Page 1 The Water Symbol Its Origin and Transformation We shall drain the well full of water, That never is exhausted, never faileth. Rig Veda, x.101.5 and Taittiriya Samhita iv.2.5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. John 15:5 Introduction The use of undulating or zigzag lines to represent water is a symbol of some antiquity and is well known to art historians and archeologists. Although clearly meant to represent the ripples or waves that appear on moving water or other liquids, these wavy lines have an older but not unrelated provenance involving fertility and procreation. This paper will investigate the history of this motif in Europe and Asia and explain how the shift from Paleolithic to Neolithic culture gradually changed its meaning. M’s, W’s, Zigzags and Undulating Lines Herbert Kühn believed that M and W marks that appear on Egyptian and ancient Greek pottery were signs for water, and by association, for fertility. 1 He extended this interpretation to include the zigzag lines that often appear on the Neolithic banded pottery of Central Europe, a tradition that continued into the Bronze Age and Halstatt periods. That these markings occur on vessels certainly cannot be due to chance, since vessels were made for the express purpose of containing fluids—water or milk—and it would be natural for people to have decorated them with the spell for ‘water,’ in the desire to have them always full. 2 A few examples, among the many that exist, will illustrate this motif. 3 1. Herbert Kühn (1895-1980) was a prehistorian who taught at the University of Mainz and was the author of a number of popular works including On the Track of Prehistoric Man (1955) and The Rock Pictures of Europe (1967). 2. See the appendix to Carl Hentze’s Mythes et Symboles Lunaires, p. 245. 3. Examples in Figures 1 and 2 are taken from Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter, Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art. Illustration sources are provided in Volume 1, Book 4.