Lunisolar calendar paper accepted for publication

At last, my lunisolar calendar paper has been accepted for publication in Time and Mind.

I must once again thank Dr John Gordon for emailing me the initial insight about the lunar cycle that appears on Pillar 43 (the top row of V-symbols in the picture above). The rest of the paper followed from this.

The article is published open access and available here.

I'm making selected images available below for free use, along with links to other images.

Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe (courtesy of Alistair Coombs)


Pillar 43 (right and middle) and  a view from Stellarium (left).



Symbols on Pillar 18 compared with the Nebra sky disk (from wikipedia).



Sketch of a likely lunar calendar (from Alexander Marshak, 1972. The Roots of Civilization: the Cognitive Beginning of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation. New York: McGraw-Hill).


Images of the Master/Mistress of animals can be found here and here.



Sketch of the Gebel D'jauti rock inscription, from Darnell and Darnell (see here).

Images of Gobekli, Karahan and Sayburc can be found here and here.

Urfa man can be found here.


Sketches of Pillar 33.



Statue of a human-animal hybrid from Karahan Tepe (now in Sanliurfa museum).


Comparison of 'bear'-symbols from Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk, thought to represent a constellation similar to Virgo.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gobekli Tepe's Pillars

Image
Significance: Gobekli Tepe (GT) probably represents the origin of civilisation for most of the world today. Most of us are connected to it in some way, through language and religion (proto-Nostratic), or genetics at least. The Pillars: GT is famous for its anomalous megalithic pillars, and especially the symbols carved on them. Most people think these symbols are telling an important story - they are not just random pictures of animals. Klauss Schmidt, who discovered GT and led its excavation, until his death in 2014, certainly thought so. It follows that the only way we will ever be able to properly understand Gobekli Tepe, and therefore the origin of civilisation, is through reading its pillars. Deutsche Archaeological Institute : the DAI operates the Gobekli Tepe dig. Despite the immense significance of the site, they continue to have a casual disregard for the information encoded on its pillars. Over 60 pillars have been uncovered, but only around 20 are documented by the DAI. Alt
Read more
Image
Decoding Pictish symbols This work is now peer-reviewed and published here . Image from Aberdeenshire.gov.uk/leisure-sport-and-culture/archaeology/sites-to-visit/pictish-symbol-stones/ The Picts lived in Scotland in the 1st millennium AD, and probably before. It is generally thought that the Romans named them after the paint they wore, and they built Hadrian's Wall to protect their lands to the south from them. The Picts are famous for their symbols, which they carved into megalithic pillars. To date, these symbols have remained a mystery, although several people have provided potential interpretations. One of the most well-known is due to Jackson who interpreted them as family crests - he describes his theory in detail in his 1984 book 'The Symbol Stones of Scotland'. In my view, they are instead practically the same system of zodiacal and astronomical symbols we have found across Europe and the Near East, from Palaeolithic caves to Gobekli Tepe, Ca
Read more

Holiday et al.'s (2023) Gish gallop: impact microspherules

Image
Holliday et al.'s "comprehensive refutation" of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH)  is a highly misleading Gish gallop . Their arguments against megafaunal extinctions and extensive wildfires at or near the YD onset are undermined by the recent paper by O'Keefe et al. (2023) concerning megafaunal extinctions in southern California.  Even though those authors attribute the wildfires to human behaviour in a warming environment, their data is fully consistent with the YDIH and strongly supports it. See an earlier  blog post for a discussion of this point. Similar conclusions concerning the YD onset megafaunal extinctions are obtained by Stewart et al. (2021) generally for N. America and Conroy et al. (2020) specifically for the region of Alaska and the Yukon. That is, when only the most accurate radiocarbon dates and modelling are used, the data typically supports the YDIH. Remember, the YDIH only proposes the event 'contributed to' these extinction event
Read more