In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth
J.P. Mallory
Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1989
288pp.

The Dedicant Program requires the student to read and review at least one book in the field of Indo-European Studies, and my choice for this study was J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Being in a hiatus between courses of university study, I wanted an academic title for my introduction to Indo-European (IE) studies if only to keep my mind limber until I begin my graduate studies in the spring. Mallory did not disappoint; this book is dense, providing a thorough survey of the state of Indo-European paleo-anthropology, archaeology, and to a lesser degree, historical linguistics—at least up to the print date of 1989. As academic research tends to do, the intervening eighteen years have likely seen some new theories advanced and some of the theories presented here altered significantly or made obsolete by archaeological discoveries; the political referents used in several of the discussions are obsolete as well, as this book was published during the first rumblings of the upheavals that would see the collapse of the Soviet Union and redraw the maps of the areas in question in a few short years.

Mallory begins by laying the groundwork for IE studies, clarifying that the Indo-Europeans in question are not a culture but a linguistic family; the inheritors of Indo-European languages may share mythic and ideological similarities but these are secondary to the linguistic provenance they share. He then spends two chapters examining the Indo-European people as we find them in historical periods and extrapolating backwards into late pre-history. Mallory divides these groups of people for the sake of discussion into two: those who lived in Asia (the Anatolians, Phrygians, Armenians, Indo-Aryans, Iranians and the easternmost group, the Tocharians, from modern-day northeast China) and those who lived in Europe (the Greeks, Thracians, Illyrians, Slavs, Balts, Germans, Celts, and the tribes that inhabited modern-day Italy.) This section of the book is most applicable for the purposes of the Dedicant Program as we know the most about them, having in many cases examples of their writing and thus possessing primary sources for their beliefs and ideologies, as well as the occasional secondary sources from writers examining other Indo-European cultures from within their own Roman or Greek cultures. Mallory provides samples of the languages of many of these people and points out clearly the correspondences between the various Indo-European families that allowed scholars to make the connection between them in the first place.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to an examination of what we can know about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture. Since they did not leave written records behind, all we have to go on other than material culture is what we can extrapolate from the linguistic evidence. When we find words that have a wide range of correlations in the various modern IE languages, we can assume that these words belonged to the PIE language rather than being words that coincidentally got assimilated into the various languages independently at a later date. Once we have derived a vocabulary of PIE, we can apply this information to determining what their culture may have been like: it is obvious that if the Proto-Indo-Europeans had a word for something, they knew about that thing. The data regarding what they knew (and didn’t know) about become very relevant to the last section of the book, which examines the various and contradictory theories advanced regarding the question of where in Eurasia the Proto-Indo-Europeans originated; a large part of the methodology used in this research is based on the existence or otherwise of various flora, fauna and geographic features for which they had terms and finding areas of Eurasia that include the things they knew about and exclude the things for which they didn’t pass down words.

Before Mallory examines the question of the homeland, however, he gives us a final short chapter particularly relevant to the ADF Dedicant. Headed “Indo-European Religion,” this chapter examines Georges Dumézil’s tripartite theory as well as some common themes that run through the religions descended from the Indo-European peoples including horse sacrifices and horse imagery, cattle stories, human (and other) sacrifice, recurring stories that recall a war between the priestly/ruling and warrior functions and the productive functions, and a common theme of dualism, often involving sacred twins (cf. Romulus and Remus of the Romans, and Mannus and Tuisto whom Tacitus says were the progenitors of the Germans) or paired deities (Norse Odin/Tyr, Vedic Varuna/Mitra) who each embody half of the first function’s ruling duties—one priestly and one concerned with political governance and judgment. The chapter ends with a discussion of the limited nature of comparative mythology in the pursuit of ancient IE knowledge, however; the short length of this chapter underlines the primacy of linguistic relation over cultural relation among IE peoples.

The final chapters are easily the most difficult to read and assimilate; Mallory sounds nearly apologetic near the end when he writes

Readers may feel that the author has betrayed them down an endless series of cul de sacs. Nevertheless, this is the current state of Indo-European origins and this seemed the best way to convey why the issue is by no means resolved. Ultimately, we have a remarkably unsatisfactory set of choices.

Indeed, the chapters regarding the theories regarding a location for the Indo-European homeland and the processes by which they expanded across Europe and into Asia from that homeland are filled with an embarrassment of competing theories and Mallory’s arguments against each of them. Ultimately, his tentative conclusion places the PIE people somewhere in the Pontic-Caspian steppe that lies on the north shores of the Black Sea from which they expanded over the millennia to become the dominant cultures of Europe and the Indian sub-continent.

This book was worth the reading effort; I feel that I have gained adequate elementary background knowledge of the peoples in question and a better understanding of what we mean when we say ADF is “based on the beliefs and practices of the ancient Indo-Europeans.” I leave this book better prepared to begin exploring the hearth cultures that arose out of the prehistoric PIE peoples with some sense of the fertile ground from which they sprung up.

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