Post: Post Reply: Re: Rare and Ordinary Birds by will

Original Message: Re: Rare and Ordinary Birds

Hi everyone,
Thanks for a wonderful aviary.
I'm leaving early next week for a few months in Southeast Asia - my second home, perhaps my first. So I've been trying to put a slight semblance of order in my stuff here, including the huge number of images on my desktop. In doing so, I came across this picture from an exhibit I saw in a Japanese museum last year. The bead, on loan from Korea, is one of the rarest and most valuable in the world. It's National Treasure 634, a jatim made in East Java, which was found in a royal tomb of the Silla kingdom that was dated to around 500CE. James Lankton wrote an excellent paper about it for the IBB conference in Istanbul, in which he pointed out that there is only one other known example in the world - in the Bead Museum in Arizona (#908 on Lois Dubin's timeline).
The bead is important, mainly because it's so well made, but also because it's the closest thing we have to a dated jatim, and because these canes, unlike most jatims, are not based on West Asian models. Lankton makes a strong case for the four heads being depictions of Buddha, and he also suggests that the birds are hamsas, divine geese. Originally the hamsa was a part of Hindu iconography, the bearer of the god Brahma, but later on it was adopted into early Buddhist symbolism. I would add that the number four and the colour white are important symbolically too.
But as I was looking at the picture yesterday, I found myself thinking: "Well, yes, perhaps, but this is a very fluffy little bird compared to those big muscular geese that are usually called hamsa." So I started looking for other images, and this is what I found: the Bali duck, which was one of the earliest domesticated ducks in Indonesia. To my eyes it looks very similar in "feel" to the birds on the bead, right the way down to the tuft on the back of its head.
That doesn't mean that it's not a hamsa too. Artists depicting religious ideas are at their most effective when their symbols are rooted in their own lived experience. The women on the walls of Angkor, the saints on the pillars of Chartres, are real live human beings, not abstract entities. The symbolic has its roots in the material.
Cheers,
Will
Copyright 2024
All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users

Original Message: Re: Rare and Ordinary Birds
Hi everyone, Thanks for a wonderful aviary. I'm leaving early next week for a few months in Southeast Asia - my second home, perhaps my first. So I've been trying to put a slight semblance of order in my stuff here, including the huge number of images on my desktop. In doing so, I came across this picture from an exhibit I saw in a Japanese museum last year. The bead, on loan from Korea, is one of the rarest and most valuable in the world. It's National Treasure 634, a jatim made in East Java, which was found in a royal tomb of the Silla kingdom that was dated to around 500CE. James Lankton wrote an excellent paper about it for the IBB conference in Istanbul, in which he pointed out that there is only one other known example in the world - in the Bead Museum in Arizona (#908 on Lois Dubin's timeline). The bead is important, mainly because it's so well made, but also because it's the closest thing we have to a dated jatim, and because these canes, unlike most jatims, are not based on West Asian models. Lankton makes a strong case for the four heads being depictions of Buddha, and he also suggests that the birds are hamsas, divine geese. Originally the hamsa was a part of Hindu iconography, the bearer of the god Brahma, but later on it was adopted into early Buddhist symbolism. I would add that the number four and the colour white are important symbolically too. But as I was looking at the picture yesterday, I found myself thinking: "Well, yes, perhaps, but this is a very fluffy little bird compared to those big muscular geese that are usually called hamsa." So I started looking for other images, and this is what I found: the Bali duck, which was one of the earliest domesticated ducks in Indonesia. To my eyes it looks very similar in "feel" to the birds on the bead, right the way down to the tuft on the back of its head. That doesn't mean that it's not a hamsa too. Artists depicting religious ideas are at their most effective when their symbols are rooted in their own lived experience. The women on the walls of Angkor, the saints on the pillars of Chartres, are real live human beings, not abstract entities. The symbolic has its roots in the material. Cheers, Will Copyright 2024 All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users

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