The Mt. Popa Watershed and Bagan’s Bronze-Iron Age | ပုပ္ပါးတောင် တေတေ တေလဲနယ်တြေနှင့် ပုဂံတေသ တြေး-သံတေေ်

Two bronze ‘mother-goddess’ figures were found last year near Wealaung, Central Myanmar. While typical of the late first millennium BCE to early CE Bronze-Iron culture of Halin and the Samon valley south of Mandalay, Wealaung and nearby sites like Inde, Songon and Sardwingyi are located to the west, in the Mt. Popa watershed. Thus the ‘Samon culture’ may not have been an offshoot of the Dian cultures of Yunnan but an indigenous development that spread east and north while locally absorbed within the early first millennium CE clan-based societies of Bagan. မြန်ြာမြည်အလယ်ြိုင်း ဝဲလလာင်ရွာအနီးြှ အြိနတ်သြီးလြေးမြားအရုြ်နှစ်ခုေို ယြန်နှစ်ေ လတေ့ရှိခဲ့ရြါသည်။ ယင်းလတေ့ရှိြှုသည် ဟန်လင်းနှင့် ြန္တလလးမြို့လတာင်ဘေ်ရှိ စြုံမြစ်ဝှြ်းလေသရှိ ခရစ်နှစ်ြတိုင်ြီ ြထြလထာင်စုနှစ်လနာေ်ြိုင်းြှ ခရစ်နှစ်ဦးြိုင်းောလ လြေး-သံလခတ် ယဉ်လေေးြှုထေန်းေားရာ စံနြူနာမြလနရာြေား၏ အလနာေ်ဘေ်တေင် ေေလရာေ်လန လသာ ဝဲလလာင်၊ အင်းတဲ ြတ်ဝန်းေေင်လနရာြေား၊ ဆုံေုန်းနှင့် ဆားတေင်းကေီးစသည့် ြုြ္ပါးလတာင် ၏ လရလဝ လရလဲလေသြေားြင်မြစ်သည်။ သို့မြစ်၍ စြုံမြစ်ဝှြ်းယဉ်လေေးြှုသည် ယူနန်မြည်နယ် ေီယန်ယဉ်လေေးြှု၏ အစေယ်အြေားတစ်ခုြဟုတ်လတာ့ဘဲ ခရစ်နှစ် ြထြလထာင်စုနှစ်အလစာြိုင်း ောလ ြုဂံလေသ၏ ဓလလ့တူလူြေုိးစုအြေဲ့အစည်းြေားအတေင်း အရြ်လေသအလိုေ် လေ်ခံ ေေင့်သုံးြှုလြောင့် အလရှ့ဘေ်၊ လမြာေ်ဘေ်အရြ်တို့တေင် ြေ့ံနှံ့ခဲ့လသာ လေသတေင်း ြေံ့မြိုး တိုးတေ်လာြှုြင် မြစ်သည်။

The prophet, the mother, the avenger: An examination of Gaia's cult worship and the "bricolage" in her myth

<p>This thesis is a study of the cult of the Greek goddess Gaia (Gē). Gaia’s cult has long been interpreted by scholars though the lens of her mythical roles. She featured in literature as the mother of the Titans, as an oracular goddess at Delphi, and as the mythical mother of Erichthonios; she is also a force that watched over curses and oaths. Her cult has been most strongly associated with Delphi, where she was part of the Previous Owners myth, a tradition that made her the primary goddess at Delphi before Apollo took over. She is also strongly associated with Athens, where almost all of our literary evidence comes from. Early 20th century scholarship characterised Gaia as a universally-worshipped “Mother Earth” figure; more specifically, she has been identified as the Greek version of the Anatolian Mother Goddess, Kybele. Gaia’s cult worship as an oracular goddess and as a mother figure is overstated, and I argue that these associations are examples of confirmation bias. In this thesis, I examine the sources for both myth and cult to establish where the boundaries lie between the two, both through re-examination of the primary sources and through a critical appraisal of secondary discussions. To compare, I examine the positive evidence for Gaia’s cult, with a particular focus on the epigraphical evidence, including a 5th century BCE statue base and inscriptions from the 4th century BCE that describe a ἱερόν of Gaia at Delphi and Attic deme calendars that provide sacrifices to Gaia, some of which are expensive. Further evidence is offered by Pausanias and Plutarch, who attest to a sanctuary of Gaia at Delphi in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, cults of Gē Kourotrophos and Gē Themis in Athens, and other cults of Gaia elsewhere. I also explore the significance of Gaia as the mother of Ericthonios, the autochthonous founder of Athens, in myth and Athenian literature. I conclude that Gaia was not worshipped at Delphi before the 5th century BCE. Gaia was receiving cult worship in Athens from the 5th century BCE in the form of deme sacrifices. Also in Athens, Gaia’s worship as Gē Themis appears arounds the 4th century BCE, while Pausanias attests to a temple of Gē Kourotrophos on the acropolis. Before the time of Pausanias, Kourotrophos appears to be a separate deity. Finally, I conclude that Gaia rarely receives cult worship under the epithet “Meter” and cannot be identified as the Greek version of Anatolian Kybele.</p>

The prophet, the mother, the avenger: An examination of Gaia's cult worship and the "bricolage" in her myth

<p>This thesis is a study of the cult of the Greek goddess Gaia (Gē). Gaia’s cult has long been interpreted by scholars though the lens of her mythical roles. She featured in literature as the mother of the Titans, as an oracular goddess at Delphi, and as the mythical mother of Erichthonios; she is also a force that watched over curses and oaths. Her cult has been most strongly associated with Delphi, where she was part of the Previous Owners myth, a tradition that made her the primary goddess at Delphi before Apollo took over. She is also strongly associated with Athens, where almost all of our literary evidence comes from. Early 20th century scholarship characterised Gaia as a universally-worshipped “Mother Earth” figure; more specifically, she has been identified as the Greek version of the Anatolian Mother Goddess, Kybele. Gaia’s cult worship as an oracular goddess and as a mother figure is overstated, and I argue that these associations are examples of confirmation bias. In this thesis, I examine the sources for both myth and cult to establish where the boundaries lie between the two, both through re-examination of the primary sources and through a critical appraisal of secondary discussions. To compare, I examine the positive evidence for Gaia’s cult, with a particular focus on the epigraphical evidence, including a 5th century BCE statue base and inscriptions from the 4th century BCE that describe a ἱερόν of Gaia at Delphi and Attic deme calendars that provide sacrifices to Gaia, some of which are expensive. Further evidence is offered by Pausanias and Plutarch, who attest to a sanctuary of Gaia at Delphi in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, cults of Gē Kourotrophos and Gē Themis in Athens, and other cults of Gaia elsewhere. I also explore the significance of Gaia as the mother of Ericthonios, the autochthonous founder of Athens, in myth and Athenian literature. I conclude that Gaia was not worshipped at Delphi before the 5th century BCE. Gaia was receiving cult worship in Athens from the 5th century BCE in the form of deme sacrifices. Also in Athens, Gaia’s worship as Gē Themis appears arounds the 4th century BCE, while Pausanias attests to a temple of Gē Kourotrophos on the acropolis. Before the time of Pausanias, Kourotrophos appears to be a separate deity. Finally, I conclude that Gaia rarely receives cult worship under the epithet “Meter” and cannot be identified as the Greek version of Anatolian Kybele.</p>

Domination of Women? Gender Representation in the Corpus of Late Neolithic Anthropomorphic Figurines

Since the inception of the discipline of archaeology, figurines have been considered as the basis for research into the praehistoric social order and religious ideas. In spite of the numerous critiques, the idea that they are the reflection of adoration of Mother Goddess and fertility cults, has persevered even to the present day, mainly thanks to the work of Maria Gimbutas. Her simplified approach to praehistory, apart from giving rise to pseudo-archaeological narratives, has induced severe criticism and polemics inside archaeology. The concept of the Goddess has migrated during the recent period from the academic writing to the realm of pseudo-science, daily politics and activism. In our country, the ideas of the Golden Past, considered to be the origin of the European civilization, are particularly present in the „grey zone“: the public sphere, facilitated through media. All these narratives are based upon the preconception that in the Neolithic collections the representations of women dominate. The results of the preliminary analyses of gender representation in Neolithic assemblages have proven that the claims of women’s dominance are ill-founded, and emphasized once more the significant presence, or even dominance of asexual figurines. On the other hand, the criteria for identification have shown to be unreliable, raising the question of usefulness of such attempts, as well as a number of new questions. Primarily, the role and meaning of the presence/absence of secondary sex attributes, their correlation to age, as well as possible regional differences in meaning and function of figurines are discussed.

Semiotic Analysis of Petroglyph «Ancient Turks and the Mother Goddess Umay/Umai»

The study of historical artifacts from a scientific point of view is acknowledged in the literature. A clear understanding of our historical roots is connected with the study of cultural heritage from empirical and especially quantitative bases of research already done by scholars like Rudenko (1927) and Gavrilova (1965). Yet, another important method of studying historical material objects is semiotic analysis, which allow studying prehistorical visual culture artifacts as a system of signs, which may be deciphered, and related to deducible meaning and sense in the context of ethnographic, cultural and specifically semiotic references which bear on location, identification and understanding of such material. Our research in this article is dedicated to a study of certain visual material artifacts from the geographical region of the Eastern Altai. In particular, we study petroglyphs on a boulder that was discovered during the excavations of the Kudyrge burial ground near the Chulyshman River, which according to some sources belong to the Turkic culture of the early period, and have recently begun to arouse the interest of scientists. Various empirical methods have been used to explore the stone monument (statue) called “Kudyrginsky plot”. Some of the techniques as those of pioneering research scholars like Rudenko and Gavrilova, include archaeological, historical, historical-chronological, historical-comparativemethods, as well as approaches including analysis and synthesis of the obtained data. In turn we supplement the existing methodological approaches with a semiotic-ethnographic analysis of the information available on the “Kudyrginsky plot”. We argue that semiotic analysis of ancient artifacts, following methods established by Reday (2019) and Martel (2020), can offer adequate information for the understanding of a rich historical heritage sight like the Kudyrginskyplot.

Magic in healing practice: a case study in Vietnam and its philosophical assessment

The use of magic and religion in healing practices in Vietnam is relatively popular. In the folklore and folk religion of Vietnam, it is often said that “In case of sickness, follow any feasible cures [co benh thi vai tu phuong]” in the sense that all means, including using religious beliefs and rituals, will be used to get healing for oneself or one’s relatives. When people or their relatives get sick, besides going to medical facilities, they will look for a shaman, necromancer, monks, even priests, bishops, and pastors to cure the illness they or their relatives are suffering from. Based on Mircea Eliade’s theory published in The Sacred and the Profane (Eliade, 2016), the article has the ambition to offer a different perspective on the use of magic (sometimes considered as a religious ritual by the subject) to cure disease. We employ both the comparative and analytical methods of study as we explore concrete cases of treatment of patients with different religious beliefs (Ms. T’s case of treatment, following Buddhist practices in comparison with the healing cases of the Mother Goddess Worship and the Catholic Church). The authors propose that a uniquely Vietnamese philosophy of life (Life-philosophy) serves as a constitutive basis for the adaptation of magic in healing practices, being itself formed and influenced by these practices.