Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Cauvin next turned to the so-called Khiamian phase. This, named after the Khiam site, west of the northern end of the Dead Sea, was significant for three reasons: for the fact that there were new forms of weapons, for the fact that the round houses came completely out of the ground for the first time, implying the use of clay as a building material, and, most important of all, for a ‘revolution in symbols’.¹⁹ Natufian art was essentially zoomorphic, whereas in the Khiamian period female human figurines begin to appear. They were schematic initially, but became increasingly realistic. Around 10,000 BC the skulls and horns of aurochs (a now-extinct form of wild ox or bison) are found buried in houses, with the horns sometimes embedded in the walls, an arrangement which suggests they already have some symbolic function. Then, around 9,500 BC, according to Cauvin, we see dawning in the Levant ‘in a still unchanged economic context of hunting and gathering’ (italics added), the development of two dominant symbolic figures, the Woman and the Bull. The Woman was the supreme figure, he says, often shown as giving birth to a Bull.

Cauvin sees in this the true origin of religion. His main point is that this is the first time humans have been represented as gods, that the female and male principle are both represented, and that this marked a change in mentality before the domestication of plants and animals took place. It is easier to see why the female should be chosen rather than the male. The female form is a symbol of fertility. At a time when child mortality was high, true fertility would have been highly prized. Such worship was designed to ensure the well-being of the tribe or family unit.

But Cauvin’s second important point, over and above the fact that recognisable religion as we know it emerged in the Levant around 9500 BC, is that this all took place after cultivation and sedentism had begun, but before domestication/agriculture proper.

He turns next to the Mureybetian culture. This is named for Tell Mureybet, near the Euphrates, in what is now Syria. Here the houses are already more sophisticated, with special sleeping areas, raised, separate hearths and storage areas, with flat mud roofs supported by jointed joists. Between the houses, communal open spaces contained several large ‘fire-pits’. These pits were of a type frequently encountered in the Near Eastern Neolithic: they were basin-shaped, and were often found packed full of pebbles. So they may have functioned on the model of the present-day Polynesian oven, where the pebbles store the heat of a fire lit on their surface, and then give off that heat over a long period. The fire-pits of Mureybet are generally surrounded with animal bones that are to a greater or lesser degree charred. ‘Their utilisation for the communal cooking of meat seems reasonably probable.’²⁰ What most excited Cauvin, however, was an important change in architecture that began to occur at Mureybet after 9000 BC. ‘It is at this point that the first rectangular constructions known in the Near East, or in the world, appear.’ Both houses and storage areas become rectangular (though some houses had rounded corners). These constructions were built out of chalk blocks ‘chipped into cigar shapes’ and bonded with mortar. Rectangular houses allowed more to be gathered into small spaces and Cauvin speculates as to whether the reason for this was defence.

Another important innovation at Mureybet was the use of baked clay for the manufacture of female figurines. ‘It [clay] is also used for very small receptacles, although we are still a millennium and a half ahead of the general use of pottery in the Near East . . . It follows that the action of fire in consolidating these modelled objects was well known and intentionally practised by the people of Mureybet from 9500 BC.’²¹