Archaeological findings from the Anatolian city of Cayonu contains evidence of a social revolution in the year 7200 BCE that installed a egalitarian, communist society lasting three thousand years.
The lower layers of building structures demonstrate a shift from hunting and gathering to a patriarchal class society. Temples contained blood-encrusted daggers from human sacrifices, and one temple contained seven hundred skeletons stacked to the ceiling.[1] Skulls were kept alongside the remains of hunted animals, leading David Graeber and David Wengrow to see the culture as showing the development of a cultural connection between hunting and social domination.[2]
Then, in 7200 BCE, there apparently occurred a social revolution according to Bernhard Brosius. Temples and large manors were burnt down and replaced with houses that were just as large but were roughly the same size. Slums and inferior shacks disappeared.
Brosius summarizes:
Not only did the revolutionaries of those remote times succeed in overthrowing a regime thousands of years old, bloody and exploitative - moreover, they also succeeded in developing their own alternative society, devising and realizing it. The social revolution of the year 7200 B.C. is the hour of the birth of neolithic communism. An egalitarian, classless society arises in which women and men are equal, a society which rapidly spreads over the whole of Anatolia and almost simultaneously over the Balcans and which endures for 3000 years.[3]
One of Brosius's sources is a paper by Turkish archeologist Mehmet Özdoğan which describes that across Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe, "some sort of social turbulence" was followed by "a much more egalitarian rural economy than the centralised system of Syro-Mesopotamia." Özdoğan reports that "specifically-built temples or cult buildings are totally absent both in Anatolian and Southeast European Neolithic cultures" and that "there is no indicatiojn of either any environmental deterioration or deforestation."[4]
- ↑ Bernhard Brosius, "From Çayönü to Çatalhöyük: Emergence and development of an egalitarian society", urkommunismus.de, 2005, http://www.urkommunismus.de/catalhueyuek_en.html.
- ↑ David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 244.
- ↑ Brosius, "From Çayönü to Çatalhöyük."
- ↑ Mehmet Özdoğan, "The Beginnings of Neolithic Economies in Southeastern Europe: An Anatolian Perspective," Journal of European Archeology 5, no. 2 (1997): 16-17.