*Kóryos
Indo-European youthful warrior-bands / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, war-band, unit of warriors"[1]) refers to the theoretical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for several years, as a rite of passage into manhood, before their full integration into society.
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Scholars such as Kim McCone[2] and Gerhard Meiser[1] have theorized the existence of the kóryos based on later Indo-European traditions and myths that feature links between landless young males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in war-bands sent away for part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities)[citation needed], then defending the host society for the rest of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between vulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.