{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027777777777777776, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007882882882882882, 'mean_word_length': 4.610526315789474, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Castles of God: Fortified Religious Buildings of the World . By Peter Harrison. pp. iv, 304. Woodbridge, Boydell, 2004 (reprinted in paperback, 2007).

drawn from Indian and Greek sources and may bring us back to the Graeco-Aryan stratum but hardly beyond that. West’s disclaimer in dealing with skulls of enemies used as drinking cups in the section on ‘Vindictive victory’ is applicable to a number of other examples in this chapter: “The evidence does not allow us to treat this as a distinctive or originally Indo-European practice”.131 There is a brief return to the subject of similes which was dealt with extensively in Chapter 2 in order to add some examples in warfare from Sanskrit and Greek epic in the battle context before an interesting survey of hero’s funerals from a wide range of sources. Nothing here, as West admits, “takes us back before the Late Bronze Age, and we simply cannot project it back to the proto-Indo-European era”. He thinks it unlikely that the Indo-Europeans practised cremation, whereas archaeological discoveries trace burial back to the fourth millennium bce. The last word goes appropriately enough to funeral rites and dirges. There is plenty of evidence, possible though not conclusive for Indo-European, of the suicide of a wife concomitant with that of her husband. Perhaps the best known case of this is the Indian suttee (from Sanskrit sat̄ı ‘good woman’), although this is not strictly speaking an example of suicide since the Vedic evidence seems to show that the wife, having lain down with her husband on the pyre, descended before it was ignited.132 As a parting jeu d’esprit West gives us his own ‘Elegy on an Indo-European Hero’ cleverly incorporating only names and motifs which have credibility for the earliest period. So why call this book Indo-European Poetry and Myth rather than Elements in the Poetry and Myth of Indo-European Peoples which may be attributed to a Common Origin? The latter title, though unwieldy, is without question an accurate description of its contents. The former implies that solutions have been found to the problem of recognising incontrovertible examples of Indo-European poetry and mythology. The answer perhaps is that we should not judge a book by its cover or, in this case, by its title. There are no extravagant claims for solutions here and, although he has not given us the last word on the subject, West has provided us with more than the ‘vista’ he promised at the outset. It is, in fact, a virtual compendium of the most relevant material distilled by one of the finest minds to venture into this field.133 This book will remain a tool of immense value to scholars.