Indo-European Documentation Center
Indo-European Texts
Indo-European texts have been attested for four millennia, written in scripts ranging from a cuneiform script borrowed from a second millennium B.C. north Syrian scribal school, and a local Anatolian kind of hieroglyphic, to the Latin letters that have become our alphabet.
As early as in the second millennium B.C. there were Indo-European text genres as diverse as religious and legal texts, historical texts, letters, literature, and texts intended to preserve knowledge of the current level of technology such as bilingual glossaries and manuals detailing how horses should be trained.
Sample Texts
We provide sample texts, all of them with English translations and almost all of them with glosses, for several Indo-European families of languages:
| Family | Language | Text(s) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anatolian | Hittite | Hymn to Istanu and Great Sun Hymn | ||
| Celtic | Old Irish | Summer Has Gone | ||
| Germanic | Old English | Bee Charm and Charm against Theft of Cattle | ||
| Old High German | Hildebrandslied 11: 1-26 | |||
| Old Norse | Edda (excerpt) | |||
| Gothic | Luke II: 1-20 | |||
| Hellenic | Homeric Greek | Chryses' Prayer (from the Iliad) | ||
| Indic | Rigvedic Sanskrit | Hymn to Agni | ||
| Italic | Old Latin | Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura and Mars Prayer | ||
| Slavic | Old Russian | The Lay of the Campaigns of Igor 11: 1-19 | ||
| Russian | Volkh Vseslav'evich Bylina 11: 69-76 |
For additional Indo-European texts with translations, see the IE Texts page.