The world's oldest known botanical art, from the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia around 6000 BCE, hides fascinating cultural shifts in its seemingly simple motifs, a new study reveals.
The decorated pottery marks an early appreciation of the artistic value of plants, the study authors say, and the precise numbering seen in the flower petals depicted also demonstrates a surprisingly sophisticated mathematical way of thinking.
Not because our ancestors lacked the cognition for math, but because we have no evidence for written numerical symbols until the emergence of proto-cuneiform number signs from around 3300 to 3000 BCE – thousands of years later, from sites in southern Mesopotamia.
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"These vessels represent the first moment in history when people chose to portray the botanical world as a subject worthy of artistic attention," say archaeologists Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"It reflects a cognitive shift tied to village life and a growing awareness of symmetry and aesthetics."
In their study, Garfinkel and Krulwich painstakingly cataloged, compared, and analyzed the plant motifs on Halafian pottery from 29 archaeological sites.
"Identifying artistic motifs involves a certain degree of interpretation," the pair emphasizes.
"Many pottery sherds presented here as decorated with [plant] motifs were not recognized as such by the archaeologists who published them."
Garfinkel and Krulwich conclude, based on their analysis, that the plants depicted – flowers, seedlings, shrubs, branches, and towering trees – probably aren't related to agriculture, since they are not food plants.
Rather, the duo argues that the art may be rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of plant beauty and symmetry, arising from an early awareness of mathematical patterns.
"The ability to divide space evenly, reflected in these floral motifs, likely had practical roots in daily life, such as sharing harvests or allocating communal fields," Garfinkel says.
This idea is echoed in the way the plants are depicted – evenly distributed across the surface of the pottery, motifs repeated in strict sequences, and in what is perhaps the most intriguing pattern, the number of petals on the flower motifs.
Many bowls, the researchers found, feature one or more flowers whose petals follow a geometric sequence: 4, 8, 16, and 32. This is a deliberate progression of numbers strongly indicative of mathematical reasoning. Some bowls even display 64 flowers, also following this sequence.
"These patterns show that mathematical thinking began long before writing," Krulwich says. "People visualized divisions, sequences, and balance through their art."
The research has been published in the Journal of World Prehistory.