Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.59

c14.59

Practically nothing can be gleaned of the appearance or lay-out of an Aryan settlement, or of the houses, but we are clearly dealing with nothing larger than farmsteads and villages. Such mundane affairs did not lend themselves to metaphor in hymns to the war-gods, though the goddess of Dawn does make a homely, rustic appearance in her ox-drawn cart, reminding us of Demeter and of the Teutonic goddess Nertha described by Tacitus, whose image was similarly transported, and of the actual ritual carts carrying a deity’s throne known in Europe from Italy, Alsace, and Denmark, and dating from the fifth century B.C. onwards. All the Aryan buildings, however, appear to have been of wood, and the house seems to have been rectangular, with a thatched roof, divided into more than one room or compartment; possibly some phrases may be construed to imply that the cattle and sheep, as well as the household, were under a single roof. If the linguistic equation of the Sanskrit word for a doorway, *ātā* (always used metaphorically for the doors of the sky) with the Latin *antae* is to be taken literally, it should have the meaning of a porch formed between the projecting end-walls of the building. This architectural device is characteristic of the *megaron* house, known in the Troad and Eastern Europe at least as early as the beginning of the third millennium B.C., and certainly associated with the early speakers of Indo-European languages in Greece, but it is dangerous to force the analogy.