8000 Years of the Rabbit - Across Civilizations
Rabbits live on almost every continent on Earth. They run fast. They breed quickly.
In Syria during the sixth millennium BCE, artisans kneaded clay by hand to create rabbit-shaped vessels. Mesopotamian craftsmen carved stone to make small amulets out of them. The Egyptians added long ears to their sphinx amulets. People carried these objects on their shoulders or around their necks all day long.
When people living in Asia looked at the moon at night, they found the silhouette of a rabbit pounding a mortar in the shadows on its surface. Chinese artisans carved these shapes out of hard jade and clear rock crystal. They drew the outlines of running animals on porcelain plates. On painted silk scrolls, they depicted them side by side with the moon goddess. Thousands of kilometers across the ocean, the Aztecs saw the exact same figure in the moon. In their capital, Tenochtitlan, they engraved its glyphs with deep lines into the surface of a coronation stone made of volcanic rock. The Maya painted finely detailed images on cylindrical ceramic vases. There, they depicted the rabbit as a scribe holding a brush.
Across the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, these creatures were worked directly into everyday objects. Iranian artisans painted backward-glancing rabbits inside glazed ceramic bowls. In Pompeii, mosaic masters arranged colored stones to make them pull chariots. On the floor mosaics of Antioch, they depicted them in the middle of geometric patterns. Roman artisans fastened clothing collars with bronze brooches they'd coated in enamel. They engraved the profiles of these creatures into the bowls of silver dining spoons. On the silver coins they minted, the Greeks placed them in the talons of hunting eagles.
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