How old are "Ancient Greek" myths? And are they "Greek" in origin? Like the myth about Hephaestus, the lame/limping Smith God and his wife, the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite?
Why do I ask?
This is the so called "Vučedol dove"...
This figurine, is one of the most well-known objects from Vučedol culture, a Chalcolithic/Bronze Age culture which flourished in the Balkans between 3000 and 2200 BC, and was contemporary with Sumerian Mesopotamia, Early Dynastic Egypt and Troy I/II.
Vučedol Culture was a metallurgical culture which made bronze objects on an industrial scale. The bronze made by Vučedol Culture smiths was arsenic bronze, the most primitive form of bronze, and most dangerous, if you are a smith...
Arsenic is extremely poisonous, and it gets released into the air from the molten metal in a form of toxic fumes. The first sigh of arsenic poisoning is the loss of the sensation in the legs, which then expands throughout the body and finally leads to death...
Therefore forging this metal was a dangerous job. But if you got out of your workshop on time, then the danger passed, although limping due to loss of sensation in the legs remained for some time...
Sounds familiar so far? We have a lame, limping smith...who had a figurine of a dove in his blacksmith workshop (this is where Vučedol dove was found)...
So???
Well dove is the bird of Aphrodite...Who was married to a lame/limping Smith God Hephaestus...
So, is it possible that this is an indication that some kind of mythological, symbolic link between lame limping smiths and doves, a precursor of the Lame/Limping Smith God/Love Goddess mythology, existed in the 3rd millennium BC Balkans?
I think so. But there is more...
Recently, some archaeologists proposed that this figurine does not depict a dove, but instead it depicts a partridge, and so should be known as not as "Vučedol dove" but as "Vučedol partridge".
Native Balkan dove
Native Balkan partridge
You can see how it can be difficult to determine which one of these two birds was depicted...
These archaeologists draw the link between limping smiths and male partridges, because when a predator manages to find a partridge nest, male partridge will draw the predator from the nest by running away from the nest pretending to limp, acting as if they are wounded...
Interesting...
Hephaestus, the smith, was a lame, limping Smith God.
The sister of Daedalus, the smith, is called Perdix (partridge) and her son, who became Dedalus's student was also called Perdix (partridge)...
Some say that Deadalus's student's name was Talos and that Perdix (partridge) was the name of Talos's father. Talos was such a good smith himself, that Daedalus, in a jealous rage, threw him off the rock of the Acropolis at Athens...
But Athena intervened and turned Talos/Perdix into a partridge to save his life. According to Ovid, that partridge later watched the death and burial of Daedalus’s son Icarus with glee...
Hephaestus limped like a partridge and was flung from Olympus...
Talos/Perdix (partridge), whose father was "Perdix" (partridge), and whose nickname was "Tantalus" (hobbling, or lurching), was flung from the Acropolis and was turned into a partridge...
So, we have either
1. A lame/limping Vučedol culture smith and "Vučedol dove" = Hephaestus and Aphrodite
2. A lame/limping Vučedol culture smith and "Vučedol partridge" = Hephaestus and Talos
Or both...
That's it folks. Cool, right? 🙂
