Indo-European Warfare

Abstract

The Indo-European languages comprise the largest language family in the world and by the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age occupied a broad expanse of Eurasia from Ireland to western China and India. The inherited vocabulary of the Indo-European languages provides us with an image of the prehistoric language(s) that was spoken at least from the late Neolithic onwards and sheds light on the actual names of weapons, types of defensive architecture, terms for aggressive behaviour, trauma, institutions and poetic diction associated with warfare. In addition, there is also a body of ethnographic and mythological data that purports to provide a picture of the social organization and attitudes toward warriors shared by the earliest Indo-Europeans.