“It would be a good idea,” Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked what he thought of European civilisation. It is a useful perspective for Europeans, many of whom still tend to think of themselves as God’s gift to the world.
Europe and its North American offshoot have no monopoly on beastliness, but no other culture has such a long and virtually unbroken record of wars, imperial aggression, genocide, enslavement and organised pillage. Time magazine once calculated that over the past two millennia the longest continuous period Europeans have been at peace is 50 years.
In fairness, other Europeans have often been at the sharp end. Julius Caesar, considered one of Europe’s “great men”, visited one of history’s first documented genocides on the continental Celts (a million dead and a million enslaved, historians estimate).
But it is with its discovery of the non-European world that Europe’s taste for decimating whole peoples — Australian Aboriginals, Khoisan, Herero, Plains Indian, Caribs — finds its highest expression.
Consider the fate of Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Aztecs, which dazzled Cortes’s soldiers with its towers, temples, markets and floating gardens. In two years, the Conquistadors overturned 30 centuries of Mesoamerican achievement, burning the city, dismantling its Great Temple to build a cathedral, grazing the land bare and destroying its cultivated terraces by diverting irrigation water to Spanish mills. By 1600, war, forced labour and disease had reduced the population of the Valley of Mexico from two million to 70Â 000.
Gandhi was right: What is the matter with Europeans? Why have they been so uncivilised?
Industrial capitalism has heightened European-inspired bedlam, through its intractable need for raw materials and markets and the political clout of its arms manufacturers. But the obvious point is that Europe’s bellicose expansionism has been constant over millennia, whatever the economic base.
Could its roots lie deep in prehistory?
Over the past 50 years, influential archaeologists such as the University of California’s Marija Gimbutas have advanced a surprising thesis — Europe was not always so. The “Old Europe” of Neolithic farmers, who spread gradually into Greece, the Balkans and southern Italy from the Middle East after about 10Â 000BC, appears to have been peaceful, sedentary and egalitarian.
Excavations have turned up hunting weapons, but no weapons of war. Most settlements were unfortified or lightly protected.
Significantly, Old Europeans also appear to have been goddess-worshipping, matrifocal and perhaps matrilinear, superimposing on the fertility cults of their hunter-gatherer forebears the outlook of primitive agriculturalists who relied on the bounty and cycles of nature.
About 30Â 000 marvellously crafted cult objects have been unearthed, many of votive female figures with exaggerated breasts, buttocks and pubic mounds; others of the deity’s animal embodiments, such as the doe, fish, bird, snake, butterfly and bee.
Gimbutas argues that, reinforced by the worship of the Goddess and the high status of her priestesses, Neolithic farming communities were sexually egalitarian. From the longest-surviving relic of the Neolithic world, the proto-Minoan culture of Crete, there is compelling evidence of both a Goddess cult and the high status of women.
Then, from about 6Â 500BC, Old Europe was overtaken by a terrible, undocumented calamity. “Tell” sites accumulated over centuries are abruptly abandoned, and images of the goddess vanish from the archaeological record. Neolithic culture was played out in marginal areas such as islands and caves.
Gimbutas argues, and it is now widely accepted — by Encyclopaedia Britannica, no less — that it was swept away by three waves of fierce semi-pastoral nomads from Russia’s southern steppe. The Nazis called them “Aryans”, from the Sanskrit arya, meaning noble, lord, ruler. Rescued from Nazi racial theory, they are generally known as Indo-Europeans.
Pre-literate and footloose, they left no written records or iconography and scanty archaeological traces. Their largest footprint is their language, the source of almost all modern European languages, as well as Russian, Iranian, Sanskrit and most tongues now spoken in northern India and Afghanistan. They fanned out eastwards as far as the Chinese border, as well as to the west.
The Nazis were certainly wrong to conceive of the Indo-Europeans as blond, blue-eyed giants who emerged in Northern Europe. “Principal components analysis”, which measures the distribution of ancient genetic markers, tends to confirm their Pontic-Caspian origins. The propagandists of the Third Reich also ignored the inconvenient fact that the languages of the Slav untermenschen, as well as Yiddish and Romany, belong to the Indo-European family.
But where they do seem to have got it right is that Indo-European society was male-dominated, warlike, hierarchical, mobile, predatory and centred on the worship of a male sky, sun or weather deity Gimbutas calls “the God of the Shining Skies”. Of course, the Nazis thought this was exactly how the master race should behave.
JP Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans emphasises that much of the surviving vocabulary says little about the people who used it. It includes the English words for close family bonds such as “father” and “mother”, elemental terms like “sun”, “moon”, “wind” and “water” and the numerals from one to 10. Even more mundane survivors are “louse” and, believe it or not, “fart”.
But Proto-Indo-European, reconstructed from its daughter languages, also hints at a darker reality. It includes terms for a (male) clan chief and king (Latin rex, Sanskrit raj); for a fortified enclosure (Greek polis, Sanskrit pur); for military commander and campaign; and for sword, bow and possibly chariot.
Other symbolically charged reconstructions are terms for blood feud or blood payment, a key patriarchal institution deeply entrenched in later Europe, and cattle raiding.
The ruling male deity, “sky father”, is attested in no fewer than six derived languages, including Latin (Ju-piter), Sanskrit (dyaus-pita) and Greek (Zeu-pater).
Hitler thought the Aryans were the source of all culture. In fact, their only innovation seems to have been the domestication of the steppe horse (reconstructed from numerous daughter languages as ekwos), an animal pivotal to the mobility, military exploits and even rituals of the Indo-Europeans, who sacrificed and buried its remains with their great warriors.
Horse skeletons and horse-head maces have been unearthed in kurgan burial mounds across southern Russia, together with bronze and flint weapons and other grave goods clearly meant to mark status and martial prowess. These point not just to a stratified society dominated by men, but to the active subjection of women.
Most house only the bones of men and children; women seem to have been buried separately in unmarked graves. One gravesite contains the remains of a warrior and a woman with head injuries, suggesting the ancient Indic practice of suttee — the execution and co-burial of a wife and her dead husband.
Significantly, the English word “wedding” derives from the Indo-European root weidh, meaning “to lead” (by the groom), implying that wives joined their husbands’ households.
Also suggestive is the markedly similar structure of the Indo-Europeans’ immediate successor cultures, the Hittites, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germans and Indo-Iranians — patriarchal, horse-riding warrior societies every one.
French comparativist Georges Dumezil points out that common to them all was a tripartite social hierarchy of priestly rulers (Sanskrit brahmanas, Latin flamines, Celts druides), warriors and herder-cultivators — the kernel of that most durable institution, the Indian caste system. It was mirrored by ranked deities of sovereignty, war and cultivation.
Vedic India gives a pregnant hint of how Aryans perceived the cultures they overran. Outside the charmed circle of the conqueror community was a fourth group — the sudras of downtrodden natives, the original “untouchable” caste. The writer George Orwell remarked that all aristocracies are the product of imperialism.
Indeed, far from being the source of culture, the Indo-Europeans seem to have been its destroyers in both east and west. An important source is the Sanskrit hymnody of the Rig Veda, which draws on an oral tradition from 1Â 000BC or earlier. Recounting the hellraising exploits of the war god Indra and his warrior band, it probably reflects prior wars of annihilation waged against the Indus Valley civilisation of the dark-skinned Dravidians and their magnificent cities, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.
Significantly, the Vedic hymns describe the indigenous enemy, the dasa, as “noseless” — hinting at racial stigmatism. In early Indo-Iranian, varna denotes both “caste” and “colour”.
One may surmise that the warrior deity, the “joy in victory”, the lust for plunder and the racial pride that pervade the magnificent poetry of the Rig Veda is an echo of the Indo-European berserkers who first broke into northern India:
“For Puru hast thou shattered, Indra! Ninety forts, for Divodasa thy boon servant
with thy bolt, O Dancer, for thy worshipper …
Distributing the mighty treasures with his strength.
Indra in battles help his Aryan worshipper
Plaguing the lawless he gave up to Manu’s seed the dusky skin.”
“So what?” you might ask — all this happened long ago. But it is the persistence of the cultural patterns incised by the Indo-European hordes that is so striking.
Consider religion. Gimbutas argues that the Indo-European incursions created a hybrid religious culture dominated by the sky-god, but where the Goddess lived on as an underling (in Greek myth, Aphrodite was the daughter of Zeus) or “Indo-Europeanised” into war deities like Athena.
There can be no doubt that the Indo-Europeans prepared the ground for the eventual conquest of Europe by Yahweh, sky-god of the Israelites. Archaeologists tell us patriarchal rule and worship were also imposed on the Goddess-worshipping Neolithic farmers of Syro-Palestine (see Colin Bower’s “Goddess of the Israelites”, Mail & Guardian, September 16).
The Asiatic steppe and the Arabian desert were rich breeding grounds for sky-god cults and mobile warrior bands — consider the rise of Islam and the Mongols, led by the patriarchal monotheist Genghis Khan. Was a factor the overwhelming reality of sun and sky, rather than animal and vegetable life, in their respective worlds?
An equally clear survival of the Indo-Europeans’ gender-ranked pantheon is the Catholic cult of Mary, “daughter of her son”. Indeed, the remnants of Goddess worship may only have been stamped out in the witch-burning crazes and heresy trials of the late Middle Ages.
A final point about the Indo-Europeans and religion. Mallory notes the idea of a “final battle” in the epic traditions of many Indo-European peoples, including the Ragnarok of the Vikings and the Irish Celts’ “Second Battle of Mag Tured”. Prominent in this mythology is a water deity (Indic Apam Napat, “grandson of water”, Latin Neptunus, from the Proto-Indo-European nepots, nephew), who opposes the forces of evil.
The notion of history as moving towards a climax — whether the ignis fatuus of the Second Coming, the Thousand Year Reich or the classless society — is profoundly embedded in European thinking. From the Jew-baiting hysteria of the medieval flagellants to the utopian atrocities of Stalin, it has been the spur for untold violence.
Societies structured for conflict would naturally think in terms of cataclysmic outcomes, while Gimbutas argues that the Old European world-view, conditioned by the annual death and regeneration of nature, was probably cyclical. Like Yahweh, Christian millenarianism may have been grafted on to much older myths.
“The God of the Shining Skies” has cast a long shadow over Europe, and through European conquest, the world. A moment’s thought should show the perfect silliness of the idea that the creator and sustainer of the universe — if such exists — has a dangly bit. But millions continue to believe it.
Millions also continue to believe in a god that controls the weather — hence the Dutch Reformed Church’s periodic days of prayer for rain. And, perhaps most central to an understanding of Europe’s bloodstained history, millions, particularly in the United States, still believe in a tribal deity who sanctifies collective violence by his followers and sides with them in war.
Rudyard Kipling’s “God of our long battle line” has been integral to European imperialism, both in justifying the conquerors and breaking down the societies they assailed. The Spaniards, in an expression of pure Indo-Europeanism, ascribed their miraculous victory over the Amerindians to “God — and the horse”.
Tribal raids have existed since time immemorial. But what the Indo-Europeans appear to have created for the first time, and lastingly bequeathed to Europe, was a society organised for aggression, with a warrior deity, warrior caste, warrior codes which exalt martial virtues and dehumanise the enemy, the ideas of soldiering as the ultimate manly calling and military leadership as “greatness”, and an abiding fascination with the technology of bloodletting.
Orwell also remarked that history is the history of arms. Combined with bronze weaponry, the warhorse — the tank of the ancient world — appears to have conferred a decisive military advantage on the Indo-Europeans which their offshoot societies have been hell-bent on retaining.
Despite its unassailable military superiority, the US has budgeted $68-billion for the single item of defence research and development in 2006, more than the total military spending of any other country.
Indeed, it is the American right which, in the 21st century, most clearly embodies the Indo-European ethos. While continental Europe has finally subsided into relative civility, spent by two world wars, the US has mounted about 40 invasions, contra wars and violent coups in the post-war era.
It might be waged with white phosphorus and computerised attack helicopters, but the Iraq war is in essence a cattle raid and a blood payment, aimed at the noseless dasa.
In both European and non-European cultures, there is a palpable link between warfare and male domination. It is highlighted by the ancient Indian religious ceremony of asvamedha, which climaxed with the king’s wife climbing “under the covers” with a sacrificed warhorse in a ritual mating.
In an age when enslavement often meant forced concubinage, women were among the spoils of conquest. But there is a deeper nexus, concerned with power-seeking and the proper relationship between men and the world. In most Indo-European languages, the word “right” (French droit, German recht, Proto-Indo-European deks) has the dual implication of strength, as in “right hand” and entitlement, as in “the rights of man”.
One must approach Gimbutas’s findings with some caution — there are cases, notably Mali’s Dogon people, of patriarchal agriculturalists who value fertility and fashion fertility idols. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy also argues that thorough-going matriarchal government has probably never existed.
But it is clear that there are more and less sexually egalitarian human groups, and societies more and less prone to collective violence against outsiders.
Continental Europe, which has become markedly less patriarchal over the past century and more peace loving over the past 50 years, offers some comfort. The most dramatic transformation has been in the former Viking states and empire-building absolute monarchies of Scandinavia — achieved, in part, by a conscious assault on martial-patriarchal values.
Heaven (note the sky reference) knows what is to be done about the US, whose militarism has spiralled into a kind of collective insanity. If one includes the military spending of non-defence departments and payments on past wars, it plans to splash out the unimaginably large sum of $600-billion on the gentle art of warfare next year — and a mere $20-billion on foreign aid.
But Gimbutas’s research suggests that warrior patriarchies are a historical phenomenon, not, as some “evolutionary psychologists” have argued, genetic destiny.
For the reform-minded, the hope lies in the remarkable plasticity of human social organisation. In theory, at least, the Indo-Europeans’ fearful legacy of blood and bronze can be overturned.