Ancient silver goblet preserves oldest known image of cosmic creation

The image on a 4,300-year-old silver goblet discovered in the West Bank of Palestine appears to show the universe emerging from primordial chaos, making it the oldest known visual representation of the creation myth.

“I think it's a brilliant design,” says Eberhard Zanger at the Luwian Research Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Switzerland. “It has very few lines and tells a very complex story.”

The Ain Samia Cup is about 8 centimeters high. It was found 55 years ago in an ancient tomb a few miles northeast of Ramallah, on the western tip of the mountain. Fertile Crescent – a region where early civilizations flourished.

The cup depicts two scenes. In the first, a large snake rears up and collides with a chimera with a human body and animal legs, which stands above a small flower circle. In the second, the snake lies on the ground under a much larger flower-like circle with a smiling face. The circle is probably held by two fully humanoid figures – although only one is visible today because the goblet is broken.

Archaeologists in the 1970s suggested that these two scenes came from Enuma ElishA Babylonian a creation myth in which a primeval creature named Tiamat is defeated in battle by the god Marduk, who then transforms Tiamat's body into the heavens and Earth. But Zangger said other researchers have pointed out the shortcomings of the idea. Not only does the cup not have a battle scene, but it was also made approximately 1,000 years earlier. Enuma Elish was first recorded.

Because of this, other researchers have proposed alternative interpretations – for example, that the cup is a symbolic representation of the birth of the new year and the death of the old.

But Zanger and his colleagues… Daniel Sarloindependent researcher from Toronto, and Fabien Haas Dantes at the University of Zurich, Switzerland – I think the original interpretation was closer to the truth. They argue that these scenes do show the formation of the world and the cosmos, but they come from a creation story much older than Enuma Elish.

The first scene, according to Sanger's team, is chaos. The chimera represents a weak god fused with animals. Under his feet, a small flower circle symbolizes the powerless sun. All this chaos is ruled by a monstrous snake. But in the second scene, order peacefully emerged from chaos. The gods separated from the animals and became powerful humanoid characters. They hold the equally powerful sun in the “heavenly boat”, indicating that the heavens are now separate from the Earth. The monstrous serpent of chaos, defeated, lies under the sun.

Zanger notes that there are cuneiform texts from elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent, which are similar in age to the cup and describe how the gods separated the heavens from the Earth. Thus, we know that by the time the cup was created, the people of this region had developed stories about the creation of the world. “But the incredible thing about the cup is that we now have an idea of ​​what they thought it looked like,” he says.

Jan LismanAn independent researcher from the Netherlands was not convinced by this interpretation. “What can be depicted is the daily movement of the Sun,” he says. “But definitely not 'origin' or 'chaos.'

Sylvia Schroer at the University of Bern in Switzerland are more inclined to accept the possibility that the cup shows the creation of the world. But she sees problems with another aspect of the new analysis.

Sanger and his colleagues say some of the images on the Ain Samiyah Cup – such as the monstrous snake – appear in ancient cosmological stories from across the Fertile Crescent and surrounding regions. They argue that this hints at a deep connection between all these creation myths, suggesting that they may all be based on a single, even older myth. In this regard, they point out that a celestial boat, similar to the one depicted on the cup, is carved on a pillar at the site of 11,500 years ago. Gobekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, northwest of the Fertile Crescent. “This predates the cup by 7,000 years,” says Sanger.

But Schrör says it would be too speculative to assume that the region's creation stories are all so deeply connected. “Even if there are similarities, the impact is not always obvious,” she says.

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