The earliest ever narrative scene depicts a man holding his genitals in his hand as he is being attacked by leopards.
The stone carvings were found in 2021 at an 11,000-year-old site in Sayburç, southeastern Turkey, with the findings published in the journal Antiquity on December 8, 2022.
The carvings portray a narrative that was part of the ideologies of the people living there during that period of time, lead author of the paper and archaeologist at Istanbul University, Eylem Özdoğan, said in a statement.
The carvings appear on a bench found in the ancient ruins of a communal building. Two panels show people interacting with dangerous animals, with the direction and stance of the figures implying that two separate but related scenes are present.
One panel shows the man holding his penis in his right hand while being attacked by a leopard from the left and right. The leopards are carved with their mouths open, and teeth bared, with only one of the leopards also having a penis. This human male is the only figure to have been depicted in high relief, or 3D, whilst all the others are shown in flat relief.
The second panel shows a squatting male holding what is thought to be either a rattle or a snake, facing a bull with sharp horns.
The paper describes how the human and animal figures being shown in this kind of horizontal progression suggest that the stories are leading on from each other.
Özdoğan said that this discovery may mark the first known examples of this kind of scene.
The time period from which these carvings emerged was a significant one for human history. During the Neolithic period, humans are thought to have transitioned from a roaming lifestyle of hunting and gathering to more permanent settlements, instead farming crops and employing animal husbandry for food. This period is often considered to be the dawn of civilization.
This shift in way of life subsequently led to changes in social relationships with other people, and possibly to a boom in collective activities and rituals. The communal building where these carvings were found may be one of the first of its kind.
Other such seminal archaeological finds in the Near East representing cultural development include monumental structures like pillars, further representations of humans and animals, and specific burial customs and ornaments. One notable example is the Gobekli Tepe archaeological mount found in southeastern Anatolia, Turkey, which contains some of the oldest art involving stone structures, such as stone sculpture, reliefs of animals, and abstract pictographs and petrograms.
Neolithic pottery art has also been found across Asia, from as early as 18,000 years ago, while in Australia, rock art by ancient Aboriginal people has been found spanning millennia.
The Sayburç carvings may help archaeologists learn more about this crucial period in human history and how our society evolved.
"This scene has the narrative integrity of both a theme and a story, in contrast to other contemporaneous images, and represents the most detailed depiction of a Neolithic 'story' found to date in the Near East, bringing us closer to the Neolithic people and their world," Özdoğan wrote in the paper.
Newsweek has asked Özdoğan for comment.
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References
Özdoğan, E. The Sayburç reliefs: a narrative scene from the Neolithic. Antiquity, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.125
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