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Bernal on the Indo-European invasions and the earlier Goddess cultures
/*- Peter Myers, November 23, 2001; update February 11, 2004. My
comments are shown {thus}.

You are at http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/*gimbutas*.html.

(1) Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, /Genes, Peoples, and Languages /(2) Colin
Renfrew, /Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
/(3) Marija *Gimbutas*, /The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 3500 -
3500 BC /(4) Marija *Gimbutas*, /The Civilization of the Goddess /(5)
Cyrus H. Gordon on the Aryan Invasions (6) Martin Bernal on the Aryan
Invasions, in /Black Athena/ (7) A.L. Basham on the Aryan Invasions, in
/The Wonder That Was India/

Archaeology has been incredibly politicised over the years. Colin
Renfrew writes that, after Hitler's use of the Aryan theme, "Childe
subsequently avoided all mention of his book The Aryans, although in
fact it offered no evidence in favour of the delusion of racial
superiority and was very careful to distinguish between language and
culture and supposed racial classifications" (/Archaeology and
Language/, p. 4).

This "avoiding all mention" amounts to swinging from one extreme to
another. It's got to the point now, where some Western scholars deny the
Aryan invasion of India.

The chariot appears to have been invented by Aryans in Central Asia, and
to have spread both West & East from there. The chariot was the tank of
the day, and allowed blitzkrieg invasions. Those invaded had to acquire
the technology, one way or the other.

Old Kingdom Egypt had no chariots. The Hyksos had chariots, which would
have helped them to defeat Egypt. Later pharoahs had them, and the
Jewish god Yahweh is depicted, in the Bible, sitting on a Merkabah,
which means "throne-chariot".

The chariot reached China from Central Asia. Silk road archeological
findings substantiate cultural exchange between East & West.

Another item that seems to have been invented once only, is the potter's
wheel. It spread slowly across the Eurasian landmass.

I'm sure that even religions and philosophies have been spread along
such routes (in both directions) from the early stages of Civilisation.
There's a similarity, for example, between the Presocratic philosophies
of Greece, and Taoism. Taoism has Opposities engaging dialectically, as
in Heraclitus; yet an underlying One, as in Parmenides.

Cavalli-Sforza is a Geneticist; Renfrew & *Gimbutas* were rival
Archaeologists, Renfrew taking the "Patriarchal" side and *Gimbutas* the
Feminist. My assessment is at the end.

*(1) Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, /Genes, Peoples, and Languages/*, tr.
Mark Seielstad, Penguin NY 2000.

*{p. 101} Archeologists working between the two world wars were trained
to interpret every cultural event* - from stylistic ehanges in axes and
pottery to changes in burial praetices during the copper and iron ages
in central Europe - *in terms of grand migrations and conquests. After
the last world war, this approach was attacked*, particularly by the
English school of archeology. Researchers began to theorize that
innovations could spread in densely populated regions as the result of
well-developed commercial networks. *This critique* was important, but
it eventually *was carried to a dogmatic extreme. Before World War II,
all cultural change was thought to result from massive migrations;
afterward,*

{p. 102} *migratory explanations were considered unacceptable*. Only
merchants traveled, carrying objects later recovered in diggings.

Archeology has shown that the spread of agriculture was very slow and
was accompanied by a considerable increase in population density. By
contrast, all purely cultural diffusions were very quick and rarely had
demographic consequences. *Ammerman and I asked, as critically as
possible, whether the spread of agriculture in Europe was a cultural or
demic process, that is, did farming or farmers spread? *Its slow pace
across the continent suggested a demic process ...

We were aided by a genetic theory developed by R. A. Fisher ... Fisher's
theory shows that a growing population spreads at an easily calculable
rate that depends on two demographic variables: the population's growth
rate and the migration rates. The archeological record showed that
agriculture spread approximately one kilometer per year. It was a bit
more rapid when people used boats or traveled along rivers or
coastlines, and slower near physical barriers or areas of ecological
change. ...

{p. 103} *We concluded that demographic data of population growth and
migration are indeed compatible with the theory of demic diffusion of
Neolithic cultivators*.

But this hypothesis was not immediately welcomed by Anglo-American
archeologists. Only recently has the situation begun to change. Colin
Renfrew, Professor of Archeology at the University of Cambridge in
England, enthusiastically endorsed the theory ...

{p. 109} To our great astonishment, we saw that *the first principal
component* {of the European gene map} ... perfectly *matched the map
plotting the arrival dates of cereals in Europe* according to
radiocarbon estimates (figure 5).

{p. 110} {text at figure 6}* there was an expansion of farmers from the
Middle East into Europe, who, in the course of expansion, mixed with
local hunter-gatherers*, who had different gene frequencies. {end of
text at figure 6}

{p. 117} The third principal component is extremely interesting. ...

{p. 118} It shows *an expansion originating in all area north of the
Caucasus and the Black and Caspian Seas, which the archeologist Marjia*
{it should be Marija} **Gimbutas* had already proposed as the homeland
of Indo-European speakers*.

We shall discuss the evolution of languages in the next chapter. Suffice
it to say here that m*uch discussion has centered on the geographic
origins of the Indo-European languages*, with suggestions spanning from
central Europe to Central Asia. *Marjia *Gimbutas* has suggested that
the Indo-European languages spread from a region north of the Caueasus
and south of the Urals, where numerous tombs called *kurgan* have been
found. These tombs were filled with sculptures, precious metals, bronze
weapons, and the skeletons of both warriors and horses*. Ecologically,
the area belongs to the Eurasiatic steppe, which extends almost without
interruption from Romania to Manchuria. *Horses were common in the area,
and the archeologist David Anthony has recently shown that they were
probably domesticated in the vicinity of this *Kurgan* culture*, where
chariots and bronze weapons were made more than 5,000 years ago. Without
written documents, it is very difficult for archaeologists to say what
language was spoken in this region at the time.

*Another archeologist, Colin Renfrew, has offered a different
hypothesis: he believes Indo-European languages originated from Anatolia
in modern day Turkey*. The first farmers of this area would have spoken
a proto-Indo-European language, and would have spread it across Europe.
Renfrew based his hypothesis on the belief that agriculture was spread
by farmers, not culturally, and farmers would have had to bring their
own language with them. *This hypothesis has received less philologic
support than *Gimbutas's**. But as we shall see later, the two theories
are not completely contradictory.

The people of the *Kurgan* culture were pastoral nomads who domesticated
horses in the steppes where agriculture was not very productive. The
horse provided milk, meat, transport, and as the *Kurgan* people would
discover later, military power. But these nomads might originally have
descended from agriculturalists of the Middle East or Anatolia, who
probably arrived on the steppes

{p. 119} through Macedonia and Romania, and may have spoken a
pre-proto-Indo-European spoken in Anatolia at the beginning of
agricultural development, around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. Thus the
language(s) common to Anatolia 9,000 to 10,000 years ago were earlier
forms of Indo-European that spread locally to the Balkans and to the
steppe. The languages that developed from this early Indo-European in
the *Kurgan* region were later spread by pastoral nomads to most of
Europe, beginning 3,000 to 4,000 years later.

... the fourth and fifth components are still statistically reliable in
Europe and can be simplly explained. The fourth (figure 9) shows an
expansion from Greece toward southern Italy, called in Latin Magna
Graecia (Greater Greece) because southern Italy became more important
and populated than Greece itself. Greek expansion also included
Macedonia and western Turkey.

{p. 120} The fifth principal component (figure 10) shows a pole in the
easily identified Basque homeland. This component repeats on a smaller
scale the lower expansion in the second PC. Today, the Basque language
and culture survive in southwestern France and northern Spain, in the
western Pyrenees. Historical information from Roman times, place names
(toponymy), and genetics all confirm that the Basques once inhabited a
much larger territory than today. The area in which Basque is still
spoken has sharply contracted, especially in France where, under
pressure favoring the French language, Basque is spoken by only about
12,000 people.

It's spoken by many more people in Spain. During the last Paleolithic
period the Basque region extended over almost the entire area where
ancient cave paintings have been found. There are some cues that Basque
descends from a language spoken 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, during the
first occupation of France by modern humans, who most probably came from
the southwest, but possibly from the east as well. The artists of these
caves would have spoken a language of the first, preagricultural
Europeans, from which modern Basque is derived.

Population Expansions Outside of Europe

We have seen that agriculture spread in many directions from the Middle
East toward other independent centers of agricultural origin. The
eastern expansion toward Iran and India is clearly visible in the
genetic maps of Asia. The same wave of expansion also headed toward
Arabia and North Africa. However, as in many of the regions that would
later become deserts, few of the original populations have survived. The
replacement of Neolithic populations with more modern ones occurred most
extensively in what is now the Sahara Desert. We find *significant areas
of admixture between Whites (Caucasoids) and Blacks in Africa:
throughout most of the Sahara where Whites have crossed both the Suez
and the Mediterranean, and in East Africa as a result of late Arab
contact*, which is well documented historically. Ancient cave paintings
in the Sahara make it clear that the earliest Saharan populations were
Black - although possibly mixed with Caucasoids - up to about 5,000
years ago.

{p. 124} In China, we find independent but nearly simultaneous
agricultural developments in the north, east and south. ... Genetically,
northern Chinese resemble Manchurians, Koreans, and Japanese. Southern
Chinese are more like Southeast Asians. China has been unified for more
than 2,000 years, and while there has been internal movement, it has
remained genetically and culturally divided. ...

{p. 125} During the last several thousand years, the most sigllificant
expansions have started in Cental Asia, thanks to technological
developments in pastoral economies. Agriculture did not do well on the
Asian steppes, but* domestication of the horse afforded Eurasian
pastoralists unprecedented advantages in migrations and military
conquests. Many waves of migration started from the *Kurgan* region* and
had a profound impact on European and Asian history. *The first
expansion toward southern Asia probably occurred between 3000 and 2000
B.C., heading for Iran, Pakistan and India via Turkmenistan. This
passage appears to have contributed to the disappearance arouud 1500
B.C. of the Indus Valley civilization*, which had produced the
magnificent cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. At the same time as
these nomadic expansions, there were dynasties related to the
Indo-Europeans throughout the steppes as far as the Altai Mountains.

*Around the third century B.C., groups speaking Turkish languages of the
Altaic family, like the Huns, began developing new weapons and
strategies.* In the next centuries *they threatened empires in China,
Tibet, India, and Central Asia, before eventually arriving in Turkey. In
1453 Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire fell before their armies*.
The conquests of their descendants continued into recent times, with
expansions to Europe and North Africa. Genetic traces of their movements
can sometimes be found, but they are often diluted, since the numbers of
conquerors were always much smaller than the populations they conquered.
In Turkey and the Balkans, the furthest point permanently settled by
these Mongolian nomads, no clear genetic trace of their origin has been
found, but genetic investigations are limited. *Further expansions of
these Eurasian nomads recorded by history are those of the Avars,
Scythians, and all of the barbarians who put an end to the Roman
Empire*. Most of the earlier conquests are poorly known. Genetic
analysis indicates a major expansion began from near the Sea of Japan -
possibly even Japan itself - but it is difficult to date. It may have
heen very early. According to our archeological knowledge, it could have
occurred 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, coinciding with or even preceding
the date of ceramic development.

{p. 128} Extension of the name Aryan to include Indo-Europeans and in
particular Germans, supposed to be the original Indo-Europeans, is a
fantasy that began in Germany and was especially dear to Nazi theorists.
In Sanskrit, the old language of Indo-Iranians, /aryas /means noble,
lord, ruler.

{This statement seems a precaution lest Nazism rise again. But the word
"Aryan" is today preserved in the names of the countries "Iran" and
"Ireland", i.e. "Eire" = "Aryan", showing the extent of the Aryan
conquest. *Gimbutas*, below, shows the reality of Aryan "nobility"}

{p. 159} The Indo-European Family

... *Not long ago, one of the most popular theories was proposed by the
archeologist Marjia *Gimbutas**, who postulated an origin above the
Black Sea and associated the earliest speakers of Indo-European with the
*Kurgan* culture of the Asian steppes. But when *Gimbutas* published her
hypothesis, the *Kurgan* lates were poorly known. She assumed 3,000 to
3,500 years B.C., a date which was rejected as too old by English
archeologists. **Gimbutas's* dates appear to have been vindicated by new
excavations, which have also shown that horses were probably
domesticated and mounted at that time and that war chariots were built
in this area*.

In 1987,* Colin Renfrew proposed that Indo-European languages were
conducted north by the Neolithic farmers of the Middle East*. In chapter
4, I mentioned his influential book, which corroborated our hypothesis
that Neolithic agriculture spread by a demic and not a purely cultural
process. *It is tempting to champion the correspondence between the
spread of Indo-European languages and the diffusion of agriculture*,
which geography brings clearly to light. However, in my discussions with
Albert Ammerman, my archeological collabolator in the initial research
on the spread of farming and farmers, *we avoided linguistic
correlations because archeology cannot tell us about them in the absence
of a written record*. Nevertheless, on the basis of theoretical
anthropological considerations, archeologist Renfrew came courageously
to the conclusion that Indo-European was spread by Middle Eastern farmers.

I learned about Renfrew's hypothesis before he published it, on the
occasion of a visit to Cambridge. Further connection between the spread
of agriculture and language came to mind when *I learned from linguistic
literature that the language written in a cuneiform script around 5,000
years ago in the region of Elam (southwestern Iran) was Dravidian *{the
language of the Harappa civilization, related to Tamil as still spoken
in South India}.* Both Renfrew and I independently suggested*

{p. 160} *that Dravidian may have originated in the Middle East and been
spread by mideastern farmers east toward Pakistan and India. But in the
last section of this book I tried to shift the origin of Dravidian away
from the Fertile Crescent further east, either to the south Caspian,
eastern Iran, or northern India*. It seems very reasonable to assume
that agricult-lral developments helped spread the languages spoken by
the first farmers. This must have happened repeatedly, and we will see
other examples. But agriculture developed no earlier than 10,000 years
ago, and therefore the relevant linguistic families are late ones. *If
Greenberg is right in stating that Dravidian as well as Afroasiatic is
older than Eurasiatic, then the center of origin of Dravidian is not
necessarily connected with the Middle East, and may be further to the
east*.

Another interesting question related to the difficult problem of centers
of origin of linguistic families arises with Renfrew's hypothesis that
the Indo-European languages originatted in Turkey, and then spread into
Europe with Neolithic peasants. Obviously, all immigrants bring their
language with them, and have no reason to learn a new one if they fail
to encounter anyone in their new territory. It is worth pointing out
that *the inhabitants of Europe before the agricultural expansion (often
called Mesolithics) usually had a very low population density*. Since
they were hunter gatherers, they may have preferred living in areas that
were geologically different from agriculturally suitable Llnd. *These
earlier inhabitants and the new settlers, the Neolithic farmers, did not
therefore have much contact*, especially at the beginning of the
agricultural expansion, when the density of farmers was lower than at
later stages.

*Renfrew's hypothesis, if correct, provides a date for the dissemination
of Indo-European languages equivalent to that of the initial spread of
farming, around 9,500 to 10,000 years ago. This date may seem to be
problematic, since old linguistic estimates *(although very
approximate)* suggested an earlier date (6,000 years ago). Moreover,
this latter date would fit more comfortalbly *Gimbutas*' hypothesis of a
*Kurgan* origin 5,000 to 5,500 years ago* (kurgans are tombs in the form
of mounds, which have been quarries of art objects in Southern Russia).
As we see, however, there is no

{p. 161} necessary contradiction between *Gimbutas* and Renfrew. On the
contrary, Alberto Piazza and I believe that their proposals reinforce
each other. If we accept this idea, it may be useful to refer to the
original Indo-European spoken in Turkey 10,000 years ago as the primary
Indo-European, pre-proto-Indo-European, and to that spoken 4,000 to
5,000 years later in the *Kurgan* region as secondary or
proto-Indo-European.

*It is clear that, genetically *speaking,* peoples of the *Kurgan*
steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern
Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey*. To arrive north of the
Black Sea farmers from Turkey may have expanded west of the Black Sea,
through Romania, and/or along the eastern coast of the Black Sea.
Shortly after their arrival, *these Neolithic farmers domesticated the
horse, which was not as abundant elsewhere, and developed a
predominantly pastoral economy*. This allowed them to survive and even
prosper in an environment ill suited to an exclusively agrarian life.
This adaptation took time, but *with the first development of bronze
(around 5,000 years ago), they were on the brink of an expansion. They
had food, a means of transport, and powerful new weapons.* Actually, the
*Kurgan* region extended fairly widely, and generated many expansions
after this first one, over the next 3,000 or 4,000 years. The very first
area of origin may have been between the rivers Volga and Don, but there
were many expansions, both eastward to Central Asia and westward toward
Europe. Kurgans are found over much of the steppe in both western and
eastern directions.

*The eastward expansion may have been first. It led east and south
through Central Asia toward Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India,
generating the "Indo-Iranian branch" of Indo-European*. These languages
later completely replaced almost all the Dravidian languages previously
spoken from Iran to Pakistan and in northern India, but not those in
southern India. *Most inhabitants of India are Caucasoid, even if their
skin is darker than that of northern Europeans*. *Populations in the
south that speak Dravidian languages are genetically slightly different
from, and darker than, northern Indians*. At least three different
ethnic layers are superimposed on this part of the

{p. 162} world. The oldest and the most limited (the pre-Dravidians, or
Australoid) ... are said to resemble Australian Aborigines ...

*The expansions *{of the *Kurgan* people} *in the opposite direction,
westward, toward central and northern Europe, generated, one after
another, the Celtic, Italic, and Germanic branches of Indo-European
languages*. Northward expansions may have originated the Balto-Slavic
expansion, which was perhaps the last. The southward expansion was less
successful, as the area was already heavily inhabited, but from the
second millenium B.C. there were various Indo-European speaking peoples
and dynasties in Turkey and the Middle East - the Hitittes and the
Mitanni - whose probable origin was from the *Kurgan*. {end of selection}

*(2)* *Colin Renfrew, /Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of
Indo-European Origins/*, Penguin, London 1987.

{p. 3} *Over the past two decades, archaeology has looked with
considerable disfavour on the work of those earlier generations of
scholars who sought to explain the changes observed to have taken place
in the archaeological record in terms mainly of migrations*. We see now
that the particular kinds of pottery so meticulously studied in the past
are not necessarily secure indicators of particular groups of people -
the pots themselves may have been traded, or a fashion in pot-making
adopted, without any change in population. W*e see more clearly that
social groups are not necessarily precisely the same thing as linguistic
groups*, and we are much more willing to accept changes in the
archaeological record as the result of locally-occurring developments
within the societies concerned rather than as the result of outside
influences, or immigration.

All this has made unfashionable the kind of work prevalent fifty years
ago, when the leading scholars of the day would write books with such
titles as /The Coming of the Greeks/, or /Prehistoric Migrations in
Europe/. We are now aware that major developments in human history, such
as the emergence of early urban society in the East Mediterranean, were
the products of the interplay of social and economic factors, and are
not usually explained adequately simply by documenting the migrations of
groups of people.

*But have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater?* For while we are
surely right in looking to social and economic causes for most of the
major developments, are not questions of national or ethnic identity
(and hence of linguistic identity) often an important element in the
social reality? This book sets out to argue that this is indeed the
case, and that archaeologists have, with a few notable exceptions,
failed in recent years to take adequate account of the linguistic
evidence in building up our picture of the past. Of course there are
sound reasons for that. *Along with the enlightened interest in early
Europe which led the great Australian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe,
to publish*

{p. 4} *his book /The Aryans/ in 1926, arose a much more tendentious
inclination to use (and sometimes to distort) the historical evidence
for partisan political ends. ... *Small wonder; then, that
archaeologists have avoided so emotive a topic. *Childe subsequently
avoided all mention of his book /The Aryans/, although in fact it
offered no evidence in favour of the delusion of racial superiority* and
was very careful to distinguish between language and culture and
supposed racial classifications.

{p. 5} *Re-reading today Gordon Childe's/ The Aryans/, one can see that
some of the questions which he posed remain entirely valid, and in most
cases unanswered. So it is time, I feel, to return to some of those old
questions*, as well as to several new ones,* without incurring the
opprobium which such discussions understandably, and perhaps rightly,
earned at the end of the Second World War*.

{p. 6} The solution which I propose for the languages of Europe is in
many ways a surprising one, and it has its implications for the modern
world. Today, for instance, many people believe that the first Celtic
inhabitants of Britain and Ireland arrived in these areas somewhere
around 2000 BC from a homeland elsewhere in Europe. Others would prefer
a date fifteen hundred years later. *I shall argue* that there is no
evidence whatever for that, and the Celtic languages *may have much
longer antecedents in the areas where they are now spoken*. Such an
argument has the effect of removing the hiatus between the British and
Irish neolithic periods - the time of the megalith builders and of the
art of the Irish passage graves and the succeeding phases of prehistory.
*It means, if we accept it, that our origins* - and in general this is
claimed here for other parts of Europe too - *go very much deeper. These
lands have been our lands, and those of our forefathers, for thousands
of years longer than is widely thought*.

{The evidence, I think, supports *Gimbutas* and Danielou against Renfrew}

{p. 17} The most influential recent archaeological treatment has
undoubtedly been that of Marija *Gimbutas*, of the University of
C'alifornia at Los Angeles, who since 1970 has published a series of
papers in which she locates the Indo-European homeland in the steppes of
South Russia, very much as Childe did earlier. She, of course, has much
more archaeological material with which to work. She uses the term
*Kurgan* culture (i.e. the Barrow culture referring to the prehistoric
burial mounds used in the area) to designate the material assemblage of
these Proto-lndo-European speakers. ... *Gimbutas*, building on the work
of Childe and before him of Schrader, thus lays considerable stress upon
the arguments from linguistic palaeontology - the 'common words' to
which she refers. In the further development of her theory, great weight
is placed on especially significant features - for instance the kurgans
(burial mounds) themselves, and the Corded Ware which, since the early
paper by Kossinna, had attracted the attention of archaeologists.

{But *Gimbutas* portrays the Aryans as wreckers, vandals, oppressors of
women} {end of Renfrew selection}

*(3) Marija *Gimbutas*, /The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 3500 -
3500 BC/*, updated edition, Thames and Hudson, London 1982.

{p. 9}* The term /Old Europe/ is applied to a pre-Indo-European culture
of Europe, a culture matrifocal and probably matrilinear, agricultural
and sedentary, egalitarian and peaceful. It contrasted sharply with the
ensuing proto-Indo-European culture which was patriarchal, stratified,
pastoral, mobile and war-oriented, superimposed* on all Europe, except
the southern and western fringes,* in the course of three waves of
infiltration from the Russian steppe, between 4500 and 2500 B.C.* During
and after this period the female deities, or more accurately the Goddess
Creatrix in her many aspects, were largely replaced by the predominantly
male divinities of the Indo-Europeans. *What developed after /c./ 2500
BC was a melange of the two mythic systems, Old European and
Indo-European*. ...

The persistence of the Goddess worship for more than 20,000 years, from
the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic and beyond, is shown by the continuity
of a variety

{p. 10} of a series of conventionalized images.

{p. 17} Villages depending upon domesticated plants and animals had
appeared in southeastern Europe as early as the seventh millennium BC,
and the spiritual forces accompanying this change in the economic and
social organization are manifested in the emergent artistic tradition of
the Neolithic. The development of a food-producing economy and
subsequent cultural innovations can no longer be simply explained as an
introduction of vaguely designated colonists trom Anatolia or the east
Mediterranean. D*uring the seventh, sixth and fifth millennia BC the
farmers of southeastern Europe evolved a unique cultural pattern,
contemporary with similar developments in Anatolia, Mesopotamia,
Syro-Palestine and Egypt.* It reached a climax in the fifth millennium BC.

A new designation, /Civilization of Old Europe/, is introduced here in
recognition of the collective identity and achievement of the different
cultural groups of Neolithic-Chalcolithic southeastern Europe. The area
it occupied extends from the Aegean and Adriatic, including the islands,
as far north as Czechoslovakia, southern Poland and the westem Ukraine.
Between c. 7000 and c. 3500 BC, the inhabitants of this region developed
a much more complex social organization than their western and northern
neighbours, forming settlements which often amounted to small townships,
inevitably involving craft specialization and the creation of religious
and governmental institutions. They independently discovered the
possibility of utilizing copper and gold for ornaments and tools, and
even appear to have evolved a rudimentary script.

{p. 195} The image of the Great Goddess of Life, Death and Regeneration
in anthropomorphic form with the projection of her powers through
insects and animals ...

... during the period of early agriculture her image must have been
transformed. The domesticated dog, bull and he-goat now became her
companions ... the goddess was flanked by male animals noted for their
strength. ...

{p. 196} In her chthonic and frightening aspect she must have been a
Mother Terrible perhaps yearning for human and animal blood, as
indicated by her epiphany in the shape of a ferocious dog.

There was no isolated image of a Mother Terrible; the aspects death and
life are inextricably intertwined. She was deployed in graves to
stimulate and perpetuate the procreative powers of the deceased. Thc
European Great Goddess, like the Sumerian Ninkhursag, gave life to the
Dead (another name for Ninkhursag was /Nintinugga/, 'She who gives life
to the Dead'). Her magical hands an music were for the relcase of the
life forces. The symbols of 'becoming' - eggs, crescents, horns, and
crosses within circles and concentric circles - were engraved or painted
over her body or on votivc vases. ...

In her incarnation as a pregnant doe, a chrysalis, caterpillar,
butterfly, bee, toad, turtle, or hedgehog, she was a symbol of embryonic
life and regeneration. In this fundamental notion lies her association
with the moon and the horns. As a bee or a butterfly she emerges from
the body or horns of the bull; as a bear she takes care of a young life.

*As a supreme Creator who creates from her own substance she is the
primary goddess of the Old European pantheon*. In this* she contrasts
with the Indo-European Earth-Mother, who is the* impalpable* sacred
earth-spirit and is not in herself a creative principle; only through
the interaction of the male sky-god does she become pregnant*.

HEKATE AND ARTEMIS: SURVIVAL OF THE OLD EUROPEAN GREAT GODDESS IN
ANCIENT GREECE AND WESTERN ANATOLIA

The question now arises as to what happened to the prehistoric goddess
after the third millennium BC. *Did she disappear after the advent of
the patriarchal Indo-European world* or did she survive the dramatic
change?

{p. 197} *In Minoan (non Indo-European) Crete the Great Goddess is seen
in representations on frescoes, rings and seals. She is shown in
association with bulls, or bull-horns, 'double-axes' (butterflies),
he-goats or lions*. On a stamp from Knossos she appears as a lady of
nature untamed on top of a mountain flanked by two lions and a male
human worshipper. On a gold ring from Isopata near Knossos the
butterfly- or bee-headed goddess is, as we have seen, surrounded by
worshippers in festive garments wearing insect masks (see Fig. 146). She
is represented on frescoes accompanied by worshippers, women or men in
festive garments with upraised arms. Gigantic dogs portrayed on steatite
vases or on cylinder seals (Matz 1962: 130) are probably the companions
of the same goddess. She or her animals, particularly the bulls,
dominate the ritualistic scenes throughout the Palace period of Minoan
Crete.

*In Greece, as in India, the Great Goddess survived the superimposed
Indo-European cultural horizon*. As the predecessor of Anatolian and
Greek Hekate-Artemis (related to Kubaba, Kybebe/ Cybele) she lived
through the Bronze Age, then through Classical Greece and even into
later history in spite of transformations of her outer form and the many
different names that were applied to her. The image of Hekate-Artemis of
Caria, Lydia and Greece, based on descriptions of early Greek authors,
vase paintings, and finds in actual sanctuaries dedicated to this
multifunctional goddess, supplement and verify our understanding of the
appearance and functions of the prehistoric goddess. Written sources
pour blood into her veins of stone, clay, bone or gold.

*In name and character she is a non-Greek, a non-Indo-European goddess*.
The name of Artemis is known from Greek, Lydian and Etruscan
inscriptions and texts. Its antiquity is demonstrated by the appearance
of the words /A-ti-mi-te/ and /A-ti-mi-to/, the dative and genetive case
of her name, on Linear B tablets from Pylos (Bennett 1955: 208-9).
*Hekate (Hekabe) was Asiatic, not known to the Greeks in name*. She was
Enodia in Thessaly, perhaps an earlier name later replaced by Hekate.
Whether Artemis and Hekate appear as two goddesses or as one, they both
belong to the moon cycle. Hekate, gruesome and linked with death;
Artemis, youthful and beautiful, reflecting the purity of untouched
nature and linked with motherhood.

In Caria (western Turkey) Hekate was the primary goddess. Mysteries and
games were performed in her sanctuary at Lagina. In Colophon, dogs were
sacrificed to her and she herself could turn into a dog. West of Lagina
was Zerynthos, from which Hekate derived her name of Zerynthia. In
Samothrace, there was a cave called Zerynthos associated with Hekate.
*Dogs were sacrificed* there and mysteries *and orgiastic dances were
performed*. Hekate and her dogs

{p. 198} are described as journeying over the graves of the dead and
above the sacrificed blood. In the days of Aristophanes and Aischylos
she is the mistress of the night road who leads travellers astray, of
cross ways, of fate, and of the world of the dead, being known by both
names, Hekate and Artemis. ... Sophocles in /Antigone /mentions Enodia
as Perscphone, the ruler of the dead. The torch of the goddess probably
relates to thc fertilizing power of the moon since Hekate's torches were
carried around the freshly sown fields to promote their fertility.
Statues of Roman Diana show her crowned with the crescent and carrying a
raised torch. Hekate is responsible for lunacy and, on the positive
side, is Giver of Vision.

The Lady of free and untamed nature and the Mother, protectress of
weaklings, a divinity in whom the contrasting principles of virginity
and motherhood are fused into the conccpt of a single goddess, was
venerated in Greece, Lydia, Crete and Italy. ... She, 'the pure and
strong one', was surrounded by nymphs, flanked by animals, and as
huntress dominated thc animal world. Games with bulls were among the
rituals of this goddess. She was present everywhcre in nature, above all
in hills, forests, meadows, and fertile valleys, and often was
therioform, appearillg as a bear or doe. ... Well-bred Athenian girls of
marriageable age danced as bears in honour of Artemis of Brauronia, and
during ritees of cult-initiation girls 'became' bears, /arktoi /(Bacho-

{p. 199} fen 1863: 24). In paintings on vascs, the worshippers of
Artemis wore animal masks while dancing. The girls and women of
Lakedemonia pertorlllcd orgiastic dances to glorify Artemis. ...

It is no mere coincidence that the venerated goddess of the sixth and
fifth centuries in Ancient Grccce resembles the Goddess of Life and
Death of the sixth and fifth millennia BC. Mythical images last for many
millennia. In her various manifestations - strong and beautiful Virgin,
Bear-Mother, and Life-giver and Life-taker - the

{p. 200} Great Goddess existed for at least five thousand years before
the appearance of Classical Greek civilization. *Village communities
worship her to this day in the guise of the Virgin Mary*.

{p. 216} The whole group of interconnected symbols - phallus (or
cylinder, mushroom and conical cap), ithyphallic animal-masked man
goat-man and the bull-man - represents a male stimulating principle in
nature without whosc influcncc nothing would grow and thrive. This
family of symbols goes back in its origin to the early agricultural era,
to the same period when the Goddess of Vegetation was born and when
goat- and cow-herds existed. Charging bulls, bull heads or horns alone,
bovine heads with human eyes and ithyphallic men are already known to
the Proto-Sesklo and Starcevo cultural complexes, /i.e./ no later than
the seventh millennium BC. Shrincs of Catal Huyuk include large bull
figures in wall frescoes and sculptured bull heads and horns. Around the
Mediterranean the bull and he-goat played a prominent part in religion
from the seventh millennium onwards. So did thc phallus, recognizable as
a high cylindrical neck of androgynous figurilles, as a stand, or the
stem of a cup. ...

{This suggests that Alain Danielou is right in seeing Shivaism and its
analogues as the original religion prior to the rise of male-oriented
morality <danielou-paglia.html> (Jain, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Confucian
etc.); further, it contradicts Renfrew's depiction of those early
cultures as Indo-European}

Representations of phalli are found in all phases and cultural groups of
Old Europe with a wider variety in Neolithic Greece and Yugo-

{p. 217} slavia, particularly the Adriatic seaboard. They were fashioned
in all sizes from the miniature to the exaggerated. Their decoration and
shape range from naturalistic to fantastic: some have a 'cap' or a
circumcision and an opening on top; others are geometrically decorated
by painting or incision; still others spiral upwards like snakes. The
clay phallus from Tsangli, a large Sesklo site in Thessaly, is painted
cream, its naturalism enhanced by reddish-brown bands and has a broad
incision at the top. From later Neolithic Sesklo comes an enormous
marble phallus painted with red meanders top and bottom (National
Museum, Athens 5936; Zervos, 1963: 398). The Vinca and Lengyel clay or
bone phalli were decorated with bands of horizontal incisions and white
encrusted patterns of dots symbolizing snakes. The East Balkan and
Cucuteni phalli are usually undecorated.

Danilo, Butmir and Vinca settlements yielded hundreds of 'wine cups'
with phallus-shaped stems. Many of them have plain, pointed stems, but
others are charmingly decorated and masterfully shaped sculptures. Most
interesting are those phalli imitating snakes, indicated by incision or
in relief. In some instances two heads of snakes or of frogs appear on
the top; others have human facial features, such as a protruding nose,
while others again are geometrically decorated with striated zigzag
bands or triangles. Cylindrical cups modelled as human heads also occur,
and dishes and bowls of the Late Vinca complex have a phallus standing
in the middle (Plocnik site: Archaeol. Museum Nis, Inv. 490).

Another category of phallic representations is made up of stands with
human, animal or amorphous facial characteristics. Simple clay cylinders
with a flattened base are frequent in the Starcevo and Early Vinca
complexes of the central Balkans. Some have human facial features and
female breasts; others have male genitals. We have already discussed the
phallic aspect of the long cylindrical necks of the Bird Goddess and
Great Goddess of the seventh and sixth millennia BC. The combining of
female and male characteristics in one figurine did not completely die
out after the sixth millennium BC.

{p. 220} The ecstatic dancer, goat- or bull-masked, as seen in the Vinca
sculptural repertory, can be interpreted as a representation of either
an archetypal Dionysus or an excited worshipper of the Great Goddess.

{p. 227} ALLUSIONS TO DIONYSUS

*Dionysus is a pre-lndo-European god of great antiquity *in spite of his
composite name (dio-nysos, 'god of Nysa or Nysai'; the latter probably
is a pre-Indo-European place name).* His cult in Greece is evidenced by
temples, sculptures of phalli and descriptions of processions carrying
huge phalli as late as the second century BC*, and the persisting
tradition of Dionysiac festivals even into later times is attested by a
group of mythical images having strong roots in the local (southeast
European-western Anatolian) soil. *Discussions about the origin of the
Greek Dionysus - whether he came to Greece from Thrace, Crete or western
Asia Minor - are pointless, since all these lands originally belonged to
the same Mother Culture*. Dionysus was a bull-god, god of annual
renewal, imbued with all the urgency of nature. Brimming with virility,
he was the god most favoured by women.

*The abundance of phalli in Dionysiac festivals, in sculptures near the
temples, on *herms used as *signposts on the roads and before the doors
of houses suggests that the ancient Greeks were no less obsessed by
phallic magic than were the Old Europeans*. ...

{p. 227} The key to a more complete understanding of the male god and
the Bull God of Old Europe lies in the Dionysiac festivals -
Anthesteria, Lenaia and the Greater Dionysia. In these festivals, which
have assimilated elements of deep antiquity, Dionysus appears as a year-

{p. 228} god. The idea of renewal is predominant throughout the
festivals of winter and spring. Each re-enacts an orgiastic agricultural
scenario with phalli, phallus-shaped cups, ladles and cult dishes and
the bullman (Diollysus) marrying the queen (goddess).

The /Lenaia /festival held in January was preceded by a /Rural Dionysia
/in which phalli were carried in procession amid general merrymaking to
promote the fertility of the autumn-sown seed, and of the soil during
the winter recess. Offerings were made before the image of Dionysus
(including pouring porridge with a ladle). and priapic and goat songs
were sung. The purpose of the Lenaia festival was to arouse the
slumbering vegetation (Deubner 1956; James l961: 142-43). The /City
Dionysia /festival in March was also designed to ellsure fertility. To
this festival the cities of the Athenian empire sent the grossest kind
of fertility emblem, the phallus, as part of their tribute (Webster
1959: 59). /Anthresteria /was a Festival of Flowers in honour of
Diollysus as the god of spring, and included drinking and rejoicing. The
second day of the festival was called /Choes/, the Day of the Cups. The
wine was taken from the jars and brought to the sanctuary of Dionysus in
the marshes, where it was silently distributed in small jugs among all
citizens over the age of four. After everyone had drunk, the wife of the
magistrate was married to Dionysus in the /Bukoleion /or Ox-stall,
attended by women who had taken vows of chastity in the service of
Dionysus. Thither the image of Dionysus, possibly in bovine form, or an
actor wearing horns and a hide, was brought on a boat-like structure on
wheels to complete the nuptial rites (James 1961: 140).

A sanctuary of Dionysus, which can be traced back to the fifteenth
century BC., has been discovered on the island of Keos (Caskey 1964:
326). It yielded more than twenty terracotta figurines portraying women
in a dancing posture, dressed in festive attire, with exposed breasts,
'snake collars and belts'. They may represent maenads, the devotees and
ecstatic dancers in the Dionysiac festivals. The sanctuary was used for
more than one thousand years, up to the Hellenistic period.

Since many elements of the year-god's festivals are represented in the
sculptural art of Old Europe, it seems not unreasonable to assume that
festivals took place in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Europe. Possibly* the
central idea of ritual drama, the 'Sacred Marriage', the ritual coition
of the male god and a female goddess*, is reflected in the little
sculpture from Cascioarele. The statuette belongs to the East Balkan
Chalcolithic Gumelnita complex and is the only one of its kind, but this
does not necessarily mean that there were no portrayals of the 'Sacred
Marriage' in other areas and periods of Old Europe. The presence of the
masked ithyphallic god also implies a festival at which a wedding
ceremony is enacted, the male god marrying the

{p. 230} Great Goddess. From the Cascioarele figurine it is seen that
she is not a pregnant goddess, but a youthful virgin. She is portrayed
in the nude and has a large pubic triangle.

When was the drama of hierogamy {sacred marriage} introduced into
Europe? Was it at the very beginning of the Neolithic period, or on the
advent of advanced agriculture? It seems unlikely to have been later
than c. 65OO BC, when the 'phallic obsession' became manifest through
representations of phallic stands, cups and ithyphallic gods.

THE 'SORROWFUL GOD'

We have considered until now the youthful, strong, creative aspect of
the primeval Dionysus. Is there anything in the sculptural art of Old
Europe to indicate his other aspect- the peaceful ancient? *There are
figures of a squatting or seated man on a stool or throne; his arms
either rest peacefully on his lap, or they are propped on his knees to
provide a support for his head. He shows no signs of emotion and is not
animal-masked; his attitude and the facial expression of the mask he
wears imply contemplation and worry. We may call him, therefore, the
'sorrowful god'*. There are not enough data to reveal his functions, but
we may suppose that he is either a god of vegetation, an old year-god
who must die in order to be reborn the following spring, or a god of
death, consort of the Great Goddess in her aspect of Death. The wide
temporal and geographical distribution of this type of god speaks for
his established position in the pantheon of Old Europe. His importance
is stressed by the fact that the sculptures of a 'sorrowful god' are
frequently produced with extreme care, some ranking as masterpieces of
Neolithic art. Among these are the Vulkaneshti and Hamangia (Cernavoda)
men in a leaning position seated on a small stool. Both are nude and in
them we find the best portrayals of the male body dating from the fifth
millennium BC.

{p. 237} In Old Europe the world of myth was not polarized into female
and male as it was among the Indo-European and many other nomadic and
pastoral peoples of the steppes. Both principles were manifest side by
side. The male divinity in the shape of a young man or a male animal
appears to affirm and strengthen the forces of the creative and active
female. Neither is subordinate to the other, by complementing one
another, their power is doubled.

{p. 238} The teaching of Western civilization starts with the Greeks and
rarely do people ask themselves what forces lay behind thesc beginnings.
But European civilization was not created in the space of a few
centuries; the roots are deeper - by six thousand ycars. That is to say,
vestiges of the myths and artistic concepts of Old Europe, which endured
from the seventh to the fourth millennium BC were transmitted to the
modern Western world and became part of its cultural heritage. {end of
selection}

*(4) Marija *Gimbutas*, /The Civilization of the Goddess/*, edited by
Joan Marler, HarperSanFrancisco, NY 1991.

{p. viii} I reject the assumption that civilization refers only to
androcratic warrior societies. The generative basis of any civilization
lies in its degree of artistic creation, aesthetic achievements,
nonmaterial values, and freedom which make life meaningful and enjoyable
for all its citizens, as well as a balance of powers between the sexes.
*Neolithic Europe was not a time "before civilization"* (used as the
title for Colin Renfrew's book on Neolithic and Copper Age Europe,
1973). It was, instead, a true civilization in the best meaning of the
word. In the 5th and early 4th millennia B.C., just before its demise in
east-central Europe, Old Europeans had towns with a considerable
concentration of population, temples several stories high, a sacred
script, spacious houses of four or five rooms, professional ceramicists,
weavers, copper and gold metallurgists, and other artisans producing a
range of sophisticated goods. A flourishing network of trade routes
existed that circulated items such as obsidian, shells, marble, copper,
and salt over hundreds of kilometers.

All of this was not /ex nihilo/. Next door, in Anatolia, a multitude of
temples appeared in the town of Catal Huyuk which had wall paintings of
extraordinary richness and sophistication a thousand years earlier than
the high-level architecture, wall paintings, sculptures, and ceramic art
of Europe. Before Catal Huyuk, there were three more millennia in which
the evolutionary transition to agriculture and a settled civilized life
took place. The rich display of religious symbolism which flowered in
central Anatolia and in Old Europe is part of an unbroken continuity
from Upper Paleolithic times.

It is a gross misunderstanding to imagine warfare as endemic to the
human condition. Widespread fighting and fortification building have
indeed been the way of life for most of our direct ancestors from the
Bronze Age up until now. However, this was not the case in the
Paleolithic and Neolithic. There are no depictions of arms (weapons used
against other

{p. x} humans) in Paleolithic cave paintings, nor are there any remains
of weapons used by man against man during the Neolithic of Old Europe.
From some hundred and fifty paintings that survive from Catal Huyuk,
there is not one depicting a scene of conflict or fighting, or of war or
torture.

{p. 293} Isbister, located on the southern tip of an island in the south
of Orkney, was covered by a cairn dome 3 to 3.50 m high, measuring 10 by
8 m. ...

Because of the discovery of bones and carcasses of sea eagles, the
Isbister tomb became singled out as "Tomb of the Eagles" ... This tomb
was not, however, an ossuary for birds alone. It was, like other
megalithic graves, a sacred place to which human bones were returned
after excarnation. Some 90 percent of the birds of prey that

{p. 294} would have defleshed the corpses were white-tailed sea eagles.
Thirty-five of their carcasses were counted alongside those of gulls,
owls, crows, ravens, and other birds found in the chamber and scattered
around the tomb. The burial or sacrifice of eagles within the chamber
speaks for their extraordinary importance as birds of the Goddess of
Death and Regeneration.

The excavation at Isbister revealed the strongest evidence for the
practice of excarnation since none of the human bones were deposited
while still articulated. The bodies were defleshed outside the tomb
before a selection of the skeletal remnants were transferred to the
chamber. These bones were bleached and weathered and must have been
exposed for a considerable length of time.

In other megalithic tombs of the Orkney islands, not fish but dogs were
buried as sacred animals of the Goddess: at Cuween, twenty-four dog
skulls were found, and at Burray, dog skulls and skeletons were
discovered in each compartment of the grave. At Holm of Papa Westray
North, a dozen pairs of deer antlers were found, as symbols of
regeneration or as remnants of headdresses for deer dances. ...

The burial of fish, dogs, and deer speaks for more extensive
celebrations than the simple eating of meat. Music and dances were
certainly involved. There are, unfortunately, no pictorial
representations on pottery found in the megalithic tombs in Orkney . ...

*Isbister is a perfect example of a Neolithic ossuary, the most sacred
place* on the land* of a kin-group. The imposing megalithic structures
symbolized the Center and were the link with the ancestral land, the
ancestors*, and the members of the kin-group. *To call the megalithic
tombs "territorial markers" as Colin Renfrew has done is *somewhat
*denigrating to the culture *itself.* We do not call the village
churches of our times "territorial markers" although they are visible,
highly revered religious centers, as were the megalithic shrines*. There
are ethnographic parallels with the practice of two-stage burial and the
construction of large megalithic edifices. Close analogies are found
among the Merina of central Madagascar. The Merina are endogamous people
who live in kin-groups on ancestral land (which M. Bloch calls demes).
These people

{p. 295} stress their unity in terms of the permanent association of
their group with the irrigated lands which they hold in common. *Every
deme has its own tomb, an extremely solid megalithic building, which is
a central symbol for the group*. The Merina practice *a two-stage
burial* in which the corpse is *first buried without any particular
sepulcher *near the locality where the death took place. *The second
stage*, called /famadihana/, *involves *exhumation of the decomposed
corpse *and reburial in the communal tomb in the ancestral land of the
deceased. The return of the bones is a joyous event, celebrated with
music and dances, even dancing with bones. Individuality is what
decomposes, whereas the bones belong to the world of the ancestors*.
/Famadihana /emphasizes the importance of the group rather than the
individual dead. This grinding together of the corpses in the tomb is
the supreme act which leads to the blessing of the ancestors. The
building of permanent megalithic structures by the

Merina, which serve as ossuaries of a single kin-group, and the
enactment of the /famadihana /ritual is a Neolithic tradition continuous
to modern times; it mirrors the tradition of two-stage burial in the
megalithic culture of Western Europe.

Despite Christian influence, the continuity of Neolithic burial
traditions can still be-traced among the modern day Basques of Spain. In
their country, the primary unit of social organization is the rural
farmstead, called /basseria/, which cannot be dismembered by sale or
inheritance. Each /basseria /is associated with a /sepulturie /on the
floor of the local church, which is a symbolic burial plot where rites
to the dead take place. On Sundays the women surround it with candles.
Masses said are for the collective dead and for all former owners of the
farmstead which, until the late 18th century, was the real burial site.
Today, corpses are buried outside the church in plots allocated by
household. The individual grave is of little importance.

{p. 338} In summary, the cemetery evidence in central and east-central
Europe during the 5th millennium BC. speaks for the existence of kinship
based societies. Graves were arranged in rows or in groups of twenty to
thirty-five people, which may reflect kin-related units. The most
honored members of the Old European society were elder females, perhaps
heads of the stem or queens, and girls who were very likely members of a
hereditary line or priestesses. Their graves do not indicate the
accumulation of personal possessions but are marked by symbolic items,
sometimes of exceptional quality, and by the erection of gigantic mounds
and consecrated structures. The graves of girls and female infants were
consistently equipped with exceptional ritual objects not found in other
graves. Analysis of blood groups testify to a pronounced endogamous
society which may suggest that these girls were important heiresses in a
hereditary female line.

/Black Sea Coast: Several Cemeteries in East Bulgaria After 4500 B.C.
with Very Rich Male Graves/

The only area where marked changes in social structure has been observed
is along the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria. Here, in several cemeteries,
the dominance of adult males in the burial domain does seem more overt
than in any other part of east-central Europe. Researchers see
"incipient patriarchal tendencies." I consider this change a result of
rapidly rising trade activities of the inhabitants of the Black Sea
coast with the Dnieper-Volga steppe population who were wedging their
way into territories west of the Black Sea. ...

/Evidence from Megalithic Tombs, Long-Bawows, and Henges of Western Europe/

*There are more than 10,000 megalithic tombs and long-barrows known in
western Europe*. Nevertheless, the essential evidence of social
structure is either hidden by the nature of the burial rites themselves,
or the tombs were robbed in antiquity. *Megaliths*, as already
discussed, *were ossuaries and ritual centers, focal points of one or
several villages*. *Bones of the dead which had been defleshed during
excarnation were placed in these tombs*. Those which were exposed to
birds and sun for a longer time were fragmental, and in many cases only
single bones, such as skulls or long bones, were collected. Cremation
also was practiced. Therefore it is nearly impossible to count the
number of individuals in a particular tomb and calculate the approximate
number and sex of individuals in the territory during the time of its
use. The association of megalithic tombs and long-barrows with
habitation sites is rarely known since the houses have long since
disappeared. The solid structures of stone barrows and gigantic henges
still stand in their majesty today, and it is from their location and
architecture that most information on the society that built them can be
extracted. Most work on the reconstruction of Neolithic society has been
done in the British Isles, particularly in the Orkneys, north of
Scotland. In 1976, Colin Renfrew described megalithic culture as
composed of

{P. 339} small-scale segmentary societies lacking the centralized,
hierarchical structure of a chiefdom or state, consisting of cellular
and modular autonomous units, but he assumes that population stress and
greater pressure on critical resources stimulated an emphasis on
territoriality. *Evidence of a hierarchical structure of the
Indo-European chiefdom type cannot be found during the entire duration
of the building of megaliths, in spite of their imposing architecture
and the enormous time and energy expended in building them*.

{p. 341} The ability to organize communal work on a grand icale is one
of the chief characteristics of the culture of megalith builders.
According to Fraser, however, there is no evidence on the Orkney Islands
that power resided in the hands of a single ndividual. This system,
judged from radiocarbon dates, existed on the islands or more than a
millennium, from the end of the 4th and throughout the 3rd nillennium B.C.

An analogous situation can be seen in southern England where monuments
from long-barrows to causewayed camps and henges exist. The human effort
expended in the construction of these camps is an order of magnitude
greater than required for large megalithic tombs, and henge monuments
required even more. The Windmill Hill causewayed camp, for instance, is
calculated to have required 120,000 work hours, the Avebury monument 1.5
million, and Durrington Walls 0.9 million. On the basis of such
calculations, Renfrew has assumed the existence of chiefdoms in
Neolithic Wessex. This statement is in contradiction to information
concerning the composite social units of the Orkney Islands since in
both areas the spacial stratification is similar. *The megalithic
culture of all of Britain and western Europe is interrelated*, and it is
questionable that Wessex diverged from the pattern to become a
patriarchal chiefdom society. It should not be forgotten that the
superordinate monuments of southern England and Ireland - Avebury,
Silbury, Durrington Walls, Newgrange, Knowth - a/re religious monuments
and communal property, the products of col1ective work dedication, and
love/. They are far from being royal tombs or administrative structures
ordered to be built by a king or chief for his own glory. The latter do
not belong within the context of the belief system of Old Europe. When
secularization of life began in Britain with the Indo-European
chieftains, religious monuments of this kind vanished.

Henges consisting of two to six concentric ring ditches and palisades of
upright wooden posts are not a phenomenon of Wessex or Britain alone.
... They were not built for the protection of people and their property,
as it was believed earlier, but as festival centers and meeting places
for funerary rituals, including music and dances perhaps also as grounds
and courses for sports and games.

{p. 342} The worship of female deities is connected to a mother-kinship
system and ancestor worship in which the sexual identity of the head of
the family and kin formulated the sexual identity of the supreme deity.
... Roman religions and mythologies, but also in Basque, Old Irish,
Welsh, Gaulish, Norse and German, Lithuanian, Latvian, and all Slavic
mythologies and folklore. It is remarkable that beneath the intertwined
layers of Christian and Indo-European influences, many elements of the
Old European layer are still richly preserved.

The Goddess as Macrocosm and Life Giver

The Paleolithic Goddess was typically a macrocosmic extension of a
woman's body. Her essential parts - vulva, breasts, buttocks, belly -
were endowed with the miraculous power of procreation. These symbols
continued into the Neolithic and can later be explained as a reflection
or memory of a matrilineal system in which paternity was considered
unimportant or difficult to establish. The Goddess was a cosmic
Creatrix, Life- and Birth-giver, while the father image is not known to
Paleolithic or Neolithic art. There follows a resume of the three main
aspects of the Goddess.

Mistress of Nature

This goddess is a manifestation of lifegiving and life-destroying
energies of nature. Her pattern is cosmic - the endlessly repeated cycle
of birth, death, and rebirth, corresponding to the phases of the moon
and to spring, summer, and winter. She was worshiped in nature - on
mountain tops, in caves, at wells, brooks, and streams - and in tombs
and temples as a Regeneratrix.

Goddess of Fertility

The Pregnant Goddess, rising and dying with vegetation, is a metaphor of
the death and renewal of plant life. She was worshiped at bread ovens in
courtyards or in houses as bread giver.

Goddesses as Symbols of Perpetual Life

The Bird and Snake Goddesses are incarnations of life energy and a link
between the ancestors and living members of the family. These house and
temple goddesses developed from the beginning of agriculture and settled
life into protectresses of the family and hearth.

Male Deities as Partners of Goddesses

There are no sculptures of male gods in the Paleolithic, and there are
no male gods associated with life and birth giving or death wielding
throughout the Neolithic period. The half-human, half-animal figure that
appears in cave art, usually interpreted as a shaman, may have been a
"Master of Animals and Forests" since the existence of such a mythical
image is well documented in European mythologies. *As a complementary
figure to Mistress of Nature, Master of Animals appears in Catal Huyuk
wall paintings*. The rising and dying Earth Fertility Goddess had* a
male partner, year god*, a fructifying consort, who appeared in the
spring, matured in the summer, and died in autumn with th~ vegetation.
This god *cannot be traced in the Paleolithic and is associated only
with the cultivation of agriculture*. In Neolithic art, as already
discussed in chapter 7, he is portrayed as strong an youthful in an
ithyphallic posture and as an old sorrowful god seated on a stool or
throne with hands on knees or supporting his chin. ...

*The representation of copulation in Neolithic imagery may be connected
with Sacred Marriage*. Such a sculptu of a female embracing a male was
found at Catal Huyuk in central Anatolia from the 7th millennium B.C.,
while a similar sculpture from the 5th millennium B.C. was found in
Gumelnita, Romania. In the Near East, an "erotique" statuette from the
Natufian culture was discovered at Ain Sakhri, which sets the beginning
of this imagery at nearly 10,000 B.C. *The hieros gamos was celebrated
in erotic hymns at Sumer* (*Inanna's stori and hymns were published by
Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer <jewish-taoist.html>*, 1983). A
strong continuity of /hieros gamos/ persists in myth and ritual
throughout history and well into the 20th century. A ritual mating with
the local goddess has been the basis of inauguration of each of the 150
tribal

{p. 343} kings reigning in Ireland in the first cenries A.D. The
earliest traditions about Medb identify her as the Goddess whose wedding
periodically created a king at Tara. A similar tradition of kings mating
with the Goddess is known in Scandinavia prior to the late 5th century
A.D. There is also the celebration of Beltane in the British Isles and
the marriage of a May Day Queen and King in rituals practiced in Germany
in the 19th and early 20th centuries. ...

Women's rituals inherited from matristic cultures in which men are not
allowed are not only expressed in fairy dances, but also in essential
birth and agricultural rituals performed in historic times as well as in
our own times in

{p. 344} patriarchal societies. The examples are many. It will suffice
here to mention one of the most characteristic rituals from ancient
Greece: the festival of Demeter Thesmophoria, a birth and earth
fertility ritual known to us from epigraphic evidence and from an
account by Aristophanes. ...

*Survival of Old European Matrilily in the Bronze Age and in Historic
Times*

A strong indication for the existence of matriliny in Old Europe is the
historic continuity of matrilineal succession in the non-Indo-European
societies of Europe and Asia Minor such as the Minoan, Etruscan,
Pelasgian, Lydian, Lykian, Carian in western Turkey, Basque in northern
Spain and southwest France, and the Picts in Britain before the Celts.
This influence is also found in Indo-European-speaking societies -
Celts, Teutons, Slavs, and Balts - who absorbed matricentric and
matrilineal traditions from the rich substratum of Old European
populations.

Traces of matrilineal practices have been found in recent centuries in
peripheral areas of the west and north of Europe, and in the Aegean
islands. In a number of islands, including Lesbos, Lemnos, Naxos, and
Kos, matrilineal succession to real property was the rule at the end of
the 18th century A.D. The facts were reported by an English traveller,
John Hawkins, who wrote: "In the large number of the islands, the eldest
daughter takes as her inheritance a portion of the family house,
together with its furniture, and one third of the share of the maternal
property, which in reality in most of these cases constitutes the chief
means of subsistence; the other daughters, when they marry off in
succession, are likewise entitled to (a portion of) the family house and
the same share of whatever property remains. These observations were
applicable to the islands of Mytilin (Lesbos), Lemnos, Scopelo, Skyros,
Syra, Zea Ipsera, Myconi, Paros, Naxia, Siphno, Santorini and Cos, where
I have either collected my information in person or had obtained it
through others."

The matrilineal system in the 18th century, and in some islands up to
the 20th century, certainly did not emerge in these late centuries but
must have continued unbroken from prehistory. Its persistence is found
in areas not touched by the Indo-Europeans, where the process of
Indo-Europeanization was weak, or where the Old European substratum was
very strong, as in Greece and Eturia. In the same areas where
matrilineality survived, a non-Indo-European language persisted into
historic times. A non-Greek language, for example, was st spoken in
parts of Crete and the Aegean islands as late as the 4th century B.C.

We shall proceed with the Minoan culture of Crete, then move to western
Asia Minor and the Aegean islands, to the Etruscans and Rome, and across
the Mediterranean to western and northern Europe.

/Minoan Crete/

*Old European culture continued on island of Crete for several millennia
longer than on the mainland and reached a magnificent flowering in the
first half of the 2nd millennium B.C. *The Minoan culture was* described
by Sir Leonard Wooley as "the enchantment of the fairy world," and "the
most complete acceptance of the grace of life world has ever known."*

The Minoan communities were generally small scale, although by the end
of the 3rd millennium B.C. the population at Knossos approximated
18,000. *The country was governed by a theacracy (rule of the Goddess).
This culture declined after the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C., *not
from internal but* as a result of natural catastrophy in combination
with the gradual incursions onto the island of patriarchal,
Indo-Eurpean-speaking Mycenaeans*.

*Cretan burial rites of the Early Minoan period (3rd millennium B.C.)
were not unlike those of the western European megalithic culture.
Communal burials*, usually in a circular tomb called /tholos/, *were
practiced, and from the provision of ceremonial space in front of the
elaborate entrances to the tombs, it seems that funerary rites with
feasting in both areas may have been similar*. The study by K. Branigan
has shown that these tombs are identified as burial places of extended
families with a living membership of about twenty persons. *The extended
family was an important social unit in this society* and at many sites,
two or three tombs

{p. 345} are built immediately alongside one another. Since these are
contemporary with each other, they seem to represent adjacent burial
places of two or three extended families. The tombs are linked with
settlements and are no more than ten to fifteen meters away. It was
noticed that one tomb is architecturally superior to the others, which
suggests that one extended family claimed primacy or pre-eminence and
that communities already knew a degree of social ranking.

*Although this culture is called Minoan, its flowering in the early 2nd
millennium B.C. had nothing to do with king Minos*, whose legendary
appearance actually came during the demise of this great culture. The
palaces were not built by kings and were not administrative centers for
a ruler, but were palace temples where elaborate religious rituals took
place within a theacratic system. Contrary to the subsequent Mycenaean
influence, Minoan culture was primarily feminine inspired.

From the first discovery of this culture at Knossos in the beginning of
the 20th century, the self-possessed independence and confidence of
women was noticed. *Frescoes, to the great astonishment of the scholarly
world, revealed beautiful, elegant women dressed in exquisite costumes,
frequently bare breasted*. They are shown* mixing freely with men in
festivals, riding in chariots driven by female charioteers, and
participating as athletes during the ritual bull games*. Frescoes from
Thera (sixty kilometers north of Crete) show women presiding at large
naval festivals, standing on balconies overseeing processions of young
men who are carrying an animal for sacrifice. (FIGURE 9-16) *There are
great numbers of outstanding women portrayed as priestesses and
goddesses*, and it cannot be doubted that women maintained a centrality
in religion until Mycenaean times. The seat of honor in the throne room
at Knossos was most likely the seat of the highest representa-

{p. 346} tive of the Goddess. The throne was decorated with a circle and
a crescent and griffins were painted on the wall at each side. The
griffin acted as guardian to the Goddess, as shown on a fresco from
Thera (see fig. 7-8).

Men also appear in Minoan art but never as priests or kings, and only a
very few images have been interpreted as depicting a god. Men are
usually shown engaged in a variety of occupations such as cup bearers,
pages, musicians, harvesters, craftsmen, and sailors. In the naval
festival portrayed in the miniature fresco from Thera, sailors can be
distinguished as representing at least several categories: simple
oarsmen, captain, assistants to a captain, and important males in long
cloaks sitting in the cabin of the boat. (FIGURE 9-17) The miniature
fresco also reveals rustic people wearing fur or skin coats, while young
men participating in rituals are shown in the nude or with hip belts.
Men's long robes seem to denote advanced age and social status. The
important women and priestesses of adult age in Thera, as in Crete,
always wore long, flounced skirts.

*Marriage in Crete was matrilocal and this custom continued late into
the historical period. Matrilocal marriage is described by Strabo in the
1st century B.C. and is witnessed by the laws inscribed on the walls of
the temple of Gortyna*. From these we learn that* a woman, on marriage,
retained full control of her property and had the right of divorce at
her pleasure*. Also, *the mother's brother occupied an important
position and was responsible for bringing up her children*.

/Sparta/

*At Sparta*, in the center of the Peloponnese,* where the inhabitants
were a mixture of Indo-European warrior clans with the indigenous
prepatriarchal peoples, women's position was similar to that in Crete*.
As Briffault remarked, "Spartan *women were entirely unrestricted in
their social and sexual relations. Virginity was not demanded of a
bride. Children born out of wedlock were called 'virgin born ' and were
regarded as equal to those born in wedlock. The*

{p. 347} *Spartans practiced fraternal polyandry, and their marriage was
matrilocal*." The clan in the area of Corinth, according to Herodotus,
observed the custom of "marrying and giving in marriage among
themselves," a clearly endogamous system. The name of the clan is
Bakchidai, i.e., a matrilineal clan. ...

/Western Asia Minor and the Aegean Islands/

*Herodotus described the Lycians of western Turkey as having practiced
matrilineal descent. He further wrote: "Their customs are in part Cretan
and in part Carian*. But they have one which is their own and shared by
no other men; *they take their names not from their fathers but from
their mothers*; and when one is asked by his neighbor who he is, he will
say that he is the son of such a mother, and recount the mother of his
mother." When Plutarch mentioned the Lycian clan, he called them Ioxidai
or Ioxides, implying that the feminine form (Ioxidai) was the proper one
by giving it first. *Succession too was matrilineal since daughters
inherited in preference to sons. The basic unit of society*, attested by
sepulchral inscriptions, *was the matrilineal household*. Some of these
inscriptions contain a formula of the familiar matrilineal type:
"Neiketes son of Parthena . . . Neiketes son of Lalla . . . Euteches,
father unknown. ... "

The Carians and Leleges both belonged to the Anatolian seaboard and the
distinction between them is somewhat indefinite. We learn from Herodotus
that at the time of the Persian War his native Halikarnassos was under a
Carian queen, Artemisia. Her mother was a Cretan, and though she had a
grown-up son she retained the royal power. Her domain extended to the
adjacent islands of Kos, Kalymnos, and Nisyros, and when Xerxes of
Persia invaded Greece, she furnished him with a contingent of five
warships, commanded by herself. At the battle of Salamis when the
Persian threat had begun, her flagship was hotly pursued by the
Athenians, but she saved herself by adroitly turning about and ramming a
Persian vessel.

The Ionian conquerors of Miletos took Carian wives who, resenting the
slaughter of their menfolk, refused to eat with their new husbands or
call them by their names. At Teos, another Ionian settlement, a list of
annual magistrates was discovered. In eleven cases out of twenty-five,
the clan and village had the same name. This means that the identity of
the two units was still largely intact and, therefore, their native
institutions must have been preserved. The Pelasgoi survived still
speaking their own language at several places in the north Aegean - Akte
on the Macedonian coast, Kreston somewhere in the same region, and
Lemnos on the Propontis. They are also recorded in Samotraike, the
Troad, Lydia, Lesbos, and Chios. The Pelasgoi of Lemnos figure in one of
the Greek legends.* After setting sail from Thessaly in quest of the
Golden Fleece, the Argonauts put in at Lemnos which was then "ruled by
women" under Queen Hipsipyle*.

/Matrilineal Succession of the Etruscans and the Roman Monarchy/

*The Etruscans are known to have been matrilineal*. In bilingual
inscriptions, the father's name is inserted in the Latin version only,
while the mother's name, always given in Etruscan, is sometimes omitted
in the Latin. It was Bachofen in the mid-19th century A.D. who first
noticed that the status of Etruscan women, in the archaic period at
least - 7th to 5th centuries B.C. - was surprisingly high in comparision
to that of Greek and Roman women.

*Tomb paintings and inscriptions have told us more of the Etruscans'
luxurious style of life and the considerable role played by women*.
*Accounts of Greek and Roman writers give further evidence of these
facts and*, more importantly, they *indicate how the high status of
women frightened them*. Their writings express the view that the
relations between men and women and their differing attitudes toward sex
create a conflict, since strong women were seen as a threat to the power
of the state. Historian Larissa Bonfante suggests that Rome's first
"cultural shock" was that she was becoming too much like the Etruscan
city that confronted her across the Tiber and from whom she took so much
external culture - letters, the arts, and symbols of royalty. For the
Romans, the Etruscans would always represent "the others."

W*hat we know best about the Etruscans is from their art and literature
which express the freedom and power of women in their society.
Theopompus, the Greek historian of the 4th century B.C., was startled by
this. According to his report, Etruscan women took great care of their
bodies, often exercising in the nude with men and with each other*,
which was not considered shameful.* They were very beautiful, and it was
not uncommon for them to recline publicly at dinner with men other than
their husbands. These women liked to drink, and they even took part in
the toasting traditionally reserved for men at Greek symposia. Most
shocking of all, they raised all their children, according to
Theopompus, whether or not they knew*

{p. 348} *who the fathers were*. The fact of raising their children
without their husbands' formal recognition was probably connected with
their right to own property.

In dress, too, there was less distinction between men and women. An
outsider could easily think that Etruscan women dressed like men. In the
late 6th century, for example, they wore mantles and high shoes, symbols
of citizenship and rank. All these marks of equality shocked the Greeks,
who took them as signs of immorality.

*Each of the last three Etruscan kings of Rome owed his throne to an
Etruscan woman*. The individual names of Etruscan women indicated their
different and legal social status.* In contrast, a Roman woman bore no
name of her own. She was known first as her father's daughter and later
as her husband's wife*. Succession from father-in-law to son-in-law in
Roman society was a recognized mode of matrilineal inheritance in which
queenship passed from mother to daughter. Furthermore, we hear from
Greek historians that the Etruscans and prehistoric Athenians had "wives
in common" and "their children did not know their own fathers." In such
a system, the woman is free to marry the man of her choice, or as many
as she pleases, and she retains control of her children without regard
to their paternity. On this basis, George Thomson in his work on ancient
Greek society made the assumption that group marriage was combined with
common ownership in prehistoric Aegean societies.

Western and Northern Europe

In western Europe, several cultural islands, like strongholds, have
continued Old European traditions throughout the millennia: the Basques
in the western Pyrenees of northern Spain and southwestern France, the
Iberians in southeast and eastern Spain, and the Picts in the Scottish
Highlands. The Celts, Teutons, and Balts also inherited a great deal of
Old European features in their social structure.

*The Basque language is a relic of the ancient western European
languages, and is not only pre-Latin but is also pre-Indo-European*. It
is the only indigenous language to survive the invasions and cultural
influences of the last 3,000 years. The Basque people have shown a
remarkable ability to integrate influences without losing their cultural
identity. Indeed, they are the great exception to all the laws of
European political and cultural history. *There is no doubt that the
Basques are living Old Europeans and their roots are sought even in
earlier times*. Proponents of the Upper Paleolithic origins of the
Basques point to the persistence of the racial characteristics of the
Cro-Magnon type and to the persistent traditions of mythological themes.
*The religion of the Goddess, the usage of a lunar calendar, matrilineal
laws of inheritance, and agricultural work performed by women continued
here into the early 20th century*. The high status attributed to the
Basque woman in law codes, as well as to her place as inheritor, judge,
and arbitrator in pre-Roman, medieval, and modern times has been widely
discussed for over a century. The codes of the French Basque region
reflect a system of laws governing succession in which there was total
equality between the sexes. Exceptions to this norm were found only
among the tiny noble class of Labourd and to a limited extent among some
of the nonrural houses of Soule. In the indigenous Basque system, no
preference was given to the male over the female. Up until the eve of
the French Revolution, the Basque woman was truly "the Mistress of the
House," hereditary guardian, and head of the lineage. *"Among the
Iberians," according to Strabo in the 1st century B.C., "the men bring
dowries to the women. With them the daughters alone inherit property.
Brothers are given away in marriage by their sisters. In all their
usages, their social condition is one of gynaecocracy."*

The Picts are another Old European group surrounded by Indo-European
speakers who preserved the matrilineal laws, Goddess's religion, and Her
symbols.* Among the Picts, the transmission of property was exclusively
matrilineal*; an inherited estate passed to the children of the
daughter, in the case of siblings. *Matrilineal kinship of the Picts
lasted until A.D. 842. Women did no leave home on marriage, a practice
that survived in the Scottish Highlands even into the early 20th century*.

Archeological finds have revealed incredibly rich graves of Celtic
princesses from the Hallstatt and La Ter periods, 7th to 4th century
B.C., in southern France and the Rhineland. This has roots in earlier
local traditions, together with the preservation of the worship the
Goddess and matrilineal success in all Celtic territories. {The Celts
were Indo-European, but *Gimbutas* sees this as an admixture from
Pre-Indo-European culture} ...

There can no doubt that matrilineal succession

{p. 349} was the immemorial rule with Celtic speaking peoples.

The Old European survival of matriliny is equally well attested in
Scandinavian and German regions. The account given by Tacitus in
Germania in the 1st century B.C. says that "the sons of a sister have
the same position as regards their uncle as with their father."
Researchers agree that Germanic matrilineal social organization
inherited from the Old European substratum survived until the historical
period. ...

The culture of the Baltic speakers, Prussians, Lithuanians, and Latvians
farther east along the Baltic Sea coast is *a true blend of Old European
and Indo-European social systems and religions*. *The Indo-European
patriarchy is diluted here by Old European elements of matriliny,
matrilocality, matricentrality*. The Old Prussian term for grandmother
was ane (compare with the Old Irish anu or ana for "old hag' and
"guardian of the dead").* The important role of the mother's and wife's
brother, as well as traces of endogamy and trial marriage, are well
attested in Latvian and Lithuanian folklore*. *The matricentric pantheon
of goddesses among the Balts is as strongly preserved as among the
Basques*. *The Slavic culture is equally replete with matricentric
elements, with goddesses preserved in Slavic folklore and folk art as
they are in the Baltic and Basque cultures*.

In conclusion, the sources from Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. to
Strabo in the 1st century A.D. speak of: 1) matrilineal structure,
inheritance in the female line, successor of the throne in the female
line (queenship passed from mother to daughter); 2) endogamy, matrilocal
marriage and group marriage combined with common ownership; 3) metronymy
(naming through the mother, father not recognized); 4) importance of the
queen's brother, no husband (only a consort); 5) the general high status
of women, particularly in Minoan and Etruscan societies.

Conclusion

Summing archeological, historical, linguistic, and religious evidence,
we visualize Old European society organized around a theacratic,
communal temple community, and a higher female status in religious life.
This was an endogamous society guided by a highly respected elder -
Great Mother of the clan and her brother or uncle, with a council of
women as a governing body. The structure was matrilineal, with
succession to leadership and inheritance within the female line.

{p. 352} *The collapse of Old Europe coincides with the process of
Indo-Europeanization of Europe*, a complicated transformative process
leading to *a drastic cultural change reminiscent of the conquest of the
American continent*. Archeological evidence, supported by comparative
Indo-European linguistics and mythology, suggests *a clash of two
ideologies, social structures and economies *perpetrated by
trauma-inducing institutions. *The Proto- or Early Indo-Europeans, whom
I have labeled "*Kurgan*" people, arrived from the east, from southern
Russia, on horseback*. Their first contact with the borderland
territories of Old Europe in the Lower Dnieper region and west of the
Black Sea began around the middle of the 5th millennium B.C. *A
continuous flow of influences and people into east-central Europe was
initiated which lasted for two millennia*.

Following this collision of cultures, Old Europe was transformed, and
*later European prehistory and history became a "marble cake" composed
of non-lndo-European and Indo-European elements*. The subsequent
existence of a very strong non-lndo-European linguistic and mythological
substratum cannot be overlooked. To begin to understand this complex
situation, it is necessary to start thinking in terms of the social and
symbolic structures of cultures.

In this chapter I shall discuss the *Kurgan* culture of the Volga-Ural
and North Pontic regions in relation to Old Europe; its influence on,
infiltrations into, and destruction of the floruit of the Old European
civilization. *Linguistic evidence suggests that the original
Indo-European homeland had to be located between the areas occupied by
the Finno-Ugric, Semitic, and Caucasian linguistic families*. A
discussion of this problem is beyond the scope of this book and, in my
belief beyond the reach of adequate archeological sources {see however
J. P. Mallory, /In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology
and Myth/}. The materials of the Volga-Ural interfluve and beyond the
Caspian Sea prior to the 7th millennium B.C. are, so far, not sufficient
for ethnographic interpretation. More substantive evidence emerges only
around 5000 B.C. *We can begin to speak of "*Kurgan* people" when they
conquered the steppe region north of the Black Sea around 4500 B.C.*

*The Russian word "*kurgan*" *(itself* borrowed from the Turkish) means
*literally a* "barrow"* or "tumulus" and *the term "*Kurgan* tradition"
was introduced by the author in 1956 as a blanket term for the culture
of these seminomadic pastoralists who built round funeral mounds.*

No weapons except implements for hunting are found among grave goods in
Europe until c. 4500-4300 B.C., nor is there evidence of hilltop
fortification of Old European settlements. The gentle agriculturalists,
therefore, were easy prey to *the warlike *Kurgan* horsemen *who swarmed
down upon them. These invaders *were armed with thrusting and cutting
weapons: long daggerknives, spears, halberds, and bows and arrows*.

The *Kurgan* tradition represents a stark contrast to the civilization
of Old Europe which was, in the main, peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal,
matrilineal, and sex egalitarian. *The Kurgans were a warlike,
patriarchal, and hierarchical culture with distinctive burial rites that
included pit graves with tent- or hutlike structures of wood or stone,
covered by a low cairn or earthen mound*. Their economy was essentially
pastoral with a rudimentary agriculture and seasonal, transient
settlements of semi-subterranean houses. The *Kurgan* tradition became
manifest in Old European territories during *three waves of infitration:
I at c. 4400-4300 B.C., II at c. 3500 B.C., and III soon after 3000
B.C*. This chronology does not represent the evolution of a single group
but of* a number of various steppe peoples who shared a common
tradition*, extending over broad temporal and spacial parameters.
*Kurgan* I people were from the Volga steppe; *Kurgan* II, who were
culturally more advanced, developed in the North Pontic area between the
Lower Dniester and the Caucasus mountains; *Kurgan* III people were
again from the Volga steppe.

Russian archeologists use the ten "early Yamna" for *Kurgan* I;
"Mikhailovka I" or "Maikop" culture for *Kurgan* II; and "late Yamna"
for *Kurgan* III. (Yamna comes from yama, "pit," i.e. "pit grave" under
a barrow.)

*The livelihood and mobility of the *Kurgan* people depended on the
domesticated horse, in sharp contrast to the Old European
agriculturalists to whom the horse was unknown*. Pastoral economy,
growing herds of large animals, horse riding, and *the need for male
strength to control the animals must have contributed to the transition
from matrism to armored patrism* in southern Russia and beyond at the
latest around 5000 B.C. (Although the accurate date of this process as
yet is difficult to establish, it certainly started much earlier than
4000 B.C., the date used for the transition to patrism and violence in
Saharasia caused by the pressures of severe desertification; see Demeo
1991.)

{p. 393} *The proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, as reconstructed on the
basis of comparative Indo-European linguistics and mythology and
supported by early historic records, coincides well with archeological
data*. In this section I shall touch upon the linguistic and
mythological evidence relevant to the question of identity between the
*Kurgan* and proto-Indo-European traditions.

*Languages, like cultures, act as living organisms: they constantly
change and live through periods of convergence and divergence*. Although
we cannot go back much further than Volga Neolithic and Eneolithic of
the 6th and 5th millennia B.C., we can reconstruct certain
characteristics of this culture that are in agreement with linguistic
and mythological elements. *The period around 5000-4500 B.C. is marked
by incessantly growing mobility and trade. I therefore assume the
possibility of linguistic consolidation in process at this period, just
before the proto-Indo-European outburst into Europe*. The hypothetical
PIE language *does not reflect preagricultural conditions*. As
linguistically reconstructed, *domesticated animals (including the
horse), mobility, and the classed patriarchal society, are among the
most characteristic phenomena *of the PIE culture. The *Kurgan* culture
of the 5th millennium B.C. in the Volga foreststeppe and steppe and its
newly acquired territory north of the Black Sea agrees with much that is
reconstructed on a linguistic basis as PIE.

Domesticated Animals

Domesticated animals played a paramount role in the PIE culture as shown
by the common names for sheep (/*owis/), cattle (/*gwows/), steer
(/*(s)tauro/), pig (/*sus and *porkos/), horse (/ekwo-ekwa/), goat
(/*aigis, os/), and dog (/*kwon-kun-/) in most of the Indo-European
languages. There is another name for "cows and sheep": /*peku(s)/: Latin
/pecus/, Old Indic /pasu/, Baltic /peku/. Since this word has a family
of related words connected with

{p. 394} the meaning "fleece," "hair," and "to comb" (Greek /pekos/,
"fleece"; Old High German /fahs/, "skin hair"; Latin /pectere/, "to
comb"), it is assumed that /peku /originally connoted a woolly animal,
probably a sheep, and that there was a stage when only sheep were
domesticated and the other animals were not. ...

*Cattle must have been the treasured possession of a family, clan, or
tribe and were used in exchange*, the trend also attested by words and
early historic records. *In Sanskrit, the term for lord means "lord of
cattle." The earliest written sources, the Iliad and the Rigveda, speak
of how a bride or weapons are obtained in exchange for cattle*. *Cattle
(/pecus/) were the main possession that had the meaning of our word
money*. Hence, the Latin name for money, /pecunia/. This role of cattle
continued up to the 20th century j(s dowry, for instance, in rural
areas). Activities associated with cattle in Indo-European mythic and
epic literature very clearly illustrate the importance of cattle
raiding. The growth of private ownership derived a powerful impetus from
the domestication of cattle.

The name for the domesticated horse is preserved as Latin /equos/,
Gothic /aihva-/, Lithuanian /asva/. The PIE form is reconstructed as
/*ekwos/ or /*ekwa/. Comparative Indo-European mythological research
indicates the unquestionably prime role of *the horse* (particularly the
white horse) as *a sacred and sacrificial animal*, the incarnation of
divine power of the God of the Shining Sky. Archeology supports the
linguistic and mythological evidence for an early date of horse
domestication, probably no later than the end of the 6th millennium B.C.
The horse was a sacrificial and riding animal and as such was used in
warfare from at least the middle of the 5th millennium B.C. *The
earliest warriors were equipped with spear points, daggers, bows and
arrows, and were able to shoot from horseback much like the historic
Indo-Europeans, Scythians, Sarmatians, and others*. In cult, the horse
as a divine and sacrificial animal is attested as early as its known use
for riding.

Metallurgy

Linguistics has failed to reconstruct a common word for metallurgy. This
should not be surprising since the early Kurgans (*Kurgan* I) did not
have this technology. Copper items were introduced to them by the Old
Europeans through barter with the Cucutenians. Metallurgy was acquired
considerably later, in the second half of the 4th millennium B.C. from
Transcaucasia when it was transmitted north of the Black Sea, and with
Wave No. 2 to east-central Europe. ...

The mobility of the Kurgans before their infiltration into Europe was
probably similar to that of the later inhabitants of the steppe - the
Scythians, Sarmatians, and others. *Herodotus describes the Scythians as
having no permanent structures or crops to defend, free to move about
with their wagons, their possessions, and their livestock, and able to
elude an enemy or to shoot at him from horseback whenever they chose*.
Indeed, it was easy for the Kurgans to *burn* their pit dwellings and
set out for the next territory.

Social Structure

The PIE culture, as shown by comparative Indo-European linguistics and
historical evidence and supported by archeology, can be described as a
patrilineal society under the patriarchal leadership of a warrior chief.
Age was

{p. 395} the determining factor for leadership by this chief, who may
have played an active role only in times of stress when greater group
cohesion was necessary. Exogamous marriage occurred between small,
mobile patrilocal families, members of a larger clan or tribe. A
separate class of priests is unlikely to have been established by the
proto period. Females possessed inferior status, elevated only by
association with their male relations. The husband's strong rights over
his wife is evidenced by epic songs and legal texts. *Under the
influence of the Indo-European culture, Neolithic women's influence
collapsed and they became private property* in the new trading and
raiding society. ...

Agrculture and Its Increase in the European Branch

In the *Kurgan* culture of the steppe, agriculture was secondary to a
pastoral economy. However, considerable knowledge of agricultural
terminology in the European branch of the Indo-Europeans is suggested by
lexical studies. It follows that the increase of agriculture is
synchronous with a decrease of nomadism after the incursion of the
*Kurgan* (Maikop) people into Europe, and especially into the
territories where agriculture was a millennial tradition.

*Some agriculture was practiced by the proto-Indo-Europeans. There are
common names for "grain," "grinding' and "quern," "to sow," and "to
cut"; and the word for "hoe," /mat(e)ya/, is widespread*. Of great
importance is the preservation of the names for *millet *(/*meli,
*melyom, *melya/) for *a lesser kind of wheat or grass, couch grass,
sedge, spelt, rye grass*: /*puras,os/; and for *cereal used for
fermentation and brewing*: /*yewos/, pl. /*yewoi/. The root /yew-/ is
associated with the family of words having the meaning to gush or
emanate, boil, ferment, agitate, rouse.

*So far only millet has been identified in *Kurgan* sites of the
Dnieper-Volga steppe. There is no trace of einkorn and emmer wheat,
barley, oats, or rye*, although *stone hoes, sickle blades of flint, and
quern stones have been found in settlements*. Large hoe-like tools known
from several settlements are considered to be primitive plowshares. It
seems that the *Kurgan* people in their original home engaged in an
extensive form of wild-grass economy. Except for millet, a "ground"
cereal; /*yewos/, a cereal used for fermentation; and /*puris/, a grass
or spelt wheat, there are no other well-attested words for cereals, and
there is no archeological evidence for their existence.

*Common names for rye, barley, and oats are found only in the European
branch of the Indo-European languages*. /*rughis/ "rye" is known in
Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, and Celtic. The word for "oats" with the root
/*aw-/ is known in Slavic, Baltic, and Latin. "Barley" apparently
designated "food derived from cereals" as Latin, Germanic, and Slavic
forms suggest: Latin /far /and /farina/; Old Nardic /barr/, "barley";
Gothic /barizeins/, "of barley"; Old Church Slavic /brasno/, "food";
Serbian /brasno/, "flour"; and Russian /borosno/, "rye flour." Some
names are common to the Indo-European speakers in southern Europe:
beans, peas, vetch, and poppies are attested in Latin, Albanian, and
Greek. All of these plants are well known from the Neolithic in
southeastern Europe, and it is quite possible that their names

{p. 396} were later inherited by Indo-European speakers. The name for
flax, /linum/, is known in Latin, Greek, Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic.
The word for hemp, /*kannabis/, is preserved in Greek, Albanian,
Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic, but is not known among the eastern
Indo-European speakers. *The above suggest that Indo-European speakers
in Europe were acquainted with many cereals and pulses and with flax and
hemp. Some of the names are common to a larger group of languages and
therefore may hark back *in time *to the formative period as an
after-effect of Wave No. 2*, to the second half of the 4th millennium
B.C.* The pulses were apparently inherited from the Old European
population of southeastern Europe. *It is clear that *the agricultural
terminology became enriched as Indo-European speakers moved west.*

*The Collision of Two Ideologies*

The Old European and Indo-European belief systems are ~ diametrically
opposed. The Indo-European society was warlike, exogamic, patriarchal,
patrilineal, and patrilocal, with a strong clanic organization and
social hierarchy which gave prominence to the warrior class. *Their main
gods were male and depicted as warriors*. There is no possibility that
this pattern of social organization could have developed out of the Old
European matrilineal, matricentric, and endogamic balanced society.
Therefore, the appearance of the Indo-Europeans in Europe represent a
collision of two ideologies, not an evolution.

*The building of temples, a long-lasting tradition of Old Europe,
stopped with the *Kurgan* incursions into Europe, except in the Aegean
and Mediterranean regions*. The masterfully produced religious
paraphernalia - beautiful vases, sacrificial containers, models of
temples, altars, sculptures, and sacred script - disappeared as well.
*Not a single temple directly associated with the *Kurgan* people is
known*, either in the north Pontic or Volga steppe nor in the *Kurgan*
influenced zone of Europe during and after the migrations. *The absence
of any temples or even structured altars is consistent with the life of
pastoralists.*

/The New Symbols and Deities of Europe/

The Old European worship of the Goddess was partially truncated by
*Kurgan* Wave No. 1 toward the end of the 5th rnillennium B.C.
Horse-head scepters and cord-impressed solar motifs on pots appeared in
Dobruja and in almost the whole Danube basin, but the Old European
religion continued to be practiced in the Aegean and the Mediterranean,
in the Cucuteni culture of Moldavia and the western Ukraine, in the TRB
of northwestern and central Europe, and in all parts of the western
European Neolithic.

*A renewed change of symbolism and mythical imagery occurred in the
second half of the 4th millennium B.C. Not only did sun and horse
symbols appear, but images of male gods with their weapons and animals
also emerged*. The Goddess religion of the still extant Old European
population was subdued.* A completely new symbolic system with no roots
in Europe is one of the strongest arguments for the presence in central
Europe of new lords and their creeds*.

The best witness of a new religion in Europe, typified by male gods,
weapons, and solar symbols, are *engraved stone stelae from the second
half of the 4th millennium B.C.* found in the Alpine valleys, in
Bulgaria, in Romania with close analogs north of the Black Sea, and in
the Caucasus. Their symbolism differs sharply from those of the French
and Italian statue-menhirs which portray the owl-faced female goddess
before she was masculinized in the Bronze Age. *The *Kurgan* stelae
display solar symbols and masculine paraphernalia, including daggers,
halberds, axes, bows*, quivers and arrows, belts, breast plates,
double-spiral pendants; male horses, stags, and hegoats; vehicles, and
ox teams pulling a plow. (FIGURES 10-41 to 10-44) These are a prime
source for the reconstruction of mythical imagery and are a great value
in the accurate representation of

{p. 398} hilted daggers, shafted halberds and axes, bows, quivers,
vehicles, belts, and breast plates, objects rarely preserved in graves.
Double-spiral pendants, breast plates, bronze daggers with triangular
blades, flat axes, and flint halberd blades such as appear engraved on
stelae are known from depots and graves of the Baden and Remedello (Po
River Valley) cultures.

*The engravings on stelae* reveal a great deal about the new ideology.
In fact, they *constitute the richest source for the study of the
earliest Indo-European symbolism and god images*. These symbols are
characteristically grouped, making possible the study of their
interrelationships. Their consistent association on the roughly
anthropomorphic stelae leaves no doubt that the engraved weapons,
animals, and solar symbols are linked, that their concurrence is not
accidental.

*The following symbols are recorded: solar signs (circles, radiating
suns, and a circle with groups of long rays)* engraved in the area of
the head; breast plate ja semicircle of multiple concentric lines!;
double-spiral pendant, one or a pair, on the chest or at the solar sign;
a circle at either side of the radiating sun; hilted dagger - one, two,
five, seven daggers or more - shown in the middle part of the stela;
shafted halberd, one or many; shafted axe, one or more; belt of parallel
lines (beaded fabric?) or of zigzag or diamond pattern (woven?);
four-wheeled vehicle (shown below the belt); bow, quiver, and arrows;
footprints; plow pulled by two yoked oxen; horse(s), stag(s)/ and
he-goat(s).

The content and association of the symbolic groups are of particular
interest.* The most frequent are the solar groups: the radiating sun,
the circle on either side of the radiating sun*, the double spiral
pendants, and the breast plate. This group of symbols is further
associated with the belt, dagger, halberd, horse, stag, plowing scene,
and a vehicle. To the specialist in comparative Indo-European mythology,
such combinations of symbols will certainly recall the image of the God
of the Shining Sky, who bestows progeny and promotes vegetation. *This
deity is known in various Indo-European groups from early historic
records and is still extant in folklore: the Indic Mitra*, Baltic
Dievas, Roman Dius Fidius, Janus, and Mars, Celtic Lug (called "Sun
faced"), German *Tiwaz (from /*deiuos/), Anglo Saxon Tiw, German Ziu,
Icelandic Tyr, northwestern Slavic Jarovit-Sventovit, and others. This
god is associated with morning and daylight, and with the spring,
summer, autumn, and winter sun. His powers are transmitted by his
weapon, the dagger (or sword, later in prehistory and early history); by
his animals, the stag and horse; and by the shining vehicle in which he
travels. As protector of vegetation, particularly of the grain, he is
associated with his pair of oxen and with plowing.

Other compositions and groupings represent other Indo-European deities.
The axe is connected with the Thunder God; the club, bow, quiver, and
arrows are also his. (FIGURES 10-45, 10-46)

Present knowledge of stelae would indicate that the majority represent
the God of the Shining Sky. In Indo-European mythology, the image of
this god is linked with kingship. The erection of stelae, therefore, may
have marked the death of important personages, either chieftains or
fallen heroes; a hero may substitute for a god and his weapons became
divine. The second of importance was the Thunder God, the hunter and
warrior, fighting with the evil and adversary of the God of Death and
Underworld, the purifier and fructifier of earth. This god is best
preserved in all Indo-European mythoiogies. The representations of male
gods on stelae are quite overwhelmingly Indo-European.

/The Contrasting Sets of Goddesses and Gods/

The main theme of Old European goddess symbolism is the cyclic mystery
of birth, death, and the renewal of life, involving not only human life
but all life on earth. Symbols and images cluster around the
parthenogenetic (selfgenerating) Goddess who is the single source of all
life. Her energy is manifest in springs and wells, in the moon, sun, and
earth, and in all animals and plants. She is the Giver-of-Life,
Wielder-of-Death, Regeneratrix, and the Earth Fertility Goddess, rising
and dying with the plants. Male gods also exist, not as creators but as
guardians of wild nature, or as metaphors of life energy and the spirits
of seasonal vegetation.

The proto-Indo-European pantheon of gods was a socially and economically
oriented ideology. This system was well suited to a pastoralist/mixed
farming economy with prominent sovereign and warrior classes which had
mastered the horse and weapons of war. *The life-creating and
death-wielding functions belonged to the principal male gods* who also
rode horses and brandished weapons. *Female goddesses, like the Dawn and
Sun Maiden, were not creatrixes but were simply brides or wives of male
deities*. This religion was oriented toward the rotating sun and other
sky phenomena such as thunder and lightning. Their sky gods shone as
"bright as the sky" and, in Bronze Age representations, carried shining
weapons - daggers, swords, and shields - and were adorned with copper or
gold chest plates, gold or amber discs, and copper-plated belts. The
Indo-Europeans worshiped the swiftness of arrow and spear and the
sharpness of the blade. The touch of the axe blade was thought to awaken
the powers of nature and transmit the fecundity of the Thunder God. The
frightening black God of Death and the Underworld marked the warrior for
death with the touch of his spear tip, glorifying him as a fallen hero.

/Differing Beliefs in an Afterlife/

These two systems exhibit very different sets of beliefs concerning an
afterlife. *The Old Europeans had a strong belief in cyclic regeneration
in which the main idea in grave architecture is "tomb is womb." Graves
are egg shaped, uterus shaped*, or anthropomorphic, the latter being
conceived as the body of the Goddess. The generative triangle also
figures in grave and shrine outlines and architecture. Engravings on
stones of megalithic graves are symbols of regeneration, life-giving
water and life energy (cupmarks, concentric circles with cen-

{p. 400} tral dot, concentric arcs, winding snakes snake coils, bull
heads as uteri, triangles lozenges, hourglass shapes, zigzags lunar
cycles); or *images of the Goddess of Regeneration herself engraved with
labyrinths, vulvas, and breasts*. It was thought that the afterworld was
in the West, and that a barrier of water existed between this world and
the next that was crossed by ships, themselves symbols of regeneration.

Communal burials were a typical Old European practice. The megaliths of
western Europe were sacred centers of the community, and the burial of
defleshed bones to these central shrines meant a return to the
ancestors. Furthermore, *the bones were compared to seed which produced
rebirth*. Indeed, *all Old European burials were*, in various forms,* a
return to the body of the Mother for regeneration within the womb of
nature*.

*The Indo-Europeans believed in a linear continuity of the individual
from this world into another "life" in the world of the dead*.
Therefore, mortuary houses were built in which *the dead took their
belongings *- tools, weapons, and ornaments that represented their rank
- *to the afterworld*. Royal tombs and those of other important members
of the society were lavishly equipped, providing the dead with status.
*Death in battle was particularly glorified. Kings and chieftains were
often buried with their entire households *- wives, servants, children -
and animals, including horses, teams of oxen, and dogs. Gifts of food
continued to be made after the funeral, considered necessary for the
well-being of the shades.

From comparative Indo-European mythologies and beliefs we know that *the
world of the dead was imagined as a cold, swampy, underground realm
ruled by the sovereign male god*. The journey to *the gloomy underworld*
involved a road or a river, usually a three-day period of walking,
riding, or travel in chariots. Souls drifted there in a pale and passive
manner, and there was no belief in the possibility of rebirth. These
radically different beliefs could not have developed from the Old
Europeans. With the formation of the Baden-Ezero culture in east-central
Europe and

{p. 401} the Globular Amphora culture in northern central Europe in the
second half of the 4th millennium BC., the Indo-European mode of burial
and beliefs in the other world took root in Europe and gradually
replaced the burials of the Old European type.

/The Contrast Between Old European and Indo-European Symbols/

The analysis of Old European and Indo-European symbols shows that these
two religions and mythologies had entirely different sets of symbols
which are still extant today in the mythologies and folklore of Europe. ...

*Conclusion*

East-central Europe in the period of 4500-2500 B.C. was in a constant
state of transformation, due to repeated *Kurgan* incursions from the
Volga and North Pontic steppe zone.

There were several major stages of changing ethnic configurations.

1. Around 4300 B.C., horse-riding pastoralists from south Russia (Wave
No. 1) created the first shock wave and population shifts in the Danube
basin. The flowering of Old Europe was truncated and the hybridization
of two very different culture systems began. Most affected were the
Black Sea littoral (Varna), Karanovo-Gumelnita, Vinca, Lengyel, and LBK
cultures. The Cucuteni culture survived. *In the west, signs of *Kurgan*
I elements (single burials under round mounds) appeared in England and
in eastern Ireland before 3500 B.C.*

2. In the second half of the 4th millennium B.C., from the North
Pontic-North Caucasus region, strong influences increased the
transformation of central Europe. The conversion of what was still Old
European into an Indo-European social structure and ideology iwas
remarkably successful. Central Europe was now ruled from hill forts and
by daggers made of hard metal (copper-arsenic alloy). The transition
from a matricentric and matrilineal to a patrilineal and patriarchal
system was in process.

3. The massive *Kurgan* Wave No. 3, from the lower Volga region after
3000 B.C. into east-central Europe, caused new ethnic shifts. The
Indo-Europeanized populations of central Europe migrated northeast to
East Baltic and central Russia, northwest to southern Scandinavia, and
south to Greece (Corded Pottery and Vucedol extensions).

4. *The warlike and horse-riding Bell Beaker people of the middle and
second half of the 3rd millennium B.C., who diffused over western
Europe*, are likely to have originated from an amalgam of remnants of
the Vucedol people with the Yamna colonists (after Wave No. 3) in
Yugoslavia and Hungary. Their parent culture is called
Vinkovci-Samogyvar. This was the largest and last outmigration, from
east-central Europe into western Europe, up to the west Mediterranean
and the British Isles, before the onset of a more stable period, and the
formations of Bronze Age cultural units.

By the third quarter of the 3rd millennium B.C., almost all parts of Old
Europe were transformed economically and socially. *Pastoralism and
seminomadism increased and tillage decreased*. Old European patterns of
habitation vanished except for territories and islands which were never
completely Indo-Europeanized. /The Indo-European religion became
official, but the Old European Goddess religion was carried on to the
present day through fragments of Old European culture/.

The functions and images of Old European and Indo-European deities,
beliefs in an afterlife, and the entirely different sets of symbols
prove the existence of two contrasting religions and mythologies. Their
*collision in Europe resulted in the hybridization of two symbolic
structures in which the Indo-European prevailed while the Old European
survived as an undercurrent*. Without this insight into different
symbolic structures, the ideologies of European peoples and the genesis
and meaning of their symbols, beliefs, and myths cannot be comprehended.

The clash between these two ideologies and social and economic
structures led to the drastic transformation of Old Europe. These
changes were expressed as the transition from matrilineal to patrilineal
order, from a learned theacracy to a militant patriarchy, from a
sexually balanced society to a male dominated hierarchy, and *from a
chthonic goddess religion to the Indo-European sky-oriented pantheon of
gods*.

{end of selections}

*(5) Cyrus H. Gordon on the Aryan Invasions*

Cyrus H. Gordon wrote in his book /Before the Bible: the Common
Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilisations/ (Collins, London 1962):

{p. 25} *The influx of Indo-European immigrants into the Near East*
during the second millennium B.C. *revolutionised the art of war. The
newcomers introduced the horse-drawn war-chariot*, which gave a swift
striking power hitherto unknown in the Near East.

{p. 26} The elite charioteer officers, who bear the Indo-European name
of /maryannu,/ soon became a new aristocracy throughout the entire area,
including Egypt. *With them appears also a new type of royal epic, which
we may call the Indo-European War Epic*. Embedded in it is a motif that
has become commonplace in world literature: *the Helen of Troy theme*,
whereby a hero loses his destined bride and must wage a war to win her
back. Greek and Indic epic illustrate this theme {*The Indian one is the
/Ramayana/*}, and it is from the/ Iliad/ that it has become popular in
the modern West. However, *it is completely absent from the romantic
literatures of early Mesopotamia and Egypt,* and it appears in the
Semitic World only in the wake of the Indo-Europeans with their
/maryannu/ aristocracy.* The Helen of Troy theme first appears at Ugarit
of the Amarna Age*, in a community where the Indo-European elements are
present, including a firmly entrenched organisation of/ maryannu/. As we
shall note later, *the theme permeates the early traditions of Israel,
particularly the saga of Abraha*m. {endquote}

Cyrus H. Gordon on the East Mediterranean Culture Common to Greek and
Hebrew Civilisations: gordon.html.

*(6) Martin Bernal on the Aryan Invasions*/,in Black Athena/

Bernal, despite his pugnacious style, is surely right when he writes, in
/Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II
The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence/ (Rutgers University Press,
New Brunswick NJ, 1991):

{p. 321} Interest in the Hurrians and their kingdom of Mitanni , which
flourished in Northern Mesopotamia and Eastern Syria in the middle of
the second millenium, became still more intense when it was discovered
that *the Mitanni swore by Indian gods, some of their kings had Aryan
Indian names* and, even more sensationally,* some of their charioteering
terms - the Mitanni were famous for their horses and chariots - were
found to be very close to those in Sanskrit.* The most plausible
explanation of this situation was to suppose that speakers of
Indo-Aryan, that is to say of the Indo-Iranian language that resembled
Indian not Iranian, had conquered the Hurrians and retained

{p. 322} a dominance over Hurrian society, which gave the latter the
dynamism to sweep through Southwest Asia.

This view was widely stated, especially by Indo-Europeanists and general
historians of the ancient world. But it was resisted by some
archaeologists of Palestine and by many E*gyptologists*. These *could
not see archaeological evidence of a 'northern' presence in either
Palestine or Egypt at this time*. They also seem to have had the
professional dislike of sensational or widespread events, and to have
disliked outside intervention in their academic provinces. What is more,
as anti-Semitism became more virulent in the 1920s and 1930s, many
liberal scholars hated the ideological implications and uses of such an
historical scheme.

This 'professional-liberal' current of thought became dominant in the
anti-racialist atmosphere after the Second World War. *After 1950, the
Hyksos 'invasion' was generally demoted to a slow and undramatic
infiltration of Semitic speakers*, who had had the collaboration of many
Egyptians. One of the most effective ways of discrediting the old
Hurrian hypothesis was to use the generally accepted middle or low
chronologies for Mesopotamian history to show that, as there were no
Hurrian movements in Northern Mesopotamia until the late 17th century
BC, Hurrians could hardly have been involved much farther south in Egypt
a hundred years earlier. However, the acceptance of the 'long' or high
chronology for Mesopotamia removes this objection to the Hurrian
hypothesis.

Hurrians and Indo-Aryans have also been linked to the development and
use of the light war chariot, and diffusionists have tended to see this
as the secret of their military success. This seemed plausible as *there
is little or no trace of horses and chariots in Middle Kingdom Egypt,
while they played an important role in the 15th and later Dynasties*.
Against this attempt to link the Hurrians and Hyksos scholars were able
to argue, until recently, that, as chariots were first mentioned in
Egypt at the end of the Hyksos period, there is no reason to suppose
that they had been present at its beginning. In the 1960s, however,
*horses or at least 'equids' were found buried in association with
Hyksos graves* dating from the second half of the 18th century BC. Thus,
there would seem no reason to deny the inherently plausible notion that*
horses and chariots came in with the Hyksos*, and that *the Hyksos
'invasion' was directly or indirectly connected to the Hurrian
expansion* and further that *there may have been Indo-Aryan speakers
involved in the movement*.

All this looks disturbingly like the Aryanist or even Nazi image of the
Indo-Europeans as a 'master race'. However, I am convinced that

{p. 323} *one should clearly distinguish between what one likes and what
is likely*. I argued in Volume I that the fact that arguments suit or
are even created for distasteful or immoral reasons does not in itself
falsify them. Here, as in Northern India but unlike in Ancient Greece,
there seems to be a case where the Aryan Model works.

However, 'works' is a relative term: the importance of the presence of
any Hurrians and Indo-Aryans in the Hyksos migration seems to have been
largely confined to military technology; the Huns had no long-term
influence on Europe and the Turks who formed the core of the Moghuls in
India left virtually no trace there. *What these farranging movements
did achieve was the breakdown of existing political structures and the
mixing of neighbouring cultures *- German language and 'culture' entered
the Western Roman Empire and Persian civilization came into India.
Similarly, *the material and linguistic culture introduced by the Hyksos
into Egypt seems to have been overwhelmingly that of the neighbouring
Canaanites* and it was this Egypto-Levantine civilization with some
'barbaric' elements that dominated Lower Egypt between 1750 and 1570 BC.

{p. 522} There would seem to be an extreme paradox here, as the main
thrust of my whole project has been against the influence of racism and
anti-Semitism on scholarship. Yet in this volume I have frequently found
myself championing the views of scholars working at the high tide of
racism 1880-1940, though it must be said that these are generally on
issues in which racism is not directly involved.

These are also issues where *the conclusions of the older generation of
scholars fit better with* the results of *modern scientific techniques
than* do the views of* contemporary scholars*. To take two instances
discussed in this volume, lead isotope analysis shows that *lead from Cen- *

{p. 523} *tral Europe was being used in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC*.
This is exactly what* Gordon Childe *would have expected, as he*
believed that Sumerian prospectors had gone up the Danube at this
period*. Similarly, the latest radio-carbon datings put the beginning of
the Egyptian Old Kingdom to around 3000 BC, which fits the chronology of
James Breasted, but that is far earlier than any accepted by
conventional wisdom today.

I believe that this pattern is not the result of random coincidence and
that the* modern archaeologists have been led astray *for reasons that
can be relatively easily explained in terms of the sociology of
knowledge. *Firstly, there has been the turn away from diffusionism*. As
I argued in Volume I, I believe that on one level this represents an
admirable rejection of the uses of diffusionism to justify imperialism
and colonialism. However, it also indicates the desire of new
professionals to appear sober and responsible and not indulge in the
spectacular theories to which amateurs are so attracted.

This is connected the second tendency that appears to have misled modern
scholarship. In a surprisingly large number of areas of Western ancient
history, there was no great increase of information between 1920 and
1960. This period was one in which there was a powerful drive among
archaeologists to acquire 'scientific' status. This in turn produced a
double effect. In the first place, archaeologists wanted, above all, to
avoid being considered as speculative and irresponsible. However, they
also needed to show that the discipline was progressing and innovative.
Thus, the only alterations they could make were those that demonstrated
their greater scepticism and caution. For this reason all 'progress' in
these disciplines since 1920 has tended to restrict the geographical
scope and lower the historical dating of ancient activities. Recent
evidence from scientific techniques, however, points in precisely the
opposite direction and this has led to the paradoxical situation that
the archaeologists who have proclaimed their scientific status most
loudly are in the greatest conflict with the results of the new
scientific techniques when applied to archaeology. What is more, the
results of the new techniques often fit better with the ideas of earlier
or more conservative scholars.

Thus, a number of the controversial ideas in this volume are only
'outrageous' in the light of modern conventional wisdom. An example of
this comes in the attempt I make in Chapter I to *reverse the present
isolationist current* among archaeologists *with a return to modified
diffusionism*, and in particular to the belief that early European
Bronze Age civilization derived in some way from the still earlier
metalworking cultures of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa. If I am
right here, it means that *the sustained attack on* the posi-

{p. 524} tions of the early 20th-century archaeologists Oscar Montelius
and *Gordon Childe launched by Colin Renfrew* and his colleagues has not
merely been a complete waste of time but* has been positively harmful to
our understanding of the origins of Greek civilization*. I also go
beyond Montelius and Childe by arguing that Crete and possibly the
Cyclades may well have become Semitic-speaking at this time.

{end of quotes}

Martin Bernal equates the Exodus with the Expulsion of the Hyksos:
archaeology-bible.html.

Martin Bernal puts the case for African/Semitic influence on the
formation of Greek culture and institutions: diop.html.

*(7) A.L. Basham on the Aryan Invasions, in /The Wonder That Was India/*

A. L. Basham wrote in /The Wonder That Was India/ (Grove Press, New
York, 1959):

{p. 22} The men wore robes which left one shoulder bare, and the
garments of the upper classes were often richly patterned. Beards were
worn, and men and women alike had long hair. The elaborate headdresses
of the Mother Goddess figures probably had their counterparts in the
festive attire of the richer women. The goddesses often wear only a very
short skirt, but on one seal women, perhaps priestesses, are depicted
with longer skirts, reaching to just below the knee. The coiffures of
the women were often elaborate, and pigtails were also popular, as in
present-day lndia. Women loved jewellery, and wore heavy bangles in
profusion, large necklaces, and earrings.

As far as we can reconstruct it from our fragmentary knowledge, the
religion of the Harappa people had some features suggesting those
characteristics of later Hinduism which are not to be found in the
earliest stratum of Indian religious literature. *The Mother Goddess,
for instance, reappears only after the lapse of over a thousand years
from the fall of Harappa.* As already stated she was evidently the
divinity of the people, and the upper classes seem to have preferred a
god, who also shows features found in later Hinduism. As well as the
figurines already mentioned, which may represent divinities, there are a
few in terracotta of bearded nude men with coiled hair; their posture,
rigidly upright, with the legs slightly apart, and the arms held
parallel to the sides of the body, but not touching it, closely
resembles the stance called by the Jainas ka-yot- sarga, in which
meditating teachers are often portrayed in later times; the repetition
of this figure, in exactly the same posture, would suggest that he was a
god. A terracotta mask of a horned deity has also been found.

The most striking deity of the Harappa culture is the horned god of the
seals (pl. IXc). He is depicted on three specimens, in two

{p. 23} seated on a stool or small dais, and in the third on the ground
in all three his posture is one well known to later Indian holy men,
with the legs drawn up close to the body and the two heels touching, a
position quite impossible to the average European without much practice.
The god's body is nude, except for many bangles and what appear to be
necklaces, and he wears a peculiar head-dress, consisting of a pair of
horns, which may have been thought of as growing from his head, with a
plant-like object hetween them. On the largest of the seals he is
surrounded by four wild animals, an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and
a buffalo, and beneath his stool are two deer, as in the representations
of the Buddha preaching his first sermon in the Deer-park at Banaras.
The animals, the plant-like growth from the head, and the fact that he
is ithyphallic, indicate that he is a fer- tility god. His face has a
fierce tigerish aspect, and one authority has suggested that it is not
meant to be human; to the right and left of the head are small
protuberances which were believed by Sir John Marshall to represent a
second and third face on either side. Marshall boldly called this god
Proto-Siva, and the name has been generally accepted; certainly the
horned god has much in common with the Siva of later Hinduism, who is,
in his most important aspect, a fertility deity, is known as Pasupati,
the Lord of Beasts, and is sometimes depicted with three faces.

Sacred animals played a big part in the religion of the Indus people.
Though all the animals shown on the seals rnay not have been
particularly sacred, the bull occurs in contexts which prove that he at
least was so; on many seals he stands before a peculiar object which is
evidently not a manger, and has no utilitarian purpose, but is a "cult
object", probably a table on which corn was grown for fertility rites.
On some seals small lines emerge from the table, which may represent the
growing corn, no doubt eaten by the sacred bull as part of the ceremony.
The bull is usually depicted with a single horn, and has sornetimes been
referred to as a unicorn, though there is little doubt that the artist
was trying to portray a normal bull, whose second horn was concealed by
the first. In Hinduism the bull is specially associated with the god
Siva, but he does not seem to have been connected with the "Proto-Siva"
of Harappa, for he is not among the animals surrounding the god on the
famous seal*. The cow, so revered in later Hinduism, is nowhere depicted.

Certain trees were sacred, as they are in Hinduism today, notably the
pipal, which is specially honoured by Buddhists as the species under
which the Buddha found enlightenment. One very interesting seal (pl.
IXd) depicts a horned goddess in a pipal tree, worshipped

* The horns of the " Proto-Siva " are evidently those of a buffalo.

{p. 24} by a figure also wearing horns, with a human-headed goat
watching the ceremony and a row of seven pigtailed women, probably
priestesses, in attendance. One of the few traces of Sumerian contact is
to be found in *the seal showing a hero grappling with two tigers *(pl.
IXe) - *a variant of a famous Mesopotamian motif in which the hero
Gilgamesh is depicted fighting two lions*. The rotund face of the hero,
and the peculiar treatment of his hair, suggest that he represents the
sun, and that the night-prowling tigers are the powers of darkness.

*Phallic worship was an important element of Harappa religion*. Many
cone-shaped objects have been found, which are almost certainly
formalized representations of the phallus. *The linga or phallic emblem
in later Hinduism is the symbol of the god Siva*, who is more commonly
worshipped thus than as an icon; it is a fair inference that these
objects were connected with the ithyphallic "Proto-Siva" of the seals.
It has been suggested that certain large ring-shaped stones are
formalized representations of the female generative organ and were
symbols of the Mother Goddess, but this is most doubtful.

Until Sir Mortimer Wheeler's work at Harappa in 1946 nothing was known
with certainty of the way in which these people disposed of their dead;
but from a cemetery then discovered, containing at least 57 graves, it
appears that burial was the usual rite. The whole cemetery has not been
excavated and the evidence is not yet fully assessed, but it is clear
that the dead were buried in an extended posture with pottery vessels
and personal ornaments.

Who were the people who built this great civilization?* Some Indian
historians have tried to prove that they were the Aryans, the people who
composed the /Rg Veda/, but this is quite impossible*. From the skeletal
remains so far examined it appears that some of the Harappans were
people of the long-headed, narrow-nosed, slender Mediterranean type,
found all over the ancient Middle East and in Egypt, and forming an
important element of the Indian population at the present day. A second
element was the Proto-Australoid, with flat nose and thick lips, related
to the Australian aborigines and to some of the wild hill-tribes of
modern India. A single skull of Mongolian type has been found, and one
of the short-headed Alpine type. The bearded steatite head to wllich we
have referred shows elements of both the latter types, while the bronze
dancing girl seems certainly Proto-Australoid. Then as now, N.-W. India
was the meeting-place of many races.

The modern South Indian is usually a blend of Mediterranean and
Proto-Australoid, the two chief factors in the Harappa culture;

{p. 25} moreover the Harappa religion seems to show many similarities
with those elements of Hinduism which are specially popular in the
Dravidian country. In the hills of Baluchistan, where the people of the
Nal and Zhob Cultures built their little villages, the Brahuls, though
ethnically now predominantly Iranian, speak a Dravidian language. Thus
it has been suggested that the Harappa folk were Dravidians, and Father
H. Heras, one of the authorities who have tried to read their script,
has even claimed that their language was a very primitive form of Tamil.

It might be suggested that the Harappa people consisted of a
Proto-Australoid element, which at one time may have covered the whole
of India, overlaid by a Mediterranean one, which entered India at a very
early period, bringing with it the elements of civilization. Later,
under the pressure of further invasions, this Mediterranean element
spread throughout the sub-continent, and, again mixing with the
indigenous peoples, formed the Dravidians. The chief objection to this
theory is that the megaliths erected by the early Dravidians in South
India have been shown to be not very ancient; a recent theory even holds
that the Dravidians came to India from the west by sea as late as the
second half of the 1st millennium B.C. We can only say with certainty
that some of the inhabitants of the Indus cities were of a type widely
found further to the west, and that their descendants must survive in
the present-day population of India.

There is no archaeogical evidence of cities of the Harappa people beyond
the Indus basin, but small outposts existed in Kathiawar; yet it does
not follow that the rest of India was wholly ignorant of the Harappa
culture. Certain finds of copper implements in the district of Ranchl
(S. Bihar) suggest that the peoples of North India learnt the use of
metal from Harappa, for the blades are without the strengthening midrib;
but the dating of these objects is very uncertain, and they may be much
later than the fall of Harappa.

Whatever the case may be, pre-Aryan India made certain advances in
husbandry for which the whole world owes her a debt. *Cotton was to the
best of our knowledge first used by the Harappa people*. Rice was not
one of their staple crops, nor was it grown in neolithic China, whose
main food crop was millet. *Wild rice is known in Eastern India, and it
is here, in the swampy Ganges Valley, that it was probably first
cultivated* by the neolithic contemporaries of the Harappa people. *The
water buffalo, known to the Harappa people*, was a comparatively late
arrival in China, and it may have been first domesticated in the
Gangetic Plain, though some authorities believe that it originated in
the Philippine Islands.

{p. 26} Perhaps the most widely appreciated of prehistoric India's gifts
to the world is *the domestic fowl*. Ornithologists are agreed that all
domestic species descend from the wild Indian jungle fowl. The Harappa
people knew the domestic fowl, though its remains are few and it is not
depicted on the seals. It was probably first tamed by neolithic Indians
in the Ganges Valley, whence it found its way by the Burma route to
China, where it appears in the middle of the 2nd millennium. The
Egyptians knew it at about the same time, as a rare luxury bird. Clearly
India, even at this remote period, was not wholly cut off from the rest
of the world.

THE END OF THE INDUS CITIES

When Harappa was first built the citadel was defended by a great
turreted wall, 40 feet wide at the base and 35 feet high. In the course
of the centuries this wall was refaced more strongly than before, though
there is no evidence that the city was dangerously threatened by
enemies. But towards the end of Harappa's existence its defences were
further strengthened, and one gateway was wholly blocked. Danger
threatened from the west.

First to suffer were the Baluchistan villages. The earliest level of the
site of Rana Ghundal shows that bands of horse-riding invaders were
present in the region before 000 B.C., but they soon disappeared, to
give way to the peasant culture which occupied the site in the rd
millennium and was contemporary with the Indus cities. Then, in 2000
B.C. or a little later, *the village was burnt, and a new, coarser type
of pottery appears* - evidently invaders had occupied the site. Soon
afterwards came other invaders, using unpainted encrusted pottery.
Similar though less complete evidence appears in other North Baluchistan
sites, while in South Baluchistain an intrusive culture founded a
settlement at Shahl Tump, not far from Sutkagen Dor, which was the
Harappa Culture's most westerly outpost. The Shahl Tump people used the
shaft-hole axe and round copper seals, and replaced the earlier local
culture, known to archeologists as the Kulli Culture. In the last phase
of the life of Mohenjo Daro painted pottery and stone vessels resembling
those of Baluchistan appear, and this may indicate a large influx of
Kulli refugees, who brought their crafts with them.

*After the barbarians had conquered the outlying villages the ancient
laws and rigid organization of the Indus cities must have suffered great
strain*. At Mohenjo Daro large rooms were divided into smaller, and
mansions became tenements; potters' kilns were built within the city
boundaries, and one even in the middle of a street.

{p. 27} The street plan was no longer maintained. Hoards of jewellery
were buried. Evidently the city was overpopulated and law and order were
less well maintained, perhaps because the barbarians were already
ranging the provinces and the city was full of newcomers, whom the city
fathers could not force into the age-old pattern of the city's culture.

*When the end came it would seem that most of the citizens of Mohenjo
Daro had fled*; but a group of huddled skeletons in one of the houses
and one skeleton of a woman lying on the steps of a well suggest that a
few stragglers were overtaken by the invaders. In this level a fine
copper axe has been found, with a very strong shaft-hole and an adze
blade opposite that of the axe - a beautiful tool, adapted both for war
and peace, and superior to anything the Harappa people possessed (fig.
v). Swords with strengthening midribs also make their appearance. A
single pot burial of a man of somewhat Mongol type may be that of one of
the invaders.

From Harappa comes evidence of a different kind. Here, near the older
cemetery of interments, is another cemetery on a higher level,
containing fractional burials in pots of men with short-headed Armenoid
skulls. A skull of similar type was buried in the citadel itself. At
Chanhu Daro, on the lower Indus, *the Harappa people were replaced by
squatters*, living in small huts with fireplaces, an innovation which
suggests that they came from a colder climate. These people, though
unsophisticated in many respects, had superior tools and weapons.
Similar settlements were made in Baluchistan at about the same time.
Among the scanty remains of these invaders there is clear evidence of
the presence of the horse. The Indus cities fell to barbarians who
triumphed not only through greater military prowess, but also because
they were equipped with better weapons, and had learnt to make full use
of the swift and terror-striking beast of the steppes.

The date of these great events can only be fixed very approximately from
synchronisms with the Middle East. Sporadic traces of contact can be
found between the Indus cities and Sumeria, and there is some reason to
believe that these contacts continued under *the First*

{p. 28} Dynasty of Babylon, which produced the great lawgiver Hammurabi.
This dynasty *was also overwhelmed by barbarians, the Kassites*, who
came from the hills of Iran and conquered by virtue of their horse-drawn
chariots. *After the Kassite invasion no trace of contact with the Indus
can be found in Mesopotamia*, and it is therefore likely that the Indus
cities fell at about the same time as the dynasty of Hammurabi. Earlier
authorities placed the latter event in the first centuries of the 2nd
millennium B.C., but new evidence, which appeared shortly before the
outbreak of the Second World War, has resulted in a revised chronology.
The fall of the First Babylonian Dynasty is now thought to have taken
place about 1600 B.C.

The earliest Indian literary source we possess is the Rg Yeda, most of
which was composed in the second half of the 2nd millennium. It is
evidently the work of an invading people, who have not yet fully
subjugated the original inhabitants of N.-W. India. In his great report
on the excavations at Mohenjo Daro, Sir John Marshall maintained that
some two centuries or more elapsed bet-veen the fall of the Indus cities
and the invasion of the Aryans; but the more recent excavations at
Harappa and elsewhere, the revision of the chronology of Babylon, and
indications in the Rg Yeda itself, have all tended to reduce the gap.
*Many competent authorities, led by Sir R. Mortimer Wheeler, now believe
that Harappa was overthrown by the Aryans*. It is suggested that the
interments in the later cemetery at Harappa are those of "true Vedic
Aryans", and that the forts or citadels which the Vedic war-god Indra is
said to have destroyed included Harappa in their number.

There is not enough evidence to say with certainty that the destroyers
of the Indus cities were members of the group of related tribes whose
priests composed the Rg Yeda, but it is probable that the fall of this
great civilization was an episode in the movement of charioteering
peoples which altered the face of the whole civilized world in the 2nd
millennium B.C,

INDO-EUROPEANS AND ARYANS

*The invaders of India called themselves /Aryas/*, a word generally
anglicized into Aryans.* The name was also used by the ancient Persians,
and survives in the word /Iran/, while /Eire/*, the name of the most
westerly land reached by Indo-European peoples in ancient times, *is
also cognate*. Here we cannot discuss the main theories on the origin of
these people, but can only give that which seems to us most reasonable,
and which, we believe, would be accepted bv a majority of those who
specialize in the subject.

{p. 29} About 2000 B.C. the great steppeland which stretches from Poland
to Central Asia was inhabited by semi-nomadic barbarians, who were tall,
comparatively fair, and mostly *long-headed* {looking on the skull from
above}. They had tamed the horse, which they harnessed to light chariots
with spoked wheels, of a much faster and better type than the lumbering
ass-drawn cars with four solid wlleels wllicll were the best mealls of
transport known to contemporary Sumer. They were mainly pastoral, but
practised a little agriculture. Though they may never have come into
direct contact with the Sumerians, they had adopted some Meso- potamian
innovations, notably the shaft-hole axe. In the early part of the 2nd
millennium, whether from pressure of population, desication of pasture
lands, or from both causes, these people were on the move. They migrated
in bands westwards, southwards and eastwards, conquering local
populations, and intermarrying with them to form a ruling class. They
brought with them their patrilinear tribal organization, their worship
of sky gods, and their horses and chariots. In most of the lands in
which they settled their original language gradually adapted itself to
the tongues of the conquered peoples. *Some invaded Europe, to become
the ancestors of the Greeks, Latins, Celts and Teutons*, while *others
appeared in Anatolia*, and *from the mixture* of these with the original
inhabitants the great empire of *the Hittites grew up*. Yet others
remained in their old home, the ancestors of the later Baltic and
Slavonic peoples, while others moved southwards and, from the Caucasus
and the Iranian tableland, led *many attacks on the Middle Eastern
civilizations. The Kassites, who conquered Babylon*, were led by men of
this stock. In the 14th century B.C. there appeared *in N.-E. Syria a
people called Mitanni*, whose kings had Indo-Iranian names, and a few of
whose gods are familiar to every student of Indian religion: /Indara/,
/Uruvna/ (the Vedic god Varuna), /Mitira/, and /Nasatiya/. As well as
the Mitanni other chiefs in Syria and Palestine had names of
Indo-Iranian type.

The marauding tribesmen gradually merged with the older populations of
the Middle East, and the ancient civilizations, invigorated by fresh
blood and ideas, rose to new heights of material culture; the peaceful
and conservative *cities of the Indus *valley *could neither withstand
nor absorb* the invaders. The culture which was to succeed that of
Harappa was, as we shall see, diametrically opposed to its predecessor.
*Only after many centuries did some elements of the older civilization,
kept alive no doubt by the poorer people and serfs, begin to influence
the conquerors*.

The Aryan invasion of India was not a single concerted action, but one
covering centuries and involving many tribes, perhaps not all

{p. 30} of the same race and language. It seems certain that* many of
the old village cultures of the western hills were destroyed before the
cities of the Indus Valley,* but otherwise the course of Aryan expansion
cannot be plotted, owing to the paucity of material remains. Evidently*
the invaders did not take to living in cities, and after the fall of
Harappa and Mohenjo Daro the Panjab and Sind became a land of little
villages*, with buildings of wood and reed the remains of which have
long since perished. For over a thousand years from the fall of Harappa
India is almost an archological blank, which at present can only be
filled by literary sources.

THE ARYANS IN INDIA. THE PROTO-HISTORIC PERIOD

Among the many peoples who entered India in the 2nd millennium B.C. was
a group of related tribes whose priests had perfected a very advanced
poetic technique, which they used for the composition of hymns to be
sung in praise of their gods at sacrifices. These tribes, chief of which
was that of the Bharatas, settled mainly in East Panjab and in the
region between the Satlaj and the Jamna which later became known as
Brahmavarta. The hymns composed by their priests in their new home were
carefully handed down by word of mouth, and early in the 1st millennium
B.C. were collected and arranged. They were still not committed to
writing, but by now they were looked on as so sacred that even minor
alterations in their text were not permitted, and the priestly schools
which preserved them devised the most remarkable and effective system of
checks and counter checks to ensure their purity. Even when the art of
writing was widely known in India the hymns were rarely written, but,
thanks to the brilliant feats of memory of many generations of brahmans,
and the extreme sanctity which the hymns were thought to possess, they
have survived to the present day in a form which, from internal
evidence, appears not to have been seriously tampered with for nearly
three thousand years. This great collection of hymns is the Rg Yeda,
still in theory the most sacred of the numerous sacred texts of the Hindus.

The period of the Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanisads is a sort of transition
from prehistory to history. If history, as distinct from archaology, is
the study of the human past from written sources, then India's history
begins with the Aryans. The Rg Yeda, and the great body of oral
religious literature which followed it in the first half of the 1st
millennium B.C., are part of the living Hindu tradition. The Vedic hymns
are still recited at weddings and funerals, and in the daily devotions
of the brahman.. Thus they are part of

{p. 31} historical India, and do not belong to her buried prehistoric
past. But they tell us little about the great events of the time, except
in irritatingly vague incidental references; even on social conditions
their information is scant; only on religion and thought is the his-
torian more fully informed.

Yet from the hymns of the Rg and Atharva Vedas, the sacrificial
instructions of the Brahmanas, and the mysticism of the Upanisads, the
outlines of a culture emerge, though often all too vaguely, and here and
there we see the faint wraiths of great sages and tribal leaders, whose
importance for their times was such that their names were recorded in
sacred literature. Around these phantoms later tradition draped a
glittering mantle of legend, legend in which many Indians still
implicitly believe, and which, in other contexts, is exceedingly
important. But when the mantles are removed only vague shadows remain,
little more than the names of chieftains who three thousand years ago
waged successful war against their enemies. For the period before the
time of the Buddha we can only trace the general character of the
civilization which produced the Vedic literature and give a brief and
tentative sketch of its expansion.

THE CULTURE OF THE RG VEDA

No real synchronisms are contained in the Rg Veda itself, to give us any
certain information on the date of its composition. Some authorities in
the past claimed an exceedingly early date for it, on the basis of
tradition and ambiguous astronomical references in the hymns themselves
- it was even believed by one very respected Indian scholar that it was
as old as 6000 B.C. The discovery of the Indus cities, which have
nothing in common with the culture described in the Veda and are
evidently pre-Vedic, proves that *the hymns cannot have been composed
before the end of Harappa*. The great development in culture, religion
and language which is evident in the later Vedic literature shows that a
long period must have elapsed between the time of the composition of the
last hymns of the Rg Veda and the days of the Buddha - perhaps as much
as 500 years. It is therefore probable that most of the Rg Veda was
composed between 1500 and 1000 B.C., though the composition of some of
the most recent hymns and the collation of the whole collection may have
taken place a century or two later.

When the hymns were written the focus of Aryan culture was the region
between the Jamna (Sanskrit /Yamuna/) and Satlaj (/Sutudri/), south of
the modern Ambala, and along the upper course of the river

{p. 32} Sarasvati. The latter river is now an insignificant stream,
losing itself in the desert of Rajasthan, but it then flowed broad and
strong, and probably joined the Indus below the confluence of the
Satlaj. The Vedic poets knew the Himilayas, but not the land south of
the Jamna, and they did not mention the Vindhyas. To the east the Aryans
had not expanded far beyond the Jamna, and the Ganges (/Ganga/) is
mentioned only in one late hymn.

At this time the Aryans had not wholly subjugated the indigenous
inhabitants. Though many hymns refer to battles between one Aryan tribe
and another, there is, underlying this intertribal rivalry, a sense of
solidarity against the /Dasas/ or /Dasyus/, who evidently represent the
survivors of the Harappa Culture, and kindred peoples of the Panjab and
the North-West. The Dasas are described as dark and ill-favoured,
bull-lipped, snub-nosed, worshippers of the phallus, and of hostile
speech. They are rich in cattle, and dwell in fortified places called
pur, of which the Aryan war-god Indra has destroyed hundreds. The main
work of destroying the settlements of the Dasas had been accomplished
some time before the composition of the hymns, and the great battles
which must then have taken place are already misted over with legend;
but the Dasas are still capable of massing armies of 10,000 men against
the invaders.

Other enemies of the Aryans are the Panis, who are described as wealthy
people who refuse to patronize the Vedic priests, and who steal the
cattle of the Aryans. They were not so strongly hated as the Dasas, and
their settlements seem often to have continued unmolested. It has been
suggested that the Panis were Semitic traders, but the evidence is so
slight that this conclusion calmot be accepted.

The Aryans were not uninfluenced by the earlier inhabitants. In
classical Sanskrit the word /dasa/ regularly means "slave" or "bondman",
and in the later hymns of the /Rg Veda/ it was already acquiring that
meaning, while the feminine form /dasi/ is used in the sense of a
"slave-girl" throughout the book; but, though many of the vanquished
Dasas must have been enslaved, some seem to have come to terms with the
conquerors, and one Dasa chief is mentioned as following Aryan ways and
patronizing the brahmans. One result of this contact of Aryan and
non-Aryan is evident even in the earliest stratum of the Rg Veda, the
language of which is appreciably affected by non Indo-European
influences. All Indian languages, from Vedic to the modern vernaculars,
contain a series of sounds, the retroflex or cerebral consonants, which
cannot be traced in any other Indo-European tongues, not even in Old
Iranian, which is closely akin to Sanskrit. These sounds must have
developed quickly, from the efforts of non-Aryans to master the language
of their

{p. 33} conquerors.* No doubt the invaders often married indigenous
women, whose children would be bilingual*, and after a few generations
the Aryans' original language would show the effect of the admixture of
aboriginal blood. Numerous words in the Rg Veda are not connected with
any known Indo-European roots, and were evidently borrowed from the
natives. Non-Aryan influence on religion and culture must also have been
felt very early, and* the gradual disappearance of much of the original
Indo-European heritage beneath successive layers of non-Aryan
innovations* can be traced through the early religious literature of India.

{end}

Joseph Needham and David Anthony on Cultural Diffusion across the
steppes ofter 2000 BC: needham-anthony.html.

The following is from a BBC documentary on Minoan Crete, featuring Colin
MacDonald (curator of Knossos) and Mike Baillie:

The island of Thera, financial centre for Aegean civilization, suffered
a massive volcanic eruption in 1628 BC. Tidal waves hit Crete,
destroying buildings and boats, and ten cold years followed, probably
causing crop failure, on account of ash in the atmosphere.

Minoan Crete survived, but people lost faith in the religious &
political hierarchy. Nevertheless,* clay tablets in the Linear A
language continued for 50 years. After that, they are replaced by clay
tablets in Linear B, a language from the Greek Mainland*. See
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/apocalypse_minoan3.shtml.

Conclusion: *The Minoan Civilization was wiped out by an Aryan
invasion*, after the eruption had destabilised the cohesiveness of
Cretan rulership. Similarly, the Chernobyl explosion did not directly
finish off the Soviet Union, but weakened the legitimacy of the ruling
elite.

*Cavalli-Sforza* dismisses the idea of Race as implying that different
kinds of people are different species or sub-species, or have
essentially different souls, but he accepts the reality of Race in a
statistical sense.

He *says that the Indo-Europeans ("Aryans") do not constitute a race,
but are part of the Caucasoid race, with the Arabs and most people of
South India*. He writes, "Most inhabitants of India are Caucasoid, even
if their skin is darker than that of northern Europeans. Populations in
the south that speak Dravidian languages are genetically slightly
different from, and darker than, northern Indians." (p. 161 above).

His *data are consistent with *Gimbutas*' presentation of the
Indo-Europeans as intruders into the old civilizations of Europe,
Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, Iran & Pakistan*. Those civilizations -
contra Renfew - appear unlikely to have been Indo-European, even though
they were Caucasoid, as the Indo-Europeans were.

Apart from India, the Aryans also invaded Western Europe (from the
steppes) and the Middle East. The word "Aryan" is today preserved in the
names of the countries "Iran" and "Ireland", i.e. "Eire" = "Aryan",
showing the extent of the conquest. Their incursion into the Middle East
may have contributed to Abraham's westward journey from Ur in Sumeria
(if that be historic), and caused a westward exodus of "Hyksos" peoples
into Egypt, bringing the Middle Kingdom to an end. The Aryans were
nomadic destroyers of civilizations; only later did they become builders
of civilizations, and then they borrowed from other peoples, just as
every other civilization has done. The Bible also portrays the Jews
entering Palestine as nomadic destroyers: guthridge.html; the real
origins of civilisation are neither "Aryan" nor "Jewish".

*Ariosophy?* The /Rig Veda's /account of the Aryan conquest: eth-civ.html.

*Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza favours *Gimbutas*' interpretation:
*http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0993/9309081.htm

*Camille Paglia's response*: "The femaleness of fertility religions is
always double-edged. The Indian nature-goddess* Kali is creator and
destroyer*, granting boons with one set of arms while cutting throats
with the other. She is the lady ringed with skulls. *The moral
ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently
forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We
cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood*":
danielou-paglia.html.

*Is today's Feminism trying to restore the pre-moralistic culture of
Goddess Europe? *Why then was it hijacked by the Lesbian Separatists,
promoting hatred between the sexes? Is Feminism fatally entangled with
ultra-leftist Marxism (Trotskyism)?

**Gimbutas* gives some details of how marriage operated in Minian Crete:
"the mother's brother occupied an important position and was responsible
for bringing up her children"* (/The Civilization of the Goddess/, p.
346). This is the case in many matrilineal societies still, and it
implies that, where divorce occurred, children were not without a father
figure (as happens in the West today); it further implies that divorced
husbands were not made to pay maintenance, their loss of their children
being a sufficient hardship to bear.

*Why do today's Feminists laud a masculine model for women - shoulder
pads, assertiveness, crewcut hairstyles, workouts in the gym,
childlessness, full-time work* (while strangers rear their offspring),*
the casting of critics into a gulag?*

*Is this not Marxism /in the guise of/ Feminism?*

*It might be supposed that Elvis Presley, John Lennon etc, herald a new
Dionysian culture. I think not ... Hedonism is not Shivaism*. Today's
youth culture is superficial, mindless, shallow, disrespectful,
self-absorbed, anti-family, far from nature. *Hollywood's idols are
wealthy materialists, fashion statements, who lead their devotees away
from the simple life to the megapolis*. Their jarring music and dancing
lacks any mystic qualities.

*The Trotskyist Cultural Revolution, with its unbounded anger against
past culture, merely repeats *in a new guise,* the anathemas of ancient
Jewish scribes against the natural world. Theirs is a false path,
however Dionysiac it might seem:* sex in the Soviet Union
<sex-soviet.html>.

Debunking the Goddess myths: http://www.debunker.com/patriarchy.html;
this item specifically debunks *Gimbutas*' later "feminist" orientation:
http://www.debunker.com/texts/goddess.html.

I have a copy of Cynthia Eller's book /The Myth of Matriarchal
Prehistory/, but haven't read it. However, I note that Eller misquotes
J. P. Mallory in his book /In Search of the Indo-Europeans/; Mallory is
now editor of /The Journal of Indo-European Studies/. The references: p.
165 in Eller, p. 185 in Mallory.

Mallory, by and large, sides with *Gimbutas* in the above book (not on
"goddess" issues, or on "Matriarchy", but on the Prehistory). On p. 185,
he is summarising the objections to *Gimbutas*' theory. Eller takes the
quote out of context, implying that this is Mallory's own position. In
the Foreword, Mallory states that he is examining the *Gimbutas*-Renfrew
debate in chapter 6 (pp. 143-185). Eller makes no reference to chapter 6.

*Gimbutas*' early book was called /The Gods & Goddesses of Old Europe/,
which name she later changed to /The Goddesses & Gods of Old Europe/,
putting the females first. She thought the Goddesses more important, but
Alain Danielou, writing about the same sort of culture, places his focus
on the male god Shiva/Dionysus <danielou-paglia.html>. In any case they
were a polarity. *Gimbutas* later wrote books called /The Language of
the Goddess/ and /The Civilization of the Goddess/, which leave the male
gods out of their title, even though they do feature.

*Gimbutas*' "Goddess" & Matriarchy baggage came late in her career,
piggybacking, as it were, on her pioneering archaeological work. But
there is no need to jettison her prehistory just because it being
wrongly used to promote Matriarchy.

The spread of Indo-European culture from Central Asia:
needham-anthony.html.

Jared Diamond summarises the case for an Indo-European expansion
covering the last 5000 years diamond.html.

Marija *Gimbutas*' book /The Goddessess and Gods of Old Europe/ appears
to be out of print.

To order Marija *Gimbutas*' /The Civilization of the Goddess/ from
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062508040/qid=1006401211/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_10_6/t/107-4812491-0016561

To order Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's /Genes, Peoples and Languages /from
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520228731/qid=1006401046/sr=12-3/t/107-4812491-0016561

To purchase/ any of/ Marija *Gimbutas*' books second-hand through
Abebooks:
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=marija+*gimbutas*
<http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=marija+gimbutas>.

To purchase any of A. L. Basham's books via Abebooks:
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=a+l+basham.

Did Judaism once have a Goddess? jewish-taoist.html.

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