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Plan of building-level VI B at Çatal Hüyük, about 6000 B.C. Note that there is a shrine signified by S in almost every household.
The largest Neolithic site in the Near East is the 32-acre Çatal Hüyük, of which only one or two acres have been as yet excavated. Here the arrangement was slightly different. Excavations at levels dating from about 6000 B.C. show that almost every house had a series of four to five rooms nestled around a god's room. Numerous groups of statues in stone or baked clay have been found within these god's rooms.
At Eridu, five centuries later, god-houses were set on mud-brick platforms, which were the origin of ziggurats. In a long central room, the god-idol on a platform at one end looked at an offering table at the other. And it is this Eridu sequence of sanctuaries up to the Ubaid culture in southern Iraq which, spreading over the whole of Mesopotamia around 4300 B.C., lays the foundations of the Sumerian civilization and its Babylonian successor which I consider in the next chapter. With cities of many thousands came the building of the huge monumental god-houses which characterize and dominate cities from then on, perhaps being hallucinogenic aids to everyone for miles around. To stand even today under such mountainous ziggurats as that of Ur, still heav-ing up above the excavated ruins of its once bicameral civiliza-
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tion, with its ramps of staircases rising to but half the height it once had, and to imagine its triple tier of temples on top rising into the sun is to feel the grip such architecture alone can have upon one’s mentality.
A Hittite Variation
The Hittites in the center of their capital, Hattusas, now Boghazkoy in central Turkey,2 had four huge temples with great granite sanctuaries that projected beyond the main fagades of the limestone walls to obtain lateral lighting for some huge idols.
But, perhaps taking the place of a ziggurat, that is, of a high place that could be seen wherever lands were being farmed, is the beautiful outdoor mountain shrine of Yazilikaya just above the city, its sanctuary walls streaming with reliefs of gods.3 That the mountains themselves were hallucinatory to the Hittites is indicated by relief sculptures still clearly visible on the rocks within the sanctuary, showing the usual stereotyped drawings of mountains topped with the heads and headdresses used for gods. As the Psalmist sings, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help.”
On one of the faces of this mountain temple, the robed king is carved in profile. Just behind him in the stone relief towers a god with a much loftier crown; the god’s right arm is outstretched, showing the king the way, while the god’s left arm is hugged around the king’s neck and grasps the king’s right wrist firmly. It is testament to an emblem of the bicameral mind.
The depicting of gods in long files, unique I think to the Hit-2 The Hittites may be an example of a group of nomadic tribes learning’ a bicameral civilization from their neighbors. It is the sudden intrusion of brightly decorated polychrome pottery among the burnished monochrome pottery of the Cappadocian plateau in the archaelogical record dating about 2100 b.c. that is taken to be the indication of their arrival, probably from the steppes of southern Russia.
3 Good photographs of Yazilikaya may be seen in Ch. 3 of Seton Lloyd, Early Highland Peoples of Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). An explanatory discussion may be found in Ekron Akurgal, Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey (Istanbul, 1969).
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Rock relief at Yazilikaya, about
1250 B.C. The god Sharruma
holds his steward-king, Tudha-
liys, in his embrace. The pretzel-
like hieroglyph for deity is seen
both as the head in the god's
ideogram on the upper left and
repetitively on the god's crown.
It is also seen in the king's ideo-
gram on the upper right, indicat-
ing, I think, that the king too was
'heard' in hallucination by his
subjects.
tites, suggests a solution to an old problem in Hittite research.
This is the translation of the important word pankush. Scholars originally interpreted it as signifying the whole human community, perhaps some sort of national assembly. But other texts have forced a revision of this to some kind of an elite. A further possibility, I suggest, is that it indicates the whole community of these many gods, and, particularly, the choice-decisions in which all the bicameral voices were in agreement. The fact that during the last century or so of Hittite rule, from around 1300 B.C., no mention of the pankush appears in any text could indicate their collective silence and the beginning of the troublous change toward subjectivity.
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Olmec and Maya
The earliest bicameral kingdoms of America are also characterized by these huge, otherwise useless centrally located buildings: the queer-shaped clumsy Olmec pyramid at La Venta of about 500 B.C. with its corridor of lesser mounds smothering mysterious jaguar-face mosaics; or the rash of great temple pyramids constructed about 200 B.C.4 The largest of them, the gigantic pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacan (literally “Place of the Gods”) has a greater cubic content than any in Egypt, being an eighth of a mile long on each side, and higher than a twenty-story building.5 A room for a god on its summit was reached by systems of steep stairs. And on top of the god-room, tradition states, there was a gigantic statue of the sun. A processional way flanked by other pyramids leads toward it, and, for miles around on the Mexican plateau, one can still see the remains of a great city, houses for priests, numerous courtyards, and smaller buildings, all of one story so that from anywhere in the city one could see the great pyramidal houses of gods.6
Beginning somewhat later, but co-temporaneous with Teotihuacan, are the many Maya cities in the Yucatan peninsula7
showing the same bicameral architecture, each city centering upon steeply rising pyramids topped with god-houses and richly decorated with Olmec-type jaguar masks and other murals and carvings, in which an endless variety of dragons with human faces crawl fiercely through the intricate stone decoration. Exceptionally interesting is the fact that some of the pyramids 4 See in this connection C. A. Burland, The Gods of Mexico (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967) ; and also G. H. S. Bushnell, The First Americans: The Pre-Columbian Civilizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
5 It was constructed of nearly 3 million tons of clay adobes, thus requiring* a tremendous number of man-hours. For a way of understanding such hand labor (Mesoamerica did not have the wheel), see p. 427.
6 See S. Linne, Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico (Stockholm: Ethnographic Museum of Sweden, 1934); also Miguel Covarrubias, Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (New York: Knopf, 1957).
7 See Victor W. von Hagen, World of the Maya (New York: New American Library, 1960).
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contain burials as in Egypt, perhaps indicating a phase in which the king was a god. In front of these Mayan pyramids are usually stelae carved with the figures of gods and glyphic inscriptions which have yet to be fully understood. Since this kind of writing is always in connection with religious images, it is possible that the hypothesis of the bicameral mind may assist in unwinding their mysteries.