The sacred tree and a bee

The sacred tree motif...may be associated with a bee in a Hittite text: "An eagle is perched on the branches of the tree above, wrapped around the roots of the tree is a snake below, a bee hangs at the middle of the tree"...

From "Apiculture in Hittite cuneiform texts". Here is my symbolic depiction of the above passage. Cool, right?

This tree is usually interpreted as "the world tree", "a colossal tree, located at the centre of the world, which supports the heavens, thereby connecting the heavens, the terrestrial world, and, through its roots, the underworld"...

The World Tree, often has an eagle in its crown and serpent /dragon in its roots. As in Hittite mythology. And Germanic mythology where we find Yggdrasil. 1897 depiction by Ernst Hermann Walther

Here are examples of the depiction of "the world tree" from Serbian epic poetry.

Excerpt from a Serbian folk poem which talks about the tree of life with Falcon (Perun) sitting on its top and Serpent/Dragon (Veles) coiling around its roots:

Here is another variant of the same poem about the Tree of Life with Eagle (Perun) sitting on its top and Dragon (Veles) coiling around its roots. This one narrated by the tree of life itself:

It is commonly believed that the eagle symbolises the heaven and the serpent symbolises the underworld...But the world tree can also be interpreted as "the tree of life". Basically "everything between the earth and the sky"...

In which case the eagle symbolises rain (god) and serpent symbolises sun (god)...I talked about this symbolism of eagle and serpent in my post "Eagle snake struggle" in which I analysed the symbolic meaning of the Eagle-Snake struggle mosaic from the palace of the Emperor Justinian I  (527-565), Istambul.

Basically this is a complex animal calendar marker for the thunderstorm season in Europe Apr/May -  Sep/Oct, which is also when migratory snake eagles and snakes can be seen in South Eastern Europe... 

BTW if you look at the above thunderstorm chart, and if you look at the Hittite part of Anatolia, you will see that Apr/May is also the start of the main thunderstorm season there too...

Eagle (Rain) and Snake (Sun)...Whose balance is needed if we want (the tree of) life to flourish. And between them, bees...Without whom...

In Polesye, area along Belarus and Ukraine border, there is a belief that God created bees "to live til the end of the world" and that "when all bees die, the world will end"... More Slavic bee folklore can be found in my post "Bee"... 

You can find lots and lots of posts about eagles and their link to thunder/rain and about snakes and their link to sun on my blog

BTW, I talked about bee as an animal calendar marker in Asia Minor, in my post "Deer and bee", about this Silver tetradrachm from Ephesus minted c. 390–380 BC.

All this helps us understand the Hittite myth about the disappearance of Telipinu, the god of agriculture. His disappearance caused all fertility to fail, both plant and animal. Everyone is looking for him, but finally it is the bee who finds the god after everyone else gave up search. And by finding the missing Telipinu, it is the bee that brings the fertility back to the world...

It is interesting that bees reappear in the spring, when the winter is finally over, and are one of the main signs that the winter (infertile time of the year) has ended and summer (fertile time of the year) had began...

One more thing about Hittites and bees:

Amulet of a bee goddess, 700 - 600 BC. Found in excavations of Kamiros, Rhodes, Greece. One of the nicknames of Persephone, The Queen of the Underworld, was Melitodes ("sweet as honey"), and the priestesses of Demeter and Persephone, were known as Melissae ("bees")...

You can read more about this in "The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Bee"...

Interestingly, Hittites believed that bees were "the gift of The Sun Goddess of the Earth", Hittite equivalent of Persephone, The Queen of the Underworld...

You can read more about this in "Apiculture in Hittite cuneiform texts"...

Both of these Queens of the Underworld were also linked to land fertility...

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...

Zawi Chemi Shanidar

AI prompt: A prehistoric Iranian man, wearing griffin vulture wings on his back and a headdress with ibex horns, standing in a mountain landscape, under dark clouds, holding a long wooden staff.

You are probably all going WTF? 

Ever heard of Zawi Chemi Shanidar?

Zawi Chemi Shanidar was a small settlement located in the Northern Mesopotamia, dating to the late 10th or early 9th mill BC...

It was built and used by the people of the so called Karim Shahir Culture, named after the Karim Shahir archaeological site...

The people of this culture shared many cultural traits with the people of the Natufian culture...

The excavations of the site took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sickles, grinding stones, and querns were found during the excavation testify to the wide use of wild cereals and possible early cereal domestication, basically agriculture...

There is also evidence that by the end of the Zawi Chemi Shanidar's occupation, the residents had domesticated sheep...Basically we are talking about the evidence of Hunter Gatherers evolving into Farmers...You can read more about Zawi Chemi Shanidar in "The Proto-Neolithic People of Zawi Chemi Village and Shanidar Cave in the Western Zagros Highlands"...

This is the area from where "Gods brought grain to Sumer". I talked about this in my post about the Sumerian legend "How grain came to Sumer", which turns out to describe exactly how grain came to Sumer from the north, and which have been over 6000 years old when it was first written down...

Anyway, this is not the most interesting thing about Zawi Chemi Shanidar. There is one discovery that makes this site stand out among other Fertile Crescent sites. During the excavations, a structure was found that appears to have been for religious purposes...

And we believe that this is indeed some kind of a temple, because next to it, archaeologists found a ritual deposit composed of at least 15 skulls of goats and the articulated wing bones of at least 17 huge predator birds, vultures, eagles and a bustard. You can read more about it in "Birds of prey in prehistory and early history"...

Knife marks on the bird bones indicate that they had been carefully cut from the birds. The archaeologists interpreted these wings as part of ritual costumes. The goat skulls were thought to be part of the paraphernalia of the ritual...

But what kind of ritual, no one knows...And so "A prehistoric Iranian man..." This is not just me dreaming up shit. 6000 years later, in the same part of the world, we find this: Proto-Elamite dude with Ibex goat horns cap, Vulture wings cape, and very schmancy shoes...

As I said in my article "Strider", to understand the real meaning of this Proto Elamite figurine, we need to look at the climate in Iran, and at the lifecycles of Ibex goats and Vultures...

The same thing will help us understand the strange find from Zawi Chemi Shanidar. So let's start with climate, which is pretty much the same in Iraq and Iran.

We can see that the climatic year is divided into two halves:

Hot, dry half, Apr/May - Oct/Nov

Cold, wet half, Oct/Nov - Apr/May

Now if you are a farmer in the part of Iraq and Iran which don't lie in the flood plains, then you are totally dependant on rain to water your fields, and the arrival of the rain in Oct/Nov is probably the most important event in your agricultural year.

This is because it is after the first rains that you can start sowing your grain...

And right at that time, in Oct/Nov, Ibex goats start mating...The mating is marked by vicious male goat fights for females...

Coincidence that a good hunter gatherer could't miss...

And as I said before: Mythology is a result of people being very good at noticing patterns in nature and very bad at distinguishing between correlation and causation.

How long do you think it took the first farmers to start believing that it was mating ibex that brought rain?

I first talked about this in my post "A vessel from Tepe Hissar", about this amazing Neolithic vessel from Tepe Hisar. Great example of related animal calendar markers used together. Mating Ibex (start of winter) followed by Mating Leopard (start of spring). Both winter and spring are rainy seasons...Semen turns to flowing water...

The rain (brought by the goat of rain) is what supports (the tree of) life in Iran, Iraq, Levant, Eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia...All the areas with the same climate...And the same ibex goat behaviour...

Which is why in all these places we find ibexes flanking the tree of life. I talked about this in my post "Bactrian Bronze Age menorah"...

Hence, I believe, all the goat heads found next to the Zawi Chemi Shanidar temple. And the goat horns headdress I proposed...

BTW the goat dude seems to have been a thing in the border area between Iraq and Iran for thousands of years.

2000 years before the Proto Elamite goat dude

"Master of Animals" stamp seals, Tepe Giyan, Iran, 5000-4000 BC...From my post "Master of Animals from Tepe Giyan"

Which depicts the eternal struggle between the rain goat (mating of goats marks the beginning of the rain season) and the sun serpent/dragon (mating of snakes marks the beginning of the drought season)...

2000 years after the Proto Elamite goat dude

Dancing goat men, 8th–7th century BC. Luristan, Iran...From my post "Dancing goat men from Luristan"...

Just for completeness, the Zawi Chemi Shanidar goat dudes could have held the goat head mounted on a staff, instead of wearing ibex horns on their headdress...

Or they could have both worn the ibex horns headdress and held ibex goat head mounted on a staff...

If you are interested, you can find pile of articles about ibex, the goat of rain, goat of winter, animal calendar marker for Oct/Nov-Jan/Feb in these articles from my blog...

Now what about the raptors?

All the raptors whose wings were found next to the Zawi Chemi Shanidar temple, are either resident species which mate during the winter/spring rain season or are migratory species which spend winter/spring rain season in the Zawi Chemi Shanidar area...

Bearded vulture, resident, mating during the winter

Griffon vulture, resident, mating during the winter

White tailed sea eagle, winter visitor

Great bustard, winter visitor

Unidentified small eagles??? Could be winter visitors as well...Like steppe eagle

How long do you think it took people from this part of the world to arrive to this: Sumerian god Ningirsu, the oldest thunder god we know by name (?), was in the earliest times imagined as a huge black bird, with outstretched wings...

I talked about this in my post "Eagle dance"...

Eagle dance:

Montenegro 1963AD

Syria, 1800BC

Eagle (vulture) couples dance above the mountains at the beginning of their mating season, which coincides with the beginning of the rain season in Fertile Crescent...

Did they already have this religious idea formed at the time when all those raptor wings were deposited with the goat heads next to the Zawi Chemi Shanidar temple?

I believe so...

Again, for completeness, maybe the the Zawi Chemi Shanidar goat dudes weren't actually goat dudes. Maybe they were eagle dudes, who held the ibex goats (heads or maybe whole goats) in their hands, like this?

Is this the same idea, 7000 years later?

A Kassite period (1595-1155 BC) seal depicting a "bird-demon" 🙂, holding two ibexes, by their hind legs. 

Found in Iraq, UChicago, A29439. The description reads: "Marduk, great lord, on the servant who reverences you show mercy."

What is really depicted here?

I talked about this seal in my post "Kassite bird demon"...

You can read more about vultures and eagles as animal calendar markers linked to rain and thunder in these posts from my blog...

Sooo....What do you think?

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...

How Tenochtitlan was established

In this post I will talk about the back panel of the "Temple of the Sacred War", a monolithic pre-Columbian miniature of an Aztec temple, currently in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City...

I first discovered that this artefact existed when in 2023 I posted this post in X:

Eagle-Snake struggle mosaic from the palace of the Emperor Justinian I  (527-565), Istambul 

is a complex animal calendar marker for the thunderstorm season in Europe Apr/May -  Sep/Oct

when migratory snake eagles can be seen in Europe...

I talked about this in my post "Eagle snake struggle"...

And @JuraPijandura replied with this: Have you ever thought about the same motive in  Aztec civilization? Do they correlate?!

As it turned out, the image he posted was the photo of the back panel of the "Temple of the Sacred War"...

It depicts: "an eagle, representation of the god of war Huitzilopochtli holding in its beak the glyph for war, while standing on a prickly pear cactus which grows out of the goddess of lakes and streams, Chalchiuhtlicue".

The symbol for war consists of two opposite elements - water and fire, forming two streams (most likely one blue and one red) that when put together form the idea of "war".

Each element is a source of energy and life-force but can also be one of destruction. Ever heard of Yin (dark, cold, water, wet, downward, earth) and Yang (light, hot, fire, dry, upward, sun)? Life thrives only where there is balance between these two opposites...

Interestingly, in the language of the Aztecs/Mexica (Náhuatl), the war glyph is called "atl tlachinolli", meaning "water, burnt earth". This indicates that in the war glyph, the fire is the fire of the sun which burns earth, causes drought, and that water is rain water...

If we look at Mexico climate chart we can see that the climatic year is divided into two "opposite" seasons, wet and dry season... 

This is why Aztec year was also divided into two "opposite" seasons: farming (wet) season, Apr/May-Oct/Nov, and war (dry) season, Oct/Nov-Apr/May...

This is also why the main temple of the Aztec/Mexica was topped by paired shrines to (rain god) Tlaloc and (war, and sun, god) Huitzilopochtli...

So sun (fire) vs rain (water) = opposites = conflict = WAR (glyph)...

Sacred War?...War between the sun and rain (gods)?

Sacred War for capturing sacrificial victims that will be sacrificed to the deified "opposing" forces which decide if Aztec/Mexica will live or die???

Ok, back to the back panel of the "Temple of the Sacred War". It's time to look at the local climate and the animals (eagle) and plants (prickly pear) depicted on it, and see if they are just random animals and plants or are we looking at animal and plant calendar markers...

Aztec civilisation developed inside the Valley of Mexico, a highlands plateau in central Mexico surrounded by high mountains, full of rivers which all emptied into the central lakes...

The lakes and most rivers of the Valley of Mexico are now gone, buried under the Mexico City, but some, like Magdalena river are still above ground and their monthly flow chart, published in this article, looks like this:

During the time when Aztec mythology was developed, the wet season in the Valley of Mexico which is Apr/May-Oct/Nov, the season when rivers, and the lakes they fed were full of water, was the season ruled by Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of lakes and streams...And floods...

Why would prickly pear be depicted growing out of the mouth of the goddess Chalchiuhtlicue?

Cause in Mexico, prickly flowering starts in Apr/Jun, start of rain (flowing water) season, and fruit season starts in Jul/Aug, peak of rain (flowing water) season...

Ok, what about the eagle? The eagle is a golden eagle, which in Mexico nests in Mar/Apr/May/Jun. The eggs hatch after about 45 days, and and chicks fledge after about 75 days, in Jul/Aug, peak of the rain (flowing water) season...

So both prickly pear and golden eagle are animal calendar markers for the rain (flowing water) season...Which is also the agricultural season...The fertile season...The season of life...

This is why both golden eagle and prickly pear cactus feature in the Aztec/Mexica myth about the founding of their capital, Tenochtitlan:

Aztecs were looking for a new place to settle. Huitzilopochtli (the sun, war god) told them that they will settle in a place where they see "an eagle with a snake in its beak, standing on a cactus growing from a rock in the middle of a lake".

Finally, after 200 years of wondering through Mexican desert, a scout looking for water saw "an eagle with a snake in its beak, standing on a cactus growing from a rock in the middle of a lake". The lake was lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. 

The Aztecs established their capital city on the island in about 1325AD and named it Tenochtitlan, which means "place where a prickly pear cactus grows from a stone"...

Wow, cactus, eagle...But what's with the snake? Is this another animal calendar marker?

It is. Rattlesnake season in Mexico is Apr/May-Oct/Nov. This is when the rattlesnakes are most active, but also when rattlesnakes mate...And when rattlesnakes mate they dance...

So a golden eagle, devouring a snake, while standing on a prickly pear cactus...Like on this depiction of the Aztec myth from the 16th century "The History of the Indies of New Spain", sometimes referred to as the Durán Codex... 

All animal calendar markers for Apr/May - Oct/Nov, the rain, flowing water, agriculture season. The season of life, peace...As opposed to Oct/Nov - Apr/May, the sun, drought, war season. The season of death...Ruled by Huitzilopochtli...

I will continue with my analysis of the "Temple of the Sacred War" in my next post, where I will talk about Huitzilopochtli...

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...