A Nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum évkönyve 50. (Nyíregyháza, 2008)

Régészet - Makkay János: Antik források — ősi szokások

Ancient sources — early ritual beliefs and customs Following a short introduction to the beginnings of the scientific career of the author, the article is a retrospect, which covers four topics the author has already written about. The first is the interpretation of an extremely tall skeleton (at least 192 cm), discovered recently in the Copper Age barrow (Hung, halom, called also kurgán) at Tiszavasvári-Deákhalmi dűlő, firmly dated to the time of the local Pit-Grave Culture. The paper lists new evidence to the history and prehistory of males of extremely high stature (for more details, see MAKKAY 2006A.), including some of the Homeric heroes, and also the famous Biblical figure of the Philistine Goliath. Among new evidence there is a recently discovered trident (probably of ritual use) from the hoard of Tel Jatt (Israel), dating around 1200 B.C. (Fig. 2). The second part deals with some special questions of the miraculous hind, a female deer which has (some times gilded) antlers and suckles her calf (MAKKAY 2006.). It brings new evidence to the long prehistory of beliefs in such magical animals, including a small votive bronze statuette (around 725-700 B.C.) from Samos (Fig. 4; see BOARDMAN 2007. fig. 26) which clearly proves that this belief of ultimately Steppic origins of the Greek mythology (primarily connected to the goddesses Leto and Artemis) was already known of the Greek world before the suggested (and detectable) influence of the Scythian art and religion. Therefore, it goes back to much earlier, Bronze Age relations, very probably connected to the arrival of the Mycenaean warlords into Greece around 1700 B.C. (for a detailed study see MAKKAY 2006A.). The third part is a short summary of sporadic Greek sources on representations of a bird (cock) and a goat on the top of antlered composite masks, applied to horse heads. After so many years and also a great number of his studies (see the references), the author was able to find hitherto neglected Greek sources to the extremely long history of the sacrificial pits, already well known from Early Neolithic assemblages, both in the Near East and Anatolia, and also in the Carpathian Basin. One of these sources is the detailed description of the pit sacrifice, offered by Hermes to the twelve Olympic gods, after his famous cattle raid (Homer: Hymnus ad Mercurium, lines 105-141). János MAKKAY Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology Budapest H-1250 Pf. 14. e-mail: janosmakkay@freemail.hu