the Wheel and Dating PIE

[rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu]

John Frauzel wrote:
>At 09:17 AM 3/1/00 -0600, Carol Justus wrote:
>>The earliest attested IE prayers don't usually ask for forgiveness
>>but are more like Menelaos's prayer to Zeus for guiding his spear so
>>that he will kill Paris or Chryses' to Apollo to make Agamemnon's
>>army pay for Agamemnon's insults. Has anyone found when the concept
>>of sin, hence forgiveness, enters the IE prayer record?

>It's certainly common in Indic tradition. The "house of clay" hymn,
>RV 7:89, ends "If we humans have committed some offence against the
>race of the gods, O Varun.a, or through carelessness have violated
>your laws, do not injure us, O god, for that sin." (O'Flaherty's
>translation).

These lines from George Hart's "The Nature of Tamil Devotion" (in
"Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, eds. Deshpande and Hook, 1979) may be
of some relevance:

'So prominent is this consciousness of sin among the Tamil bhakti
poets... On the other hand, the awareness of sin is notable for its
almost complete absence in premedieval North India.  Wendy O'Flaherty
writes, "There are some striking exception examples of a true sense of
sin and repentance in [classical] Hinduism: some Rig-Vedic hymns to
Varuna, some poems of Tamil Saivism, and a [Sanskrit] verse still
recited by many sophisticated Hindus today: "Evil am I, evil are my
deeds".  But these are outweighed a thousandfold by instances of sin
regarded as the fault of God or nature.  Evil is not primarily what we
do; it is what we do not wish to have done to us.'

The rest of the article is an extremely interesting study of the
mapping of "high" (Sanskritic) devotion onto the indigenous Tamil
varieties.

Might we postulate 1) that while sin may occur more frequently the
Indian (Indo-Iranian?) tradition than in the Greek, it is still
exceptional when it does; and 2) as a concept there, it may have
leached in from Dravidian traditions where it is not only common but
basic?

An Iranian perspective would probably be valuable here.  It would be
interesting if the Gathas parallelled the Rig Veda but without the
concept of sin -- sort of like the parallels between the languages
that stop short at retroflex consonants.

Disclaimer: I am not a student of any of this.

Regards,
Rohan.