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ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 9 



poseful burials and objects of magical art have been common enough 

 since modern man appeared on earth some 25,000 years ago, more or 

 less, obvious references to the sun are relatively recent. No Aurig- 

 nacian artist hit upon the device of sun representation as a thauma- 

 turgical means of hastening the end of the ice age. 



ANCIENT AND RECENT SUN SYMBOLS 



Disks of bone and stone, plain or marked with internal or external 

 rays, are found but rarely in Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic de- 

 posits, and in no case where they do occur can they be linked safely 

 with a cult of the sun. Nevertheless on the subsequent Neolithic 

 horizon similar but more richly varied devices, commonly explained 

 as sun symbols, are found around the world. They are met with as 

 pictographs and petroglyphs in regions where agriculture and the 

 higher arts never have been practiced and among retarded tribes 

 whose culture never has risen above the hunting plane. In other 



FiGDEB 1. — Sun, stars, and cosmic symbols from the Chalcolithic art of western Asia. 

 These symbols, with others, lay the ground for the first writing. 



regions, both in the Old and New World, where man uses tamed 

 plants and animals for food and where ceramic and textile arts flour- 

 ish, the same motives are still further elaborated with considerable 

 evidence of special evolutions. What is the answer ? Did these cere- 

 monial figures arise spontaneously and diffuse from one or several 

 centers ? Are they true evidences of sun worship ? 



Some of the simpler sun pictures, such as circles fringed with rays, 

 and circles marked with crosses, are still in use among primitive 

 peoples of both hemispheres who do not hesitate to explain them fully 

 to ethnologists. Others in more complicated forms, but with begin- 

 nings as simple, intergrade in richly documented art of the past or the 

 present. Still others enter into the ancient construction of hiero- 

 glyphic writing belonging to apparently independent systems, such as 

 the Cuneiform and the Egyptian, the Chinese, and the Mayan. A last 

 group expresses the expanding knowledge and terminology of astron- 

 omy with attempts to figure not only the sun, moon, and stars, but also 

 concepts of the earth and the universe. 



