Abstract

SYMBOLIC WORLDS OF CENTRAL AND SOUTH-EAST ANATOLIA IN THE NEOLITHIC

Damien BISCHOFF
IFEA, Nuru Ziya Sok n° 22, PK 54, 80072 Beyoglu, Istanbul, TR. EHESS, Toulouse, FR.
damienbischoff@hotmail.com

The talk gives an explanatory introduction to the significance of Central Anatolian neolithic symbolism and its links to South-East Anatolia. In this way, Central Anatolian culture is not a sui generis culture but has to be understood as part of the processes of construction of the neolithic cultures, as part of the processes of neolithisation.

The climatic optimum highlighted by paleoclimatology gives us a background for understanding the changes of the relation between man and environment from the hunter-gatherers to farmers: neolithisation phase and achieved Neolithic. Those two stages belong to two different symbolic worlds related to psycho-cultural models.

Cosmogony characterizes the hunter-gatherers' world and its symbiosis between animal and man through the phenomenon of shamanism, totemism and throughout the domestic and social life. Man gives himself explanation about the way he is in a world conceived as shamanist cosmos, and as such expresses the cosmic genesis of his inner life in his art.

Cosmology characterizes the farmers' world that is made of cosmic logics built on the old mythical world. Cosmic logics influenced by the new agricultural economy and experimentations made during the neolithisation phase are made of human and social logics put over the old concepts.

The lecture mostly deals with the dynamic symbolic interrelationships between Göbekli Tepe for the Urfa region, Çatalhöyük for the Konya region and Tepecik-Çitflik, Kösk Höyuk for Cappadocia. These sites show how integrative logics are put over the origination myths through which the preservation of society, production and reproduction of life is made possible. Every aspect of iconography is related to the significance of life and thus the symbolisms are the most synthetic expression of the people.

Göbekli Tepe (9100-8750 cal BC) is a shamanist world where totem poles are placed. Its centre sacralises demarcated spaces, highest part of the landscape. Due to their topological relation with the rest of the world, these spaces turn into the access ways, or points of contact that dialectise the polar opposition of the sky and the underworld.

In the cosmic vision of neolithic Çatalhöyük (7400-6200 cal BC), the cosmology is a possible arrangement of a possible world based on integrative logics. The order of nature is a cosmos thought of as a macro-projection of the social order recognizable in the habitations and "shrines".

In another way, if every incidence of the quotidian in the social order must have its consequent explanation in the order or disorder of the environment on which society is dependent, Early Chalcholithic Tepecik and Kosk Höyük (early sixth millennium cal BC) give us an example of the continuity of iconography representing, in this case, domesticated animals.