Eastern Connections

• There is a common narrative motif to send a son on dangerous missions to fetch something of value or to perform some labor that is actually meant to kill the son in the process. This relates to Heracles easily. It can also relate to his son who was sent to fetch him from war in The Women of Trachis (Kirk 1970: 76).
• Snake strangling is an important image in Mesopotamian art. This is reminiscent of the first adventure of Heracles as an infant (Burkert 1992: 87).
• The seven-headed snake and the lion are common images in the Semitic East (Burkert 1986: 17-18).
• The 12 labors of Heracles are also related to the East in the number 12 itself, which was considered a "good" number in the Babylonian world (Kirk 1970: 184-5).
• The Greeks also named foreign gods after their own gods and heroes. In India, the Greeks named two of the deities Heracles and Dionysus. Scholars originally believed that Heracles was the god Krishna (Vishnu) and that Dionysus was the god Shiva. It is now believed that Heracles was more likely to be Indra and that Dionysus was more likely to be a non-Aryan god of the hill peoples (Sedlar 1980). (MAC)