Libmonster ID: IN-1477

According to the myth of the origin of man, recorded among the peoples of Eastern Europe and Siberia, the creator put a dog to guard the figures of people, and the creator's opponent bribed the watchman and made people vulnerable to diseases. The Creator punished the dog by forcing it to serve man. The texts recorded in India (mainly among the Munda peoples), the Hindu Kush Dards, and the Abkhazians are similar to the North Eurasian texts, but in them the dog did not betray, but protected the person whom the horses tried to destroy. In the Mongolian (more precisely, Oirat) version, a cow appears instead of a horse, otherwise the Mongolian version is close to the Abkhazian ones. The image of a horse that evokes negative associations is typical of the myths of the population of Europe and Central Asia. The source of similar stories in Eurasia was the myth of the origin of man, common among the Indo-Europeans of the Bronze Age. In the folklore of South Asia and the European-Siberian zone, there are other parallels, in particular, the myth of the diver behind the earth. Their analysis allows us to reconstruct the ancient mythology of the inhabitants of the Eurasian steppes.

Keywords: Indo-Europeans, Munda peoples, mythology of Eurasia, myth of the origin of man, myth of the diver behind the earth.

The abundance of vivid archaeological materials on the cultures of the Eurasian steppes in the third-first millennium BC contrasts with the lack of information about the mythology of the bearers of these cultures. Greek sources are stingy. It is difficult to say which motifs reflected in the Avesta are related to the steppe zone, and which are related to the south of Central Asia (Bryant, 2001, pp. 132-133). The traditions of the Turkic peoples of the Eurasian steppe belt contain almost no narratives about the origin of the world and man. The mythology of the pre-Turkic period was lost as the waves of nomads moved from east to west, and the Turkic one itself almost disappeared under the influence of Islam. Based on image analysis, the myth plot cannot be restored. There is only one way to reconstruct the myths of the steppe zone - to identify ancient borrowings in the traditions of those regions whose population was once in contact with the inhabitants of the steppes.

Anthropogonic plot man, dog and horse

In the folklore of the peoples of Eastern Europe and Siberia, there are motifs that evoke associations either with Christianity or with Zoroastrianism, but do not find analogies in the canonical texts of these religions. Such motives, in particular, contain the story of the creation of man.


* The work is based on the electronic Catalog of folklore and mythological motifs and is supported by the program of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences "Historical and Cultural heritage and spiritual values of Russia". The catalog is available on the website: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/berezkin, maps of the distribution of motifs and their English definitions on the site: http://starling.rinet.ru/kozmin/tales/index.php?index=berezkin. I am grateful for the help of many friends and colleagues, especially Y. V. Vasilkov, V. Y. Kryukova, I. I. Peyros and N. A. Yanchevskaya.

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A common option is this. After creating the bodies of people and leaving the dog to guard them, the creator went away. The antagonist bribes the caretaker with a fur coat, approaches the figures of people and spits on them, which is why people are now susceptible to diseases and death. When the creator returns, he turns the bodies inside out so that the filth remains inside, and punishes the dog: now it is obliged to serve man and eat garbage.

In this form, the myth is recorded among the Russians of the central and northern provinces of European Russia, Ukrainians, Udmurts, Mari, Mordvins, Chuvash, Mansi, Nenets, Western Evenks, various groups of Yakuts, Russian-speaking Mestizos of the Russian Estuary, Kumandins, Tubalars, Khakas, Tofalars, Buryats*. This story was probably also in the folklore of the Lithuanians, although the retelling in the source is fragmentary. Some variants retain the core of the plot, but differ in details. So, in the Komi Republic, we are talking about a child protected by a dog and spat on by the antagonist Ombl, and there are no motives for the creator to take care of the soul for a person and turn their bodies inside out. The inversion motif is generally compatible only with variants in which the creator himself animates people. However, where the antagonist puts his soul into them, or where it is not about animating the figures, but about giving them strength, this motif does not occur. The Khanty, most Nenets and Evenks, Mongols, Altaians, Shors, Negidals and Evens do not have it. The Western Evenks have not only a standard version, but also different versions [Vasilevich, 1959, p. 175, 178]. According to one of the latter, certain "employees" of the creator Haveki are allowed to access the human figures of the antagonist Harga. In another version, Haveka's "helper" is a raven, which the creator punishes in the same way as in other versions of the dog - he commands to eat garbage.

The plot is not recorded on the territory of Kazakhstan, but there is a recording made by the "Siberian Kyrgyz". The devil let out the frost, the dog hid, and the devil spat on the man. The returning creator does not punish the caretaker, but recognizes that the dog could not perform its duties without warm clothes, so he himself, and not the antagonist, gives it a skin [Ivanovsky, 1891, p.250]. "Justification" of the dog distinguishes this version from the usual Siberian ones.

Most of all, the Oroch text deviates from the main scheme, representing the eastern periphery of the distribution zone and areally isolated from others. In it, the dog itself, having fed (and thereby revived) a person contrary to the instructions of the creator, turns out to be his antagonist. As a result, people lost their hard skin, preserved only in the form of fingernails. The text of the southern Selkups leaves an impression of half-forgotten and distorted: loz (devil) forces the dog to change its skin, which was like a man's fingernails, to the current one, and nothing is said about the fate of the man himself.

Despite the obvious connection of some texts with the Christian apocryphal tradition, it is not clear where the corresponding motives came from. The names of the protagonists in the Siberian and Volga-Perm versions are not borrowed from the Russians, they are local mythological characters. The main thing is that the hypothesis of the development of the plot from the "Abrahamic" mythology does not agree with the South Eurasian versions of the same plot. There are no traces of a dualistic worldview, the role of the antagonist is not comparable to that of the creator, and the antagonist usually appears in the image of a horse (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Map-scheme of distribution of the northern and southern versions of the myth of human creation. 1-the watchman (usually a dog) cannot protect the human bodies created by the creator from the antagonist; 2 - the watchman (usually a dog) successfully drives away the antagonist who tried to destroy the creation of God; 3 - the antagonist is a horse or cow (among the Mongols).


* I omit references to the sources of European-Siberian texts, as they are indicated in my article [Berezkin, 2006b].

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These versions are recorded in peoples who speak languages of different families (Figure 2). Vakhans speak one of the Pamir languages belonging to the Eastern Iranian ones. The Kalash and Kho languages of the Eastern Hindu Kush speak Indo-Aryan languages of the Dardian branch (possibly equidistant from Iranian and Indo-Aryan). The language of the Oraons living in India in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and neighboring states belongs to the northern branch of Dravidian languages, the language of the Gonds-to the central Dravidian, spoken in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Limbu, Kachari (similar in language to Bodo) and Mizo (also known as Lushei, Hami, Kumi) live in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, North-Eastern India and neighboring Burma and speak Tibeto-Burman languages. Barela-Bhilala in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh speak Bhili, the language of the Indo-Aryan family. Khasi are Austroasiatic by language, living in the state of Meghalaya in northeastern India. The remaining South Asian groups that know the plot are Munda-speaking, living in the eastern and central regions of India (actually munda, or Mundari, Korku, Santali, Birjya, birkhor, Haria).

Almost all variants recorded in India and Nepal were studied by the German indologist D. Kapp (Kapp, 1977). Additional materials were collected by the Japanese linguist T. Osada [Osada, 2010]. Only the Kachari version remained out of their attention (Soppitt, 1885, p. 32). The most recordings were made among Oraons (ten versions), Mundari (six), Santals and Korku (three versions each).

A typical scenario is this. God makes clay figures of a man and a woman and leaves them to dry. A horse or two horses, often winged, break pieces. The Creator creates a dog or two dogs that fend off the attackers. The horse is punished-it loses its wings, from now on its destiny is to serve man and be beaten. The horse's desire to prevent the creation of man is connected with its fear that man will harness it. In one of the korku texts, trees try to destroy human figures because they are afraid that a person will cut them down.

Similar to the Indian version is recorded in the Dards. Before the creation of man, the world was inhabited by horses. They were prevented from trampling Adam's clay body by a dog that has been guarding the man ever since. The navel on our body is a mark from a hoof strike [Yettmar, 1986, p. 444].

The main group includes texts in which the watchman is not mentioned at all or is (in mundari) not a dog, but a tiger or spider. Among the Dards [Ibid., p. 359] and Munda-speaking groups, similar variants exist along with typical ones. At the Wakhans and Lim-

Figure 2. Map-diagram of the current distribution of Munda languages in India and the areas inhabited by some Dravidian (blue font) and Tibeto-Burman (red font) groups, as well as Khasi (purple font) and Bhila (green font).

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bu full texts (with a watchdog) are not known. The Vakhans say that God created man beautiful, but the horse kicked the unfinished figure out of envy, so people always have some kind of bodily flaw. As a punishment, God ordered the horse to serve man. In the limbu myth, Niva-Buma made a figure of the first man out of gold, but a monster in the form of a horse destroyed it out of envy for the perfection of creation. For this, Niva-Buma ordered the horse to move not on two legs, as before, but on four and be a pack animal. The Creator fashioned people out of ashes and bird droppings (Hermanns, 1954, p. 10-11). In Mizo, Kachari, and Khasi, the antagonists who try to destroy human figures are the serpent, an evil spirit, or the creator's brothers (Kapp, 1977, p. 50; Shakespear, 1909, p. 399; Soppitt, 1885, p.32). In these texts, the role of protective dogs is the same as in most others. Within India, the most distinct and geographically remote tradition is the barela-bhilala tradition, in which the goddess sculpts human figures, the "heavenly queen of eagles" tries to destroy them, the male character kills this queen, and the supreme god-creator invests souls in people [Kapp, 1977, p.46].

Let us note the "late Zoroastrian legend" (Litvinsky and Sedov, 1984, p.166). When Ormuzd created the primordial man Gaiomard, he assigned seven sages to protect him from Ahriman, but they failed to do so. Then Ormuzd put a watchdog called Zarringos ("yellow ears") as a guard, and since then this dog has been guarding souls going to the other world from demons. There is no such plot in the Avesta, but this does not exclude the possibility of its early existence in the oral tradition.

As can be seen from the above examples, there are systematic differences between the variants of the plot in the north and in the south of Eurasia. In the variants that exist in Eastern Europe and Siberia, the dog did not cope with the task, and in the south of Eurasia, it successfully protected human figures. The northern versions not only tell about the creation of man, but also explain why he is sick and mortal, while in the southern versions this topic is absent. However, the similarity between the northern and southern versions is sufficiently great to exclude the possibility of accidental coincidence. There are no similar narratives anywhere else. Only one text of the Ojibwa steppes in Canada is slightly similar to the Eurasian ones. Visekechak makes a human figure out of stone and goes to admire it. The bear rubs against the figure, it falls and breaks. Visekechak makes a new one out of clay, so people are weak [Simms, 1906, p. 338-339]. The similarity with the Eurasian texts is accidental here, since the Ojibwa plot is essentially not the presence of a specific antagonist character, but the opposition of strong and fragile materials with which a person is associated. This particular feature is typical of the myths about the origin of death recorded in northwestern North America (Berezkin, 2010, pp. 17-21).

There is only one historical scenario that can explain the analogies between the South Asian and European-Siberian variants. Since the areas of their distribution are separated by the steppe zone, this is where you need to look for the original source of the plot. The period before which the plot should have already existed is determined by the time when contacts between steppe and South Asian groups of origin began.

The most interesting variants are those recorded among the munda. Today, speakers of most of the" tribal " languages of India are scattered over a large area, and some groups have changed their language affiliation over the past hundred or two hundred years. However, the areas where the number of native speakers of the respective languages is highest still coincide with the areas where they primarily lived in the past [Osada and Onishi, 2010]. The main area of distribution of Munda languages is located within the Chota Nagpur plateau (Jharkhand state and neighboring territories). Here live the Santals, Ho, Mundari, Birhor, Asur (including Birjya) and other peoples who speak the languages of the northern branch of the Munda. Further south, mostly in the ROC. Koraput of the state of Orissa, the languages of the southern branch are represented - bondo, Sora and similar ones. Much to the west, in the state of Maharashtra, the Korku language is localized, belonging to the northern branch. The Kharia and Juang languages were previously considered to belong to the southern branch, but in recent classifications they are considered to belong to the northern branch (Diffloth, 2005).


* Information from Bogsho Lashkarbekov dated 14.02.2005.

* Lod and Galela on the island of Halmahera (Indonesia, Northern Moluccas), whose languages are among the Papuan, also recorded myths about how the creator (or his messenger) made clay images of people and went to get souls for them. An evil spirit named O Ibilisi (from the Arabic "Iblis" - "devil") split the images. Then the creator turned the antagonist's feces into a female and a male, which drove the antagonist away, and people were successfully revived [Baarda, 1904, N 13, p. 442-444; Kraijt, 1906, p. 471]. Although this Indonesian version is close to the Indian ones (especially the Khasi version), it, like the Ojibwa myth, can be left out. The plot came to Moluccas, most likely, after the spread of Islam, as evidenced by the name of the antagonist. How exactly this happened is irrelevant to our topic.

** Haria and juang belong to the northern group and confirm the conclusions of I. I. Peyros, obtained on the basis of a hundred-word list of M. Svodesh according to S. A. Starostin's glottochronological formula.

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Juang is spoken in Northern Orissa, while Haria is spoken in almost the same areas as Mundari (Peterson, 2009, VI-VIII).

The Munda family of languages first split into southern and northern branches, then separated the Haria and Juang languages, then separated from each other Bondo and Sora, and finally Korku. Lexicostatistical dates, although approximate, give an orientation on the scale of centuries and indicate the sequence of division of languages. In the case of the languages that we are interested in now, we are talking about the period from the beginning of the second millennium BC (the collapse of the protomund) to the middle of the first millennium BC (the separation of Korku).

Among the Munda peoples, the myth of creating human figures and attempting to destroy them is recorded in the northern groups, including the Korku. It should be noted that Korku mythology is poorly reflected in the sources, and materials on bondo and sora are plentiful. Korku has several versions of the myth, but Bondo and Sora are fairly certain that it is not. This means that the Munda may have been familiar with the story in question between 1700 and 900 BC (the dates, as I have pointed out, are approximate, but we are definitely not talking about the third millennium BC or the middle of the first millennium BC). a version similar to the mundari variants [Pinnow, 1965, N 26, p. 142-143]. Since the Haria were in contact with the Mundari, the presence of their plot is not indicative. But its absence in the southern Munda and its presence in Korku is precisely because these groups do not have territorial contact with the northern Munda.

The Dravidian languages of India are mostly localized south of the Munda languages. The Oraons are northern Dravidians who live in alternate bands with the northern Mundas. They are the leaders in South Asia in the number of texts with the subject under consideration, the Gonds (central Dravidians) have only one such text, and the rest of the Dravidian peoples do not have them at all. The Oraon texts do not differ from the Mundari versions. They could have been borrowed either from Munda or directly from the original, non-South Asian carriers of the story.

The Tibeto-Burmese peoples of South Asia live in the Himalayan zone. They have both motifs-the antagonist horse and the watchdog. The first, however, is recorded only in the Nepalese Limbu, and the second-only in those living to the east, already in India, Kachari and Mizo. The mythologies of Northeast India and the lepcha mythology of Sikkim are well studied. This plot is clearly not the main one for the Tibeto-Burmese and most groups do not have it. The same can be said about Khasi, in the version of which the watchdog is represented, but the antagonist is just some evil spirit. The Munda and Khasi languages are Austroasiatic, but they belong to different branches. Austroasiatic peoples outside of India do not know the plot.

Materials on the mythology of the Bhils, which also include the barela-bhilala, are scarce, but the stories that are recorded indicate connections with the mythologies of the "tribal" peoples of Eastern India, and not with the Indo-Aryan ones [Karr, 1986, p. 266-269; Koppers and Jungblut, 1976, p. 167, 199 - 201]. What language the Bhils spoke before switching to Indo-Aryan is unknown, but it is likely that it was the language of the Munda family. The absence of both a horse and a dog in the barel-bhilal myth is explained by the loss of elements of traditional mythology in the inoculature environment.

It is the Munda who can claim to be the main carriers of the plot in South Asia. However, they themselves borrowed the plot. First, it is not present in the southern Munda and other Austroasiates, except for the Khasi. Secondly, the horse, which plays an important role in the myth, appeared in South Asia only with the Indo-Europeans. Equid bones at Harappan sites do not belong to domestic horses (Bryant, 2001, pp. 170-175; Parpola and Janhunen, 2010, p. 435). On the western border of the Indian Subcontinent, a change in culture has been noticeable since the 13th century. It is probably associated with the appearance of Eastern Iranians (Kuzmina, 2008, pp. 300-305; 2010, p.34). The arrival of the first Indo-Aryans is not archaeologically reliably recorded, as, indeed, most other migrations known from written sources or language data. However, most linguists and archaeologists limit the time of the arrival of Indo-Europeans in India to 1900-1200. BC [Bryant, 2001, p. 218, 224, 229-230].

Neither the Sanskrit texts nor the folklore of modern Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples, with the exception of Barela-Bhilal, contain any stories about an attempt to destroy the human figures created by the deity. But, as it was said, this story is recorded among the speakers of the Dardic languages of the Eastern Hindu Kush. Therefore, it is quite likely that it was the Dards or some group close to them that brought the story to India. Traces of her presence were later erased in the course of the promotion of related Indo-Aryans. The above-mentioned time of Indo-European penetration into India is consistent with the estimated time when the subcontinent aborigines borrowed the story from them - between the breakup of protomund in the early II millennium BC and the separation of Korku in the early I millennium BC. According to the configuration of the area of plot variants in South Asia (mainly from the Himalayas to the east of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand), the carriers of the story settled in the Ganges Valley.

In the Pamirs, the plot, as noted, is known to the Vakhans. They could have borrowed it from the Dards or inherited it from their Saka ancestors. Were the eastern Iranians of Turkestan familiar with the plot?

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it is difficult, but very likely, that this myth was once widespread in the Eurasian steppes. This hypothesis is supported by Abkhazian and Mongolian materials.

Among the Abkhazians, the plot was discovered in the 1990s. One text was written by the ethnographer M. Bartsyts from the words of her mother, the other by the folklorist V. Kogonia*. The version recorded by M. Bartsyts is as follows. When the creation of the world was taking place, the devil sent horses on a man made of clay to destroy him: "otherwise, they say, he will torment them all his life." The man managed to grab a handful of clay from his stomach and throw it at the attackers, the clods became dogs and drove the horses away. In the second version, the dog protects a person on its own initiative, and not by the decree of the creator. God created man from clay. The devil warned the horses: "If a person comes to life, then you will not live. Kill him!" The horses lunged at the man, but the dogs drove them away. This is why a person and a dog are considered close.

These texts have no analogues in the Caucasus. The plot could have penetrated here as a result of contacts of the local population with steppe Indo-Europeans, whose direct linguistic descendants have not been preserved (the penetration of the Alans-Ossetians into the Caucasus dates back to a later time).

The Mongolian, or more precisely, Oirat (Derbet) version, recorded, as the author of the Russian-language publication kindly informed me, in 1984 in the Ubsunu aimag, shows parallels with the Abkhazian ones and is also unique for its region. God made two people out of clay. A cow came and picked up a figure with her horn, and it fell and broke. The shards became a dog that has been barking at the cow ever since. A dog and a human have a common origin, so their bones are identical (Skorodumova, 2003: 51-52). Among the Mongols, as among the Abkhazians, the dog is not assigned by the creator to protect the human figure; it arises from a fragment of this figure at the moment of the antagonist's attack. In these variants, unlike others, the proximity of the dog and the person is emphasized. In this connection, it is impossible not to recall the highest status of the dog and its proximity to humans in the Avestan and late Zoroastrian traditions [Kryukova, 2005, p. 202-205; Chunakova, 2004, p.203; Vouse, 1989, p. 145-146].

Since the story is narrowly distributed in Mongolia, the probability of Abkhazians borrowing it from the soldiers of Genghis Khan is small. On the eastern and southwestern edges of the Great Steppe, the source of borrowing was the inhabitants of this territory in the Bronze Age-native speakers of Indo-European languages. Only they could have been in contact with some groups in the east, from which the plot reached the modern Mongols, and with the North Caucasians in the west, and with the peoples of South Asia.

It is significant that in the Mongol version, the antagonist is not a horse, but a cow. Among the Mongolian and Turkic peoples of Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, the horse does not cause negative associations, while the bull and cow sometimes act as their carriers. Among the Kazakhs, Altaians, Tuvans, Mongols (including Oirats), Yakuts, and also among the Nenets, the image of a bull or cow is the embodiment of fierce cold or is associated with the appearance of winter, and among the Tuvans and Yakuts, a bad bull is contrasted in the corresponding myth with a good horse that wants warmth [Benningsen, 1912, pp. 55-57; Katash, 1978, p. 18-19; Kulakovsky, 1979, p. 73, 77-78; Lekhtisalo, 1998, p. 16; Potanin, 1883, N 37, p. 203; 1972, p. 54-55; Ergis, 1974, p. 149; Taube, 2004, N 5, p. 19]. On the contrary, among the peoples of Europe, less often the Caucasus and Central Asia (ancient Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Gagauz, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Norwegians, Danes, Lithuanians, Latvians, Veps, Finns, Komi, Ossetians, Tajiks) and in the Middle Persian Avestan tradition, the horse is considered to be the creation or incarnation of the enemy of god [Belova, 2004, N 374, 375, p. 176; Bulashev, 1909, p. 401; Bulgakovsky, 1890, p. 189; Velyus, 1981, p. 263; Vukichevich, 1915, p. 109-111; Zaglada, 1929, p. 12; Limerov, 2005, N 70, 73, 74, pp. 68-70, 74-76; Moshkov, 2004, pp. 204-205, 261; Petrovich, 2004, pp. 183-184; Pogodin, 1895, p. 439; Stoynev, 2006, p. 163; Sukhareva, 1975, p. 39-40; Chubinsky, 1872, p. 49; Chunakova, 2004, p. PO, 216; Shevchenko, 1936, p. 92; Aagpe, 1912, N 58, p. 11; Dahnhardt, 1907, p. 341 - 342], and in folklore Images of demonic cannibal horses are presented [Apollodorus, 1972, II, 5, 8, p. 36, 149; Byazyrov, 1971, N 15, p. 156-173]. In the ancient Greek tradition, as in the Turkic Siberian tradition, the bull and the horse are opposed to each other as beings that bring good or evil, but the signs in this opposition are opposite: bees arise from the bull's corpse, and wasps or drones arise from the horse's corpse [Gunda, 1979, p. 398-399].

One of the Norwegian versions directly echoes the South Asian myths. The devil decided to create a beast that would run around the earth and destroy people. He tried to revive the beast by spitting, but to no avail. The beast was revived by God, who told it to become a horse and serve man. The mark of devil's spit is horn formations on the horse's legs (Dahnhardt, 1907, p. 342).

The last version of the plot that remains to be mentioned is recorded in nganasan. The progenitor gave birth to a child-a sprig of talc. Her husband planted a twig. "The disease came and shat." The husband asked his wife for a second child to guard the first. The second child was a hornless olenchik. He asks his father to give him horns to fight the worms


* I owe this information to M. Bartsyts and Z. Japua.

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and reptiles, gets horns made of mammoth bone and stone, destroys reptiles [Popov, 1984, pp. 42-43].

The Nganasan myth is closer to the southern rather than the northern versions, since the watchman in it successfully drives away the antagonist. The genesis of the Nganasan was influenced by the Tungus, Samoyedic peoples, whose language was inherited by the inhabitants of Taimyr, as well as a local substrate of unknown linguistic affiliation (Dolgikh, 1952). There is no linguistic evidence of contacts between the Prasamodians and steppe Indo-European groups*, but archaeological materials indicate that the descendants of the creators of the Pazyryk culture probably moved far north [Molodin, 2003, pp. 148-178]. In any case, we are probably dealing with an ancient version of the myth preserved in Taimyr, which the population of the taiga and tundra borrowed from the inhabitants of the steppe zone. Later, this variant was almost completely replaced by the European-Siberian one.

Plot The diver behind the earth

The time of spread of the northern version of the myth of the creation of man is determined by the presence of Manichaean motifs in it. The story of its appearance in Eastern Europe may be similar to that of the land diver myth. The latter is of the deepest antiquity [Berezkin, 2007; Napolskikh, 1991], but it most likely came to the south of Eastern Europe during the Great Migration period and was reworked there under the Bogomil influence [Napolskikh, 2008]. Manichaeism probably reached Siberia during the Sogdian colonization along the Great Silk Road [Kyzlasov 2001], and from there nomads (Avars, as suggested by V. V. Napolskikh) were brought to Europe, where it also penetrated from other sources. The areas of fixation of the northern variants of the myth of the corrupted creation and the watchdog fit into the North Eurasian area of the "diver" (Figure 3). In the Siberian Northeast, most peoples of the Amur-Sakhalin region, as well as the Sami, have neither a "diver" nor a "corrupted creation". But in many North Eurasian traditions, in particular among the Mari, Mordvins, Chuvash, Nenets, Kiren Evenks, Altaians, Khakass, Shors, Buryats, and Mongols, the story of the creator, antagonist, and watchman directly continues the story of the origin of terrestrial land extracted from the ocean floor (Vereshchagin, 1996, p. 134; Gomboev, 1890, No. 1b, pp. 67-69; Yegorov, 1995, pp. 117-118; Katanov, 1963, pp. 155-156; Labanauskas, 1995, pp. 13-15; Lar, 2001, pp. 188-205; Nenyang, 1997, pp. 21-23;

Pinegina and Konenkin, 1952, pp. 49-50; Potanin, 1883, No. 46, pp. 218-223; Sedova, 1982, pp. 13-15; Skorodumova, 2003, pp. 35-37; Shtygashev, 1894, pp. 1-8].

Northern Eurasian myths, which combine stories about a diver behind the earth and the antagonist's attempt to spoil the figures of people created by God, finally took shape, probably in the era of the Great Migration of Peoples. However, the initial plot concatenation of the two plots may have occurred earlier, since both are connected in the same texts also in India.

The myth of the land diver in South Asia is widespread among the northern and southern Munda (Agaria, Birkhor, Mundari, Santala, Bondo, Sora), Oraons, central Dravidians (Gonds, Koya and Mari) and Tibeto-Burmese (Garo, Kachari, Mishmi, Kachin). It is also recorded among the Baiga and Chero (a group of not quite clear, apparently changing linguistic affiliation) and some Indo-Aryan peoples. Among the latter are the Tharu of Nepal and the Sinhalese, who migrated to Ceylon from Eastern India almost 3 thousand years ago. This story is reflected in early Sanskrit texts, although their compilers already poorly understood it [Vasilkov, 2006]. East of India, the plot is recorded in the Shan states of Burma and the Semangs of Malaysia, but in general it is not typical for Southeast Asia. In Mundari, Santal, birkhor, oraon and Kachari, the story of the creation of man with the participation of an antagonist-a horse and a watchdog-directly continues the story of extracting land from the bottom of the sea.

The plot of the land diver myth is too complex to have independently emerged in the north and south of Eurasia. Its American variants undoubtedly go back to Asian ones, but the ratio of Indian and Siberian variants has not been studied. In the last millennium and a half, contacts between India and Siberia have passed through Tibet and Mongolia. Fragments of the Tibetan myth of extracting earth from under the water have been preserved [Hermanns, 1949, p. 289-290, 833], but it is clear that the turtle was a diver in it, as in one of the Mongolian versions [Skorodumova, 2003, p.35-37]. In another Mongolian version, there is a frog instead of a turtle [Potanin, 1883, N 466, pp. 220-223]. The same variant with a frog is represented in the Trans-Baikal and Okhotsk Evenks (Vasilevich, 1969, pp. 214-215; Mazin, 1984, pp. 19-20). A version with a turtle as a land diver is also available in India, so the Indian influence on the Mongolian version of the "diver" is possible. However, all this is not directly related to the main North Eurasian tradition. According to most versions recorded among the Mongolian-speaking peoples, the turtle or frog began to support the earth, but the grains of earth appeared not from the bottom of the ocean, but from somewhere above or from the side [Benningsen, 1912, pp. 13-14; Nassen-Bayer and Stuart, 1992, p. 327-329; Stuart,


* It is possible that (proto)had such contactstokharov [Napolskikh, 1997, p. 82].

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3. Map-scheme of distribution of some mythological motifs in Northern Eurasia. 1 - "tainted creation": the dog passes the antagonist to the human figures created by God; 2 - " diver for the earth "(approximate range limit); 3 - "striped chipmunk".

Limusishiden, 1994, p. 41]. It seems that the diving motif came to the Mongols late and did not become widespread. In Siberia, the myth of the diver has existed since the Paleolithic period, otherwise it would not have been brought to the regions of North America located south of the Laurentian Glacier (Berezkin, 2007). For such an early time, it is unrealistic to assume contacts between India and Siberia via Tibet: during the epochs of global cooling, high-altitude regions most likely remained uninhabited.

If in the North Eurasian versions the protagonists of the myth of extracting land from the bottom of the sea are waterfowl, then in the South Eurasian versions different characters play the role of divers. According to the texts of mundari and Santalov, the crab (or crab, shrimp) and then the turtle reach the bottom, but they cannot bring the earth to the surface, and the worm succeeds [Bodding, 1942, p. 3-5; Roy, 1912, v-vi; Osada, 2010]. Among the Tharu, agaria, sora, birkhor, baiga, and Gonds, one or more of these characters or their close analogs (a leech instead of an earthworm) try to get the earth [Elwin, 1939, p. 308-316; 1949, N 1, p. 27-28; 1954, N 14, p. 433-134; Fuchs, 1952, p. 608-617; Krauskopff, 1987, p. 14-16; Prasad, 1989, p. 3]. The variant in which the land is brought by insects is represented in the Mishmi in the north-east of India (white ants), shan (also ants) and semangov (dung beetle) [Elwin, 1958, No. 18, p. 23-24; Evans, 1937, p. 159; Walk, 1933, p. 74]. In the related Kachari garo, two species of crabs fail, and the land is brought by a beetle, in the Oraons-by a kingfisher, in the Kachin and Sinhalese - by anthropomorphic characters [Volkhonsky and Solntseva, 1985, N 1, pp. 28-29; Elwin, 1958, N 27, p. 137; Playfair, 1909, p. 82 - 83]. In one of the Bondo texts, among the Dravidians koya and maria, and in the Hindu tradition, a boar gets the ground from the bottom [Vasilkov, 2006; Elwin, 1949, N 4, p. 30-31; 1950, p. 135-136; 1954, N 5, p. 426].

The composition and character sets in the stories of land mining from the bottom of the sea in South Asia are more diverse than in Europe and Siberia, so it is more likely that the northern variants spun off from the southern ones, and not vice versa. In any case, the areas of the southern and northern versions of the plot must have been in contact at some point.

There is no "diver" in East Asia. In the Pacific regions, a different story is presented - the descent of the earth from the upper world to the waters or into some indefinite abyss. Among Austronesians (except Taiwanese), this story dominates. It is also characteristic of the Vietas, Ryukyusans, Japanese, Udege, Nanais, and the easternmost groups of Evenks, Itelmen, Chukchi, and Eskimos. Both in India and in continental Siberia, the plot of the earth's descent from the sky, although it is found, is very rare (kondy, chero, mansi).

It is therefore more likely that the southern and northern versions of the "diver" are connected through areas west of Tibet. In favor of it - the presence of two territorial divisions.-


* For sources, see the website: http://www.rathenia.ru/folklore / berezkin, motif of VZE.

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integrated versions in intermediate territories. The first one is typical of the Dards and neighboring Burish (Yettmar, 1986, p.223-224; Hermanns, 1949, p. 839), and the second one is typical of the Karachais (Karaketov, 1995, p. 64-67). The Dardian-Burish variant is not similar to either the European-Siberian and North American or South Asian variants and leaves the impression of a fragment of a special tradition. Its content is as follows. The world is covered with water, some of it frozen. The giants ask the wolf to place the earth above the water. The wolf demands a bird that lives in the snows of the mountains. Then he tells the giant lord to stand in the water, a bird sits on the giant, a mouse makes a hole in the ice, takes out the earth and pours it on the bird's outstretched wings.

According to the Karachai version, a pair of geese built a nest on the crown of a dragon lying in the middle of the sea. Fearing that he will throw them into the water, the goose dives twice, does not reach the bottom and then descends to the lower world, where he learns how to kill the dragon. When he was in agony, the geese dived and came up again, smeared in mud. Elder Kjart-Choppa scraped the dirt from their feathers and smeared it on the dragon's back, which led to the creation of our world.

Such a myth is unlikely to have been brought in recently by the Turks from Southern Siberia. The space dragon motif is present in the east among the Uyghurs of Gansu [Stuart and Jhang Juan, 1996, p. 13], but it is not combined with the motif of diving for land there. The Dardian-Burish version is all the more isolated from the rest. Both may indicate the spread of the myth of a land diver in the steppe zone in pre-Turkic times. If both the steppe Indo-Europeans and the ancient inhabitants of South Asia were familiar with the land diver myth, then it is understandable why the Ganges Valley aborigines borrowed the myth of man, horse, and dog from the Indo - Europeans-both of whom already had structurally similar narratives, which dealt first with the extraction of land, and then with the search for it. creating a person.

It was mentioned above that in those Indian anthropogenetic myths in which the dog and horse are involved, there are no dualistic motifs characteristic of the European-Siberian version of the plot. These motifs, however, are found in other southern versions. In them, just as in the Siberian and Eastern European ones, the protagonists are two characters: one creates the human body and goes for the soul, and the other, reviving the person at this time, makes him mortal. Similar myths exist among the Munda-speaking Santals and are especially characteristic of Southeast Asia, where they are recorded in Kalimantan (Ngaju), Sulawesi (Toraja), the Philippines (Tboli, Bukidnon, Manuvu), as well as among the Semangs*. Parallels to the motif are found in Madagascar (Abrahamsson, 1951, p. 115-118). Since the Madagascar variants are close to the Indonesian ones, we can confidently say that there was a plot in Indonesia before the migration of the Malgash ancestors to Madagascar in the 7th century AD (Adelaar, 2009).

The antiquity of the dualistic myth of the creation of the world and man in Eurasia should be comparable to the antiquity of the motif of the earth diver. This is evidenced by the presence of North American parallels both for the "diver" and for the motif of the confrontation between the two creators (Berezkin, 2006a). The Zoroastrian dualistic tradition, which influenced the emergence of Manichaeism and Gnosticism in general, has no correspondences in other Indo-European mythologies and, most likely, was formed among the Iranians under the influence of the substrate. As in the case of the diver, the areas of the dualistic creation myth in the north and south of Eurasia were once supposed to form a single whole. All of these are just parts of a vast set of beliefs that explain the mortal nature of humans. It includes the motif of nail-like skin that was supposed to cover human bodies (it is known both in Northern Eurasia, in Indonesia and among the Indians of British Columbia*), and the motif of the elixir of immortality spilled on plants (in Northern and Central Eurasia, it is found among the Greeks, Talysh, Azerbaijanis, Persians, Tajiks Uzbek, Kazan Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Altaians, Tofalars, Buryats, Mongols and Udege people, and in the south - in Indonesia at Ngaju and in Micronesia on Palau**).

In the light of the hypothesis of ancient trans-Eurasian cultural connections, other folklore and mythological parallels between Europe, Siberia, and India can also be explained. It is impossible to consider them in the article. Here is just one example. In Siberia, a popular story is about how the skin of a chipmunk became striped***. Wanting to thank or punish the animal, the character runs his hand or paw along its back and leaves traces (Altaians, Telengites, Tofalars, Khakas, Buryats, Mansi, Khanty, northern Selkups, Chum Salmon, various groups of Evenks, Evens, Yakuts, Nanais, Nivkhs). From Siberia, this motif in a plot-related context got to North America (Salish Thompson, Sanpual, Vasco, Yakima, Kootenay, blackfeet, Iroquois, Seneca, Yuchi, Teal, Creeks, Miwok, Hopi), it is also recorded in the application of the local squirrel-type rodent in the Santals and South Indian nayars. Cumulative


* For sources, see the website: http://www.rathenia.ru/folklore / berezkin, motif H43.

* For sources, see the website: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore / berezkin, motif E36.

** For sources, see the website: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore / berezkin, motif H6B.

*** For sources, see the website: http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore / berezkin, motif B69.

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The zone of distribution of the motif is close to the area of the "land diver" motif (Figure 3). Both motifs are present in India, as well as in the continental regions of North America and Siberia, but are absent in the Bering Sea.

Conclusions

During the Bronze Age, groups of steppe pastoralists familiar with the domestic horse penetrated South Asia, where they came into contact with native speakers of the Munda languages. A combination of data, including texts recorded in Abkhazia, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, and Mongolia, suggests that the Munda story of human creation was borrowed by the natives of South Asia from early Indo-European migrants and was once widespread in the Eurasian steppes. Separate groups of Tibeto-Burmese and Dravidians also borrowed it-directly from Indo-Europeans (specifically from the Dards?) or already at Mund's. Later, the Northern Eurasian variant branched off from the steppe variant. The dog went from being a successful human defender to a traitor, and the negative connotations associated with the horse were transferred to it. This variant has spread in the forest zone from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean. In the steppes, however, pre-Turkic and pre-Islamic cosmogonic and anthropogonic themes disappeared.

The second level of reconstruction is directed to more distant epochs. There are plots that connect the south and north of Eurasia, but are not presented in its central part. Among them is the myth of extracting land from the ocean floor. The parallels between the Indian and Siberian variants suggest that the southern and northern regions of the "land diver" motif were once connected. It is most likely that the plot was known in the steppe zone of Eurasia. Versions from the Hindu Kush (Dards and Burish) and the North Caucasus (Karachays) are fragments of this tradition.

The presence of ancient trans-Eurasian connections is also indicated by the areas of other folklore and mythological plots. I was inclined to associate parallels of this kind with the formation of ca. 2 thousand bp of the trans-Eurasian information network [Berezkin, 2006b]. It remained unclear, however, why the chain of analogies did not coincide with the trajectory of the Great Silk Road, nor with the routes of maritime trade between Europe and Asia. Apparently, we have traces of much earlier connections. A kind of mimicry of some subjects under the mythology of world religions prevents you from seeing them. In ancient times, the steppe zone from the Caucasus to Southern Siberia was the area of distribution of many stories, which until the twentieth century were preserved only in the more northern and more southern regions of Eurasia.

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The article was submitted to the Editorial Board on 15.12.10, in the final version-on 27.01.11.

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