TRANSLATIONS
Is it possible to integrate 'high summer' in our new map of the 1st half year? The season in question apparently is beginning (according to G) beyond the transition periods 6-7:
Haú with 16 feathers in Ga3-22 probably refers to the moon, while mago has the sun at his highest point, ready to spew him out. The reversed order of the moon apparently still governs (with moon coming before the sun). The fully grown season (tagata) is the main sign at the beginning of the 7th period, and takaure should be determinant telling about what season now is fully grown. Counting Ga4-2 as the last (84th) glyph, the new sun regime comes with Ga4-3. Judging from the parallel K text 'high summer' ends in period 22:
Adding 84 to takaure gives too high a number (168) and cannot be the reason for 'high summer' ending here. Neither can the explanation be 168 - 28 = 140 which is too low a number. Counting backwards from 365 we have 365 - 145 = 220 and 365 - 150 = 215 as possible candidates. 215 = 5 * 43 could be the mark (one more than 42), in which case Ga6-10 is the first glyph of next season. By counting backwards from Gb1-6 we can identify Ga6-10 as an important glyph, because there are 84 glyphs (3 months) between them:
Although 28 is a number which accounts for the location of Ga4-2 (as 3 * 28 days beyond Ga1-1) and also for the following 10 * 28 days to the end of the 364-day long year, it is not a measure which is useful beyond 'haga takaúre' (Ga4-2). We must use another measure to account for 'high summer'. 64 is the 7th term in the growth series: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 ... What I have been calling 'high summer' should therefore be renamed into the 'season of growth':
Disorder is caused by this arrangement, because 64 is not congruent with 28. At Gb1-6 order has still not returned, because 235 = 13 * 18 + 1 refers to the final of a sun season. Moon should be black (bathing in the rays of Tane) at midsummer and have no power to enforce her rule. Beyond that point will she take command. It must be also be noted that also the order of the sun is disturbed by the 'season of growth'. Counting backwards from Gb1-6 in terms of 13 or 18 will not reach any agreement with Ga6-9, the 7th and last of the growth terms with ordinal number 149:
The growing beast is a dangerous third member. When is his head cut off? Maybe he continues to grow beyond 64 up to 128? If so, he will stretch to ordinal number 85 + 128 = 213:
No obvious signs indicate the growing is continuing so far. 64 is 8 * 8 and the obvious choice for how much growing should be allowed to go. It must be tempered (tampered with) at 64: ... Ogotemmêli had his own ideas about calculation. The Dogon in fact did use the decimal system, because from the beginning they had counted on their fingers, but the basis of their reckoning had been the number eight and this number recurred in what they called in French la centaine, which for them meant eighty. Eighty was the limit of reckoning, after which a new series began. Nowadays there could be ten such series, so that the European 1,000 corresponded to the Dogon 800. But Ogotemmêli believed that in the beginning men counted by eights - the number of cowries on each hand, that they had used their ten fingers to arrive at eighty, but that the number eight appeared again in order to produce 640 (8 x 10 x 8). 'Six hundred and forty', he said, 'is the end of the reckoning.' According to him, 640 covenant-stones had been thrown up by the seventh Nummo to make the outline in the grave of Lébé. So the cowries that the father of the first twins found in the ground when harvesting millet after the second sowing, were a foreshadowing of commerce. But in the very earliest days cowries were not the medium of exchange; on the contrary men began by bartering strips of cloth for animals or objects. Cloth was their money. The unit was a span-long strip twice eighty threads wide. A sheep was worth eight cubits of three handsbreadths each; a small measure of millet was worth one cubit. Later the value of things was fixed in cowries by the seventh Nummo, the master of Speech; a fowl was worth three times eighty cowries, a goat or a sheep three times 800 cowries, an ass forty times 800, a horse eighty times 800, an ox a hundred and twenty times 800 ... |