Stone Hills,
Inside the Wilderness
World's First Civic Law · Protrusile Petroglyph · Natural vs Involuntary · The Generative Foundation of Civilisation
The Royal Symmetry post develops the full symbolic chain from Sayburç to the pyramid. This post focuses on the Sayburç relief itself — what it shows, what Cambridge has skipped over, and why it is the foundation of everything that follows.
What Is Being Uncovered & What Is Being Covered Up
Today's revelations from the ancient world — from the first known settlements of civil society — are being largely halted in Turkey after the covering up of the remainder of the Göbekli Tepe site with olive trees. For future generations, free from the threat of a new flood, to uncover for themselves. But the Stone Hills Project continues the serious and utterly vital work of understanding humanity's origins at the dawn of civilisation, based on what we already have from this new progenitor society — the forebearers of the Hittites.
Active excavations at ten sites including Göbeklitepe, Karahantepe, Sayburç, Çakmaktepe, Sefertepe, Gürcütepe, Harbetsuvan and Yeni Mahalle are ongoing as of August 2024, led by Prof. Necmi Karul of Istanbul University. Year-round settlement evidence from approximately 9,600 BCE has been confirmed at Karahantepe. The sites collectively represent the first known example of sedentism and social union on Earth — the first organised labour, the first specialisation, the first civic structures. Archaeology Magazine (March/April 2024) describes the Sayburç relief as "a portion of what may be the world's first narrative." Seven standing stones arranged in a circle around a central stone have also been newly unearthed at Sayburç in the same excavation season. As of December 2024, the Turkish Ministry of Culture has allocated dedicated tourism funding to develop Sayburç as a visitor destination, with Turkish Airlines partnership confirmed.
Linking ministries across regions, states and with united international support — including collaboration with German universities and the Berlin Museum for Asia Minor — to uncover the structures buried by the ancient people of modern-day Turkey, the Stone Hills Project is a noble example of collaborative enterprise. Anything less than full engagement with what these sites contain damages the well-being and integrity of our fragile civilisation, by producing ignorance — which leads to dangerous carelessness for the sanctuary that is planet Earth.
The Sayburç relief has been noted in the academic literature as the world's first narrative scene. What has not been addressed — by Cambridge, by the mainstream archaeological press, or by the official Stone Hills Project communications — is the specific social content of what the narrative depicts: the explicitly phallic male figure, the female figure bracing for impact, the beasts, the civic law implications. The relief has been described as "remarkable" and "complex." Its actual argument has been left to this blog.
Protrusile & Inscribed — Two Fashions of Rock, Two Registers of Meaning
The Sayburç relief, Karahantepe, Turkey, c.9,600 BCE. The world's oldest known narrative scene. The male figure (right) protrudes in high relief — protrusile technique — in phallic posture, surrounded by two predators. The female figure (left) is inscribed rather than protruding, facing an apparent bull impact. The medium itself differentiates the two registers of the narrative.
The site contains two varieties of petroglyph: the inscribed image and the protrusile image. The imagery appears as a quintet conveying two humans with two functions — the inner and outer function thereby differentiated. The male image protrudes from the stone. The female image is inscribed into it. The medium is the first layer of meaning, before any reading of the figures themselves begins.
The male figure protrudes from the stone wall in high relief — the protrusile technique enacting what it depicts. He is in phallic posture. Two predators surround him. The scene does not hold true to literal reality: a man surrounded by tigers intent on him is either commanding them or being consumed by them. The reading offered here is that his sexual presence — rendered in the protrusion from stone itself — is depicted as equally powerful as two hungry tigers. His genitalia, in the affair of two inverting forces, pronounces a generative authority that the predators acknowledge rather than overcome. Chinese medicine preserves the reverse of this logic: the ingestion of tiger testicles as the acquisition of that potency.
The female figure is inscribed rather than protruding — a different commitment of the artist, a different register of the narrative. She is unknown to and behind the tiger, facing an apparently imminent threat of impalement by a bull. Her posture is reminiscent of Spanish corrida — bracing for impact, with what appears to be a fabric or garb in hand, teasing the bull's approach while preparing to receive it. Her breasts are visible front-facing, contrary to the neck or collar attire of the male. The reciprocity is structural: the forceful and ever-natural sexual approach of the male finds an equally forceful reception in the female figure to the left.
What the Relief Was Instructing & Whom It Was Addressing
These figures present a very dominant archetype for a patriarchal society — where women doubtfully wrestle bulls, and men more doubtfully tame tigers. In this originally centralised society, we can expect a far more indicative opposition with the natural world, where members may choose to centralise or choose to go wild. If entry into the metropolis meant obedience to laws — the restriction of going wild at this location — what is conveyed here is instruction to both males and females entering the civic space.
As a wilder citizen entering the complex, taking observations, making adherences to the lore — now apart of a plan, and not freely determined by desires in the wild, but limited in ways of living among others, ways such as not hurting another person.
The youthful intentions to family are described here: where the young male's propensity to gratification does not equal a young female's ability to satiate — indicative in the context of her bracing for impact whilst he is sexually active. This may indeed be a premier instruction for any youth, likewise for new citizens entering from the wild, whether of deliberate intention to join the civilisation, or by accident, and recovery from the wild by the arbiters of this society.
It is on good laurels that this may be the lore of the first recorded law against rape.
The natural male force depicted here is not being celebrated without qualification. It is being depicted within a framework of predators — powers that match and surround it. The female figure is not passive — she is actively bracing, managing, responding. The scene's instruction is bilateral: the male's generative authority is real and natural; the female's reception is equally forceful and is not without agency. The civic law encoded here is precisely that the natural force exists, has a corresponding natural female response, and that civil society is the structure within which these forces are governed rather than suppressed or shamed. This is the foundation on which every subsequent civic law regarding sexual conduct — from the Code of Hammurabi onward — implicitly stands.
What the Relief Shows That the Clinical Framework Cannot Say
The Sayburç figure is the oldest surviving statement of a principle that every subsequent civilisation either preserved, encoded, or suppressed: male generative power as a natural force — not a loss of control, not an involuntary event, not a pathology requiring clinical management. The erection protrudes from the stone in the same way the figure protrudes: it is the natural state of a man present and alive in the world, expressed at the scale of civic architecture.
The modern clinical reclassification of male arousal as involuntary — something that happens to a man, requiring external governance — is not neutral physiology. It is the Abrahamic desacralisation expressed in medical language. The Sayburç civilisation knew the difference between the natural force and its ungoverned expression. They depicted both, and governed the second without shaming the first.
The question this raises — does depicting the erection as natural obligate others to honour it, and does it dismiss the idea of rape? — is answered by the relief itself. The law is in the scene. The female figure is not shown in submission. She is shown in active, forceful, bilateral engagement with a threat as large as the male's. The civic law encoded here says: your nature is given. The governance of its expression is what you are entering this settlement to receive. That is not a licence. That is the most sophisticated statement of sexual civic ethics in the archaeological record — and it predates every legal code we know of by thousands of years.
The Royal Symmetry post contains the dedicated section on natural vs involuntary, the paideia argument, and the full historical arc of desacralisation. This post is the archaeological foundation; that post is the philosophical and symbolic development.
Originally published December 2022. Updated September 2024 to incorporate new findings from the March/April 2024 Archaeology Magazine feature and August 2024 excavation reports. The reading of the Sayburç relief as the world's first recorded law against rape is original to this blog and has not been addressed in the mainstream academic literature. The natural vs involuntary argument is developed in full in the Royal Symmetry post (January 2023). humanityqualifies.blogspot.com · Jason Steven Jowett
