The Temple City of Prehistoric Anatolia

The City at the Center of the Ancient World


Ancient cities, as we find them today, are not impressive sights. All that remains of Catal Huyuk (Chat-al Hoo-yook), the first city, is a gullied, pitted mound, floating in a rolling plain of wheatfields. Little is left to show that this place was a primary source of Western civilization, a nexus of trade and ideas for two thousand years, the first organized cosmopolitan city-state, and arguably the source of the Great Mother Goddess religion -- the universal faith of Europe, the Near East, and the Far East before the great empires of the Fertile Crescent arose. Sadly, most of the research on this unique neolithic site has been abandoned, and thousands of pages of analysis remain unpublished. Only one acre of the thirty-two acre mound has been systematically excavated, recorded, and reported. Those excavations reveal an almost fairy-tale city of shrines and temples, of philosophy, luxury, and wealth. This was Catal Huyuk, the ancestress of all other cities, a unique Temple City that was the religious center of the first great prehistoric civilization.


http://www.telesterion.com/catal1.htm