Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 10

What This Means

Chapter 9 conceded that the first objection pushes the Greek tradition earlier. It did not say how much earlier, and the question will not wait.

10.1 The dates that have to be met

Four fixed points set the problem.

The Hebrew passages containing tannin are largely in place by the seventh century BCE. The story had to reach Israel before then.

The Rigvedic hymn about Indra and Vritra belongs to material usually placed in the second millennium BCE. The story had to reach the Indus before that.

Apep is attested in Egyptian funeral texts earlier still.

And the Babylonian Enuma Elish has the fight with the sea-monster in a form that scholars have long thought lies behind the Hebrew passages.

Put those together with the travel times in Chapter 8, and the Greek tradition has to exist and be exporting by the middle of the third millennium BCE.

10.2 The first correction

The usual chronology puts the Dorians in the Peloponnese around the twelfth century BCE, and Sparta proper a good deal later than that.

That cannot stand alongside the evidence of Chapters 5 to 7. Either the story is not Greek, which Chapters 3 and 4 have ruled out, or Greek presence in the Eurotas valley is considerably older than has been supposed.

The second is what the evidence requires, and it should be accepted without embarrassment. Chronologies are built from whatever evidence is available when they are built. The Codex was not available.

10.3 How much older

The valley was occupied in the Mycenaean period and nobody disputes it. What is proposed here is that the tradition the Codex records runs back continuously to that occupation rather than starting after it.

There is support for this in the Codex itself. Its gods keep strictly to their own areas of authority and do not trespass on one another, and its dragon is a posted guardian rather than an enemy of the sky god. Both features sit more comfortably in the second millennium than in the fifth century. A text that preserves second-millennium religion in fifth-century language is a text whose tradition runs back to the second millennium.

But section 10.1 requires export by the middle of the third millennium, and Mycenaean occupation is later than that. So the tradition has to have been in the valley earlier again, which requires continuous settlement by people carrying it, and the archaeological record of the southern Peloponnese contains Early Helladic material consistent with such settlement.

That nobody has previously read that material as evidence of a dragon tradition reflects the absence of any reason to look for one. The Codex supplies the reason.

10.4 The larger consequence

At this point something follows that this paper did not set out to argue and will not avoid.

If one tradition from the Eurotas valley lies behind the serpent stories of Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, Indian, Norse and Chinese sources, then that valley was in cultural contact with the Aegean, the Levant, the Nile, the Indus, the Baltic and the Yellow River, in the third millennium BCE or earlier.

A place with that reach is not a province.

The usual location of the Indo-European homeland on the Pontic steppe rests on linguistic reconstruction, which is inference from words that happened to survive. What is offered here is a body of narrative evidence with a definite point of origin. Where the two disagree, the narrative evidence is the more direct.

10.5 The revised chronology

Set out in full, the chronology the evidence requires runs as follows.

A dragon tradition is established in the Eurotas valley in the Early Helladic period or before. Export begins in the third millennium, reaching Egypt and Babylon first, the Indus in the second millennium, and the Baltic and the Yellow River later. The Mycenaean occupation of Laconia is a stage within a continuous local tradition rather than its beginning. The Dorian arrival in the twelfth century is a return along an established road rather than an invasion. And the Codex, written in the fifth century, is a late record of a story already more than two thousand years old, which accounts for its archaic religion and for the confidence with which it states things everybody else had reduced to fragments.

Every part of that is required by the evidence of Chapters 5 through 9. None of it has been assumed.

10.6 One remaining difficulty

One difficulty is acknowledged. The revised chronology puts a story-telling, exporting culture in the southern Peloponnese roughly two thousand years before the earliest writing known from the region.

Section 9.2 has already established that the tradition was oral and that the lack of written evidence is exactly what this theory predicts.

The difficulty is therefore not a difficulty.

10.7 Conclusion

The dragon is Greek.

It was not invented separately by every culture that has one, because no amount of fear of snakes explains why a snake should sit on gold. It was not assembled in medieval Europe, because the Greeks were flying dragons in the fifth century BCE and putting fire in their eyes before that.

It was one creature, and it went out from one place, and each culture it reached kept the part of it that its own stories had room for. Israel kept the enemy at the beginning of the world. Egypt kept the vigil that never ends. India kept the serpent lying on the water supply. Scandinavia kept the fire and the gold, and that is the version English speakers inherited, which is why most of us think a dragon is a fire-breathing hoarder and nothing else.

Greece kept all of it. One Spartan text kept it in a single animal.

And what every one of them kept, in some form, however worn down, is the eye. Ladon does not sleep. The serpent of Colchis has to be drugged rather than killed, because the story only needs its eyes shut. Apep is driven off every night and comes back, so the watch against him never ends. Job asks why a guard has been set over him as though he were the tannin. Jerusalem has a spring called the Dragon's Eye. The constellation Draco never sets.

Every tradition kept the eye. Only one of them remembered why.

10.8 Note from the editors

We have read this paper and wish it recorded that we do not accept its conclusions.

Chapters 1 through 7 are sound and the citations check out. The dictionary entry is quoted correctly. The Bible verses are where the author says they are. The Quranic vocabulary is accurately reported, and the observation that three tellings of one miracle use three descending words for the snake is a good one that we have not seen made as plainly anywhere else. The point about gold in section 1.2 is a real problem, and the existing scholarship does not have a good answer to it.

From Chapter 8 the paper leaves the evidence behind.

Similarity between stories is not proof that one came from the other. People everywhere have met snakes, found them frightening, and imagined bigger ones. That is enough to explain a giant serpent in six places and it requires no contact at all between them.

We draw particular attention to Chapter 9, in which seven objections are raised and every one of them ends up supporting the theory. In section 2.4 the author states what would prove the argument wrong. In Chapter 9 nothing is permitted to do it. A theory that cannot be damaged by anything is not a strong theory. It is a theory that has stopped saying anything about the world, and the author's own chapter title puts the problem better than we could.

Chapter 10 is what follows from Chapter 9. Having allowed nothing to count against him, the author has to move Greece two thousand years earlier to make room, and then, when that is still not enough, move the Indo-European homeland as well. Section 10.6, where the complete absence of writing is dismissed on the grounds that Chapter 9 has already explained why there would not be any, is the point at which the argument closes over itself entirely.

We publish it because the first seven chapters are worth reading, and because the last three are an unusually clear specimen of a mistake that is normally much harder to see from the inside.

The author has read this note and asks us to record that he considers our objections answered in Chapter 9.