Çatalhöyük is very old. Those who are interested in Ancient Egypt are apt to dismiss the Roman period as recent and consequently lacking in interest. However, even those studying the meagre evidence for the foundation of the Egyptian state in the pre-dynastic period are looking back only to around 3000 B.C., whilst at Çatalhöyük we have a town that dates back as far as 7,400 B.C. Perhaps like the Romans, the Egyptians too are rather recent!

Çatalhöyük was discovered in the late 1950s by James Mellaart from the London Institute of Archaeology. It lies on the Anatolian plateau of Southern Turkey in an area rarely visited by tourists since this large, featureless plain is largely devoid of interesting monuments. When found, Çatalhöyük was a simple low-lying ‘tell’, notable for its large size (32 acres), and for the fact that it was covered in Neolithic pottery.

Mellaart’s excavations in the early 1960s attracted great interest not only because Çatalhöyük appeared to be a carefully constructed town dating to a time when man was believed only to be beginning to develop village communities, but also because of the remarkable sacred images found adorning the interiors of houses. There were figurines, including those of  the ‘mother goddess’*, and wall-reliefs depicting antithetical leopards, and scenes of hunting; but far stranger were scenes in which vultures preyed on headless human bodies, and rooms in which bull’s horns adorned moulded bovine heads, or ranged along flat bench-like structures. The frequency with which such rooms, or shrines, appeared throughout the settlement suggested that the people of Çatalhöyük enjoyed a close personal relationship with the hereafter, and the divine. At the same time there appeared to be a complete absence of public buildings such as temples, granaries or administrative centres. The recent excavations under Ian Hodder of the Universities of Cambridge and Stanford failed to find any streets or footpaths:

 ‘Rather, just as Mellart had shown, Hodder’s team has found the mound densely packed with small rectangular buildings. Each is typically made up of a main room, about 5m by 5m, with one or more ancillary storage rooms. And each stands just centimetres from its neighbour. Their thin, windowless, mud-brick walls nearly, but not quite, touch. No building has an outside door. People entered through an opening in the roof…The absence of ground-level roads suggests that people will have moved through the town across the roof-tops – which may well have served as a focus for daily activities. The only break in this dense pattern of buildings was provided by small open areas where ‘domestic rubbish was discarded, or the odd young sheep or goat tended’.

The houses tend to follow a common plan with a kitchen – including fireplace, oven, and storage area – to the south of the main room, from which access to ancillary rooms was by small ‘crawl-holes’. Where decoration occurs, it is always in the main room, and it was here, beneath the floor, that the inhabitants interred their dead. Sometimes, like the figures in the relief paintings, the bodies were headless, but Hodder has found only articulated skeletons – not the bones of individuals excarnated by vultures, found by Mellaart. On the other hand, Hodder’s team found the skeleton of a woman holding a red-painted, plastered skull in her arms! The rooms themselves were bereft of finds:

‘It seems that the occupants tended to empty the building of all portable items and clean it thoroughly after the end of the life of the house. At which point, the roof was collapsed in and posts and beams removed. Then the tops of the walls were dismantled, broken up and compacted down. This provided a firm foundation over which a new house was built.’

The houses are believed to have been occupied for 70 to 100 years before new ones were erected upon exactly the same plan. Thus the settlement retained the same form for about a thousand years, gradually rising above the surrounding plain.

Hodder’s excavations have thus done little to question Mellaart’s original discoveries, and the broad uniformity of the buildings at Çatalhöyük has led to the conclusion that this was, perhaps, an egalitarian society. In one respect, however Hodder has changed the view of Çatalhöyük:

‘While Mellaart assumed that the town was once set in a well-watered fertile area, with a nice river running past, new research from Hodder’s team indicates that the river was in fact one big area of marsh land. Rather than a gorgeous verdant pasture, Çatalhöyük was set in a potentially tough environment – the nearest place to grow plants or indeed tend animals was a good few kilometres trek away.’

Apart from supplying mud for bricks and reeds for roofing or floor-coverings, the site was barren.

What a strange place was Çatalhöyük! No peaceful scenes of village industry, no people wandering slowly back after a hot day in the fields. Instead we have commuters returning to sit on the roofs of their houses, because the sitting room was dark and decorated with scenes of death, and beneath the floor lay perhaps recent burials.

Think again of the thin, windowless walls, and the crawl-holes between rooms – hardly pleasant living quarters. And think of the lack of domestic finds in the houses. Did the residents really so scrupulously wipe clean their residence before demolishing it and building anew? Is it possible that there were no items to remove, because the people didn’t live in this remote and barren spot? For, above all, this place was home to the dead – as many as 60 bodies being laid beneath some houses – and a great many of the ‘living rooms’ were actually shrines. Rather I would say that these were chapels where rites were conducted and prayers said for the ancestors buried below.

Çatalhöyük was a quiet place. The thin walls and windowless rooms suited the inhabitants, because they made no sound and had no eyes, they were dead. Just occasionally, at a funeral or festival, the living would make the journey to the home of their ancestors, carry out the rites, cook and eat with the dead, before departing. Remember the occasional young sheep or goat tethered in the few open spaces. Was this not the sacrificial lamb or kid?

And then, as the generations ticked by, and the ancestors receded into the past, new chapels would be constructed to sit above new tombs for the more recently departed; the new structures still honouring the same family group, but now raised a little higher above the nearby marsh.  

Çatalhöyük, the world’s oldest cemetery?

Dylan Bickerstaffe April 2008.

All of the quotes are from Nadia Durani, ‘Çatalhöyük. The most ancient town in the world?’, Current World Archaeology No. 8, 56-64. This was purchased at the AEMES Conference 19-20^th April 2008.

I should stress that the conclusions reached in this article are my own, and not shared by the excavators.

 * These discoveries were later employed by Marija Gimbutas to create the myth of a peaceful goddess-worshipping culture in the early Neolithic period, subsequently destroyed by brutal patriarchal regimes. See Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Their Nature and Legacy (London 1991), 39-42.