3,300-YEAR-OLD SHRINES USED FOR READING FUTURE UNCOVERED IN ARMENIA
10:10, 20 Feb 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
Three shrines, dating back about 3,300 years, have been discovered
within a hilltop fortress at Gegharot, in Armenia, according to an
article published by Live Science.
Local rulers at the time likely used the shrines for divination, a
practice aimed at predicting the future, the archaeologists involved
in the discovery say.
Each of the three shrines consists of a single room holding a clay
basin filled with ash and ceramic vessels. A wide variety of artifacts
were discovered including clay idols with horns, stamp seals, censers
used to burn substances and a vast amount of animal bones with markings
on them. During divination practices, the rulers and diviners may
have burnt some form of substances and drank wine, allowing them to
experience “altered” states of mind, the archaeologists say.
“The logic of divination presumes that variable pathways articulate
the past, present and future, opening the possibility that the link
between a current situation and an eventual outcome might be altered,”
write Adam Smith and Jeffrey Leon, in an article published recently in
the American Journal of Archaeology. Smith is a professor at Cornell
University, and Leon is a graduate student there.
The fortress at Gegharot is one of several strongholds built at around
this time in Armenia. “Evidence to date suggests that this coordinated
process of fortress construction was part of the emergence of a
single polity that built and occupied multiple sites in the region,”
write Smith and Leon.
Smith believes that Gegharot would have been used as an occult center
for the rulers. “I would think that this is probably a cult center
largely specializing in servicing the emerging rulers from the ruling
class,” he told Live Science in an interview.
At the time, writing had not yet spread to this part of Armenia so
the name of the polity, and its rulers, are unknown.
Smith and Leon found evidence for three forms of divination at
Gegharot. One form was osteomancy, trying to predict the future through
rituals involving animal bones, in this case the knucklebones of cows,
sheep and goat.
The knucklebones, which were covered in burns and other markings,
would have been rolled like dice in rituals attempting to predict the
future, Smith said. “You would roll them and depending upon whether
the scorched side or the marked side came up you would get a different
interpretation,” Smith said.
Lithomancy, trying to predict the future through the use of stone,
also appears to have been practiced at Gegharot. Inside a basin at one
shrine, archaeologists found 18 small pebbles. “These stones appear
to have been selected for their smooth, rounded shape and their color
palette, which ranged from black and dark gray to white, green and
red,” Smith and Leon write. How exactly these unmarked stones would
have been used in rituals is unknown.
At one shrine, on the fortress’ east citadel, the archaeologists
found an installation used to grind flour. Smith and Leon think that
this flour could have been used to predict the future in a practice
called aleuromancy.
“What is conspicuous about the grinding installation in the east
citadel shrine is the lack of a formal oven for bread baking,” Smith
and Leon write. The shrine’s basin “was clearly used for burning
materials and certainly could have been used to bake small balls of
dough, but it is unlikely that it would have been used to cook loaves
of bread.”
Stamp seals found at the shrine would have allowed people to punch
a variety of shapes into dough. “One possibility (admittedly among
many others) is that the stamps marked the dough that was then used
for aleuromancy.”
The shrines were in use for a century or so until the surrounding
fortress, along with all the other fortresses in the area, were
destroyed. The site was largely abandoned after this, Smith said.
At the time, there was a great deal of conflict in the south Caucasus
with a number of regional polities fighting against each other,
Smith said. The polity that controlled Gegharot seems to have been
wiped out in one of those conflicts.
Although the rulers who controlled Gegharot put great effort into
trying to predict and change the future, it was to no avail — their
great fortresses being torched in a cataclysm they could not avoid.
Excavations at the shrines are part of the American-Armenian Project
for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies
(Project ArAGATS).
The west terrace shrine was excavated in 2003, the west citadel shrine
in 2008, and the east citadel shrine in 2010 and 2011.