Language Log " Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels

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Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels

March 13, 2016 @ 12:05 am<br>· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and culture, Language and fashion

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In my work on the Bronze Age mummies of Eastern Central Asia (ECA), one of the attributes that has struck me perhaps more powerfully than any other is their stupendous felt hats.  Here's a photograph of some of them:

For this part of the world, the Bronze Age means roughly the second millennium and first half of the first millennium BC.

When I first started noticing these hats more than two decades ago, but especially since around the year  2005, when many magnificent specimens were unearthed from Small River Cemetery No. 5 in the northeastern corner of the Tarim Basin near Lop Nor and Loulan ( || Uyghur Krorän<br>are peaked

have cords wrapped around them

have feathers stuck in the side

are made of felt

Now, felt is a product of pastoral and nomadic herding peoples.  The first archeologically attested felt was found in Beyce-Sultan in Anatolia, coming in off the steppes at around 2600 BC.

I also had in mind Norman Rockwell's fantastic "Yankee Doodle" mural from the 1930s in the Nassau Inn, at Princeton.  With the image of Yankee Doodle Dandy clearly in mind, then the song would fill my head:

Yankee Doodle went to town

Riding on a pony;

He stuck a feather in his hat,

And called it macaroni.

When I was a little boy, I thought that Yankee Doodle was being silly calling the feather in his hat "macaroni".  I know better now and interpret the "it" as referring to the foppish 18th-century English style (apparently inspired by European fashions of the time) that he was affecting.

I don't know if Alpine hats ever have anything analogous to another feature of the ECA Bronze Age hats, one that few people notice, but which intrigues me mightily, viz., a weasel mummy wrapped around the base of the crown.  Somewhat in the vein of "Yankee Doodle", when I contemplated the weasels on the Bronze Age hats from ECA, I couldn't help but think, "Pop! goes the weasel!"  Again, when I was a wee lad and sang our local Ohio version of that mid-19th century nursery rhyme, I was oblivious to all of the scholarship on the meaning of "pop", and just took it to be a sound (onomatopoeia) expressing the quick movement of the little weasel jumping out at the monkey that was chasing it.

Now, faced with the Bronze Age inhabitants of the Tarim Basin ornamenting their fancy hats with weasel pelts, it occasioned much deeper reflection on the symbolism of the weasel.

Back a few years ago when we were having the big Silk Road exhibition at the Penn Museum, I wrote an article for Orientations (see Bibliography below; pdf available on request) about the amazing felt hats worn by many of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies.  Clearly, this sleek, little animal had great symbolic significance for the Bronze Age inhabitants of the Tarim Basin.  In my own mind, I assumed that it had something to do with the great hunting skills and the almost magical slithering, slinking abilities of the weasel.  We all know what it means to call a person a weasel.  We don't exactly admire them, but we are impressed with their great, powerful skills, despite their diminutive size.  If we can capture one of these slinky, slippery, sneaky fellows and put it on our hat as a decoration, that shows we are pretty capable too, and the presence of the weasel on our hat might impart to us some of its awesome potency.

I didn't write much about the meaning of the weasel back then, but I definitely had those thoughts in the back of my mind.  Now we have even more of those spectacular hats, and, as I prepare a lecture for the opening of a major mummy exhibition on the West Coast next week, I want to devote a special section to the weasels on the peaked felt hats.  I feel compelled to dig deeper into the comparative folklore of the least weasel.  Already I have found some fascinating materials, which I here share with you in a preliminary way.  Be sure to read the last quoted paragraph, from the Wikipedia entry for "least weasel".

The Ancient Macedonians believed that to see a least weasel was a good omen. In some districts of Macedon, women who suffered from headaches after having washed their heads in water drawn overnight would assume that a weasel had previously used the water as a mirror, but they would refrain from mentioning the animal's name for fear that it would destroy their clothes. Similarly, a popular superstition in southern Greece had it that the least weasel had previously been a bride, who was transformed into a bitter animal which would destroy the wedding dresses of other brides out of jealousy.[38] According to Pliny the Elder, the least weasel is the only animal capable of killing the...