Curlew

60BC-20BC, Celtic Atrebates/Regni gold coin, found in 1873 in Selsey, East Wittering, England, currently in the British Museum.  Official description:

Obv: Abstract design derived from head of Apollo.

Rev: Stylised horse, left; wheel above horse; bird, right below horse.

Basically what the description says is that this Celtic coin is an abstraction of a coin like this: Bronze drachm of the Philip II of Macedon. 359-336 BC. Alexander the Great's father. From this article...

Obv: Head of Apollo

Rev: Naked youth on a prancing horse

Celts are known to have made their own copies of well known Greek/Macedonian coins. More on this great site "Balkancelts"...

But what I find very interesting about this Celtic coin is how it has abstracted the Macedonian one.

The head of Apollo became two sun discs eyes...

The youth on a prancing horse (which was actually a depiction of the Young Sun God Apollo himself riding on a solar horse) became sun disc on a prancing solar horse...

BTW, Celts made another version of this Solar Rider coin, where the rider is still "a young man" but with a sun for a head...Like this Celtic coin from Hungary...

I talked about solar riders, and why was horse a solar animal in many of my posts...

Anyway, the reason why horse is a solar symbol found all over Eurasia, is because horse mating season, characterised by vicious stallion fights, is governed by the sunlight: it starts at the beginning of the summer and it peaks in midsummer, on summer solstice...

Hence these two lads, Castor and Polux, marking the summer solstice...

This is the horse sorted 🙂 But what bird is depicted on the original Celtic coin? 

I think to answer this "important" 🙂 question, we need to look at the reverse of this coin as an animal calendar marker...

Knowing what we know about horses mating season, and how horse was used as a calendar marker elsewhere, I would suggest that the prancing solar horse with the sun disc on the original Celtic coin depicts the hot, sunny half of the year in England, Apr/May-Oct/Nov.

Now usually, the birds associated with solar cult are migratory birds, like swans, which arrive to the areas with the continental climate from their wintering grounds in spring, with the "Young Sun"...

This link is already found in Late Neolithic Northern Europe. Among the Lake Onega petroglyphs, Russia, made c. 4000BC, the only two petroglyphs which were "Christianised" with a cross were "The Devil" and "The Swan"...

Why? Cause "The Devil" is actually the sun god. And (migratory) swans are his birds. These two images are actually part of a large solar year calendar which was encoded using local animal and plant calendar markers. I talk about these amazing petroglyphs in my post "Bes"...

I talk about migratory birds as animal calendar markers linked to the solar cults in many of my posts...

But looking at the bird depicted under the horse, you can see that it definitely isn't a swan. I was first reminded of a common crane, another bird associated with the solar cult

Another bird that looks like the bird standing under the horse, which is also associated with the sun cult is a stork.

But there is a problem here: the curved beak...Now this could be just a bad craftsmanship. But it could actually be an important clue that could help us identify the bird depicted standing under the solar horse...

There is a bird native to England, which (kind of 🙂) looks like this: curlew. This bird is a resident species in England, bit it is also locally migratory: During the warm part of the year, it is found inland, and during the cold part of the year it is found only on the coast...

The reason for this is that curlew "nests on the ground in rough pastures, meadows and heather"...

This is the horses country...

And: "Curlew arrive back at their breeding grounds in late March or early April, laying their eggs between mid-April and mid-May. Chicks hatch between May and June and have typically fledged by mid-July"...

Right during the time when horses are mating (and prancing 🙂).

And when the "Young Sun God" arrives riding on a prancing horse...

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...