Why "Indo-European" Means Nothing and Covers Everything

An incisive critique of how the labels "Indo-European" and "Semitic" distort history, tracing steppe warriors into Vikings and Russians, contrasting Persian human rights with Greek practices, and dema

The word is “Indo-European.” It sounds precise. It sounds scientific. It sounds like the kind of term that emerged from decades of careful philological research, which it did. But the term has escaped its cage. What began as a linguistic category—a way of grouping languages that share a common ancestor—has metastasized into a cultural, racial, and civilizational label that now does work it was never designed to do. The label says “Indo-European” and the mind supplies “Western.” The label says “Indo-European” and the mind supplies “Aryan.” The label says “Indo-European” and the mind supplies a whole imagined world of chariot-riding conquerors who burst out of the steppe carrying the seeds of philosophy, democracy, and the good life. The label is a machine for smuggling assumptions. The assumptions are wrong.

The steppe peoples who domesticated the horse and spread ‘their’ languages across two continents were not Indo-Europeans in any cultural sense. They were Yamnaya, Corded Ware, Andronovo, Srubnaya—names that refer to specific archaeological cultures with specific material traces, not to a unified civilization with a shared set of values. They built no cities. They wrote no philosophy. They invented no democracy. Their gift to the world was the wagon, the composite bow, and a social structure built around the Männerbund—the initiated war-band of young men who lived as wolves, took heads as trophies, and extracted tribute from the settled peoples they raided. This is not an indictment. It is a description. The steppe was an environment of radical scarcity and unpredictability, and the social forms that emerged there were adaptive responses to that environment. But they are not the social forms that the label “Indo-European” conjures in the modern mind. The modern mind has been trained to hear “Indo-European” and think “Plato.” It should be trained to hear “Indo-European” and think “scalp-taking.”

The confusion is not accidental. It is the product of a deliberate conflation of language with culture, and culture with race, that served the needs of nineteenth-century European scholarship. The scholars who constructed the Indo-European hypothesis were brilliant linguists and devoted racists. They needed the ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European to be a noble race of conquerors, preferably light-skinned and preferably from somewhere close to Europe, who had carried the torch of civilization into the benighted lands of the East. When the archaeological evidence pointed to the Pontic-Caspian steppe, they reframed the steppe as a nursery of warriors rather than a backwater of nomads. The label did the work. The label still does the work. The label is the patch. The patch covers the flaw. The flaw is that the data do not support the story the label tells.

Consider the Persians. The Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE, was an Indo-European-speaking polity by any linguistic definition. Old Persian is an 'Indo-Iranian language, a direct descendant of the ‘Proto-Indo-European’ that was ‘spoken’ on the steppe. And yet the practices and mindset of the Achaemenid Persians were radically different from those of the Greeks, who are also classified as Indo-European and who are typically presented as the cultural heirs of the steppe tradition. Cyrus issued what amounts to the first charter of human rights, inscribed on the Cyrus Cylinder: a declaration of religious toleration, an abolition of forced labor, a policy of repatriating captive peoples to their homelands and funding the restoration of their temples. The same Cyrus whom the Bible calls “the Lord’s anointed”—Messiah—was a Persian, not a Greek. The same empire that invented the satrapy system of provincial administration, that built the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis, that governed three continents without imposing a state religion or a single language on its subjects, was Indo-European in the same sense that the Spartans were Indo-European. But the Spartans practiced helotage—the systematic enslavement of an entire population. The Spartans exposed deformed infants on the mountainside. The Spartans institutionalized pederasty as a mechanism of social control. Which of these is the true expression of Indo-European values? The question is absurd. The label cannot answer it because the label is a linguistic category being forced to do cultural work it cannot perform. The Persians and the Greeks spoke related languages. They did not share a civilization.

The Greeks themselves understood this. Herodotus, who wrote the first great work of history, spent much of it marveling at the differences between Greek and Persian customs. The Persians, he noted, did not build temples to their gods. They worshipped the sky, the sun, the moon, the earth, fire, and water. They considered lying the most disgraceful act a man could commit. They educated their sons in three things only: to ride, to shoot the bow, and to tell the truth. The Greeks, by contrast, built temples everywhere, told lies as a matter of statecraft, and educated their sons in rhetoric, which is the art of making the weaker argument defeat the stronger. Herodotus was not writing to celebrate the Indo-European brotherhood. He was writing to document the chasm that separated two peoples who happened to speak distantly related languages. The label “Indo-European” collapses the chasm into a continuity. The continuity is an artifact of the label. The chasm is the data.

Now follow the Persians north. Not the Persians of the Achaemenid court, but the Iranian-speaking peoples of the steppe—the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Alans—who carried the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family across the Eurasian grassland for two thousand years. These were not the builders of Persepolis. They were the wolf-warriors whom Herodotus described, the scalpers and skull-cup drinkers, the Enarei with their sacred androgyny. They were, in their social organization and their predatory economy, far closer to the Yamnaya of the Bronze Age than to the Persians of Cyrus. And yet they, too, are Indo-European. The label covers both. The label covers everything. The label covers nothing.

The Sarmatians and Alans moved west under pressure from the Huns. They entered the Germanic world. They entered the Roman world. Some of them became the cavalry elite of the late Roman army. Some of them settled in Gaul and gave their name to the region of Brittany. Some of them moved further north, into Scandinavia, where their influence on the emerging Norse culture is attested in the archaeological record, in the shared motifs of Sarmatian and Viking art, in the legends of the Narts that parallel the Norse sagas with a specificity that cannot be coincidence. The Vikings who burst out of Scandinavia in the eighth century CE were not pure Germanic tribesmen. They were the product of a thousand years of recombination between the indigenous Scandinavian substrate and the waves of steppe-derived elites who had been migrating north and west since the Bronze Age. Their dragon ships had precursors in the vessels of the Baltic. Their warrior ethos had precursors in the Männerbund of the steppe. Their pantheon—Odin, Thor, Tyr—was the Germanic expression of the same Indo-European divine structure that produced Zeus, Jupiter, and Indra. But the Vikings were also, and perhaps primarily, the heirs of the Sarmatian and Alanic horsemen who had carried the steppe template into the forests of the north.

The Vikings conquered England. The Danelaw, established in the ninth century, was a Scandinavian colony on English soil. The Normans who conquered England in 1066 were themselves the descendants of Vikings who had settled in northern France only a few generations earlier. The English language is a Germanic tongue with a heavy overlay of French vocabulary, spoken on an island that has been invaded and settled by Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans. The English are not a people. They are a palimpsest. And every layer of the palimpsest speaks an Indo-European language, which means the label “Indo-European” can be applied to all of them and can therefore distinguish none of them.

The same Vikings who conquered England moved east. The Varangians, as they were called in the Slavic lands, rowed down the rivers of Russia and Ukraine, established the Kievan Rus’ state, and gave their name to the people they ruled. The Rus’ were originally Norsemen. They spoke Old Norse. They worshipped Thor and Odin. Within a few generations, they had adopted the Slavic language of their subjects, converted to Orthodox Christianity, and become the ruling dynasty of a vast territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The name “Russian” derives from “Rus’,” which derives from the Old Norse word for “rowers.” The label “Slavic” now applies to the language that the Russians speak, which is an Indo-European language of the Balto-Slavic branch. The label “Indo-European” applies to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Serbs, the Croats, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Bulgarians. It also applies to the Greeks, the Persians, the Scythians, the Vikings, the English, the Germans, the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds, the Pashtuns, the Punjabis, the Bengalis, and the Sinhalese. It is the most capacious label ever devised. It covers half the planet. It means nothing.

The Semitic peoples are excluded from this club. The label “Semitic” is also a linguistic category, coined from the name of Shem, the son of Noah, and it applies to the speakers of Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Arabic, and Ethiopic. But the label “Semitic” has been racialized in a way that “Indo-European” has resisted. The “Semites” are a people, in the popular imagination, in a way that the “Indo-Europeans” are not—or rather, the “Indo-Europeans” are a people when it suits the narrative, and a mere linguistic category when it does not. The Phoenicians were Semitic. They sailed the Mediterranean, founded Carthage, and gave the Greeks their alphabet. The Israelites were Semitic. They wrote the Bible. The Arabs were Semitic. They built an empire that stretched from Spain to India and preserved the works of Aristotle while Europe was burning them. And yet the Semitic peoples are consistently framed as outsiders to the Western tradition, as the Orient against which the Occident defines itself, as the eternal Other whose achievements must be borrowed but whose contributions must be minimized. The label does the work. The label is the patch. The patch covers the flaw. The flaw is that the cultural practices and mythological structures of the Semitic peoples have, in many respects, more in common with the so-called Indo-European traditions than with the Egyptian or African religions from which they are supposedly derived.

The biblical flood narrative is a direct descendant of the Mesopotamian flood narratives, which are preserved in Sumerian and Akkadian—Semitic languages, or languages that were adopted by Semitic speakers. The creation story in Genesis shares a deep structure with the Babylonian Enuma Elish. The law codes of the Torah have parallels in the Code of Hammurabi, which was written in Akkadian. The prophetic tradition of Israel—the lone voice crying in the wilderness, denouncing the king for his injustice—has no parallel in Egypt, where the pharaoh was a god and his word was law. But it has a clear parallel in the Iranian tradition of Zoroaster, who spoke an Indo-European language and whose moral dualism influenced the Judaism of the Second Temple period. The Semitic and Indo-European worlds were not separate spheres. They were overlapping circles of mutual influence, shared myth, and continuous cultural exchange. The label “Semitic” and the label “Indo-European” are both useful for classifying languages. They are worse than useless for classifying civilizations. They obscure more than they reveal.

The fundamental problem is that the labels have become more real than the data they were meant to organize. The label “Indo-European” was coined to describe a language family. It has become a civilizational brand. The label “Semitic” was coined to describe a language family. It has become a racial category. The label “Western civilization” was coined to describe a curriculum. It has become an identity. Each of these labels is a patch applied to a flaw in the underlying code. The flaw is that the data do not support the narrative that the labels were designed to sustain. The narrative is that the West is the heir of Greece and Rome, that Greece and Rome were the heirs of the Indo-Europeans, that the Indo-Europeans were a distinct and superior race, and that the Semitic peoples are a separate and inferior stock whose contributions can be acknowledged only insofar as they were absorbed and transcended by the West. The data say that the West is the heir of a thousand recombinations, that Greece and Rome were themselves the products of continuous admixture between steppe elites and Mediterranean substrates, that the Indo-Europeans were not a race but a loose confederation of peoples who happened to speak related languages and whose cultural practices varied wildly across time and space, and that the Semitic peoples have been integral to the formation of the Western tradition from the moment the first Phoenician trader taught the first Greek the alphabet.

The patch will not hold forever. The code is too messy. The labels are too thin. The data are too loud. The Persians who built the first human rights charter, the Scythians who wore the scalps of their enemies, the Vikings who rowed down the Dnieper and became Russians, the Israelites who wrote the Psalms, the Phoenicians who gave us the letters we are using now—these peoples are not separate branches of a tree. They are threads in a single fabric, and the fabric has been woven and rewoven so many times that no thread can be disentangled from the rest without destroying the whole.

The label is the technology, the device. It constructs a rhetoric-based worldview that is meant to capture dialogue, not contain it. If you haven’t read my short book, maybe you should.