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Duvakin E. Balkan and Carpathian Links of the Mythology of the Peoples of the Caucasus

E. Duvakin
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera)
of the Russian Academy of Sciences
St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0003-3464-6902
E-mail: e.duvakin@gmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. The mythology of the peoples of the Caucasus is highly heterogeneous and demonstrates multiple parallels with European and Asian traditions. One of the directions of these links is the Carpathian-Balkan area. Here, we explore them using our database that contains information on the world distribution of more than 3,200 folklore-mythological motifs and includes summaries of ca. 85,000 texts attested in 1,020 oral and written traditions. We focus primarily on the spread of four motifs that are extremely rare in the global context and seem to occur in an integrated manner only in the Caucasus and the Carpathian-Balkan area. These parallels are consistent with the presence of non-trivial connections between ancient Greek mythology and Caucasian folklore traditions. They also find correlations with archeological, linguistic and paleogenetic data on early ethno-cultural and population processes in the circumPontic zone, including information on the migration of Yamnaya pastoralists into Southeast Europe and on contacts between speakers of the Indo-European, North Caucasian and Kartvelian protolanguages. The identification of such correspondences in the field of folklore and mythology makes it possible to reconstruct partially the set of motifs that were spread in Anatolia and the Pontic steppes in antiquity, but were lost there and remained unattested in written sources.

 

KEYWORDS: folklore, mythology, Balkans, Carpathians, Caucasus, prehistory

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2024-2(24)-34-58
UDC 398 (479)

 

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