Indo-European Immanence in Early Christianity.
Indo-European Immanence in Early Christianity.
At a certain point, according to the logic of most Indo-European creation myths (including the Big Bang Theory), something had to come from nothing. If Christianity sprung from Judaism, then of what did Judaism spring? If in the beginning there was the word of God (Logos1), then of what was God created? Indeed, of what are the words (and their meanings) which communicate these origin myths created?
Buddhism sidesteps this issue by holding that all we can know is that everything’s creation depends on the existence of another creation. And so this quality of phenomena which Tibetan Buddhists call emptiness (selflessness / dependent arising) is the only starting point we can be sure of. Emptiness is a quality of the macro (universe) as well as of every micro instance within the universe - words, religions, our minds, each thought: everything depends on something else in one long continuum.
From the perspective of the Highest Yoga Tantra school of Tibetan Buddhism, the ultimate nature of reality is the inextricable union of emptiness and luminosity2.
Tibetan Buddhism itself arose from a number of Indo-European religious vectors: the early Vedas of India in the Vedic and Sanskrit languages (around 1200 BCE); Buddha Śākyamuni’s Persian reform of the Vedic and Sanskrit religion and theology from around 300 BCE; and the pre-Tibetan evolution of Indo-European Buddhism over many centuries at Nalanda Monastic University in Bihar, India (from around 300 CE).
In the Power of Mana (http://www.powerofmana.net), we will look carefully at the Mana element in Luminosity (and in the “muni” element of the Buddha’s Śākyamuni epithet). Here, let’s just look briefly at how an understanding of emptiness can inform how we elucidate the conventional wisdom that Christianity only or mainly sprung from Judaism.
Emptiness in this sense signifies that all existents, all phenomena (including words, and religions) are dependent on other phenomena for their existence. Selflessness / Dependent Arising / Dependent Origination / Emptiness signify precisely the same phenomena. They’re synonyms. Emptiness is a simple designation that for something to exist, something else must also exist. That a word does not have an inherent meaning, for example, follows from this.
We sometimes think of words (signs) and their meanings (semantics) as being mere vehicles for something that exists independently of them. This is the troll which understanding the ultimate nature of reality as being emptiness (and luminosity) guards us against.
I couldn’t express any of this unless you understood and were fluent in an Indo-European language; one of a family of languages first spoken when Yamnaya in eastern Ukraine encountered the Old European Dniepr - Donets and Sredni Stog peoples3. And the existence of these ideas in your mind is dependent on your understanding of the signs (words) and meanings (semantics) of the Indo-European language(s) you have learned since birth. This enables you to get what I'm talking about.
If we think some particular meaning inheres in words then we might imagine Christianity exists apart from the Indo-European languages the Christian biblical texts and the Old Testament were written down in from earliest times. Western Christianity is determined by the Indo-European languages in which the first collections of Christian texts were written, transmitted and heard/seen by Indo-European language speakers.
The earliest fragments we have of many parts of the bible were found in jars in what is today the State of Israel. Some of these texts are written in Greek, an Indo-European language. Greek was the lingua franca in the Roman occupied land of Judea where Christ lived and taught.
Note too that Latin, the language of the Roman colonisers, is an Indo-European Language. Of relevance also is that we now know through Comparative Archaeology, Genetics and linguistics that the Philistines mentioned in the bible hailed from the Aegean. They were Greeks. The Philistines occupied Palestine first around 1100 BCE. The Philistines are therefore also Indo-European language speakers and Indo-European culture and religion conveyors4.
In fact, the overall impression the Indo-European texts of the bible as well as all pre-Tibetan language Buddhist texts convey is dependent on the words in Indo-European languages like Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Greek, Latin, and their contingent meanings (mobile armies of metaphors). Without these Indo-European languages these foundational texts and the religions they encode would not have existed in the first place. While emptiness / dependent arising applies at the macro level - in Tibetan Buddhism the world can only be said to exist. It can’t be said that at some moment it didn’t exist, and that it was “created.” This also works at the micro level - the nature of the Christianity its first Indo-European adherents encountered was dependent on those Indo-European language speakers mastery of the words and their meanings in which the first Christian textual teachings were conveyed.
The Heart Sūtra is a core teaching in Tibetan Buddhism5. Its famous formulation “Form is Empty - Emptiness is Form” is resolved thus by the Dalai Lama:
the moment we see things as empty we must see everything as Dependent Arising. Thus we must see at the same time what’s Dependent Arising is Emptiness. So “Empty” and “Selflessness” do not mean: no existence. If you see, hear smell, touch and take that as "nothingness" then you are mistaken [that would be to fall for the extreme of nihilism]. But if you see, hear, sight and smell and at same time understand they are empty [that is the middle-way, between the extreme of nihilism and the extreme of eternalism / reification]. But if you think smell, and touch have their own identity, then you are mistaken [the extreme of eternalism / reification]. But if you see, hear, smell and touch and understand in the same moment they are dependent arisings then you are correct [this is the Right View of the nature of ultimate reality (emptiness and luminosity), from the perspective of Highest Yoga Tantra]. Another thing: when we speak about Emptiness. Emptiness is a quality. Emptiness must abide on the basis of an object [a word or a religion or any phenomenon of the mind]. Emptiness must be understood as a quality of an existing object.6
In this way all forms (including words) are empty of any essential, specific, eternally reified meaning. And the emptiness of these forms (words and all that they provoke in our minds and world) is a feature, not a bug. It is not to be negated or celebrated; it merely is. Once we bear this emptiness in mind we do not become sad (which is to fall into the trap of the extreme of nihilism) nor do we pretend that something empty actually isn’t empty (which would be to fall into the extreme of eternalism).
The emptiness of forms (for example, these words and the whole universe of their potential meanings) is itself a form. It is all that form can be. We cannot see emptiness unless it is in the form of, well, a form, like a word or mental phenomenon.
So reifying as eternal, say, the Christian Logos (an Indo-European Greek word in which the “Lord’s Word” was first expressed by and to Indo-European language speakers) without understanding that “Logos” is empty, and emptiness is inherent to the form of the word “Logos” would be to miss everything.
It then follows that the signifier (Logos) and signifieds’ (Logos’s meaning) evolving trajectories since the time of Christ are empty. And they are also a form of emptiness; a form through which we can see emptiness.
In this example, the Christian bible is a form which is selflessness / emptiness incarnate. The bible is dependent on the language and sounds (as well as their meanings) of which it is composed. Similarly, without the Bible (a form), in this example, we would have nothing to convey the idea that the quality of the (and all) form(s) is Emptiness / selflessness / a dependent arising. So everything “Christian” depends on the words and their meanings, which although empty (and embodying the quality of emptiness) themselves depend on a particular historical, traceable evolutionary trajectory for their meaning.
The origin story they tell inside themselves is that they are dependent on Judaism. And this is true. Up to a point. Yet, Judaism which cohered around 1100 BCE (according to the Old Testament) arose inside an environment that we now know (but which they could not possibly have known as the Indo-European language family was only first intuited in 1782 CE) was infused with at least five different evolutionary vectors of Indo-European language:
Romans, Greeks, Philistines (who arrived from the Aegean and first occupied Palestine around 1100 BCE) and
Indo-European Persian Achaemenid Empire that ruled Judea / Phoenicia between ~521 BCE and ~331 BCE (at a time much of the Old Testament and Judaism itself was being solidified and institutionalised).
“Aryans” (probably Indo-European Sintashta culture migrants from today’s Kazakhstan7) around 1500 BCE.8
The Indo-European philistines of 1100 BCE whose occupation of parts of Palestine played a dominant determining role in the system of pressures out of which King David and King Solomon's first state of Israel9 was forged. Additionally, the so-called “Aryans” who ruled some land in what would become Israel for a few centuries around 1500 BCE,10 as Indo-Europeans, also contributed to the mix of non-Philistine-related words, meanings and institutions (forms) out of which Judaism and Christianity both emanated.
These "Aryans" may well be the missing link explaining why, as Lincoln notes at the beginning of this text, the Judaic sacrificial creation myth in the Book of Enoch is dependent on the "Iranian" model. It is indeed anachronistic yet defensible to call the recently excavated Sintashta Culture in today's Kazakhstan "Aryan" or even "Iranian."
Iran and Aryan as words and identities arose from a religious reform by Zarathustra / Zoroaster that occurred long after what we know as the Sintashta Culture had evolved into new forms. Yet, as recent excavations of Sintashta graves have shown the origins of what we would call Iranian and Aryan cultural traits are first discernible in the Sintashta culture11. This archaeological evidence was not available to Bruce Lincoln in 1975 when he deduced the dependent relationship between the Jewish creation myth and the Iranian Indo-European creation myth. Indeed, it's only now in the light of this archaeological evidence which matches descriptions of funerary ceremonies in India's earliest texts (1200 BCE) that we can know for certain where these "Aryan" customs evolved centuries before Zoroaster's reforms created the Ahriman character from whose name is derived "Aryan" and indeed "Iran."
Without understanding its dependence on Indo-European language, we might take as the word (Logos) of God that the sole or main inheritance in Christianity is Judaism. Now we can understand that Judaism itself is dependent in certain ways on its Indo-European inheritances (not least the core of the communion sacrament which riffs of the Indo-European creation myth from the Book of Enoch).
Just as the ingredients of language - words and meanings - depend on their elements to arise, we must also understand that language does not colonise our minds independently of culture. There is no way to learn a language without receiving an ideological education.
We make a mistake when we think that learning an Indo-European language can occur without imbibing structures (grammar, syntax, roots of verbs, words, sounds). As we learn these languages the means through which the language is conveyed into our minds (words and meanings) also perform the role as vehicles for an ideology which is conveyed through the practise of using and hearing the language.
Marija Gimbutas’s archaeological approach to linguistics found that the gradual infiltrations of Indo-Europeans over millennia in the area between India and Ireland replaced a concrete pan-European culture (in Europe west of the Don River anyhow). With Indo-European infiltrations arrived a patriarchal (we see this in the male chiefly burials that replaced whole community burials as well as in the sudden disappearance of female deities’ idols in burials12) society that used domesticated horses, cattle and wheeled carts on a scale never seen before in the history of humanity.
We now know as a matter of scientific fact that all the main Indo-European language families (Celtic, Greek, Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Indic (Iranian and Indian)) arise from a common core language (Proto-Indo-European). Now we know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that this language was first spoken in what is today eastern Ukraine, I propose we now refer to Proto-Indo-European as Old or Ancient Ukrainian.
All our words for “God” and their meanings grew out of the sounds first forged by these first Indo-European language speakers of eastern Ukraine. Sky Father (*Dyēus pətḗr) in eastern Ukraine spread along with Indo-European proto-Greek to Greece where Sky Father became Zeus Pater (Ζεύς πατήρ), Greece’s supreme being. By the time Indo-European Zeus reached Rome, he (note the “he.” As Gimbutas has shown Old Europe worshipped almost exclusively female deities - 95% of idols found in Old European tombs and excavated household temples are manifestly female) had become Iuppiter/ Jupiter. By the time these Yamnaya culture-carrying migrants arrived in India (via Persia) *Dyēus pətḗr became Dyāuḥ pitā.
So when Christ was born in Judea, the Greek speakers (Greek was the lingua franca of the Aramaic, Philistine, Roman and other residents) thought God was Zeus Pater (Ζεύς πατήρ). The Romans: Jupiter. The Jews: Yahweh.
The currency into which these different signs in different languages (together with their meanings) is converted is the word “deity.”
*Deiwos as an ancient Ukrainian / proto-Indo-European word stemming from day/sky/shine is the only theological word that is attested in every Indo-European language family.
The basic word for ‘god’ in Proto-Indo-European appears to have been *deiwo ́s, itself an o-stem derivative of *dyeu- ‘sky, day’ < *dei- ‘shine, be bright’ and it is widely attested across the Indo-European groups, e.g. OIr d ̄ıa, Lat deus, Lith die~vas, Hit sius, Skt deva ́-, all ‘god’ in turn; in both Slavic and Iranian, e.g. Av dae ̄va-, the word means ‘demon’…13
As such, it is certain that even the word for God, as well as its meaning, stemmed from the migrations of the first core Indo-European language speakers from what is today’s eastern Ukraine by 2,500 BCE. Without understanding this, we miss one of the major evolutionary vectors of which early Christianity consists.
Since we understand that the word for God and its meaning are each empty of any inherent essence (they’re forms that manifest emptiness and are themselves empty), we can easily get that, along with the Indo-European word, came a specific Indo-European meaning for Sky Father. That meaning arose dependently on the Indo-European word (and vice versa). The early biblical texts expressed in Greek and then Latin exerted an Indo-European influence on their contents as a function of being expressed in Indo-European terminology. Moreover, the only people who could understand a bible expressed in Indo-European languages like Latin and Greek had minds already structured in accordance with the grammar, syntax, roots of verbs and words that had grown out of the first Indo-European language and cultural community in what is today Ukraine - for references see:
There is, however, more evidence of the Indo-European inheritance in early Christianity, which complements the archaeological (which prove the Greek, Latin, Philistine and so-called “Aryan” determined environment which co-existed with the Judaic in the land of Judea at the time of Christ) and the linguistic.
The core trope in Christianity is of a man sacrificing himself, so that those who live (and die) after him can be saved. Christ is the first Christian to die, just as Yamá (known as Ahryaman or Yima in Persia) was the first Indian man to sacrifice himself to become Lord of Death, the Dead, and the Kingdom of the Dead14.
This same structure is present in other Indo-European religions. In pre-Christian Indo-European Irish religion Donn is cognate with the Vedic Yamá, "Twin" (Indo-European *Yemós).
Donn, who is described as 'king' of the Sons of Míl, may then be compared with Yamá himself, 'king of the Fathers', 'the first of men that died, the first that departed to the other world… the gatherer of mankind'. 'Yamá chose death, and found out the path for many, and he gives the souls of the dead a resting place.15
Donn, according to Lebor Gabála Érenn (literally "The Book of the Taking of Ireland"), was the grandson of the king of Scythia (modern day Ukraine). As Donn was arriving to Ireland, just after making the following declaration he was drowned, and became Ireland’s Lord of Death.16
'Now,’ he cries, ‘I will put whatever there is in Ireland under the edge of spear and sword.’ And a new wind seizes upon his ship, driving it upon the shoals so that he is drowned, and is buried on the island that comes to be called Tech Duinn, the House of Donn...in other sources, we are told that all of the dead – or at least all of the Irish dead – go to the House of Donn; and in one early poem it is said that all who go there are Donn’s own descendants.17
In the Scandinavian offshoot of Indo-European Germanic culture’s foundation myth Odin, for whom our Wednesday ("... Tacitus called the primary god Mercury, a name associated with the German Wodanaz or Wodan / Wotan (related to the Anglo-Saxon battle god Woden and later the Norse Odin )— thus the Latin Mercurii dies, the Germanic Wodaniztag, and the English Wednesday..."18) is named19
Odin was the High God and “All Father” of Norse mythology. He was also a magician king, a mysterious Shamanic god of runes. The strange self-sacrifice described in the Havamal depicts the shaman-trickster hanging on the world tree [beside the Royal Mound in Uppsala, Sweden], Yggdrasill—literally Ygg's or Odin's horse—a kenning for the gallows:
I know I hung
on the windswept tree,
through nine days and nights.
I was stuck with a spear
and given to Odin,
myself given to myself.20
Jan Puhvel, a preeminent Indo-European scholar, elaborates on Odin's sacrifice:
In the Norse myth the "giant" Ymir (< Proto-Germanic *Yumiyáz< Indo-European *Ym(mi)yós, "Twin") is slaughtered by the gods (Odin and his brothers) and the parts are used to fashion the world21.
Likewise, in the Indo-European Roman tradition, twins Romulus and Remus were sacrificed at the beginning of their culture. Puhvel suggested Remus might well originally have been called *Iemos and since:
"the initial sequence *yem- has been eliminated from the Latin phonetic pattern. By the same token, I assume that the mythical name *Iemos (= Vedic Yamá, Avestan Yima) was changed to Remus by attraction to the name Roma, perhaps by alliterative.”
Bruce Lincoln in the “Indo-European Myth of Creation22” held that the comparative similarities between the Indic, Germanic and Iranian origin myths point to an Indo-European origin myth complex involving primeval twins.
"If we are correct, the Old Norse account preserves certain details from the Proto-Indo-European Ur myth that have been almost completely lost in even the earliest Indian and Iranian texts...Norse accounts retain the fact that Ymir (< *Yemo) was the victim of the first sacrifice, a fact already lost at the time of composition of Ṛg Veda 10.90 (1200 BCE?) and Yasna 32 (1000 BCE)… Most scholars have agreed that Yamá is another First Man/First King figure and have also noted that he is the first to die, thus establishing the realm of the Dead23.
In this context, what really matters is the Indo-European texture of the first Christian’s self-sacrifice on the cross at the first moment of the Christian civilisation they were held to have founded.
As with Yamá, Donn, Ymir’s son Odin, Yima, we have, in Christ’s crucifixion, likely a reflex of an Indo-European origin myth complex.
What I have added in this paper is a better understanding of the mechanism through four different Indo-European vectors of influence in Judea at the time of Christ.
I have helped us get that the view that the language in which our theology is expressed has no bearing on the theology expressed is bunkum. Language determines meaning, and there is no “God” outside of Indo-European language and culture. There may well be deity-like phenomena outside of Indo-European language and culture. But they aren’t God, Sky Father or what the Indo-European vectors of influence in Judaism and Christianity render into those religions’ theology.
Bruce Lincoln noted that sacrifice in Judaism came from Iranian influences. Judaism itself has a creation myth which Lincoln includes as within the Indic-Iranian model of the Indo-European family. This is how he expresses it24:
Four centuries before the historical King David and the historical King Solomon established the first State of Israel, according to the ancient Egyptian Amarna letters25, Indo-European princes’ names are found across Palestine.
“The Amarna letters show that in the early fourteenth century most of the important cities of Palestine and Syria were controlled by men with either Aryan or Hurrian names. At Ugarit the kings have Semitic names, but their military force includes many men of Hurrian descent. Among the Aryan princes of Palestine whose doings are detailed in the Amarna letters, we find an Indaruta as lord of Achshaph: this kinglet "bears the same Indo-Aryan name as his contemporary Indrota or Indrauta of the Rig Veda." Aryan names are also attested for the princes of Megiddo (Diri-diya), Ashkelon (Widia), the Hebron area (Shuwardata), Acre (Zatatna and Surata), Damascus (Biryawaza), and other places. The kinglet of Jerusalem has a Hurrian name (Abdu-Heba), as do several of his colleagues.”26
For present purposes, all I intend to do is open the question of the Indo-European influences in early Christianity. I won’t therefore go into the detail of the meaning of Lincoln’s findings (though at least we have a possible material link with the land that would become Israel, through the Sintashta proto-Ahryaman culture migrants previously identified as “Aryan Kings” in around 1500 BCE27).
Suffice it to say, when our idea of history extends beyond 1000 BCE and our mental model of the evolution of Indo-European language and culture expands, taking early Judaism of 1000 BCE as the genesis of everything Christian becomes much harder to maintain as a coherent intellectual strategy.
For now, let’s conclude with this idea: Once we understand the multiple vectors of ancient Ukrainian / Indo-European inheritances in Christianity from the millennia before and after it took shape, we might begin to understand better why Christianity appealed to so many different Indo-European inheritance cultures over the following millennia.
We might also start to understand that what we have been trolled into seeing as a severe break in history between pre-Christian / Pagan territories and Christianised lands may be a softer continuity after all. The Christianity itself adopted in these areas, as I have shown, is a function of its Indo-European influenced early life. And indeed in places like Ireland, layer-upon-layer of different eras’ Indo-European infiltrations through migration (from at least 2500 BCE) were already well established, at the moment when Christianity arrived. Christianity in this understanding then may merely be new wine, in old Indo-European urns (within urns, within urns).
So what was similar between the new fangled religion, nomenclature, cosmogony and language may be a lot more profound than what those who are ignorant of the Indo-European inheritances in Christian and pre-Christian cultures have the capacity to imagine.
“Logos, the “Word,” is a name or title traditionally applied by Christians to Jesus as the Christ, in whom the Logos, or divine reason, was incarnate. Theologically speaking, in the context of the doctrine of God as the Trinity, Christ as Logos has always existed. So it is that the evangelist John begins his gospel with the words “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God's presence, and what God was, the Word was.” As a purely philosophical term, logos is the principle of order and knowledge in the universe” from the Oxford Companion to World Mythology, Oxford University Press (2005): https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195156690.001.0001/acref-9780195156690-e-951?rskey=e9fnFV&result=1
Dalai Lama’s introduction to Karma-gliṅ-pa, Coleman, Graham, Thupten Jinpa, Padma Sambhava, Gyurme Dorje, and Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho. The Tibetan Book of the Dead : The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States. London: Penguin, 2008. Print. Penguin Classics.
“…The Philistines were a group of people from the Aegean who arrived on the southern Palestinian coast at about the same time that the Israelite tribal groups were forming in the highlands…” in Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195139372.001.0001/acref-9780195139372-chapter-6;jsessionid=3F74A742DBE59F8A2C1B4F479AD95CBF
“A highly influential and popular Mahāyāna scripture used in both Tibetan and east Asian Buddhism; the full title is ‘The Sūtra of the Heart of the Perfection of Insight’. This scripture, only one paragraph in length, is a terse summary of Perfection of Insight (prajñā-pāramitā) teaching, and describes the truth realized in meditation by the BodhisattvaAvalokiteśvara. This truth is that form (one of the five skandhas and here standing in for all individual, differentiated phenomena) is emptiness (śūnyatā, the transcendent and undifferentiated absolute) and vice versa. In this way, it affirms that the transcendent is found only in its manifestation in the immanent and nowhere else. It ends with a mantra to be recited, the effect of which is to induce understanding of ultimate truth in the reciter. Because of its extreme brevity, it has been used both as a summary statement of Mahāyāna truth, and as a liturgical and ritual text. Recent research has shown that the Heart Sūtra is almost certainly a Chinese composition back-translated into Sanskrit” in “A Dictionary of Buddhism",” Oxford University Press (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198605607.001.0001/acref-9780198605607-e-723?rskey=2OLl24&result=2)
Dalai Lama teaching heard directly by the author 16th June 2016, Dharamsala, India.
"Prehistoric Religions: The Eurasian Steppes and Inner Asia ." Encyclopedia of Religion. . Encyclopedia.com. (February 23, 2023). https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/prehistoric-religions-eurasian-steppes-and-inner-asia
“…For orientalists, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the Aryan takeover of northwest India was related, somehow, to the appearance of Aryans in Mitanni and the Levant. But this takeover, which had probably occurred by ca. 1500 B.C., seems to have resembled the others only in its objectives and not in the way in which it was carried out. Even though its relationship to the end of the Indus Valley civilization remains unclear, the Aryan takeover of northwest India must have been far more violent and destructive than the other takeovers reviewed here, and must have been effected by a force far larger than those that took over states in the Fertile Crescent…” from Drews, Robert. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691186580
“…One of the best examples of the aggrandizement of David is the Goliath story; the accomplishment of Elhanan in slaying the Philistine warrior (2 Sam. 21.19) becomes part of the David legend (1 Sam. 17)… Reading the biblical account of the emergence of the monarchy while simultaneously considering social-science models of state formation has led recent investigators to reassess the role of the Philistines…True, the early Israelite state is linked to the need for military forces that could deal with Philistine incursions. It also had to repel the raids of such groups as the Ammonites (1 Sam. 10.27) and Amalekites (1 Sam. 30.1), and perhaps meet threats from neighboring Moab, Edom, and Syria (1 Sam. 14.47; 2 Sam. 8.1–14)…The tenth century [BCE] saw the recovery of tribal lands lost to Philistines, the capture or incorporation of nontribal enclaves still surviving in tribal territories, the development of regional centers, and the establishment of trade routes…”See Kinship and Kingship: The Early Monarchy: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195139372.001.0001/acref-9780195139372-chapter-6;jsessionid=3F74A742DBE59F8A2C1B4F479AD95CBF
See Drews, Robert. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691186580
“…the rites performed at the Sintashta burial ground (in the southern Ural region, northeast of Magnitogorsk) had a pronounced Indo-Iranian character. The tribes that used this and related burial grounds from the eighteenth to the sixteenth century BCE carried out both individual and group interments. The wooden burial cover was held up by wooden posts; the most ancient of Indian scriptures, the Ṛg Veda, makes reference to a similar practice…The sacrifice of animals is reminiscent of another ancient Indian sacrificial custom, the Agnicayana. The Sintashta burial ground reflects a stage of ancient Indian beliefs earlier than that found in the Ṛg Veda. Moreover, elements of the funeral rites have parallels to those in a wider area…” in Litvinskii, B (2005) “Prehistoric Religions: The Eurasian Steppes and Inner Asia,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 11, pp. 7382–7388.
Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500– 3500 B.C.: Myths and Cult Images. Berkeley, 1982.
Mallory, J. P, and Adams, D. Q. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006
The story of Yama is told first in the “Ṛg Veda dating from between c.1700 bce and c.1200–1000 bce…were first put into an orally transmitted saṃhitā collection, arranged into ten maṇḍalas, or ‘books’, possibly around 1200 bce…”https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198610250.001.0001/acref-9780198610250-e-2083?rskey=QG7Wjx&result=3
Rees, Alwyn D, and Rees, B. R. Celtic Heritage : Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1961. Print.
Donn: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198609674.001.0001/acref-9780198609674-e-1542?rskey=8MXt33&result=3
John Carey “The Voice of Amairgen, and Ireland's Myth of Itself.” In private correspondence Professor Carey (http://research.ucc.ie/profiles/A007/jcarey) confirmed Rees brothers’ (as well as Myles Dillon and Kuno Meyer’s) view that Yama and Donn are cognates.
See “German Mythology” in The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195156690.001.0001/acref-9780195156690-e-605?rskey=Wjxz8S&result=1)
See “Germanic Divinities in Weekday Names,” Strutynski, Udo in Journal of Indo-European Studies 3, 1975, pp. 363–384
Odin:https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195156690.001.0001/acref-9780195156690-e-1171?rskey=P0GlOr&result=3
Puhvel, Jaan. "Remus Et Frater." History of Religions15.2 (1975): 146-57.
Lincoln, Bruce. "The Indo-European Myth of Creation." History of Religions 15.2 (1975): 121-45.
Lincoln, Bruce. "The Indo-European Myth of Creation." History of Religions 15.2 (1975): 121-45.
Lincoln, Bruce “The Indo-European Myth of Creation,” History of Religions , Nov., 1975, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Nov., 1975), pp. 121-145. University of Chicago Press (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061927).
“In 1887, Egyptian peasants rummaging in ruins on the plain of Amarna found inscribed clay tablets… Eventually, the corpus of letters, with four attached inventories, would number 350…The language of the Amarna Letters, with a few exceptions in Assyrian, Hurrian, and [Indo-European-European] Hittite, is Babylonian… Correspondence with independent powers to the north is attested from late (about the thirtieth year) in the reign of Amenhotpe III to early in the reign of Tutankhamun, a period of about twenty-five years…” in the Oxford Companion to Ancient Egypt (2005): https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195102345.001.0001/acref-9780195102345-e-0026?rskeyEJzn9r&result=2
See page 59 of Drews, Robert. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691186580
See Drews, Robert. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691186580