reat Mother.

The only serious fact which arouses some doubt as to the validity of
Houssay's theory is the discovery of an early painted vase at Susa
decorated with an unmistakable swastika. Edmond Pottier, who has
described the ceramic ware from Susa,[323] regards this pot as
Proto-Elamite of the earliest period. If Pottier's claim is justified we
have in this isolated specimen from Susa the earliest example of the
swastika. Moreover, it comes from a region in which the symbol was
supposed to be wholly absent.

This raises a difficult problem for solution. Is the Proto-Elamite
swastika the prototype of the symbol whose world-wide migrations have
been studied by Wilson (_op. cit. supra_)? Or is it an instance of
independent evolution? If it falls within the first category and is
really the parent of the early Anatolian swastikas, how is it to be
explained? Was the conventionalization of the octopus design much more
ancient than the earliest Trojan examples of the symbol? Or was the
Susian design adopted in the West and given a symbolic meaning which it
did not have before then?

These are questions which we are unable to answer at present because the
necessary information is lacking. I have enumerated them merely to
suggest that any hasty inferences regarding the bearing of the Susian
design upon the general problem are apt to be misleading. Vincent[324]
claims that the fact of the swastika having been in use by ceramic
artists in Crete and Susiana many centuries before the appearance of
Mycenaean art is fatal to Houssay's hypothesis. But I think it is too
soon to make such an assumption. The swastika was already a rigidly
conventionalized symbol when we first know it both in the Mediterranean
and in Susiana. It may therefore have a long history behind it. The
octopus may possibly have begun to play a part in the development of
this symbolism before the Egyptian Bes (_vide supra_, p. 171) was
evolved, perhaps even before the time of the Coptos statues of Min
(_supra_, p. 169), or in the early days of Sumerian history when the
conventional form of the water-pot was being determined (_infra_, p.
179). These are mere conjectures, which I mention merely for the purpose
of suggesting that the time is not yet ripe for using such arguments as
Vincent's finally to dispose of Houssay's octopus-theory.

There can be no doubt that the symbolism of the Mycenaean spiral and the
volute is closely related to the octopus. In fact,