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 47 relation of man and his society to the natural surroundings. This problem, touched but incidentally so far, has been formulated by Gy. László clearly in our day: »Whereas the success of the hunter depends on his skill, fine arms, the knowledge of animal nature, i. e. on a row on »worldly« things which may be acquired and learnt, the farmer is entangled to the network of different forces. The fate of the seed is independent of human power from the act of sowing till harvest; it is threatened by inundation or draught, by hail or scorching sunshine. Therefore life is a function of the weather.«

58 Thus it is easily understood that the religious systems which centered on the securing and raising of vegatable fertility put the emphasis on the female sphere, being in connection, or susceptible of such connection, with the fertility of land both practically and symbolically. Main does not direct this work actually, nor is he symbolizing the plant fertility, his role is restricted to the fertilization of the birthgiving woman who influences fecondity in a magical way.

SD This situation is reflected in the male consort or in the adolescent son of the goddess in idol plastics. If we attempt now to arrange the male representations in the area of the early village-farming communities to a genetic and correspondingly chronological series, with regard to plastics, incisions and vall-paintings equally, we may draw the following line of development which is. however, not proved to be continuous in a single circumscribed area yet. Generally, not only in the restricted sphere of male presentments, the phases of development may be followed in a continuous line possibly in the single Anatolia, though Palaeolithic parallels are very few there. Therefore they do not prove more unquestionably than that an art related to the Franco-Cantabrian style and the religious beliefs connected to it may have been familiar also to the Late Palaeolithic consequently Preneolithic man in Anatolia. Therefore in the earliest Neolithic, inheriting the religious and artistic traditions of Palaeolithic evidently, male representations appear as members of groups or actors of scenes mainly of hunting, as active members of the one-time society; more rarely they step forward in connection with the cult of the dead and of the ancestors. In those group actions the represented men are mot connected to some religious idea as individuals but the subject and the action of the whole presentment has a religious 58 Hunor és Magyar nyomában. (In the Wake of Hunor and Magyar.) (Budapest 1967) p. 33; cp. K. J. Narr. Antaios 2 (1960) p. 139. 59 J. Mellaart, Catal Hüyük, op. cit. p. 202. purpose. Therefore no self-standing male deity appears in their case; these male figures do not represent the self-standing gods of a polytheistic system. If in spite of all we meet male representations in plastics, those figures may be defined as the companion or the son of a more circumscribed figure, a (divine) female generally. However, in this period, also in connection with the described collective scenes, a female figure makes its appearance, known from numerous individual representations (mainly plastics). It is closely connected, probably according to the tradition of the hunters' way of life, to some wild beasts, or to the bull and the ram, respectively, or to their symbols: the horn and the genitals, shown with little abtsraction yet. The last named connection may be the result of the domestication of the animals, developing together with the beginning agriculture. Doubtlessly people attributed to this female figure symbolic qualities, power and strength as early as at this time; qualities which were in possession of the individual females of the society but not of the feminine sex in the whole framework of life: those of representing and ensuring fecundity. Some features of the female representations (chthonic traits, protecting and helping funtion, etc.

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) bear out characteristics even on Palaeolithic finds which may mark the very origins of the evolution of the figure of a goddess. These antecedents may have contributed to the fact that in the very beginning of the Neolithic, in the period of beginning agriculture, the evolution of the concrete figure and the cult of the goddess preceded that of the male god. In our judgment this period and this phase of development corresponds to the situation found in the time before level VI of Chatal Hüyük. As agriculture has become general and the way of peasant life all-embracing (i. e. in the period in which the wall-paintings with hunting scenes have disappeared on Chatal Hüyük), an even development results in the clear-cut figure of a goddess, assuming her final attributes; as a matter of fact some sources bear out the inference of the consolidated forms of rites assuring the plant-fertility (sacrificial ceremonies, apotropeica] procedures, etc.). Though in Anatolia herself this phase of evolution is characterized by the disappearance of male representations from art (mainly the plastic one), we may surmise that this Neolithic goddess, being more the goddess of fertility than the mistress of animals (with due allowance to preservation of the latter feature 60 K. J. Narr, Antaios 2 (1960) pp. 150—151.