diffusion. But they cannot, as they stand, go back to the archetypal mythology
of the proto-Indo-Europeans.^58
This is a devastating result for us seekers of Indo-European mythology.
If ideas and myths could spread so far and so fast over lands that had been
Indo-Europeanized long before, how can we ever know if we are getting back
to an original common heritage? Perhaps we cannot. Perhaps we must con-
tent ourselves with identifying ‘isomyths’, elements shared by a particular
pair or a particular constellation of peoples, acknowledging that they may
date only from a comparatively late phase in the long history of the diaspora.
CONCLUSIONComparative Indo-European mythology remains and is bound to remain a
poor relation of comparative Indo-European philology. It is easy to see why.
People change their gods and their mythologies more readily and quickly
than they change their declensions and conjugations, and more capriciously.
Rules can be formulated to predict how a given Indo-European phoneme will
turn out in Old High German or Pale Dry Tocharian, but the mutations of
divinities or of mythical motifs are subject to no rules. The validity of a
comparison, therefore, cannot be tested in the same way, by reference to
a standard, but has to be judged on its intrinsic appeal. The total harvest will
certainly be modest in comparison with the quantity of linguistic material
available for the reconstruction of Indo-European speech.
As the various Indo-European tribal groups spread into new lands and
contacts between them weakened, they became exposed to other cultural
influences of many kinds. The Hittites came into the cultural orbit of the
Hattic, Hurrian, and Mesopotamian civilizations, and their society, religion,
and mythology were transformed as a result. The Greeks absorbed much
from previous Aegean culture and from contacts with the peoples of the
Near East. If we take the principal gods of the Homeric Olympus –– Zeus and
Hera, Leto, Apollo and Artemis, Poseidon, Athena, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes,
Aphrodite –– we find that only one of them, Zeus, has a clear Indo-European
ancestry. The rest either developed on Greek soil or were taken over from
other peoples with whom the Greeks came in contact. Zeus himself has
(^58) Cf. Durante (1976), 15. On the origin of the spoke-wheeled chariot see Robert Drews, The
Coming of the Greeks (Princeton 1988), 107–57; D. Anthony and N. Vinogradov, Archaeology
48(2) (1995), 36–41; EIEC 627 f.; E. W. Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi (London 1999), 203 f.;
E. E. Kuzmine, JIES 29 (2001), 12–17.
24 Introduction