Çatalhöyük is a prehistoric settlement near the village of Küçükköy, in the Çumra district of Konya province, 52 kilometres southeast of the city of Konya and eleven kilometres north of Çumra. People lived on its two mounds from about 7000 BC, through the Neolithic and on into the Chalcolithic. Turkish Wikipedia, on which our guide to the site is based, counts it among the oldest settlements in the world and calls the eastern mound probably the oldest and most developed Neolithic settlement found so far. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2012.
Among the oldest — and why it is called a city
The question of the oldest city in the world is easy to ask and hard to settle, so it is worth being exact about what is said of Çatalhöyük. The account behind our guide puts it among the oldest settlements, not at the head of a ranking. What sets it apart, in that account, is something else: its size, the number of people it held and the strength of its art. More than eight thousand people are thought to have lived here, and the settlement had moved beyond a village and was going through a stage of urbanisation. That is the sense in which Çatalhöyük is an early city. Its people were also among the first farming communities, and the mounds were inhabited without a break for roughly two thousand years.
Two mounds on the Konya plain
The site is made of two mounds side by side. The eastern one, Çatalhöyük East, is the Neolithic settlement, and it is the principal mound, where excavation has been concentrated. The western one, Çatalhöyük West, was settled in the Chalcolithic. A channel of the Çarşamba river once ran between them, and both were built on alluvial soil that suited early farming; today the land around them grows wheat and looks out over the Konya plain.
By the end of the Neolithic the eastern settlement had built itself up twenty metres above the plain, one layer of houses on top of the last. Excavation has identified eighteen Neolithic occupation layers there. A few hundred metres to the east lies a much later Byzantine settlement, but the prehistoric mounds had been abandoned before the Bronze Age.
Houses entered through the roof
One detail changes how you picture the place. The houses of Çatalhöyük were entered from above, through the roof, rather than from the side. Hold that in mind on the eastern mound, together with the eight thousand or more people thought to have lived here and the twenty metres the settlement rose above the plain, and the scale of this early town starts to come into focus.
Who dug it
James Mellaart found the eastern mound in 1958 and excavated it in 1961-1963 and 1965. On the western mound he made two deep soundings in 1961, on the summit and the southern slope, and the pottery from them pointed to an Early Chalcolithic settlement in two phases; the ware he dated to its first phase is known as Western Çatalhöyük ware. Excavation started again in 1993 under Ian Hodder of the University of Cambridge, with a mixed team of British, Turkish, Greek and American researchers, and the same campaign began surface survey on the western mound. The site entered UNESCO's Tentative List in 2009, three years before its inscription.
Where the finds are: Konya Archaeological Museum
Neolithic finds from Çatalhöyük are among the notable holdings of the Konya Archaeological Museum in the city, alongside Roman marble sarcophagi, for which the museum is known internationally, Roman sculpture, and pieces of bath architecture from the Assyrian Colony period. According to Turkish Wikipedia it was the first archaeological museum founded in Anatolia and the second opened in Türkiye, after the İstanbul Archaeological Museum. It opened on 10 December 1899 as a branch of the Imperial Museum in İstanbul, moved several times, and has been in its present building, at the corner of Sahip Ata Caddesi and Ahmet Küçük Armağan Sokağı, since 1962. To see the site and the museum together is to give the mound its objects back.
Getting there and when to go
Çatalhöyük lies 52 kilometres southeast of Konya, so the city is the natural base for a visit. Across Konya province the monthly mean temperature stays between 15 and 25 °C from May through September, while January averages -0.1 °C; an open site on the plain is most comfortable in the warmer half of the year. The visiting details are on the site's own page here.
