Thread by @serbiaireland

Thread (longish but hopefully interesting): The other day I came across this beautiful mural from a Neolithic (7th millennium BC) site Tell Bouqras en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouqras from Syria...

It is believed that this mural depicts a group of Common Cranes en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cr…

While looking for more info about this image I came across this very interesting paper entitled "Dance of the Cranes: Crane symbolism at Çatalhöyük and beyond" birds.cornell.edu/crows/rusmcg03…

And in it I found this beautiful image of a wall painting from Çatalhöyük depicting a pair of dancing Common Cranes...

Here is the real thing for comparison. A pair of beautiful Anatolian mountain cranes, a darker local subspecies of the Common Cranes found only in Anatolia dogadernegi.org/en/cranes/

The article talks about a possibility that a crane cult of some sort existed in Çatalhöyük and that it involved making crane wing costumes used for performing ceremonial crane dances...

The reason why the authors suspected this to be the case is because one of the things found in Çatalhöyük were bones of a complete crane wing, with cut marks corresponding to the cuts that have to be made to remove muscles during fixing of a wing in a spread position...

Which you would have to do if you wanted to make crane costume, to perform a crane dance...Which article authors imagined like this:

The authors then ask: "When would people from Çatalhöyük perform crane dance"? And they propose that the crane dance was most likely performed at weddings, "because cranes, dance during their mating season"...

And "because, cranes, which are monogamous and are dedicated parents, can be associated with successful marriage"...

The article authors say that although "...cranes are associated with changing seasons...it is unclear that the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük would have made that association..."

"...because Common Crane winter as well as live and breed in the area of Çatalhöyük, and so their seasonal association wouldn't be as strong as in Europe, where they depart just before the onset of winter..."

Also, based on the vulture depictions with human legs from the temple VII.21, which were interpreted as "priests in vulture costumes dancing over dead bodies", the authors suggest that "it is tempting to imagine a vulture dance of death and a crane dance of life"...

Well...Vultures areal "dance" was actually used in wedding ceremonies in the Balkans...And, in Western Asia, vulture was not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of rebirth of nature, through its link with the rain season and the rain god...

https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1455542652955504652

Sooo...What do I think about this? I think that the authors of this article were on the right track when they were discussing the mural with two facing cranes and said: "The male and female Common Cranes look alike, so we cannot tell whether this is meant to be a mating pair..."

"...However, the facing pair of animals is a repeated theme in Çatalhöyük art, and for example is seen in a pair on onagers immediately below the cranes, as well as the facing leopards reliefs..."
I will talk about the leopards in Çatalhöyük art soon. Very interesting subject.

"...The cranes may thus be linked into a larger symbolic system of pairs or twins..." Hmmm "symbolic system of animal pairs" sounds very much like "animal calendar markers derived from annual mating (or birthing) seasons of animals"

More about ancient animal calendar markers, start here oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/p/animal-solar… then check the rest of the blog posts I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 7 months behind now...

Now back to cranes...

And so being "obsessed with animal calendar markers", I was intrigued by the fact that the crane wing was found on top of a horn of a female wild cow...Next to two wild goat horns...

I think that this is very important...Cause this links crane with two most important animal calendar markers related to agricultural cycle in Eastern Mediterranean, Western and Central Asia: wild goats and wild cattle...

The animal calendar markers which also mark sowing and harvesting seasons of the most important crops grown by the people of Çatalhöyük (and other Neolithic farmers in Western Asia): grains like wheat and barley and pulses like lentils, peas...

While I was digging around to find info about the agriculture practiced by the people of Çatalhöyük, I came across this amazing article researchgate.net/publication/24… which talks about the influence of the local climate and hydrology on the way people of Çatalhöyük grew their crops...

Here is the gist:

There were two types of Neolithic agriculture:

Rain fed agriculture, where crops were planted after the first autumn rains, on the hills...
Flood fed agriculture, where crops were planted after the first spring floods, on the alluvial plains...

It was previously assumed, that because Çatalhöyük is located on a two mounds in the middle of the alluvial Konya plain, that the agriculture practiced by the people of Çatalhöyük was flood fed one...

Just like in early Neolithic sites in the Balkans. I talked about the alluvial plain agriculture in my post about 7th mill BC early grain farming Starčevo culture Blagotin settlement in Serbia. oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2015/03/blagot…

But it turns out, that the climate and the way it influenced water regime in the area made that impossible...On the Konya climate chart you can see that after a hot dry summer, rains and snow arrive in Oct/Nov, and that the precipitation remans constant over the next 6 months...

The combination of rain and snowmelt in the spring results in annual spring flood which basically turned the whole area around Çatalhöyük into a giant swampy lake, with Çatalhöyük settlement mound becoming an island...Which had huge influence on the life in the settlement...

The flood during the most important growing period for the agricultural crops would make it impossible to plant crops in the alluvial plain near the settlement, making the flood fed agriculture impossible...

This means that the only type of agriculture that the people of Çatalhöyük could have practiced is rain fed agriculture in the hills. With crops planted in the late autumn and harvested in the early summer...

BTW, the nearest suitable land for agriculture was located 13 km away...This means that the people of Çatalhöyük had to have been spending half of the year outside of the settlement, near their fields in temporary seasonal villages...

The same thing was found in Serbia with regards to the Bronze Age alluvial tin mining, also a seasonal activity during spring floods...

https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1317853656318943233

Sooo...As I said, people of Çatalhöyük planted grains and pulses at the end of autumn (Oct/Nov) and harvested them at the beginning of summer (Apr/May)... jstor.org/stable/4003590…

Oct/Nov is when wild Ibex goats start mating...Which is why wild goats are animal calendar marker marking grain planting season...
Apr/May is when wild Auroch cattle start calving...Which is why wild cattle are animal calendar marker marking grain harvest season...

OK....But what does all this have to do with cranes? Have a look at this...This is one of my favourite maps...It shows migratory routes of all migratory birds that cross over Turkey...Do you see how congested the skies are over Çatalhöyük?

Basically during Sep/Oct/Nov and Mar/Apr/May the skies over Çatalhöyük must have been filled with millions of migrating birds of all kinds...A spectacle eagerly awaited by the people of Çatalhöyük, because it signalled that the time to plant/harvest crops was nearing...

One of those migratory bird species were Common Cranes, which breed in Northern Eurasia and winters in Iberia, Northern and Eastern Africa, Levant, Mesopotamia, Northern India and Eastern China...

digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewconten…

You can see that Central Anatolia (where Çatalhöyük is located), is both breeding and wintering ground for Common Crane...The area contains a small permanent breeding populations which swells during the winter when the wintering birds arrive from the north...

I am talking about thousands and thousands of birds all arriving and landing together in Oct...And all getting up and leave together in Apr...Now this is not something that can be missed, if you live in Çatalhöyük, in a middle of a marshy plain, ideal crane habitat...

This is a recent image from one of the crane wintering grounds in Israel showing birds getting ready to leave...Totally amazing...Imagine how many more cranes must have been arriving together to and leaving together from Çatalhöyük in the 7th mill BC, before we killed them all...

Interestingly, just before leaving, the cranes would gather in huge groups...to dance...Until I read this paper digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewconten… I thought that cranes dance only as part of their mating ritual which takes place in Apr/May...

It turns out that "crane dancing can be seen frequently in winter quarters before the northward migration"...So basically, Apr/May was the period when cranes danced all around Çatalhöyük...So if you were a Çatalhöyük crane worshiper, when would you have danced your crane dance?

So I would argue that if the people of Çatalhöyük were indeed into dressing up as cranes, they would have performed their crane dances at the same time when cranes danced all around them, in Apr/May...

To celebrate the beginning of the most important event in the agricultural year: harvest season...

In any case, they would have used cranes arrival and departure as calendar markers for planting and harvesting their crops...Together with mating of Ibexes and calving of Aurochs🙂

By the way, you know how the two facing (mating) cranes were depicted on the Çatalhöyük mural above the two facing onagers (wild asses)...Were they depicted there by accident? Well, cranes start mating in Apr...And onagers start mating in...April... oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2020/11/onager…

So that's it...Oh one more thing: In Serbia people believed that if cranes land on a field during their arrival in the spring, that field will have an especially good harvest...

PS: Cranes and bulls calendar markers Indus Valley

https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1468237287062478865