L'Aquitaine sur la route d'Oedipe. La Sphinge comme motif préhistorique.

Julien d'Huy (1)

1 LIAS - IMM - Centre de Linguistique Anthropologique et Sociolinguistique - Institut Marcel Mauss

Aquitaine on the road of Oedipus? The phinx as a prehistoric story. Different lines of evidence point to the resettlement of a large part of western and central Europe by populations from the Franco-Cantabrian region during the Late Glacial and Postglacial periods. In this context, the study of the mythology of contemporary Basques and Gascons may be particularly useful to reconstruct a plausible prehistoric mythology. Indeed, a partial genetic and cultural continuity of contemporary Basques exists with the preceding Paleolithic/Mesolithic settlers of their homeland. But how could we demonstrate the antiquity of the local mythology? A tale from Gascony mirrors the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx, but the Gascon monster asks many riddles. One of them ("The brother is white, the sister is black. Every morning, the brother kills the sister. Every evening, the sister kills the brother. Nevertheless, the brother and the sister never die") is an inverted copy of a fragment from an Oedipus attributed to the fourth-century tragedian Theodectes ("There are two sisters. One gives birth to the other, then that one gives birth to the first"; the answer is Night and Day). The french scholars of Middle Age didn't know how to read Greek, and could not read Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae where this fragment has been quoted. Later, very few people knew this book, and a passage from the scholar to the folktale doesn't seem very plausible because the riddle is anecdotal in Deipnosophistae. Earlier, not a single direct contact has occurred between Greeks and inhabitants of Gascony; additionally, this riddle has been found nowhere else in the indo-european area. Consequently, Theodectes' and Gascony's riddles may conserve a very ancient version (probably prehistoric) of the Sphinx story. A confirmation is that, among the Algonquians, there are similar myths where owls ask riddles that the hero must answer on pain of death. Indeed, European and Amerindian mythological area are similar to the area of the haplogroup X2. This haplogroup appears to have undergone extensive population expansion in Europe and dispersal around or soon after the last glacial maximum. So the genetic sequences of haplogroup X2 and the European and Amerindian myths may have diverged at the same time, about 21.000 years ago. Logical reconstructions of ancient myths seem to allow us to reach right back 21.000 years ago, way before the Neolithic revolution. If other stories that are equally resistant to change can be found, it may be possible that even deeper prehistorical mythology can be reconstructed.

Le mythe du Sphinx posséderaient des racines préhistoriques.

Mots clés: Haplogroup X; Greece; Gascony; Algonquian; Prehistory; Mythology

Mots clés: Sphinx; Haplogroupe X; Grèce; Gascon; Algonquiens; Levi-Strauss; Préhistoire; Mythologie

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie; Archéologie et Préhistoire; Etudes classiques; Histoire; Génétique des populations [q-bio.PE]

Julien d'Huy. L'Aquitaine sur la route d'Oedipe. La Sphinge comme motif préhistorique.. Bulletin de la SERPE, 2012, 61, pp.15-21. ⟨halshs-00734560⟩