The few references to lions in the Schubert song texts all have a connection with the levant. Hagar imagines fighting a lioness in the Syrian desert in order to obtain a drop of milk for her dying son. Atys is carried from Anatolia to Thrace on Cybele’s chariot drawn by lions. King Richard I of England is dubbed ‘the lionheart’ because of his crusading activity in and around Jerusalem.
The Near East, the birthplace of modern civilization, is riddled with iconography lionizing giant cats. Bones of the powerful animals have been found at archaeological sites from the Neolithic era and onward, into the biblical period. But how common were big cats: the lion and the leopard, and the cheetah too, in the Neolithic and biblical times of the Near East?
A leopard head carved in stone leaps out at Göbekli Tepe, a site from 11,000 years ago in southeastern Turkey. Actually, it leaps at the Şanlıurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum, but it was found at Göbekli. Big cat bones are not uncommon in Neolithic contexts throughout the entire Near East, but become rarer as of the Chalcolithic.
Then, as the first states began to emerge, images of big cats began to appear, conveying messages of power and subjugation.These include, for instance, depictions of captive cats and images such as legendary king Gilgamesh strangling a lion 4,700 years ago. Lions strode across the stone gates to Babylon. A relief from Nineveh shows King Ashurbanipal hunting more lions 2,700 years ago. David boasted to Saul of killing a lion (and a bear), implying that he was man enough to handle Goliath too.
Lions as metaphor live on to this day: that English king wasn’t known as Richard the Hamster-heart.
Ruth Schuster, Why Were There Lions in the Towns of Biblical Israel – as Predators, or Trophies?, 2023
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-11-29/ty-article-magazine/why-were-there-lions-in-the-towns-of-biblical-israel/0000018c-1ada-d4e4-a1df-3edfd4890000#
☙
Descendant of:
AnimalsTexts with this theme:
- Hagars Klage, D 5 (Clemens August Schücking)
- Atys, D 585 (Johann Baptist Mayrhofer)
- Romanze des Richard Löwenherz, D 907 (Walter Scott and Karl Ludwig Methusalem Müller)