Essay On Swastika

Have you ever wonder how the swastika came to be before the reign of Hitler ever began? It has a long and quite complex history full of good fortune and had a use in many different cultures until it became a symbol of evil. This is the history of how the swastika that once decorated many cultural symbols became a symbol of great tragedy and strife.
In the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, swastika means "well-being" or “good fortune.” The symbol has been used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for millions of years and is assumed to once have been an Indian sign. Early travellers to Asia were inspired by its positive associations as well as its ancient use and started using it back home. By the beginning of the 20th Century the swastika had become popular as a benign good luck symbol. It was used by the American military units during WWl and it could be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. Most of these common uses stopped in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.
The Nazi use of the swastika begins from the work of 19th Century German scholars translating Indian texts, who noticed a couple resemblances between their own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and came up with the idea of a race of white god-like warriors that they called Aryans. This idea was seized upon
Among the museum's most prized treasures is a small ivory figurine of a female bird made from the tusk of a mammoth. It was found in 1908 at the Palaeolithic settlement of Mezin near the Russian border. On the torso of the bird is engraved the pattern of joined up swastikas. It's the oldest identified swastika pattern in the world and has been dated to an astonishing 15,000 years ago. The bird was found with a number of objects during archeology