Symbol Number One: Circled Cross

A symbol commonly encountered in many cultures is a simple cross enclosed in a circle.  So common is this particular symbol, in fact, that it is popularly known as a universal symbol.  I don't know about others, but I always assume if something is "universal," that means it's everywhere.  I mean really and truly EVERYWHERE and never, ever missing.  If it fails to show up someplace, any place, then it isn't really universal.  It's only really common.  So let's have a little look around and see if this circled cross is truly universal, shall we?

One website (www.symbols.com/encyclopedia) describes the circled cross as “the wheel cross, sun cross, Odin’s cross or Woden’s cross” and since Odin and Woden were gods of peoples speaking Germanic languages, this suggests the symbol was found in Europe once upon a time. The website also states that this symbol appears in ancient Egypt, China, pre-Columbian America, and the Near East. In these places, so the website tells us, this symbol is associated with the wheel, especially its revolutionary effects on society. In China specifically, says the website, the sign is associated with “thunder, power, energy, head, and respect.”

Already, I'm getting a little uncomfortable since this information doesn't quite match up with what my sources say.  And this website doesn't give its sources, so I can't check out why they don't match.  The Egyptians did not use the circled cross as a hieroglyph.  Instead, glyph O49 was a a circle with four small "V" shapes outlining an "X" shape.  This is similar, but not quite the same thing.  It was not a wheel, either.  It was the ideograph for a village or town, being a representation of a crossroads, transliterated niwt.  It was also used as a determinative, an unpronounced indicator of the category of word, used after spelled out names of towns, villages, and inhabited areas.  For example, one name of Egypt was Kmt, which was spelled with glyphs indicating those consonantal sounds followed by the Fat Ex in a Circle to let you know it's the inhabited kmt and not some other similar-sounding word.  It meant literally "the black" (land), which was the nice part of Egypt, because the opposite was "the red," namely the desert where you'd die of heat exhaustion and thirst.

The Egyptians did sometimes draw wheels on chariots as circles with just four spokes.  Sometimes they drew more spokes.  Personally, I think a wheel with only four spokes would be a bit impractical.  The first little pebble in your driveway and your chariot would get a crack in its rim and that would the end of your drive!  Too flimsy!  But maybe the pharaoh made his servants sweep his driveway before he went anywhere...

The Chinese once had a circled cross, although it has now become very square, just as all formerly round symbols have.  This is the character now pronounced tien2 in Mandarin, which represents a furrowed field, and means "field, countryside."  It is now the 102nd radical and square, but still divided in four sections by the cross shape inside.  It does not have anything to do with wheels and never did, apparently.  Despite what the website (mentioned above) stated, I have found no references to heads, thunder, respect, etc.  That's rather confusing.

In between Egypt and China is an area once called the Near East and now more often called the Middle East.  I mean ancient Iraq.  Before people spoke Arabic there, in the south they spoke Sumerian and in the north they spoke Akkadian.  Akkadian had two dialects, Babylonian and Assyrian, both related rather distantly to modern Arabic.  The writing system used for the ancient languages was cuneiform, so called because of the wedge shaped marks made by the stylus used to write in clay.  But before that, there was still another system of making symbols.  For want of a better name, this has been dubbed proto-cuneiform.  In this system of proto-writing, there was a circled cross also.  Since this symbol eventually morphed into one which came to be called UDU in Sumerian, it has the same name in proto-cuneiform.  If it meant the same thing to start with -- which is possible but not proved -- it meant a sheep or goat.  That is to say, it represented what in English used to be termed "small cattle," a category of livestock including both sheep and goats.  They weren't confused about whether the critter was a sheep or a goat.

There's another symbol in proto-cuneiform that's almost the same, only there are two verticals and two horizontals in the cross.  This is SIG2~a3, which may have meant something like the later Sumerian SIKI, "hair; wool; fur, hide."  That's still a far cry from a wheel.  The interesting thing about wheels is that the Sumerians had them, but did not have wheels with spokes.  No, the Sumerians' wheels were solid -- no spokes at all.  So, their circled cross certainly wasn't a depiction of a wheel!

The Sumerians' neighbors in ancient Iran were the Elamites.  Naturally enough, whoever was writing proto-cuneiform seems to have influenced whoever was in Iran way back then.  So there is a proto-Elamite type of proto-writing also.  Now, in this style of sign making, there are very few round symbols.  There is a kind of elongated, diamond-like shape that might have been an angular Elamite variation on the roundish proto-cuneiform original.  But then, there isn't exactly a simple cross inside this odd, angular shape, either.  It isn't exactly an "X" shape, either, although it looks like it was aiming for that and had its middle elongated as its container stretched out.  When you examine the accompanying illustration, you'll see what I mean.  The proto-Elamite system also had a round, impressed circle -- made by pressing the rounded end of the stylus into the clay -- with an incised cross inside.  Did it mean the same thing as the proto-cuneiform UDU?  Who knows?

Luwian hieroglyphs have been pretty well deciphered by now, and these symbols, used in Turkey during the Bronze Age, did not include a simple circled cross.  So much for universal!  But there was a similar shape.  A roundish symbol contained two verticals with a bump on either side.  It makes me think of a letter "C" stuck to a letter "I" with a backwards "C" on the other side.  This is DEUS, the symbol meaning "god."

The circled cross appears in the rock art of North America, as shown in collections from Texas, Nevada and California.  Since these collections were made long after the people who painted or carved the symbols had disappeared from the areas, the meaning of the symbols is not known. But the same symbol also appears in Navaho sand paintings, a living tradition.  Here, meaning depends on context.  In or near the hand of a supernatural being, the circled cross represents a basket with its contents.  In a quandrangular shape, it represents a fire in a hearth on a mountain.

The circled cross appears as a letter of various alphabets, in later times.  In the Phoenician, Palestinian, and Aramaic alphabets, it is the letter teth (and there should be a dot under the first "t").  In Old Hungarian, a circle with small cross inside that does not touch the rim represents the letter f.  In archaic Greek, theta sometimes took the form of a circled cross as well.  At other times, it was a circled ex.  Only later did it take on the form it has now, which I would describe as a belted circle.

A form I would describe as a circled fat cross or outlined cross appears occasionally on cylinder seals in the Near East, over a recumbent crescent moon.  This is a symbol for the moon god, Nanna to the Sumerians, Suen or Sin in Akkadian.  But this symbol was not completely standardized.  Neither was the sun god's symbol entirely standardized -- sometimes his was a four-point star with wavy lines between the points, sometimes a winged disk, sometimes the star with wavy lines inside a disk.  The planet Venus was identified with Inanna (Sumerian) and Ishtar (Akkadian) and she, too, was represented with a star.  This star might have six or eight points, inside a circle or not.  All of which makes for a certain amount of confusion when one comes upon a fat cross in a circle on one of these cylinder seals.  Is this Ishtar?  An unusual sun?  A moon without its usual attached crescent?  Sometimes the only thing one can be sure of is that it is not a wheel!

But then, in the rock art in the southern Alps, at Val Camonica, we finally see some circled crosses attached to carts.  There are often four of these circled crosses attached to the four corners of a cart and there are beasties attached to the carts as well.  Finally, we have wheels!  But again, surely the real wheels had more spokes than four for practical reasons.

I have found no images of the circled cross in my -- admittedly limited -- collections of Australian rock art.  Nor have I seen any in the rock art from Southern Africa, where the ancestors of today's San people once lived and painted and engraved images.  It cannot simply be that the Australians and San did not make images of the circled cross because they lacked the wheel.  In North America, people were not depicting the wheel either, but still they did make images of the circled cross.  It simply looks like this is not a universal symbol.  If any readers have evidence to refute this conclusion, let me hear from you!

Finally, we come to India, the real reason for writing all this.  I began examining symbols from around the world with the aim of determining what is and is not universal.  If a symbol is universal, we should expect to find it among symbols of the undeciphered Indus script.  But, at the same time, if a universal symbol does appear there, we cannot be certain of its meaning.  The circled cross does indeed appear in the Indus script.  It is KP377, W387 (numbers given by different researchers who have enumerated the symbols).  In my list, it is designated IV42, the Roman numeral indicating how many strokes it takes to write it, the Arabic number indicating that it is the 42nd of the 4-stroke signs.  It is a singleton, appearing only once on a single seal, M272 from Mohenjo daro.  It appears with one other sign on that seal, the BI-QUOTES (which resembles double quotation marks), a rather odd inscription since the two signs together would usually be analyzed as a prefix.  Here, they are the whole inscription.  They occur over a goat with long, curving horns, which is looking backward.

The people of the Indus Valley, like the Sumerians, had solid wheels, as shown by the little, clay models found in archeological excavations.  So, their symbol, whatever it meant, was not a wheel.  We can be pretty sure it wasn't Odin's symbol either, since the Norse god never got that far south.  So, if we glance over the varied meanings cited above, we can guess that the Indus symbol represented a village, a sheep, a field, a god, a basket, a hearth, the moon, or maybe a very, very, very early theta.  Or, none of the above.

Well, readers, what do YOU think it meant?

Cambel, Halet. 1999. Corpus of Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. Vol. II. Karatepe-Aslantas. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Damerow, Peter and Robert Englund. 1989. The Proto-Elamite Texts from Tepe Yahya. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gardiner, Sir Alan. 1976 & 1927. Egyptian Grammar. Oxford: Griffith Institute & Ashmolean Museum.
Heizer, Robert F. and Martin A. Baumhoff. 1962 & 1984. Prehistoric Rock Art of Nevada & Eastern California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Koskenniemi, Kimmo & Asko Parpola. 1982. A Concordance to the Texts in the Indus Script. Dept. of Asian & African Studies, University of Helsinki.
Newcomb, Franc J. & Gladys A. Reichard. 1975 & 1937. Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant. New York: Dover.
Newcomb Jr., W.W. 1967 & 1996. The Rock Art of Texas Indians. Austin: University of Texas.
Wells, Bryan. 1998. An Introduction to Indus Writing: A Thesis. The University of Calgary. www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ31309.pdf
protocuneiform www.cdli.ucla.edu/toola/SignLists/protocuneiform/archsigns.html
proto-elamite http://cdli.ucla.edu/wiki/doku.php/linear-elamite