References
For those who are interested, there are lots of places to dive in and pursue aspects of the Indo-European story, as evidenced by the many hyperlinks given in the text of this web site. Below, I have listed some of the more important books which have helped me and would serve as a beginner's Indo-European library.
David Anthony's 2010 book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World was a best seller (for its limited category) and started my interest in Indo-European studies. Anthony is an archeologist and the purpose of his book is to prove the steppe theory of the proto-Indo-European homeland. It's a 568 page book which goes into deep detail about the burial customs of dozens, maybe hundreds of cultures, so it's hard to absorb on first reading. But Anthony is a good writer, and he does pick up many linguistic and sociological insights, so it's an excellent text, especially if you read it three or four times.
Kristian Kristiansen, et al, edited The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistics, a collection of 23 chapters which focus on current topics in Indo-European studies from an integrative interdisciplinary perspective. I borrowed a lot from chapters by Anthony and Haak on Corded Ware, but it's full of great stuff. It's pretty current, having been published in 2023, but it's also very expensive, over $100. Maybe available from the library?
J.P. Mallory is also an archeologist focused on Indo-Europeans, and he wrote a very accessible book in 1989 titled "In Search of the Indo-Europeans", covering language, archeology and myth. It is not up to date will all the new research, but it's a good overview of the field and can sometimes be found on Abebooks for under $3.
There are two books which I used in Chapter 1 that do a good job of tracing Indo-European vocabulary back to early and proto-Indo-European culture.
The Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society by Emile Benveniste was published in 1969 but does a good job of gathering all the cognates associated with topics such as economy, kinship relations, social status, royalty and religion, and putting them in a context. More technical than desired for someone just beginning Indo-European studies.
A very similar book, published in 2006 is The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams. Mallory is a pre-eminent PIE archeologist and Adams is a PIE linguist, so the book is thorough, but again, sometimes very technical.
There are two books by pre-eminent IE scholars on Indo-European myth traditions. How to Kill a Dragon is by Calvert Watkins and Indo-European Poetry and Myth is by M.L. West. Both are towering masterpieces of scholarly achievement and largely unreadable to the lay person. But they're much fun to pick up and read a chapter or two and marvel at the scholarship in the field.
Ranko Matasović has written a delightful book titled A Reader in Comparative Indo-European Religion. It does an excellent overview of proto-Indo-European religion and then delves deeper into ten of the Indo-European branches.
Best of all, it's free and available on the web.
Bernard Comrie is editor of a thousand page book that covers 48 major language groupings, including chapters on 26 Indo-European languages. It is written for linguists, so I found myself quickly over my head in abstruse linguistic arcana, but I also found plenty from it to share in this course. You can sometimes find it for just a few dollars on Abebooks, HERE.
Marija Gimbutas wrote three lovely coffee table books, heavily illustrated with drawings and pictures. They are The Civilization of the Goddess, The Language of the Goddess, and The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe.
After her death, a colleague assembled and published the final book she was working on: The Living Goddesses. It has far fewer pictures but has six chapters on religion in Old Europe, followed by chapters on Minoans, Greeks, Etruscans, Basques, Celts, Germans and Balts, a few of which I shared in this course.
I'm deeply indebted to Joel Breretonand Stephanie Jamison for their 288 page book, The Rigveda, A Guide, which formed the basis for much of my syllabus on The Indo-Iranians (session 9). It's a great companion to the Rig Veda, which you can find on the internet for free.
