Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Cauvin, late director of research emeritus at the Institut de Préhistoire Orientale at Jalés in Ardèche, France (between Lyons and Marseilles), starts from a detailed examination of the pre-agricultural villages of the Near East. These begin, he says, between 15,500 and 12,500 BC, at Kharaneh in Jordan, with ‘base camps’ up to 2,000 square metres in extent and which consist of circular depressions in open air sites. Between 12,500 and 10,000 BC, however, the so-called Natufian culture extended over almost all of the Levant, from the Euphrates to Sinai (the Natufian takes its name from a site at Wadi an-Natuf in Israel). Excavations at Eynan-Mallaha, in the Jordan valley, north of the Sea of Galilee, identified the presence of storage pits, suggesting ‘that these villages should be defined not only as the first sedentary communities in the Levant, but as “harvesters of cereals”’.17

  The Natufian culture also boasted houses. These were grouped together (about six in number), as villages, and were semi-subterranean, built in shallow circular pits ‘whose sides were supported by dry-stone retaining walls; they had one or two hearths and traces of concentric circles of posts–evidence of substantial construction’. Their stone tools were not just for hunting but for grinding and pounding, and there were many bone implements too. Single or collective burials were interred under the houses or grouped in ‘genuine cemeteries’.18 Some burials, including those of dogs, may have been ceremonial, since they were decorated with shells and polished stones. Mainly bone art works were found in these villages, usually depicting animals.

  At Abu Hureyra, between 11,000 and 10,000 BC, the Natufians intensively harvested wild cereals but towards the end of that period the cereals became much rarer (the world was becoming drier) and they switched to knot grass and vetch. In other words, there was as yet no phenomenon of deliberate specialisation. Analysis of the microblades from these sites shows they were used both for harvesting wild cereals and for cutting reeds, still more evidence for the absence of specialisation.

  Cauvin next turned to the so-called Khiamian phase. This, named after the Khiam site, west of the northern end of the Dead Sea, was significant for three reasons: for the fact that there were new forms of weapons, for the fact that the round houses came completely out of the ground for the first time, implying the use of clay as a building material, and, most important of all, for a ‘revolution in symbols’.19 Natufian art was essentially zoomorphic, whereas in the Khiamian period female human figurines begin to appear. They were schematic initially, but became increasingly realistic. Around 10,000 BC the skulls and horns of aurochs (a now-extinct form of wild ox or bison) are found buried in houses, with the horns sometimes embedded in the walls, an arrangement which suggests they already have some symbolic function. Then, around 9,500 BC, according to Cauvin, we see dawning in the Levant ‘in a still unchanged economic context of hunting and gathering’ (italics added), the development of two dominant symbolic figures, the Woman and the Bull. The Woman was the supreme figure, he says, often shown as giving birth to a Bull.

  Cauvin sees in this the true origin of religion. His main point is that this is the first time humans have been represented as gods, that the female and male principle are both represented, and that this marked a change in mentality before the domestication of plants and animals took place. It is easier to see why the female should be chosen rather than the male. The female form is a symbol of fertility. At a time when child mortality was high, true fertility would have been highly prized. Such worship was designed to ensure the well-being of the tribe or family unit.

  But Cauvin’s second important point, over and above the fact that recognisable religion as we know it emerged in the Levant around 9500 BC, is that this all took place after cultivation and sedentism had begun, but before domestication/agriculture proper.

  He turns next to the Mureybetian culture. This is named for Tell Mureybet, near the Euphrates, in what is now Syria. Here the houses are already more sophisticated, with special sleeping areas, raised, separate hearths and storage areas, with flat mud roofs supported by jointed joists. Between the houses, communal open spaces contained several large ‘fire-pits’. These pits were of a type frequently encountered in the Near Eastern Neolithic: they were basin-shaped, and were often found packed full of pebbles. So they may have functioned on the model of the present-day Polynesian oven, where the pebbles store the heat of a fire lit on their surface, and then give off that heat over a long period. The fire-pits of Mureybet are generally surrounded with animal bones that are to a greater or lesser degree charred. ‘Their utilisation for the communal cooking of meat seems reasonably probable.’20 What most excited Cauvin, however, was an important change in architecture that began to occur at Mureybet after 9000 BC. ‘It is at this point that the first rectangular constructions known in the Near East, or in the world, appear.’ Both houses and storage areas become rectangular (though some houses had rounded corners). These constructions were built out of chalk blocks ‘chipped into cigar shapes’ and bonded with mortar. Rectangular houses allowed more to be gathered into small spaces and Cauvin speculates as to whether the reason for this was defence.

  Another important innovation at Mureybet was the use of baked clay for the manufacture of female figurines. ‘It [clay] is also used for very small receptacles, although we are still a millennium and a half ahead of the general use of pottery in the Near East…It follows that the action of fire in consolidating these modelled objects was well known and intentionally practised by the people of Mureybet from 9500 BC.’21

  Cauvin’s central point, then (and there are others who share his general view), is that at places such as Mureybet, the development of domestication was not a sudden event owing to penury, or some other economic threat. Instead, sedentism long preceded domestication, houses had already changed from the primitive round structures, half underground, to rectangular buildings above ground, and that bricks and symbolic artefacts were already being produced. From this, he says, we may infer that early man, roughly 12,000–10,000 years ago, underwent a profound psychological change, essentially a religious revolution, and that this preceded domestication of animals and plants. (This argument is reminiscent of Merlin Donald’s, that the first use of language was for myth, not more ‘practical’ purposes.) This religious revolution, Cauvin says, is essentially the change from animal or spirit worship to the worship of something that is essentially what we recognise today. That is to say, the human female goddess, flanked by her male partner (the bull), is worshipped as a supreme being. He points to carvings of this period in which the ‘faithful’ have their arms raised, as if in prayer or supplication. For the first time, he says, there is ‘an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man’.22 From now on, says Cauvin, there is a divine force, with the gods ‘above’ and everyday humanity ‘below’.

  The bull, he says, symbolises not only the male principle but also the untameability of nature, the cosmic forces unleashed in storms, for example. Batons of polished stone are common throughout the Mureybetian culture, which Cauvin says are phallic symbols. Moreover, Cauvin discerns in the Middle East a clear-cut evolution. ‘The first bucrania of the Khiamian or Mureybetian remained buried within the thickness of the walls of buildings, not visible therefore to their occupants. Perhaps they only metaphorically wanted to ensure the resistance of the building to all forms of destruction by appealing to this new symbolism for an initial consecration [i.e., when the houses were built]. The time had not yet come for direct confrontation with the animal.’23 After that, however, bovine symbolism diffused throughout the Levant and Anatolia and at ’Ain Ghazal we see the first explicit allusions, around 8000 BC, to the bull-fighting act, in which man himself features.24 Man’s virility is being celebrated here, says Cauvin, and it is this concern with virility that links the agricultural revolution and the religious revolution: they were both attempts to satisfy ‘the desire for domination over the animal kingdom’.25 This, he argues, was a psychological change, a change in ‘mentality’ rather
than an economic change, as has been the conventional wisdom.

  On this reading, the all-important innovation in ideas is not so much the domestication of plants and animals, but the cultivation of wild species of cereals that grew in abundance in the Levant and allowed sedentism to occur. It was sedentism which allowed the interval between births to be reduced, boosting population, as a result of which villages grew, social organisation became more complicated and, perhaps, a new concept of religion was invented, which in some ways reflected the village situation, where leaders and subordinates would have emerged. Once these changes were set in train, domesticated plants at least would have developed almost unconsciously as people ‘selected’ wild cereals which were amenable to this new lifestyle.

  These early cultures, with the newly-domesticated plants and animals, are generally known as Neolithic and this practice spread steadily, first throughout the fertile crescent, then further, to Anatolia and then Europe in the west, and to Iran and the Caucasus in the east, gradually, as we shall see, extending across all of the Old World. In addition to farming and religion, however, a third idea was included in this spread: the rectangular house. Foundations showing different variations have been found, in Anatolia, at Nevali Cori in Iran, and in the southern Levant, but the evolution of circular houses into rectangular ones with rectangular rooms appears to be a response to the consequences of domestication and farming. There was now more need for storage space, for larger families and, possibly, for defence (with sedentism the number of material possessions grows and there is more to envy/steal). Rectangular rooms and houses fit together more efficiently, are easier to vary in size, allow more ‘interior’ rooms, and make more use of shared walls.26

  We have here then not so much a renaissance as a naissance, a highly innovative time–relatively short–when three of our most basic ideas were laid down: agriculture, religion, the rectangular house. The mix of abstract and practical down-to-earth ideas would not have been recognised by early humans. Religion would have suffused the other two ideas as each activity spilled over into the other.

  When Jericho was excavated by the British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in the 1930s she made three discoveries of interest in the context of this chapter. First, the settlement consisted of about seventy buildings, housing perhaps as many as a thousand people: Jericho was a ‘town’. Second, she found a tower, eight metres high, nine metres in diameter at the base, with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps. Such architecture was unprecedented–it would have needed a hundred men working for a hundred days to build such an edifice.27 Garrod’s third discovery, unearthed at Terrace B, was a good example of a Natufian baking/cooking unit. ‘This terrace seems to be provided with all the equipment required for the processes: the pavement, partly preserved, would be suitable for hand-threshing and husking; the cup basins and the numerous stone mortars would be suitable for the grinding or milling of the grain; the one larger basin would serve for mixing the ground grits or rough “flour” with water; and all this was found not far from ovens.’28

  There was no clay. All tools and personal accessories of the Natufians were produced by the meticulous grinding of stone on stone, or stone on bone.29 The first use of clay in the Middle East is documented at Jericho (ninth millennium BC), at Jarmo (eighth) and at Hacilar (seventh), where it was found mixed with straw and chaff and husks–in effect the by-products of threshing–used to bind bricks. At both Jericho and Jarmo depressions were discovered in the clay floors.30 ‘Whether used as basins for household activities, or as bins, oras ovens with “boiling stones”, the main interestlies in the fact that these immovable receptacles are located together with the ovens and hearths in the courtyards, the working spaces of the houses. We may now conclude…that some accidental firing, due to the proximity of the various acts of preparing-cooking-baking the ground wheat or barley in the immovable basins and the oven, was the cause of the transformation of the mud clay into pottery.’31 Johan Goudsblom speculates as to whether the preservation of fire became a specialisation in early villages, giving the specialists a particular power.32

  Among archaeologists there has been some debate that the earliest forms of pottery have never been found, because what has been found is too good, too well made to represent ‘fumbling beginnings’.33 So perhaps pottery was invented there earlier, even much earlier. This would fit with the fact that the very first pottery was made in Japan, as part of the Jomon culture, as early as 14500 BC, among people who were full-time hunter-gatherers.34 The Jomon Japanese were extremely creative, with very sophisticated hand-axes, and they also invented lacquer. However, no one knows exactly why Jomon pottery was invented or what it was used for (it has even been suggested that large numbers were smashed, in some form of ceremony). The full development of pottery, as one of the ‘cultures of fire’, is better illustrated through its development in the Middle East.

  At the early Neolithic site of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey (seventh millennium BC), two types of oven were found built next to one another. ‘One is the normal vaulted type of baking oven. The second is different in that it has a fire chamber divided into two compartments by a half brick some 15cm high below the main chamber. The front part of these ovens and kilns, which evidently protruded into the room, was destroyed, and was evidently removed to take out whatever was baked in them, whether pots or bread. With the next firing/baking, the front part would be covered over again, which is of course easily done in mud.’35 It appears from shards found at Jarmo, Jericho and Çatal Hüyük that pots were made from coils of clay laid in rings and then smoothed over. Dung and grasses were the fuel used, rather than wood.36

  At a village like Teleilat al Ghassul, near the northern edge of the Dead Sea, in Jordan, we see both stone tools and early pottery, as this important transition occurs. Frederic Matson found during his excavations at Tepe Sarab, near Kermanshah in western Iran (a site roughly contemporaneous with Jarmo), that there were but three principal diameters of the vessels. Does this suggest three functions? He found that, once invented, the technology of pottery quickly improved. For example, methods were found to lower the porosity of the clay, using burnishing or more intensive firing and, sometimes, the impregnation of organic materials. Vessels that were too porous lost water too quickly; but vessels needed to be a little porous so that some water evaporated, helping to cool what remained.37

  Some early pots were left plain, but decoration soon appeared. Red slip was the first type of decoration used, together with incising, using the fingers. ‘The discovery that the brown earth will fire to a bright red colour might have come from camp fires.’38 The most common pot shapes at the earliest sites are globular (for rodent-free storage), part of which was underground, and open bowls, probably used for gruel or mush made from the seeds of wild and cultivated plants.39 After the first pots–blackened, brown or reddened as the case might be–creams and mottled grey began to appear (in Anatolia, for instance).40 Cream-ware especially lent itself to decoration. The earliest decorations were made by hand, then by pressing such things as shells into the clay before firing.41 Lids, spouts and flaring rims also evolve, and from here on the shape and decorations of pottery become one of the defining characteristics of a civilisation, early forms of knowledge for archaeologists for what they reveal about ancient societies.

  The Woman and the Bull, identified by Cauvin as the first true gods, as abstract entities rather than animal spirits, found echoes elsewhere, at least in Europe in the Neolithic period. They occurred in very different contexts and cultures, together with a symbolism that itself differed from place to place. But this evidence confirms that sedentism and the discovery of agriculture did alter early humans’ way of thinking about religion.

  Between–roughly speaking–5000 BC and 3500 BC, we find the development of megaliths. Megaliths–the word means ‘large stones’–have been found all over the world but they are most concentrated, and most studied, in Europe, where they appear to be associated with the extreme western end
of the continent–Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain and Denmark, though the Mediterranean island of Malta also has some of the best megalithic monuments. Invariably associated with (sometimes vast) underground burial chambers, some of these stones are sixty feet high and weigh as much as 280 tons. They comprise three categories of structure. The original terms for these were, first, the menhir (from the Breton men = stone and hir = long), usually a large stone set vertically into the ground. The cromlech (crom = circle, curve and lech = place) describes a group of menhirs set in a circle or half-circle (for example, Stonehenge, near Salisbury in England). And third, the dolmen (dol = table and men = stone), where there is usually an immense capstone supported by several upright stones arranged to form an enclosure or chamber.42 The practice now is to use plain terms such as ‘circular alignment’ for cromlech.

  Most of the graves were originally under enormous mounds and could contain hundreds of dead. They were used for collective burial, on successive occasions, and the grave goods were in general unimpressive. Very rarely the chambers have a central pillar and traces of painting can be seen. As Mircea Eliade has said, all this ‘testifies to a very important cult of the dead’: the houses where the peasants of this culture lived have not stood the test of time, whereas the chamber tombs are the longest-surviving structures in the history of the world. Perhaps the most impressive structures of all are the stone temples of Malta, which some archaeologists consider may have been a sacred island in pre-history. The most striking, according to Colin Renfrew, is at Ggantija on Gozo, the more northerly of the Maltese archipelago. ‘In front of the Ggantija is a spacious terrace, some forty metres wide; supported by a great retaining wall, the façade, perhaps the earliest architecturally conceived exterior in the world, is memorably imposing. Large slabs of coralline limestone, set alternately end-on and sideways-on, rise to a height of eight metres; these slabs are up to four metres high for the first course, and above this six courses of megalithic blocks still survive. A small temple model of the period suggests that originally the façade may have been as high as sixteen metres.’43 In one of the other Maltese temples, Tarxien, on Malta itself, relief carvings of spirals were found, together with friezes of animals and, most surprising of all, ‘a large fragment of a colossal statue of a seated woman. Originally she must have attained a height of two metres in the seated position. This must be the earliest colossal statue in the world.’44 Several smaller stone structures have also been found, most of them ‘fat ladies’, ‘splendidly plump personages in stone’.45 The basic idea, of a seated goddess, possibly pregnant, certainly recalls the Natufian figures discussed by Cauvin.