The tendency to ascribe ancient artifacts to "ritual purposes" or religion always astounds me.
This is a calendar. It's proven to be a calendar. We know how it works as a calendar. It's a tool for predicting celestial events.
It doesn't need to be hand-wavingly described as "worn by a priest or diety of a sun-god religion". What evidence is there for that? Which sun-god?
Why is there never any proof or evidence required for saying an artifact has a religious purpose?
It's like saying "this object, that we know to be a screwdriver, must be an item of ritual significance to the god of Sunday Afternoon Home Maintenance, and used by their priests in their rituals"
There are people who study and investigate this kind of things who probably have good reasons to believe this object served some kind of ritualistic purpose.
> What evidence is there for that? […] Why is there never any proof or evidence required for saying an artifact has a religious purpose?
From a related Wikipedia page:
It is assumed that the Golden Hats served as religious insignia for the deities or priests of a sun cult then widespread in Central Europe. Their use as head-gear is strongly supported by the fact that the three of four examples have a cap-like widening at the bottom of the cone, and that their openings are oval (not round), with diameters and shapes roughly equivalent to those of a human skull. The figural depiction of an object resembling a conical hat on a stone slab of the King's Grave at Kivik, Southern Sweden, strongly supports their association with religion and cult, as does the fact that the known examples appear to have been deposited (buried) carefully.
I'm sure you can find more precise details if you dig deep enough.
> Which sun-god?
You can read more about this cult here[1] and here[2].
> This is a calendar. It's proven to be a calendar. We know how it works as a calendar. It's a tool for predicting celestial events.
Do not project the hyper-rationalistic character of our current society to societies and civilizations of the pre-industrial era. People in the ancient times were not as rational and utilitarian as we are. Everything was permeated by religion, superstition and magic.
> Do not project the hyper-rationalistic character of our current society to societies and civilizations of the pre-industrial era. People in the ancient times were not as rational and utilitarian as we are.
I think it's much, much more the other way around. Modern archaeologists have inherited their Victorian predecessors attitudes, who tended to look on primitive societies as backward and superstitious; "nasty, brutal and short".
> Everything was permeated by religion, superstition and magic.
I don't think there's much evidence to support this. Lots of speculation and interpretation, but not much actual evidence. A girl wearing a "sun disk" is interpreted as being a "priestess of a sun religion". On what basis? Can't it just be decoration?
Again, saying "ritual" or "religious" is easy because it requires no proof. If you said that the disk was a tool, you'd be required to specify what the tool was and what it was used for. But you're not required to say what ritual, or how the item was used in the ritual. It's a different standard of proof.
It would be better if archeologists admitted that they don't know what the thing is for, until there's more evidence or better understanding of the culture.
"Their use as head-gear is strongly supported by the fact that the three of four examples have a cap-like widening at the bottom of the cone, and that their openings are oval (not round), with diameters and shapes roughly equivalent to those of a human skull"
Further: "The figural depiction of an object resembling a conical hat on a stone slab of the King's Grave at Kivik, Southern Sweden, strongly supports their association with religion and cult" which links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Grave
I can't see the hats but whatever, I assume people aren't actually stupid.
Being made of gold indicates that it was at least not an every day tool. Of course it could still be just a fancy golden calendar.
Anyway the German Wikipedia page about Goldhüte [1] says the ritual significance was attributed because there are tomb paintings depicting similar hats being worn in some religious/cultic context.
"Being made of gold indicates that it was at least not an every day tool."
Because of fragility or because costs of the material? Gold is one of the earliest metals used. I don't know out of my head what alloys (1000 BCE!) they could have used to create sub-milimeter wall thickness (0.6mm!). If they had been able to do this out of iron, it would be dust by now. Remember from Chemistry class? Gold does not react easily.
Archeologists must publish, too, so there’s pressure to say more than “we don’t know”, but in my very humble opinion, “a tool” isn’t the best description.
You also see this a lot in translations of undeciphered scripts. Often there's a period of speculative translations that really make no sense, but are justified with "it's just religion, of course it's esoteric".
Well there is a vaste amount of evidence and history regarding religious use of hats. It's not a stretch to assume this hat was used by a priest or someone in a leadership role, ancient Egypt has volumes of different immense hat types worn by priests and Pharaohs, Christianity does as well, the pope's various Mitre hat's for example, worn for thousands of years. High priests and priestess's of many types of religions, ancient and modern, use hats to signify rank, especially those made with gold, rare materials, and decorated with significance.
I agree, but we can move two ways - we could also make sure we describe more contemporary occurences with the ritual language, and maybe that might clarify what we mean in just the same way, bridging the cultural gap between then and now?
I'm not sure about the the screwdriver, but certainly such things as the Sunday Morning Family Waffle Iron, can be described as items for ritualistic purposes, right?
I think it's the conflating of "religious" and "ritual" that gets out of hand.
So if your family has a tradition of Sunday Morning Waffles, then sure it's "ritual" in a very minor sense. But it's not religious. You don't make waffles every Sunday morning to appease the Waffle Gods, or because of some superstition that the next winter will be terrible if you don't. But these are the sorts of things that get associated with "ritual".
Archeologists being lazy about their interpretations leads to a view of ancient civilisations that they were all "permeated with magic and superstition". And I don't think the evidence actually supports that.
It wasn't actually a hat, it wwnt onto a hat you were already wearing, like a headpiece. And even then, you'd only wear it a few times a year at ceremonies.
I recently finished reading "The Art of Forgery" by Noah Charney and that is the exact same feeling I had. Great book, very interesting, but it will leave you curious and perhaps a little doubtful about all art that you look at afterwards. Things like this are so wild and unlikely (to me at least) that when something like it comes up with zero provenance it just raises a whole lot of questions.
I honestly didn't get that feeling but I am genuinely obsessed with museums and landing on the museum Island, I had spent the entire day lurking through the museums and by the time I got to the gold had, my brain had turned into melted jelly, I could barely focus my eyes at that point.
I had a similar kind of "something isn't right here" feeling when I saw the mold cape (linked in wikipedia article on Golden Hats). It was so tiny and would have been so cumbersome to wear that there might be something we are missing. These things might look vaguely like hats, but they don't really make sense as "clothing" even for spiritual purposes.
Every time I see these amazing works of art I wonder why they didn't just focus on building a steel lathe [0] as soon as possible and kick start the industrial revolution. It probably had more to do with geography, transportation, culture and unequal development of the planet than the skill of the craftsmen at the time.
[0] If you have a lathe you can build more steam machines and locomotives which then enable you to transport coal and steel to build and power even more lathes and steam machines and locomotives...
Even if tools looking like the lathe existed as early as the Bronze Age, I think the knowledge to smelt steel wasn't available until much later. And even then if you smelt steel and build a lathe, the industrial revolution was possible because steam power was also known.
“And as further proof this was a religious artifact they also describe an event in 1980 as the Miracle on Ice to which there was much celebration most likely as this was the start of rising temperatures that rid the land of frozen water”
My dear colleague, the bowl doesn't go on your head. There was a period local rite of keg standing* and the Stanley Cup, judging from the materials (evidence for an expanded elite trade network), is obviously an apparatus for the temple version of this ritual.
Far to generous...in this instance it’s a “sun cult”
It’s kind of funny the worship of the sun, which a) actually exists; and b) is responsible for life on earth (not to mention stars generally are responsible for the elements that make up life) is cult status...but if you worship a “God” that is entirely faith based and more akin to a invisible friend, that is a sacred religion.
I don't understand. Is stuff like this supposed to be serious? Even if there was a disaster that completely destroys the communicative link between us and a future people (say, because humans have to return to subsistence hunting/gathering), there is an outrageous amount of written language everywhere as durable artifacts. Any future industrialized (or hell, even agrarian) society will be able to learn to read our language and understand huge amounts. These sorts of widespread written artifacts just didn't exist before the printing press, so pretending that looking at our current era by future people will be like us looking at 1000 BC makes no sense.
The only way to change this is to go to the far future when tectonic activity plausibly erases most artifacts. But once you've looking millions of years in the future, you're talking about a different species and everything about interpretability goes out the window.
Readit News
This is a calendar. It's proven to be a calendar. We know how it works as a calendar. It's a tool for predicting celestial events.
It doesn't need to be hand-wavingly described as "worn by a priest or diety of a sun-god religion". What evidence is there for that? Which sun-god?
Why is there never any proof or evidence required for saying an artifact has a religious purpose?
It's like saying "this object, that we know to be a screwdriver, must be an item of ritual significance to the god of Sunday Afternoon Home Maintenance, and used by their priests in their rituals"
> What evidence is there for that? […] Why is there never any proof or evidence required for saying an artifact has a religious purpose?
From a related Wikipedia page:
It is assumed that the Golden Hats served as religious insignia for the deities or priests of a sun cult then widespread in Central Europe. Their use as head-gear is strongly supported by the fact that the three of four examples have a cap-like widening at the bottom of the cone, and that their openings are oval (not round), with diameters and shapes roughly equivalent to those of a human skull. The figural depiction of an object resembling a conical hat on a stone slab of the King's Grave at Kivik, Southern Sweden, strongly supports their association with religion and cult, as does the fact that the known examples appear to have been deposited (buried) carefully.
I'm sure you can find more precise details if you dig deep enough.
> Which sun-god?
You can read more about this cult here[1] and here[2].
> This is a calendar. It's proven to be a calendar. We know how it works as a calendar. It's a tool for predicting celestial events.
Do not project the hyper-rationalistic character of our current society to societies and civilizations of the pre-industrial era. People in the ancient times were not as rational and utilitarian as we are. Everything was permeated by religion, superstition and magic.
[1]: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
[2]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnja9z/scientists-reconst...
I think it's much, much more the other way around. Modern archaeologists have inherited their Victorian predecessors attitudes, who tended to look on primitive societies as backward and superstitious; "nasty, brutal and short".
> Everything was permeated by religion, superstition and magic.
I don't think there's much evidence to support this. Lots of speculation and interpretation, but not much actual evidence. A girl wearing a "sun disk" is interpreted as being a "priestess of a sun religion". On what basis? Can't it just be decoration?
Again, saying "ritual" or "religious" is easy because it requires no proof. If you said that the disk was a tool, you'd be required to specify what the tool was and what it was used for. But you're not required to say what ritual, or how the item was used in the ritual. It's a different standard of proof.
It would be better if archeologists admitted that they don't know what the thing is for, until there's more evidence or better understanding of the culture.
Deleted Comment
It's there if you bothered to look. 2 minutes following links gets me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hats
"Their use as head-gear is strongly supported by the fact that the three of four examples have a cap-like widening at the bottom of the cone, and that their openings are oval (not round), with diameters and shapes roughly equivalent to those of a human skull"
Further: "The figural depiction of an object resembling a conical hat on a stone slab of the King's Grave at Kivik, Southern Sweden, strongly supports their association with religion and cult" which links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Grave
I can't see the hats but whatever, I assume people aren't actually stupid.
Anyway the German Wikipedia page about Goldhüte [1] says the ritual significance was attributed because there are tomb paintings depicting similar hats being worn in some religious/cultic context.
[1:] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldhut
Because of fragility or because costs of the material? Gold is one of the earliest metals used. I don't know out of my head what alloys (1000 BCE!) they could have used to create sub-milimeter wall thickness (0.6mm!). If they had been able to do this out of iron, it would be dust by now. Remember from Chemistry class? Gold does not react easily.
It may be a tool, but why would they make it in gold, and so delicate? Why would they bury such a tool in a seemingly ceremonial way, on a stand, with axes leaning it to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Hat_of_Schifferstadt#Pr...)?
Also, how would they keep track of time on this, if its primary purpose was use as a tool?
Example in hieroglyphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obeliscus_Pamphilius?wprov=sfl...
Example in an undeciphered script: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_rongorongo#F...
I'm not sure about the the screwdriver, but certainly such things as the Sunday Morning Family Waffle Iron, can be described as items for ritualistic purposes, right?
So if your family has a tradition of Sunday Morning Waffles, then sure it's "ritual" in a very minor sense. But it's not religious. You don't make waffles every Sunday morning to appease the Waffle Gods, or because of some superstition that the next winter will be terrible if you don't. But these are the sorts of things that get associated with "ritual".
Archeologists being lazy about their interpretations leads to a view of ancient civilisations that they were all "permeated with magic and superstition". And I don't think the evidence actually supports that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_cape
Modelling the hat as a cylinder surface of length 745 mm and 88% gold, the resulting radius is about 1 cm.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=490+*+0.877+grams+of+g...
[0] If you have a lathe you can build more steam machines and locomotives which then enable you to transport coal and steel to build and power even more lathes and steam machines and locomotives...
* In Great White North, head goes on bowl.
ObCanada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCcWzLAcv4o
Far to generous...in this instance it’s a “sun cult”
It’s kind of funny the worship of the sun, which a) actually exists; and b) is responsible for life on earth (not to mention stars generally are responsible for the elements that make up life) is cult status...but if you worship a “God” that is entirely faith based and more akin to a invisible friend, that is a sacred religion.
https://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-Macaulay/dp/039...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...
The only way to change this is to go to the far future when tectonic activity plausibly erases most artifacts. But once you've looking millions of years in the future, you're talking about a different species and everything about interpretability goes out the window.