Oh yeah, very good. I hadn’t thought a lot about the whole heraldry thing.
What about Bush2 and a capital W?
Thread title edited to indicate actual subject. Please don’t post misleading thread titles.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
There are the symbols the four members of Led Zeppelin chose to represent themselves. These are indisputable cases of people specifically choosing symbols to represent themselves as individuals.
Perfect, thanks.
Besides the cross/crucifix there’s also:
and others.
When literacy wasn’t anywhere near universal, lots of people had “marks.” If you were an artisan, you marked all your work with your mark, and usually had it on a sign above your shop, in addition to using it to sign documents. You might be literate, but you wanted to be recognized by people who were not, so rather than sign your name, you had your mark, often based on your initials.
Ranchers had brands for their cattle, that signified who owned the cattle, so the brands, or marks, or symbols, stood for the ranchers.
Hallmarks of artisans and brands became so traditional that they lasted into the time that literacy became pretty widespread.
Early logos of businesses were usually based on the name or initials of the founder.
Initials weren’t used so much, precisely because in a largely non-literate society they were no more use than words.
The symbol of the Medici banking house was six red balls. The origin is uncertain, but a likely explanation is that they represent drug pills, and are a reference to the family name (which means “doctors”). Löwenbräu, the German brewery established in the fourteenth century, has the symbol of a lion. Monte Dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank still trading, has a mountain on its badge. And so forth; there’s a certain theme here. Even Johannes Gutenberg, who might be expected to be selling into a literate market, used a stylised representation of a printing press as his mark.
I don’t think initials are much used to identify businesses before about the sixteenth century. Not coincidentally, it’s also in the sixteenth century that British monarchs cease to use badges (a boar, a rose, a falcon) as their main personal identifiers, and start to use cyphers more and more (“HR” for Henry VIII, for example)
King David’s six-pointed star.
We have no reason to think that this was used by King David, or in his time. It first appears as a decorative motif in architecture in about the fourth century CE, but there is no reason to think it had any represenational function - it was just ornamentation. From maybe about the tenth century CE it starts to be used in contexts which suggests that it symbolises Jewish identity or Judaism. From about the fifteenth century until the nineteenth it’s occasionally referred to as the “Shield of David” or the “Star of David”, but it’s not otherwise associated with King David; just with Judaism. (It’s also sometimes known during this period as the “Seal of Solomon”.) It doesn’t eclipse other symbols of Judaism (e.g. the menorah, the Lion of Judah) in popularity until it’s adopted by the Zionist movement around the turn of the twentieth century.
You’re not seriously going to engage with that nutbar are you? I know, fighting ignorance and all that - but this would be like mud wrestling a pig - you can’t possibly win, and the pig enjoys it.
Coats of arms are personal. Yes, families do have coats of arms, but a person can also make up his own (they had to start somewhere, you know, way before there was anybody to decide what was and was not Acceptable); often, an individual would modify his family’s coat of arms in some way to differentiate himself from the rest of the siblings and cousins (it was common for example to add a colored border or to paint an existing checkerboard pattern in colors other than black and white). In my grandmother’s house there was a glass window with the “quartered arms” of my great-great-great-grandfather, an arrangement I have seen in other materials from the 16th-19th centuries: a very busy coat of arms where each quarter corresponds to the arms of each of that person’s four lastnames.
Before literacy became common, many people would have “their sign” be a little picture rather than a plain cross. The arrano beltza (black eagle in Basque) was the personal signature of Sancho VII of Navarre. It’s now being claimed as a political symbol by local groups of a surprising array of ideologies (link in Spanish).
I have a personal symbol, based in part on the coincidence of my name and a mathematical symbol. I have used it since grad school and put it on my nametag at meetings.
The pattern of plaid is “house-specific” for them cute lil’ skirts Scotsmen wear. {Official register}
I’m guessing that someone in Egypt probably conforms to this system.
Not engage in the sense of some sort of rational debate, more like a point and laugh.
Now that I think of it the point and laugh thing meshes nicely with your pig wrestling.
I made one that I’ve used since the 70’s.