Puhvel Jaan. Myth and Law Among the Indo-Europeans Studies in Indo-European. Comparative Mythology

University of California Press, 1970. — 290 p. — ISBN 0-520-01587-8.Research activity in Indo-European comparative mythology has been regularly pursued at the University of California, Los Angeles, since the academic year 1959-60, when the Seminar in Indo-European Mythology was held for the first time. Other organizational milestones have been the creation of the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology in 1961 and of the Section of Indo-European Studies as an autonomous part of the Department of Classics in 1964.
Workers from many fields—anthropology, classical languages, Eng­ lish, folklore, Germanic languages, Indo-European studies, Slavic languages—have participated in these endeavors. Numerous research papers have been written and discussed over the years. A succession of research assistants (Anastasia Demetriades, C. Scott Littleton, Robert Gartman, Eleanor Long, Antoinette Botsford) have helped lay an exhaustive bibliographical and documentary groundwork under the auspices of the mythology section of the Center. At least two pub­ lished doctoral dissertations have drawn their inspiration and incep­ tion from these efforts (C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966], and Donald Ward, The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968]).
In a purely historical sense, the activity has centered on discovering and understanding the mythic, religious, social, and legal underpin­ nings of the ancient Indo-European-speaking continuum in terms of their oldest or most archaic manifestations. In a comparativistic vein, these materials have been used as starting points for prehistoric re­ construction.