8 petal flower eareing 3D print model

cgtrader

Eight-petaled rosettes like those on the Disk were not exclusive to those ancient gameboards but appeared also on many other objects and so allow us to reconstruct their symbolic meaning from the contexts in which they were used. Their frequent appearance on gameboards may reflect their importance in real life to mark major events because many early gameboard paths were meant to simulate real life. It turns out that these rosettes were generally a symbol for the sun, or more precisely for its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and so indicated the passages from one state of existence into another. The earliest documented example of this ancestral sign, and among the most beautiful I have seen, is an eight-leaf rosette carved through an ivory disk from about 28,000 years ago, shown above. It was found in a child’s burial at the late Aurignacian site of Sungir in Russia, and its funerary context suggests that it may have been associated with the rebirth-and-renewal cluster of ideas already back then. Why else would anyone leave charms or other gifts with the dead if these were not expected to somehow live on and use them? Whatever this rosette may have meant to its ancient carver, its pierced design evokes to modern eyes the concept of passage or transition through its central funnel opening even better than any flat shape could, and our intuitive perception may well echo that of its long gone maker. The widespread and long-lived association of that eight-petaled flower with major life events, particularly in the life of the sun, is again attested in this account by Sig Lonegren, a researcher of labyrinths and archaeo-astronomy, about his visit to one of the Irish burial mounds from the fourth millennium BCE: In Cairn T at Loughcrew, northeast of Dublin in Ireland, another cruciform chamber, I witnessed the spring equinox sunrise. The light of the rising sun focused sharply on the enormous stone that formed the chamber's back wall and moved slowly from left to right across that wall. The climax came when it seemed that the sunlight was about to eat a circle with an eight-petal daisy inside it. (The circle and daisy were pecked into the face of that boulder on the chamber's back wall.)21A Many ancient cultures in temperate climes had their year begin with the spring equinox which coincided with the re-awakening of nature and the beginning of new life. That equinox rosette on the wall may therefore have meant here the renewal of the sun itself, just as in the many other megalithic examples of such solar displays and alignments that marked instead one of the solstices at the end of its path. Closer to us in time, and equally leaving no doubt about their meaning, are the many ancient Egyptian pictures that show the young sun god being born in a lotus blossom with eight leaves. This image still reflects a sunrise over the flooded lands of the Delta where lotus, which grows as the Nile rises, covered the waters to the horizon. It was therefore a fitting sign for that daily rebirth and new beginning. The Egyptian Book of the Dead calls the king of the gods Re in Chapter 15 the golden youth who came forth from the lotus, and in Chapter 81 the deceased utters the desire to be transformed into a sacred lotus21B.