ВОПРОСЫ ОНОМАСТИКИ | PROBLEMS OF ONOMASTICS

Armen Yeghishevich Petrosyan
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

THE INDO-EUROPEAN MYTH OF THE FOUNDING OF CITY BY TWIN BROTHERS

For citation
Petrosyan, A. Y. (2026). The Indo-European Myth of the Founding of City by Twin Brothers. Voprosy onomastiki, 23(2), 28–49. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2026.23.2.020

Received on 20 April 2025
Accepted on 14 October 2025

Abstract: The existence of fraternities of young warriors is reconstructed for the Indo-European past. Under the guidance of adult mentors, these young men hunted and raided, often imitating wolf behavior, and lived for several years on the peripheries of their tribe’s territory. Only then, after undergoing an initiation ritual, could they become full members of the tribe, marry and acquire property of their own. These brotherhoods played a key role in the spread of Indo-Europeans throughout Eurasia. Their raids and conquests of new territories led to the establishment of settlements, and then to the resettlement there of new groups of people, including adults, women and children. A distinctive feature of the young warriors in these brotherhoods was their association with black or dark colors. In some traditions, the youths themselves, or their mythological incarnations, may have been designated by the Indo-European root *h₂reh₁mo- ‘black, dark color’. The article examines several Indo-European myths concerning the founding of new cities, often by twins, who can be considered mythological personifications of the members of such brotherhoods. In the Armenian ethnogonic tradition, including the epic Vipasank‘, in the War of Taron, and in the Daredevils of Sasun, the founders of new cities are twins or twin-like figures whose names and images are in one way or another connected with blackness or the aforementioned root. In the Indian Mahabharata five brothers, two of whom are twins, build their city Indraprastha. The legendary twin brothers who are regarded as the founders of Prussia come from afar and become, respectively, the king and the chief priest; the latter establishes the cult center of Romove. The legend of the founding of Rome by the twins Remus and Romulus, as well as the history of the city under its first legendary kings, bears a close resemblance to the Armenian material. Remarkably, the names Romove and Rome (Rōma) can be etymologized as deriving from an ablaut variant of the root *h₂reh₁mo-. The parallels among the Indian, Armenian, Baltic, and Italic legends point to the common Indo-European character of the myth, perhaps with the exception of the Anatolian tradition.

Keywords: Indo-European studies; fraternities of young warriors; the myth of the founding of the city; twin characters; Armenian mythology; Roman mythology; Prussian mythology

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