3k-Year-Old Golden Bowl Adorned with Sun Motif Found in Austria | Hacker News Reader

3k-Year-Old Golden Bowl Adorned with Sun Motif Found in Austria

smithsonianmag.com

90 pointsdiodorus34 comments

Some cultural context, this bowl is probably associated with the Urnfield culture, a wide-spread cultural horizon that was probably associated with Indo-European language speakers (probably late proto-Indo-European or pre-proto-Celtic).

The sun motif is naturally widespread among many unrelated cultures, but in this case is probably associated with a dawn or sun deity (*seh₂u-el, cognate with Sol, Helios, etc). Sometimes female, sometimes male depending on the culture and period, but in this period, probably female.

A similar culture (i.e. late PIE), with similar mythology, created the Trundholm sun chariot -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot.

Apparently this bowl is typical of a Bronze Age culture known as the "Urnfield culture". They made some amazing hats[0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urnfield_culture#/media/File:C...

It's amazing how many stuff in the ancient world infringe on Larry Ellison's trademarks. First there was the Oracle at Delphi, and now this.

I am sure whoever, owns this object will be hearing from Oracle lawyers pretty soon about the need to get a license for the Sun motif.

I guess in 3k years archeologists will discover black bricks and say “it appears to have an apple motif. These people seemed to worship some apple god.”

A not un-funny observation. I used to suggest that after seeing what the equestrian world was like, that future archeologists would see how the wealthiest people of this era spent huge fortunes on temples and buildings for horses, when in fact they were just for horse shows - and this suggested that the ancient Egyptians probably didn't worship cats at all, but that cat shows were just a really big social thing back then. Someone from thousands of years in the future discovering the now ancient internet could interpret the same thing.

Every now and then you see anthropologists admitting that "ritual object" is just their way of saying they have no idea what it's for

Some of the Moai of Rapa Nui (aka the giant stone heads on Easter Island) used to have eyes. The fragments of the whites of the eyes - almond-shaped white stones with a central hole - were misidentified as "ritual bowls" for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai#Eyes

Interestly, it was also associated with black turtles and a fear of buttons. Some scholars think that there were two different apple gods, both named Steve, while others insist that it was two aspects of the same deity.

Records point that there was a war for the skies between the thunder god, Macromedia Flash,and the apple god, Steve. The thunder god was huge and lived in the cloud, so Steve gave its followers very small boxes and put the clouds on them. Little by little there were no more clouds big enough for the thunder god and he falled into oblivion.

At least one AOL CD will survive whatever civilisation-level apocalypse.

If I'm running an excavator at a construction site and I dig up a relic like this, do I get to keep it? Do all items of a certain historical significance immediately get confiscated by a government body?

It's going to depend on the country, and exactly what you dig up (bones is going to be different than gold coins). But in the US, dig up a gold bowl in your backyard? You'd do well to contact a museum or something, but it's yours.

At least here in Denmark (probably most of Europe), anything really old you dig up belongs to the state. They do pay some kind of compensation for the finder.

Same in Turkey, and this applies to ancient (not modern) shipwrecks as well. While diving my cousin and uncle found an ancient shipwreck off the Aegean coast of Turkey that was recently revealed by moving silt, reported it to the state, and have gotten a fairly significant compensation out of it. Eventually their find ended up in the local antiquities museum.

There are some things that are ancient but common so you can keep, like Roman or Byzantine coins, but even then, you should bring it under for review so they can either pay you the value of it and hold on to it, or give you back with confirmation saying it’s not rare and OK to keep as a keepsake.

Is it weird that I pictured the logo of Sun Microsystems?

...and OSF Motif!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)

Through the looking glass ….

if so, you're not the only one with that idea!

That's hilarious the archaeologist's named is Michal Sip and he discovered a bowl

What do you call it when people are named similarly to their profession?

Perhaps the concept of nominative determinism[0], or (more generally) the saying from Latin, "nomen est omen"[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nomen_est_omen

What's the opposite -- where someone has an unfortunate name for their industry? I know of a developer with the last name Null.

Inaptronym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym#Inaptronyms

"Nominative determinism" is when there are reasons to suppose that the profession was inspired by the name. 'Aptronym' is a term for the expression "name checks".

It's called nominative determinism

Thanks this is what I was looking for

My last name is Colle so maybe I should start a glue company

No idea, but my zoology professor was called Prof. Elepfandt.

Andreas Elepfandt? That is amazing. What are his thoughts on elephants?

'Aptronym'. Edit: it should actually be 'aptonym', I do not know where that 'r' came from.

The library investigator's name is actually Bookman?

Previously on HN: Things Unexpectedly Named After People

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725

So this culture spread across central and northern Europe at just about the same time as every city on the Mediterranean was being sacked, producing a 300-year dark age (Egypt and mesopotamia excepted). It seems to matter whether they were all sacked first, or after.

Looks like time wasn't too kind to it. I wonder what it would have looked like 3,000 years ago - how precise the original craftsmanship was.

Looking at it with the eye of someone who did a lot of metal working: the driving of the sheet was done expertly and given how old it is what amazes me is how well some of the detail stands out and how detailed it is. What an amazing object.

It must have been glorious.

I half expected it to be Sun Microsystems and the Motif GUI based on the funky capitalization.

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