The find
In late 2022, Eylem Özdoğan published the Sayburç reliefs in the journal Antiquity. Along a bench inside a communal building runs a scene of five figures: a man holding his phallus flanked by two leopards, and a squatting figure with a rattle or snake facing a charging aurochs.
Özdoğan argued this is not a set of separate images but a single connected scene — the earliest known depiction of a 'narrative' in art, dating to the mid-ninth millennium BCE.
Why it matters
If the reading holds, Sayburç marks a shift: from a Neolithic art of isolated symbols toward something like storytelling. It deepens what these carvings could do, and it did so with a relief found in place, on the wall it was made for.