formed the core of the house. Impractical as such an arrangement may
appear today, it did offer some advantages. The attached buildings were
more stable than freestanding structures and, at the limits of the town
site, formed a defensive perimeter wall. If enemies managed to breach
the exterior wall, they would find themselves not inside the town but
above the houses with the defenders waiting there on the roof.
The houses, constructed of mud brick strengthened by sturdy
timber frames, varied in size but repeated the same basic plan. Walls
and floors were plastered and painted, and platforms along walls
served as sites for sleeping, working, and eating. The dead were
buried beneath the same platforms. A great number of decorated
rooms have been found at Çatal Höyük. The excavators called these
rooms shrines, but their function is uncertain. Their number sug-
gests that these rooms played an important role in the life of Çatal
Höyük’s inhabitants.
The “shrines” are distinguished from the house structures by
the greater richness of their interior decoration, which consisted of
wall paintings, plaster reliefs, animal heads, and bucrania (bovine
skulls). Bulls’ horns, widely thought to be symbols of masculine po-
tency, are the most common motif in these rooms. In some cases
they are displayed next to plaster breasts, symbols of female fertility,
projecting from the walls. Many statuettes of stone or terracotta
(baked clay) also have been found at Çatal Höyük. Most are quite
small (2 to 8 inches high) and primarily depict female figures. A few
reach 12 inches.
Although animal husbandry was well established, hunting con-
tinued to play an important part in the early Neolithic economy of
Çatal Höyük. The importance of hunting as a food source (until
about 5700 BCE) is reflected also in wall paintings, where, in the older
decorated rooms, hunting scenes predominate. In style and concept,
however, the deer hunt mural (FIG. 1-17) at Çatal Höyük is worlds
apart from the wall paintings the hunters of the Paleolithic period
produced. Perhaps what is most strikingly new about the Çatal
Höyük painting and others like it is the regular appearance of the
human figure—not only singly but also in large, coherent groups
with a wide variety of poses, subjects, and settings. As noted earlier,
humans were unusual in Paleolithic cave paintings, and pictorial
narratives have almost never been found. Even the “hunting scene”
(FIG. 1-13) in the well at Lascaux is doubtful as a narrative. In Neo-
lithic paintings, human themes and concerns and action scenes with
humans dominating animals are central.
In the Çatal Höyük hunt, the group of hunters—and no one
doubts it is, indeed, an organized hunting party, not a series of indi-
vidual figures—shows a tense exaggeration of movement and a
rhythmic repetition of basic shapes customary for the period. The
painter took care to distinguish important descriptive details—for
example, bows, arrows, and garments—and the heads have clearly
defined noses, mouths, chins, and hair. The Neolithic painter placed
all the heads in profile for the same reason Paleolithic painters uni-
versally chose the profile view for representations of animals. Only
the side view of the human head shows all its shapes clearly. How-
ever, at Çatal Höyük the torsos are presented from the front—again,
the most informative viewpoint—whereas the painter chose the
profile view for the legs and arms. This composite view of the hu-
man body is quite artificial because the human body cannot make
an abrupt 90-degree shift at the hips. But it is very descriptive of
what a human body is—as opposed to what it looks like from a par-
ticular viewpoint. The technique of painting also changed dramati-
cally since Paleolithic times. The pigments were applied with a brush
to a white background of dry plaster. The careful preparation of the
wall surface is in striking contrast to the direct application of pig-
ment to the irregularly shaped walls and ceilings of caves.
More remarkable still is a painting (FIG. 1-18is a watercolor
copy) in one of the older rooms at Çatal Höyük that art historians
generally have acclaimed as the world’s first landscape(a picture of a
natural setting in its own right, without any narrative content). As
such, it remained unique for thousands of years. According to radio-
carbon dating, the painting was executed around 6150 BCE. The fore-
ground has been interpreted as a town with rectangular houses
neatly laid out side by side, probably representing Çatal Höyük itself.26 Chapter 1 ART BEFORE HISTORY1-17Deer hunt, detail of a wall
painting from Level III, Çatal
Höyük, Turkey, ca. 5750 BCE.
Museum of Anatolian Civilization,
Ankara.
This Neolithic painter depicted
human figures as a composite of
frontal and profile views, the most
descriptive picture of the shape of
the human body. This format would
become the rule for millennia.