In reply to my suggestion of the Sumerian Gilgamesh diving for the
flower of immortality Mark wrote
> A Sumerian source? There seems to have been something like this
going on in the New World too with the Mayas. Waters have a universal
fascination; and objects lost or retrieved, either accidentally or
deliberately (even ritually) have the same attraction as tossing
coins into a wishing well or public fountain.
>
> Accepting a Pontic homeland, the PIEs were religiously at the
shamanistic level, with medicine men a la Sitting Bull. What
fragments of this we can retrieve (and we really can, it seems) have
NOTHING to do with Sumeria. Even with a Middle European homeland, the
Old Europeans were separated from whoever became the Sumerians by a
good 2000-3000 years.
Mark, religious elements have circulated independently from each
other and rapidly across large areas. Thus Buddhist Boddhisattvas
crop up as Christian saints (i.e. Saint Jehosephat etc)and vice
versa. The closure of the Oecumene was somthing that started in
early classical times, precisely when many of the extant myths and
legends of gods and goddesses originated. To propose that popular
stories and mythic elements did not circulate extremely widely,
across the whole of the Indo-European realm, from Jutland to the
Indus is a risky supposition. This circulation of stories is not
something that began in classical times. Dennis is of the belief
that there was a large Egypto-Semitic influence in the Aegean from
Bronze Age times onwards, influences also ran the opposite way.
Pagan syncretism and popular devotions to particular cults could
change things extremely rapidly, and frequently did.
When one finds the same mythic elements in Sumeria as we find
throughout the Middle East, we have to ask about their origins.
Sumerian culture shows no destinction or cultic interruption from
Ubaid times onwards (5,500 BCE) and it is not unlikely that much of
the Sumerian corpus began that early. Temples remained on the same
site down to late historical times. Certainly there is evidence that
the sign for Inanna for instance (a curled, bound bundle of reeds,
found at her temple door) was a widespread iconographic element from
Ubaid times onwards. Given that Sumerians were trading from
Mozabique to Badakhstan and the Egyptians were trading into Central
Africa and late stone age Europe, we see here a commonality of
religious elements across huge areas. Stories of brothers (or twins)
slaying each other are precisely those kinds of oral tradition
folkloric elements wich would spread furtherest and fastest.
Hope this helps
John