The scale shows autosomal genetic distance, where the warmer red and orange colors represent the closest modern populations. The data reveals that these ancient steppe warriors share their closest genetic proximity directly with Balkan Turks, followed by neighboring populations in the southern Balkans.

This provides clear visual evidence of population continuity across the Eurasian steppe. As ancestral Turkic tribes, including the ancestors of Tatars, Oghuz, Kipchaks, and other Turkic groups, expanded across the region, they did not simply replace the people living there. Instead, they absorbed and heavily admixed with the existing Iron Age nomadic cultures.

Introduction: This dissertation aims to consider the origins of Hades as a god using the existing material in literature and archaeology, and applying comparative techniques to derive novel answers to questions about his formation within the Greek pantheon. With these different evidences, it will prove that Hades arose as a personification of his realm, and that his development was likely influenced by Poseidon, a similar and related god who ties into the broader network of chthonic male figures in Greek myth. Common Indo-European tropes and themes were applied to this character as it developed, allowing us to compare him with other figures for a more accurate understanding of his early role in Greek myth, before the earliest literature

This table comes from A. K. Akishev's Art and Mythology of the Sakas (Alma-Ata, 1984), Table X. It arranges the dynastic signs found on Kushan coins by king, and it remains the most reproduced single image of the Kushan tamga system. It is worth reading carefully, both for what it captures and for where the scholarship has moved past it.

A tamga is a property mark of the kind used by nomadic clans across the Eurasian steppe from the Scythian period onward. It was branded on horses, impressed into bricks and pottery, cut into rock, and, once nomadic dynasties began minting, placed on coins as a mark of the issuing house. The Kushans inherited the practice from their Yuezhi origins in the Gansu corridor and the Ili valley, and they carried it into Bactria and then across the Hindu Kush into Gandhara and the Punjab. Sergey Yatsenko, whose comparative work on Sarmatian, Chorasmian and Kushan signs is the standard reference, has shown that the Kushan version follows a two-part grammar. The upper element is a pronged fork shared by the whole dynasty, a clan sign. The lower element is a personal device that changes with each ruler. Reading a Kushan tamga therefore means reading two things at once: membership of the ruling clan, and the identity of the king.

The table shows that grammar developing. In the first row the fork has three prongs and sits on a ring or a hooked stem. From the second row onward the fork has four prongs, and the variation moves entirely into the base. Wima Kadphises places the fork over splayed legs that resemble pincers. Kanishka keeps the pincer legs and adds curled or flowering terminals. Huvishka's signs, the largest group in the table, set the fork over stick-figure legs in a dozen variants, one leg straight and one bent, or crossed, or with feet; these variants track mints and production phases rather than any change of ruler, since the main Bactrian mint and the subsidiary mints in Gandhara and Kashmir each cut their own dies. Vasudeva I retains the stick legs and adds a crossbar. Vasudeva II reduces the base to a single lozenge-shaped pendant. The fork never changes; the base always does. That is precisely what a clan-plus-individual system predicts.

The table's weakness is its king list. Akishev published in 1984, nine years before the discovery of the Rabatak inscription in 1993, which settled the early Kushan succession. Rabatak confirmed that a king named Wima Takto reigned between Kujula Kadphises and Wima Kadphises, and that the large anonymous coinage bearing only the titles Soter Megas, "great saviour," belongs to him. Akishev's two "Kadfiz" rows therefore compress three reigns into two. The ring-based three-pronged signs in his first row are the Soter Megas type, and so most likely Wima Takto's rather than Kujula's. Kujula's own earliest tamga, as Yatsenko notes, is close to that of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares whose territory he took over, which is what one expects of a ruler legitimising himself in a region with an existing coinage. The Kushan tamga as a distinct dynastic sign crystallises under Wima Takto and Wima Kadphises, not under the founder.

The last row is a further caution. "Bakarna" corresponds to no name in the thirteen-king sequence now accepted (Kujula, Wima Takto, Wima Kadphises, Kanishka I, Huvishka, Vasudeva I, Kanishka II, Vasishka, Kanishka III, Vasudeva II, Mahi, Shaka, Kipunadha). It is probably a misread legend, or an issue of one of the later kings whose names were only recovered from the vertical Brahmi inscriptions on their gold after Göbl's work of the same year. The single trident-headed sign in the Kanishka row also looks less like a royal tamga than the trident of the god Wesho on the reverse, and should be checked against the source coin before it is used.

What makes the table useful today, despite these problems, is practical. Kushan copper circulated for centuries and is often found worn beyond legibility. The tamga survives wear better than the legend, because it is cut deep and sits in the field. For a site like Sanghol in the Punjab, where the excavators report coins of Soter Megas, Wima Kadphises and Kanishka around the stupa, or Ropar, where a hoard of some 660 coppers is described only as "Kushan and tribal Kushan," the tamga is frequently the only way to assign a coin to a reign. The modern catalogue to use for that is Jongeward and Cribb's Kushan, Kushano-Sasanian, and Kidarite Coins (American Numismatic Society, 2015), which supersedes both Göbl and Akishev on attribution. The Akishev table is best treated as a visual index to be read against it.

One final point, because it comes up whenever tamgas are discussed. A shared tamga indicates a shared political claim, membership of a clan or a dynastic house. It does not indicate shared biological descent. The Kushanshah governors who ruled Bactria for the Sasanians after about 230 CE went on reproducing Vasudeva I's tamga for decades, and Yatsenko has traced identical signs across groups in Sarmatia and Chorasmia that no one supposes were kin. Tamgas are evidence for how power was signalled, and they are good evidence for that. They are not a substitute for genetics, and the two lines of argument should be kept apart.

Sources: Akishev 1984; Yatsenko, Znaki-tamgi iranoyazychnykh narodov (2001); Cribb, "The early Kushan kings: new evidence for chronology" (1996); Bracey, "Kushan Dynasty iv. Coinage," Encyclopaedia Iranica (2016); Jongeward and Cribb 2015.

I'm watching a documentary on YouTube about the Yamnaya, and here's an illustration that they're showing of their genetic origins. This documentary is found here.

Modern day South Indians are actually South Asian H&Gs mixed with Zagros Mountain Farmers. So this is mind-blowing to me, but the Yamnaya are suggested to be basically Indian people that were extremely bottlenecked. I find this hard to believe. I don't see how a people who evolved in the jungles of India could have the same environmental pressures of someone who lived in Western Siberia in an extremely cold place.

Indo-European + Paleo Lakelandic / Laplandic?

I've seen many proposals for a proto indo european sister / cousin language. Uralic is one of the most notable ones. And some similarities with the Caucasian languages have been noted. (pre pie ergative system, laryngeals)

But I've never seen anyone consider a possible linguistic connection between the old european western hunter gatherers, and the indo european language. PIE speakers have western hunter gatherer admixture, and the finno ugric substrates may be remnants from the original western hunter gatherer languages.

If this is true it's probably impossible to even prove anyway, but it could explain why PIE was so isolated being so unique in its morphology and not sharing many similarities between other languages of eurasia. And I doubt the extinct paleo anatolian languages of anatolia were related to pie, because proto indo european in its earliest stage likely had no agricultural terms until much later. And anatolia likely would have had agriculture during the time period when proto indo european would have been spoken if the anatolian early homeland was true.

Which is why I believe pre pie, or mother tongue pie had to have been spoken far north of the Caspian sea, where agriculture hadn't spread yet. Making it possible that the western hunter gatherer / eastern hunter gatherer ghost languages could be distantly related.

I looked at the Ancient Greek lexemes of the text, checked their grammatical forms, then checked their PIE roots and made nouns/verbs from those roots, putting them in the correct forms (I feel, there are some mistakes here and there). I had to replace some of the lexicon that is essentially Hellenic, which means, their original PIE etymology shifted. For example, Ancient Greek πόντος (pontos), 'sea', decended from PIE \póntoh₁s, 'path', so I changed it to PIE *\móri. The word *muse, A.G. μοῦσα I reverse engineered as \mohn̥tih₂,* from the root \moh-* (“endeavour, will, temper”), following the interpretation of J. Pokorny.

Just as a fun thought experiment what would the likely Proto-Indo-European forms of planet names be? I think Venus is from *Wénh₁os from what I found but what about Mercury, Mars and Saturn for example?

The EEF were a Stone Age people and their technical acumen allowed them to farm. They had the technical expertise to farm and they migrated and thrived in places with Loess soil.

The PIE people became 15% EEF but weren’t settled. They had some domesticated animals. They also had access to bronze and were experts here.

So it seems that the Yamnaya people were 85% HGs and they didn’t get wiped out by the EEF. They intermarried with the EEF without fully embracing EEF ways of life and seemed more advanced than the EEF without fully embracing their bronze.

So it seems that for some reason the EEF weren’t as successful in the Yamnaya homeland. Why is this? That language also has LOESS SOIL.

What conditions did the Yamnaya need to spread their culture?

Abstract - This paper re-examines Pāṇini’s rules (A 3.2.112–114) on the sigmatic future used for past actions. While some scholars attribute this usage to Middle Indo-Aryan influence, citing in particular the use of the future for a habitual past in Niya Prakrit, this study argues that Pāṇini primarily describes Late Vedic occurrences of the future in íti-clauses within past contexts; indeed, these contexts correspond to the so-called conditional, the future in the past (lṚṄ in Pāṇini), in indirect speech. The paper also considers later Middle Indo-Aryan developments, showing how the future could express modality, habituality, and its use as the so-called futurum historicum.

I love the way this song sounds, the way the beat and rhythm mimic the hoof beat of a horse galloping at full stride, it just speaks to something deep within my ancient soul that must be familiar to the PIE DNA within me

But I don’t want to just take this song wholesale, as its very clearly a Turkic/Mongolic song, and it just doesn’t feel right for me to take this song and say it applies to me as about as white as they come

So I was curious if it would be possible, through s complicated chain of translations and reverse evolution, work the lyrics out of Tuvan into Proto-Indo-European or some closely related immediate daughter language so I can feel the sense of cultural pride without having that pride be attached to a culture to which I don’t belong

If this can’t be done, I would be curious if anyone has recommendations for songs in PIE that don’t follow the weird and ahistorical trend of the very shamanistic and dark spiritual stuff I’ve seen a lot of songs in PIE try to go for

I understand that wanting an entire two or three minute song replicated in the style of a culture long dead and gone, that we have probably no record of their musical traditions, is…putting it lightly, an intergalactic level of long shot

But it would make a very lonely and usually depressed autistic boy from the midwestern United States very happy

Who knows, having a song like that to sing to myself when I’m feeling sad or lonely might even keep me kicking around another day or two longer than I’d ever normally be willing to put up with

And I don’t mean…going that far, but moreso just sleeping in for an entire day, thus “skipping it” and potentially setting me up for multiple days in a row of just doing nothing but ignoring the world around me

Thank you for your time, patience, acceptance, understanding and support

The Saṁhitā of the R̥gveda (henceforth RV) consists of hymns which contain few narratives. The absence of the extensive telling of any myth of the Rigvedic religion is kind of frustrating. In many cases, fundamental myths have to be reconstructed from bits and pieces which have been inserted in poems devoted mostly to the praise of the gods. Even one of the best-known myths, the killing of the serpent Vr̥tra by the god Indra, is never told in a way which would ideally include all the steps of this major fighting of the warrior god against a demonic figure (vr̥trá- masc.) which represented the forces of chaos, while embodying the obstacle (vr̥trá-, nt.) to the flowing of waters, and more generally to the living of the world. Actually, the whole myth is summarized in the phrase *vr̥tráṃ han-* ‘to kill Vr̥tra’, which had become a formula, with Indra as agent, at the surface syntactic level the subject of this phrase. This phrase is also the basis of the compound agent noun *vr̥tra-hán-* which qualifies Indra as the ‘killer of Vr̥tra’ and ‘smasher of the obstacle’. The myth is then condensed in its crucial point, and the agent noun could be used for referring to the god himself in short. One would like to know more about the chain of events which preceded and prepared this action, about other possible actors, and about the sequels. It happens that a complete myth can be so to speak encapsulated in a single word. The previous example is of course well-known and much commented on. This approach may lead to pause on some isolated words which resisted until now any interpretation, and to search the key for their understanding in a myth or mythical motif which left some testimonies in parts of the Rigvedic text.

Swanenvleugel, Cid. "8 Prefixes in the Sardinian substrate" In Sub-Indo-European Europe: Problems, Methods, Results edited by Guus Kroonen, 215-282. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111337920-008

The chapter develops historical linguistic work undertaken as part of a four-year cross-disciplinary project funded by the Swedish Research Council. New evidence tracing metals in Bronze Age artefacts has revealed that Scandinavia was in trade contact with metal-rich regions in Wales and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Italian Alps. This new knowledge leads to reopening two long-known, but poorly explained phenomena: (1) a large body of inherited vocabulary shared by Celtic and Germanic languages, but not Indo-European generally, and (2) detailed similarities shared by the Bronze Age rock art of Scandinavia and the “warrior” stelae of the Iberian Peninsula. In the past, the Celto-Germanic words have been explained as reflecting contacts in Central Europe from 500 BC down to the Roman period. However, that dating seemed possibly too late as many of the words pre-dated Grimm’s Law and lacked earmarks as loanwords, looking instead like inheritances from Proto-Indo-European with limited geographic distributions. Recent archaeogenetic discoveries have also undermined the once prevalent view that only non-Indo-European languages were spoken in Ireland, Britain, Brittany and western Iberia until ~1000 BC or later. Therefore, we now pursue the hypothesis that shared rock art motifs and Celto-Germanic words can be better explained as reflections of the ideology and language of highly mobile Bronze Age warrior/traders who brought copper from Atlantic and Central Europe to metal-poor Scandinavia. The Celto-Germanic word stock highlighted in this paper has to do with myths, beliefs, ideology and their possible resonances in rock art iconography.

Ever since Emil Forrer’s 1924 identification of Greek names in Hittite texts, scholars have clashed over the identification of Hittite ‘Ahhiyawa’ as Greek ‘Achaea’ – Greece. It is now generally agreed that the term somehow relates to the Mycenaean Greek world, but where precisely it should be sought, and if it referred to a specific region in the first place remains contested. Much of this debate is fuelled by the reference to a LUGAL.GAL, ‘Great King’ of Ahhiyawa in two of these texts, and another three texts where the Ahhiyawan king is addressed as ‘brother’ (a sign of parity and amiable relations between the correspondents). The term ‘Great King’ was otherwise exclusively used to refer to the kings of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and the Hittites themselves; all of whom ruled extensive territories, comprised of several (previously independent) smaller polities.

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the possible presence of an east–west divide in Indo-Aryan languages suggested in previous literature (Peterson, John. 2017a. Fitting the pieces together – towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond). Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4(2). 211–257.), with the further hypothesis that this divide may be linked to the influence of the Munda languages, spoken in the eastern part of the subcontinent. Working with 217 fine-grained variables on a sample of 27 Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, we test the presence of a geographical divide within Indo-Aryan using computational methods such as cluster analysis in combination with visual statistical inference. Our results confirm the presence of a geographical divide for the whole dataset and most of the individual features. We then proceed to compute the degree of similarity between the Indo-Aryan languages and Munda, using a Bayesian alternative to a t-test. The results for most features support the claim that the languages identified in the eastern clusters are indeed more similar to Munda, thereby opening up further research scenarios for the history of this region.

Stroński, Krzysztof and Tiwari, Neha. "4 Language contact in South Asia — typology meets diachrony" In Towards a Holistic Understanding of Language Contact in the Past edited by Lavidas Nikolaos, Sitaridou Ioanna and Yanovich Igor, 55-84. De Gruyter Mouton, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989571-004

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110989571-004/html#Chicago

nyAbstract: The main objective of the present paper is to demonstrate that an inte-gration of two recent approaches in areal studies on South Asia, namely, large scale typological investigation based on advanced quantitative methods such as Neigh-bor-Net or UPGMA and diachronic corpus-oriented studies, can bring us closer to a better understanding of the diachrony of language contact phenomena in the re-gion. The most recent approaches to areal studies and language contact phenomena in South Asia seem to abandon the notion of a “linguistic area”, which has been very deeply rooted in the linguistic literature of the region. The focus of areal re-search has shifted to the diffusion of features rather than cataloging them in order to define or re-define linguistic area(s). Thus, in contrast to Emeneau (1956), Masica (1976, 2001) (to name a few), Peterson (2017)focused on analyzing the distribution of 28 features in 29 languages belonging to modern Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda vernaculars, and on this basis, he convincingly proved that there are clear convergence zones in South Asia and that, for example, there is a solid basis for the division of eastern and western Indo-Aryan into two distinct structural groups. This view was then further corroborated by Ivani et al. (2021)on a much larger sample of 217 features. However, features attested in contemporary tongues require further verification in older varieties once spoken in the region (for which we have reliable written records). Thus, a long-standing desideratum is a diachronically ori-ented work on previously established feature-distributional patterns (cf. Masica 2001: 259; Peterson 2017: 245). Here we present only three features that have been selected and analyzed diachronically: ergativity, agreement and classifiers.

Abstract - One of the most fascinating specimens of the earliest Vedic literature, the famous dialogue hymn RV 10.10, focuses on the relationships between Yamī and Yama.Yamī (who opens this dialogue) attempts to beguile her twin brother into incestual relation. Yama, who replies in even stanzas (second, fourth etc.), constantly refuses this invitation. Yamī insists, providing further arguments, such as the necessity of producing offspring; their prenatal physical union in the womb; etc. Yet, Yama consistently argues that the incestual relation is inappropriate, which makes their sexual relations impossible. The characteristics of Yamī as a mythological personage can only be gleaned from the text of this dialogue on the basis of its thorough linguistic and philological analysis. In what follows I will offer a linguistic and text-critical study of a few relevant stanzas, paying special attention to the evolution of Yamī’s attitude towards her twin brother from passionate love towards anger and hatred.

Palmér, Axel I.. "7 Indo-Iranian prehistory through language contact" In Beyond Recorded History: Unlocking the Past Through Contact Linguistics edited by Marwan Kilani and Rasmus G. Bjørn, 185-224. De Gruyter Mouton, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111574547-007

Indo-Iranian prehistory through language contact Abstract: This paper aims to identify Indo-Iranian substrate words and to discuss their impact on the study of Indo-Iranian prehistory. A methodology for distinguishing substrate words from the inherited part of the lexicon is laid out, after which a list of Proto-Indo-Iranian and Common Indo-Iranian substrate words is presented. Here, substrate wordlists proposed by M. Witzel and A. Lubotsky are synthesized and analysed according to uniform methodological principles. The resultsshow that Proto-Indo-Iranian was in contact with one or more now extinct languages, from which it borrowed words pertaining to animals, body parts, food and drink, clothing, construction, plants, and religion, etc. Based on the semantics of certain words, the substrate language(s) can plausibly be connected to Central Asia. The contacts started during Proto-Indo-Iranian unity and persisted until Indo-Iranian had begun to diversify dialectally (which I call Common Indo-Iranian). This language contact episode was preceded by language contact with Uralic languages, which supports an Indo-Iranian migration from north to south across Central Asia in the 2nd millennium BCE.