foundation myth

Noun

foundation myth (plural foundation myths)

1. An aetiological myth that serves to explain the foundation of a city, nation, or civilization.
   • 1997, Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, University of Missouri Press (→ISBN), page 145

     The first attempts at inventing a foundation myth for Rome, fitting her into the Greek system, were naturally made by the Greeks themselves and go back to the fourth century B.C. By the beginning of the third century, the story became important ...

   • 2003, Irad Malkin, Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean, Cambridge University Press (→ISBN), page 100

     He was connected with the foundation myth and thus with the collective identity of Sparta itself. He led a formal colony to Thera from Sparta; his house, the Aigeidai, was said to have inhabited both Sparta and Thera ...

   • 2014, Naoise Mac Sweeney, Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies: Dialogues and Discourses, University of Pennsylvania Press (→ISBN), page 129

     This chapter looks, by contrast, at a foundation myth that—initially, at any rate—seems to have been quite unitary, as indeed one might have expected from a state created and ruled autocratically. ...