10-09-03 08:51, lifeiscool86 wrote:
> I was thinking ... what would the "perfect" heraldry symbol for the
> PIE community, or a possible pan-symbol used by the PIEs.
> Well, ..ofcourse we may not know for sure, but it won't hurt to have
> an idea of what "ethnic symbol" they had to identify themselves.
> Much like my post on Indo-European for Indo-European.
>
> Or, if we have really no "exact" idea, we, modern Euros, can give
> our own proposals for an IE heritage symbol on the Pan-European
> crest. Nothing "Nazisistic" here!!! Just give your proposals (based
> on whatever evidence we have!).
>
> I suggest:
> 1. an eagle
> 2. a horse
> 3. a cow -- a IE sacred beast
> 4. a cross -- which has been an ancient sun-symbol
> 5. a lion?????
>
> What do you think?
Since we have no evidence that speakers of PIE regarded themselves as a
single ethnos (it's indeed far more likely that they comprised many
tribe-size units with some regional organisation but without any form of
central government or collective identity), it would be plain silly to
insist that they must have shared a common heraldic badge. Simple motifs
like the solar disc or the swastika have been used for countless
millennia by all sorts of cultures worldwide, and it would hardly be
tactful to appropriate them as IE symbols.
Note that we "modern Euros" are not all IE-speakers (what about our
Finno-Ugric, Basque or Turkic-speaking fellow Europeans?), and that IE
languages are not restricted to Europe (what about areas of early spread
such as Central Asia, India, Iran, etc., and the recent colonial
expansion of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French or Russian?). Even if
PIE originated somewhere in Europe, _most_ of Europe was not originally
IE-speaking. For these reasons the retrospective establishment of an IE
heritage symbol by "us Europeans" makes no sense to me. What would be
the purpose of that? To promote the myth of an original European Union
back in the Neolithic -- something that never existed? Thank you, count
me out. And whatever you do, please, don't fall for an eagle holding an
ancient sun symbol.
Cyril Babaev's original choice of an emblem for this forum and his
Indo-Europead Database was a spoked wheel. Nice, harmless and
politically neutral (though again it can't be proved at present that the
inventor of the wheel was IE). However, it was common understanding that
it was not a "reconstructed IE crest" but a modern (if historically
inspired) symbol for a modern Internet project. Ominously, even before
the emblem disappeared from our home page, the address of Cyril's site
had been taken over by net pornographers and by clicking on the wheel
the puzzled net-surfer was thrown among some "excellent amateur teens".
That's often the problem with magical symbols -- they fail to work as
expected.
Piotr