From mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu Thu Nov 28 10:56:59 2002 Received: from mailscan1.cac.washington.edu (mailscan1.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.136]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.11) with SMTP id gASIuwrw034470 for ; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:56:58 -0800 Received: FROM mxu2.u.washington.edu BY mailscan1.cac.washington.edu ; Thu Nov 28 10:56:58 2002 -0800 Received: from KIWI (kiwi.lemoyne.edu [192.231.122.6]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.11) with ESMTP id gASIuvEi021201 for ; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:56:57 -0800 Received: from mail.lemoyne.edu ([192.168.250.160]) by KIWI; Thu, 28 Nov 2002 13:56:31 -0500 Message-ID: <3DE666CE.DF16AF36@mail.lemoyne.edu> Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 13:56:14 -0500 From: "John M. McMahon" Reply-To: mcmahon@mail.lemoyne.edu X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: Shards for Saturnalia References: <5.1.1.6.2.20021128093215.00a016f0@pop.staff.uni-marburg.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit James Butrica wrote: > > Does anyone know what could be behind this claim? Can't help with metal shards at the moment, but there is a cross-cultural tradition of rags/ribbons being placed on trees. A second-century votive relief in Munich's Glyptothek shows a plane tree garlanded with ribbons as a sacrifice takes place, for example. Also, I've been sent by the author a draft of a forthcoming article -- when, I don't know; it may be out already -- in *Economic Botany* (Amots Dafni, "Why Are Rags Tied to the Sacred Trees of the Holy Land?") that deals with primarily (modern) Eastern Mediterranean cultures, but there is some slight CC as well: "The earliest written evidence concerning rag hanging on trees is related to Arnobius (3rd century AD) who complained about the Libyans’ pagan manner of putting ribbons on trees (*Disputationes adversus gentes* I: 39 ...." (p. 2 in MSW draft). > It must have been hard on the birds ... Well, probably not as hard on them as window glass and the nighttime illumination of buildings are these days ... or nights. For info on this quite serious problem see the Fatal Lights Awareness Program, headquartered in Toronto: http://www.flap.org The numbers are pretty sobering. John McMahon LMC .