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Calvert Watkins definitively illustrated the connections between the Vedic slaying of the dragon Vrtra by the thunder-god Indra and the storm-god dragon-slaying myths of the both ancient Iran (Azi Dahaka) and Indo-European Hittites (Illuyanka). But there are actually two Hittite dragon-slaying myths - the other, Hurrian in origin, concerning the storm god Teshub - and the relationship between the two remains unclear. The Hurrian-Hittite myth clearly underlies the Canaanite storm-god dragon slaying, but the connection of the latter to an independent Semitic dragon-slaying myth is also unclear. Is there a separate Semitic myth at all, or does the dissemination of these mythological motifs all go back to Indo-European Hittites and Indo-Europeans among the Hurrians? And if there is a Semitic myth, did it disseminate from the Levant southeastward to Mesopotamia with the spread of the Amorites in the early 2nd millennium or was there an originally-Sumerian dragon-slaying myth already in Southern Mesopotamia? And what are we to do when specific motifs of the earliest Mesopotamian form reappear in the late Iranian Shahname? This essay tracks the dragon across the ancient Near East, as similar myths fed into each other, their elements interweaving and combining in new forms.
Keywords: Stormgod - Indra - Vrtra - Trita - Visvarupa - Thraetaona - Fereydun - Zahhak - Tarhuna - Illuyanka - Teshub - Ullikummi - Hedammu - Baal - Yamm - Haddad - Enuma Elish - Tiamat - Marduk
In 2001, Michael Witzel called for "exploring the historical development" of the Indo-European and Near Eastern myth-families "by setting up a family tree of such groupings," to "fill the gap between, say, the reconstructed Near Eastern branch and the individual local mythology, e.g., that of the Sumerians or Hittites."1 The present essay is part of a larger project to track the storm god-slays-dragon myth across the ancient Near East, from the Rig-Veda to Iran and Anatolia, from Sumer through the Levant.2 This essay is a condensed version of the first half of that trek, "a combination of extremely close reading of text passages in the original ... with the traditional Comparative Method."3 The comparative method used here is genetic; fundamentally, "its goal is history."4 But it must be used with caution. Scholars tend far too often to equate...