Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 4.-5. 1963-1964 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1965)

Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Makkay János: What was the Copper Age Clay Wagon Model of Budakalász? IV–V, 1963–64. p. 11–15.

For the rest O.-F. Gandert has collected those graves of the Central European Neolithic Age in whic cattle or their skulls were found. He does not think either that the 25 buried cattle and 20 skulls were parts of wagon burials or symbols of such.3 As it is shown by I. Bona, the skeletons of a cow and a calf were found in a male grave at Alsónémedi. The Copper Age wagons were doubtless drawn by oxen. Thus the carcasses of a cow and a calf were not meant to symbolize the drawing of a car. Symbolic wagon burial must be discarded also in this case. We are justified in regarding these bones of cattle as the remainders . of animals sacrificed at the burial and buried with the deceased. It is doubtless on the other hand that the two small clay wheels, found in one of the child's graves of the Fatyanovo Culture (Central Russia) suggest the conclusion that a toy, a small wagon model was placed in the grave originally and not only a pair of wheels.

44 However, this find and its explanation does not influence our view on the destination and the secondary position of the Budakalász model. Summing up: Mesopotamia is not only the birthplace of the real cars and the models fashioned after them but naturally also the starting-point of the superstitions and customs connected with those. To look for the latter separately, without reckoning with the object used in everyday life, would be a grave mistake. On the base of Mesopotamian information we are able to state that the Budakalász model used to be a votive object, manufactured not for a single occasion but used for a longer time or at several instances as a vessel destined to store the liquid necessary for libation. This lasted until it became damaged at several places; then it was placed in a symbolic grave as grave-furniture, being an object already unsuitable in the performing of rites. For the supposition that it might have played any other rule in the burial ceremony, there is no trace whatever. The possibility that it were meant to symbolize a wagon burial, as a sort of a "pia fraus", is to be discarded. For the time being no statement can be hazarded as to the question, which god or goddess it was whose cult the object may have served. The attempt of connecting it with some sort of sun cult, the veneration of the sun-god, seems especially unjustified. J. Makkay 43 Neolitische Gräber mit Rinderbeigaben und Rinderbestattungen in Mitteleuropa. Actes de la lile Session, Congés Int. des Sciences Préhist. et Protohist. Zürich, 1950. (Zürich 1953) p, 201. 44 A. HÄUSLER: Die kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen der Bevölkerungsgruppen Mittelrusslands am Ende der jüngeren Steinzeit. Wiss. Zeitschrift der Martin Luther Universität, Halle-Wittenberg 5 (1955) pp. 101, 103-104.