The oldest dates back 9,000 years. - Costumes, jewelry and mirrors. - The frescoes and the hand symbol. - We ask once again: Where's the writing? - The shrines of the Godto Mother. -- Those forks that come from so far away to prick our minds. - Obsidian technicians and the myth of Prometheus. -Prints of agriculture. - Questions about the Ark. -The Descendants, of whom?

We have evoked in this book many conjectural wonders. But if It is preferable to marvel without conjecture, here is a civilization that makes you dream, but whose existence is currently proven. Four of its centers have been definitively identified. The most One of the famous is called Çatal Huyuk.

 

We owe its exhumation to James Mellaart.

The serendipitous discovery of an obsidian object, south of Turkey, intrigued Mellaart. He thought that his finding might come from of an unexpected workshop, in the vicinity of one of the volcanoes of central Anatolia. The Prospect of Determining the Origin of so many weapons, tools, and utensils of the same material, exhumed in Numerous countries where there was no obsidian, I couldn't help but seduce to an archaeologist.

 

The location of such a center would demonstrate that, since the Neolithic period, exchanges between Asia and Asia had been taking place. Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and, probably; Different Western regions. So the young sage searched the region of Konya. Fifty kilometers from the city and eighty from the volcano Hassali Dagh, two tells or hills hug each other on the plain. The The results far exceeded Mellaart's hopes.

He discovered twelve overlapping cities, the oldest of which it went back to 7,000 years before B.C., that is, to 9,000 years before of our day. With the exception of the most recent, there was no doubt that these Cities had been destroyed by fire and rebuilt after. Without even appealing to symbolism, it is conceivable that this The overlapping of cities presents an analogy with our civilization, which might well have been built on a Lots of vanished civilizations.

But what strikes us the most, here, is the degree of culture and refinement presupposed by the findings made in these twelve towns.

These cities were made up of brick houses, devoid of of doors. They were penetrated through the roof and with the help of some Stairs. The housing complex in one neighbourhood was arranged in It was shaped like a beehive and was a fortress against the eventual and the flooding of the Carsamba River. The buildings had been collapsed almost completely, but it was possible to reconstruct fragments of Walls.

 

It was discovered that these were covered with frescoes in their inner part. However, the restaurateurs were met with a Pitfall: Once exposed to sunlight, the colors Altered. No doubt they had been made from pigments minerals, which deteriorate under the action of light. The Frescoes they were immediately photographed, to preserve His memory intact. (Subsequently, several coating tests were carried out to protect the colors. Polyvinyl acetate worked satisfactory.)

These frescoes depicted a variety of scenes: hunting, games, ceremonies or characters in different attitudes. The workmanship was a realism so pronounced that we can read the most dominant features of the characters' character: the overflowing activity and favored by great agility, shrewd intelligence, and bordering on cunning. The style of clothing was also reconstituted.

 

Men wore woollen shirts, tunics, and winter coats. of leopard skin, fitted with belts with bone buckles. At the hem of the women's costumes, copper earrings, similar to the brass ones that gave rigidity to the miriñaques of Our grandmothers prevented her from lifting her skirts. Necklines, They did not resemble, however, that of the Cretan woman who served as a model for the statuette baptized with the name of "The Parisian."

 

Jewellery made of lead, a very rare metal at the time, or copper, inlaid with hard cut stones or stones They completed the attire. A few boxes containing Different tints suggest that the use of shaves was not unknown, and the elegant ones, to test the effect of their They had obsidian mirrors, with the handle protected with plaster, so that the fingers would not be injured...

Animals are also featured in these frescoes; birds (in particular, falcons), leopards and bulls. Bulls are the most numerous. The Symbols abound in these wall paintings: curious networks of lines crisscross red and black; rosettes, mandalas, double axes Philus (which we find, several millennia later, among the Scythians, in Thrace and also in Crete) and quite numerous crosses.

But the most impressive and most frequently depicted symbol in Catal Huyuk it is the human hand. Impossible not to establish a Between these and those already painted by the Aurignacians, several tens of millennia earlier, on the walls of its caves; by for example, in Gargas (Hautes-Pyrénées), in Cabrerets (Lot) and in Castilic (near Santander). However, they used a different procedure, as they applied the paint between their fingers and around the hands, which, when placed flat, reproduced their Negative image.

 

In Catal Huyuk, they were also colored. Certainly, one can only presume the importance attached to them Granted. Is it possible that, fresh out of the Carboniferous period, the man already pays particular attention to that part of his body, in which, according to the palmists of so many regions, from From Mesopotamia to China, the traits of his character were drawn and the essential events in your life? Or do you have to see, in the series of hands juxtaposed in Catal Huyuk, numerical indications, in which each finger represented a unit?

 

Only when the hands perch on breasts, the symbol becomes clearer, in the sense of a procreative invocation...

If we consider, on the one hand, all these symbols, and on the other, the Fired clay seals found in large numbers, results in The absence of any form of writing is surprising. Those stamps, the size of ours from the Post Office, appear on all houses.

 

They were used to mark ceramic objects and were differentiated of each other, which leads one to think of a property and also in a social structure based on family. They could be compared to the coats of arms of our Age; but the latter are exclusive to the nobles, while the former they existed in every home.

 

It can also be imagined that such Stamps were used to sign written messages on materials Perishable.

 

But how can we explain the fact that the child has not been preserved? Trace of these materials, altered and even in the form of dust? And how can we explain, too, that there is no inscription in the frescoes unearthed to this day? However, the achievements made in so many fields it is not possible to presume that the men of Catal Huyuk devoid of any form of graphic design or preservation of the word. Or are we the ones who don't know how to identify this problem? writing, this subtle register? Shall we find ourselves in the presence of the heirs of the lost deed of early times? ¿Was deliberately secret or forbidden?

 

We can also wonder if they wouldn't use a cryptographic ink exclusively sensitive to a special developer, known only to the initiated masters.

In forty unearthed shrines, numerous sculptures and various objects of worship. These elements allow you to reconstitute, in part, the religion of the first citizens of the world (until proven otherwise). These sanctuaries they all seem to have been consecrated to the Mother Goddess.

 

The The presence of this Godseems to indicate that, at the dawn of the Humanity, there was a bond between all the cults. Isn't there among the statuettes of the Solutrean period, discovered in Vilendorf (Austria), in Brassenpouy (Landes) and in the Grimaldi grotto of Menton? Do we not find it in the Tchukchi Eskimos?

 

There she was Sometimes she is called the Mother of the Dead, and at other times she is given names but all of them refer to the essential quality of the fecundity.

In Egypt, it is identified with Maat. In Chaldea, she is represented, now Slender as a nymph, now gravid. And isn't she the one who shows up symbolized by mothers breastfeeding their children, in the figurines of baked earth from Tell-Obeid? It has been thought to be recognized in Mohenjo Daro, in the Indus Valley, and, since Vedic times, has occupied a place in the featured in the Indian Pantheon.

 

La Reina del Agua, in Mexico (from the water, source of life), and the Queen of the Fecundity of the Minoans, first gravid and then slender, now naked, now Dressed and adorned, they identify with her. In Luristan, We find various representations of it, about 5,500 years old. antiquity.

 

And in Anatolia it is still present after 4,000 years after the disappearance of Çatal Huyuk. Links are missing, but one he is tempted to find her again in the cult of Maya, the mother of Gautama Buddha. Is the permanence of this God-to-Mother of the God? Universe?

In the statues found in Catal Huyuk it is exclusively Fertile. In one of them, he is depicted at the time of giving birth to a bull (a prefiguration of the cult of Mithras?). Certain Paints Murals indicate that he had the power to resurrect the dead. His Color, like that of life, was red. The one of death, the black one.

In the frescoes, we also find motifs in pink. white, purple, rarely blue and, inexplicably, never green. In several frescoes you can discover scenes referring to death and indicate belief in a future world. The corpses were stripped naked and exposed, no doubt in a high place, at the mercy of vultures.
A parallel can be drawn with the Mazdeists. In fact, in In the time of the Achaemenides, they still buried the whole of the Corpses; but; after the reconquest of the Empire by the After the Parthians, the use of the Towers of Silence was extended. continued among the Parsis of India.

In Çatal Huyuk, when there was nothing left of a body but the skeleton, He was buried after being clothed with the clothes of the dead man. In at the grave, their weapons and implements were placed, if it was a man; jewellery and various utensils, if the dead man was a woman, and toys, if it was a child.

Fragments of barely any tissues have been discovered in the tombs. all of them of excellent quality, especially those of wool, which have made it possible to identify three types of fabrics. Had also goat hair and felt fabrics. To this day, the oldest fabrics on our planet.

 

Two circumstances favored their preservation: the fact that they were not in contact with decaying meat, and condition it, air hygrometrics. But it could also be, that the soil had particular qualities, like that of Isfahan. No pedonological study has yet confirmed this.

Among the usual objects left at disposal; of the dead, It seems interesting to mention some wooden and bone forks. This object is not found in any other prehistoric village nor of protohistory, and its use was previously ignored in the West of the last few centuries.

 

And, alongside these forks, there are plates, platters, cups, glasses and goblets, made of very fine ceramic.

Examination of the skeletons discovered to date has not allowed us to Determine the dominant race. Modern types of Mediterranean and Anatolian countries. But the excavations continue, And we don't know what surprises they have in store for us. On the other hand, Ethnologists have been able to fix, approximately, the average age: Thirty-two years for men, and thirty for women.

 

It can be presumed that excessive motherhood, as was the case in the past in the India, caused this slight difference. Apart from this, there is no room for He doubted that women were in the front rank in that society.

This is suggested by one detail, regardless of the importance of the It was granted to women in religious matters. The tombs were excavated beneath the place where the beds of the Deceased. The men's were simple bunk beds.

The housewife was entitled to a very large, almost majestic bed.

 

Perhaps one day a relationship between the different civilizations, scattered in time and space, practiced matriarchy: predecessors of the Indo-Europeans in various regions of Western Asia and Indonesian tribes or Malaysia, to cite just a few examples.

Without too much fear of being mistaken, we can think that, even being hierarchically inferior to the priestesses, who are the only depositories of the ritual, there was a confraternity of priests (or magicians), and technicians, who knew how to make splendid use of the obsidian, Catal Huyuk's main resource. There were three sites of obsidian, near the volcano that is now extinguished. And this material served for the manufacture of almost all utensils: sickles, axes, scrapers for cleaning wool, awls, various weapons and spearheads or arrowheads.

Now, technically, obsidian is a crystal: hard and black. Why shouldn't the wise men of this city attempt the invention? varieties of different colors, and they were not to be the first in making glass, which is attributed to the Phoenicians and the Egyptians?

And the expeditions of these technicians to the vicinity of the volcanoes of Hassan Dag, Karaqa Dag and Nekke Dag, couldn't they give origin, long before the Hellenic civilization, to the legend of Prometheus? It is true that nothing confirms this hypothesis. Nor We can't even rely on a legend that, born in the region, as a result of a real event, was transmitted through the ages to the first generations of the historical era.

 

But the The geographical conditions of Greece and Crete were not the most important. suitable for the birth of this myth. So why not Can we find its origin around once incandescent craters?

But, in Çatal Huyuk, the same reality inclines us to dream. Among the Mellaart immediately looked at the mortars, which served as to grind the grain. The grains sometimes left their mark, and others were preserved almost intact. And the researchers had to surrender very quickly to the evidence (thanks to the studies Danish professor Hans Helbart): the inhabitants of the Neolithic cities were not limited to cutting ears of wheat They cultivated three varieties.

 

They also sowed barley and lentils, and cultivated oily and medicinal plants, almond and alfóncigos.
We know that some American scholars also discovered in the caves of Mazanderan, on the banks of the Caspian, grains of wheat whose They were able to determine how old they were able to determine by carbon-14: about 10,000 years. On the other hand, a little before them, in 1948, Robert J. Braidwood had discovered, in the course of his excavations at Jarmo (Iraq), grinding wheels and biscuit ovens.

 

And these objects are date back to 6,750 years before J. C. Mellaart is of the opinion that men, while still hunters, but having also become shepherds and farmers, they had to understand the necessity of abandoning their scattered abodes in the flanks of the mountains, to gather on the plains, in order to facilitate agricultural operations and, surely, livestock farming.

After the works of Maurits van Loot in Mureybat, Syria in the north, the age range was lengthened in terms of farming communities: these were said to exist in the eighth millennium B.C. But at the present time we can't We would risk establishing chronologies with the dogmatism of the archaeologists and ethnologists of the past. Every year, somewhere in the Globe, a new discovery calls into question antiquity of a civilization.

That place in Syria no longer looked like the first agglomeration cultural culture when, recently, traces of a village that dates back to 8,500 years before our era. Maybe Older ones will soon be discovered.

The Tunay Akoglu classification has, naturally, Catal Huyuk as a starting point. After a gap of several millennia, Tell Hala, discovered by Oppenheimer in 1911, and dating back to 3,800 or 3,500 B.C. But this table, which then includes Uruk, the Hakites, the Hittites and the Hurrians, it seems very precarious, despite its rigor scientist.

 

Between the date of the last Çatal Huyuk, around the year 5600 B.C. and the expeditions of which Tashin Ozguk speaks, made by the Sumerians for the acquisition of copper, what It happened in this region, where so many events since the beginning of the historical era and that, For a long time, it was believed to be disorganized, even in the United States. very primitive communities, from the Neolithic period?

 

Exchanges between the Sumerians and Anatolians are more than twenty centuries B.C. The Mysterious Disappearance of the Last City Unearthed by Mellaart. How can this gap be filled?

In more recent times, the Assyrians settled in the same region a major shopping mall: Kanesh. It was here that, in 1963, Tashin Ozguk (currently director of the archaeological section of the Ankara University) and his collaborators discovered 14,000 engraved tablets. They have not yet begun to be deciphered. Will they contain any indications related to Çatal Huyuk?

In 1967, Tashin Ozguk discovered, in Altin Tepé, the vestiges of a city, with a citadel and a necropolis. The place, which is located in the eastern region of the present-day Turkish state, belonged to to the Urartu that was built in the vicinity of Ararat. Even before excavations began in the area of this vast empire that collapsed in the fourth century B.C., we already possessed, thanks to some Assyrian texts, a lot of information about it.

 

Having begun as a small state in the second millennium, Urartu had reached its apogee in the eighth century before (and not in the second millennium). after) of our Era. At that time the Lydians considered it to be as far more powerful and unsettling than Assyria. To the north, it extended beyond the Caucasus; to the west, it crossed the Euphrates. To the east, he had made the Indo-Europeans of the Middle East his vassals. Lake Urmiah region.

 

The most frequently cited residence of Its sovereigns, and whose exact location we still do not know, was Toprak Kaleh, on the shores of Lake Van. We do not know the origin of the inhabitants, although it is known that they were Asians and not Semites. We are ignorant, therefore, of the bond that existed between them and the citizens of the United States. Çatal Huyuk. But we can't help but be intrigued by Various similarities.

The discovery of two tombs on the "Golden Hill" (Altin Tepé), in 1938 and 1956, he encouraged the Historical Foundation and the Department of Antiquities of the Turkish Government to be excavated. These allowed them to reconstruct everyday life, techniques, art and the religion of the people. The walls of the enclosure and those of the citadel were more than ten meters thick, and the technique used to Its construction reveals great skill.

 

A part of the texts Once deciphered, it gives us indications of the way in which they were 40 ton granite blocks, raised and adjusted by engineers to a height of more than 60 meters. Without However, even if the procedure is explained, we find it astonishing that such a feat could be accomplished at Altin Tepe of the same kind. so that we were astonished at the slabs of Baalbek, wondering where they came from and how they could have been transported and put in place.

It has also been possible to decipher some texts relating to the accounting and reserves. One of them tells us that They stored 375,000 litres of wine for the consumption of the king and the Noble. When we get to deciphering the other texts, we will get, A lot of new data, no doubt.

 

But, already in the Nowadays, some objects provide us with valuable information: like that gold record, whose motifs, meticulously and artistically engravings, allow us to make unique comparisons. Well Do we not see there a God dressed in a long robe and mounted on a winged horse, predecessor of those in Greek mythology?

The tombs are reduced copies of the houses, as will be the case more afternoon at the necropolis of Nagheh-e-Rustem. Here, too, the corpses are sumptuously attired before they are buried, and, as in Çatal Huyuk, weapons are placed on the graves of men, and jewels in women's.

The luxury far surpassed that of the Neolithic city: the furniture they had ornaments of gold and silver; the bronze legs of the tables and of the beds were in the shape of horse's or male's hooves Chevron. Bulls' heads decorated the cauldrons. To run the meticulous drawing of the frescoes, the artists had rulers and Bars.

All these fragmentary elements are not enough to reconstitute a Solid chain. Too many links are missing, and the spread of those in space give rise to the multiplication of hypotheses. If we know, for example, how Catal Huyuk disappeared, destroyed (probably by the Scythians) in the middle of the sixth millennium BC On the other hand, we do not know the motives that led to the first building in this city.

Difícilmente podemos admitir que se tratase de un ensayo, ya que se consiguió una obra maestra de urbanismo. Por otra parte, el monopolio de la obsidiana no basta para explicar este logro. Unas técnicas tan complicadas como la consistente en practicar en una bola de dura piedra un orificio más fino que la más fina aguja, no pueden surgir espontáneamente. Si se trata de un invento, éste presupone un ingenio desconcertante.

 

But wouldn't it be more like of something inherited? It's hard to imagine that Catal Huyuk's art was a normal extension of that of the Upper Palaeolithic, at the end of The Last Ice Age. And this can also be applied to the civilization of technical priests recently discovered in the Caucasus, in a region certainly in contact with the city Neolithic, which had, as we have already said, an important network of commercial.

First full-fledged urban civilization? Born, how? By abruptness apparition? In another case, what was his parentage? What was your inheritance? Did it represent progress, in relation to a past that Do we not know, or was it a memory of some higher civilization?

Perhaps the inhabitants of Çatal Huyuk were ignorant or in denial of the existence of his predecessors, in the same way as those of Altin Tepé was unaware of theirs. When your writing is deciphered, We may read:

Rise of the Sorcerers - 08 (bibliotecapleyades.net)

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The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Seventeen - THE TWELVE CITIES OF ÇATAL HUYUK (basecamp.com)

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The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Seventeen – THE TWELVE CITIES OF ÇATAL HUYUK – Library of Rickandria