Keywords
Geryoneis
Mother of the Sun
Comparative poetics
Indo-European
Rig Veda
How to Cite
Abstract
In one of the fragments of the Gerioneid of Estheire, the Sun, after crossing the skies to the west, returns at night by the Ocean to his home, where a mother, wife and children await him. The identity of the sun's mother is obscure; according to the Hesiodic tradition, the Night is its progenitor, but it dwells, according to Hesiod himself, in the West. This article suggests a solution regarding the identity and abode of the mother of the Sun based on indo-European comparative poetics. Material of the oldest Indo-European Islamic tradition, the Rig Veda, leads us to assume that Aesthesicorum, in this particular, preserves an archaism that, in Greece, is only indirectly atone in one of the Homeric Hymns.
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