THE NEW GODS OF THE BRONZE AGE AND THEIR ATTRIBUTES
A small pantheon of early gods shares their names within the Indo-European languages and hence goes back to the Proto-Indo-European period (West 2007: ch. 4). Language thus testifies to the existence of a small pantheon of gods before and during the early period of expansion of Indo-European languages and social formations in the early third millennium BCE.
Presiding over them is the sky god with his club or rather hammer axe. This would correspond very well with the western expansion of Indo-European speaking societies during the early third millennium BCE, where males are often buried with an axe made of precious stone or copper.After 2000 BCE, texts from the Near East and India present the second and third generations of gods, and among them the “Divine Twins” are the most interesting and important also from an archaeological point of view. Their archaeological history and their attributes will therefore be the focus of this contribution. They persist until the end of the Bronze Age, when new gods mark their arrival in many Indo-European speaking societies, not least in central and northern Europe, in the form of the zEsir gods, which corresponds to the decline of the dominant Bronze Age gods. We find no archaeological parallels to this change until the beginning of the Iron Age, when some rock art panels are carved over by a gigantic spear-holding figure, which could count as a proto-Odin, but otherwise the most likely arrival of this new layer of gods can be archaeologically identified and dated to the fifth and sixth centuries CE (Hedeager 2007).
The main gods of the Bronze Age are the sun, its god and goddess, and their helpers: the Divine Twins. A myriad of rock art panels in Scandinavia and a thousand bronzes with solar symbolism attest to this (R. Bradley 2006; Kristiansen 2010). It is also clear from this archaeological evidence that the solar journey is a shared myth throughout Europe (Sprockhoff 1954; Pasztor 2008; Vianello 2008), just as the twin symbolism linked to the helpers of the sun: the Divine Twins. There are most certainly other shared myths that can be identified in archaeological iconography, but so far little work has been done in these areas of research (but see Kristiansen & Larsson 2005: fig.
152; Fredell 2006).Bronze Age texts and Bronze Age rock art are dominated by male gods, or rather their earthly representatives, the priest chiefs, mostly armed and with a huge phallus. In a quantitative study of gender in rock art in 0stfold in Norway it could be demonstrated that non-phallic males rarely had weapons, while among the phallic males more than half carried a sword. Figures with horned helmets, lur blowers, and figures with bird masks, or rather eagle heads or masks, are always phallic (Skogstrand 2006: figs 16-20). The warrior ethos is strong, and is linked to an ideology of sexual strength and penetration, which is echoed in Indo- European texts as well.
The eagle-headed figures in rock art may relate to the sky god. There are several myths about how the drink of wisdom was snatched by eagles/birds, or by Odin in the shape of an eagle. However, this would be a proto-Odin, which also sometimes figures as a sun god in rock art, the body being a sun wheel. A bronze eagle-headed figure from the Late Bronze Age has one eye with radiating rays like a sun, and one eye without. We may here have the dark side and bright side of the sun, a Bronze Age prototype of Odin, as a sun god. In the Rig Veda there are also many allusions to the story that a falcon or an eagle brought the Soma plant to Indra (West 2007: 158f.). This legend thus belongs to a shared mythological past, in the fashion of the Divine Twins, as we shall see.