One for the road

This is really cool. The people of the Bronze Age Encrusted Pottery Culture (Middle Bronze Age, 2000-1500BC) from the Carpathian basin, buried children with miniature versions of the pottery with which the adults were buried. Pic: pottery from children graves (L) vs pottery from adult graves (R)

This was also observed when remains of adults were found in the same grave. For instance, the remains of a child and of an adult male were found in the same grave, and their vessels could be clearly separated on the basis of their size and differing decoration....

Furthermore, vessels accompanying children showed differences according to age at death, since small, horn-shaped vessels (baby horns) typically occurred in graves of infants. 

I talked about these baby rhyta here in my post "Baby (milk) horns"...

Now the reason why this is soooooo cool, is because it explains why these vessels were buried with the dead...To provide them with the food (or drink) for their trip to the other world... I proposed that these vessels originally contained drink in my post "Thirst"...More about insatiable thirst and hunger of the dead in my post "Blood red wine"...

Oh and remember goat Amaltheia ("Nourishing Goddess"), who fed baby Zeus with her milk? And then he "accidentally broke off one of her horns", which then became "cornucopia", the horn which had "the divine power to provide unending nourishment"...I talked about this in my post "Cornucopia"...

Well this whole link between goats, thunder gods and abundance originates from the fact that Ibex goat mating season in Crete coincides with the beginning of the rain season. And it is rain that bring fertility and abundance...

I talked about this in my post "Goat riding thundergods"

If horn vessels were buried with infants, this means that what was contained inside of the funeral vessels was drink. Because it is impossible to feed infants using horns. Unless you fed them milk...

How would you use these baby horns? Just like you would use gunpowder horns like this one. 

You cut the tip off. You close the hole with your finger. You fill the horn with water, milk, soup...You stick the horn tip into the baby's mouth and voila...Suck suck suck...

This basically proves my hypothesis, which I based on ethnographic data, that the funerary vessels found in Neolithic, Bronze age and Iron age burials were buried full of drink...Most likely just water...Cause the otherworld is a thirsty place...

But that would mean that the same beliefs and the same rituals related to the departure of the dead have survived in Europe since Neolithic...How interesting...But not surprising...At least not to me...