Friday, August 31, 2007

King Minos of Crete and Manu of Hindus

I got this idea, when I was reading an article on Crete. Please see my posting on Crete.

On King Minos, Thucydides, and Herodotus had perpetuated traditions regarding King Minos, the great law-giver.

On Hindu Manu, the Manu Smriti Scripture of Ancient Hindu Laws is well known all over the world. Traditions says that the laws were given by Manu to Hindus.

If one puts the hard aspirate, Sanskrit "visarga", as often put before the Singular Subjective Nouns and Adjectives, it becomes Manu(h) or Manus.

Is it a strange co-incidence? I went to Wikipedia just to check out, if I could get some additional information on the subject. And guess what, this is what I got, which proved my thinking was not unique or weird!

It is not clear if Menes is a name or if it was the Cretan word for "King". Scholars have noted the interesting similarity between Minos and the names of other ancient founder-kings, such as Menes of Egypt, Mannus of Germany, Manu of India, and so on. There is a name in Linear A mi-nu-te that may be related to Minos.