Dragon
Proto-Indo-European

The tale of a hero slaying a giant serpent occurs in almost all Indo-European mythology. In most stories, the hero is some kind of thunder-god. In nearly every iteration of the story, the serpent is either multi-headed or "multiple" in some other way. Furthermore, in nearly every story, the serpent is always somehow associated with water. Bruce Lincoln has proposed that a Proto-Indo-European dragon-slaying myth can be reconstructed as follows: First, the sky gods give cattle to a man named *Tritos ("the third"), who is so named because he is the third man on earth, but a three-headed serpent named * Ng hi steals them. *Tritos pursues the serpent and is accompanied by *H nér, whose name means "man". Together, the two heroes slay the serpent and rescue the cattle.
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