The Swastika, the Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migration: With Observations on the Migration of Certain Industries in Prehistoric TimesWilson, Thomas
Religion
The Swastika, the Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migration: With Observations on the Migration of Certain Industries in Prehistoric Times
Wilson, Thomas
Industries, Primitive; Swastikas; Symbolism
Lastly he introduces a group of the Swastika in the nineteenth century. He
presented figures of Swastikas from these localities and representing
these epochs. He had a similar display at the Paris Exposition of 1889,
which at its close was deposited in the St. Germain Prehistoric Museum. I
met M. Zmigrodzki at the Tenth International Congress of Anthropology and
Prehistoric Archæology in Paris, and heard him present the results of his
investigations on the Swastika. I have since corresponded with him, and he
has kindly sent me separates of his paper published in the Archives für
Ethnographie, with 266 illustrations of the Swastika; but on asking his
permission to use some of the information in the chart at Chicago, he
informed me he had already given the manuscript chart and the right to
reproduce it to the Chicago Folk-Lore Society. The secretary of this
society declined to permit it to pass out of its possession, though
proffering inspection of it in Chicago.
In his elaborate dissertation Count Goblet d'Alviella[90] shows an earlier
and prehistoric existence of the Swastika before its appearance on the
hill of Hissarlik. From this earlier place of origin it, according to him,
spread to the Bronze age terramares of northern Italy. All this was prior
to the thirteenth century B. C. From the hill of Hissarlik it spread east
and west; to the east into Lycaonia and Caucasus, to the west into Mycenæ
and Greece; first on the pottery and then on the coins. From Greece it
also spread east and west; east to Asia Minor and west to Thrace and
Macedonia. From the terramares he follows it through the Villanova epoch,
through Etruria and Grand Greece, to Sicily, Gaul, Britain, Germany,
Scandinavia, to all of which migration he assigns various dates down to
the second century B. C. It developed westward from Asia Minor to northern
Africa and to Rome, with evidence in the Catacombs; on the eastward it
goes into India, Persia, China, Tibet, and Japan. All this can be made
apparent upon examination of the plate itself. It is introduced as Chart
I, p. 794.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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