V. R. Sonti
Educated as a Mechanical Engineer in the UK and the US, he specialized in the construction of algorithms for the design and optimization of structural systems; which have been used in devising programs on a variety of computers from the 1957 Ferranti “Pegasus” to the IBMs of the mid eighties: he is now completely and irrevocably retired, having deleted even the multiplication tables from his mental HDD!
He joined a group of amateur archaeologists in a survey of middle-eastern sites (back in the 50s) searching for Indo-European inclusions in the Mid East of the period 2200 to 800 BCE; and had the rewarding experience of traveling (crawling, in fact) all over the region from Gilan in Iran to Morocco in the West; giving him a real down to earth outlook of the subject. While in the pre-1967 West Bank, he had the painful experience of a sound clubbing by Israeli soldiers for presuming to enter the West Jerusalem, at the old Mandelbaum Gate, on a British passport with Arab stamps in it. He is also proud of spending some time as a teacher of elementary mathematics to children in Penjwin and Halbja, villages in Kurdistan bordering on Iran lately gassed into oblivion by Saddam Hussain the Great King, King of Kings, of the Aram Nehraim. He is proud of the fact that a version of a name still current among his people was found by him on a cuneiform tablet of the Amarna period, at the Cairo Museum; and another version,by a colleague of his, at the Kassite capital of Dur Kurigalzu east of Baghdad! The Hyksos of Egyptian history and their contemporaries elsewhere, from Anatolia to Elam still live! The names of the Tarquins of Etruscan Rome, the Tarhunds of the Khabur River region and the Tarkhundes of contemporary India may well reflect the mass migrations of Indo-European hordes armed with battle-axes and riding chariots hitched to the 'asses of the hills'. He regrets having missed a visit to Hebron; where fully a third of the graves of 13th Century BCE, are of chiefs of the Mitannian-Hurrite Conferderation with recognizably Indo-Iranian names!
His present interest in the region is purely speculative and philosophical. He can be contacted at eccmei@lycos.com
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