Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  Gobekli Tepe’s monumental images of wild animals and public displays of painted skulls exist on a smaller scale inside people’s houses at Çatalhöyük. In the city, they became private, domestic objects, associated with hearth and home. This could be a sign that the people of Çatalhöyük no longer felt an urgent need to establish identification with a single place. People in the city were so entangled with their material environment that they could walk for several blocks without ever touching ground that wasn’t formed by human hands. No one at Çatalhöyük would ever question whether humans could change their environment, and thrive in a structure that far outstripped anything the nomadic world had seen. Benz speculated that this might explain why Çatalhöyük’s architecture is “anti-monumental.” There are no great houses or towering monoliths. Instead there is simply the awe-inspiring sprawl of the city itself, thousands of interlocking homes, the tamed fields around them growing generation by generation. Çatalhöyük was always a place in transition, a doorway into the urban future but also a monument to the wild, nomadic past.

  Getting abstract

  As Çatalhöyük grew older, its residents adjusted to mass society by creating networks of trusted people within the city—others who shared their beliefs, or their skills. With its population of thousands, the city was big enough that these networks might include strangers, so people needed a quick, easy way to identify themselves, along with their affiliations. That’s why the people of Çatalhöyük and nearby settlements began to carry small, decorated clay tokens that archaeologists call stamps. Usually a stamp was roughly the size of a business card, with an image in relief on one side. There’s evidence that some were worn as pendants, while others were traded. Some were used as actual stamps, dipped in paint for use with textiles or pressed into soft clay to create a pattern.

  Early stamps are covered with Neolithic imagery that’s now familiar to us: vultures, leopards, aurochs, snakes, and other wild animals. Others show houses, sometimes two stories high, with a simple triangular roof. Middle East Technical University archaeologist Çigdem Atakuman, who has studied stamps throughout the region, believes these tokens were like portable versions of the house, using symbolism to tie a person to a place or group. People in a particular family, or from a particular village, might all carry a stamp with the same symbol. Coming-of-age ceremonies might involve granting new adults a special stamp to mark their transition. Stamps could show membership in a group of farmers or shamans, or some other group. We don’t know all the ways they were used, but they appear in settlements across the region, and some of them are found hundreds of kilometers from where they were made. They brought the symbolism of sedentary life back onto the road again.

  Over hundreds of years, stamp designs become more abstract. Atakuman pointed in particular to the evolution of phallic imagery. Erect phalluses are a recurring theme in the wild animal imagery at Çatalhöyük, Gobekli Tepe, and countless other Neolithic sites. In the wall paintings of people hunting animals at Çatalhöyük, the bulls and pigs often have erections. There are disembodied erections carved into the stones at Gobekli Tepe, as well as ones that are attached to vaguely human figures. Some of the figurines retrieved from Çatalhöyük appear to be disembodied phalluses, and we see those again on stamps. These phalluses have aroused a lot of debates among archaeologists. Do they represent male power? Fertility? Excitement and violence? As we’ll see when we explore phallic imagery in other cities, a phallus is not always a penis. It’s a symbol for a wide range of things, many of them unrelated to sex and gender. And the fate of phallic imagery on stamps tells a story of people whose society is entering a new phase.

  Eventually, Atakuman explained, phalluses on stamps got more abstract: early stamps portray an undeniably phallic shaft atop two oval testicles, but as the decades passed, stamps show a pointed bulbous shape atop a circle, and then centuries later a simple triangle. Those once-phallic triangles also found their way into abstract representations of houses. Anthropologist Janet Carston has observed that early city dwellers drew a spiritual connection between human bodies and houses,12 so it makes symbolic sense that a body part would eventually morph into a house part. But that doesn’t explain why people created symbols that were increasingly abstract.13 Atakuman suggested it was a sign that people communicated with symbols so often that they developed a shorthand. They could recognize meaning in pictures that no longer looked anything like what they represented.

  There’s no evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük invented written language, but in their stamps we can see they were right on the cusp. Writing is a continuation of the abstraction process we see in Neolithic phallus stamps. People were identifying themselves by referring to layers of abstraction. People using the triangle might not have even realized that the shape came originally from a phallus. Instead, it was simply the roof of a house, symbolizing connection to a specific place. Or it was embedded in a larger set of unique symbols that told people about its bearer’s identity. It might reveal her hometown, her trade, or prove that she had crossed over into adulthood.

  As the population of Çatalhöyük grew from hundreds to thousands, its people had to get used to a lot more than domestication. They lived in a bubble of human culture, where people’s kinship ties, skills, and belief systems were deeply complex and varied. During the early Neolithic, people might identify themselves as being from a family that lived in a specific place. But a person at Çatalhöyük could be descended from a revered, shared ancestor represented by an animal; they often lived in houses with people who weren’t blood relatives; and they could spend most of the day making stone tools while other people brought food in from the fields to cook. Identity was fungible and intersectional. It’s no wonder that urbanites carried stamps around to explain themselves and show their allegiances.

  Over time, an even more complex symbolic pattern began to emerge out of the built environment at Çatalhöyük. While I was visiting the site, the State University of New York at Buffalo anthropologist Peter Biehl suggested that the act of rebuilding a house repeatedly is the first step toward creating an idea of history. Perhaps, he mused, the people of Çatalhöyük belonged to one of the first civilizations to move beyond memory into historical thinking. History, he said, is an “externalization of memory” that lasts beyond one lifetime. Perhaps people with a strong sense of place were primed to develop that kind of cognitive framework.

  Harvard University anthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef pointed out that Biehl could just as easily be describing the birth of cosmology, which he’s also seen emerging from cave dwellings filled with symbolism during the Upper Paleolithic, thousands of years earlier. Çatalhöyük’s people might have threaded their ancient city with bones to mark their spiritual place in the world. Bar-Josef mused that there’s probably no way to disentangle history and cosmology in the Neolithic world. Both are abstract concepts that explain human relationships in the context of something larger. We have to imagine Neolithic urban culture as one where little distinction was made between the past and the spiritual realm, or between magic and science.

  Hodder believes that the city begins and ends with the small acts of many people, who imbue their houses with “increased practical and symbolic importance.” Urbanism at Çatalhöyük wasn’t some grand plan forged by kings and warlords. Instead it emerged from an ever-expanding sprawl of houses, where humans developed the crafts, tools, and symbolism that still make cities so appealing despite their many drawbacks. “It is in the distributed processes of daily life that small acts come to have large consequences,” Hodder writes.14 What he means is that the awe-inspiring cities we know today began as expressions of humble domesticity. The city’s social relationships also emerged from domesticity, alongside new ideas about community, history, and our spiritual connections to the wild past.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Truth about Goddesses

  Sometime in the middle of the eighth millennium BCE, a Çatalhöyük woman stepped through the door to her ho
me and fell. She landed hard on her left side, fracturing several ribs. Her chest must have ached after healing, because for the rest of her life she favored her right side for lifting, carrying, and working. As she aged, those repetitive tasks left their marks on her bones as clearly as her fall had, dramatically wearing down her right hip joint, and leaving signs of strain in her ankle and toe joints. When UC Berkeley archaeologist Ruth Tringham unearthed this woman’s skeleton, she was the first person to see it in millennia. Brushing sand from empty eye sockets and a gaping jaw in the dry summer heat, Tringham suddenly recalled the words sung by Dido in Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas: “Remember me but forget my fate.” She named the woman she’d found Dido. For the next seven years, Tringham spent her summers excavating Dido’s home, trying to get to know a woman separated from her by roughly 350 generations.

  On a mild afternoon in San Francisco, I met Tringham at a café known for its Portuguese pastries and excellent coffee. Though she’s lived in California for a while, she still has the touch of a British accent from her youth spent in England and Scotland. Tringham has the athletic look of somebody who is ready to dig trenches in a remote part of Eastern Europe or Turkey, regions where she’s spent most of her career trying to understand the ancient masses one life at a time.

  When Tringham found Dido, the ancient woman was dubbed Skeleton 8115 from Building 3 in the northern part of the 4040 excavation. Tringham’s goal was to turn those anonymizing number designations into something rich and personal. “I to try to look at lives of individual households when I’m excavating, because history is not a big flow from the top down,” she told me with the quirk of a smile. “You have to look from the bottom up, and combine small stories, small pieces of evidence, to see a history which is dynamic.”

  Tringham creates videos and writes speculative stories to bring Neolithic people to life, recording both the process of excavation and the acts of interpretation that turn bones back into human beings. Like Hodder, she’s interested in the context of her finds. She wants to know what Dido would have felt, smelled, and seen in her everyday life keeping house. At Çatalhöyük, focusing on a single home can also reveal a lot about the city as a whole because the Neolithic’s cutting-edge technologies were largely centered on domesticity: building homes from bricks, cooking, and crafting tools and art. Tringham believes that imagining the life of a woman like Dido can give us insights into what drew people to Çatalhöyük—and, perhaps, why they left.

  What would the city have looked like through Neolithic eyes? Located on an alluvial plain shadowed by distant mountains, Çatalhöyük’s mud-brick skyline in the mid-7000s BCE dominated the tops of two low hills divided by a winding river. Smoke rose from hundreds of rooftops in a fragrant haze, drifting over the tiny plots of farmland that surrounded its walls. When a house stood empty for a long time, neighbors turned it into a trash heap, filling it to the brim with broken pots, gnawed animal bones, ashes, and dung, before sealing it up with clay. To re-create the urban landscape around Dido’s home, we have to picture it riddled with crumbling houses under repair, as well as open pits of reeking garbage. As archaeologist Kamilla Pawłowska writes rather understatedly, “it is likely that what we would consider rather bad smells dominated at Neolithic Catalhöyük.”1

  For a Neolithic visitor, however, the scents would have been unremarkable. The most astonishing part of this scene would have been the people. Thousands of people, far more than most humans saw in a lifetime, were living together in one, seemingly endless village. It was a precarious arrangement. Deadly rifts could open easily between neighbors, as well as in the soft brick of its walls.

  Dido lived in a house made from sunbaked clay and wooden beams, its interior walls plastered white and painted with abstract designs in red ochre. When she was born, the house was already at least 40 years old, and the city itself was roughly 600 years older. Like a modern woman living in New York or Istanbul, Dido might sometimes have mused on the generations who raised children here before her. But most days would have been devoted to more ordinary concerns. After tending hearth in the morning, she climbed a ladder, opened a door in the ceiling, and then emerged into an environment created entirely by human hands. To fetch food and water, Dido strolled between rooftop workshops, goat pens, shade canopies, and small braziers for cooking outdoors. People lived on their roofs seasonally, so she might have seen bedrolls and dinner bowls tucked away for evening use. Eventually she lowered herself down another ladder to leave the city and head down a gentle slope to a river that flowed below. On her way, she passed through a patchwork of small farms dotting the swampy landscape. She might have seen people tending herds of sheep, or digging up fresh clay by the river to make cooking pots and bricks.2

  When she returned to her house, burdened with water, grains, sheep’s milk, fruit, or nuts, Dido had to climb awkwardly up and down the same ladders she’d mounted that morning. Tringham speculates that’s when she took her fall, landing with a painful crunch on her left side next to the hearth. But, she cautions, that’s just one possible interpretation. In a brief fictional story, Tringham imagines how Dido had “celebrated mightily under the moon” for her daughter’s birthday and fell from her family’s rooftop to the ground below.3 Either way, Dido survived the cracked bones and lived to see her midforties, an extremely old age during the Neolithic period.

  Tringham reconstructed major events from Dido’s life by examining a feature of her house that would strike most modern city dwellers as disturbing. There are bodies buried under Dido’s bed and floor. But these are not the remains from an ancient scene of hidden murders. As I saw for myself when I looked into those oval grave pits at 4040, Dido’s people did not treat skeletal remains as something taboo or unclean. They interred their loved ones directly beneath their houses. In Dido’s house, two infants and a toddler were buried together near the hearth on the south side of the room. On the north side, three adults and one child found their final resting places beneath two elevated, white-plastered bed platforms that were once piled with furs and rugs. A few other bodies were found in a side room. Dido herself was one of the last to be buried under the platforms, interred enigmatically with a woven reed basket normally seen only in the burials of children. Her bones revealed a long life of labor, and a soot-colored residue in her chest cavity suggests she had black lung disease from cooking at a hearth in a poorly ventilated room. A mature man was later buried in a platform beside hers, and last of all a young child was buried in Dido’s platform. Based on these remains, Tringham speculates that Dido had a number of children who died very young, then a son and daughter who lived into young adulthood. The older man was likely the father of her children, and the child buried last may have been a grandchild or other kin. It seems that Dido lived long enough to see many of her children die, which gives her life a melancholy cast.

  Dido, like her neighbors, interacted a lot with human bones, routinely digging them up and entombing them again many years later in what are called “secondary burials.” Wall niches in Çatalhöyük homes were used as display cases for human skulls. Each one was lovingly preserved under plaster and paint that re-created the long-lost faces of ancestors or revered elders. Scientists analyzing the wear and tear on these skulls believe that people passed them from house to house, perhaps swapping them for different skulls. They reburied them decades later, with the remains of people who were not their kin.4 So when we contemplate the bodies in Dido’s house, we have to think about this cultural context. Some bones may not have come from her immediate family. Plus, her house was abandoned shortly after she died, so Dido’s survivors may have set up house elsewhere. For all we know, Dido was the matriarch of a proud line of people whose children lived on for generations, tending the same farmland and flocks that Dido did.

  Tringham and her colleagues also found commemorative items from rituals buried in the floor. At some point, Dido and her family dug a hole near the bed platforms and filled it with two boar jaws and neck bones from
three different sheep—which all showed telltale signs of having been cooked and eaten—as well as shell beads and a bird beak. This wasn’t trash. For archaeologists familiar with the site,5 this collection looks like the prized remnants of a feast for many people, plus some ceremonial jewelry. Maybe these were from a celebration for someone who lived in the house, marking a birth or major turning point. At another time, someone had buried red deer bones in the floor, and bricked a half-burned antler into one wall. Like many other people in the city, Dido also had two auroch skulls covered in plaster, their snouts and horns painted a deep red.

  During Tringham’s excavation of the house, she and colleagues uncovered 141 clay figurines, far more than archaeologists usually see in a single dwelling. Most depicted animals. But there were also a few voluptuous female figures, their facial features smoothed into anonymity, arms akimbo with hands cupping their breasts. These clay women, sometimes called goddesses or fertility symbols, pop up throughout Çatalhöyük for its entire thousand-year history. Similar female figurines have been found at other sites in the region, suggesting they’re part of a belief system that spread far beyond this city’s walls. They are Çatalhöyük’s most iconic symbol—and also the basis for one of the most widespread pseudoscientific myths about the place.

  Sometimes a naked woman isn’t a naked woman

  It all started back in the early 1960s, when the British archaeologist James Mellaart was the first European to get permission to excavate Çatalhöyük. At the time, the place was known to locals as two picturesque mounds whose grassy tops still showed the faint, angular ridges of an ancient city’s walls.6 When Mellaart and his team visited, they talked to local farmers whose plows had unearthed pottery and other artifacts that suggested Neolithic craftsmanship. Excited and not sure what to expect, Mellaart cut deeply into the eastern mound in 1961, roughly 200 meters south of where Dido’s house once stood. Among many other artifacts, he found a few female figurines. He was especially impressed by one of them, who was seated in a chair with her hands on the heads of two leopards. He decided she must be on a throne, and that an abstract bulge between her ankles was a recently birthed child. Further excavation revealed the figurine had come from an elaborately decorated room that he dubbed a temple. Based on this scant evidence, Mellaart announced that the people of Çatalhöyük were a matriarchy that worshipped a fertility goddess.