Bronze Dragons West and Jade Dragons East

The very earliest finds of the dragon images in the shape resembling the ouroboros, the dragon or serpent who swallows his tail, are found in the steppes of Asia and along the Yellow River that spans China and borders on Mongolia. The finds were dated scientifically to around 4000 B.C.  This image came from or was spread across a great distance to the area along the border of Eastern Anatolia, Northern Mesopotamia and ancient Persia.   As the symbol went from West to East or vice versa, the symbol took on new meanings and new shapes.  

The images shown on the plate below are images on bronze seals in ancient Northeastern Persia, on carved stone ritual objects or on royal possessions in Western Persia and finally at the bottom of this blog entry I show a modern reproduction of the Eastern version of the ouroborus ritual symbol.  Even though the dates of the earliest findings of the archeological artifacts are in the Far East, there are scholars who insist that the dragon image entered into human history and spread from the West.  So I will begin this blog by showing the various versions of the serpent with a face and ears that have been found in the regions of Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Persia.  

after Sarianidi, 1998

The drawings in the plate above are the third millennium B.C. renditions in bronze of the serpent dragon, in which he is not swallowing his tail.  In the Bactrian or ancient Persian culture, the dragon had already changed his shape and how he fit into the rituals of the ancient culture of Persia.  In the West, the dragon was often shown as being a crawly, creepy thing, as in the photo above. The dragon was also shown being vanquished by sky creatures such as the eagle shown in the photo below, while in the East, the dragon was often portrayed in jade as a sky creature himself, a flying dragon.  There may have been a fascinating pre-historical event that explains the dragon ornament, as we shall see in later blogs.  Since blogs cannot be books, I have to limit each blog to a small part of the dragon story. 

Below, the cast bronze seal from Bactria shows dragons being seized and held by the great eagle that was such a powerful iconic figure in Bactria.  

after Sarianidi, 1998

The photo below is one of the small ritual columns carved in the soft chlorite stone that was the favored stone in the West, where soft stones were engraved with bone or sharpened stone points.   In the East, they used agates and jade which are very hard stones that had to be shaped by grinding them.  After metal saws, chisels and knives came into use, the jade and agate could be cut much easier and quicker.  

The Persian chlorite stone cult object below shows a lion hero fighting against two dragons, again showing a difference in the dragon's position in the Western pantheon.  On looking again at the image below, it is possible that the dragon in back of the lion is actually attaching the other dragon?  In the East, the dragon is always shown as a provider and protector and is still popular as a lucky amulet.  

after article in Teheran Times, shown online by Iran Chamber Society, 2011

Below is an antique but not ancient image of the Eastern dragon that does show a less creepy, crawly image, but retaining an allusion to the swallowing of the tail myth, the one that produced the ouroboros.   This image is in my collection as a piece of jewelry.  There are other cultural accretions in this particular dragon image, which may be discussed in later blogs.  It is a complicated story of how this Eastern dragon took on a mammal's face and head, but the story will be told at which time I will have the complete piece of jewelry showing on my web site. 

Read a fuller story on this particular piece HERE. 

Some features that this dragon image shown above shares with some of the images in the first plate above are the mammal-like head with bulging eyes and a forked tail.  

In later blogs, we will trace the development of the ouroboros as a human expression of an aurora appearing in the sky in the geologic era of the New Stone Age and therefore seen by all humanity.  From there we will trace the development first to being the totem or protector and the devolution of the dragon's status  from protective sky creature to terrestrial or subterranean creature that heroes must struggle against.  

The Dragon Will Lead You to Water

From the modern legend of the Loch Ness monster in Celtic Scotland to the Biblical Leviathan that plays in the water of the Mediterranean in David's Psalms, to the equally ancient Chinese water dragon that does not actually live in the water but needs a daily soak in order to stay healthy.

What I am going to write in this blog entry is pure speculation on my part.  But I will tell my own legend of how the dragon attained the place of honor that he enjoys on our calendars, our protective amulets, our household decorations and even in the tattoos worn by so many.  The legends that elevated the dragon to a heroic or maybe even deified level in the ancient world may be related to the fact that dragons -- serpent like reptiles that have legs and a more expressive face -- are land creatures but must have a nearby body of water for survival.

A large lizard occupies the area of Gonur Depe, the site of the excavation of one of the sites of the Bronze Age Bactria-Margiana Complex.  His ancestor may well have pointed our ancestors to the Murghab River, where Gonur was founded some four thousand years ago.  When my husband was visiting the site, the workers always warned him that the 'dragon' might crawl into his tent; the warning was not that the dragon was dangerous, but that the dragon brought a bad odor into the tent.  You see, the dragon soaked for a while each day in the murky waters where no doubt a lot of waste had been dumped.
Given the needs of the dragons or large lizards that crawl through the deserts of Central Asia, migrants might have found the dragon a valuable guide to water.  Especially in the era of 4000 to 3000 B.C. there were great migrations from the Asian steppes toward settled regions or to still Neolithic nomadic herders.  By the end of that era, the herders, too were moving into contact with the more sedentary cultures that were farming and raising domestic animals such as pigs, cows, sheep and goats and even horses and donkeys.  The dog had domesticated himself long before this age.  The domestic canine was following the camps of Ice Age Hunters, helping in the hunt.
Noting the fascination held by birds, the fourth millennium cultures of Central Asia may have kept even large birds when they could be caught.  The eagle and the phoenix -- a really fancy chicken -- are displayed on a huge percentage of their amulets.
A note here on the migrants.  They were not nomads who had adopted the life style of constantly moving.  They were usually people who simply had to move from their home land to a more comfortable climate or culture.  Therefore, along with the pigs, the rams' heads and the magnificent horses that the people already honored by being buried with them, sometimes worshipping their statues, the ancients added the dragon symbol.

Another blog will be on the jade dragon and the bronze dragon.   Such as this jade one:

Old Hongshan Style Hetian Jade Necklace Hand Carved Amulet and Beads

The photo above shows the pig-drgaon amulet that might have developed from the veneration of the ancient settled farming community for its pig and the migrants' respect for the dragon.  In the late Neolithic and Bronze Age culture named Hongshan with archeological traces across much of the Northern part of what is now China, the pig dragon held sway as the most powerful spiritual symbol.  

Meanwhile on the other side of the Himalayas in what is now Afghanistan, migrants were moving into the high desert oasis called Bactria.  In Bronze Age Bactria they immortalized the dragon in small stone seals and cast bronze amulets.  Here is another image of a dragon amulet with the eagle image on the opposite side of the carved steatite seal from Bactria:

Out of Mongolia - Ancient Symbols in Jade and Bronze

To begin in the middle of things, I will post a few entries on the central and most imposing image in the ornamental and ritual symbols created by the earliest jade craftsmen along the Yellow River in a part of the world we now call Inner Mongolia in the fourth millennium B.C.: the Dragon symbol in various forms.   The symbol is often in amulets or talismans; but it is also carved into small statues and is often an image on a vessel, on utensils or symbols of authority such as the jade axe head. 

This is a short introduction that I wrote on another blog that I am moving to this site because it more properly belongs with the much later spiritual symbolism in the tribal ornamentation of the Turkmen up into the beginning of the twentieth century A.D. 

Dragons in Ancient Himalayan Cultures

I will begin this series of blog posts with my interest in the ancient symbol of the entwined or coiled serpent, especially the amuletic expression of the whorled serpent.  It began as a stone carved in the image of a serpent or serpent dragon with its tail in its mouth.  It is the ancient ouroboros.  As the word is spoken it almost sounds like a wheel-y motion if you roll the 'R' while pronouncing the word.

I found my first ouroboros as a Bactrian artifact in an antique shop in Ghazni, Afghanistan.  It was lying in an old bronze pot, and I knew I had to buy it.  I am glad I did; I had no idea whence it had come, nor what age it was.  I knew it appeared to be an ancient whorled serpent symbol that I had studied and imagined for years already at that time -- 1974.  

This is my very own Ouroboros that I bought that day, beginning our collection of Bactrian artifacts, though we did not know it was Bactrian.  

I assume that the stone cutter of this piece and the one that carved the naturalistic statue in the header above had two different things in mind or that they were separated in time, distance, status or even lived in two different artistic traditions, but both were in Bactria at some time long ago.  The difference is evident between the abstract and rather primitive ouroboros and the naturalistic domesticated dragon statue above.  He is wearing a collar, so he is apparently a domestic animal belonging to perhaps a royal person in the community.  We will find that there is a strong relationship between the dragon and the ruler of a settlement or a kingdom.  

Some days after I collected this ouroboros, my husband found a spectacular detailed Bactrian ouroboros in a Kabul antique shop: 

This is a very different kind of ouroboros.  The whorl design is there, but there are two serpent dragons and they are not eating each other or their own tails.  They are eating a goat.  The goat later becomes a sacred ancestor symbol among certain of the Altai-Himalayan tribes, so this may have been an early intimation of that spirituality, expressing a struggle between two forces, one good and another that is devouring the good.  

This is a very short and rather superficial introduction to the study of dragon images in two different Himalayan communities of late Neolithic to Middle Bronze Age: the Bactrian  culture on the west side of the mountains and the later Tocharian culture on the east side of the Himalayas.   The connection between the Euro-Iranian Tocharians in what is now Northwest China and the Chinese culture in South China is JADE.  It is from jade that the Chinese nobility wanted their amulets and statuary made.  And it was the people that lived near the Hotan River in Northwest China that could bring it to the developing dynastic rulers to the South of them.  

 This is a very small print of a copy of a Hongshan jade amulet purported to be from about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.  Such symbols were carried by tradition into the Bronze Age and respected by the dynastic families.  The nobility wanted their status symbols made of jade, too.  And for many centuries the jade dragon has been carried as an amulet or protective jewelry for those who could afford the price of jade.  Phoenixes and a combination of a dragon and phoenix have come into modern times as noble symbols, especially when expressed in jade. 

In later posts, we will fill in the history of how the Himalayas came to be the home of people who dressed like the ancestors of Europeans, looked like them and spoke many words that English speakers could still recognize, in a language somewhere between Old Persian (Iranian) and Old Celtic, which was spoken until Medieval times in places as far apart as  what is now Ankara, Turkey and Ireland.  

Furthermore, we will discuss the significance of jade and agate in the amuletic traditions on each side of the Himalayas.  Though the Bactrians spoke a language related to the Tocharian, their attitude toward ornamentation seemed to differ.  The Tocharian mummies found in the Tarim Basin of China wear beautifully woven clothing, but the jewelry either had been removed or they did not wear much of it.  Their relation to the jade dragon amulets made by the successors of the Hongshan culture in what is now called Inner Mongolia seemed to be through trade.  They supplied much of the Hetian or Hotan jade that the successors of the Hongshan people used to make the dragon amulets.  The Tocharian mummies in what is now Xinjiang Province in China are dated ca. 2,000 B.C. around a thousand years after the Hongshan culture had passed into history, except for the legacy of jade dragon symbols that continued to be reproduced into modern times.  

While the Indo-Europeans of the Eastern side of the Himalayas seemed not be a heavily bejeweled culture, the Bactrian ruins were found to be full of highly symbolic ornaments of very valuable materials, from beautifully shaped colored agate amulets and beads to life-sized gold masks.  

These names and places will be filled out for us in the upcoming blogs.  For now, the dragon will sleep.