Lecture

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                                                                                                 

Dedicated to Jean Perrot and Klaus Schmidt

Within the framework of the climatic optimum and the two recognised stages as recently proposed by Jean Perrot (2000), namely the neolithisation phase and the phase of the achieved Neolithic, I will, in my paper, try to re-read the archaeological evidence by stressing symbolism, which I would like to see as the most synthetic expression of the Neolithic people. The climatic optimum, highlighted by palaeoclimatology, gives us a background for understanding changes occurring in relations between humans and environment, from hunter-gatherers to farmers, from the neolithisation phase to the achieved Neolithic phase. These two stages belong to two different symbolic worlds, each of them related to different psycho-cultural models.

Cosmogony of the Neolithisation Phase vs. Cosmology of the Achieved Neolithic during the Holocene climatic optimum, 9000-5000 cal BC, in the Near East

Southeast Anatolia, Göbekli Tepe and the Urfa Region

Cosmogony characterises the world of the hunter-gatherers and its symbiosis between animals and humans through the phenomenon of shamanism, totemism and throughout domestic and social life (Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1996, 2001; Clottes 2000; Lewis-Williams 1981, 1991, 1998; Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1988; Whitley 1992, 1994, 1998; Layton 1987, 1992, 2000). Humans give themselves explanation about the way they are in a world conceived as a shamanist cosmos, and as such they express the cosmic genesis of their inner life in their art.

Ritual places in hills, mountains and high places were always created fundamentally as cosmic projections. The centre of the shamanist world determines the architectural configuration of the cosmos. The centre is a place where totemic poles are placed. It sanctifies demarcated spaces. As highest parts of the landscape and due to their topological relation with the rest of the world, these spaces turn into the access ways, or points of contact, that express the polar opposition of the sky and the underworld, of light and darkness. Origins of things are expressed through pillars, stelae, round buildings, circles of stones, etc.

As mentioned, the construction of ritual spaces has cosmic connotations, as it demarcates the cultural landscape and the direction of the world: cosmic axis and axis mundi. In such a world, the natural elements are syncretic with animal forms: they stand in a zoomorphic perspective of humankind. Culture is conceived from nature. On the one hand, the narrations always refer to a particular reality, and also always explain the existence of that reality. Thus the myths, made of those narrations, are an answer to questions a child might ask, such as why the moon has its face stained, or about the colours of the rainbow. On the other hand, the explanations that a shaman must give have to be sought in the origins of things.

As the shamanist cosmos is divided in different levels, within the cosmogony representative spaces, or symbolic spaces, are organised between nature and the relationships of the society with it. There is a shift from cosmic order (shamanist order) to social order (totemism).

According to Robert Layton (1987, 1992, 2000), in totemism each social group takes representations of animal and plants as exclusive emblems. In shamanism, some animal species are preferred in the spiritual meetings for the shamans, but otherwise available for all members of the society. In this way, totemic art is restricted to settlements which represent significant points in the group territory, while, on the other hand, domestic art will be present in all domestic settlements. Still other settlements are preferred for the spiritual quest of the shamans.

In one way or another, settlements like Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt 1995, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c), Gürcü Tepe (Schmidt 1998a, 1999, 2000b), Nevali Çori (Hauptmann 1988, 1992, 1993, 1999), Çayönü (Davis 1998; Özdogan 1995, 1999; Schirmer 1983, 1986, 1988, 1990), Urfa-Yeni Yol and Karahan Tepe are meeting places for the accomplishment of initiation and passage rites to adult age. Following such a distribution, we could propose that in Southeast Anatolia the three recognisable universal aspects of cosmogony, that is, shamanism, totemism and domestic art, find their expression throughout domestic habitations and in extraordinary buildings and plazas (Hauptmann 1999).

The totemic dimension, through animals and natural forces, meets the social dimension of the ancestors. Pillars are put in the earth as links between the underworld and the world and upper world, the sky. Animals such as foxes, lions, aurochs, wild pigs and birds refer to the origination forces as well as to different ethnical marks, as totemic groups. Animals such as snakes (reptiles having an amphibian condition) deal with two worlds, just as – in other regions and continents – iguana, caiman, frog, anaconda or fish are also able to act in two worlds. Given that the representations are mostly animal, people made an animal choice following the passage from one level of the world into the other: underworld, world, sky and related different animals. Shamanism explains this choice.

In the symbolic world, all the composing elements are not visible at the same time, because of the lack of excavations or because of the specificity of the settlements. Nevertheless, Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori, Yeni Yol and Karahan Tepe, all in the Urfa Region, give us an overview of this symbolic world. Extraordinary buildings are thought of as places of initiation and passage rites to adult age, as mentioned; and the aim is to enter them in order to receive the forces and the inheritance of the represented presence of ancestors through pillars and stelae (e.g., Nevali Çori), as such creating one community of the dead and the living. People receive the social responsibility for the permanence of the community as much from the living chiefs as from all the dead – through living and dead people shaping the linearity of the whole community ancestors. The entrances of such extraordinary buildings reach a renewed birth significance as people are born, entering into childhood, and are born a second time upon leaving young age for the age of responsibility. As such, the entrance of the big building in Nevali Çori is like a vagina, while the pillars representing ancestors have an ithyphallic meaning, originating the life in the earth. All animals of Göbekli Tepe are male sexually marked. Plazas are completing the ritual buildings as in Çayönü, Karahan Tepe and Nevali Çori itself. The T-shaped head pillars with arms, hands and tie constitute a standard. By contrast, for the statues and on the plazas the head and the sexual mark were added as in Yeni Yol, because without the ithyphallic T-form, head and sexual mark had to be added. The style expresses a part for the whole. The same meaning is expressed in the political strategies of the different communities through the location of the different settlements: hills, valleys, inhabited settlements, etc.

During the initiation and rites, shamans make a journey beyond life to negotiate with the forces from there, to cure illnesses, to restore the former harmony, to be successful in hunting, predict the future, modify the weather and control real animals by surreal means. The buildings are places of passage between two parallel worlds. This universe is dominated by relationships of a mystic order between human and animal, where the shaman, standing in between them, is a specialist in ecstasy. All the shamanist experiences and activities are held within a universe and their own cosmos – what Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1996, 2001) called the shamanist cosmos. The shamanist cosmos means that the common human world is staged, and presents various levels. Its complexity depends on the complexity of the individual social structures.

The Konya Region and Çatalhöyük

Cosmology characterises the farmers’ world, which is made up of cosmic logics built on the old mythical world. Cosmic logics influenced by the new agricultural economy and experiments carried out during the neolithisation phase consist of human and social logics put over the old concepts. Integrative logics are put over the origination myths through which the preservation of society and the production and reproduction of life is made possible. Every aspect of iconography is related to the significance of life.
The funeral spaces are places of the mytho-poetic reconstruction of life, and are linked to the permanence of life; burials, for instance, are underneath platforms, within the limits of the habitations.

Icons allude to the contexts that give them meaning and unity, like, for instance, births, sexual intercourse, pregnant ‘Madonnas’, uteri, flowers, erect phalli, solar depictions, ritual officiating persons – animals like serpents, birds, etc., carry out their analogical functions from the uteri of the tombs by actualising the continuity of the inverse world where people continue living in society. The funerary architecture of Çatalhöyük (Mellaart 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966) is an inhabited ritual space where the mediators, or the shamans or people who own knowledge, are authorised to act symbolically, ‘magically’, upon that reality. Positive and negative hands, fingers and feet are relevant to special shamanist ceremonies within domestic habitations. This mediation demonstrates that there are no segmented worlds, no dual polarities, and no exclusions by opposition. We have of course to reach a much wider and complete group of meanings to understand the logical orders, the cosmic logics, and, earlier, the cosmic geneses and their incidents in real life.

Cosmos is a harmony of meaning, the possibility of living through the directions of the world, the theoretical references to possible spaces. The directions – according to the levels of the shamanist cosmos: underworld, world surface, sky – define their own cultural space from where humans can rule the world and pass from chaos to cosmos. The structure of the cosmos is articulated by the directions and is the most synthetic structure explaining the spatial worlds of the mythical thinking. This synthetic structure explains why in the cosmic vision of Çatalhöyük, for instance, the cosmology of the mythical thinking is a possible arrangement of a possible world. The order of nature is a cosmos conceived as a macro-projection of the social order.

In societies experimenting with agriculture (Eliade 1976; Lévi-Strauss 1958, 1962, 1964–1971; Meillassoux 1975, 1977; Testart 1982, 1985, 1986, 1991, 1998) but still deeply influenced by a hunting-gathering way of life, the cosmological explanation of the social environment has other implications. Earth, here, is the fundamental element, origin of the elements, mater genitrix of the social environment of humans, and particularly so when the society has an economy based on intensive agriculture. This chthonic notion of the human condition derives from the relative power that people have over their natural environment and from the affirmation of the fact that life, as a natural phenomenon, is the same everywhere. It especially derives from the idea that humans survive by the produce of the land. It is the meaning of an achieved Neolithic. There is biological solidarity between the facts of ordinary life and the natural phenomena, like there was a symbiosis between humans and animals.

Life and death are staged, ritualised and mediated in the habitations. As extensions of chthonic forces, funerals are expressions of the mater genitrix. Thus, the funerary spaces constitute pregnant wombs, the manifestation of the terra mater, the maternity of the earth in whose insides the mortuary enclosures hold the propitiation of life by means of depictions of women giving birth on the ground, of mythological intercourse ensuring fertility in rural properties, terraces and fields, of purification rituals that exonerate the profanities of daily life, of erect phalli, of bull and ram cults that plant the seed needed for the continuity of the social order. Pregnancy refers to the earth mother, birth to the position on the humus, and burial of the body is within the humus.

This telluric conception of human nature is also related to the rest of nature – either as primary, direct inhumations, or as depositions of mortuary offerings in their secondary forms: buried children, cremated adults, the foetal positions being understood as ratifications of this telluric concept.

In such societies, every cosmic conflict implies a set of representations such as rain, earthquake, thunder and lightning, flowing of day and night, fire, stars, rainbow and volcanoes as at Çatalhöyük. According to the model of the cosmos proposed, leopard, ram, bull, woman represent the world, vulture the sky, snake the underworld. Cosmic logics are superimposed over the old cosmic geneses and configurations of the shamanist cosmos. They are still not forgotten in Çatalhöyük.

Ram and bull have a central place in the Central Anatolian mythography, together with deer, aurochs, leopard and vulture. The choice of the elements constituting the cosmology depends on the region. Anatolia and Central Anatolia present a bull cult – and griffon vultures – because of the environment (Taurus, Anti-Taurus, Binboga Dag, etc.), – not goat, but ram and bull refer to virility. Other regions would emphasise the role of anaconda and other animals.

Some mythical scenarios are in this way possible in Çatalhöyük: the leopard is dispenser of cultural benefits, and humans are derived from the wild love between a mythical animal and a primitive woman. In the cosmic logic, this relationship implies a step from nature towards culture. In another myth, the relation of polarity is transformed, as HUMAN is none other than the son of the LEOPARD. As such, people hunt leopards, skin them, tear out their claws and fangs and, attired like shamans with these elements characteristic of the leopard, they turn into leopards with the purpose of actualising the myth. In Amazonian and Andean cultures, the leopard is a jaguar. In Çatalhöyük, leopard, bull and ram belong to the same mythical dimension: the permanence of the society or how a cosmic logic explains the existence of the community. In this way, woman is responsible for the contradiction HUMAN / LEOPARD, where woman represents nature and leopard represents culture. It explains why in some representations we have a woman overpowering leopards.

Following such an explanatory model, it is easy to understand the painted human figures, red for male and white for female, as well as the hunting and dancing scenes with animals: deer hunt – humans with animal skins, aurochs, leopards, animals captured or worshipped. Is it to say that these scenes were progressively less represented and that hunting lost its importance with the increasing practice of agriculture? Roger Matthews, during the CANeW email discussion, had pointed to the archaising tendencies of the hunting scenes at Çatalhöyük and wondered how the symbolic life of Çatal might compare to the Cappadocian evidence. Those scenes belong to another mental world and came from another age and region. As mentioned, the old world is still not forgotten in Çatalhöyük.

In the same set of cosmic logics superimposed on cosmic geneses other themes are recognisable. Breasts are relevant to the idea of feeding and enter into the cycle of life and death. Fat women of steatopygous type and other groups with bulls or leopards are relevant to the fertility idea. According to this scenario, bulls, rams and leopards have the same function with different architectonic or ornamentation features. The metamorphosis with flowers, butterflies and honeycombs belongs to the same cycle of life and death, life on the west, death on the east.

Cappadocia and Tepecik and Kösk Höyük (early 6th millennium cal BC)

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, in that case Early Chalcolithic Tepecik and Kösk Höyük (datable to the early 6th millennium cal BC) give us an example of the continuity of iconography representing, however, domesticated animals.
Laurens Thissen during the CANeW email discussion reminded us how blurred is the distinction between hunter-gatherers and early farmers, concluding with the suggestion that the depiction of cattle on pottery at Kösk in effect typifies the full domestication of that species by the Early Chalcolithic.

Given that the neolithisation phenomenon relies on a general psycho-cultural development of the Near East since the end of the Younger Dryas, we could propose to avoid speaking of ‘Chalcolithic’, because in this cultural area, at this time, ‘Chalcolithic is the real Neolithic’, as Frédéric Gérard put it. We have to follow the development of domestication throughout an archaeology of farming, as is proposed by Jean Guilaine (1991, 1994). From now on the old world will not be represented anymore – on the contrary: the human imagination will now concentrate on other concepts and logics, which will ultimately lead into protohistory. Here I would join Henri Laborit (1968, 1974, 1976), who argues that during mythical time all human experiences are preserved genetically as much as spiritually in the minds of the people, while actualising at each second of human life the whole dialectics between man and nature.

Conclusions and general proposals

From Göbekli Tepe to Çatalhöyük and Tepecik and Kösk Höyük, the social dimension organises and superimposes itself on the world order through a ritual vocabulary and through buildings. In this way, Nevali Çori and Göbekli Tepe in the statuary show the expression of cosmic and ancestor origins on rites and myths belonging to the cosmogony.

Contrary to that, Çatalhöyük, occupied during the neolithisation phase and achieved Neolithic, shows other logics through cosmologies of a farming world, and sees hunting loosing its importance.

They are differences in the way of expression. Mythical consciousness expresses itself sometimes in a minimalist way and sometimes in a maximalist one and corresponds to different needs to mobilise images. The differences of size of the architectural elements and buildings express a different need of images to strengthen social order and also depend on the available material. The expression and the transmission of the cosmic and cosmological orders are different following cultural areas, ecological niches and periods.

The cosmogonic expression, easy to recognise during the neolithisation phase, presents itself in a maximalist way in Southeast Anatolia in Göbekli Tepe and in a minimalist way on the Middle Euphrates in Jerf el Ahmar, for example. Those settlements were partially or entirely occupied during the neolithisation phase, avoiding a farming vision of the Neolithic. The represented bestiary is the same in the symbolic vocabulary of Göbekli Tepe and Jerf el Ahmar (Stordeur 1998, 2000; Stordeur et al. 2000).

As said, integrative logics superimpose themselves on the origination myths, which command the permanence of the society. The new farming societies are built on an old substrate; the special Southeast Anatolian buildings for congregation or for rites of initiation find their equivalents in Central Anatolia, for instance in the Asikli HV and T buildings. It was suggested in the CANeW email discussion that shared attitudes on the social level (linked to specific buildings within settlements used for specific rites) might have connected Central Anatolia and Southeast Anatolia at least during the Aceramic Neolithic.

The meeting point of the hunting-gathering and farming worlds, as exposed, is not exclusive and the predominance of one logic does not mean elimination of the other, but rather superimposition, and as such there is no determinism in the interpretation I attempt to give in a materialist way or spiritualist one: simply the social dimension organises and superimposes itself on the world order. It is only possible to understand the relationship between humans and environment when we understand ‘the Neolithic’ as a culture – and culture understood as a moving nebula around which all elements such as architecture, economy, way of life, the mobile finds, symbolic expressions, etc., create a constellation.

As a matter of fact, culture is an unstable solution, in essence aleatory (Amselle 1990). It is a nebula in perpetual movement, rather than a well-defined system, an indeterminate association of practices and beliefs, following Amselle culture’s definition. And it is valid for all humans.

The relations of Central Anatolia with adjoining regions were taken into consideration throughout the workshop and in particular the links of Central Anatolia with the Southeast played a key role in the debate on origins. The symbolic worlds show with the highest evidence the possible roots of Central Anatolia in Southeast Anatolia. Because as indicated by Jean Perrot and Klaus Schmidt (Perrot 2000; Schmidt 2000a), despite the distances in space and time the Franco-Cantabrian caves demonstrate that it can be expected that the monumental art of Upper Mesopotamia should have a Palaeolithic background, which is not discovered in the region so far.

The Konya region and Cappadocia had an indigenous development in terms of a perfect human knowledge of the own region including geographic distances and distribution of resources; but as non sui generis units both regions still have to be linked with Southeast Anatolia.

In this paper, I tried to focus on change and continuity in order to come to grips with the distinguishing features of each period and region. If the timeframe includes major shifts on the cultural and socio-economic levels, and sees the spread of farming all over Asia Minor, as discussed in the discussion list, I propose also that, in the regions considered, Neolithic diffusion proceeded, as a nebula, from – what Serge Grusinski has called – an imaginary colonisation (Grusinski 1988, 1990, 1999) As such, human appropriation of the surrounding world was, contrary to Cauvin’s view, carried out by an ordinary mental activity.

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Go to the related debate (Panel : Bleda Düring, Ali Türkcan, Harald Hauptmann)