27-03-2016, 03:37 PM
Koen,
Koen, yes, I collected a heap of similar references when I was researching the question of why some waters in the Vms are painted blue, but most green. I was aware of the habit's prevalence in the eastern Mediterranean, and its antiquity in Egypt, but I wasn't then sure of any connection between the Vms and those areas, or earlier times - except for that bearded sun which was an immediate indicator, as was the form for 'Leo'.
However - it seemed to me a logical first premise to suppose that if the ladies were similarly drawn in the calendar's tiers as in the 'bathy-' section, and pretty obviously deliberately made unbeautiful, even deformed in the face (though still with nice bellies, backs and armpits) then they were personifications - abstractions like the figure of 'Justice' - not meant literally. And since those in the calendar section were evidently meant for stars, then why wouldn't the same apply elsewhere?
Since medieval Europe, like the old Egyptians, used a formal custom of denoting identity and character by providing figures each with a particular token (these are known as emblemata), so what would happen if I checked if each of the figure's little tokens had some counterpart that made sense in terms of astronomical lore - without bias towards any one tradition, neither Greek nor Latin, nor Persian, nor Indian etc.
Well, it proved slightly less simple than that, but in general that seemed to be the idea, and with a bit more work I was able to get a pretty clear idea of the system, even if some of the details' explanation appears impossible now to retrieve: lost to history.
But I don't want to be soap-boxy about this. I've written about it elsewhere anyway, and I might also be mistaken.
Koen, yes, I collected a heap of similar references when I was researching the question of why some waters in the Vms are painted blue, but most green. I was aware of the habit's prevalence in the eastern Mediterranean, and its antiquity in Egypt, but I wasn't then sure of any connection between the Vms and those areas, or earlier times - except for that bearded sun which was an immediate indicator, as was the form for 'Leo'.
However - it seemed to me a logical first premise to suppose that if the ladies were similarly drawn in the calendar's tiers as in the 'bathy-' section, and pretty obviously deliberately made unbeautiful, even deformed in the face (though still with nice bellies, backs and armpits) then they were personifications - abstractions like the figure of 'Justice' - not meant literally. And since those in the calendar section were evidently meant for stars, then why wouldn't the same apply elsewhere?
Since medieval Europe, like the old Egyptians, used a formal custom of denoting identity and character by providing figures each with a particular token (these are known as emblemata), so what would happen if I checked if each of the figure's little tokens had some counterpart that made sense in terms of astronomical lore - without bias towards any one tradition, neither Greek nor Latin, nor Persian, nor Indian etc.
Well, it proved slightly less simple than that, but in general that seemed to be the idea, and with a bit more work I was able to get a pretty clear idea of the system, even if some of the details' explanation appears impossible now to retrieve: lost to history.
But I don't want to be soap-boxy about this. I've written about it elsewhere anyway, and I might also be mistaken.