Thread: Homer's "ASPHODEL MEADOW" (ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα), "where the spirits of the dead dwell" (Od. 24.14), could be a result of an ancient confusion between ἀσφόδελος (the plant name) and σφοδελός, or rather σποδελός, meaning "ashen"... #FolkloreThursday
The Ancient Greek word "σποδός" is regularly used in Greek poetry for the ashes of the dead, and for the ashes used in the act of mourning for the dead. It is also commonly used in funerary epigrams for the ashes of the dead contained in a vessel, in the earth...
The Hades (as in land of the dead) was always portrayed as a dark, gloomy, and mirthless place. So the translation of the "dead wondering through asphodel meadows" as "dead wondering through ash-filled meadows" fits the context well...
Thread: Sumerian limestone bowl fragment with three ibex goats following a lion...3300-3100 BCE, Currently in the Detroit Institute of Arts dia.org/art/collection…
What's all this about?
Well, I think, climate in Mesopotamia and annual lifecycle of the depicted animals...
I am so sorry only a fragment of this bowl has survived. But I could bet that the original bowl had
3 ibex goats, following 3 lions, following 3 bulls, following 3 leopards...
Why?
Check this thread out. It is about a copper bowl from the same period and the same area...And about the climatic year in Sumer and Elam, and local Sumerian/Elamite animal calendar markers for the four seasons
Here they are again...So which one of these dolphins was depicted on the above Minoan fresco? I would say that we can pretty much immediately discard the Bottlenose dolphin because of the color...
Thread: This is a detail of the griffin fresco (reproduction) from the throne room, palace of Knossos, Crete, dated to 1700-1450 BC.
In this shortish thread I would like to explain why I think that the flowers depicted around the lying griffin are sea daffodils...
To start, check this thread in which I showed that Minoans basically treated both the animals and plants they depicted together as calendar markers. For instance swallows nesting season overlaps with Madonna lily flowering season
Then check this thread in which I explained why I believe griffin is not a mythical animal, but actually a complex animal calendar marker for autumn (Aug/Sep/Oct)...
Thread (longish): The charge of the Polish Winged Hussars at the 1683 battle of Vienna. 3000 of them took part of the biggest cavalry charge in history, which finally stopped the Turkish expansion into Europe... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of…
This is the story about their origin...
And about a very interesting and unusual Serbian phrase: "Kititi se tuđim perjem" which means "To take credit for something great someone else has done", but literally it means "To adorn oneself with someone else's feathers"...
So where do we start? With Nicolas de Nicolay, a French nobleman, who In 1567 publish a book entitled "Quatre premiers livres des navigations" which recorded his observations about the Ottoman court and peoples from his 1551 mission to Istanbul on behalf of the French government.
Thread: I wonder if people looking at this image realize that it contains a proof that people in one part of this map preserved a story about the arrival of agriculture as an oral legend for at least 5000 years, before it was first written down...
I am talking about these dudes here...The dudes who lived in the ancient city of Susa (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa) which is currently located in Iran
When archaeologists excavated the city, they discovered, among other things, a text, known today as "How grain came to Sumer" (etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.…)