Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)

HALL 3-4 - The Bronze Age (2800-800 B.C.) (Ildikó Szathmári)

37. Bird shaped rattle from Füzesabony. 16th century B.C. and particularly of human-bird representations. One fine example is the bird perching on an altar standing on human feet found at Füzesabony. The same site yielded a rattle in the form of a bird with outspread wings standing on human feet (Fig. 37). Two askoi with obvious anthropomorphic features must also be mentioned here: one comes from Füzesabony and has two small knobs indicating the female character, the other one was found at Tiszafüred, and its portrayal of a human face reflects cultural impacts from the Anatolian-Aegean realm. The heyday of bird depictions (chiefly ducks) spanned the period from the late 2nd millennium to the first half of the 1st millennium B.C. Most of the duck-billed bird figures were made from bronze and adorned bronze jewellery and bronze vessels. The duck shaped bronze vessels (Fig. 38), which served some ritual purpose, are among the most superb relics of this period. Bird motifs figured prominently in the ornamental repertoire of the Late Bronze Age; it has been suggested that their popularity can be explained by the belief that birds symbolised life and the mythical creature flying over or swimming across the waters bordering the otherworld. This motif occurs among the bronze ornaments of funerary wagons, as shown by the finds from Nagybobróc.