both areas from the neighbouring Finno-Ugric peoples of north and central
Asia.^55 Some myths that occur both in India and in Greece can be traced to
the far-reaching influence of Mesopotamia. For instance, in one of the
poems of the Greek Epic Cycle, the Cypria, it was related that once upon a
time Earth was oppressed by the excessive numbers of people milling about
on top of her. Zeus took pity on her and conceived the plan of lightening
the burden by means of the Trojan War. A similar myth is found in the
Maha ̄bha ̄rata. The earth once complained to Brahma ̄ of the ever-increasing
weight of mankind, and Brahma ̄ created death to alleviate the problem. Some
have inferred from the coincidence that an Indo-European tradition lies
behind the story, although it appears only in a late phase of the Greek epic
tradition and at an even later date in India. What is more to the point is that a
similar myth is attested over a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia. The
natural conclusion is that the Greek and the Indian poets were both using a
motif somehow derived from Mesopotamia, not one inherited from Graeco-
Aryan antiquity.^56 Similar considerations apply to the Hesiodic and Indian
Myths of Ages, or to the currency of the animal fable in both Greece and
India.^57
When we have parallels that extend all the way from India or Iran to the
Celtic world, their probative value may be rated particularly high, because
horizontal transmission seems virtually ruled out. But even then we must be
cautious. The heroic traditions of both India and Ireland portray warriors
using horse-drawn chariots. We might be tempted to infer that this was an
Indo-European style of warfare. Similarly, as we shall see in Chapter 5,
the myth of the Sun’s horse-drawn chariot is widely diffused among
Indo-European peoples, and we might well conclude that this was an Indo-
European myth. But it cannot be so, for archaeology tells us that the war-
chariot with spoked wheels –– the only type of vehicle light enough for horses
to pull at speed ––first appeared east of the southern Urals around 2100–2000
, long after the Indo-European cultural continuum had been broken up.
Chariot warfare as a military reality and as a heroic motif, and the myth of the
solar chariot, must have spread across the Indo-European territories long
after the Indo-European peoples themselves had done so. These novelties
were no doubt widely disseminated in the space of a few centuries; it is likely
enough that chariot-borne warrior bands were instrumental in their rapid
(^55) Cf. Lorenz (1984), 259 f.
(^56) Cypria fr. 1; MBh. 1. 58, 3. 142, 11. 8. 20–6, 12. 248–50, etc.; V. Pisani, ZDMG 103 (1953),
127 f. = Schmitt (1968), 156 f.; id. (1969), 64 f.; Durante (1976), 61; W. Ruben, Sitzb. Ak. Wiss.
DDR 1973 (24), 50–5; C. Vielle in L. Isebaert and R. Lebrun (edd.), Quaestiones Homericae
(Louvain–Namur 1998), 275–90; West (1997), 480–2.
(^57) Myth of Ages: West (1997), 312–19. Animal fable: ibid. 319 f., 502–5.
Introduction 23