Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 8

How the Greek Dragon Travelled

If the dragon is Greek and everyone else borrowed it, there has to be a way it got to them. This chapter sets out the routes.

8.1 Westward, which is not in dispute

The Codex itself travelled west. This is not a theory. The scroll was dug out of a Roman villa at Herculaneum, and it was already an antiquity by the time it went into that library, having been written four hundred years before the house was built.

So a Laconian text about a dragon physically reached Italy. Whatever happened in the other directions, this one happened, and it happened to the very document this study relies on.

8.2 East and south, which is easy

Greeks and Egyptians were in constant contact for centuries. There was a Greek trading city in the Nile delta from the seventh century BCE. Greek soldiers served Egyptian kings and carved their names on the monuments while doing it.

Greeks and Persians were in contact continuously, sometimes at war and sometimes not, and the Codex itself is set against a Persian background. From Persia the ordinary trade routes run to Mesopotamia and on to the Indus.

Israel sits in the middle of all of this. Nothing needs to be invented to get a story from a Greek port to Jerusalem.

8.3 Further east

India is reached by the same road as Persia, only longer, and China by the same road again, longer still.

The distance is what explains the condition the story arrives in. A tale passed along a trade route for a few thousand miles arrives thin. Chapter 7 showed that the further you go from Greece, the less of the original creature survives, which is what you would expect and which is set out properly in section 8.5.

8.4 North, which needs an argument

Scandinavia is the hard one, because nobody has ever documented contact between archaic Greece and the Baltic.

The route is there all the same, and it runs through the Dorians.

The Dorians came into the Peloponnese from the north. That is the standard account of how Sparta came to be where it is. Whatever their exact origin, they arrived from the northern direction, which means a road existed between the north and Laconia and that people had walked it.

Roads are not one-way. A route that carried people south will carry stories north, and there is no reason to think that traffic stopped once the Dorians had settled.

The Norse dragon is what you would expect to find at the far end of that road. It kept the fire, which is dramatic and easy to remember. It kept the gold, which is the motive of the story. It lost the watching, the harness, the oath and the guarding on another's behalf, which are the parts that need explaining and therefore the parts a story sheds first.

8.5 The pattern of the distances

Here is the test of any theory of this kind. If a story spreads out from one place, the versions nearest that place should resemble the original most, and the versions furthest away should resemble it least.

That is exactly the pattern.

*Greece*, the origin, has all the features.

*Israel and Egypt*, near neighbours in constant contact, have substantial pieces: the giant serpent, the enemy at the beginning of the world, the endless vigil.

*Scandinavia*, far away but connected by the Dorian road, has two strong features and nothing else.

*India*, much further, has the serpent and one function.

*China*, furthest of all, has the serpent and the weather and has lost even the hostility.

Lay the traditions out by distance from Laconia and the resemblance falls away steadily as the distance grows. That is not something that happens when cultures invent things separately. It is what happens when something spreads.