Indo-European Poetry and Myth

2); τ:ν κο ́ σμον το ́ νδε‘this set-up’ (Heraclitus B 30); τ: Jλον τοτο (Pl. Gorg.
508a); τ: π|ν το ́ δε (id. Tim. 29d, al.).^4

Stony skies

Alcman and other Greek poets refer to an obscure figure Akmon as the father
of Ouranos, the personified Heaven.^5 Normally Eκμων means an anvil; it
can also signify the head of a battering-ram, or in Cypriot speech a pestle,
so in each case a block of stone or metal designed to withstand a battering.
The cognate word in other languages means ‘stone’: Vedic ás ́man-, Avestan
asman-, Lithuanian akmuõ. But in Avestan asman- and its synonym asan-
(Vedic ás ́an-) also have the meaning ‘heaven’, as do asman- in Old Persian
and related forms in Middle Iranian dialects.^6 In the view of some scholars
Germanic hemena- (from which come Gothic himins, Old English heofon,
etc.) derives from the same proto-form.^7 The inference has been drawn ‘that
Indo-European h 2 emo ̄n meant both “stone” and “heaven”, and... that this
was no mere homophony but that the notion of stone sky was part of the
Indo-European world view’.^8
Certainly there is nothing improbable in an ancient people’s having
believed in a solid firmament. There was a Babylonian concept of three
heavens made of different semi-precious stones, and there are hints of a
metallic sky in the Hebrew Genesis and the Younger Avesta.^9 In Homeric
formula the sky is of bronze (χα ́ λκεο,πολ3χαλκο) or iron (σιδρεο).
These may be Bronze and Iron Age modifications of the more primitive
conception of a stone sky.
One source of the idea may have been the observation or delusion that
certain stones had fallen from the sky. We noted in Chapter 6 the widespread
belief that they come down with the thunder and lightning. The word
ás ́man- is used among others of Indra’s weapon, and in Lithuania the

(^4) See further West (1971), 196, 243.
(^5) Alcm. PMGF 61, cf. Hes. fr. [389], etc.; Pfeiffer on Call. fr. 498; V. J. Matthews on Antim.
fr. 51.
(^6) H. W. Bailey, Zoroastrian Problems in the Ninth-Century Books (Oxford 1943), 125.
(^7) From emen-o-, built on (h 2 )men-. Cf. R. Wachter, HS 110 (1997), 17 f.; M. C. Beckwith,
HSCP 98 (1998), 97; rejected by R. S. P. Beekes, EIEC 547b.
(^8) M. C. Beckwith (as n. 7), 95. Cf. H. Reichelt, IF 32 (1913), 23–57; Durante (1976), 59 f.;
Beckwith, 91–102.
(^9) Alasdair Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and
Babylonian Scholars (Oxford 1986), 86; West (1997), 139 f.; Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian
Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake 1998), 263; A. R. George, The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh
(Oxford 2003), 865; Yt. 13. 2; H. W. Bailey (as n. 6), 127.
342 9. Cosmos and Canon