Persian Zoroastrianism is the true source of Judaic Monotheism? Dr. Gad Barnea

 Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4,000 years ago. Arguably the world's first monotheistic ....

Russian-Armenian University
Gad Barnea - on the beginning of Monotheism from Persian Zoroastrianism
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

 The development of “Indo-European” monotheism was shaped by Indo-Iranian
conceptions, especially the early Zoroastrian tradition.
• This framework gave peoples under Persian imperial influence a model for participation in
divinity, emanation, and a bridge between the one and the many.
• Monotheism developed across a broad spectrum, ranging from remnants of "polytheistic
conceptions" (interpretatio) to differing understandings of the “one God.”
• Before the rise of Islam, monotheism did not enter the calculus as a central principle of faith.
• Islam’s position developed through an evolutionary process that reached from Indo-Iranian
foundation, through Mazdeism, Judaism, and Christianity (in various forms) to the tawḥīd.
• Islam’s tawḥīd is a wholesale rejection of the Indo-Iranian conception. It introduced a new
form of monotheism (strict monotheism) that has shaped the concept to this day.

 the eternal god in Egypt was "eternally procreating" and NOT "eternally existing" - Monotheism means "eternally existing." 

 https://uni-oldenburg.academia.edu/GadBarnea

 https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/17/9/1092

 Anatolia preserved important Mazdean traditions well into the Common era, while the budding miϑra cult established itself in Judea around the time the Fourth Gospel was actively being elaborated—most notably at Caesarea Maritima, where an early Christian community coexisted with the party responsible for one of the earliest Mithraea (ca. 80 CE). This article reexamines the Johannine Prologue against the backdrop of Mazdean traditions, such as miϑra’s emergence in the Roman world as δημιουργός, the concept of the incarnate mąϑra (“divine utterance”), and, especially, the Mazdean eschatological figure of the final saošiiaṇt (restorer of creation)—notions that were integrated by the Johannine community through a process of interpretatio Iohannica to articulate its Christology. Rather than influences from Mithraism, which was at the time in its infancy, or direct textual dependence on Mazdean sources, the article appeals to a convergence of geographical, archaeological, chronological, theological, and linguistic evidence for a shared religious environment where the Johannine Prologue creatively assimilated a coherent network of Mazdean concepts into a thoroughly Jewish theological framework.

 At Elephantine Egypt there was an actual "fire holder" to Yahweh - a divine fire - just like Mazdean worship of eternal fire.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS--T7CVuCY

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwhu34jLy4E

 The cult of miϑra expanded out and westward/southwestward from Anatolia in the second half of the first century CE (Mastrocinque 2017, p. 185) to eventually take root among members of the elite in Rome (see below) and other centers of the empire, easily fitting in socially (Beck 2006, p. 72). Through the intermediary of the Anatolian time capsule, the Roman miϑra cult known as Mithraism assimilated not only the name of the deity but also some key elements from Mazdeism while also maintaining a certain degree of independence—appropriately dubbed perserie by Beck (2006, p. 72)—from its Iranian counterpart. The process of cross-pollination between Mazdeism and the new miϑra cult was certainly complex, multifaceted, and dynamic, as all such cultic assimilations are, and it is largely opaque to us today. It is highly probable, as several scholars have argued, that this cult underwent extensive elaboration and reached initial maturity within the confines of Anatolia and specifically in Commagene (Painter 2000, pp. 207–11).

 ..................

Evidence for the worship of miϑra/mitra was already well-established by the mid-second millennium BCE, as can be seen in a treaty between the Mitanni and Hittites concluded around 1380 BCE, where the deity was invoked as a witness to oaths (ANET, 205–6; CIMRM 16; see also Vittmann 1992) and in the Semitic theophoric name mt-r-šm(Ꜥ) (“miϑ/tra has heard”), constructed with the Semitic verb שמע (“to hear”), documented at around the same time (nineteenth dynasty) in Egypt (Barnea 2025c, p. 5; see also Ranke 1935).31 In the fifth century BCE, a maguš by the name of miϑ/trasarā מתרסרה is documented, among several other miϑ/tra theophoric names, on the island of Elephantine in close contact with the Yahwistic community there (Barnea 2025c, p. 5). In Mazdeism and the Avestan tradition, miϑra was associated with vigilance and cosmic oversight, with the Avesta describing him as all-seeing, sleepless, and impossible to deceive, with “a thousand ears” and “ten thousand eyes,” and, intimately, in line with his Vedic heritage, with water. This is most apparent in the yašt to his name, the mihr yašt (Yt 10), where he is described as frat̰.āpəm (“one who fills the waters”) and tat̰.āpəm (“making the waters fall”) (Yt 10:61i–j).

Although often associated with the sun, miϑra was not originally identified with the sun god but deeply associated with light and dawn (Cantera 2017, esp. 28–32)—to the point of being, it seems, assimilated with Venus, as described in Herodotus, and thus presented as a feminine deity (Hist. 1.131).32 In later times, miϑra’s western doppelgänger became increasingly identified with the sun as a bona fide sun god (Lahe 2019, pp. 43–44; Beck 2002; for a thorough yet somewhat dated overview, see Lincoln 1982). Finally, miϑra is often associated with two acolyte deities: sraōša (the deity of the liturgical soundscape) and rašnu (the divine judge), which in mature Roman Mithraism were most probably represented by the figures of Cautes and Cautopates (Gordon 2023, p. 454).

 ..................

 Around the time pro-J was written or within a generation of it, Numenius of Apamea (apud Porphyry) already referred to miϑra matter-of-factly as δημιουργός, labeling him τοῦ πάντων ποιητοῦ, καὶ πατρὸς Mίθρου (“miϑra, maker and father of everything”), and asserting τοῦ κόσμου, ὃν ὁ Mίθρας ἐδημιούργησε (“(of) the cosmos, which miϑra created/made”) (Porphyry, De Antro, 6.12–13).

.........................

 

 

 Drawing on Achaemenid-era archaeology, Elephantine papyri, and textual criticism, this discussion reveals:

• Why Moses removing his sandals mirrors Zoroastrian priestly ritual

• How the idea of perpetual, undefiled fire enters the Hebrew Bible

• Why the burning bush scene interrupts the original call-of-Moses narrative

• How Persian Yehud reshaped biblical theology after the exile

• Why priestly redactors inserted liturgical authority into Exodus

This isn’t theology — it’s history.

 The first contribution, by Gad Barnea, offers a new and detailed
analysis of P. Berlin 13464 which is famously known as the “Passover papyrus.”
Barnea presents a detailed epigraphic study of the papyrus, including the history
of its previous publications and suggests that since there is no hint of a Passover
or a feast of Maṣṣot being known and observed prior to the Hellenistic period,
another cultic observance could fit the description better. This, according to Bar-
nea, is the Zoroastrian yasna – specifically, the Haoma-drinking ritual intended
to purify those who partake in it. Unlike the Passover or the Maṣṣot festival, this
ritual is well documented in the Achaemenid period and the cultic assimilation
of the Yahwists with Achaemenid-Zoroastrianism was so strong that they had an
’atrwdn – a Zoroastrian fire-altar – in their temple to Yhw.

 ..........

 The island of Elephantine, facing modern-day Aswan (historical Syene) on the
first cataract of the Nile, hosted a remarkable settlement of migrants from the
Levant during the late-Saite and Achaemenid periods. The founders of this com-
munity had originally arrived at the Syene area from Palestine, most probably in
the middle of the sixth century BCE, still under the rule of the Egyptian twenty-
sixth dynasty.1 Their chief ethnic deity was Yhw(h) – a deity known also from the
Hebrew Bible and a number of ancient inscriptions.2 According to their own
account, prior to the conquest of Egypt by Persian king Cambyses in 526 BCE,3
their forefathers had already built a full-fledged temple to this deity on this im-
portant and already millennia-old Egyptian cultic center. The temple was com-
plete with priests (and priestesses),4 sacrificial offerings, and an altar. Some of
the leaders of this temple-based community were referred to as “priests of Yhw”
( כהניאזייהו ).5 They expended significant resources and a lot of effort building a
temple for their deity,6 claimed that he dwells therein,7 referred to leading members
of the community – both male and female – as “servant of Yhw” ( לחן/הזייהו ),8
had theophoric names based on his and raised funds for his service.9 

 ............

 term brzmdnʾ found in this
inscription.20 This Indo-Aryan term – found here transliterated into Aramaic – is
almost certainly related to the term ạrtācā bạrzmaniy found in Xerxes I’s XPh
inscription – i.e., bạrzman with a suffix of place (-dan).21 The term ạrtācā
bạrzmaniy is complex but its basic meaning is: “(and) the Orderyazata character-
ized by the exaltationrite.”22 This syntagm, as it is found in XPh, is governed by
the verb yad- “to worship” and defines the character by which Ahuramazdā and
Artā (the Orderyazata) are to be worshipped – which was now the imperially
sanctioned form of worship according to AZ principles. The stele is dated to June
6–13, 458 BCE – i.e., the seventh year of Artaxerxes I,23 Xerxes I’s son. 

 ..................

 brzmdnʾ is described as having been “built,” it indicates that a cultic structure,
set up according to the AZ concept of bạrzman was functioning at Syene already
at the middle of the fifth century BCE. Such a place would presumably include
the presence of Maguš-priests,24 possibly also a fire-altar and provisions for the
sacred drink haoma and other necessities.
2.2 Magi
The presence of Magi – in contact with the Yahwists at Elephantine – is, in fact,
documented on a legal papyrus from Oct. 30, 434 BCE,25 in which a house is
bequeathed to a certain woman and where a previous real-estate transaction
between Caspians with Iranian names and a Yahwistic family is recorded. These
Magi serve as witnesses to the transaction. They have names that reflect Mazde-
an/Indo-Iranian cultic roots – Mithrasarah and Tāta.26 They lived in proximity to
the Yahwists and seem to have been intimate enough with them to serve as
witnesses for a relatively mundane property transaction. 

 ................

 In fact, around the same time
TAD 4.5 was written (using ʾtrwdn), other documents mention a mdbḥʾ in the temple of Yhw (TAD
A4.7:26, 4.8:25) and another document mentions mnḥh with an altar on which it is specifically
to be offered, but the term mdbḥʾ (TAD A4.9:9–10) was used for this case. Moreover, an AZ fire-
altar (ʾtrwdn) is not an altar in the sense this term is generally understood. It is a fire holder for
the purposes of veneration – nothing is offered on it or consumed by its fire. It must be kept
pure – it cannot be used to “consume” an offering and cannot be confused with an incense altar.

  yhw יהו the god, and the ʾtrwdn אתרודן . the fire-altar, are all mentioned within
the same immediate context

.................. 

 In actuality, fire already possesses an important place in older Israelite beliefs
and religion, as reflected in biblical sources predating the Persian period. Thus,
fire is at times an aspect of YHWH’s theophanies as, for example, at the burning
bush (Exod 3:2) where the messenger of YHWH or YHWH himself (cf. v. 4) ap-
peared in the fire, and at Horeb (Deut 5:4, 19), where YHWH speaks out of the
fire. Pillars of cloud and fire accompanied the Israelites during their wandering
in the wilderness (Exod 13:21). The connection revealed by these instances be-
tween YHWH and fire made the Israelite religion a convenient platform for ab-
sorbing aspects of the Persian concept of fire. 

 ....................

 the first person to bear a Yahwistic name in the literature
was Joshua, and that was only after his name was changed by Moses from הושע
to יהושע .

Understanding Elephantine, c. 550-399 BC - The Jewish Colony at the Edge of the Persian Empire (provisional title)

Gad Barnea

2027, Palgrave Macmillan (Forthcoming)

 This is, by far, the richest, most variegated and most comprehensive
witness to Jewish life prior to the Hellenistic period.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please explain the magnetic and electrochemical forces of the Spirit. the Shen

 good question. So that article "Light is Heavy" by Nobel physicist Gerard 't Hooft and Martin van der Mark (who did a talk on it, uploaded to yt) - basically since there is no "center of gravity" to light then the momentum of light as part of relativity is also part of mass. This is called the gravitational mass of light but previously it was called the relativistic mass. 

Anyway quantum physics documents that light has a momentum repulsive force but the source of the magnetic force is virtual photons. So in meditation when the light is turned around - as the "light of no light" or "clear light" - this is the "yuan shen" in the sense that the virtual photons are then creating the Yuan Qi as an antigravitational magnetic force that has nonlocal precognitive information. 

This then manifests as perceptions more vivid than being awake - since the information is coherent laser precognitive information and all the perceptions are thus nonlocal. So when you have an "enlightenment experience" you can then smell nonlocally - and qigong master Jim Nance said he could always smell what his sister-in-law was cooking - when he called them up. But he stopped talking about it since it would spook her out. hahaha. What else?

So the electrochemical force then would be the negative ion or "yin qi" imprint into the "yang shen." The Soul in Daoism has two parts - the Hun Soul which is yin shen and yin qi. The Po soul is yang qi (lower body) and yin shen. So the "yin shen" is the light you see with your eyes closed - like when dreaming or meditating.

 

When you have an enlightenment experience you start to see auras and spirits around you - and the dreams become precognitive and you start "manifesting" a new physical reality as in being awake as a dream. So this causes a spacetime vortex and confusion - and most people, like myself, "fall out of enlightenment." 

 

So when the "yang shen" begins to manifest that is only when the "yin qi" is built up - so it's a matter of intensity of light. The light has to become so bright that the spiritual ego gets burned off. That's when the golden body starts to manifest as the "yang shen." But since it based on the "yin qi" as electrochemical energy then it is based on purification of the soul in the body. This is called the "yuan jing" that has to be unified with the Yuan Qi and the Yuan Shen.

 

So in terms of science the microtubules are found in all the cells and our awake perceptual consciousness is based on the pyramidal neuron cells of the brain - the microtubules in those cells have interlocking tubulin proteins like a Fibonacci spiral. So that creates a superluminal radiance via ultrasound activation and has tryptophan blue light psychedelic frequency proteins inside those tubulin.

But the rest of the body also has microtubules and thus also has PROTOconsciousness that normally is subconscious of the emotions. 

 

So when the brain thinking consciousness has a third eye opening then it unites back with the protoconsciousness that is nonlocal of reality as the Yuan Qi and this Yuan Qi can increasingly fill the body - eventually the body would be vaporized or pulverized by the Yuan Qi as the inherent precognitive magnetic antigravitional force of the Universe that is nonlocal.

spontaneous self-replicating Benzene Cell origin of life as noncommutative quantum nonlocality: Sijbren Otto, Uiversity of Groningen

 self-replicating 1/2 electron benzene ring quantum nonlocal origin of life in Nature

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PMkxhBE4xg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u6ePwO9ePg 

 

Big $ Brainwashing!! A billionaire (google) spends more than $100 million to defeat the CA billionaire Wealth Tax vote! Wow.

 California voters yesterday rejected a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ net worth. During the run-up to the election, the “no” side raised roughly 10 times as much as the “yes” side, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone spending more than $100 million into a political action committee working to defeat the measure. The “Yes on 40” campaign said the measure sought to protect healthcare for Californians and that they will put a tax back on the ballot in 2028 if patients are not protected. Sophie Austin reports for AP News.

 would have imposed a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of Californians whose net worth exceeds $1 billion. Most of the money would have been used to backfill federal funding cuts to healthcare, and 10% would have gone toward education and food-assistance programs.

“Buying an election is not the same as winning the debate,” the measure’s proponents said in a statement on Monday. “The billionaires may have bought themselves a temporary victory at the ballot box, but they have not bought themselves an end to this debate, and this is only round one.”

Billionaires donated millions of dollars to a political action committee, Building a Better California, working to defeat the measure. The committee, which backed other measures on the ballot designed to nullify the tax, raised more than $333 million, nearly a third of which came from Brin.

California is home to more than 250 billionaires (around 255 according to recent Forbes estimates), maintaining its position as the U.S. state with the highest concentration of billionaire residents. [1, 2]

• Total Count: Approximately 250–255 billionaires live in or claim residency in the state.
Collective Wealth: Their total net worth is estimated at around $1.87 trillion to $2.06 trillion.
Top Figures: Prominent California billionaires include Meta's Mark Zuckerberg (the state's richest resident) and Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

But some of the state’s wealthiest people aren’t taking any chances and have already moved out of state, starting with its two wealthiest people, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to their representatives, Page (estimated fortune: $288 billion) and Brin ($265 billion) are now residents of Florida and Nevada, respectively. 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2026/10/14/how-californias-billionaire-exodus-is-changing-whos-richest-in-other-states/ 
 Eisenhower had a 91% marginal tax rate on the rich! But now it's considered wrong to have a progressive tax on the rich. What are the results? https://theconversation.com/us-national-debt-keeps-rising-after-years-of-tax-cuts-and-this-will-make-policymaking-all-the-more-difficult-292099
•  

  Even as the U.S. economy grew, lawmakers have cut taxes repeatedly, sometimes with bipartisan support, instead of paying down debt.

  The series of tax cuts since 2001 has added over $10 trillion to the debt, according to an analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by the Center for American Progress. In fact, without these series of cuts, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be decreasing, the study found.

   

Someone takes interest in my research and so I summarize it again! thanks to Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

 https://alisav.substack.com/p/the-symphony-in-my-head-how-a-hidden

nice to hear more recognition of auditory reality via music training! Fields Medal math professor Alain Connes has a great talk called "Music of Shapes" on yt - he describes orchestration as different spacetimes all harmonized. He goes deeper into the truth of music as noncommutative nonlocality. He likes to read scores on the subway in Paris... to help him do mathematics.

I actually got a peer-reviewed academic paper published in this noncommutative music secret to meditation and biophysics - see the open access "Cosmos and History" Dec. 2024 article "noncommutativity music as biophysics" - https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1100

Your ability is very impressive!! I can somewhat relate from my own music training but - my article explains my focus on something a bit more strange about music. Have you heard of the book "The Haunting Melody"? That writer was with Brahms and Freud in Vienna - arguing that music is the gateway to our subconscious. I think there is a deeper truth to this that also ties into political economy (not like Jacques Attali but even deeper). thanks,

Like (6)

Reply (1)

Share

Catherine Condon

Catherine Condon 39m

I am totally ignorant of what you’ve laid out. I’m captivated and would like to read more. I want to read the book you’ve mentioned. Any place else I should look for more info?

Like

Reply (1)

Share

voidisyinyang

voidisyinyang 1m

The Haunting Melody:Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music is a 1953 book by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik (1888–1969), a prominent early student of Sigmund Freud

https://archive.org/details/hauntingmelody0000unse

If you allow me to share - I don't want to "spam" but I grew up in Minneapolis where music training was taken very seriously (must have been the very long cold winters). I started music training at age 3 and classical piano at age five. Turns out early music training increases the corpus callosum that integrates the right and left brain.

But by age 15 I was taking "adult" music theory and I noticed a logical error. I was also training with a University music professor in private lessons (ear training, orchestration, music composition). He said "Oh that's just logarithms."

OK but my dad was a serious lawyer and I took logic seriously - and I stuck to my "guns" so to speak. I thought I had discovered a great secret to reality and my music teachers began giving me some mystic books and philosophy of science, etc.

My 1st year of college I went to Hampshire and I took quantum physics from Herbert J. Bernstein - (he designed NASA's quantum teleportation system but he also collaborated with Anton Zeillinger who got the Nobel prize in 2022 on nonlocality).

Anyway - suddenly I noticed the SAME logical secret I had discovered from my music theory class!! I kept this to myself but I wrote home about it - who was I? Just an undergrad but again I stuck to "my guns" and I pursued it.

My theory was that this secret to basic music explains the foundation of reality - and also harmonizes reality. Anyway - I was in a music composition degree at University of Wisconsin Madison but I was also protesting all the time on social environmental justice. My professor claimed my transcription of a Schoeberg piano sonata to string quartet was "communist" - he called me in to a meeting to say this and to order me to redo my past assignments that already had gotten "As" and Bs." I was protesting a lot nearby the music building so I put two and two together - he and his co-professor had gone through Princeton and bragged that we could all go to Princeton. They were into computer avant-garde music and I didnt' realize that was a whole Anti-Communist CIA propaganda "freedom" thing. hahaha

So I did my undergraduate in "sustainability" but determined to pursue my music secret - I noticed a qigong master Effie P. Chow giving a demonstration. I was skeptical but thought this might be the secret I was looking for. I asked for "Half off" the price - and brought my gf - we paid $10 each. Sure enough after she filled the room with qi and had us make "qi balls" I felt a very strong force - magnetic force pushing the centers of my hands apart. A security guard wandered in at St. Mary's University - Minneapolis - asking what was going on in there since the fuse got blown in the room behind us! The Chinese lady was small and I was hooked.

I found John Beaulieu's book on "Biosonics" - he was a Ph.D. but in psychiatry but he ended up training in music tuning as healing energy - using tuning forks. Sure enough he explained the secret of Qi energy was the SAME secret I had discovered.

Now I was off the races and I wrote a monograph that got me into graduate school for Liberal Studies at U of Minnesota - self-designed. I did my master's thesis on what I called "sound-current nondualism." But I had to test it out! A qigong master did a presentation at my University spiritual healing class and I had done enough research to realize he was the real deal. He works with Mayo clinic doctors - his name is Chunyi Lin and he has the http://springforestqigong.com clinic

So I took his classes to finish my degree - through the African Studies Department! Self-directed based on the racial Contract book - that Platonic philosophy as the "great chain of being" from equal-tempered tuning logarithms with inverse exponential growth for the elite is inherently racist and also promotes eugenics.

I then experienced seriously mind-body transformation and I could feel the center of my brain. I saw ghosts that Chunyi Lin was healing - and I had telepathy and telekinesis and I did serious healing - with no touching.

But the energy was too strong and out of control and I experienced a spacetime vortex! I stopped practicing seriously after that (by serious I mean celibacy also has to be maintained both mentally and physically).

I went into a "dirty tantra" practice and my goal was to cause a global revolution out of Minneapolis via free love psychic healing energy. I sat in full lotus in public all the time while I read one scholarly book a day and had psychic energy healing experiences with "strangers." I called this "Etherealize Pranarchy!" (a pun on Prana and Ether and anarchy and realize).

OK... then I did lots of free research posted online - you can find that at my academia edu site. https://independent.academia.edu/hempeldrew

Like

Reply

shamanic Deer Skull Masks of the Northern European Mesolithic African-Trait people, 10,000 BCE Mesolithic hunter-gatherers

 

  It showed that the [Danish, 4500 BCE] person was female and had dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes. She was also more closely related to hunter-gatherers from mainland Europe than those [neolithic farmers] who lived in central Scandinavia at the time, according to a report in Nature Communications.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/17/neolithic-dna-ancient-chewing-gum-denmark 

 At Star Carr in what is now Yorkshire, the sediments of an ancient and now-vanished glacial meltwater lake have preserved a rare level of detail of an ancient hunter-gatherer settlement, occupied on and off for roughly a thousand years from about 9,300 BCE to 8,300 BCE. It may have been a seasonal winter retreat, part of a long-term lifestyle in between nomadism and full “sedentism.” Alongside stone tools, wood, bone, and antler crafts that would have decomposed at most sites this old were here preserved in the mud, revealing the inhabitants as expert carpenters who made everything from ax shafts to large platforms mounted on stilts made from entire carved tree trunks. Genetic analysis reveals that these Mesolithic Europeans, part of the first-ever Homo sapiens group to live in Great Britain after the ice retreated, were dark-skinned, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, “unlike any modern group of people in physical appearance.” Most strikingly, these Star Carr people made elaborate headdresses and masks from parts of smoothed and carved deer skulls, with thirty-three different examples found so far.

 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Carr_Frontlets

 A total of 21 headdresses made from red deer skulls were found in this excavation and these were donated to the British Museum, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and the Rotunda Museum. A later series of excavations led by Nicky Milner, Chantal Conneller, and Barry Taylor from 2004 to 2010 and then 2013–2015 discovered a further twelve red deer frontlets as well as some roe deer examples.

Since the first discoveries at Star Carr, antler frontlets have been found at ten prehistoric sites in northern Europe.^[1]

 In his original 1954 work Clark also suggested that they could have functioned as disguises for hunting deer or as costumes for ritualised dancing.^[4] Conneller argued that the headdresses could have "facilitated a bodily transformation". She argues that this was not a literal transformation into deer, but something that affected change in a human by taking on the effects of an animal.^[5]

 From Anthropocene post

 Most strikingly, these Star Carr people made elaborate headdresses and masks from parts of smoothed and carved deer skulls, with thirty-three different examples found so far. Eleven thousand years later, we know nothing of their meaning, with hypotheses ranging from practical hunting camouflage to symbolic religious regalia. They hunted and ate a lot of deer, and may have seen it as defining their culture to some extent. This hunter-gatherer “Mesolithic” genetic and technological package defined human life in Europe for around seven thousand years, from the retreat of the glaciers to the coming of the agricultural Neolithic to the continent, and Star Carr is one of the few keyholes we have to see a bit more of just how richly complex their lives were.

 https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-ice-age?embedding_publication_id=951083

 During the Last Glacial Maximum.... Europe was too cold so people only lived in Ukraine?

We call this the “Last Glacial Maximum,” and for most of the world, it took place between about 26,000 and 20,000 years ago. Much of Europe was simply uninhabitable, either covered by ice sheets or near enough to them that frigid arctic desert was the main landscape. On the frozen grasslands of the Ukraine, people clung on by hunting and scavenging woolly mammoth, even using their bones and tusks as the framework for large, elaborate houses. This is a replica of a house excavated at the village of Mezhyrich: 

 

After about 20,000 years ago, however, the ice sheets began to recede for good. The arctic desert became mammoth steppe, the mammoth steppe became new-growth woodland, and people left their refuges to explore the new landscapes. They adopted new ways of life to fit their emerging environments: new cultural practices and new subsistence strategies for a new world. The Clovis hunters who made their way south into the vast and un- or barely inhabited tracts of the Americas were one of these groups, following the mammoth, mastodon, and bison across a largely unexplored land. As Europe became increasingly forested, the mammoth and horses who had wandered the mammoth steppe disappeared, and deer, aurochs, and boar became the favored prey. The Natufian hunter-gatherers of today’s Near East exploited huge expanses of wild grasses, the forerunners of domesticated crops, and hunted gazelle.

This was the final Paleolithic, the last gasp of the old Stone Age.............

 The people who survived in Northern Europe, for example, turned to intensive reindeer hunting with a new weapon, the bow and arrow....All of that meant fewer people in a harsher landscape, and for some 1200 years (12,900 years before the present to 11,700), these conditions persisted........

 After 1200 years, around 11,700 years before the present, the Younger Dryas came to an end. The warming resumed, and the Holocene - our present era - began. The ice melted, sea levels rose, and the environment changed once more. A whole clutch of new cultures and practices emerged to capitalize on the new possibilities. In Europe, these new cultures belonged to the Mesolithic period. They were quite different from what had come before. Genetic evidence suggests that Mesolithic people only had a small bit of ancestry from the Paleolithic Europeans who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. As the population changed, cave painting, a practice that had lasted for perhaps 20,000 years, came to an end. The tools changed, too: Rather than making large spearpoints and blades, they created small, modular blades called “microliths,” which could then be placed into a variety of antler, wood, or bone handles and used for a number of different purposes. Rather than making an arrowhead and a separate scraper to clean hides, Mesolithic people made microliths, which could be used for either purpose in the right setting....

 The rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, and greater moisture created a diverse array of wetland environments on sea- and lakeshores across Europe, and this was where Mesolithic people often resided. At the site of Star Carr in Yorkshire, which was then a reed-covered lakeshore, Mesolithic Britons plied the waters in small boats, lived in wigwam-like houses, and hunted deer. They wore deer skulls, with antlers attached, as masks: Whether they did this as a disguise while hunting or during some kind of shamanic ritual is impossible to say, but the masks look pretty cool:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Golden Road: How Buddhist monks arrived in Alexandria Egypt, prominent by 1st century

 The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World? Speakers : Speakers: William Dalrymple

Romans bought their Silk in Kerala - a "highly erotic garment" - transparent and showing everything off with Indian jewelry... and even receipts to show off the value.  Buddha in Alexandria Egypt, 1st CE:

 

Celebrated writer and historian William Dalrymple discusses The Golden Road, exploring India's pivotal role as the heart of ancient Eurasia. 

 Buddhism in turn is "historicized" as a human - by Roman Alexandrian influence.... whereas previously Buddha was not depicted as a human icon but rather the Dharma wheel of law....

 William Dalrymple playlist on India