| Summary: | Archeological evidence suggests that there was a strong, widespread and long-lasting close association of the Sun with death in Central Europe and its neighboring regions during the Bronze Age. We interpret it based on etymological, phraseological, motivic, and narrative correspondences of Indo-European traditions that point towards an ancient Indo-European belief about the souls of the blessed dead “going to the Sun”, most likely to an island in the sea which the Sun deity visits during the night. In contrast to ancient Near-Eastern and Egyptian beliefs, this Indo-European Sun deity did not descend into a subterranean realm of the dead and was not associated with rebirth. Based on iconographic and other archaeological evidence, we conclude that there was a belief in a solar deity envisioned in an anthropomorphic feminine form with a Sun (symbol) on the lower part of her abdomen during the Bronze Age in Central and Northern Europe. She was the central character of an important mythic narrative about the diurnal voyage of the Sun, along with its helpers and foes, that has been concurrently reconstructed using material culture or comparative mythology. In Central Europe, this solar cycle has been linked to portrayals of pairs of bird protomes connected to a Sun symbol, interpreted as (Sun-)bird-barges. However, this interpretation was based on a superficial resemblance and does not take into account the cultural and artistic context. Accounting for artistic conventions of the Urnfield culture, we propose that the supposed (Sun-)bird-barges actually often represent pairs of birds directly pulling the Sun, similar to Scandinavian depictions of the Sun pulled directly by a horse (or several horses). Therefore, these depictions portray the day part of the solar cycle and not the nocturnal sailing in the waters of the Netherworld. Copyright©2022 The Acoustical Society of Korea.
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