Thread: Fragment of a vessel with wheat stalks and a procession of bulls in relief, Late Uruk–Jemdet Nasr, 3300–2900 BC, Southern Mesopotamia. Why bulls and grain? metmuseum.org/art/collection…
Sumerian limestone bull cup with wheat stalks. Late Uruk–Jemdet Nasr, 3100–2900 BC, Southern Mesopotamia. Why bulls and grain? christies.com/lot/lot-a-sume…
Steatite bowl with bulls in relief (5 cm. high). Found in a house of much later (Persian) times; dated stylistically to the Jemdet-Nasr period, 3100–2900 BC, Southern Mesopotamia. Why bulls and grain? classics.unc.edu
Why bulls and grain? For the same reason sun god Shamash/Utu was depicted as a bull with a tail made of wheat...
Because it is in Taurus (Apr/May), that the grain harvest begins in Mesopotamia...
But this is the old Taurus, which has nothing to do with stars...It is an ancient animal calendar marker which marks the beginning of the calving of the wild Eurasian cattle. I talked about it in this thread:
If you look at the Mesopotamian agricultural calendar, you will notice that that in Mesopotamia summer (Apr/May-Jul/Aug) started with grain harvest and ended with grain threshing and storage...
Thread: This Is Mad! The almost complete collapse of the Earth's magnetic field around 41000 years ago most likely majorly contributed to the extinction of Neanderthals...
In the recent geological past, Earth’s magnetic field reduced to ~10% of the modern values and the magnetic poles shifted away from the geographic poles, causing the Laschamps geomagnetic excursion, about 41 millennia ago...
The excursion lasted ~2000 years, with dipole strength reduction and tilting spanning 300 years. During this period, the geomagnetic field’s multipolarity resembled outer planets, causing rapid magnetospheric changes...
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)...