A ceramic bowl, covered with flying birds, found in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Currently in the local Duhok museum. The Pic is from this Facebook post. I don't know who the photographer is...
Now I don't know exactly when the bowl was made. But it is displayed in this display cabinet...
Together with this statuette, which was dated to 4000 BC, so I assume the bowl is from the same period. Stylistically it fits...
I am of course interested in the birds depicted on this vessel.
After a lot of checking through the lists of birds of Iraq, and a lot of comparing of depicted birds with real birds, I believe that the depicted birds are white storks...
Depicted during their spring migration back to their nesting grounds in North Eastern Iraq...
Storks usually arrive back to their nesting grounds in Mar/Apr and begin their nesting season in Apr/May and the first eggs hatch in May...
Nesting storks are a spectacle, and a very hard thing to miss, so it is possible that storks here are animal calendar markers for Apr/May...A very important part of the year in Mesopotamia...
Apr/May, is the time when the grain harvest begins in Mesopotamia...
Apr/May is also the time when Tigris, which flows through the area where this stork bowl was found, reaches its peak annual water levels...and floods...
That the depicted birds could in some way be linked to grain agriculture, can be deduced from the fact that they are depicted flying over checkered rectangular surfaces, usually interpreted as fields...
But, who knows...
That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...
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