A New Race Springs Up 1665

Georg Andreas Wolfgang the Elder created this print, titled "A New Race Springs Up". Here we witness Deucalion and Pyrrha, survivors of a great flood, casting stones behind them, which miraculously transform into humans, thus repopulating the earth. The act of throwing stones is not merely physical, but deeply symbolic. Stones, often seen as inanimate, here become the seeds of new life. This transformation echoes ancient myths of creation from primordial matter, a motif that recurs across cultures. Consider the myth of Prometheus, who molded humans from clay, or the Egyptian god Khnum, who fashioned children on a potter's wheel. These tales, like Wolfgang's print, tap into a collective memory of creation, a profound human desire to understand our origins and the cyclical nature of life and death. These images, like the stones themselves, carry a weight of cultural memory, resurfacing across time, each retelling adding new layers of meaning.