Goose Salmon Stone

In "The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, July 1895", in the chapter entitled "Discovery of an Ancient Burial Place and a Symbol-Bearing Slab at Easterton of Roseisle" (page 142), we can read this: 

At the end of April, 1895, a still further discovery was made, for, on removing the symbol -bearing slab from the grave, we observed that it was a square sea-beach stone much water worn, and without mark of any tool on it. On the outer side or back of the stone were cut two figures, viz., a bird, either a goose or duck, with webbed feet, and a salmon...

Here is the illustration from the book showing the stone...

And here is a photo of the stone, now in National Museum of Scotland...

A very interesting stone indeed...Why is it decorated with a depiction of a goose and a salmon? 

Ever heard of animal calendar markers? 

Well, this is one, marking Oct/Nov...

Here is why...

In Oct/Nov, huge flocks of pink-footed geese arrive to Scotland from Northern Europe...They spend winter in Scotland and leave in Mar/Apr...More about pink-footed gees in Scotland can be found here...

In Oct/Nov, huge shoals of salmon arrive to Scotland and run up the Scottish rivers to their spawning grounds. This is the best time to see salmon leaping in Scotland...Mora about salmon in Scotland can be found here...

Both are hugely important annual events which happen at the same time, every year, and are not easily missed, if you are a hunter gatherer whose survival over winter depends on these birds and fishes as food sources... 

So, Oct/Nov, the time when gees and salmon arrive to Scotland...Rejoice, the food is here...🙂

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...

Carnage

Carnage...A fragment of a stone relief depicting a scene of a battle, Discovered in 1983 during excavations of the Yubileinoye I settlement on the Taman Peninsula southern Russia. This relief was made in the 4th century. BC. in the Bosporan Greek workshop...

Now the guys who commissioned this relief were not Greeks or Scythians...They were Maeotians, an ancient people dwelling along the Sea of Azov, which was known in antiquity as the "Maeotian marshes" or "Lake Maeotis"

These guys had a complicated relationship with both Bosporan Greeks and Scythians. Most of the time they were actually enemies of Scythians and the allies of the Bosporan Greeks...Other times...They were in process greatly influenced by both Bosporan Greeks and Scythians...

The scene depicted on the relief is one of utter carnage...Among the chaos, it is easy to miss "the interesting bits". So I have tilted the image slightly and have added some notes to it (based on the translation from "Военное дело синдомеотов"

On the left in the foreground is a man with long hair; he is wearing a large torc around his neck, and a bow and arrow is suspended from the belt on his left side...

In his raised right hand, he holds a small spear, pointed downward, the strange position of which suggests that this warrior is defeated by the enemy or, possibly, doomed to death...

His enemy on the right had grabbed him by the hair, and has a sword raised to strike. Probably, this second warrior is mounted on a horse, whose head, with a wide opened eye, as well as part of the neck and chest, is visible in front of him...

The most interesting bit: Suspended to the horse's bridle are two severed human heads, hanging upside down...

Now remember this: Celts, "When their enemies fall, cut off their heads and fasten them about the necks of their horses...." (Diodorus Siculus). 

I talked about the head cutting Celts in my article "Head cutters"...

Also remember that Scythians also liked cutting their enemies' heads off.

I talked about this in my article "Helmet?"...

So, Celts and Maeotians hanged the severed heads of the dead enemies from their horse's bridles...Celts, Scythians and Maeotians collected human heads as trophies...

Who started it? Where? When?

Helmet?

This amazing object is officially described like this: "Gold parade helmet with the image of warriors. Scythian culture. Found in the mound of Peredereyev Grave (Передереева Могила), Zrubnoe. Donetsk region, Eastern Ukraine. 4st century BC"...But...

Is it possible that this is not a "ceremonial helmet" but instead a "ceremonial cup" used in human sacrifices? Well the scene depicted on the vessel surely shows a man about to be slaughtered...

Herodotus says that: "Of all their enemies that they take alive, they sacrifice one man in every hundred...to their god Aries...which they represent by a scimitar placed on a pile of sticks..."

"They pour wine on the men's heads and cut their throats over a vessel; then they carry the blood up on to the pile of sticks and pour it on the scimitar"...Is this the vessel used for collection of the sacrificial blood??

Oh, and Herodotus also says that "Scythians drank the blood of the first person they have overthrown"...You need cups for that too...Like this one? More from Herodotus on Scythians can be found here. 

PS: I was just shown this pic of the top of this object, from "Images of scythians on the “helmet” from perederieva mohyla kurgan"

Cups usually don't have holes at their bottoms...So... 🙂

PPS: Another similar strange object, found in 1898 in Kurghip tumulus, Krasnodar, Maykop district, Russia. Gold. Height 5,4 cm. Dated to 4th century. BC...Two warriors, one holding a sword and the other holding a severed head of an enemy, holding onto a spear together...Is this some ritual? Definitely confirms that Scythians liked cutting heads of their enemies off...

Nakovana

This is the abandoned Nakovana village located near the tip of the Pelješac Peninsula in Southern Dalmatia, Croatia...

The name Nakovana is related to the Slavic word "nakovanj", meaning "anvil", most likely because of the shape of this nearby hill. It is known today locally as Grad (City), because of the ruins of a huge Illyrian fortress which once stood on its top...

The fortress was destroyed during the Octavian's Illyrian campaign which lasted 8 years, from 35 to 27 BC, and encompassed almost the entire eastern Adriatic and much of its hinterland...

During the first year of operations, the Roman army massacred the native populations of the islands of Korčula and Mljet. Historical sources do not say whether the Illyrians on the Pelješac peninsula met the same faith...

But the archaeological survey of the region found virtually no traces of occupation during the Early Imperial or Late Roman periods. This is an unusual situation in Dalmatia, where those periods often account for the bulk of archaeological remains...

Most likely, the conquering Romans could not tolerate a native stronghold at such a key strategic position and they most likely destroyed it and turned the surrounding area into a wasteland. The local population was either exterminated or expelled...

How important Nakovana fort was during the Illyrian times can be seen from the fact that over 50 stone tumuli (cairns) are strewn over the fields surrounding the fort. Like the one on this picture shown with the Grad fortress in the background...

These are burials of important people, most likely the aristocracy of the era and the time - the people who built and lived in the Grad fortress. None of the tumuli have been excavated so far...

You have probably never heard of Nakovana before...Unless you are an archaeologist with an interest in Dalmatian prehistory...But you should have. And the fact that Nakovana is not famous world wide beggars belief...

The reason why Nakovana should be famous is not because of its Illyrian fortress and its tumuli...It is because of this cave that lies near the fortress. 

It is the same cave I talked about in my article about the Neolithic maritime trade...

The reason why Nakovana should be famous is not (just) because the lithics found in the cave's front chamber are the proof of the maritime trade network which existed for thousands of years in the South of the Adriatic Sea...

The reason why Nakovana should be famous was discovered in the cave's second chamber which was deliberately sealed, probably immediately before or after the Illyrian fortress Grad was destroyed by the Romans...

This is how the archaeologists who discovered this hidden chamber described the event:

And what they discovered in the hidden chamber is this: A large gleaming white stalagmite in a shape of a phallus...

The stalagmite sits on top of a series of superimposed prehistoric layers, the earliest being from Early Copper Age and dated to the mid-fourth millennium BC. A direct radiocarbon date on the base of the stalagmite suggests that it began to grow about 3600 years ago...

The floor of the chamber was strewn with broken high quality pottery, mostly drinking cups, mostly imported and mostly Greek, broken and deposited there as sacrifice...

The fact that the pottery was Greek made, doesn't mean that Greeks deposited there. Some of the cairns surrounding the Grad fortress, were looted in the past. What remains in and around them shows that the character of the funerary rite is unquestionably Illyrian...

The people were buried with locally made Iron Age jewellery, handmade pottery, and fairly often, fragments of fine Hellenistic ceramic vessels, identical to those from the cave...

Illyrians were famous maritime traders and pirates and they pretty much controlled the southern Adriatic for hundreds of years...

And the Nakovana Grad fortress controlled one of the most strategically important points, the entrance into the Neretva river which was the entrance into the Balkan hinterland...

Which is the reason why the Romans eventually wiped them out...

By the way, were Illyrians the descendants of the people who controlled the Southern Adriatic since Neolithic??? Just putting this out there for people to think about it...

The broken pottery was deposited around the stalagmite, showing that it was the centre of the cultic activities in the cave. The earliest pottery shards deposited next to the stalagmite date to the 4th century BC, around the time of the Alexander the Great...

Now this is very very interesting...

If I didn't tell you where this cave was, you would be forgiven to think that this was a Siva lingam cave temple located somewhere in India...

I wonder if this Illyrian sanctuary predates or postdates Alexander's Indian campaign and who was celebrated in a shape of a lingam in this cave???

The archaeologists who excavated the cave say Silvanus, Pan...

Hmm...Possibly...

Believe or not, as impressive as this phallus looks like :)  this is not the most amazing thing found in the hidden chamber of the Nakovana cave...The most amazing thing was found among the rubble deposited around it...

Among hundreds of pottery shards, archaeologists have also found several pieces of ivory with engraved astrological signs, which once formed part of an astrologer's horoscope board...The oldest so far found horoscope in the world...

I am here talking about Greek horoscopic astrology, which is believed to have been invented in late Ptolemaic Egypt, in the 2nd or early 1st c. BC...

Now we know that the Nakovana cave was sealed around 35BC. So the horoscope board deposited next to the stalagmite must have been made before that. Radiocarbon dating actually points to much earlier date...

The age obtained by the accelerator mass spectrometry is 2217±21 B.P. The calibrated range of two standard deviations is the period between 375 and 204 BC, with an asymmetrical probability distribution leaning towards the 3rd c. BC...

In plain English, the animal from which the ivory was obtained was killed in the 3rd century BC...

Archaeologists who discovered this amazing artefact say: "It is believed horoscope was invented in Egypt, late 2nd, early 1st c. BC. Therefore, the Nakovana zodiac could not have been made before the 2nd c. BC (probably not much before 100 BC), meaning that the ivory used to make it was at least hundred years old"...

Now I don't know for how long a piece of ivory is usually left lying around before it is cut and carved into sellable objects, but I don't think it was left to "age" for over 100 years...

Why playing it down? "It is believed (!!!) that horoscope was invented in Egypt in late 2nd, early 1st c. BC"...What if it wasn't? What if it was invented somewhere else? Earlier? And brought to Egypt from there?

I have been writing about zodiac for a while...One of the things that I have discovered is that zodiac signs, as they are positioned in this "Ptolemaic Greek zodiac" mark the annual lifecycle events of the depicted animals in Europe. You can read about this in this series of articles about Zodiac signs (work in progress)...

As if someone observed the significant annual behavior (mating and birthing) of the animals in Europe, and derived the zodiac signs from that behavior: Pisces - mating season of Europan salmon, Cancer - mating season of Atlantic crabs and European crayfish, Taurus - calving season of European Aurochs...

By the way, I am here talking about the horoscope zodiac circle the way we know it today. Not animal solar calendar markers found in many cultures in Eurasia and North Africa over last 10,000 years. I wrote about those extensively too. You can read about this in this series of articles about Solar calendar markers (work in progress)...

Do you see now why I think that it is completely unbelievable that Nakovana is not a famous archaeological site? 

Sources

Text and images:

"Zodijak iz Nakovane" by S. Forenbaher, A. Jones

"Recognizing Ritual in the Dark: Nakovana Cave and the End of the Adriatic Iron Age" by T. Kaiser and S. Forenbaher

Images:

The oldest horoscope board 

Nakovana tourism

Taurides

This is a very interesting vessel from Kizil-Koba settlement, fragment and reconstruction. Kizil-Koba Culture was an archaeological culture that existed in the mountain and foothill regions of the Crimea in the ninth to sixth centuries B.C.

The material similarity between Kizil-Koba culture and Koban culture of the northern Caucasus has led to the supposition that the two were genetically linked and that the Kizil-Koba culture originated in the Caucasus. Kizil-Koba pottery. Probable cheese curd strainer bottom right

The Kizil-Koba culture has been also linked with the Tauri tribes of transhumance shepherds which at the time lived in the mountains of southern Crimea. Map showing Kizil-Koba settlements (circle) and Taurian cemeteries (square).

Kizil-Koba settlements, consisting of pit-houses or aboveground wattle-and-daub houses with numerous grain pits around, had no fortifications. The excavations unearthed bronze decorations, arrowheads, parts of horse harness similar with the artifacts found in Taurian cists.

The Taurian cists were about one meter in diameter, made from four massive stone walls stuck into the ground and a massive cover stone. They were encircled by pebble pavement surrounded by square stone fence

Some necropoleis consisted of a few grave constructions, the other contained tens of cists sometimes located in parallel lines.

Cists were used for multiple burials. It seems that when cist got full, the bones were removed and only skulls kept. One cist in Mal-Muz cemetery contained 68 skulls.  

Kizil-Koba Household pits contained a few dozen artefacts of ill- baked clay including anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines,  like these two, probably of cultic nature 

The local population mixed with Greeks who set up colonies along the Crimean coast. Example of this mixing can be seen in the settlement and necropolis of Panskoye, village near Greek Chersonesos 

Herodotus says that "...Tauri...live by plundering and war...they sacrifice their captives...to the Virgin goddess...The Tauri themselves say that this deity to whom they sacrifice is Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia...."

And this is very very interesting. The Greeks called the Tauric goddess Artemis Tauropolos and also linked it with Iphigeneia, daughter of Agamemnon... 

According to Euripides, the cult of the bloodthirsty Artemis Tauropolos was brought to Greece by Orestes and Iphigenia, who brought a wooden statue of Artemis to Sparta where she was from then on worshiped as Artemis Orthia

The whole story about how Iphigenia finds herself among the Tauri and how and why she gets the Artemis statue from Tauri to Spartans is very strange....

Apparently King Agamemnon accidentally kills a deer in a grove sacred to Artemis and is forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess to repay his debt. But goddess changes her mind at the last moment and replaces Iphigenia with a deer which is then killed...

Artemis then transports Iphigenia to Tauris where she becomes the priestess in Taurid Artemis temple, directing human sacrifices...

When her brother Orestes is captured by Taurides and was brought to the temple to be sacrificed to Artemis by Iphigenia, two of them instead steel the statue and run away to Greece. And as I said, according to Euripides, they bring the statue to Sparta...

In Sparta the wooden statue of Artemis becomes the centre of a major cult. During the excavation of the temple, numerous female offering statues were discovered. Possibly symbolic replacement for actual female sacrificial victims??? Or the depictions of the Goddess?

But the Tauride goddess still demanded blood. As described by Plutarch Xenophon Pausanias and Plato, the temple of Artemis was the place where once a year young men were ritually whipped until they bled and the blood sprayed the statue of the goddess

Here is the best bit: During the Roman period, according to Cicero, the ritual became a blood spectacle, sometimes to the death, with spectators from all over the empire 🙂 An amphitheatre had to be built in the 3rd century CE to accommodate the tourists

Bloody Romans 🙂 

Sources:

Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia
Очерки этнической истории Крыма в раннем железном веке. Тавры. Скифы. Сарматы
Essays on the archaeology and ancient hystory of the black sea littoral
PONTIKA 2008 Recent Research on the Northern and Eastern Black Sea in Ancient Times

Northern Etruscans

The Pomeranian culture, was an Iron Age culture with origins in parts of the area south of the Baltic Sea, from the 7th c. to the 3rd c. BC, which eventually covered most of today's Poland

People of the Pomeranian culture made these amazing bronze collars.

These collars are commonly thought of being jewellery but it is possible that they were a type of a neck armour. These are depiction of warriors from Tiryns Peloponnese (c. 1500-1200 BC). Bronze statuettes of warrior from Sardinia Italy (c. 1900 BC). Both wearing ring neck amour.

This type of armour was found in Italy (c. 2000-1600 BC).

From Greek age of Bronze.

Pomeranian culture is also known as face urn culture. Reason for that is that they put ashes of the deceased in urns with sculpted faces, possibly resembling the faces of the deceased.

Now interestingly, at the same time, or a bit earlier (they first appear during the 8th centuries BC. ) in Italy, Etruscans also made urns with faces.

I love the more stylised design of the older versions of these Etruscan face urns, like these 4.

One of the most striking examples, to me anyway, is this one. It could have been made in 1930s...

At the same time when both people in Etruria and in South Baltic made face urns, the people in both places also made house urns.

The House Urns culture was an early Iron Age culture of the 7th century BC in central Germany, in the Region between Harz Mountains and the junction of river Saale to river Elbe. It was the western periphery of the bronze and Iron Age Lusatian culture.

At the same time (actually slightly earlier) in Italy, we find Villanova culture, (Early Etruscan culture) which also made house shaped urns

The most elaborate house urns made in Italy come from the Etruscan city of Vulci and date to the 9th century BC. They are made of bronze.

One of my favourite Etruscan house urns is this one, today kept in Vatican museum. Some people will find symbols adorning this urn interesting. I particularly like this one:

Etruscans loved amber, and amber comes from South Baltic. So the trade connection between the two places definitively existed during the time when these two urn traditions developed in both Italy and South Baltic.

Villanovans, early Etruscans, were master amber carvers

What is interesting is that both urn traditions are developed earlier and to the much higher level in Etruria. This points to the corresponding North European traditions being cultural exports from Etruria.

Cultural exports brought along the amber road? The shortest route directly connects these two cultural areas.

These cultural traits are not present along the whole length of the Amber Road. Does this indicate the presence of the Etruscan settlers in the South Baltic area? Maybe to control the amber trade?

Latest Etruscan genetic data shows that they were a very mixed population...But "...the finding of the Central European lineage G2a-L497 (7.1%) at considerable frequency would rather support a Northern European origin of Etruscans"...

Interesting...