Ancient Việt 8: Bách Việt

girlWhiteFlowers

(Continued from Ancient Việt 7: Văn Khoa Đẩu)

I am one of those individuals who never learned my people’s ancient history from a classroom.  Everything I have learned all came from ancient books which I have had to painstakingly translate and/or decipher, using a very thick ancient Viet dictionary.

Famous foreign sources (Chinese) usually have English translations, so that is a great help, but most ancient Viet books have never been translated.  This means I have to do most of the grunt work myself.

Then, I have to dig through modern archaeology, geology, oceanography, paleontology, human, animal, and plant genetics, and various other studies, including vulcanism and plate tectonics in order to piece together the fragments of ancient writing that prove what modern scientific findings allude to.

It’s slow going, and most of the time, I am scrambling about in the weeds, trying to find the relevant material from amongst seemingly random stuff.

ReadingInDark

Having said that, there is plenty of material on Bách Việt ancient civilization, and it has been a serious lack of diligence on my part that I have not gone into detail about this very important subject, so I will rectify the situation and address this crucial information.

Up until this point, I’ve been talking about the one-hundred Việt tribes throughout my website, but I never really defined who the Bách Việt were.  

So—here we go.

Bách Việt

guyFlute

In ancient times, the Han Chinese referred to those living south of the Yangtze (Trường Giang river) collectively as Bách Việt, which means the one-hundred Việt tribes.

In the Sách Hán Thư (漢書), an ancient Han documentation, it is written:  

Within five miles from Giao Chỉ to Cối Kê (within the region south of the Yangtze river), the people of Bách Việt can be found everywhere, each group with its own individual regional customs.  [1]

According to ancient Han Chinese historian La Hương Lâm (羅香林) the Bách Việt people have the same ancestral origins with the House of Hạ (the royal lineage of the kings of Hạ.

Furthermore, Neolithic archaeology excavated from Quảng Tây (Quanxi) and north Vietnam, with emphasis on the aggregate ancient tombs found within these areas show that the Bách Việt people have their origins in the south, with close association with the Hòa Bình and Bắc Sơn civilization from Vietnam.  [2]

This explains who the Bách Việt are, but what does the word Bách Việt mean?  Well, here’s a surprise for you.  Regional dialect linguists have ascertain that the phonetic sound of the word 越 (Việt, Yue, Yueh) may be associated with the hemp plant since the region south of the Yangtze river is where it was found to be mass cultivated.  [3]

girlWeed.jpg

Now that may seem the ultimate in coolness, but there is more relevant meaning of Bách Việt.  The word Việt (越) is also associated with the word việt (鉞 ) which means a giant axe, an ancient weapon of giants in the far past, and also the symbol of the power of the royal emperor. 

Many giant axes have been found in the region of Hàng Châu (Hángzhōu 杭州 ) with plenty of solid evidence that those axes were invented in the southern regions.  In fact, the first historical mention of the people of Bách Việt from the ancient Han writings describe a people who wielded an unusual weapon that they called a Việt.  [4]

This Việt weapon was a diamond-polished stone axe–unheard of six-thousand years ago, and something that the Han Chinese did not have.  It was the sole invention of the people living south of the Yangtze.  Although modern archaeologists label them as Chinese because they were found within the borders of modern-day China, they are actually of Vietnamese origin.  [5]

The group of the one-hundred-tribes of Bách Việt consisted of  the Câu Ngô aka Wu (句吳), Ư Việt (於越), Dương Việt (揚越), Mân Việt (閩越), Nam Việt (南越), Đông Việt (東越), Sơn Việt (山越), Lạc Việt (雒越) and Âu Việt (甌越, 西甌).  

All these names are still in use today, in various phonetic forms.  These kingdom states were documented as being part of the empire of Emperor Hùng, collectively called Văn Lang (aka Lĩnh Nam).

ancientVietmap.jpg

As you can see in the image above, half of Giang Nam was part of the lands belonging to the kingdom state of U Việt, one of the loosely held kingdom states of Bách Việt.

Since this was a very wealthy region, even by the standards of the day, Ư Việt, along with Mân Việt, were the first to fall into Han Chinese hands.

TrungMap

By the time The Trưng Sisters had begun rallying the people of Bách Việt, the remaining kingdom states looked like this.

The loss of Giang Nam (Ư Việt and Mân Việt) was heartbreaking for my people.  We wrote songs and poems, documenting this loss, one of which is a famous folk song called Lý Giang Nam.

This song, although simple in format and contains only a few words, is actually very important for various reasons.  I will detail these reasons in my next posting about Lý Giang Nam.

(Continue to Lý Giang Nam)

…

[1]  Book of Han

[2]  Jiangnan

[3]  Bach Viet

[4]  Rìu

[5]  Diamond-polished stone axe

23 thoughts on “Ancient Việt 8: Bách Việt”

Add yours

  1. Thanks for your insight work of the ancient VIET. I now have a better understandings about Vietnam in ancient times and how much china has robbed the Vietnamese people since then.

    Like

  2. Hi Jake
    Thank you for visiting my blog. It is true. We have lost much. I hesitate to dig into this because…the more I dig, the more I find of things that have been taken. The more I find, the more my heart breaks. But I can’t stop digging.

    Like

  4. Your hemp reference made me giggle. Another thing I just noticed, about the axes, have you read about some of the recent discoveries about ancient axes? Some were in that part of the world from tens of thousands of years ago. It sounds like the Bách Việt took it to a new level.

    Like

  5. Hemp? Việt means enlighten, knowledge; it’s the soften sound of biết, in the same family with words like veda and Swedish vet. In the old Chinese era the sound recorded for Việt was guad because the sound used at the time was in same family with Welsh. Have a look at the character for Việt on Goujian’s sword, it depicts the real meaning of the word.

    Look also at the oracle bone script for Hạ, it shows a bug to represent summer, as we Vietnamese have the custom of killing bugs on tết đoan ngọ to save the crops. We choose to call the Hạ “Viêm Bang” instead. Han people had nothing to do with the Hạ, that’s why they call the Hạ the Grand instead of Summer, and invented the Huaxia story to divide the Việt north of the Yangtze from the Việt south of the Yangtze and fool them into worshiping the lord of the underworld Huangdi. The Han came from north of the Wei river, the infiltrated then subverted the people of China culture with the Huangdi cult which started about 2600 years ago . Most if not all of the history books available are mostly false information, with bits of truth here and there.

    I’ve been shown plenty of information to know that the Han was not part of civilization of China and even the Chinese characters were created by the Viet people which would make a thick book if I keep on writing about it. Get yourself out of the prison they’ve built around your mind and do your own research. Good luck!

    Like

  6. Hi Truc
    I am seriously interested in finding out more about what you just told me. Where can I get more information? Which books are you reading? Where can we go to get this suppressed information? Thanks in advance!!!

    Taobabe

    Like

  8. Thank you for your prompt post. There’s no single book but a vast range of sources of information that people have shown me. For example north Vietnam was called Thina the greatest Mediterranean city in the world in the Greco-Roman book THE PERIPLUS OF THE ERYTHRAEAN SEA, by Marcus or Marciano of Heraclea, in the period around roughly 150AD. Think of why he would call it Mediterranean, and have a look at various Dongson artefacts the see if there is any link, in fact there are a few like the Dongson bronze oil lamp where the man is kneeling is one of them. Thina means Dragon city, it comes from the word thìn ̣(dragon).

    They call the people south of the Yangtze Sinae, which referred to us Viet peoples and north of the Yangtze people Sera that is our cousin Sở ie. Chu. At the time of writing, the Qin dynasty was already gone so Sinae could not have come from the word Qin, beside Qin was a northern state at first, yet they did not call the north Qin but Sera instead; putting things together you’ll see that Sinae is derived from Cửư Chân Chính (Cochinchine), which was the name of to our Nine Yi people, not Han people.

    The proper chronology of ancient Vietnamese history is available at hodovietnam.vn, we start with 1) Hòa Hy, 2)Phục Hy, 3)Thần Nông, 4)Tiết Đế…etc. as for old Chinese characters and sound you can look up on wiktionary.org. The inscription on Goujian sword is widely available on the internet, you’ve probably seen it by now, the character for Viet shows a dragon reaching for the sun and a shaman with a shepherd staff next to it.

    There’s so much more that I can tell you but I’ll have to leave it here, remember the key points the Great Bách Việt dispersal or migration around the world occurred in around 2500BC in the story of separation between Lac Long Quan and Au Co. Current archaeological evidence shows that the oldest civilization found so far is in South East Asia, linguistic and genetic evidence shows that human civilizations spread out from South East Asia not from Mesopotamia, you can check out Gordon White’s work, the author of Star Ship, he gathered information from researchers in various fields to make his case. There’s also finding like I think it’s the malaria antigen, some think to do with malaria, which is widespread among Mediterraneanlike the South East Asian.

    Take care!

    Like

  9. Allan C, thank you for your comment. Sarah Allen’ research into Huangdi found that he is the lord of the underworld which is correct. I’ve been told before the color yellow became popular to be associated with gold and royalty, it was the color of death and decay, of the dying leave, which the character sound for august probably also is derived from it.

    Like

  11. Thanks Truc,

    I am going through the information you just gave me. The website that talks about the họ Đỗ, is it the history of that family only? I didn’t know there was a different history for different family names.

    Insofar as the idea that ‘Chinese characters were created by the Viet people’, where is that information found? Do we have any evidence of that? I would love to find that information, if you would be so kind as to point the source out for me to begin my research.

    I dug through as much as I could, of the ancient writings, and all I could find of the discovered writing sources of ancient Vietnam was the Khoa Đẩu, which I actually have the book for, and am training myself to read. There are inscriptions written in Khoa Đẩu which, when read out loud, actually reads in Vietnamese.

    I am also interested in the source for the oracle bone indication of the written Viet word since I am also a scholar of the I Ching (Kinh Dịch), so this is a solid lead into something I can ferret out.

    Much to discover. Much to think about.

    Like

  12. Allan,

    Per the scarab: In the Secret of the Golden Flower, there is mention of this animal.

    ‘The scarabaeus rolls his ball and in the ball there develops life as the result of the undivided effort of his spiritual concentration. If now an embryo can grow in manure, and shed its shells, why then should not the dwelling place of our heavenly heart also be able to create a body if we concentrate the spirit upon it’ ~ The Secret of the Golden Flower – A Chinese Book of Life

    I’ve also heard that the shape of the carved scarab symbolizes the various sections of the brain, but not sure if that was relevant in the past.

    Like

  14. Taobabe, Stephen…

    That seems to explain the discovery of dirt inside the braincase of this female mummy:

    http://www.realmofhistory.com/2015/12/05/researchers-find-mysterious-dark-substance-inside-a-mummy/

    Archaeologists seem confused by the dirt and (evidence?) brain was not removed…

    Later mummification examples seem to have the brain systematically removed using quite a set of tools:

    http://ancientegyptianhistorynpcc.weebly.com/mummification.html

    Like

  16. Hi Taobabe, Kinh Dịch I Ching came from the Việt people, although I was fascinated witht it when I first had a look at it, I never got to study it though. The reason that it came from the Viet people is that Vietnamese and the Miao people’s mythology say the the lord of the underworld Huangdi killed Fuxi, and Fuxi is known to be the author of the I Ching. We have the proper mythology and don’t worship Huangdi unlike the Han who has the false history. When the Christian Figurist went to China and discovered the I Ching, they thought the people of China are descendants of I Japheth (I think, one of Noah’s son anyway) who taught them the pure teaching of the Lord. We don’t only share the same origin mythology with the Miao, Vietnamese genetic is clustered with Miao also, Vietnamese share many vocabularies when you examine them closely.

    As far as I know the Chinese script used to be called Văn tự/script not Han tự/script, only until 700-800AD that they pushed to completely call it Han script, I read that piece of information on article on the hodovietnam website, I can’t remember exactly what it’s about except for that part and they reference it to primary source which is in Chinese or Nho which I can’t read much.

    The word Văn varies in pronunciation depending on the region, in ancient time the northern Viets pronounced it as man, mian ect. The Wuyue pronounced it as mon, that’s why the Hmong and Mienh called themselves with those sounds because they are people of Văn Lang. The proof is in the bronze inscription/script for the character văn, it shows a person in the shape of a fish with a tattoo on the chest which show a set of buffalo horn and a Phrygian cap in the middle, these symbols are Viet symbols not Han. The buffalo horn is liberation by love and compassion, the Phygian cap is liberation by freedom of thought. You can see that Văn is synonymous with Việt from the symbol.

    You can see these symbol in the painting depicting ancient Vietnamese ambassadors in the painting “Hiếu Ức Quốc”. Hiếu Ức has the same meaning as Xích Quỷ; Hieu Uc is in the same family word with Hebrew “hevel” breath which can be used to mean soul as Hevel or Abel, which the brother of Cain represents whereas Cain means head representing the ego. Xích Quỷ is in the same family with Greek, ‘psychi’ soul, ‘psucho’ breath. I’m not plucking it out of the air here, people have shown me lots of evidence, for example words related to the above are hơi, hồn, khí, qui etc. You should know that if they have or find evidence of Chinese script coming from south of the Yangtze, it will never be published, and people will probably get killed if they try to. Remember that they found Vietnamese artefacts all over Southern China and hid them for a long time until most people got brainwashed into their system then they showed them.

    As for the Đỗ/Đậu family, if you’ve heard of Việt Thường, the old sound for Thường was Dangn a variant sound of Đỗ. The linage is from our Mother Buddha of our Việt peoples, the Tibetan worship her as Jetsun Dolma, the Welsh say that they are children of Goddess Dôn and they came from the Country of Summer, I don’t have time to go into etymology to show you that they have Đai Vũ / Dayu and from Shennong people right now from their own history. The river Don in Russia and the Donau or Danube river in Germany are also named after our Goddess.

    I have to go, I’ll check back in a few weeks to see how you’re going when I come back to the city . Happy researching!

    Like

  18. Observation: We seem to be leaving out the aboriginal people in Australia as we discuss the recollections of ancient floods, the development and migration of ancient technology etc.

    Paraphrasing Crocodile Dundee’s statement, “Now that’s KNOYFE”:

    Now thats an axe:

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/10/oldest-known-axe-discovered-in-australia-claim-researchers

    To me the previously pictured axes (diamond honed) actually look more like implements to create furrows in the earth, more like hoes. And, the handle holes in the sides of the implement make them look more like hoes…although an early ‘adze’ would be a possibility.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adze

    Also, the pictured axeheads look like they’re made of a jadelike material. Jade is pretty ‘tough’, and would survive repeated impact with the earth…

    The aborigines also have a type of oracle that uses stones for divination 🙂

    Like

  19. Thank you Allan C, the correlation between the Miao mythology and Hebrew mythology is interesting, but we need to be careful not to conclude that the story moved from Mesopotamia to China, as the author of the article seems to make as he is a Christian. My friends think the Hebrew moved from where the Viets were to the Middle East, not because they are being nationalistic but by looking at Hebrew words, the mystical terms which have hidden meanings that need to be taught by the Levi, are used with plain meaning in Vietnamese vocabularies. Our Lequios people of South East Asia were known to be White but they were not the only one though.

    There is an agenda to brainwash and divide people so that the top elite can keep the masses enslaved, while the academic establishment try to protect their false paradigm instead of searching for truth. The power establishment use religion to control people, and they push the narrative of civilization spread out from the Middle East, from Abrahamic religion, and Columbus discovered the Americas. But the Viets (the real ancient Chinese) always had contact with the Americas. They like to have a large section of people believing civilization come from White men from that side of the world.

    I don’t have time to write much, so I’ll leave a little note for Taobabe. Search in google search “Guimet lampe giao chi Thierry Ollivier”, you will see the bronze figure of a person with the same kind of Phygian cap depicted in the “Hieu Uc Quoc” painting. The description says he’s holding a lance but it’s actually the staff of Moses. Also type in Dongson bronze in google images search, you’ll find a bronze ceremony Phrygian cap helmet with buffalo horns on it and the spirals of twin electrical male and female vortices. You will also see a bronze thap (bucket) which depicts a Ky Lan on the left and a Buffalo on the right just like on the “Hieu Uc Quoc” painting. That’s should be plenty to prove the continuation of our Van Lang people in association with the Oracle bone script and Bronze inscription, so the Academia clap trap that keeps on dismissing our history can shove it up their own black hole.

    Take good care of yourselves warriors!

    Like

  21. that bach viet map u used a fabrication by vietnamese nationalist

    apart from guangdong and gaungxi theres no viet ppl in the rest of the areas shown

    i come from the place u call U-Viet present day zhejiang

    i speak wu dialect, ningbo to be exact

    i hear alot viet ppl speak because i live in Australia (very sizeable viet population here)

    the two languages they nothing in common phonetically

    on the other hand cantonese and viet sound very similar to me like Spanish and Italian

    theres alot of minority languages in southern china not all of them are viet in origin

    in closing viet people don’t follow down path of history revisionist like the koreans

    like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiLA6Bk_ivs

    Like

  23. stupid map of China all over again, China didn’t exist in that dynasty, all regions are part of China today, if that was ancient map of “China” then Guangdong wouldn’t name Guangdong, Fukien would be MAN VIET, GuangDong would be NAM VIET, hundred Viet includes U VIET which is Zhejiang. and Sichuan+tibet are HUNDRED PU /BACH PU, there are hundred tribes as well. false information, hate when people mix modern politics with ancient history and misinforming readers

    Like

Leave a comment

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑