parents. At the same time (as with Zeus) certain individual deities are called
his progeny. They are generally gods that have a connection with the sky:
Agni, the god of fire; Su ̄ rya, the Sun; the storm-gods Indra, Parjanya, and the
Maruts. But labelling these as children of Dyaus seems to be little more than
a casual acknowledgement of their celestial affinities. It is not a distinctive
means of identifying them.
It is different in the case of one who is called his child more often than all
the rest: Us
̇
as, the goddess of the dawn. She is duhita ̄ ́ Diváh
̇or Divó duhita ̄ ́
in over thirty places in the Rigveda, and the phrase is uniquely hers.^71 She is
alsoduhita ̄ ́ divoja ̄ ́h
̇
, ‘the daughter born of Dyaus/heaven’ (6. 65. 1), and
divija ̄ ́h
̇
, ‘born in heaven’ (7. 75. 1). This goddess will occupy us in the next
chapter. Here it is enough to note that she corresponds in name and nature to
the Greek Eos, and that while Eos does not appears as a daughter of Zeus –– he
has become one of the younger gods, and she must clearly have existed before
him –– one of her most constant Homeric epithets is δ4α < díw-ya, originally
‘belonging to Zeus’ or ‘heavenly’. When we add that in Lithuanian folk-song
the (feminine) Sun is addressed as Die ̃vo dukrýte ̇,^72 it seems reasonable to
assign at least to Graeco-Aryan theology, and probably to MIE, the idea that
the Dawn-goddess was the daughter of Dyeus.
In Greek epic ∆ι: θυγα ́ τηρ, or less often θυγα ́ τηρ ∆ιο ́ , is used
of several goddesses, especially the Muse, Athena, and Aphrodite, and also of
Helen. In the case of Aphrodite, a deity of oriental provenance who probably
did not enter the epic tradition until the Sub-Mycenaean period at earliest,
it has been suggested that certain of her attributes, including perhaps ∆ι:
θυγα ́ τηρ, may have been taken over from Dawn, the existing goddess
outstanding for beauty and desirability.^73 Helen, as we shall see later, has a
more intimate connection with the Dawn-goddess.
The divine TwinsScholars were long ago struck by the similarities between the Vedic As ́vins, the
Greek Dioskouroi, and the ‘Sons of God’ who often appear in the Lithuanian
(^71) It is applied to her and Night as sisters at 10. 70. 6, and to Night alone at AV 19. 47. 5.
Cf. Schmitt (1967), 169–75.
(^72) Rhesa (1825), no. 78; G. H. F. Nesselmann, Litauische Volkslieder (Berlin 1853), no. 1;
cf. W. Euler in Meid (1987), 44 f.
(^73) G. E. Dunkel, Die Sprache 34 (1988–90), 8 f. If Dawn could still be called ∆ιf: θυγα ́ τηρ
in the Sub-Mycenaean period, this has the interesting implication that Zeus had not yet been
firmly redefined as one of the younger gods, the sons of the Titans.
186 4. Sky and Earth