Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | The Modern Antiquarian Forum | Rock art. so what's that all about then. ?

tjj

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Edited Aug 03, 2010, 15:49

Re: Rock art. so what's that all about then. ?

Aug 03, 2010, 08:42

A while ago I bought a copy of ‘Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age’ by Richard Rudgley (published 1998) in an Oxfam Shop. He comes at things very much as an anthropologist.
The chapter on the Palaeolithic Origins of Writing has proved interesting and a comment someone made recently has prompted me to re-visit it. Among some of the symbols discussed is the zigzag which seems to have been deliberately carved throughout the upper Palaeolithic period as an unbroken symbol. Very simply put, it seems to be accepted that the zigzag represents water; the V shape depicts birds in flight; the cross represents the yearly cycle or wholeness; and the spiral the life giving element of water.

Rudgley acknowledges and refers often to the work of Marija Gimbutas on Old Europe. I’m currently re-reading this chapter and recommend the book if you can get hold of it, here is the opening paragraph:

In seeking to explain the emergence of Old European script, Gimbutus proposed that it was part of a much wider corpus of signs that expressed the cosmological and spiritual beliefs of the Neolithic age. These symbolic designs and motifs (crosses, spirals, dots lozenges etc) appear on numerous artefacts made from bone, stone, wood and clay...

It seems to me that what ‘we’ are learning from the enigmatic clues from the past is that ‘they’ lived as part of Nature and that the downfall of ‘modern mankind’ will be that we have lost their knowledge.

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Rock art. so what's that all about then. ? (megadread)

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