All connected to the realm of the dead

We started our journey in a tomb where the archeologist Schliemann encountered this gold balance in the hands of a deceased infant. You can see how much one object can tell us about its history; every element of this balance has such a rich story waiting to be told.

The loop, the first element we tackled, showed the functional use of the balance (and any balance in general): it is to be held in the middle so that gravity can play its role in the see-sawing motion. This both refers to the merely practical use of a scale, in daily life when commodities are measured, but also in the more symbolic sense, where it is not commodities that are being weighed, but the deeds of one’s life, which ultimately affect one’s fate. The weighing aspect was part of the funerary cult within the broader Near East, where scales were used in the burial customs and functioned to determine a certain outcome.In the Hittite culture scales were also used during funerary rituals, where on the second day of the burial the priests placed on one pan valuable material, such as gold, silver and jewelry, and on the other they placed mud or mortar, in order to find out the fate of a person. See, Konstantinidi-Syvridi, E. (2018). “Mycenae, Shaft Grave III. Tomb of the High Priestess?”, Journal of Prehistoric Religion 26:55; Pare, C. F. E. (1999). [“Weights and Weighing in Bronze Age central Europe.”](( https://www.academia.edu/1337533/Weights_and_Weighing_in_Bronze_Age_Central_Europe), Eliten in der Bronzezeit. Ergebnisse zweier kolloquien in Mains und Athen. Mainz: 476.

The butterflies displayed on the pans of the balance are also connected to the funerary rites. This was based on the fact that butterflies undergo this beautiful transformation in which they seemingly come to life again.Dietrich, B. (1974). The Origins of Greek Religion. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 122.This transformation can be taken as a very appealing illustration of how the belief in the afterlife worked. Beside the symbolism of the balance and the depicted butterflies, the gold material of which this balance is made is also closely connected to the funerary cult, as gold was a precious commodity and a status symbol to display wealth that even the dead would appreciate to receive it as a grave-gift .Whittaker, H. (2006). “Religious symbolism and the use of gold in burial contexts in the late Middle Helladic and Early Mycenaean periods”, _Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici _48: 283..

We hope these stories about fate being determined by the gods or dying a second death will not give you too many sleepless nights. Now you know how the ancients believed fate worked, how it was related to the functions of a balance and how this was all connected to the realm of the dead.