Backward into Prehistory

One look at the bulging buttocks of the squat female figurine and British Archaeologist James Mellaart recognized a Stone Age fertility symbol; the dig he was starting on a plain in southern Turkey promised to open a door onto the most ancient reaches of human civilization. Mellaart treated every crum bling bit of dirt as a hard-to-read book, and after three years of diligent scratching through the 32-acre mound called Qatal Hiiyiik, he is now piecing together the story of a city that flourished at least 3,000 years before the first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt.

Rough mud walls proved to be covered with strange and intricate paintings almost too faint to be seen. Painted gods and goddesses emerged from lumps of clay, and scraps of charcoal-like material turned out to be the remnants of food that the ancient people ate, pieces from clothes they wore. By putting the pieces together, Mellaart reports in the latest journal of the British Institute of Archaeology, at Ankara, what he has learned about how people worked and played and worshiped at C,atal Hiiytik 80 centuries ago.

Huddled Pueblo. During most of its existence, from 6500 to 5700 B. C.- dates determined by carbon 14 dating -the city must have looked like an Indian pueblo of the U.S. Southwest, its mud-brick buildings huddled together in a single mass. They had the same doorless outside walls, and were entered by ladders through their flat roofs. There were no streets, and only a few small courtyards. C,atal Hiiyuk may have been well-designed for defense, but its comfort was questionable and its sanitation offensive.

The inhabitants were long-headed people of good stature. They made sharp, beautiful weapons out of obsidian from a nearby volcano and cultivated barley, peas and primitive kinds of wheat. During the earlier centuries, they had no pottery but made graceful vessels of wood. The women carried makeup kits with polished obsidian mirrors, little baskets of rouge mixed with fat, and delicate bone sticks with thin tips still covered with green paint resembling the implements with which modern women apply mascara.

Great Mother with Navel. Life in C,atal Hiiyiik centered around religious ceremonials. The largest rooms in the city were windowless shrines furnished with a wide assortment of idols and symbols. The center of attraction was usually a chunky goddess modeled of clay in a spread-legged attitude that Dr. Mellaart calls the "giving birth" position. She is, he thinks, an early representative of the Great Mother cult that dominated the Mediterranean world for many thousand years.

Other goddesses are slimmer, and some have prominent navels. One is spraddled against the wall with her navel painted in concentric circles like a target-a treatment that Dr. Mellaart thinks shows concern with the continuity of life. Male gods are not common in the C,atal Hiiyuk pantheon, and those that have survived are generally shown riding on a small creature that Dr. Mellaart says is a bull.

Bulls were certainly prominent in the C,atal Hiiyuk religion. The dim shrines bristled with enormous horns of the fierce wild aurochs. Heads of bulls protrude from the walls, and full-sized bodies of bulls are carved in the clay. This veneration of cattle is one of the most persistent of human customs, and the privileged cattle that are so prominent in modern India may have inherited their sacredness from the holy bulls of Anatolia 8,000 years ago.

Vultures for the Dead. The priests or priestesses of the shrines were handy with their paintpots. The walls are usually decorated, sometimes with patterns that recur in modern Anatolian textiles. There are friezes of red hands, geometric figures and pictures of animals. Many walls show conventionalized but lively vultures attacking headless corpses. Dr. Mellaart believes that the bodies of the C,atal Hiiyiik dead were exposed in mortuaries, where vultures picked their bones clean, a custom still practiced by the Parsees of India. two mud walls, it showed several rows of irregular rectangles of various sizes with a two-peaked object decorated with dots standing above them. The archaeologist finally decided that the rectangles are a kind of city plan, a view of Catal Hiiyiik itself. Beyond the city stands the double-peaked volcano Hasan Dag, where the vital obsidian came from. The volcano is in eruption, and the dots are apparently meant to show fiery rocks blowing out of its crater. The frieze may be man's first known attempt at landscape painting.

Lower Depths. Dr. Mellaart is far from finished with his dig at C,atal Hiiyiik. Below the levels that are already excavated, he hopes some day to find the debris of still earlier occupations. And he intends to study it, grain by carefully sifted grain, extracting every fragment of information that can lead him backward into prehistory.

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