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Gnosis Magazine Spring 1990

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CATAL HUYUK

The Temple City of Prehistoric Anatolia
BY WlLLIAM CARL EICHMAN

The City at the Center of the Ancient World 

Ancient cities, as we find them today, are not impressive sights. All
that remains of Catal Huyuk (Chat-al Hoo-yook), the first city, is a
gullied, pitted mound, floating in a rolling plain of wheatfields.

Little is left to show that this place was a primary source of Western
civilization, a nexus of trade and ideas for two thousand years, the
first organized cosmopolitan city-state, and arguably the source of
the Great Mother Goddess religion -- the universal faith of Europe,
the Near East, and the Far East before the great empires of the
Fertile Crescent arose. Sadly, most of the research on this unique
neolithic site has been abandoned, and thousands of pages of analysis
remain unpublished. Only one acre of the thirty-two acre mound has
been systematically excavated, recorded, and reported. Those
excavations reveal an almost fairy-tale city of shrines and temples,
of philosophy, luxury, and wealth. This was Catal Huyuk, the
ancestress of all other cities, a unique Temple City that was the
religious center of the first great prehistoric civilization.
The oldest layer of Catal Huyuk yet excavated (virgin soil has not
been reached) is reliably carbon dated to 6,500 B.C,, and reveals a
thriving, completely developed and planned, city. While no traces of a
town preceding the city were found in the excavated areas, it seems
reasonable to assume that several hundred years (and possibly several
millennia) before 6,500 B.C. the site was occupied, found ideal, and
then developed from a village into a town, and finally into a city.

Twelve successive layers of building, representing distinct stages of
the city and reflecting different eras of its history, have been
found. The top layers of the mound, containing the most recent
buildings, are dated at 5,600 B.C. The city was mysteriously abandoned
at about this time, and a new city, labeled Catal Huyuk West, was
founded several miles away across the Carsamba Cay river. While Catal
Huyuk West has barely been investigated, the site appears to have been
occupied for another 700 years until it, too, was abandoned. After
4.900 B.C. the entire area was forsaken -- there are no traces of any
later buildings or further occupation after neolithic times. Thus, the
full duration of this early civilization looks as though it should be
measured from approximately 7,000 B.C. to 4,900 B.C., some 2,100
years, give or take a century,  "The neolithic civilization revealed
at Catal Huyuk shines like a supernova among the rather dim galaxy of
contemprary peasant cultures," says James Mellaart, excavator of Catal
Huyuk and premier authority on the ancient Near East.

At a time when a "big" town like early Hacilar had ten houses, Catal
Huyuk was a multiracial city of 6,000 people. Mellaart maps out Catal
Huyuk-style village sites stretching out over a trade network of
hundreds of miles; the city appears to have been the central hub of a
widespread population. At certain times of the year this rural
population almost certainly congregated at the city for trade,
marriage-exchange, and the religious services offered by the city's
many shrines and temples.

The widespread presence of trade goods and materials from the
Anatolian plateau, found throughout the Near and Middle East,
reinforces the notion that traders must have regularly visited the
city. We can imagine the plastered outer wall of the city's houses, a
brilliantly painted natural defensive enclosure, as a spectacle for
the benefit of visiting traders and tribesfolk. Surrounding the city,
perhaps, were courtyards, tent bazaars, stock corrals, carnivals,
fields, craftshops, and unknown marvels of artwork, ritual, and
performance. The great, enclosed, mysterious, sacred city towered over
it all -- the first human-made mountain, the first pyramid.
These days we live in cities of millions, and occupy single buildings
that comfortably hold the population of three Catal Huyuk: it's easy
to dismiss the idea of a city of 6.000 people.

But we can use our creative imagination to visualize Catal Huyuk as
its inhabitants may have seen it: a technological achievement as
futuristic as Disney's Epcot Center is for us, an unmatched
concentration of the best and the brightest. This was a bustling
place, the largest concentration of humans on the planet, and in its
time there was simply nothing else like it. 

The Great Mother Goddess seated on a throne, her hands on the heads of
leopards. This is a characteristic ceramic statuette from Catal Huyuk.

The Great Mother of Catal Huyuk

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