Eyes

What is the best way to symbolically depict "Mother Earth"? 

Well, place mountains, plants and animals between wide open eyes and vulva...Simple...

Decorated bone depicting slightly bewildered "Mother Earth", 6th - 5th millennium BC, Hagoshrim, Southern Levant.

Decorated bone depicting Mother Earth with a stern "I am watching you!" expression, 6th - 5th millennium BC, Neve Yam, Southern Levant...

Reconstruction of a stone palette depicting Mother Earth who...well...had enough and is ready for bed...6th - 5th millennium BC, Ein Zippori, Southern Levant...

This symbolic depiction of the Mother Earth later found its way to Upper Euphrates. Stele of Mari, found in a pit at the temple of Ninhursag...

Now remember this? 6th mil BC, Balkans. No eyes, but the "important" bit, plants growing out of the vulva, is there...Early Vinča Culture terracotta figurine from Jela, Iron Gate region of the Danube, Serbia, c. 5200 BC...

The oldest European one from Lepenski Vir is from c. 8000BC. Anyone knows of any Levantine examples from before 8000BC?

These Levantine Mother Goddess depictions are from this article:  "Iconographic motifs from the 6th–5th millennia BC in the Levant and Mesopotamia: Clues for cultural connections and existence of an interaction sphere"...

BTW, these guys were farmers, grain farmers...This is very important...So this Mother Earth is Mother of Grain...This girl

Left: Anthropomorphic vessel with breasts, Neolithic Lengyel culture (5000-3400 BC)

Right: Anthropomorphic vessel with breasts and grain ears (?) instead of hands, Chalcholitic Baden culture (3600–2800 BC) which developed from Lengyel culture.

Both from Central Europe...

I talked about this in my post "Femal pots from Europe"...

Female pots from Europe

Anthropomorphic vessel with breasts, Neolithic Lengyel culture (5000-3400 BC)

Anthropomorphic vessel with breasts and grain ears (?) instead of hands, Chalcholitic Baden culture (3600–2800 BC) which developed from Lengyel culture

I wrote about these two vessels in these posts, "Baden culture grain maiden" and "So Indoeuropean" and I asked the question: are we looking at this, grain goddess, later known as Demeter/Persephone? See the posture?

If you are interested in Demeter/Persephone you might also find this article "Who are Persephone's parents" interesting. It talks about snakes in Persephone/Demeter cult...

Now have a look at this:

Left: Anthropomorphic vessel with breasts, 3000-2000BC Troy, Turkey

Right: Anthropomorphic vessel with breasts and vagina, 3000-2000BC Lemnos, Greece

Interesting, right? This is obviously the same cultural trait, which first appeared in Neolithic Central Europe and then traveled down to Anatolia and Greece during Chalcolithic and Bronze Age...

We know that these areas were connected. The same type of butter churners was found from Central Europe, through Greece (Lemnos), Asia Minor (Troy) to Levant (Gilat) during the period 5000-1000BC...I talked about this in my post "Milk, butter, cheese"...

The distribution of butter churns could be just a sign of technological exchange along trade routes, if it wasn't for the fact that milk consumption was rare during this time, as it depended on milk tolerance, which is a genetic trait passed from parents to their children...

Does this mean then that these cultures were somehow related? I mean not just culturally, as seen by the female vessels found in both Central Europe and Greece and Anatolia, but also genetically? I know Lengyel and Baden genes (I2a, G2a). What about Troy, Lemnos, Gilat?

Maybe there are other examples of these "female pots" with raised arms? I didn't spend much time looking into this so any additional info would be appreciated...

Female pots...Female pots...Have you seen these female pots from Late Neolithic Chalcolithic Central Europe? With birth diver "M"(ama) symbol depicted on them? I talked about these pots in my post "Mama"...

Female pots...Female pots...Did you read my post "The female pots from Sudan", about the female pots with boobs used as granaries and the (likely) remnants of the Neolithic grain goddess cult found in Sudan?

Interestingly the female pots we are talking about served as urns...Remember the link between the pot and the "womb (of the mother goddess)" preserved in Nigeria, also (likely) remnant of the Neolithic grain goddess cult?

The same Neilithic grain goddess cult found all over Eurasia too. This cult probably originated in the Fertile Crescent in the first farming communities, and was from there spread to Europe, Asia and Africa...

The female pots symbolising the body of the grain goddess, mother earth, would explain all the pithos (large storage vessels used as granaries) burials found all over Western Anatolia in the 3rd millennium BC. You can read more about it in "Early Bronze Age Burial Customs in Western Anatolia"...

When and where did this custom appear first?

Female pots from Sudan

Fur women from Sudan making clay pots...Pic from "Sudan Notes and Records Vol. 22, No. 1 (1939)". 

And in there we read that Fur people regarded pots, their making and their use, as "female" only and a taboo for men...

For instance, in the above article we can read that when ethnographers asked Fur men how do you say in their language "he lit fire under "burma" (pot used in brewing beer)", the reply was that "you can't say that in our language, cause only women can do that"...

The authors then say that this taboo most likely originates from the ancient association between pots and goddess [mother earth] as for instance "in Nigeria, pots are still associated with mother goddess and a pot is a symbol for a female genitals"...

In "Nile Valley archaeology and Darfur ethnography: the impact of women on cultural evolution. A personal reflection" Randi Haaland gives us further info about this association between pots and women in Fur society:

"The Fur used terms for body parts to describe parts of pots in addition they explicitly associated pots as females, and in particular with motherhood occasionally manifested by placing two protrusions called nansu (breasts) on pots..."

"...Grain storage pots were made by women and only accessed by women...Body terms are used for different parts of the container such as stomach, neck and mouth. And these granary pots are made with features resembling breasts."

It seems that not only pots were exclusively in the female domain. Any grain processing and storing equipment was under strict female control too...Like a cooking fireplace, which is exclusively controlled by a woman. And grinding stones...

"Women in the village were making their own grinding stones. Suitable raw material was found in only one area, where a fine grained sandstone was located. Women had their own quarry where they extracted the raw material and did the rough shaping of the grinders..."

"...The making and using of grindstones were closely associated with female identity, so much so that when grinders are used in male dominated activities like iron production, it is only women who perform the task of grinding the ore."

These taboos are all linked with tools used for storing, grinding, cooking grain. Which indicates that they all come from the grain cult, which directly links woman, mother and female fertility and earth, mother earth and earth fertility...

This is confirmed by this taboo:

"Porridge and beer, both made from the same raw material – millet – are both made by women. In Fur tradition, they were set apart from other food items in the sense that the selling of these products would imply an activity classified as shameful, similar to selling sex."

This elevation of grain, grain food and grain drink to a level of holy food is very interesting...It must be very very old, coming from the time when grain was rare luxury. I believe that this grain cult most likely arrived to Sudan with the Neolithic farmers.

And got preserved in Sudan isolated until present time. We actually find evidence of the existence of such cult in archaeological, historical and ethnographic data throughout Eurasia from Neolithic until present day...

The remnants of this female grain cult were preserved in European "folklore" to this day, particularly among Slavs...I talked about this a lot already, like in this post about the "Mother of grain"...

The symbolic link between women and earth depicted on this Early Vinča Culture terracotta figurine from Jela, Iron Gate region of the Danube, Serbia, c. 5200 BC, H. 5.3 cm, which has a branching plant growing out of the womb...

I have been meaning to talk about the female cult of the bread baking pottery from Serbia for a while, but I always get distracted with something else, so...But I promise I will get to it soon...

PS: I want to thank my friend @dalaygiz for reminding me of this amazing Bronze Age terracotta couple from Tell Marlik in Iran. The man is depicted with a knife and a woman with a...pot...

Mother of grain

MOTHER Earth...The symbolic link between women and earth depicted on this Early Vinča Culture terracotta figurine from Jela, Iron Gate region of the Danube, Serbia, c. 5200 BC, H. 5.3 cm, which has a branching plant growing out of the womb...Pic from "The Body of Woman as Sacred Metaphor"...

It is interesting that this Neolithic Early Vinča culture depiction of the mother goddess was found in the same region where in Mesolithic we find Lepenski Vir culture, whose people made exactly the same image out of a bone...5000 years earlier...around 10,600 BC. It was found at Cuina Turcului, a rock shelter in the Iron Gates gorges on the Danube river, Romania.

The symbolic depiction of a mother earth as a woman is kind of easy to understand. They both give birth to things...

What is interesting is that Slavs who live in the area today, have preserved this symbolic depiction of the mother earth as a female...

Baba, the word which means Mother, Grandmother, Midwife...Birth Giver...The rock which gives birth to life...Which is why we have so many rocky mountain peaks in the Balkans named Baba. Like this one, "Baba's tooth" from Stara Planina (Old Mountain) You can find many more examples in my post "Baba, mountains and crags"...

That mountain alone has all these toponyms and hydronyms with Baba (mother, grandmother) in them...

But Slavs have also preserved something else: belief that female fertility and earth fertility, particularly agricultural fertility, and even more specifically grain fertility, are directly linked, and that one can affect the other...

Which is why we have Slavic agricultural rituals like these: In the past in Russia, after the last sheaf of grain was cut, women harvesters would lie down on the ground and roll around the field "to return the strength to the earth"...I talked about this in my post "Walking sheafs of wheat"...

Or why we have Slavic beliefs like this: A pregnant woman was forbidden to climb fruit trees or even touch them, because "the tree would dry out" (she would steal the tree's fertile energy for her own pregnancy)...I talked about this in my post "Planting tree when the child is born"... 

Or why bread oven is called "baba" (mother, grandmother, midwife, birth giver, mother earth)...I talked about this in my post "Baba, earthen bread oven"...

Now back to our mother earth figurines. The people from Lepenski vir who made that figurine depicting plants growing out of the womb of the mother earth, also made these: womb stones. Sculpture from the hearth of house No. 51, Lepenski Vir (9500–6000 BC, Serbia). It shows a vulva in a specific physiological state, just before giving birth, with all its anatomical details...Photo: From "Lepenski Vir" by Dragoslav Srejović 1972...

They also made very strange trapezoidal shaped houses dated to 6300-6000BC. 

They are all shaped like a flat top pyramid they could see from their settlement. Why? Because every summer solstice, the sun rose on top of it...I talked about this in my post "Sun on top of pyramid"...

Interestingly the only other example of a house like this was a Natufian culture "shrine", dated to 12,600-10,000 BC. I talked about this in my post "Natufian house"...

Natufians also made lots of stones like these...The pic is from this paper "The Natural Inspiration for Natufian Art: Cases from Wadi Hammeh 27, Jordan" which says that "They have sometimes been referred to as ‘shaft straighteners’ with the idea being that they were used to straighten bone or wooden shafts, perhaps when heated..."

"This function is unlikely, however, given direct observations of traditional artisans and experimental reconstructions of these objects’ use. Wooden spears or shafts are usually straightened by hand while being held over a fire..."

"Alternatively, the grooved stones were probably used to abrade softer materials such as Phragmites reeds, while drawing shafts back and forth through the cavity formed by binding two stones tied together with the grooves opposed..."

So we don't know what these stones were used for. That they were tools becomes doubtful (at least to me) when we know that they also made decorated, stones of the same type...The pic is from the same above article...

And this is why I don't think these were tools. The same type of objects, just made from clay, were found deposited in a sacrificial pit in the 7th mill BC early grain farming Starčevo culture Blagotin settlement in Serbia. I talked about this in my post "Blagotin"...

These were the guys who brought grain to Europe...The guys who built temple dedicated to grain. 

If we look at the clay objects from Blagotin, we can see that the groves made in them are too wide and shallow to be used for any kind of straightening of anything...

Which is why they were interpreted by Serbian archaeologists as "grain seed models", grain fertility idols...Now if you squint you will see that they don't just look like grain seeds. They also look like vulvas...Vulvas made of stone and clay, made of the body of mother earth...

Starčevo culture was ancestral culture of the Vinča culture...So we have come full circle...Hence plants growing out of the womb of the Vinča culture idol...But also out of the womb of the Lepenski Vir idol. Which predates Starčevo...

I recently came across this: A gynomorphic (woman like) figurine made of "soil mixed with chaff and grain seeds" from Grčac, Serbia. Proto-Starčevo culture, 6200-5500 BC. Direct symbolic link between earth, grain and female fertility. Basically, "Mother of Grain"...

Now that I think about it, the plant is most likely grain...These are symbols for grain from Mesopotamia and Central Asia...

This (widespread) belief that plants (especially grain) grow out of the womb of the mother earth was for the first time spelled out in Mesopotamia, where in "The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi" we find these verses:

"...Before my lord, Dumuzi,

I poured out plants from my womb.

I placed plants before him,

I poured out plants before him.

I placed grain before him,

I poured out grain before him,

I poured out grain before my womb..."

BTW, every year during the harvest, a man and a woman performed ritual sexual act on a threshing floor, imitating Inanna (earth, womb) and Enki (sweet water, seed) consummating their holy marriage. I talked about this in my post "Sacred marriage on the threshing floor"...

The result of which was grain grew out of Inanna's womb...

And so on and so forth...I will end this rambling article here. Got to go and make dinner...

PS: Forgot to say that Natufians were some of the first people to eat, gather and maybe even grow grain...I talked about this in my post "How grain came to Sumer"...

Three sacrifices

In this article I will talk about two (actually three) sacrifices, which marked the beginning and the end of the Trojan war...

7th c. BC Mykonos pithos. 

It contains the oldest depiction of the Trojan Horse, the way Homer described it...

Now in my article "Trojan horse", I talked about the proposition by the Italian naval archaeologist, Francesco Tiboni, that the famed Trojan horse was not a horse at all, but a ship, with a horse head on the prow...

Like this one, from a depiction of Phoenician ships found in the palaces of Assyrian kings from the 7th and 8th centuries BCE.

It is because of this that the Greeks called the Phoenician ships "horses", and the Phoenicians "the horse people".

Tiboni says that "it would make far more sense to think of the Greeks' treacherous gift to the Trojans as a ship, because nautical 'hippos' were commonly used to carry tributes to the enemy - such as precious metals - after defeats."

"A ship's hold would also have made a better hiding place for soldiers than a wooden horse's belly. And a reference in Virgil's Aeneid to wary Trojans calling for the sinking of the Greek gift seems odd outside of a nautical context." concludes Tiboni...

I agree with Tiboni. But my article was not about what Trojan horse really was. My article was about the fact that both Phoenicians and Greeks had sea gods associated with horses...Very strange...

Well, strange that is, until you look at the sailing season in the Eastern Mediterranean and the natural mating season of horses, which is characterised by vicious stallion fights...They pretty much overlap...

When horses start their mad mating fights, in Apr, it's time to put your ships into the water...

When horses stop their mad mating fights, in Sep, it's time to take your ships out of the water...

Why? Cause of the weather...And particularly because of the winds...This table, from a South Aegean Yachting site, gives directions of the prevailing winds in Aegean sea during the sailing season: Apr-Oct...

Even today, with much better boats, this is the safe sailing season...Because of the fact that this is when the persistent Northerly trade winds blow over the Aegean...

They start in Apr, but stabilise in May, and blow towards Levant and Egypt until Sep, when they become unstable again and cease all together in October...

These are "etesian" winds, and I talked about them in my post "Anat", about this Semitic "warrior" goddess worshipped by the Canaanites & Egyptians during the Bronze and Iron Ages.

She was a sister and the right hand woman of the rain god Baal...Interestingly, Baal's enemies were two brothers, Mot, the god of death, and Yam, the sea god...Strange division of power, right?

Well, apparently, Mot, the god of death, was by the people of Levant equated with the sun...I talked about this in my post "Oldest Arabic poem"...

Not surprising considering that we find sun as the god of death in Middle East since the time of Sumerians...Nergal, the destructive sun of the late summer...Which is the strongest and most deadly in Jul/Aug...In Leo...Hence, Nergal the lion man...I talked about this in my post "Winged superhuman hero"...

If we look at the climate in Levant, we can see that the climatic year is divided into cool wet season, ruled by Baal, and hot dry season, ruled by Mot...Hot, dry season being also the sailing season, we end up with brothers Mot and Yam, "natural" enemies of Baal...

So in the Anat mythology, she is said to have killed Arsh, a monstrous attendant of Yam, the sea god and "the darling of the gods"...In order to bring Baal back to power...Apparently Arsh means "towards the land"...Who is Arsh? Who does Anat kill?

Well, the "etesian" winds of course, which blow "towards the land" of Levant and Egypt during the hot, dry season in the Eastern Mediterranean. And which stop blowing right when the hot, dry season, ruled by Mot, Sun, ends and the cool, wet season, ruled by Baal starts...

Sooooo....What the hell does any of this have to do with the beginning and the end of the Trojan war????? 🙂

Well, a lot...You want to sail in Aegean sea, you need to know all of the above, very very well...

Sorry about the long intro, but I think it was necessary...

You see, the Greeks could not have set sail for Troy, at the beginning of the war, before the beginning of the sailing season, in Apr...And they couldn't have set sail for Greece, at the end of the war, after the end of the sailing season, in Oct...

Wait, the prevailing winds in the Aegean during the sailing season are northerly winds...And if the Greeks wanted to sail across the sea, they needed to have a keel (A large beam along the underside of a ship’s hull from bow to stern which gives the ship's structure its rigidity), in order to stabilise the ship, and allow them to sail with the side winds...

Well, the oldest shipwreck we have (last time I checked) with a keel is Uluburun shipwreck, a shipwreck of a Late Bronze Age Phoenician ship, dating to ca. 1400 BC.

Here is the ship structure with the central keel and the horse head stem invented by Phoenicians...Looks familiar to anyone?

But did Greeks have ships with keels? Well, based on the available depictions of ancient Greek ships, they definitely did...Way back in the 3rd millennium BC...This Minoan seal is from 2000BC from this great site: "The Greek Age of Bronze"...

Unfortunately, we don't have any actual shipwrecks to prove this. But considering that Greeks were able to sail from Aulis, where they assembled, to Troy, and back, using side Northerly winds, proves that they must have had boats with keels...

Well, they could have done it technically, providing there was wind...And here we come to the two sacrifices, which I mentioned way up there in the first tweet, and which marked the beginning and the end of the Trojan war...

Finally...🙂

The sacrifice that marks the beginning of the Trojan war, is the famous one, the sacrifice of Iphigenia: 

"As the Greek fleet gathers in Aulis to prepare for war against Troy, Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, kills a deer in a grove sacred to the goddess Artemis."

"Artemis punishes Agamemnon by STOPPING THE WINDS, so that Agamemnon's fleet cannot sail to Troy. Calchas the seer tells Agamemnon that to appease Artemis, he must sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia."

"At first Agamemnon refuses, but pressured by the other commanders, he finally agrees. Iphigenia gets either killed, or at the last moment replaced with a deer by Artemis herself, who accepts the sacrifice, RESTARTS THE WINDS, and the Greeks sail to Troy."

Here is a typical depiction of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Greek, 450-400 BC. Kiel Antikensammlung Kunsthalle B538. 

The sacrifice that marks the end of the Trojan war, the sacrifice of Polixena/Polixene is less well known: 

"An oracle prophesied that Troy would not be defeated if Trojan Princess Polyxena's brother, Prince Troilus, reached the age of twenty."

"So, Achilles kills Troilus and then falls in love with Polyxena and tells her about his vulnerable heel. She then tells that to her brothers, Paris and Deiphobus, who ambush Achilles in the temple of Apollo, and shoot him in the heel with an arrow, guided by Apollo himself."

"After the burial, Achilles' ghost comes back to the Greeks to demand that Polyxena is sacrificed "so as to appease the wind needed to set sail back to Greece". Polyxena, gets sacrificed, the winds start blowing and the Greeks sail away."

Interesting...

While depictions of the sacrifice of Iphigenia are quite subdued, the depictions of the sacrifice of Polyxena are anything but...

The most famous one is this gruesome image, showing Polyxene's throat being slit over the sacrificial fire alter, from an Atic black-figured amphora, dated to 570BC-550BC. Currently in the British Museum...

The second most famous one is this one from the so called "Polyxena sarcophagus", a late 6th century BC sarcophagus from Phrygia.

Anyone still here? 🙂

Interesting, right...Two sacrifices of young princesses, to get good winds...

And two questions:

Was there once a custom to sacrifice girls "for good winds"?

When did Greeks make these sacrifices? At what time of the year?

I can't answer the first question. I believe so, but can't prove it...

But,I can answer the second question, and I think I can give you the approximate time of the year of  the beginning and the end of the Trojan war...Cool right?

Spoiler: the same time of the year...

So we know that the Greeks could only sail from Aulis to Troy from April to October...We know that they had to sacrifice Iphigenia to get the winds "start blowing again". So this must have been sometime after the beginning of the sailing season...Which is April...

But when exactly? Which month? To answer this, we will first have to look at the third sacrifice...The one that took place during the first gathering of the Greek army at Aulis...Before their first attempt to reach Troy, which failed miserably cause no one knew where Troy was.🙂

So, after all the ships gathered at Aulis, Greeks performed a sacrifice...

Homer, in Iliad, doesn't specify to which god did Greeks make their sacrifice.

But Apollodorus, in Epitome, explicitly states that they sacrificed to Apollo.

Why did the Greeks sacrifice to Apollo before sailing for Troy? 

Well, when does the sailing season start? 

In Apr/May...The beginning of the hot dry half of the year, dominated by the sun...

It is the sun, that heats up the Eastern Mediterranean...Which creates an updrift, which sucks the cooler air from Europe to start streaming southward, creating the etesian trade winds...And they get stronger as the summer progresses...

You know how Phoenicians believed that Mot, the god of death, the sun, and Yam, the sea god, are "brothers"...No wonder they thought that...It was easy to see for everyone that the hottest the sun was, the better the sailing conditions were...

According to Hesiod, the best time to go sailing was in Jul/Aug...Which is when the sun is the hottest...And when the etesian winds are the strongest...

Oh by the way, you know how both Phoenician and Greek sea gods loved horses...And how Phoenicians considered Sun god and Sea god to be linked (brothers)...Well, ever heard of a solar horse? That pulls sun's chariot? 

Bronze Age "Sun Chariot" pulled by a horse, Denmark 1400 BC...

But I am digressing, again 🙂 So Greeks are sacrificing to the sun god, when suddenly, a snake slithered from the altar to a sparrow's nest in a plane (platanus) tree nearby. It ate the mother and her nine chicks, then was turned to stone. 

Calchas the seer interpreted this as a sign that Troy would fall in the tenth year of the war...

That's the same Calchas who during the second gathering of the Greeks at Aulis, before they actually set sail for Troy, told Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter "for good winds"...

So the above mad "prophetic scene" with the snake, plane (platanos) tree and sparrows, is actually a complex animal and plant calendar marker, which points at exact time of the year when the first gathering of Greeks at Aulis took place...And the first sacrifice to Apollo...

First the snake. Snake is the only true solar animal. It is in our world when sun is in our world (day and hot part of the year) and it is in the underworld when sun is in the underworld (night and cold part of the year). 

Considering that the Greeks were praying to Apollo, appearance of his holy animal is not a surprise at all...BTW, knowing that snake is a solar animal, the fact that Apollo took over the snake temple at Delphy makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it?

Anyway, apart from being the symbol of the sun and sun's heat, snake is more specifically a calendar marker for Apr/May, beginning of summer. Why? Because this is the time when most common snakes in Europe mate...And fight...Something not easy to miss if you are out and about...

So the snake comes out of the Apollo's altar, and slithers up a platanus tree...

Platanus, is a very common tree in Greece...And because its distinctive red ball flowers appear in Apr/May, which are hard to miss, it is a perfect plant calendar marker for this time of year...

"This is all circumstantial!!!" I can hear classicists yell...

Enter sparrows 🙂

The snake slithers up the plane (platanus) tree and devours a sparrow and her chicks...Now there are two types of sparrows that live in Greece: 

L: house sparrow http://oiseaux-birds.com/card-house-sparrow.html

R: Spanish sparrow http://oiseaux-birds.com/card-spanish-sparrow.html

Both house sparrow and Spanish sparrow nest in Apr/May...Incubation lasts 11-14 days and the chicks become independent at about 25-28 days...Sooooo...

So, the only time of the year when a snake could have devoured a nesting sparrow and her chicks on a plane (platanos) tree, is Apr/May...

The beginning of the sailing season in the Eastern Mediterranean, right when the northerly trade winds start to blow down the Aegean sea...

Cool, right? 

Homer doesn't give us a clue when did the second gathering at Aulis take place, but I would bet that it took place at the exact same time of the year, in Apr/May, the beginning of the sailing season...

When the northerly trade winds start blowing...Well they did, eventually, after Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to Apollo's "twin sister" Artemis...Who was in her earliest incarnation associated with the Sun...Twin!!!...And snakes...And Gorgone......I will talk about it soon...

Well actually, Homer does, in a way, symbolically, give us a clue when the second gathering in Aulis took place, and when the Greeks sacrificed Iphigenia "for good winds": after Agamemnon killed a sacred deer...

Now I will soon write an article about Artemis and her sacred deer...But here I would just say that there is a time of the year, when all the stags die, and only hinds/does are left to graze the meadows...And that happens in Apr/May...Clue in this article, "The return of the Apollo to Delphi", where I analyse symbols depicted on this large Cycladic krater...

So, I think that we can pretty confidently say that the Greeks performed the first sacrifice in Aulis, and set sail for Troy in Apr/May...But when did they perform the second sacrifice in Troy and set sail back for Greece?

If I was a betting man, I would say in Apr/May, at the beginning of the sailing season in Eastern Mediterranean...You want to catch "the good winds" early...

The scene depicts Polixene being dragged towards the mound representing the tomb of Achilles, whose ghost is depicted as a miniature warrior flying above it...Love it 🙂 So far so expected...

The unexpected things are:

The ivy leaves and fruit on the shield of the Greek warrior standing to the left of Polyxene...

Huge snake and small lion depicted on the tomb of Achilles...

Polixene is depicted being dragged from the Ivy to the snake-lion...

Why?

Now in this article, "Woman and a pitcher", I explained why Ivy is linked to winter and the Winter sun, Dionysus...Ivy flowers in Autumn, and bares fruit during winter...See the little dark dots on the ivy wreath around Dionysus's head?  

This is what is depicted on the shield of the Greek soldier who is standing behind Polyxene, blocking the way of the horses which are following Polyxene...Solar horses???

So Polyxene is being dragged from the winter, the season of ivy fruits, to the "season that starts when snakes begin to mate (Apr/May) and ends when lions begin to mate (Jul/Aug)"...Summer, also  the best time to sail in Eastern Mediterranean...

Do you think that it is interesting that the grave mound, is symbolically linked to summer? Knowing that Phoenicians symbolically linked the god of death and the sun? I do...

Considering that Greeks sacrificed Polyxene on the grave of Achilles, with the snake, the marker for the beginning of summer depicted extra large, I would say that this sacrifice "for good winds", at the end of the Trojan war, took place at the beginning of summer, in Apr/May...

And just like the two sacrifices that wer performed "for good winds" in Aulis, and which were dedicated to Apollo and "his twin sister", this one that was performed in Troy is also most likely performed in the temple of Apollo, or dedicated to Apollo...

Cause it is the sun that heats up the sea and causes the northerly trade winds to begin to blow down the Aegean sea...And as expected, after the sacrifice, the good winds begin to blow...And the Greeks leave Troy and set sail to Greece...

Oh, BTW, Here is another Etruscan vessel, where ivy was used as a plant calendar marker related to Apollo...

These Etruscans knew stuff...Which Greeks seemed to have forgotten...I talked about it in my post "Skipping"...

So this is it from me for today I think...Hope you didn't give up half way through this article, and that you have found it interesting...

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...