Heracles and IIr

Source: TW

This image of Herakles was brought from placed in a temple of Apollo ~151 CE. It has a remarkable bilingual inscription in Greek & Parthian dialect of the Iranian language. There Heracles is identified with the Iranic god verethraghna & Apollon with tishtrya. It shows that between Greek & Iranic branches of the IE religion the homologies could be more or less correctly sorted out with Herakles being placed in his ancestral indra-class & Apollo in the rudra-class. This identification is also seen in the statues produced by the Greco-Iranic king Antiochus.

However, in the iconographic tradition of the Greco-Indian kings the senior representative of the indra class Zeus was identified with indra. For the Iranics that posed an issue as they tended to id him with ahura mazdha.

In the indosphere, Herakles was identified with the club-bearing primal teacher of shaiva tradition – the v1 whose corpse was animated by rudra himself at kAyAvarohaNa. His name was identified with Herakles ~ lakulIsha.