Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 12
to be a redoubtable warrior, but not powerful enough to unseat
God. 17 After spending a long time in a liminal state, outside of
human settlements, the hero is killed, not by God himself, but by
his proxy.
We turn now to the Caucasus, in particular the west-central
part of that region. The three folk traditions to be studied, although
communicated through three unrelated languages (the Northwest
Caucasian language Abkhaz, the Kartvelian language Svan, and
the Indo-European Ossetic), share numerous elements of social
structure, ritual practice and mythology. The Ossetic tradition, in
particular, has drawn the attention of scholars for its Indo-
European/Caucasian syncretism, on the one hand retaining
elements of archaic Indo-European social ideology and, on the
other, adopting many beliefs and practices from their Kartvelian
and Northwest Caucasian neighbors (Abaev 1949, Dumézil 1978,
Charachidzé 1987b). This is, however, but a relatively recent stage
in the history of contact and exchange between the Caucasus and
the Indo-European world, which goes back at least two millenia
before the arrival of the Ossetes in the North Caucasus. The
Caucasian myths and epics to be discussed here, those within
which the parallels to the Achilles myth are imbedded, share
elements with IE mythology and social ideology which might
derive from at least three contexts of cultural contact at different
time depths: (i) myths of great antiquity widely diffused in the
Near East and perhaps further abroad; (ii) elements dating to early
(or even proto-) IE times; (iii) elements which most likely reflect
contact between the Greeks (or Proto-Greco-Armenians?) and the
western Caucasus.
2. AMIRAN. In Caucasian mythology, as in that of classical
Greece, “the divine and the human come together on mountains …
Any hunter or herdsman on an imaginary Greek mountain will
17 Throughout this paper ‘God’ with a capital G refers to the supreme deity of
the community in question: the Greek Zeus, the Svanetian Xoša ƒerbet, the
Ossetic Xutsau, etc.