{"id":16826,"date":"2022-04-20T16:31:26","date_gmt":"2022-04-20T16:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=16826"},"modified":"2022-04-20T16:31:26","modified_gmt":"2022-04-20T16:31:26","slug":"swastika-with-a-different-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/swastika-with-a-different-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"SWASTIKA WITH A DIFFERENT MEANING"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"The Swastika’s History
\nHeinrich Schliemann discovered the archaeological site of Troy, but his discovery also boosted the visibility of swastikas. Illustration from clu \/ Getty Images.<\/div>\n

When archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Ithaca, Greece in 1868, one goal was foremost in his mind: discovering the ancient city of Troy using Homer\u2019s Iliad<\/em>. The epic poem was widely believed to be no more than a myth, but Schliemann was convinced otherwise. For him, it was a map to the hidden location of ancient cities.<\/p>\n

Over the next several years the German businessman, who made his fortune in trading raw materials for ammunition production, tramped around the Mediterranean. Schliemann took Homer\u2019s advice on everything from local customs to treating physical maladies<\/a>. Trained at the Sorbonne, he used Homer\u2019s verses to identify what he thought were the epic\u2019s real-world locations. \u201cOne of his greatest strengths is that he had a genuine historical interest. What he wanted was to uncover the Homeric world, to know whether it existed, whether the Trojan war happened,\u201d writes classics scholar D.F. Easton<\/a>. \u201cBut here also is a weakness. He was not very good at separating fact from interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until 1871 that Schliemann achieved his dream. The discovery catapulted him to fame, and with his fame came a burst of interest in all that he uncovered. The intrepid archaeologist found his Homeric city, but he also found something else: the swastika, a symbol that would be manipulated to shape world history.<\/p>\n

Schliemann found his epic city\u2014and the swastika\u2014on the Aegean cost of Turkey. There, he continued the excavations started by British archaeologist Frank Calvert at a site known as Hisarlik mound<\/a>. Schliemann\u2019s methods were brutal\u2014he used crowbars and battering rams to excavate\u2014but effective. He quickly realized the site held seven different layers from societies going back thousands of years. Schliemann had found Troy\u2014and the remains of civilizations coming before and after it. And on shards of pottery and sculpture throughout the layers, he found at least 1,800<\/a> variations on the same symbol: spindle-whorls, or swastikas.<\/p>\n

He would go on to see the swastika everywhere, from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa. And as Schliemann\u2019s exploits grew more famous, and archaeological discoveries became a way of creating a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more prominent. It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca-Cola products, Boy Scouts\u2019 and Girls\u2019 Club materials and even American military uniforms, reports the BBC<\/a>. But as it rose to fame, the swastika became tied into a much more volatile movement: a wave of nationalism spreading across Germany.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe antiquities unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Troy acquire for us a double interest,\u201d wrote British linguist Archibald Sayce<\/a> in 1896. \u201cThey carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Terracotta balls from Schliemann’s archaeological digs at Troy bearing swastikas. Photo from Heinrich Schliemann \/ Wikimedia Commons \/ Public Domain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Initially, \u201cAryan\u201d was a term used to delineate the Indo-European language group, not a racial classification. Scholars in the burgeoning field of linguistics had noticed similarities among the German, Romance and Sanskrit languages. The rising interest in eugenics and racial hygiene, however, led some to corrupt Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient, master racial identity with a clear throughline to contemporary Germany. As the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several years before the start of World War II, \u201c[Aryanism]\u2026 was an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered scholars as to the existence of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at one stage of the earth\u2019s history.\u201d In the 19th century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and others made the connection between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who were the superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead the world towards greater advancement by conquering their neighbors.<\/p>\n

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\"Ilios_-_the_city_and_country_of_the_Trojans_-_the_results_of_researches_and_discoveries_on_the_site_of_Troy_and_throughout_the_Troad_in_the_years_1871-72-73-78-79,_including_an_autobiography_of_the_(14598213400).jpg\"<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Schliemann found numerous examples of the swastika motif on artifacts from his digs at Troy.Photo by Heinrich Schliemann \/ Wikimedia Commons \/ Public Domain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The findings of Schliemann\u2019s dig in Turkey, then, suddenly had a deeper, ideological meaning. For the nationalists, the \u201cpurely Aryan symbol<\/a>\u201d Schliemann uncovered was no longer an archaeological mystery\u2014it was a stand-in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the Reichshammerbund (a 1912 anti-Semitic group) and the\u00a0Bavarian Freikorps<\/a>\u00a0(paramilitarists who wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic in Germany) used the\u00a0swastika to reflect their \u201cnewly discovered\u201d identity as the master race. It didn\u2019t matter that it traditionally meant good fortune, or that it was found everywhere from monuments to the Greek goddess Artemis to representations of Brahma and Buddha and at Native American sites, or that no one was truly certain of its origins.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Heinrich Schliemann discovered swastika-like decorations on pottery fragments in all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site had been Aryan all along,\u201d\u00a0writes anthropologist Gwendolyn Leick<\/a>. \u201cThe link between the swastika and Indo-European origin, once forged was impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol, which hence served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non-Aryan, or rather non-German, and German identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A postcard mailed from Rochester, New York in June 1910. Photo from Wikimedia Commons \/ Public Domain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As the swastika became more and more intertwined with German nationalism, Adolf Hitler\u2019s influence grew\u2014and he adopted the hooked cross as the Nazi party symbol\u00a0in 1920<\/a>. \u201cHe was attracted to it because it was already being used in other nationalist, racialist groups,\u201d says Steven Heller, author of\u00a0The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI think he also understood instinctually that there had to be a symbol as powerful as the hammer and sickle, which was their nearest enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

To further enshrine the swastika as a symbol of Nazi power, Joseph Goebbels (Hitler\u2019s minister of propaganda) issued a decree on May 19, 1933 that\u00a0prevented unauthorized commercial use<\/a>\u00a0of the hooked cross. The symbol also featured prominently Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s propagandist film\u00a0Triumph of the Will<\/em>,\u00a0writes historian Malcolm Quinn<\/a>. \u201cWhen Hitler is absent\u2026 his place is taken by the swastika, which, like the image of the F\u00fchrer, becomes a switching station for personal and national identities.\u201d The symbol was on uniforms, flags and even as a\u00a0marching formation at rallies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Efforts to ban the display of the swastika and other Nazi iconography in the post-war years\u2014including current German criminal laws that\u00a0prohibit the public use<\/a>\u00a0of the swastika and the Nazi salute\u2014seem to have only further enshrined the evil regime it was co-opted by. Today the symbol remains a weapon of white supremacist groups around the world. In recent months, its prevalence has spiked around the U.S., with swastikas appearing around\u00a0New York City<\/a>,\u00a0Portland<\/a>,\u00a0Pennsylvania<\/a>, California and elsewhere. It seems the harder authority figures attempt to quash it out, the greater its power to intimidate. For Heller, this is an intractable problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you can\u2019t win,\u201d Heller says. \u201cEither you try to extinguish it, and if that\u2019s the case you\u2019ve got to brainwash an awful lot of people, or you let it continue, and\u00a0it<\/em>\u00a0will brainwash a lot of people. As long as it captures people\u2019s imaginations, as long as it represents evil, as long as that symbol retains its charge, it\u2019s going to be very hard to cleanse it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lorraine Boissoneault<\/a> is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of \u201cThe Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle’s Journey Across Americ<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Swastika’s History Heinrich Schliemann discovered the archaeological site of Troy, but his discovery also boosted the visibility of swastikas. Illustration from clu \/ Getty Images. When archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Ithaca, Greece in 1868, one goal was foremost in his mind: discovering the ancient city of Troy using Homer\u2019s Iliad. The epic poem Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[56,133,1],"tags":[1088],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16826"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16826"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16831,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16826\/revisions\/16831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}