A. Indo-European Culture
A. Indo-European Culture
A. Indo-European Culture
INDO-EUROPEAN ORIGINS
I. Concept
A. Indo-European Culture
On the basis of cognate words, we can infer a good deal about Indo-European culture before it spread
over many parts of Europe and Asia. That spread startedno later than the third or fourth millennium B.C.
and perhaps very much earlier. Indo-European culture was considerably advanced. Those who spoke the
parent
language, which we call Proto-Indo-European, had a complex system of family relationships. They could
count. They used gold and perhaps silver also, but copper and iron only later. They drank a honey-based
alcoholic beverage whose name has come down to us as mead. Words corresponding to wheel, axle, and
yoke make it clear that they used wheeled vehicles. They were small farmers, not nomads, who worked
their fields with plows, and they had domesticated animals and fowl. Their religion was polytheistic,
including a Sky Father (whose name is preserved in the ancient Vedic hymns of India as Dyaus pitar, in
Greek myth as Zeus patēr, among the Romans as Jupiter, and among the Germanic peoples as Tiw, for
whom Tuesday is named). The cow and the horse were important to their society, wealth being measured
by a count of cattle: the Latin word pecus meant ‘cattle’ but was the source of the word pecūnia ‘wealth,’
from which we get pecuniary; and our word fee comes from a related Old English word f ēoh, which also
meant both ‘cattle’ and ‘wealth.’ So we know things about the ancient Indo-European speakers on the basis
of forms that were not actually recorded until long after Indo-European had ceased to be a single language.
Gimbutas, Kurgan Culture - They domesticated cattle and horses, which they kept for milk and
meat as well as for transportation. They combined farming with herding and were a mobile people,
using four-wheeled wagons to cart their belongings on their treks. They built fortified palaces on
hilltops (we have the Indo-European word for such forts in the polis of place names like
Indianapolis and in our word police), as well as small villages nearby. Their society was a stratified
one, with a warrior nobility and a common laboring class.
In addition to the sky god associated with thunder, the sun, the horse, the boar, and the snake
were important in their religion. They had a highly developed belief in life after death, which led
them to the construction of elaborate burial sites, by which their culture can be traced over much of
Europe. Early in their history, they expanded into the Balkans and northern Europe, and thereafter
into Iran, Anatolia, and southern Europe. Other locations have also been proposed for the Indo-
European homeland, such as north-central Europe between the Vistula and the Elbe and eastern
Anatolia (modern Turkey and the site of the ancient Hittite empire). The dispersal of Indo-European
was so early that we may never be sure of where it began or of the paths it followed.
Even a casual comparison of English with some other languages reveals similarities among them.
Thus English father clearly resembles Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish fader, Icelandic faðir,
Dutch vader, and German Vater (especially when one is aware that the letter v in German
represents the same sound as f ).
Although there is still a fair resemblance, the English word is not quite so similar to Latin pater,
Spanish padre, Portuguese pai, Catalan pare, and French père. Greek patēr, Sanskrit pitar-, and
Persian pedar are all strikingly like the Latin form, and (allowing for the loss of the first consonant)
Gaelic athair resembles the others as well. It takes no great insight to recognize that those words
for ‘father’ are somehow the “same.” Because such similarity of words is reinforced by other
parallels among the languages, we are forced to look for some explanation of the resemblances.
The explanation—that all those languages are historical developments of a no longer existing
source language—was first proposed several centuries ago by Sir William Jones.
Sir William Jones, a British judge and Sanskrit scholar in India. The Indo-European hypothesis, as
it is called, is now well supported with evidence from many languages: a language once existed
that developed in different ways in the various parts of the world to which its speakers traveled. We
call it Proto-Indo-European (or simply Indo-European) because at the beginning of historical times
languages derived from it were spoken from Europe in the west to India in the east. Its
“descendants,” which make up the Indo-European family, include all of the languages mentioned in
the preceding paragraph, as well as Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian,
Romany, and many others. Nineteenth-century philologists sometimes called the Indo-European
family of languages Aryan, a Sanskrit term meaning ‘noble,’ which is what some of the languages’
speakers immodestly called themselves. Aryan has also been used to name the branch of Indo
European spoken in Iran and India, now usually referred to as Indo-Iranian. The term Aryan was,
however, generally given up by linguists after the Nazis appropriated it for their supposedly master
race of Nordic features, but it is still found in its original senses in some older works on language.
The term Indo-European has no racial connotations; it refers only to the culture of a group of
people who lived in a relatively small area in early times and who spoke a more or less unified
language out of which many languages have developed over thousands of years. These languages
are spoken today by approximately half of the world’s population.