Images from the Larousse Encyclopedia of Ancient and Medieval History (1963)
About 10,000 years ago, a great revolution took place. The previously nomadic tribes of the Paleolithic started settling down. They introduced farming, village life and a new kind of art. This time is called the Neolithic.
It sprang from the fertile soils in the area between Egypt and Iran and gradually spread across the globe. As it spread, the new art styles became localised and so regional styles were born.
What was so special about this `new age’? Previously, art had been a way of expressing the world of nature. Paleolithic artists covered surfaces with representations of the animals they hunted and shared their lives with. They used natural thins like bone and gut and skin from these animals, and shells and unpolished minerals to create the new necessities of life, like clothes, tools and needles, and some ornamentation, like jewellery and small clay statues.
But with settlement and time to ponder and relinquish oneself to the Creative Fire, a new form of art arose – abstractionism. This took its earliest form in pottery. The Neolithic people were mad about pots. They made huge numbers of them, many of which have come down to us intact. I imagine both men and women had a hand in this ancient art – certainly pots would be needed by both sexes. But what really makes them stand out is that they are such a rich vein of early abstract art styles.
This new style did not copy from the pragmatic forms of nature, but from its abstract forms – the swirl of waves, the ridges in sand, the curve of hills, the jagged shapes of mountains, and, it must be suspected, the patterns found on animal hides.
But these new artists did not choose to make abstract geometric patterns because they were easier. Take a look at the spiral pot above. The spirals are Grecian in their precise geometry but they were not made by Greeks – at least, not by artisans of the famous Kingdom of Ancient Greece, which came much later.
The undulating waves of the second pot suggest waves upon the ocean, or perhaps ribbons of cloud. This beautiful new art flowed around the generous swell of the pots, creatin objects that were both practical and aesthetically pleasing. Nor were the neolithic experiments in art confined to pottery – they were the first to use polished stones in jewellery and with no cave walls to decorate, they moved on to decorating their increasingly comfortable homes and temples.
The Neolithic people did not have the reservations about the human form of their Paleolithic ancestors – they delighted in its representation. Naturalistic forms were not forgotten – but the new abstract styles were to have an even more far reaching consequences for artists of the pen and the word processor.
For the writers among us, we found our creative beginnings here, in the simple geometric forms found on these pots. The stylistic simplicity of these symbolic forms led the way directly to the concept of writing. Into this is inextricably woven the development of language.
Neanderthals were not silent, nor did they merely howl and grunt at each other. Soft tissues do not become fossils, but we know neanderthals could speak because of the discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid bone in Israel proved that they were capable of speech, and DNA retrieved from fossils show that they had the genes which make speech possible. So language was born in this most unlikely place, inhabited by creatures we always thought of as utterly primitive.
The paleolithic era saw the development of speech as we know it today, although what languages these early ancestors used is lost in time. That is because nothing was ever recorded of their communication with each other.
But the neolithic became increasingly complex, as communities settled and began trading their surplus produce with each other. The invention of writing was for strictly pragmatic reasons, a way of keeping record by inscribing symbols into clay. This grew out of the creative process of conveying meaning in abstract ways, such as on these pots.
It came from a creative process, and not unexpectedly, it soon went back there and became absorbed by it. The world’s oldest writing, not account keeping, comes from Vedic India. The world’s oldest known creative writing is the Epic Poem of Gilgamesh, written in clay tablets in Ancient Sumer 5000 years ago.
From a pot to an epic poem – from a stylus to a pen to a word processor. The Creative Fire cannot be quenched.
