Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 42
and Caucasian epics, focusing upon the situation of the man before
his death, differ notably from the Indo-European hope for
incorruptible fame conveyed by the Homeric poems. The latter
doctrine is furthermore embedded in the distinctly IE ideology of
three social functions — perhaps realized as distinct classes:
priests, warriors and food-producers (Dumézil 1992; Littleton
1982) — with the corresponding need to harness the aggressive
activity of the warrior class. On the other hand, the epics of
Gilgamesh and Amiran reflect fundamentally opposite perceptions
of women as partners of men. During his career as an itinerant
warrior, Amiran shows little interest in women as anything other
than pretexts to do battle, but this indifference turns to overt
hostility during his imprisonment in the mountain. As was
expressed in the final episode of the Svan myth cited earlier,
should Amiran escape, it is feared he will wipe the earth clean of
‘blacksmiths and the bright-eyed ones’. The text-internal
motivation for this destructive misogyny is usually a scene in
which a hunter or shepherd encounters the enchained Amiran on
the one day each year (or each seven years) when his rocky
covering opens, exposing him to the open air. Amiran instructs the
hunter to fetch the chain from his hearth, which Amiran needs in
order to reach his enormous sword, which he will use to break his
chains. He also demands that the man neither speak nor turn back
while doing this. On returning home, the villager is pestered with
questions by his wife, who is not unreasonably curious as to why
her husband is hauling the hearth chain off to the mountains. He
turns to rebuke her, or in some versions, to hit her. By the time he
reaches the spot where he saw Amiran, it is too late; the mountain
has already closed up again (Charachidzé 1986: 120-123). While
on the face of it this is a rather feeble pretext for the destruction of
an entire gender, Charachidzé has demonstrated that the Amiran
cycle is embedded in a dominant ideology which portrays women
as impure, dangerous and of demonic origin (Charachidzé 1968;
Tuite 1993). By contrast to early-20th century Transcaucasia, the
image of gender relations reflected in the Mesopotamian epic
composed five millenia earlier is one of cooperation rather than