Hinduism: Details about 'Indo Iranian Mythology'
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The ancient Indo-Iranians were the founders of Persia and of Indian Vedic culture. They believed in one God with many names: Rig Veda,1:164:46 Truth is One, but sages call it by many names It is assumed that before they divided into Persian and Vedic groups they shared a common Indo-Iranian (Aryan) mythology. The details of this are not known, but the names of some Aryan gods are found in texts surviving from the lost Hittite and Mitanni kingdoms. The main sources of information are the early Iranian Avesta and Indo-Aryan Rigveda. God names that can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-Iranian religion include Soma,Dyaus (Indo-European Dyeus), Mitra and Varuna, Agni, and Tvastar. It is assumed that these God names developed in different ways as cultures separated and evolved. Thus, a name of God such as the Vedic Mitra appears in Persian form as Mithra and then later develops into the Roman Mithras. Because Aryan texts are the oldest surviving evidence of early Indo-European speaking peoples it was assumed during the nineteenth century that they preserved aspects of Proto-Indo-European culture, before the dispersal of the Indo-European peoples across Europe and Asia. It was thus thought that Aryan God names are linked to Celtic, Norse, Greek and Roman mythology. Many ethnologists hoped to unify all the pagan European mythologies into a Proto-Indo-European belief system. Many such thinkers, following Max Müller, believed that all the Aryan mythical systems began as forms of sun worship. Such ideas influenced the emergence of New Age thinking about myth, and theories such as Jung's notion of a collective unconscious. See also
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