Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family.

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A

• It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific out­ look, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology.
  • S. Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 310

C

• The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south.
  • Crossland, R. A. 1971 “Immigrants from the North.” Chap. 28 of Cambridge Ancient History. 3d ed. Vol. 1, p art 2: 824—76. p 826 Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. quoted in Sir Edmund Leach. Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990,

G

• Competent authorities have warned against the “semi-conscious prejudices on original genetic characteristics of the Indo-Europeans: they are supposed to be blond and blue-eyed”.
  • T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov, in Journal of Indo-European Studies, 1985/1-2, p. 182., The Problem of the Original Homeland of the Speakers of Indo-European Languages in Response to I. M. Diakonoff's Article. as quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

M

• We don’t exclude the possibility of contacts between the ancient Indo-Europeans and their Caucasian contemporaries, but no precise trace has so far been brought forward. The structural similarities that one may envision for a very distant period would not imply a common origin nor a period of symbiosis.
  • Martinet, André, 1986: Des Steppes aux Océans. L’Indo-Européen et les “Indo-Européens”, Paris: Payot. Martinet, page 21. Quoted in K. Elst, "Some unlikely tentacles of early Indo-European", published as ch.3 in Angela Marcantonio & Girish Nath Jha, eds.: Perspectives on the Origins of Indian Civilization.

R

• Indo-European: a term borrowed from comparative linguistics and most usually used to designate the blond North-European race (Homo europaeus), but which may provoke confusion since in most of these regions, originally settled by the North-Europeans, race and language have not overlapped for some time due to the bastardization (Bastardierung) of the Northern European speakers of Indo-European languages.
  • Otto Reche, in Dictionary of Prehistory (Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte; 1924–1928), quoted in Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans_ Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West