You can call me Doc or Cap'n. Pokémon, space, sea, sci-fi, nature and more. Italian. I barely answer PMs because tumblr is fried, I'm not ignoring you! Used to be cosmic-cerusico
I had to tell my spouse to stop standing behind me and staring at the fried eggs with an unblinking gaze because he was making me nervous as I tried to flip the eggs without breaking them. He told me that he was “willing it to go well.”
Escultura conocida con ese nombre, se ha propuesto que sea la representación del dios Ptah, con la cara cubierta con una máscara de oro. A pesar de su analogía no se puede pensar en ella como un dios egipcio y sí, en cambio, como la imagen de alguno de los dioses protectores del comercio internacional que estaba teniendo lugar en la antigua Gadir.
La composición de su bronce, con arsénico y zinc, hace pensar que se trata de una pieza importada, posiblemente de Fenicia.
The Bicha of Balazote is an Iberian sculpture that was found in the borough of Balazote in Albacete province (Castile-La Mancha), Spain. Bicha is a Spanish word, one meaning of which is a hybrid man/animal. Carlos Fuentes has called it the “Beast of Balazote.” The sculpture has been dated to the 6th century BCE, and has been in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid, since 1910.
The Bicha was found at the site of Majuelos not far from the city center. Recent excavations in the Balazote plain revealed a tomb and burial mound where this piece may have originated. Nearby, important mosaics from a Roman villa were also discovered.
Carved of two limestone blocks in the second half of the 6th century BCE, the statue is 93 cm long and 73 cm high. It is a chimeric synthesis of man and a bull. The body is in repose and shows good knowledge of the traits of that animal, with the forelegs bent under the chest and hind legs tucked under the belly. The tail is curved on the left thigh and ends in a tuft of hair. The head is that of a horned, bearded man with bull’s ears. Details of the sculpture are similar to archaic Greek hieratic sculpture in that the hair and beard are rendered by straight grooves.
The piece is not carved in entirely in the round; one corner appears to be ashlar and designed to adhere to some place, like the lions of Pozo Moro. It may have belonged to a tomb or temple. There is some possibility that it represents a god of fertility, as did the man-headed bull statues used by the Greeks to represent river gods which made the fields fertile. According to A. García and Bellido, the Bicha represents the Greek river god Achelous whose image on Sicilian coins it resembles. “This sculpture is a daughter of the Greeks, and if you will, granddaughter of the Phoenicians and great-granddaughter of Mesopotamia,” A. García and Bellido observed in 1931.
According to the Greek geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–21 A.D), the ancient Iberians wrote down their laws and composed both poetry and prose. But not a single text of this kind has yet been unearthed. All we have are short inscriptions on stone slabs, lead sheets and pottery (see, for example, the silver bowl from Jaén and the vase fragment from Liria, above). Although we have many of these inscriptions, ancient Iberian, like the language of the Etruscans, remains undeciphered.
The Iberians left behind three different scripts. The oldest, dating to the eighth century B.C., was used to record the language of southwestern Iberia and was derived from the Semitic script of the Phoenicians, who had come to Iberia’s shores in search of tin, silver and gold. Like their Phoenician teachers, the Iberians, as far as we know, used writing for functional rather than literary purposes—to record inventories, perhaps, and to incise funeral inscriptions on stone grave markers. [source]
