Bu anlatılar yaşayan geleneklerin doğrudan icrası değil; 19. ve erken 20. yüzyılda belgelenmiş tarihsel ve akademik kaynakların karşılaştırmalı editoryal derlemesidir.
These retellings are not a direct performance of living traditions. They are a comparative editorial compilation drawn from historical and academic sources documented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This is transparency and context. It is not a legal immunity and is not offered as one. This book has not been reviewed, approved or endorsed by any community, tradition, institution or representative body, and it does not claim to have been.
This page carries the two things the printed book promises and has no room for: every source behind every story, and every factual claim in the book, typed and given a confidence. Nothing here is a summary of the book — it is the evidence the book was checked against.
Corrections made while the book was written
13 of them. Five exist because a file turned out not to be what its name said. Two were duplicate stories inside the book, and one of those was created by the fix to a different problem.
C-1 — Ṛgveda 10.129 (Nāsadīya) planned for S03 (resolved)
Planned: Ṛgveda 10.129 (Nāsadīya) planned for S03
Found: no public-domain English Mandala 10 obtainable — Griffith vols III and IV fetched and neither contains it; Wikisource and sacred-texts.com both refuse automated requests; Mackenzie does not quote it
Done: S03 moved to the Prajāpati creation Mackenzie does quote. The Nāsadīya is named in the story, never quoted.
Resolution: RESOLVED 10 Sep 2026. Griffith's volume IV (Books IX-X) was located on archive.org (india.history.resource.112166) and downloaded; it contains RV 10.129 in full with Griffith's notes, and RV 10.90. The earlier finding — that volumes III and IV as then fetched lacked Mandala 10 — was wrong about volume IV; the file fetched under that name at the time was a different volume. S03 now QUOTES the Nāsadīya Sūkta instead of naming it, and S14 is upgraded from Mackenzie's paraphrase to Griffith's translation. The re-planning of S03 onto the Prajāpati cosmogony is kept, because that story is now written and is the better one for its place in the book; the Nāsadīya closes it as its own voice rather than as a report.
C-2 — the Poetic Edda file was named for Bellows
Planned: the Poetic Edda file was named for Bellows
Found: Gutenberg #14726 is the Norrœna Society edition. Its title page reads: 'THE ELDER EDDAS OF SAEMUND SIGFUSSON … BY BENJAMIN THORPE, AND THE YOUNGER EDDAS OF SNORRE STURLESON … BY I. A. BLACKWELL', with Rasmus B. Anderson as editor in chief. The verse quoted in this book is Thorpe's, not Bellows's.
Done: citations corrected in plan.json; the filename kept so it still matches disk
C-3 — S06 was planned as '*Enūma Eliš* tablets I–IV, in George Smith, *The Chaldean Account of G
Planned: S06 was planned as '*Enūma Eliš* tablets I–IV, in George Smith, *The Chaldean Account of Genesis* (London, 1876)'
Found: the file enuma-elish-king.txt is Gutenberg #60559 = Smith's *Chaldean Account of Genesis* in A. H. Sayce's new revised edition (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), preface dated 21 May 1880 — not the 1876 London first edition. Smith also had no tablets II–IV: chapter V prints the top fifteen lines of tablet I, the upper part of tablet V, a four-line fragment he assigns to VII, and two doubtful scraps; the battle survives only as six detached fragments in chapter VI whose order Smith says cannot be decided.
Done: citation corrected in plan.json (edition and tablet range) and stated in the S06 source note. The filename is kept so it still matches disk; the ledger records that the file's name promises L. W. King and delivers Smith/Sayce. No material from King 1902 is used.
C-4 — S07 was to be written from hewitt-iroquoian-cosmology.txt
Planned: S07 was to be written from hewitt-iroquoian-cosmology.txt
Found: that file (archive.org iroquoiancosmolo00hewi, the separately issued 1904 extract) is an uncorrected OCR so degraded that it renders the report's own title as 'IROQIOTAN COSMOLOGY' and Hewitt's 'five different versions' as 'five ditterent versions'. Verbatim quotation from it would not have been safe.
Done: a cleaner scan of the same text was located and downloaded — the full Twenty-first Annual Report (archive.org annualreportofbu21smithso, GPO 1903) — verified by its title page and letter of transmittal, hashed, and registered as bae21-hewitt-iroquoian-cosmology.txt. All S07 quotations are taken from it and were checked character by character. The degraded file is kept on disk, not deleted. Disclosed in the S07 source note.
C-5 — S11 was planned as '*Mahābhārata*, Ādi Parva, as retold with quotation in Mackenzie, *Indi
Planned: S11 was planned as '*Mahābhārata*, Ādi Parva, as retold with quotation in Mackenzie, *Indian Myth and Legend* (1913)' — kind PRIMARY-QUOTED-IN-SECONDARY
Found: Kisari Mohan Ganguli's complete prose Mahābhārata is public domain and the Ādi Parva is available in full. Working from Mackenzie's paraphrase when the primary translation is obtainable would have been a needless remove, and would also have made Mackenzie the source of three stories.
Done: S11 upgraded to PRIMARY-IN-TRANSLATION and rewritten from Ganguli, Astika Parva sections XVII-XIX. plan.json source and cite corrected. Mackenzie remains the source for S03 only.
C-6 — the Prose Edda file was named prose-edda-brodeur.txt
Planned: the Prose Edda file was named prose-edda-brodeur.txt
Found: Gutenberg #18947 is Rasmus B. Anderson's *The Younger Edda* (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1901; copyright 1879, S. C. Griggs), not Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur's 1916 translation. The Gutenberg header names Anderson as translator and the title page carries his name and titles; his distinctive spellings confirm it — Ginungagap, Ymer, Audhumbla, Ganglere, Har, Jafnhar, Thride, where Brodeur has Ginnungagap, Ymir, Audhumla, Gangleri, Hárr, Jafnhárr, Thridi.
Done: S12 cites Anderson. plan.json source and cite corrected. Filename kept so it still matches disk, with the mismatch recorded here and disclosed in the S12 source note. This is the third filename-vs-content mismatch in the project; production standards rule 14 already covers it.
C-7 — S13 was planned as PRIMARY-QUOTED-IN-SECONDARY — a Chinese primary text reached through a
Planned: S13 was planned as PRIMARY-QUOTED-IN-SECONDARY — a Chinese primary text reached through a quotation in Werner
Found: Werner does not quote any primary text in his Pangu section. He summarises in his own English from sources he does not name there. He does quote a named primary author, the eighth-century historian Sima Zhen, but only for Nüwa.
Done: S13 re-labelled SCHOLARSHIP SUMMARISING A TRADITION in the source ledger and in plan.json. Nothing in the retelling is presented as a quotation from a Chinese text; the one quoted phrase is identified in the source note as Werner's own English.
C-8 — S16 was planned as 'The Earth Torn in Two' — the Aztec account in which the earth-monster
Planned: S16 was planned as 'The Earth Torn in Two' — the Aztec account in which the earth-monster Tlaltecuhtli is pulled apart to make the world
Found: Alexander's Latin-American volume does not contain it. His Mexican cosmogony chapter gives the Tarascan Tucupacha, the Mixtec account quoted from Fray Gregorio García, the Zapotec Coqui-Xee, and the Four Suns in five mutually incompatible orderings. The earth-from-a-monster survives only as one clause — the gods make Cipactli in the sea, 'from which they shaped the earth'. The Tlaltecuhtli dismemberment reaches modern readers chiefly through the Histoyre du Mechique, for which no public-domain English translation could be found.
Done: S16 re-scoped to the account Alexander actually prints in full — the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas — and re-titled 'The Suns That Failed'. plan.json title, cite and kind corrected. The absence of Tlaltecuhtli is disclosed in the S16 source note. Production standards rule 15 (when a source cannot be reached, change the book) applied.
C-9 — S18 was planned as 'Seven Eggs on a Knee' (Finland/Karelia, Kalevala Rune I)
Planned: S18 was planned as 'Seven Eggs on a Knee' (Finland/Karelia, Kalevala Rune I)
Found: S09 'Ilmatar in the Water' is drawn from the same Rune I and already tells the duck, the knee, the six golden eggs and the seventh of iron, their fall and the making of the world from the fragments. S18 would have retold the same passage of the same poem from the same translation — an internal duplicate inside one book, which is worse than a duplicate across two.
Done: S18 replaced. The Part Four theme is 'From an Egg', so the slot needed a cosmic egg from a tradition not already used. It is now the Orphic egg as preserved in Aristophanes' *Birds* — a rival Greek cosmogony explicitly at odds with Hesiod's, which makes the point that 'the Greek creation myth' is not one thing. plan.json culture, title, source, cite and kind corrected.
C-10 — S28 was planned as 'The Suns Before This One' (Aztec, from Alexander's Latin-American volu
Planned: S28 was planned as 'The Suns Before This One' (Aztec, from Alexander's Latin-American volume)
Found: This duplicate was created by correction C-8. S16 had been planned as the Tlaltecuhtli dismemberment, which is not in the source; re-scoping S16 onto the Four Suns made S28 a retelling of the story S16 now tells.
Done: S28 replaced with the Mixtec cosmogony from the same volume — a different people, a different source document (Fray Gregorio García, whom Alexander quotes directly), and a different shape: the Deer-God and Deer-Goddess raising a cliff above the water and setting an axe edge-upward for the heavens to rest on. plan.json corrected. Both remaining Mesoamerican entries now come from separate documents about separate peoples.
C-11 — S22 was planned to be written from popol-vuh-brasseur-1861.txt
Planned: S22 was planned to be written from popol-vuh-brasseur-1861.txt
Found: that file is Brasseur de Bourbourg's 1861 edition — the K'iche' text with a FRENCH translation, not English. Writing the story from it would have meant this book making its own English translation of a nineteenth-century French translation of a colonial-era Spanish copy, with no published English to check against; and the scan's optical character recognition is too poor to quote safely, rendering the book's own running head as 'IWYTHES DE L'AN lOUITE AMERICAINE'.
Done: S22 written instead from Hartley Burr Alexander's English of the same chapter in *Latin-American Mythology* (1920), which is already held and registered. The chain K'iche' → Ximénez's Spanish → Brasseur's French → Alexander's English is stated in the source note, and Alexander's dependence on Brasseur was VERIFIED by comparing the Hurakan passage in both files. Brasseur's volume is retained and cited for the verification, never quoted.
C-12 — S24 was planned as 'The Sand, the Hen, and the Chain' — Obatala descending on a chain with
Planned: S24 was planned as 'The Sand, the Hen, and the Chain' — Obatala descending on a chain with a snail shell of sand and a five-toed hen
Found: that account is not in Ellis 1894. It reaches modern readers through later works, chiefly Samuel Johnson's *History of the Yorubas* and twentieth-century writers, none obtainable in public domain for this edition. Ellis does carry a palm-nut and a scratching fowl, but in his MIGRATION tradition and as the founding of Ife, which he himself reads as a memory of a real southward movement into the lagoon country.
Done: S24 re-scoped to the cosmogony Ellis does record — Obatala and Odudua as the two halves of a closed calabash, their confinement, the quarrel, the blinding and the curse of snails — and re-titled 'Two Halves of a Closed Calabash'. plan.json title, cite and kind corrected. The absence of the chain and hen, and the location of Ellis's nearest equivalent, are disclosed in the S24 source note. Production standards rule 15 applied. Internal duplicate scan re-run per rule 18: no new collision.
C-13 — S29 was planned as 'The Diver Who Kept Some Back' (Slavic, from mar03-slavic-celtic.txt)
Planned: S29 was planned as 'The Diver Who Kept Some Back' (Slavic, from mar03-slavic-celtic.txt)
Found: Jan Máchal's Slavic half of The Mythology of All Races vol. III contains no cosmogony. Its chapters run: belief in soul and genii, worship of the dead, household gods, and onward through nature spirits and deities. The dualist earth-diver legend in which God and the devil dive for mud and the devil keeps some in his mouth is a folk-legend type Máchal does not print, and no other public-domain source for it was held.
Done: S29 replaced with the Samoan and Tongan creation sequences from Dixon's *Oceanic Mythology*, which are already held and registered, and which fit the Part Six theme exactly: a series of provisional fixes each of which creates the next problem. Western Polynesia was otherwise absent from the book. plan.json culture, title, source, cite and kind corrected. Internal duplicate scan re-run per rule 18: Dixon now supplies three stories — S05 Māori, S20 Society Islands, S29 Samoa and Tonga — which is at the audit's limit and not over it; the three are different archipelagos with different cosmological plans and share no material.
Source ledger
33 source records across 30 stories. “Framing” is what the source carries with it — a commission, a mission, an empire — and is part of the evidence, not a caveat about it.
| No. | Tradition | Source | Date | Location | Framing | Uncertainty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ancient Egypt · Heliopolis | Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt James Henry Breasted | 1912 | ch. I, 'The Origins', pp. 8-12, quoting Pyramid Texts §§1248, 1652, 1778, 1818 | Nineteenth-century translator reticence: the self-generation is explicit in the Egyptian and Breasted confines it to a Latin footnote. The act is in the source; the veiling is the translator's, and the story says so | The episode of the lost children, the searching eye and the tears is assembled from more than one spell; no single text runs it end to end |
| 2 | Archaic Greece | Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White | composed c. 700 BCE; translation 1914 (Loeb) | Theogony ll. 22-34, 116-138, 154-206; Works and Days ll. 106-201 | None colonial. The translator's 'Chaos' imports a modern English sense the Greek does not carry | Hesiod's own etymologies (Titans as 'straining ones', Aphrodite as 'foam-born') are folk etymologies rejected by modern philology; the story reports them as his |
| 3 | Vedic and Brahmanic India | Indian Myth and Legend Donald A. Mackenzie | 1913 | ch. VI, pp. 99-101 | Mackenzie writes within an Indo-European comparative framework of his period; that framing is not adopted | HIGH on the translation chain. The quoted English cannot be traced to a named translator in the source |
| 3 | Vedic and Brahmanic India | The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X) trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith | hymn composed in the late Vedic period; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892 | Book X, hymn CXXIX ('Creation'), verses 1-7, with Griffith's notes | A Victorian Indologist's translation, made in Benares, heavily annotated from Sāyaṇa's commentary. Griffith's diction is archaic; his notes are cautious and he marks the stanzas he finds obscure as obscure | LOW on the English quoted. The Sanskrit of verse 5 is notoriously difficult and Griffith says so; the retelling summarises that verse rather than quoting it |
| 4 | Zoroastrian Iran | Pahlavi Texts, Part I (Sacred Books of the East, vol. V) trans. E. W. West | Bundahishn compiled 9th c. CE from older Avestan material; translation 1880 | Bundahishn I.1-11; Selections of Zādsparam I.1-8; West's introduction pp. xxiii-xxv | Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship; West is philologically careful and doctrinally restrained | The Bundahishn is fragmentary and shows omissions and dislocations, which West states |
| 5 | Māori · Aotearoa | Oceanic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. IX) Roland B. Dixon | 1916 | ch. I, 'Myths of Origins and the Deluge', pp. 6-7 | Comparative-mythology framing of 1916, which classes accounts by type; the classification is not adopted | 'The Delightful Void' for Te Kore-rawea is unexplained in the source; the story offers a speculation and marks it as one |
| 5 | Māori · Aotearoa | Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race Sir George Grey | 1855 | 'The Children of Heaven and Earth', opening | NAMED IN THE STORY: Grey was the sitting Governor of New Zealand during a colonial administration in which he was a principal actor, and he collected these narratives from named informants while holding that office | Grey edited and combined what he was given; the degree is disputed |
| 6 | Babylonia | The Chaldean Account of Genesis George Smith; new edition revised, corrected and enlarged by A. H. Sayce | first published London 1876; this edition New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880 (Sayce's preface dated 21 May 1880) | ch. V 'Babylonian Legend of the Creation' (first tablet, fifth tablet, seventh tablet fragment); ch. VI 'Other Babylonian Accounts of the Creation' (the war fragments K 4832, K 3473, K 3938, K 3449 and the sixth fragment); ch. III (Berosus via Alexander Polyhistor; Damascius via Cory); ch. I (the discovery narrative); ch. IV (the table of deities) | NAMED IN THE STORY AND IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: the volume is titled *The Chaldean Account of Genesis* and arranges the fragments against the six days of Genesis 1. The philology (tehom / Tiamat) is sound; the frame treats a Babylonian poem as an account of a Hebrew one. This edition keeps the translations and drops the frame | HIGH on sequence, LOW on wording. Smith states that the order of the war fragments cannot be decided and that one 'dry land' fragment probably does not belong to the series at all. Three tablets between the first and the fifth were entirely missing to him. The retelling marks the break rather than bridging it |
| 7 | Haudenosaunee · Onondaga | Iroquoian Cosmology, First Part — An Onondaga Version narrated by John Buck (Onondaga chief and fire-keeper), revised with Joshua Buck; recorded, translated and annotated by J. N. B. Hewitt | narrated 1889, revised 1897; published in the Twenty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office) | report pp. 141 ff. ('An Onondaga version'), with Hewitt's introduction pp. 127-135; comparative details from 'A Seneca version' (p. 221 ff.) and 'A Mohawk version' (p. 255 ff.) | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Bureau of American Ethnology publication of the assimilation era, written inside a cultural-evolutionary theory whose vocabulary ('primitive people', 'barbaric man', 'the reified fictions of savage mentation') appears throughout Hewitt's commentary and nowhere in the narratives themselves. Hewitt was raised on the Tuscarora reservation and was of Tuscarora descent through his mother, which does not make the report a Haudenosaunee publication | LOW on wording, once the clean scan is used. The three versions in the report differ substantially from one another and the retelling follows one of them throughout, saying so and listing the divergences rather than blending them |
| 8 | Cherokee | Myths of the Cherokee collected, translated and annotated by James Mooney, from narrators named in his introduction: A'yûñ'ini (Swimmer), Itagû'nahi (John Ax), Ta'gwadihi' (Catawba-killer), Ayâ'sta, and James D. Wafford | collected 1887-1890 and later at Qualla, North Carolina; published in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900) | myth no. 1, 'How the world was made', p. 239; Mooney's note on myth 1 in 'Notes to the myths', p. 431; the biographies of the narrators, pp. 236-238; the removal narrative in the historical sketch, pp. 130-133 | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Bureau of American Ethnology publication written on the salvage assumption that Cherokee tradition was in its final days, and measuring what Mooney recorded against a supposed complete original. Against that, the same volume records the removal of 1838 as an atrocity, in a report addressed to the government responsible for it | MEDIUM on the completeness of the account, by the collector's own statement. LOW on wording. The printed myth is a composite of at least four narrators and Mooney's note says so; the variants are listed in the source note rather than merged |
| 9 | Finland · Karelia | Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland compiled by Elias Lönnrot from oral runes collected in Savo, Karelia and Archangel; translated into English verse by John Martin Crawford | runes collected from 1828; Old Kalevala 1835; New Kalevala (50 runes, 22,793 lines) 1849; Crawford's translation New York, 1888 | Rune I, 'Birth of Wainamoinen', in full; the Proem for the clasped-hands couplet; Crawford's preface for the collection history, the duck/eagle variant, the reception by Grimm and others, and his own acknowledgements | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a work of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, produced under Russian imperial rule for a Finnish-speaking population whose language had almost no printed literature. Lönnrot arranged the collected songs 'under the central idea of a great epic'. Crawford's own account of Finland's political status in the 1820s is wrong and is corrected in the historical context | HIGH on the relation of any given line to any individual singer's version — the text is Lönnrot's arrangement. LOW on the wording of Crawford's English, which is what is quoted |
| 10 | Ainu · Hokkaidō | The Ainu and their Folk-Lore John Batchelor, F.R.G.S., Church Missionary Society missionary to the Ainu | London: The Religious Tract Society, 1901 | ch. III, 'The Creation of the World' — the general idea of creation; the water-wagtail legends; the legend why Yezo is rugged; the Aioina and Tureshmat variant and the nupe etymology; the axe rock at Moruran; 'How mattocks evolved demons' and Nitat-unarabe | NAMED IN THE STORY AND THE SOURCE NOTE: a Church Missionary Society missionary writing for the Religious Tract Society, who introduces the chapter by calling much of the material 'absolutely absurd' and an illustration of 'what depths of intellectual blindness a race may sink into'. He also floats and then rejects the idea that the wagtail legend derives from Genesis 1 | HIGH on attribution — no narrator is named anywhere in the chapter, and the one identified informant is 'an Ainu companion' on a walk. MEDIUM on completeness, since Batchelor selects. LOW on the wording quoted, which was checked against the scan |
| 11 | Epic India | The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Translated into English Prose — Book 1, Adi Parva traditionally ascribed to Vyāsa; translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, with acknowledged assistance from Charu Charan Mookerjee in parts of this book; published by Pratap Chandra Roy | epic material accreted over centuries around the turn of the era; translation published in fascicles, Calcutta, 1883-1896 | Āstīka Parva, sections XVII, XVIII and XIX; the Translator's Preface for the method and the anonymity dispute | Not colonial in the usual sense of this book: an Indian translation, Indian-financed, Calcutta-printed, deliberately literal in resistance to the domesticating translations of the period. The anonymity dispute recorded in the preface is itself a document of what English readers of 1885 expected | LOW on wording. The epic is a composite text of uncertain and layered date, which is stated in the historical context rather than smoothed over |
| 12 | Norse · Iceland | The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (Poetic Edda) anonymous Old Norse poems; trans. Benjamin Thorpe | poems of uncertain and disputed age, preserved chiefly in the Codex Regius of c. 1270; Thorpe's translation 1866, in the Norrœna Society edition edited by Rasmus B. Anderson | Vǫluspá 3-6; Vafþrúðnismál 20-21, 29-35; Grímnismál 40-41; Vǫluspá 9-10, 17-18 | Nineteenth-century Northern antiquarianism, issued as a subscription set. The translations themselves are literal and unembellished | HIGH on the age of the poems, which is disputed and not settled here. LOW on the English quoted |
| 12 | Norse · Iceland | The Younger Edda; also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda Snorri Sturluson; trans. Rasmus B. Anderson | composed in Iceland in the 1220s; Anderson's translation copyrighted 1879, this printing Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1901 | Gylfaginning, sections 5-8; Gylfaginning 9 and 14 | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Christian Icelandic author writing two centuries after the conversion, who in his preface explains the gods as misremembered human beings and ends the dialogue by revealing the whole vision as an illusion | MEDIUM on details unique to Snorri — the cow, the salt-stones, the three days, the four dwarfs — which cannot be checked against a surviving poem |
| 13 | China | Myths and Legends of China E. T. C. Werner | London: George G. Harrap, 1922 | ch. III, 'Cosmogony — P'an Ku and the Creation Myth': the fashioner of the universe; the sun and the moon; P'an Ku and Ymer; P'an Ku a late creation; Nue Kua Shih the repairer of the heavens | NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE: the confident comparative manner of 1922, including appeals to a national temperament ('the ordinary mind', 'the placid Chinese mind') and a diffusionist speculation about the Chinese bringing a cosmogony from Babylon. Neither assumption is adopted here | HIGH on wording — there is no primary text behind Werner's Pangu paragraphs that this book can check. MEDIUM on his dating and attribution, corrected in the historical context |
| 14 | Vedic India | The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X) anonymous Vedic poets, the hymn ascribed by tradition to the ṛṣi Nārāyaṇa; trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith | hymn composed in the latest stratum of the Ṛgveda; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892 | Book X, hymn XC, verses 1-16, with Griffith's notes and his closing bibliographic note | NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE: Griffith's gloss explaining why each caste derives from its body part — the labourer from the feet because on his toil all ultimately rests — is a Victorian interpretation, not a translation, and is quoted as his without agreement | LOW on the English quoted. Verse 5 (Virāj) is genuinely disputed and Griffith prints two readings; the retelling reports both and settles neither |
| 15 | Zoroastrian Iran | Pahlavi Texts, Part I (Sacred Books of the East, vol. V) trans. E. W. West | Bundahishn compiled 9th c. CE from older Avestan material; translation 1880 | Bundahishn IV.1-5 (the two deaths and the complaint of Gōshurvan); X.1-4 and XIV.1-5 (what grew from the ox and from its seed); XV.1-13 (the rhubarb plant, Mashya and Mashyoi, the soul-and-body question, Ohrmazd's charge, the false speeches, the goat); Selections of Zādsparam X.2-4 (the eight metals and Spandarmad receiving the gold) | Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship, philologically careful and doctrinally restrained; the frame was set out in full at the earlier Iranian story and is not restated | MEDIUM on the numbers, which differ between manuscripts and are given here in the majority reading with the variants recorded. MEDIUM on the ox's gender. LOW on the wording quoted |
| 16 | Aztec · Mexica | Latin-American Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. XI) Hartley Burr Alexander, drawing on the *Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas*, Ixtlilxochitl, the *Annals of Quauhtitlan*, the *Codex Vaticanus A*, Camargo and Sahagún | Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920; the underlying documents are sixteenth-century | ch. III, 'Mexico (Continued)', section I 'Cosmogony' and section II 'The Four Suns' | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: every underlying document is post-conquest, most produced by or for the colonial church and administration, after the systematic burning of the Mexica painted books. Alexander adds his own comparative identifications, of which only those present in his sources are used | HIGH on the sequence of the Suns, which the sources contradict each other about; the retelling follows one document throughout and prints the disagreement. MEDIUM on names, because the available scan's optical character recognition is poor and each proper name was checked against its least corrupted occurrence |
| 17 | Japan | Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 compiled by imperial order, traditionally under Prince Toneri and Ō no Yasumaro; trans. W. G. Aston | chronicle completed 720; Aston's translation published for the Japan Society, London, 1896 | Book I, 'The Age of the Gods', opening pages: the egg and the separation; the reed-shoot and Kuni-toko-tachi; the five 'In one writing it is said' variants; the seven generations; the jewel-spear and Onogoro; the circling of the pillar; the birth of the islands. Aston's footnotes on Motoori and Hirata, on the later addition of the variant quotations, on the Kiujiki scheme, and on the name etymologies | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a court chronicle written to establish an imperial genealogy descending from the sun goddess, in a Chinese form adopted as part of state-building; and a translation made in 1896 for a British learned society while that genealogy was live political material in Japan | LOW on the English. Aston's name etymologies are his own and he hedges several of them explicitly, including Izanagi and Izanami, which he suspects may be folk etymology |
| 18 | Orphic Greece | The Birds Aristophanes; anonymous English prose translation | produced at Athens 414 BCE; the translation is a late-nineteenth-century prose version, translator not named in the copy used | the parabasis, Greek lines 685-703, with the chorus's continuing address on the services of birds | NAMED IN THE STORY AND THE SOURCE NOTE: this is a comedy, and the cosmogony is spoken by a chorus of birds arguing that they should be worshipped instead of the gods. It is a parody, and it is presented as one | MEDIUM on the relation between the parody and its target. LOW on the English quoted. The retelling gives what the comedy says, in the comedy's voice, and does not present it as Orphic doctrine |
| 19 | Vedic India | The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X) anonymous Vedic poet, the hymn ascribed by tradition to Hiraṇyagarbha son of Prajāpati; trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith | hymn composed in the latest stratum of the Ṛgveda; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892 | Book X, hymn CXXI, verses 1-10, with Griffith's headnote and his notes on verses 1, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 10 | A Victorian Indologist's translation made in Benares with Sāyaṇa's commentary; Griffith prints competing readings where the sense is disputed | LOW on the English quoted. The status of verse 10 as a later addition is scholarship and not stated by Griffith, and is labelled as such in the claim ledger |
| 20 | Polynesia · Society Islands | Oceanic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. IX) Roland B. Dixon, compiling from collections he cites by footnote number without naming reciters or recorders | Boston: Marshall Jones, 1916 | ch. I, 'Myths of Origins and the Deluge', pp. 11-13 for the two Society Islands versions, and p. 20 for the egg fragment; p. 11 for the equivalence of Ta'aroa, Tanaoa, Tangaroa, Tangaloa and Kanaloa | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Society Islands material was recorded chiefly by London Missionary Society personnel during and after the dismantling of the traditional religion from 1797. Dixon is at a further remove, a Boston comparativist working from other people's collections | HIGH on attribution — no reciter and no recorder is named anywhere in the passage. LOW on the wording quoted, which is Dixon's printed text |
| 21 | Ancient Egypt · Memphis | Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt James Henry Breasted, translating the Memphite theology from British Museum Stela No. 797 | the stone inscribed under Shabaka c. 700 BCE, copying an older papyrus; Breasted's book 1912 | ch. II, 'The Origins', pp. 43-47, quoting the stela ll. 48-61; Breasted's footnote on the stone's history and the earlier copies by Sharpe and by Bryant and Read | NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Breasted dates the underlying composition to the Pyramid Age and presents it as the earliest philosophical system in the world. The stone is Shabaka's, c. 700 BCE, and whether the text it copies is genuinely Old Kingdom or an archaising composition of that period has been argued since. This book gives his translation and does not repeat his dating | HIGH on date. MEDIUM on wording in the abraded passages, by Breasted's own warning that the signs are very faint and reading excessively difficult. He also flags the verb rendered 'thinking' as questionable and notes that heart and tongue share a gender so the pronoun may refer to either |
| 22 | K'iche' Maya | Latin-American Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. XI) — the opening chapter of the Popol Vuh anonymous K'iche' authors, 16th century; copied and translated into Spanish by Francisco Ximénez c. 1701; K'iche' text and French translation published by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, 1861; English by Hartley Burr Alexander | K'iche' manuscript mid-16th century; Brasseur 1861; Alexander 1920 | Alexander, ch. IV, 'Central America', pp. 160-162, quoting the first chapter of the Popol Vuh entire | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a text written in the Roman alphabet introduced by the friars, within a generation of the conquest; copied by a Dominican; published by an editor who also wrote about Atlantis; and translated for an American comparative series | MEDIUM on wording, given three translation steps. The mountains 'like great lobsters' is Brasseur's image and later translators working directly from the K'iche' render the comparison differently; this is flagged in the source note |
| 23 | Inca · Tawantinsuyu | History of the Incas Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, by order of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo; trans. Sir Clements Markham | written at Cuzco, 1572; Markham's translation for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1907 | ch. VII, 'Fable of the second age, and creation of the barbarous Indians according to their account'; with Sarmiento's statement of commission and method at the opening of ch. VI, and Markham's footnotes on unu pachacuti and on Taguapaca | NAMED IN THE STORY, THE SOURCE NOTE AND THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: the book was written by order of Viceroy Toledo as part of a programme to establish that the Incas had been usurpers and that Spanish rule was therefore legitimate. It was written in the year Toledo had the last Inca ruler beheaded at Cuzco | MEDIUM on the flood, by the translator's own warning that unu pachacuti was probably coined by priests after leading questions about a universal deluge. LOW on the wording quoted |
| 24 | Yoruba | The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa A. B. Ellis, Colonel, 1st West India Regiment | London: Chapman and Hall, 1894 | ch. III, 'Chief Gods', the sections on (1) Olorun, (2) Obatala and (3) Odudua; with the migration tradition in the later chapter, cited in the source note but not retold | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: an officer of the 1st West India Regiment writing in 1894, during the British extension of authority across Yorubaland, in the racial idiom of his decade, with a recurring interest in whether religious practice is trickery | HIGH on attribution — every account is credited only to 'the priests', 'some natives' or 'other natives', with no informant, place or date. LOW on the wording, which was checked against the scan |
| 25 | Kuba · Bushoong · Congo | African Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. VII) Alice Werner, reporting the fieldwork of Emil Torday among the Bushongo of the Kasai | Boston: Marshall Jones, 1925; Torday's fieldwork 1907-09 | the chapter on myths of origins, in the section on creation legends | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: collected in the Kasai in 1907-09, during and immediately after the Congo Free State, in a kingdom whose rising had been put down in 1904; and gathered as part of a museum-collecting expedition | MEDIUM. Werner's claim that the Bushongo were entirely untouched by missionary influence is a strong one for the Kasai at that date and is questioned in the source note. Her count of the creatures — eight stated, nine listed — is left uncorrected because the error cannot be located |
| 26 | Archaic Greece | Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica — Works and Days Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White | composed c. 700 BCE; translation Loeb Classical Library, 1914 | Works and Days ll. 106-201, with ll. 202-211 for the hawk and the nightingale | None colonial. The poem is a partisan document in a family inheritance dispute and an attack on the magistrates who decided it, and the historical context says so | LOW on the English. The exact sense of the line rendered 'grey hair on the temples at their birth' is debated, though the image is not |
| 27 | Inca · Tawantinsuyu | History of the Incas Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, by order of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo; trans. Sir Clements Markham | written at Cuzco, 1572; Markham's translation for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1907 | ch. VI, the first creation and its destruction; Markham's long footnote on the derivations of Viracocha; Sarmiento's own remarks fitting the Andean flood to the biblical one | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: written by order of Viceroy Toledo as part of a programme to establish the Incas as usurpers; and containing Sarmiento's own accommodation of the Andean flood to the biblical one, with an Atlantic land connection, so that recording it should not require setting aside the Scriptures | MEDIUM on the flood, by the translator's own warning. LOW on the wording quoted. The content of the broken precept is stated by the source itself to be unknown |
| 28 | Mixtec | Latin-American Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. XI) — the Mixtec cosmogony narrated by Fray Gregorio García, early 17th century; quoted and summarised by Hartley Burr Alexander | García early 1600s; Alexander, Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920 | Alexander, ch. III, 'Mexico (Continued)', section I 'Cosmogony', where he quotes García's opening sentence and summarises the narrative in four numbered episodes; and the following paragraph on the Zapotec Coqui-Xee, Piye-Tao, Cozaana and Huichaana | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: a Dominican collecting American origin traditions in part to test theories about where the peoples of the New World had come from — a purpose unlike the tradition's own | MEDIUM. Only the opening sentence is quotation; the rest is Alexander's summary of García's account, so the wording of the narrative is at two removes and no phrasing beyond the first sentence should be treated as the source's own |
| 29 | Samoa and Tonga | Oceanic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. IX) Roland B. Dixon, compiling from collections cited by footnote number without naming reciters or recorders | Boston: Marshall Jones, 1916 | ch. I, 'Myths of Origins and the Deluge', pp. 18-19, in the section on the creative type | NAMED IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Pacific material recorded in the nineteenth century by missionaries and residents after the London Missionary Society reached Tonga in 1797 and Samoa in 1830, published in collections, and compiled at a distance in Massachusetts in 1916 | HIGH on attribution — no reciter, recorder, place or date is given for either account. LOW on the wording, which is Dixon's printed text |
| 30 | Norse · Iceland | The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson — Vǫluspá anonymous Old Norse poem; trans. Benjamin Thorpe | poem of disputed age, preserved in the Codex Regius of c. 1270; Thorpe's translation 1866, in the Norrœna Society edition | Vǫluspá 56-65, with 7-8 for the golden tables | NAMED IN THE SOURCE NOTE AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT: written down in Christian Iceland some two and a half centuries after the conversion, and heavily enlisted since the nineteenth century by nationalist and later by extremist movements; the version given is the thirteenth-century Icelandic one | HIGH on the poem's date and on the pagan or Christian character of the closing stanzas. LOW on the English quoted. Thorpe's numbering skips stanza 63 and nothing has been supplied |
Claim ledger
726 claims. PRIMARY SOURCE is something the source says. SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP is something scholars say about it. EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION is something this book says, and every one of those is marked in the text where it appears.
| ID | No. | Claim | Type | Confidence | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C-001 | 1 | The Egyptian primeval ocean is named Nun and precedes all else | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 10 | |
| C-002 | 1 | Atum came into being of himself, not made by another | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 | |
| C-003 | 1 | At Heliopolis the sun-god appeared on the Benben stone in the Phoenix-hall | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 n.2 | |
| C-004 | 1 | Atum begat Shu and Tefnut by his own masculine power, self-developed | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 n.3 | |
| C-005 | 1 | Shu separated earth from sky and continued to support the sky | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 10-11 | |
| C-006 | 1 | Rival cosmogonies existed at other temples: Ptah shaping an egg, a lotus rising from the water | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 | |
| C-007 | 1 | The Egyptian words for tears and for people are near-homophones and the texts play on it | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — reported in the story as a pun the Egyptians made, not as an etymology |
| C-008 | 1 | Egyptians expected Nun to return and cover the world again, leaving Atum alone | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | |
| C-009 | 1 | The annual Nile flood shaped Egyptian comfort with cyclical inundation | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | LOW | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story asks 'perhaps because', not asserts |
| C-010 | 1 | The Pyramid Texts were carved in sealed royal burial chambers at Saqqara from about 2350 BCE, beginning with the pyramid of Unas | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-011 | 1 | They were funerary spells for the dead king, not narratives, and the cosmogony appears in them only incidentally | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-012 | 1 | Heliopolis, Memphis and Hermopolis maintained different cosmogonies which Egyptian religion never reconciled | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Breasted p. 11 | |
| C-013 | 1 | The Hermopolitan Ogdoad consists of four frog-headed gods and four snake-headed goddesses representing water, darkness, hiddenness and boundlessness | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-014 | 1 | Breasted's developmental thesis, announced in his title, is no longer accepted and shaped his selection and ordering | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT; the translations are kept and the frame dropped, and the story says so |
| C-015 | 2 | Greek khaos derives from a verb meaning to gape or yawn and denotes a chasm, not disorder | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-016 | 2 | Theogony names four primordials in order: Chaos, Earth, Tartarus, Eros | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 116-122 | |
| C-017 | 2 | Aether and Day are the children of Night and Erebos — light descends from dark | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 123-125 | |
| C-018 | 2 | Earth bore Ouranos 'equal to herself, to cover her on every side' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 126-128 | |
| C-019 | 2 | Ouranos pushed each child back into Gaia and would not let them into the light | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 154-160 | |
| C-020 | 2 | Kronos castrated Ouranos with a sickle of grey adamant made by Gaia | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 161-182 | |
| C-021 | 2 | Hesiod's derivation of 'Titans' from straining is a folk etymology | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-022 | 2 | An anvil falls nine days from heaven to earth and nine more to Tartarus | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 722-725 | |
| C-023 | 2 | The world is opened rather than made — the separation is an injury | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-024 | 2 | Hesiod is usually dated around 700 BCE, near the beginning of Greek alphabetic writing, and the Theogony is among the earliest surviving Greek texts | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-025 | 2 | Hesiod names himself, describes the Muses meeting him while he kept sheep on Helicon, and gives them a staff of laurel | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 22-34 | |
| C-026 | 2 | Hesiod says his father left a failing merchant's trade at Cyme and settled at Ascra, which he describes as bad in winter and worse in summer | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 633-640 | |
| C-027 | 2 | Hesiod's Works and Days records a dispute with his brother Perses over their inheritance, decided against him by gift-taking lords | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | — | |
| C-028 | 2 | Herodotus said Hesiod and Homer gave the Greeks the names, forms and functions of their gods | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-029 | 2 | The Theogony's succession sequence proceeds by force, deception or mutilation at every transfer, and its author had lost an inheritance case | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — offered as a reading, not as a causal claim about composition |
| C-030 | 2 | Egypt maintains its separation by continuous effort (Shu) while Greece achieves its by a single act of damage | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-031 | 3 | A Brāhmaṇa creation account opens 'At first the Universe was not anything' and has the non-existent resolve 'Let me be' | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 100 | FLAGGED — quoted at one remove; translator unnamed in the source |
| C-032 | 3 | The sequence runs fervour → smoke → fervour → fire → rays → cloud → sea | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 100 | |
| C-033 | 3 | Prajāpati rose from the waters and asked what purpose he was born for, from that which forms no support | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 100 | |
| C-034 | 3 | His tears became the earth; what he wiped away became air, and upward, sky | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 100 | |
| C-035 | 3 | The text links arodīt (he wept) to rodasī (the two world-halves) | TRADITIONAL ACCOUNT | HIGH | p. 100 | The link is in the source and is a folk etymology; the story says both |
| C-036 | 3 | Tapas means both physical heat and the energy generated by ascetic effort | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-037 | 3 | Ṛgveda 10.129 declines to say where the world came from | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | NAMED NOT QUOTED — no PD translation obtainable |
| C-038 | 3 | Indian tradition preserved multiple creation accounts side by side without requiring a choice | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-039 | 3 | The Brahmanas are prose texts of roughly 900-600 BCE whose purpose is to explain the sacrifice, and their cosmogony is told to account for ritual acts | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-040 | 3 | Vedic oral transmission used word-by-word, paired and reversed recitation patterns designed to make errors audible, preserving texts over two millennia with exceptional fidelity | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-041 | 3 | No public-domain English Rgveda Book 10 was obtainable for this edition, so the Nasadiya Sukta is named and never quoted | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT and recorded as correction C-1 |
| C-042 | 3 | Egyptian plurality of cosmogonies is geographical while Indian plurality is held within a single canon | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-043 | 4 | 'Light was above and darkness below, and between those two was open space' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 155 | |
| C-044 | 4 | Ohrmazd knew Ahriman existed; Ahriman did not know Ohrmazd existed | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, pp. 155, 4 | |
| C-045 | 4 | Creatures remained 3,000 years in a spiritual state, unthinking and unmoving, with intangible bodies | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 4 | |
| C-046 | 4 | Ahriman, walking the border, saw a ray of light and strove toward it | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 156 | |
| C-047 | 4 | Ohrmazd drove him back 'through pure words' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 156 | |
| C-048 | 4 | Ohrmazd answered 'Thou art not a doer of everything, O fiend' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 156 | |
| C-049 | 4 | The conflict was fixed by agreement at 9,000 years, of which the middle 3,000 favour Ahriman | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. xxiii | |
| C-050 | 4 | The six creations damaged: movement in the sky, saltness in water, mountains in earth, withering in plants, death of the primeval ox, death of Gayōmard | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. xxiii | |
| C-051 | 4 | Matter is a tactic — the material creation exists so the enemy can be caught in a bounded arena | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT; consistent with the standard reading of Zoroastrian cosmology |
| C-052 | 4 | The Bundahishn was compiled in the ninth century CE in Pahlavi from older Avestan material much of which is lost | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | SBE V, introduction | |
| C-053 | 4 | The surviving Avesta is a fragment of a larger corpus, and Zoroastrian tradition records its destruction | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | The tradition's accounts of the destructions are reported as tradition, not as established event history |
| C-054 | 4 | Zoroastrianism was the Sasanian state religion; after the Arab conquests of the mid-seventh century its adherents became a shrinking minority, and the great Pahlavi books were written in that period | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-055 | 4 | West's translation appeared in 1880 as volume V of Max Müller's fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V title page | |
| C-056 | 4 | Zoroastrianism is a living religion of a few hundred thousand adherents, chiefly Parsis in India and Zoroastrians in Iran and the diaspora | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-057 | 4 | Iran's is the only strict dualism in the book, and the only cosmogony in which the material world is created as a tactical arena | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-058 | 5 | Māori cosmogony is recited as a genealogy in which the stages before the world are ancestors | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Dixon pp. 6-7 | |
| C-059 | 5 | Nine named voids precede the nights, including Te Kore-whiwhia (Unpossessing) and Te Kore-rawea (Delightful) | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 6 | |
| C-060 | 5 | The nights are named and differ: Hanging, Drifting, Moaning; and Hine-maki-moe, Daughter of Troubled Sleep, stands among them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 6 | |
| C-061 | 5 | The sequence ends Te Ata (Dawn), Te Ao-tū-roa (Abiding Day), Te Ao-mārama (Bright Day), Whai-tua (Space) | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 6-7 | |
| C-062 | 5 | In Whai-tua, Maku (Moisture) and Mahora-nui-a-rangi produced Rangi-pōtiki, who took Papa to wife | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 7 | |
| C-063 | 5 | Grey records darkness from the first division of time to the thousandth, each division a being called a Pō | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | opening of 'The Children of Heaven and Earth' | |
| C-064 | 5 | Whakapapa reckons relationships to land, people and the natural world by descent, and the cosmogony is the top of the recitation | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-065 | 5 | The void is an ancestor rather than an enemy, unlike Nun in Egypt | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — this is the story's comparative reading |
| C-066 | 5 | Grey was Governor of New Zealand 1845-1853 and 1861-1868, arriving three years after the Treaty of Waitangi | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-067 | 5 | Grey published the Māori text as Ko nga Mahinga a nga Tupuna Maori in 1854 and his English as Polynesian Mythology in 1855 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-068 | 5 | Grey said he undertook the collection because he could not conduct government business with Māori leaders without understanding their allusions, proverbs and genealogies | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-069 | 5 | Grey's second term coincided with the New Zealand Wars and the land confiscations that followed | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-070 | 5 | Māori scholars have long criticised Grey's versions for combining accounts from different sources into continuous narratives without marking the joins | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-071 | 5 | Dixon compiled Oceanic Mythology from other collectors' work and names neither the recorder nor the reciter of the genealogy used here | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 6-7 | |
| C-072 | 5 | Hesiod's Theogony and Māori whakapapa are both descent lists beginning from a non-person, but Hesiod's terminates in the gods while whakapapa continues to the speaker | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-073 | 6 | The poem opens by saying heaven was unnamed and earth unrecorded by name | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, first tablet ll. 1-2 | |
| C-074 | 6 | The same tablet couples being called by name with destiny being fixed | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, first tablet l. 8 | |
| C-075 | 6 | In Babylonian thought naming confers function and destiny rather than merely labelling | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | The couplet is in the source; the generalisation about Babylonian thought is scholarship and is presented as an explanation, not as a quotation |
| C-076 | 6 | The boundless deep is called their generator and the sea she who bore the whole of them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, first tablet ll. 3-4 | |
| C-077 | 6 | Apsu is specifically the fresh subterranean water and Tiamat the salt sea | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Smith ch. III n.4; ch. IV table | FLAGGED IN THE SOURCE NOTE — the story's title rests on this later reading and the note says so |
| C-078 | 6 | Their waters were collected together in one place | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, first tablet l. 5 | |
| C-079 | 6 | The absence named in the poem is that the flowering reed was not gathered and the marsh-plant was not grown | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, first tablet l. 6 | |
| C-080 | 6 | The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates with the Gulf is a marsh landscape where fresh and salt water mingle without a clear coastline | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | Geographical observation offered to explain the imagery; the story presents it as such |
| C-081 | 6 | The gods are produced in male-and-female pairs: Lakhmu and Lakhamu, then Sar and Kisar (upper and lower expanse), then Anu, Elum and Hea | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, first tablet ll. 9-15 and commentary | |
| C-082 | 6 | Smith identifies Anu with heaven, Elum with earth and Hea with the sea | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. V commentary | |
| C-083 | 6 | Only fifteen lines of the first tablet survive, and the three tablets between it and the fifth were entirely missing | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V | |
| C-084 | 6 | Anu kissed the bow, addressed it, and made it the protection of mankind | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | ch. VI, fourth fragment K 3449 ll. 4-9 | Smith translates 'with some doubt on account of its mutilation' and says so |
| C-085 | 6 | The scimitar is sickle-shaped and appears as Marduk's weapon on cylinders and bas-reliefs | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. VI commentary | |
| C-086 | 6 | Kingu is named in the war fragments but his role cannot be reconstructed from them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. VI, third fragment K 3938 l. 12 and sixth fragment reverse l. 35 | The story says only that the fragments name him and break off; Smith's own gloss that Tiamat took a god as husband is his inference and is reported as such |
| C-087 | 6 | Tiamat stands at the head of the seven evil spirits, who elsewhere swoop from mid-heaven and eclipse the moon | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. VI, the sixteenth tablet of the evil-spirit series and Smith's linking comment | |
| C-088 | 6 | Marduk hurled the lightning before him, heat filled his body, and he created and launched the winds into the sea | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. VI, sixth fragment obverse ll. 4-13 | |
| C-089 | 6 | Tiamat used spells, grounded her foundations at the roots, and determined return | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. VI, sixth fragment reverse ll. 4-7 | |
| C-090 | 6 | She opened her mouth to swallow him; the evil wind held it open, filled her stomach, and the sword cut her inside asunder and ended her life | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. VI, sixth fragment reverse ll. 11-19 | |
| C-091 | 6 | Berosus reports that the god cut the woman Omoroka asunder and formed the earth of one half and the heavens of the other | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | Greek summary of a lost Babylonian book, at three removes; the story says it is changing witness |
| C-092 | 6 | Berosus reports that the god's own blood was mixed with earth to make human beings, which is why they are rational | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-093 | 6 | The fifth tablet has Anu fix the stars in mansions, set three stars to each of the twelve months, and establish a station so that they might not err or deflect | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, fifth tablet ll. 1-8 | |
| C-094 | 6 | Great gates in the sides of the world are bolted on the left and right, with a staircase in the centre | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, fifth tablet ll. 9-11 | |
| C-095 | 6 | The moon is given month-by-month instructions in the second person, ending 'rise and set, and judge judgment' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, fifth tablet ll. 12-24 | |
| C-096 | 6 | A four-line fragment, probably the seventh tablet, has the gods create the strong monsters, living creatures, cattle, beasts and creeping things of the field | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V | |
| C-097 | 6 | The surviving copies come from Assurbanipal's library at Kouyunjik and carry his colophon | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, colophon of the first tablet | |
| C-098 | 6 | Smith and Sayce judged the surviving version Assyrian rather than Babylonian in its present form, probably composed under Assurbanipal | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. V, opening | Reported as their judgement, not as settled fact |
| C-099 | 6 | Smith announced the flood tablet to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872, after which the Daily Telegraph funded an excavation, and he died on the 1875-76 expedition | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. I | The source says he 'fell a victim to over-fatigue'; the story quotes that phrasing rather than narrating a death scene |
| C-100 | 6 | Smith was a banknote engraver who taught himself cuneiform at the British Museum | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-101 | 6 | Hebrew tehom and Assyrian Tiamat are the same word, and Smith makes the identification | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V commentary on Genesis i.2 | |
| C-102 | 6 | Smith's book frames the poem against Genesis and tabulates his tablets against the six days | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. V, the Genesis/tablet table | |
| C-103 | 6 | L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation (London, 1902), is the standard edition that superseded Smith and recovered much more of the poem | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | NAMED NOT USED — no material from King is in this retelling |
| C-104 | 6 | Enuma Elis was recited at the Babylonian New Year festival | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-105 | 6 | The Nile's flood is regular and fertilising while the Tigris and Euphrates flood violently and unpredictably | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the comparative reading explicitly declines to claim that hydrology produced the theology |
| C-106 | 6 | Babylon's cosmogony is a matricide while Iran's is a defence against an outsider and Greece's a wound to the father | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — this is the story's comparative reading |
| C-107 | 7 | The narrator opens by attributing the legend to five generations of grandfathers | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | report p. 141 | |
| C-108 | 7 | Man-beings dwell on the farther side of the visible sky, which is the ground of the world above | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 141 | |
| C-109 | 7 | The Mohawk version says the sky people knew neither weeping nor death | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 255 | |
| C-110 | 7 | Down-fending was a custom of secluding a child marked at birth as carrying unusual power, with cat-tail down scattered to reveal intruders | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 255 n.b; p. 142 | Hewitt calls the custom 'now almost, if not wholly, obsolete' |
| C-111 | 7 | The maiden crossed the lodge each morning to comb and straighten the man-being's hair | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 142-143 | |
| C-112 | 7 | She became pregnant and would not say by whom, when asked twice | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 143, 145 | |
| C-113 | 7 | Nobody in the sky world had died before, and they did not know what it meant to say 'I shall die' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 144 | |
| C-114 | 7 | His mother closed his eyes with both hands and began to weep, and all in the lodge wept | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 144 | |
| C-115 | 7 | The girl child wept five days and was quieted only by being lifted to the burial case | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 145 | |
| C-116 | 7 | She brought down a wampum armlet and later a necklace, saying her father gave them to her | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 145-147 | |
| C-117 | 7 | The dead father instructed her to bake a basket of bread, not to stop or answer on the road, and named the maple log crossing and the tree Tooth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 147-149 | |
| C-118 | 7 | The blossoms of the tree called Tooth are the source of light for that world | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 149 | |
| C-119 | 7 | Aurora Borealis and Fire Dragon of the Storm spoke to her on the road, and the chief himself waited at the crossing to test her | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 150-152 | |
| C-120 | 7 | She said 'Thou and I marry' and handed him the basket, and he said nothing | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 152 | |
| C-121 | 7 | The ordeal required her to make mush naked, be scalded without flinching, then be licked raw by two white dogs and restored with sunflower oil | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 153-156 | |
| C-122 | 7 | He said no one from anywhere had been able to do it before | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 155 | |
| C-123 | 7 | He shook the basket seven times to fill it, and sent word that the lodges were to be unroofed; corn then rained into them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 156-158 | |
| C-124 | 7 | The narrator explains her second pregnancy as caused by catching the chief's breath while they conversed, and generalises this as the origin of reproduction for man-beings and animals | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 159-160 | This is the narrator's own explanatory aside; the story presents it as his, not as a general Haudenosaunee doctrine |
| C-125 | 7 | The chief became ill and jealous without understanding why, and foretold a daughter named Zephyrs (Gusts-of-wind) | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 160-162 | |
| C-126 | 7 | A dream feast was held to divine the chief's Word, attended by Deer, Great-horned Deer, Spotted Fawn, Red Meteor, Great Turtle, Wind-who-moves-about, Daylight, Night, Thick Night, Duck, Fresh Water, Yellowhammer, Medicine and Aurora Borealis | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 163-167 | |
| C-127 | 7 | Aurora Borealis divined the Word: uproot the tree Tooth, tear the earth open, all look in, and the wife sit with her legs in the abyss | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 166-167 | |
| C-128 | 7 | He gave her dried spotted-fawn meat and three fagots of wood, then seized the nape of her neck and pushed her into the abyss | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 168-170 | |
| C-129 | 7 | Falling, she saw blue light and a lake covered with ducks, and no earth anywhere | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 171 | |
| C-130 | 7 | The Loon saw her first; the Otter tried to bear the assembly and sank; the Turtle bore them all | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 171-173 | |
| C-131 | 7 | The Muskrat surfaced dead with earth in his paws and mouth, and the earth was placed on the Turtle's carapace, which then grew | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 173 | |
| C-132 | 7 | The large waterfowl joined their bodies to catch her and set her on the carapace | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 174 | |
| C-133 | 7 | She lit the first fire with the three fagots, butchered a deer left for her, and three nights later gave birth to Zephyrs a second time | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 174-175 | |
| C-134 | 7 | Hewitt printed three versions — Onondaga (John Buck, 1889/1897), Seneca (John Armstrong, 1896, revised with Andrew John), Mohawk (Seth Newhouse, 1896-97) — and they differ substantially | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 127-128 | |
| C-135 | 7 | Hewitt says Buck's version is shorter because the relator seemed averse to telling more than a brief outline | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 127 | |
| C-136 | 7 | In the Seneca version the girl's father is lean and dried with what the translation calls jealousy over the child | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 221 | |
| C-137 | 7 | In the Mohawk version the two down-fended persons are explicitly brother and sister | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 255 | |
| C-138 | 7 | Hewitt records a fuller Onondaga version from Chief John Arthur Gibson, promised for a later report | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 127 | |
| C-139 | 7 | Hewitt argued that such narratives must be recorded in the vernacular with both literal and free renderings | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 130 | |
| C-140 | 7 | Hewitt's commentary uses the evolutionary vocabulary of its period — 'primitive people', 'barbaric man', 'the reified fictions of savage mentation' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 129-131, 141 n.a | |
| C-141 | 7 | Ohwachira denotes a woman's offspring and their descendants in the female line; orenda denotes immanent magic potence | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 141 n.a, 255 n.a | |
| C-142 | 7 | Hewitt was born in 1859, raised on the Tuscarora reservation in New York, and of Tuscarora descent through his mother, though accounts of her ancestry differ | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — stated with its uncertainty in the historical context, and explicitly does not make the report a Haudenosaunee publication |
| C-143 | 7 | The Bureau of American Ethnology was a United States federal body operating during the allotment and boarding-school era, on a cultural-evolutionary theory | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-144 | 7 | The Haudenosaunee held territory in what is now New York and, after the American Revolution, the Grand River lands in Ontario where Buck and Newhouse were living | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 127 | |
| C-145 | 7 | The earth-diver makes this the only cosmogony so far in which the world is retrieved rather than made, by the smallest animal present, who dies doing it | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-146 | 7 | The first copy of Hewitt obtained for this book was too degraded by OCR to quote from, and a cleaner scan of the same report was substituted | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | Production fact, recorded in the source note and the source register (correction C-4) |
| C-147 | 8 | The earth is an island in water, suspended by four cords from a solid rock sky vault | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 239 | |
| C-148 | 8 | When the world grows old the cords will break and everything will be water again, and the Indians are afraid of this | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 239 | |
| C-149 | 8 | The animals lived above in Galûñ'lati and wanted more room because it was crowded | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 239 | |
| C-150 | 8 | Dâyuni'si, 'Beaver's Grandchild', the little water-beetle, dived and returned with soft mud that grew into the island | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 239 | |
| C-151 | 8 | Mooney identifies the water-beetle as the Gyrinus, locally the mellow bug or apple beetle, and records a variant in which the water-spider helps | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to myth 1, p. 431 | |
| C-152 | 8 | The earth was fastened to the sky with four cords and no one remembers who did it | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 239 | |
| C-153 | 8 | The Great Buzzard's failing wings cut the valleys and raised the mountains of the Cherokee country | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 239 | |
| C-154 | 8 | The buzzard shaping the mountains also occurs among the Creek and Yuchi, though there the crawfish brings up the first earth; among northern peoples a turtle carries the world | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to myth 1, p. 431 | |
| C-155 | 8 | The sun was raised a hand-breadth at a time to seven hand-breadths, the 'seventh height', after scorching Tsiska'gili' the Red Crawfish, whom the Cherokee therefore do not eat | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, pp. 239-240 | |
| C-156 | 8 | An underworld exists with reversed seasons, entered through springs at the heads of mountain streams, requiring fasting, going to water and a guide | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 240 | |
| C-157 | 8 | The animals and plants were told to keep awake seven nights; the owl, panther and one or two others succeeded and were given night vision, and the cedar, pine, spruce, holly and laurel were given evergreen leaves and the greatest medicine | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 240 | |
| C-158 | 8 | The first people were a brother and sister; he struck her with a fish, a child came every seven days, and it was then made one child a year | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | myth 1, p. 240 | |
| C-159 | 8 | Mooney states the Cherokee genesis myth is too far broken down to be recovered except in disjointed fragments, through decay of tradition and admixture of Bible ideas | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | note to myth 1, p. 431 | The collector's own assessment, quoted rather than adopted; the source note says it may be right and cannot now be tested |
| C-160 | 8 | Myth 1 is a composite: main body from Swimmer and John Ax; evergreens from Ta'gwadihi'; the fish incident from Ayâ'sta; John Ax's divergent Little People version; Wafford's blind first man | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | note to myth 1, p. 431 | |
| C-161 | 8 | Mooney glosses the fish incident as possibly phallic | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to myth 1, p. 431 | Reported as Mooney's own bracketed guess, not as Cherokee interpretation |
| C-162 | 8 | Swimmer was born about 1835, trained as priest, doctor and keeper of tradition, served as a sergeant in a Cherokee Confederate company, wrote in the Cherokee syllabary, spoke no English, and died in March 1899 | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 236-237 | |
| C-163 | 8 | Swimmer supplied nearly three-quarters of the myths in the collection, and Mooney wrote that with him perished half the tradition of a people | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 236 | |
| C-164 | 8 | John Ax was born about 1800 and remembered the Creek war | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 237 | |
| C-165 | 8 | Mooney describes the 1838 removal as possibly exceeding any other passage in American history in grief, with troops taking families from their homes, houses burned, and graves robbed | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | historical sketch, pp. 130-132 | |
| C-166 | 8 | Mooney quotes a Georgia volunteer and later Confederate colonel calling the Cherokee removal the cruelest work he ever knew | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 130 | |
| C-167 | 8 | Around four thousand Cherokee died as a direct result of the removal | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 133 | Mooney's own figure, given as an assertion 'probably with reason' |
| C-168 | 8 | Tsali surrendered voluntarily and was shot with his brother and two elder sons near the mouth of the Tuckasegee by Cherokee prisoners compelled to do it; the Eastern Band descends from those permitted to remain | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 131-132 | |
| C-169 | 8 | This is the only cosmogony in the book whose stated motive is overcrowding, and the only one that twice declines to name an agent | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading, which also states that Mooney read the blank as damage |
| C-170 | 8 | Almost every element of the account explains an observable feature of the Cherokee country | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-171 | 9 | The poem opens by calling a second singer to sing with the first, and instructs them to clasp hands so as to remember better | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Proem | |
| C-172 | 9 | Ilmatar, Daughter of the Ether, lived alone in the air for ages and her existence was wearisome, sad and hopeless | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I, opening | |
| C-173 | 9 | She descended to the ocean and the east wind whipped the sea; she conceived from the storm and water | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-174 | 9 | She swam seven hundred years, called also nine ages of man's existence, unable to rise or give birth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-175 | 9 | She lamented that it would have been better to remain a maiden in the ether than become a water-mother | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-176 | 9 | She prayed to Ukko, ruler of the heavens, to come and deliver her, and he does not appear in the poem | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | The silence is an absence in the text, not a statement in it; the story reports the prayer and then what actually happens next |
| C-177 | 9 | A duck searched every direction for a nest site and reasoned aloud that wind and waves would destroy a nest built on air or flood | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-178 | 9 | Ilmatar raised her shoulders and knee so the duck could nest, and the duck took them for grassy hillocks | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-179 | 9 | The duck laid six golden eggs and a seventh of iron and brooded three days until the knee burned | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-180 | 9 | The shaken eggs fell and shattered, and the fragments formed earth from the lower half, sky from the upper, moon from the white, sun from the yellow, stars from the motley and cloud from the dark | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-181 | 9 | In the ninth year, in the summer of the tenth, she raised her head and shaped headlands, fish-holes, deeps, level banks, bays and inlets with her hand, foot, dives, side and head | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-182 | 9 | Resting on her back she made the rocks and the hidden reefs where ships are often wrecked and many lives have perished | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-183 | 9 | Väinämöinen remained unborn thirty summers and thirty winters after the world was made | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-184 | 9 | He petitioned the Moon, the Sun and the Great Bear to release him and all three refused | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-185 | 9 | He forced the lock with an unnamed finger, used the toes of his left foot and the fingers of his right hand, and plunged head first into the sea | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-186 | 9 | He remained in the sea five, six and seven years and came ashore in the autumn of the eighth on a promontory bare of verdure, then stood to look at sun, moon and the Great Bear | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Rune I | |
| C-187 | 9 | Topelius collected eighty epic fragments from his sickbed by having Karelian traders sing to him, publishing 1822-1831 | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-188 | 9 | Lönnrot, born 1802, a physician, collected runes from 1828 in Savo, Karelia and Archangel province by horse, reindeer sledge and canoe | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-189 | 9 | Lönnrot arranged the material under the central idea of a great epic and sent the manuscript to the Finnish Literary Society in February 1835 | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-190 | 9 | The 1849 second edition contains fifty runes and 22,793 lines and resulted from sifting, arranging and organizing the material | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-191 | 9 | Crawford's manuscript was compared against Schiefner's German and Barna's Hungarian translations by named scholars | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-192 | 9 | How directly Crawford worked from the Finnish rather than through Schiefner's German has been questioned | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — stated as a question raised, not as established fact |
| C-193 | 9 | In the Kalevala the world-egg is laid by a duck; in other Finnish traditions by an eagle | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-194 | 9 | Grimm, Steinthal, Uhland, Carrière and Max Müller took up the Kalevala; Grimm contrasted its genuineness with Ossian | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-195 | 9 | Finland was an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917, having previously been under Swedish rule; Crawford's preface states the political position incorrectly | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | preface | |
| C-196 | 9 | Swedish was the language of administration and educated life; Finnish was spoken widely and printed almost not at all | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-197 | 9 | The Kalevala became the founding text of Finnish national identity in the decades before independence in 1917 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-198 | 9 | This is the only creation in the book produced entirely by accident, the sole deliberate act being Ilmatar raising her knee for the bird | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-199 | 9 | The poem places the drowning of sailors inside the act of creation itself | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT; the quoted lines are the evidence |
| C-200 | 10 | The world began as a slushy quagmire of mixed water and earth, incapable of sustaining life, with land drifting in it | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-201 | 10 | The clouds already had thunder demons, the skies living creatures, and the Creator dwelt in the highest heavens with hosts of subordinate deities | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-202 | 10 | God made a water-wagtail and sent it down to produce the earth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-203 | 10 | The wagtail fluttered over the waters, trampled the mud with its feet and beat it with its tail until dry places appeared and the waters became the ocean | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-204 | 10 | The Ainu call the world moshiri, 'floating earth', and hold the wagtail in great esteem as the angel of God | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-205 | 10 | In a second version God cast up the rough ground with mattocks and axes and the wagtail levelled it by hopping, scratching, flapping and tail-waving | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-206 | 10 | The wagtail's present-day tail-beating is explained by this work | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-207 | 10 | Many Ainu understood the Creator to have used stone hammers, axes and mattocks, because God is never conceived of as working without means | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-208 | 10 | Sixty mattocks were used and discarded; decomposing, they became demons, bad water, and trees that originate diseases | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III, 'How mattocks evolved demons' | |
| C-209 | 10 | The chief demon so produced is Nitat-unarabe, 'aunt of the swamps', whose offspring are called Toihekunra | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-210 | 10 | Batchelor obtained the Yezo legend from an Ainu companion who rebuked him for criticising the west coast as a reflection on God's works | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-211 | 10 | Yezo was made by two deputy deities racing; the goddess stopped to talk with Aioina's sister, then rushed her half, producing the rugged west coast | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-212 | 10 | The legend was quoted at women who talked too much, with the moral to set a watch over the lips | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | Reported as the recorded use of the story, neither endorsed nor concealed |
| C-213 | 10 | In another version Aioina's sister Tureshmat wept on being given the western portion, and this is the origin of tears; nupe is heard as nu (hear) plus pe (water) | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | A folk etymology recorded in the source and presented as one |
| C-214 | 10 | A rock near Moruran called mukara-so, 'axe rock', is said to be a deity's axe, unliftable by anyone | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-215 | 10 | Batchelor introduces the chapter by calling Ainu ideas of creation 'absolutely absurd' and an illustration of the depths of intellectual blindness a race may sink into | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III opening | |
| C-216 | 10 | Batchelor suggests the wagtail legend may derive from Genesis 1 and then argues against his own suggestion | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-217 | 10 | Batchelor names no narrators in this chapter beyond 'an Ainu companion' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-218 | 10 | Japan annexed Ezo in 1869, renamed it Hokkaidō and opened it to settlement; fishing and hunting rights, language and customs were progressively restricted | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-219 | 10 | The Hokkaidō Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 allotted land conditional on agriculture and set up separate schools, with assimilation as its purpose, and remained law until 1997 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-220 | 10 | Japan recognised the Ainu as an Indigenous people by Diet resolution in 2008, followed by the Ainu Policy Promotion Act in 2019 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-221 | 10 | Batchelor lived among the Ainu for decades and compiled an Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-222 | 10 | This is the only account in the book in which evil is a by-product of construction rather than an opponent, an ancestor or a consequence | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-223 | 10 | The wagtail is the only creature in the book that makes the world by manual labour rather than by diving, laying or intending | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-224 | 11 | Nārāyaṇa instructed Brahmā and the gods to churn the Ocean with the Asuras, promising amṛta together with all drugs and gems | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVII | |
| C-225 | 11 | The celestials sat in conclave on the peak of Meru as eager seekers after amṛta | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVII | |
| C-226 | 11 | Mandara rises eleven thousand yojanas and descends as far, and the gods could not tear it up | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-227 | 11 | Ananta, prince of snakes, tore up the mountain with its woods and the denizens of those woods | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-228 | 11 | The gods asked the Ocean's leave and it consented on condition of receiving a share | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-229 | 11 | The king of tortoises agreed to hold the mountain on his back and Indra placed it there | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-230 | 11 | Vasuki served as the churning cord, Asuras at the hood and gods at the tail | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-231 | 11 | The stretching produced black vapours and flames from Vasuki's mouth, which became lightning clouds whose rain refreshed the gods, along with falling flowers | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-232 | 11 | A roar came from the deep like the clouds at the Universal Dissolution; aquatic animals were crushed, denizens of the lower regions killed, trees with birds uprooted, and friction fires burned lions and elephants until Indra's rain quenched them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-233 | 11 | Tree gums and herb juices with the properties of amṛta mixed into the water; the gods who drank became immortal and the milky water turned to clarified butter, but nectar had not appeared | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-234 | 11 | The gods said they were spent up with no strength to churn further, and Nārāyaṇa granted them strength | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-235 | 11 | There emerged in order the Moon, Lakṣmī in white, Soma, the White Steed, the Kaustubha gem, Dhanvantari with the white vessel of nectar, and the elephant Airāvata with two pairs of white tusks | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-236 | 11 | On seeing Dhanvantari the Asuras cried 'It be ours' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-237 | 11 | The poison Kālakūṭa arose last, engulfed the earth, blazed with fumes, and stupefied the three worlds by its scent | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-238 | 11 | Śiva, solicited by Brahmā, swallowed the poison for the safety of creation and held it in his throat, and is therefore called Nīlakaṇṭha, blue-throated | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-239 | 11 | Nārāyaṇa assumed an enticing female form by māyā and the Danavas placed the amṛta in her hands | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVIII | |
| C-240 | 11 | Rāhu drank the amṛta in the guise of a god; Sūrya and Soma exposed him; Nārāyaṇa cut off his head with the discus when the nectar had reached his throat | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XIX | |
| C-241 | 11 | The severed head rose crying to the sky and the trunk fell and made the earth tremble; the quarrel with Sūrya and Soma explains solar and lunar eclipses | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XIX | |
| C-242 | 11 | The churning is told as Sauti's answer to Saunaka's question about the origin of the horse Uchchaihsravas | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Āstīka Parva XVII | |
| C-243 | 11 | Ganguli states that a translator should hold the mirror up to his author and refuses to make Hindu ideas agreeable to English taste | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-244 | 11 | The translation was published anonymously by agreement, with two prefaces; an Indian journal accused Pratap Chandra Roy of a great literary imposture and later apologised; Ganguli's name appeared only on completion | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-245 | 11 | Ganguli acknowledges assistance from Babu Charu Charan Mookerjee in portions of the Adi and Sabha Parvas | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | preface | |
| C-246 | 11 | The Mahābhārata is an accreted composite in eighteen parvas, traditionally ascribed to Vyāsa, grown over centuries around a dynastic war narrative | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-247 | 11 | Ganguli's was the first complete English Mahābhārata; it was Indian-translated, Indian-financed and Calcutta-printed, partly distributed free, and Roy died before completion with his widow seeing the remaining volumes out | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — the free distribution and the widow's role are well reported but are not stated in the text used here |
| C-248 | 11 | Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East was in progress at the same period and is the source of this book's Bundahishn | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V | |
| C-249 | 11 | This is the only primeval water in the book that negotiates terms rather than being killed or ignored | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-250 | 11 | Cooperation between gods and Asuras here is a mechanical requirement of the churning rather than a moral position | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-251 | 11 | This is the only account in the book in which the poison and the medicine are produced by one and the same process | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-252 | 12 | Vǫluspá 3 says that where Ymir dwelt there was neither sand nor sea nor cold waves, no earth and no heaven, a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 3 | |
| C-253 | 12 | Niflheim to the north held ice, rime, drizzle and gusts; Muspelheim to the south threw out sparks; between them Ginnungagap was as warm and mild as windless air | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 5 | |
| C-254 | 12 | Heat from Muspelheim melted the rime and the drops quickened into a man named Ymir, called Aurgelmir by the frost-giants | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 5 | |
| C-255 | 12 | Venom drops from Élivágar grew until they became a giant, and sparks from the south gave the ice life | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vafþrúðnismál 31 | |
| C-256 | 12 | Snorri's Hár denies that Ymir is a god and calls him and all his offspring evil | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 5 | |
| C-257 | 12 | Ymir sweated in his sleep and a man and woman grew under his left arm, and one foot begat a son with the other | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 5; Vafþrúðnismál 33 | Vafþrúðnismál gives the offspring as a six-headed son; the retelling follows the prose and does not merge the two |
| C-258 | 12 | The cow Auðhumla was formed from the melting rime and four milk-streams from her fed Ymir | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 6 | |
| C-259 | 12 | She licked rime-covered salt-stones, producing a man's hair on the first day, his head on the second and the whole man, Búri, on the third | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | section 6 | FLAGGED — unique to Snorri, with no surviving poetic witness; the source note says so |
| C-260 | 12 | Búri begat Borr, who married Bestla daughter of the giant Bölthorn, and their sons were Óðinn, Vili and Vé | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 6 | |
| C-261 | 12 | The sons of Borr killed Ymir and his blood drowned all the frost-giants except Bergelmir, who escaped with his household in an ark | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 7; Vafþrúðnismál 29, 35 | |
| C-262 | 12 | They made the earth of his flesh, the seas and lakes of his blood, the rocks of his bones, and stones and pebbles of his teeth, jaws and broken bones | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 8; Vafþrúðnismál 21 | |
| C-263 | 12 | The free-flowing blood became the ocean, laid around the earth in a ring most men would think impossible to cross | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 8 | |
| C-264 | 12 | His skull became the sky raised with four corners, with a dwarf set under each, named East, West, North and South | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | section 8 | FLAGGED — the four named dwarfs are Snorri's and have no surviving poetic witness |
| C-265 | 12 | Grímnismál adds that his hair became trees and plants, his brows Midgard for the sons of men, and his brain the clouds | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Grímnismál 40-41 | |
| C-266 | 12 | Sparks from Muspelheim were fixed in the sky as lights, some set in place and some given assigned courses | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 8 | |
| C-267 | 12 | The sun did not know where her hall was, the moon did not know what might he had, and the stars did not know their resting-places | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 5; Gylfaginning 8 | |
| C-268 | 12 | The gods in council gave names to night, the waning moon, morning, midday, afternoon and evening, whereby to reckon years | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 6 | |
| C-269 | 12 | Iceland adopted Christianity by decision of the Alþing in the year 1000 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-270 | 12 | The Poetic Edda survives chiefly in the Codex Regius, written about 1270; the poems are older but by a disputed margin | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-271 | 12 | Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda in the 1220s, was lawspeaker of the Icelandic assembly, and was killed in 1241 on the orders of the king of Norway | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-272 | 12 | The Prose Edda was written as a handbook for poets, because skaldic kennings require knowledge of the myths | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-273 | 12 | Snorri's preface explains the gods as human beings later mistakenly worshipped, and the Gylfaginning ends by revealing the vision as an illusion | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Foreword; end of Gylfaginning | |
| C-274 | 12 | Anderson was professor of Scandinavian languages at Wisconsin, later US Minister to Denmark, and author of 'America Not Discovered By Columbus' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | title page | |
| C-275 | 12 | Norse myth has been repeatedly enlisted for political purposes since the nineteenth century | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT, stated briefly and without elaboration; the point made is that the versions given here are the thirteenth-century Icelandic ones |
| C-276 | 12 | The itemised parts list served Icelandic poets as a working reference for kennings, not only as narrative | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-277 | 12 | The Norse flood is a flood of the victim's blood and the ark-survivor is the victim's kinsman, inverting the usual flood pattern | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-278 | 12 | The final stage of the Norse creation is a timetable rather than a substance | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-279 | 12 | The gods in council resolved who should create the race of dwarfs from the sea-giant's blood and livid bones, making Móðsognir greatest and Durin second | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 9-10 | |
| C-280 | 12 | Snorri says the dwarfs had quickened in Ymir's flesh like maggots and were given understanding and the likeness of men but had to dwell in earth and rock | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 14 | The maggot comparison is the source's own |
| C-281 | 12 | Vǫluspá names more than sixty dwarfs across four stanzas | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 11-16 | |
| C-282 | 12 | Three gods found Ask and Embla on earth nearly powerless and void of destiny, without spirit, sense, blood, motive powers or goodly colour | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 17-18 | |
| C-283 | 12 | Óðinn gave spirit, Hœnir gave sense, and Lóðurr gave blood and goodly colour | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Vǫluspá 18 | |
| C-284 | 12 | In Snorri's prose the three gifts are life and spirit; reason and power of motion; and form, speech, hearing and eyesight, after which the gods gave them clothes and names | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 9 | |
| C-285 | 12 | Borr's sons found two trees on the sea-strand and made the first man and woman of them, naming them Ask and Embla | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | section 9 | |
| C-286 | 12 | Ask means ash and Embla is probably elm | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — 'ash' is secure, 'elm' is the usual but not certain reading of Embla, and the story says probably |
| C-287 | 13 | Pangu was produced by the yin and the yang and set the task of giving form to Chaos and making the heavens and the earth | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | Werner summarises; no primary wording is available in the source |
| C-288 | 13 | 'P'an' means the shell of an egg and 'Ku' means to secure or solid, referring to his being hatched from Chaos | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | ch. III | Werner himself notes the characters may mean nothing more than 'Researches into antiquity' |
| C-289 | 13 | He is pictured in bearskin or leaves, with two horns, holding hammer and chisel, sometimes attended by unicorn, phoenix, tortoise and dragon, sometimes holding sun and moon | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-290 | 13 | His task took eighteen thousand years, during which he grew six feet taller each day | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-291 | 13 | He died that his works might live | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | Werner's English; flagged in the source note as his phrasing, not a translated quotation |
| C-292 | 13 | His head became the mountains, breath the wind and clouds, voice the thunder, limbs the four quarters, blood the rivers, flesh the soil, beard the constellations, skin and hair the herbs and trees, teeth bones and marrow the metals rocks and precious stones, sweat the rain | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-293 | 13 | The insects creeping over his body became human beings | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-294 | 13 | Werner compares this to the tears of Khepera in Egyptian cosmology and calls it a lowlier origin | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-295 | 13 | The account is of Taoist origin and the Buddhist version is a late adaptation from it | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-296 | 13 | The sun and moon hid in the Han Sea; Terrestrial Time was sent and they refused; Pangu, directed by Ju Lai, wrote the characters for sun and moon on his palms and called them out with a charm said seven times | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | Werner identifies this as the Buddhist adaptation; the story says so |
| C-297 | 13 | Other versions give Pangu a dragon's head and serpent's body, or have him make wind by breathing, day by opening his eyes and thunder with his voice | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-298 | 13 | Werner attributes the invention of the myth to the fourth-century Taoist Ko Hung (Ge Hong), author of the Shen hsien chuan | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | Reported as Werner's attribution and corrected in the historical context |
| C-299 | 13 | The earliest surviving account of Pangu is usually credited to Xu Zheng, third century CE, in the lost Sanwu liji, which survives only in later quotations | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-300 | 13 | A long-standing suggestion is that Pangu entered the written Chinese tradition from non-Han southern myth; the question is unsettled | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — the book records the debate and does not adjudicate it |
| C-301 | 13 | The cosmogonies of the I Ching, Laozi, Confucius, Guanzi, Mencius and Zhuangzi are impersonal, and Chinese thought had no personal creator for centuries before Pangu | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-302 | 13 | Nüwa, serpent-bodied and human-headed, moulded human beings from yellow earth and is described as the repairer rather than the creator of the heavens | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | This is the one passage in the chapter where Werner quotes a named primary author |
| C-303 | 13 | Gong Gong struck the Imperfect Mountain, breaking the pillars of heaven; Nüwa melted five-coloured stones to patch the sky, cut off a tortoise's feet to prop the four corners, and stopped the flood with reed ashes | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-304 | 13 | Werner himself compares Pangu with Ymir and adapts a stanza of the Vǫluspá to do so | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-305 | 13 | Werner speculates that the Chinese may have brought the elements of a cosmogony from Babylon, which is period diffusionism | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III | Reported and explicitly not adopted |
| C-306 | 13 | Pangu is the only figure in the book who is both the worker and the material of creation | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-307 | 13 | Pangu does not hold the sky up but becomes the distance between sky and ground | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-308 | 13 | This is the only account in the book in which human beings are neither made nor intended | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-309 | 14 | Puruṣa has a thousand heads, eyes and feet, covers the earth on every side, and extends ten fingers' breadth beyond it | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 1 | |
| C-310 | 14 | Griffith glosses 'a thousand' as innumerable and Puruṣa as embodied spirit or Man personified, one with all created life | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 1 | |
| C-311 | 14 | Puruṣa is all that has been and all that is to be, and lord of immortality | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 2 | The second line is disputed; Griffith prints seven competing renderings and the story does not choose |
| C-312 | 14 | All creatures are one-fourth of him and three-fourths are eternal life in heaven | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 3 | |
| C-313 | 14 | With three-fourths he went up and one-fourth remained here, striding over what eats not and what eats | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 4 | |
| C-314 | 14 | From Puruṣa was born Virāj and from Virāj Puruṣa was born again | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 5 | FLAGGED — Griffith reports one tradition making Virāj the mundane egg animated by the primeval Puruṣa and another making Virāj his female counterpart; both are reported and neither adopted |
| C-315 | 14 | The gods prepared a sacrifice with Puruṣa as the offering, its oil spring, its gift autumn, its wood summer | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 6 | |
| C-316 | 14 | Sāyaṇa reads the sacrifice as mānasam yajñam, a mental or imaginary sacrifice | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 6 | |
| C-317 | 14 | He was anointed as victim on the sacred grass, and the deities, Sādhyas and ṛṣis sacrificed with him | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 7 | |
| C-318 | 14 | From the dripping fat were formed the creatures of the air and the animals wild and tame | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 8 | |
| C-319 | 14 | From the sacrifice were born the Ṛcas, the Sāman hymns, the metres and the Yajus | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 9 | |
| C-320 | 14 | From it were born horses, all creatures with two rows of teeth, cattle, goats and sheep | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 10 | |
| C-321 | 14 | The hymn asks how many portions they made of Puruṣa and what they call his mouth, arms, thighs and feet | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 11 | |
| C-322 | 14 | The Brahman was his mouth, the Rājanya was made of his arms, his thighs became the Vaiśya and from his feet the Śūdra was produced | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 12 | |
| C-323 | 14 | Griffith states this is the only passage in the Ṛgveda which enumerates the four castes | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 12 | |
| C-324 | 14 | Griffith explains each caste's derivation by the function of the body part, the Śūdra from the feet because on his toil all ultimately rests | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 12 | Quoted as Griffith's Victorian interpretation and explicitly not endorsed |
| C-325 | 14 | The moon came from his mind, the sun from his eye, Indra and Agni from his mouth and Vāyu from his breath | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 13 | |
| C-326 | 14 | Mid-air came from his navel, sky from his head, earth from his feet, the regions from his ear | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 14 | |
| C-327 | 14 | Seven fencing-logs and thrice seven layers of fuel were prepared when the gods bound Puruṣa as their victim | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 15 | |
| C-328 | 14 | The closing verse says that the gods sacrificing sacrificed the victim, and that these were the earliest holy ordinances | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 16 | |
| C-329 | 14 | Griffith judges the hymn of comparatively recent origin and an attempt to harmonise the ideas of sacrifice and creation | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to hymn XC | |
| C-330 | 14 | The tenth maṇḍala is generally agreed to be the youngest layer of the Ṛgveda, and contains the Nāsadīya, the Hiraṇyagarbha hymn and the riddle hymns as well as this one | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-331 | 14 | India abolished untouchability by constitutional article in 1950, under a constitution drafted by B. R. Ambedkar, who was born into that exclusion and wrote against the authority of such texts | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-332 | 14 | The Puruṣa Sūkta remains in liturgical use in temple worship today | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-333 | 14 | Verse 12 says nothing about descent, endogamy, purity or exclusion; it supplies four ranked categories with a shared bodily origin in scripture | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — offered as a reading of what the verse does and does not contain |
| C-334 | 14 | Puruṣa is the only body in the book that is offered rather than killed, and the dismemberment is accordingly a liturgy rather than an inventory | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-335 | 14 | This is the only cosmogony in the book that produces literature among the physical furniture of the universe | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-336 | 14 | This is the only cosmogony in the book that explains the structure of society by the same mechanism as the structure of the world | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-337 | 15 | The primeval ox fell to the right hand when it passed away and Gayōmard afterwards to the left | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 20 | |
| C-338 | 15 | The ox is 'the sole-created ox' from whom all animals and some plants proceeded, as mankind proceeded from Gayōmard | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | SBE V, p. 20 n.1 | |
| C-339 | 15 | Gōshurvan, the soul of the ox, came out of the body, stood before it and cried as much as a thousand men crying at once | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 20 | |
| C-340 | 15 | She asked with whom the guardianship of the creatures was left, and where was the man promised to preach carefulness | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 20 | |
| C-341 | 15 | Ohrmazd answered that if it were proper to produce that man at this time, the evil spirit would not have been oppressive in the earth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 20 | |
| C-342 | 15 | She went to the star station, the moon station and the sun station crying, and at the sun the guardian spirit of Zarathustra was shown to her, after which she consented to nourish the creatures | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 21 | |
| C-343 | 15 | The complaint of Gōshurvan is recorded in the Gāthās, the oldest part of the Avesta, at Yasna 29 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | SBE V, p. 20 n.2 | |
| C-344 | 15 | The gender of the ox is doubtful; West notes the angel Gōsh is usually considered female and that Zādsparam describes the animal as female | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | SBE V, p. 21 n.1 | FLAGGED in the source note; the retelling follows West's feminine pronouns and says the point is unsettled |
| C-345 | 15 | Fifty-five species of grain and twelve species of medicinal plants grew from where the ox's marrow came out | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | SBE V, pp. 31, 45 | Manuscript K20 gives fifteen medicinal species at XIV.1; the majority reading of twelve is used and the variant recorded |
| C-346 | 15 | Peas came from the horns, the leek from the nose, the grapevine from the blood, rue-like herbs from the lungs and thyme from the heart for keeping away stench | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 46 | |
| C-347 | 15 | The text explains that wine abounds with blood because the vine came from the ox's blood | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 46 | |
| C-348 | 15 | The ox's seed was purified at the moon station and produced two oxen and then two hundred and eighty-two species of each kind | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | SBE V, pp. 32, 46 | K20 has 272; the majority reading of 282 is used and the variant recorded |
| C-349 | 15 | The animals went a thousand days and nights without eating, then drank water and afterwards ate herbage | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 46 | |
| C-350 | 15 | Eight metallic minerals arose from Gayōmard's members — gold, silver, iron, brass, tin, lead, quicksilver and adamant — and gold is produced from the life and seed | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 183 | |
| C-351 | 15 | Spandarmad received the gold of the dead Gayōmard and it was forty years in the earth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, pp. 183, 53 | |
| C-352 | 15 | After forty years Mashya and Mashyoi grew from the earth in the shape of a one-stemmed rivās plant with fifteen leaves over fifteen years, joined together with arms behind their shoulders | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 53 | |
| C-353 | 15 | Their waists were so connected that it was not clear which was male and which female | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 53 | |
| C-354 | 15 | The rivās is a rhubarb-like plant whose shoots supply an acid juice used by the Persians for preserves and drinks | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | SBE V, p. 53 n.3 | |
| C-355 | 15 | The text asks whether soul or body is created first and answers that the soul is created before and the body after, because the body is created only for activity | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, pp. 53-54 | |
| C-356 | 15 | They changed from the shape of a plant into the shape of man and the breath went spiritually into them as the soul | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 54 | |
| C-357 | 15 | Ohrmazd charged them: you are man, you are the ancestry of the world, think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds, and worship no demons | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 54 | |
| C-358 | 15 | Their first deed was to wash themselves and their first words were that Ohrmazd created the water, earth, plants, animals, stars, moon and sun | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 54 | West notes the Pahlavi phrase for the first deed is ambiguous and may mean that they feasted or made water; the retelling follows his primary rendering |
| C-359 | 15 | Antagonism corrupted their minds and they exclaimed that the evil spirit created the water, earth, plants and animals; through that false speech they became wicked and their souls are in hell until the future existence | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, pp. 54-55 | |
| C-360 | 15 | They went thirty days without food, clothed in herbage, then found a white-haired goat and drank its milk with their mouths | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 55 | |
| C-361 | 15 | Mashya's second false speech about his delight enhanced the demons' power, and the taste of food was taken away so that one part in a hundred remained | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | SBE V, p. 55 | |
| C-362 | 15 | The Bundahishn is written as systematic reference knowledge with numbered answers, in the register of a priesthood recording what it still held | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — offered as a reading of the book's form |
| C-363 | 15 | In a strict dualism the worst available act is misattribution, because it credits the enemy with a creation he cannot make | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-364 | 15 | Iran alone in this book presents world-from-a-body as loss rather than as liturgy, inventory or completion, and alone lets the victim speak | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-365 | 16 | Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl dwelt from the beginning in the thirteenth heaven and bore four gods: Camaxtli, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, the last born without flesh, a skeleton | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 91-92 | Primary in the sense of a sixteenth-century document reporting pre-conquest tradition, reached through Alexander |
| C-366 | 16 | The four gods lived in idleness six hundred years, during which time was not reckoned because Huitzilopochtli was in his bones | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 92 | |
| C-367 | 16 | They created first the fire, the hearth of the universe, and afterward a half-sun | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 92 | |
| C-368 | 16 | They formed Oxomoco and Cipactonal, commanding him to till and her to spin and weave, and giving her powers of divination and grains of maize for curing | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 92 | |
| C-369 | 16 | They divided time into days and inaugurated a year of eighteen twenty-day periods, three hundred and sixty days | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 92 | |
| C-370 | 16 | They created Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl as Lord and Lady of hell, the heavens below the thirteenth, the sea, and in the sea the monster Cipactli from which they shaped the earth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 92-93 | |
| C-371 | 16 | Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue were created with dominion over the Quarters | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-372 | 16 | The son of the first pair married a woman formed from a hair of the goddess Xochiquetzal | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-373 | 16 | A second half-sun was resolved on and Tezcatlipoca became the sun-bearer; what crosses the daily heavens is not the sun itself but only its brightness, the true sun being invisible | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-374 | 16 | The first Sun's people were giants who uprooted trees by brute force and ate acorns, and it lasted thirteen times fifty-two years | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-375 | 16 | Time began to be counted from the first Sun | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-376 | 16 | Quetzalcoatl struck down Tezcatlipoca and became Sun; Tezcatlipoca became a jaguar identified with Ursa Major, wheeling into the waters, and devoured the giants | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-377 | 16 | After another six hundred and seventy-six years Quetzalcoatl was treated by his brothers as he had treated Tezcatlipoca; a great wind carried away most people or turned them into monkeys | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-378 | 16 | Tlaloc was Sun for seven times fifty-two years until Quetzalcoatl rained fire from heaven | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-379 | 16 | Chalchiuhtlicue was made Sun in her husband's place for six times fifty-two years, and in those days maize began to be used | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-380 | 16 | In the year 2,628 from the birth of the gods it rained so heavily that the heavens fell and the people were transformed into fish | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-381 | 16 | Four men were created, and with their aid Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl upreared the heavens again and became lords of the heavens and stars | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-382 | 16 | After the restoration Tezcatlipoca discovered the making of fire from sticks and from the heart of flint | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-383 | 16 | Piltzintecuhtli and his wife did not perish in the flood because they were divine, and the gods created other people as before | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-384 | 16 | Quetzalcoatl cast his own son by Chalchiuhtlicue into a great fire and he issued as the Sun; Tlaloc hurled his son into the cinders and thence rose the Moon, ever following after the Sun | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-385 | 16 | The gods said this Sun should eat hearts and drink blood, and established wars so that there might be sacrifices of captives to nourish the orbs of light | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-386 | 16 | Alexander gives five incompatible orderings of the Suns and states that no single account preserves the whole | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 85, 91-94 | |
| C-387 | 16 | Most authorities take four past Suns and a fifth present one to be the orthodox Mexican form | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 94 | |
| C-388 | 16 | Mexica painted books were destroyed twice, by Itzcoatl in the fifteenth century and systematically by the Spanish after 1521 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-389 | 16 | The Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas is an anonymous Spanish text of about 1543 thought to derive from friars questioning Nahua informants and reading painted books with them | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | FLAGGED — the date and the manner of compilation are the usual account but the document is anonymous |
| C-390 | 16 | Ixtlilxochitl was a Christianised nobleman of Texcoco descended from its royal line; Sahagún was a Franciscan whose compilation was suppressed by his own church | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-391 | 16 | Mexica human sacrifice is independently attested archaeologically, while Spanish accounts had an interest in emphasising it and some of their figures are not credible | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | The book prints what the source says, notes the attestation, and does not adopt the conquerors' scale |
| C-392 | 16 | Fifty-two years is the Mexica calendar round, the interval at which the 260-day and 365-day counts realign, marked by extinguishing and relighting fires; every Sun's length in this account is a multiple of it | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 93 | |
| C-393 | 16 | This is the only cosmogony in the book in which creation is iterated and the failed drafts are recorded with their dates | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-394 | 16 | The Suns end by fratricide rather than by exhaustion, making the history of the universe a sequence of coups | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-395 | 16 | This is the only cosmogony in the book that ends by establishing a permanent obligation on the living | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-396 | 17 | Heaven and Earth were not yet separated and the In and Yō not yet divided, forming a chaotic mass like an egg of obscurely defined limits containing germs | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I, opening | |
| C-397 | 17 | The purer and clearer part was thinly drawn out and formed Heaven while the heavier and grosser element settled and became Earth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-398 | 17 | The finer element united easily but the consolidation of the heavy and gross element was accomplished with difficulty, so heaven was formed first | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-399 | 17 | The soil of which lands were composed floated about like a fish sporting on the surface of the water | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-400 | 17 | A thing in form like a reed-shoot was produced between Heaven and Earth and became the god Kuni-toko-tachi | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-401 | 17 | Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane judged the opening sentences a Chinese rationalistic essay awkwardly prefixed to genuine Japanese tradition, and Hirata named two Chinese works as sources | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Book I n.1 | |
| C-402 | 17 | Motoori pointed out that the connecting word 'hence' has no meaning where it stands and was inserted to disguise the join | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Book I n.3 | |
| C-403 | 17 | The Nihongi prints alternative accounts of the beginning in its main text, each introduced 'In one writing it is said' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-404 | 17 | The variants include a thing in the Void whose shape may not be described; a young land floating like oil with a reed-shoot; Ame-no-minaka-nushi and the two Musubi in the Plain of High Heaven; a cloud over the sea with no place of attachment for its root; and floating oil in the Void | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-405 | 17 | Aston judges the variant quotations a somewhat later addition indicating a large body of written literature on the subject | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Book I n.2 | |
| C-406 | 17 | Aston appends the Kiujiki genealogy remarking that it will further exemplify the confusion of these traditions | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-407 | 17 | The paired generations include Uhiji-ni and Suhiji-ni, Oho-to-nochi and Oho-to-mahe, and Omo-taru and Kashiko-ne, with Izanagi and Izanami the seventh generation | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-408 | 17 | Aston glosses Uhiji-ni and Suhiji-ni as mud-earth and sand-earth, Omo-taru as face-pleasing and Kashiko as awful, and Izanagi and Izanami as male-who-invites and female-who-invites | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | Book I | FLAGGED — Aston calls several of these doubtful or obscure and suspects the Izanagi/Izanami reading may be folk etymology |
| C-409 | 17 | They thrust down the jewel-spear of Heaven and groping about with it found the ocean | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-410 | 17 | The brine dripping from the point of the spear coagulated and became the island Onogoro | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-411 | 17 | They descended, wished to become husband and wife and to produce countries, and made Onogoro the pillar of the centre of the land | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-412 | 17 | The male deity went round the pillar by the left and the female by the right, and on meeting the female spoke first: 'How delightful! I have met with a lovely youth' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-413 | 17 | The male deity was displeased, said that as a man he should by right have spoken first, called it unlucky, and required them to go round again | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-414 | 17 | They exchanged statements about the source-place of femininity and masculinity in their bodies and were united as husband and wife | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-415 | 17 | The island of Ahaji was reckoned as the placenta and their minds took no pleasure in it, whence its name | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-416 | 17 | Aston notes Ahaji may be read as 'the island which will not meet' or as 'my shame' | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-417 | 17 | They then produced Oho-yamato, Iyo-no-futana, Tsukushi, Oki and Sado | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Book I | |
| C-418 | 17 | The Nihon Shoki was completed in 720 by imperial order, is the second-oldest surviving Japanese book after the Kojiki of 712, and is written in classical Chinese in the form of a Chinese dynastic chronicle | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-419 | 17 | Book I runs from the separation of heaven and earth through the generations of gods to Amaterasu and thence to the imperial line | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Books I-II | |
| C-420 | 17 | Motoori spent more than thirty years on a commentary on the Kojiki, and the Kokugaku movement preferred the Kojiki partly because it is less Chinese | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-421 | 17 | In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the imperial descent set out in these chapters was made the basis of a state ideology taught as history in Japanese schools | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-422 | 17 | This is the only cosmogony in the book that separates its elements by density, with no maker and no violence | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-423 | 17 | The Nihongi is the only source in this book that prints its variant beginnings unreconciled in the main text rather than in notes or appendices | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-424 | 17 | Japan and Iran independently make the first failure a failure of speech order with a permanent diminishing consequence | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT; the comparison is the book's, and no historical contact is claimed |
| C-425 | 18 | The Birds was produced at Athens in 414 BCE and its plot concerns two Athenians founding a city in the air to intercept sacrifices and starve the gods | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | the play, passim | |
| C-426 | 18 | The chorus addresses the audience as weak mortals, creatures of clay, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 685-687 | |
| C-427 | 18 | They promise to teach the nature of the birds and the origin of the gods, the rivers, Erebos and Chaos, and say even Prodicus will envy the audience its knowledge | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 688-692 | |
| C-428 | 18 | At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night, dark Erebos and deep Tartarus, and Earth, the air and heaven had no existence | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 693-694 | |
| C-429 | 18 | Black-winged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebos | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 695-696 | |
| C-430 | 18 | After the revolution of long ages Eros sprang from it with glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 696-697 | |
| C-431 | 18 | Eros mated in deep Tartarus with dark Chaos, also winged, and hatched the race of birds, the first to see the light | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 698-699 | |
| C-432 | 18 | The Immortals did not exist until Eros had brought together all the ingredients of the world, from whose marriage Heaven, Ocean, Earth and the blessed gods arose | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 700-702 | |
| C-433 | 18 | The birds conclude that their origin is much older than that of the dwellers in Olympus and that they are the offspring of Eros | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | l. 703 | |
| C-434 | 18 | They cite their wings and their assistance to lovers, and the winning over of reluctant youths by the gift of a quail, waterfowl, goose or cock | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 704-707 | |
| C-435 | 18 | They claim to mark the seasons: the crane's migration signalling sowing, the hanging up of the tiller and Orestes' tunic; the kite signalling spring and shearing; the swallow signalling the sale of winter clothing | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 708-715 | |
| C-436 | 18 | They offer themselves as Ammon, Delphi and Dodona — a replacement for the paid oracles | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 716-722 | |
| C-437 | 18 | Hesiod's Theogony places Earth second among the primordials while this account denies Earth any existence at the beginning | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | — | |
| C-438 | 18 | Aristophanes is the earliest surviving witness to a Greek cosmic egg, centuries earlier than Damascius and the other sources for Orphic theogony | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-439 | 18 | How closely the parabasis tracks an actual Orphic poem is disputed | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | FLAGGED — the source note states the dispute and does not settle it |
| C-440 | 18 | Night as the layer of the egg, the egg's germlessness, and a winged golden Eros emerging recur in later Orphic material | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | |
| C-441 | 18 | Orphism was initiatory, possessed books attributed to Orpheus, and concerned the soul and its fate after death | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-442 | 18 | Plato refers to people going door to door with books of Orpheus, and Orphic gold tablets have been found in graves from southern Italy to Thessaly | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-443 | 18 | The play was produced during the Peloponnesian War, in the year after the Sicilian expedition sailed, following the mutilation of the herms and the recall and defection of Alcibiades, and it took second prize | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-444 | 18 | A germless egg is a wind-egg, unfertilised, which by definition cannot hatch | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | l. 695 | |
| C-445 | 18 | A parody must resemble its target closely enough to be recognised, so the comedy is evidence that the doctrine was current in Athens in 414 BCE | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT and in the source note; offered as reasoning, not as proof of the doctrine's content |
| C-446 | 18 | This is the only source in the book whose author was not attempting to preserve anything | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-447 | 18 | Greek tradition held at least two incompatible cosmogonies, one of which was well enough known in Athens to be worth parodying | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-448 | 18 | This is the only cosmogony in the book that begins with a specified impossibility rather than with something holding potential | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-449 | 19 | Hiraṇyagarbha rose in the beginning, born only lord of all created beings, and fixed and holds up earth and heaven | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 1 | |
| C-450 | 19 | Nine of the hymn's ten verses end with the refrain 'What god shall we adore with our oblation?' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verses 1-9 | |
| C-451 | 19 | Griffith glosses hiraṇyagarbha as literally 'the gold-germ', source of golden light, and quotes Wallis calling it the nearest approach in the Ṛgveda to the later conception of Brahmā | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 1 | |
| C-452 | 19 | He gives vital breath, power and vigour, and all the gods acknowledge his commandments | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 2 | |
| C-453 | 19 | His shade is death and his lustre makes immortal | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 2 | |
| C-454 | 19 | He is sole ruler of the moving world that breathes and slumbers, and lord of men and cattle — literally of biped and quadruped | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 3 | |
| C-455 | 19 | The snow-covered mountains are his, men call sea and Rasā his possession, and 'his arms are these, his are these heavenly regions' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 4 | |
| C-456 | 19 | Griffith glosses 'sea' here as air and Rasā as the mythical river of the firmament | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 4 | |
| C-457 | 19 | By him the heavens are strong and earth steadfast, light's realm and the sky-vault supported, and the regions in mid-air measured | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 5 | |
| C-458 | 19 | Two embattled armies, supported by his help, look to him trembling in spirit while the risen sun shines over them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 6 | |
| C-459 | 19 | When the mighty waters came containing the universal germ and producing Agni, the gods' one spirit sprang into being | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 7 | Griffith notes that 'one' in the text gives two superfluous syllables and is suspicious |
| C-460 | 19 | He surveyed the floods containing productive force and generating Worship, and is the god of gods with none beside him | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 8 | |
| C-461 | 19 | The ninth verse asks that he never harm us, naming him earth's begetter, the heavens' creator and the bringer-forth of the great and lucid waters | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 9 | |
| C-462 | 19 | The tenth verse names Prajāpati, says none but he comprehends all created things, and asks for the heart's desire and store of riches | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | verse 10 | |
| C-463 | 19 | Verse 10 is almost certainly a later addition, differing in voice and supplying the name and a request for wealth | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | FLAGGED IN THE SOURCE NOTE as scholarship rather than something the source says |
| C-464 | 19 | Ka, 'who', was applied as a name to Prajāpati and other gods from what Griffith calls a forced interpretation of the interrogative pronoun in the refrain | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | headnote to hymn CXXI | |
| C-465 | 19 | Some translators render the refrain not as a question but as 'Worship we Ka the god with our oblation' | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 1 | |
| C-466 | 19 | Vedic offerings were addressed to named gods in prescribed formulas, and most Ṛgvedic hymns declare their addressee | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-467 | 19 | X.121, X.129 and X.90 all belong to the tenth and youngest book of the Ṛgveda | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-468 | 19 | The single unnamed power of this hymn anticipates the Upaniṣadic conception of Brahman | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | note to verse 1 | |
| C-469 | 19 | Garbha means womb, embryo or germ rather than egg; the literal golden egg belongs to later Brāhmaṇa literature and is not in this hymn | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | Stated in the source note because the story sits in the part called From an Egg |
| C-470 | 19 | A hymn that refused nine times to name its god was later read so that the refusal itself became the god's name | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT; the underlying fact is Griffith's headnote |
| C-471 | 19 | The Nāsadīya doubts that anyone knows, while X.121 is certain of the being and withholds only the name | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-472 | 19 | This is the only account in the book in which death is neither punishment, damage nor mistake but the shadow cast by the same thing that confers immortality | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-473 | 20 | The chant opens 'He existed. Taaroa was his name' and states there was no earth, no sky, no sea and no man | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 | Primary in the sense of a recorded chant; no reciter is named in the source |
| C-474 | 20 | 'Taaroa calls, but nothing answers' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 | |
| C-475 | 20 | 'Existing alone, he became the universe' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 11 | |
| C-476 | 20 | The chant identifies Ta'aroa with the root and rocks, the sands, the light, the within, the germ, the support, endurance and wisdom | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 11-12 | |
| C-477 | 20 | He erected the land of Havai'i, great and sacred, as a body or shell for Ta'aroa | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-478 | 20 | The chant turns to imperatives, summoning foundations, rocks and sands and commanding 'Press, press again' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-479 | 20 | It reports in the present tense that 'They do not unite' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-480 | 20 | It commands the seven heavens to be stretched out and ignorance, darkness, immobility and the period of messengers to cease, declaring 'It is the time of the speaker' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-481 | 20 | It closes with the foundations, rocks and sands completed, the heavens enclosing and raised, and the land of Havai'i finished in the depths | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-482 | 20 | In a second version Ta'aroa's origin is not described and he embraces a rock, the imagined foundation of all things, which afterward brought forth the earth and sea | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-483 | 20 | The heralds of day, the dark and light blue sky, solicited a soul for the inanimate universe and Ta'aroa replied 'It is done' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 12 | |
| C-484 | 20 | Ra'i-tubu the Sky-producer looked into the heavens, at the unformed mass and into the abyss, and each received the power to bring forth its own contents | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 12-13 | |
| C-485 | 20 | A Society Islands fragment states that in the beginning Ta'aroa existed in an egg, in darkness, from which he later burst forth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 20 | |
| C-486 | 20 | Dixon records the equivalence of Ta'aroa, Tanaoa, Tangaroa, Tangaloa and Kanaloa across Polynesia | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 11 | |
| C-487 | 20 | In the Society Islands and the Marquesas this deity is the origin of the universe and all the gods, while in New Zealand Tangaroa is one god among several with the sea as his sphere | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 10-11 | |
| C-488 | 20 | Havai'i in the chant is the old name of Ra'iātea, not the Hawaiian Islands; the name recurs across Polynesia as Hawaiki, Havaiki and Savai'i | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | FLAGGED IN THE SOURCE NOTE because the source prints 'Hawaii' without comment and the spelling invites confusion |
| C-489 | 20 | Taputapuātea on Ra'iātea was the ceremonial centre of the Society group and of a wider Polynesian network | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-490 | 20 | The London Missionary Society landed in Tahiti in 1797 and within a generation the traditional religion had been dismantled under a Christianised monarchy | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-491 | 20 | Tahitian cosmological material was recorded chiefly during and after that dismantling, largely by the people who helped bring it about | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-492 | 20 | Dixon names no reciter and no recorder for these chants and cites by footnote number to works not inspected for this edition | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 11-13 | |
| C-493 | 20 | The world here is not what the god came out of but what he is inside; the shell is worn rather than discarded | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-494 | 20 | Ta'aroa is a substance where Hiraṇyagarbha is a sovereign | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-495 | 20 | This is the only text in the book that claims to be performing the creation at the moment of recitation, reporting both its failure and its completion | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-496 | 21 | Ptah was the master craftsman of the gods and his temple was at Memphis | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 43 | |
| C-497 | 21 | The Memphite ennead consisted of a primeval Ptah and eight emanations or manifestations of himself, and the use of an ennead betrays Heliopolitan influence | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 43-44 | |
| C-498 | 21 | One member of the Memphite ennead is named Ptah the Great, with the appended explanation that he is the heart and tongue of the ennead | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 44 | |
| C-499 | 21 | That heart and tongue are identified with Atum, who accomplishes all things through them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 44 | |
| C-500 | 21 | The Egyptians used 'heart' as the seat of the mind and possessed no word for mind | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 44 | |
| C-501 | 21 | From Ptah proceeded the power of mind and tongue, the controlling power in all gods, men, animals and reptiles | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 44 | Breasted flags the verb rendered 'thinking' as questionable |
| C-502 | 21 | When the eyes see, the ears hear and the nose breathes they transmit to the heart; the heart brings forth every issue and the tongue repeats the thought of the heart | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 44-45 | |
| C-503 | 21 | He fashioned all gods, even Atum and his ennead, and every divine word came into existence by the thought of the heart and the commandment of the tongue | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 45 | Breasted notes heart and tongue share a gender in Egyptian so the pronoun may refer to either |
| C-504 | 21 | He made the kas and created the qualities, all food and offerings by this word, that which is loved and that which is hated, and gave life to the peaceful and death to the guilty | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 45 | |
| C-505 | 21 | The qualities are might, radiance, prosperity, victory, wealth, plenty, augustness, readiness, making, intelligence, adornment, stability, obedience and nourishment | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 45 n.2 | |
| C-506 | 21 | He made every work and handicraft the hands make, the going of the feet and the movement of every limb, through the thought of the heart that came forth from the tongue | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 45 | |
| C-507 | 21 | Atum stated that Ptah-Tatenen is the fashioner of the gods from whom all things went forth, Thoth perceived his strength greater than all gods, and then Ptah was satisfied | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 45 | |
| C-508 | 21 | He made the cities, settled the nomes, installed the gods in their holy places and made likenesses of their bodies, and the gods then entered into bodies of every wood and every stone and every metal | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 46 | |
| C-509 | 21 | He assembled the gods and their kas and told them to take possession of the storehouse of Ptah-Tatenen whence the Life of the Two Lands is furnished | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 46 | |
| C-510 | 21 | The document survives on British Museum Stela No. 797, acquired in 1805, which had previously been used as a nether millstone that abraded the inscription | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 46 n.1 | |
| C-511 | 21 | Sharpe published an early copy and, because the signs face the end of the line, numbered the vertical lines backwards; Bryant and Read did the same in 1901; Breasted established the correct direction and published a facsimile | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 46 n.1 | |
| C-512 | 21 | Breasted warns that the signs are very faint, that reading is excessively difficult in worn places, and that better light than a museum gallery would recover more | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 46 n.1 | |
| C-513 | 21 | Breasted dated the original papyrus behind the stone to at least the Eighteenth Dynasty and treated the theology as belonging to the Pyramid Age | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 43, 46 n.1 | Reported as his view and explicitly not adopted |
| C-514 | 21 | The stone was inscribed under Shabaka around 700 BCE, and whether the text it copies is genuinely Old Kingdom or an archaising composition of that period has been debated, with opinion moving toward the later date since 1912 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-515 | 21 | This is the oldest surviving statement that the world was made by thought and speech | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED — qualified in the source note: the claim is about the idea as we have it, and the date of the underlying composition is disputed |
| C-516 | 21 | Breasted compares the document to Genesis 'And God said' and asks whether it is the primeval germ of the Alexandrian Logos doctrine | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 47 | Reported as his question and not answered by this book |
| C-517 | 21 | Breasted states that the world Ptah brought forth was merely the Egyptian Nile valley and that the world-idea was not yet born | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 47 | |
| C-518 | 21 | The Memphite document absorbs the rival Heliopolitan creator rather than refuting him, which no other tradition in the book attempts | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-519 | 21 | Babylon's word assigns function to what exists while the Memphite word brings into existence | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-520 | 21 | This is the only cosmogony in the book explained by analogy with human cognition rather than with a craft, a birth or a fight | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-521 | 22 | The chapter opens by denying the existence of man, animal, bird, fish, wood, stone, bog, ravine, vegetation and marsh, leaving only the sky | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 160 | Three translation steps from the K'iche'; flagged in the source note |
| C-522 | 22 | Nothing was formed into a body, nothing joined to another thing, naught held itself poised, there was not a rustle nor a sound, and naught stood upright | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 160 | |
| C-523 | 22 | Alone were the Creator and Maker, Tepeu the Lord and Gucumatz the Plumed Serpent, upon the waters like a growing light | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | pp. 160-161 | |
| C-524 | 22 | They are enveloped in green and azure, whence the name Gucumatz | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-525 | 22 | The Heart of the Sky is named as God names himself | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-526 | 22 | The word came to Tepeu and Gucumatz in the shadows and the night and spoke with them, and they consulted and joined their words and counsels | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-527 | 22 | Light came while they consulted together | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-528 | 22 | Hurakan's three signs are the Lightning, the Streak of Lightning and the Thunderbolt, and these three are the Heart of the Sky | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-529 | 22 | They held counsel on how seed should be formed, how light should be produced, and how the sustainer and nourisher of all | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-530 | 22 | They stated that they would receive neither glory nor honour from what they had created until human beings existed, endowed with sentience | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-531 | 22 | 'Earth,' they said, and immediately it was formed | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 161 | |
| C-532 | 22 | The formation was like a fog or a cloud, and the mountains appeared upon the waters like great lobsters, instantly grown with cypress and pine | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | pp. 161-162 | FLAGGED — the lobster image is Brasseur's rendering carried into English; later translators from the K'iche' differ |
| C-533 | 22 | Gucumatz was filled with joy and welcomed the Heart of the Sky, Hurakan, the Streak of Lightning and the Thunderbolt | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 162 | |
| C-534 | 22 | The reply was that what they had created and shaped will have its end | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 162 | |
| C-535 | 22 | The course of the waters was divided, the rivulets running serpentine among the mountains | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 162 | |
| C-536 | 22 | Those who did it are called the Heart of the Sky and the Heart of the Earth, who first made fruitful the heaven and the earth while suspended in the midst of the waters | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 162 | |
| C-537 | 22 | The Popol Vuh was written in K'iche' in the Roman alphabet in the mid-sixteenth century by authors who do not name themselves | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-538 | 22 | Francisco Ximénez, a Dominican, copied the K'iche' and set a Spanish translation beside it around 1701 at Chichicastenango | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-539 | 22 | Brasseur de Bourbourg published the K'iche' text with a French translation in 1861 as the first volume of a collection of documents in indigenous languages | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | title page | |
| C-540 | 22 | Alexander's English is translated from Brasseur's French, verified by comparing the Hurakan passage in both texts | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | Alexander p. 161; Brasseur at the Hurakan passage | Verification performed for this edition and described in the source note |
| C-541 | 22 | Brasseur also wrote theories connecting Mesoamerica to Atlantis | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | Reported; his interpretations are not used |
| C-542 | 22 | The K'iche' are the largest Maya group in Guatemala today, numbering over a million, and Maya communities were the principal victims of the Guatemalan civil war | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-543 | 22 | This creation is the only unmixed moment of joy in the collection, and the announcement of the world's end arrives in the same breath | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-544 | 22 | Memphis makes the word an organ the god owns; here the word is a third party that arrives and confers | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-545 | 22 | Mexica and K'iche' both state the god-human relationship as transactional but in different currencies, blood and praise | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-546 | 23 | Everything was destroyed in the flood called unu pachacuti | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 32 | |
| C-547 | 23 | Markham glosses unu pachacuti as the world overturned by water and calls it probably a word coined by the priests after putting leading questions about a universal deluge | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 32 n.1 | FLAGGED — the translator warning that a central term may be an artefact of the interrogation |
| C-548 | 23 | Viracocha preserved three men, one named Taguapaca, to help him create new people in the second age | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 32 | |
| C-549 | 23 | He determined to people the land a second time and, to make it more perfect, decided to create luminaries to give it light | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 32 | |
| C-550 | 23 | He went to the island of Titicaca, meaning the rock of lead, in a great lake in the Collao | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | pp. 32-33 | |
| C-551 | 23 | He ordered the sun, moon and stars to come forth and be set in the heavens, and it was so | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 33 | |
| C-552 | 23 | The moon was created brighter than the sun, which made the sun jealous as they rose, so the sun threw a handful of ashes over the moon's face, giving it its shaded colour | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 33 | |
| C-553 | 23 | Taguapaca disobeyed; Viracocha had him tied hand and foot and launched on a balsa, and he was carried down the drain of the lake blaspheming and threatening vengeance | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 33 | |
| C-554 | 23 | Viracocha made a sacred idol on the island as a place of worship and a sign of what he had created there | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 33 | |
| C-555 | 23 | At Tiahuanaco he sculptured and designed on a great piece of stone all the nations he intended to create | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 34 | |
| C-556 | 23 | He ordered his two servants to charge their memories with the names of all the tribes depicted and of the valleys and provinces where they were to come forth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 34 | |
| C-557 | 23 | One servant went by the coastal range above the South Sea, the other by the heights overlooking the Andes, and Viracocha took the road between them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 34 | |
| C-558 | 23 | They called aloud: 'Oh you tribes and nations, hear and obey the order of Ticci Viracocha Pachayachachi, which commands you to go forth, and multiply and settle the land' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 34 | |
| C-559 | 23 | At the sound of his voice every place obeyed and people came forth from lakes, fountains, valleys, caves, trees, rocks and hills, spreading over the land to form the nations now in Peru | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 34 | |
| C-560 | 23 | A variant holds that the creation was made at Titicaca, where shapes of large strong men seemed out of proportion and were remade at the creator's own stature, the average height of men, and given life | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 34 | |
| C-561 | 23 | Sarmiento states the work is done by order of Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 28 | |
| C-562 | 23 | Sarmiento states the history rests on attested proofs from the general testimony of the whole kingdom, old and young, Incas and tributary Indians | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 28 | |
| C-563 | 23 | On completion the history was read aloud in Quechua to an assembly of Inca elders and keepers of the knotted-cord records at Cuzco for certification | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-564 | 23 | Toledo arrived as viceroy in 1569 and commissioned histories to establish that the Incas were recent usurpers, in answer to arguments that Spanish rule was illegitimate | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-565 | 23 | In 1572, the year the history was written, Toledo had the last Inca ruler Túpac Amaru beheaded at Cuzco | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-566 | 23 | Markham collects the variant names of Taguapaca from Cieza de León and Yamqui Pachacuti and concludes that nothing more than the names can be recovered | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 33 n.1 | |
| C-567 | 23 | Sarmiento was a navigator and cosmographer who later commanded an expedition to fortify the Strait of Magellan and was captured by Sir Walter Raleigh; the manuscript was rediscovered at Göttingen and published by Markham in 1907 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-568 | 23 | Here the word summons rather than makes or confers existence, and the people are already located in the ground | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-569 | 23 | A history commissioned to prove the peoples of Peru had been dispossessed by usurpers preserves a cosmogony asserting that each nation belongs exactly where it stands | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT as an irony, not as a claim about Sarmiento's intent |
| C-570 | 23 | This is the only account in the book in which the moon's inferiority results from an act of spite rather than from design or assignment | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-571 | 24 | Olorun means Owner of the Sky and is the Yoruba sky-god | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III (1) | |
| C-572 | 24 | Olorun made Obatala, handed over to him the management of the firmament and the world, and himself retired to rest | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (2) | Attributed by Ellis to 'the priests'; no informant named |
| C-573 | 24 | Olorun has no priests, symbols, images or temples, and survives chiefly in greetings and exclamations | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III (1) | |
| C-574 | 24 | Obatala's name means Lord of the White Cloth, and his temples, images, paraphernalia and followers' cloths are white | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III (2) | Ellis records an alternative derivation, Lord of Visions, and prefers the first |
| C-575 | 24 | Odudua's name means the Black One, she is the chief goddess, and she is always represented as a woman sitting down nursing a child | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-576 | 24 | Odudua is the wife of Obatala but was coeval with Olorun and not made by him, as her husband was | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-577 | 24 | Obatala and Odudua represent Heaven and Earth | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-578 | 24 | The priests say the pair resemble two large cut calabashes which, once shut, can never be opened; this is modelled in the temples by two whitened saucer-shaped calabashes, one covering the other, the upper the firmament and the lower the earth, meeting at the horizon | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-579 | 24 | In the beginning of the world Obatala and Odudua were shut up in darkness in a large closed calabash, he in the upper part and she in the lower, and the myth does not state how they came to be there | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-580 | 24 | They remained there many days, cramped, hungry and uncomfortable | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-581 | 24 | Odudua complained and blamed her husband for the confinement, a violent quarrel followed, and in a frenzy of rage Obatala tore out her eyes because she would not bridle her tongue | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-582 | 24 | She cursed him, saying 'Naught shalt thou eat but snails', which is why snails are offered to Obatala | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-583 | 24 | Ellis observes that the myth does not restore her sight, so she must be supposed to have remained sightless, yet no native regards her as blind | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-584 | 24 | One myth, contradicted by another and disputed by some, has Obatala make the first man and woman out of clay, whence the titles Owner of the Best Clay and the Orisha Who Kneads Clay | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (2) | |
| C-585 | 24 | All are agreed that Obatala forms the child in the mother's womb and that women who wish to become mothers pray to him | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (2) | |
| C-586 | 24 | Some priests hold that Obatala and Odudua are one androgynous divinity, symbolised by a figure with one arm and leg and a tail ending in a sphere, but Ellis records this as a minority view | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III (3) | |
| C-587 | 24 | Ellis's migration tradition has a palm-nut and earth fall from a black cloth into a country of water, and a fowl scratch the earth about so that wherever it falls the water dries up, founding Ife | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | the migration chapter | Described in the source note, not told in the story; Ellis reads it as a memory of a real southward migration |
| C-588 | 24 | Ellis names no informant, place or date for any of these accounts, attributing only to 'the priests' or 'some natives' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ch. III | |
| C-589 | 24 | Ellis was a colonel of the 1st West India Regiment and published three successive volumes on the Tshi-, Ewe- and Yoruba-speaking peoples | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | title page | |
| C-590 | 24 | Lagos was annexed in 1861, British authority was extended across Yorubaland through the 1880s and 1890s, and the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was formed in 1900 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-591 | 24 | Yoruba religion is practised today in Nigeria and Benin and, through the Atlantic slave trade, in Cuban Lucumí and Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and diaspora communities across the Americas and Europe | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-592 | 24 | This is the only cosmogony in the book in which heaven and earth are never separated and the world is the inside of a sealed container | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-593 | 24 | Japan, the Ainu and the Yoruba independently trace a defect in the world to a woman speaking at the wrong moment | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT and stated as a fact about who told these stories, not about cosmology; no historical contact is claimed |
| C-594 | 24 | Olorun's absence is a delegation rather than a failure to answer, unlike Ukko's silence in the Finnish poem | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-595 | 25 | Bumba is described as a gigantic white being in human form who existed alone in the beginning in a universe of nothing but water | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | myths of origins chapter | Reported at two removes — Werner from Torday — with no narrator named |
| C-596 | 25 | Bumba felt severe internal pains and as a consequence vomited up the sun, moon and stars, giving light to the world | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | same | |
| C-597 | 25 | The sun's rays dried the water so that sandbanks appeared above the surface, but there was no life anywhere | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | same | |
| C-598 | 25 | He produced in the same manner the leopard, crested eagle, crocodile, a small fish, the tortoise, the lightning as a beast like a black leopard, the white heron, a beetle and the goat | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | same | FLAGGED — Werner says eight creatures and lists nine; the discrepancy is left as it stands and disclosed in the source note |
| C-599 | 25 | He then produced men | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | same | |
| C-600 | 25 | The animals undertook to people the world: the goat produced all horned beasts, the beetle all insects, the crocodile all serpents and the iguana, and the white heron all birds except the kite | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | same | |
| C-601 | 25 | Bumba's first son produced white ants and died in the effort; the second produced a plant from which all vegetable life sprang; the third tried to bring forth new creatures and produced only the kite | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | same | |
| C-602 | 25 | Werner records that why the kite should be set apart from all other birds is not explained | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | same | |
| C-603 | 25 | Werner states she has not met with a parallel to this legend elsewhere in Africa | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | same | |
| C-604 | 25 | Werner notes the narrative's resemblance to Genesis I and defends its independence on the grounds that the Bushongo were untouched by missionary influence and Torday unusually independent of interpreters | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | same | FLAGGED — the claim of no missionary influence in the Kasai at that date is questioned in the source note and not adopted |
| C-605 | 25 | Bumba is First Ancestor as well as Creator, and the reigning chiefs preserve every link in their genealogy of descent from him | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | same | |
| C-606 | 25 | Werner reports that the Bushongo say they came from the far north, probably the region of Lake Chad, within historical times, bringing an archaic non-Bantu language nearly out of use | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | same | |
| C-607 | 25 | Emil Torday, a Hungarian-born ethnographer, collected in the Kasai for the British Museum between 1907 and 1909 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-608 | 25 | The Congo Free State was the personal possession of Leopold II from 1885 to 1908, run for rubber and ivory through quotas enforced by hostage-taking, mutilation and killing, and was annexed by the Belgian state in 1908 after international campaigning | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-609 | 25 | A Kuba rising against the Free State was put down in 1904, three years before Torday arrived | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | — | |
| C-610 | 25 | The Kuba kingdom was known in Europe for its sculpture, textiles and royal portrait figures, and Torday's collecting served a museum market as well as scholarship | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-611 | 25 | Alice Werner was a scholar of Bantu languages who later taught at the School of Oriental Studies in London | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-612 | 25 | This is the only creation in the book produced by illness rather than by intention, labour, speech or violence | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-613 | 25 | This is the only account in the book in which the created finish the creation, with uneven competence and one fatality | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-614 | 25 | The unexplained kite is an example of a collector printing a gap rather than filling it | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-615 | 26 | Hesiod introduces the passage as another tale of how gods and mortal men sprang from one source | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 106-108 | |
| C-616 | 26 | The golden race was made by the gods on Olympus in the time of Cronos and lived free from toil and grief, dying as though overcome with sleep | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 109-120 | |
| C-617 | 26 | The fruitful earth bore them fruit unforced, abundantly and without stint | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 117-118 | |
| C-618 | 26 | After death the golden race became pure spirits on the earth, kindly guardians clothed in mist who keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds and give wealth | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 121-126 | |
| C-619 | 26 | The silver race was less noble by far and unlike the golden in body and spirit | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 127-129 | |
| C-620 | 26 | A silver child was reared at his mother's side a hundred years, an utter simpleton playing childishly at home | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 130-133 | |
| C-621 | 26 | Grown, they lived only a little time in sorrow through their foolishness, could not keep from wronging one another, and would not serve or sacrifice to the immortals, so Zeus put them away | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 134-139 | |
| C-622 | 26 | They became blessed spirits of the underworld, of second order, but honour attends them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 140-142 | |
| C-623 | 26 | The brazen race sprang from ash-trees, was terrible and strong, loved the works of Ares, ate no bread and was hard of heart like adamant | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 143-147 | The ash-tree origin is stated without explanation in the poem and is left unexplained here |
| C-624 | 26 | Their armour, houses and implements were of bronze and there was no black iron | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 150-151 | |
| C-625 | 26 | They were destroyed by their own hands, passed to Hades and left no name | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 152-155 | |
| C-626 | 26 | The fourth generation was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero demi-gods, the race before our own | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 156-160 | |
| C-627 | 26 | Some were destroyed at seven-gated Thebe fighting for the flocks of Oedipus and some at Troy for Helen's sake | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 161-165 | |
| C-628 | 26 | The rest Zeus settled at the ends of the earth in the islands of the blessed, where the earth bears honey-sweet fruit three times a year, with Cronos released from his bonds ruling over them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 166-169b | |
| C-629 | 26 | Hesiod wishes he were not among the men of the fifth generation but had died before or been born afterwards | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 170-172 | |
| C-630 | 26 | The race of iron never rests from labour and sorrow by day nor from perishing by night, though some good is mingled with the evils | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 174-179 | |
| C-631 | 26 | Zeus will destroy this race when men come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | ll. 180-181 | FLAGGED — the exact sense of the line is debated, as noted in the source note |
| C-632 | 26 | Father will not agree with children, nor guest with host, nor comrade with comrade, nor brother with brother; parents will be dishonoured and unrepaid; might will be right and one man will sack another's city | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 182-189 | |
| C-633 | 26 | There will be no favour for the just or the oath-keeper, men will praise the evil-doer, strength will be right, reverence will cease, and the wicked will slander the worthy man on oath | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 190-194 | |
| C-634 | 26 | Envy, foul-mouthed and scowling, will accompany all wretched men | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 195-196 | |
| C-635 | 26 | Aidos and Nemesis, wrapped in white robes, will forsake mankind for the company of the deathless gods, leaving bitter sorrows and no help against evil | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 197-201 | |
| C-636 | 26 | Hesiod immediately follows with a fable for princes: the hawk carrying the nightingale in his talons and telling her that one far stronger than she has her | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | ll. 202-211 | |
| C-637 | 26 | The heroes interrupt a metallic decline and are usually read as Hesiod combining an inherited decline myth with a heroic age known from epic | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | Reported as the standard reading and labelled a reading |
| C-638 | 26 | Works and Days is addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses over a divided estate decided in Perses' favour by gift-taking magistrates, and combines appeal, warning, treatise on justice and farming manual | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | — | |
| C-639 | 26 | Aidos is the internal sense of shame that restrains dishonourable action and Nemesis the righteous indignation of others at wrongdoing | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-640 | 26 | Hesiod's five races replace people rather than worlds, and three of the four superseded generations still exist somewhere | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-641 | 26 | This is the only account in the book whose narrator places himself inside the events he describes | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-642 | 26 | This is the only ending in the book that offers no return, repair, scheduled victory or consolation | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-643 | 27 | Before this world was created there was a being called Viracocha, who created a dark world without sun, moon or stars | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 28 | |
| C-644 | 27 | He was named Viracocha Pachayachachi, which Markham translates as Creator of all things | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 28 | |
| C-645 | 27 | He formed a race of giants of disproportioned greatness, painted and sculptured, to see whether it would be well to make real men of that size | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 29 | |
| C-646 | 27 | He then created men in his likeness as they are now, and they lived in darkness | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 29 | |
| C-647 | 27 | He ordered them to live without quarrelling and to know and serve him, and gave them a precept to observe on pain of being confounded | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 29 | |
| C-648 | 27 | They kept the precept for some time, but it is not mentioned what it was | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 29 | The source itself records the content of the precept as unknown; nothing is supplied here |
| C-649 | 27 | Pride and covetousness arose among them and they transgressed the precept, falling under his indignation, and he confounded and cursed them | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 29 | |
| C-650 | 27 | Some were turned into stones, others into other things, some swallowed by the earth and others by the sea | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 29 | |
| C-651 | 27 | A general flood called unu pachacuti, water that overturns the land, rained sixty days and nights and drowned all created things | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | pp. 29-30 | Markham warns that unu pachacuti was probably coined by priests after leading questions about a universal deluge |
| C-652 | 27 | Vestiges of those turned into stones remained as a memorial of the event and an example to posterity, in the edifices of Pucara, sixty leagues from Cuzco | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 30 | |
| C-653 | 27 | Sarmiento notes that nations besides the Cuzcos say a few were saved from the flood to leave descendants, and that each nation has its own fable | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 30 | |
| C-654 | 27 | Markham collects competing derivations of Viracocha from Garcilasso, Cieza de León, Acosta, Montesinos, Molina, Betanzos and an anonymous Jesuit without choosing between them | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 28-29 n.1 | |
| C-655 | 27 | Markham reports uira possibly a corruption of pirua, a depository; cocha as profundity, abyss or space; ticci as base or foundation; illa as light; and gives 'the Dweller in Space' as one gloss | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 28-29 n.1 | |
| C-656 | 27 | Markham glosses pacha as time, place or the universe, camac as Ruler and yachachi as Teacher, giving Pachayachachi as Teacher of the Universe | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 29 n.1 | |
| C-657 | 27 | Sarmiento argues that America was peopled after the biblical flood by way of an Atlantic land connection and states that there is no necessity for setting aside the Scriptures | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 30 | |
| C-658 | 27 | Pucara lies on the altiplano north-west of Lake Titicaca and was the centre of a culture flourishing centuries before the Inca, with carved stone monoliths and sunken courts, abandoned long before the sixteenth century | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-659 | 27 | Tiahuanaco is likewise a monumental site far older than the Inca state and is where the second creation is placed in the following chapter | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-660 | 27 | The petrified first people function as an exhibit rather than as a trace, unlike the landscape marks left by construction accidents elsewhere in the book | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-661 | 27 | The giants are a deliberate prototype tested for scale rather than a failed creation discovered after the fact | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-662 | 27 | The lost precept is the clearest case in the book of a source recording what it does not know | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-663 | 28 | The account opens: in the year and in the day of obscurity and darkness, when there were as yet no days nor years, the world was a chaos sunk in darkness, while the earth was covered with water on which scum and slime floated | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | p. 86 | The only direct quotation available; the rest of the narrative is Alexander's summary |
| C-664 | 28 | The Deer-God and the Deer-Goddess are also known as the Puma-Snake and the Jaguar-Snake | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 86 | |
| C-665 | 28 | They magically raised a cliff above the abyss of waters | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 86 | |
| C-666 | 28 | On its summit they placed an axe, edge upward, upon which the heavens rested | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 86 | |
| C-667 | 28 | The place was called the Place-where-the-Heavens-stood and they lived there many centuries | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 86 | |
| C-668 | 28 | They reared two boys, Wind-of-the-Nine-Serpents and Wind-of-the-Nine-Caves, who could transform into eagles and serpents and pass through solid bodies | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 86 | |
| C-669 | 28 | The brothers inaugurated sacrifice and penance and the cultivation of flowers and fruits | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | pp. 86-87 | |
| C-670 | 28 | With vows and prayers they besought their ancestral gods to let the light appear, to cause the water to be separated from the earth, and to permit the dry land to be freed from its covering | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 87 | |
| C-671 | 28 | The earth was peopled, a flood destroyed this First People, and the world was restored by the Creator of all Things | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | MEDIUM | p. 87 | |
| C-672 | 28 | Alexander suggests the deer is an emblem of fecundity, that as Puma-Snake and Jaguar-Snake the pair doubtless represent the day-sky and the starry night vault, and that the two boys are demiurgic twins typifying the upper and nether worlds | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 86-87 | Reported as Alexander's interpretations and explicitly not used in the retelling |
| C-673 | 28 | Alexander notes the resemblance of the opening's negative mode to Genesis and the Babylonian cosmogony, and explains it as characteristic of an early stage of human thought struggling with abstractions | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 86 | Quoted as the evolutionary anthropology of its period and not adopted |
| C-674 | 28 | The Mixtec are a people of the Oaxaca highlands with their own language, city-states and dynasties, distinct from the Mexica | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-675 | 28 | A handful of pre-conquest Mixtec screenfold codices painted on deerskin survive, recording ruling lineages across centuries by named individuals | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-676 | 28 | Mixtec personal names combine a number and a calendar sign, which is the form of the two sons' names in this account | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-677 | 28 | Fray Gregorio García was a Dominican best known for an enquiry into the origin of the peoples of the New World, and collected origin traditions partly to test theories about it | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-678 | 28 | The Mixtec today number around half a million, in Oaxaca and in migrant communities in Mexico City, Baja California and the United States | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-679 | 28 | This is the only account in the book in which the sky rests on the edge of a blade rather than on a person, pillar, corner-props or a growing body | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-680 | 28 | This is the only cosmogony in the book whose decisive act is a prayer, performed by beings who are neither the creators nor the created | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-681 | 28 | The opening sentence dates the event to a year and a day and then denies that years or days existed | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT; the observation is about the quoted sentence |
| C-682 | 28 | Alexander suggests the Mixtec Creator-of-All-Things was the same deity the Zapotec knew as Coqui-Xee or Coqui-Cilla, Lord of the Beginning | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 87 | Reported as Alexander's suggestion |
| C-683 | 28 | Of Coqui-Xee it was said that he was the creator of all things and was himself uncreated | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 87 | |
| C-684 | 28 | Seler read Coqui-Xee as a spirit of the beginning in the sense of dawn, the east and the rising sun, and identified him with the Zapotec Quetzalcoatl on the strength of his second name Piye-Tao, the Great Wind | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 87 | |
| C-685 | 28 | Coqui-Xee is described as merely the principle or essence of the creative deity, without reference to the act of creating the world and human beings | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 87 | |
| C-686 | 28 | The act of creating is ascribed instead to the primeval pair Cozaana, Maker of all Beasts, and Huichaana, Maker of Men and Fishes, equivalent to the Mixtec Deer-God and Deer-Goddess | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | p. 87 | |
| C-687 | 28 | Fish are classified with human beings rather than with the animals in the Zapotec division of labour, and the source does not explain it | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT as an observation about the titles, with the absence of explanation stated |
| C-688 | 29 | From the high heavens Tangaloa saw a stone floating in the boundless sea beneath | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 18 | Reported by a compiler with no reciter or recorder named |
| C-689 | 29 | He brought it up to the skies, shaped it into human form, inspired it with life and took it to wife | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 18 | |
| C-690 | 29 | She bore him a bird, which he sent down from the sky-world, casting a great rock into the sea to serve it for a home | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 18 | |
| C-691 | 29 | The bird returned complaining of the shadeless character of the land, and the god cast down a vine which grew and gave shadow | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 18 | |
| C-692 | 29 | Tangaloa in anger sent worms which fed upon the vines and killed them | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 18 | No reason for the anger is given in the source and none is supplied in the retelling |
| C-693 | 29 | From the worms or maggots developed from the rotting vines, man was later made | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 18 | |
| C-694 | 29 | In the Tongan account four dwelt in the heavens: Tama-pouli-alamafoa the King of Heaven, Tangaloa-eiki the Celestial Chief, Tangaloa-tufuga the Celestial Artisan and Tangaloa-atu-logologo the Celestial Messenger | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | pp. 18-19 | |
| C-695 | 29 | The messenger descended on a bird, flew about a long time and found only a sandbank on which the waves broke, reporting no dry land | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 19 | |
| C-696 | 29 | He was told to wait seven days and look again, and found the land already risen above the waters | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 19 | |
| C-697 | 29 | He complained there was no place below where he could rest and was told to ask the divine artificer to cast down chips and shavings from his work, whereupon the island of Eua arose | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 19 | |
| C-698 | 29 | He reported a great land with no plant or tree in it, and the divine chief gave him a seed which grew into a great vine spreading over all the land | PRIMARY SOURCE | MEDIUM | p. 19 | |
| C-699 | 29 | Dixon identifies the type's constants as a pre-existing world of gods above, a universal sea below, something cast down from which the world is made, and a bird as messenger or offspring of the sky-deity | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 19-20 | |
| C-700 | 29 | Tangaloa, Tangaroa, Ta'aroa and Kanaloa are the same name across Polynesia, holding different ranks in different island groups — supreme and pre-existent in the Society Islands, a sky-dwelling sender of messengers in Samoa and Tonga, and a god of the sea among several in New Zealand | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | pp. 10-11 | |
| C-701 | 29 | Tufunga is the Tongan term for a master craftsman, the builder of canoes, houses and stone monuments | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-702 | 29 | The London Missionary Society reached Tonga in 1797 and Samoa in 1830, and both groups were substantially Christianised before these traditions were printed | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-703 | 29 | This is the only multiple-attempt account in the book in which nothing is destroyed and the world is revised rather than restarted | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the story's comparative reading |
| C-704 | 29 | This is the only creator in the book who discovers what the world needs by sending someone to look and listening to the report | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-705 | 29 | Samoan humanity comes from maggots in a solution the god reversed in anger, which differs from Pangu's insects in being produced by the reversal rather than merely present | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-706 | 30 | The sun darkens, earth sinks in ocean, the bright stars fall from heaven, fire's breath assails the all-nourishing tree and towering fire plays against heaven itself | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 56 | |
| C-707 | 30 | She sees earth arise a second time from ocean, beauteously green, with waterfalls descending and the eagle flying over which captures fish in the fell | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 57 | |
| C-708 | 30 | The Æsir meet on Ida's plain, speak of the mighty earth-encircler, and call to memory their deeds and the supreme god's ancient lore | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 58 | |
| C-709 | 30 | The wondrous golden tables which the ruler of the gods possessed in days of old shall again be found in the grass | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 59 | |
| C-710 | 30 | At the beginning of the same poem the Æsir played at tables on Ida's plain, joyous, wanting for no gold | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 7-8 | |
| C-711 | 30 | Unsown fields shall bring forth, all evil be amended, and Baldr shall come, with Höðr and Baldr inhabiting Hropt's glorious dwellings | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 60 | |
| C-712 | 30 | The seeress's refrain is 'Understand ye yet, or what?' | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 60-61 | |
| C-713 | 30 | Hœnir shall choose his lot and the two brothers' sons inhabit the spacious Vindheim | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 61 | |
| C-714 | 30 | She sees a hall brighter than the sun, decked with gold, at Gimlé, where righteous people shall dwell and enjoy happiness for evermore | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 62 | |
| C-715 | 30 | Then comes the mighty one from above to the great judgment, who pronounces dooms, allays strifes and establishes a holy peace that shall ever be | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 64 | |
| C-716 | 30 | The final stanza has the dark dragon Níðhǫggr fly from Niðafjöll over the plain bearing a corpse on his wings, after which the seeress descends | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 65 | |
| C-717 | 30 | Thorpe's numbering goes from stanza 62 to stanza 64 | PRIMARY SOURCE | HIGH | st. 62-64 | FLAGGED — the cause cannot be determined from the file and nothing has been supplied |
| C-718 | 30 | The Vǫluspá is spoken by a vǫlva raised by Óðinn and is the first poem in the Codex Regius, written in Iceland around 1270 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-719 | 30 | The closing stanzas' resemblance to Christian eschatology has been argued since the poem entered scholarship, with positions ranging from Christian interpolation to coincidence to composition at the meeting of the two | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | FLAGGED — three positions set out in the source note and none adopted |
| C-720 | 30 | Some editors move or discount the final stanza on the grounds that a renewal ought not to end with a corpse-eating dragon; Thorpe prints it last | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | st. 65 | |
| C-721 | 30 | The Codex Regius was lost for four centuries, rediscovered in 1643 by an Icelandic bishop, sent to the Danish king, held in Copenhagen and returned to Iceland in 1971 | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | |
| C-722 | 30 | The Vǫluspá has been enlisted since the nineteenth century by nationalist and later by extremist movements | SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP | HIGH | — | Stated briefly, with the observation that the poem's content resists the use |
| C-723 | 30 | This is the only account in the book that describes the world after this one in detail | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT — the book's final comparative reading |
| C-724 | 30 | Hesiod places the unsown field at the beginning of time and loses it; the Vǫluspá places it at the end and waits for it | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-725 | 30 | Nothing else in the book allows an object to survive from one world into the next | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
| C-726 | 30 | The poem gives the renewal in full and then, without comment, ends on a corpse | EDITORIAL INTERPRETATION | — | — | MARKED IN TEXT |
Bibliography
| Work | Date | Used in |
|---|---|---|
| Latin-American Mythology Hartley Burr Alexander | Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920; the underlying documents are sixteenth-century | no. 16; no. 22; no. 28 |
| The Birds Aristophanes; anonymous English translation | produced at Athens 414 BCE; the translation is a late-nineteenth-century prose version, translator not named in the copy used | no. 18 |
| Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 trans. W. G. Aston | chronicle completed 720; Aston's translation published for the Japan Society, London, 1896 | no. 17 |
| The Ainu and their Folk-Lore John Batchelor | London: The Religious Tract Society, 1901 | no. 10 |
| Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt James Henry Breasted | 1912 | no. 1; no. 21 |
| Oceanic Mythology Roland B. Dixon | 1916 | no. 5; no. 20; no. 29 |
| The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa A. B. Ellis | London: Chapman and Hall, 1894 | no. 24 |
| History of the Incas Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa; trans. Sir Clements Markham | written at Cuzco, 1572; Markham's translation for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1907 | no. 23; no. 27 |
| The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Translated into English Prose trans. Kisari Mohan Ganguli | epic material accreted over centuries around the turn of the era; translation published in fascicles, Calcutta, 1883-1896 | no. 11 |
| Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race Sir George Grey | 1855 | no. 5 |
| The Hymns of the Rigveda, volume IV (Books IX and X) trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith | hymn composed in the late Vedic period; Griffith's four-volume translation published 1889-1892 | no. 3; no. 14; no. 19 |
| Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica Hesiod; trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White | composed c. 700 BCE; translation 1914 (Loeb) | no. 2; no. 26 |
| Iroquoian Cosmology, First Part J. N. B. Hewitt | narrated 1889, revised 1897; published in the Twenty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office) | no. 7 |
| Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland comp. Elias Lönnrot; trans. John Martin Crawford | runes collected from 1828; Old Kalevala 1835; New Kalevala (50 runes, 22,793 lines) 1849; Crawford's translation New York, 1888 | no. 9 |
| Indian Myth and Legend Donald A. Mackenzie | 1913 | no. 3 |
| Myths of the Cherokee James Mooney | collected 1887-1890 and later at Qualla, North Carolina; published in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900) | no. 8 |
| The Chaldean Account of Genesis George Smith; rev. A. H. Sayce | first published London 1876; this edition New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880 (Sayce's preface dated 21 May 1880) | no. 6 |
| The Younger Edda; also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda Snorri Sturluson; trans. Rasmus B. Anderson | composed in Iceland in the 1220s; Anderson's translation copyrighted 1879, this printing Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1901 | no. 12 |
| The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson trans. Benjamin Thorpe | poems of uncertain and disputed age, preserved chiefly in the Codex Regius of c. 1270; Thorpe's translation 1866, in the Norrœna Society edition edited by Rasmus B. Anderson | no. 12; no. 30 |
| African Mythology Alice Werner | Boston: Marshall Jones, 1925; Torday's fieldwork 1907-09 | no. 25 |
| Myths and Legends of China E. T. C. Werner | London: George G. Harrap, 1922 | no. 13 |
| Pahlavi Texts, Part I (Sacred Books of the East, vol. V) trans. E. W. West | Bundahishn compiled 9th c. CE from older Avestan material; translation 1880 | no. 4; no. 15 |