Çatalhöyük

Thousands of people lived in this town in central Turkey, in houses packed so tightly that they came and went through holes in the roofs. They painted their walls and buried their dead beneath the floors.

Date: About 7100 to 5950 BCIII · Farming and the New Stone Age
Place: Çatalhöyük, TurkeyThe Middle East
Laid out as: A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons: 5 planned, none written yet
Themes: Society, family and daily life
Art, architecture and design
Religion, belief and myth
Transport, towns and building works

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IA town with no streets
IIInside a house
IIIPaintings on the walls
IVThe dead under the floor
VEqual or not?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

James Mellaart
Ian Hodder

Objects

Wall paintings
The “seated woman” figure
Obsidian mirrors

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

7100 BC to 5950 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

The Natufians, the first villagers outline
Göbekli Tepe outline
Sumer and the first cities outline

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?