Hero

The Nart epic is often rightly called the heroic epic. It describes the adventures, exploits, and feats of many heroes.

In the twentieth century, fierce scholarly debates raged over the question of the national origins of the Nart epic. The main contenders for the primacy of their national version of the epic were the Ossetians and the Circassians (Kabardians, Adygeans, Shapsugs).

Each of these two sides saw their distant ancestors as the creators of the “Narts”: for the Ossetians, those were the Iranian-speaking Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans; for the Circassians — the tribes of the Maikop culture.

The controversy has not subsided to this day, although the logical conclusion to this dispute was long ago drawn by the Ossetian scholar, Professor B. Gardanov: “The most ancient core of this epic consists of cosmic and totemic myths that have a general Caucasian and worldwide distribution. After all, it is perfectly obvious that the emergence of such myths dates back to the deepest antiquity, when, of course, neither the ‘Alan’ nor the Ossetian people yet existed… And consequently, the most ancient core of the Nart epic is connected in its origin not with the medieval Alans, or even less so with the modern Ossetians, but with the most ancient population of the Caucasus and the Black Sea region.”

A. Kasyan complements this conclusion with his own finding that the language of the Maikop culture (5th–3rd millennia BCE) can only be the North Caucasian proto-language — the ancestral language of the Adyghe (Circassian) language.

Sources
Kasyan A. “Cuneiform Languages of Anatolia (Hattian, Hurrito-Urartian, Anatolian): Problems of Etymology and Grammar.” Moscow, 2015.
Gadagatl A. M. “The Heroic Epic ‘Narts’ and Its Genesis.” Krasnodar, 1967.

Author of the project “Legends of the Narts” Eco-park Valley of Narzans @park_dolina_narzanov
Artist: Aslan Karmoko @karmoko_art