Archaeologia Baltica

In a letter to Aššur, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon informed his god about a campaign against the small state of Šubria located in the hills north of Assyria. When Assyrian troops besieged Uppume, the capital city of Šubria, in the dead of night “on the 21st day of Kislimu, the birthday of Asakku”, the defenders tried to burn the rampart constructed by the Assyrians; this was the only military success of the Šubrians who not long after were defeated by their enemies. The most interesting element of this story is the date of this event, which according to the letter’s author was not accidental and explicitly called uhulgalû (Akkad. “unfavourable day”). The term “birthday of Asakku” is not known from other sources, but its significance may be explained in terms of Assyrian hemerology, astromancy and astral symbolism. First, it was the 21st day of the month, the day of lunar third quarter and one of five most dangerous days in the month when appropriate rituals must have been performed in order to prevent the increased activity of demons. Second, the month of Kislimu was close to the winter solstice and attributed to Nergal, the god of the Underworld and great warrior. The link between this date and Asakku, a stony monster in Sumerian lore and a demon of the eastern mountains in Assyrian tradition, was well-grounded in contemporary speculative theology in which the combat of a warrior-god against Asakku had been connected with winter storms. The whole passage discussed seems to be a deliberate attempt to set the campaign against Šubria in a broader cosmological context which contemporary learned Assyrians would find easy to recognise, using the network of astronomical and calendrical symbols developed during the Neo-Assyrian period by priest-astromancers.

The antiquity of the Egyptian ritual of the “stretching of the cord” can be traced back to the 1st Dynasty, although the possibility that it was even older can not be absolutely discarded. Right up until the latest representations of the ceremony, which date to the Roman period, one goddess always appeared in it: Seshat. The iconography of the ritual retained throughout several features that are present in the earliest scene known, dating to king Khasekhemuy. We know that the “stretching of the cord” was used for the orientation of Egyptian constructions and that the scenes represented in several temples were accompanied by texts with astronomical references. During the Ptolemaic period, these texts referred to the constellation Meskhetyu. However, it is the question of the iconography of the goddess, and especially of her hieroglyphic sign, that has moved us to propose a new hypothesis for the technique developed and used during the foundation ceremony. Despite many theories, there is no definitive explanation of the sign held by Seshat over her head. The hypothesis we consider here takes into account the

Ancient cultures of the northern hemisphere created symbols, myths, and rituals that related deer to certain astronomical phenomena, to cosmological and cosmogonical ideas, and to hunting calendars. From their knowledge of the animal’s appearance, behaviour, and phenology they derived conceptions of power, fertility, creation and renewal, life and death, and psychosomatic transformation during a shamanistic seance.

The relationship between petroglyphs and archaeoastronomy has been treated in several ways in the past. In the present study, we examine a particular motif found among the rock carvings in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula: a large deer with over-sized horns and an unnatural number of tips on each horn. A multidisciplinary approach combining landscape archaeology, comparative history of religions, and archaeoastronomy suggests a coherent interpretation of the motif. It reveals a unique amalgamation of calendrical motives, landscape relationships and lunisolar events. It may also be significant in relation to the Celtic world-view and its artistic manifestation, and to the relationship between time and landscape.

In this article, we discuss the phenomenon of crescent-shaped pendants dating back to the Late Roman Iron Age and Early Migration Period (3rd – 6th centuries AD). Placed on horse’s foreheads, these crescent-shaped pendants evidently embodied a mythological link between the moon and the horse. The same link is clearly reflected in linguistic data and folklore right up until the 20th century. We draw special attention to a horse with a white mark on its forehead called laukas (adj.), laukis (noun) in Lithuanian, which derives from the I-E root *louk- ‘shining, bright’, as also does the Latin luna (< *louksnā). Considering the data as a whole, we propose an unexpected link between the Baltic and Roman traditions.

This paper analyses some interconnected aspects of Lithuanian folk astronomy. The same mythical–poetic images linking sky luminaries, things in the natural world, and mythological beings as well as human beings are present in Lithuanian mythicalpoetic folklore and in the names of textile ornamentations. Their semiotic net generally comprises flowers, plants, wild and domestic animals, celestial luminaries and mythical people as well as human beings and their artefacts. The investigation of images reveals the mythical-poetic linkage between all the celestial luminaries and concepts of light, marriage and fertility that belong more generally to the Sun Maiden mythology complex.

I have previously presented some evidence concerning the possibility of a Baltic zodiac, documented by archaeological artefacts and supported by historical sources (Vaiškūnas 2000). It seems clear that such knowledge was imported into the Baltic region from Classical and Medieval cultures to the south. If the Baltic zodiac was a simple copy of the Mediterranean one, it would be of minor interest for the iconography of Baltic constellations, but in the Baltic versions we observe very important differences from the Classical model. In this paper I analyse the relevant traditions in more detail and discuss these differences in the hope that it can offer us valuable information about sky mythology in northern traditions.

Since Clark and Stephenson (1977) proposed that the supernova remnant (SNR) G315.4-2.3 should be identified with the historical supernova (SN) seen by Chinese observers in the year A.D. 185, a great deal of work has been done by theoreticians and observers to test the hypothesis. Some authors have proposed the SNR G320.4-1.2 as a better candidate, while, on the basis of a reinterpretation of the Houhan-shu original text, even the very nature of the A.D. 185 event has been questioned, leading to the hypotheses of a cometary transit (Chin and Huang 1994) or a combination of Comet P/Swift-Tuttle and a nova (Schaefer 1995, 1996). In fact, a cometary transit was apparently registered in one of the Priscilla Catacomb frescoes, an ancient Roman artwork dating from the end of the second century. During our examinations of Roman Catacomb frescoes in an attempt to discover representations of “guest star” apparitions in Imperial Rome, we also discovered what seems to be a record of SN 369, indicating that this may have been the explosion which originated Cas A.

This work aims to present a panorama of the space-time of certain Brazilian native peoples, and especially the Tupi-Guarani and the Apinayé, as reported by some of the early ethnologists who traveled to Brazil, including Paul Ehrenheich, Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Curt “Nimuendajú” Unkel, as well the Canadian naturalist C. F. Hartt. This ethnohistoric data is compared to recent fieldwork.

The identification of six significant solar eclipses during specific years of the reigns of ancient Chinese kings from the Xia, Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties has made it possible to establish an absolute chronology back to the first year of King Yu, 2070 BC.