Seemingly he was not a solo act in the Bronze Age sources, his entourage included Annarumenzi (“the forceful ones”) and Marwainzi (“the dark ones”), two groups apparently sharing his interests. He also had some sort of connection to the plague, being invoked against it in rituals. Texts written in either Hittite or Luwian pretty consistently portray Santa as a warlike deity armed with a bow. Luckily, later sources do offer a bit more insight. Its precise origin remains unknown, though there is a reasonably popular theory that it comes from one of the Anatolian languages, perhaps Luwian, and that it can be translated as “the furious one” or something to that effect. The only thing which might shed some more light on what sort of deity he was is his name. names invoking the name of a deity, and do not offer much information about his character, beyond telling us that he was viewed as an appropriate figure to name children after by some of the locals the Assyrian traders did business with. The early attestations of Santa are therefore basically limited to theophoric names, ie. These have been dated to roughly 1800 BCE, and are largely just the ancient version of store receipts, legal agreements and guarantees.
Santa’ career began in the earliest textual sources from Anatolia, the texts from the Assyrian trading colony, so-called karum, Kanesh (modern Kultepe in Turkey). There’s also a variety of derivative Greek forms, but we’ll get to that in time. I admit I went with “Santa” here entirely because it’s funny. Variable orthography was not uncommon for names written phonetically rather than logographically. Santa’s name has a variety of spellings in cuneiform, with either a ta or a da, and transcriptions both with and without diacritics (specifically, with š - read like the English sh sound in “cash” and so on - in place of s) can be found in literature. Needless to say, Santa has nothing to do with Santa Claus I’m publishing this as a Christmas special only because the accidental homophony is funny to me. The following article is meant to shed some light on the two main examples, Santa and Maliya - or, according to Greek sources, Sandas and Malis. Obviously, part of the problem is that the survival of Bronze Age Anatolian deities - whether Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Hattian or Hurrian - in the Iron Age was the exception, not the rule. Even generally credible sites will overlook them. It is likely that this myth was used to explain the origin of an unknown Spartan festival that functioned similarly to the Argive festival of Hybristica, where women took over the roles of men.įor reasons unknown to me, while poorly researched hot takes like “Aphrodite is LITERALLY Inanna” (nevermind that that in areas which plausibly had contact with Greece the closest analog to Inanna would be Ashtart, notably dissimilar to Aphrodite) are repeated over and over again, the actual presence of specific eastern deities under their actual names in Greek sources seems to be a matter mostly of interest to experts in Bronze Age Anatolia. The Spartan army, realizing their city was under siege, returned and assumed that the women were the enemy army until they stripped off their armour to reveal their identities. A related Spartan epithet, "Armed Aphrodite" (Ἀφροδίτη 'Ενόπλιος) was associated with an etiological myth recorded by Lactanius, who stated that once the Spartan army was away from the city attacking Messene, part of the Messene army launched a counterattack against Sparta that was thwarted by the Spartan women who armed themselves and defended the city. Pausanias' claim that "Aphrodite Areia" was simply a female version of Ares has some support in the contemporary epigraphy. Various authors make reference to Sparta worshipping an armoured Aphrodite, such as Plutarch, Nonnos, and Quintilian. In Sparta, Pausanias described two temples dedicated to Aphrodite Areia and archeological evidence supports this claim.
0 kommentar(er)
