A graphic communication system shared among ancient Neolithic societies?

 By analyzing images and figurative objects created more than ten thousand years ago by societies spread between present-day Turkey and northern Syria, scholars from the University of Bologna have highlighted a series of visual codes with associative, repeated and interconnected rules.

Did ancient Neolithic societies already develop a shared and standardized graphic communication system ? This is the hypothesis put forward by Mattia Cartolano and Silvia Ferrara, scholars at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna, in an analysis published in the Cambridge Archaelogical Journal .

The study shows that already in the early stages of the Neolithic, more than ten thousand years ago, societies spread between present-day Turkey and northern Syria produced images inserted into a system of visual codes with associative, repeated and interconnected rules.

"We have identified some figures with particular traits, for example X-shaped snakes and stylised birds, which follow layouts and structures corresponding to specific and codified messages", explains Silvia Ferrara . "It is therefore likely that the creation of codified sequences of this type had a significant impact on the social life of ancient cultures already in the Neolithic era".

During the early stages of the Neolithic (9,700–6,600 BC), several innovations emerged among human settlements in the Near East and Anatolia , including the domestication and breeding of animals, the first crops and the birth of the first large villages. All these innovations had a profound impact on the development of social relations and were also reflected in material culture, with many elements showing the presence of contacts and connections between different and distant communities.

Among these elements, the production of images and figurative objects played a central role. By analyzing various finds from ancient archaeological sites, scholars from the Alma Mater have therefore tried to identify the presence of graphic codes: clear and easily understandable motifs that can be combined and related to each other.

"The finds we have analysed show that several Neolithic communities, living in the regions between Syria and Turkey, relied on shared graphic codes to mediate their increasingly numerous and complex relationships with animals, plants and other human groups", confirms Mattia Cartolano . "Comparing the images and inscriptions that have emerged from archaeological sites, we observe an experimental phase in which a series of different communicative approaches are tested and modified over time".

In a phase of great socioeconomic changes, with the birth of the first large agricultural villages and the domestication of animals and plants, it is therefore conceivable that the first Neolithic communities began to use a series of codified images as their first means of communication.

"This system is clearly not linear or continuous, but includes experimental phases and exploratory attempts with various communicative approaches", specifies Silvia Ferrara . "However, the development of shared graphic systems may have been crucial in influencing social and cultural dynamics during this important prehistoric phase".

The study was published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal with the title "Codes in the Making. A New Appraisal of Neolithic Imagery in Southwest Asia". The authors are Mattia Cartolano and Silvia Ferrara of the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna .

https://magazine.unibo.it/archivio/2025/03/13/un-sistema-di-comunicazione-grafica-condiviso-tra-le-antiche-societa-del-neolitico