05-08-2016, 02:25 AM
(04-08-2016, 02:20 PM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I had not seen this image before. It is relevant beyond any doubt and your conclusion is plausible.
Thanks. I guess it's just a judgment call, but I have a hard time seeing how the similarity here could be a total coincidence.
Quote:It is also the view that I hold, following Diane: the figures in the centres of the roundels were initially non-European month emblems and they have been edited to bring them closer to what a medieval European would expext.
It seems like something along these lines is probably correct. In some cases it seems like the original image must have been totally replaced with a contemporary example, such as in the case of Sagittarius, but in other cases it was merely modified, as in the case with Leo here and probably also Aries, Taurus, and Scorpio.
Quote:In this image we see that it may have been custmary to depict this type of feline with a palm tree behind it. Maybe as an emblem to mark its species? This would have looked strange in Europe, so they turned it into the tail, still allowing the original image to be understood for those who knew.
Depicting animals with a tree directly centered in the background seems to have been common in the Hellenistic period. Diane has a picture on her site of a coin with a lion in front of a tree that looks similar to this (somewhere... can't find the link at the moment).