civ Dei On the City of God against the Pagans
Basil of Caesarea
Hex Homilies on the Hexaemeron
Dionysius
CH Celestial Hierarchy
DN Divine Names
MT Mystical Theology
Eriugena
Per Periphyseon
Plato
Pol Politeia
Sym Symposium
Theaet Theaetetus
Tim Timaeus
Proclus
Elem Theol Elements of Theology
General
A.D. Anno Domini
B.C. Before Christ
Reference works
LSJ Liddell, H. G., R. Scott & H. S. Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon.
OSB The Oxford Study Bible. Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha.
Reality
From Metaphysics to Metapolitics
Copyright © 2019 Wynand de Beer. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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The Indo-European Background
A common origin has been ascribed to Indo-European humanity, dating back to its sojourn in the southern parts of the vast land known since medieval times as Russia, the name of which is derived from Rus’ in Old East Slavic. More precisely, this people lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, adjacent to the northern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas. This location of the Urheimat, or ancestral homeland, of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans has been demonstrated on the grounds of historical linguistics, archaeology, quantitative analysis, and archaeogenetics. Other possible locations of the Indo-European Urheimat advanced by scholars include Central or Northern Europe, Northern Mesopotamia, and even the Arctic regions. However, none of these are as convincing as the Southern Russian hypothesis.1
What kind of culture did these original Indo-Europeans possess? A leading scholar in this area, the archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, has enumerated some of the features of their Kurgan culture, named after its burial mounds (singular, kurgan in Russian). These features include a patriarchal society, a class system, the existence of small tribal units ruled by powerful chieftains, a predominantly pastoral economy including horse breeding and plant cultivation, small villages and massive hillforts, and religious elements including a Sky/Sun god and a Thunder god.2 Evidently, the early Indo-Europeans valued patriarchy, social differentiation, leadership, agriculture, communal defense, and nature-based religion.
Migrations and Languages
From their ancestral homeland on the steppe the Indo-Europeans ventured forth in successive waves, first westwards into Europe from around 3000 B.C. and then southwards into the Near East and the Indian subcontinent from around 2000 B.C. Through these migrations new cultures arose, such as the Corded Ware culture in Northern Europe and the Vedic culture in the Indian subcontinent. The western branch of the Indo-Europeans developed into the Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Italic, and Hellenic peoples, while the eastern branch unfolded as the Indo-Aryans of Iran and India. An offshoot of the western branch migrated south between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, eventually settling in Asia Minor where they became known as the Hittites.3
Due to these extensive migrations, the Proto-Indo-European language (abbreviated as PIE) of the Kurgan culture developed into the numerous Indo-European languages spoken or studied today, of which Sanskrit, Classical Greek, and Latin are the most venerable ones. That the European languages only developed after the arrival of the Indo-Europeans is suggested by the fact that Europe is hydronymously uniform – that is to say, the names of watercourses from the Baltic to Spain occur in an identical form. To this observation, Jean Haudry adds that differentiation into Proto-Baltic, Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Celtic only occurred later, so that the languages diverge at the same time as the different peoples come into existence. Arguing along similar lines, Francis Parker Yockey remarks that language is no barrier to the formation of a people. This is suggested by the fact that all existing Western languages appeared after the formation of their respective peoples.4
By juxtaposing the Kurgan hypothesis in archaeology with the Three-Stage theory in linguistics, the Spanish scholars Carlos Quiles and Fernando López-Menchero found that the deployment of the Indo-Europeans and their languages occurred in the following stages:
i. Between around 3500 and 3000 B.C. the Late Indo-European language (LIE) became differentiated into at least two dialects, namely southern (or Graeco-Aryan) and northern.
ii. Between around 3000 and 2500 B.C. these dialectical communities began to migrate away from their Urheimat, so that the resultant Corded Ware culture eventually extended from the Volga to the Rhine.
iii. Then, between around 2500 and 2000 B.C., when the Bronze Age reached Central Europe, the southern LIE dialect had differentiated into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian.
iv. The invention of the chariot enabled the rapid spread of the Indo-Iranians over much of Central Asia, Northern India, and Iran during the next stage, dated between around 2000 and 1500 B.C. This stage also saw the break-up of Indo-Iranian into Indo-Aryan and Iranian, the differentiation of European proto-dialects from each other, and languages such as Hittite, Mitanni, and Mycenaean Greek being spoken or written down.
v. By between around 1500 and 1000 B.C., the European proto-dialects had evolved into Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Baltic, and Slavic, while Indo-Aryan became expressed in its sacred language Sanskrit, notably in the composition of the Rig-Veda.
vi. Finally, with Northern Europe entering the Iron Age between around 1000 and 500 B.C., the Greek and Old Italic alphabets appear in the south of the continent, and the Classical civilization flowers among the Hellenic peoples.5
Ethnicity
At
