Proto-Indo-European mythology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Trundholm sun chariot, Nordic Bronze Age, c. 1600 BC
Part of a series on
Indo-European topics
Indo-European migrations.gif
Languages
[show]
Philology
[show]
Origins
[show]
Archaeology
[show]
Peoples and societies
[show]
Religion and mythology
[show]
Indo-European studies
[show]

vte

This article contains characters used to write reconstructed Proto-Indo-

European words. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks,
boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode combining characters and Latin
characters.

Proto-Indo-European mythology is the body of myths and deities associated with the
Proto-Indo-Europeans, the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European language.[note 1] Although the mythological motifs are not directly
attested � since Proto-Indo-European speakers lived in prehistoric societies �
scholars of comparative mythology have reconstructed details from inherited
similarities found among Indo-European languages, leading to the assumption that
parts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans' original belief systems survived in the daughter
traditions.

The Proto-Indo-European pantheon includes a number of securely reconstructed

deities such as *Dy?ws Ph2t?r, the daylight-sky god; his consort *D?�??om, the
earth mother; his daughter *H2�wsos, the dawn goddess; his sons the Divine Twins;
and *Seh2ul, a solar goddess. Some deities, like the weather god *Perk?unos or the
herding-god *P�h2uson, are only attested in a limited number of traditions�Western
(European) and Graeco-Aryan, respectively�and could therefore represent late
additions that did not spread throughout the various Indo-European dialects.

Some myths are also securely dated to Proto-Indo-European times, since they feature
both linguistic and thematic evidence of an inherited motif: a story portraying a
mythical figure associated with thunder and slaying a multi-headed serpent to
release torrents of water that had previously been pent up; a creation myth
involving two brothers, one of whom sacrifices the other in order to create the
world; and probably the belief that the Otherworld was guarded by a watchdog and
could only be reached by crossing a river.

Various schools of thought exist regarding possible interpretations of the

reconstructed Proto-Indo-European mythology. The main mythologies used in
comparative reconstruction are Vedic, Roman, and Norse, often supported with
evidence from the Baltic, Celtic, Greek, Slavic, Hittite, Armenian, and Albanian
traditions as well