Roots

[jsburbidge]

Fustel de Coulanges' La Cité Antique, published in 1864, can be considered the first major attempt to get behind the historically recorded Indo-European classical cultures to find a root culture. (A parallel enterprise on the Germanic front may be seen in its opening stages in Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835) and Deutsche Wörterbuch (1854), regarding which, see Tom Shippey on Tolkien's philological background.)

There are reasons that it is still referred to. Aside from the fact that Coulanges had a graceful, classic prose style, the basic argument (unwelcome to the enlightenment) that religion is/was central to the structure of society - in particular, that the core structures of Roman, Greek, and Indic societies were shaped by religion - has been qualified considerably since then but has not been replaced by a generally better model (much of the history of the US republic can be read as an attempt to create and make functional a civic religion to replace the old monarchies of Crown and Altar; a great deal of modern professional sports snaps into place once one recognizes the team identification of committed fans as a variant of religious zeal).

That being said, it was an early stab in that direction, and it would be dangerous simply to take it as a guide, a clue for finding one's way back to an ur-society of the Indo-European culture. (Still less can it be taken as a reference to classical culture: a recent popular history of liberal individualism, Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism shows its tendency towards slovenly research at a surface level only in part by its almost entire reliance on Coulanges as a guide to the individual in classical antiquity.)

Modern refinements run in two directions. For those (the majority of those with expertise, it seems) who accept the kurgan hypothesis for the origins of Indo-European, archaeological evidence of the Yamnaya culture provides direct evidence of the parent culture. (For elaboration of this from an archaeologist's perspective, see David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.) The other route is by very careful, painstaking, working backwards from the earliest Greek and Indic poetry towards common roots.

The common origin of Greek and Vedic metres has been recognized since Meillet's Les origines indo-européennes des mètres grecs in the 1920s. This has been the foundation for various extended approaches including Calvert Watkins (How to Kill a Dragon) and Gregory Nagy, whose Greek Mythology and Poetics collects a number of narrowly focussed studies of phrasing and imagery. This generates less sweeping, but more certain, insights into the cultural patterns of the PIE world.

This sort of focus on origins - whether Indo-European or simply archaic and prehistoric successor cultures - has two sides. It's fascinating because it gives us glimpses of otherwise lost worlds, and in a few cases it highlights traits which not only started out prominent but have remained important through western societies' various later histories. It also illuminates (for example) both Homer and Sappho to knows that the adjective poikilos does not just mean "richly-woven" but a particular kind of weaving, and has specific cultic overtones.

On the other hand, there's sometimes a danger of treating origins, especially philological ones, as the mediaevals tended to - treating the origin as a controlling, rather than supplementing, force in one's understanding. To take a trivial case, hlafdige -> levedy -> lady no longer has even the ghost of loaves of bread hovering around its meaning. Worse, even very real arguments deriving from a philologist's idiolect frequently find no parallel in those of others. Consider: there is a fairly important Indo-European root *men- with a meaning roughly of "think, be aware". It's left traces all over Italic, Greek, and Germanic branches: reminiscere, mimnesco, memorial, minion. In particular, there's a very old Germanic or pre-Germanic word meaning "a thinking being"[1], mann, the direct ancestor of the English word man. It's also clear, looking at the OED, that this remained the only meaning until the Middle English period, and the primary meaning well into the modern English period. However, a secondary meaning, male as opposed to "woman", developed in the ME period, and many NE uses are ambiguous, sometimes deliberately ("No living man may hinder me", says the Nazgûl) and sometimes simply by blurring of the general original meaning with male as the unmarked state. By now, though, the secondary meaning (historically) has become so dominant that it is not only pointless but either clueless or malicious to continue using it in the old way - leaving us to fall back on Latinisms like person ("mask") or human for non-gendered nouns representing a member of the species Homo sapiens.

[1]Which leads to an observation about what I think is a philologist's joke by C. S. Lewis. In Out of the Silent Planet he introduces the Malacandrian word "hnau", with exactly this meaning. But not only does Weston not get the identification with the original root meaning ("No care for hnau. Care for man.") but Ransom, the philologist, doesn't seem to make the connection either. If the withholding of the equivalency isn't a joke on Lewis' part, then I can only conclude that as a Lit. rather than Lang. person he didn't know it and could have used some help here from Tolkien.

Comments

[stoutfellow]

Thank you. I've been hoping for something like this from you since my post on FdC. It'll be a while before I can follow these leads, but I do intend to do so.

[jsburbidge]

An interesting point qualifying Coulanges is Denys Page's observation re Mycenean Linear B that Homer gave us no reason to suspect such a _bureaucratic_ state at such an early period. To postulate, say, a late PIE / Yamnaya culture built around the tribe and the family, there's a very wide gap and much change between that and classical culture.

[stoutfellow]

An interesting point indeed! But was the Mycenean state IE in origin, or was it built on a Minoan - presumably non-IE - foundation?