Sayburç · Communal building
The round, bedrock-cut communal building in Sayburç's northern area whose interior bench carries the five-figure relief argued to be the earliest known narrative scene in human art.
01
02
The northern communal building is a round, semi-subterranean special-purpose structure in the northern part of the Sayburç settlement. It was carved into the limestone bedrock and its stone-built walls rest on an interior bench that runs around the room — architecture made to be experienced from the inside, at close range, by people seated within it. Özdoğan gives the building a diameter of about 11 m. It is only partially excavated, because much of the site still lies beneath a standing modern village.
The bench itself is a built feature, not just a ledge: it is reported as roughly 0.6–0.8 m high and about 0.6 m wide, and its face carries a series of cavities about 0.4 m wide spaced along the wall. Özdoğan reads these cavities as evidence that the bench was originally partitioned by pillars — so the relief belonged to a fully built, articulated room rather than being an isolated carved surface.
03
Along the front face of the bench runs a row of five figures, carved on a panel reported as roughly 0.7–0.9 m high and about 3.7 m long. On one side, a male figure holding his phallus is flanked by two leopards with open mouths and bared teeth. On the other, a second squatting male — side-on, phallic, raising a hand and holding an object read as either a snake or a rattle — faces a charging aurochs whose body is shown in profile while its head is rendered from above so that both horns are visible.
The principal male figure is worked in high relief and projects into the room, facing the interior, while the surrounding figures are shallower. Özdoğan's central argument, published in Antiquity in 2022, is that these figures form a single connected narrative scene — figures that appear to react to one another in one event — rather than a set of separate symbols. That claim is carefully bounded: a reasoned interpretation of a composition, not a decoded story.
04
Unlike an isolated monument, this building sits inside an ordinary lived-in settlement of houses, hearths and food-preparation areas. Özdoğan stresses that the same T-shaped monoliths appear in both domestic and communal contexts at Sayburç, with public buildings marked out by centrally placed stones — so the communal building is best read as the elaborated, shared end of a single architectural tradition rather than a separate 'sanctuary'. The occupation is short and essentially single-layer, placed in the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic A into the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, with radiocarbon framing discussed around 8650–8300 BCE — a chronology Özdoğan gives in interview and which fuller publication is expected to confirm.
05
Özdoğan's central reading, published in Antiquity (2022): the five figures are not a set of separate motifs but a single connected situation — an event, story or myth — laid out horizontally along the bench 'like a film strip', perhaps to recall or preserve a story the community already knew. This is a carefully bounded interpretation of a composition, not a decoded tale.
Özdoğan interprets the phallic and male imagery here — and in the wider region — as emphasising maleness, masculinity, power and control rather than simply reproduction or fertility. Offered as interpretation.
Özdoğan stresses that images like these must be interpreted through their archaeological context, and warns that isolated objects lifted out of that context invite false or sensational explanations — a methodological caution that shapes how the panel should be read.
06
The objects recorded for this building, gathered as one catalogue. Where a full object page exists, it is linked from the card.
07
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →
Last reviewed 7 October 2026. Something wrong?
