Sumer and winter BMAC seals

BMAC (Bactria-Margiana) seal, Turkmenistan, 1st half of the 2nd mil BC. From: "Ancient Art in Miniature: Ancient Near Eastern Seals from the Collection of Martin and Sarah Cherkasky"

Official description:

Obverse: boar "striding towards tulip shaped flowers"

Reverse: bird of pray with wings spread, as seen from below...

That's it...But is it? Of course not...

Both animals

Vulture

Wild boar

depicted on this seal are animal calendar markers for winter in Northern hemisphere. The reason for this is that the mating season of both animals in Central Asia starts in November and spans the whole of winter (Nov, Dec, Jan)...

Now the climatic year in Turkmenistan is divided into hot dry summer (May-Oct) and cold wet winter (Nov-Apr). It is the rain and snow which fall during winter (and subsequent snowmelt) which bring life to this dry region...

Which is why wild boar is depicted under a green leafy branch. But why is it striding towards tulips?

Because, most tulips originate in the mountains of Central Asia, where huge number of different wild varieties can still be seen blooming every spring...

So wild boar striding towards blooming tulips indicates the end of winter and beginning of spring...And symbolically depicts the effect of winter precipitation on the land...It turns desert into this...

Now on the same page of the "Ancient Art in Miniature..." we can see another two faced seal. 

The official description of the seal says:

Obverse: Nude hero dominates writhing snakes

Reverse: winged dragon strides towards a branch

Of course this is not a nude hero. This is the Sun, Sun God, Bactrian equivalent of Sumerian Utu/Shamash (see the heat rays coming out of "hero's" shoulders just like they do from Utu/Shamash's ones?)...I talked about this seal in my post "Nude hero dominating snakes"...

He is not fighting snakes. He is holding snakes which are symbols of sun, sun's heat...You could though say that he is dominating snakes, because they are utterly dependent on sun's heat for survival...

Remember that snakes are solar animals. They are in our world when sun is in our world (hot part of the year) and they are in the underworld when sun is in the underworld (cold part of the year)...I talked about snakes (and dragons) as solar symbols in my posts "Bactrian snakes and dragons", "Enemy of the sun", "Chthonic animal", "Dragon who stole rain"...And many others...

The dragon is actually a winged lion. Where wings are stylistic evolution of heat rays found in earlier depictions of this "beast"...Like on this Bactrian seal...

Beast which represents the hot, dry part of the year, summer...I talked about this in my post "Lion radiating heat"...

By the way did you see how the dragon lion is striding towards a bare branch? This is symbolic depiction of the effect the hot dry summer season, symbolised by the lion, has on nature...It turns it into this

So side by side, on the same page, we have a summer seal and winter seal...I don't think the authors of this paper knew what they did when they placed these two seals together like this...

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...