From Hunter to Farmer
By 7,000 BCE, agricultural communities were well established in at least three Near Eastern regions: Jordan, Iran and Anatolia (Turkey). The central Anatolian plateau was the site of a flourishing Neolithic culture between 7,000 and 5,000 BCE that may well have been the most advanced culture of its time. Excavations at Catal Huyuk (1961-1964) uncovered twelve successive building levels that have been dated to between 6,500 and 5,700 BCE. Only one acre of the 32 acre site has been explored, but in this single acre, it is possible to trace 800 years of cultural, agricultural and artistic evolution.
The regularity of the town plan of Catal Huyuk suggests that it was based on an earlier schema and similar architectural arrangements survive in parts of central Turkey and western Iraq today. Streets were absent from the town layout, building abutted each other and access through the town was gained over rooftops. Structurally, the buildings are more stable than free standing structures and the exterior walls of the outer most buildings form a solid, defensible perimeter wall. Open courts, employed as trash dumps, pockmark the city. Ashes were mixed with the refuse to act as a sterilizer. The houses are of sun-dried mud brick with sturdy timber framing, a building form also employed by the indigenous people of the American southwest. Walls and floors were plastered and painted and platforms along the walls served as tables and beds.
Interspersed among the houses are more richly decorated shrines. Inside, wall paintings and plaster reliefs adorn the walls, bull horns are set into stylized sculptures of bull heads, columns or benches and animal skulls and stone or baked clay statues lie on the floors. The statuettes indicated both male and female deities and when represented with animals, females are typically seen with leopards and males with bulls. The statues are small, most only 2-8 inches tall, a few are 12 inches and female figurines predominate. The figures are believed to represent a mother goddess in various aspects; maiden, ruler of wild animals, bride, pregnant mother, giving birth, and wise crone. The Seated Goddess, dated to 5,900 BCE, is a voluptuous, realistic image. The artist’s attention to the detailing of the fingers on the small hands on the 2 inch tall sculpture and additional examples found nearby, suggest that the now-missing head was also lovingly detailed. The figure is painted with a crossing floral pattern that is also exemplified in wall paintings, illustrating a possible agrarian association.
Art in the upper levels (chronologically more recent) of Catal Huyuk is dominated by fertility and agricultural symbolism, but Paleolithic hunting rituals and art survived well into the Neolithic period. In older shrines, hunting scenes are in the majority. The Deer Hunt, found in Level III and dated to 5,750 BCE, is stylistically and conceptually similar to the rock-shelter paintings found in eastern Spain. The Anatolian artist used a range of pigments, derived from minerals and applied with a brush onto dry plaster to give figures of the Deer Hunt more detail and realism. The dancing hunters, wearing leopard skins and/or loincloths and holding bows, surround two naturalistically rendered deer. It appears that after these painting served their ritual or religious purposes, they were plastered over and replaced with another scene at a future time.
Landscape with Volcanic Eruption, found inside a shrine and dated to 6,150 BCE, is atypical in that it is a solely a landscape. In the foreground of the painting lies a town, perhaps Catal Huyuk itself. Behind the town, on a smaller scale in order to illustrate distance or perspective, are two mountains with dots and lines emanating from the taller peak. The 10,600 foot Hasan Dag, which is within view of Catal Huyuk and is the only twin-peaked volcano in central Anatolia, has been tentatively identified as the subject of the painting. Because the painting was found on the wall of a shrine, it is thought to represent the fury of the underworld but may also represent wealth, abundance and strength, in that obsidian, a stone highly valued for tools and weaponry and a source of trade income is a product of the inner earth, is thrown up from inner earth during volcanic eruptions.
A variety of arts and crafts, such as weaving and pottery, were also well developed at Catal Huyuk and the arts of smelting copper and lead in small quantities was known prior to 6,000 BCE. The evolution to an agricultural society is evidenced by the gradual decline of the production of male divinities and the disappearance of hunting scenes. As male representations decreased, the occurrence of female images, representing the mother goddess, increased. With the shift to an agrarian society, the traditionally female arts of milling, baking, weaving and the care of domestic animals became more important and the role of and reverence for the fertile earth mother increased as well.
Catal Huyuk appears to have converted almost fully to an agrarian economy by 5,700 BCE. Less than 100 years later, the site would be completely abandoned. A related culture at Hacilar, two hundred miles to the west, developed soon after the end of Catal Huyuk, but by 5,000 BCE Mesopotamia and Iran to the east and Syria to the south became more prominent.
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