DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.52552#0042
20
THE THUNDERWEAPON
antiquities at the National Museum, is depicted in fig. 13. The
inscription, according to the infor-
mation kindlysupplied by Professor
Bruno Meissner of Breslau, con-
tains only the names of Shamash
and Ai, i.e. the sun-god and his
wife, and so has no nearer con-
nection with the engraved figures.
In a well-known picture of a scene
of sacrifice found on a cylinder (Revue archeol. 1887, II. p. 269)
a club and a one-edged axe are seen placed on a throne, and to
these a fish is being sacrificed. A comparison with religious
pictures of a kindred nature (W. J. Hinke, A New Boundary
Stone of Nebuchadrezzar, I. pp. 88-89) shows that the axe
represents the lightning or the god of lightning.
Provided that the old belief, according to which the lightning
was produced by means of a stone axe, was predominant in the
Hittite and Assyrian regions1, as well as in those parts where
Mycenaean culture prevailed, it becomes intelligible how during
the bronze age, by a parallel development in the two districts,
the old thunderweapon was replaced by the bronze axe in the
two distinct forms which appear in the two regions respectively.
Without this assumption it would be difficult to find an explana-
tion. If one district had merely borrowed from its neighbour
we might have expected to find a complete similarity; either
the Hittite and Assyrian regions would have adopted the double-
axe, or the Mycenaean would have taken over the one-edged
Asiatic axe.
After the thunderweapon had thus passed, by a natural
evolution, from its primitive form into a bronze axe in the Greek
and western Asiatic world, in some parts of these countries, as
has already been said, this bronze form was preserved by hieratic
tradition throughout the early ages. It must certainly have
been with this form that the myth which relates how the
Kyklopes made the lightning for Zeus was originally associated.
1 It was from some of the cities of this very district that the Hellenistic worship of
the keraunos was transmitted. This too we must suppose to have been a later
successor of the primitive thunderweapon, the stone axe. (See p. 15.)
THE THUNDERWEAPON
antiquities at the National Museum, is depicted in fig. 13. The
inscription, according to the infor-
mation kindlysupplied by Professor
Bruno Meissner of Breslau, con-
tains only the names of Shamash
and Ai, i.e. the sun-god and his
wife, and so has no nearer con-
nection with the engraved figures.
In a well-known picture of a scene
of sacrifice found on a cylinder (Revue archeol. 1887, II. p. 269)
a club and a one-edged axe are seen placed on a throne, and to
these a fish is being sacrificed. A comparison with religious
pictures of a kindred nature (W. J. Hinke, A New Boundary
Stone of Nebuchadrezzar, I. pp. 88-89) shows that the axe
represents the lightning or the god of lightning.
Provided that the old belief, according to which the lightning
was produced by means of a stone axe, was predominant in the
Hittite and Assyrian regions1, as well as in those parts where
Mycenaean culture prevailed, it becomes intelligible how during
the bronze age, by a parallel development in the two districts,
the old thunderweapon was replaced by the bronze axe in the
two distinct forms which appear in the two regions respectively.
Without this assumption it would be difficult to find an explana-
tion. If one district had merely borrowed from its neighbour
we might have expected to find a complete similarity; either
the Hittite and Assyrian regions would have adopted the double-
axe, or the Mycenaean would have taken over the one-edged
Asiatic axe.
After the thunderweapon had thus passed, by a natural
evolution, from its primitive form into a bronze axe in the Greek
and western Asiatic world, in some parts of these countries, as
has already been said, this bronze form was preserved by hieratic
tradition throughout the early ages. It must certainly have
been with this form that the myth which relates how the
Kyklopes made the lightning for Zeus was originally associated.
1 It was from some of the cities of this very district that the Hellenistic worship of
the keraunos was transmitted. This too we must suppose to have been a later
successor of the primitive thunderweapon, the stone axe. (See p. 15.)