Cross
the least distinctive mark there is
Two lines meeting at an angle is the simplest figure a hand can make that is not a line. That is why it appears in nearly every visual tradition, and why almost none of its instances are related to each other.
- Instances
- The Christian cross · Ankh ☥ (Egyptian) · the solar or wheel cross (Bronze Age Europe) · 十 (the character for ten) · the quincunx and cardinal-direction crosses (Mesoamerican) · the Nordic cross flags
- The flip
- An instrument of public execution became the emblem of the faith whose founder it killed, and then became a flag. The Roman cross was a deterrent — deliberately humiliating, deliberately visible — and it now flies over Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Switzerland as a mark of national identity, printed on aircraft tails and sports kit. No other archetype here travels that far from its first job: gallows, to badge, to state.
Sources · 4
- documented Cicero, In Verrem, and Tacitus, Annals 15.44 — crucifixion as a Roman judicial punishment, described by those who lived under it.
- documented The Nordic cross flags of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, and the Christian derivation stated in their own national flag descriptions.
- traditional Pre-Christian solar and wheel crosses in the European Bronze Age. The objects are excavated and dated; reading them as solar is interpretation, and the Institute cannot point to a source that settles it.
- folk That the world’s cross symbols share a single origin, usually solar. The form is too easy to draw for common ancestry to be the default explanation; independent invention is the null hypothesis and it is rarely tested.