Birth was one of the most magical, miraculous, and blessed events of post-paleolithic spiritualit... more Birth was one of the most magical, miraculous, and blessed events of post-paleolithic spirituality. The Mesolithic - Early Neolithic rock art paintings of the Ranaldi Shelter (Southern Italy) give distinct visual evidence to a universal subject: the woman during childbirth and the wild animal which, given the context data, is the adult male red deer. The pivotal personage of the drama, Mother Ranaldi, shares her iconographic canon with the Goddess of Childbirth in prehistoric art. She is a majestic, naked, corpulent and fertile anthropomorph who is delivering a new life between her generous thighs. The depiction of the newborn’s head emerging from the vagina emphasizes her female power to procreate. Mother Ranaldi is birthing flanked by two adult stags which she touches with her sacred hands. They are not ordinary animals. Their supernatural nature is described by three features: exaggerated unnatural antlers, clear epiphanic seasonal nature, and bicephalism. They were symbol of wor...
We analyze and present new points of view regarding the ‘Danube’ script based on recent investiga... more We analyze and present new points of view regarding the ‘Danube’ script based on recent investigations of the old Tărtăria discoveries: archaeological context, anthropological expertise, absolute dating and the meaning of the renowned tablets.
Ursu Constantin-Emil, Poruciuc Adrian, Lazarovici, Cornelia-Magda (eds.), Symbols and signs through millennia, Muzeul Național al Bucovinei Suceava and Academia Română-Filiala Iaşi, Institutul de Arheologie Iaşi, Editura Karl. A. Romstorfer, Suceava: 155-196., 2021
The author describes the situation in the Canary Islands, referring first to the deities of the c... more The author describes the situation in the Canary Islands, referring first to the deities of the communities here. The aborigines of the Canary Islands utilized sacrificial altars, locally known as pireos, to perform rituals on prominent geological locations such as mountaintops or cliffs. These are dry stone constructions shaped as an ovalcircular enclosure with one or more small cavities, where burning of food offerings was performed. It presents the construction characteristics of these sacrificial enclosures. The shared prominent location and aspect of altars for sacrifices reflect a phenomenon on pan-insular scale, a unitary ideological system, a network of territorial connections along the entire archipelago, and a hierarchical social organization. It is noted the southern peak of the Montaña de Tindaya (northeastern Fuerteventura Island) with 213 foot-shaped rock engravings, where different sacred activities took place. The hub of the religious, cultural and social network was the great insular-scale sanctuary on El Alto de Garajonay (La Gomera Island). In conclusion, sanctuaries were organized according to a well-established territorial hierarchy, which is easily associable with the image given by ethnohistorical sources about an aboriginal segmented and non-egalitarian society. Some of these monuments have been investigated, providing information about their age, as well as the products offered to the deities (especially parts of animals, wild fruits and cultivated cereals). A cult center with about twenty-five altars for fire sacrifices and related stone altars occurs on La Fortaleza de Chipude (The Fortress of Chipude). A hierarchical network of fire-sacrificial sanctuaries set in the different islands participated to a complex process of social segmentation-interrelation cohesion-guidance of the population. A pan-insular organization above the tribes did not exist. A supraterritorial religious and social institute was established instead, based on the power to interpret the divine will and predict the future through sacrifices.
Marco Merlini, Neo-Eneolithic Literacy in Southeastern Europe: an Inquiry into the Danube, Biblioteca Brukenthal XXXIII, Ministery of Culture of Romania and Brukenthal National Museum, Editura Altip, Alba Iulia, 2009
The article presents a matrix of basic semiotic markers and rules for examining the internal stru... more The article presents a matrix of basic semiotic markers and rules for examining the internal structure of the sign system developed in the Neo-Eneolithic in the Danube basin. It is intended a) to test the hypothesis that these cultures had an early form of writing, the so-called Danube script; b) to infer the principles of this system of writing; c) to distinguish between bi- and multi-signs texts of the Danube script, without knowing what any of them meant, from compounds of signs associated with other communication codes, among them decoration, symbols, and divinity identifiers. The matrix is applied to some recent discoveries selected not from the core area of the Danube civilization in the Vinča region, but from peripheral regions, in order to document how widespread the Danube script was.
Birth was one of the most magical, miraculous, and blessed events of post-paleolithic spiritualit... more Birth was one of the most magical, miraculous, and blessed events of post-paleolithic spirituality. The Mesolithic - Early Neolithic rock art paintings of the Ranaldi Shelter (Southern Italy) give distinct visual evidence to a universal subject: the woman during childbirth and the wild animal which, given the context data, is the adult male red deer. The pivotal personage of the drama, Mother Ranaldi, shares her iconographic canon with the Goddess of Childbirth in prehistoric art. She is a majestic, naked, corpulent and fertile anthropomorph who is delivering a new life between her generous thighs. The depiction of the newborn’s head emerging from the vagina emphasizes her female power to procreate. Mother Ranaldi is birthing flanked by two adult stags which she touches with her sacred hands. They are not ordinary animals. Their supernatural nature is described by three features: exaggerated unnatural antlers, clear epiphanic seasonal nature, and bicephalism. They were symbol of wor...
We analyze and present new points of view regarding the ‘Danube’ script based on recent investiga... more We analyze and present new points of view regarding the ‘Danube’ script based on recent investigations of the old Tărtăria discoveries: archaeological context, anthropological expertise, absolute dating and the meaning of the renowned tablets.
Ursu Constantin-Emil, Poruciuc Adrian, Lazarovici, Cornelia-Magda (eds.), Symbols and signs through millennia, Muzeul Național al Bucovinei Suceava and Academia Română-Filiala Iaşi, Institutul de Arheologie Iaşi, Editura Karl. A. Romstorfer, Suceava: 155-196., 2021
The author describes the situation in the Canary Islands, referring first to the deities of the c... more The author describes the situation in the Canary Islands, referring first to the deities of the communities here. The aborigines of the Canary Islands utilized sacrificial altars, locally known as pireos, to perform rituals on prominent geological locations such as mountaintops or cliffs. These are dry stone constructions shaped as an ovalcircular enclosure with one or more small cavities, where burning of food offerings was performed. It presents the construction characteristics of these sacrificial enclosures. The shared prominent location and aspect of altars for sacrifices reflect a phenomenon on pan-insular scale, a unitary ideological system, a network of territorial connections along the entire archipelago, and a hierarchical social organization. It is noted the southern peak of the Montaña de Tindaya (northeastern Fuerteventura Island) with 213 foot-shaped rock engravings, where different sacred activities took place. The hub of the religious, cultural and social network was the great insular-scale sanctuary on El Alto de Garajonay (La Gomera Island). In conclusion, sanctuaries were organized according to a well-established territorial hierarchy, which is easily associable with the image given by ethnohistorical sources about an aboriginal segmented and non-egalitarian society. Some of these monuments have been investigated, providing information about their age, as well as the products offered to the deities (especially parts of animals, wild fruits and cultivated cereals). A cult center with about twenty-five altars for fire sacrifices and related stone altars occurs on La Fortaleza de Chipude (The Fortress of Chipude). A hierarchical network of fire-sacrificial sanctuaries set in the different islands participated to a complex process of social segmentation-interrelation cohesion-guidance of the population. A pan-insular organization above the tribes did not exist. A supraterritorial religious and social institute was established instead, based on the power to interpret the divine will and predict the future through sacrifices.
Marco Merlini, Neo-Eneolithic Literacy in Southeastern Europe: an Inquiry into the Danube, Biblioteca Brukenthal XXXIII, Ministery of Culture of Romania and Brukenthal National Museum, Editura Altip, Alba Iulia, 2009
The article presents a matrix of basic semiotic markers and rules for examining the internal stru... more The article presents a matrix of basic semiotic markers and rules for examining the internal structure of the sign system developed in the Neo-Eneolithic in the Danube basin. It is intended a) to test the hypothesis that these cultures had an early form of writing, the so-called Danube script; b) to infer the principles of this system of writing; c) to distinguish between bi- and multi-signs texts of the Danube script, without knowing what any of them meant, from compounds of signs associated with other communication codes, among them decoration, symbols, and divinity identifiers. The matrix is applied to some recent discoveries selected not from the core area of the Danube civilization in the Vinča region, but from peripheral regions, in order to document how widespread the Danube script was.
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