Thread by @serbiaireland

Thread: Bogatyrs (1898) Painting by Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov. A bogatyr is a character in medieval East Slavic legends, akin to a Western European knight. I would here like to talk about the surprising origin of the word Bogatyr...

The official etymology says that this word was borrowed by Slavs "from a Turkic language, probably Khazar, ultimately from Old Turkic baɣatur (hero)"...

But it looks like this Turkic word could in turn be borrowing as well...

The other day, I was looking for some info on Ultimogeniture, when I stumbled across this very interesting paper:

"Son of Heaven and Son of God: Interactions among Ancient Asiatic Cultures regarding Sacral Kingship and Theophoric Names" by Sanping Chen
jstor.org/stable/25188290

The paper talks about the influence of the Bronze Age Central Asian and particularly Indo-Iranian cultures on Bronze Age China...And vice versa...It is a great read, showing through linguistics how chaotic a place was the area of today's China during the Bronze and Iron Age...

And in it the author claims that the Turkic word "baɣatur" is itself a borrowing from Indo-Iranian "bagadar" meaning "god given"...

The story starts with the Zhou people defeating Shang people and taking over China...Which happened in 1046 BC...

These Zhou guys, are a bit of a mystery...

They were described by their enemies as "western barbarians". Who believed that "The gods don't accept sacrifices from the people who are not of their own race..." Which means that they saw themselves as different...

They also introduced the concepts of Tian = heaven, sky as in Sky God, Tianzi = son of heaven as in Emperor being the son of Sky God and Tianming = mandate of heaven, as in the Emperor being divinely appointed to rule by the Sky God...

"Chosen people" worshiping the Sky God...

Who were these western barbarians? Well they were possibly Caucasoids or a mix of tribes with Caucasoid oligarchy, or...

Caucasoid figurines were found in 8th century BC Zhou palace.

One was marked with the graph "+" which was interpreted as shaman. But in old Chinese this graph was actually pronounced as "*myag" and probably meant magus...More on this in:

jstor.org/stable/23351579

This seems to show that the Iranian, influence was very strong among the Zhou...

Zhou themselves claimed that they descended from the inventor of agriculture, but that they had to abandon the agriculture "and live among the Barbarians (pastoralists, nomads) for 1000 years"...

So the Zhou could have actually been a Chinese people who lived so ling in Central Asia mixed with the Indo-Iranians, that they probably intermixed and adopted a lot of Indo-Iranian customs and beliefs...As I said, they are a bit of a mystery...

The 1000 years among the Barbarians is very interesting...1000 years before the Zhou took over the China, is the time of the collapse of the Early Bronze Age civilisations, due to catastrophic weather event known as 4.2 Kiloyear event, which wiped out the agriculture...

Anyway, Zhou ruled the middle kingdom (China) for 800 years...

During that time, the Zhou royal title "The son of heaven, the son of Sky God" spread out through Central Asia where it became a synonym for the Chinese (Zhou) emperor...

The Iranians rendered it "bagapuhr" and Sogdians "ßγpwr". Both mean "son of god" and both are derived from the Proto-Indo-Iranian "bʰagás" meaning god in a sense of "the giver" and in Indian title "devaputra" (son of god) derived from Sanskrit देव (devá) meaning deity, god...

Considering the sudden appearance of the sky veneration and the "son of (sky) god" in China with the arrival of Zhou and the presence of the Magi among the Zhou, I do have to ask: where did the belief in the "Son of God", the "Divine ruler" originate? China or Central Asia?

It's very interesting that the term "Magi" was used to denote both an ethnicity, a tribe and (probably hereditary) priesthood...That fits perfectly with the Zhou story, where Zhou, "the chosen people" ruled by the "divine king", the "son of god" and who had "magi" as priests...

So, as I said, I don't know when the Steppe people started calling their supreme rulers "Son of God". But as more and more tribal chiefs added this title to their name, its meaning was eventually devalued from "Divine King" to "Hereditary tribal chief"...

The same goes for the term "Bhaga, Baga" meaning god, supreme deity...

Rig-Veda exclaims:

"The wide-shining Dawn has been seen ascending to the sky, the path of the Eternal is full of rays; full of rays is the eye of Bhaga".

Bhaga was originally the eye of Sky god, Sun...

Persian kings used the same word "Baga" with the meaning "God" in their inscriptions. The first one to use the term Baga was Darius the Great. The upper inscription on the sepulchre of Darius at Nakshi-Rustam, begins with the following words:

Interestingly, Darius was the first to mention Magi too...I wonder if this is in any way related...

But then the process of the deification of the kings began in the area... The founder of the Parthian dynasty Aršak, was the first to be deified and to call himself "baga" god...

By the way, I find it very interesting that the first God-Kings of the Central Asia appear right at the time when the Zhou empire, the empire ruled by the God Kings for 800 years, ends...I wonder if this is in anyway related...

After that, the term "baga" (god) starts appearing in sovereign titles in the Iranian world. By the time of the Sassanian dynasty, the deification of the Iranian kings was such a "normal" thing that Shahpur II called himself "partner with the stars, brother of Sun and Moon"...

With the political fragmentation of the area, the devaluation process was set in place...Baga (God), which was once applied only to the Great King of Kings of the Persians, was soon usurped by local kings, then kinglets, owners of castles and finally any noble person...

By the time Turks adopted "baga" as a title, their version "beg" simply meant "chief, lord, titled man"...

The Chinese rendition of the title "bagapuhr" was "mohefu" and "mofu". These were found in the Chinese documents in the early centuries AD, and were understood by the Chinese to mean: "Barbarian hereditary chieftain"...No more no less...

There were two important prerequisites for someone to become the legitimate ruler in the Iranian, Steppe and Chinese cultures of the Bronze and Iron Age: to come from a recognised ruling family and to be a great warrior...

Being a member of a recognised ruling family was important because this meant that you were a descendant of god, through "son of god" which became "son of divine king" and eventually became "descendant of the diving king"...Which gave you the "Mandate of heaven" to rule...

The reason why being a great warrior, was a prerequisite to become a king, is kind of self explanatory...In warrior societies only warriors can be rulers...The qualities required to be a great warrior, stature, strength, smartness, skill were seen as gifts from god...

These two prerequisites were captured by the two titles used for the Northern barbarians:

"Bagapuhr" = son of god
"Bagatur" = god given

According to Sanping Chen, "Bagatur" is a mangled Iranian "Bagadar" = Baga + dar = god + gift, given, which is the equivalent to the Sanskrit "Devadatta" = Deva + datta = god + gift, given ...

Because we are here talking about an ethnic god, the god of the chosen people, this applied to a warrior king becomes "god's warrior, protector" but also the "tribe's warrior, protector". Guys otherwise known as "heroes" or "knights"...

The Chinese rendered this title as "moheduo" and used it to describe hereditary chiefs of the Northern Barbarians...In one document the chieftains of the Northern Shiwei were called Quyin (Khagan) Moheduo (Bagatur) and were said to be assisted by three "mohefus" (Bagaphurs)...

But there is also another rendition of the Bagatur which appeared in Chinese documents for a short time from 304 to 439 CE to refer to the Barbarian chieftains...

The Chinese symbols used to write this title are today pronounced BuDa but were in old Chinese pronounced "*b'əg- d'âd" = baga + dad = god + given...This basically confirms that Bagatur = Bagadar, Bagadad = God + given...

Apparently some linguists have found it difficult to accept Bagatur = Bagadar because of the fact that Iranian laguages don't have "dar" as meaning "given, gift"...

Sanping Chen lists the Indo-European languages considered as possible sources for the "given, gift" part in Bagatur as Pali/Sanskrit "-datta", Iranian "-dāta" and Ancient Greek "-doros"...And proposes that the term Bagatur = Bagadar was an Iranian-Greek compound...

Even though compounds like these are recorded, it is strange that one group of Indo-European languages which has both baga and dar is missing from the above list: Slavic languages, the only ones, apart from Turkic languages, where we find the term Bogatir meaning a knight, a hero

In Slavic languages Bog = God, da = give, dade = gave, dan = given, dar = gift...Bogdan is a personal name meaning God given. Božidar is a personal name meaning God's gift...

And the expression "Boga dar" still means God's gift...

But there surely couldn't have been any Slavs knocking about Chinese northern borders during the Bronze and Iron Age, right? Well, who knows...Maybe...

Or maybe, again, Slavs have preserved in their language all the versions of the old PIE root "*deh₃-" to give, which are now strewn across IE spectrum in fragments...As well as the word for god, Bhaga...Just enough to form Bagadar...

Also, there are some theories that Serbs are of Indo-Iranian origin, as opposed to Slavic origin. Now that we know that Serbs are such a genetically mixed population, maybe both are true? But this story gets better...

In Serbian mythology, Dabog, Da Bog = Da Bhaga = Giving God, is the sun god, but also the rain god, basically the sky god, the all mighty ruler, giver of life (and everything else for that matter)...

In Serbian the expression "On vedri i oblači" means "he rules", "he has absolute control, absolute power". Literally this expression means "he makes the sky clear and cloudy"...

In "Actes Du Huitieme Congres International Des Orientalistes, Tenu en 1889" we can read that "...for Darius Bhaga was a clan deity..." Just like the supreme god of the Zhou...

I don't know if this is true or not, but in Serbian mythology, Dabog is not just the supreme sky god of the Serbs, he is also the ancestral god of the Serbs, "djed" (grandfather) the progenitor of the Serbs...

I don't know what to make of all this...

But the search for the root of the title Bogatir certainly has led us down a very interesting rabbit hole 🙂