On a cold November day in 1958, archaeologist James Mellaart arrived at a mound near Konya in the Anatolian plateau of Turkey. The mound was 450 meters long and covered an area of 32 acres.
Mellaart excavated the mound between 1961 and 1966, unveiling an incredible human settlement. Rectangular mud-brick houses that were close together and set up in a geometric pattern gave the impression that they were the remains of an old city. The site had painted walls, bull’s heads, human burials, and fertility figurines.
Did Mellaart unearth a long-lost civilization?
With his trained eye, Mellaart could tell that he had found a Neolithic settlement. But the size of the “city” made many people wonder if stone age people could build a complex urban center. Any suspicions about the site being a Neolithic community were dispelled when it was dated.
Çatalhöyük, was the name of the mound that Mellaart discovered, one of the largest and earliest proto-cities in human history. But why isn’t Çatalhöyük a city?
Remember the definition of the city from my previous post? I want you to keep Childe’s criteria of a city in mind as we talk about three major proto-cities in human history. We shall discuss Çatalhöyük, the cities of Cucuteni and Tryipilia culture, and Mehrgarh.
But wait, didn’t I say I’d talk about Gobkeli Tepe? Don’t worry, I won’t disappoint you. While researching proto-cities, I realized Gobkeli Tepe has changed how we view human civilization. Hence, it merits a post by itself. Discussing Gobkeli Tepe in this series would be a distraction, and I defer it to a later post.
Let us dive into the earliest hints of humans developing a city, the proto-city, and find out why we cannot call them as “cities.”
The Neolithic hell at Çatalhöyük
Imagine a world without independent thought. Imagine rituals controlling every aspect of your life. Symbols of bulls, vultures, and obese women with exaggerated breasts seated on thrones guarded by beasts are all around you. Society teaches you since childhood only to believe in customs and dedicate your life to their preservation.
Welcome to the Neolithic hell at Çatalhöyük.
Archaeologist and author Steven Mithen, in his book After the Ice, describes the world of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük (pronounced as Chatal-Huyuk) as a “hell.” Any semblance of free thinking was destroyed and people had to comply with the rituals that decided their lives.
Trying to see things through Dr. Mithen’s perspective is impossible for an untrained eye like mine. But the Çatalhöyük looks sophisticated for its time. The settlement is one of the earliest examples of humans progressing toward building a city.
The most noticeable feature of Çatalhöyük is the closely packed rectangular houses of roughly the same size. The dwellings were not connected by streets. You would have to travel by the roof to get from one house to the next.
People used ladders to enter and exit their homes. Painted walls, bullheads, human burials, and statues found at Çatalhöyük tell us the story of an early human experiment to build a city.
Established in 7500 BC near the Turkish city of Konya, the settlement became a major proto-city by 7000 BC. At its peak, up to 10,000 people may have lived there. The houses of the maze-like settlement were made of mud-brick. Archaeologists discovered a separate cooking hearth in each dwelling.
The people of Çatalhöyük cleaned their houses like we do today. There is little evidence of garbage inside the houses, with animal bones, plant waste and other rubbish disposed of in an orderly fashion. They buried their dead beneath their homes.
We have found a number of obsidian tools at Çatalhöyük. The residents of the settlement did not manufacture the tools, which shows the people engaged in trade with other communities.
You may wonder why such a developed settlement where people knew how to build houses, were knowledgeable in arts and crafts, and had an organized religion isn’t classified as a city?
Recall Childe’s definition of a city. Çatalhöyük didn’t have a distinct social structure. Because all the dwellings were nearly the same size, we can rule out a centralized building, such as a palace, from which day-to-day matters were managed. This doesn’t mean there were no individuals who ranked higher than others. But a ruling class is absent at Çatalhöyük. The society was probably egalitarian.
There is also a lack of evidence of long-distance trade and writing or documentation systems. But the people of Çatalhöyük were quite close to building a true city. The dwellers of the magnificent Neolithic proto-city abandoned the settlement in 5700 BC.
Çatalhöyük’s remarkable rise provided the blueprint for upcoming city-states in the fertile crescent as humans would begin their next journey and build formidable cities lasting thousands of years, with some such as Jericho still inhabited.
The dentists of Mehrgarh
Let us move eastwards from Çatalhöyük, towards the Indian subcontinent, in search of proto-cities. We stumble upon a spectacular find at Mehrgarh, in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Archaeologist Jean-François Jarrige and his wife, Catherine Jarrige, discovered the site in 1974 and excavated it until 1986. At first, it looked like another city of the Indus Valley civilization. However, the date of the finding showed that the settlement was much older.
Mehrgarh gives us early evidence of farming and animal domestication in South Asia. We can say the Neolithic revolution of South Asia began in Mehrgarh. The site began approximately 7000 BC, around the same period as Çatalhöyük, and was abandoned by 2600 BC.
Mehrgarh is one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in the world, spanning almost four thousand years. At the same location, people began farming and then turned to metallurgy. The residents of Mehrgarh would later form one of the largest civilizations of the Bronze Age, the Indus Valley civilization.
The most remarkable discovery at Mehrgarh is the evidence of an ancient form of dentistry found in the graves of nine men. This is the first known example of drilling the teeth of a living person in the world. 7500-9000 years ago, Neolithic farmers in Mehrgarh figured out how to fix tooth problems.
The residents of Çatalhöyük made progress in buildings, rituals, sculpture, and art. Mehrgarh also has a strong religious component. But it is the scientific discoveries of the South Asian settlement that stand out.
We have the oldest known example of the lost-wax technique of casting at Mehrgarh. A wheel-shaped amulet discovered at the site was made using the lost-wax process. Later, the Indus valley people used the process (most likely adopted by the residents of Mehrgarh) to produce one of the most notable figurines of the civilization, the dancing girl of Mohenjo-Daro.
A striking feature of the Mehrgarh community is the unique human figurines. Initially, the designs were crude, but with time, the finer details became apparent. Women had prominent breasts, wide hips, and distinctive hairstyles, in the later period. There is a debate among archaeologists if all the female figurines represent fertility, similar to the “mother goddess” at Çatalhöyük. This is something we cannot be certain about.
The pottery in Mehrgarh was sophisticated. I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of pots from the Mehrgarh and Indus valley civilizations. To my inexperienced eye, the aesthetic appeal of Mehrgarh’s pottery with clear animal and plant motifs could put the Indus pottery to shame. Both are beautiful in their own right, but Mehrgarh’s clay work was well ahead of its time.
The dwellers of Mehgarh made tremendous progress in sciences and art but lacked a social structure and large centralized government buildings. The discovery of lapis lazuli from the Badshakan mines of Afghanistan and sea shells at Mehrgarh imply that the inhabitants engaged in trade with far-off regions.
Like the residents at Çatalhöyük, humans at Mehrgarh were one step closer to cracking the code of cities. They transitioned to the urban life of the Indus valley civilization, with the nearest city to Mehrgarh, Nausharo, only five miles away. This is one of the best examples we have of people who moved from the Neolithic phase to the urban phase, in the ancient world within the same region.
The “super towns” of Cucuteni-Tripolye
When the Greeks, headed by Alexander, invaded Babylon in 331 BC, the city of Uruk was 300 hectares in size and housed 40,000 people. Almost 3400 years before Alexander’s conquest of Babylon, a hamlet known as Talianki in Ukraine grew to 450 hectares and housed 21,000 people. It was the world’s largest human colony. To put things into perspective, Alexander is closer to our time than Talianki was to his!
This astonishing feat by humans during the Chalcolithic period (also known as the Eneolithic or Copper Age) is the first known example of a mega community. Talianki wasn’t the only large town of the era.
Nebelivka (300 hectares), Maydanets (270 hectares), and Dobrovody (250 hectares) were other enormous “super towns” built by a people known as the Tripolye culture (also called Trypillia culture). Maydanets was the most densely populated with almost 46,000 people living there.
The same culture stretched from Romania, across Moldova, to Ukraine. In Romania, the people were known as the Cucuteni culture. Hence, archaeologists go by the term Cucuteni-Tripolye culture to describe around 1200 settlements stretching from the northeast of the Danube river basin to the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine.
The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture began approximately 5000 BC and survived until 2700 BC, making it Old Europe’s longest-lasting pre-historic culture. We use the term “Old Europe” to refer to the many people who lived in Europe before the migrations of the Indo-Europeans from the Steppes, who created the modern European identity.
The builders of these mega settlements of the ancient world descended from the Vinča, Bug-Dniester, and Boian cultures of nearby regions. People of the Cucuteni-Tripolye are known for their beautiful pottery, a plethora of female figures, and their housing. But something was unusual about these dwellings.
The residents destroyed them every 60-80 years.
One of the unresolved mysteries of our history is the Cucuteni-Tripolye people’s recurrent demolition of their settlements. The destruction was not accidental but planned. Seems like the people took the trouble of securing a shelter only to burn it down.
Unlike the houses at Çatalhöyük and Mehrgarh, the houses in Cucuteni-Tripolye weren’t of the same size. At the Maydanets settlement, the people build smaller houses close to bigger ones. These might point to evidence of several clans living in the same society. Female figurines were more prevalent in the larger homes.
The people of Cucuteni-Tripolye built houses next to each other, and the settlements spread as concentric oval rings. These features show the residents had a sense of urban planning.
So why aren’t Cucuteni-Tripolye’s “super towns,” as archaeologist Dr. David W. Anthony calls them, considered cities? The settlements, though impressive, lacked a distinct hierarchical social class. The economy was primitive, with little long-distance trading. Specialized workers dedicated to arts and crafts are lacking in these sites. There is no evidence of a writing system.
The inhabitants of Cucuteni-Tripolye were not far behind the rest of the world in the sciences and arts. The mega settlements of this culture may have been the closest thing people in Neolithic Europe got to building a real city.
Each proto-city satisfies a number of Childe’s criteria for a city. People were figuring out different pieces of the puzzle to complete a sophisticated urban life. Humans ultimately learned to live in an advanced urban setting as we’ll see when we look at the world’s first cities in the next post.
Stay tuned!
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References
Mithen, S. J. (2003) After the Ice: a global human history, 20,000-5000 BC. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London
Hodder, Ian. The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. London; New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006
Singh, Upinder, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th century, Dorling Kindersley
Coppa, A. et al. 2006. "Early Neolithic tradition of dentistry: Flint tips were surprisingly effective for drilling tooth enamel in a prehistoric population." Nature. Volume 440.
Anthony, David W. (2007), The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press.