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Euyuk

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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or Evuk (the eu pronounced as in French), a small village in Asia Minor, in the Angora vilayet, 12 m. N.N.E. of Boghaz Keui (Pieria), built on a mound which contains some remarkable ruins of a large building - a palace or sanctuary - anterior to the Greek period and belonging to the same civilization as the ruins and rock-reliefs at Pteria. These ruins consist of a gateway and an approach enclosed by two lateral walls, 15 ft. long, from the outer end of which two walls return outwards at right angles, one to right and one to left. The gateway is flanked by two huge blocks, each carved in front into the shape of a sphinx, while on the inner face is a relief of a two-headed eagle with wings displayed. Of the approach and its returning walls only the lower courses remain: they consist of large blocks adorned with a series of bas-reliefs similar in type to those carved on the rocks of Boghaz Keui. Behind the gateway is another vestibule leading to another portal which gives entra ice to the building, the lateral walls and abutments of the portal being also decorated with reliefs much worn. These reliefs belong to that pre-Greek oriental art generally called Hittite, of which there are numerous remains in the eastern half of the peninsula. It is now generally agreed that the scenes represented are religious processions. On the left returning wall is a train of priestly attendants headed by the chief priest and priestess (the latter carrying a lituus), clad in the dress of the deities they serve and facing an altar, behind which is an image of a bull on a pedestal (representing the god); then comes an attendant leading a goat and three rams for sacrifice, followed by more priests with litui or musical instruments, after whom comes a bull bearing on his back the sacred cista (?). On the lateral walls of the approach we have a similar procession of attendants Leaded by the chief priestess and priest, who pours a libation at the feet of the goddess seated on her throne; while on the right returning wall are fragments of a third procession approaching another draped figure of the goddess on her throne (placed at the angle opposite the bull on the pedestal), the train being again brought up by a bull.

These are all scenes in the ritual of the indigenous naturalistic religion which was spread, in slightly varying forms, all over Asia Minor, and consisted in the worship of the self-reproductive powers of nature, personified in the great mother-goddess (called by various names Cybele, Leto, Artemis, &c.) and the god her husband-and-son (Attis, Men, Sabazios, &c.), representing the two elements of the ultimate divine nature (see Great Mother Of The Gods). Here, as in the oriental mysteries generally, the goddess is made more prominent. Where Greek influence affects the native religion, emphasis tends to be laid on the god, but the character of the religion remains everywhere ultimately the same (see Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, ch. iii.).