Janus Pannonius Múzeum Évkönyve 13 (1968) (Pécs, 1971)

Régészet - Makkay, János: The Chalcolithic Male Relief from Villánykövesd and the Earliest Male Figurines in South-Eastern Europa

CHALCOLITHIC MALE RELIEF 43 search keeps a single contemporary parallel in evidence but it is still unpublished.

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) This piece bears out the conclusion that also the Vinca find represents the sacred marriage. There are several facts supporting the correctness of this assumption. One of them is that the representations of the sacred marriage, though of a different character iconographically, appear also much earlier, in the Late Neolithic.

23 Then the first third of the third millennium produces exclusively Mesopotamian parallels, identical to the Vinca piece in composition too; they present the holy union on bed-shaped terracottas.

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* At the same time the subject is known on seals too.

25 The next but somewhat later European parallel is a double figurine of a man and woman from Gumelnita (the Gumelnita A2C period).

253 There is a further proof for the correctness of our statement: also the material of the Tisza culture contains a representation of the sacred marriage, exactly contemporary to the Vinca piece (and the Gomolava relief). It is incised on a fragment of a vessel from Hódmezővásárhely—Kökénydomb; it shows the scene of the sacred union over a pattern which is incised in a typ otherwise uncommon in the Tisza culture (PL 4 no. 4). This ornament figures an altar, a bench or a bed, situated in a sactuary, a sacred district or a holy grove probably, i. e. an object which used to be the site not only of the ceremony of the sacred marriage but mainly of the incubation at that time. (The early existence of the holy grove as an idea and an actual cult place is explicitly proved by the decoration of the generally known vessel from Szelevény-Vadas^) The appearance of such pictures in the Tisza culture is by no means a surprise, as it is just the period and the culture in which male portraits occur in our country 22 K. Majewski, Bull, du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 9 (1956) p. 5 note 3. 23 Thus e. g. the possibly earliest protoneolithic statuette of the Near East, the Ain Sakhri (Palestine) figurine from the Natufian period (E. Anati, Palestine befőne the Hebrews. New York 1963, no pagination) and J. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East. (London, 1965.) Fig. 11, further a composition of four figures, depicting the hieros gamos: J. Mellaart, Catal Hüyük, op. cit. fig. 83. 24 M.

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L. und H. Erlenmeyer, Vier altorientalische Statuetten. Archiv für Orientforschung 20 (1963) pp. 103—108, Fig. 4 on p. 104. 25 H. Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, a Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East. (London, 1939.) t. XV. 1. Its age is Early Dynastic III. 25

a v. Dumitrescu, Figurines from Gumelnita. Antiquity 38 (1964) 221—222., fig. 1. 26 A. Kovách, Szelevény-vadasi virágcserép. (A Flower-Pot from Szelevény-Vadas.) Arch. Ért. 14 (1894) p. 191, or its sketch, respectively: Arch. Ért. 18 (1898) pp. 137, 157. for the first time: both in the shape of plastics and incised and painted ornaments. The first and most important example is the male statuette from Szegvár-Tűzköves;

27 then there is a phallic figure, incised on the side of a vessel, equally from Tűzköves, reminding us of the Villánykövesd relief in structure very strongly (PL 3 no. 6); finally the painted parallel of the latter, belonging to an other contemporaneous culture, from Szentes-Ilonapart.™ We have another contemporaneous analogy in the incised male repsentation of the Bükk group,

29 from Borsod. Starting, from the partial coincidence or transition of the latest Bükk and earliest Tisza and Tisza-Lengyel cultures, respectively, we cannot doubt that the appearance of a considerable number of male portraits has to be dated to the Tisza culture and the Vinca В period. The Villánykövesd small relief is a relatively late member of this groups of male portraits. As regards the female-ishaped reliefs, we have dealt with the interpretation of a special group, representing women in childbirth probably; their role seems to have been the symbolic insemination, the preservation, ensuring and increasing of the fertility of the one-time contents of the vessel in a sympathetic-magical way. The same role may be suggested in the case of our single relief representing the sacred marriage or of the vessel incision of a similar subject, respectively. Surely, the act and the presentation of childbirth could express and facilitate the idea and the magical securing of fertility just as indirectly as the act of the saored marriage. It is to be questioned, however, whether one may assume the same purpose in cases in which, instead of an action played by one or two persons (labour, sacred marriage), we are simply faced by a portrait of a naked, rather abstractly shaped figure of a man or a woman, a small relief. An answer to the affirmative may be found in the complete identity of the Villánykövesd small relief and of a contemporary female-shaped relief from Croatia. Thus we may presume that the same goal was aimed at by the representation of an extract of the scene, as it were, of the woman (or more rarely, of the man) as a symbol of fertility. Or, regarding the male portraits, should we look for some other product than grain or seed-corn, being the most evident, the most 27 J. Makkay, Early Near Eastern and South East European Gods. Acta Arch. Hung. 16 (1964) pp. 3 seqq. 28 Quoted by J. Csalog at the Third Archaeological Conference at Szeged, 1965, in his paper: »The informations gained by the excavations on Szentes-Ilonapart«, read on the 17th November. Not published among the papers of the Conference. 29 F. Tompa, Die Bandkeramik in Ungarn. AH 3 (Budapest, 1928.) PI. XVIII. no. 5.