The Case for Eostre, Part 3: Meanwhile, Six Thousand Years Ago...

[cavalorn]

All of us understand how archaeological and documentary evidence can help us to build up a picture of our past. Historical linguistics, however, is a less well known field. It’s complex, but this is the essence of it: by studying how languages have changed over time, experts attempt to reconstruct earlier forms of language, and from those

Comments

[michaleen]

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the common ancestor of all the Indo-European languages, and would have been spoken from approximately 4500 to 2500 BCE.
I am uncomfortable with this sentence.

One problem, I think, with attempting to reconstruct PIE mythology is the assumption that such a thing existed independent of other cultures. If you allow your eyes to wander out of focus a bit, Cain and Abel seem to be a similar creation myth. One brother slays the other and in the aftermath erects the first city. Is this a possible reflex of the PIE myth or even the reverse? We can't really answer that question unless we are fairly certain where PIE originated and that question is, despite the certainty of some proponents, far from settled.

[unwholesome_fen]

However we do know that there were Indo-European societies in the Levant, the Hittites being the obvious example - one of the major empires of the second millennium BCE. So if the origin were PIE, and if it survived in Hittite culture, then it could have become known to neighbouring Levantine cultures by that route. Of course in the Genesis story, Cain is said to be cursed for killing his brother, so it could actually be seen as a repudiation of the sacrifice motif.