Semitic PaNis

[Narayan R. Joshi]

It was pointed out sometime ago on this list that RV PaNis could not be the
ancient Phoenicians of the Lebanese coast because Phoenicians were Semitic
people.The people called Phoenicians in English had no such name for
themselves.And they were not calling themselves Semitic.There is no
evidence to deny the ancient name of those ancient traders from Lebanese
coast(2500 BCE) was PaNis.The adjective Semitic was coined in 1781 by a
German scholar, Schlozer, to qualify a group of closely related languages.
Subsequently the adjective was extended to the large number of the ancient
tribes in the land around Palestine, Lebanon.The division of the ancient
tribes from that area of the time 2500 BCE into three groups of Semitic,
Hamite and Japhetic after legendary sons Shem,Ham and Japhet of legendary
Noah from Bible is the recent construct and has neither archaeological
support nor anthropological support. The Japhetic theory was proposed by
Nikolai Yakovlevich around the beginning of the 20th century, who in the
later part of his life proposed fantastic linguistic system revealed to him
in a dream. In and around 2500 BCE, the Palestine and Lebanese coast was
occupied by hundreds of different tribes with strong Hittite and Hurrian
presence.Scholars disagree on such three broad divisions of the ancient
people based on the scriptural evidence.Now if we admit that PaNis were on
Lebanese coast in 2500 BCE, then certain new questions might arise and
might require adjustment in certain chronologies.Instead of doing that it
is easy to transfer PaNis in the ancient theatre of the Indian sub-
continent in the way once DAsas and Dasyus were transferred from the West
to the East. To the best of my knowledge there is no archaeological
evidence for placing PaNis in the ancient Northwest corridor of the Indian
sub-continent and keep them waiting for Aryans to arrive in order to have
tailored interaction as imagined by certain writers.Thanks.