As has been noted by Émile Benveniste (1969: 99–101), ‘order’ is an extremely important concept for Indo-Europeans and is represented by, inter alia, Greek ‘harmonia’, Sanskrit ṛtá, Avestan aša, and Old Persian arta, all of which descend from the same PIE root – *H2er- (to become adjusted, to fit). However, as Franklin has pointed out, the importance of order to Indo-Europeans is often discussed in light of the connection between arta and ṛtá. It is surprising that there have been scarcely any accounts of the striking similarities between harmonia and ṛtá, and my aim in this paper is to shed some light on that affinity. Harmonia was an important cosmological and ethical concept for Heraclitus, Empedocles and the so-called Pythagoreans; ṛtá, on the other hand, is considered by many to be the quintessence of Vedic philosophy. I argue that both these terms can be understood as abstract concepts of order, and I rely on evidence from the Ṛgveda and from the fragments of Heraclitus, Empedocles and Philolaus in order to do so. (For ṛtá see also Jurewicz in this volume.)

The first pressing problem concerning both terms is that they are not easily translatable. A cursory glance at any lexicon will demonstrate the vast range of meanings that ṛtá has; and harmonia isn't nearly as straightforward as most present-day translators have taken it to be – indeed much is lost in unhesitatingly translating it as ‘harmony’. Accordingly, I will begin with an overview of the various meanings of each of these terms before turning to the Ṛgvedic hymns and Pre-Socratic fragments in order to offer a conceptual comparison between the two.

Harmonia

I would like to begin with a brief note on the etymology of ‘harmonia’ (‘harmoniē’ in the Ionic Greek dialect). The abstract suffix ‘ia’, (-iə̯) is added to a conjectural theme *ar-mn, which itself presumably comes from the PIE root *H2er- (fit). Harmonia does not, of course, mean what contemporary music theorists define as ‘harmony’; indeed, as the other words that derive from this root suggest, the earliest uses of harmonia are not even specifically musical. For Homer, in whose works we find the first extant occurrence of the word, the primary meaning is ‘physical joining’ together of planks of wood. In the same corpus, though, we already encounter a more abstract meaning in the Iliad (22.255–6), where harmonia stands for ‘covenant’ or ‘agreement’.