Legendary progenitor
Masculinity, femininity and "ghenos" or lineage linked to legendary progenitors were fundamental concepts of family identity in the Etruscan and Ancient Greek eras.
These included communal dining, and "charis" a form of charity that Vittoro Cigoli and Eugena Scabini described as being "deployed to oppose the core of violence inherent in the family relationship".
Etrusco-Roman culture, developed from the Greek where each "gens" (family or house) had their own deified hero, prince or demi-god along with various household deities.
The expansion of family trees to include heroic or legendary ancestors was used to boost social status and amass personal finances.
The traditions are generally vague and obscure and the personages whose names are associated with these sites have often only a mythical, or, to speak technically, an eponymic existence.
'[7][8] Varying manuscripts of the early medieval Frankish Table of Nations claim that thirteen Germanic tribes were descended from three brothers: Erminus, Inguo, and Istio.
[23] Patrick Wolfe has discussed the work of Scottish ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan in his study The Worship of Animals and Plants (1869, 1870) regarding the role of legendary progenitors in Totemism, practised by Native Americans.
He suggested that "patrilineal totem stocks were endowed with fictional ancestral figures who were well suited to provide a basis from which subsequent and more sublime theologies might develop".
[24] David Conrad discusses how ancient Mali's ruling elite adopted composite characters of Islamic forebears into legendary progenitors.
Such a composite image is discussed as a character called Fosana, whose legends are told as "a collage of loosely connected incidents from the Prophet's life and times".
Fragments of the stories of Fosana have been connected with events in the lives of Bilal ibn Rabah al-Habashi and Suraqa bin Malik.
[25] In Arnhem Land in Australia, the Kunwinjku people consider Wurugag and Waramurungundi to be their original ancestors and have depicted them in their tribal art.
