Hacker News Reader

Comment by conqrr | Hacker News Reader

I remember a time when promises meant something. Lots of epics in human time (Greek, Hindu), people would stick to their word and commitment was respected. Written word was much more powerful than spoken. People appreciated depth. Wish we could teach and learn from those times.

View on HN

Proto-Indo-European culture seems to have placed a great deal of importance on the sanctity of contracts and the notion of reciprocal hospitality, reflected in many descendant myths and etymologies surviving from Ireland through India. If the Indo-Europeans did indeed come from the Ukrainian steppes, as seems likely, this may be a reflection of their high mobility (on horseback) causing lots of contact with potential for friction, and the fact that important personal property (for a steppe society, mainly herd animals) was moveable and vulnerable to cattle rustling. There's some great books on Indo-European society if you're interested.

With no centralised justice system people had to rely on people keeping their word. If people had lied and cheated all the time their society would have collapsed.

An oath breaker didn’t just harm an individual, they did harm to the whole community, and the whole community viewed them negatively.

Yes, though that could apply to any pre-modern society, whereas the Indo-Europeans were especially caught up on contracts and hospitality, even compared to similar societies. It's all quite fascinating, and in the context of them going on take over a vast swathe of Eurasia, one wonders whether this kind of ritualised deal-making was a significant competitive advantage that their neighbours lacked at the time.

> Proto-Indo-European culture seems to have placed a great deal of importance on the sanctity of contracts and the notion of reciprocal hospitality ... There's some great books on Indo-European society if you're interested.

What are those books?

For PIE, the most accessible recent book in English is probably The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (Anthony 2007), and I would highly recommend it. (It pulls double duty as a laymen's and as an academic publication, so if you do read it, know that it's OK to skip the minutiae of pottery shards.)

A slightly older but enduringly popular work is In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (Mallory 1989). I'm told How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Watkins 1995) is very good too, but I have not read it myself.

Chapter 2 of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (Fortson 2004) is a very good summary of PIE culture. The book is excellent in general - probably the best English language introduction to PIE linguistics at the moment - but outside the first two chapters it is not generally accessible to laymen.

If you read other European languages it's worth checking out other books that may be available to you. The field by definition requires the ability to read a decent number of languages, so the literature is spread out across English, German, French, Russian, etc.

This nation’s largest institutions were founded on deceit from the colonies to the founding fathers.

Aaron Burr raised capital for a fake water company and applied for a banking charter for what is now JP Morgan Chase

some people are playing by a more effective set of rules and others are being lied to from a young age

Reply on news.ycombinator.com