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48-656: The Sanskrit noun āśrama- is a thematic nominal derivative from the root śram 'toil' (< PIE * ḱremh 2 , cf. śramaṇa ) with the prefix ā 'towards.' An ashram is a place where one strives towards a goal in a disciplined manner. Such a goal could be ascetic , spiritual , yogic or any other. An ashram would traditionally, but not necessarily in contemporary times, be located far from human habitation, in forests or mountainous regions , amidst refreshing natural surroundings conducive to spiritual instruction and meditation . The residents of an ashram regularly performed spiritual and physical exercises, such as

96-471: A Northern European origin . The view of a Pontic origin was still strongly supported, including by the archaeologists V. Gordon Childe and Ernst Wahle . One of Wahle's students was Jonas Puzinas , who became one of Marija Gimbutas's teachers. Gimbutas, who acknowledged Schrader as a precursor, painstakingly marshalled a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of the Soviet Union and

144-446: A patriarchal warrior society, a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains: The process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical, transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of successfully imposing a new administrative system, language, and religion upon the indigenous groups. In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized

192-546: A French Jesuit who spent most of his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages. According to current academic consensus, Jones's famous work of 1786 was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included Egyptian , Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi . In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated

240-677: A PIE homeland, the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses are the ones most widely accepted, and also the ones most debated against each other. Following the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew, the original author and proponent of the Anatolian hypothesis, has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe. The table lists

288-549: A conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as * wódr̥ , * ḱwn̥tós , or * tréyes ; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English words water , hound , and three , respectively. No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using the comparative method . For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: piede and foot , padre and father , pesce and fish . Since there

336-453: A detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated by 1959. Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie gave a better understanding of Indo-European ablaut . From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Scholars have proposed multiple hypotheses about when, where, and by whom PIE was spoken. The Kurgan hypothesis , first put forward in 1956 by Marija Gimbutas , has become

384-627: A language. From the 1870s, the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as illustrated by Verner's law , published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role of accent (stress) in language change. August Schleicher 's A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1874–77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct

432-550: A migratory pattern out of the Pontic Steppe at the relevant time but also suggest the possibility that the population movement involved was more substantial than earlier anticipated and invasive. Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially-hostile military incursions in which a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful, matrilinear , and matrifocal (but not matriarchal ) cultures of " Old Europe " and replaced it with

480-734: A plausible explanation for the spread of at least some of the Indo-European languages, and suggest that the alternative theories such as the Anatolian hypothesis , which places the Proto-Indo-European homeland in Neolithic Anatolia , are less likely to be correct. Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the Pontic–Caspian region had already been made in

528-613: A thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis , the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoral culture and patriarchal religion of its speakers. As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through the Indo-European migrations ,

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576-422: Is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants ( p and f ) that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a common parent language . Detailed analysis suggests a system of sound laws to describe the phonetic and phonological changes from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have become so detailed and reliable as to support

624-572: Is believed to have had an elaborate system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes (analogous to English child, child's, children, children's ) as well as ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved in English sing, sang, sung, song ) and accent . PIE nominals and pronouns had a complex system of declension , and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation . The PIE phonology , particles , numerals , and copula are also well-reconstructed. Asterisks are used by linguists as

672-521: Is derived from the Turkic word kurgan ( курга́н ), meaning tumulus or burial mound. The steppe theory was first formulated by Otto Schrader (1883) and V. Gordon Childe (1926), then systematized in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas , who used the term to group various prehistoric cultures, including the Yamnaya (or Pit Grave) culture and its predecessors. In the 2000s, David Anthony instead used

720-921: Is not possible. Forming an exception, Phrygian is sufficiently well-attested to allow proposals of a particularly close affiliation with Greek, and a Graeco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly accepted. Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include: The vowels in commonly used notation are: Kurgan hypothesis Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as

768-424: Is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family . No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language , and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during

816-561: Is the result of gross misinterpretation of the cultural history of Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe. In the 2000s, Alberto Piazza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza tried to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the steppe theory. According to Piazza, "[i]t is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Anatolia ." According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006),

864-549: The Eastern Bloc that was not readily available to Western scholars, revealing a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe. When it was first proposed in 1956, in The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Part 1 , Gimbutas's contribution to the search for Indo-European origins was an interdisciplinary synthesis of archaeology and linguistics. The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins identifies the Pontic–Caspian steppe as

912-541: The Globular Amphora culture to the west. From these kurganized cultures came the immigration of Proto-Greeks to the Balkans and the nomadic Indo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC. Gimbutas defined and introduced the term " Kurgan culture " in 1956 with the intention of introducing a "broader term" that would combine Sredny Stog II , Pit Grave (Yamnaya), and Corded ware horizons (spanning

960-558: The Indian subcontinent became aware of similarities between Indo-Iranian languages and European languages, and as early as 1653, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families: Germanic , Romance , Greek , Baltic , Slavic , Celtic , and Iranian . In a memoir sent to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux ,

1008-647: The Kurgan theory , Kurgan model , or steppe theory ) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia . It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term

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1056-853: The Lok Biradari Prakalp Ashram Shala . A number of ashrams have been established outside India. Typically, these ashrams are connected to Indian lineages, focus on imparting Yoga -related teachings, often in residential retreats , and are headed by spiritual teachers (Indians or Western). Proto-Indo-European Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Proto-Indo-European ( PIE )

1104-591: The Neogrammarian hypothesis : the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception. William Jones , an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal , caused an academic sensation when in 1786 he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit , Greek , Latin , Gothic , the Celtic languages , and Old Persian , but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to

1152-651: The domestication of the horse followed by the use of early chariots . The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Sredny Stog culture north of the Azov Sea in Ukraine , and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5th millennium BC. Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes led to hybrid, or in Gimbutas's terms "kurganized" cultures, such as

1200-605: The "Kurgan culture": Gimbutas's original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture: In other publications she proposes three successive "waves" of expansion: The Kurgan hypothesis describes the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European during the 5th and 4th millennia BC. As used by Gimbutas, the term "kurganized" implied that the culture could have been spread by no more than small bands who imposed themselves on local people as an elite. This idea of PIE and its daughter languages diffusing east and west without mass movement proved popular with archaeologists in

1248-550: The 1970s (the pots-not-people paradigm). The question of further Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe, Central Asia and Northern India during the Bronze Age is beyond the scope of the Kurgan hypothesis, and far more uncertain than the events of the Copper Age, and subject to some controversy. The rapidly developing fields of archaeogenetics and genetic genealogy since the late 1990s have not only confirmed

1296-615: The 19th century by the German scholars, Theodor Benfey (1869) and Victor Hehn  [ de ] (1870), followed notably by Otto Schrader (1883, 1890). Theodor Poesche had proposed the nearby Pinsk Marshes . In his standard work about PIE and to a greater extent in a later abbreviated version, Karl Brugmann took the view that the urheimat could not be identified exactly by the scholarship of his time, but he tended toward Schrader's view. However, after Karl Penka 's 1883 rejection of non-European PIE origins, most scholars favoured

1344-478: The 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and its daughter languages , and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method ) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from approximately 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age , though estimates vary by more than

1392-481: The 4th to 3rd millennia in much of Eastern and Northern Europe). The Kurgan archaeological culture or cultural horizon comprises the various cultures of the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the Copper Age to Early Bronze Age (5th to 3rd millennia BC), identified by similar artifacts and structures, but subject to inevitable imprecision and uncertainty. The eponymous kurgans (mound graves) are only one among several common features. Cultures that Gimbutas considered as part of

1440-569: The North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic. Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of a Paleo-Balkan language area, named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of the Balkan peninsula . Most of the other languages of this area—including Illyrian , Thracian , and Dacian —do not appear to be members of any other subfamilies of PIE, but are so poorly attested that proper classification of them

1488-525: The Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe. Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis , which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginning c. 7500–6000 BCE, the Armenian hypothesis , the Paleolithic continuity paradigm , and the indigenous Aryans theory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible within academia. Out of all the theories for

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1536-413: The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) urheimat , and a variety of late PIE dialects are assumed to have been spoken across this region. According to this model, the Kurgan culture gradually expanded to the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with the Yamnaya culture of around 3000 BC. The mobility of the Kurgan culture facilitated its expansion over the entire region and is attributed to

1584-455: The Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian languages due to early language contact , as well as some morphological similarities—notably the Indo-European ablaut , which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian. The Lusitanian language was a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between present-day Portugal and Spain . The Venetic and Liburnian languages known from

1632-626: The Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism. Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is " some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East." Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis is incompatible with the linguistic evidence. David Anthony 's The Horse, the Wheel and Language describes his "revised steppe theory". He considers

1680-606: The authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian society centered on the nature/earth mother goddess ( Gaia ) to a patriarchy worshipping the father/sun/weather god ( Zeus , Dyaus ). J. P. Mallory (in 1989) accepted the Kurgan hypothesis as the de facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he distinguished it from an implied "radical" scenario of military invasion. Gimbutas' actual main scenario involved slow accumulation of influence through coercion or extortion, as distinguished from general raiding shortly followed by conquest: One might at first imagine that

1728-602: The common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833, he began publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend , Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German . In 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as Grimm's law as a general rule in his Deutsche Grammatik . Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of

1776-566: The core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference. Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper – Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC). The people of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists , who, according to

1824-401: The economy of argument involved with the Kurgan solution should oblige us to accept it outright. But critics do exist and their objections can be summarized quite simply: Almost all of the arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansions, and most of the evidence so far presented is either totally contradicted by other evidence, or

1872-582: The effects of hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of cuneiform tablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879 on the basis of internal reconstruction only, and progressively won general acceptance after Jerzy Kuryłowicz 's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite. Julius Pokorny 's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave

1920-654: The main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. Slavic: Russian , Ukrainian , Belarusian , Polish , Czech , Slovak , Sorbian , Serbo-Croatian , Bulgarian , Slovenian , Macedonian , Kashubian , Rusyn Iranic: Persian , Pashto , Balochi , Kurdish , Zaza , Ossetian , Luri , Talyshi , Tati , Gilaki , Mazandarani , Semnani , Yaghnobi ; Nuristani Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages include Italo-Celtic , Graeco-Aryan , Graeco-Armenian , Graeco-Phrygian , Daco-Thracian , and Thraco-Illyrian . There are numerous lexical similarities between

1968-465: The model, by the early 3rd millennium BC had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe . Genetics studies in the 21st century have demonstrated that populations bearing specific Y-DNA haplogroups and a distinct genetic signature expanded into Europe and South Asia from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the third and second millennia BC. These migrations provide

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2016-480: The most popular. It proposes that the original speakers of PIE were the Yamnaya culture associated with the kurgans (burial mounds) on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea. According to the theory, they were nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse , which allowed them to migrate across Europe and Asia in wagons and chariots. By the early 3rd millennium BCE, they had expanded throughout

2064-509: The princes receive martial instruction from the sage, especially in the use of divine weapons. In the Mahabharata , Krishna , in his youth, goes to the ashram of Sandipani to gain knowledge of both intellectual and spiritual matters. Boarding schools , especially in the tribal areas of Maharashtra and elsewhere in India , are called ashram shala or ashram schools. One such school is

2112-426: The proto-Indo-European language. By the early 1900s, Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages added to the corpus of descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: the laryngeal theory , which explained irregularities in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as

2160-428: The regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (the Indo-European sound laws ), morphology, and vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the known ancient Indo-European languages. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages. PIE

2208-730: The set of correspondences in his prize essay Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse ('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued that Old Norse was related to the Germanic languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance languages. In 1816, Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit , in which he investigated

2256-577: The term "Kurgan culture" so imprecise as to be useless, and instead uses the core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as points of reference. He points out: The Kurgan culture was so broadly defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the Baden culture) without them could be included. He does not include the Maykop culture among those that he considers to be Indo-European-speaking and presumes instead that they spoke

2304-597: The various forms of yoga . Other sacrifices and penances, such as yajnas , were also performed. Many ashrams also served as gurukulas , residential schools for children under the guru-shishya tradition . Sometimes, the goal of a pilgrimage to the ashram was not tranquility, but instruction in some art, especially warfare. In the Ramayana , the princes of ancient Ayodhya , Rama , and Lakshmana , go to Vishvamitra 's ashram to protect his yajnas from being defiled by emissary-demons of Ravana . After they prove their mettle,

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