Appendix. Centaurs It is difficult to discuss horses and hippomorphism in Greece without mentioning the figure of the centaur, so I will not conclude this work without doing so. There is no real reason to suspect that the figure is of IE origin, and its treatment is different from that of horses themselves, yet some traces of the IE equine ideology outlined above may still be observable… Read more
Conclusion To appreciate any literary subject it is best to know what came before. The scholar of Hellenistic poetry, for example, brings to bear on the subject a knowledge of Classical Greek literature and culture. Yet in the case of the earliest phases of Greek poetry we rarely have access to comparable information, so we are forced to approach the subject in a very different way. The… Read more
4. Chariots and the Ἵππιος Νόμος The metapoetic charioteer introduced at the end of the last chapter is but one example of the sort of similarity in the treatment of chariots and charioteers that one is likely to find among the IE cultures. When faced with such correspondences the reader may find it difficult to accept the archaeological conclusion that chariots are not themselves a common inheritance. Read more
3. Lyric Horses I believe that it is clear that the PIE horse sacrifice ritual and the depiction of the hero in Greek epic reveal an inherited Indo-European tendency toward the hippomorphizing of humans and the anthropomorphizing of horses which continued to exert influence into the Greek Archaic period. The examples of this phenomenon that have been considered so far have focused generally, although not exclusively, on… Read more
2. Horses, Heroes, and Sacrifice The prominent position of the formula ὠκέες ἵπποι and related expressions attests the special role played in Greek epic by horses and the physical abilities that distinguish them. The similarity of formulas in both Indian and Iranian oral poetries makes it clear that the phrase indicates a common poetic inheritance. It is a sensible assumption that a formula about horses that is… Read more
1. “Swift Horses” from Proto-Indo-European to Greek Horses are nearly ubiquitous in the early recorded poetries of the Indo-European world, and one particular facet of this presents a perfect starting point for our discussion: a reconstructible Proto-Indo-European poetic expression describing horses. For the earliest poetries of Greece, India, and Iran not only treat horses in ways that are strikingly similar but even utilize some of the same… Read more
Introduction The world of the ancient Greeks did not arise ex nihilo but developed from earlier cultures, which are harder to evaluate because of their extreme age. The last century or more of research has, however, proven that most of the languages of Europe, the Near East, and India all descend from a common language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and that the various cultures of the Indo-European (IE) world,… Read more
Acknowledgments Many individuals deserve thanks for helping me produce this work, some for their great personal support, some for intellectual support, and many for both. First I must thank Jessica, my wife, for her unflagging encouragement and for the patience that she showed during my many late nights and weekends in the office. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to friends and mentors who read… Read more
Bibliography Abel, E. 1891. Scholia recentia in Pindari epinicia, vol. 1. Berlin. Ackerman, S. 2001. Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah. Winona Lake. Adang, C. 1996. Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm. Leiden. Ahl, F. 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and… Read more
Balang-Gods Wolfgang Heimpel Introduction [1] In his 1997 essay “The Holy Drum, the Spear, and the Harp: Towards an Understanding of the Problems of Deification in Third Millennium Mesopotamia,” Gebhard Selz found that the items in his title and other ‘cultic objects’ were deified by providing them with a name, animating them with the magic of the mouth-washing ritual,… Read more
