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

48 MAKKAY in some of her forms up to the recent periods), has male companion as well. Let us take either the divine child of the goddess or her male consort, both are in a subordinate situation. It is not known, however, if this male figure is a direct descendant of the paredros of a prior phase of transition (coloured by strong traditions of the way of life of the Palaeolithic hunter), or a result of the stronger factors created by the new way of life. It is problematical, then, if the figure and the functions of the goddess are supplemented by her male companion from the side of the manly occupation (hunting), or whether the role of the man has been created and defined by recently acquired knowledge on fertilization and the securing of fertility. This period in which the goddess plays the leading role in the pantheon covers the whole Neolithic, as a matter of fact, as we may gather from the strong majority of female figures of human representations. It lasts till the general extension of the developped forms of agriculture (farming with a plough, irrigation) and of metallurgy; till the time when those new phenomena mark the zenith of Neolithic revolution and signal the birth of urban civilization. Territorial differences are very strongly felt in this development of the Neolithic, in part owing to the really large distances, in part because of the uneven progress of the various areas. We may add another factor: as the achievements of the Neolithic revolution extend slowly from region to region, so do some religious ideas begin to extend, they become amalgamated with the traditions of each territory, nevertheless. Thus the three factors result in the formation of several regions of local colours; it is but natural that Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Palestine, or Greece and the Balkans present different pictures. This statement is valid for the situation of the idol plastics and religious forms of the Körös-Starcevo culture too. Though this culture represents the earliest Neolithic culture of its territory, it still corresponds to the last phase of general Neolithic development, both in the absolute chronology and in the parallels. Therefore we may regard its types also as retardations, corresponding to the parallel types of Anatolian or Near Eastern Neolithic which has begun very earlier. In our judgment, this is especially valid for idol plastics. Besides, in the Körös-Starcevo culture the formation of the special local types (retardation types since they have existed earlier to the South) was favoured by the fact that it has come to being on the farthest periphery of the early civilizations of southern origin, thus it was bound to establish connections with peoples not familiar with the peasants' way of life yet; those connections lasted longer than the birth of the Körös-Starcevo culture, following also a part of its existence. In the present case the intercourses were established with those ethnical groups which, just on account of this relation, have created the linear pattern pottery, or its eastern groups, respectively. At any rate it is certain that in the archaeological material of the Körös-Starcevo culture and of the corresponding Balkanic-East European groups the idols portraying men and other male representations are unknown as far, so this material, though much later than e. g. the finds of Anatolian Neolithic, represents the period of the absolute priority of the early goddess well, in our judgment. We believe that the birth of the figure of a self-standing chief god as the head of the polytheistic Pantheon is contemporaneous with the evolution and general extension of the highly developed forms of agriculture. This was a very long and complicated process which we endeavoured to reconstruct at another place.

61 The process resulted in the formation of the first city states in Mesopotamia, reaching its culmination in them. But whereas the development of the idea of a goddess was an event which happened in several areas, sometimes independently of each other, during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, the figure of the chief male god could not come to being outside the sphere of the early urban civilization, i. e. it was an exclusive feature of th^e Near East. If therefore we can identify finds which may be regarded as figures of the self-standing chief god in the third millennium or earlier in European territory, they must be regarded, both iconographically and from the point of view of the religious background, as types developped by the impact of Near Eastern influences, instead of being divine figures of the loiocally formed religious belief. In our view only a small portion of the earliest European male representations may be attached to this type, above all the Szegvár statue and its parallels.

02 Since the inner tendencies did not suffice to create the figure of the self-standing chief god and the religious system surrounding it, the Late Neolithic of South-Eastern Europe preserved, probably organically, the traditions regarding the figure of the male divinity of the preceding system. This survival possessed doubtless much more vitality, than e. g. in the Near East. Thus it is possible that we find in South-Eastern Europe the evidences of the male presentments of both types side by side. Consequently, if we 111 J. Makkay, Acta Arch. Hung. 16 (1964) pp. 3 seqq. e Ibid.