Tigers tigers everywhere

Open bracelet decorated with feline heads. 9th - 8th century BC. Bronze, Luristan, Western Iran, currently in Louvre Museum...

Which feline? Tiger or Lion? I would say tiger...See all the stripes everywhere, including the neck...

If Tiger, this becomes very interesting...Here is Luristan on the 1900 AD Caspian tiger distribution map. Did tigers live further south during Iron Age?

It seems like it, considering that people in Luristan made tiger bracelets...

Why is this important? Cause of the "monster" Humbaba and the story about the Erin forest he (it) protected...Humbaba was described as a frightening roaring monster "whose face is that of a lion" but stripy...And he guarded the eastern mountains, the residence of the sun god Utu, from where all the wood came from to Mesopotamia. Until Mesopotamian heroes killed him...And cut all the trees...

"My friend! We have reduced the forest to a wasteland...How shall we answer God Enlil in Nippur?" 

Enkidu talking to Gilgamesh, after they have killed Humbaba, the guardian of the forest, and have cut all the trees down... 

Now in my post "Humbaba", I proposed that Humbaba, the guardian of the ancient eastern forests was a tiger...

And based on the above distribution of tigers in Western Asia, and the fact that Enkidu and Golgamesh transported felled trees "down Euphrates westward", I proposed that the original location of the Erin forest which Humbaba guarded was here, in upper reaches of Euphrates...

In the time before "Civilisation came to Sumer"...

Now when I was in Louvre, I came across this bowl, with felines. It was found in Tepe Djowi, south western Iran, and was dated to 6th millennium BC

When I saw this bowl, I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Were these cats tigers? But Tepe Djowi is all the way down south, at the bottom of Mesopotamia... Did tigers live there during late Neolithic period?

The cats depicted on this bowl are definitely not leopards, so often depicted on early Iranian pottery. For comparison, have a look at this vessel also currently kept in Louvre. The vessel is from Tepe Sialk, Iran, and was dated to 4th millennium BC. The animals depicted on the vessel are leopards.

Leopards are depicted above flowing water, because they are used as an animal calendar marker for the end of winter, beginning of spring. I talked about this in my post "Spots and stripes"...

The zig zag lines symbolically depict flowing water, making leopard "the cat of flowing water"...And the reason for this is that snowmelt in Iranian mountains stats when leopards start to mate, Jan/Feb. In Aquarius 🙂

Pic snow cover Iranian mountains

And it is this snowmelt that makes Iranian rivers flow...

 Pic: water flow in Iranian rivers

And so it is possible that the felines depicted on the Tepe Djowi bowl are leopards with "flowing water" zig zag line drawn on their bodies, to symbolically turn them into "cats of flowing water"...But that would be the only such depiction of leopards I have seen so far...Which makes it a lot more likely that these cats are actually tigers...Now extinct Caspian tigers...Which is kind of amazing...

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...