Çatalhöyük

Imagine a city with a big secret. It has no streets. Not a single one. All the houses are packed so tightly together that they look like a giant honeycomb. To visit your neighbor, you wouldn’t open a front door and walk down a path. Instead, you would climb a ladder up to your roof, walk across the sunny, flat rooftops, and then climb down another ladder into your friend’s home. It sounds like a fun game, doesn’t it. This very special place is me, and I sit on a wide, sunny plain in a country we now call Turkey. I am Çatalhöyük, one of the oldest cities in the whole world. People first started building my cozy homes a very, very long time ago, around the year 7500 BCE. That’s more than nine thousand years ago. I was a bustling, busy place where everyone lived side-by-side, sharing the sky as their giant street and playground.

My rooftops were the heart of the community. They were like big, open courtyards where people worked, played, and chatted together under the warm sun. Below these busy rooftops were the homes, made from mud-brick that kept them cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Inside, families lived together in one big room. They cooked their meals in hearths that sent smoke up through the same hole in the ceiling that they used with their ladders. The people who lived here were very creative. They painted amazing pictures right on my walls, showing wild bulls, leaping deer, and scenes of people hunting. They also made tiny, neat statues from clay. These people were some of the world's very first farmers. They learned how to grow crops like wheat and to look after sheep and goats. For over one thousand years, until about 6400 BCE, many generations of families lived within my walls. When a house got old, they would build a new one right on top of it. This made me grow taller and taller over time, just like a layered cake with stories instead of frosting.

But after more than a thousand years of happy life, my people left. I became very quiet. Slowly, the wind and rain covered me with dirt and dust until I was just a big hill in the plain. I fell into a long, deep sleep for thousands of years, dreaming of the families who once walked on my roofs. Then one day, I felt a little poke. It was the year 1958, and an archaeologist named James Mellaart had found me. He was so excited. In the 1960s, he and his team began to carefully wake me up, uncovering my houses and my secrets. Much later, in 1993, another team led by a man named Ian Hodder came to continue the important work. On July 2nd, 2012, I was given a special honor and became a UNESCO World Heritage site. Now, I am awake again. I love sharing my stories with visitors from all over the world, teaching them how people first learned to build a community together, side by side.