On an episode of a funeral ritual associated with a dog in the Teleut epic “Keziyke”: To the problem of Turkic (Oghuz) and Indo-Iranian cultural heritage

Abstract

A dog plays a significant role in the world mythology. The Teleut epos “Keziyke” presents the motif of a dog being killed during the funeral ceremony. Also, this motif can be seen in the text of “Avesta” telling about bringing a dog to the funeral ceremony to help the soul reach the world of the dead safely. Teleuts are considered descendants of the ancient Oguz, an ethnic group of Turkic origin. The oral folklore provided us with the idea of a dog state and people born with a dog body and a human head. The analysis of the Chinese chronicle allows assuming that a habit of people’s feeding the dogs from their plate was despised by representatives of the official religion of the Turkic Tengrism. This information can serve as a chronological marker, suggesting confidently that the dog was not a deity in the religious-mythological pantheon of the Turks around the sixth century. Nevertheless, the Turks had neighbors, perhaps even Turkish-speaking people, greatly respecting. In the Teleut epic, the traces of the dog cult appear in the context of afterlife representations. The presence of the dog cult in the epic of Oguz indicates their worship of this creature. They were also close to the Siberian peoples with the most prominent dog cult. The motifs similar to the Iranian and their ethnographic sources indicate that the ancestors of several Altai ethnic groups (Tele / Oguz) were part of the ancient Turkic-Iranian cultural community.