Thread: This is truly incredible object. Composite #Lion and Bull, bronze, Iran, 1500-1000 BC. clevelandart.org/art/1969.122 The meaning of this object is unknown. It is presumed that it has served as an object of worship in a temple or shrine...Worship of who? Who else. The beast. 🙂
The beast in this case is the hot, dry season, which in Mesopotamia starts at the beginning of May, beginning of summer and ends at the end of October.
It spans summer (symbolised by bull) and autumn (symbolised by lion). I talked about the animal symbols of the seasons in this article:
The dry season in Mesopotamia is the season of drought and death...Completely dominated by the blazing summer and autumn sun....The god of death: Nergal...
And the hottest and driest part of the dry at the moment when bull meets lion. At the end of summer, beginning of autumn. This moment is "marked" by all those "lion killing bull" images, like this one from Persepolis...Lion (autumn) killing (ending) Bull (summer)...
This Iranian two headed figurine is showing us that Bull (summer) and Lion (autumn) are just two phases of the dry season which follow each other...They are just calendar markers...
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Thread: Another interesting detail from this Daunian globular pottery askos, made in Canosa di Puglia and dated to 350BC-325BC, "painted with bands of decoration. This consists of flora and fauna, geometric patterns and swastikas"... metmuseum.org/art/collection…
Is this the symbol? Christmas cake from Serbia with the sun and "the hands of god" cross. The hands of god cross by itself in the next picture. The hands of god represent 4 seasons with 3 months each, which means that the god whose hands these are is the Sun
Thread: Daunian globular pottery askos, made in Canosa di Puglia and dated to 350BC-325BC, "perhaps for funerary use, painted with bands of decoration. This consists of flora and fauna, geometric patterns and swastikas"...
What about this detail? A curly swastika with each arm connected to a sun. Two of which are red and two of which are black.
That this is not a one off squiggle, can be seen from the fact that we find the same motif on this Daunian askos from the Heinz Weisz collection christies.com/en/lot/lot-572…
The problem was that The Roman winter was an Ugly Old Hag...And the woman on John William Waterhouse's painting was young and beautiful. I was sure I was missing something important, but I didn't know what...
Thread: Buckle up, this is going to be quite a ride.
Meet Cetus, Poseidon's pet which he released on people that really pissed him off. Usually kings with beautiful daughters.
3rd c. BC mosaic depicting Cetus, from Ancient Kaulon, Calabria, Italy
Two most famous Cetuses 🙂 were so called Æthiopian (Levantine) Cetus and Trojan Cetus. This thread is about them, the two beautiful babes that were supposed to be sacrificed to them to appease them and the two heroes who strongly objected to such arrangements...
Here we go:
Queen Cassiopeia boasted that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the Nereids. This angered Poseidon so much that he sent the sea monster Cetus to attack Æthiopia (Levant)...
Thread: Two days ago I wrote this analysis of this Early Mesopotamian bowl. But ever since I wrote it, I can't stop thinking about the "bundle of stylised reeds" and what does it actually look like...Here is why:
This is part of the full object description from the museum page: "...The animals are crouched before a bundle of stylised reeds (not shown), much like the reeds carved into a door at the base of the Ziggurat of Anu..."
Anyone seen this door? Is this what this "bundle of stylised reeds" looked like? Like these two "bundles of stylised reeds" depicted behind Inanna on the Uruk (Wakra) vase ? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warka_Vase