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 53 Fig. 2. S. L. ROSTOV, Kult na Chermana i Bulgarie. Bulletin de la Société Archéologique Bulgare 3 (1912—13) 108—124. The first ten years of the XX. Century.

(!) the cult of a (self-standing) male god in any way.

116 We possess a further statement, furnished by etnography, which may help us in illustrating the functional use of the mainly very phallic male statues. During World War I the people of some parts of Bulgaria used to produce very archaic type phallic male figurunes from clay, generally strongly resembling the prehisto116 A. Benac, 42. BRGK (Berlin 1961) p. 120. ric ones

117 (Fig. 2). These were made in summer, in the time of draught, and the following happened to them: the women producing a figure »la posent dans une petite bière de bois, la couvrent de fleurs, et pleurent sa mort, après quoi elles se rendent sur le bord de la rivière et y enterrent la figure ou bien elles la jettent dans l'étang ou dans la rivière.«

118 We might suppose that partly our prehistoric male statuettes played a role in such form of securing fertility. f) The chronological position of the male idols of the five cultures reviewed in paragraph »a« is in full harmony with the chronology of the male reliefs treated as the parallels of the Villánykövesd find. The situation of the male idols of the five cultures in time is in full coincidence also with the fact that the number of male idols is higher in the contemporary Greek Subneolithic than earlier. We know perhaps two specimens from Drachmani,

m an especially important idol in thinking posture found at Zerelia,™ and mainly the generally known largesize phallic cult statue from Larissa.

111 A male idol from Sesklo may belong to this period too.

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22 g) Thus our territory witnesses the first appearance of the male idols at the time of the period Vinca-Tordos B, mainly in the eastern territories of the Vinca culture and in the cultures contemporaneous and in a large part related to it. It is extremely important that no male idols are known in the western areas of the Vinca culture, further in the Danilo, Kakanj, Butmir and Lisicici cultures; the situation may be the same also in the archaeological material of Croatia-Slavonia, corresponding to the Lengyel culture.

123 This is the best illustrated by the fact that among the 72 idols or fragments found at Butmir there is no male figurine. In our judgment such a chronological and territorial extension of the male idols in SouthEastern Europe is closely connected to the circumstance that the pictographic tablets of Tartaria, or the pictograph-like forms of the »Tordos group of signs« respectively, make their appearance just in that period.

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'* Namely, our 117 S. L. Rostov, Bulletin de la Société Archéologique Bulgare 3 (1912—1913) pp. 108—124, or the French summary p. 124. Cf. S. N. Bibikov, Poselenie Luka-Vrubleveckaja. (Moskva

—Leningrad 1953) pp. 264—265. 118 Ibid. 119 L. Franz, JPEK 1932—1933. p. 44. m J. Makkay, Acta Arch. Hung. 16 (1964) p. 54., PL 4,1, with further literature. 121 H. Möbius, AA 1954. pp. 209—216. ш Hr. Tsountas, op. cit. Pl. 37,1. 123 A. Benac, op. cit. 123—124. m J. Makkay, Orientalia 37:3 (Roma 1968) pp. 272—289. and The Late Neolithic Tordos Group of Signs. Alba Regia 10 (1969) 9—49.