Swastika
Etymology and nomenclature

With well-being (swasti) we would follow along our path, like the Sun and the Moon. May we meet up with one who gives in return, who does not smite (harm), with one who knows.

— The Rigveda V.52.15

The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit root swasti, which is composed of su 'good, well' and asti 'is; it is; there is'. The word swasti occurs frequently in the Vedas as well as in classical literature, meaning 'health, luck, success, prosperity', and it was commonly used as a greeting. The final ka is a common suffix that could have multiple meanings.

According to Monier-Williams, a majority of scholars consider the swastika a solar symbol. The sign implies well-being, something fortunate, lucky, or auspicious. It is alternatively spelled in contemporary texts as svastika, and other spellings were occasionally used in the 19th and early 20th century, such as suastika. It was derived from the Sanskrit term (Devanagari स्वस्तिक), which transliterates to svastika under the commonly used IAST transliteration system, but is pronounced closer to swastika when letters are used with their English values.

The earliest known use of the word swastika is in Pāṇini 's Ashtadhyayi, which uses it to explain one of the Sanskrit grammar rules, in the context of a type of identifying mark on a cow's ear. Most scholarship suggests that Pāṇini lived in or before the 4th century BCE, possibly in 6th or 5th century BCE.

An important early use of the word swastika in a European text was in 1871 with the publications of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered more than 1,800 ancient samples of the swastika symbol and its variants while digging the Hisarlik mound near the Aegean Sea coast for the history of Troy. Schliemann linked his findings to the Sanskrit swastika.

By the 19th century, the term swastika was adopted into the English lexicon, replacing the previous gammadion from Greek γαμμάδιον. In 1878, Irish scholar Charles Graves used swastika as the common English name for the symbol, after defining it as equivalent to the French term croix gammée – a cross with arms shaped like the Greek letter gamma (Γ). Shortly thereafter, British antiquarians Edward Thomas and Robert Sewell separately published their studies about the symbol, using swastika as the common English term.

The concept of a "reversed" swastika was probably first made among European scholars by Eugène Burnouf in 1852 and taken up by Schliemann in Ilios (1880), based on a letter from Max Müller that quotes Burnouf. The term sauwastika is used in the sense of 'backward swastika' by Eugène Goblet d'Alviella (1894): "In India it bears the name of swastika, when its arms are bent towards the right, and sauwastika when they are turned in the other direction."

Other names for the symbol include:

In various European languages, it is known as the fylfot, gammadion, tetraskelion, or cross cramponnée (a term in Anglo-Norman heraldry); German: Hakenkreuz; French: croix gammée; Italian: croce uncinata; Latvian: ugunskrusts. In Mongolian it is called хас (khas) and mainly used in seals. In Chinese it is called 卍字 (wànzì), pronounced manji in Japanese, manja (만자) in Korean and vạn tự or chữ vạn in Vietnamese. In Balti / Tibetan language it is called yung drung.
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