Çatalhöyük Excavations Unveil Very Dawn Of Human Civilization

A total of 130 houses have been unearthed to date during excavations at the 9,000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in Konya's Çumra district, excavation assistant team leader Shahina Farid has said.

The first excavations at the site -- considered one of the oldest settlements in the history of mankind, dating back to the Neolithic Age -- were conducted by British archaeologist James Mellart, who uncovered 80 houses during excavations between 1961-1964, according to the Anatolia news agency.

“Fifty new houses have been uncovered since that date," said Farid. "We are trying to shed light on an obscure period of mankind through these excavations. The excavation findings reveal that there was a river and small lakes in the region 9,000 years ago. We also found buildings were located one above the other. The oldest houses were destroyed after a period of habitation and new structures were built over them. These structures consist of two rooms and a larder. We assume that Çatalhöyük housed a population of around 7,000-10,000 at that time.”

He said the community built their houses of oak and poplar and that wooden columns were brought in by river from a distance of 40 kilometers, adding that research also suggested that these columns were re-utilized in the building of new houses.

“We also found more than 60 human skeletons in mud brick houses built side by side. The inhabitants of that period buried the dead underneath the house with a sense of being close to their ancestors. In other words, Çatalhöyük inhabitants were born, died and buried in these houses.

“We also traced in our research that the community here engaged in farming and animal husbandry and hunted wild animals. Small cattle had been kept before then, while we assume that cows were domesticated during that period,” he said.

He also said they had not come across clothing on the skeletons, adding, “Yet pieces of leather we found near the skeletons suggested that they wore skins from deer they hunted.”

“This year's excavation, which is currently under way with a 45-strong team from different countries that will likely reach around 100 in July, will continue until the end of September,” he added.

She became Dean of History at the local community college here. She wrote her thesis on the role and influence of secret societies on and in French Government during a 10 year period in the 18th century (I believe 1730 to 1740).

The class was a survey of Western Civ. It was a good class, I learned a lot. She brought a lot to the lecture that wasn't in the book. We were given reading assignments out of the textbook, but the lectures were almost exclusively devoted to her own material. The textbook was titled Western Heritage to 1527, but we spent 85% of class time on civs up to the fall of Rome. Half of the remaining time we spent on Darwin, and everything else. There was a second survey class that was focused primarily on history post Dark Ages.

You have to understand, the class was a survey of history, so the civilization at Catal Huyuk was neolithic, or prehistory. So we did cover stone age culture (the caves in France), neolithic, bronze ages. I have a two volume set of the history of the world (approx 2000 pages), and all it mentioned about the civilization at the Catal Huyuk settlement was that one sentance about the complex cult discovered in existance there. So I asked her what she knew if anything. And she was clear that while most pre-history (and a lot of history) was dark, to her there was a special darkness reserved for that culture. And she made clear that was her opinion. She said that she'd look into it, and came back with the refernce sources cited. She was adamament that those were THE best ones.

Her passion was Egyptology. We probably spent 40% of class on Egypt. And she knew that material cold.

Excerpted from Catal Huyuk by James Mellaart; Thames & Hudson, London, 1967.

Catal Huyuk has yielded among other splendors, a unique sequence of sanctuaries and shrines, decorated with wall paintings, reliefs in plaster, animal heads, and containing statues, which give us a vivid picture of Neolithic man's concern with religion and beliefs. Out of 139 living rooms excavated, not less than one-fourth appear to have served the religion. Such worship rooms or shrines are more elaborately decorated than houses and they are frequently the largest buildings. Although these buildings are used for religious practices, no provisions for animal sacrifices have been discovered. No pits for blood or caches of bones of sacrificed animals such as we find in the Early Bronze Age shrines of Beyce Sultan. The only evidence of burnt offerings consist of small deposits of charred grain preserved between a plastering of red clay on ceremonial hearths.

Excerpted from http://www.telesterion.com/catal1.htm:

Mellaart, W.I. Thompson, Marija Gimbutas, and others have connected the animal art in Lascaux with the animal art of Catal Huyuk (hundreds of representations of bulls, rams, leopards, vultures, and other animals). The horse as a sign for the female Goddess in Lascaux has been replaced by Her anthropomorphic plaster sculpture, the central icon found in most of Catal Huyuk's temples. But the bison is still completely present as a non-anthropomorphic symbol of perfect male virility and energy, although, in keeping with non-ice-age Anatolia, the extinct bison has been replaced in Catal Huyuk by the aurochs bull (a massive scythe-horned beast and an ancestor of modem cattle, which was hunted in huge herds on the Konya plain). The bull is always paired with the Goddess; when bull heads are found in shrines not apparently dedicated to the Goddess, they are surrounded by breast-like knobs -- the very walls of the shrine have become the body of the Goddess, from which the bulls emerge. Other survivals of the paleolithic sacred animal alphabet can be found in Catal Huyuk's camivore imagery. Leopards are the ultimate sign of Goddess power, and perhaps represent the untouchable, unknowable edges of Goddess mystery; on only one occasion is the traditional Goddess icon replaced with another sign in a Goddess shrine, and there She is represented by two leopards, facing each other. Perhaps the paleolithic symbol for "Endings, the dangerous edges of the Sacred World (carnivores)" was assigned to the unknowable Great Goddess. Breasts are found, modeled in plaster with the skulls and teeth of boars (a deadly, unpredictable animal, much feared by hunters), foxes, and weasels (both have bloodthirsty folk- lores); and the beaks of griffin vultures are molded into the breasts, the teeth forming its nipple -- all this amounting to a shocking (to us) combination of Goddess and camivore imagery.

This ancient religion's apparent teaching on matters of life and death reveals a type of thinking utterly foreign to our own. Our culture displays a rabid fear of death, fate, and accident, and an especially strong fear of being forgotten; the people of Catal Huyuk, however, were on intimate terms with death in ways which would terrify us.

A number of Catal Huyuk shrines are obviously associated with a funerary cult, and there are many representations of death or funeral practices scattered throughout the city's art. The vulture shrines at Catal Huyuk portray in eerie frescoes the excarnation practices wherein the dead were exposed, in open funeral houses of strange design, to the tearing beak of the griffin vulture, who stripped the skeleton of soft tissue. One painting shows a vulture with human legs, wings outspread over a tiny headless figure; it is the Goddess in her vulture epiphany, reclaiming what was always hers. The vulture is also found in the bull shrines, hidden in the clay breast.

The people of Catal Huyuk seem to have been almost Buddhist in their lack of emphasis on the personal ego, and in their ruminations on death -- omnipresent in the vulture Goddess and the toothed breast of Catal Huyuk art -- as the great equalizer, the Dark Goddess to whom everyone and everything returns. The idea of spiritual merit and personal survival after death, so clear in the chieftain burial practices and lavish tombs of later times, seems entirely foreign to Catal Huyuk's thought. The notion of a true personal selfhood, found in the Greek and Christian Mysteries, Hermetic texts, and later thinkers such as Gurdjieff and Crowley, and which seems to be implied by the Lascaux painting of the Wounded Man, appears to be missing or sublimated in Catal Huyuk.

There is a possibility that Catal Huyuk religion utilized psychedelic drugs. Mellaart describes the mound of Catal Huyuk as being covered by shrubs of the psychedelic plant Syrian rue, whose seeds contain the compounds harmine and harmaline (the psychoactives in the South American shamanic brew yage) in very active amounts. Harmine, once called telepathine because it was believed to cause shared hallucinations, is well known for causing visions of panthers, leopards, and other large cats. This curious property has been attested to by dozens of reporters, both native and presumably immune white ethno-botanists, who consistently describe hallucinatory adventures with big cats. It is easy to speculate and draw a connection with the leopard imagery which is extremely important in Catal Huyuk art.

Catal Huyuk is located in an area where the psychedelic plants of old Europe -- amanita muscaria mushrooms, Syrian rue, ergotized grains, and cannabis -- are all commonly found. Perhaps we are looking at the trappings of yet another psychedelic shamanic religion.

Lastly, consider the possible connection of the ancient Catal Huyuk religion to the Cybele and Attis cult, whose bloody castration orgies were very popular in declining age of Classical Greece, and whose ethos of sexless devotion was a powerful shaping force for early Christians who "out-holied" the pious but scandalous Castrati. The Cult of Cybele was one of the oldest and most widespread of the Mystery Religions, and its priesthood, the emasculated Castrati or Galli, had a reputation for being skilled wonder-workers, prophets, and magicians. Circumstantial evidence connects the Persian-Phyrgian-Anatoian cult of Cybele and Attis, especially in its form of the worship of the dying and reborn Son-God, with the esoteric astrological cults of the Persian Magi, and to other roots of the Western esoteric tradition.

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