At Home - Bill Bryson [22]
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ancient cities, as even laymen knew, were phenomena of Mesopotamia and the Levant. They were not supposed to exist in Anatolia. Yet here was one of the very oldest—possibly the very oldest—bang in the middle of Turkey and of a size that was astoundingly unprecedented. Çatalhöyük (the name means “forked mound”) was nine thousand years old. It had been lived in continuously for well over a thousand years and at its peak had a population of eight thousand.
Mellaart called Çatalhöyük the world’s first city, a conclusion given additional weight and publicity by Jane Jacobs in her influential work The Economy of Cities, but that is incorrect on two counts. First, it wasn’t a city but really just a very large village. (The distinction to archaeologists is that cities have not just size but also a discernible administrative structure.) Even more pertinently, other communities—Jericho in Palestine, Mallaha in Israel, Abu Hureyra in Syria—are now known to be considerably older. None, however, would prove stranger than Çatalhöyük.
Vere Gordon Childe, father of the Neolithic Revolution, didn’t quite live long enough to learn about Çatalhöyük. Shortly before its discovery, he made his first visit home to Australia in thirty-five years. He had been away for well over half his lifetime. While walking in the Blue Mountains, he either fell to his death or jumped. In either case, he was found at the bottom of an eminence called Govett’s Leap. A thousand feet above, a passerby found his jacket carefully folded, with his glasses, compass, and pipe neatly arranged on top.
Childe would almost certainly have been fascinated with Çatalhöyük because almost nothing about the place made sense. The town was built without streets or lanes. The houses huddled together in a more or less solid mass. Those in the middle of the mass could be reached only by clambering over the roofs of many other houses, all of differing heights—a staggeringly inconvenient arrangement. There were no squares or marketplaces, no municipal or administrative buildings—no signs of social organization at all. Each builder put up four new walls, even when building against existing walls. It was as if the inhabitants hadn’t got the hang of collective living yet. It may well be that they hadn’t. It is certainly a vivid reminder that the nature of communities and the buildings within them is not preordained. It may seem to us natural to have doors at ground level and houses separated from one another by streets and lanes, but the people of Çatalhöyük clearly saw it another way altogether.
No roads or tracks led to or from the community either. It was built on marshy ground, on a floodplain. For miles around was nothing but space, and yet the people packed themselves densely together as if pressed by incoming tides on all sides. Nothing at all indicates why people should have congregated there in the thousands when they might have spread out across the surrounding countryside.
The people farmed—but on farms that were at least seven miles away. The land around the village provided poor grazing, and offered nothing at all in the way of fruits, nuts, or other natural sources of nutrition. There was no wood for fuel either. In short, there wasn’t any very obvious reason for people to settle there at all, and yet clearly they did in large numbers.
Çatalhöyük was not a primitive place by any means. It was strikingly advanced and