Folklore 56
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The Dog, The Horse and The Creation of Man
The farthest from the basic scheme is the Oroch version located at the
eastern periphery of the tale’s spread area and isolated territorially from the
others (Avrorin & Lebedeva 1966: 195–196). In the Oroch text the dog itself
proves to be the antagonist because, despite the creator’s warning, it itself fed
the man and made him alive. As a result, people lost the hard covering on their
skin that is now preserved only on the fingers and toes (the nails). The text
of the southern Selkup leaves the impression of being distorted and partially
forgotten: loz (a devil) makes the dog to change its skin which originally was
as hard as the nails of the humans (Pelikh 1972: 341). Northing is told about
the destiny of the man himself.
Despite the obvious Christian Apocrypha elements in some texts, the ulti-
mate origin of corresponding motifs cannot be attributed to the late Christian
influence. The names of protagonists in the Siberian and Volga–Permian ver-
sions are not borrowed from the Russians but belong to the local mythological
personages. The Northern tradition looks like being derived from the Southern
one but with the dog’s role in creation of the man radically changed. In the
southern versions the dog successfully drives the antagonists away while in the
northern versions it betrays the man and is punished for this. The punishment
itself is the same as the punishment of the horse in the southern versions, both
animals must serve the man and suffer bad treatment and a lack of good food.
The positive role of the dog corresponds to its high status in the Zoroastrianism
and probably among the Bronze Age Indo-Europeans. The change of its role
to the negative one probably reflects the transformation of the plot thanks to
its adaptation to a different cultural milieu. This process can be provisionally
dated to the I millennium A.D. when the ethnic situation in the Steppe zone
changed and the influence of the “Abrahamian” religions began to be felt across
a large part of the continental Eurasia.
CONCLUSIONS
There is but one historical scenario capable to explain parallels between the
South Asian, Caucasian, European–Siberian and other variants of the mytho-
logical tale about the creation of the human figures by God and an attempt
of antagonists to destroy them. The areas where different versions of the tale
have been recorded, are separated from each other by the Eurasian steppe belt.
Therefore just these steppe territories could be the area of the initial spread
of the story.
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Yuri Berezkin
The terminus ante quem for the emergence of the tale is defined by the
time of contacts between the people of the steppe origin and the inhabitants
of South Asia.
In the Bronze Age groups of the steppe cattle breeders who were familiar
with the domestic horse penetrated South Asia where they came into contact
with the speakers of Munda languages. Taking into consideration all the evi-
dence from the Caucasus, Hindu Kush and Mongolia, we can contend that the
tale about the creation of man typical for the Munda people was borrowed by
the South Asian natives from the early Indo-European migrants and was for-
merly widespread across the Eurasian steppes. In South Asia, some groups of
the speakers of the Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian languages also borrowed it,
either directly from the Indo-Europeans (possibly from the Dards) or already
from the Munda. In some later traditions the ancient anthropogonic tale was
incorporated into the Christian or Muslim beliefs and brought to such distant
territories as Maghreb and Maluku.
In the I millennium A.D. a new, the Northern, variety of this tale emerged.
The dog, who originally was a successful guard of the man, was transformed
into the betrayer and acquired all the negative associations that were initially
related to the horse. This variant spread across the forest zone of Eurasia from
the Baltic to the Pacific. In the steppes, however, the pre-Turkic and pre-Islamic
anthropogenic tales almost totally disappeared, their unique trace being the
Oirat story from western Mongolia.
The hypothesis according to which early Indo-Europeans were familiar with
a tale about a good dog and a bad horse does not contradict a suggestion shared
by most of the scholars concerning a high ritual status of the horse in the Indo-
European cultures. At least two possibilities should be considered. The horse
could have been originally domesticated not by the Indo-Europeans but by some
other groups, thence its associations with hostile forces. Or the horse could have
been domesticated by the Indo-Europeans, but before this it was a game animal
and a part of the wild and non-human world. For parallels we can address the
American Indian myths in which the big game animals like buffaloes or tapirs
usually play a role of dangerous antagonists. Such stories also coexisted with
an important role of the buffalo in the Plains Indians’ rituals.
In any case I am convinced that the only way to reconstruct the mythology of
the people who lived in the past is a search of its survivals in the later folklore.
The analysis of ancient iconography or scraps of evidence preserved in the early
written sources is not enough for the reconstruction of the plots of complex tales.