If I had to characterise this volume in two words they would be ‘vintage Monah’. From the opening sentence, it is clear that the framework within which the figurines of the Cucuteni-Tripolye groups of Old Europe (fifth to third millennia BC in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine) will be discussed is religion. Indeed, despite his own warning that “it is meaningless to invent mythologies and names of Gods” (p. 2), Monah's persistent rhetoric and recurrent arguments throughout the volume unequivocally relate these prehistoric figurines to Anatolian and Greek mythologies and their divine pantheons. Thus, not only are the human representations he studies termed “idols” (p. 6) and suggested to represent, among other divinities, Potnia Theron (p. 131), or to feature in rituals such as hieros gamos, but he also introduces an art-historical vocabulary (e.g. bas-relief, ronde-bosse) to describe these images. The theoretical foundations underpinning Monah's approach—comparative religion and the history of religion—is almost entirely borrowed from Mircea Eliade with minor additions from James Frazer, Erich Neumann and Olaf Höckmann.
The introductory chapter may be of some interest for the non-Eastern European reader for examples of irrational attitudes to the interpretation of figurines, but it does not outline the content of the book. What is clearly stated, however, is that Monah does not favour statistical analysis, which reflects his selective use of numbers (e.g. in his discussion of cardinal points) and disregard for the overwhelming number of fragmentary figurines that do not support his interpretation (see below). Moreover, although it is clear that not all Cucuteni-Tripolye figurines are illustrated in Monah's volume, the introduction does not state whether all of the figurines that are illustrated are actually discussed in the accompanying text.
Chapter 1 deals with the history of figurine research, in which the legacy and longevity of some ideas are identified. Chapter 2, one of the longest, discusses site by site the conditions under which the figurines were discovered. Monah argues for a random distribution of figurines, which is his way of saying that the majority of the figurines were not found in primary contexts. He divides the contexts into ritual (e.g. sanctuaries) and non-ritual (e.g. pits), and thereby creates a circular argument—sanctuaries are defined through the presence of complete figurines, and figurines are ritual objects because they are found in sanctuaries. He further postulates an essentialist and deterministic relationship between complete figurines and sacred contexts, maintaining that any other combination (e.g. fragments in pits) is not representative of the function and use of figurines; the only exception is when broken figurines are taken to indicate ‘ritual’ breakage.
The key message of Chapter 3, ‘Material and techniques’, is that technology also has a deep, religious significance, namely the fact that the majority of the figurines are made of two halves. In later chapters, this finding is related to the ‘binary’ nature of the portrayed character: the ‘duality of the spirit’, androgyny, coincidentia oppositorum and so on.
The next three chapters present Monah's formal typology of Cucuteni-Tripolye figurines, despite his statement in Chapter 8 that “formal typology has no certain religious relevance, therefore to decipher religion, a different approach is needed” (p. 103). These chapters all follow the same structure; having defined his ten typological criteria—technological, dimensional, positional, compositional, modelling, ornamental, age, maternity, sexual and artistic—examples of each type are then discussed in detail. The total number of figurines of each type is unclear, but, if anyone is interested in large figurines (KIIC) or seated statuettes with undifferentiated legs (KIIIB2a), his classification is a very useful reference point. The discussion is an eclectic combination of detailed description of finds and contexts, Monah's own ideas and experience, references to key sites supporting his views, and concepts derived from his selected scholarly influences. The spatial distributions of figurines are often discussed, although no distribution maps are provided.
Chapters 7–11 refer to violin-shaped bone pendants, anthropomorphic pots and objects, ceramics with anthropomorphic decoration and garments, footwear, jewellery and hairstyles. The teleological rationale is that, even though made of different materials, these images share the common denominator of the human form and therefore should convey the same function and significance as ‘sacred objects’. Thus, despite the weak links of many of these varied objects to ritual paraphernalia, in these chapters, Monah persists with his core topic, leading the reader into the final crescendo on great religious themes.
Chapter 12 explores recurrent themes including Potnia Theron, hieros gamos and concepts such as coincidentia oppositorum; but the overarching topic is the ‘Great Mother’. Monah is clear that his conclusions are not necessarily valid across the whole of south-eastern Europe, but refer primarily to the Cucuteni-Tripolye region. He is also clear that what he offers is not a reconstruction of religion but a thematic typology of epiphanies and kratophanies, that is, the appearance and realisation of sacred power.
Monah's volume is an English version of two previous Romanian editions (Reference Monah1997; 2012). It presents a mixture of a very literate reading of the evidence interleaved with more abstract concepts (e.g. transubstantiation, simulacrum, sympathetic magic). The Western European scholar will struggle with the structure and the nature of the arguments, which are much more at home within the Eastern European literature. These arguments often take a diversion, which, although interesting, makes the overall style of argumentation difficult to follow. A better structure would have been to place the details and description in a catalogue and to have made the chapters more discursive. The English reader may also find the language arcane. The text would have benefited from editing and proofreading by a native speaker (the most embarrassing mistake being the repetition of the same title for Chapters 4 and 5).
This volume by the late Dan Monah shows erudition in amassing all sorts of evidence, mostly from mythology and comparative religion, to make a case for the essentialist and universalistic religious associations of anthropomorphic images, which for sceptics like me remains unconvincing. Even if, however, the interpretation is not innovative, this does not diminish the value of the wealth of information presented in this richly illustrated volume.
