One God, a Thousand Names

Follow the gods of your week back far enough and several of them fall together into one. The people who spoke that six-thousand-year-old mother tongue seem to have worshipped a single great god — a "sky father," whose name was something close to Dyeus Phter. As his worshippers scattered across the world, his name travelled with them and twisted in each new mouth.

In Greece he became Zeus. In Rome, Jupiter — Dyeus-pater, "sky father," barely changed at all. In the cold north he became Tiw, or Tyr — and his day is your Tuesday. The same forgotten god, shattered into a dozen separate mythologies, still hiding in plain sight: in your calendar, and in the brightest planet in your night sky.

Every Tuesday, and every time anyone points up and names the planet Jupiter, they are quietly saying the name of one god, six thousand years dead.

And if one tribe's god could conquer half the world's tongues — who were they?