the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Carol F. Justus]

>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). Sin might
>be an unfortunate translation for 'enas', although Grassmann does give as
>meanings Frevel, Suende, Bedraengnis, Unglueck (originally Gewalttat). But
>the concept is not that far removed. And there are dozens of RV hymns with
>formulaic verses, to various gods, "If we have offended you in a or b or c,
>please don't x or y or z."

>This does seem to be much more common in the Indo-Iranian tradition that in
>the Greek. In fact I can't think of anything comparable in Greek.

>John Frauzel  Phone 520 579-3235
>                Fax 520 579-9780

Thank you for pointing me in the direction of these passages. In Hittite
too there is a lot of emphasis on not performing the ritual correctly, and
with Mursili's plague prayers a recognition that the gods are punishing
them for errors, but part of the prayer theme is that Mursili doesn't know
why the punishment continues. Hittite wastai- 'make a mistake' (often
translated as 'sin') not quite the same thing as sin, which would seem to
be related more closely to personal (knowing) responsibility and resultant
guilt. With Zarathustra and the dichotomy between good and evil, there
seems to be a basis for what we have come to know as 'sin' associated with
guilt, although as late as the Biblical Job and its Babylonian parallel
(Ludlul bel nemeki 'Let me praise the lord of wisdom' ca. 700 BC ?), there
is a sort of rejection of a necessary connection between deeds and
punishments.

As has been pointed out in the discussions of dating and contact, there
were historical periods of contact between the Hittites and the
Indo-Iranian Mitanni perhaps as early as 1500 BC, certainly by 1400 BC.
Zarathustra's Iranian then represented a religious reform which had an
impact on their Near Eastern neighbors as well. If the Vedic notion of
violation of divinely prescribed ritual was more like the Hittite and less
like later guilt associations, we should find datable IE vocabulary to
distinguish these, datable vocabulary that might help with the distinctions
that Neu, Meid, Polome, and others have drawn between old peripheral
retentions (between e.g., Germanic and Anatolian) and newer shared
isoglosses like those among Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Italic, and Celtic.
What about words for 'sin', 'guilt', and 'violation', for example?

Thanks again for the Vedic passage,

Carol Justus