The Bullroarer Atlas

ANATOLIA-002 - secondary catalog

Phrygian Cybele / Mt Dindymon

Turkey - Phrygia - Mysia (Cyzicus region; Hellenistic aetiology) - Near East - Asia Minor

Sacred / spirit

Three incised Pre-Pottery Neolithic bone objects identified as bull-roarers, from Göbekli Tepe and Körtik Tepe, carved with bird and geometric...
Representative image. Three incised Pre-Pottery Neolithic bone objects identified as bull-roarers, from Göbekli Tepe and Körtik Tepe, carved with bird and geometric motifs; the rhombos whirled alongside the tympanon in Phrygian worship of the Mountain Mother at Mt Dindymon, established by Argonaut legend, has left no surviving instrument of its own. Dietrich & Notroff 2016

rhombos / trochos

rhombos (Greek ῥόμβος): a slat or disc swung on a cord, taken by Lobeck and later scholars as a bullroarer; Seaton's standard English renders it "the wheel" at this line. trochos, literally "wheel," is the alternative Greek word attached to the passage in modern discussions of the same sound-device.

Etymology. Greek term for the whirled sounding object paired with the tympanon in Cybele worship. (medium confidence)

In Apollonius Rhodius' telling, the rite was born from a massacre the Argonauts themselves had committed. Having killed the Doliones and their king Cyzicus by night, mistaking them for enemies, the heroes climbed Mount Dindymon to placate the Mountain Mother. While Jason poured libations, the young men danced in full armour and clashed their swords against their shields, so that the people's grieving cry for their dead king would be lost in the air. From that day, the poem says, the Phrygians propitiated Rhea-Cybele with the whirled rhombos and the tympanon, the spun slat and the drum of her ecstatic worship. The Greek of the passage names the instrument rhombos, a slat or disc swung on a cord; its identification with the bullroarer is the reading of Lobeck, Burkert, and West, and is the basis for listing it here rather than a settled fact.

Hence from that time forward the Phrygians propitiate Rhea with the wheel and the drum.

Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.1139 (trans. R. C. Seaton, 1912)
Object
Whirled rhombos paired with tympanon in Mountain Mother worship; aetiologically established by the Argonauts on Dindymon.
Function
Propitiated Rhea-Cybele in ecstatic rite, the whirled sound drowning out ill-omened cries.
Map confidence
medium - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
Source location
Bk.1

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