‘Tebo Deves’; this may represent debess Dievs‘God of heaven’ or te ̄vs Dievs
‘father God’.^19
The title of ‘father’ was not confined to MIE. We have seen that in Anatolian
Dyeus, as a specific deity, became identified with the Sun. But the divine
name and its variants continued to be associated with the term ‘father’. In
the Hittite phrase attasˇdUTU-usˇ,attasˇ is ‘father’,dUTU is a Sumerogram
denoting a Sun-god, and -usˇ is a phonetic complement helping the reader to
identify the Hittite name and case-ending. Here it is possibly to be read as
Sius, though Istanus, a solar name borrowed from Hattic, may be a stronger
candidate. Also attested, however, are a Luwian tatisˇdTiwaz and a Palaic Tiyaz
... papaz. The words for ‘father’ are not the same as Vedic pita ̄ ́, Greek πατ ρ,
Latinpater; they are hypocoristic forms, related to them as ‘dad’ or ‘papa’ to
‘father’. We can infer nevertheless that the combination ‘Father Dyeus’ goes
back to PIE.
The all-seeing, all-knowing godAnother Homeric epithet of Zeus is ε1ρ3οπα, since antiquity often inter-
preted as ‘with far-reaching voice’, but originally probably ‘with wide vision’,
referring to his ability to survey the world from his lofty station. Hesiod warns
unjust rulers that ‘the eye of Zeus sees everything and notices everything’.
‘Thrice countless are they on the rich-pastured earth, Zeus’ immortal
watchers of mortal men, who watch over judgments and wickedness, clothed
in darkness, travelling about the land on every road.’ In the Iliad it is the Sun
who ‘oversees everything and overhears everything’, and for that reason he is
invoked, together with Zeus, as a witness to oaths. But in tragedy it is more
often Zeus who is called ‘all-seeing’.^20
These appear to be fragmented survivals of an Indo-European complex of
ideas. The Indic Dyaus is ‘all-knowing’ (AV 1. 32. 4 vis ́vávedas-, cf. RV 6. 70.
6), and this is doubtless because of his celestial nature. As Raffaele Pettazzoni
showed in a wide-ranging study,^21 omniscience is not an automatic privilege
of gods. It is predicated primarily of sky and astral deities, because they are
in a position to see all that happens on earth. In India it is another god of
celestial nature, Varuna, or the pair Mitra–Varuna, that supervises justice,
(^19) W. Euler in Meid (1987), 38 f., 54 n. 27, citing H. Biezais, ‘Baltische Religion’ in
C. M. Schröder, Die Religionen der Menschheit, 19.1 (Stuttgart 1975), 323.
(^20) Hes. Op. 267–9, 249–55; Il. 3. 276 f., 19. 258 f.; Aesch. Supp. 139, Cho. 985 (986 is inter-
polated), Eum. 1045; Soph. Ant. 184, El. 175 (cf. 659), OC 1085; Eur. El. 1177; Achaeus TrGF 20
F 53; Trag. adesp. 485; cf. Ar. Ach. 435; Usener (1896), 59, 196 f. We shall return in the next
chapter to the topic of oaths by the Sun.
(^21) Pettazzoni (1955).
- Sky and Earth 171