Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, issue: 56 / 2014 — The Dog, the Horse and the Creation of Man

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              www.folklore.ee/folklore

Yuri Berezkin

the separation of the southern Munda) and 900 B.C. (before separation of the 

Korku). The age estimations, as I have already mentioned, are approximate 

but both III millennium B.C. and the middle of the I millennium B.C. are 

practically excluded. The tale is not recorded among the Juang and the only 

Kharia version is similar to the versions of the Mundari (Pinnow 1965, no. 26: 

142–143). Because the Kharia were in contact with the Mundari, the existence 

of the version of the tale in their case is not significant. But the absence of the 

tale among the southern Munda is significant just because these groups were 

not in contact with the northern Munda for a long time.

Though the Munda can definitely be considered as the main South Asian 

possessors of the story in question, they must also have borrowed it. Firstly, 

this tale is absent among the southern Munda and among other Austroasiatic 

people besides the Khasi. Secondly, the horse, whose role in this story is very 

important, was brought to South Asia by the Indo-Europeans. Bones of the 

Equidae from Harappa sites do not belong to the domestic horse (Bryant 2001: 

170–175; Parpola & Janhunen 2010: 435). No horses are buried in Gonur, 

Turkmenistan (ca. 2150–1500), though dog, donkey and sheep burials are com-

mon. The isolated horse bones are found but their stratigraphic position is not 

certain (Dubova 2012).

The cultural change on the western periphery of the Indian subcontinent 

becomes visible since ca. 1400 B.C. and was probably related to the coming of 

the Eastern Iranians (Kuzmina 2008: 300–305; 2010: 34). The first Indo-Aryans 

remain invisible archaeologically, just as the traces of many other migrations 

known from written sources or linguistic data. However, the linguists and 

archaeologists almost unanimously put the time of the Indo-Aryan arrival to 

India inside the interval between 1900 and 1200 B.C. (Bryant 2001: 218, 224, 

229–230) that corresponds to the suggested time of the spread of the war chariot 

and development of the nomadism (Kuzmina 2000).

As it was told already, there are no stories about an attempt to destroy 

human figures made by the deity neither in Sanskrit texts nor in the folklore 

of modern people who speak the Indo-Aryan languages, besides the Barela-

Bhilala, though slight reminiscence of such a plot has possibly been preserved 

in the Hinduism. According to one of the legends, the horse had wings and 

could fly, and neither men nor gods were able to catch it. Indra was in need of 

horses to pull his cart and asked a saint to deprive the horses of their ability 

to fly (Howey 1923: 214). 

Because the full-bodied versions of the tale in question have been recorded 

among the speakers of Dardic languages of Eastern Hindu Kush, it is probable 

that this tale was brought to India by the Dards or some group closely related to 

them. The traces of these people were wiped off by the Indo-Aryans who spoke 

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Folklore 56 

 

       

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The Dog, The Horse and The Creation of Man 

Figure 2. The present day spread of the Munda languages (after Osada & Onishi 2010, fig. 

10) and the location of selected ethnic groups of South Asia. 

a kindred language and came later. The time of the first Indo-European arrival 

to India fits well the suggested time of the borrowing of the tale by the native 

people of the sub-continent, i.e. between the disintegration of the Proto-Munda 

and the split of Korku from Northern Munda. According to the areal pattern 

of the spread of the story in South Asia (mainly between the Himalaya and 

the eastern parts of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand), it was brought by the 

groups which moved along the Ganges Valley.

As it was mentioned, the Wakhi are the bearers of the story in the Pamir 

area. They could have inherited it from their Saka ancestors or borrowed it 

from the Dards. It is difficult to say if the Eastern Iranians of Turkestan were 

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              www.folklore.ee/folklore

Yuri Berezkin

familiar with the story, but it is very probable that this myth had been formerly 

widespread at least in some areas of the Eurasian steppes.

As for the Algerian and the Caucasian versions, they are clearly influenced 

by the “Abrahamic” mythology, and the tale probably reached Maghreb only 

after it had been integrated into the folk Christian or even Islamic tradition. 

The Loda and Galela versions from Maluku and the Armenian and Arabic 

versions share the motif of the dog created from the antagonist’s excreta (his 

dung or saliva), and this detail looks like a late addition spread with the Islam. 

It would be wrong, however, to seek the origins of these stories in the Near 

East. Neither the Bible nor any other early texts from the Near East contain 

anything like this while the South Asian cases have nothing to do with the 

Christianity or Islam. 

Another argument in favor of the early spread of the tale across Eurasia are 

the exclusive parallels between the westernmost (the Caucasus and Algeria) 

and the easternmost (Mongolia) versions. In all these cases the dog was not 

put by the creator to guard the figure of the man but emerged itself at the very 

moment when the antagonist attacked the creation. It is also only in these 

variants that the affinity of the dog and the man is specially underlined. Here 

it is appropriate to remind of the extremely high status of the dog in the Zoro-

astrian tradition (Boyce 1989: 145–146; Chunakova 2004: 203; Kriukova 2005: 

202–205). Because this tale has a limited, narrowly localized spread in western 

Mongolia, the probability of its emergence in Mongolia and the transmission 

to the Caucasus with the Genghiz Khan warriors can be practically ignored. 

It is much more plausible that both at the western and eastern peripheries of 

the great steppe the tale was ultimately inherited from the earlier inhabitants 

of this region, all or most of whom spoke the Indo-European languages. Only 

these people could contact the natives of the Caucasus, the South Asian Munda 

and some groups in Mongolia from whom the story was ultimately inherited 

by the Oirats.

When it comes to the Nganasan myth with its southern parallels, its Arctic 

location is not so difficult to explain as it could seem. The Nganasan ethnogen-

esis is complex with different components merged, including the Tungus, the 

Samoyed (which language was adopted) and a local substratum of unknown 

linguistic affiliation (Dolgikh 1952). There are no data in favor of language 

contacts between the ancestral Samoyed and the Indo-European groups of 

the steppes besides a very hypothetical possibility of such contacts with the 

(proto-)Toharians (Napolskikh 1997: 82). However, the archaeological materi-

als evidence a movement of the descendents of the Pazyryk culture of Altai far 

to the north (Molodin 2003: 148–178). In any case the people of the taiga and 

tundra zones could have borrowed the variant of the myth from the inhabit-

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