Çatalhöyük

The story

A city without streets

If you could look down on Çatalhöyük, in Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, you would not see streets or squares, but a spread of flat roofs, all at the same level, one next to another, like the keys of a keyboard. The houses were joined, with shared walls, with no space in between. Walking round the village meant walking on the roofs, from one house to another, and to enter a house you had to climb down through an opening in the ceiling by a wooden ladder. The smoke from the hearth went out through the same opening.

The name Çatalhöyük is Turkish and means “fork mound”: “çatal” is a fork and “höyük” an artificial hill, formed, as at Jericho, by layers of villages one on top of another. The place is in the Konya plain, in the centre of Anatolia. Today it is a field of dry grass with two mounds, one bigger and one smaller, but once marshes, reed beds and fields stretched around it.

From discovery to modern excavations

The mound was noticed in 1958 by the British archaeologist James Mellaart, who recognised it as an important place. From 1961 to 1965 he dug it and brought to light houses with wall paintings that nobody expected, and a clay statuette of a seated woman with two big cats at her sides. Mellaart thought she was a “Mother Goddess”, and Çatalhöyük became famous all over the world. After him, from 1993, a new research team led by the English archaeologist Ian Hodder, with scholars from many countries, resumed the excavations with modern techniques: chemical analyses, the study of seeds, of animal bones, of DNA. These studies have corrected many ideas of the past, and today it is thought that the “Mother Goddess” is too simple an interpretation.

How people lived

The village was inhabited for more than a thousand years, from about 7100 to 5700 BC. How many people lived there is not certain: older estimates spoke of thousands of people (from about 3,500 to 8,000), but a recent study, from 2024, puts the average at 600–800 inhabitants at the peak, because the houses were not all occupied at the same time. It was still a very large settlement for its time.

The houses were rectangular, made of unbaked mud brick, and usually had one main room. On the south side there were a hearth and an oven; along the walls, raised platforms where people sat, worked and slept. The walls were plastered white with a lime made from clay and redone many times. Under the platforms the dead were buried, sometimes many people in the same house, sometimes with beads, tools and textiles. Children grew up together with their ancestors.

The inhabitants ate wheat, barley, lentils and peas, kept sheep and goats and hunted aurochs, deer and wild boar. They made terracotta pots, wooden bowls and baskets, and made jewellery and mirrors from obsidian, a black volcanic glass that came from volcanoes in Cappadocia, many kilometres away: a sign of well-organised trade.

Paintings, bull heads and symbols

The walls of many houses were decorated with red and black paintings: men hunting a big wild bull, vultures, geometric designs, handprints. In others there were bulls' heads and cattle horns, called “bucrania” by archaeologists, set into plaster like trophies. Some rooms had reliefs of leopards. These images certainly had a religious or symbolic meaning, but what it was is still largely a mystery.

A painting found by Mellaart, with a series of squares and a big pattern of dots, has been interpreted as a map of the village with a volcano erupting in the background, perhaps Hasan Dağ. It would be the oldest known map. Many scholars, however, doubt this reading and think it is only a decorative motif.

Why it was abandoned

Around 5700 BC the village was gradually abandoned. Perhaps the climate had become drier, perhaps the river had changed course, or the fields had been overused. People moved to the nearby hill and then to other places. None of this is entirely certain.

Today Çatalhöyük is one of the most studied sites of the Neolithic and, since 2012, has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage List.