Trypilia
Published: 12/09/2003
For the last two months, volcanoes have taken center stage.
And with Thera, Krakatau and Tambora all accounted for,
it's time for something completely different.
There are books I return to again and again, the mental
equivalent of comfort food. They're a disparate lot, and the only common
thread they all share is the ability of the author to tell a great story.
One of these books is "With Fire and Sword," by
Henryk Sienkewicz
( pronounced Sin-KAY-vitch), the first part of the Polish Trilogy and one
of the great masterpieces of European literature.
The Polish Trilogy concerns itself with the decline and fall
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth starting in the 1640's.
And while I definitely recomend the recent
English translations by W.S. Kuniczak, this
week's topic has nothing to do with that tragic time!
What makes me use the Trilogy as a starting point is this
quote. The protagonist has been sent on a mission down the Dnieper River in the Ukraine
and what he observes as they pass through the land is:
"Everything here grew taller,
flew quicker and farther, stretched over greater distances and bloomed in
brighter colors than anywhere else. The soil along the riverbanks was
thick and black and glistening with rich oils; oats spilled carelessly
from a horse's feedbag, or a cherry-pit spat out here in passing, sprouted
a footlong green stalk overnight, Pan Yan knew. It was a magic land, a wild world waiting
for a master.
"... so these riches waited, untouched and unused in an
unpeopled land as vast as all the rest of Europe
west of the Vistula."
Henryk Sienkewicz, "With Fire and
Sword"
Which leads to an important
question. Why?
Admittedly, a rhetorical question for Sienkewicz makes it quite clear why the lands of the
Southern Ukraine were empty in the
seventeenth century Anno Domini, but were they always so? Of course not!
There was a time when cities were being built in the
Southern Ukraine long before the kingship descended to Eridu in Sumer. We are
accustomed to thinking that "history began in Sumer", but there is
a time of cities and peoples that have been lost and re-discovered. We
don't need to look for a mythical Atlantis to discover lost realms.
Around 5400 BC there must have been a great forest in the
Southern Ukraine and while this is pure speculation, the people of the
Black Sea Diaspora must have made made their
migratory ingress into these territiories,
moving up the great rivers of the Danube, the Dnieper and the Dneister. To the ancients who were making the switch
from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agrarian lifestyle, the
rivers were the highways, the safest way to travel and the riverbanks were
the best place to grow grains.
In case the term Black Sea Diaspora doesn't mean anything,
we now know that around 5600 BC the New Euxine Lake, as that freshwater sea was
known, was permanently changed by the opening of the breaching of the
Bosphorus Straits. There is quite a bit of
controversy on the exact manner of how this happened. Was it gradual?
was it sudden? Was there a prior flooding from
the Caspian Sea? etc.... But what we do know, thanks to Robert Ballards efforts in undersea archeology, is that there
were human settlements in the shallow regions of the northern Black Sea that are now 140 meters underwater.
In mythology there are subtle echoes of this time. The
Greeks who were quite emphatic that there were several floods, not one,
tell of a man known as Dardanus who led his
people to Samothrace in the wake of the flooding
of the Black Sea, and whose descendants eventually establish fabled Troy.
The Serbs speak of a man named Kranyatz who fled
the flood and lived off a vine for nine years. Of course we can confuse
the story of Xiusudra/Utnapishtim/Noah with this
event. I personally think the Sumerian deluge is a totally different
affair. The Black Sea Inundation is not the Biblical Deluge.
It is sort of interesting that Kranyatz lives off the fruit of the vine (ie. wine) for nine years, because Noah promptly gets
drunk after the deluge, and then there is the whole Aztec story about....
then again I suppose getting drunk is a quite human response to surviving
a world altering catastrophe, but I digress...
What we do see is a sudden change in the cultures
surrounding the Black Sea. As if there
was a great migration(s) of peoples up the river valleys previously
mentioned. To put this in perspective though, we're talking about
potentially 20 to 30 thousand people in different subgroups moving into
regions where they either are assimiliated or do
the assimilation over the course of several centuries. The
Ukraine was one of those
regions. It would be incorrect to say that they were moving into virgin
territory, surely there were people(s) who were there before. But it is in
the centuries after the Black Sea Diaspora where we see a sudden
change.
The forest-steppe region between the Dnieper and the Dniester they moved into was as fertile as
described by Sienkewicz more than 6,000 years
later. Dr. Mykhailo Videiko, describes the flora and fauna based on spore
pollen analysis:
"Plantain grew near houses and
along roads; nettle around settlements. Slopes of ravines were covered
with rich motley grass, red mallow, white bindweed and pinks.Cornflowers displayed their blue color among
wheat fields. Stands of willows, alder and nut-trees could be seen above
steams and creeks. The oak and hornbeam woods were inhabited with auroch, deer, wild boars, bears, wolves, foxes and
hares."
Dr. Mykhailo Videiko, Archaeology Institute
of the
National Science Academy of Ukraine
The first archeological digs were done as early as 1898 by
V. Khvoika near the town of Trypil'ska, south of
Kiev, but
until the 1960's the scope of what is now called Trypilian culture was unknown. Then Soviet military
topographer Konstantyn Shyshkinon realized that there were traces of large
ancient settlements visible throughout the Ukraine
thanks to aerial photography. The initial reaction of archeologists was
disbelief, especially when it was discovered that some of these ancient
settlements were over four square kilometers in size.
Valerii Dudkin in 1971-74 expanded on this with a series of
magnetic surveys throughout the Ukraine and Moldova
that turned up over 40 villages and seven cities. Further evidence turned
up in Romania at a site called Cucuteni. At last count over 2,000 sites have been
identified; cities, settlements and burial sites.
The cities, which grew over centuries eventually had
thousands of dwellings, including public buildings and temples, some up to
three stories tall made of wood and coated in a mixture of clay and bran
( a constuction method
used to this day in some regions of the Ukraine to this day), all
closely packed like a terrace for defensive purposes. Population estimates
for these cities are believed to have reached up to 15,000 people - the
Talianki site being the largest city in
Europe at it's
height, (3700-3500 BC). It appears the cities were never engineered to
exact standards like the Sarasvati Culture of
India or grew organically from a central point as we are accustomed to,
instead the terraced houses were arranged in a double horseshoe
arrangement. The distance between these two multi-habitations was the
length of an arrow flight, so these people did not live in a peaceful
time.
They were an agrarian people who used swidden (slash and burn) agriculture to clear their
fields to grow the staple crops; wheat, barley, peas, etc. These were not
small plot clearings but massive endeavors to support large populations,
and it was a technique that was not sustainable over the long term. But
the Trypilians had a unique solution that took
into account the fertility and abundance of the Ukraine.
We will discuss that shortly.
In their pottery and clay sculptures, the Trypilians attained a level of artistic creativity
still emulated by present day folk artists in the Ukraine.
The quality of their pottery was unsurpassed in Old Europe. Figurines,
pots, jars, bowls, and other vessels have been found with elaborate
paintwork usually of black, red and white mineral bases.
The Trypilians made an attempt at
creating their own written language. There are similarities to the
Sumerian in the cuneiforms etched on clay tablets uncovered at the Trypilian sites. However, there doesn't appear to be
any crossover in my research from the Vinca
culture of the Danube who did have their
own written and still un-deciphered language.
They worshipped the Great Goddess in her various
incarnations: the Moon, the Bird, the Cow. The
Moon aspect was linked with snakes and she-bears,
the Cow aspect evolves and merges with the God-Bull later in the Trypilian culture.
Concerning Sumeria, the temples
built around 3900-3100 BC at the city of Uruk, in honor
of the goddess Ninhursag, have a similar design
and layout to the Trypilian temples. The
rush-temples of the Sumerians and the Trypilians
were built for the earth and mother goddess and leads one to ask how the two cultures were related.
There has been speculation that Trypilia was
known to the Sumerians as "Aratta," something I
will look into later.
With the Great Goddess at the center of their spiritual
world, the Tripylians were matriarchal and clan
based in the material. The women tended the fields, ruled the hearth, and
had leadership roles. The men hunted or herded. I can speculate that there
was probably the odd man here and there who switched roles and assumed
shamanistic duties - but the Great Goddess was served by women. She was
the Giver-of-Life, Wielder of Death, and Regeneratrix. The pioneering archeologist Marija Gimbutas notes that
their world existed in a "cyclical, non-linear time" as represented by the
symbols embedded in their artwork.
"It is in burials that we see
the first stirring of civilization. It is a strange thought, but it is in
the primal desire to preserve the memory of those who have died that have
inspired the the burial mounds, the pyramids,
the mausoleums, the cemeteries and necropolises that are everywhere. We
see over and over again in these early societies that the preservation and
worship of the dead, especially those of higher class is paramount to the
social structure."
That is how I stated the case when discussing the culture of
Krete back in September (Never thought I'd be
quoting myself!) The Trypilians had a far
different approach in the matter of burials than the pyramids, the burial
mounds, and etc. that glorified and immortalized the god-kings of the
patriarchal cultures. And it was rooted in the concept of "cyclical,
non-linear time."
Every 60-80 years, (with the probable exception of the
proto-cities) the settlements of the Trypilians
would be burnt to the ground, and the inhabitants would move and
start over at an entirely new location.
Archeologists were mystified at first but became
convinced what the rationale behind this behavior was the gradual process
of a city of the living becoming a city of the dead. In due time,
it became necessary to abandon the city to the ancestors. The
abandoned settlements became the burial mounds of the Trypilians.
Sacred vessels, statues, human skulls and bones along with
animal heads and parts have been found buried under the dwellings along
with clay figurines and other oddments that are consistent with the
rituals involved with burning of the settlements.
This custom, also used in the Balkans was traditional
behavior to honor their ancestors, in essence leaving the old cycle of
life behind and starting anew. This cyclical pattern of relocation was an
ideal adapation for an agrarian civilization to
renew their croplands - and they were free to do so for millenia without cultural competition.
But then somewhere around 3100-3000 BC the Trypilian's vanish, their cities are abandoned, their
efforts go unrealized. What happened? There are two possible
explanations:
Are the Kurgan migrations
responsible for the disapearance of the Trypilians? Did they fall beneath the onrush of the
barbarian horde?
We do know there was a period of paleoclimatic stress around 3100 BC, a peak in the
methane levels in the Greenland ice core samples show up, and bristlecone
pine rings from Britain indicate that a period
of cold weather ensues- this sounds familiar. We've heard this before in
the wake of Thera and Kapi Krakatau, let us hold
off on that inquiry till a later date...
last revised: December 9,
2003
