9,500 BC: Earliest representation of gods?

Ne parla oggi un articolo uscito su The Guardian. È opera di Klaus Schmidt, membro del German Archaeological Institute. Queste raffigurazioni sarebbero di molto precedenti alle divinità cananee, da cui discende lo Yahweh biblico:

"This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria.

Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

E ancora:

the site is devoid of the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless.

Schmidt commenta:

"I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods," said Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers.

"In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all. What is this universe? Why are we here?"

With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hilltop was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles.

mercoledì 23 aprile 2008