Bentresh t1_izonnrc wrote
Reply to comment by Vesalii in A wall relief, comprising five figures carved on a bench in a communal building dating to the 9th millennium BC, was found in Sayburç, south-eastern Turkey, in 2021. It constitutes the earliest known depiction of a narrative ‘scene’ by -introuble2
The 9th millennium BCE is not really all that early; humans had been making art for millennia by that point.
Some have argued, for example, that far earlier cave paintings contain narrative scenes.
>Humans seem to have an adaptive predisposition for inventing, telling and consuming stories. Prehistoric cave art provides the most direct insight that we have into the earliest storytelling, in the form of narrative compositions or ‘scenes’ that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other, and from which one can infer actions taking place among the figures. The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe hosts the oldest previously known images of humans and animals interacting in recognizable scenes and of therianthropes—abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on)...
>Here we describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 (Sulawesi, Indonesia) that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.
“Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art” by Maxime Aubert, Rustan Lebe, et al. in Nature 576, 442–445 (2019)
-introuble2 OP t1_izoxsb1 wrote
Thank you!
"... in the form of narrative compositions or ‘scenes’ that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other..."
Though it isn't hard to understand what 'narrative scene' could mean, however, I can't always recognize it. In such and other examples, at least in my eyes it isn't always clear; i.e. when this should be considered one depiction of larger scale, or separated and independent somehow 'scenes', or in the end separated but connected [like 'panels'] 'telling a story'? Even if they were arranged horizontally
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