Dilmun goats seal

This amazing seal is one of many found in Dilmun, an ancient port located in today's Bahrein which was founded in the late 4th millenium BC and abandoned in the mid 1st millennium BC...

Located in the Persian Gulf, it controlled the major trade route between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Now back to the seal. It depicts a date palm, the Mesopotamian tree of life. On one side of the tree is ascending ibex goat and on the other is descending ibex goat. The tree grows out of a scorpio...What does all this mean?

The climate in Bahrein consists of very hot and completely dry summer (May-October/November) and slightly cooler slightly rainy winter (October/November - May)...

If it wasn't for the winter rain, Dilman would have not been there at all. It was this rain that supported life in the area. And again, interestingly, in Dilman the beginning of the rain season coincides with the beginning of the Ibex goat mating season...October/November...

So this is why we have ibexes flanking the tree of life. The one going up symbolises the beginning of the mating season when Ibexes ascend the mountain peaks and the one going down symbolises the end of the mating season when ibexes descend the mountain peaks...

But what about the scorpion? Why is the tree of life growing out of a scorpion? Because of this: Zodiac sign scorpio marks the part of the Solar year between 23rd of October and 22nd of November...Right the period when Ibexes start their mating season and rains arrive...

We know that scorpion was a common marking sign on seals and stamps since the Early Sumerian civilisation. I have managed to explain every animal zodiac symbol as a marker for a significant lifecycle event of the animal depicted in the series of articles about zodiac.

Why is scorpio in the zodiac circle where it is?

Scorpions prefer areas where the temperatures range from 20 to 37 °C. When temperatures get low enough, like for instance in late October, early November, scorpions metabolism slows down and they hide in warm places. This table shows yearly fluctuation of temperature in Dilmun. 

Based on this, we can see that scorpions will start slowing down and looking for a place to spind the winter right about the time of the dancing goats: November.

Based on these statistics people must have noticed that the scorpions were stinging a lot less suddenly...

"Epidemiological study of scorpion stings in Saudi Arabia between 1993 and 1997"

Maybe people noticed the sudden absence of scorpions??? And marked that with Scorpio? Or maybe people noticed sudden appearance of scorpions inside their dwellings, where they move because they are warm and cosy? And marked that with Scorpio?

Still open question, but getting closer...

House of the bones

In November 2019, archaeologists excavating the Hittite city of Sapinuwa, an important military and religious centre of the Hittite empire 3,500 years ago, discovered a skull and femur bone believed to be from the Hittite period...

The discovery of the bones is important as Hittites cremated and seem to have hid the remains of their dead. This is why no royal tombs belonging to Hittite kings have been found to date, and only very few skeletal remains of Hittite people have been unearthed...

Now the fact that no Hittite royal burials were ever found is very interesting indeed. Hittite texts talk about "The stone house (É.NA4) of the Gods" which was the place where the bones of the deceased Hittite kings and queens were brought after the cremation ceremony...

This royal cemetery, or royal mausoleum was probably a resting place for all members of the royal family. But the problem is no one knows where that royal cemetery or royal mausoleum was...

There is however an indication that it was located in Yazılıkaya, the natural bedrock outcrop, which was the main sanctuary of the Hittite capital Hattusa...

Yazılıkaya means "inscribed rock" because it contains the most important group of religious rock reliefs made by the Hittites. One of the reliefs alone depicts a procession of 12 gods of the underworld...

So if there was a "Stone house of the gods" anywhere in the Hittite kingdom, this could have been it...

Yazılıkaya is where some archaeologists, like Charles Burney in his "Historical Dictionary of the Hittites" believe the mysterious "Hesti house" was situated...

What this "Hesti house" was is still a matter of debate. Hittite "Hesti" meaning "a ritual place", is equated to Greek altar, and in that sense would indicate a presence of fire, hearth, which is what "Hesti house" contained...

Now was this hearth just a ritual hearth where offerings were prepared for the gods and offered to them, as was a Hittite custom?

Or was this hearth also the funeral pyre hearth, where bodies of the kings and queens were cremated? The Yazılıkaya chambers, rooms are open courtyards where a funeral pyre could have been lit without problems...As can be seen on this map of the sanctuary from "Hattusa: sacred places near Büyükkaya, Ambarlikaya and the Budakŏzŭ" by Joost Blasweiler:

Well when the body is cremated, the only things that remain among the ashes are the big bones and sometimes the skull. It is these bones that were placed into "The stone house of the gods"...

In Hittite language the word for bones was "hastai". There is even a late Hittite term "hastiyas pir" meaning "house of the bones"...Which is why some linguists propose that "Hesti house" would then be "the house of the bones", the place where the bones of the members of the Hittite royal family were deposited after being taken out of the funeral pyre...

Now this "Hesti" house, the house containing the bones of the Hittite kings and queens, was an important cultic place which had permanent attendants, priests...Which is not surprising knowing how important ancestor worship was to the Hittite royal elite...

Even the remains of the kings who died away from Hattusa were later brought to Hattusa, so they can reside with their  kin. This was and still is a practice around the world, where royals are all buried together. Usually near the capital and the throne room...

This was done not just so the living kings can pay proper tribute to the famous dead ones, but also that these famous royal ancestors can give legitimacy to the present kings...

If a king chose a new capital and new burial place for himself, this was an act with a political or religious message. It meant he wanted the break with the tradition. And the family...

And if a king was not buried in the royal cemetery, that was also an act with a political message. It meant that he was not worth being buried together with his ancestors...

For the Royal Hittites this link between the living and the dead was so strong, that when the split happened in the royal family, and the king Muwatalli transferred his capital from Hattusa to Tarhuntassa, he took with him the statues of the gods and "GIDIM.HI.A" a mysterious thing which is now believed to mean "the bones of his ancestors"...

This is not the only time someone did something like this in Middle East. Chaldean king Meredach, when he fled from Babylon to Elam, in front of the advancing forces of Sargon, "took with him all the gods of the land and all the bones of his ancestors from their graves"...

He did this so he can continue to make funerary offerings to his ancestors.

Also, there is a King Ashurbanipal’s inscription in which he says that he exposed the grave of the Elamite kings and deprived them of sacrificial food and drink offerings...This inscription is mentioned in the article "Peace for the Dead, or kispu(m) Again" by Akio Tsukimoto, which talks about "the Mesopotamian wide custom of regular, ritual food and drink offerings to the dead"...

And knowing how important ancestors were for Chaldeans, we can now understand this scene depicted on the relief from Nineveh palace: Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Elamite captive to grind bones of his family, 7th - 6th c. BCE. 

This wasn't like most people think an act of random cruelty...Making someone destroy the bones of their ancestors was a deliberate forced act of sacrilege...

Why were ancestors and their bones so important to the Hittites?

In "The Religion of the Hittites" published in "The Biblical Archaeologist" in 1989,  Gary Beckman gives a ritual incantation dating from the Hittite Old Kingdom period in which Hittite king says that gods have entrusted him to rule the land of Hittites...But he only mentions two gods: Sun god and Storm god...

"The gods, the Sun-God and the Storm-God, have entrusted to me, the king, the land and my household, so that I, the king, should protect my land and my household, for myself"

As the source for the incantation text, Gary Beckman cites E. Laroche, "Catalogue des textes hittites" 1971, and K. Bittel, "Hattusa, the Capital of the Hittites", 1970...

Well, the Hittite royals, who "ruled in the name of the Sun god and the Storm god" also firmly believed that the fortunes of the living were not only determined by the gods, but also by the ancestors...

Which is why the ancestors were regularly remembered and given food and more importantly water. Because forgotten, hungry and especially thirsty ancestors can get angry and bring ruin to their descendants...

They can bring drought and storms which can result in crop failures and hunger and thirst...Which is what was happening increasingly often during the last years of the Hittite empire...

The effects of the climate change which eventually led to the collapse of the Bronze Age empires around Mediterranean, Hittites blamed on themselves. Because they have forgotten to honour their ancestors. And all that have been plaguing the living was the revenge of the dead...

This belief was the most clearly expressed in the oath of the last Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II in which he says that the "...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the living Hittite kings and their subjects have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with the dead..." He then promises in the name of the Hittite kings and in the name of his subjects that they will do everything in their power to rebuild this sacred bond again...

But that was too little too late...The Hittite empire collapsed, their capital Hattusa was abandoned and Hittite royals disappeared from the face of the world...Together with the bones of their ancestors...

Curious...Very curious...Maybe the reason why archaeologists have never found the bones of the Hittite royals in the house of bones, was because the Hittite royals took them with them when around 1200 they moved out of Hattusa...

Where did they go?

At the end of his paper "In Hattusa the Royal House Declined. Royal Mortuary Cult in Thirteenth Century Hatti", Itamar Singer from the university of Tel Aviv says:

"To sum up Suppiluliuma II's document, it would seam that its all embracing message of the vital bond between the Living and the Dead is unique in the Hittite literature, and I am not aware of a clear parallel in the Near Eastern corpus either...This document seeks to guarantee and immortalise the obligations of the Living towards the Dead and vice versa..."

I don't know if this kind of "vital link between the Living and the Dead" existed in any other culture, but here is something I know, which is totally unrelated to the previous story about the Hittites' ancestor cult of course:

The cult of the dead was and still is the most important cult of the Serbs. Serbs believed that it was not just the gods that determine their faith but also their dead ancestors...They even considered their supreme god Dabog, who is both Sun god and Storm god, to be their original ancestor, thus attributing even god's actions to the ancestors. In the past Serbs buried their dead under their doorsteps and their hearths. Effectively they lived with their dead...So that the Living can continuously venerate the dead, and so that the Dead can continuously support and protect the Living. And they made damn sure that the dead were always remembered, always well fed and especially well watered...

Or else: 

You can read more about this in my post "Thirst"...

And finally:

There are even records from this, 21st century, of Serbs digging out and carrying away their dead with them when they were forced to move or relocate. Here is an example from last Serbian exodus from Kosovo: 


In an isolated village Staro Gracko, on a scorching summer day in 1999, 14 men were bringing in the wheat harvest as NATO and the U.N. were still moving in to secure the province. Shots rang out, but no one came to help. Later, British peacekeepers found the 14 dead in a field fringed with poplar trees, in an attack blamed on ethnic Albanians. 

Local Serb Ljubica Zivic didn't hear the shots that day, but felt an ominous breeze that seemed to foretell that both of her sons, Radovan and Jovica, would not return home. 

"I waited and waited. There was an eerie wind blowing," Zivic said, clasping her hands together in grief. "In the evening I went inside and said, 'It's all over.'" 

Zivic ekes a living on euro40 (US$60) a month, struggling to feed seven grandchildren who survived their slain fathers. 

She did not join the 200,000 Serbs who sought shelter in Serbia, some unearthing their dead and carrying away the bones as they left. 

Clad head to toe in black, the tiny woman is bound to the dead in a village that now has the air of a ghost town. 

"This is my village and this is where my dead are," she said. "I will stay." 

PS: According to genetic data, Serbs are a very mixed population, which has absorbed pretty much anyone who passed through the Balkans in last 10,000 years...Some of Serbian ancestors could have been in some way related to Hittites...Or not...

There of course could have been intermediaries with the same belief in the link between the Living and the Dead. Ancestor worship was and still is an important part of many cultures. Also there is the common Indoeuropean cultural root...

Knocking stones

Knocking stones, or Clach chnotainn in Scottish Gaelic were exposed bedrock stone or boulders with a pot-shaped concavity cut into them used for husking and pounding barley and other cereals before the introduction of other methods of milling grain...

They were once used by every farming household and abandoned examples are still to be found in Ireland, the Highlands and the Western Isles and remained in use in remote areas until the 19th century...

A large pot-shaped cavity known as "knocking well" was cut into exposed bedrock or boulders. Grain was then poured into the cavity and pounded with a rounded stone or with a hardwood (oak) mell... These were basically bedrock mortars...

One example of a knocking stone at the old St Macarius chapel site of Mackrikil near Dailly in Ayrshire has a prominent cross carved on one side. Locally it was known as the 'font' and that indicates an understandable confusion with a stoup used to hold holy water for baptism...

Well, maybe not a confusion. In Ireland these kind of stones are called Bullaun stones. And there they are "definitely not mortars"...They are holy stones used for blessing and cursing. And when they get filled with rain water, the water acquires miraculous healing properties...

The fact that the same kind of stones like Bullaun stones (pounding stones) were in Scotland used as mortars means nothing in Ireland. The Irish are different... 🙂

I wrote an article about Bullaun stone being mortars few years ago...Which was then followed by another article about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Bullaun stones...

These stone mortars were considered holy not just in Ireland and Scotland. In South Baltic region they were buried in the house foundations to protect the household...

I talked about this in my post "Stones with narrow bottomed bowls".

This stone from Latvia is called "Lielais Daviņu Akmens" which means great stone of giving, offering, great altar. It seems that the stone was linked to harvest rituals. For the farmers, anything to do with sowing, harvesting, grinding, eating grain had religious significance...

We know this from ethnographic records. This includes tools used for ploughing, sowing, harvesting, grinding grain and making bread. They all had religious significance and were seen as possessing supernatural powers...

Large bedrock stone mortars were communal tools. Once made they could last for generations. This definitely made them special in the eyes of the farmers who used them. These mortars, being permanent in the impermanent world, must have eventually become holy...

Which is why rain water, water that comes from heaven, accumulated in bedrock mortars was also holy and was used in religious, especially healing ceremonies...

Which is why large boulder mortars were moved to churchyards where a lot of them were turned into holy water fonts. Well they already were holy water fonts even before Christians appropriated them...

I wonder if Christian stone fonts, like this Norman font from St Nonna's Church at Altarnun, UK, developed from stone mortars filled with rain water...This one is particularly interesting because it is decorated with Perunikas, flowers of Perun, Slavic thunder, rain god. 

I talked about this symbol in my posts "Burning rolling wheel", "Ognjena Marija" and "Archangel Michael"...

This symbol is also known as Flower of life...Because it is rain that makes grain grow, makes life possible??? Bread of life anyone???

That this Norman font is not just a once off weirdness, have a look at this article: "St Austell font"...

Ostrich symbolism

The Arabian ostrich, Syrian ostrich, or Middle Eastern ostrich (Struthio camelus syriacus) is an extinct subspecies of the ostrich that lived on the Arabian Peninsula and in the Near East until the mid-20th century...

This bird appears on early middle eastern seals, like this one from Arslantepe, dated to the end of the 4th millennium BC...Here is a seal with ostriches and snakes...Any reason for this or is this just random?

Ostriches are seasonal breeders. In the northern hemisphere, breeding period is March to September. During hot part of the year...In Northern Syria, where these seals were made, temperature suddenly rises in March, peaks in July/August, and falls in October. More details about the climate in Syria can be found here. 

Snake seems to be a universal (Eurasia and North Africa) symbol, which represents sun's heat, hot part of the year...This true meaning of this old symbol was best preserved in Slavic mythology. I talked about this in my post "Enemy of the sun". 

So ostriches mate during the time when snakes are out...

The destructive power of the burning sun's heat during the hottest part of the year, end of July, beginning of August, is represented by the Dragon...Again Slavic mythology has preserved the key to understanding this universal symbol too...I talked abut this in my post "Dragon who stole the rain" and "Apep"... 

The destructive giant serpents, dragons are the main enemy of Storm gods. The reason becomes obvious if we know that Dragon is the drought and the Storm god is the rain...

Here is another seal with snake and lion

Snake and lion are found together in many myths around the world. The reason is that sun's heat (represented by snake) is strongest during Leo (end of July beginning of August). And Leo signals the beginning of the mating season of the Eurasian Lions...

Like in this Romanesque marble statues which I talked about in my post "Lion killing snake".

Or like on this Egyptian mural which I talked about in my post "Apep".

And the reason why lion is killing the snake is because it is in Leo, that the cooling of the northern hemisphere begins...

Back to our ostriches...

Ostrich mating season, which corresponds with the hot, snake season, is characterised by wild mating dances and loud calls...Definitely something you can't miss when it starts and stops...Which makes ostrich a very good calendar marker... 

Does putting ostriches and snakes on a seal together mean that in the 4th millennium Syria we already have this symbolic link established and widely known????

O yeah. Almost forgot about the other seal. 

The seal with:

Auroch bull (Mating season ends in Aug)
Ostrich (Mating season Mar-Aug/Sep)
Snake (Hot part of the year, hottest part: beginning of Aug)
Persian deer (Mating season starts in Aug)

Here's an old Neolithic Syrian love poem:

Under the burning late summer sun
Me and my love run
Jumping over bloody snakes
Which were everywhere
The aurochs were at it
The deer were at it
The ostriches were at it
So I turned to my sweetheart and asked
Why aren't we at it tooooooo??? 

For the lovers of ancient poetry, you might like this Elamite one from my article about date picking season seal.

You can find the details about the seals in "THE ORIGINS OF ADMINISTRATIVE PRACTICES AND THEIR DEVELOPMENTS IN GREATER MESOPOTAMIA. THE EVIDENCE FROM ARSLANTEPE, ARCHÉO-NIL Revue de la société pour l'étude des cultures prépharaoniques de la vallée du Nil, 26, 2016"

Lesnik

The most commonly used Serbian word for forest is "šuma". I love this word. Serbian word "šum" means rustling, which is the sound of deciduous forests. This makes forest "the shushing place". 

But this is not the only Serbian word for forest... 

Another word used for forest, but more specifically for mountain forest, and mountain in general is "gora". Like this one on Mt Tara:

I talked about this word a lot when I talked about words for sun, fire and warmth in Serbian and Irish languages

Yet another word used for forest is "dubrava". This word which means "oak forest" comes from Proto-Slavic root "*dǫbъ" (oak). This is a very common toponym found all over Central Europe wherever Slavs live or have once lived...

Oak was the holy tree of the Slavs. It is still considered a holy tree in Serbia, where people in villages still hold masses under ancient oaks called "zapis", like this one from South Eastern Serbia, also marked with a "Celtic" :) cross...

The holy status of oaks can be seen from the fact that when a young oak is cut in Serbia to be used for Yule log, it is addressed and treated as living god...

I talked about Serbian Yule log rituals in my post "Badnjak".

To Serbs, and other Slavs, oak was an extremely important tree. Its hard, durable, water resistant wood was used for building houses, boats, kitchen utensils, tools, furniture, carts...You could say that in the past, Slavic culture was built around oak...

I talked about this in my post "Oaks".

Balkans Slavs also ate acorns until the mid 20th c. Most lowland people only during "hungry years", but some mountain populations regularly. Forests of sweet acorn oaks called "sladun" (sweat oak) "medun" (honey oak) were planted and maintained on village boundaries...

These "sacred" oak forests, cultivated as a source of acorns, for people and pigs, were called "gaj" (cultivated forest), "zabran" (forbidden forest), "lug" (light forest, as oak forests are very airy and bright) and "zabel, zabela"... 

I talked about these cultivated forests in my post "Pelasgos".

Knowing the importance oak held in Serbian culture, I was surprised to discover that one other tree was maybe venerated even more: hazel. 

When village holy oak suddenly died, people planted hazel in its place and prayed to it for protection. Why? 

More about Serbian hazel lore can be found in my post "Hazel".

Well, the last word for forest used in Serbia is: "les" or "lijes". This is a Slavic wide word, found in all Slavic languages. Now interestingly, the word for hazel in Slavic languages is "leska". Now this can mean that "leska" literally just means "tree", or that "les" literally just means "hazels"...You will see why this confusion is very important...

And this handsome guy is Lesnik, Leshy, Leśniczy, Lasowik...a tutelary deity of the forests in Slavic mythology. 

His name basically means "Of the forest"...Except this depiction of Lesnik from 1906 is wrong...It depicts him in a wrong forest...Fir, Pine forest...Not hazel forest...

In Slavic languages "bor" means pine but also a conifer forest...So the forest spirit on the picture above should better be called by his other name: Boruta, Borowy, Боровой (of conifer forest) or even Svyatobor (Holy pine, holy forest) also known as Svyatibog (Holy god)...Interestingly "Bor" is in Serbian also used with the meaning "god", instead of "bog", like in phrases "Bora mi" (instead of Boga mi, meaning May god be my witness)...

Now here is the interesting bit :) 

Few years ago I wrote a post about post ice age floral repopulation of Europe. 

In it I talked about how different tree species migrated back into Europe at different times. 

At the end of the Ice Age, the only trees left in Europe were conifers...

At that time, fir, conifer meant tree, as there were no other trees, and it meant forest, as the only forest left were fir, conifer forests...By the way did you know that "forest" comes from Proto-Germanic *furhiþą (forest, wooded country), from Proto-Germanic *furhō (fir, pine).

Now add to Germanic "fir" (fir, conifer, forest) Slavic "bor" (pine, conifer forest, forest spirit, god)...

How old is this linguistic and cultural root? Could it be that this comes to us from the time when the only trees left around were fir, pine, conifers? From about 12000 years ago? 

Interestingly, after the weather got warmer, the first trees that really moved in, in a big way, and took over were birches...That must have been some site...Dark fir forests and white birch forests...It still is...

But then in the yet warmer early Boreal period (7000 - 5500 BC) hazel and pine expanded into the birch woodlands to such a degree that palynologists refer to the resulting ecology as the hazel-pine forest. Now this is interesting...

We still have fir forests and now pine forests are joining them. 

But hazel forest are taking over, to the point when hazel became dominant tree species in Europe...

Is this when "bor" (pine, tree, conifer forest, forest,  Borovoi-forest spirit) became "les" (hazel, tree, deciduous forest, forest, Lesnik-forest spirit)?

Is this the time when the confusion between les (hazel, tree) and les (forest) was created in Slavic languages? About 7000 years ago?

This was all happening before first Oak (dub) even bothered looking up north...But when they did finally decide to move up north, they truly took over...The age of oaks began...

Now if we look at the chronology, we have Fir (Jela), Birch (Breza), Pine (Bor), Hazel (Les-ka) then Oak (Dub)...All Slavic holy trees...All very difficult trees to spread by themselves because of big heavy nuts, acorns, cones... All edible...

Now in my post about post ice age floral repopulation of Europe I asked whether people helped oaks to move up north after the last Ice age? They just spread too quickly...And we know that people used acorns as food...They are very nutritious and very easy to store. I talked about human consumption of acorns in the posts linked from this page. But did they help fir, birch, pine, hazel too? 

Was this Garden of Eden, the endless forest of edible trees and berries full of wild animals, birds, fish...planted by men or god? Or both? I talked about this in my post "Christmas trees from Garden of Eden"

To be devil's advocate, I tried to think if the links fir-tree-forest-forest god, oak-tree-forest, hazel-tree-forest-forest god could have been forged in recent time too. And the two out of three of these links could:

1. fir-tree-forest-forest god could have been forged in Scandinavia and Northern Russia where fir is still the predominant tree species. Considering that only Slavs have the forest spirit, the link was probably forged by them and then transmitted to their Germanic neighbours

2. oak-tree-forest could have been forged in vast oak forests of Central Europe by Central European Slavs

But the link hazel-tree-forest-forest god, could only have been forged at the time when hazel forests covered most of Europe...And the last time that was the case was during early Boreal period (7000 - 5500 BC)...