205. Serious counting is difficult, for it calls us to think.
We could therefore here in contrast try to speculate for a while (→ wheel, whole, hole, holy, Yule), move up in order to take a wider view of cosmos, to relax for a minute (from the minutes). The devil lies to us by way of his details.
The wood of this curious Ur object had long ago disintegrated into nothing when the archeologists discovered it. Only quick thinking saved its remains in form of the outer coating of small mosaic pieces made from lapis lazuli, sea-shells, and similar beautiful 'pixels' which had been the make up of its intended 'contents'. "The ravages of time over more than four thousand years caused the decay of the wooden frame and bitumen glue which had cemented the mosaics in place. The soil's weight crushed the object, fragmenting it and breaking its end panels. This made excavating a challenging task. Wooley's excavators were instructed to look for hollows in the ground created by the decayed objects and to fill them with plaster or wax to record the shape of the objects that had once filled them, rather liike the famous plaster casts of the victims of Pompeii. They found that the mosaic pieces had kept their form in the soil, while their wooden frame had disintegrated. They carefully uncovered small sections measuring about 3 square centimeters and covered them with wax, enabling the mosaics to be lifted while maintaining their original designs ..." (Wikipedia) I imagine there might have been a background 'black cloth' of a kind which held these pixels in their proper places, a cloth fastened to the outside of the wooden 'box' needed for structure. Bitumen is black. So is Raven. ... The mountains and the sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry ... And so is ebenholz.
Such a background cloth together with all its glorious figures, held in place by the wooden box, might have represented the night sky. In the not far away Harappa culture Parpola has found evidence of a Sky Garment. "Note that rain and stars are singled out as the characteristics of the sky: we have seen that the ancients of Mesopotamia and in India shared the concept of a divine 'sky garment' consisting either of rain clouds or of the starry sky." ... At this point an odd reflection occured to the European. The first imperfect Word was associated with a technical process, simple in character and no doubt the most archaic of all processes, which had produced the most primitive form of clothing made of fibre. The fibre, which was neither knotted nor woven, flowed in a wavy line, and might be said therefore to be of one dimension. The second Word, less restricted than the first, arose from weaving, done on a wide warp crossed by vertical threads forming a surface, that is to say, having two dimensions ... This might explain the flat top surface of the mysterious object from Ur, which had to be much elongated, like a road: ... The line exactly around the middle of the sphere is called ke alanui a ke ku'uku'u, the road of the spider, and also ke alanui i ka Piko a Wakea, the way to the navel of Wakea (the Sky-father). Between these lines are the fixed stars of the various lands, na hokupaa a ka aina. (These are the stars which hang suspended in the zeniths of the Polynesian islands most of which lie within the tropics.) On the sides are the stars by which one navigates ...
And the possible association with the night sky (Nut → Knot, thread, net, weaving) was what first had caught my attention in form of the figure of a harpist, which made me think of the Lyre constellation.
In summer, we remember, the winter hexagon (6) could be observed in the night sky:
And in winter the summer triangle (3) could be seen. 36 ↔ 63.
And the Bull was evidently associated with the strings of a Harpsichord. *68 (Aldebaran) + *364 - *144 (Wega) = *288 (→ 2 * 144). ... string games could be resumed after it was clear that the Sun had managed to leave the horizon and was rapidly gaining in altitude: 'Before the sun starts to leave the horizon ... when it shows only on the horizon, ... then string games were no longer allowed as they might lacerate the sun. Once the sun had started to go higher and could be seen in its entirety, string games could be resumed, if one so wished. So the restriction on playing string games was only applicable during the period between the sun's return and its rising fully above the horizon ...
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