Re: Indo-European Studies
H. M. Hubey (firstname.lastname@example.org)
7 Jul 1995 17:49:18 -0400
email@example.com (Gerold Firl) writes:
>A lack of historical consciousness was common until recently. Thucydides,
>one of the three great historians of classical greece, opened his history by
>stating that nothing of significance had occurred prior to 400bc! This
>should be seen as an indication of both the lack of knowledge about what
>happened in the past, as well as a mark of the state of mind in which the
>ancients lived; the world was very finite for them, in both time and space.
>Their span of knowledge was small, a tiny bubble of space-time which they
>carried around wherever they went.
There could be another reason for this residues of which might be
gleaned in pieces in other places.
For some strange reason it seems to be Indo-European speakers who
seem to think that they possessed something which others allegedly
did not. For example, Russians called Germans nyemtsi (mute) because
they did not speak Russian. Greeks called others barbarian. Even in
Iran in modern times we find them callling a Turkish tribe Farsi-madan
(those who don't know Farsi). For some strange reason these people
thought themselves center of the universe, or their language to be
some kind of a divine gift (which nobody else had) or else like many
really primitive people did not know that others existed. The last
reason could imply that they were cut off from the rest of the
world in some hidden place like between mountains, or surrounded
by a marsh or whatever.
I keep thinking that the best place for this in Inner Asia someplace
from which they burst forth and reached Europe, Iran, India and further
east all around the same time.
>they appear in the middle-east; around 1500bc. They may have reached shang
>china around the same time, since their characteristic two-wheeled chariots
>suddenly appeared contemporaneously. The vedas were not written down until
So it was almost simultaneous.
There are strange parallels in legends of other peoples. For example
the she-wolf legend exists among Turkic peoples. The word for
"bull" is "bugha/Bogha" which sounds a lot like bhagas or Bog (God in