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

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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              www.folklore.ee/folklore

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.

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