These “groups of comrades” ... were singularly dedicated to predatory behavior and to “wolf-like” living by hunting and raiding, and to the performance of superior, even super-human deeds. The members were generally young, unmarried men, thirsting for adventure. The followers were sworn not to survive a war leader who was slain in battle, just as the leader was expected to show in all circumstances a personal example of courage and war-skills ... . Only in reference to Indo-European aristocratic [warriors] ... can we speak in Hegelian terms of a fight to the death for the sake of pure prestige.”[51]
The original I-Es, termed Proto-Indo-Europeans (PI-Es), underwent a profound cultural shift from a hunter-gatherer economy to a herding economy by 7800–7200ybp.[52] Hunter-gatherer groups tend to be egalitarian, but the shift to pastoralism resulted in social inequality. Herding also “required a flexible, opportunistic social organization”[53] as well as the ability to defer gratification and plan ahead: it could only be done “by people who were committed morally and ethically to watching their families go hungry rather than eat their breeding stock.”[54]
However, in addition to the shift to a pastoral economy, a critical aspect of PI-E success stemmed from the development of a militarized culture that proved to be highly effective in dominating other groups. This is turn was based on several important cultural attributes:
Technological Advances
Domestication of Horses. Horses were domesticated by 6800ybp.[55] This was followed by horseback riding by 5700ybp and spreading outside the steppes between 5700 and 5000ybp.[56] These cultural practices allowed much larger herds of sheep and cattle, but they were also an aspect of militarization, with the invention of bows that could be used while riding horses.[57] Steppe horses were larger and stronger than onagers (derived from Asian wild asses) found in the Middle East; they were thus much more effective for military uses. The result was that after 5300ybp there was a decline in agriculture in Europe as land was given over to pasture and an increase in warfare.
Sophisticated Wagons. Along with horseback riding, the development of sophisticated wagons facilitated the expansion into the deep steppes—“living on their wheels.”[58] It required wealth to produce wagons (wheels required highly skilled carpentry) and to maintain them (they required two specially trained horses). PI-E society therefore became more socially stratified, with the possession of wagons distinguishing elites.[59]
The Secondary Products Revolution. The PI-Es also benefited from a “secondary products revolution” in which domesticated animals were used not only for meat (a primary product), but also dairy products such as milk, cheese, and yogurt. This offered a more nutritious diet than farming, produce tall, muscular warriors. Other secondary products included skins (leather), as well as riding, transport, and labor (pulling wagons).
Social/Cultural Practices
While there were doubtless important changes in technology over the span from the earliest Indo-European societies to the European Middle Ages, many of the most basic social/cultural features of I-E-derived societies remained remarkably the same.
The Militarized Culture of the Indo-Europeans. The PI-Es developed a completely militarized culture. Boys were socialized for warfare and cattle raiding. Young boys “had to go out and become like a band of dogs or wolves—to raid their enemies.”[60] All young men went out on raids as part of their initiation into the group. The aggressiveness of these groups increased with increased wealth and social inequality of the culture as a whole, resulting in increased bride-price—i.e., males were forced to raise ever larger amounts of resources in order to be able to afford to pay the family of a prospective wife.
At the center of PI-E society was the institution of the Männerbund (other terms: korios, comitatus), “the warrior brotherhood bound by oath to one another and to their ancestors during a ritually mandated raid.”[61] Thus Beowulf, even though set in the Germanic/Scandinavian sixth century ad, depicts an “aristocratic ethos of companionship and equality.”[62]
The formation of voluntary war-bands held together by oaths, camaraderie, and a common self-interest was a fundamental characteristic of these chiefdoms. This was a time when social status and rank were still openly determined by one’s heroic deeds and by the number of followers or clients one could afford.[63]
I-E religion also had a military focus. Among Germanic groups, Odin is the god of the Männerbünde, the “god of battle rage.”[64] Warriors in a state of battle rage are known as “berserkers.” The concept is connected to a belief in shape-shifting wherein the soul is disengaged from the body and can roam as a wolf or a bear, at which time it can engage in superhuman heroic deeds. Snorri Sturluson, the medieval chronicler of the Norse sagas writes: “Woden’s men went without hauberks [armor] and raged like dogs or wolves. They bit their shields and were strong like bears or bulls. They killed men but neither fire nor iron hurt them. This is called berserkgangr.”[65] Young men were initiated into the Männerbünde by mock hanging and were taught berserker techniques.[66]
Military success became a critical aspect of sexual competition among males. Successful males would be able to afford bride-price, which became increasingly competitive. The myth of Trito, the god of cattle raiding, rationalized cattle raids with the belief that others’ cattle rightfully belonged to those who made the correct sacrifices—i.e., to the Indo-European raiders themselves![67]
Indo-European culture was what one might term “hyper-masculine.” Lotte Hedeager’s Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia, AD 400–1000 paints a picture of a completely militarized society in which male sexual penetration was a marker of power, while being penetrated was, for a male, the ultimate insult.[68] Accusing a man of having been sodomized was a grievous accusation, with the same penalty as for murder. Older males lacking the power or ability to penetrate took on the status of women and were even ridiculed by slaves. Women were seen as legitimate spoils of war and raiding, and such women were typically enslaved.
The following passage from Hedeager gets at this hyper-masculine, completely militarized culture that appears to have been characteristic of I-E culture in northwestern Europe at least from 2500 bc until the Middle Ages:
In the extremely competitive and aggressive Scandinavian society in which blood feuds were taking place everywhere, often lasting for many years and several generations ..., the concept of honour evolved around reputation, respect and prestige. Social life and reputation were hierarchically organised and arranged according to dominance and submission, powerful and powerless. At the bottom of the social scale, female thralls [slaves] were routinely subjected to rape and traded as sexual subjects. In the account of a Viking market at Volga in 922, the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan describes how the Vikings (the Scandinavian Rus) regularly had sex with their slaves, often in public, and in groups of both sexes. This activity took place both in front of potential buyers and their own formal partners, whether wives or girlfriends, who seemed unaffected ... . Rape of a free woman, however, was a serious matter ... .
Within this social hierarchy, power was explicitly connected with metaphors for penetration—by the sword, penis, or tongue. Those who penetrated—with words, with weapons, or with the phallus—were the powerful (“males”); those who became penetrated were the powerless (“females”). In a social setting, sexuality provided a symbolic code for dominance and submission, throwing light on power and thus status differences ... . The most severe accusations in the Old Norse society evolved around “effeminacy” and penetration, implying that sexuality and hostility were two sides of the same coin.[69]
Similarly, the Latin word “vagina,” from which the English word is derived, means sheath or scabbard—that which is penetrated by a sword.
Reciprocity as a Trait of I-E Culture. The aristocratic individualism of the PI-Es was based on reciprocity, not despotism or kinship ties. For example, at the heart of PI-E culture was the practice of gift-giving as a reward for military accomplishment. Successful leade
rs were expected to reward their followers handsomely.[70] Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships were characteristic of PI-Es and this practice continued with the various I-E groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers, and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of closeness of kinship) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree).
Oath-bound contracts were not only typical of the aristocratic individualism of the Männerbünde: they extended to relationships of domination and subordination between military elites and conquered peoples, providing protection in return for service. In conjunction with the previous points, this is a prescription for feudal-type societies dominated by military elites with mutual obligations to the people they dominate, but in which kinship ties between elites and the people they dominate are relatively unimportant.
Breaking Down Bonds of Kinship. PI-E society developed institutions that tended to break down strong kinship bonds. David Anthony, e.g., writes that Yamnaya cultural practices related to guest-host relationships led in a direction away from kinship toward reciprocity. These reciprocal guest-host relationships “functioned as a bridge between social units (tribes, clans) that had ordinarily restricted these relationships to their kin or co-residents.”[71] There were thus mechanisms to provide guest-host relationships beyond kinship where everyone had mutual obligations of hospitality; in a comment illustrating the pervasiveness and longevity of these practices, Anthony notes that this was a “way to incorporate outsiders as people with clearly defined rights and protections, as it was used in the Odyssey to medieval Europe”[72]—another indication of the persistence of I-E culture over very long periods of historical time.
The Rewards of Military Success. Besides the tangible rewards for success, successful warriors were honored in poetry. Successful leaders not only gave feasts and gifts to their followers, they were celebrated in poetry—their memory lived on long after their death. Odes proclaiming the generosity of patrons were very characteristic of widely dispersed I-E cultures (Vedic, Celtic, Greek, and Germanic), indicating an origin in late Proto-Indo-European.[73] As Duchesne emphasizes, at a conscious level, I-E warfare was conducted principally to gain fame and glory—“The fame of a dead man’s deeds.”[74] Nevertheless, to the victors remained the very tangible spoils resulting from successful military campaigns.
Indo-Europeanism as a Free-Market, Individualist Culture. For my purposes, it is especially important to note that the military cultures created by the I-Es were permeable—that they were based on individual accomplishment rather than kinship ties. Indeed, I-E societies recognized that kinship biases people’s perceptions and judgments. For example, in the Visigothic Code (ad 642–643) near relatives or other kinsmen could not testify in a legal case against a stranger. In Europe, where genetic differences between conquerors and their subjects were not great, barriers between groups broke down fairly rapidly. When the Visigoths conquered Spain, marriage between Goths and Romans was at first prohibited. However, the Visigothic Code provided for marriage between the two groups, breaking down ethnic barriers so that individuals could pursue marriage strategies based on perceived self-interest (typically individual or familial strategizing or personal attraction) rather than a requirement that marriage be within the kinship group.
On the other hand, intermixture between the I-Es and those they conquered had different consequences in the Near East, Iran, and India, presumably because the genetic distance between the I-Es and the natives in these areas was much greater than with Europeans and because the people they conquered were genetically prone to kinship-based collectivism. As a result, societies originally dominated by I-E elites in the East eventually became typical Oriental despotisms. As in Europe, when these marauding bands arrived in the Near East and India, there was significant interbreeding with the native populations. Thus the Indo-European Hittites fused with the native Hattic population in Anatolia, in India with the pre-existing Harappan culture, and similarly in Iran. In all these areas they gave up the pastoral lifestyle for agriculture and developed despotic rule centered around a king who was “the only character with any individuality and heroic achievement.”[75] All subjects and foreigners were required to prostrate themselves before him. This practice was common to virtually all the “state-centered hydraulic civilizations” (i.e., civilizations centered on irrigation agriculture—China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Incans, Aztecs), but quite foreign to the Indo-European cultures of Europe.[76]
Herodotus’s is a kind of locus classicus on this matter. Some Spartan envoys arrived in Susa and gained an audience with King Xerxes. The king’s bodyguards ordered them to prostrate themselves before the king and actually tried to force them do so. They refused, saying “they would not do any such deed, though they should be pushed down by them head foremost; for it was not their custom to do obeisance to a man.”[77]
Exogamy and monogamy appear to be core features of the Yamnaya-derived I-E cultures of Europe. Indeed, the general cultural pattern of predatory bands of males seeking riches and females implies that such relationships would be exogamous, and, as noted in Chapter 1, this fits with the sex-chromosome data. Thus the Corded Ware culture of Central Europe (4900–2950ybp)—a Yamnaya-derived culture[78]— practiced monogamy, quite possibly by abduction.[79] A study of ~4600-year-old Corded War burials from Eulau (contemporary Germany) shows nuclear families, with family members facing each other, sometimes with their arms intertwined—an apparent marker of the importance of affection.[80] Large percentages of adult women were of non-local origin, had a different diet during childhood, and showed more genetic variation than the males. And whereas the previous Neolithic groups in the area practiced collective burials (a marker of kin-based collectivism), both Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures practiced individual burials in “small family mounds, reflecting the transmission among individual families of animals and other property between generations. In contrast to this, the collective, megalithic or similar type burials of Neolithic groups reflected collective, clan-like shared ownership of property, animals, and land.”[81]
As noted, military leaders maintained their position by military success and by bestowing gifts upon their followers, with the most talented followers obtaining the greatest gifts. A corollary of this is that followers chose successful leaders and abandoned unsuccessful leaders. The system functioned more or less as a free-market system based on merit rather than nepotism. As in all free-market systems, the fundamental principle is reciprocity, whether it is giving gifts commensurate with contribution to the exploits of the Männerbund, or, in the modern world, paying employees a wage commensurate with the value they add to the company on pain of defection to another company. And just as companies compete to obtain talented employees in the modern world, I-E military leaders competed to attract a following of talented warriors.
Reciprocity thus lies at the heart of societies based on individualism. Another important example is mating. Whereas kinship-based societies typically feature arranged marriage, often to relatives (e.g., first cousin marriage, common in the Middle East), individualist societies tend toward free choice of marriage partner based on personal attraction (e.g., traits such as physical beauty or intelligence) and other interests (e.g., economic), which in turn are based on the personal qualities of the marriage partner.
Congruent with a free-market model, Anthony likens the spread of I-E languages to a “franchising operation” rather than invasion:
The initial spread of Proto-Indo-European dialects probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. At least a few of the steppe chiefs must have moved into each new region, and their arrival might well have been accompanied by cattle raiding and violence. But equally important to their ultimat
e success were the advantages they enjoyed in institutions (patron-client and guest-host arrangements that incorporated outsiders as individuals with rights and protections) and perhaps in public performances associated with Indo-European rituals.[82]
While this has more than a tinge of political correctness because it needlessly minimizes the role of violence in I-E conquests, it correctly emphasizes that the peoples conquered by I-E groups were not exterminated but dominated by new military elites that remained permeable; relationships were based on reciprocity, even though the relationships certainly favored the conquerors. But young men with military talent could still rise; physically and personally attractive young women could still engage in the age-old phenomenon of hypergamy (marrying higher status males).
There were, however, limits on social mobility. In a 1973 paper, Roger Pearson argues that social mobility was for the most part inter-generational rather than intra-generational. “In many cases, such as among the Celts, Teutons, Indo-Aryans and Iranians, and also in Homeric Greece and Republican Rome, it can be demonstrated that marriage was predominantly endogamous within these classes [i.e., nobles, freemen, and slaves], thus effectively restricting intra-generational social mobility in favor of a caste-like structure.”[83] “Caste-like” patterns of endogamy are attested for all these groups, with illicit offspring taking the status of the lower-status parent.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 4