This is a Roman bear cameo from Arbeia. It’s cut from sardonyx stone, a type of agate. As well as being unbelievably detailed and beautiful, it offers a tantalising clue about the place.
I wrote in this post about the post-Roman name for South Shields being ‘Caer Urfa’, with ‘caer’ meaning fort while ‘urfa’ remains a mystery. Well, could it not be that ‘urfa’ is a corruption of the Latin for ‘bear’: ursa? That is, Caer Urfa was ‘Bear Fort’.
The changing of one phoneme from ‘s’ to ‘f’ is a tiny jump (sibilant fricative to close non-sibilant fricative). And it would not be surprising if the ancient Britons had from prehistoric times referred to the Lawe at South Shields as ‘the place of bears’, the Romans simply calqued this to Latin, then the post-Roman settlers, a mix of Angles and Britons, kept the name, with this very slight sound change coming in perhaps centuries later from a scribe, from where Leland eventually received it in the 16th century.
To put it another way: Arbeia was the late-Roman name for the fort. This ‘place of the Arabs’ was in honour of the Tigris bargemen stationed there, and this has been well-argued by N Hodgson (2005). This name replaced the earlier name for the fort, Lugdunum. The wider area of the Lawe, occupied since Mesolithic times and essentially an island at the time, was known as “the place of bears”.
Who knows? But it seems a plausible theory to me.
References:
The Roman place-names Arbeia and Corstopitum: a rejection of recently suggested meanings, N Hodgson (2005)
Update: Edinburgh-based Celtic scholar, William Young, added this fascinating piece of knowledge referencing the veneration of bears in Redesdale, Northumberland:
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No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
Very good research fascinating findings
Some thoughts on agate.
Agate was used by ancient seafarers to ward off bad luck. Numerous ancient cultures used agate for that purpose.
To the Romans it was sacred to Aurora. She has many parallels with the dawn gods of Egypt, and Hathor, the cow, is derived from hath hor, the house of horus, the dawn god.
So we have the AU and ro and ra again in the etymology.
It is a form of Chalcedony, which again links back to Turkey, where it is associated with Chalcedon.
Numerous forms exist and there are some that are starkly red streaks in white, like the St George symbol.
The ancients saw significance and correspondences everywhere, and their associations with things they saw, totems, and meanings are diverse. This fed into their language and etymology.
That the bear on a lion or panther (Bastet form of sekhmet, as in Hathor Sekhmet) evokes a lot of Egyptian archetypes. That it is in agate, even more so.
BTW Bastet is possibly the root of elements of words such as alabaster, which the Egyptians used for canopic jars and pots. Such as this white leonine form in alabaster, and it isn’t a stretch to see how agate as a similar compound might equate. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Lioness_Bast_cosmetic_jar_83d40m_tut_burial_artifact.jpg
Here are a few thoughts on the bear.
The bear can relate to many things in the Celtic and Egyptian way of thinking, where both cultures looked at nature and what they saw they used as symbolic of a ‘thing’.
Bears were important apex creatures in Europe. They were important in Celtic myths.
Bears were seen as bearing a small foetus, a mouse-like entity without ears, that the Mother Bear would ‘lick into shape’. Bears were heavily associated with birth and motherhood.
The ears were therefore a focus. The etymology of ear leads to auricle etc. But it is linked with bears too, as ear, ous, ore, ars and urs. Ar and ur come into play too, linked and no doubt syncretised down the ages.
The bear’s brown ear is the only animal with the same ear shape as the lion, which was the apex beast in Egyptian. Brown being Ar in the Gothic derivation, also shining, as in bronze. Very dominant in the Bronze Age.
The ear links with the qualities of the bear as a shape that very much resembles the early bear cub, and a foetus in general.
A cub, is related to a cob – an offspring of corn, and corn is a symbol of Osiris. And an ear of corn is a well known phrase. Note the ‘cor’ in the word, as in Coria/Cor. Note the ous in the name Osiris, as ws-ir, ou-sir, or Asar.
These are words and symbols which naturally weld together and syncretise through the ages, probably mostly brought together in Roman times when they had Egyptian, Greek and all manner of gods that they enjoyed.
The Egyptian lion, or symbol of the sun god likely transferred in Britain and Europe to the bear, and their archetypal forms as totems would have syncretised, as would their language and words for them.
And if you look to the archetypal mother goddess of Egypt, as Hathor the cow in a humanized form, she is depicted with very prominent ears 😉 The myths of the ancient Aryans are related to the bringing of the plough, the arja or arya, as the first to cultivate with the plough drawn by the ox, and in Egypt likely the water buffalo, a form of Hathor. This led to our letter A, as represented by the horns. So perhaps the ear relates to the mother goddess to as a symbol of the embryo?
So, perhaps it then gets associated with the bear in our region thousands of years later, via the ear symbol. Hathor-Sekhmet was a lioness goddess derived from Hathor and the lion-headed Sekhmet, when Hathor turned into her to appease Ra. We don’t have lions here but we did have bears.
The bear as Ur and Ar are well attested. The ears are very symbolic – especially in an Egyptian mythos sense – combining cow and lion archetypes with the mother archetype. Proto Germanic ear as auso and urso are close phonetically, as are many old words for bear and ear.
Bear is even spelled b-ear. And the alphabet letter B, as Beth, is also associated with mother, and housing/enclosing, and birth.
So the bear bears the bairn and when it is born it is bare. And the bear is then barren. It then licks the pink ear shaped, earless mouse into shape and turns the ear-shaped mouse into a brown hairy creature that has round ears like a lion. And the words for bear and ear share often common roots.
But does that have anything to do with Urfa?
I don’t think as much as we would wish, but there are logical links with the name via the Ur and Ar. I think they share a common root.
Do you think that the white agate bear supplanting the white lioness could have anything to do with the symbol of the bear here replacing the symbol of the lioness there (another motherly ‘goddess’ cubs and all), and as a symbol of protection and strength, which was the associated meaning of the lion over there? The lion being a symbol for the sun?
The bear as mother may also relate to Ishtar. “She who lives in Arbela”!
Here she is also standing on the lion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_of_Arbela#/media/File:0000864538_OG.jpg
Arbela was the Romanized name for the Land of the Arabs. This equates with the Biblical area of the ‘Garden of Eden’, prior to the journey to the plains of Shinar (Sumer/Mesopotamia).
The capital of the region, Josephus called Adiabene, is Ebli, and was known as Arbela in Latin. Translated from Aramaic Adiabene is Eden.
She came down through various streams as Eve (Guinnevere or Gunn-effer), Ishtar, Britannia, Danu (the Mother goddess of the Tuatha de Danaan), the Arthurian Lady of the Lake and many more. Demonised in the Bible as the mother harlot, identified with Tiamat, the watery mother of the dragon Marduk, whose name is preserved in the Irish kings as Merodach or Muiradach, and was intimately associated with the Celtic nobility of the Irish kings, which became incorporated into the ‘Celtic’ church, which was wholly pagan until the days of the Roman conversion.
Always associated with water, the infinite sea of the heavens, lakes etc. and all sacred wells and springs dedicated to the Mother Goddess of the Celts were converted to churches dedicated to St Mary. Mary as mother of Jesus is cognate with Isis/Meru, whose tear was Osiris, the bread and wine as lord of inundation and god of the harvest, who, as Serapis wears the modius. Which links nicely with Cor. The river being the blood of Osiris or the tear of Isis, wsir.
The sir element of wsir became our word for a noble, or knight, and is cognate with the Eddic Aesir, and the Ash, which is incorporated into Asherah, as a variant of Ishtar, as Inanna, or Ish Kur Gal who brought the sacred plant of life to the garden in the Babylonian myth. Iskur was a rain god.
The lion was always associated with Ishtar, as the Mother figure to the father the all-Father the sun. Likely a later transposition of the hundreds and thousands of years of syncretism, we end up with Arbella and Urfa and the same icon of the goddess standing on the lioness. Thus making the bear an icon of the mother goddess in this image, whose history comes down in a direct route from the Arbela of antiquity, which is in the same region as Urfa, or Edessa. All in the names and symbols associated with South Shields!
And all symbolised by the agate bear and lion, which I have used as a key (a kind of Rosetta Stone) to unlock this mystery (perhaps) 😉
Hi Luan
Could you please direct me to the source of your statement that Caer Urfa was originally known as Lugdunum?
It seems very significant. But I’m struggling to find that as a documented fact.
Many thanks
Ivan