Archive for May, 2010
I think of myself as having an extremely privileged position in being able to run Eternal Idol, and one of many reasons for this is the nature of some of the contributions and contributors. One of these contributors is Alex Down, who has worked for the Stonehenge Riverside Project and who has also very generously taken notes and reported back on meetings concerning Stonehenge before now. Once again, Alex has provided a huge surface for all of us who are interested in the latest developments on Stonehenge, because he recently attended the event named in the title of this post, a seminar of Stonehenge and Avebury held at Devizes last Saturday. As well as attending and reporting back, Alex took copious notes which are freely reproduced here for the benefit of all, so without further ado, I’ll present Alex’s fascinating account of this meeting.
Stonehenge and Avebury seminar at Devizes – a report
A constellation of the archaeological stars of Wessex appeared at the first Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site research seminar. Arranged by Amanda Chadburn of English Heritage, the Prehistoric Society and David Dawson and the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (WANHS), fourteen different speakers spent the day telling the audience packed into Devizes Town Hall about the latest ideas and research relating to the World Heritage Site (WHS).
There was, in fact, so much material that I can’t do justice to it all here, so I’ve been selective, including what I think will most interest the EI audience. The tight schedule unfortunately meant that opportunities for questions were very limited.
Amanda Chadburn welcomed us, and introduced the seminar, and explained that the two different sites are actually just one WHS – that was news to me – with the large gap of Salisbury Plain and Pewsey Vale in between. She explained that it’s proposed that an Archaeological Research Group be set up for the whole WHS, and asked for ideas to help frame its terms of reference. I’ve sent mine, and I bet that the readership here has a whole lot more.
Michael Allen’s presentation on “Defining the inherited natural landscape” was interesting because he’s using the natural archaeo-ecology of the site (like land snails, for instance) to map the ancient woodland landscape. John Evans did important work using snails to show that shrubs and trees had encroached on the Stonehenge site after the ditch/bank was built, so there had to be clearance for the construction of the sarsen stone circles. Allen’s work from the car park postholes shows that the Mesolithic landscape was open savannah, or rough grassland, while the preserved soil under the Cursus long barrow would never have supported ancient woodland. But similar long barrows show different condition: Woodhenge was originally scrubland, while Durrington Walls was open woodland.
Allen proposes that the early landscape showed a number of “special” places, with open grassland, but with a mosaic of different vegetation nearby. This ecological diversity would have provided good opportunities for early settlers to have found the resources they needed for survival. The lesson to be learned is that the early landscape was not of uniform tree/vegetation cover, and the diversity would have determined patterns of settlement.
Rob Ixer’s presentation on the geological origins of the bluestones was difficult for a non-specialist to follow, and I was surprised that his current thinking seems to have located all the bluestones in the Preseli/Fishguard area after his recent British Archaeology article, where he points out that the original source [of the rhyolite stones] came not from Pembrokeshire, but from “a far wider and, as yet, unrecognised area or more likely areas – perhaps north Wales (Snowdonia, the Llyn Peninsula and Anglesey), or even beyond.” (Discussion in Eternal Idol article here.)
Martin Barber’s presentation on historical aerial photography in the WHS was visual, so not easy to summarize, but what seemed obvious was that the mass of older aerial photographs contain huge amounts of valuable information that hasn’t yet been fully analyzed and followed up. Many of these photos are in the public domain, so the opportunity for original research is open to all.
David Field’s presentation on “Deciphering the palimpsest” applied the general principle of interpreting archaeological sequences to Stonehenge, which gave him an opportunity to talk about his discovery of the mound in the south of Stonehenge, and the antiquity of the “North barrow” (not actually a barrow) which seems to be the oldest surviving component of the monument, predating the ditch and bank. His discoveries, from a detailed non-invasive landscape survey of the monument by English Heritage, are summarized in “Sun mound, Moon ring” here in EI, and David told me that there will be a more detailed report published by English Heritage shortly.
Stuart Needham talked on “A complex of cemeteries”, relating BA barrow distribution to the earlier monuments. He believes that there is a compelling case for continuing reverence of a “super-sacred” zone around Stonehenge, and of Stonehenge itself; he cites the evidence of the axe carvings and the digging of the Y/Z holes, while the adjacent cemeteries, like Normanton Down, show “barrow intensification”, with selected individuals being chosen for burial in these special zones. He made some interesting points about the Y/Z holes, suggesting that at least one of the holes seems to have held a stone orthostat, while the pattern of the rings seems to have encouraged a spiralling perambulation, with the point of entry being near the henge’s southern entrance.
Needham went on to suggest that, while the sacred use of Stonehenge continued into the BA, the map of sacredness was more distributed into the surrounding landscape. The Normanton Down cemeteries complex straddles the NE/SW solstitial line. Could it be, he wonders, that there are the remains of less substantial structures still to be found on the line? And it’s defined by the two dry valleys extending from Lake, to the south, while there’s similar dry valley access from the river Till to the Coniger and Winterbourne Stoke cemeteries. He believes that archaeologists “need to take river valleys more seriously.”
After lunch, Josh Pollard’s discussion of “Neolithic Avebury” focussed more on what we don’t know, rather than what we do and, as such seemed to be setting a research agenda. Earlier we had seen aerial photographs that showed evidence of structures in Avebury’s western palisades. Josh Pollard wondered whether this was Avebury’s Durrington Walls, and suggested that there is significance in the association with the river, as in the Stonehenge landscape. He used an interesting term in connection with the (almost completely missing) Beckhampton Avenue: “memoryscape.” He suggested that the Avenue was constructed to commemorate the construction and subsequent eradication of the Longstone Enclosure. If so, to me this sounds very much like MPP’s suggestion that the extended Stonehenge Avenue was built to commemorate the construction and removal of Bluestonehenge by the river Avon.
Jim Leary of English Heritage gave an abbreviated version of his WANHS lecture earlier this year, superbly summarized, heh heh, in this EI article. You can read that for the full story, but Jim did add that the mysterious “dancing ground” – an apparent trampling of the original stripped ground surface – can’t be replicated under modern conditions, so he’s inclined to believe that instead it’s a worm-sorted soil horizon. Hmmm … to me, that seems much less likely.
Tim Darvill’s talk on “Beyond Stonehenge” considered the bluestones, unsurprisingly given his recent excavations on the site. But there was little or no mention of healing powers – instead, he gave a very different view of the site to the conventional one that we’re familiar with. He started with the Preseli source sites, where the natural outcroppings are very similar to built monuments, and where there is already a Neolithic culture associated with the source stones. He believes that the bluestones are the first stone structures within the henge, but that they’ve been subject to constant rearrangement through prehistory to Roman times. Some of the remains are no longer found today as orthostats, suggesting that the stones have been constantly recycled into different configurations, and broken up.
Importantly, Darvill claims that we should regard Stonehenge “as a Roman temple”. Certainly the bluestone sequence seems to be much longer than conventional chronologies, with the major pit in Darvill’s excavation dating to the 4th century AD. This long sequence of changes, he suggests, is because the “doing” was more important than the result; perhaps in a similar way to Silbury, where the scope of the monument seems to have been extended many times. (Puzzlingly, Darvill suggests this chain of bluestone activities appears to have included breaking them up for stone implements.) He concluded that there are “many reasons why Stonehenge is Stonehenge …” with all sorts of connections and associations. Was Stonehenge at the centre of the different communities through history, or at the edge? Probably both, at different times.
For me, Colin Richards’ talk on “Wrapping up Stonehenge: a dermatological approach” was the most interesting, because it took a more conceptual, symbolic approach. He tries to understand if answering the question “what was it like to be Neolithic?” can help explain Stonehenge’s “peculiar architecture”.
He started with an anthropological viewpoint from Polynesia, where the “chants of Creation” help the people relate to their ancestors. Their use of tools (creation) gives birth to “things” so, conceptually, there is a relationship between genealogy and objects. He quoted MPP on Stonehenge: “… the living will have visited Stonehenge at certain times to meet the ancestors, and to communicate directly with them.” People need a relationship with the supernatural to use its power for sustaining life, and this gives rise to what he called an “economy of vitality”: the procreating power of the deity gives rise to more life that needs to be acknowledged and returned through sacrifice. The approach to the awesome power, normally a taboo, requires a graded approach – that is, a ritual – which activates a contextual relationship between living and supernatural and eventually results in a transaction with the deity.
At this point Richards introduced the concept of “wrapping” which, from its common and practical uses, can imply secrecy (and hence disclosure), protection for something (without or within), enclosure (and hence unification), and containment of something animated (and here he gave the example of a tattoo, which I confess I didn’t fully understand.) Richards, guided by his Polynesian experience, asserts the idea of animation is important, particularly in the context of animism: a belief that natural phenomena such as rocks, trees, or thunder have life or divinity. He wonders if, in Neolithic times, all things were considered living, or animate?
[As an aside, this idea is also very similar to the Australian aboriginals' idea of songlines, whereby their ancestry is defined through connections to different parts of their landscape along routes through their land. The hills, rocks and other features are equated to characteristics of the creator-spirit.]
So how does the idea of wrapping influence our view of Stonehenge? Richards believes that the monument was subject to constant wrapping and re-wrapping through modification and re-cutting of the ditches, containing depositions. And what was actually wrapped? The Altar Stone. There is more wrapping through the medium of the bluestones. We’ve already heard from Tim Darvill that the bluestones were in a constant state of flux – and Richards believes that the Y/Z holes too held bluestones in one incarnation of a wrap (Atkinson found rhyolite in some of the holes.)
He also believe that there was an even wider concept of wrapping that involves the whole landscape. It’s apparent from the remaining stones that there were two main types of stone, rhyolite and dolerite, undressed and dressed. I didn’t collect his argument fully, but the gist of it is that bluestone chips of rhyolite are found all round the Stonehenge landscape, especially at the end of the Cursus. His theory is that Stonehenge was originally “wrapped” in a number of bluestone henges, probably of rhyolite, surrounding dressed dolerite trilithons. Perhaps at some stage the wrapping was consolidated by bringing the wraps from outside to within the henge – we can see the remains of dolerite trilithons, with mortice recesses, within the monument today. And if you’re wondering why I’m so enthusiastic about Richards’ thesis, it’s because I suggested something very similar here earlier, proposing that Coneybury henge, Bluestonehenge and the Fargo henge/hengiform could all have been consolidated into one super-site, around the time when the sarsens arrived. It seems as though Colin Richards sees an even wider collection and consolidation.
Julian Thomas gave a wide-ranging talk on “The Stonehenge Cursus complex” which is difficult to summarize succinctly. In viewing Stonehenge and Durrington Walls as the two ends of a journey, involving the dead and the living respectively, he pointed to the frequent pairing of a long barrow with a long enclosure. The pairing is seen at the Great Cursus (Amesbury 42, the long barrow, sits at the eastern end of the Cursus), the Lesser Cursus, Normanton Down, and so on. This seems again to be a similar conjunction of the living and the dead, where the cursuses, for instance, may formalize a long-established pathway. Radiocarbon dating of antler picks discovered at the bottom of the western terminal ditch, plus other features, all suggest that the Stonehenge Cursus was first constructed around 3500 BC, forming a highly visible feature in the landscape. It then appears that, around 500 years later, there was a social change from a society that saw the dead as part of itself, to one that regarded the dead as being kept at a distance, in a separate zone.
Mike Parker Pearson (MPP) spoke about “Future research priorities.” He’s interested in where the people came from, and envisages more isotope analysis like that which determined the origins of the Amesbury Archer. So the Beaker People Project will sample a proportion of the well-preserved skeletal remains of the Beaker period, aiming to reconstruct individuals’ diet and mobility. He wondered whether Stonehenge was a specific place of pilgrimage, and appeared to answer his own question by saying that there are similar results from other equivalent sites … but I’m afraid that I didn’t capture the details of what I presume are still pilot studies.
He also talked about some post-excavation research for the Stonehenge Riverside Project that he called “Feeding Stonehenge.” This involves analyzing the large quantities of pig and cattle remains from Durrington Walls. I’m not sure how definite these results are, but he said that the animals are raised off the chalk, and are therefore imported, and that all the evidence points to temporary settlement. Interestingly, the evidence from the pigs points to slaughtering at two peak points in the year: midwinter and, less convincingly, midsummer. All of those straws seem to point to a pattern of twice-yearly solstitial use. He plans to look for similar patterns at Avebury, but he suggested that it would not be the same at Avebury, where there are no strong solstitial alignments. However, there do appear to be spring/May Day alignments. And that raises the interesting possibility that perhaps Avebury and Stonehenge were used in a complementary way at different times of the year, by a widespread Wessex people. Just my speculation.
Mike wouldn’t be Mike without leaving us a little surprise. On this occasion, he told us of some recent fieldwork he’d done near the Devil’s Den, a cromlech at the bottom of the long valley running south from Fyfield Down and the Grey Wethers, a valley that must have been a stone chute for the sarsens sliding down the valley sides. MPP said that he and Mike Pitts had spotted large depressions in the valley above the Den, and he suggested that these might have been the resting places of sarsen stones before they made the journey to Stonehenge. So, what would that journey have been? It’s very unlikely that they’d have been dragged up the valley and then down again to Avebury. So the only reasonable suggestion is that they went down Clatford Bottom, the valley continuation to Clatford, and crossed the river Kennet. Crossing the Kennet would require a causeway – and MPP thinks he’s spotted one beside the existing bridge. Exciting, or what? The obvious route then is to take the easy slopes through Lockeridge to Knap Hill, and then down to Marden henge, and the headwaters of the Avon. Perhaps the Marden henge monumentalizes the crossing of the Avon? The Clatford hypothesis should be easy enough to test and, if MPP is right about a heavily-piled Kennet causeway strong enough to carry stones weighing up to 50 tons, there could still be some mud-preserved remains in the river bottom. And that could lead to an RC dating that would date Stonehenge precisely.
And on that bombshell, as Clarkson says, I’ll say goodnight. That was the end of the presentations, leaving just enough time for a short Q&A session. In my view, the day was an outstanding success – my only suggestion would be to spread it over a whole weekend to do full justice to that volume of material. It sounds as though there are plans to repeat the seminar next year and, if so, I’d strongly recommend that you try and attend. It’s an almost unique opportunity to hear the world’s experts on Stonehenge and Avebury talking together.
Once again, I’d like to extend my grateful thanks to Alex for his generosity of spirit in compiling this report and for his kind permission to use the photos of the 2009 Bluestonehenge excavation.
More original posts to follow as soon as time allows.
The White Goddess
2:07 am
My apologies to anyone who may have thought that I’d lost interest in this site, but nothing could be further from the truth. One of the penalties of living in rural seclusion is that my internet connection occasionally goes awry, so I’ve spent the last week or so without being able to post for this site or even use my email account.
During this time, I occupied myself in a number of ways, one of which was making serious inroads into a Christmas present, which was The White Goddess, by Robert Graves. It is a truly astonishing book that I’ll be referring to again in the future, but I’m going to resist for now the temptation to so much as mention the many captivating gems I’ve encountered just a third of the way through.
However, there are two points that I thought were worth reproducing, albeit briefly. I’ve seen two so-called reviews of my own book, where I was amazed to read of matters that were purely figments of the so-called ‘reviewer’s’ imagination, as opposed to being anything that appeared in print in my book. I ascribe this to either simple-mindedness or more likely, pure malice on the part of the reviewer, so this is why I habitually refer to such people as idiots and blatant liars. It’s not something that I lose any sleep over, but when I glanced at the appendices in The White Goddess, I noticed that Robert Graves had been prompted to write to two individuals on account of what they’d said about his book, and one of these letters appeared in The Spectator on June 25th, 1948.
Rather than reproduce the letter in its entirety, Robert Graves lists nine instances in a single review by the archaeologist Dr Glyn E. Daniel, where the reviewer had passed comment on something that simply didn’t exist in the book. When I have some more leisure time, I’ll have a lot more to say about this, but in the meantime, I was heartened to read that even someone of the towering stature of Robert Graves had had to endure something as exasperating as this.
I can’t hope to do him justice here, but I was also very struck by what Robert Graves had to say in the opening section of Chapter 13, where he laments the inability of people in the 1940s to write meaningful prose, although I’m sure he’d turn in his grave if he could see the content of some of today’s chatrooms and text messages. He observed “The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy…(but)…it has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge….the joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar, the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues.”
Well, it doesn’t look as if a great deal has changed since The White Goddess was first published in 1948 and I could write about this at far greater length. However, I have other equally pressing matters to attend to, so I’ll do my best to bring some more original posts here as soon as I can.
The picture above, “The White Goddess”, is reproduced courtesy of my extremely talented friend Anne Sudworth – if you’ve not seen or visited her site, then I strongly recommend that you do so and have a good look around.
After publishing the previous post last night, I felt a mild and highly unusual pang of guilt. In an ideal world, I like to keep any personal information or updates to an absolute minimum, whereas I want to continue to provide original information on Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and the subject of Jesus in Britain. On several occasions before now, I’ve implied that I have some fairly sensational material in the archives, so while I’m preparing another lengthy post on the subject of the Shepton Mallet Chi-Ro Amulet, I thought this was as good a time as any to present what I personally consider to be one of the most stunning and telling Stonehenge-related discoveries of recent times, in what will be the 300th post I’ve published on this incarnation of Eternal Idol.
Again, in an ideal world, I would have made this post something like 5,000 words long by way of arguing a detailed case for a theory I have, but time is not on my side. However, it’s abundantly clear from the responses to many previous posts that many of you thoroughly enjoy applying yourselves to the minute details of an ancient mystery; I’ve always tried my best to make this site a pleasure to visit, so I’ll confine myself for now to a brief presentation, followed by an invitation to you to add your own thoughts on the matter at hand.
The picture below shows a discovery made a few years ago in the Stonehenge landscape. You are looking at the remains of a baby aurochs, which has been laid carefully on its side. The four limbs have been removed and they’ve been laid in a neat pile beside the creature’s head. It does not strike me that this was in any way a hasty disposal, because the creature’s remains have not been squashed, thrown or forced into the grave, which seems to have been dug in a calculated fashion so as to accommodate the body with some room to spare.
This was apparently a Neolithic burial, and from what I understand, this was a period when precious few human beings were accorded an individual burial, let alone an animal as ferocious as the aurochs. Julius Caesar wrote about them in great detail in his De Bello Gallico, 6: 28, observing, as you’ll see, that “…not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed.”
So, this baby aurochs self-evidently had not been butchered or cooked, because the creature’s remains are complete, with the exception of the removal of the limbs. However, I understand that there’s a good chance that the creature’s skin had been removed on account of the the discovery of small cuts or scrapes on some of the bones, incisions that appeared to have been made by sharp flints.
I’ve had the relative luxury of several years to ponder all this, but the simple truth is that a solution to this mystery appeared to me within seconds of seeing the remains and the grave in which they lay, and nothing in the intervening time has altered my original impression. On the contrary – the more I’ve read about Stonehenge and the people who built the monument, from the earthworks onwards, the more my original impressions have been reinforced.
So, bearing in mind “the vast importance of little distinctions and the endless significance of trifles”, why did the Stonehenge people do all this? Why did they bury a baby aurochs in a methodically-dug grave in what was described at the time as “a ritual landscape”, when the human dead were treated in a very different fashion? Why did they remove the creature’s limbs? Why did they place these limbs in a neat pile by the creature’s head? Why did they acquire this creature in the first place? What was going through their minds when they performed these actions? What end result, or results, were they striving towards? And what relevance, if any, does this have to the ceremonies that were conducted at Stonehenge in prehistory?
“What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?”
Burning the Midnight Oil
2:06 am
When I first started Eternal Idol, I was condescendingly informed by some ‘fellow archaeologists’ that there was nothing original I could possibly add to the subjects of Stonehenge or Silbury Hill, but five years down the line, there’s a backlog of posts on these subjects, not to mention the increasingly involved matter of ‘Jesus in Britain’.
I realise it’s been ten days or so since a lengthy post last appeared here, while it might also appear that I’ve neglected other subjects such as Caer Sidi. The truth is that I’ve been deluged with an unprecedented amount of correspondence, not that I’m complaining for a moment, because this correspondence from various sources has provided me with some fascinating and thought-provoking information. One day soon, I hope to be able to find the time to do it all justice, but I’d prefer to try to write a quality post rather than revert to the ‘picture-postcard’ approach that some other sites choose to employ.
I also made mention a little while back of two major projects I’ve been working on. I realise that such a cryptic mention can be infuriating, but the choice is a fairly stark one – I either go ‘off the air’ for a while and simply post a few updates or comments, or else I do my best to give some suggestion of how my time’s being occupied.
Of the projects I mentioned, one is still ongoing and it’s required most of my waking hours. It’s ambitious and unprecedented, but to say more at this point would be to tempt Fate and there’s an unbelievable amount of paperwork involved as well. It will either happen or it won’t, but as soon as I’m in a position to say more, you may rest assured that I’ll announce it to the Four Winds.
My involvement in the other project has virtually come to an end as of earlier tonight, which is to say that I’ve contributed everything I can to it and it’s now in the hands of others. I have many reasons for hoping it will succeed, one of which is that it looks likely to be a ‘wonder of the world’, but as every second goes by without interruption, we’re another second closer to seeing it.
So, thank you all for your patience and indulgence, which I sincerely hope will be rewarded soon. I’m also greatly surprised by the statistics for this site, which show ever-growing numbers of people spending longer and longer here. There are a number of Stonehenge-related posts I want to complete and publish, but for now, I’m working on what I hope will be a fairly exhaustive study of the Shepton Mallet Chi-Ro Amulet. In the meantime, if anyone has any other information on Stonehenge, Silbury Hill or Jesus in Britain, it will always find a welcome home here, no matter how busy I might be.
It’s still the case that my time’s limited, sadly, but I thought it was more than worthwhile publishing the photograph above, which was kindly sent in by Yvonne Whiteman. It is the centrepiece of a larger mosaic that was discovered in 1963 in the north Dorset village of Hinton St Mary, by the local blacksmith, John White. You can read details concerning the mosaic in the link above, if you wish, but for now, I just intend to air some observations about the figure in the central panel, thought by some to depict Christ.
The figure is clean-shaven, although his hair was described by Peter Johnson as “decadent” (see Romano-British Mosaics, Shire Archaeology 1995). This is curious indeed, given what we know of the long-haired Gauls and Britons when contrasted with this BBC depiction of the ‘likely’ figure of the historical Jesus with close-cropped hair. Be that as it may, the figure stands in front of a Chi-Ro symbol, which as Yvonne points out, was also known as a labarum.
As you can see for yourselves, a ‘labarum’ was a Roman military standard, but its origins are unclear, because one historian maintains that the emperor Constantine was told, in a dream, to “delineate the heavenly sign on the shields of his shoulders”. Eusebius, another historian, gives two accounts of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge; one contains a detailed account of the vision in question, apparently from the emperor himself, but the other completely fails to mention a vision.
While I’m perfectly prepared to accept the reality of people seeing portents and other ‘fires in the sky’, this particular matter of what Constantine saw (or didn’t see) seems rather involved, while there also seems to be some confusion about where Constantine’s loyalties lay as far as Christianity was concerned. What interests me above all, I suppose, is the fact that Constantine was the first Christian emperor and that he became emperor while living in Britain.
Returning to the subject of the Chi-Ro, or labarum, it also strikes me as rather odd that Jesus, the “Prince of Peace”, should be associated with a Roman military standard and with warfare, in the case of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.
At the same time, however, he was spoken of at the time of his birth as a Messiah, or warrior who would deliver his people by force of arms, while every piece of evidence that I’ve seen tells me that he travelled to Britain at a time when the island was notorious for the warlike ferocity of its inhabitants. The Roman historian Tacitus makes it perfectly clear that the Silures (Men of the Stones? Guardians of the Sun?) were responsible for driving Caesar’s legions out of the island, and this same tribe were to put up the most savage and sustained resistance to the Roman legions after the Claudian invasion of 43 AD. And before we leave the subject of Jesus and banners, I still find myself wondering why he frequently appeared in mediaeval paintings carrying an English flag.
Back to the Hinton St Mary mosaic, and it seems universally accepted that the Christ figure in the centre is flanked by pomegranates. There is undoubtedly a Jewish connection, as I learned from my friend Salim who runs the Bequest Unearthed site:
“According to Jewish tradition, the pomegranate symbolizes righteousness, due to the fact that it supposedly has 613 seeds (some do, some don’t), and those seeds are attributed to the 613 mitzvot/commandments of the Torah. The pomegranate also symbolized fruitfulness. It is one of the Seven Species spoken about in the Torah (Exodus 28:33-34). The Seven Species are: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates.
The ‘crown’ of the pomegranate is crown-shaped, and it has been told that Solomon designed his crown based on it. Torah scroll handles are often covered with two hollow, silver pomegranates, when they are not being used.”
There is also clearly a Phoenician connection, as we learn from the etymology of the word, so this led me to think of the recent information supplied by Keith Wilce-Davies (see post below), a gentleman from south Wales who discovered that he had mixed Jewish and Phoenician ancestry after a DNA test carried out by the National Geographic Genographic Project, all of which makes me wonder once again about the likelihood of Jesus visiting the West of England with Joseph of Arimathea on board a Phoenician galley, as the legends maintain.
Well, the Hinton St Mary mosaic has been known of since 1963, but just as is the case with the Eisu coins of the West Country, there seems to be surprisingly little information or informed speculation about it, although I’m happy to be corrected on this. The official line seems to be that it’s (possibly) the earliest known representation of Jesus in Britain, but there are many aspects of this mosaic and representation that make me mildly suspicious.
In addition to Jesus sporting curiously decadent long hair, there’s the matter of the Chi-Ro symbol, which originated, or so we’re told, in a vision witnessed by the first Christian emperor, but the hard evidence suggests that this is not the case. Once again, I’m very grateful to Yvonne for pointing me towards these Ptolemaic coins dating from the third century BC and if you click on the images in the link above, you’ll clearly see the Chi-Ro symbol between the legs of the eagle. There is more information and speculation on the Chi-Ro symbol here, but I’ll leave you to ponder the contents at your leisure.
The Wiki link to the Hinton St Mary mosaic tells us that although the mosaic itself has been rescued, the structure in which it was housed has not been excavated. It goes on to say that this structure could have been a villa, or else it could have been a church or other Christian complex. A mere glance at my Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (page 173) tells me that the prefix ‘Hinton’ has two different origins, one meaning ‘high farmstead’ and this, apparently, is the meaning of the Hinton St Mary name. Another meaning for ‘Hinton’, however, is “farmstead belonging to a religious community”, but I must admit that I don’t know precisely how the scholars differentiate the two.
Nonetheless, if the figure in the mosaic is indeed the earliest known representation of Jesus in Britain, it’s not too great a leap to suppose that the building in which it was housed reasonably qualifies it as a very early church. This seems a striking coincidence, given its proximity to Glastonbury, where the first ever church was constructed by Jesus himself, according to the legends.
The matter doesn’t end there, though, because you’ll also see Shepton Mallet marked on the map above, in the same small region. This, of course, is where the famous Shepton Mallet Chi-Ro amulet was discovered back in 1990, an artefact that “was initially regarded as the earliest evidence of a Christian burial in Britain and was hailed as one of the archaeological finds of the century.”
This discovery has long intrigued me, so before anyone considers sending in links pointing out that the amulet is a hoax, I’ll spell out one reason why it interests me so much. The amulet (below) was discovered 20 years ago and if it’s genuine, then would of course be a fascinating relic, especially coming from a small area replete with legends of Jesus, of the world’s first church and so forth.
However, two decades have now gone by and I can’t find a definitive report stating categorically that it’s a hoax, as every document I’ve seen is very careful to qualify its conclusions by judicious use of terms such as ‘probably’, ‘almost certainly’ and so forth. So, if anyone ‘out there’ can throw any further light on the matter of the Shepton Mallet Amulet or the figure in the mosaic, please feel free to share your findings here with the rest of the world.
My grateful thanks to Yvonne Whiteman and once again, to MOJO Productions of Minnesota.
Post Scriptum: Anyone who wishes to is welcome to add comments to this post, but I should point out that I plan to publish a much more detailed piece on the Shepton Mallet Chi-Ro Amulet in the near future, before I publish anything else.
By a complete coincidence, I’ve just been sent this uplifting quote by J Calvin Coolidge “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination are Omnipotent. The slogan: Press On, has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave.”
