A good friend once postulated that you could probably explain the whole gamut of human history just by using hats. So here is my attempt...
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Berlin Gold Hat, Bronze Age, about 1000-800 BC Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin
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The earliest and most magical hats are the gold hats of Europe dating from 1000 BC. These stunning hats chart all of the phases of the moon and sun.
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Berlin Gold Hat, Bronze Age, about 1000-800 BC Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin
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You can begin to understand that these hats may have been the precursor of the witches hat. It would certainly explain why witches and wizards hats are so often emblazoned with images of stars and the moon, and it would give a serious foundation for the architecture of their shape.
The moons importance for fecundity, sowing seeds and ensuring a good harvest together with its power to control the ebb and rise of the tides; was essential ancient lore. Research at the
Centre of Alternative Technology in Machynlleth powerfully demonstrated that sowing seeds on the new moon and harvesting on the waning moon greatly improves the quality and abundance of the harvest.
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Berlin Gold Hat, Bronze Age, about 1000-800 BC Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin
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The symbols on the
Gold Hats are a logarithmic table which enables the movements of the sun and the moon to be calculated in advance. Researchers discovered that the 1,739 sun and half-moon symbols decorating the Berlin hat's surface make up a scientific code which corresponds almost exactly to the "Metonic cycle" discovered by the Greek astronomer
Meton in 432 BC - about 500 years after the hat was made - which explains the relationship between moon and sun years. This suggests that people of the Bronze Age were making long-term, empirical astrological observations. The person who had knowledge of the sun & moon and their phases would have a magical status indeed.
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Berlin Gold Hat, Bronze Age, about 1000-800 BC Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin
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The earliest auguries of Babylon believed an eclipse was an omen of a catastrophic event. ‘The Assyrian
King Esarhaddon (690-669 BC) was so fearful of lunar eclipses that during his reign he enthroned substitute king-figures when eclipses occurred, who were afterwards executed to divert the malign influence of the eclipse from the king himself’
Whitfield, The Mapping of the Heavens, 1995.
The ability to forsee when an eclipse would occur would be a powerful indication of a diviners ability; this would give the priestess or priest who wore the solar/lunar calendar hat a highly esteemed status and the illusion of magical control of the heavens.
Interestingly these wonderful gold hats are exactly the same shape as those of the women of Yemen. The gold leaf calendar hats are fragile and would have needed a straw support very similar in shape and structure to the traditional high hats of Hadramaut, Yemen seen below.
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| Traditional clothing, Hadramaut, Yemen |
So why would a straw hat from rural Yemen be important? Well...Yemen (& Ethiopia) is none other than the magical land of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba of legend 'Bilquis' was the wealthiest woman of her age. She controlled all of the annual harvest of frankincense and myrrh; which was essential to any ceremony of the ancient world. Pliny the Elder said that the Emperor Nero burnt the
annual frankincense harvest (approximately 7000 tonnes) in a single day at the funeral
pyre of his wife Poppaea (65 AD).
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| Wadi Hadramawt, Yemen by © george steinmetz |
3000 years ago the kingdom of 'Sheba' or 'Saba' as it is known in the Arabic world was an architecturally innovative and culturally advanced Queendom. It's cleverly constructed dam irrigated all of Yemen's farmland and Saba's adobe high rise towers were the envy of all. This futuristic economy run with foresight and intelligence would be why King Solomon was so keen to invite Queen Bilquis to his kingdom (his father 'King David' also married a Sheban; 'Bathsheba'). Archaeology and textual history attests that rather than converting Bilquis to Judaism;
Solomon became an ardent worshipper of the Goddess Asherah (guardian of fertility and forest groves).
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| Detail of house in Old Sana'a, Yemen - High hat, Yemen © Eric Lafforgue - Dar al Hajar, Yemen |
...Next time the Gold Crowns of Scythian Warriors and the hat as a weapon.
