Another one of *those* topics, very interesting too./blockquote>
Posted on 05/04/2015 7:48:22 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Midwife Mercada Dasa lived in the Old City of Jerusalem until 1948. In her attic she raised an unusual pet -- a white female snake about a meter and a half long -- and fed it sugar cubes. Just before the entry of the Jordanian Legion she left the besieged city with her family and her pet remained behind. That a midwife, whose family lived in Jerusalem since the time of the Second Temple, carried on a tradition of feeding white female snakes was part of the family's lore, but not something anyone considered significant.
Now Mercada's grandson, Benny Avigdory, a 57-year-old architect at the antiquities preservation department of the Jerusalem municipality, believes she was the last practitioner of rituals from Minoan culture...
In the 1990s, Benny's sister Sigalit attended a lecture by Kimberley Patton, a scholar of ancient Greece, who related that in Minoan culture midwives raised snakes in their attics and fed them honey cakes and honey diluted with water. At the lecture, Sigalit told how her Jerusalemite great-grandmother would feed sugar cubes to a female snake. Patton was stunned; scholars had heard rumors that the tradition had continued in the Middle East but attempts to prove this or find traces of the practice had failed...
The Minoan culture is known mainly as the predecessor of Greek culture and the start of Western European culture. But the Minoans had a connection to the Children of Israel, too, according to Professor Israel Knohl, chair of the Bible Studies department at Hebrew University and a specialist on the Philistines. For example, the Biblical story of Samson is basedon on the Minoan-Mycenaean myth of Hercules. Others relate Samson's tribe, Dan, to names for the Minoans, Denyen or Danai, apparently "the sea peoples" in the Bible.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
Mycenae and Scythia
http://www.varchive.org/dag/mas.htm
[snip] We, on the contrary, must begin to have doubts about a scheme which needs to postulate a five hundred year tradition of work in stone for which not a thread of evidence exists. Stone constructions of the type, had they existed, would have survived. Gregory Borovka in his Scythian Art writes of “the striking circumstance that the Scytho-Siberian animal style exhibits an inexplicable but far-reaching affinity with the Minoan-Mycenaean. Nearly all its motives recur in Minoan-Mycenaean art.” [/snip]
Another one of *those* topics, very interesting too./blockquote>
OK, but did she leap bulls bare-breasted?
Vergil in the Aeneid has a Trojan say, with reference to the Trojan horse, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes ("I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts").
"Danaoi" is possibly related to "Danauna," one of the Sea Peoples.
;’)
I’m trying to figure out how the snake survived on sugar cubes...it must have eaten something else.
-JT
Or maybe -- just maybe -- the Biblical story of Samson actually happened the way the Bible said it did, and the tribe of Dan actually descended from one of the sons of Jacob. Just a thought.
Note: this topic is from . Updating the message, not pinging the list.
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Note: this topic is from . I'm only repinging because I see this topic is pretty small, maybe some missed it.
That's interesting, apparently the removed post above was a list of topic links, and the one at the other topic was also deleted.
This one might hurt the bull !
Whitesnake? I think I saw them in concert back in 84...
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