But in general we may say that MIE had dyéus (Dyéus) for ‘heaven (Heaven)’,
whether considered as a cosmic entity or as a divine figure, and deiwós for
‘heavenly one, god’.
In Anatolian the picture is a little different. The thematic stem deiwo- is
not found. The reflex of dyeus (Hittite sius) does not mean ‘heaven’ but
either ‘god’ in general or the Sun-god. In an Old Hittite text, the Pro-
clamation of Anitta, there is a deity Sius-summi, ‘Our God’, who has been
shown to be the Sun-god.^9 There is also a set of forms with a dental extension,
Hittite siwat- ‘day’, Luwian Tı ̄wat-, Palaic Tı ̄yat-, ‘Sun, day’, going back to a
proto-Anatolian *díwot-.^10 The underlying sense of ‘heavenly brilliance’ is still
recognizable; the identification with the sun must be secondary, not inherited
from PIE.
The Greek Zeus is king of the gods and the supreme power in the world,
his influence extending everywhere and into most spheres of life. There
is little reason, however, to think that the Indo-European Dyeus had any such
importance. He was the Sky or Day conceived as a divine entity. He was
the father of the gods (see below), but not their ruler. In the world of the
Rigveda Dyaus has no prominence. Not one of the 1028 hymns in the
corpus is addressed to him alone, though six are addressed to him and Earth
as a pair. He has no mythical deeds to his credit. He can do what the sky
does: he roars and thunders (RV 5. 58. 6; 10. 44. 8, 45. 4, 67. 5); the rain is
his seed (1. 100. 3; 5. 17. 3). But he is not even the major storm-god. That is
Indra. We shall see in Chapter 6 that the god of thunder and lightning was
a distinct figure in the Indo-European pantheon, not identified with the
deified Sky.
In Greece this storm-god’s functions have been taken over by Zeus. The
poetic attributes of Zeus as the storm-god, as well as some other features of
his image as exalted ruler, show the influence of Near Eastern poetry and
theology.^11 But the starting-point was his celestial nature. Most of the formu-
laic epithets applied to him in epic verse refer to this: cloud-gatherer, thunder-
ing on high, god of lightning, delighting in the thunderbolt, he of the dark
clouds. In other texts he appears as the source of rain (Ζε7 Zμβριο, Ζε7
ει), and he is equally the god of the unclouded sky (Ζε7 αAθριο) or of the
fair wind (Ζε7 οOριο).
(^9) E. Neu, Der Anitta-Text (Studien zu den Bog ̆azköy-Texten 18, 1974), 116–31; Gurney
(1977), 9–11. In later Hittite texts sius, siun- has the general sense ‘god’, as does Lydian civs, civ-.
On the Hittite forms see E. Laroche, JCS 24 (1967), 174–7; C. Watkins (as n. 7), 103–9.
(^10) Melchert (1994), 209, 214, 231, al. A Luwian theophoric name Tiwazidi occurs on a tablet
of the sixteenth century from Inandık: Neu (as n. 9), 54 n. 51. The Urartian Sun-god dSˇi-u-ini
is evidently a loan from Hittite: Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 793; I. M. Diakonov, JIES 13
(1985), 136 with 171 n. 52.
(^11) West (1997), 114–16, 557–60.
168 4. Sky and Earth