Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Within MIE, the clearest major sub-group is an eastern one characterized by a series of linguistic innovations and represented b ...

closely related, and to show some affinities with Baltic.^14 Links have also been seen between Thracian and the Anatolian langua ...

with the migration into Anatolia. There is in fact archaeological evidence that would be consistent with its introduction to Ana ...

residing in the south Balkans. They may have retreated from there under pressure from Thracian tribes coming down from further n ...

with the vast uninhabitable desert region of eastern Iran, they divided right and left: one group headed west between Mt Elbruz ...

Those practised in this form of endeavour tend to agree that three large culture complexes in the third millennium are likely to ...

SOURCES In the search for Indo-European poetry and myth we have to draw on sources of very various character and very various da ...

instructions to officials, omen texts, oracles, and a limited number of mythological narratives. The myths, however, mostly seem ...

The oldest documents of Iranian literature are the seventeen hymns of Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) known as the Ga ̄tha ̄s. They are ...

The remaining Indo-European language in which we have texts from the second millennium is Greek. However, these early, non-liter ...

which is generally considered to be Illyrian, and a number of statements by Classical authors about Thracian religion.^41 Among ...

Cycle. The most celebrated single work, from the Ulster Cycle, is the Táin bó Cúailnge or Cattle-raid of Cooley (sometimes refer ...

(Alemannic and Bavarian), Old Saxon, Old English (Anglo-Saxon), and Old Norse. These show mutual similarities of metre and dicti ...

were also slow to disappear. Some of them could still be documented in nine- teenth-century Latvia.^46 TheSlavs were converted m ...

It is to be noted that these levels are stemmatic, not synchronic. A significant parallel observed between Homer and the Rigveda ...

peoples is entirely outside our concern’.^50 Nor is the reconstructive method invalidated by objections on the lines ‘the parall ...

been a southward swoop parallel to that of the Indic group who took over Mitanni at the same period. If it really happened, it w ...

both areas from the neighbouring Finno-Ugric peoples of north and central Asia.^55 Some myths that occur both in India and in Gr ...

diffusion. But they cannot, as they stand, go back to the archetypal mythology of the proto-Indo-Europeans.^58 This is a devasta ...

evolved some way from his Indo-European beginnings. Similar con- siderations apply to the traditions of the other peoples that f ...