Ancient symbols

About ancient symbols

These pages gather the symbols of peoples who lived long ago: cave and rock art, Mesopotamia, Egyptian hieroglyphs and gods, Chinese radicals and the Greek gods. In the Americas they are the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Andean and Taino. In northern Europe they are the Celtic symbols, the ogham alphabet, Norse runes, the Norse gods and Norse and Viking symbols.

Every ancient symbol reaches us through someone who came later. Friar Ramón Pané, whom Columbus commissioned to collect Taino ceremonies and antiquities, wrote down what he learned of Taino belief. Each page here says who recorded a meaning, when, and which parts are a later reading or a modern invention.

How we know what an ancient symbol meant

The surest meanings come from a script that can be read. Cuneiform began as a bookkeeping tool in Uruk and was used for more than 3,000 years, the British Museum says. After it was abandoned, Cécile Michel writes, the history of Mesopotamia was completely or almost completely forgotten, until nineteenth-century scholars worked on trilingual inscriptions, as Champollion had with Egyptian. The British Museum’s guide to its Egyptian collections credits Young with first deciphering a royal name, Ptolemy, on the Rosetta Stone.

Some scripts are still closed. Britannica says the Andean narrative quipus have not yet been deciphered. Britannica calls the jaguar-and-infant hybrid of Olmec art the “were-jaguar”, and the Metropolitan Museum says the Olmec ceramic “babies” are named after their infant characteristics: both are names for how the figures look.

Later reading can sit on top of old evidence. The OG(H)AM project at the University of Glasgow and Maynooth University says some ogham letter names are “unambiguously identical” with words for trees in medieval Irish literature. The thirteen-month tree calendar attached to ogham today was published by Robert Graves in The White Goddess in 1948, and the Robert Graves Review says witches embraced it a decade or so later.

Alike on the surface

The same shape can have different settings. Heritage Ireland describes a large triple spiral on the entrance stone at Newgrange. On Fajada Butte, the National Park Service says, two spirals carved by ancestral Pueblo people were crossed by beams of sunlight and appear to have worked as a calendrical marker for the people of Chaco Canyon. These pages treat a likeness as a likeness and do not infer a shared origin from it. The symbols across cultures pages, with the spiral among them, set each tradition’s account side by side.

Where to start

Scripts: the ankh, cuneiform, the ogham letter beithe and the rune fehu. Caves: Lascaux and the Lion Man. Americas: the Olmec colossal heads, the Nazca lines and the Taino zemi.