Prehistory in Four Dimensions
Across Geography and Up through Time
Jim Felton
A true and very ancient ‘fish story’.
Gene and I have both traveled some in Southeast Asia and know of the immense fish. Now the trout in North American and European lakes and rivers don’t generally get as big as a man, but in the great slow rivers either side of the Tropic of Capricorn they do. But, they are getting smaller. “The price of civilization,” seemed like a poor excuse for the disappearance of such a wonder in our front step conversation.
Returning to my house I realized with a start that I’ve had a pressed-paper temple rubbing from Angkor Wat hanging on my wall for years. It’s hanging in front of me as I write. I noticed something interesting! This rubbing shows a dragonboat full of Khmer warriors surrounded by fish of gigantic proportion.
These must be the actual sized river carp. So I took the temple rubbing of the wall to show my neighbor and his wife Mary. We noticed several other interesting things as we looked closer at the temple rubbing. So, I’ve gathered some supporting images to share with you what we think we observed.
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| tourist 'temple' rubbing on my wall. [pardon the low-res eyeball-cam shot] |
These must be the actual sized river carp. So I took the temple rubbing of the wall to show my neighbor and his wife Mary. We noticed several other interesting things as we looked closer at the temple rubbing. So, I’ve gathered some supporting images to share with you what we think we observed.
Looking at man-sized fish gathered around a Khmer period canoe I ‘naturally’ think these are conventionalized ‘regular’ fish. I mean they portray them as big as the crocodile going after the overboard sailor in the same water. That news spot reminded us that, in the world’s great rivers, “’taint necessarily so.” These probably were drawn to scale!
How about something equally as interesting? I’m about to show you a series of similar images of ‘large fish and crocodiles surrounding war canoes’ that stretches back nearly 1500 years, straight back to Babylonia and Egypt. The picture and story is even today essentially the same. This reoccurring ‘motif’ or arrangement of elements of a carved image is clear evidence just how conservative memorial carving traditions of earlier times were. I wonder if there could be a carried forward ‘convention’ in the type of environment you look for as well, if you are setting up a new ‘traditional’ dynasty out beyond your ancestral Egypt or Mesopotamia?
But, let’s stick to fish and dragonboats for the moment.
I’m going to quickly trace the “big fish around boat with crocodile” motif back through time. Let’s see where it takes us.
This wall hanging in my living room shows a squad of javelin and shield warriors standing at ready in a dragonboat propelled by many oarsmen. The dragonboat has phoenix-like bird heads on tall bow and stern posts. The canoe body has the face of a ‘makara’ like animal right where the post of the phoenix neck rises from the canoe body. That’s right about where the boat’s eye-stone would be for Phoenician and Greek boats. I think the rubbing is from a panel off a Angkor Wat temple, which would put it in the 9th to 13th century as a Khmer motif.
The water around the dragonboat is filled with giant carp looking fish, a crocodile, a water snake, a turtle and some kind of catfish looking thing I don't recognize. There are two men without helmets below the canoes apparently in the water. The croc is about to take the seat out of one the swimming warrior’s loin cloth. A warrior with the same uniform stands on shore just in front of the first canoe, with his hand apparently touching the bow. A tree rises behind him to verify he’s on shore. Another duplicate canoe follows the first into my wall hanging’s frame. A warrior on that second canoe reaches up across to the first canoe for its pennant? I can't guess what that signifies? Maybe he is just avoiding a collision during a crowded run up to the beach.
There is what seems to be an extra, back-facing ‘fish fin’ attached to the front of the first canoe. There isn't a fin at the front of the second canoe. At first I thought it was a cutting ram as seen on Greek vessels. I wonder if this isn't supposed to indicate the bow of the first canoe driving up through the sand onto the shore. There are two round parasols in the center of the canoe and a pennant flapping in the breeze fore and aft.
The Khmer period of my wall hanging was from about 800 AD to the beginning of the 1400’s. We start our stroll back through time in a more recent period. First here, from around 1974, a few images of dragonboats, now made ceremonial by modern battle technologies. Here are the pennants and parasols in the correct position. I can’t think that extra yardage in the wind can make paddling any easier. But we must put tradition before comfort after all.
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| This is the Suphan or Golden Swan, the royal barge of the King of Thailand. |
This is the canoe that originally got me interested in the history of Southeast Asian dragonboats and the expansion of cultures using battle canoes for fast strike riverine warfare.
It was surprising that even then in the early ‘70s, no Thai I could find, during my few days at a time in country, could tell me much about the history of the Royal Barges. I saw them blocked up in their storage barns. Craning my neck over the heads of literally a hundred thousand Thai, hoping for a good luck view, I saw the procession down river. I talked shortly to a man who said the princes of the royal family were the ones to be consulted on matters of history, as they had the leisure to pursue it. Then it was time to come home and start college.
Here is the same barge in 1936. The prow-form is said to a combination of griffin and snake, but remember the symbolic importance of the ‘swan’ to the royal lineage of Thailand.
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| Suphan. Scenes from Many Lands. 1936. |
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| Another of the royal barges about 1974. |
The following images give you a sense of the incredible conservative impulse carrying traditional images through the migrations of culture influence out along vast reaches of geography.
So, let’s cycle back in time toward the centuries of the Khmer dynasty and even further back.
Starting in contemporary Indonesia here is a traditional Lampung cloth.
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| [Navigating Culture, Indonesia. Sudha Rajagopalan. Fig. RMV 4268-5] |
Lampung ‘Ship Cloths’ are made today for life transition ceremonies in Indonesia. They show us how limits of material that must generalize an image can take an image far away from its original presentation. We can still see the double ends to the canoe, the small second boat behind, the guy in the upper left on shore, and are those animal figures below the bow and stern of the main canoe. Could they be crocs and fishes?
Here a dragonboat casts off with a slightly less organized crew.
Here a dragonboat casts off with a slightly less organized crew.
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| Phnom Penh about 1903 |
Then next at about the turn of the century I’d say, Indian[?] soldiers in cobbled together double-hulled canoes confront a flotilla of more traditional dragonboats full on, face to face with muskets and spears. Sheesh! It’s understandable why the 'sailors' in the foreground canoes look a little reluctant to charge right in there.
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| 1914. Sven Anders Hedin. From Pole to Pole |
This next carving is a commercial vessel. I include it to show the convention of the large fish and the croc are standard during the Khmer era [805 AD to 1431 AD] in memorial carving. Note too the pennant and parasols in the same general positions.
These include the giants of the Yangtze River of China, The sturgeon of caviar fame in the Russian rivers and lakes, giant catfish in the Mississippi and the Amazon, and of course our own Northwest monster fish, the sturgeon of the Columbia.
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Here in 1911 is a small one (just 1600 lbs.) they had to throw back. |
From the waters of Southeast Asia we move west to Ceylon. No fish or crocs but you got your war parasols in the boats and atop to elephant backs, and you’ve got your chin-to-knee square shields. Oh, and there is too one little fish, between the oars, just below the bottom boat unloading elephants.
The picture says “about 543 B.C.” but that must mean the date of the landing as the Ajanta frescoes were painted from the 6th to the 7th century AD.
The great pyramid mound of Borobudur in Java has a carved plaque that shows this poor sailor very anxious to get back in the boat from waters full of good sized fish, and also with large mouths full of teeth. Is this monster a crocodile, or are these ocean sailors outside the quiet flow of their rivers, experiencing the appetites of sharks?.
The great pyramid mound of Borobudur in Java has a carved plaque that shows this poor sailor very anxious to get back in the boat from waters full of good sized fish, and also with large mouths full of teeth. Is this monster a crocodile, or are these ocean sailors outside the quiet flow of their rivers, experiencing the appetites of sharks?.
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| Fig. 7-13. Raft of Borobudur in Java. [Krom, 1920-1922. pl, 21] | |
[Maspero. Vol. 8.] On the Tigris and Euphrates. A skirmish in the marsh.
Culture influence spreading east may naturally originate from the Tigris and Euphrates. The cultures of Chaldea, and Mesopotamia may have influenced cultures of Greater India and Southeast Asia. The style of early riverine warfare was the same, as was the size of the fish in the river marshes. In this carving the archers have to be very nimble to shoot from those tiny canoes. Here are boys in a row with weapons in a canoe. The water is full of large fish.
Culture influence spreading east may naturally originate from the Tigris and Euphrates. The cultures of Chaldea, and Mesopotamia may have influenced cultures of Greater India and Southeast Asia. The style of early riverine warfare was the same, as was the size of the fish in the river marshes. In this carving the archers have to be very nimble to shoot from those tiny canoes. Here are boys in a row with weapons in a canoe. The water is full of large fish.
Here is a random thought: A famous mystery of near eastern memorial carving is this image of the man wearing the head and body of a fish. He is one of the gods who brought knowledge and technology to the early people of the region.
This is not really the mystery it seems to be because we all know that eating lots of fish protein contributes to brain development without the hormonal extremes of beef proteins or the after meal crash. This is a very useful state of health for the early developers of your kingdoms and your dynasties, it turns out. And since you are what you eat . . . or is it . . . you are what you wear?
Just a little diet reminder from your local ancient health department, carved on hundreds of years of Near Eastern memorials.
But, seriously folks the size is right; the body has the right number of fins in the right places, and has the split tail of our iconic fish. What do you think? How about the fish ‘hoody’ being a sign of abundance, since it is the actual size fish skin of a giant river carp or other species, worn here ceremonially, but from the real fish?
Do you know that high born ladies in Mongolia wear ‘fish skin’ coats for their Sunday best? And many images of temple gaurdians and warriors still show a layer of scales at wrist or shoulder or waist. Ideas and symbolic images travel to strange extremes across cultures and up through time. Most of us couldn’t tell where our founding symbols come from, or originally meant.
Now back another step to the waters of the Nile. The people of the Nile occupied the river banks as early as 6000 BC. But just counting from the XVIIIth dynasty the images that follow portray a life almost 3500 years old from about 1500 BC.
The Egyptian people evolved in relation to the pulse of the great river. In fact even their expression for health and good life came from the quality of the yearly inundation of the Nile over the land. This was a people who hunted, planted, and traded, people who fought and build by the changes of the Nile.
Sails versus oars here, notice the crocodiles and maybe a hippo on shore.
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| [Maspero. Manual Egyptian Archaeology. 1895. fig. 128.] |
Fishing with spear and net.
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| Maspero, Egypt Vol. 1. [047.jpg] |
So let’s finally confront the giant fish itself. Here on murals carved for the ruler Ti more than 3500 years ago we find our giant fish captured, strung on a stout oar and on the way home to feed a very large family, or half a Pharaoh’s dynasty. This is in fact the Latus from the Nile River. Is this the giant river fish who is carved surrounding Egyptian hunters and war canoes in the waters of the Nile River. Could this fish have started the motif carried across other lands and other seas to other immense rivers becoming the standard for many later dynasties’ memorial carvings on their temples and palaces?
I think there is a good chance we are looking at the great grandmother of all fish-surrounding-war-canoes for many centuries across South Asia.
Was this big fish a carver’s motif or were each of these water-side cultures living surrounded by a fish the size of, and perhaps a species related to, the river carp of the Mekong?
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| A giant Pakse fish from Thailand is here held in the clutches of dragon claws. |
Maybe people carrying ancient ancestral ideas from an earlier people, who fought, hunted, and built on the giant rivers of the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates among the crocodile and giant river fish would feel most at home building new dynasties on giant river shores also surrounded by crocodiles and giant fish.
Now-a-days you get in a dragonboat or racing canoe in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Hawaii, New Zealand, or British Columbia with a bunch of good neighbors and friends and just paddle hell bent for sunset like the crocs, and the giant fish, and the hereditary enemies are really chasing you.
You paddle your heart out flinging your paddles skyward with each stroke to fill the air with sun filled silver, and just have a great time! Then the team throws a big barbecue featuring some giant swimming thing from the river to celebrate the abundance and the richness of community life.
Until next time,
Yours in cooperation,
Jim Felton
February 3, 2010
Pacific Ancient Voyagers
[1] I shouldn’t say ‘ancient times.’ I know young men doing apprenticeship in their father’s shops carving ‘standard scenes’ again and again. They graduate by getting their carved pieces sold for home or temple.
[2] The craft master teaches the craft apprentice and the carver offers an image from his repertoire of scenes most appropriate to the celebration. The master carver adapts the traditional image (reluctantly) to suit the new description of the figures being memorialized. [See: my article on the slowly evolving lineage of the carver apprentice tradition.]
[3] The craft master teaches the craft apprentice and the carver offers an image from his repertoire of scenes most appropriate to the celebration. The master carver adapts the traditional image (reluctantly) to suit the new description of the figures being memorialized. [See: my article on the slowly evolving lineage of the carver apprentice tradition.]
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