thank you for prioritizing historical contexts around religions and not just theology! your channel is an important reminder that both the past and present are richly nuanced
Nowadays, theology is all about historical context. Iconoclasm, monothelitism, Filioque, Donatism, and Monophysitism only make sense in a historical context.
@@ferretyluv Not even close. Monotheism if something keeps proving to be a mere political stance, thanks to archaeology and history. That abrahamic mindset is incredibly alien to ancient religions, and that is incredibly noticeable studying stuff like the PIE religion and it's linguistic and cultural connections.
@@xiuhcoatl4830 Monotheism was essentially created as a result of political pressure. Forgive me for not remembering exact details, but at some point various places were told they could keep their independence under the empire as long as they all followed the same doctrine, which led to a whole bunch of council meetings and people compiling the lessons and beliefs of various peoples into a single self-coherent belief system with a single god. Studying any pre-Abrahamic theology leads one to a massive influx of revelations of literary theft.
I also had no idea, and it took me until reading your comment to consider how naming the largest planet in our solar system "Jupiter" makes a lot more sense knowing this
I would love to see a whole series on reconstructed Indo-European religion because it's so fascinating. One of my favourite examples is how we can be pretty sure that the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived inland because we know they had words for bodies of water but not specifically for the sea. Many sea gods from Indo-European mythologies had strange associations with things other than the sea (Poseidon was the god of horses and storms, Neptune was the god of springs) that suggest that they weren't originally worshipped as sea gods and only became associated with the sea after their peoples migrated to coastal areas.
Interesting. The vedic sea god Varuna is also the god of justice, truth and medicine. His name comes from the root vr - to bind. He carries a noose to bind the wicked and unrepentant sinners. Ouranos, the Greek god of the sea, also binds Cyclopes.
I absolutely adore linguistics and religious studies separately, and it's awesome watching these videos of you putting them together. Thank you so much
@@lemokemo5752 I honestly don't know, but I also don't see how that would change anything. He regularly puts out great material which is why I watch him.
8:34 The powers of Dyaus Phter was transferred to his son -the God Indra -in Vedic mythology. Indra is the supreme God and the king of the Gods. He wields a thunderbolt weapon and has slayed a serpent demon . This is almost identical to Zeus and Jupiter. Similarly, in Germanic mythology the thunderbolt weapon and serpent slaying are attributed to Thor but his father Odin is the king of the Gods . So there are some regional variations.
@@PraveenKumar-z3e2yvedic indra had dyaus and prithvi as his parents. All of that changed and got retconned with the later texts. Now indra is the son of kashyapa
@@PraveenKumar-z3e2y I think it's in the puranas where his parents got changed to kashyap and aditi. Indra from the vedas had dyaus and prathvi as his parents
As a geneticist, I want to point out that we now have access to a lot of valuable genetic data that can help answer these questions about the origin of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. We don't have to rely on linguistic and cultural data alone anymore. For example, when considering the distribution of clades within the R1 hablogroup in modern humans as well as from DNA from preserved human remains, it is likely that the original speakers of the PIE formed after hunter gatherer populations from Eastern Europe mixed with hunter gatherers from the Caucus mountains. And given that important domesticated animals associated with the spread of Indo-European (IE) languages, such as horses, are grassland species that naturally inhabited steppe regions, such as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, it is quite likely that the ancestral Indo-European culture formed in that region, where it eventually spread west into Europe and East into India and parts of the Middle East. From a genetic perspective, there was a westward migration into Europe from the East around 4,500 years ago, where many of the original inhabitants of Europe were mostly displaced by the new migrants, with some genetic mixing. These migrants are referred to as Western Steppe Herders (WSH), and most Europeans derive most of their ancestry from these people. Since the arrival of these WSH corresponds with the timing of the spread of Info-European languages into Europe, it is very likely that these WSH spoke the PIE language. Also, the amount of loanwords shared between modern Indo-European and Uralic languages suggest that there was linguistic mixing between the early speakers of the two language families. And since the Uralic languages are distributed in the regions near the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, this is further support that the the Indo-European languages originated there, as opposed to further south in the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, genetic data shows that the peoples who lived in Europe before the WSH were agriculturalists who originated on the Islands of the Aegean Sea, referred to as Eastern European Farmers (EEF). So there definitely is good evidence for a migration of people into Europe from the Aegean, but those peoples were mostly displaced by the WSH, where most modern Europeans have more WSH ancestry than EEF ancestry, which suggests that it was the WSH who spread Indo-European languages, not these Aegean farmers. It is usually the language of the displacers that survives, not the peoples being displaced. I personally believe that the Basque language is a descendent of the language spoken by the EEF. Not only is the Basque language not of Indo-European-European origin, the Basque people have the highest EEF DNA of all Europeans. In summary, using genetic data to determine migration patterns into Europe, which correspond with the spread of languages, I think there were three major language families brought to Europe since the beginning of the Holocene: There was an original migration of hunter gatherers into Europe after the end of the Ice Age (11,700 years ago). And those hunter gatherers probably spoke a family of language belonging to a language family that has no living representatives, because those hunter gatherers were then replaced by the Eastern European Farmers, who came from the Aegean a few thousand years after and spread agriculture into Europe. And then, the Western Steppe Herders, from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, spread into Europe some 4,500 years ago, bringing horses and mostly displacing the EEF and their languages. And it was the WSH who brought the Indo-European-European languages into Europe. I hope more research goes into determining whether Basque could be a descendant of the languages spoken by the EEF. I honestly don't know here else Basque could have come from, especially since the Basque people have so much EEF ancestry. Interestingly enough, using the DNA from bodies buried around Stonehenge, we can see the major shifts in ancestry.
You wrote "hablogroup" instead of "haplogroup" which is a brilliant unintentional pun since "hablo" means "I speak" in Spanish, which brings us back to IE linguistics.
My knowledge of genetics and linguistics is admittedly quite minimal, but I do like to consider myself somewhat of an amateur historian, and I've developed quite an interest in these subjects as of late (especially the Yamnaya and corded ware, maykop, and Sintashta cultures). I think your basque theory sounds quite plausible given the DNA results, and I'd love to read more about it. Care to point me in the direction of some reading material? Preferably not too much of a heavy read, I don't really have the time to make a study out of it unfortunately ;-)
I think the Basque word for "knife" which is something like "aintz" is similar to the Basque word for stone, suggesting that the word was coined at a time when knives were made of stone, as opposed to Bronze.
@@stein1919 You're thinking of axe (aizkor) which roughly translates as "tough rock". Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to live in the Basque country
Note that the word Dyeus is still being used in modern Romance languages for "God" - dios in Spanish, dio in Italian, dieu in French, deus in Portugese etc., as well as in other modern Indo-European languages - deity in English, theos in Greek (d became th), dievs in Latvian, Deva/Devas in modern descendants of Sanskrit, but also diva in many south Asian languages...
Pre-Indoeuropean is literally the most interesting concept ever. It might be because I was already interested in Greco-Roman civilization AND Hinduism, but the whole idea is just endlessly fascinating. Mention PIE and you've immediately got my attention!
"Pre-Indoeuropean" is used for all those peoples and languages living in areas later conquered and assimilated by Indoeuropeans, for example Vasconics in much of Europe, Elamo-Dravidians in South Asia, Hattics and others in Asia Minor... You may mean the so-called "Pre-Proto-Indoeuropean", which, at least per this video, would be what I call "proto-PIE", i.e. the linguistic precursor of PIE (Proto-Indoeuropean). My take is that it corresponds to a Neolithic culture in what is now NE Turkey, that would explain the slight linguistic overlap with Basque at "proto" level (as Vasconics originated in what is now Southern Turkey, not too far from them. For example, Basque says bear as "hartz", which is much more closely related to PIE *hrktos than to its derived western versions like Latin "ursus" or Celtic-Gaelic "mathun" (Brythonic has a form "arz" but lacks the aspiration /h/ and may well be a Basque-influenced back-borrowing). Credit for this to Prof. Roslyn Frank, about the only US linguist who speaks Basque. Another example is "ash", which has a clear PIE root *hesHs but is almost identical to Basque "hauts" (ash, dust), again missing the original PIE aspiration. This is my own finding. There are many, I counted around 15% plausible cognates Basque-PIE in a mass lexical comparison, which is not massive but well above the 10% noise threshold, there must have been some ancient contact (sprachbund) even if the languages almost certainly do not derive from each other. IMO that happened in the early Neolithic, at the northern edges of the Fertile Crescent (which was surely very linguistically diverse at the time, the Pelasgo-Tyrsenian or proto-Etruscan family, once widespread in Anatolia and the Balcans before reaching Italy, surely was also there, East of Göbekli Tepe).
@@LuisAldamiz haha no I meant, "proto" I just have a bad habit of saying "pre". Thanks for sharing this information with me though, that's especially fascinating to learn about the inclusion of residents of Gobekli Tepe and other Neolithic cultures in the shared antecedents of PIE. Hearing about your research has definitely answered some of the questions that I had after seeing this video, so thanks again for taking the time to explain the subject in greater detail. Hope you have a great day!
@@t0xcn253 - IDK, IMO the GT culture (whose archaeological name is Novi Cori, frm a nearby site where people actually did live) just went extinct (as culture): we don't see any sign of their expansion. Not sure how exactly it happened but probaly they were absorbed by their expansive eastern neighbors of Halaf culture, which are IMO precursors of Etruscans, Pelasgoi and other peoples from Asia Minor and the Balcans I call Pelasgo-Tyrsenians (but linguistically are just "Tyrsenic", as only Etruscan = Tyrsenian and Lemnian, a very similar language from an island near Troy, are clearly documented). But it is indeed interesting that, at least as far as I can discern, the magnificent monument (and maybe center of primitive cultural and material exchange between early farmers) is located between these three cultures that would later expand to Europe. Not everyone would agree, especially the pre-PIE people but there's very little other alternative, knowing, as we know now, that Zagros-Caucasus genetics were strongly involved at their genesis (also in the Elamo-Dravidian group, mind you and all the Mesopotamian arch (Sumerians for instance) -- genetics does not seem to directly imply linguistic affinity but they are still somehow related, while more Western groups of the Levant and Anatolia have another distinctive genetic pool (a range, less homogeneous maybe in terms genetic but more closely related in terms cultural as PPNA/B).
@@LuisAldamiz Wasn't the Zagros-Caucasus genetics in steppe people mediated by women, which doesn't inspire confidence in them also mediating PIE into a patriarchal society. As for Anatolian Neolithic genetics, it doesn't amount to much in steppe people. I would place PIE in the EEHG half of steppe ancestry.
Here’s another weird one, Cerberus in Greek mythology and an underworld dog named Sarvara in Hindu mythology, they think they both go back to the same mythological creature in the Proto-Indo-European religion.
@@rockfrimaybe they were thinking about leopards or other predators I don’t think there were spotted dogs before we created modern dog races with selective breeding. But I could be wrong maybe they existed already I am not sure take it with a pinch of salt
On the point of reconstructing myths, it is telling how many cultures share similar stories (not just in the indo-european family). A deity associated with the sky defeating a mighty serpent associated with chaos and using its remains to construct the world (Chaoskampf), a dog that watchfully guards over the underworld, a pair of twins who travel to the underworld, etcetera.
And yet to think these were all fabrications feels very wrong. Something happened back then, something our ancestors could only understand and record as myth and legend. We will never know, unless it happens once again.
Conclusión: Benevolent, organized aliens fought chaotic, beastial xenos with Earth as a battleground and we've been worshipping our saviours ever since.
Laugh if you will, but I am a Christian and the more videos like this I see, the more the Bible's cosmology falls into place. Myth is important people! It's the pattern of reality!
I'm actually reading The Horse, the Wheel, and Language right now! Pretty dense, but observing the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin is extremely cool.
@@gwynbetts29 Ancient languages were far more mathematical and structured than modern languages where every syllable/letter carried with it a meaning. DeUs originally meant "light of God/heaven" similar to the word KaOs which originally meant "voice of God/primordial waters manifesting from God's voice" - light and sound/photons and phonons/energy and vibration is now found to be the fundamental building blocks of our existence.
@@suriel8164 that's interesting. "Primordial waters" "KAos". In the Vedas, the first god created by God (Vishnu) is called KA. KA is later called Brahma, who marries the goddess of speech. God (Vishnu) lays down on primordial waters which were manifested from His meditation. From there, all gods were born. The importance of sound is that Vishnu first uttered OM, the primeval sound that was the seed of creation.
@@Himanshu_Singh793 Yes brother - Hinduism is really an umbrella term for many divergent philosophies, but I believe studyijg etymology is the key to figuring out what the ancients originally believed. The original vedic teaching in my opinion is of Brahman (the infinite) who created through Vac (voice) which later became personified as the cow coddes (hence the word Vac is synonymously used for voice as well as for cow in Sanskrit/Latin). The letters BRHM originally meant "one that is beyond comprehension/finite definition" and also "that which satiates/fulfills". Likewise SheVa linguistically means "source of the voice" but is also translated as "nothing" meaning the voice/speech (things created of matter/ripples within the waters") is NOT like the one who speaks so God is not a "thing" conposed of matter/energy like me and you but the source of it - hence "nir va na" linguistically meant "not of the voice" i.e. where one transcends the temporal realm of time/space/matter to find the timeless/blissful presence of God. In my opinion, the advaita school is probably the most authentic and true to original vedic teaching as is also in line with abrahamic monotheism. God bless.
The way you present this information and the way you are wary of the uncertainties regarding such historical, archaeological and linguistical studies shows an acute sense of truth and a healthy dose of scepticism. Wish more people would approach subjects with as much care and knowledge as you do, especially when presenting those subjects publicly. Never stop spreading knowledge please, people like you are a gift and should be cherished!
YES. I would absolutely LOVE more PIE religion content from you. Your way of presenting information is next level and everything Proto-Indo-European is massively underrated! 🙏
In indigenous Siberian and Mongolian religions, we know the highest deity as Tenger, тэнгэр (Tengri/Taniz in other languages). A very common epithet is Tenger Etseg, тэнгэр эцэг. Tenger means sky and etseg means father; the epithet names them Sky Father. I've always wondered if there was a cultural connection between the Mongolic Tenger Etseg and the Indo-European Father Sky, and other deities. It is not inconceivable, as they both originate in the Eurasian steppe and are known to have had contact.
Europeans and Siberians share a common group called Afontova Gora. There's also some Blonde people in Mongolia, meaning that some sort of Aryans went there at some point. So likely related if not just inspired
Difference is that it clashes with the sedentary civilization of the yangtze river making it an isolated case study of how an imperialistic nomadic pastoralist clash with a sedentary city state government with it's own set of belief or ideology.
I read that the inhabitants of the Seven-river-region in souther Siberia have a story where it is said that the local rulers were topplet by a rebellion of their servants. The servants married the daughters of the former rulers, the former rulers married the daughters of the former servants. If the former rulers were Indo-European and the former servants Turks and Uralics it would explain why Turks and Uralics still living in Siberia look like European-Asian hybrids.
My favourite linguistic factoid is one regarding the word for bears. There is a split since the PIE where the word for bear was considered taboo in some areas (which have lots of bears). Where the etymology of bear comes from the word brown, and approximates to “the brown one”, the original word was more similar to Arctus or ursa. So in some areas people wouldnt mention the name of the brown ones. Making a split in the language, which at the start would have been 100% regional, as in they could speak the same language but use different phrases to talk about the same thing.
For some reason Chechen is not considered indo-europian language, but in our language "day" is "de" (you would probably pronounce it like "Deh") and "God" is "Dela" (Delah) which is a construction of two words "De" and "Ela" (means "King"). Also father is "Da" (like russian "Duh")
The relationship between religion and language seems fascinating, it would be interesting to see how religions differ depending on the language family associated with them.
@@ethanjacobrosca7833 That's because the month Easter fell in was named after the goddess in Germanic languages. Like how in English and Latin languages, March is named after the Roman god, Mars, and Saturday is named after the god Saturn. Easter the festival has no connection to Eostre, though. Any more than the 4th of July is an annual feast to a deified Julius Caesar. In pretty much every non-Germanic langauge (including Latin languages and Greek) Easter is called Pascha/Passover because it shares roots/origins with the Jewish holiday
@@RevengeOfIjapa Eostre is where the *name* Easter comes from. She had a feast roughly around the same time. No one's saying that's where the custom itself originated. At most, hares might be a germanic association.
2:57 vedic Sanskrit, Hittite, and Avestan Iranian 4:26 including Indonesian 5:00 dialects 6:52 concept of God 7:11 gods being called 9:15 dawn daughter Hewsos 9:56 Sehk 10:51 predate second millenium bce and after 5000 bce 11:32 Pontic-Caspian Steppe 11:42 Yamnaya culture people
Love the video! I particularly like that the Lithuanian language had a brief cameo in it. For those who don't know, among all modern living languages, the two Baltic ones; Lithuanian and Latvian, are said to have retained the most Proto-Indo-European features. Also, Lithuanians technically were the last "pagans" in Europe to be baptized.
There still exist actual "pagans" in European Russia. The Finno-Ugric Mari people have retained a continuous religious tradition despite conversion attempts from both Muslims and Orthodox Christians throughout the centuries. It has been influenced to a degree by both Christianity and Islam, but it's been kept alive all this time and it's not a constructed neo-Pagan religion based on later Christian texts or something of the sort that most "pagans" practice.
@@nzx. It will be soon wiped out in this century, the Islamists in the subcontinent don't want it to. Islam and Christianity has wiped out native ancient religions since their inception.
If my late father were alive (1923-1996) nowadays, he'd be completely addicted to your channel. And he's the person that got me into history in general.
I learned pashto for the military and it was very interesting first learning about these similarities. I feel like most people would expect pashto and latin derived languages to be extremely different, yet they have so many similarities and root words it is almost absurd. One thing I find very interesting is that words that are closer to the family, and closer to needs tend to stay very similar- we go from pater and even in pashto, the word is now 'plaar'. It is familiar but not identical. Two is 'dwa', which of course is EXTREMELY similar. Those basic numbers are so important to every day life that they must have stayed common throughout history. Words that mean water are also highly similar through all of these languages (Aqua, agua, and in pashto, auba- very silly). Family names and things like agriculture too- for instance, when English was conflated with Norse, many of the family names stayed similar to old English. The 's' plural indicator was a norse thing that was applied because of English women being... well, adopted into their new families by those who stayed. Those old english words (Children? BRETHEREN? Bretheren became brothers, but children never became childs. who decided to call cows cattle????) are still with us today, but lots of the less familiar ones are gone or heavily corrupted. English may be a mutt language but so is everything else!!!!!
it’s very interesting to see a non-pashtun spot all this cause its rare for people to learn it. I’m a native pashtun but i find pashto to be a very strange language compared to its neighbors, because it’s ancestor language got isolated in the mountains mainly because they were pushed down by other northern nomadic persian then turks (which also led to many dialects) it retained many more older proto-indo-european features compared to its neighbors. the most interesting to me is the confusion with “blue” because there is no such word, it’s just used with green which is “sheen” and i heard that was a common occurrence in older languages and that certain irish still has it similar. which is interesting cause their both on the other ends to each other but isolated from neighbors. Pashto can’t even be traced properly but traces of every language can be found in it, the number system sounds more similar to russian and balkan, while farsi and hindi sound more similar to each other. There are many vocab in pashto which are very uninfluenced and specific to the language, very strange considering farsi devoured most other eastern iranian languages. Pashto’s grammar is also a mix of suffix and prefix like mashing latin and balkan grammar together. Farsi is definitely more similar to romance languages though, with things like “biradar and brother, padar padre, mother madre etc”. We learn a lot about who we are by learning who our neighbors are
I made a presentation on Proto Indo European and their mythology for one of my classes. It's such an insightful video. I wished this video came out two months ago.
Interestingly, the most important* god of the vedas is Indra, who is the god of war, sky, storms, and lightning, and who literally uses a ligthning thunderbolt weapon called vajra. I had no clue Dyaushpitr was a thing before this video and just assumed that Indra was the Zeus-Jupiter equivalent, and looking into it it seems that though Indra's parentage is inconsistent in the vedas, he is sometimes in fact identified as son of Dyaushpitr. So it's clearly more complex than i thought before, maybe the introduction of Indra was a later development within vedic tradition and the roles and attributions once given to Dyaushpitr were associated to Indra instead, Dyaushpitr being relegated to a minor deity *important as by far the most mentioned and praised, as there's no fixed hierarchy of gods implied in the vedas, whenever a god is invoked, they are spoken of as the supreme being
Indra is considered to be the son of Dyaus, but as is typical with Proto-Indo-European religions, the son and father are often considered to be one and the same, and often they will use their names interchangeably, especially with the more 'cosmic' seeming gods I think there is a belief I've seen that Indra was a real figure, and was beloved so much that they believed him to be the Son of Dyaus, but also Dyaus himself born as a man, and so they began to say Indra instead of Dyaus. I forget where I read this, but they also argued that Odin underwent a similar thing.
This is so cool! Years ago I took a seminar course on P.I.E. and Lithuanian in college and I remember being pleasantly surprised that after only a few weeks of study in the basics of P.I.E., they had us reading the first ever Lithuanian printed book (Mažvydas' 1547 catechism) in the original with no real difficulty. Granted, according to the course write up, Lithuanian is hypothesized to have been the least-changed of all surviving Indo-European languages, so maybe it wasn't so amazing, but it was still pretty neat! Now that's 15 years later, all I can remember is the words for "hi!" and "eggs" (labas and kiaušiniai, respectively), but the discussion of historical linguistics in this video brought back some happy memories. Thank you, RFB!
The Indo-European homeland must have been modern day Japan, because that's where all inhabitants(ancient population centers) of India, Greece, Persia(Iran+Iraq), Anatolia came from ?? When Ice-age Ice receded from middle and upper Central Asia, you move in, not move out ? Thats why Horse carts. Some people were moving in , not moving out.
A funny thought about the prehistoric wagons that occurred to me is that it establishes an ancestral link between the modern concepts of "live in a van down by the river" and "return to tradition"
@@LuisAldamiz Interestingly enough I recently heard about a guy who's been doing it out in the northwest like oregon for over a decade,just lives in his little wagon with his sheep and has a youtube channel about it.
For more on language development, NativLang here on YT is pretty darn good. If you're interested in the history of the English language, starting with PIE, The History of English Podcast is absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for this coverage which brings together two favorite topics.
The thing I think is the most cool about PIE, is that we can infer the development of society. Like IE languages share a root for wheel and cooper, but not all share a word root for iron. We can then infer that iron production was a development that occurred after PIE started to split into new language groups and copper production and use of the wheel occurred before the split. Ik there are others, but that is the example that comes to mind. Its so cool that linguistics can point that stuff out.
I've been intrigued by this concept of a common root for many religions since I first heard about it, it just makes so much sense when you start to compare, especially the creational and foundational myths of different cultures. There are still so many depths to uncover.
To connect the God and the Sky, in Latvian we have slightly outdated expression "Dieva diena", "a God's Day", to describe perfect, cloudless sky/day. Sounds like "There is only God above today". But to entangle it even more, "Tēvs" in modern Latvian is "Father", which sounds like Greek "Theus". So, just one consonant apart, we have a single word for God, Sky, and Father. I got slightly excited on the slide at 9:15. I knew about PIE Héwsōs being Greek Eos and Latvian Austra, but never met Iranian version. The thing is that our deity of spring renewal and guardian of horses is called Ūsiņš. While the ending "-iņš" is mostly perceived as a diminutive, it (debatably) could mean "subordinate" or "descendent", like English "-ling". Spring, the son of Daybreak, huh? Makes me ponder the cosmology of our nomadic ancestors.
The concept of sky seems to be different tho. I studied asian myths as a historian and it seems to me that they count the ground as a part of Sky. They probably wanted to mean Space or Universe. The word used for Space, "Uzay" seems to be invented in last century and it means "Far-" and "-ay" suffix probably adapted from Mongolian. So we could make a literal translation, like "Ranged". "Evren" the word used for universe on the other hand meant Dragon, and I never saw an instance of it to describe anything space related.
Your channel is one of the most interesting ones on RUclips. Every single video is so engaging and educational, I'm extremely grateful for the work you put into your videos.
I'd love your take on the relationship between Indo-Iranian religions, comparing the Avestan and Sanskrit, the Vedas and the Gathas, the Ahuras and Asuras, Devas and Daevas relationships etc
I actually found the word for Dyeus Pater in Persian, it's "Deev Pedar" Deev in Persian means demon because the Avesta believes that Ahura(which itself is a cognate with Asura in Sanskrit and Aesir in Old Norse) is the sign of goodness and Deev is a sign of devilry. But at the end, it refers to something inhuman and immortal. And Pedar obviously means Father in Persian.
While Indo-European is the biggest language family in terms of the number of speakers, Austronesian is actually the family with the most languages in it.
@@feather1229 You're right that there were Indo-European languages that were spoken in India before colonisation, but that is not the only country affected by colonialism. There are also large parts of Africa, all of the Americas, and Australia.
Yes I'm high school dropout with a GED but I absolutely love this stuff my whole life and I've read books and now watch all the RUclips channels I can on the subject for the last 50 years so thank you for this it is wonderful 👍😊
Great video! Fell down a PIE rabbit hole, especially in relation to religion and migration and was wondering if anyone on RUclips had anything about it. Found your vid and immediately subscribed upon watching.
Five minutes in and this is already easily among the more accurate representations of knowledge from several branches of linguistics I've seen in a RUclips video 😅
I am muslim and iranic from Afghanistan but all praises to sky father of indo europeans.I am ethnically Pashtun from Afghanistan which mean i am indo European so as indo European i respect relegion of my ancestors
Congratulations on a great episode. You mentioned the Hittite language, have you any plans for a show on the “Land of 1000 Gods” including the Hittite or Hurrian Pantheons? Or any episodes on pre Indo European Paleolithic or Neolithic religion, or the groundbreaking work of Jacques Cauvin on the development of symbolic thought and the “Birth Of The Gods”
The way linguistic relationships can imply or preserve aspects of long gone cultures, preserving small hints of long gone stories and beliefs, just really tickles my interest in world-building for science fiction and fantasy; I am definitely going to be learning more about it!
You're hinting that it's possible to think something without inheriting the belief from your ancestors? The internet is full of guys who try to "think with their blood."
Imagine thousands of years from now, some aliens trying to reconstruct our mythology of Spiderman, with nothing to go on but his name, Spiderman, and that he was some kind of hero figure. They could never dream of the richness and all the particulars of his story, the things that make him what he is, the backstory and everything. Likewise, when we are looking back at these ancient peoples, we should keep in mind that they surely had rich stories for their mythological characters, too, and what we can deduce from just a name, like DeusPater, is just a tiny tip of big iceberg.
Interesting idea, but most stories don't really last over such timespans, only few have a sufficient selective advantage. How many of the stories told by people thousand years ago you actually know? I'd say just couple, and most of these are related to cultural or religious concepts which were established already back then for hundreds if not thousands of years in a form or another. Spiderman is a bit over sixty year old, mostly a commercial concept without much of a religious cult outside United States. Without continuous literal tradition and continuous interest of supporting it I would expect it - just counting probabilities of competing interests - to first turn into a historical curiosity, and eventually disappear from any relevance or linguistic effect over coming 100-500 years as almost all ideas do. After all, it's pretty presumptuous to assume that future is set in stone by our current fads and interests...
@@foobar1500 Um. I don't think that's what they were saying at all. Since we don't have much left to work with other than tiny fragments (like a possible name), it can be easy to view ancient peoples and their culture as simple. The Spiderman example is being used as a way to consider how ancient peoples storytelling was not necessarily any less rich than the people of today. It doesn't actually matter how relevant Spiderman may or may not be in the future. That wasn't the point.
This is really fascinating. It's becoming more and more evident that ancient people were more interconnecting than we moderns would intuitively give them credit for
He just said in the video we have known about the indo european language family for more than a century. Also this is just evolution from a common ancestor. Nothing really ground breaking. It's fascinating, sure, but I don't like how many alternative media spin that narrative of "the ancients were an interconnected civilization". It leads to people like Graham Hancock getting the spotlight
@@theghosthero6173 and it doesn't mean all Europeans and such go back to this ancestor. People lived in Europe before the tribe arrived who spoke PIE. They just carried their language with them and for other reasons the language become the dominant language in the places they arrived in. But the interconnectedness of the civilizations after they "broke off" is not something we can conclude based on the fact that the language had a common ancestor ..
@@silasfrisenette9226 yes I agree with you. Trade was a thing far back in time, but people love to fantasize about people going far and teaching others about things while we mostly have proof for commodities traveling from hand to hands.
Sky Father, Mother Earth and Sun Deity (who serves Justice/Sees everything) (sometime divided into two deities, like Varuna-Mithra) are very common across various cultures and probably propagated from one common ancient religion. Also, Avesta and Veda share a lot of cognate terms, hinting that both had a common parent language which branched into their own thing.
@@kishandubey7882 And if he's christian, there's many "pagan" traditions embedded in Christianity. I'm from Mexico and i'm surprised that many of the traditions i thought were 100% Catholic actually came from European folk traditions and even some Amerindian ones (since Christian missionaries in the Americas oftentimes allowed people to keep practicing some traditions to make conversion easier).
This was a favorite topic of mine when back in the day as an undergraduate (not quite the Neolithic) I began reading up on linguistics. I found out that in the late 19th c it was usual for anyone studying linguistics to master Lithuanian, which was thought to be the closes European relative to PIE. As it happened, I ended up marrying a Lithuanian, but I'm no closer to the PIE in the sky (father)...
I learned about PIE existence just after finishing my university PR degree and before my specialisation in Teaching, way back in 2001. It has fascinated me ever since, I have read tons of materials, wrote a couple papers and bought some books. What I highly recommend for going deeper into this (although it will be an advantage if you speak more than one modern European language) is the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European roots. Hard to read and check but fascinating through and through. Greetings from Argentina.
The Indo-European homeland must have been modern day Japan, because that's where all inhabitants(ancient population centers) of India, Greece, Persia(Iran+Iraq), Anatolia came from ?? When Ice-age Ice receded from middle and upper Central Asia, you move in, not move out ? Thats why Horse carts. Some people were moving in , not moving out.
In turkic and mongolian languages, there is also a sky father god : Tengri or Tenger. It seems plausible that there was an ancient religion of the steppes, which transcended the language barriers, and was common to both PIE and Turko-Mongols nomads. In Uralic langages, Jumala is a sky god and that word has become synonymous with god.
@@Mixran Uralic, Altaic, and old indo-european share a LOT of common history and influences. The Scythians and proto-scythians, the Tokharians, the Hunic, the various Finno-Ugrian populations of the eurasian steppes have certainly exchanged words, ideas, genes and beliefs, before the advent of history. That's not the case with far-away african populations, separated by the Mediterranean sea and the Sahara desert. Of course, I can't prove that Tengri is Dyeus-pater. But that one may have influenced the other seems possible.
I am absolutely thankful for your videos about the Indo-European 'gods', I've tried to read into these subjects, but they were a little complicated for me, especially with the Indo-European ""spellings"" of words - I'd be very grateful if or whenever you feel like making more of those!
The Indo-European homeland must have been modern day Japan, because that's where all inhabitants(ancient population centers) of India, Greece, Persia(Iran+Iraq), Anatolia came from ? When Ice-age Ice receded from middle and upper Central Asia, you move in, not move out ? Thats why Horse carts. Some people were moving in , not moving out.
Nice episode there about the Proto Indo-European history and their ancient religion. I hope you should also make an episode about the usage of the ancient symbol of Swastika and why the Nazis used that symbol on their evil ideology.
Germans/Nazzis used to call that hakenkruez (hooked cross) not swastik .It were British who deliberately made the Indian sanskrit word swastik famous across Europe as a part of their agenda to demoni ze people of India and justify their occupation here .
As a linguist I have to say this is a wonderful introduction to historical linguistics! You covered all the necessary points very clearly. I especially appreciate that you drew attention to the fact that reconstructions are imperfect and are just linguists' best guesses. P.S. If you really want to get deep into some PIE debate, check out some papers on the glotallic theory! There has been a lot of back and forth about how typologically plausible the mainstream reconstruction of the PIE consonant system is, and whether or not an entirely different interpretation is more plausible. Personally I think that the mainstream reconstruction has a lot of problems, but I'm not sure the glotallic theory has all the answers.
Etymology and PIE roots of modern words are so fascinating. I know we'll never be able to learn very much about the PIE people themselves, but what a legacy they left behind!
@@trollarasan Systematic correspondence between sounds. Vindication of laryngeal hypothesis with Hittite retaining two of the three laryngeals in word-initial position. Inconsistencies in grammar such as the verb 'to be' from *h₁ésti where there's a consistent alteration between forms that start with a vowel and other forms that start with 's-'. Clear evidence of the language being related and that means they descend from and ancestral language which the evidence points to.
i'd LOVE to see more stuff about prehistoric religion both speculative and archaeological, if you have any interest in doing that. also as a linguistics nerd i love any discussion involving p.i.e. and other super early languages. prehistoric cultures are my biggest interest in history (besides very early christianity) but they're usually not very accurately discussed on youtube thanks to all the alternate history/atlantis proponents that live here. it's a shame.
Don't forget about the Germanic god *Tiwaz (heard about Tuesday? That's named after him) and the fact that in Romanian, an eastern romance language, the word god, as in "a god" is written and pronounced zeu, almost the same as Zeus, which reinforces the hypothesis that the sound D and Z are related in words like Dios in spanish and Zeu in Romanian.
Finally an indepth video on this! I hope we could get another part that maybe delves into the idea of Perkwunos as the hypothetical origin of the Sky-father/Thunder God.
Wolf Dieter Storl, ethno-botanist, has done a huge amount of research about ancient gods and myths and how they share similarities around europe and even indigenous Americans. His talks about "Frau Holle" are beautiful
Há uma conexão entre Dyaus Pitr e os outros deuses celestiais. Dyaus é a origem da palavra deus, que significa céu, luz do dia etc. ou seja, é uma divindade da qual criou-se o conceito de "deus". No fundo, parece que inúmeras religiões tem o "papai do céu"
Hm... I remember vaguely that there seems to be some kind of motif shared by many cultures with the notion that a God of the Sea (or western) and a God of the Sky (or eastern) were in conflict. Poseidon vs Jupiter, Enki vs Enlil, Indra vs Varuna. Then there are over several epochs some references that seem to indicate a shism of cultural conflict and shifting borders over time associated through god names and their affairs toward each other. Asura were at the beginning seen as much as benevolent like Devas, but over time had been deemed to be evil lesser gods from the hindu point of view, while on the persian side Deva had become the root for evil bringing Dew or Daeva, similar to Devil in our english nowadays. Ahura (from Asura?) is ressembling interestingly enough the name of Assur, the old-assyrian city, also known as Ashur. I wonder if some religious myths correspondent directly with political affairs over several era.
@@Himanshu_Singh793 The opposition between Varuna and Indra is as far I know not depicted that much and was described from a person I read from, that looked for correspondence between Veda, Rigveda and Avesta. It was like some tension between two aspects of one thing (principle of Rulership) later, since those deities are from a much older time period and changed over time in their cultural meaning, it was not that clear. Fact is, that Indra was more famous in India later and Varuna seemed to be "absorbed" or linked with Indra, before even Indra became meaningless as deity in later time. What stick up with me was the one thing about one being of the west and the other of the east (it was to be honest somewhat a wild and somewhat vague association game, I was sceptic at that time). My personal stakes here is just the parallels between many namings between indian/hindu and persian/zoroastrian (and in part afrosemitic) regions/cities/gods/devils, that indicates that there was more cultural connection once, before it split and diversified. I was also reading some links between Abrahamitic and few Brahamic stories, that were quite interesting, which is part of my little "search". I came up over a decade ago, that Varuna and Ahura Mazda are linked/associated by some who compared those myths, and that Angra Manyu was associated with Ahriman (unfortunately that was a long time ago, before I was taking it more "serious"). After that I was looking into more and found many similarities that span over to many cultural epochs. What do you think about the Names Assur/Ashura and Asura/Ahura? Coincidence? A City named after a God in Assyria, those references in India became negative over time. What I was hinting at, is that there are several names between those regions switching their meaning along a region which is between (around nowadays Hindukush Region). The Varuna vs Indra is the weakest one of my examples. I was talking about several motifs being shared, in some part even diametrical inversed in their opposition, over many regions, that would have been at least by trade and somewhat migration over several times culturally linked at some point. It looks like that some Cults and religious movements, that had been growing communities (originating near India at the Hindukush) eventually settled in other regions (in part toward the West) and had different conditions to thrive, while becoming meaningless in India.
@@Chareidos dharmic/brahmic faiths have no connection to abharamic faiths please dont connect us to them, They will start saying we should convert to abharamic faiths and stuff.
@@snipescyth7944 I spoke about historic connections, that definitely must had been there at some point of time in human history to explain certain coincidences in the namings. People did not exist in isolation, they did trade, shared narrations and common roots. Most of those had been long before hinduism was what it is now, long before abrahamitic religions were diversified from other cultures. I talked about pre-islamic/pre-abrahamic context. Nowhere am I implying that one should convert to the other. There are several more things that draw the connection in the past already. It is known, that Herodot thought of jewish priests as the descendants of indian philosophers. (if it is true or not stands on another page). It is told, that Jesus was known as Buddha Isa in the eastern parts, and that he traveled to many places and religious sites in his younger age, before he came back to his home to be crucified, becoming the Icon of a social movement before that symbol became more or less that Idol of worshippers. It is clear that abrahamitic religions had not plopped out of thin air from non-existence. Many cultural motifs, spiritual symbols, theological concepts had been developing and influencing each other. Without any means of accusing you of anything, but you speak somewhat in bad faith about those who would act in bad faith themselves with their argument that everyone should convert to the "newest" iteration. The argument could be also reversed, meaning that abrahamitic religions derived from brahmanic and pre-brahmanic religions and should rejoin the bigger context. This is just contemporary politics! I am not operating in terms of membership and groupings, I am talking about many lingual coincidences that hints to more cultural exchange and diversification in the past over several times. In the end ALL humans are linked somewhere in history. Who would deny that?
i was aware of the linguistic evidences some suggest for PIE people being potentially nomadic animal herders with horses (words like axle, vehicle, etc) , but i had not heard of the hypothesized connection to the archaeological group of yamnaya people - really interesting stuff!
Actually it's much more than just "hypothetical" today: nobody half-serious challenges that anymore, even the main opponent, Lord Renfrew, acknowledged that he was wrong after all before dying, Gimbutas was quite exactly right instead. However Yamna is only the first(-ish) expansive phase in Europe (East Balcans primarily, looting and destroying what I sometimes call "the first European civilization" in what is now Bulgaria approx.) and it's rooted to an older culture spanning the North Caucasus and Lower Volga callde Khvalynsk culture (and even older relation would be Samara culture at the Volga but it's not fully clear). By the time Yamna (Yamnaya is the adjective form AFAIK, both are used) coalesced, two groups had already diverged (IMO): 1. The Anatolian (Luwio-Hittite) branch was already a different cuture in the NW Caucasus (Maykop) and woul expand more or less simultaneously southwards (Kura-Araxes culture). 2. The Tocharian branch had also spread to Altai (Afanasevo culture) when Yamna coalsced. 3. Additionally it's worth mentioning that East (Volga) and West (East Balcans) Yamnaya are linked by another group that is only partly Yamna-like, the complex phase of Sredny-Stog in what is now East and North Ukraine and nearby parts of Russia (lower Don basin) and Belarus. It was a mix of Yamna-like elements and Dniepr-Don ones, these being local pre-Indoeuroeans and a very ancient local population (Paleolithic roots). They may be important in the genesis of later Corded Ware, which would be the most important expansion of Indoeuroeans into non-Eastern Europe and root of all Indoeuropean languages of Europe (minus Albanian and plus Armenian surely). Eastern Yamna (less hierarchical than the Western branch) remained behind and is, most likely, at the origin of Indo-Iranian languages.
This is my first video from you but this topic is so interesting for me that I feel that you could have dug so much deeper into every point you talked about, all the connections and similarities between the PIE society and people to the ones that followed them in early history
Proto-Indo-European religion may have been very alike on Tengriism i.e. the common naturalistic-shamanic religion of other Central Eurasia cultures non-closely related into language, yet very alike in development on sociocultural ways adapted to the particular temperate-semi-dry long plain-shrublands of Central Eurasia, as later groups as Mongols and Turkic people developed a similar religion on their own, where their highest god-being is some Sky God called Tengri hencefort the name. The same related issues happen on Siberian people and Pre-Buddhist Bon religion on Tibet too.
There is a great influence of Proto-Turkic and Mongolic culture on PIE, as it seems. It wouldn't be so surprising since they lived together as a confederation of tribes under the name of Scythians which was ruled by a Proto-Turkic ruler class. Most probably, after they saw and adopted how to tame and ride horses and use wheels, PIE spread into Europe with their culture.
@@Soykancelik7 well it could have been that all of them had a common way of living and seeing things in the world for sharing more or less the same-environment where they lived rather than being properly influenced each other. Furtherlymore it´s unknown on true certain way if the PIE are older than the Proto-Mongolian and/or Proto-Turkic people, though certainly all or most of them might have shared a furtherly background ancestor and a similar POV which derived into common spiritual-religion ways according to the large Central Eurasian Steppes and Inner Asia semi-desertical plateaus. From all of that and the common ancient inner/Central Asia highlands as the Altai, Tian-Shan, Pamir, Kuen-Lung, Altyn-Tag, TransHimalaya, Hindu-Kush and Karakorum mountains plus the Urals and Caucasus, happened to be a common shared backround development rather than being one culture overall influencing the others and so far the Scythians though extending a lot through Central and Inner Asia, happened to be labeled more as PIE related than Turkic or Mongol so far as I know about them. (Also makes furtherly sense related to the enigmatic people of Chinese Turkestan, i.e. modern Xingiang Uygur province and nearby Tibet and Inner Mongolia areas where the Yuezhi/Tocharian people lived including their mysterious ancestors of the White-Europeoids/Caucasian-like mummified people of the Tarim bassin river on Takla-Makkan and Gobi Inner Asia deserts and nearby Tian-Shan and Altai mountains, which seemed to be PIE related than Tukic or/and Mongolian actually.)
@@ShivamRaina-dm9df I don´t think Hinduism got a big wisepread of their ideas religion beyond their territory except on nearby areas surrounding the Indian subcontinent, as it´s a furtherly closed-ethnocentric religion, much alike Jews, Zoroastrians and some Musilm sectons, so couldn´t expand much influencing outside, so it had to be other people with more open-inclusive ideas as Christianity and Buddhism, which also moved more outside their original area. However I could give you some rightfullness as not Hinduism itself but their previous common Indoeuropean religion, from which came the Vedic religion into India as well the closely related Zoroastrian Mazdeism at Persia, which got very wisepread on Central Asia as the litttle-known but important BMAC or Oxus civilization rise up for a while, setting the earliest large commercial and cultural trades on long distance between Western and Eastern worlds. being itself a long forgotten forerunner of Silk Road, and very cosmopolitan as latter Central and Inner Asia kingdoms, empires and cultures became.
@@lhadzyan7300 If you know about we Brahmins you never say it .Buddhism that whole religion came from us.Buddhism was always used a kings tool by Kings ,they got against of us .There is nothing new in Buddhism
There was a 3rd factor that may have helped the Yamnaya spread their culture and presumably their PIE languages: it is now know they are carriers not just of Proto IE languages but also of Proto Yseni-pestis ie bubonic plague. Would like to see more posts on those findings and research
Hi! I'm new to the channel but I very much enjoy your videos! I'm a history major with a minor in religious studies student and your videos sometimes are better than some of my classes hahaha. I was wondering if you ever considered in making a video about Kardecism and Allan Kardec. Thank you! Keep up the amazing videos
Well for the IE branch we cannot go beyond the PIE in regards to the reconstruction. The Uralic language family turned out to be more fruitful as it goes significantly further back in time.
I don’t know if it is a some sort of cultural convergent evolution due to the same kind of environmental boundaries or a result of cultural interaction (or exchange), old Turkic religion (Tengrism) had a very similar supreme sky deity called “Tengri”. Tengri basically meant sky and he was like the father figure in the religion. So I wonder if there are any explanations for this similarity. Perfect work as always, thanks for the highest quality!
Turkish is not an Indo-European language, nevertheless, Turkey was a long-time home to Indo-European languages starting with Hittite and Palaic and others, and even after the Bronze Age collapse, Luwian (an Indo-European language spanning most of Turkey, possibly what the Trojans spoke) persisted. The Luwian sky god was Tiwaz, which is linguistically related to Tyr, Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus, etc. Tiwaz is also stunningly close to how the Norse Tyr is reconstructed in Old Germanic. Possibly there was also even earlier cultural contact between Indo-European cultures and Turkic cultures on the Eurasian Steppes.
@@toddmcdaniels1567 I feel like there would've almost certainly been contact between the two in the steppes since the environment facilitates so much rapid migration and movement between peoples.
The steppe, from modern day Hungary to Xinjiang, China, was for a long time populated by an Iranian (and thus speakers of an Indo-European language) people called the Scythians or Saka, who were in contact with the earliest recorded Turkic/Mongolic peoples. Early Turkic peoples did have an immense amount of Saka influence in their culture. I wouldn't be surprised if Tengri is among the influences.
@@keshav3479 I suspect you are quite likely correct. I understand now that the distribution of Tengri within Turkic extends well beyond the geographic confines of Turkey, and Turkey is not an original homeland for the Turkic family of speakers generally. So, the more economical solution would be to posit contact at an earlier point before extensive dispersal of Turkic peoples.
The History of English podcast has some pretty good opening episodes on the P.I.E language and an argument for placing their point of origin somewhere near the area placed in this video. Of all the theories I've heard so far it's one I think holds the most water. On another point I really appreciate how Dr. Henry points out the fact that so far all this is truly just speculative till someone digs up some physical evidence. There have been a couple comparative mythology youtubers I've seen who have tried to make videos arguing for the "concrete" authority of these guessed at "original myths" and even some trying to say the stories in the Hebrew Bible all stem from the original P.I.E speakers as if the Arbramahic religions are actually ancient North Eastern European religions and boy... that's not one I'm soon to believe till we dig up tons of evidence.
Great video - I can't help but see similarities between your description of Indo-European culture of the Pontic Steppe and modern day Romani gypsies (including wagon burials) - maybe a throwback to the region's nomadic past?
The Vedic God Dyeus Pitr became Zeus Pater in Greece, became Ju - Piter in Rome and became Thor in Norse. They share almost same mythology, characteristics, behaviour, position etc.
@@kalpanaghimire1342 I think the answer would be somewhere along the lines..."Rome is more Vedic than Greece" which is very fascinating since one would usually think Greece to be a predecessor of Rome in terms of cultural/religious sense. So "more Vedic" certainly means less distortion in the linguistics of Sanskrit.
@@phoenixj1299 thanks for the reply. I wouldn't say 'distortion' . There are 2 Sanskrits- the Vedic and the Classic. The Vedic Sanskrit of the ancient Vedas is 'archaic' and can be difficult even for Sanskrit scholars. In the 6th century BC, the great grammarian Panini reformed the Sanskrit grammar and linguistics, syntax and semantics rules so scientifically and tightly that his reformed Sanskrit became the language of scholaship and litterature as well as the grammar basis of all Indic languages. This is the Classic Sanskrit of even today. His works were discoved by Europeans in early 19th century and when studying Linguistics at the Sorbone University in Paris, I was surprised to hear the professor talk of Panini as 'father of Linguistics'. There is much debate these days as to his grammar being the framework for a universal grammar' and thus to be taught to the AI.
@@kalpanaghimire1342 Absolutely. And yes agree that "distortion" is a strong word. "Different manifestation" would be a more accurate term. And yes the sophistication of Sanskrit is unparallel. Thanks for the information by the way 😊
Thor was seen the same by the Greeks and the Italians but he is a completely different God from a different mythology. Δίας - Dio in Italian means God. They had their own name for Zeus… that’s why they got Jupiter… just like Aphrodite and Venus or Ares and Mars
Umay comes from uma which is an Indian diety and tengri is shiva her husband who is a god in Hinduism, also tengrism is tantric which is shamanic and so it falls even more in line cuz shiva does have those aspects. But turks are not indo-Europeans also tengrism was later borrowed from Hinduism and it is still a major faith along with buddhism which also comes from Hinduism, some mongolians and chinese people do follow tengrism.
thank you for prioritizing historical contexts around religions and not just theology! your channel is an important reminder that both the past and present are richly nuanced
Nowadays, theology is all about historical context. Iconoclasm, monothelitism, Filioque, Donatism, and Monophysitism only make sense in a historical context.
Thankfully, most people are moving away from actually taking the delusions of religious nutjobs seriously
@@ferretyluv Not even close. Monotheism if something keeps proving to be a mere political stance, thanks to archaeology and history. That abrahamic mindset is incredibly alien to ancient religions, and that is incredibly noticeable studying stuff like the PIE religion and it's linguistic and cultural connections.
@@xiuhcoatl4830 Monotheism was essentially created as a result of political pressure. Forgive me for not remembering exact details, but at some point various places were told they could keep their independence under the empire as long as they all followed the same doctrine, which led to a whole bunch of council meetings and people compiling the lessons and beliefs of various peoples into a single self-coherent belief system with a single god. Studying any pre-Abrahamic theology leads one to a massive influx of revelations of literary theft.
@@SamuraiMasenko And you can look even before that, during the maccabee rebellion against the seleucids. One nation, one people, one god.
Learning Jupiter came from Sky-Father rather than being an independent name really blew my mind.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyaus
Why will u think that?
Wait til u learn yhwh is the exact same sky father
Specifically, the word dzey-wois
I also had no idea, and it took me until reading your comment to consider how naming the largest planet in our solar system "Jupiter" makes a lot more sense knowing this
@@hominhmai5325 That's pseudoscientific, but go for it bud
Dyus Pitr is directly mentioned in Rig Veda
And when we Hindus perform rituals we chant - Dyuas Shanti which means - the sky is peaceful
We are so lucky that we were not swallowed by Abrahamic religions
May thy sky remains in peace
@@indianboy59 how tf are you Hindu and have that emoji in your name
💩💩💩💩💩🚽
@Christopher John who gets to define who's "civilised"?
I would love to see a whole series on reconstructed Indo-European religion because it's so fascinating. One of my favourite examples is how we can be pretty sure that the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived inland because we know they had words for bodies of water but not specifically for the sea. Many sea gods from Indo-European mythologies had strange associations with things other than the sea (Poseidon was the god of horses and storms, Neptune was the god of springs) that suggest that they weren't originally worshipped as sea gods and only became associated with the sea after their peoples migrated to coastal areas.
Poseidon was also an underworld deity in our most ancient records of Greek gods, predating Hades' introduction to the pantheon
My understanding is that Poseidon is considered to be a break off from the sky father which is why the bull is one of his motifs.
I suggest checking out the channel Crecganford. He does exactly that for a lot of myths.
@@jaredlash5002 agreed.
Interesting. The vedic sea god Varuna is also the god of justice, truth and medicine. His name comes from the root vr - to bind. He carries a noose to bind the wicked and unrepentant sinners. Ouranos, the Greek god of the sea, also binds Cyclopes.
I absolutely adore linguistics and religious studies separately, and it's awesome watching these videos of you putting them together. Thank you so much
May I recommend Crecganford here on RUclips. An expert in indo-european mythology, he specializes in just this.
Same
@@Sporathandersson isn't he a pagan practicer as well?
Agree!!
@@lemokemo5752 I honestly don't know, but I also don't see how that would change anything. He regularly puts out great material which is why I watch him.
8:34 The powers of Dyaus Phter was transferred to his son -the God Indra -in Vedic mythology. Indra is the supreme God and the king of the Gods. He wields a thunderbolt weapon and has slayed a serpent demon . This is almost identical to Zeus and Jupiter. Similarly, in Germanic mythology the thunderbolt weapon and serpent slaying are attributed to Thor but his father Odin is the king of the Gods . So there are some regional variations.
Dyaus is not father of indra
@@PraveenKumar-z3e2y He was in the early scriptures. A lot of the mythology was revamped later with Kashyapa gaining that position
@@PraveenKumar-z3e2yvedic indra had dyaus and prithvi as his parents. All of that changed and got retconned with the later texts. Now indra is the son of kashyapa
@@parthkhanolkar7916 no no verses mention this he is son of Aditi and Kashyap
@@PraveenKumar-z3e2y I think it's in the puranas where his parents got changed to kashyap and aditi. Indra from the vedas had dyaus and prathvi as his parents
As a geneticist, I want to point out that we now have access to a lot of valuable genetic data that can help answer these questions about the origin of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. We don't have to rely on linguistic and cultural data alone anymore. For example, when considering the distribution of clades within the R1 hablogroup in modern humans as well as from DNA from preserved human remains, it is likely that the original speakers of the PIE formed after hunter gatherer populations from Eastern Europe mixed with hunter gatherers from the Caucus mountains. And given that important domesticated animals associated with the spread of Indo-European (IE) languages, such as horses, are grassland species that naturally inhabited steppe regions, such as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, it is quite likely that the ancestral Indo-European culture formed in that region, where it eventually spread west into Europe and East into India and parts of the Middle East. From a genetic perspective, there was a westward migration into Europe from the East around 4,500 years ago, where many of the original inhabitants of Europe were mostly displaced by the new migrants, with some genetic mixing. These migrants are referred to as Western Steppe Herders (WSH), and most Europeans derive most of their ancestry from these people. Since the arrival of these WSH corresponds with the timing of the spread of Info-European languages into Europe, it is very likely that these WSH spoke the PIE language.
Also, the amount of loanwords shared between modern Indo-European and Uralic languages suggest that there was linguistic mixing between the early speakers of the two language families. And since the Uralic languages are distributed in the regions near the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, this is further support that the the Indo-European languages originated there, as opposed to further south in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In fact, genetic data shows that the peoples who lived in Europe before the WSH were agriculturalists who originated on the Islands of the Aegean Sea, referred to as Eastern European Farmers (EEF). So there definitely is good evidence for a migration of people into Europe from the Aegean, but those peoples were mostly displaced by the WSH, where most modern Europeans have more WSH ancestry than EEF ancestry, which suggests that it was the WSH who spread Indo-European languages, not these Aegean farmers. It is usually the language of the displacers that survives, not the peoples being displaced.
I personally believe that the Basque language is a descendent of the language spoken by the EEF. Not only is the Basque language not of Indo-European-European origin, the Basque people have the highest EEF DNA of all Europeans.
In summary, using genetic data to determine migration patterns into Europe, which correspond with the spread of languages, I think there were three major language families brought to Europe since the beginning of the Holocene:
There was an original migration of hunter gatherers into Europe after the end of the Ice Age (11,700 years ago). And those hunter gatherers probably spoke a family of language belonging to a language family that has no living representatives, because those hunter gatherers were then replaced by the Eastern European Farmers, who came from the Aegean a few thousand years after and spread agriculture into Europe. And then, the Western Steppe Herders, from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, spread into Europe some 4,500 years ago, bringing horses and mostly displacing the EEF and their languages. And it was the WSH who brought the Indo-European-European languages into Europe. I hope more research goes into determining whether Basque could be a descendant of the languages spoken by the EEF. I honestly don't know here else Basque could have come from, especially since the Basque people have so much EEF ancestry.
Interestingly enough, using the DNA from bodies buried around Stonehenge, we can see the major shifts in ancestry.
You wrote "hablogroup" instead of "haplogroup" which is a brilliant unintentional pun since "hablo" means "I speak" in Spanish, which brings us back to IE linguistics.
My knowledge of genetics and linguistics is admittedly quite minimal, but I do like to consider myself somewhat of an amateur historian, and I've developed quite an interest in these subjects as of late (especially the Yamnaya and corded ware, maykop, and Sintashta cultures). I think your basque theory sounds quite plausible given the DNA results, and I'd love to read more about it. Care to point me in the direction of some reading material? Preferably not too much of a heavy read, I don't really have the time to make a study out of it unfortunately ;-)
I think the Basque word for "knife" which is something like "aintz" is similar to the Basque word for stone, suggesting that the word was coined at a time when knives were made of stone, as opposed to Bronze.
@@stein1919 You're thinking of axe (aizkor) which roughly translates as "tough rock".
Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to live in the Basque country
@@howlrichard1028 oh wow. very cool.
Note that the word Dyeus is still being used in modern Romance languages for "God" - dios in Spanish, dio in Italian, dieu in French, deus in Portugese etc., as well as in other modern Indo-European languages - deity in English, theos in Greek (d became th), dievs in Latvian, Deva/Devas in modern descendants of Sanskrit, but also diva in many south Asian languages...
Deux is two. ;)
@@davidlericain He meant *Dieu :p
@@jean-michelnadeau2833 I know. Hehe.
Deus in Portuguese
Deity in English
I remember reading a paper by an Irish scholar on similarities between Old Irish language and rituals and those of India. It was fascinating.
I think I may have read a similar paper....?
Link?
Link?
Link
liiiink!
Pre-Indoeuropean is literally the most interesting concept ever. It might be because I was already interested in Greco-Roman civilization AND Hinduism, but the whole idea is just endlessly fascinating. Mention PIE and you've immediately got my attention!
"Pre-Indoeuropean" is used for all those peoples and languages living in areas later conquered and assimilated by Indoeuropeans, for example Vasconics in much of Europe, Elamo-Dravidians in South Asia, Hattics and others in Asia Minor...
You may mean the so-called "Pre-Proto-Indoeuropean", which, at least per this video, would be what I call "proto-PIE", i.e. the linguistic precursor of PIE (Proto-Indoeuropean). My take is that it corresponds to a Neolithic culture in what is now NE Turkey, that would explain the slight linguistic overlap with Basque at "proto" level (as Vasconics originated in what is now Southern Turkey, not too far from them.
For example, Basque says bear as "hartz", which is much more closely related to PIE *hrktos than to its derived western versions like Latin "ursus" or Celtic-Gaelic "mathun" (Brythonic has a form "arz" but lacks the aspiration /h/ and may well be a Basque-influenced back-borrowing). Credit for this to Prof. Roslyn Frank, about the only US linguist who speaks Basque.
Another example is "ash", which has a clear PIE root *hesHs but is almost identical to Basque "hauts" (ash, dust), again missing the original PIE aspiration. This is my own finding.
There are many, I counted around 15% plausible cognates Basque-PIE in a mass lexical comparison, which is not massive but well above the 10% noise threshold, there must have been some ancient contact (sprachbund) even if the languages almost certainly do not derive from each other. IMO that happened in the early Neolithic, at the northern edges of the Fertile Crescent (which was surely very linguistically diverse at the time, the Pelasgo-Tyrsenian or proto-Etruscan family, once widespread in Anatolia and the Balcans before reaching Italy, surely was also there, East of Göbekli Tepe).
@@LuisAldamiz haha no I meant, "proto" I just have a bad habit of saying "pre". Thanks for sharing this information with me though, that's especially fascinating to learn about the inclusion of residents of Gobekli Tepe and other Neolithic cultures in the shared antecedents of PIE. Hearing about your research has definitely answered some of the questions that I had after seeing this video, so thanks again for taking the time to explain the subject in greater detail. Hope you have a great day!
@@t0xcn253 - IDK, IMO the GT culture (whose archaeological name is Novi Cori, frm a nearby site where people actually did live) just went extinct (as culture): we don't see any sign of their expansion. Not sure how exactly it happened but probaly they were absorbed by their expansive eastern neighbors of Halaf culture, which are IMO precursors of Etruscans, Pelasgoi and other peoples from Asia Minor and the Balcans I call Pelasgo-Tyrsenians (but linguistically are just "Tyrsenic", as only Etruscan = Tyrsenian and Lemnian, a very similar language from an island near Troy, are clearly documented).
But it is indeed interesting that, at least as far as I can discern, the magnificent monument (and maybe center of primitive cultural and material exchange between early farmers) is located between these three cultures that would later expand to Europe. Not everyone would agree, especially the pre-PIE people but there's very little other alternative, knowing, as we know now, that Zagros-Caucasus genetics were strongly involved at their genesis (also in the Elamo-Dravidian group, mind you and all the Mesopotamian arch (Sumerians for instance) -- genetics does not seem to directly imply linguistic affinity but they are still somehow related, while more Western groups of the Levant and Anatolia have another distinctive genetic pool (a range, less homogeneous maybe in terms genetic but more closely related in terms cultural as PPNA/B).
Odin von Tyrkenland rules all them ..
@@LuisAldamiz Wasn't the Zagros-Caucasus genetics in steppe people mediated by women, which doesn't inspire confidence in them also mediating PIE into a patriarchal society. As for Anatolian Neolithic genetics, it doesn't amount to much in steppe people. I would place PIE in the EEHG half of steppe ancestry.
I’m a big fan of linguistics and religious studies so I’m very happy to see you talking about this, keep up the great work!
Same. He provides another perspecitve and the more one learns the more learned ones.
whats wild is Dyeus kinda sounds like spanish Dios ruclips.net/video/qYhuePJG6Ac/видео.html hit CC for english subs if you need!
@@thatguyinaband6341 because Dios is a descendant of Dyeus
@@libbybibby1579 for sure! it's gotta be, makes me wonder what else about those languages have esoteric truths
you want to know the reality of hindiusm its horrible
Here’s another weird one, Cerberus in Greek mythology and an underworld dog named Sarvara in Hindu mythology, they think they both go back to the same mythological creature in the Proto-Indo-European religion.
they both mean spotted
Was it a Dalmatian dog?
@@rockfrimaybe they were thinking about leopards or other predators I don’t think there were spotted dogs before we created modern dog races with selective breeding. But I could be wrong maybe they existed already I am not sure take it with a pinch of salt
Not to forget Thor, Donar, Perun, and Indra. All red thunder gods with hammers which similar root words.
On the point of reconstructing myths, it is telling how many cultures share similar stories (not just in the indo-european family). A deity associated with the sky defeating a mighty serpent associated with chaos and using its remains to construct the world (Chaoskampf), a dog that watchfully guards over the underworld, a pair of twins who travel to the underworld, etcetera.
Even the flood
And yet to think these were all fabrications feels very wrong. Something happened back then, something our ancestors could only understand and record as myth and legend. We will never know, unless it happens once again.
Conclusión: Benevolent, organized aliens fought chaotic, beastial xenos with Earth as a battleground and we've been worshipping our saviours ever since.
Laugh if you will, but I am a Christian and the more videos like this I see, the more the Bible's cosmology falls into place.
Myth is important people! It's the pattern of reality!
Not the case. Don't expect anything worthy where Peterson pulls his ideas out from. It's his arse.
I'm actually reading The Horse, the Wheel, and Language right now! Pretty dense, but observing the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin is extremely cool.
It is cool.
In Welsh the word for god is dios, same as Latin.
@@gwynbetts29 Ancient languages were far more mathematical and structured than modern languages where every syllable/letter carried with it a meaning. DeUs originally meant "light of God/heaven" similar to the word KaOs which originally meant "voice of God/primordial waters manifesting from God's voice" - light and sound/photons and phonons/energy and vibration is now found to be the fundamental building blocks of our existence.
@@gwynbetts29 in Sanskrit, it is Deo/Dev.
@@suriel8164 that's interesting. "Primordial waters" "KAos". In the Vedas, the first god created by God (Vishnu) is called KA. KA is later called Brahma, who marries the goddess of speech. God (Vishnu) lays down on primordial waters which were manifested from His meditation. From there, all gods were born. The importance of sound is that Vishnu first uttered OM, the primeval sound that was the seed of creation.
@@Himanshu_Singh793 Yes brother - Hinduism is really an umbrella term for many divergent philosophies, but I believe studyijg etymology is the key to figuring out what the ancients originally believed.
The original vedic teaching in my opinion is of Brahman (the infinite) who created through Vac (voice) which later became personified as the cow coddes (hence the word Vac is synonymously used for voice as well as for cow in Sanskrit/Latin).
The letters BRHM originally meant "one that is beyond comprehension/finite definition" and also "that which satiates/fulfills". Likewise SheVa linguistically means "source of the voice" but is also translated as "nothing" meaning the voice/speech (things created of matter/ripples within the waters") is NOT like the one who speaks so God is not a "thing" conposed of matter/energy like me and you but the source of it - hence "nir va na" linguistically meant "not of the voice" i.e. where one transcends the temporal realm of time/space/matter to find the timeless/blissful presence of God.
In my opinion, the advaita school is probably the most authentic and true to original vedic teaching as is also in line with abrahamic monotheism. God bless.
The way you present this information and the way you are wary of the uncertainties regarding such historical, archaeological and linguistical studies shows an acute sense of truth and a healthy dose of scepticism. Wish more people would approach subjects with as much care and knowledge as you do, especially when presenting those subjects publicly. Never stop spreading knowledge please, people like you are a gift and should be cherished!
YES. I would absolutely LOVE more PIE religion content from you. Your way of presenting information is next level and everything Proto-Indo-European is massively underrated! 🙏
I love the study of etymology. This is such an interesting video.
That part about the link of Jupiter and Devas was really surprising, excellent video
Mondernday pakis are decendant of vedic ans sanrit origneted from afghanistan modernday hindus nothing to do with iranian -aryas
In indigenous Siberian and Mongolian religions, we know the highest deity as Tenger, тэнгэр (Tengri/Taniz in other languages). A very common epithet is Tenger Etseg, тэнгэр эцэг. Tenger means sky and etseg means father; the epithet names them Sky Father.
I've always wondered if there was a cultural connection between the Mongolic Tenger Etseg and the Indo-European Father Sky, and other deities. It is not inconceivable, as they both originate in the Eurasian steppe and are known to have had contact.
Europeans and Siberians share a common group called Afontova Gora. There's also some Blonde people in Mongolia, meaning that some sort of Aryans went there at some point. So likely related if not just inspired
Difference is that it clashes with the sedentary civilization of the yangtze river making it an isolated case study of how an imperialistic nomadic pastoralist clash with a sedentary city state government with it's own set of belief or ideology.
@@Panguman And mongoloid looks among high Norse & Icelanders like Bjork.
I read that the inhabitants of the Seven-river-region in souther Siberia have a story where it is said that the local rulers were topplet by a rebellion of their servants. The servants married the daughters of the former rulers, the former rulers married the daughters of the former servants.
If the former rulers were Indo-European and the former servants Turks and Uralics it would explain why Turks and Uralics still living in Siberia look like European-Asian hybrids.
@@rick149ou Wouldn't alot of that look just be because of Russians mixing there?
As a linguist I always enjoy hearing people talk about historical linguistics 😊
I study Zoroastrianism, and the scholarly work done on that is mainly dominated by linguists at the moment. Respect
My favourite linguistic factoid is one regarding the word for bears.
There is a split since the PIE where the word for bear was considered taboo in some areas (which have lots of bears). Where the etymology of bear comes from the word brown, and approximates to “the brown one”, the original word was more similar to Arctus or ursa.
So in some areas people wouldnt mention the name of the brown ones. Making a split in the language, which at the start would have been 100% regional, as in they could speak the same language but use different phrases to talk about the same thing.
I always wondered why the Spanish words dia (day) and Dio (god) were so similar! This is so interesting!
Dios with an s at the end but yes it makes sense
Day and deity are very similar in English.
In Portuguese too!
Dia(Day)
Deus(God)
For some reason Chechen is not considered indo-europian language, but in our language "day" is "de" (you would probably pronounce it like "Deh") and "God" is "Dela" (Delah) which is a construction of two words "De" and "Ela" (means "King"). Also father is "Da" (like russian "Duh")
@@riz1_kSame in Ingush language
The relationship between religion and language seems fascinating, it would be interesting to see how religions differ depending on the language family associated with them.
I like the Eos-Eostre-Ostara-Ishtar-Inanna-Isis-Astarte-Ushas-Uzume-Aurora-h2éwsōs goddesses best myself. Sun Lady!
Eostre video currently in the works. Stay tuned for April 2023.
@@ReligionForBreakfast may want to mention that the word Easter originates from the Germanic goddess Eostre.
@@ethanjacobrosca7833 That's because the month Easter fell in was named after the goddess in Germanic languages. Like how in English and Latin languages, March is named after the Roman god, Mars, and Saturday is named after the god Saturn. Easter the festival has no connection to Eostre, though. Any more than the 4th of July is an annual feast to a deified Julius Caesar.
In pretty much every non-Germanic langauge (including Latin languages and Greek) Easter is called Pascha/Passover because it shares roots/origins with the Jewish holiday
@@RevengeOfIjapa Eostre is where the *name* Easter comes from. She had a feast roughly around the same time. No one's saying that's where the custom itself originated. At most, hares might be a germanic association.
Eostre and Ishtar aren't related
2:57 vedic Sanskrit, Hittite, and Avestan Iranian
4:26 including Indonesian
5:00 dialects
6:52 concept of God
7:11 gods being called
9:15 dawn daughter Hewsos
9:56 Sehk
10:51 predate second millenium bce and after 5000 bce
11:32 Pontic-Caspian Steppe
11:42 Yamnaya culture people
Love the video! I particularly like that the Lithuanian language had a brief cameo in it. For those who don't know, among all modern living languages, the two Baltic ones; Lithuanian and Latvian, are said to have retained the most Proto-Indo-European features.
Also, Lithuanians technically were the last "pagans" in Europe to be baptized.
Well at least India is still keeping the flame alive.
There still exist actual "pagans" in European Russia. The Finno-Ugric Mari people have retained a continuous religious tradition despite conversion attempts from both Muslims and Orthodox Christians throughout the centuries. It has been influenced to a degree by both Christianity and Islam, but it's been kept alive all this time and it's not a constructed neo-Pagan religion based on later Christian texts or something of the sort that most "pagans" practice.
@@jokemon9547 yeah except Hindus, there are no real pagans still continuing. Maris were Christian since the last 8 centuries.
@@nzx. It will be soon wiped out in this century, the Islamists in the subcontinent don't want it to.
Islam and Christianity has wiped out native ancient religions since their inception.
There's still a large amount of practicing pagans in Lithuania.
If my late father were alive (1923-1996) nowadays, he'd be completely addicted to your channel. And he's the person that got me into history in general.
I learned pashto for the military and it was very interesting first learning about these similarities. I feel like most people would expect pashto and latin derived languages to be extremely different, yet they have so many similarities and root words it is almost absurd. One thing I find very interesting is that words that are closer to the family, and closer to needs tend to stay very similar- we go from pater and even in pashto, the word is now 'plaar'. It is familiar but not identical. Two is 'dwa', which of course is EXTREMELY similar. Those basic numbers are so important to every day life that they must have stayed common throughout history. Words that mean water are also highly similar through all of these languages (Aqua, agua, and in pashto, auba- very silly). Family names and things like agriculture too- for instance, when English was conflated with Norse, many of the family names stayed similar to old English. The 's' plural indicator was a norse thing that was applied because of English women being... well, adopted into their new families by those who stayed. Those old english words (Children? BRETHEREN? Bretheren became brothers, but children never became childs. who decided to call cows cattle????) are still with us today, but lots of the less familiar ones are gone or heavily corrupted.
English may be a mutt language but so is everything else!!!!!
You should research the Avestan language, it is a direct ancestor to Pashto, and likely bears even more similarities to Latin
it’s very interesting to see a non-pashtun spot all this cause its rare for people to learn it. I’m a native pashtun but i find pashto to be a very strange language compared to its neighbors, because it’s ancestor language got isolated in the mountains mainly because they were pushed down by other northern nomadic persian then turks (which also led to many dialects) it retained many more older proto-indo-european features compared to its neighbors. the most interesting to me is the confusion with “blue” because there is no such word, it’s just used with green which is “sheen” and i heard that was a common occurrence in older languages and that certain irish still has it similar. which is interesting cause their both on the other ends to each other but isolated from neighbors. Pashto can’t even be traced properly but traces of every language can be found in it, the number system sounds more similar to russian and balkan, while farsi and hindi sound more similar to each other. There are many vocab in pashto which are very uninfluenced and specific to the language, very strange considering farsi devoured most other eastern iranian languages. Pashto’s grammar is also a mix of suffix and prefix like mashing latin and balkan grammar together. Farsi is definitely more similar to romance languages though, with things like “biradar and brother, padar padre, mother madre etc”. We learn a lot about who we are by learning who our neighbors are
Dva is two in Yugoslav languages too
I made a presentation on Proto Indo European and their mythology for one of my classes. It's such an insightful video. I wished this video came out two months ago.
Interestingly, the most important* god of the vedas is Indra, who is the god of war, sky, storms, and lightning, and who literally uses a ligthning thunderbolt weapon called vajra. I had no clue Dyaushpitr was a thing before this video and just assumed that Indra was the Zeus-Jupiter equivalent, and looking into it it seems that though Indra's parentage is inconsistent in the vedas, he is sometimes in fact identified as son of Dyaushpitr. So it's clearly more complex than i thought before, maybe the introduction of Indra was a later development within vedic tradition and the roles and attributions once given to Dyaushpitr were associated to Indra instead, Dyaushpitr being relegated to a minor deity
*important as by far the most mentioned and praised, as there's no fixed hierarchy of gods implied in the vedas, whenever a god is invoked, they are spoken of as the supreme being
Indra is considered to be the son of Dyaus, but as is typical with Proto-Indo-European religions, the son and father are often considered to be one and the same, and often they will use their names interchangeably, especially with the more 'cosmic' seeming gods
I think there is a belief I've seen that Indra was a real figure, and was beloved so much that they believed him to be the Son of Dyaus, but also Dyaus himself born as a man, and so they began to say Indra instead of Dyaus. I forget where I read this, but they also argued that Odin underwent a similar thing.
Indra is Zeus/Jupiter, Dyaushptr is Kronos/Saturn, both dethroned and taken the title by his son.
They are invoked as the supreme being because they are. In the vedas into modern Hinduism, all gods are aspects of one god.
One god
Many forms
Indra is the god of lightning i think
He is the son of Dyaus pitŕ
Just like odin and thor
A bit like in the norse religion
At some point Thor became much more popular than odin
This is so cool! Years ago I took a seminar course on P.I.E. and Lithuanian in college and I remember being pleasantly surprised that after only a few weeks of study in the basics of P.I.E., they had us reading the first ever Lithuanian printed book (Mažvydas' 1547 catechism) in the original with no real difficulty. Granted, according to the course write up, Lithuanian is hypothesized to have been the least-changed of all surviving Indo-European languages, so maybe it wasn't so amazing, but it was still pretty neat! Now that's 15 years later, all I can remember is the words for "hi!" and "eggs" (labas and kiaušiniai, respectively), but the discussion of historical linguistics in this video brought back some happy memories. Thank you, RFB!
The Indo-European homeland must have been modern day Japan, because that's where all inhabitants(ancient population centers) of India, Greece, Persia(Iran+Iraq), Anatolia came from ??
When Ice-age Ice receded from middle and upper Central Asia, you move in, not move out ? Thats why Horse carts. Some people were moving in , not moving out.
I just wanna say, as a historical linguist, this is, like, the best video you could’ve ever put out, at least for me specifically
A funny thought about the prehistoric wagons that occurred to me is that it establishes an ancestral link between the modern concepts of "live in a van down by the river" and "return to tradition"
You'd want some sheep and open steppe to make a living of that.
okay, store enough litres of milk, we are about to go full expansion... Hail Aryavarta
@@LuisAldamiz Interestingly enough I recently heard about a guy who's been doing it out in the northwest like oregon for over a decade,just lives in his little wagon with his sheep and has a youtube channel about it.
@@ffwast - Beware: he probably looks like a harmless hippy but that's exactly how the Indoeuropeans kickstarted their conquest of half the world. 😝
Return 2 monke
This is such a fascinating topic and I am incredibly grateful you are talking about it! I hope to see more in that regard in the future ☺
For more on language development, NativLang here on YT is pretty darn good. If you're interested in the history of the English language, starting with PIE, The History of English Podcast is absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for this coverage which brings together two favorite topics.
I love NativLang!
The thing I think is the most cool about PIE, is that we can infer the development of society. Like IE languages share a root for wheel and cooper, but not all share a word root for iron. We can then infer that iron production was a development that occurred after PIE started to split into new language groups and copper production and use of the wheel occurred before the split. Ik there are others, but that is the example that comes to mind. Its so cool that linguistics can point that stuff out.
I've been intrigued by this concept of a common root for many religions since I first heard about it, it just makes so much sense when you start to compare, especially the creational and foundational myths of different cultures. There are still so many depths to uncover.
To connect the God and the Sky, in Latvian we have slightly outdated expression "Dieva diena", "a God's Day", to describe perfect, cloudless sky/day. Sounds like "There is only God above today".
But to entangle it even more, "Tēvs" in modern Latvian is "Father", which sounds like Greek "Theus". So, just one consonant apart, we have a single word for God, Sky, and Father.
I got slightly excited on the slide at 9:15. I knew about PIE Héwsōs being Greek Eos and Latvian Austra, but never met Iranian version. The thing is that our deity of spring renewal and guardian of horses is called Ūsiņš. While the ending "-iņš" is mostly perceived as a diminutive, it (debatably) could mean "subordinate" or "descendent", like English "-ling". Spring, the son of Daybreak, huh? Makes me ponder the cosmology of our nomadic ancestors.
Latvian Lithuanian languages are so common to our indian languages
Deiva dhinam is there in Tamil the southern most language, it's means the day of God
About the one God thing us Hindus have always believed in one God but the god is interpreted in many ways
They say Lithuanian is one of the most conservative Indoeuropean languages, so I'm not really surprised. Still very interesting.
Just a minor correction. Greek is Theos, the -us ending would be Latin (but actually makes Deus), in any case the connection sounds solid.
Sky Father is pretty universal in Eurasia. Turkic and Uralic people also had a main/central sky father god: Kök. Which probably meant the color blue.
Mongolic as well
@@itisprofile KekTengri blue sky
@@barguttobed same tradition
Also, we call the sky "Gök" in Turkish. And our ancient religion is "Gök Tanrı", which means "Sky God".
The concept of sky seems to be different tho. I studied asian myths as a historian and it seems to me that they count the ground as a part of Sky.
They probably wanted to mean Space or Universe. The word used for Space, "Uzay" seems to be invented in last century and it means "Far-" and "-ay" suffix probably adapted from Mongolian. So we could make a literal translation, like "Ranged".
"Evren" the word used for universe on the other hand meant Dragon, and I never saw an instance of it to describe anything space related.
Your channel is one of the most interesting ones on RUclips. Every single video is so engaging and educational, I'm extremely grateful for the work you put into your videos.
I'd love your take on the relationship between Indo-Iranian religions, comparing the Avestan and Sanskrit, the Vedas and the Gathas, the Ahuras and Asuras, Devas and Daevas relationships etc
Pandemonium is such a funny concept
I actually found the word for Dyeus Pater in Persian, it's "Deev Pedar"
Deev in Persian means demon because the Avesta believes that Ahura(which itself is a cognate with Asura in Sanskrit and Aesir in Old Norse) is the sign of goodness and Deev is a sign of devilry.
But at the end, it refers to something inhuman and immortal.
And Pedar obviously means Father in Persian.
@@descendedofrigvedicclans2216 ?
@@indianboy59You didnt understand. He was speaking proto dehati language
Avestan - Ahura = God
Sanskrit- Deva = God
Avestan- Daeva = Demon
Sanskrit- Asura = Demon
I did my undergrad in both linguistics and religious studies, so I am elated whenever PIE tcomes up as a topic!
I've tried to learn more about it, but a quite high percentage of information online quickly takes some uncomfortable white nationalist turns.
Awesome, you sell tires now?
@@emptyhand777 No, why?
@@EudaemonicGirl - it was a joke based on your major.
Like the shortest book ever written, "Career Opportunities for History Majors."
@@emptyhand777 what a clown you are
While Indo-European is the biggest language family in terms of the number of speakers, Austronesian is actually the family with the most languages in it.
Also the reason it has the most speakers is colonialism, doesn't really have anything to do with ancient peoples.
Islands maybe?
@@beethovenjunkie yes, but Indians speak Indo eripean languages (where do you think 'Indo' comes from?)
Way before colonialisation..
@@feather1229 You're right that there were Indo-European languages that were spoken in India before colonisation, but that is not the only country affected by colonialism. There are also large parts of Africa, all of the Americas, and Australia.
@@beethovenjunkie yes, but even if Brittish didn't invade India, we would still be speaking many Indo European language
Another great video as always many thanks
Yes I'm high school dropout with a GED but I absolutely love this stuff my whole life and I've read books and now watch all the RUclips channels I can on the subject for the last 50 years so thank you for this it is wonderful 👍😊
Same here.
Gedmatch?
Great video! Fell down a PIE rabbit hole, especially in relation to religion and migration and was wondering if anyone on RUclips had anything about it. Found your vid and immediately subscribed upon watching.
I would absolutely love it if you did more Proto-Indo-European religion videos. It's one of my favorite topics in the field of ancient religion.
OMG it’s about time this got brought up!
Five minutes in and this is already easily among the more accurate representations of knowledge from several branches of linguistics I've seen in a RUclips video 😅
The videos about Antiquity are the ones I enjoy the most. The quality of information you provide always impresses me. Thank you.
I like the coherent narrative of your videos, which even make an amateur like me understand the concept
I am muslim and iranic from Afghanistan but all praises to sky father of indo europeans.I am ethnically Pashtun from Afghanistan which mean i am indo European so as indo European i respect relegion of my ancestors
Make a Test DNA!
According to your picture you seems to be like any Greek. Your may be an ancestor to Alexander The Great.
Congratulations on a great episode. You mentioned the Hittite language, have you any plans for a show on the “Land of 1000 Gods” including the Hittite or Hurrian Pantheons? Or any episodes on pre Indo European Paleolithic or Neolithic religion, or the groundbreaking work of Jacques Cauvin on the development of symbolic thought and the “Birth Of The Gods”
The way linguistic relationships can imply or preserve aspects of long gone cultures, preserving small hints of long gone stories and beliefs, just really tickles my interest in world-building for science fiction and fantasy; I am definitely going to be learning more about it!
This is the video I've been looking for for a while. Thank you!
Wow two of my favorite topics, linguistics and religions, in one video. Awesome!
On the subject of sky gods, it'd be really interesting to learn about tengrism and related belief systems.
You're hinting that it's possible to think something without inheriting the belief from your ancestors? The internet is full of guys who try to "think with their blood."
@@faithlesshound5621 what on earth are you talking about?
@@freddypowell7292 The idea that men's religious beliefs are connected to their Y chromosomes.
@@faithlesshound5621 You are having a schizophrenic episode.
@@connorperrett9559 I presume your diagnosis is of "sluggish schizophrenia" with its characteristic "reformist delusions."
I could imagine that the sky's universality played a role in the sky fathers popularity
Imagine thousands of years from now, some aliens trying to reconstruct our mythology of Spiderman, with nothing to go on but his name, Spiderman, and that he was some kind of hero figure. They could never dream of the richness and all the particulars of his story, the things that make him what he is, the backstory and everything. Likewise, when we are looking back at these ancient peoples, we should keep in mind that they surely had rich stories for their mythological characters, too, and what we can deduce from just a name, like DeusPater, is just a tiny tip of big iceberg.
Interesting idea, but most stories don't really last over such timespans, only few have a sufficient selective advantage. How many of the stories told by people thousand years ago you actually know? I'd say just couple, and most of these are related to cultural or religious concepts which were established already back then for hundreds if not thousands of years in a form or another.
Spiderman is a bit over sixty year old, mostly a commercial concept without much of a religious cult outside United States. Without continuous literal tradition and continuous interest of supporting it I would expect it - just counting probabilities of competing interests - to first turn into a historical curiosity, and eventually disappear from any relevance or linguistic effect over coming 100-500 years as almost all ideas do. After all, it's pretty presumptuous to assume that future is set in stone by our current fads and interests...
@@foobar1500 Um. I don't think that's what they were saying at all. Since we don't have much left to work with other than tiny fragments (like a possible name), it can be easy to view ancient peoples and their culture as simple. The Spiderman example is being used as a way to consider how ancient peoples storytelling was not necessarily any less rich than the people of today. It doesn't actually matter how relevant Spiderman may or may not be in the future. That wasn't the point.
But they can also learn about how it's an imaginative character 😁
This is really fascinating. It's becoming more and more evident that ancient people were more interconnecting than we moderns would intuitively give them credit for
They were one tribe back when this mythology was starting to form 😁
He just said in the video we have known about the indo european language family for more than a century. Also this is just evolution from a common ancestor. Nothing really ground breaking. It's fascinating, sure, but I don't like how many alternative media spin that narrative of "the ancients were an interconnected civilization". It leads to people like Graham Hancock getting the spotlight
@@theghosthero6173 and it doesn't mean all Europeans and such go back to this ancestor. People lived in Europe before the tribe arrived who spoke PIE. They just carried their language with them and for other reasons the language become the dominant language in the places they arrived in. But the interconnectedness of the civilizations after they "broke off" is not something we can conclude based on the fact that the language had a common ancestor ..
@@theghosthero6173 (it was not meant as a correction or argument against you, I am in agreement with you, just added to your point)
@@silasfrisenette9226 yes I agree with you. Trade was a thing far back in time, but people love to fantasize about people going far and teaching others about things while we mostly have proof for commodities traveling from hand to hands.
Sky Father, Mother Earth and Sun Deity (who serves Justice/Sees everything) (sometime divided into two deities, like Varuna-Mithra) are very common across various cultures and probably propagated from one common ancient religion. Also, Avesta and Veda share a lot of cognate terms, hinting that both had a common parent language which branched into their own thing.
pagan ideas
@@عليياسر-ذ5ب Yours is also rooted in same traditions!
They are also extremely simple concepts that are easy to come up with independently
@@kishandubey7882 And if he's christian, there's many "pagan" traditions embedded in Christianity. I'm from Mexico and i'm surprised that many of the traditions i thought were 100% Catholic actually came from European folk traditions and even some Amerindian ones (since Christian missionaries in the Americas oftentimes allowed people to keep practicing some traditions to make conversion easier).
Christian missionary is a clever thing..they will keep your tradition but will enforce later to not follow
You gave a great presentation of this topic! I'm speaking as someone with both an MA and a BA in linguistics
This was a favorite topic of mine when back in the day as an undergraduate (not quite the Neolithic) I began reading up on linguistics. I found out that in the late 19th c it was usual for anyone studying linguistics to master Lithuanian, which was thought to be the closes European relative to PIE. As it happened, I ended up marrying a Lithuanian, but I'm no closer to the PIE in the sky (father)...
I learned about PIE existence just after finishing my university PR degree and before my specialisation in Teaching, way back in 2001. It has fascinated me ever since, I have read tons of materials, wrote a couple papers and bought some books. What I highly recommend for going deeper into this (although it will be an advantage if you speak more than one modern European language) is the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European roots. Hard to read and check but fascinating through and through. Greetings from Argentina.
The Indo-European homeland must have been modern day Japan, because that's where all inhabitants(ancient population centers) of India, Greece, Persia(Iran+Iraq), Anatolia came from ??
When Ice-age Ice receded from middle and upper Central Asia, you move in, not move out ? Thats why Horse carts. Some people were moving in , not moving out.
@@pcom9209 🤣🤣🤣 shut up would ya
If I looked up at the open sky
I would also assume that there was something sacred up there
Have you ever SEEN a sunset?
Of course it's one of the most beautiful things on Earth, the nature itself is the most beautiful thing
In turkic and mongolian languages, there is also a sky father god : Tengri or Tenger. It seems plausible that there was an ancient religion of the steppes, which transcended the language barriers, and was common to both PIE and Turko-Mongols nomads. In Uralic langages, Jumala is a sky god and that word has become synonymous with god.
More of a Buddhist influence. Gokturk adopted Buddhism at certain point in time.
@@Karlsewak-kempetai Those predate Buddhism in the area for centuries if not millennia. Xiongnu worshipped Tengri.
@@mecha-sheep7674 Africans also worshipped a sky father, its just a coincidence. There's no similarity between proto indo Europeans and mongols/turk
@@Mixran Uralic, Altaic, and old indo-european share a LOT of common history and influences. The Scythians and proto-scythians, the Tokharians, the Hunic, the various Finno-Ugrian populations of the eurasian steppes have certainly exchanged words, ideas, genes and beliefs, before the advent of history.
That's not the case with far-away african populations, separated by the Mediterranean sea and the Sahara desert.
Of course, I can't prove that Tengri is Dyeus-pater. But that one may have influenced the other seems possible.
@@mecha-sheep7674 dyeus Peter has nothing to do with tengri, stop appropriating history
I heard this theory before in a more rough edition. This was very well constructed. Well done.
I am absolutely thankful for your videos about the Indo-European 'gods', I've tried to read into these subjects, but they were a little complicated for me, especially with the Indo-European ""spellings"" of words - I'd be very grateful if or whenever you feel like making more of those!
The Indo-European homeland must have been modern day Japan, because that's where all inhabitants(ancient population centers) of India, Greece, Persia(Iran+Iraq), Anatolia came from ?
When Ice-age Ice receded from middle and upper Central Asia, you move in, not move out ? Thats why Horse carts. Some people were moving in , not moving out.
Nice episode there about the Proto Indo-European history and their ancient religion. I hope you should also make an episode about the usage of the ancient symbol of Swastika and why the Nazis used that symbol on their evil ideology.
Germans/Nazzis used to call that hakenkruez (hooked cross) not swastik .It were British who deliberately made the Indian sanskrit word swastik famous across Europe as a part of their agenda to demoni ze people of India and justify their occupation here .
the Nazis werent evil
The swastika is an indo-european symbol
As a linguist I have to say this is a wonderful introduction to historical linguistics! You covered all the necessary points very clearly. I especially appreciate that you drew attention to the fact that reconstructions are imperfect and are just linguists' best guesses.
P.S. If you really want to get deep into some PIE debate, check out some papers on the glotallic theory! There has been a lot of back and forth about how typologically plausible the mainstream reconstruction of the PIE consonant system is, and whether or not an entirely different interpretation is more plausible. Personally I think that the mainstream reconstruction has a lot of problems, but I'm not sure the glotallic theory has all the answers.
Isn't this a racist theory about the Aryans?
@@عليياسر-ذ5ب you mean the 20th-century one?
This makes my heart so happy 🥺 what a beautifully old world we live on
Etymology and PIE roots of modern words are so fascinating. I know we'll never be able to learn very much about the PIE people themselves, but what a legacy they left behind!
where? please give archeological proof of so-called PIE.
@@trollarasan Why hindoo-doo eat da cow poo-poo???
@@1sanitat1 Why Christinsanes eat da hindu poo-poo??? ex Christian yoga
@@trollarasan Systematic correspondence between sounds. Vindication of laryngeal hypothesis with Hittite retaining two of the three laryngeals in word-initial position. Inconsistencies in grammar such as the verb 'to be' from *h₁ésti where there's a consistent alteration between forms that start with a vowel and other forms that start with 's-'. Clear evidence of the language being related and that means they descend from and ancestral language which the evidence points to.
The Indo-Europeans were da real MVPs and OGs.
They were the killers
@redrose-gd8fu and yet here you are speaking their language
And?
@@redrose-gd8fu, all humans were killers back then.
id argue that afro-asiatic makes indo european pale in comparison lol
i'd LOVE to see more stuff about prehistoric religion both speculative and archaeological, if you have any interest in doing that. also as a linguistics nerd i love any discussion involving p.i.e. and other super early languages.
prehistoric cultures are my biggest interest in history (besides very early christianity) but they're usually not very accurately discussed on youtube thanks to all the alternate history/atlantis proponents that live here. it's a shame.
Crecganford covers this and other proto-Indo-European stuff too! I highly recommend checking is channel out.
Dan Davis History also has a lot of good stuff on just-barely prehistoric societies (Bell Beaker, Yamnaya, Sintashta, etc.)
Cannot recommend Crecganford enough, great guy and great channel.
Don't forget about the Germanic god *Tiwaz (heard about Tuesday? That's named after him) and the fact that in Romanian, an eastern romance language, the word god, as in "a god" is written and pronounced zeu, almost the same as Zeus, which reinforces the hypothesis that the sound D and Z are related in words like Dios in spanish and Zeu in Romanian.
Isn't tuesday named after the norse tyr
@@HehehehawMonkeyTyr descends from the sky-father diety as does Odin and Thor.. I believe they split somewhere aroubd the 1st millenium b.c.e
@@HehehehawMonkey 'Tuesday' is named after the same god, but the source of the 'tues-' is English.
All praises to Dyeus the sky daddy🙌
just talked to god he said don’t call him that
Sky zaddy
@@robdoghd which god? Dyeus?
@@WreckageHunter the one true god, the flying spaghetti monster
@@robdoghd who odin
Finally an indepth video on this! I hope we could get another part that maybe delves into the idea of Perkwunos as the hypothetical origin of the Sky-father/Thunder God.
survive the jive did a better job
@@VSM101 Yeah, sure bro. 😂😂😂
@@descendedofrigvedicclans2216 he isn’t a white supremacist. How do you come to that conclusion?
@@clayton33 Pretty sure he is, altough his videos are well researched and sourced, and don't really reflect his personal beliefs.
Wolf Dieter Storl, ethno-botanist, has done a huge amount of research about ancient gods and myths and how they share similarities around europe and even indigenous Americans. His talks about "Frau Holle" are beautiful
the title freaked me out cause "Deus" is portuguese for God and children (at least here in Brazil) do call god "sky father" (or sky daddy) 💀☠️
Also in italian, the christian god may be called " Padre celeste", which is the same thing
Right, lord’s prayer father in heaven. heavenly father
Deus is sky Pitar is father
That's because ceu means sky and heaven in Portuguese.
Há uma conexão entre Dyaus Pitr e os outros deuses celestiais. Dyaus é a origem da palavra deus, que significa céu, luz do dia etc. ou seja, é uma divindade da qual criou-se o conceito de "deus". No fundo, parece que inúmeras religiões tem o "papai do céu"
Hm... I remember vaguely that there seems to be some kind of motif shared by many cultures with the notion that a God of the Sea (or western) and a God of the Sky (or eastern) were in conflict.
Poseidon vs Jupiter, Enki vs Enlil, Indra vs Varuna.
Then there are over several epochs some references that seem to indicate a shism of cultural conflict and shifting borders over time associated through god names and their affairs toward each other.
Asura were at the beginning seen as much as benevolent like Devas, but over time had been deemed to be evil lesser gods from the hindu point of view, while on the persian side Deva had become the root for evil bringing Dew or Daeva, similar to Devil in our english nowadays. Ahura (from Asura?) is ressembling interestingly enough the name of Assur, the old-assyrian city, also known as Ashur.
I wonder if some religious myths correspondent directly with political affairs over several era.
Indra vs Varuna? I don't seem to have read that in the Veda or am I missing something?
@@Himanshu_Singh793 The opposition between Varuna and Indra is as far I know not depicted that much and was described from a person I read from, that looked for correspondence between Veda, Rigveda and Avesta. It was like some tension between two aspects of one thing (principle of Rulership) later, since those deities are from a much older time period and changed over time in their cultural meaning, it was not that clear.
Fact is, that Indra was more famous in India later and Varuna seemed to be "absorbed" or linked with Indra, before even Indra became meaningless as deity in later time.
What stick up with me was the one thing about one being of the west and the other of the east (it was to be honest somewhat a wild and somewhat vague association game, I was sceptic at that time).
My personal stakes here is just the parallels between many namings between indian/hindu and persian/zoroastrian (and in part afrosemitic) regions/cities/gods/devils, that indicates that there was more cultural connection once, before it split and diversified.
I was also reading some links between Abrahamitic and few Brahamic stories, that were quite interesting, which is part of my little "search".
I came up over a decade ago, that Varuna and Ahura Mazda are linked/associated by some who compared those myths, and that Angra Manyu was associated with Ahriman (unfortunately that was a long time ago, before I was taking it more "serious").
After that I was looking into more and found many similarities that span over to many cultural epochs.
What do you think about the Names Assur/Ashura and Asura/Ahura? Coincidence? A City named after a God in Assyria, those references in India became negative over time.
What I was hinting at, is that there are several names between those regions switching their meaning along a region which is between (around nowadays Hindukush Region).
The Varuna vs Indra is the weakest one of my examples. I was talking about several motifs being shared, in some part even diametrical inversed in their opposition, over many regions, that would have been at least by trade and somewhat migration over several times culturally linked at some point.
It looks like that some Cults and religious movements, that had been growing communities (originating near India at the Hindukush) eventually settled in other regions (in part toward the West) and had different conditions to thrive, while becoming meaningless in India.
@@Chareidos dharmic/brahmic faiths have no connection to abharamic faiths please dont connect us to them,
They will start saying we should convert to abharamic faiths and stuff.
@@snipescyth7944 I spoke about historic connections, that definitely must had been there at some point of time in human history to explain certain coincidences in the namings. People did not exist in isolation, they did trade, shared narrations and common roots. Most of those had been long before hinduism was what it is now, long before abrahamitic religions were diversified from other cultures.
I talked about pre-islamic/pre-abrahamic context. Nowhere am I implying that one should convert to the other.
There are several more things that draw the connection in the past already. It is known, that Herodot thought of jewish priests as the descendants of indian philosophers. (if it is true or not stands on another page).
It is told, that Jesus was known as Buddha Isa in the eastern parts, and that he traveled to many places and religious sites in his younger age, before he came back to his home to be crucified, becoming the Icon of a social movement before that symbol became more or less that Idol of worshippers. It is clear that abrahamitic religions had not plopped out of thin air from non-existence. Many cultural motifs, spiritual symbols, theological concepts had been developing and influencing each other.
Without any means of accusing you of anything, but you speak somewhat in bad faith about those who would act in bad faith themselves with their argument that everyone should convert to the "newest" iteration. The argument could be also reversed, meaning that abrahamitic religions derived from brahmanic and pre-brahmanic religions and should rejoin the bigger context. This is just contemporary politics!
I am not operating in terms of membership and groupings, I am talking about many lingual coincidences that hints to more cultural exchange and diversification in the past over several times.
In the end ALL humans are linked somewhere in history. Who would deny that?
Love this channel, it's truly enriching. Well researched and formulated.
i was aware of the linguistic evidences some suggest for PIE people being potentially nomadic animal herders with horses (words like axle, vehicle, etc) , but i had not heard of the hypothesized connection to the archaeological group of yamnaya people - really interesting stuff!
Actually it's much more than just "hypothetical" today: nobody half-serious challenges that anymore, even the main opponent, Lord Renfrew, acknowledged that he was wrong after all before dying, Gimbutas was quite exactly right instead. However Yamna is only the first(-ish) expansive phase in Europe (East Balcans primarily, looting and destroying what I sometimes call "the first European civilization" in what is now Bulgaria approx.) and it's rooted to an older culture spanning the North Caucasus and Lower Volga callde Khvalynsk culture (and even older relation would be Samara culture at the Volga but it's not fully clear). By the time Yamna (Yamnaya is the adjective form AFAIK, both are used) coalesced, two groups had already diverged (IMO):
1. The Anatolian (Luwio-Hittite) branch was already a different cuture in the NW Caucasus (Maykop) and woul expand more or less simultaneously southwards (Kura-Araxes culture).
2. The Tocharian branch had also spread to Altai (Afanasevo culture) when Yamna coalsced.
3. Additionally it's worth mentioning that East (Volga) and West (East Balcans) Yamnaya are linked by another group that is only partly Yamna-like, the complex phase of Sredny-Stog in what is now East and North Ukraine and nearby parts of Russia (lower Don basin) and Belarus. It was a mix of Yamna-like elements and Dniepr-Don ones, these being local pre-Indoeuroeans and a very ancient local population (Paleolithic roots). They may be important in the genesis of later Corded Ware, which would be the most important expansion of Indoeuroeans into non-Eastern Europe and root of all Indoeuropean languages of Europe (minus Albanian and plus Armenian surely).
Eastern Yamna (less hierarchical than the Western branch) remained behind and is, most likely, at the origin of Indo-Iranian languages.
Sky Father, Earth Mother.
As Above, So Below.
This is my first video from you but this topic is so interesting for me that I feel that you could have dug so much deeper into every point you talked about, all the connections and similarities between the PIE society and people to the ones that followed them in early history
Proto-Indo-European religion may have been very alike on Tengriism i.e. the common naturalistic-shamanic religion of other Central Eurasia cultures non-closely related into language, yet very alike in development on sociocultural ways adapted to the particular temperate-semi-dry long plain-shrublands of Central Eurasia, as later groups as Mongols and Turkic people developed a similar religion on their own, where their highest god-being is some Sky God called Tengri hencefort the name. The same related issues happen on Siberian people and Pre-Buddhist Bon religion on Tibet too.
There is a great influence of Proto-Turkic and Mongolic culture on PIE, as it seems. It wouldn't be so surprising since they lived together as a confederation of tribes under the name of Scythians which was ruled by a Proto-Turkic ruler class. Most probably, after they saw and adopted how to tame and ride horses and use wheels, PIE spread into Europe with their culture.
@@Soykancelik7 well it could have been that all of them had a common way of living and seeing things in the world for sharing more or less the same-environment where they lived rather than being properly influenced each other. Furtherlymore it´s unknown on true certain way if the PIE are older than the Proto-Mongolian and/or Proto-Turkic people, though certainly all or most of them might have shared a furtherly background ancestor and a similar POV which derived into common spiritual-religion ways according to the large Central Eurasian Steppes and Inner Asia semi-desertical plateaus. From all of that and the common ancient inner/Central Asia highlands as the Altai, Tian-Shan, Pamir, Kuen-Lung, Altyn-Tag, TransHimalaya, Hindu-Kush and Karakorum mountains plus the Urals and Caucasus, happened to be a common shared backround development rather than being one culture overall influencing the others and so far the Scythians though extending a lot through Central and Inner Asia, happened to be labeled more as PIE related than Turkic or Mongol so far as I know about them. (Also makes furtherly sense related to the enigmatic people of Chinese Turkestan, i.e. modern Xingiang Uygur province and nearby Tibet and Inner Mongolia areas where the Yuezhi/Tocharian people lived including their mysterious ancestors of the White-Europeoids/Caucasian-like mummified people of the Tarim bassin river on Takla-Makkan and Gobi Inner Asia deserts and nearby Tian-Shan and Altai mountains, which seemed to be PIE related than Tukic or/and Mongolian actually.)
@@lhadzyan7300 it's because of Hinduism
@@ShivamRaina-dm9df I don´t think Hinduism got a big wisepread of their ideas religion beyond their territory except on nearby areas surrounding the Indian subcontinent, as it´s a furtherly closed-ethnocentric religion, much alike Jews, Zoroastrians and some Musilm sectons, so couldn´t expand much influencing outside, so it had to be other people with more open-inclusive ideas as Christianity and Buddhism, which also moved more outside their original area.
However I could give you some rightfullness as not Hinduism itself but their previous common Indoeuropean religion, from which came the Vedic religion into India as well the closely related Zoroastrian Mazdeism at Persia, which got very wisepread on Central Asia as the litttle-known but important BMAC or Oxus civilization rise up for a while, setting the earliest large commercial and cultural trades on long distance between Western and Eastern worlds. being itself a long forgotten forerunner of Silk Road, and very cosmopolitan as latter Central and Inner Asia kingdoms, empires and cultures became.
@@lhadzyan7300 If you know about we Brahmins you never say it .Buddhism that whole religion came from us.Buddhism was always used a kings tool by Kings ,they got against of us .There is nothing new in Buddhism
There was a 3rd factor that may have helped the Yamnaya spread their culture and presumably their PIE languages: it is now know they are carriers not just of Proto IE languages but also of Proto Yseni-pestis ie bubonic plague. Would like to see more posts on those findings and research
The Steppe just can't help it self but act as the perfect avenue for such spreads. It's just topography.
Hi! I'm new to the channel but I very much enjoy your videos! I'm a history major with a minor in religious studies student and your videos sometimes are better than some of my classes hahaha. I was wondering if you ever considered in making a video about Kardecism and Allan Kardec. Thank you! Keep up the amazing videos
im also interested in the hammer/club/mallet wielding god traditions too. its neat stuff.
Haha watching this before my Proto-Indo-European Exam tomorrow :D
Break a leg.
@@benjaminklass5118 thanks haha
i love stuff like this. wish i had adopted this as a pursuit in school early on but i got turned off to school early, did not enjoy my studies at all
Well for the IE branch we cannot go beyond the PIE in regards to the reconstruction. The Uralic language family turned out to be more fruitful as it goes significantly further back in time.
For the “horseback riding”, i believe I have heard somewhere that wheeled carts predate horseback riding.
I don’t know if it is a some sort of cultural convergent evolution due to the same kind of environmental boundaries or a result of cultural interaction (or exchange), old Turkic religion (Tengrism) had a very similar supreme sky deity called “Tengri”. Tengri basically meant sky and he was like the father figure in the religion. So I wonder if there are any explanations for this similarity. Perfect work as always, thanks for the highest quality!
Turkish is not an Indo-European language, nevertheless, Turkey was a long-time home to Indo-European languages starting with Hittite and Palaic and others, and even after the Bronze Age collapse, Luwian (an Indo-European language spanning most of Turkey, possibly what the Trojans spoke) persisted. The Luwian sky god was Tiwaz, which is linguistically related to Tyr, Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus, etc. Tiwaz is also stunningly close to how the Norse Tyr is reconstructed in Old Germanic. Possibly there was also even earlier cultural contact between Indo-European cultures and Turkic cultures on the Eurasian Steppes.
@@toddmcdaniels1567 I feel like there would've almost certainly been contact between the two in the steppes since the environment facilitates so much rapid migration and movement between peoples.
The steppe, from modern day Hungary to Xinjiang, China, was for a long time populated by an Iranian (and thus speakers of an Indo-European language) people called the Scythians or Saka, who were in contact with the earliest recorded Turkic/Mongolic peoples. Early Turkic peoples did have an immense amount of Saka influence in their culture. I wouldn't be surprised if Tengri is among the influences.
Steppe cultural exchange
@@keshav3479 I suspect you are quite likely correct. I understand now that the distribution of Tengri within Turkic extends well beyond the geographic confines of Turkey, and Turkey is not an original homeland for the Turkic family of speakers generally. So, the more economical solution would be to posit contact at an earlier point before extensive dispersal of Turkic peoples.
what a simply great video
The History of English podcast has some pretty good opening episodes on the P.I.E language and an argument for placing their point of origin somewhere near the area placed in this video. Of all the theories I've heard so far it's one I think holds the most water.
On another point I really appreciate how Dr. Henry points out the fact that so far all this is truly just speculative till someone digs up some physical evidence. There have been a couple comparative mythology youtubers I've seen who have tried to make videos arguing for the "concrete" authority of these guessed at "original myths" and even some trying to say the stories in the Hebrew Bible all stem from the original P.I.E speakers as if the Arbramahic religions are actually ancient North Eastern European religions and boy... that's not one I'm soon to believe till we dig up tons of evidence.
Another awesome video! I'm fascinated by the Proto-Indo European language and beliefs.
Sanskrit is very much similar to the Lithuanian language.
Great video - I can't help but see similarities between your description of Indo-European culture of the Pontic Steppe and modern day Romani gypsies (including wagon burials) - maybe a throwback to the region's nomadic past?
The Vedic God Dyeus Pitr became Zeus Pater in Greece, became Ju - Piter in Rome and became Thor in Norse. They share almost same mythology, characteristics, behaviour, position etc.
Pitr being Sanskrit and Pater being Latin, the question that intrigues me why the Romans have 'piter' not 'pater' in Jupiter?
@@kalpanaghimire1342 I think the answer would be somewhere along the lines..."Rome is more Vedic than Greece" which is very fascinating since one would usually think Greece to be a predecessor of Rome in terms of cultural/religious sense. So "more Vedic" certainly means less distortion in the linguistics of Sanskrit.
@@phoenixj1299 thanks for the reply. I wouldn't say 'distortion' . There are 2 Sanskrits- the Vedic and the Classic. The Vedic Sanskrit of the ancient Vedas is 'archaic' and can be difficult even for Sanskrit scholars. In the 6th century BC, the great grammarian Panini reformed the Sanskrit grammar and linguistics, syntax and semantics rules so scientifically and tightly that his reformed Sanskrit became the language of scholaship and litterature as well as the grammar basis of all Indic languages. This is the Classic Sanskrit of even today. His works were discoved by Europeans in early 19th century and when studying Linguistics at the Sorbone University in Paris, I was surprised to hear the professor talk of Panini as 'father of Linguistics'. There is much debate these days as to his grammar being the framework for a universal grammar' and thus to be taught to the AI.
@@kalpanaghimire1342 Absolutely. And yes agree that "distortion" is a strong word. "Different manifestation" would be a more accurate term. And yes the sophistication of Sanskrit is unparallel. Thanks for the information by the way 😊
Thor was seen the same by the Greeks and the Italians but he is a completely different God from a different mythology. Δίας - Dio in Italian means God. They had their own name for Zeus… that’s why they got Jupiter… just like Aphrodite and Venus or Ares and Mars
There's just something so cool about a mysterious name that has survived for thousands of years!
I can also see the resemblance between the PIE and Turkic deities. We also have the Sky Father called Tengri/Tengir and Earth Mother called Umay
I have also seen this similarity. Both the Turkic and Indo-Europeans hail from the steppe.
It's means nothing turkish is not indo European language. Even African people used to worship sky so it means nothing.
Coincidence nothing else turks are not connected to indo Europeans
Umay comes from uma which is an Indian diety and tengri is shiva her husband who is a god in Hinduism, also tengrism is tantric which is shamanic and so it falls even more in line cuz shiva does have those aspects.
But turks are not indo-Europeans also tengrism was later borrowed from Hinduism and it is still a major faith along with buddhism which also comes from Hinduism, some mongolians and chinese people do follow tengrism.
@@HS-su3cf Turks came from china
As a New Zealand/Aotearoa Maori, our sky fathers name is Ranginui, and our sun is called Ra. 🙂Oh, and earth mother is papatuaanuku, or papa for short.
Egyptian sun god is also ra 🤔