NO. 13 SOVIET ANTHROPOLOGY — FIELD 85 



artistically and yet archaic, with cattle-raising, agricultural settlements 

 with protective cyclopean walls, circular houses, huilt with mud hricks, 

 with high flues raised above the hearths, and traces of the cult of the 

 domestic fire and of a female goddess. 



The development of artistic pottery took place locally, not in the 

 direction of the application of colored painting (Tell Halaf, Samarra, 

 Al Ubaid, Elam styles), but along the lines of the refined use of the 

 still earlier traditions of black polishing and of a gutterlike design of 

 the pottery. This had a pink inner surface of the type from Sak- 

 chegozy and proto-Hittite Akhlatlibel near Ankara, with its suspected 

 western connections on which depend the peculiarities of the South 

 Caucasian Chalcolithic stage. For example, here developed the spiral 

 motif, foreign to Mesopotamia ; the unusual restriction of the design 

 to only one side, the front of the vessels, springing perhaps from the 

 facial urn of western Asia Minor; the presence of earthenware hearth 

 stands of the Alishar and Aegean "homed altar" type; and finally, 

 partly the construction of "tholoi," which are completely absent, for 

 example, in the corresponding lower layer of Pcrsepolis. 



All this taken together changes radically the customary historical 

 perspective and opens up new possibilities for the understanding of 

 the early processes of the cultural and ethnic formation of the South 

 Caucasus. This throws light on the conditions causing the appearance 

 of the brilliant cultural rise in the Middle Bronze Age, revealed in 

 Trialeti. and on the proposition made by Kuftin concerning the 

 aboriginality of Georgian culture in the Caucasus. 



ARMENIA 



Georg Goyan reports " from Yerevan that his recent researches 

 on the history of ancient Armenian drama reveal that in 58 B. C. the 

 theater was on a high professional level, performing in both Greek 

 and Armenian, the latter being the official language during the reign 

 of Tigranes. Plutarch, for example, recorded that Euripides' "Bac- 

 chante" was* presented in Artashat in 58 B. C. in honor of the victory 

 of the .Armenians and Parthians over the Roman legions of Marcus 

 Crassus. Excavations are now in progress. 



DON REGION 



Tsymliansk gorodishchc. — The Sarkcl expedition of IIMK, under 

 the leadership of Liapushkin.'^ resumed work in 1939 after a 3-year 



^^ From the Moscow News, February 9, 1946. 



*• Liapushkin, I. I., in Kratkie Soobshcheniia, No. 4, pp. 58-62. 



