— — the town nine thousand years tried to keep.
“A Neolithic mound on the Konya Plain, settled by farmers around 7400 BCE and lived in for more than a thousand years. The houses had no streets between them; people walked across the roofs and lowered themselves through ladders into rooms painted with bulls, leopards, and the long view of a smoking volcano.
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Çatalhöyük lies on the southern Konya Plain in central Anatolia, about 50 kilometres southeast of the city of Konya. The site is a double mound rising roughly 20 metres above the surrounding farmland, formed by mudbrick houses built on top of the ruins of older houses over more than a millennium. At its peak around 7000 BCE the settlement may have held 8,000 people, making it one of the largest known Neolithic communities anywhere in the world.
The houses were packed wall to wall with no streets between them. Each was a single rectangular mudbrick room, entered through a hatch in the flat roof and a wooden ladder. Walls were plastered and replastered, sometimes with painted murals of aurochs, leopards, and vultures, and the dead were buried under the floors. Excavations led by James Mellaart in 1958 and Ian Hodder from 1993 to 2017 documented more than a dozen building levels stacked vertically on the mound.
Çatalhöyük was occupied from roughly 7400 to 6200 BCE, then abandoned for reasons still under debate. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012 for its evidence of one of the earliest urban experiments in human history. The seated figurine known as the Çatalhöyük mother goddess, found in a grain bin in 1961, is held by the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, where most of the major finds from the mound are on display.