Video links 70,000-year-old South African rain snake to later dragon-slaying myths

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Key facts

• The video describes the older dragon myths, the rainbow serpent and the rain snake, as benevolent creator beings that carve valleys and mountains, whose milk or leaking fluids create vegetation and bring rain.
• The rain snake is traced to South Africa and the video dates it to over 70,000 years old.
• With the adoption of agriculture the video argues the water-serpent creator was recast as a rival in the clouds, producing the Indra and Vritra conflict in which a god beats the serpent to release rain.
• The Babylonian Enuma Elish is described with Tiamat (deep or salt water) and Apsu (fresh water) producing children named after the deltas and rivers of the Persian Gulf, and Marduk killing Tiamat and splitting her body to form the world.
• The video interprets the opening of Genesis ('wind over the deep') as a mistranslation of the Enuma Elish episode, and says a recent tablet discovery renders Tiamat as a cow, indicating pastoral farming influence on Babylonian tradition.
• An Indo-European cattle-raiding motif is described: a dragon steals cattle and a hero kills it for the cattle; in the Norse version Thor kills a bull to obtain bait for fishing the Midgard serpent.
• The video argues a mistranslation of the Persian word dhenu as women who give milk produced Indian dragon-eating-princesses motifs, which then fed back into European tradition.

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