The Hearth That Smiles Back

You may remember that we have already met the Kura-Araxes culture, in the museum at Van. Well, now we have reached the Araxes itself, which rises not far from Erzurum and skirts the Lesser Caucasus to the south.

And here we were ambushed by some altogether charming objects: anthropomorphic terracotta fittings from an Early Bronze Age cooking hearth. Look at them. Faces, gazing out at you from a depth of five thousand years.

To see how the hearth itself worked, I found an illustration in an Iranian scholarly paper; the Erzurum type is marked “2.” The design is beautifully simple: an open ring with three upright supports. You lit the fire inside it and stood the cooking pot on top, and the gap in the ring let you blow on the embers and feed in fresh wood.

The date, for scale

3200–2000 BC.

Which is to say a thousand years before Troy and fifteen hundred before Moses. In Egypt the first pyramids were only just going up. In England, at very much the same time, men were dragging the sarsens into place at Stonehenge—and while they were about it, the people of the Araxes country were cooking their dinner on these smiling stoves.

The megalith-builders got the monuments and the tourism. This lot got the better hob.