The Transformation of Cyavana: A Case Study in Narrative Evolution

Ongoing Issues in Comparative Work

Few will argue with the proposition that stories are fluid and continuously evolving; nor are many likely to deny that a successful narrative can spread like wildfire across time and space. Yet in spite of these two well-documented truths, attempts at the identification of borrowings and parallels (though a venerable scholarly pursuit) can be tricky. Few other common scholarly undertakings generate the level of resistance that the proposal of a set of parallels can, and perhaps with some valid reasons. Shared features that make an enormous impression on one scholar will strike others as insignificant or coincidental, and most comparativists have come to accept that many of our colleagues are completely uninterested in the endeavor, particularly when engaging with a borrowed narrative requires transporting their focus beyond the boundaries of their field.

Normally at this point in an academic paper, with the introductory salvo concluded, one would begin grounding the issue within academic debate by quoting from the relevant literature. The state of the methodology for evaluating parallels is, however, such that there is scant literature on it to invoke. Tigay describes the situation facing scholars who work on literary parallels between the Hebrew Bible and other Near Eastern Literature (1993:250-51):

That we have still not reached agreement on how to distinguish borrowed from original elements is clear from two recent statements about the relationship between Biblical and Mesopotamian parallels. Theodore Gaster, Frazer's modern editor, writes in the introduction to his revision of Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament that the Hebrew compiler of Genesis "had . . . a cuneiform original before him." [Gaster 1969:xxvii.] On the other hand, the Assyriologist A. R. Millard says of the flood story, which most consider the outstanding example of a borrowed story in the Bible, that ". . . it has yet to be shown that there was borrowing, even indirectly"

[Millard 1967:17].

Recent years have witnessed a new interest in pursuing the study of the genetic relationships between narratives through more scientific methods (for example, Witzel 2012 and Tehrani 2013), primarily in the service of tracing tales back to a common ancestor. The current work seeks to augment those large-scale efforts with a small-scale, close examination of the sorts of tiny incremental changes that cumulatively transformed the myths and folktales of earliest cultures into the rich diversity of traditional narratives scholars have documented across the globe.

There is no official list of tested criteria for gauging the likelihood of a relationship between a pair of proposed parallel narratives that may be appealed to as the basis for acceptance or rejection of a claim.¹ Instead there exists a sort of commonsensical conventional wisdom on how a set of parallels should look. The following list summarizes a number of these commonly accepted precepts (Tigay 1993):

1. 1. The tales should have multiple shared motifs.

2. 2. The shared motifs should occur in the same sequence.

3. 3. The tales should have specific, peculiar, and significant shared details.

4. 4. Similarities should be heterogeneous, unpredictable, and non-trivial.

5. 5. The two tales should have comparable characters.

6. 6. The two tales should have comparable settings.

7. 7. The two tales should have comparable themes.

8. 8. Alterations must be culturally explicable.

9. 9. There must be a feasible path of transmission between the two tales.

Nothing about these principles is self-evidently unsound, and all of them must surely have their place in the evaluation of parallel narratives. As with all pieces of common knowledge, however, they should be employed with the understanding that they have been assembled largely by perceptions of what narrative evolution "should" look like, rather than formulated by means of systematic testing and observation. I have included them here because they are the closest thing to a starting point we have; below we shall be applying these criteria to our case (a set of tales whose genetic relationship is known), after the other elements of the project have been introduced.

For the sake of comparison, let us transport the discussion into a different arena: diachronic linguistics, for example, would be a very different field if decisions...