HOME: LIFE AND DEATH TOGETHER

As time flows, the world is constantly changing. The past is like a completely different city far away from us. Even the lives of our own grandparents seem foreign to us today, so how can we understand the lives of our ancestors 376 generations before us?  The remains in Çatalhöyük shed light on how the people of Çatalhöyük, who lived in the Konya Plain 9000 years ago, lived and what values they adopted. Life in Çatalhöyük, the first settled urban life and the first example of cartography, continued for sixteen hundred years without any war, everyone was equal in Çatalhöyük.

Çatalhöyük, where people lived between approximately 7100-5500 BC, was one of the largest settlements of the period. The small, cramped, mud-brick houses housed about 8000 people at the peak of the population. The people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead at the entrances of the houses they lived in (dead babies were buried next to the hearths in the houses). They made detailed and elaborate paintings of wild animals inside the houses, and at the same time they preserved the horns and skulls of these animals by placing them in certain places. In addition to the first mirror, the first salt shaker and the first piece of textile, 21 obsidian stones used as cutting tools, a bear figured stamp seal, a sisman woman figurine, a pot with a face engraved on it, a pot made of human teeth were found during the excavations.

The Çatalhöyük people paid great attention to their wall paintings, as we can see from the leopard paintings on the walls, which were made with small details despite the poor facilities. One of the other common wall paintings is the symbolised headless human and vulture paintings. At first it was thought that the vultures were eating people, but it was found that this was not true after the examination of the human skeletons recovered from the excavations, and the meaning of the paintings is still a mystery. On other walls we can see the handprints of different people like a signature. In the excavations, since people were buried in the houses where they lived, sometimes too many human skeletons were found on top of each other, people were generally buried in the fetal position, but archaeologists think that the reason for this is not that people knew this at that time, but that it was done to take up less space because of the limited space. In another excavation, a female skeleton and a male skull were found facing each other.

Today Çatalhöyük is still a mystery for us. Started in 1950, excavations and researches are still going on.