A town on a mound
Çatalhöyük is two mounds on the Konya plain, in central Anatolia. The larger, eastern mound holds eighteen levels of Neolithic houses, built one on top of another between about 7400 and 6200 BCE. The western mound continued the story into the Copper Age, from about 6200 to 5200 BCE. Each time a house was replaced, the new one went up on the remains of the old, so the town slowly rose.
How many people lived there is an estimate. Figures of 5,000 to 8,000 inhabitants at a time are often given, up to 10,000 at the peak, though numbers surely changed over more than a thousand years. Either way, this was far more than a village, and its people were among the early farmers of Anatolia.
Houses with a door in the roof
The houses were built back to back, wall against wall, with no streets between most of them. People moved across the flat roofs, which worked like a shared terrace, and entered each house through an opening in the roof, climbing down a ladder. Some parts of the town were bounded by narrow alleys, but the basic plan was a dense block of homes.
Inside, the main room of a house had a hearth and raised platforms, and it was here that most of the decoration was placed. The walls and floors were plastered and replastered again and again, sometimes many times over. In practice, the house was both a home and a place where much of the town’s art was made and seen.
Wall paintings, leopards and bulls’ horns
Almost every house excavated at Çatalhöyük had some decoration on its walls or platforms, usually in the main room. The excavator James Mellaart, who dug the site in four seasons between 1961 and 1965, found painted hunting scenes, with groups of people baiting a wild bull, and reliefs modelled in plaster, among them pairs of leopards facing each other.
The most striking objects are the bucrania, from the Greek and Latin for “ox skull”: the skulls and horns of wild bulls, covered in plaster and set into walls and benches. Mellaart also found female figurines. Because these decorations were renewed along with the plaster, the art was part of the life of the house, not something added once and forgotten.
The dead under the floor
The people of Çatalhöyük buried many of their dead beneath the floors of their houses, often under the platforms and near the hearth. The living, in other words, slept and worked above their ancestors. Some individuals received special treatment in death, and some houses seem to have served as burial places for groups of related households.
Why keep the dead so close? A written answer does not exist, but the practice fits the rest of the town: the house was where daily life, memory and ritual met. That link between home and ritual already appears, on a monumental scale, at Göbekli Tepe, more than a thousand years earlier.
A town without a ruler?
No palace, temple or obviously grand house has been found. The houses are similar in size throughout the town, and UNESCO’s description calls the society largely egalitarian, without large-scale central administration. That does not mean nobody took decisions; it means power did not leave the kind of mark in buildings that it leaves in later cities.
Since 1993 a new project led by the archaeologist Ian Hodder has reopened the excavation with an international team, recording each house in detail. Their work has made Çatalhöyük one of the best-studied places in the history of prehistoric art and daily life.
Where to see it
Çatalhöyük is an open site on the Konya plain, with shelters over the main excavation areas and reconstructed houses. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 2012.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük” (1405), and nomination file.
- Çatalhöyük Research Project, site guidebook (English) and archive reports.
- Hodder, I., The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük (2006).
