The Ashwini Kumaras

Most Vedic gods are powers. The Ashvins are helpers, and what the hymns to them mostly contain is a catalogue of people they got to in time. Bhujyu is cast away in the sea and carried home. Chyavana, worn out with age, is made young again. Vishpala loses a leg in battle and is given one of iron. Atri is brought out of a glowing pit. Rijrashva, blinded, is given back his sight. The list runs to dozens of names, many of them attached to nothing else in the collection, and the poets recite it the way one recites a reference: these are the things you have done, do them for us.

The pattern inside the catalogue is consistent enough to be the point. In every case the person is already lost when the twins arrive. They are not asked to prevent a disaster; they are asked to reverse one, and the reversals are physical and specific, a limb, an eye, a body pulled out of water or fire. That gives them a role no other Vedic god quite occupies. Indra wins, Agni carries, Varuna binds and looses, and the Ashvins turn up at the last possible moment with a repair.

Their equipment matches the job. The chariot is three wheeled and has three seats, moves faster than thought, and is described as going over land, water and air alike. They travel at dawn, are invited to the first pressing of the soma, and are closely tied to Ushas, whom they follow or accompany. Honey belongs to them: they carry it, they pour it, and the word for it runs through their hymns. A tradition that later hands them the invention of medicine had a good deal of material to work from.

The earliest firmly dated occurrence of any of these divine names is not in India and is not in a religious text. A treaty between a Hittite king and a ruler of Mitanni, preserved in the Hittite archives and belonging to the fourteenth century BCE, calls as witnesses on Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas, in a form of Indo-Aryan, in that order. The Rigveda cannot supply a date for itself. A diplomatic document in northern Syria can, and it puts the twins under their older name into the record at a fixed point.

That is one half of what makes them interesting to comparison. The other half is that divine twins associated with horses, with rescue at sea and with the dawn recur across the Indo-European languages, in the Greek Dioskouroi, in the Baltic material, and in scattered traces elsewhere. The correspondence is one of the stronger cases in the comparative study of Indo-European religion, and it does not depend on the etymology of any single name.

What the twins originally stood for, if they stood for anything, is a different matter and it has never been settled. The two twilights, the morning and the evening star, the sun and the moon, day and night, and a pair of stars have all been proposed. The disagreement is old: Indian commentators were already recording rival opinions about the Ashvins long before any European scholar took the question up, which is unusual and tells you the obscurity is not a modern problem. The atlas holds the question as argued rather than open, because the positions are real and can be read, and it does not adopt one of them.