Agria 41. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2005)
Domboróczki László: A háromszögletű AVK-fejek szimbolikája
new possible relationships. Thus, although it has been more or less possible to establish what religious notions and rituals one would expect Neolithic man to have had, one can never be sure whether such conclusions are correct or the degree to which we are projecting the spirit of our own age, our own logical thought systems and our rationalising approach onto the way we think mankind lived at that time. More recently greater attention has been devoted to critical approaches which prefer examinations of the contexts of the finds themselves. 12. Let us now return to the Füzesabony-Gubakút figure, and what we believe it actually represents? It is a bull with a triangular head bearing human facial features. The triangular head is one of the main characteristics of the mid to late Neolithic idols found in our region. It has been considered to be both a stylised human head and a representation of a mask. 24 It is for these reasons that one cannot consider it to be simply an animal representation. At the same time the engraved marks and painted surface also suggest that it is more than simply being a representation of a bull. Because it is not realistic one can conclude that the figurine has some additional meaning. Another of the Gubakút figurines has a body which is now stool-like rather than tubular 2 ^ and there is another similar piece, also from Gubakút, where the seated figure clearly has female breasts (Table 4. ill. 4.). 26 This latter figure already reminds one of earlier (southeastern) steatopyg figurines of seated women, as well as later triangular-headed male sculptures found in our region, one of the best known of which was found at Szegvár-Tűzköves (Table 6. ill. 3.). Seen from the front our figurine in fact also resembles those standing idols, which in our region at this time had such fiatbodies that gave them a more human appearance (Table 4. ill. 5.). As we will attempt to show in the examples that follow, it is possible that these sculptures share the same symbolic content despite their formal differences. We would also like to mention two figurines by way of analogy. These were found at SzolnokSzanda (Table 2. ill. 5.), 21 from the Körös Culture preceding the development of ALP. Once again one is dealing with stylised representations of bulls, which consist of a pair of vertical horns growing out of a stool-like body. As the excavators have already pointed out, the southeastern European parallels are quite clear to see. It is possible that the figurines carried the same message as those at Füzesabony-Gubakút. Indeed, the perforated decoration found on the 23 Ivan PAVLÚ 1966. 709-717.; István ECSEDY 1976. 47-52.; Eszter BÁNFFY 1991. 183-249.; Alasdair WHITTLE 1996, 64-66. 24 For a detailed bibliography: István ECSEDY 1976. 51. footnote 61. 25 László DOMBORÓCZKI 1997. 22 cat. no. 1/38. 26 László DOMBORÓCZKI 1997. 22 cat. no. 1/40. 27 Nándor KALICZ-Pál RACZKY 1981. 8-9. pl. 2-3. 22
