Deer and Birds at Sos Höyük

Last time we were looking at the Kura-Araxes culture of the Early Bronze Age. The Erzurum Museum now lets us take a step forward, into the Middle Bronze Age—roughly 2000 to 1500 BC.

This time the finds come from Sos Höyük, one of the key archaeological sites of eastern Anatolia, dug for a decade from the mid-1990s by an Australian team from the University of Melbourne under Antonio Sagona—which is why a good deal of the literature on it is in English.

What they found includes some beautiful polychrome pottery, painted with geometric ornament and with animal figures. The engaging deer and birds are not merely decoration but an entire symbolic language, in which ideas about nature, the cycles of life and, quite possibly, ritual practice are all woven together.

Meanwhile, elsewhere

These vessels were made and used in the same centuries in which the Minoan palace at Knossos was at its height and the bull-leaping frescoes were being painted; in which Egypt was in its Middle Kingdom and Senusret III was campaigning in Nubia; and in which Babylon was steadily rising, until a king called Hammurabi had his laws cut into a slab of diorite.

And somewhere out here, on the Anatolian plateau, in very small settlements indeed, people were living a cultural life no less full than any of that—and left behind painted jugs and bowls which, four thousand years later, are still cheering us up with their bright birds and deer.