Laird Scranton on the Dogon

In Boing Boing Avi Solomon interviews Laird Scranton who studies Dogon mythology and symbolism. He highlights a number of Dogon-Egyptian correlations:

Dogon granaries in North Africa. Photo: Robin Taylor

Avi: Can you give some significant examples of connection between Dogon and Egyptian words?
Laird: Each key term of Dogon cosmology comes packaged as a kind of bundle that includes: 1) Its pronunciation. 2) At least two logically-disconnected meanings, such that you cannot reasonably guess the secondary meanings simply by knowing the first. 3) An associated cosmological drawing. 4) A relationship to a stage of creation and/or mythogical character within the cosmology.
When proposing correlations between Dogon and Egyptian words, my intent is to demonstrate likely correlations between each of the bundle's elements.
While developing these matching sets of elements, I came to realize that the most consistent matches were to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Wallis Budge, not to the German Worterbuch that is preferred by many modern Egyptologists. The consensus is that Budge's dictionary is outdated and often unreliable — some Egyptologists go so far as to say that Budge could barely read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Nonetheless, I realize that it would be unreasonable to suggest that Budge could have been grossly wrong about Egyptian words and yet still somehow in predictable agreement with the Dogon. And so I offer the body of interrelated Dogon words as new evidence to show that Budge must have been substantially correct in his understanding of Egyptian words of cosmology.

And possible connections to the birth of Buddhism:

Avi: How is the Dogon granary related to the Buddhist Stupa?

Laird: Each represents the Grand Mnemonic of their associated cosmologies — a structure whose plan recreates key shapes that relate both to the processes of creation and to the acquisition of civilizing skills. Both are based on the same basic plan, evoke the same series of geometric shapes in the same sequence and assign the same symbolism to those shapes. Both are tied to detailed cosmologies that define the processes of biological and cosmological creation, defined by matching symbols and concepts.

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