with their weapons and horse and a tumulus was raised. Pagan Prussian
nobles were still cremated or interred with horses, male and female slaves,
weapons, hunting dogs, and other precious offerings in the thirteenth
century, as were Lithuanian kings even later.^150
None of this evidence takes us back before the Late Bronze Age, and we
cannot simply project it back to the proto-Indo-European era. The Indo-
Europeans, in all probability, did not practise cremation, which first appears
among the Hittites and spreads into Greece and northern Europe from the
thirteenth century .^151 On the other hand, the tradition of tumulus burial
goes back into the fourth millennium and is characteristic of many of the
cultures that feature in models of Indo-European expansion.^152 Burial with
weapons and horses is also widely and early documented by archaeology.^153
Cremation is a separable element which, when introduced, could be prefixed
to the older practice of interment in a tumulus. The heroic burials described
in Homer, the Maha ̄bha ̄rata, Beowulf, and so on may be considered as
regional manifestations of a broad current of tradition and practice common
to most of the aristocratic societies of Late Bronze and Iron Age Europe.
LamentsLaments for the dead hero lend themselves to poetic treatment, and besides
general references to ritual wailing and breast-beating by a body of women^154
we often find composed laments put in the mouth of someone who was close
to the deceased. In the Iliad it is said that he or she $ξHρχε γο ́ οιο, ‘led the
lamenting’ (18. 316, 24. 723, 747, 761, cf. 721); the others present are treated
as a kind of chorus giving responses (19. 301, al., $π? δC στενα ́ χοντο
γυνα4κε). Within this rather formal setting the poet gives us laments for
Patroclus by Achilles and Briseis (18. 324–42; 19. 287–300) and for Hector by
(^150) Sources in Mannhardt (1936), 41, 88, 123, 142 = Clemen (1936), 95. 20, 97. 25, 99. 16, 106.
35; cf. 174 = Clemen 107. 14; 334 f. Cf. Gimbutas (1963), 184–7.
(^151) Sergent (1995), 232, 234 f., 354. For discussion of Indo-European funeral customs cf.
Otto Schrader, Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde (Strasbourg 1901), i. 102–18,
123–36; id. (1909), 16–29; Feist (1913), 311–17; Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 725–30;
L. J. Hansen, JIES 8 (1980), 31–40; Sergent (1995), 232–8; K. Jones-Bley in Dexter–Polomé
(1997), 194–221; EIEC 151 (agnostic).
(^152) Especially Marija Gimbutas’ imposing Kurgan theory, on which cf. Mallory (1989), 182–5;
EIEC 338–41.
(^153) Cf. Feist (1913), 316 f.; Turville-Petre (1964), 272; Gelling–Davidson (1969), 168; EIEC
279.
(^154) A commonplace of Indo-European tradition; cf. Sergent (1995), 233. For India cf. AV 8. 1.
19; 12. 5. 48; 14. 2. 59–61 (women with loose hair who dance, wail, and beat their breasts); MBh.
- 64ff.; 11. 26. 40; 16. 8; Rm. 2. 70. 21 f.; 4. 19. 20, 24. 27–9.
498 12. Arms and the Man