ヘロドトスのスキュタイ神話

概要

論文の詳細を見る
Of the two tales which we find in Herodotus (4, 5-10), both recounting the origin of the Scythian race, there is no more doubt today that the first one, which is said to be an account given by the Scythians themselves, preserves for us a valuable fragment of the otherwise almost entirely lost mythology of the Scythians. For as it has been convincingly demonstrated by G. Dumezil and E. Benveniste, it reflects, in the composition of the group of golden tools fallen from heaven, and perhaps also in the names of the four Scythian yivq descended from the three sons of Targitaos, a genuine Indo-Iranian conception about the ideal tripartite social organization, attested in the Avesta as well as in the Rig-Veda, that recognizes three social classes (priests, warriors and producers of food) as basic components of the community. The second myth, told by the Greeks dwelling about the Pontus, may appear at first sight to be quite different from the first tale; it in fact is, however, undoubtedly a variant of the same myth. For in the Heracles of the second myth, we have surely to do with the very Scythian god, whom the first myth calls Zeus and whose native name was Papaios, while the Echidna, who, inhabiting a cavern in the Hylaia district near the banks of the Borysthenes, exhibits a shape quite befitting a river-goddess, is without doubt identical with the daughter of the Borysthenes river mentioned in the first myth as a consort of Zeus and the mother of Targitaos. In the story about Heracles' loss of his horses in the wilderness during a sleep and the copulation he is obliged to effectuate with Echidna with a view to recovering the lost animals, we may have then a part of the original Scythian myth, which precisely happens to be lacking in the first version: a narrative accounting the circumstances under which Papaios had intercourse with the daughter of the Borysthenes. The story about Rustem's brief union with Tehmine, in the Shahname of Firdausi (A. G. Warner & E. Warner, The Shahnama of Firdausi, II, London, 1906, 120-126), should be regarded as an epic transposition of the same myth, whose scheme is combined here with the story of the combat between father and son to constitute the famous tragedy of Sohrab. As is well-known, the Father and Son Combat theme forms a common element in the biographies of a number of typical Indo-European warlike heroes, such as Cuchlainn, Arjuna, Ilya Murometz and Odysseus. It may have belonged also to the Scythian tradition, because its traces may be detected in the Ossetic legend about the Nart Uryzmaeg and his anonymous son. The major part of the Sohrab legend in Shahname thus seems to have derived ultimately from a mythicolegendary tradition of an Eastern branch of the Scythians, that is to say, the Sakas of Seistan.
日本西洋古典学会の論文
1972-03-25

著者

吉田敦彦
学習院大学

ヘロドトスのスキュタイ神話

スポンサーリンク

概要

著者

関連論文

スポンサーリンク