“A young woman with purple fingers, Eos, rose from the darkness ...” Thus begins Homer the second song of the Odyssey (8-7 a. BC). This poetic image of a young beauty - the dawn is found in the folklore of many peoples. "You are approaching, goddess, laughing, young." This is the description of the dawn in the ancient Indian Rig Veda (11-10 centuries BC). And in the Novgorod Khludov Psalter of the end of the 13th century, the morning dawn is drawn. She is depicted as a fiery-red young woman holding the Sun in her hands. The commonality of descriptions and miniatures is undeniable, although they refer to different eras and different peoples, separated by centuries, chains of mighty mountains, seas and vast plains.
What lies at the basis of the noted similarity: a mere chance or some kind of regularity? “Yes, a regularity,” the author of an article in Soviet Slavonic Studies replies with all his material. The image of the Sun in the form of a fiery wheel, the morning and evening dawns in the form of two women - one light, the other dark, the interpretation of a solar eclipse as the struggle of the Sun with a dragon who wants to "devour" the luminary, are found among Russians and Slovaks, Belarusians and Bulgarians, among Goths and Anglo-Saxons, Danes and ancient Greeks, Romans, Irano-Aryans and Indo-Aryans.
Such ideas about the Sun and dawns developed, according to the author, in that distant time of mankind, when there was an Indo-European community of people with a single language, common views on nature. Many modern peoples, including the Slavic ones, were formed on the basis of this community that disintegrated over time. It is possible to scientifically reconstruct the Indo-European community according to those identical ancient features and remnants that, having passed through the thickness of time, still exist among the peoples of different countries and continents.
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