[HN Gopher] Babylon's Mystery Goddess
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Babylon's Mystery Goddess
Author : diodorus
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-06-21 17:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| sgt101 wrote:
| Wikipedia is good on the artefact :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burney_Relief
|
| This includes the reconstruction of the original colours:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burney_Relief#/media/File:Quee...
| advael wrote:
| It's interesting that the relief gives the impression that this
| deity is either just now taking off or just now landing from
| flight, given the positions of her feet and wings
| doubloon wrote:
| This is a long shot, but Hindu Lakshmi is also associated with
| lions and owls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This was 250 - 400 years before the earliest Sanskrit
| inscription (found in Northern Syria linked to the Mittani).
|
| So this would predate that by quite a bit.
| jdougan wrote:
| Nit, it is spelled Mitanni when referring to the peoples.
| When spelled Mittani it refers to the former Eve Online space
| tyrant.
| aapoalas wrote:
| Ooh, Mittens!
| wl wrote:
| The inscriptions you refer to aren't Sanskrit, but Hurrian.
| The inscriptions in question contain Indo-European loan words
| and seemingly reference Vedic gods, but that does not make
| them Sanskrit inscriptions. If you're looking for the
| earliest Sanskrit inscriptions, you're looking to the first
| century BCE, over a millennium and a half later than this
| plaque. We have Sanskrit texts that are older than this, but
| the physical artifacts are newer copies of older copies that
| don't survive.
| sreeramvenkat wrote:
| The left hand seems to hold something like a noose which is an
| oft repeated item in Hindu iconography (pasha/pasa)
| card_zero wrote:
| It's in both hands (one fell off), and it's this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod-and-ring_symbol
|
| Gods hold it and offer it to kings, for whatever good that
| does them.
|
| It might be related to , the Egyptian shen ring:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_ring
|
| Here's the pasha.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasha_(Hinduism)
| dsign wrote:
| Very little is known from deities of the period, so this one is
| no exception. But I wonder if these messages carved on stone have
| survived longer than what our UTF-8 encoded text files may ever
| hope to.
| Zancarius wrote:
| Partially, this is because parallel works that exist often
| reference them pejoratively as part of a polemic. As the
| article mentions, she could be Lilith from the Bible (Isaiah
| 34:14), mentioned only once, whose identity is largely
| uncertain (and usually translated as "night creatures" or
| "night owls"... which is unfortunate). The author of Isaiah was
| probably aware of who or what this creature was, but as with
| most other references in the Bible, its use is only tangential
| and occurs in the chapter relating to the judgment of Edom. We
| see something similar in Habakkuk 3 with Deber and Resheph
| translated as plague and pestilence, though the Hebrew words
| are also the names used for Canaanite deities, suggestive again
| of a polemical quality that we lose in the English.
|
| _The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible_ has an
| interesting article on Lilith, but it doesn 't provide
| substantial evidence that this creature is the same as
| represented by the Babylonian carving. Lilith is attested to,
| most likely, in other Mesopotamian literature, but distorted by
| later Jewish and Christian lore.
|
| This is one of the reasons why I find ancient Near Eastern
| materials so fascinating. We're always discovering something
| long forgotten, and then it provides evidence roping it back
| into other surviving literature, stories, or mythologies (the
| _Epic of Gilgamesh_ being one such work).
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Late anthropomorphisms and stylizations of "squatter man" and
| "eye mask" figures seen glowing in the heavens, i.e. ones that
| began to develop decades or centuries after the deaths of the
| last humans who had witnessed the plasma light shows (natural
| phenomena, seen all over the world at different times).
| adzm wrote:
| I'm sorry what are you referring to here?
| oidar wrote:
| Here is a colorized version of it based on extracted pigments:
| https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2317/the-queen-of-the-nig...
| atombender wrote:
| That's a great site! I had not heard of the World History
| Encyclopedia before.
|
| I love reconstructions like these. Museums all too often give
| the false impression of past times as colorless, impoverished
| ruins rather than what they used to look like in their heyday.
| The Great Pyramid of Giza used to be covered in smooth, white-
| painted limestone with a capstone of gold [1], and the Roman
| marble statues that are just white today used to be painted in
| lots of colors [2].
|
| There are of course objects (such as jewelry and glass) that
| survive more or less intact. But most often the surviving
| objects are just pale shadows of the originals. I would love a
| museum that instead offered life-sized reconstructions that you
| could walk around in, to bring the past to life better. The
| Ishtar Gate in Berlin is an example of this that really works.
| (I bet most visitors think it's the real thing, though. Most of
| it is a modern reconstruction.)
|
| [1] https://www.openculture.com/2019/12/what-the-great-
| pyramid-o...
|
| [2] https://bigthink.com/high-culture/greek-statues-painted/
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