by Peter Watson
What ideas lay behind the worship in these temples? Renfrew’s researches on the island of Arran, in Scotland, have shown that the tombs there are closely related to the distribution of arable land and it therefore seems that these tomb/temples were somehow linked to the worship of a great fertility goddess, which developed as a cult as a result of the introduction of farming, and the closer inspection of nature that this would have entailed. We can, however, say a little more about this set of beliefs. Although it is very variable, megalithic sites are often sited so that ‘the countryside falls into certain patterns around them. The classic megalithic site is on a platform part-way down a spur which runs from higher ground behind. From the site itself, a bowl or valley in the land will be noticeable below, while the horizon will be surrounded by ridges of hills which wrap around behind the spur.’46 These sitings are believed to relate to ancient beliefs about sacred landscape–geomancy. ‘The happy site is almost always sheltered by the hills, slightly elevated within them, and connected to them by land through which the geodic currents flow. In the angle formed by the junction of such hills, the geomancer looked for a “little hollow or little mound”, from which the chain of hills around can be seen to form “a complete horseshoe” with one side open, and streams that run away gently rather than steeply.’47 From about 1930 onwards, modern dowsers have explored megalithic sites and picked up very powerful reactions in their vicinity. One dowser, Guy Underwood, published in 1969 a map of primary dowsing lines under Stonehenge which showed that twenty lines converged on the site.48 Some, but by no means all megalithic sites are also grouped in straight lines that, when connected on a map, link several places which, in England, have names that end in the syllable ‘ley’. (These are called leylines.) Whether there is anything to this, it does seem to be true that several megalithic circular alignments were prehistoric astronomical observatories. Knowledge of the sun’s cycle was clearly important for an agricultural community, in particular the midwinter solstice when the sun ceases to recede and begins to head north again. From the mound, features on the horizon could be noted where the midwinter solstice occurred (for example), and stones erected so that, on subsequent years, the moment could be anticipated, and celebrated. Sun observatories were initiated round 4000 BC but moon ones not until 2800 BC. Tombs usually faced east. Chris Scarre, of Cambridge, argues that many of these huge stones are taken from sacred parts of the landscape, ‘places of power’–waterfalls, for example, or cliffs, which have special acoustic or sensory properties, such as unusual colours or texture, and are taken to form shrines in areas that are important for hunting or domestication. This, he says, explains why these stones are transported sometimes over vast distances but are otherwise not modified in any way.49
There may however be a further layer of meaning on top of all this. A number of carvings have been found associated with megalithic temples and observatories–in particular, spirals, whorls and what are called cup-and-ring marks, in effect a series of concentric Cs.50 Elsewhere in Europe, as we shall see in just a moment, these designs are related to what some prehistorians have referred to as the Great Goddess, the symbol of fertility and regeneration (not everyone accepts this interpretation). In Germany and Denmark, pottery found associated with megaliths is also decorated with double circles and these too are associated with the Great Goddess. Given the fact that, in the very earliest times, the fertility of women must have been the greatest mystery and greatest miracle known to mankind, before the male function was discovered, and given the fact that menhirs almost by definition resemble the male organ, it is certainly possible that the megalithic cromlechs were observatory/temples celebrating man’s new-found understanding. The sexual meaning of menhirs is not simply another case of archaeologists reading too much into the evidence. In the Bible, for example, Jeremiah (2:27) refers to those who say to a stone: ‘You have begotten me.’ Belief in the fertilising virtues of menhirs was still common among European peasants at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘In France, in order to have children, young women performed the glissade (letting themselves slide along a stone) and the friction (sitting on monoliths or rubbing their abdomen along certain rocks)’.51
It is not difficult to understand the symbolism. The midwinter solstice was the point at which the sun was reborn. When it appeared that day, the standing stones were arranged so that the first shaft of light entered a slit in the centre of the circular alignment, the centre of the world in the sacred landscape, which helped to regenerate the whole community, gathered there to welcome it. A good example of this is Newgrange in Ireland.
One final word on megaliths. While Orkney and Malta cannot really be called part of the same early culture, there are signs in both that there was a special caste of people, apart from the general population, in sizeable megalithic communities. ‘In Malta, the skeletons of those associated with the temples after 3500 BC indicate a lightly-muscled people, who ate a special diet which wore down their teeth very little for Neolithic times.’ The bones of animals slaughtered at an uneconomically early age, associated with inhabitants who lived in houses luxurious for the time, suggests that there was already in existence a social division between people with, at the top, a special caste, a combination of ruler, priest and scientist.52
At much the same time as megalithic ideas were proliferating, but in a different part of Europe, a different form of worship of essentially the same principles was evolving. This part of the continent is generally referred to as ‘Old Europe’, and includes Greece and the Aegean, the Balkans, southern Italy and Sicily and the lower Danube basin and Ukraine. Here the ancient gods have been studied by the Lithuanian scholar, Marija Gimbutas.
She finds a complex iconography grouped around four main entities. These are the Great Goddess, the Bird or Snake Goddess, the Vegetation Goddess, and the Male God. The snake, bird, egg and fish gods played their part in creation myths, while the Great Goddess was the creative principle itself, the most important idea of all. As Gimbutas puts it, ‘The Great Goddess emerges miraculously out of death, out of the sacrificial bull, and in her body the new life begins. She is not the Earth, but a female human, capable of transforming herself into many living shapes, a doe, dog, toad, bee, butterfly, tree or pillar.’53 She goes on: ‘…the Great Goddess is associated with moon crescents, quadripartite designs and bull’s horns, symbols of continuous creation and change…with the inception of agriculture’.54 The central theme was the birth of an infant in a pantheon dominated by the mother. The ‘birth-giving Goddess’, with parted legs and pubic triangle, became a form of shorthand, with the capital letter M as ‘the ideogram of the Great Goddess’.55
Gimbutas’ extensive survey of many figurines, shrines and early pottery produced some fascinating insights–such as the fact that the vegetation goddesses were in general nude until the sixth millennium BC and clothed thereafter, and that many inscriptions on the figurines were an early form of linear proto-writing, thousands of years before true writing, and with a religious rather than an economic meaning. By no means everyone accepts Gimbutas’ ideas about proto-writing but her main point was the development of the Great Goddess, with a complicated iconography, yet at root a human form, though capable of transformation into other animals and, on occasion, trees and stones.56 There is a link here, back to Lewis-Williams’ ideas of the mind in the cave, ‘releasing’ living forms from the rock surfaces.
At this point, then, say around 4000 BC, there is a small constellation of ideas underlying primitive religion, all woven together. We have the Great Goddess and the Bull. The Great Goddess, emerging via the Venus figurines, symbolises the mystery of birth, the female principle, and the regeneration of nature each year, with the return of the sun. This marked a time when the biological rhythms of humans and the astronomical rhythms of the world had been observed but not yet understood. The Bull and stones represent the male principle but also suggest, via the decorated caves of the Palaeolithic age, the idea of a sacred landscape, special
locations in man’s environment where significant occurrences take place (having mainly to do, first, with hunting, then with agriculture). These are early humans’ most basic religious ideas.57
There was another reason why stones and the landscape should become sacred, and it had nothing to do with astronomy. At some point after 4000 BC, early humans experienced the apparently magical transformation by which solid rock, when treated in a certain way through heat, can produce molten metal, sometimes of a very different colour.
Pottery, as we have seen, was the first of five new substances–the ‘cultures of fire’–which laid the basis for what would later be called civilisation. The other four were metals, glass, terra-cotta and cement. Here we shall concentrate on metals but the other pyrotechnological substances underline the continuing importance of fire in antiquity, and show how sophisticated early humans became in their understanding, and manipulation, of heat and flame.
Although archaeologists now order the ‘ages’ of man into the Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, in that order, the first use of a metallic substance was almost certainly iron, around 300,000 years ago, when ochre found favour as decoration. Haematite in particular was popular, possibly because of its colour–red, the colour of blood and life. By Neolithic times (8000–6000 BC), there appear to have been special workshops in places like Çatal Hüyük to produce red ochre and green malachite in cakelike lumps, as a storage technique.58 In pre-pottery Jericho three life-size plaster figures thought to portray divinities were covered in ochre. But houses too were painted red at other sites in the Middle East. As pottery developed, ochre continued as the favoured colour, though blue-green took over as the colour considered most beneficial to the dead.59
If the colour, lustre and even the weight of metals made their impact on early humans, it was as raw rocks, or in the beds of rivers and streams that they first encountered them. From this, they would have discovered that some rocks, such as flints and cherts, became easier to work with on heating and that others, like native copper, were easier to hammer into serviceable tools. Gradually, therefore, as time passed, the advantages of metals over stone, wood and bone would have become apparent. However, when we think of metallurgy in antiquity we mainly mean one thing–smelting, the apparently magical transformation by which solid rock can be transformed into a molten metal. One can easily imagine the awesome impact this would have had on early humans.
Copper ores are found all over the fertile crescent region but invariably in hilly and mountainous regions. Archaeologists are inclined therefore to think this is where metallurgy began, rather than in river valleys. The area favoured nowadays is a region ‘whose inhabitants, in addition to possessing ore and fuel, had adopted some form of settled life and were enjoying a chalcolithic culture’.60 This area, between the Elburz mountains and the Caspian Sea, is the front-runner for the origin of metallurgy, though the Hindu Kush and other areas have their adherents too. ‘That the discovery was fortuitously made can hardly be doubted, for it is inconceivable that men, simply by taking thought, would have realised the relationship existing between malachite–a rich-blue, friable stone–and the red, malleable substance, which we call copper.’61 Because such a link was regarded then as magical, the early copper-smiths were believed to have superhuman powers.
At one stage it was believed that ‘the camp-fire was the original smelting furnace’. No more. Quite simply, the hearths at around 4000 BC were not hot enough. Without a forced draught, ‘a camp fire, though giving enough heat to cook the food and to warm the feet…would not produce a temperature much higher than about 600° or 650°. Such copper ores as malachite, the easiest to deal with, are not reduced at temperatures lower than 700° to 800°C, and metallic copper does not melt below 1083°C.’ It is not only the temperature that acts against campfires. Not being enclosed, the atmosphere would not have been conducive to ‘reducing’ (separation).62 On the other hand, well before the discovery of smelting, much higher temperatures would have been obtained in some pottery kilns. Two-chambered kilns, with the fire down below and the pots above, had been evolved by the fifth millennium, temperatures as high as 1200°C being obtained, for example, at Susa (Iran) and Tepe Gawra (near Mosul, in Iraq).63 The atmosphere in these baking chambers would have been of a strongly reducing character and modern experiments have confirmed that a spongy copper could be smelted in this way. The accident may have happened when ancient potters used malachite to colour pottery–‘and then got the shock of their lives, when the colour delivered was very different from that anticipated’.64
By placing the invention of two-tiered pottery kilns–towards the end of the fifth millennium–next to the archaeological observation that certain copper objects were discovered at Susa, Al ‘Ubaid, Nineveh and Ur, we can conclude that smelting was discovered about 4300 BC. We know that by 4000 BC knowledge of the process had spread to a number of regions in western Asia and that, by 3800 BC, copper smelting was being practised ‘comparatively widely’ in the ancient world.65 ‘By the early years of the third millennium BC, the people of Sumer had created the first important civilisation known to us in which metals played a conspicuous role.’ (The oldest known stock of metal tools dates from 2900 BC.) From these dates onward copper was the dominant metal in western Asia and north Africa until after 2000 BC.66
Insofar as early metallurgy was concerned, after the discovery of smelting two advances were crucial. These were the discovery first of bronze and second of iron. There are two mysteries surrounding the advent of the Bronze Age, certainly so far as the Middle East is concerned, where it occurred first. One mystery lies in the fact that tin, the alloy with copper that makes it much harder, as bronze, is relatively rare in nature. How did this particular alloy, therefore, come to be made for the first time? And second, why, despite this, were advances so rapid, with the result that, between about 3000 BC and 2600 BC, all the important advances in metallurgical history, save for the hardening of steel, were introduced?67
In one sense, we should call the early Bronze Age the alloy age. This is because for many years, either side of 2000 BC, and despite what was said above, objects that might be called bronze had a very varied chemical make-up. Alloyed with copper, and ranging from less than 1 per cent to 15 per cent, there could be found tin, lead, iron and arsenic, suggesting that although early man had some idea of what made copper harder, more malleable and gave its tools and weapons a better edge, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the precise details of the process. The exact composition of bronze also varied from area to area–between Cyprus, Sumer and Crete, for example. The all-important change-over from copper to real bronze occurred in the first quarter of the second millennium BC. ‘Tin differs from copper–and the precious metals–in that it is never found in nature in a pure state. Instead, it is always in chemical combination. It must therefore have been smelted, though (and this is another mystery) hardly any metallic tin has ever been found in excavations by archaeologists. (In fact, only one piece of pure tin older than 1500 BC has ever been found.)’68
Though the exact origins of bronze are obscure, its attractions over copper were real enough, once its method of production could be stabilised, and its increasing popularity brought about considerable changes in the economy of the ancient world. Whereas copper was found in a fairly large number of localities, this was not the case with bronze for, as was said above, in neither Asia nor Europe is tin ore widely distributed. This limitation meant that the places where tin was mined grew considerably in importance and, since they were situated almost entirely in Europe, that continent had advantages denied to Asia and Africa. The fact that bronze was much more fluid than copper made it far more suitable for casting while its widespread use in weapons and tools simply reflects the fact that, provided tin content could be kept at 9–10 per cent, hammered bronze is usually a good 70 per cent stronger than hammered copper. The edges of bronze tools were at least twice as hard as copper.69
This final fact about bronze was very impo
rtant. The sheer hardness of bronze meant that the edges of daggers became as important as their points, encouraging the development of swords. Moreover, this development coincided with the domestication of the horse in the steppe countries of Europe, and the wheel in Sumer. Warfare was therefore suddenly transformed–in fact, it changed more rapidly than at any other time until gunpowder was used in anger in China in the tenth century AD.70
