Since Early Bronze Age (3000-2000 B.C.E.), a herder stock dwelling in Southwestern Russia began to move from its original seat, spreading in two opposite directions: towards East, till Persia and India, and West, in Europe. From the two opposite poles, India and Europe, such stock is named Indo-European. The Aegean area (Greece and Crete) was reached in two different main waves, the first about 2000-1900 B.C.E. and the second, the so called Dorian migration, about 1200 B.C.E. It was not a massive invasion which replaced the former people, but an infiltration of a small number of lords who submitted the former agricultural civilization thanks to their warrior supremacy, due, among other things, to the use of horses and chariots.To understand the phenomena we can think to the British domination in India or to the French one in Algeria.
As all nomad herders, Indo-Europeans were great warriors. Such relationship is easy to understand: nomad herders are used to fight not only against the stationer agricultural peoples that find in their wanderings, but also among themselves for stealing their cattle. To have an idea of it, let us think to another important movement of a warrior herder stock, the Arabs that in the Seventh Century C.E. moved from their original seat, the Arabic peninsula, and conquered all the agricultural peoples dwelling both in Eastern and Western countries, from Afghanistan to Morocco and Spain. Well, as it can be easy argued, a warrior society is also a patriarchal one, due to the lack of weight of females in war: while women are able to do almost all the agricultural jobs —with the only exception of ploughing, the hardest of them—, it is obvious that war and stealing cattle are male jobs.
Thus, Indo-European society was patrilineal: the children were thought to belong to their father, not to their mother. And, since the father is never certain, he will be always frightening to bring up children who are not of him: hence, he will be unbelievably jealous and will lock his wife at home, allowing her to see nobody and allowing nobody to see her. In a patriarchal society woman’s rôle will be only that of child-bearer, being reckoned only for her beauty and, after getting old, being reckoned as a useless thing. It is not an exaggeration to say that, for herder peoples, woman is reckoned as a piece of their cattle, who can be either purchased with a given number of cows according to her beauty, or abducted: in this second case, the offense is perpetrated to her owner (the husband if married, the father if not), since the woman’s opinion has no importance. All this picture is clearly showed by the Iliad, an Eighth Century B.C.E. epic poem celebrating the wars of Mycenean Greeks either for cattle or for beautiful and young women.
Furthermore, herder and patriarchal peoples do not worship a Goddess of Nature and of Fertility, dwelling in the Earth, but a male deity of the sky, because in their wanderings the Earth will always change, while only the sky will be the same. This sky-god was worshipped as the god of lightning and thunder, and of the oak (perhaps because of the feature of oaks to attract lightnings more than other trees).Not only Greece, but all Europe was conquered by Indo-Europeans: Greeks, Latins, Germans, and Celts, were the main branches into which the Indo-European stock was broken down. It is important to remember that also Celts were Indo-European, i.e. herders, warriors, and patriarchal: many people think Celts to belong to the agricultural, peaceful, and matriarchal Stone Henge Britain, and the patriarchal new rulers to be only the later Germanic tribes of the Angles and the Saxons. Nothing of all this. Celts worshipped their god of the sky, of thunder, and of the oak: the name druid derives from the Indo-European root *dry- which means “tree”, especially “oak”.
While pre-Indo-European society believed in female triads, according to the three female ages and assimilated to the phases of the Moon, Indo-Europeans believed in a couple of divine male twins, assimilated to the stars of the morning and of the evening (ignoring that they were the same heavenly body, Venus). Such twins, known as the Indo-European Dioscuri, had three main features: a deep polarity among them, the nature of horsemen, and that of savers, often saving a female character who can be their sister, mother, or wife of one of them. The most famous examples of Greek twins were the Dioscuri Castor and Polydeuces —who saved their sister Helen after her first abduction by Theseus—, the Atreidai Agamemnon and Menelaus —who saved Agamemnon’s wife, always Helen, after her second abduction by Paris—, Neleus and Pelias, Anfion and Zetho, Idas and Lynceus, Cleobis and Bithon, Calais and Zethes, etc.Thus, 5000 years after the Neolithic Revolution, the agricultural, peaceful, and matriarchal European civilization was definitely over. Another chapter in the history of Europe was open, a chapter made of wars, hates, and violence, until the Twentieth Century. Archaeological evidence shows that, after the Indo-European migrations, history of settlements is a history of destructions.
