Ҫatalhöyük stands on a boundary between the wild and the domestic and all the archaeological categories these invoke – we’re not going to go there here! The following remarks concern spiritual worlds and the cosmological content of art forms found there.
Reconstruction of the east and west mounds at Çatalhöyük (Çatalhöyük Research Project, 2018)
In the past, archaeoastronomy (‘cultural astronomy’, today) was guided by overarching alignment theories which meant that structures needed to have distinct orientations in order for astronomy to have been considered important. Instead, reconstructing the patterns of a year back to the time of an ancient society provides clues to how its social behaviour was organised. Notably, feasts, rituals and major gatherings were often timed by solstice and equinox periods. These annual events also had spiritual and religious meanings.
Life in rural areas on the Konya plain (where Ҫatalhöyük is) and Turkish Anatolia more widely has remained relatively unchanged since the Neolithic. The colourful woven mats named kilims that decorate Turkish markets in these areas were created in the seventh millennium. Nevertheless, other cultural systems, such as pictures seen in constellations, get folded into the dirt of the disconnected stages archaeology divides history into – mostly on the basis of assumption.
An indication of a summer solstice tradition fairly close to Ҫatalhöyük in time and place comes from the massive Jericho tower built about 8000 BCE. Although little is admittedly known about the sacred or secular use of this structure, which its excavator compared to a castle of medieval Europe, its orientation to the summer solstice sunset (Barkai & Liran, 2008) was likely not the beginning of a change in astronomical insight but a tradition brought down to its time.
Unity of symbolic and secular life at Ҫatalhöyük (I. Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale)
A cosmological plan noted at Ҫatalhöyük is a tiered cosmos of three levels, corresponding to an underworld, a human-intermediary level, and a sky/heaven. This is very common elsewhere. David Lewis-Williams compared the Amazonian longhouse (maloca) buildings of the Barasana hunter-gatherer people with the “spirit houses” of ‘Ain Ghazal and Ҫatalhӧyük to illustrate how cosmology invests architectures designed to facilitate access to supernatural realms. He demonstrates how the multipurpose interiors of these buildings present no defining boundary between domestic space and temple. As materialisations of earthly and spiritual domains these houses reproduce the cosmos and its connective levels. Dark netherworlds occupy spaces below the house. Ancestral animals such as the jaguar mediate access to spirit realms analogous to bucrania (bull skulls) fixed on Neolithic columns marking transition between cosmic levels. Snakes, such as the ancestral anaconda, transform into raptor birds in spiritual journeys which inform décor in these these cult houses. He sees these architectures as neurologically generated, although acknowledges schemes of celestial movement, such as the sun and moon, in their vertical and horizontal designs. (Lewis-Williams, 2009)
A Barasana Longhouse (S. Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades)
Ҫatalhöyük is thought to be the first Neolithic town in southern Anatolia, with a maximum population reaching as much as 8000. Its lowest occupation layer has been radiocarbon dated to about 7250 BCE. The place appears to have been mostly destroyed by an intense fire around 6400 BCE, with later occupation layers dating to around 6250 BCE on its eastern site. In view of distinct construction methods and pottery designs, its younger western site was likely occupied by a different culture, between 6200-6000 BCE. The iconography at Ҫatalhöyük features a large array of fauna, the most prominent of which are dangerous wild animals, expressed in paintings, wall inclusions and installations. The most central of these are the installations found in rooms interpreted as shrines. These consist of large wall and floor features that appear to have been re-plastered and re-painted every year commemoratively.
Only four types of large installations are known, each appearing frequently in Ҫatalhöyük shrine rooms, corresponding to the following four animals: aurochs, ram, leopard and another that has been interpreted as a goddess or a bear (Marler & Haarmann, 2007). The reason why only these animals are represented in shrines is unknown. Ian Hodder suggests they are selected from a nexus of prowess-animal, spirit-hunt and ritual-feast where aggressive wild animals were given special status above more domesticated stock (Hodder, 2011). As ancestors of powerful hunters and guardians of domestic space, the aesthetic value of the art itself, though remarkable, is considered secondary to its quality for capturing the spirit or “otherness” of the animal. Hodder believes these cult animals likely had origins in much earlier hunter-gatherer societies and circulated as myth from the close of the last Ice Age (2011: 206).
South shelter, Ҫatalhöyük (image, AC)
The importance of dangerous animals in Ҫatalhöyük art is normally read through modern ideas (and obsessions) of the domestication of the wild – which included women and society. In Ҫatalhöyük art, an affinity has been shown between violent animals, women and hunting. Though it’s interesting why female representation lacks at earlier sites like Gӧbekli Tepe, domestication was likely not a conscious process to Ҫatalhöyük people more than a by-product of corralling wild beasts for religious and sacrificial purposes. Another reason why this pattern of fauna continued, we suggest, is because they formed a calendar that announced sacred dates. The key dates in this calendar also reflected the breeding cycles of the four Ҫatalhöyük shrine animals fairly accurately. At Ҫatalhöyük, breeding cycles had symbolic connections.
Fearsome big cats such as the leopard would evoke the awakening of spring in predacious hinterlands beyond the confines of the domestic environment. In appearance it is a lively and vibrant beast blooming with rosettes. In ancient civilisations, kings, underworld gods and witchdoctors wore leopard skins to signify their pliability between realms, which may have held at Ҫatalhöyük with the leopard-skin garments of dancers in hunting shrines. Normally solitary animals except when mating, leopards are not generally known as seasonal breeders. Their countered, head-to-head position in the shrines has been interpreted by Hodder as a balancing of social order but this likely meant something entirely different. It is significant they are known to be nocturnal and diurnal hunters for in ancient societies the spring equinox marked a time when there was a balance of forces which opened the underworld.
The bear or human-animal hybrid installations provide a good display of the summer solstice since June is the peak mating season of Eurasian bears. This knowledge would appear strongly indicated by the circle on the belly of the goddess-bear in Shrine VII which could signify the sun. Concerning the aurochs, the association of bulls with death, graves and ancestors has too a long precedent in Neolithic Anatolia to give extra meaning to here. Interestingly, however, wild bulls mated in early autumn during which time they had violent fights which could even end in death (van Vuure, 2005). Over the autumn they also fatted up for winter, a seasonal behaviour likely not overlooked by their human predators, especially since wild bulls (aurochs) was prestigious game in feasts. A well-known wall painting from Level V shows a “giant” bull surrounded by figures who appear to be teasing it. Was this possibly an annual event such as a baiting ritual that happened around the fall equinox?
Solstice/Equinox constellations at time of Ҫatalhöyük occupancy (Stellarium)
At Ҫatalhöyük, and elsewhere, the material technology of hunting had a spiritual aspect. Lewis-Williams (2009) suggests hunters interacted with one of the lowest tiers of the cosmos, where the archetype of spirit-animals was found. A physical representation of this supernatural hunting potency was Shrine VI which former excavator James Mellaart thought was dedicated to ‘the cult of the wild bull’ (Mellaart, 1963). The building, which had no paintings or reliefs, was decorated by a number of stylized bull heads set on benches on the floor which appear rising, sinking or balanced on the edge of an underworld below.
The ram seasonally follows on from the bull since sheep, irrespective of domestic circumstances, naturally breed in periods of the smallest daylight. In his crucial role of contributing to the success of the flock, the ram (a male sheep) would answer to a “Master of the Animals” in the spirit-animal, shaman-hunter consciousness of Ҫatalhöyük. Astronomically, the image of the ram (Aries) re-emerged in Egypt thousands of years later when it occupied the spring equinox. The Greeks poetically figured the relative faintness of this constellation (which appears like a ram with the “horns” of Triangulum above it) by the hidden glow of its golden fleece on earth.
Shrine installations: twin-leopards, bear/goddess, and combined bull and ram skulls
A wall painting located at Level VI of Ҫatalhöyük has attracted attention for possibly depicting ideas about time. The panel, which was hidden beneath coats of white plaster, displays a group of symbols and images. From the right is a stylised bull head, a wheeled cross and a “double-axe” design. The bull head, which is modelled on the bench at the same level into which seven pairs of aurochs horns had been set, is painted in deep red, orange and white. The wheeled cross with miniature satellite figures, including a steatopygous female, an archer, and a bear-goddess symbol, is painted in bright orange and purple manganese to which a mineral was added to make the figures sparkle.
The Ҫatalhöyük “double-axe” has been proposed as a precursor to its more well-known metallurgical form across Minoan Crete and the Classical Mediterranean (Schachermeyer, 1964). The double-axe, or labrys, was a prevalent cult emblem which had multiple ideas attached to it. It was known as astropeleki, ‘star-axe’ from which the Greek word for lightning (ἀστροπελέκι) derived. The Zeus Labraunda figure of southwest Turkey shows the god thunderbolting the heavens with his labrys and an Indo-European antecedent of this figure is the Hurrian weather-god Teshub who stands on a sky-bull and wields a labrys. A possible cultural intermediary is the Mesopotamian hoe, a practical tool divinised through its creation by Enlil.
The wheeled cross has been previously associated, by Marija Gimbutas (1974), with the four cardinal directions of space and the four seasons of a year. The labrys design, on the other hand, was seen by Hertha von Dechend (1977) as symbolising precession and of time zodiacally conceived which, based on that image alone, is a far-fetched interpretation! Although its meaning is unknown, the symbol is also observed at earlier Neolithic sites in Anatolia.
The image below shows a stone pendant or amulet, possibly once accompanied by a larger beadwork, found at the PPNB site of Gürcü Tepe. Despite its match to the panel example at Ҫatalhöyük nothing more can be said about the item which is currently an isolated example. The double-headed staff next to it is one from a collection excavated at Göbekli Tepe which have the appearance of wands, or sceptres of office.
A labrys-shaped item recovered from Gürcü Tepe, b) one of several ‘sceptre-wands’ recovered from Göbekli Tepe, c) miniature-pillars (image, AC)
Concerning the miniature (and monumental) T-shapes, Klaus Schmidt (2012) thought they might represent double-faced beings looking in opposite directions like the Roman time-god Janus. Possibly, the labrys-shaped amulet, sceptre-staffs and miniature T-shapes might be identified as the cultic paraphernalia of a group who exercised religious power in organising the ritual year.