l love these weird confluences, where words evolve from widely disparate roots end up sounding the same in a strangely suggestive way.
EG the Danaans in Homer sound like the Tuatha de Danaan in the old Irish stories. Prolly no relation but a gust of 19th century volks-nostalgia sweeps over me at the thought of it.
A mate of mine at work has a wild Graves-esque theory about the name Lk (Lycurgus, Luke, Lykia (the wolf-land yes, but he linked thatb to Romulus...I forget how), a whole bunch other supposed derivatives from a bunch of traditions) coming from a one-eyed (=the sun...I think he used that to tie in Solon) proto-lawgiver with some trickster characteristics. Crazy imaginative stuff.
I showed him a bit from the saga about Odin (one-eyed, crafty, etc etc it was a good match) but I noted the name didn't match...except in the footnotes it said Odin had simply absorbed the attributes of an older trickster god...
Ooooh didn't that give me shivers.
Prolly nonsense but I love it.
So I vote that the Persian name for bowmen comes from another word meaning river because the PIE speakers lived by a bow in a river which looked like a bow. Or a bear.
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