Ancient Man and his First Civilizations

Additional photos of artifacts from Sumer, Elam and

Assyria (5a).
The destruction of Susa by Assyrian king

Ashurbanipal, 647 B.C.

The inscription reads..

Susa, the great holy city, abode of their

Gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I
entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries
where silver and gold, goods and wealth were
amassed...the treasures of Sumer, Akkad,
and Babylon that the ancient kings of Elam
had looted and carried away. I destroyed the
ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining
copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam
to naught; their goods and goddesses I
scattered to the winds. The tombs of their
ancient and recent kings I devastated, I
exposed to the sun, and I carried away their
bonmes toward the land of Ashur. I
devasteated the provinces of Elam and on
their lands I sowed salt.
The Swastika: (note bowl above)

Equilateral cross with arms bent at right angles, all in the same rotary
direction, usually clockwise. The swastika as a symbol of prosperity
and good fortune is widely distributed throughout the ancient and
modern world. The word is derived from the Sanskrit svastika, meaning
conducive to well-being. It was a favorite symbol on ancient
Mesopotamian coinage. In Scandinavia the left-hand swastika was the
sign for the god Thor's hammer. The swastika also appeared in early
Christian and Byzantine art (where it became known as the gammadion
cross, or crux gammata, because it could be constructed from four
Greek gammas [ G ] attached to a common base), and it occurred in
South and Central America (among the Maya) and in North America
(principally among the Navajo).

In India the swastika continues to be the most widely used auspicious

symbol of Hindus, Jainas, and Buddhists. Among the Jainas it is the
emblem of their seventh Tirthankara (saint) and is also said to remind
the worshiper by its four arms of the four possible places of rebirthin
the animal or plant world, in hell, on Earth, or in the spirit world.

The Hindus (and also Jainas) use the swastika to mark the opening
pages of their account books, thresholds, doors, and offerings. A clear
distinction is made between the right-hand swastika, which moves in a
clockwise direction, and the left-hand swastika (more correctly called
the sauvastika), which moves in a counterclockwise direction. The
right-hand swastika is considered a solar symbol and imitates in the
rotation of its arms the course taken daily by the Sun, which in the
Northern Hemisphere appears to pass from east, then south, to west.
The left-hand swastika more often stands for night, the terrifying
goddess Kali, and magical practices.

In the Buddhist tradition the swastika symbolizes the feet, or the

footprints, of the Buddha. It is often placed at the beginning and end of
inscriptions, and modern Tibetan Buddhists use it as a clothing
decoration. With the spread of Buddhism, the swastika passed into the
iconography of China and Japan, where it has been used to denote
plurality, abundance, prosperity, and long life.

In Nazi Germany the swastika (German: Hakenkreuz), with its oblique

arms turned clockwise, became the national symbol. In 1910 a poet
and nationalist ideologist Guido von List had suggested the swastika as
a symbol for all anti-Semitic organizations; and when the National
Socialist Party was formed in 191920, it adopted it. On Sept. 15, 1935,
the black swastika on a white circle with a red background became the
national flag of Germany. This use of the swastika ended in World War
II with the German surrender in May 1945, though the swastika is still
favored by neo-Nazi groups.

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_add5a.htm