The Earliest States of Eastern Europe

Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences

For citation: Bucharin, Michail D. Borysthenes as Theonym and Hydronym // Drevneishie gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy (The Earliest States of Eastern Europe). 2023: The Black Sea Region in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Problems of Historical Geography / Editor of the volume A.V. Podossinov. Мoscow: GAUGN-Press, 2023. S. 174–182.

DOI: 10.32608/1560-1382-2023-44-174-182

Abstract: The most important information on the geography of resettlement and mythology of the Scythians is transferred in the “Histories” of Herodotus ‒ the most important, along with the Akkadian royal annals, source on the history of the Scythian language as a whole. The supreme deity of the Scythians, according to this source, was Borysthenes (Βορυσθένης). This name as a theonym should have been familiar to the Greeks already in the 7^th century BC. The river Βορυσθένης (modern Dnieper), along which part of the Scythians settled, was also called in the same way. Modern interpretations of the hydronym Borysthenes proceed from the fact that the ancient Greek name of this river goes back to the Scythian form, meaning “wide place”, “long water”, “floodplain [of the river] Varu”, “very noisy” / “powerfully roaring”, “full-breasted”, “beaver”. These interpretations, the most common of which is the “wide place” (based on Old Iranian *ṷaru - + sthāna-), seem erroneous both in terms of the transmission of Scythian phonemes in ancient Greek and in semantic terms (for example, the presence of an element with the meaning “place” in the name of the supreme deity is doubtful). An analysis of a significant part of the previously given assumptions regarding the etymology of the ancient name of the Dnieper (Βορυσθένης) was quite successfully performed by S.V. Kullanda. The theonym Βορυσθένης can hypothetically be interpreted as “dark brown”, “the colors of a thunderstorm cloud” (from Old Iranian *baura- (< Aryan. *bharu- with metathesis) ‒ “brown”, “red”, “bulan” and the Old Iranian suffix -ēšta, which would strengthen the basic meaning). Borysthenes was the deity of water, the father of Api ‒ also a river deity, and, taking into account that it was at the head of the Scythian pantheon, functionally Borysthenes in the Scythian pantheon was the deity of thunder, and rain and as such was similar to Slavic Perun, Baltic Perkunas, Indian Parjanya. Other cases of color designation of Indo-European in general and Indo-Iranian in particular deities are known on the example of the Indian Rudra (“red”).

Keywords:

Scythians, Borуsthenes, ancient Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian mythology, Classical sources

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