“Ok, got a question, I can't find an answer. Which god came first, Jupiter or Zeus? I know they are the same, but which came first is older—are Greek or roman gods older? Which is first referenced in the oldest texts?”
-Rick, 10/18/21
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Rick, this is a fascinating question in that Zeus and Jove were regarded by their worshippers as the only immortal god, the only god to exist outside of Time. Indeed, in the first references of Zeus, he is described by Hesiod and Homer as 'Time Holder' the conqueror of Chronos, or Time.
The first references of either, are of Zeus, in Greek. So far as I know, the earliest archaeological evidence is of Zeus in Crete. That is old evidence, I had from books written in the 1930s.
Briefly the Аrуаn ages expressed in the first poetics of Hellas were these:
-Cosmos [Creation]
-Sky [Uranus]
-Time [Chronos]
-Thunder [Zeus]
-Thought [Promethean Man, us arrogant twits]
Zeus was more powerful than all other gods combined. The other gods could be killed—even by men!
It is conventional wisdom, as Greek writing was developed before Latin writing, that the Romans copied and followed the Greeks in all things. Yet, with more ancient literature lost than surviving, how much of our ordering of antiquity is a symptom of lost source omission? I discuss two possible exceptions below.
-If the Romans were descended, as they believed, from the Trojans, then they not only shared the same ideal of the Almighty Thunderer, Sower and Reaper of Gods and Men, but also had a more ancient claim to civilization.
-Or, if we do not accept the Roman notion of their ancestors having arrived in Italy aboard ships during the Bronze Age Collapse and cleave to scientific evidence of migration out of the Caucasus Mountains and Steppes and down into the European peninsulas, [1] then we are again, to arrive at a probable conclusion that the Romans came first to Europe, for they penetrated further than the Greeks.
Recognizing the same root Аrуаn traditions, I suspect that the Romans were descendants of Trojan refugees who mixed with an earlier Аrуаn population that invaded Europe ahead of the Greeks. There remains a good chance that Greek oral traditions borrowed from Latin traditions earlier in some pre-literate past.
On the other hand, the cults of Herakles to Hercules and of Alexander the Great, were clearly borrowed by Romans from Greeks. The question comes down to who was the more ancient branch of the Аrуаn people, something I am not qualified to determine.
I would suggest viewing the Survive the Jive YouTube channel for linguistic and DNA evidence.
There is also another consideration, Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, who I suspect was displaced by Odin as chief deity, in part because conversion to Christianity was had mainly through the cult of Odin, and that these converted Odinist-Christians, persecuted Thor cultists who fled to Greenland and North America and interbred with the Iroquois Folk rather then surrender Thunder to Thought. Indeed, Thunderer is an Iroquoian God, whose son, He Who Makes Rivers [Hiawatha] and his Prophet Degeniwida [Three-rivers] is the subject of The Sunset Saga novels.
It is no accident that the latent snake cultism of Pre-Аrуаn Europe is depicted not just in the Near Eastern Tiamat, but the medusa, hydra and the titan Typhon in ancient Greek myth, and also by the dragon that slew Beowulf. For that the first Christian King of Norway forced snakes down the throats of Thor Cultists who would not embrace the newer Hanged God.
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Notes
-1. Across all historic disciplines, a focus on land travel migration rather than nautical migration, when the ancient preferred travel by sea rather than land as soon as they had access to water, with the Vandals even becoming pirates in Late Antiquity, retards and distorts origins studies. This may be as simple as the ocean being less conducive to raising old wrecks than the land is of delivering old ruins, and is, in my estimation, probably a symptom of our current separation from sea travel, as the automobile tends to obscure the hardships of pre-industrial land travel.
They are the same god, separated by etymological distance. The IE god, and I know I don't need to tell you just posting for others, was something like "Dyews Pahtar" Father Dyews, God the Father. Whence we get Latin "Deus". And then after the IE expansions it gets shorted into Greek Zeus or something like that, in the various Greek dialects.
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%96%CE%B5%CF%8D%CF%82
The Latins kept the "Pahtar" part so if you say "Dyews Pahtar" fast, you can see how you get "Iupiter" Jupiter, of course they didn't have that "J" sound we picked up from the French.
As a Christian, I've always wondered if God the Father didn't cut a special deal with the Indo Europeans. Clearly they were favored by some supernatural entity. It's curious how, if you strip the IE religion down to the common elements, nearly all you're left with is God the Father, outside time as you say, just like the first person of the Holy Trinity. Not saying the early IEs were monotheists, just that across the various tribes, it seems like Dyews was one of the few things they all kept going after leaving the steppe. Fun fact: Tuesday is named after Germanic version of Dyews, who got demoted by Woden to be merely a god of war.