Tuesday is named after the same ancient sky father as Zeus and Jupiter
Zeus Pater in Greece, Jupiter in Rome and the Vedic sky god Dyaus Pitr in India carry names that are linguistically identical. The Germanic Tiu, who gave English its Tuesday, belongs to the same family. All descend from one reconstructed Proto-Indo-European name meaning roughly divine father of the sky.
Comparative mythology sets myths from different cultures side by side to find shared themes. The anthropologist C. Scott Littleton called it the systematic comparison of mythic motifs across many cultures, sometimes with the aim of reconstructing an ancestral protomythology. Linguistics has been its most convincing tool. The matching god names across Europe and India imply that Greeks, Romans and Indians inherited their sky father from a common ancestral culture.
The field has a split personality. Comparativists stress similarities; particularists stress differences and dismiss the parallels as vague. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars went broad, some claiming nearly every myth was a garbled poetic description of the sun's movements. Modern scholars mostly lean particularist, though E. J. Michael Witzel has proposed a historical reconstruction of older and older mythic layers. He finds a storyline running from creation to the end of the world in Eurasia and the Americas, a northern group he calls Laurasian, but not in sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea or Australia.
Other scholars hunt for structure or psychology. Vladimir Propp argued that many Russian fairy tales follow events in a predictable order. Claude Lévi-Strauss instead organised myths into binary oppositions such as raw and cooked, nature and culture, and saw myth as a way of mediating those tensions. Freudians find echoes of Oedipus around the world, and Jungians trace recurring images to archetypes lodged in every unconscious mind.
The recurring motifs are striking. Humans moulded from clay appear in the making of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in Genesis and in the Chinese goddess Nüwa shaping figures from yellow earth. Fire stolen for humanity links Prometheus to the Vedic hero Mātariśvan. Great floods with a lone survivor on a boat appear in Babylonian, Hebrew and Hindu traditions, where Manu builds the ark. Sir James Frazer's multi-volume The Golden Bough compared dying and returning gods such as Osiris and Tammuz.
Source: Comparative mythology
