That's a great site! I had not heard of the World History Encyclopedia before.
I love reconstructions like these. Museums all too often give the false impression of past times as colorless, impoverished ruins rather than what they used to look like in their heyday. The Great Pyramid of Giza used to be covered in smooth, white-painted limestone with a capstone of gold [1], and the Roman marble statues that are just white today used to be painted in lots of colors [2].
There are of course objects (such as jewelry and glass) that survive more or less intact. But most often the surviving objects are just pale shadows of the originals. I would love a museum that instead offered life-sized reconstructions that you could walk around in, to bring the past to life better. The Ishtar Gate in Berlin is an example of this that really works. (I bet most visitors think it's the real thing, though. Most of it is a modern reconstruction.)
The inscriptions you refer to aren't Sanskrit, but Hurrian. The inscriptions in question contain Indo-European loan words and seemingly reference Vedic gods, but that does not make them Sanskrit inscriptions. If you're looking for the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions, you're looking to the first century BCE, over a millennium and a half later than this plaque. We have Sanskrit texts that are older than this, but the physical artifacts are newer copies of older copies that don't survive.
Very little is known from deities of the period, so this one is no exception. But I wonder if these messages carved on stone have survived longer than what our UTF-8 encoded text files may ever hope to.
Partially, this is because parallel works that exist often reference them pejoratively as part of a polemic. As the article mentions, she could be Lilith from the Bible (Isaiah 34:14), mentioned only once, whose identity is largely uncertain (and usually translated as "night creatures" or "night owls"... which is unfortunate). The author of Isaiah was probably aware of who or what this creature was, but as with most other references in the Bible, its use is only tangential and occurs in the chapter relating to the judgment of Edom. We see something similar in Habakkuk 3 with Deber and Resheph translated as plague and pestilence, though the Hebrew words are also the names used for Canaanite deities, suggestive again of a polemical quality that we lose in the English.
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible has an interesting article on Lilith, but it doesn't provide substantial evidence that this creature is the same as represented by the Babylonian carving. Lilith is attested to, most likely, in other Mesopotamian literature, but distorted by later Jewish and Christian lore.
This is one of the reasons why I find ancient Near Eastern materials so fascinating. We're always discovering something long forgotten, and then it provides evidence roping it back into other surviving literature, stories, or mythologies (the Epic of Gilgamesh being one such work).
It's interesting that the relief gives the impression that this deity is either just now taking off or just now landing from flight, given the positions of her feet and wings
Late anthropomorphisms and stylizations of “squatter man” and “eye mask” figures seen glowing in the heavens, i.e. ones that began to develop decades or centuries after the deaths of the last humans who had witnessed the plasma light shows (natural phenomena, seen all over the world at different times).
Wikipedia is good on the artefact : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burney_Relief
This includes the reconstruction of the original colours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burney_Relief#/media/File:Quee...
Here is a colorized version of it based on extracted pigments: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2317/the-queen-of-the-nig...
That's a great site! I had not heard of the World History Encyclopedia before.
I love reconstructions like these. Museums all too often give the false impression of past times as colorless, impoverished ruins rather than what they used to look like in their heyday. The Great Pyramid of Giza used to be covered in smooth, white-painted limestone with a capstone of gold [1], and the Roman marble statues that are just white today used to be painted in lots of colors [2].
There are of course objects (such as jewelry and glass) that survive more or less intact. But most often the surviving objects are just pale shadows of the originals. I would love a museum that instead offered life-sized reconstructions that you could walk around in, to bring the past to life better. The Ishtar Gate in Berlin is an example of this that really works. (I bet most visitors think it's the real thing, though. Most of it is a modern reconstruction.)
[1] https://www.openculture.com/2019/12/what-the-great-pyramid-o...
[2] https://bigthink.com/high-culture/greek-statues-painted/
This is a long shot, but Hindu Lakshmi is also associated with lions and owls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi
This was 250 - 400 years before the earliest Sanskrit inscription (found in Northern Syria linked to the Mittani).
So this would predate that by quite a bit.
Nit, it is spelled Mitanni when referring to the peoples. When spelled Mittani it refers to the former Eve Online space tyrant.
Ooh, Mittens!
The inscriptions you refer to aren't Sanskrit, but Hurrian. The inscriptions in question contain Indo-European loan words and seemingly reference Vedic gods, but that does not make them Sanskrit inscriptions. If you're looking for the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions, you're looking to the first century BCE, over a millennium and a half later than this plaque. We have Sanskrit texts that are older than this, but the physical artifacts are newer copies of older copies that don't survive.
The left hand seems to hold something like a noose which is an oft repeated item in Hindu iconography (pasha/pasa)
It's in both hands (one fell off), and it's this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod-and-ring_symbol
Gods hold it and offer it to kings, for whatever good that does them.
It might be related to 𓍶, the Egyptian shen ring:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_ring
Here's the pasha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasha_(Hinduism)
Very little is known from deities of the period, so this one is no exception. But I wonder if these messages carved on stone have survived longer than what our UTF-8 encoded text files may ever hope to.
Partially, this is because parallel works that exist often reference them pejoratively as part of a polemic. As the article mentions, she could be Lilith from the Bible (Isaiah 34:14), mentioned only once, whose identity is largely uncertain (and usually translated as "night creatures" or "night owls"... which is unfortunate). The author of Isaiah was probably aware of who or what this creature was, but as with most other references in the Bible, its use is only tangential and occurs in the chapter relating to the judgment of Edom. We see something similar in Habakkuk 3 with Deber and Resheph translated as plague and pestilence, though the Hebrew words are also the names used for Canaanite deities, suggestive again of a polemical quality that we lose in the English.
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible has an interesting article on Lilith, but it doesn't provide substantial evidence that this creature is the same as represented by the Babylonian carving. Lilith is attested to, most likely, in other Mesopotamian literature, but distorted by later Jewish and Christian lore.
This is one of the reasons why I find ancient Near Eastern materials so fascinating. We're always discovering something long forgotten, and then it provides evidence roping it back into other surviving literature, stories, or mythologies (the Epic of Gilgamesh being one such work).
It's interesting that the relief gives the impression that this deity is either just now taking off or just now landing from flight, given the positions of her feet and wings
Late anthropomorphisms and stylizations of “squatter man” and “eye mask” figures seen glowing in the heavens, i.e. ones that began to develop decades or centuries after the deaths of the last humans who had witnessed the plasma light shows (natural phenomena, seen all over the world at different times).
I'm sorry what are you referring to here?