of Mankind spread across the globe from some point of origin in Africa; therefore, we can invent stories, like the book of Genesis or the epic of Gilgamesh, to explain our beginnings, and in those stories, though they be fiction — "lies," if you like — there will be a core of fact, and they will be lies in the service of truth. 

Many things fascinate me, but the idea of evolution fascinates me to the point of awe. One of the reasons I could not become the minister my pastor father wanted me to become is that I could not believe in a Creator, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t seem reasonable to me that a creature so great and complicated could have existed a priori and have invented the cosmos because all that does is beg the question, “Who (or What) created the Creator?” It is easier for me to believe that the cosmos forever existed, exists now, and will forever exist (I will not at this point consider the so-called Big Bang theory) than it is to postulate an omnipotent Creator. He would have had to create Himself. That, in fact, may be what the Cosmos is doing: evolving the Godhead, for with the aid of science we can at least experience through our senses elements of the cosmos.

If evolution is inventing a godlike creature, and if one of the avatars of that creature is mankind, then at some point in the history of that evolution one of the predecessors of mankind must have given birth to the first true human being. What would that have been like? One of the things I enjoy is reading scientific books, especially anthropological works: I consider that Loren Eiseley’s book The Firmament of Time is one of the great works of literature of the twentieth century, and another great writer of anthropology was Margaret Mead. Sometimes in my reading I come up against a passage that arrests my eyes and causes my mind to begin to spin a fable. Such a passage was this portion of a sentence by Mead: "...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song."

What must it have been like for the first truly human being at dawn one day to awaken from her sleep, to look out on the savannah, and to realize that she was conscious of herself and of her plight and glory? To know, beyond all doubt, that she knew?

 

DAWN SONG

I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —

it breaks across my mind as across the eyes

of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,

and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,

breaking across my terror and my surprise;

to know that I am the beast who knows his name:

Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun

of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see stone for a stone,

to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight

and know what it may do to the brittle bone

of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone

held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.

The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.

He is the child of dust.  I am stone's son,

born of the first rose and the first lark's song.

 

If anthropologists could be good, clear-thinking scientists who also knew how to write, how to communicate their thoughts to readers and strike awe into their minds, they could also, unfortunately, be romantics who, if one thought about what they said, convey to readers ideas that fall apart under scrutiny, like Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”

As a reader of science fiction when I was young — what is called “speculative fiction” these days, I guess, and of fantasy — “magical reality” now, I soon understood the difference between the two, between, let’s say, the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and the beautiful, impossible worlds of Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed the one for its projections of a possible reality, and the other for its imaginary evocations of primal hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows. Therefore, when I run across a scientist who confuses the two, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey did in the passage I quote below, I feel constrained to comment on that confusion. How close have we come to populating the stars? So I once again put words into the mouth of a skull, as I did with “Dawn Song”:

 

THE MAN HUNTER

"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.  And so what shall we wonder at?...The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.  We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." — Robert Ardrey

When I saw, spinning webs of sense and dust,

the heart-shaped spider of the womb's demands,

I raised myself upright upon the crust

of earth and issued it my first commands:

"Give me what I may take before the glass

of time is empty as a brain's white bowl

where slugs drink, where the mosses gorge and green."

I walked out of the forest, across the grass —

it withered underneath my callous sole,

for I could not forget what I had seen.

I saw the scarab in the turning earth

spinning murders from its golden shell;

I saw the rooting beast probing death,

but death must root if it would hope to dwell.

Therefore, I walked the trench of lambs and ewes

with winter's humour snowing in my bones,

and in my web of veins the scratching, dumb

dry tongue of the beast feeding on my dews.

Then, when at last I lay down in these stones,

I knew that more of us would one day come.

And you have come to find yourself in me

here where I lie, a skull transformed to stone.

My sightless eyes look out at you and see

that under the eons we are still alone —

but we are billions now who were a few

to forsake the forest and face time with a rock,

a naked rock held in a naked hand.

We face the ages still, and we bestrew

this cairn of stars with the remnants of our stock:

a jawbone here and there wearing to sand.

 

Perhaps one day, many centuries from today, mankind will indeed get off the planet, a bit farther off it than Luna, and take with him the myths born of Earth. When I was young I thought that might begin to happen in my own lifetime.

 

FATHERS:

 

First Father

I see him standing on the empty plain

As dawn begins to break across his eyes.

He is alone, this first of all my fathers,

But he can sense his scions and his daughters

Following down the looming centuries,

For time has started weaving through his brain,

And he can think. He understands at last

What must become, and what’s become his past.

And here I stand upon this farthest link

Staring down the line of molecules

Twisted in a spiral arc. I gaze

The other way to where the whirling haze

Rises over dark and depthless pools

And wonder what the final man must think.

 

Fathers of the Tribe

 

His sons and grandsons travel with the tribe

As it drifts out of the immense savannah

Following the herds, but searching for

Something else as well. They must explore,

Apparently. For Eden? For Nirvana?

Their leaders are unable to describe

What they are seeking past these eastern sands,

Moving always northward to colder lands.

What have we found beyond those roaming droves

That led us into canyons made of glass?

Where do we go from here? How shall we feed

The starving myriads whose simplest need

No longer can be met on Earth? En masse

We need again a miracle of loaves.

 

The Final Father

 

And as they stop, wherever they may move,

Each scion takes his mate who bears his seed,

The generations of First Father’s loins.

Time spends these children like so many coins

Minted from the soil. The Earth has need

Of purses full of these. The parents rove

Into the mystery to make it known,

To turn the strangest climes into their own.

Now we are everywhere. The human race

Has filled the niches that the world provided.

What’s left is Easter Island duplicated

On a massive scale. We are checkmated

By ourselves; we are the tribe divided

Staring hopelessly to outer space.

 

III. THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

In 2006 I participated in the National Geographic Human Genome Project⁴ and discovered that my blood confirms what my name asserts: I am paternally a Turk through and through! Males are traced genetically through the Y-DNA marker which is passed down unchanged from father to son over generations; women are traced through their mothers’ mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter, also unchanged. Of course every now and then, at great intervals, both Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA do take on characteristics that differentiate them from other evolutionary lines, and these mutated lines can be traced.

So far as can be discerned with the data currently at hand, it turns out that my father’s branch of the Turco family is part of a group of people about which little is known. My Y-chromosome results identify us as members of haplogroup G, “a lineage defined,” my National Geographic report stated, “by a genetic marker called M201” which had its origin some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y-chromosome marker called M168.

According to Spencer Wells⁵ there was a single male who lived perhaps 75,000-100,000 years ago whose mutated Y-chromosome is carried by every male currently alive. Although scientists call this person “Genetic Adam,” or “Eurasian Adam,” in fact he was not likely the first fully human male, but none of the other males alive at the time have passed down to posterity their particular genetic markers. Adam’s line is the only one to have survived and proliferated.

A descendant of Adam identified by a mutation called “M94” was an inhabitant of the East African savannahs 75,000 years ago, and it was he who was the progenitor of most modern males because he was the founder of all haplogroups from B through R (haplogroup A did not leave Africa in ancient times). A later mutation on this male line called “M168” 60,000 years in the past is believed to have lived in an area that includes what is now Ethiopia in Africa, and he is the founder of haplogroups C through R.

To the north of Africa, according to  Spencer Wells, an ice age was developing and drying up Africa’s ecology to the extent that at least two groups that were descended from M168 migrated from Africa. The first group left around 60,000 years ago, and they are believed to have gone east following the southern coast of Asia populating southeast Asia, Australia, southern China, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. A few appear to have been reunited with their by-then-distant kinsmen in North America about 10,000 years ago. A second wave of M168 emigrants from Africa traveled to the east and the north from the area of what is now the Sahara through Egypt and the Middle East.

A mutant marker on the M168 line called “M89” inhabited what became Mesopotamia or “Erech,” now Iraq, perhaps 45,000 years ago. As the founder of haplogroup F, this male was the ancestor of all the members of haplogroups G through R which include almost all Middle Eastern, European, Asian, and native American males. Several groups of M89 males traveled in various directions to a variety of places, but the founder of haplogroup G appears to have lived around 30,000 years ago in the area of the Indus Valley in what is now northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Up to around 10,000 years ago the members of haplogroups G through J were hunter-gatherers, but those people who lived in what is known now as the “Fertile Crescent” developed agriculture, and “settled civilization” became possible — not only possible, but established, and disseminated far and wide. Populations expanded, farming and farmers followed the pioneers along the shores and through the islands of the Mediterranean, into the lands now called Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Indo-European language and its offshoots were soon to be found in northern India — including the Indus Valley — the Middle East, and Europe.

The Indus Valley civilization was the largest of the four great early civilizations including Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, South Asia, and China, but it is the one that is least known and understood because, unlikely as it may seem, it was discovered only in the 1920’s! How it was possible for modern mankind to live unwittingly among the ruins of this Indus civilization in one of the most populous regions of the Earth is confounding, but so they did, and still do. Archaeological researches are in their infancy there, and very little is known of the early tongues of the Indus because few language-bearing artifacts, most of them square stone seals with indecipherable symbols and animal motifs, have been found. So far, for lack of a Rosetta Stone, none of those scripts can be read, but we can recognize the animals, in particular the mythical unicorn, the bull, the rhinoceros, and the elephant. However, some of the major Indus cities have been identified and explored to a certain degree.

The first, Harappa, discovered in the western part of South Asia during the early 19^th century, flourished from about 2600 to 1700 BCE. Its inhabitants built with bricks of the same size as were found in other Indus cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira.  Harappa had well laid-out wide streets, public and private water supplies and distribution-drainage systems. Remnants of this Indus civilization exist in the south from the former Bombay in India to the Himalayas and Afghanistan in the north, and in the east from beyond New Delhi in Uttar Pradesh to Baluchistan, Pakistan, in the west, adjacent to the border of Iran.

Since there is evidence that trade existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, some of those members of haplogroup G living in its western portion must have gravitated toward the major centers of the Middle East. The westernmost Harappan site is Sutkagen Dor, located on the border of Pakistan and Iran on what once was, apparently, a navigable inlet of the Sea of Arabia and thus part of the trade route to Mesopotamia — in particular the fishing trade — between 3500 and 1700 BCE. This is the route, or one similar to it, that the early Turcos must have taken on their way to Sicily.

Looking at a map of the world one notes that a straight line drawn between the Indus River and a spot just below Sicily in what is now Tunisia, the ancient site of Carthage (not that our forebears followed anything like a straight line) crosses Iran (once Persia), Iraq (once Mesopotamia), Arabia, Jordan / Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Other modern countries in the area between the Indus and Tunisia are Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Israel / Palestine.

Family Tree DNA is the name of the Internet organization that administers the DNA results of those people who have been tested and agreed to have their results publicly posted. Subgroups of FTDNA include organizations that follow individual haplogroups, including the Haplogroup G web group. There are other specialty groups including the Turk Name group, and the Sicily Project, to all three of which I belong. Peter Christy, administrator of the Haplogroup G organization, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Our haplogroup is seeking members from the Middle East and adjacent areas, but with little success. There are a number of ‘high profile’ members of the Saudi royal family, as well as a claimant to the throne of Iraq, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, that are members of Haplogroup G. Perhaps by your efforts to publicize our haplogroup in Saudi Aramco World, [to the editors of which I wrote a letter on October 25, 2006, to which I had not had no response] readers familiar with that part of the world may come to realize that they are a significant source of additional members.

“We have been attempting to contact those who have already been tested, but with little success. Bill Van Hemert has been using modal matching to profiles of known members of our haplogroup to find candidates who are registered at Ysearch. As you might expect, few of our emails even get through to the intended recipients and even fewer respond. All we have is some tantalizing clues left by a long list of potential Haplogroup G members with names that start ‘Al-‘ e.g., Al-Blais, Al-Bukhary, Al-Khalili, Al-Kureishi, Al-Qureshi, Al-Rikabi, Al-Ruwaili, Al-Sada, Al-Saman, Al-Shaibani, Al-Suwaidi and Al-Wazzan!”

The history of the swift spread of Islam is amazing. Muhammad was born in the Arabian city of Mecca circa 570 CE. Around 610 he experienced a revelatory vision, began to write what became the Koran, and in 613 he began to preach publicly. He left Mecca and settled in Medina in 622, and he died in 632 CE. Only sixty-five years later Islamic Arabs, many of them Moors — a mixture of Arabs and Berbers — lived in North Africa and occupied what was left of Carthage which had been destroyed in classical times and was again destroyed in 698. Today it is a wealthy suburb of Tunis.

In the ninth century CE, around 820, the Tunisian Arabs began to set up trading posts in Sicily. Incredibly, they were soon invited by Euphemius, a Byzantine general, to invade the island, and on June 13, 827, they did so from the town of Sousse, 120 km south of Carthage, with ten thousand infantry and seven hundred cavalry. According to Sandra Benjamin, “Although the invaders originated in many parts of the Muslim empire (including Spain), most of the men were Berbers (from the North African coast) and Arabs (from farther east).” Seventy-five years later, on August 1, 902, the Arabs captured Tauromenium, the Byzantine capital and the last unconquered Sicilian city. All the inhabitants were slain and the city burned to the ground.⁵

Surnames began to be used only about 1000 years ago, so the surname “Turco” dates from about 1000 CE, the eleventh century or 100 years after the Arab conquest of Sicily, that is to say about the same time as the Norman conquest of both England and Sicily. Sicily was the earlier to be conquered, by the brothers Hauteville, Robert the elder and Roger the younger who did most of the fighting, conquering Massena in 1061.

The Hautevilles’ success is said to have inspired both the envy and ambition of their countryman William the Conqueror who invaded and subjugated England in 1066. Although he never ruled there, he pretended to the kingship of Sicily as well. It was William who ordered the Domesday Book of England to be written in 1086, and it was in this statistical survey that surnames were first assigned to every family. Something similar during this period was occurring throughout Europe, including Sicily.

Michael Maddi who administers the FTDNA Sicily Project, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Have you noticed that out of 81 yDNA results in the Sicily Project, 10 are in the G haplogroup? That’s about 12%. This has been the biggest surprise to me so far in our Sicily Project results. My guess, based on my previous reading, was that we would have maybe 5%.

“I have always wondered what the Arab contribution is to Sicily’s genetic pool. It’s hard to figure out how many people of Arab ancestry remained in Sicily after the crackdown by Frederick II on Muslims about 1230. (Frederick actually had good relations with Muslim rulers and spoke Arabic and appreciated the scientific knowledge promoted by Muslim scholars. It was the Vatican which demanded that he expel Muslims from Sicily.) One book I read recently [see Benjamin, op. cit..} said that 1/3 of Sicily’s population was ethnically Arab when the Normans defeated the Muslim rulers around 1075. The town where my paternal grandparents were born, Mezzojuso, was founded by the Muslim rulers in the 10^th century. It remained a majority Muslim town until about 1220, when Muslim rebellions in western Sicily and the subsequent crackdown led to many Muslims fleeing their towns for mountain refuges.

“I think our [haplogroup] G results, if they continue to stay above 10%, indicate that there is significant Arab deep ancestry in Sicilians and Sicilian-Americans.”

The branch of the Turco family to which I belong has long resided in Riesi, a village in south-central Sicily. The closest city of any size is Licata, on the south coast. Although I know for a fact that a number of my relatives still live in the area, at the end of 2006 I was the only person worldwide with the surname Turco who has been identified through DNA analysis as belonging to haplogroup G2. (My son and my brother and his sons may be presumed to be members in this country.)

 

 

IV. GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU

Those who are interested in such things as epics are likely to know that The Epic of Gilgamesh “is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script,” the Academy for Ancient Texts avers on its Web page. “It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk [Erech, modern Iraq] (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).”  In fact, however, it is an amalgamation of two stories, the older having to do with the adventures of a most likely mythological person named “Enkidu,” and the second about an ancient King of Erech.

Over the course of no one knows how many centuries, the two tales of Enkidu and Gilgamesh became intertwined and it is in this form that Gilgamesh has come down to us in various versions and languages.  In order to blend the earlier tale of Enkidu with the later doings of Gilgamesh, apparently in order to ascribe to the latter many of the feats of the former, the pair came to be seen as in some essential ways twins, even to the point where they look alike, for the King is a bit taller, it seems, and his close companion Enkidu shorter and broader.

What I have attempted to do The Hero Enkidu¹⁰ is to cut away from the Gilgamesh epic those actions and events that can quite clearly be ascribed to the older Enkidu and to write his own tale in the manner of the author of the anonymous Medieval epic titled Gawain and the Green Knight, that is to say, in cantos of the strong-stress metric line called Anglo-Saxon prosody with appended five-line accentual-syllabic metrical tails called “bobs-and-wheels.”

I do not claim to have restored the Enkidu epic, nor am I writing history: I am still writing fiction, like the original author(s), and I could not absolutely separate Gilgamesh and his companion.  What I do claim is that I have given back to Enkidu what pretty clearly is his tale, and I hope I have written it in a comprehensible and interesting way for modern audiences.

 

___

^1”Turco Coat of Arms, Historiography,” Bath, Ohio: Halberts, n.d.

²The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 4, 1993.

³Science. May 2010 issue.

⁴National Geographic Human Genome Project, on-line at www.NationalGeographic.com.

⁵Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man—A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2004.

⁶Indus River Valley civilization, etc., on-line at www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html

⁷Sandra Benjamin, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.

⁸Morris Jastrow Jr., and Albert T. Clay, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, etc., New Haven: Yale, 1920.

⁹Robert Lebling, “Monsters from Mesopotamia,” Saudi Aramco World, Vol. 63, No. 4, July-August 2012.

¹⁰Lewis Turco, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 107, 2015.