Çatalhöyük: a 9,000-year-old town with no streets
One of the world's earliest towns had no roads, no doors at ground level — you came home across the rooftops.
Between roughly 7400 and 6000 BCE, thousands of people lived at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), one of the largest and best-preserved Neolithic settlements ever found.
Its plan defies expectation: there were no streets. Rectangular mud-brick houses were packed wall-to-wall in a dense honeycomb, and people entered not through ground-level doors but through a hole in the roof, climbing down a wooden ladder. The flat rooftops themselves served as the town’s walkways and workspaces.
Inside, whitewashed walls carried vivid paintings of hunting scenes and geometric patterns, and the dead were sometimes buried beneath the sleeping platforms. Houses were repeatedly demolished and rebuilt on the same footprint, layer upon layer, until the settlement rose into the great mound visible today.
Çatalhöyük shows that complex, densely packed community life — a kind of urbanism — predates the first cities, and the first writing, by thousands of years.
Sources & references
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