Can a comparison between Indian and Greek philosophies abstract from history? Most scholars would agree that to isolate philosophical positions from the socio-cultural history in which they were formulated is artificial and problematic, but the question then becomes what sort of history is needed. Of course the Vedas were preceded by the Indus Valley civilisation and Homer by the Mycenaeans, but such precursors cast little light on philosophy and can be left to other specialists. So histories of Sanskrit thinking usually start with the Ṛgveda, much as their Greek equivalents start with Homer. No doubt many scholars take for granted that no other style of history is or ever will be feasible.

The assumption is paradoxical, however, since, as languages, Sanskrit and Greek have histories that go back well before the Vedas and Homer. For two centuries philologists have been writing their own sort of history, embodying many of their findings in the starred forms they attribute to the Indo-European protolanguage (usually dated to the fourth millennium BCE). This history involves semantics as well as phonology, and the well-known work of Benveniste (1969) studied the vocabulary of Indo-European institutions. Equally well-recognised are Calvert Watkins (1995), who applied a similar approach to the history of Indo-European poetical phraseology, and Martin West (2007), who in addition tackled some particular constructs found in Indo-European myth and epic.

More immediately relevant is the vast corpus of comparativism produced by Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), much of it addressing the Indo-European ‘trifunctional ideology’. Leaving the functions till later, I emphasise the word ‘ideology’, which Dumézil defines in various ways. Depending on viewpoint, it can be defined ‘either as a means of exploring material and moral reality or as a means of ordering the capital of ideas accepted by the society’. It was ‘at once an ideal and a way of analysing and interpreting the forces that ensure the smooth running of the world (le cours du monde) and the life of men’. Trifunctionality was ‘the framework (cadre) of a system of thought, an explanation of the world, in brief a theology and a philosophy, or, if you like, an ideology’.