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The Dragon Hunt

Dragon from San Francisco New Year parade, 2020. Kajmeister photo.

A few weeks back, while still wrapped in the blanket of dinosaur research, I started thinking about serpent gods, flying monsters, and dragons. I wondered how scholars had addressed this question, but when a few glances at research led to papers on children’s stories and the ancestral memory of tree shrews, I gave up quickly. It was Christmas; I had presents to wrap and muffins to bake. Those few who discussed the possible origins of dragons appeared limited to art museums, mythology experts, or psychologists, rather than historians or paleontologists.

But last Thursday was of all things, Appreciate a Dragon day, according to Sandra Boynton. And we are finishing the Year of the Dragon, after all, with January 29th ending this most auspicious year and moving on to a different animal in the Chinese calendar, Year of the Snake.

Perfect timing to take another dive into the topic.

It seemed a simple question. After all, dinosaurs once covered the earth, which, at the beginning of the Triassic, was a single land called Pangaea. The continents split up after the dinosaurs proliferated, so dinosaur fossils now cover the globe, with similar species now found flung far apart in Argentina, the Rockies, and the Gobi Desert. Dragon stories also span the globe. It seems a question with a fairly obvious answer: Were human ideas and stories about dragons influenced by dinosaurs, by fossils found by ancient, primitive paleontologists?

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Old Beginnings

Woman Reclining at Desk Next to Typewriter @1900, image from © CORBIS

It’s January. It’s time to take stock of ourselves. Make resolutions. Change habits. Sweep out the old. Set some goals.

This is a New Year, but also a repeat of another year. Our universe moves forward, but circles around at the same time. We follow cycles that are as old the understanding of time itself. There are patterns that repeat, which we can see and use to fuel our hope.

There is always possibility.

Ancient planisphere, i.e. map of the cycle of the heavens, with cuneiform, from africame.

Ancient Cycles

The celebration of a new year likely began as soon as people realized that there was such a thing as a year. One of the first big things people noticed must have been the sun and its movements, noticed that this giant flame that provided light did so in a slightly different way every day. There are 37,000 year old cave paintings that show the sun and the moon, using the cave walls a kind of “paleo-almanac.”

Last night, the moon set in the west, pouring light through my bathroom window when I got up. It does that every so often, doesn’t it?

The earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia–the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians–all had ways of counting time and all celebrated the new year. The Egyptians celebrated the flooding of the Nile, which happened in the middle of our calendar year, so their New Year was near the summer solstice. They called it Wepet Renpet, the “Opening of the Year.” As part of the coming year, they held feasts, exchanged gifts, and honored their gods.

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Under Wraps

Late Victorian era, photo from hhhistory.com.

Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things…

The extra-hard crossword puzzle contest this week courtesy of the WSJ is “Under Wraps,” so while I was pondering its solution, I started thinking about wrapping paper. I discovered, as I poked around sites which did addressed this topic (sponsored by Hallmark etc), that many had bits and pieces but none seemed to thread them together. You need the Victorians, you need the Flexography press, the toilet paper, the papyrus reeds, the red symbology of China, and the Roman army. Nobody mentioned them all. So let me rectify that gap.

I set out to answer two specific questions. First, when did we–Americans if you want to be specific–start decorating holiday gifts with colored wrapping paper and ribbons? And, secondly, how did cultures over time convey their gifts? Who started wrapping, when and how?

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