“Nor can we reasonably doubt, how degenerate and abased so ever the Hindus may now appear, that in some early age they were splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge.” Speaking to the small group of British colonial officials who made up the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in February 1786, the president of the group, William Jones, went on to make some surprising claims about Sanskrit, the ancient language of India.
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exqui- sitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philosopher could ex- amine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celt- ick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
Jones postulated that the family resemblances of these languages must have resulted from a geographical dispersal of peoples from some central country.
William Jones was right. The Sanskrit language is incontestably related to Greek and Latin. So, too, is it related to old Persian, as well as to the Celtic language and the Gothic or Old Germanic. In addition, the languages descended from them – including the modern languages of northern India such as Hindi and Bengali from Sanskrit; the contemporary Romance languages like French and Spanish from Latin; and northern European languages like English and modern German from old Germanic – all share a common linguistic ancestor, which linguists call “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE for short.
Still others which Jones did not notice also belong to this extended family of languages, most notably the Balto-Slavic group that includes Russian, Czech, and Polish, and the Anatolian group that encompasses the ancient languages Hittite and Lycian. Altogether, linguists identify some 140 languages that derive from an original Proto-Indo-European. It is a remarkable, far-flung family indeed. At present over two billion people, roughly half the world’s population, speak an Indo-European language.
How did this come about? Most scholars assume that long ago, at least five or six thousand years back, groups speaking a common language and inhabiting some common territory must have begun migrating in several directions. Eventually, others in the new territories they occupied also adopted their languages. As these groups spread geographically, their once-common language diverged into separate “stocks” that developed into new localized languages, which linguists designate “daughter languages.” While these derivative languages naturally changed over time and incorporated loan words and new features from other non-Indo-European languages, they also retained enough vocabulary and grammar in common that their shared ancestry can be recognised.
Through a process of inferring backwards, from the later known languages to an earlier unknown source, linguists have attempted to reconstruct the originating Proto-Indo-European language. A linguist supplied with training in this reconstructed PIE and a time machine might plausibly be able to converse with the Indo-Europeans of six thousand years ago. One noted nineteenth-century philologist, August Schleicher, even composed a folktale, Avis akvasas ka (“The sheep and the horses”), meant for an audience of PIE speakers.
However, this hypothesis of a primordial partitioning of a once-unitary community of Proto-Indo-European speakers raises many new questions. Where did they come from? Why did they leave? If they shared a linguistic heritage, what else did they share? Is there a common Indo-European protoculture? How were they so successful in imposing their languages in new lands? What other aspects of culture did they impose? And to what extent did they remain, in their new territories, distinct ethnic communities? These are beyond the scope of this book, but we can make a few observations about the earliest Indo-Europeans, as the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans.
Early Indo-European society appears to have been hierarchical, with an elite strata of chieftains, warriors, and priests, and a lower class of common people. Family organisation was clearly central to social structure, as indicated by broadly shared and extensive kinship terminology. Families were patriarchal. Marriages were arranged between partners outside of each other’s kin group, and a new wife went to live with her husband’s family. It is more difficult to ascertain more encompassing levels of social organization within Indo-European culture, since there are few if any shared terms. Many scholars assume that extended families formed “clans,” which were in turn grouped within “tribes.” One word that does seem to be widely shared is raj, an individual leader of a group. This is the form for the later Sanskrit term rajan (king), as well as Latin rex and such English derivatives as “regal” and “reign.” However, for a nomadic tribal society such as the Indo-European, “chieftain” is a more suitable translation than “king.”
The Indo-Europeans knew agriculture, as indicated by shared terms for plow and other agricultural implements. However, the mainstay of the material economy was stockbreeding. The Indo-Europeans kept domesticated sheep, goats, cows, and oxen. Cattle were crucial for their meat, their hides, their bones and horns, their dairy products, and their strength in pulling plows. Dogs had made themselves useful members of the Indo-European community by protecting the herds of livestock from predators. The most distinctive animal domesticated by the Indo-Europeans, though, was the horse. From the PIE word for horse, ekwos, come the Sanskrit ashva and the Latin equus, as well as the English word “equestrian” for one who rides a horse. The Indo-Europeans were the first to domesticate the horse, both for riding and transportation. This new technology posed many advantages. With horses, they could transport goods more quickly, control larger herds of livestock, scout farther afield for new pastures, and carry out quicker and more successful cattle raids on neighbours.
The Indo-European peoples also knew the wheel and developed wheeled vehicles pulled by draft animals. Paired with the domestication of the horse, wheeled transport allowed much greater mobility and no doubt facilitated the wide-ranging migrations of the Indo-European groups over the succeeding centuries. Conversely, shared terminology for built structures like houses is relatively sparse. This, too, points to a pastoral and nomadic or semi-settled mode of life among the Indo-Europeans.
The religious world of the Indo-Europeans revolved around a pantheon of gods, predominantly male, who were often described as “shining” like the bright sky. Deities were distinguished as immortal in contrast to mortal humans, and as dwellers of the sky in contrast to earth-bound humans. Some were identified with natural phenomena, like the fire god Agni, but this was not primitive “nature worship,” as earlier religious historians classified it. Certain narratives of divine deeds seem to be widely shared among Indo-European cultures, such as the “dragon-slaying” myth. Throughout Indo-European traditions, we hear repeatedly of a hero or god going into battle against a nonhuman creature, usually a dragon or snake-like demon, who poses a threat to the life and prosperity of the community, and defeating it to restore the proper order of things. We will see the Rig Veda version of this myth later in the chapter.
While archaeological evidence for material arts among the Indo-Europeans is scanty, the verbal arts appear to have been a central cultural preoccupation. Poets or bards assumed the crucial social role of transmitting the cultural knowledge of the community. They celebrated the gods, tribal heroes, and their own leaders in oral verse. In a society where the elite highly valued “imperishable fame” (a phrase shared in Sanskrit and Greek), poets were the ones who could confer this glory by composing memorable verses of praise. This placed them in a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with the chieftains and warriors who acted as their primary patrons. Poets eulogized leaders for their feats in battle, and the successful warriors honoured the poets with gifts and shares in the booty. It is thanks to this tradition of mutual back-scratching among Indo-European warriors and their bards that we know of the legendary heroes of the Mahabharata and the Iliad, epic compositions that did indeed bring imperishable fame to their protagonists.
Where did the original PIE speakers live? The most widely held view among current scholars locates these tribes in the vast grasslands north of the Black and Caspian seas, called the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. This large territory, some 200,000 square miles, spreads across the modern borders of eastern Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. At a certain point, around the mid-fourth millennium BCE, some of these groups began to move out beyond this region, taking with them their version of the PIE language. No doubt their movements were facilitated by the new possibilities of horse-and-wheel technologies, with small nomadic tribal bands migrating with herds of cattle and other livestock.
In some cases, they were moving into sparsely populated regions, but in others, the Indo-European speakers entered into more densely populated areas of settled agricultural economies, where the new immigrants found themselves decidedly in the minority. There would have been interaction between populations as well as trade, competition, periodic conflict, and bilingualism, leading oftentimes to the eventual adoption of the Indo-European language by significant segments of the population.
Excerpted with permission from Religions of Early India: A Cultural History, Richard H Davis, Princeton University Press.
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