Weird Wednesday

June 18, 2008 - 11:52 PM by

Israeli researchers have discovered that the initial appearance of green beads in ornamentation in the ancient Middle East coincides with the beginning of agriculture.

Let me run that one by you again: although bead-making began 110,000 years ago in these parts, an emphasis on green beads emerged only about 11,000 years ago. Archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer of the University of Haifa in Israel and geologist Naomi Porat of the Geological Survey of Israel in Jerusalem theorize that the rise in use of green beads was directly related to the onset of agriculture. In excavating sites, the researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies used white, red, yellow, brown and black beads, while green was used occasionally – until agriculture began. “Green jewelry mimicked the color of young leaf blades, thus signifying a wish for successful crops and fertility… Green beads remain popular in agricultural groups today,” Science News reports.

I did a Google search to find out if that last statement was true, as visions of emerald-encrusted farmers wives flashed through my mind. I didn’t find much to back it up. No matter. The burning question for the researchers is whether the green sought after by early farmers was the same green used to ward against the evil eye.

Green evil eye amulet

Now this is a very big deal in the Middle East. There is always some old crone sitting on the corner, at a bus stop, running a stall in the shuk, or living on the ground floor of your building, biding her time and storing up energy so that, when the time comes, she can let loose a full throttle laser beam of bad karma. And if you don’t have a red string, hamsa amulet or some blue-green beads on you, you’re as helpless as Superman in the face of Kryptonite. Green Kryptonite.

Or, as the researchers put it, “Mesopotamian texts from around 5,000 years ago mention the evil eye, a belief in a kind of curse caused by a person praising someone while looking enviously at that person. Evil eye traditions still exist, especially in Mediterranean and Aegean regions. It’s not known when evil eye beliefs originated, but they go back at least to the increasing complexity of spiritual belief that occurred at the dawn of agriculture.”

Whew! That’s a pretty heavy for some little green holey bits of stone. Curses, spiritual beliefs, fertility gods, harvest gods… I’m beginning to think that diamonds, purportedly the strongest material known to man (at least according to the DeBeers folks), might be better suited to bear the load. Perhaps that’s why they’re so popular today. Although, there is that one curse they can’t seem to escape…

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Comments

One Comment on Weird Wednesday

  1. varda on Fri, Jul 4th 2008 9:10 AM

    2. in 5 billion years they’ll dig up some diamonds and say that they were amulets against glacier melting and global warming.

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