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The
legend of the Five Races in Hesiod’s
Works
and Days,
109-201, and the Four Yugas (=Ages) in India (MB
III,
14-8, 1866-9) has parallels in NE cultures and must therefore be
discussed with reference to the NE sources as well.
In his
edition of
Works
and Days
(hereafter, W and page-number), M L West examines four “striking
oriental parallels” – from the Zoroastrians, the Judaic Book of Daniel,
the Indian tradition and the Mesopotamian culture (1978: 174-7). He
concludes: “Mesopotamia is a likelier place of origin. It was well
situated to disseminate ideas to the Persians, the Indians, the Jews and
the Greeks... Greece’s oriental contacts in the eighth century were
primarily Semitic; [this] is the most probable time for the myth to have
come… Nineveh-Karkemish-Posideion-Chalcis-Boeotia would be a plausible
enough route”. He rests with this plausibility (p 177).
West
gives a good detailed analysis of the Hesiodic account (WD
109-201)
but overlooks one noteworthy fact, namely that
there is
no clear description of exactly how and why these races were created.
First was created the golden race by the Olympian immortals at the time
of Kronos (109ff) – but we are not told who these Olympians were and how
they were related to Kronos nor in what manner they created the golden
race of mortals. Then the Olympians created the silver race (127ff). The
third race of bronze was created not by the Olympians but by Zeus
(142ff): here we are not told why Zeus took over the creation of mortals
but we are told (or so is mostly believed) that the bronze race sprang
out of ashtrees
ek
melian;
thus we wonder why Zeus should at this point take over and why the poet
should give the origin of this race alone. Afterwards, again Zeus
created the fourth race of godlike heroes (157-9).Finally came the
“iron” generation (176) – but, here, also no origin or mode of creation
is given, not even Zeus. The origin of the bronze race from
melia
is linked
with
melieaisi
‘race of
mortals sprang from ash-trees’ in
Theogony
563;
another interpretation has “Melian nymphs” connecting this with
numphas melias
in
Theogony
187 (W
179)[1]. Both
interpretations originate in two ancient commentators, Eustathius and
Proclus (White: 13, n 1; 93, n 2; 121 n1); but also Hesychius with
melias
karpos to toan
anthroapoan
genos
(GEL
suppl).
Some scholars combine the two and have ashtree-nymphs engender humans in
general (GM
38 n 4;
Kerényi 209). Others see in
ek
melian
only a
reference (as in Homer) to ashwood-spears (White, 13 n 1), that is an
adverbial phrase qualifying
deinon
and
obrimon:
‘a race terrible and mighty because of their ashwood-spears’.
If we
look at the bare text without the interpretations of ancient and modern
commentators, we see that the text narrates a succession of human
generations increasingly deteriorating; this deterioration is an
additional or parallel reason why at the poet’s time mankind is in a
sorry state – apart from Zeus giving to them Pandora with her jar of
ills. The text is not really concerned with anthropogony. If it were, it
would have given details of the genesis of each race and not only of the
third one – if that. In fact the archaic texts contain no anthropogonic
accounts. The ad hoc creation of Pandora (WD
60ff)
cannot be taken as such, since mankind already existed. Accounts of
anthropogony come later, with Anaximander where, according to the extant
fragments, men emerge from fish or similar creatures out of slime (KRS
140-1), the Orphics where Zeus creates mortals from the soot of the
Titans he had blasted but only after Protogonos and Phanes had created
their own distinct races (West 1998: 75, 98, 107, 139, 164, 212), and so
on. If such accounts were current before Hesiod, as some sources say
(West 1998: 39ff), then it becomes even clearer that Hesiod is not
dealing here with anthropogony, otherwise he would have used them; on
the other hand, they might have been current, but not known to Hesiod.
Penelope’s words “Tell me your race and whence you come, for you don’t
come, as said of old, out of the oak or the stone” (Odyssey
19,
162-3) imply that some men came out of the oak(s) or stone(s) and some
from elsewhere; although here we see possible references to the legend
of Deucalion and Pyrrha (stone) and
Theogony
563
(ash-tree), a third source is implied also but left unexplained.
A further
problem lies in Hesiod’s statements that the first two races were
created by the Olympian immortals (not Kronos or Ouranos) and the other
three by Zeus. Who were the Olympians that created the golden generation
at the time of Kronos?… According to
Theogony
114-20
and 543ff, Zeus and the other Olympians – except Aphrodite – did not
exist then, nor is there in these passages any mention of the creation
of mortals. West thinks they are the Titans (which ones?) and that
Hesiod is not careful in his use of
Olympia
doamat’echontes
‘those
who dwell on Olympus’ (W 179). This may be right but apart from the fact
that the Titans did not dwell on Olympus, they (or many of them) were
certainly not
athanatoi
nor were
they said in any text to create other creatures. So who were these
immortal Olympians?
The
situation is very peculiar. I can only suppose that Hesiod (or whoever)
had before him several threads of legends and wove them together as best
he could. Some were brought by the Greeks themselves in their IE
heritage, no doubt altered by the passage of many centuries and perhaps
dyed with contacts with other cultures. Others, of a newer and brighter
make, came from the Near East, perhaps via the route suggested by West.
West
opted, as mentioned earlier, for Mesopotamia as the original source of
these legends. This is possible, of course, but not borne out by the
available data, and it is a pity that West did not pursue these in
greater detail. It has been fashionable since the 1960’s to find
affinities and contacts with, and borrowings and influences from NE
cultures – just as in the early nineteenth century scholars had their
mind on India and in the late nineteenth on Egypt. No doubt satiety will
come, or some other event will occur, and the pendulum of interest will
swing in a different direction. Hesiod’s myth does not seem to derive as
a whole from NE sources. It is an amalgam of disparate elements and some
of these are not found in the Near East, only in the Vedic tradition. A
consideration of the chronology of the texts involved would point to the
same direction. West is quite wrong to list all the parallels he has
collected together as of the same chronological value and not
distinguish between them according to approximate dates of composition
(see also West 1971: 37-46, with motifs from Indian, Judaic, Egyptian,
Zoroastrian and Norse traditions; and p 218, n 2, with another
collection).
We can
easily first put aside the Judaic Book of Daniel. It is true that in
chapter 2 of this text Daniel recaptures the dream which King
Nebuchadnezzar had seen but forgotten, then relates and explains it to
him. The dream is of a large image with head of gold, breast and arms of
silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed
with clay: the head symbolizes Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, and the
other four parts four successive kingdoms, one inferior to the former;
after the fifth one, which has no unity, God will set up a new kingdom
“which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel, II, 1-44). The metals and the
five kingdoms do provide a distant parallel but no more. The Book of
Daniel in the Old Testament was according to West written c 166 BC (W
175); being some 500 years later than Hesiod it could hardly have
influenced him and so we can discard it as a possible source.
However,
the Judaic tradition has, in the earlier books that comprise the Torah,
and specifically in
Genesis,
an element that is also present in the Hesiodic myth, namely the
shortening of men’s lifespan from the epoch before the Flood and after.
In the first period the descendants of Adam live many centuries,
Methuselah reaching 969 years (Genesis,
ch 5) whereas in the second the descendants of Noah reach scarcely 400
years (ch 12) and later patriarchs like Abraham live only 175 years (ch
25). But these people do not live less because their mode of life
becomes less virtuous as is the case with Hesiod’s races; even in the
Judaic Paradise life was not entirely free of evil since Adam and Eve
disobeyed God, their Lord. This motif of shorter life may derive from
Persian or Mesopotamian sources.
Although
Mesopotamian literature also contains this belief in the progressive
shortening of man’s life, as is evidenced in their king-lists (W 176),
this too cannot be regarded as a probable source. Apart from the ante-
and post-deluvian periods, we find no Ages or races of men with
distinctive features, diminution of virtue and metallic quality.
Consequently apart from the location of Mesopotamia and the early date
of the king-lists, it is difficult to see why West chooses this as the
“likelier place of origin” for the Hesiodic legend
[2].
A much
more likely source is the Iranian tradition. The surviving texts here
also are much later than Hesiod. In fact, the Pahlevi texts mentioned by
West are from the Christian era, but since, as Boyce writes, they derive
from the Zend Avesta, the Zoroastrian Scriptures (1991: 379ff), they may
belong to the sixth century BC “and possibly many centuries earlier”
(Dunstan 1998: 284). In these the prophet has the vision of a tree with
four branches – of gold, of silver, of steel and of iron alloy; these
represent the four successive ages into which the religion of Zoroaster
will pass as wickedness increases, earth’s fertility diminishes and men
become smaller in stature. A second version with an image of seven
branches of seven metals and seven periods has nothing more of relevance
to the Hesiodic legend and need not therefore concern us, nor the fact
that some of these periods are identified with specific historical
times. (Now the Hebrews were released from their Babylonian exile
captivity by Cyrus the Great in 537 and Judea itself became a vassal
state of the Persian Empire until 332 when Alexander absorbed all
Palestine; therefore, it is quite possible and likely that the dream of
the five-metal statue in Daniel (Book 2) is an adaptation of the
Zoroastrian tree.) The Zoroastrian details of increasing wickedness,
loss of earth’s fertility and diminution of men, agree in large part
with features in Hesiod’s description of the five generations. We can
safely assume then that the Persian tradition is one source for Hesiod’s
legend or, at least, for some elements in it.
However,
the Iranians were IE and their early culture has many points of
similarity with the Vedic one in India. To take the language alone,
Avestan and Vedic are so close that often passages from the one language
can be rendered into the other by sound-changes only: Indo-Iranian is
generally regarded as a distinct branch of IE
[3].
So
it should cause no surprise that a similar legend about the Ages or
generations of man appears in the Vedic tradition also. However, here
the legend has no metals but has the element of heroes which is present
in
Works
and Days
but
absent from the Iranian legend.
At this
point I should state that I don’t think the Greeks borrowed this legend
(or much else) from India during the archaic period. I think rather that
they brought some version(s) of it with them. As I argued above (section
1), there were no very significant contacts between Greeks and Indians
prior to 326 BC.
I
sympathise with West (and any other scholar) who writes, “One of the
annoying things about Indian literature is that its chronology is so
uncertain” (1971: 34). We need not go into the causes of uncertainty;
suffice it to say that sanskritists and indologists in general have
learnt to live with this. The doctrine of the four Ages appears in
detail in the epic
Mahābhārata,
Bk III Āraņyaka-
or
Vana-parvan
(=Book of
the Forest), chapters 148 and 186-9, (though shorter or longer
references are found in other Books, eg VI and XII). The Poona critical
edition of the epic and J A B van Buitenen’s translation (1981) accept
these passages in the Vanaparvan as belonging to the mainstream
narrative of the epic. This by itself does not mean very much, of course
(van Buitenen gives c 400 for the oldest preserved portions, p xxv). The
native Indian tradition places the great war of the Bhāratas
which forms the main theme of the epic (hence its name) c 3100, but at
present this is disputed by most academics and, in any case, many of the
incidents, tales and doctrines in it are certainly much later products.
So the period given by West as 500-100 BC (1978: 176) is not
unreasonable in the conventional chronology. The
Manusmŗti
which
alludes to the four ages in ch I, stanzas 81-6, can, in the form we have
it, be placed within the same period
[4].
The
Manusmŗti
gives
only the bare essentials of the doctrine of the four Ages and this
implies that the knowledge of its wider aspects was current then. This
knowledge was current earlier also since the four Ages are mentioned
sporadically in the Upanishads and the Brāhmaņas.
West was
wrong to write that “the theory [of the 4 Ages] is absent from the Vedas
and Brāhmaņas”
(W 176). The
Vedic
Index
by A A
Macdonell and A B Keith, upon which subsequent studies and discussions
of this doctrine are based, does indeed doubt the presence of the four
Ages in the Vedas and Brāhmaņas
(vol 2, pp 192-3, under
Yuga).
But the two scholars give no substantial reasons for their doubt other
than their own choice of a particular interpretation of certain passages
where the word
yuga
occurs.
Sanskrit
yuga
means
‘team, pair, generation, race, epoch’. In the sense ‘Age’ the word
occurs very frequently in the
Ŗgveda
and we
read of ‘former ages’ (pūrvāņi
yugāni
VII, 70,
4), of ‘future ages’ (uttarā
yugāni
III, 33,
8) and ‘from one age to another’ (yuge
yuge
‘in every
age’: I, 139, 8), but the ‘Four Ages’ (catvāri
yugāni)
are not mentioned. In
Atharvaveda
VIII, 2,
21, which is a hymn prayer “for exemption from the dangers of death”
(Bloomfield 2000: 55), we read “A hundred years, ten thousand years,
two, three, four ages allot we to thee…”. Now this verse can be
interpreted in many ways according to one’s predilections. One Indian
scholar for instance translates “O man, thine is the age of a hundred
years, with two intervals of day and night and three seasons of summer,
winter and rains, and four stages of childhood, youth, middle age and
old age…” (Chand 1982: 341) omitting the term
ayuta
‘ten
thousand’, arbitrarily inserting the three seasons and ignoring that
dve yuge
means
simply ‘two yugas/ages’ (and not ‘intervals of day and night’, which
were mentioned in the previous stanza as
ahne… rāraye)
and also that the
catvāri
‘four’
does not of itself automatically denote the four stages of man’s life as
stated. There is no real reason why the ‘four ages’ here should not
refer to the Four Ages or Yugas. True, the Four Yugas are not mentioned
by name, but then why should they?… (The
Vedic Index
writes:
“the inference from this [sequence] seems to be that a Yuga means more
than an
ayuta,
but is not very certain”. This is very lame, because it is undoubtedly
more certain that a Yuga in this sequence means more years than that it
does not.) That a reference to the Four Yugas may be intended can be
supported by the context: subsequent stanzas implore for immortality (eg
26: “Deathless be, immortal […amŗta]…”)
and this implies superseding the Four Yugas which are for this reason
perhaps allotted in stanza 21. Some of the names of the Yugas occur in
two Brāhmaņas
(Vedic
Index
ibid) and
all four of them occur in
Aitareya,
VIII, 2, 21 (kŗta,
tretā,
dvāpara,
kali).
Here again the
Vedic
Index
doubts
the meaning and cites one scholar who thought that dice-throws were
meant (a quite legitimate thought) against five others who thought the
Four Yugas were meant. For my part, I do think that the doctrine
of the Four Yugas was known fully in the earlier period of the Vedas
because much that is not stated (or only partly stated), not defined and
not explained, in so many cases in the Rigvedic hymns appears more fully
in later texts, even though there may be innovation or departure from
the original concepts. In many hymns there are tantalizing hints,
allusions, brief incidents and so on, that suggest there was current a
much wider web of mythological knowledge.
Now, the
preceding paragraph does not aim to show that, as was mentioned earlier,
Hesiod borrowed this myth from Indian sources, but only that
the
doctrine was present in India as well as in Persia and Greece, and is
therefore part of the inherited IE lore.
Some scholars, like West (W 177) and A Arora (1981: 183-4, citing
others) think that the Indian version originated in, or was influenced
by, NE legends. This is totally improbable. Mesopotamia had no such
legend – at least in the extant documents; if early tablets with a
similar legend are unearthed, then the situation will, of course, need
to be re-appraised. The Judaic legend is much too late. We are left only
with the Iranian myth, which, again, is too late, since this is later
than the Vedas even if these are placed by the most conservative dating
c 1000-800. Apart from all such considerations, the analysis that
follows of affinities and differences shows that such a borrowing by the
Indians is extremely unlikely. The Indian texts nowhere allude to the
metallic framework present in the Iranian and Greek legends. In the
discussion that follows the Judaic legend in the Book of Daniel is
excluded.
Greek :
Golden,
Silver, Bronze, Heroes, Iron.
Persian:
Golden,
Silver, Steel, –––, Iron.
Indian:
Sat, Kŗta,
Tretā, Dvāpara, Sandhyā, Kali.
Common to
the Greek, Persian and Indian traditions are the Four Ages, although the
Greek one has in addition the heroic race (and Persia two more ages and
metals in the later version). The diminishment of virtue, of man’s
lifespan and of earth’s fertility is also common to all three
traditions. Common also is the note of prophecy that sounds in the
description of the final Age (W 198). However, the series of metals is
common to Greece and Persia only. The Vedic tradition (at least in the
Mahābhārata)
gives instead a change in the colour of Vişņu,
the god who embodies the world: white corresponds to Krrta,
the yuga of harmony and perfection; red to Tretā, the yuga of knowledge;
yellow to Dvāpara, the yuga of passion, fragmentation and multitudinous
ritual; black to Kali, the yuga of ignorance, selfishness and
lawlessness. It is worth mentioning here that the
Manusmŗti
(I, 86)
prescribes one virtue or practice as appropriate or remedial for every
yuga: for Kŗta
is recommended
tapas
‘austerity, inner concentration’, for Tretā
jňāna
‘knowledge’, for Dvāpara
yajňa
‘sacrifice’ and for Kali
dāna
‘generosity’. The Greek and the Indian sources present the Ages as
successive periods without any visions or symbols, whereas the Iranian
version gives the vision of a tree with four branches that represent the
Ages. The Indian version alone sees the Four Ages within a larger cycle
of universal recurrence[5],
which is first mentioned in
Ŗgveda
X, 190,
3, whereas the Greek tale alone introduces the generation of heroes.
West
thinks that the Greek poet(s) inserted the heroic generation into the NE
legend with its
metallic frame so as “to do justice to ‘folk memory’” which harped back
on the heroes of the
Theban and Trojan wars (W 174). This may well be so. If we consider the
subtle
contradictions and difficulties of Hesiod’s narrative mentioned at the
beginning of this paper, we must
take it that the poet had before him more than one version of the
succession of Ages. When we
add the tales of gods and demigods, titans and giants, centaurs and
other monstrous
creatures, we can surmise that a poet (or compiler) would not have found
it easy to
accommodate them all into a neat framework. As for “the general Greek
idea of history” which
West invokes as fitting for Hesiod’s last three generations (leaving out
the golden and silver
races), we don’t really know what that was before Homer’s and Hesiod’s
works, but I am
inclined to agree with this idea, as I show below.
I propose
a different explanation, based on several indications that the basic
idea of the
succession of the generations was the primary element, an IE inherited
one, suitably
transformed with Greek innovations, and that the metallic scheme was
welded onto it.
To begin
with, there are some verbal and conceptual parallels between the Greek
and the Vedic –
which, however, I admit, may be wholly fortuitous. In Hesiod’s silver
age, people fail to serve
the gods (athanatous
therapeuein)
and to offer sacrifices. In the Indian version[6]
this failure
occurs in the third yuga, corresponding to Hesiod’s bronze race; the
Indian second yuga has
as its main feature the performance of sacrifice (and Manu, as we noted
above,
recommends this as a remedy for the third yuga). The inconsistency
between the two versions is not so
important (when the time involved after the dispersal is taken into
account); more
significant is perhaps the actual mention of sacrifice. A second
interesting correspondence is found in
the last Age of both versions (Hesiod’s iron race and Indian Kali-yuga)
where is stressed
the enmity between fathers and sons and the failure to keep one’s vow as
two of the
multifarious manifestations of sinfulness; another correspondent detail
is the grey hair with which in
Hesiod’s description new born babies will appear and which, in the
Indian version, youths
will have at sixteen: these correspondences may be fortuitous.[7]
Then, Hesiod’s bronze people
have great strength but also a hard heart while in the corresponding
Indian Dvāpara yuga
people are full of lusts and pursue selfish ends even in religious
matters: these too may be
coincidental. The bronze race are also said not to eat grain (oude
ti siton ēsthion), while
in the
Indian Kali yuga the people “will live on fish and bad meat”: here some
commentators of the Greek
text see a turning away from vegetarianism (W 188). Another point is
that as the Greek
heroic race is destroyed and followed by the iron generation, so the
Indian
kşatriya
class of
warriors and heroes gets annihilated in the great Bhārata
war on the eve of the Kali yuga (=Hesiodic
Iron Age). This is the transitional period,
sandhyā
.
Two more
points need to be made. a) Hesiod’s heroic race seems in fact to be an
extension of the
bronze race: here West seems quite right in seeing “an unwillingness to
couple” the heroic
with the bronze race (W 174) – but wrong in thinking that the bronze
race might be
“bellicose gigantes” (ibid). The bronze race also consists of warriors,
strong and hard-hearted, who love
fighting and indulge in
hubris
(like the
bold heroes who often challenge the gods in the
epics) and who finally destroy themselves in wars (again like the
heroes). b) The
Mahābhārata
speaks
also of a Twilight period (sandhi/sandhyā
‘conjuction, transition’)
comprising the close of one yuga and the start of the next (Bk V, 186,
17 ff). The Bhārata
war took
place precisely in the sandhi-period just before the Kali yuga, which
period could easily be taken
as a separate era.In the
light of the preceding considerations I suggest that the immigrant
Greeks brought with them
some version(s) of the legend of successive Ages. Reshaped with
appropriate
innovations, this knowledge was mixed with similar notions from the Near
East and
particularly the attractive scheme of metals. Hesiod’s version in
Works
and Days
gives us
the one
surviving fusion of these elements.
Notes:
1.
W and number stands throughout for West 1978 and page number. West’s
subsequent study
The East Face of Helicon
discusses again this subject but adduces no fresh material and seems
even less convincing (1997: 312-9).
2.
Arora cites (p 16) two secondary works saying the Mesopotamians had “a
primordial paradise” and, perhaps, seven Creations, but no primary text
or secondary authority mentions anything like the idea of 4-5 Ages
(Jacobsen 1976; Bottéro 1992; Dalley 1991).
3.
The Irish Celts form another IE branch and affinities between them and
Indo-Aryans are noted extensively by M Dillon (1975, passim). The four,
five or six races and invasions (MacCulloch 1948: 10-11; MacCana 1996:
54ff) mentioned in some early sources (all late in the Christian Era)
may conceal the idea of Four or Five Ages as well (Arora 1981: 16), but
“even in the oldest documents that have survived, the Biblical Adam and
Eve have already been accepted as the first parents of mankind” (Rees
1995: 95) and the innovations are so prolific that this tradition cannot
provide reliable grounds for comparison.
4.
It has been argued that since in
Manusmŗti
X, 44, are mentioned Greeks, Scythians and Pahlavas,
this stanza at least is of the second century C E (Buhler, pp cxiv-cxvii).
A similar argument is used by
Farquhar (1920: 83) for the
MB.
Two points here: (a) The alien people could have been known long
before their arrival (as the Greeks
yavana
certainly were). (b) The “prophecy” of foreign kings ruling
NW India in the Kali Yuga (MB
III, 186, 30) has Greeks and Scythians but not Pahlavas. If Pahlavas
(=Parthians) had already been in occupation, then they most probably
would have been mentioned in
the relevant passage.
5.
The Norse
Edda
speaks of the recurrence or regeneration of the Cosmos after its
destruction at
Ragnarok (1996: 56), but as these texts are very late and show
influences from Greece and Rome (ibid,
64-6) this motif may derive from Stoic or (Neo-)Pythagorean notions of
recurrence. Crossley-Holland
mentions also Christian influences (1993: 235-6) and although he
concludes that the motif is
preChristian, we must exercise caution.
6.
All references to the Indian version will be found in van Buitenen’s
translation (1981: vol II, 504-6
and 593-8)
7.
It may be argued that these correspondences may be due to Indians
borrowing from Greeks since
there is evidence (Arora 1981: 179-81) that some Indians in the North
knew Greek. However, if the
Indians knew of, and borrowed from, Hesiod, we should expect more and
closer affinities and also
perhaps the metallic scheme; for it seems to me most unlikely that only
the bare succession of the ages
and few details would reach the Indians. Besides, all Yugas were
mentioned in the
Brāhmaņa
and
Upanishadic texts, as we saw, and the certainty with which the Indian
epic speaks of the succession of
the Four Yugas, the sandhi-periods and the distinctive traits of each
Yuga, indicates an older, long
tradition.
Bibliography.
For Greek
texts the Loeb editions are useful but, of course, there are many good
translations in many languages.
The
Old
Testament
of the
Jews is also in many editions and translations
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1981
Motifs
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Manoharlal, Delhi.
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Atharvaveda
(1897 SBE,
OUP) reprint, Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi.
J Bottéro
1992
Mesopotamia
(1987)
transl by Z Bahrani & M van de Mieroop Univ
Chicago
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Grenet F 1991
A
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Vol III,
Brill, Leiden.
Bühler G
1982(1886)
The Laws
of Manu
Delhi, M.
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Crossley-Holand K 1993
Norse
Myths
(1980),
Penguin, London, NY.
Dalley
Stefanie 1991
Myths
from Mesopotamia
Oxford,
OUP.
Davidson
H.R.E. 1981
Gods &
Myths of Northern Europe
Pelican,
Hammondsworth.
Dustan W
E 1998The
Ancient Near East
Harcourt
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