If you’ve spent any time reading about ancient mysteries online, you’ve probably seen the image: a row of carved shapes that look, honestly, like handbags. Rounded handle on top, a flat-bottomed body below. They sit on an 11,000-year-old stone pillar in Turkey, in the hands of winged figures on Assyrian palace walls, and in the hand of an Olmec figure carved in Mexico.
The internet has a favorite explanation: one shared symbol, passed down by some lost source of knowledge. I find this motif fascinating enough that it gave my novel its title. Before I tell you what drew me in, though, here’s what the evidence actually says. In my experience the real story is often stranger, and more satisfying, than the meme.
1. Göbekli Tepe, Pillar 43 (around 9600–8200 BCE)
Göbekli Tepe sits on a ridge in the Germuş mountains of southeastern Türkiye. UNESCO dates its monumental stone enclosures to between 9,600 and 8,200 BCE. They were built by hunter-gatherers, before pottery, before writing, before farming had taken hold in the region (UNESCO).
One of the most elaborately carved stones there is Pillar 43, often called the “Vulture Stone,” in Building D. Along its top run three handbag-shaped objects, each accompanied by a wild animal. Below them are a band of geometric motifs and a vulture with a disc or sphere balanced on its wing. The official UNESCO/Google Arts & Culture description adds a telling question mark: “three handbag-shaped objects (architectural structures?)” (Google Arts & Culture).
That question mark matters. The excavators have not declared what these shapes are. Readings that have been proposed include:
- Schematic buildings or shrines. The rounded top could be a roof and the rectangle the walls.
- Symbols of sky over earth, a cosmological shorthand.
- Actual containers that mattered to the people who carved them.
None of these is confirmed. Some astronomical readings of Pillar 43, like the claim that it records a comet impact, have been published, and the excavation team has formally disputed them (summary and references at Taş Tepeler). The fair summary is that nobody knows yet. These are among the oldest repeated carved symbols we can see clearly and still cannot read.
2. The Assyrian apkallu (9th century BCE)
Jump forward about 8,500 years to the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (ruled 883–859 BCE) at Kalhu, modern Nimrud in northern Iraq. Its walls were lined with carved reliefs of winged figures called apkallu, a word meaning “sage.” These were benevolent semi-divine beings believed to counsel and protect the king. Images of them were placed near doorways to ward off evil.
Here the “handbag” has a name. The Fitzwilliam Museum, which holds one of these reliefs, explains that the apkallu holds a banduddû (“pail”) and a mullilu (“sprinkler”), from which he dispenses water for purification (Fitzwilliam Museum). The cone in his other hand, often described as a pine cone, was the sprinkler. The “handbag” was the bucket that held the purifying liquid.
So this one is not a mystery. It’s a ritual tool, documented in Mesopotamian texts and imagery. It just happens to look like something you’d carry to brunch.
3. La Venta Monument 19, Olmec Mexico (1st millennium BCE)
Now cross an ocean. At La Venta, in Tabasco, Mexico, workers building an airstrip for the oil company Pemex in 1943 found a basalt relief now known as Monument 19. It’s about 95 cm tall and has been in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology since 1964. Archaeologist Hugo Herrera Torres places it late in La Venta’s history, roughly 550–450 BCE.
It shows a figure in profile, framed by a huge rearing serpent with a feathered crest, often cited as one of the earliest feathered-serpent images in Mesoamerica. In front of him, the figure holds a small bag. Herrera Torres describes it as the kind of bag typical of ritual acts led by religious specialists (Arqueología Mexicana, in Spanish). Many guides describe it as a pouch, possibly for incense, but that specific reading is an interpretation, not a certainty.
So… are they the same thing?
Here’s where I try to be honest with you, even though a “yes” would make a great blog post.
- The three carvings are separated by thousands of years. Göbekli Tepe is more than 8,000 years older than the Assyrian reliefs.
- They sit on different continents with no known contact between them.
- In two of the three cases, the objects have plausible, local, ritual explanations: a purification pail in Assyria and a ritual bag in Olmec art. The Göbekli Tepe shapes remain unexplained, and may not be bags at all.
A rounded handle on a box is a very simple shape. Simple shapes get invented again and again, and most archaeologists see the resemblance as coincidence or convergence, not as evidence of one hidden source.
But I’ll admit what keeps me up at night. Even if they aren’t connected, every one of these objects seems to belong to people who were doing something sacred: purifying, protecting, carrying something set apart. Why does the human imagination keep reaching for a container when it wants to show something precious?
Where my novel comes in
That question is the spark behind Handbags of Time, my debut novel and Book One of a series. It’s an archaeological mystery and first-contact thriller about Dr. Jane Gresham, an archaeologist, and her two daughters, whose lives change after an extraordinary encounter. It moves through ancient landscapes and hidden chambers, and through a fight with a powerful organization that wants to control what gets discovered and what the world is allowed to believe.
The novel is fiction. These posts are where I share the fact behind the fiction: what’s real, what’s debated, and where I let my imagination take over.
Some knowledge was never meant to stay buried.
Your turn: When you first saw the “ancient handbag” carvings, what did you think they were: buildings, buckets, a message, or coincidence? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.
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