September 14, 2010

Old Syrian Hawk Discovered

And by Syrian hawk, I don’t mean a war monger or the Syrian coat of arms. SANA (and Global Arab Network, they have exactly the same story) reports the discovery of a very old sculpture of a hawk at Belaas, Hama, in central Syria. Syrian and French archaeologists date the sculpture to the 10th millennium BCE.

The discovery was during the excavations of the Syrian-French joint expedition, it proves that the Syrian Hawk is 5 millenniums older than all other sculptures, which proves, in return, the historic role of the region where the sculpture was first created and then spread out to the whole world along with other aspects of the Syrian culture in contribution to human culture. [SANA]

Hummm. Could be. Certainly Syrian culture has contributed significantly to human culture. But for reasons I can’t quite articulate, for now I’m a little dubious about the age of this sculpture. I instinctively react negatively to anything that is “first” of its kind or that “proves” something. This is particularly true when this “first” “proves” something about a national coat of arms. But then, my skepticism may be misplaced. As usually, we’ll need to wait for the publication of the excavation report.

While I like the fact that the articles have a picture, why is it out of focus?

Posted by Duane Smith at September 14, 2010 11:17 AM | Read more on Archaeology |

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Comments

love that spelling -- milleniums (!). Jim W. would be proud... or actually very annoyed.

Posted by: jeremy at September 14, 2010 11:48 AM

Yeah, that is a little strange but then, I’d hate to think what I would do if I were called upon to translate something from English into Arabic. And then Webster’s 3rd gives "millennia" as the first plural but "millenniums" as the second. Except for the missing n, "milleniums" can only really be wrong to language purists. It’s not my impression that JW is a language purist.

Posted by: Duane at September 14, 2010 12:55 PM

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