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oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
@serbiaireland
Aug 10, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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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. 🙂 Image
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. Image
It spans summer (symbolised by bull) and autumn (symbolised by lion). I talked about the animal symbols of the seasons in this article:

oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2019/10/symbol… Image
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)... Image
This is the lair of the fire breathing dragon... oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2020/06/is-tha… The seat of the beast... Image
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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More from @serbiaireland

oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
Aug 11
Thread: Late Sassanian depiction of a deity on a column capital now held in Taqe Bostan , which @persiaantiqua identified as Mehr (Mithra) based on the fact that he is surrounded by blooming lotuses... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taq-e_Bos…Image
Mithra was directly associated with lotus, to the point where on the most famous relief of Mithra, the one from Taqe Bostan, he is actually depicted standing on a lotus flower, radiating light, while witnessing Ahura Mazda giving ring of power to king Ardashir II... Image
Why Lotus? Mitra originates in India. Where he was, in the earliest times, directly associated with Varuna, the old Monsoon good whose Vahana was a crocodile, an animal calendar marker for the monsoon season in India....

Read 28 tweets
oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
Aug 6
Thread: Two Sassanian wall relief slabs dated to the 5th-6th c. AD, depicting rampant ibex goats flanking "the tree of life"... Image
Image
This is an ancient symbol found throughout Iran, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Levant, Crete. The reason for that is that in all these regions, year is divided into two halves:

hot, dry half, roughly Apr/May - Oct/Nov
wet, cool half, roughly Oct/Nov - Apr/May Image
And the wet, cool half begins when ibex goats start their mating fights...see, "flanking"... Image
Image
Read 11 tweets
oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
Aug 1
Thread: 900-700 BC Syro-Hittite relief from Carchemish which everyone believes depicts the ancient Sumerian Hero Gilgamesh as master of animals, holding the horn of a bull and the leg of a lion. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations (Ankara, Turkey). Who is this dude really? Image
If we interpret the animals as animal calendar markers, which they always are in compositions like this, The Dude (with big D) stands in the moment when bull (summer) ends and lion (autumn) begins (end of Jul start of Aug)...

The moment usually depicted like this
Read 11 tweets
oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
Jun 9
Thread: Silver Stater from Mallos, Cilicia, C. 425-385 BC. Depicting (???)

Obv: Winged male deity advancing right, holding solar disc; Aramaic legend.
Rev: MAΛP , swan standing to left, flapping its wings. Rare.

I would suggest that this is (a local version of) Apollo... Image
An anthropomorphised, Hellenised, version of the winged sun disc...Like this one depicted on Stele to Assurnasiripal II at Nimrud (9th c. BC)... Image
BTW, do you see the Sun Cross (Cross of Shamash) inside the winged Sun Disc? I talked about Sun Cross (of Shamash) here
Read 9 tweets
oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
Apr 30
Thread: Illustration by Bernard Zuber for Maurice Garçon’s La Vie Execrable de Guillemette Babin, Sorciere, 1926.

May Day Eve (April 30) is across Northern and Central Europe known as Walpurgis Night, the night when everyone is trying to "ward off, scare, witches"...

Why? Image
Maybe this has something to do with the old Celtic calendar which divided the year into two halves:

Winter (Samhain, 1st of Nov - Beltane, 1st of May)
Summer (Beltane, 1st of May - Samhain, 1st of Nov)

oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2016/07/two-cr…Image
This division of the year, is btw based on the old transhumance shepherd calendar:

Lowland grazing and lambing Oct/Nov - Apr/May
Highland grazing and milking Apr/May - Oct/Nov

Check this whole thread:

Read 17 tweets
oldeuropeanculture Profile picture
Apr 27
Thread: Goats flanking the tree of life. Ritual vessels from Gonur-depe, the administrative and ritual center of Ancient Margina, the Northern regions of the Oxus civilization, dated to 2300˗1600 BC. Pic from researchgate.net/profile/Nadezh…Image
The reason why we find goat flanking the tree of life in Iran, Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Levant, Crete is because in this part of the world, the climatic year is divided (roughly) into hot/dry summer (Apr/May - Oct/Nov) and cool/wet winter (Oct/Nov - Apr/May)... Image
Image
Image
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Oct/Nov is also the time when male ibex goats start their ferocious mating fights...And because the wet season in these parts of the world starts when ibex goats start mating, ibex goat became an animal calendar marker for the beginning of the rain season... Image
Image
Read 27 tweets

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