Bennu Herons Perhaps Avert Elementary's A Giant Gun Filled With Drugs

Summary: Bennu herons perhaps are the ancient ash-arising phoenixes that a consulting detective admires on Elementary's A Giant Gun Filled with Drugs Feb. 7, 2013.

Bennu heron (Ardea bennuides) describes extinct gray heron species that may have been associated with Bennu bird of resurrection in ancient Egyptian mythology: Denis Bezmelnitsin @Bezmelnitsin, via Twitter Jan. 31, 2013

Bennu herons perhaps account for allusions on Elementary's procedural drama television series episode A Giant Gun Filled with Drugs Feb. 7, 2013, to arise as phoenixes from the ashes of drug abuse.

Director Guy Ferland and writers Corinne Brinkerhoff, Liz Friedman and Christopher Silber bring together a recovering dealer and a recovering user on Season One's 15th episode. Joan Watkins (Lucy Liu), addiction counselor and sober companion to drug ex-user Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) considers drug ex-dealer Rhys Kinlan's (John Hannah) company counterproductive. Rhys deems that Sherlock alone draws upon the daring, deductive detective skills to divine the former's daughter Emily Grant's (Allie Gallerani) whereabouts with dangerous, ransom-demanding abductors.

Sherlock elucidates their co-destructive experiences as "And it's worth nothing, he is an ex-dealer, just as I am an ex-junkie. Two phoenixes risen from the ashes."

Mythology-fed ancient Greek and even more ancient Egyptian art, histories, literatures and religions respectively featured phoenixes by the 25th century B.C.E. and the sixth century B.C.E.

Herodotus (484?-425? B.C.E. guided anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists and paleontologists to ancient Egypt as generator of phoenix presences through Book II in The Histories of 440 B.C.E. Peninsular Greece's Mycenaean civilization (1600-1100 B.C.E.) harbors the word phoenix (from Greek φοῖνῐξ, "crimson purple," "date [palm fruit]," guitar-like instrument invented by Phoenicians, mythical bird, "Phoenician"). It inherited the phoenix mythology from the ancient Egyptian word bnw, indicated hieroglyphically as lower leg and foot, pot, six-crested wave, quail chick and Bennu-bird deity.

Perhaps Bennu herons, as Chapter 73's phoenixes, join sacred cats, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, otters and serpents in Book II, Euterpé (from Greek Εὐτέρπη, "muse of lyric poetry").

Herodotus knew phoenixes from images and from information from Nile Delta inhabitants of Heliopolis (from Greek Ἡλιούπολις, "City of the Sun," from Egyptian I͗wnw, "The Pillars").

The 73rd chapter in The Histories' second book, labeled Euterpé, lists phoenixes as leaving Arabia every 500 years to land at Heliopolis' Temple of the Sun. Death motivated quincentennial migrations across the modern-day Arabian Peninsula, perhaps from Umm al-Nar (from Arabic أُمّ الـنَّـار‎, "Mother of the Fire") in modern-day United Arab Emirates. Phoenixes nestle dead parents within huge balls of myrrh (Commiphora) that necessitate plastering fresh myrrh over insertion openings to net "the same weight as at first."

Herodotus observed phoenixes artistically with gold and red plumage over body shapes and sizes similarly observable in eagles (Accipitridae family) and hieroglyphically perhaps as Bennu herons.

New Kingdom art of the 18th through 20th dynasties, from the 16th through 11th centuries B.C.E. poses long-beaked gray herons with two-feathered crests atop benben stones.

Ella Hoch, Copenhagen University Geological Museum professor (1974-2000) and, since 2000, Gram Museum of Paleontology research associate, qualifies Bennu herons as quintessential phoenixes from Umm al-Nar. She realized the scientific classification Ardea bennuides (from Latin ardea, "heron"; Egyptian Bennu, god of death; and Greek -ειδής, "-like") from a tibio-tarsus (lower leg bone) fragment. The benben stone to creation from watery chaos, the god Bennu (from Egyptian wbn, "to rise in brilliance") and Umm al-Nar source phoenixes in Bennu herons.

Herodotus, Hoch and Holmes perhaps turn bone from 3050 B.C.E. reconstructively into Goliath (Ardea goliath), gray (Ardea cinerea) and purple (Ardea purpurea) heron-like Bennu heron phoenixes.

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) doubts self'-described "ex-junkie" Sherlock Holmes' (Jonny Lee Miller) characterization of a surprise visit by ex-drug dealer Rhys Kinlan (John Hannah) as "Two phoenixes risen from the ashes" in CBS Elementary's A Giant Gun Filled With Drugs (season 1 episode 15): Elementary @CBSElementary, via Facebook Feb. 6, 2013

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Bennu heron (Ardea bennuides) describes extinct gray heron species that may have been associated with Bennu bird of resurrection in ancient Egyptian mythology: Denis Bezmelnitsin @Bezmelnitsin, via Twitter Jan. 31, 2013, @ https://twitter.com/Bezmelnitsin/status/297027163511721984

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) doubts self'-described "ex-junkie" Sherlock Holmes' (Jonny Lee Miller) characterization of a surprise visit by ex-drug dealer Rhys Kinlan (John Hannah) as "Two phoenixes risen from the ashes" in CBS Elementary's A Giant Gun Filled With Drugs (season 1 episode 15): Elementary @CBSElementary, via Facebook Feb. 6, 2013, @ https://www.facebook.com/ElementaryCBS/photos/a.151627898295663/220838548041264

For further information:

"A Giant Gun Filled with Drugs." Elementary: The First Season. Los Angeles CA: Paramount Pictures Corporation, Feb. 7, 2013.

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Available @ https://twitter.com/Bezmelnitsin/status/297027163511721984

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