You give me suggestions

Especially if Krishna and Ram ( Avatars of Vishnu ) came much much later. Rig-Veda doesn't mention them either. Then how are the later Avatars of Vishnu present in stories ( Ramayan and Mahabharata) that predate the Aryan Invasion of India ? Isn't Vishnu supposed to be a minor diety of the Proto-Indo-Europeans ( as he is present in one verse of Rig Veda ) ? Especially since Vedas are supposed to have been compiled in Northern India and have influence from Central Asia and Iran.

I am aware that many different beliefs make up Hindusim, but I am now really confused by the timeline of events.

I was watching HBO Rome and some similarities like using bells, putting colour on forehead, the praying and everything just looks oddly familiar to someone who grew up in a Hindu household in India.

I recently read about about how the name of the Roman god Jupiter is phonetically similar to the Vedic Djous-patēr and that is why I thought about some similarities in the rituals. Now I just read about this out of interest so I am no expert by any means.

Any answers are appreciated

Hey guys!

I was wondering about how much truth there is to the claim that the idea of Rta / Arta / Asha, a kind of "cosmic law / order / balance", was already present and an important concept in Proto Indo European religion?

I noticed this is mentioned in the wikipedia page (under "cosmic order") and also some other websites state that this concept was already present in Proto Indo European religion.
Because of this, I am wondering how well supported this idea is, since as far as I know it can't be reconstructed in all branches (eg. Slavic)
Do you guys also know of any good sources about this topic? I find this idea very interesting.
Of course we can never know for sure, just wondering about your opinions and the reason for them!

Thanks a lot!

Hey guys,
I was wondering how prominent Animism or elements of Animism was in Proto Indo European religion. Would it have likely been somewhat (of course only vaguely) similiar to Shinto in that regard? Having gods as well as a lot of general spirits as well? I know that many Indo European societies nowadays have things like fairies, elves, water spirits or so, but is there a reconstructed concept of these for the Proto Indo Europeans (especially a word connected to them?), it seems quite possible they had such a concept or not? Are there animistic rituals that can be reconstructed for the Proto Indo Europeans? Was there a concept of holy places, if so, is a word for these reconstructable?

Also, do you guys have any good sources on relatively authentic or well based reconstructions of / information on the Proto Indo European religion? A lot of the information I could find online doesn't seem too scientific...

Thanks!

Obviously it's quite hard to reconstruct the proto Indo-European cultures, but based on the evidence we have, is there any reason to believe that the God of Judaism, Islam and Christianity is an evolution of the ideas of God(s) worshipped by the proto Indo-European peoples? Perhaps an evolution of the Sky Father archetype, for example.

What could/would/should be name the Proto-Indo-European Religion if it's revived as a neopagan movement/religion today? For example although Germanic Neopaganism is known by different names, it's mainly/commonly known as Heathenry or in the case of Slavic Neopaganism, it's known by different names but it's mainly/commonly known as Rodnovery. Similarly Greek Neopaganism is known by different names but it's mainly/commonly known as Hellenism.

https://preview.redd.it/qhe15rlvces41.png?width=1434&format=png&auto=webp&s=1effb88b5860295b900458e2755cee20c3572b87

I hope you guys are ready for the long overdue third edition of the r/IndoEuropeean Dedicated Topic thread. This time we will discuss the Proto-Indo-European society and religion. Now you might be wondering didn't we cover this in the first dedicated topic thread about the steppe herders on the Pontic-Caspian steppe? And my answer would be no we didn't, we talked about the steppe societies which most likely would have been the people which spoke Proto-Indo-European and practiced the culture, but we did not really touch on those Proto-Indo-European aspects, drawn from the various hints left in the many descendant cultures we all love and cherish today.

Now while I think this could be a very interesting Dedicated Topic thread, Proto-Indo-European religion really isn't my area of expertise, and when it comes to Proto-Indo-European society and culture I more or less always focus on the stuff which can be corroborated by archaeological findings. Nevertheless I will try me best to write a short introduction to the topic and provide some further information in the comments, where most of the action occurs anyway. It would be nice if I could add some of your segments to this post as well, help me knock out the inaccuracies as well guys!

Consider this post something which is very much a work in progress.

Society

The Proto-Indo-European societies seemed to have been hierarchical society with the three P's: patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal. Which meant that men generally rule, your descent goes through your paternal lineages, and wives marry into the family of the husband.

The basic terms for family and kinship are present in Indo-European cultures, however there are apparently more terms related to males than to females. An interesting feature is the role of the maternal uncle (mother's brother) in the life and upbringing of the son in Indo-European cultures, which likely was part of Proto-Indo-European culture as well.

The first distinction in Proto-Indo-European society seemed to have been one between free men and slaves, and within that class freedmen you likely would have a distinction between kings, priests, warriors and commoners. More on that later.

That being said to me it seems unlikely that kings as we know them nowadays were even a thing in Proto-Indo-European societies and I think it is still debated amongst

My knowledge of Hinduism is near non-existent, but I know cows are held to be sacred in it. I thinks this applies to the ancient Zoroastrian religion as well. So my question is was the irregular declension in Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Old Irish, Probably Proto-Germanic preserved due to being held sacred in the PIE religion?

Can the conspicuous similarities between the two be explained simply as parallel evolution? That doesn't seem like too much of a stretch when it comes to Tengri as analogue with *Dyeus Pater, as the concept of a masculine force inhabiting the sky seems rather pervasive worldwide to say the least. But I was reading today about the mythological origins of the Oghuz Turks, and I was struck by the uncanny resemblance to the story of Romumlus and Remus. A boy's village is raided and razed, the attackers leave him for dead in a stream, he is discovered and raised to adulthood by a female wolf. The fact that the story involves one boy as opposed to twins and that it's the chimeric offspring of the boy and the she-wolf who go on to greatness rather than the boy himself notwithstanding, the similarities seem too great to be explained by anything besides common origin or areal transmission.

I've read that many people see Hinduism as the latest form of the Proto-Indo-European religion. The religion of the people that likely lived on the Pontic Steppe, and who spoke a language that is the ancestor language of most European languages (English, Latin, Greek, German, Russian, Norse, Irish, Armenian, Albanian, and many other languages). The Proto-Indo-European religion is also believed to be the Ancestor religion of Greek, Roman, Celtic, Dacian, Slavic, Norse, Iranian, Baltic, etc, polytheism.

The general idea among many scholars is that the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from the Pontic Steppe and branched out into different language and cultural families across Europe, Central Asia, Iran, Anatolia, and India, with the migrants intermixing with the locals but imposing their culture, religion, and language on areas they migrated to. The idea is that the branch that migrated to central asia, the Indo-Iranians, split into the Iranians and Indo-Aryans, with the Indo-Aryans migrating into India. The Indo-Aryans heavily mixed with the locals and adopted some of their words and religious practices, forming the Vedic Religion, which evolved into modern Sanatan Dharma.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think this is wrong? How does this fit into Hindu thought?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration

Yes its wikipedia, but wikipedia gives good intros to topics and you can check out the sources of the articles in the sources section of each page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology

Sort of like the language families but for faith, are there any other ancient base religious or spiritual beliefs that morphed into many living or dead systems with similarities?

I saw this question posted once before, but it didn't get a lot of attention and the answers were muddled by a single poster who repeatedly cited a minority view that the Proto-Indo-European pantheon was not genetically (linguistically) inherited with no other answers.

Greek mythology, Roman mythology, Hinduism, German mythology, Norse mythology, and a bunch of other mythologies of Indo European speaking peoples probably all originated from the same religion - the Proto-Indo-European religion.

The above mentioned religions all share some common traits, like similar names for their Gods, similar stories, etc. India has a myth involving twins named Manu and Yama, whereas Germany has a myth involving twins named Mannus and Ymir. In Roman mythology, their God is Jupiter, in Greek mythology their God is Zeus Pater, in the Indian Vedic religion, their god is named Dyaus Pita. Iranian and Lithuanian religions both have gods named Diva.

Baha'is believe Krishna's divinity, so they affirm that there is some truth in Hinduism, but what about the other countries' pagan religions and their ancestor religion, the Proto Indo European religion?

I was reading about Tengri on Wikipedia and noticed this interesting remark:

> Tengri is considered to be strikingly similar to the Indo-European sky god, *Dyeus, and the structure of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion is closer to that of the early Turks than to the religion of any people of Near Eastern or Mediterranean antiquity.

Citing "Mircea Eliade, John C. Holt, Patterns in comparative religion, 1958, p. 94."

So, to restate the title, are the similarities between Tengri and the proto-Indo-European sky god Dyeus coincidental, or some kind of a relation?

Sorry if this is the wrong place. Reading about the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion fascinates me. Are there any other reconstructed religions that are just as old? For example, I tried googling Proto-Afro-Asiatic religion, but didn't find many good results. I know reconstructing something so old is hardly an exact science, but still I find it very interesting.

While many cultures broadly share similar types of crops despite being distantly related, some crops or animals have become nearly synonymous with certain broad cultural groups due to that crop or animal's prevalence within the broader societies which cultivated them. It is because these cultures of the past relied so heavily on just one or two staple foods that we now associte certain foods (corn-tortillas) with certain cultural cuisines (mexican food). So, what are the equivalents of these crops or animals in your world? Are they different than the kinds of plants and animals we have already domesticated here? Are they different? How so? And how has this impacted the cultures of your world's societies?

TL;DR: Real old time-y religion, myth in culture, antiquity to modernity, wild speculation

Sometime in the late 18th century, William Jones discovered Proto-Indo-European, what some may describe as the ursprach or mother tongue of all languages. Jones was a member of the East India Company and was based in India at the time. Upon beginning his study of Sanskrit as an attempt to more fully understand Hindu culture, Jones realised that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit were all exceedingly similar, so much so that these similarities could not be the result of coincidence. As this hypothesis was expanded and confirmed, it was realised that languages as disparate as Hittite and the Tocharian languages of West China stemmed also from this one root. Not just the languages were similar, but also their mythologies and rituals.

Much of this information has been compiled through comparing similarities between languages and fragments of languages from these time periods, as archaeological evidence has proved hard to come by.

The PIE term for "a god" was likely "deiwos", from which we likely get the Latin "deus" and the Sanskrit "deva".

Some of the variations of Gods in PIE religion include:

• A sky father, "dyeus", god of the day lit sky, believed to have been the chief deity in the pantheon. His consort is believed to have been the "earth mother", probably a symbolic motif on the cycle of night/day. The sky father's role as protector and provider mirrors the relative calm of day in prehistory, where large predators would be sleeping and food would be easier to spot. At the end of the day he rests in the earth mother, and no longer stands guard over the realms of men. It is believed the Greek god Zeus may have derived from this original sky father.

• "The broad one", reconstructed as "plenty", a goddess of wide, flat lands and the rivers that meander across them. The choice of goddess over god here perhaps symbolises the yielding, fertile quality of the land as associated with similar traits in the female human.

• "Perkwunos", the striker, the god of thunder, whose name is derived from an early word for "oak". The connection with oaks and thunder can perhaps be explained by the commonplace happening of lightning striking the tops of tall trees. In Norse mythology, the god Thor could strike enemies hiding under an oak tree, but not under smaller trees such as beech. Another myth held that oak trees contained a fire within them that lightning could set free, per

Give my band a name!

While looking into Proto-Semitic words, I noticed the similarity of some with other Proto Indo-European words which carry the same meaning. Specifically, I noticed that the words for "bull" and "horn", are *ṯawr- and *qarn- in Proto Semitic, *táwros- and *ker- in Proto Indo-European. And as a speaker of arabic, i can confirm it is "thawr/ṯawr" and "qarn" in my native language, i also know it's "taureau" and "corne" in french. There's also Greek tauros, Latin taurus, Hebrew shor/(Aramaic) tawrā among others...

Okay so whenever we think about new civs for the game we at are best fantasizing, and this one is even more unlikely than most, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment: Proto Indo-Europeans

Dropoffs: Plough (a movable food dropoff) pulled by an ox, Storecart (movable gold and wood dropoff) pulled by a horse.

Favor generation: Priests can generate favor by fighting, or by praying at a temple.

Major Gods:

Dyḗus ph₂tḗr: (Sky father cognate to Zeus and Tyr) Power: Target an enemy creature, it is attacked by wolves. You can control them.

Priests can spend favor to select an area of map to become visible.

Dhéǵhōm Méhatēr (Earth Mother). Power: Create a forest of trees which will endlessly regenerate as they are cut down.

Priests can spend favor to select a nearby area of map to cover with Lush.

H2éwsōs (Dawn Goddess): Power: Select an empty piece of land to create a number of creatures, trees and a small goldmine.

Priests can spend favor to select a nearby area to turn into farmland

.

Heroes include the Horse Twins: Horsebound Heroes, limit of two you can build, very powerful.

Myth units inspired from Lithuanian folklore (the Indo-European culture which has changed its mythology the least): Ragana (Witches), Baubaus (Devils), Aitvaras (Spirits)

Particulalary curious on the dairy products they had or didn't have. Did they have yogurt, sour cream, clotted cream, hard cheeses, soft cheeses , brined cheeses, Labneh type products, room temperature yogurts like https://nourishedkitchen.com/viili-piima-fil-mjolk/), refit?

How was meat cooked? Braised? Grilled? Smoked?

As a speaker of Hebrew, which afaik is one of the most innovative Semitic languages, I can understand much of reconstructed Proto-Semitic - it's mostly just straightforward sound correspondences - but as an English speaker Proto-Indo-European is usually completely foreign. I thought this might be an artifact of Hebrew being essentially a time capsule from 2000 years ago, but even Latin compared to PIE looks more different than Hebrew compared to PS. So why are Semitic languages so conservative? Or Indo-European languages so innovative?

"Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/xodъ - Wiktionary" https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/xod%D1%8A

Anatolian is usually described as the "first to branch off" from Proto-Indo-European, but what that really amounts to is that Proto-Indo-European split into two branches: one which would became Proto-Anatolian, and one which would became Proto-Non-Anatolian (the ancestor of English, Russian, Tocharian, etc.).

But what actual differences are there between PIE and Proto-Non-Anatolian ('PNA')? One that I've heard is the development of the feminine gender. But what about sound changes? Surely over the centuries between PIE and PNA there must have been various sound changes?

e.g. are there some distinctions that existed in PIE, but were lost in PNA? Or maybe a consonant split?

What could/would/should be name the Proto-Indo-European Religion if it's revived as a neopagan movement/religion today? For example although Germanic Neopaganism is known by different names, it's mainly/commonly known as Heathenry or in the case of Slavic Neopaganism, it's known by different names but it's mainly/commonly known as Rodnovery. Similarly Greek Neopaganism is known by different names but it's mainly/commonly known as Hellenism.

Reading about the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion fascinates me. Are there any other reconstructed religions that are just as old? For example, I tried googling Proto-Afro-Asiatic religion, but didn't find many good results. I know reconstructing something so old is hardly an exact science, but still I find it very interesting.