Some time a long time ago, Man discovered that fulfilling basic needs, rinsing and repeating was not enough any more.
A need for more arose from the fulfilment of the basics. Aesthetics, art albeit primitive art, gave rise to culture. Culture morphed into civilization.
Religion followed suit. You add civilization and religion, and you have the modern world.
A search for more has taken Man from a troglodyte existence into the age of AI.
But it all started one day, when the crops were being harvested by rustic Neolithic people in the centre of Anatolia. They must have decided they owed it all their bounty, their happiness, their children, the happiness of their wives and mothers and fathers, to the one and only Sun God.
And they started worshipping it. A natural occurrence.
Later on they added other deities to their polytheistic Pantheon because why have one God for everything when you can have 10 dedicated gods for everything important.
The ancient used gods like Christians used saints: lots and lots, with reckless abandon, for every ailment and state of mind and imagined use.
One day, hundreds of years after that harvest festival, one of their high priests, in charge of the state religion of Hattay and later on Hattusa, must have wanted to signify to the people that he alone could commune with the Gods, via special incantation, habits, or rites.
He decided he was going to wear a pointed hat.
That was good. It made an impact. People appreciated his new look, domestically and abroad. Some other locales (Akkad, Babylon) even borrowed the notion and made it their own. Cultural appropriation is the name of the game and that’s how the cookie has always crumbled, baby.
In no time, i.e., cca. 3,200 years ago, around the time the Bronze Age was making place for the Age of Iron, Hattusa artists started to capture via bas-reliefs their religious rituals as can be seen below.
Because of that, two days ago, the chiseled art of Hattusa artisans met the light of our Sun and got captured by my phone’s camera, which performed an act indistinguishable from magic for the Ancient ones.
Time travel happens every day, folks. It’s called photography.
Today, in another time travel experience, I witnessed the most interesting ritual: the flying dervish of Cappadoccia.
You see, Cappadoccia lies exactly where Hattusa was born, lived as a great empire, and died as all empires do.
But not everything dies with them. Tradition lives on.
Now the ritual dance, recitation, lyrics and demeanour of the dervish is clearly Islamic in character. But the choreography is pre-Islamic. In my mind, is pre-Byzantine, pre-Christian, pre-Roman, and even predates the Iron Age.
Like the ancient Romanian folk dance called “Călușarii”, that hails from the depths of the Neolithic, the dervish dance routine is a clear link to the Hattusa past of this region of Anatolia.
History is Everything. We are mere vessels communicating knowledge across the gulf of space and time. Somewhere sometime someone will make use of some of the things we do or say in our time.
Inch’Allah! God willing! Amen!
Götterdämmerung 