"Handbags"

Jason Wilde @JasonWilde108 photographer from Ontario thinks he's onto something:

The mysterious “handbag” motif is a recurring symbol found across various ancient civilizations, all sharing a similar design despite large geographical distances and thousands of years of separation. This motif is generally depicted as a rectangular object with a rounded top and a handle, resembling a modern-day handbag. What makes this motif fascinating to me is how closely its design resembles itself across cultures, suggesting either a shared concept or a global diffusion of a significant idea. Artifacts showing this motif have been discovered in places like Göbekli Tepe, Jiroft, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, each depicting similar stylistic features despite differences in artistic mediums.

A chronological breakdown of the handbag motif starts with Göbekli Tepe (Turkey, circa 9600 BCE), where carvings of handbag-like shapes are engraved on T-shaped stone pillars, appearing to be held by divine figures or suspended as ritual symbols. Following this, the motif appears in Jiroft, Iran (circa 2500 - 2200 BCE), where chlorite vessels and carvings found at Konar Sandal display similar objects, often associated with mythological beings or ceremonial scenes. Around the same time, the Sumerians and Akkadians of Mesopotamia (circa 2500 - 2000 BCE) also depicted these handbags in their reliefs, usually held by divine figures like the Anunnaki, often shown in conjunction with the Tree of Life. Later, the motif appears in the Neo-Assyrian period (circa 900 - 600 BCE), prominently featured in palace reliefs, again in the hands of divine beings or priests.

The same motif resurfaces thousands of miles away in Mesoamerica, particularly among the Olmecs (circa 1200 - 400 BCE), where similar objects are depicted on ceremonial stelae and statues held by priestly or god-like figures.

Despite differences in cultural context, the handbags are almost always depicted as objects of importance carried by divine or significant figures. The consistency in design...a rectangular base with a rounded top and handle...is too precise to be coincidental. It suggests to me either a shared symbolic meaning or perhaps an item of practical or ceremonial use that ancient cultures regarded as sacred or essential. Whether this motif represents a common technological tool, a symbolic container of spiritual power, or something else entirely remains a mystery to me, but the fact that such a unique object appears in nearly identical form across distant and unrelated civilizations is a mystery that I think deserves a second look.

So these representations of bags/pouches/busckets are found in various places, but there is not a single preserved item of this kind, anywhere. This could mean that they are an abstract symbol rather than an object. Anyway they are found in the Near East in three peroods 9000BC, 2500/2000 BC and 900/600BC. That is hardly evidence of anything like continuity or a connection between them. We are talking about the same gaps as between Cheddar Caveman, Stonehenge 3b and Soshenq II succeedings Osorkon I as king of Egypt. Rather a wide span. As for appearing the other side of teh Atlantic, among the Olmecs, even later it is even more far fetched. Especially if you look at the areas (vast areas) between them where NO depictions of this type are seen. This is grasping at straws with the "looks like" paradigm.