Pieces of the global PIE

Across the ancient world, a powerful sky god once ruled supreme. Some ancient stories tell us that the universe emerged from him, others say that he was responsible for its creation with his partner, the Earth mother.

- ARUNDHUTI DASGUPTA

Across the ancient world, a powerful sky god once ruled supreme. Some ancient stories tell us that the universe emerged from him, others say that he was responsible for its creation with his partner, the Earth mother. The sky god, known by many names and whose identity morphed into many gods over time, spawned an army of minor and major gods and held the universe together with his shining eye and staff, or a lightning bolt and hammer or any other such divine accessory.

He was known as Dyaus Pita among Vedic Indians, Zeus pater or Zeus among the Greeks, Jupiter in the Roman pantheon and Tyr in the Scandinavian sagas. All these names and the multiple ideas about his divinity are derived from the speakers of a common language family. Proto Indo European (PIE)

Spoken by just a handful of people who lived between Asia and Europe 5,000-odd years ago, PIE is the largest language family in the world today. Nearly every second person in the world speaks one of its languages and its words are strewn across the universe, revealing a breathtaking expanse of connections between geographically and culturally distant communities. The fascinating journey of this language is the theme of Laura Spinney's book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.