this is....

interesting. the kush of the sudan, connected with the kushans of central asia? a very strange suggestion.

while the existence of a classical writer stating that there was a migration from india to the sudan is interesting - i was not previously aware of this - the migration could not have been this simple. the name 'kush' is what the ancient egyptians called the area, many centuries before the 'kushan' invasion of india from the north - which was thought to have been by an iranian tribe, rather than a tocharian one.

nonetheless, we know there were periodic invasions of egypt and the near east by central asian tribes. there was the hyksos invasion, for example. the persian empire conquered egypt. etc.

if the merotic script appeared around 500 BCE this is roughly contemporary with persian hegemony in the area. the exact point in this essay may be historically ignorant, but if we the idea is not outside the range of possibility.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/91594296/Tocharian-the-Cognate-Language-of-Meroitic

i've studied the achaemenids in depth. (there *are* some things i haven't studied). resettling unruly tribes outside of their homelands is something that the persians did do. so, could darius have hauled some tocharians out to egypt? well, if they were pissing him off, he might have done that. they *are* right on the silk road. there's a potential for annoyance, there.

it doesn't explain what is likely a false connection between the two kushes, though. there's a term, "hindu kush", that relates to the mountains in the area. this is probably what the asian kushans are named after. they were the mountain people.

i suppose there's a possibility that the nubian kushites could have also been named after the mountains. but, that's a stretch, and even if it's true it's still an argument for a false cognate.

yeah. i was thinking it might have been possible that kush was named during one of the periods where egypt was under possible northern rule (hyksos, sea peoples), but it seems like it was renamed from nubia during a period where the egyptian pharoahs were black.

(that's a complex issue that's riddled with racism on both sides. the truth is that some pharoahs were white and some pharoahs were black. whites and blacks in the area took turns enslaving each other. you need to understand 5000 years of egyptian history in the context of racial class struggle, not in the context of one race being perpetually dominant over the other).

so, there's no logical connection there. the egyptians were referring to their southern areas as 'kush' back when the proto-tocharians were living somewhere in eastern europe.

so, if there's a connection it would have to be from nubia to asia, and it doesn't really make any sense given the indo-european etymology of kush as a mountain.

false cognate.

still, that doesn't rule out the possibility that the false cognate is a coincidence, or even that the persians noticed the false cognate and used it as a sort of a twisted joke in resettling some annoying tribes.

but, see, this is where *evidence* becomes useful.

...although i guess the decipherment, if it's valid, and that's something i can't comment on, is inductive.