Gerry wrote
> Taken from Lecture 7 of The Alekseev Manuscript:
> "In the Caucasus in the pre Neolithic, both caves and stone houses are
> used as primitive dwellings. In the Neolithic, there are houses made
of
> clay bricks. These are approximately eight feet in height and called
> "tolos". The tolos is also used as a grave. As graves, each contain
> 5-20 bodies. The "living tolos" (house) is distributed in Iran and in
> Turkmenistan and other mountain areas of Central Asia. They are never
> found on the Arabian Peninsula.
I quote from Ancient Iraq, by Georges Roux, Chapter 2 "Although very
similar to the previous cultures where weapons and utilitarian tools
are concerned, the Halaf culture offers a number of new and distinctive
features, The settlements are still of the village type but cobbled
streets, at least in Arpachiyah, indicate some municipal caretaking.
Pressed mud or mudbrick remains the standard building material , but
rectangular houses tend to be smaller than before and round houses
called tholoi (plural of tholos) by analogy to the Mycenaean tombs of
much later date, become predominant. The Tholoi of Yarim Tepe are
usually small; some divided into two rooms, others are surrounded by
rectangualr rooms or concentric walls of pressed mud. Those at
Arpachiyah, however, are much larger structures, up to 32 feet in
diameter, they rest on stone foundations and to some of them is
appended a long antechamber which furthers the resemblance to the
Mycenaean tombs. Since they had been built and rebuilt with great care
and since they had been found empty, it was long thought that they were
shrines or temples, but the finds at Yarim Tepe clearly show that most
tholoi were simple beehive shaped houses such as can still be seen
around Aleppo in Northern Syria. In fact the only building that can be
considered a sanctuary is a small, square structure with mud pedestals
and an ox skull on the threshold of a doorway, excavated by Mallowan at
Tell Aswad, on the Balikh River. At Arpachiyah the dead were buried in
pits beneath the floors or around the tholoi, but there are collective
burials of dismembered bodies at Tepe Gawra and of cremation, perhaps
for ritual purposes, at Yarim Tepe.
No less interesting than the tholoi are some of the small objects found
at Arpachiyah and elsewhere. We allude in partiuclar to the amulets in
the form of a house with a gabled roof, a bulls head and a double axe,
and to terracotta figurines of doves and women. The latter were not
new to Mesopotamia, but they now differ from previous models. The
woman is usually shown squatting or sitting on a round stool, her arms
are supporting her heavy breasts. The head is reduced to a shapeless
lump, but the body is realistic and covered with painted strips and
dots which may stand for tattoo marks, jewels or clothes. It is
probable that these figurines were talismen against sterility or the
hazards of childbirth...
Last but not least comes the remarkable painted pottery, the most
beautiful ever used in Mesopotamia. The Halaf pottery is made by hand
from a fine ferruginous clay slightly glazed in the process of firing.
The walls of the vessels are often very thin, the shapes varied and
daring: round pots with large flaring necks, squat jars.... Triangles,
squares, checks, crosses, scallops and small circles are among the
favourites, though flowers, sitting birds, crouching gazelles and even
leaping cheatahs are encountered. Most characteristic of all and
perhaps loaded with religious symbolism are the double axe, the maltese
square... and the bucranium, or stylised bulls head.
While the tholoi belong to a long tradition of round houses, the
splendid pottery and the peculiar amulets and figurines of the Halaf
culture are unrelated to similar artifacts of the preceeding cultures
of Mesopotamia. They appear progressively, though rapidly in new sites
around 5,300 and appear to have been introduced by foreigners who
peacefully invaded a wide area and mingled with local populations.
Where these foreigners came from is still a mystery, but the hypothesis
put forward by J. Mellaart that the 'Halafians' originally were
'controllers of the obsidian trade', established in the mountains of
Lake Van makes sense, since from that central point they could have
easily descended into the plains, crept into the Balikh and Khabur
valleys and the future Assyria where they settled in large numbers,
pushed further south along the Tigris River and reached the Mandali
Region (Choga Mami) and also penetrated into Cilicia and Northern Syria
to the west and Armenia and Transcaucasia to the north. This is as far
as the geographic distribution of the Halafians ware takes us, but an
even wider influence cannot be excluded, since the Halaf pottery has
undoubtedly similarities with the 'Urfinis' painted ware of continental
Greece, while the tholoi have parallels in Neolithic Cyprus
(Kirokitia), and perhaps not by chance, the dove, the double axe and
the bucranium reappear as the standard cult objects of both Minoan
Crete and pre-Hittite Anatolia, some three thousand years later."
Where does this get us linguistically.
Firstly the western connections seem to be interesting as it could have
been these cultural connections that helped carry proto-Eutruscan/Pelas
gian influences from the Caucasas to the Aegean region.
Secondly, it is unlikely that the Halafians were a single language
group but may have comprised more than one. Plotting their
distribution, and considering their origins from Lake Van suggests that
they were the progenators of the Hurrian/Urartuian languages that are
historically found exactly in this region. Thirdly their connections
into Anatolia, and the religious connections of bucrania, doves and
double axe, suggest connections with Catal Huyuk and Halicar, probaly
early expressions of proto-Khattic speakers. Thus we see a culture
which had developed just after the fusion of these two language groups.
Finally, the religious connections with Minoan Crete are also
interesting. Clearly religions spread fastest into cultures where
cultural similarities and contact have already been established. Here
we see some of the core elements of Minoan Crete, but much earlier, and
we see a clear transmission route connecting the two. Is it too much
to propose people and traders moved in that direction, carrying their
religious practices and perhaps their language with them.
If this is the case then we see in the Aegean two destinct groups. A
southern group, connected to Halafian Hurrian and Khattic languages,
the language of Minoan Crete, and a northern group, connected to the
Transcaucasian region, perhaps with some similar elements of religion,
but centred in North Western Anatolia, Thrace, Macedon, Thessaly and
Attica, speaking a Tyrrhenoi/Pelasgian language. Relations between
these languages seem to have been essentially peaceful and much
interpenetration is found. Is this the pedistal into which Hellenic
Greeks arrived from the north (a kurgan derived culture) coming down as
a conquering warrior aristocracy through the Vardar gap and building
the fortifications at Dimini?
Finally if this reconstruction is correct, we find evidence of
Hurro-Urartueans and Khattic folk intermediate between Semetic and
Indo-Europeans. As these were the most complex and well developed
cultures of their time, could we have a case where the "Semitish"
elements Glen and Dennis find in Indo-European could have originally
been copied from an identical source - the Halaf tholoi builders of
5,300 BCE, whose geographic spread was exactly intermediate between the
Cuacasian and the Arabian realm, with trade connections into both
areas. If this is the case, then we do not need to have a Semitish
neolithic in Eastern Europe and an IE substratum - we have instead a
neolithic "Asianic" substratum stretching from Minoan Crete, through
Khattic to the Halafian Hurro-Urartueans.
Hope this helps
John