Author : Rumana Reza
Previously we've seen how dinosaurs and dragons were formatted through scientific and mythological way respectively . Now we are going to take a glance on those dragon heroes who are still alive through their remarkable tasks.
Dragon Heroes:
Marduk:
Marduk and his dragon Mušḫuššu, from a Babylonian cylinder seal
Marduk (Sumerian spelling in Akkadian: AMAR.UTU "solar calf"; Greek Μαρδοχαῖος, Mardochaios) was a late-generation god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon. When Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi (18th century BC), he slowly started to rise to the position of the head of the Babylonian pantheon, a position he fully acquired by the second half of the second millennium BC.
In the perfected system of astrology, the planet Jupiter was associated with Marduk by the Hammurabi period. Marduk's original character is obscure but he was later associated with water, vegetation, judgment, and magic.
In Enûma Elish, a civil war between the gods was growing to a climactic battle. The Anunnaki gods gathered together to find one god who could defeat the gods rising against them. Marduk, a very young god, answered the call and was promised the position of head god.
To prepare for battle, he makes a bow, fletches arrows, grabs a mace, throws lightning before him, fills his body with flame, makes a net to encircle Tiamat within it, gathers the four winds so that no part of her could escape, creates seven nasty new winds such as the whirlwind and tornado, and raises up his mightiest weapon, the rain-flood. Then he sets out for battle, mounting his storm-chariot drawn by four horses with poison in their mouths. In his lips he holds a spell and in one hand he grasps a herb to counter poison.
First, he challenges the leader of the Anunnaki gods, the dragon of the primordial sea Tiamat, to single combat and defeats her by trapping her with his net, blowing her up with his winds, and piercing her belly with an arrow.
Then, he proceeds to defeat Kingu, who Tiamat put in charge of the army and wore the Tablets of Destiny on his breast, and "wrested from him the Tablets of Destiny, wrongfully his" and assumed his new position. Under his reign humans were created to bear the burdens of life so the gods could be at leisure.
Marduk was depicted as a human, often with his symbol the snake-dragon which he had taken over from the god Tishpak.
Cadmus
Euboean amphora, c.550 BCE, depicting the fight between Cadmus and a dragon
Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BC. According to Theban telling, Cadmus sent some of his companions to the nearby Ismenian spring for water. They were slain by the spring's guardian water-dragon (compare the Lernaean Hydra), which was in turn destroyed by Cadmus, the duty of a culture hero of the new order.
By the instructions of Athena, he sowed the dragon's teeth in the ground, from which there sprang a race of fierce armed men, called the Spartoi ("sown"). By throwing a stone among them, Cadmus caused them to fall upon one another until only five survived, who assisted him to build the Cadmeia or citadel of Thebes, and became the founders of the noblest families of that city.The dragon had been sacred, so the god made Cadmus do penance for eight years by serving him.
Nevertheless, Cadmus was deeply troubled by the ill-fortune which clung to him as a result of his having killed the sacred dragon, and one day he remarked that if the gods were so enamored of the life of a serpent, he might as well wish that life for himself. Immediately he began to grow scales and change in form. In Euripides' The Bacchae, Cadmus is given a prophecy by Dionysus whereby both he and his wife will be turned into snakes for a period before eventually being brought to live among the blest.
Norse legend
Engraving by Lucas Jennis, in alchemical tract titled De Lapide
Philosophico.
In Norse
mythology,
the ouroboros appears as the serpent Jörmungandr, one of the three children of Loki and Angrboda,
which grew so large that it could encircle the world and grasp its tail in its
teeth. In the legends of Ragnar Lodbrok, such as Ragnarssona þáttr, the Geatish
king Herraud gives a small lindworm as
a gift to his daughter Þóra Town-Hart after which it grows into a large serpent which
encircles the girl's bower and bites itself in the tail. The serpent is slain
by Ragnar Lodbrok who marries Þóra. Ragnar later has a son with another woman
named Kráka and this son is born with the image of a white
snake in one eye. This snake encircled the iris and bit itself in the tail, and
the son was named Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye
Heracles:
Heracles- in Rome and the modern West, he is known as Hercules. According to the poet Hesiod, the Hydra was the offspring of the half-Nymph/half-serpent Echidna, and the snake-bodied Typhaon (Typhon) but he fails to describe the Hydra in detail. However, the Hydra's actual appearance was well documented in ancient artwork as a large multi-headed snake. This description agreed with later writers who said that the Hydra had a huge body with eight mortal heads and one immortal head. The creature lurked in the swamps of Lerna, which was a marshy region near ancient Argos in southeast Greece on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. The artistic representations of this Labor date back to the end of the eighth century BCE, where a bearded Heracles was almost always assisted by his devoted nephew, Iolaos (Iolaus).
The Hydra was very hard to kill because each time one of the serpent-like
heads was hacked off, two new heads grew to replace it. Also, the blood of the
Hydra was a deadly poison.
He used either a sword or a sickle to hack at the heads while a giant crab,
sent by the vengeful Hera to distract him, snapped at his heels. To prevent the
heads from growing back two-fold, Heracles succeeded in cauterizing the
squirming necks with fire as he cut off each head. After the Hydra was dead,
Heracles dipped his arrows in the poisonous blood … an act he would regret
during his Fourth Labor.Rostam:
Two Persian heroes, Rostam and Esfandyar, share Labours stories with Hercules.19 According to the traditional narrative, the story starts when Kai Kaus's expedition to Mazandaran fails, and the armies are captured by the Divs. Rostam engages to liberate them, and proceeds by the labors.
His one of the labor is: At midnight a monstrous dragon serpent issues from the forest; Rakhsh retires towards his master, and neighs and beats the ground so furiously, that Rostam is awakened. Looking round on every side, however, he sees nothing as the dragon had vanished, and he goes to sleep again. The dragon again appears, and the faithful horse tries to rouse his sleeping master. Rostam again is awakened,and is again angry; but fortunately at this moment sufficient light is providentially given for him to see the prodigious cause of alarm. Rostam succeeds to slay the dragon.
Cyrus:
Cyrus II of Persia (Old Persian: Kūruš; New Persian: کوروش بُزُرگ Kurosh-e Bozorg ; c. 600 or 576 – 530 BC), commonly known as Cyrus the Great,was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. The ancient Greek historians Ctesias and Plutarch noted that Cyrus was named from Kuros, the Sun, a concept which has been interpreted as meaning "like the Sun" (Khurvash) by noting its relation to the Persian noun for sun, khor, while using -vash as a suffix of likeness. This may also point to a fascinating relationship to the mythological "first king" of Persia, Jamshid, whose name also incorporates the element "sun" ("shid").
Under his rule, the empire embraced all the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanded vastly and eventually conquered most of Southwest Asia and much of Central Asia and the Caucasus. From the Mediterranean Sea and Hellespont in the west to the Indus River in the east, Cyrus the Great created the largest empire the world had yet seen. Under his successors, the empire eventually stretched from parts of the Balkans (Bulgaria-Pannonia) and Thrace-Macedonia in the west, to the Indus Valley in the east. His regal titles in full were The Great King, King of Persia, King of Anshan, King of Media, King of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, and King of the Four Corners of the World.
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| (Modern replica of the “Cyrus Cylinder”), 2010, original, 539–530 BCE. Resin. Near East Section, African and Middle Eastern ...www.loc.govنسخۀ باز تولید شده منشور کوروش |
The Babylonian dragon worshiped by the court of the Persian Cyrus the Great, in the Hebrew narrative in Bel and the Dragon probably dates to the late 2nd century BCE. Some contemporary Muslim scholars have suggested that the Qur'anic figure of Dhul-Qarnayn is Cyrus the Great.This theory was proposed by Sunni scholar Abul Kalam Azad and endorsed by Shi'a scholars Allameh Tabatabaei, in his Tafsir al-Mizan and Makarem Shirazi.
Modern impression of Achaemenid cylinder seal. The use of cylinder seals appears to have been restricted to officials of the royal administration during this period.
To be continued…………
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