Jacques Cauvin 2000 Birth
Cauvin 2000 Birth
The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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ToC of Cauvin 2000 Birth
| Table of Contents |
Part I: THE ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE |
| General topic(s) of the book |
The volume analyses the development of first spiritual symbolism or religious beliefs in the prehistory of ancient Near East, specifically in the Neolithic period. Among the great turning points in human history, the one called the Neolithic Revolution is one of the most criticai: it concerned the beginning ofthe first manipulations of the natural environment by our species, and it lies directly at the origins of our present power. The analysis of this metamorphosis, its circumstances and its causes, is therefore an indispensable first stage for those who are interested in how civilisation began. This event occurred first in the Near East, before radiating directly to other regions, or giving piace to later imitations elsewhere. This book is therefore first and foremost the synthesis of recent research on the Neolithic ofthe Near East. The period covered is from about 12,000 to 6300 BC, when the transition of prehistoric communities of hunter-gatherers into the first farmers and the first herders was effected in stages, earlier in this part of the world than anywhere else, together with technical and ideological changes which accompanied and sometimes preceded the process (p. xv). |
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Extended summary of Cauvin 2000 Birth
«Jacques Cauvin has spent many years researching the beginnings of the Neolithic in the Near East, excavating key sites and developing new ideas to explain the hugely significant cultural, social and economic changes which transformed mobile hunter-gatherers into the first village societies and farmers in the world. In this book, first published in 2000, the synthesis of his mature understanding of the process beginning around 14,000 years ago challenges ecological and materialist interpretations, arguing for a quite different kind of understanding influenced by ideas of structuralist archaeologists and members of the French Annales school of historians. Defining the Neolithic Revolution as essentially a restructuring of the human mentality, expressed in terms of new religious ideas and symbols, the survey ends around nine thousand years ago, when the developed religious ideology, the social practice of village life and the economy of mixed farming had become established throughout the Near East and east Mediterranean, and spreading powerfully into Europe» (description on editor’s webpage).
The volume analyses the development of first spiritual symbolism or religious beliefs in the prehistory of ancient Near East, specifically in the Neolithic period.
The contribution is particularly relevant as an introduction to the first attested forms of spiritual symbolism and religious beliefs in ancient Near East, specifically in the Neolithic period (cf. entries: Hodder 2010 Emergence and Schmidt 2011 Costruirono). Chapter 3 is indeed the most relevant for our aims: ‘The Revolution in symbols and the origins of Neolithic religion’. The author present firstly a discussion about the Khiamian phase, when technology in producing weapons for hunting further developed, together with an architectural progress. According to the author, «This episode would scarcely merit being made the first stage in neolithisation if it had not produced another type of transformation, which we think the critical one and which we have called the ‘revolution of symbols’» (pp. 22-23; about the ‘symbolic system’, cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, specifically Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1958, Anthropologie structural = Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963, New York: Basic Books; a discussion on some of his works can be found on CAR). In the following paragraphs, Cauvin focuses on the symbolism connected firstly with objects representing animals (gazelles, deer) to female figurines and bucrania, stressing the passage from a hunting-gathering economy to agriculture, as clearly attested at Çatalhöyük (cf. entry Hodder 2010 Emergence), where a first ‘religion’ growth up: «There we can perceive that this ‘woman’ is truly a goddess, defined the ‘Mistress of Life’ by James Mellaart (cf. Mellaart 1967 Catal): in the schematic monumental relief sculptures she dominates the north or west wall of the domestic sanctuaries of Çatalhöyük, arms and legs spread, giving birth to bulls (or exceptionally rams) whose sculpted bucrania, set below her, seem to emanate from her. […] Here are all the traits of the Mother-Goddess who dominates the oriental pantheon right up to the rime of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel» (pp. 29, 31).
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Excerpts from Cauvin 2000 Birth
NOTE: The notes in square brackets and in smaller font are by the author of this excerpts page.
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A new religion
| A new religion | pp. 29, 31-33 | The Woman and the Bull The female representations will in fact multiply very quickly throughout the whole Near Eastern Neolithic [on this topic, cf. also Balter2005Catalhoyuk]. From that time their economic context will be one of farming. At the same time, on the basis of their simple realisation and their material environment, their meaning will often be better perceived. However, we shall leave till later the account of the diffusion of the Neolithic from its source in the northern Levant into Anatolia. But here let us note that in the seventh millennium, in the civilisation of Çatalhöyük [for which cf. Mellaart 1967 Catal] that derives directly from this stream of diffusion, the woman and the bull will be predominant because of the number of their representations. They will manifest themselves in the heart of the exceptionaliy well-preserved architecture of the settlement, whether as painted frescoes, modelled relief sculptures or statuettes. [...] There we can perceive that this 'woman' is truly a goddess: in the schematic monumental relief sculptures she dominates the north or west wall of the domestic sanctuaries of Çatalhöyük, arms and legs spread, giving birth to bulls (or exceptionally rams) whose sculpted bucrania, set below her, seem to emanate from her. Paintings and mural reliefs attach a significant retinue to her. There are the jaws of carnivores (weasels and foxes), wild boar tusks or beaks of vultures, all carnivorous or dangerous animals, disguised inside female 'breasts' that are modelled in day and protrude from walls in a curious combination of simultaneously nutritious and lethal symbolism. [...] Mellaart 1967 Catal, the excavator of Çatalhöyük, quite rightly underlined the funerary association of this imagery, the Mistress of Life also ruling the dead. [...] Thus, there is the celebrated statuette of Çatalhöyük, the Goddess, obese, giving birth, seated on panthers that serve as her throne [...]. Thus, in surreal assemblages which bring evidence of the world of the imagination, there are ideas of fertility, of maternity, of royalty and of being the mistress of wild animals. Here are all the traits of the Mother-Goddess who dominates the oriental pantheon right up to the rime of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel. The image of the bull is equally an almost obsessive theme at Çatalhöyük. From the simple texture of the first bucrania found at Mureybet, still quite 'natural' in their style, they have become works of art in which the head is modelled in day and attached to a wall; but they are always real horn-cores that finish off the objects. Equally, in the sanctuaries, horn-cores project from the multiple pillars and benches, while on the wall murals themselves an enormous silhouette of a bull frequently occupies the totality of a wall, modelled in relief and incised or painted. On several of these frescoes, the beast is surrounded by men in movement, armed with bows and throwing-sticks; these men, represented at a very reduced scale in proportion to the bull, emphasise its enormity by the contrast. It is one of the first known scenes of the bull-contest, whose later history in the eastern Mediterranean we know well in the Minoan ceremonies. Above all, as with the Goddess, here are relevant facts for the contextual analysis, the placing and the association of the figures, the contrasts in size that show the hierarchy of respective values, which put us on the track of a structured symbolic thought-system in which the simple quantitative predominance of these representations with which we must elsewhere content ourselves takes shape and is made clear. Female and male key-symbols Throughout the total duration of the Neolithic across the whole of the Near and Middle East, a unique 'ideology' is found [...]. It is organised around two key symbols: one, female, has already taken human form. [...] What is new at this time is their number, and also the indication that she was not only a 'fertility symbol' but a genuine mythical personality, conceived as a supreme being and universal mother, in other words a goddess who crowned a religious system which one could describe as 'female monotheism' in the sense that all the rest remained subordinated to her. The other, incarnate in the form of the Bull, is male but in an essentially zoomorphic expression. At Çatalhöyük he appears subordinated to the Goddess by filial relationship [...]. It is possible, as J. Mellaart [Mellaart 1967 Catal] has suggested, that a symbolic system which knew the mythology of the son who is also the spouse already existed in the Neolithic, analogous to what the much later texts of the tablets of the Mesopotamian Bronze Age reveal to us, but at this date with nothing in the religious art yet so specifically indicated. The Bull may be born of the Goddess, but no married couple, no 'divine couple' in the proper sense, was yet explicit. From agriculture to religion (and vice versa?) What recent research in the Near East has shown and what is important to us here is that this system with two persons began to be put in place around 9500 BC among the last hunter-gatherers of the Khiamian of the Levant. Without doubt this is the epoch when the first experiments in bringing wild cereals into cultivation may have been taking place in what is for us a marginal and imperceptible fashion. [...] In the same way, it is not certain that the recasting of the symbolic repertoire that has been described would have straightaway attained the explicitly 'theological' form that the iconography of Çatalhöyük allows us to assert. At this stage nothing more than the promotion of new 'dominant symbols' can be proved. This change, whose historical importance has been underlined because of the germ of all the later constructions of mythic thought of the Near East and the east Mediterranean that it contained, occurs at this initial stage as a purely mental development. |
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The religion of the bull
| The religion of the bull | pp. 123-125 | We can call the PPNB [Pre-Pottery Neolithic B] people the 'people of the bull', so clearly has the importance of this animai in their world of imagination become to us. [...] The idea that the image of the wild bull signifies a brute force, instinctive and violent, is spontaneous in us and is without doubt universal. However, it is worth confirming the point by means of reference to iconographic and the documentary sources provided by the later urban civilisations of the Bronze Age [...]. The image of the bull is in effect perpetuated generally, most often associated with a masculine, anthropomorphic god of whom the bull is the attribute or the animal form. Through this image the god at once symbolises the generic force of the storm and the qualities of the warrior. [...] Only one god, whether he was Phoenician Baal [better spelled as Baʿal, already attested at Ugarit in the Late Bronze Age and even earlier; also widely attested in the Bible], Hittite Hadad [more precisely, Hadad was the Semitic name for the Storm-god in Northern Syria in the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age; the Hittites were more used to define him as Teššup/Teššob, of Hurrian origins], or earlier perhaps the Neolithic male God of Çatalhöyük, could ride the storm-clouds and the celestial Bull, in exactly the same way that the Goddess alone could dominate the panther. But in man brute violence, once mastered ('humanised'), could be converted into an organised power of confrontation. Through the image of Baal of Ugarit who was master of the Bull or could himself become the Bull, and who was represented as warrior-hero and civilising force, by braving the wild bull-animal man could learn to seek the opportunity to prove his mastery over it, his courage and his effectiveness in combat. [...] Consequently the instinctive force is in part drawn from its animal straitjacket when it finds a 'man' to confront it. What the imagination embraces in the category of the 'virile', whether generic or combative force, ceases to be lived in the spontaneity of instinct, since only he who can control instinct can truly and precisely be a man, and since, despite their common impetuosity, the hero is something quite different from the brute. It may be that this dialectic of 'virility', taking the form of a dominant self-confidence, emerged in the Mediterranean consciousness around 8000 BC; and in that dialectic the real internal dynamism of the PPNB culture that underlies the more visible manifestations perhaps lived on at the level of the predominant mythical images. |
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A dynamic drama: suffering and death
| A dynamic drama: suffering and death | pp. 71-72 | We shall see that from the Neolithic onwards suffering and death are well represented in the attributes of the oriental Goddess. These are lions or panthers, vultures and other animals that are dangerous for man, which form the immediate retinue of the Goddess and specify her powers to the exclusion of familiar and readily controlled species. The ambiguity of the symbol, where birth and death are joined, is readily decipherable for us who bear the 'terrible mother' in the deepest strata of our unconscious. As for divinity, however, the universal Mother-Goddess is seen on a transcendent plane where fears and conflicts are resolved, where the compliant panther becomes a seat. [...] He who 'prays' feels himself powerless and calls for help from above. A vertical topology is thus introduced in the very intimacy of the human mind, where the initial state of anguish can be transformed into a reassurance at the price of a truly experienced, uplifting mental effort in the form of an appeal to a divine authority external to man and elevated above him. This 'cult' is the other face of a misery that is experienced daily. The Goddess is immediately depicted as a woman: this humanisation of art from the Khiamian period was the clearest and the most spectacular change noted. The supreme authority of that rime, for all that it is distant in relation to man, is not totally alien to him: [...] not only is the Neolithic Goddess enrolled in the historical vanguard of the creationist theologies which follow, but in a certain manner man also recognises himself in all that surrounds him, since at the level of their symbolic genesis a personalised unifying principle reconciles empirical man and the natural world that he confronts. |
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Personified divinity
| Personified divinity | pp. 69, 71 | [...] the Woman and the Bull of the Neolithic appeared in the Levant as divinities whose emergence in the tenth millennium is followed by their diffusion throughout the ancient Near East. The Goddess, flanked by a male partner assimilated by the bull, will be the keystone of a whole religious system which is organised around her. The supreme beings will be able to change appearance in different regions ofthe world [...] The theme of the 'supplicant' introduces an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man. [...] It is thus significant that the very notion of sovereignty is first manifested in the artistic imagination of the Neolithic period, well before its social transposition which will cause it, so to speak, to come down to earth. It is still more important that the emergence of divine figures appears to have its introduction on the Euphrates as part of the process of neolithisation. That is not at all surprising since the literate, urban civilisations, which we too often see as the beginnings of History, were only continuing to intensify in a phase of rapid evolution a cycle of transformation that was inaugurated 12,000 years ago. |
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Symbols and symbolism
| Symbols and symbolism | pp. 22, 25 | The episode known as the Khiamian phase, which occurred between 10,000 and 9500 BC, at first seemed simply to mark the transition between the Natufian and the following chronological horizon, in the Levant labelled PPNA (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A). But it remains without a doubt much closer in terms of its material culture to what preceded it than to what followed. Initially, it is solely the appearance of the first projectile points, a type with lateral notches that is known as the 'Khiam point' after the Palestinian site of that name, which engendered the generic title of 'Khiamian' to indicate ali the sites producing such points. These sites are numerous between the Israeli littoral, the Dead Sea and the Jordan valley, but they also occur on the Euphrates (Mureybet), in some Jordanian oases (Azraq), in the Anti-Lebanon (Nasharini) and in the south as far as Sinai (Abu Madi). [...] This episode would scarcely merit being made the first stage in neolithisation if it had not produced another type of transformation, which we think the critical one and which we have called the 'revolution of symbols'. [...] British researchers under the infiuence of Hodder 2010 Emergence have recently sought by means of 'symbolic archaeology' to penetrate beyond the empirical and adaptational purposes of archaeological objects to the underlying structures which operate in every culture to effect a dynamic cohesion. [...] Among all the information we have at our disposal, art therefore introduces those things which have the least practical utility but which are by contrast, thanks to the imagery that they develop, well able to set us on the track of the 'symbolic systems' (Claude Lévi-Strauss) which under-pin them. In this sense the period from about 10,000 to 9000 BC, that is, the period that includes the Khiamian and the four or five following centuries just preceding the emergence of village-farming societies, witnesses important changes. It is in effect our good fortune to have a figurative art, before and during this period of change, that permits us to perceive its real content. |
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Woman and Bull
| Woman and Bull | pp. 25-26, 28 | Thus the principal change in the Khiamian period seems to concern its art. Limestone figurines from the Jordan valley (Salibiyah IX and Gilgal) are representations of female forms, though still schematic; comparable pieces come from Mount Carmel (Nahal Oren) and the shores ofthe Dead Sea (El Khiam), and another, broken example from the Khiamian phase at Mureybet (phase Il) [on this topic, cf. also Balter2005Catalhoyuk]. By contrast, no representation of an animal is known in the Levant for this period. A little later, between 9500 and 9000 BC, but still on the eve of the appearance of an agricultural economy in the Euphrates valley, the site of Mureybet (in phase IIIA) produces still more explicit documents. Eight figurines, in stone or baked day, are female representations. The majority, whether they are naturalistic or schematic, have clear indications of their sex. Two of them, anthropomorphic but still more simplified, do not exhibit any clear sexual character. They represent, without a doubt, the same reality, but in a more allusive fashion. There is no masculine figurine among them, and just one zoomorphic figure; the latter represents a nocturnal raptor. The spectacular humanisation, of this art is thus the first recorded trait, and whenever there is sufficient realism to permit the definition of the sex, what it shows is a female figure. However, at least in the northern Levant, not all representation of animals is absent from this symbolic repertoire, but its thematic content appears to differ completely from that of Natufian art. Besides the raptor statuette from Mureybet already mentioned, which may mark the first appearance in the Levant of a theme that later becomes very widespread in Near Eastern symbolism, the animal kingdom is dawning for the first time in the Levant are these two dominant symbolic figures, the Woman and the Bull. They will keep their leading roles throughout the whole of the Near Eastern Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, induding the religion of the prehellenic eastern Mediterranean. |
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