Bogatyr

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

But this Turkish word could in turn be a borrowing too...

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

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 throught linguistics how messed up and 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". One of the main aspects of their religious practices was 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, sky as in the Emperor being divinely appointed to rule by the Sky God...

They basically brought Heaven, Sky God worship, and the idea of the "Chosen people" to China...

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 is in old Chinese actually pronounced as "*myag" and interpreted as shaman, but probably meant magus...

You can read more about this in "Old Sinitic *Myag, Old Persian Maguš and English Magician" by Victor H. Mair...Magus is in turn derived from the PIE "megʰ-" meaning "to be able to, to have power to" 

This seems to show that the Iranian, Sogdian 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 they could have actually been a Chinese people who lived so long in Central Asia mixed with the Indo-Iranians, that they probably intermixed and adopted a lot of Indo-Iranian customs and beliefs...

This 1000 years among the Barbarians is very interesting...1000 years before the Zhou took over the Midle kingdom (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...Is this what this story talks about?

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 appearence of the sky veneration and the title "son of (sky) god" in the Middle kingdom with the arrival of Zhou and the presence of the Magi among the Zhou, I do have to ask the question: Where did the belief in the "Divine king" the "Son of God" originate? China or Central Asia? 

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

So, as I said, I don't know when the Northern Steppe people started calling their supreme rulers "bagapuhr". But as the northern borderlands between China and the Steppe became more and more fragmented and more and more tribal chiefs took the title "the son of god" this title eventually lost its meaning of "divinely installed supreme ruler" and eventually just meant "hereditary tribal chief". 

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

In the "The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Volume 94" we can read that 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". 

We can see here that Bhaga was originally the eye of the Sky God, The Sun...

In the same article we can read that the 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...

After the arrival of Alexander the Great to Central Asia, 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"...

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, ends...

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 this as a title, "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"...

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 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...

This was captured by the title "bagapuhr" = hereditary chieftain, prince...

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. 

This was captured by another related title: "Bagatur". 

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 ... Basically the title means "one who was given by god to fight for god"...And because we are here talking about an ethnic god, the god of the chosen people, this "god's warrior, protector" is also the "tribe's warrior, protector" otherwise known as "hero" or "knight"...

The Chinese rendered this title as "moheduo" and "manduo" and used it to describe hereditary chieftans 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 in their ruling 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 = Iranic 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...

Now, even though compounds like these are possible, and recorded, it is strange that one group of Indo-European languages which has both baga and dar is missing from the Above list: Slavic, the only languages, appart 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...And the word for god, Bhaga...

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? Maybe this is why we find both parts of Bhagadar in Slavic languages???

It gets more interesting actually:

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...

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..."

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...

Just like the supreme god of the Zhou...

But then, Ancestral Ethnic Sky gods are not that uncommon in Eurasia...

Finally, In Slavic languages we find the privative adjectives "*ubogъ" (“poor, miserable”) and "*nebogъ" (“poor, miserable”), as well as the later derivation "*bogatъ" (“rich”). Official explanation is that these additives prove that Slavic "*bogъ" originally meant "earthly wealth/well-being; fortune", and that it only later acquired the meaning "dispenser of wealth/fortune" and finally "god". The thing is "*ubogъ" and "*nebogъ" literally mean both "no god". The meaning "no wealth" could be derived from "no wealth given by god"...This can be seen from the word "*bogatъ" which can be derived from "god gave it" (bog ga dao)...

Which would make "Bogadar" both "Gift from god" and "Rich man"...Considering that "Bogatir" was used to denote "a knight" and only rich princes could afford horses, weapons, equipment, training...and become knights, the word "Bogadar" could have also had a meaning of a rich man, a noble...🙂 In Slavic languages we still have word "Bogataš" meaning a rich man...

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

Is Slavic Bogatir borrowing from Turkic Bagatur which is in turn a borrowing from Indo-Iranian-Proto-Slavic Bagadar? 🙂 

I don't know...

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