In 1961, James Mellart, then the assistant director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, began a dig at a place called Catalhoyuk, due south of Ankara. The object of his interest was a large artificial mound, which preliminary work had suggested was some 5000 years old.
When he dug into the mound, Mellart and his team discovered a Neolithic settlement. It consisted of a network of houses, built next to one another, with common mud brick walls and no separating roads or alleyways. It was necessary to climb and stomp across the roofs of the other houses to reach the entry point in the roof of each individual house. It was hardly a formula for richly harmonious relationships. However, the residents may have thought it worthwhile, because it made for a natural fortification against foreign intruders.
It seemed that families would live in these houses for about 100 years, then fill them in with earth, and build again on top. Research suggested that the bottom layers of the settlement dated from about 8500 years before today - about 6500 bc. This is the very dawn of human civilisation, and means that early Catalhoyuk would have been contemporaneous with the first agriculture and the first attempts at domesticating animals.
It was also about 3000 years before the first writing. The beginnings of the historical (or probably better-termed 'recorded') period are said to coincide with the creation of writing by either the Babylonians, Sumerians or Egyptians, or maybe all three in parallel, around 3500 bc.
Figure 1: The three sections of the map on display at the Museum of Anatolian Antiquities in Istanbul. Click on the image below to view it in more detail.
So Mellart and his co-workers did not expect to find, on the plaster in one of the rooms, a map showing the town, in detail, and an erupting volcano.
Figure 2: A modern plan (above) and 3D perspective (below) of Catalhoyuk, drawn by Mellart during the excavation in 1963. Click on the images above and below to view them in more detail.
In archaeological and cartographic terms, this is a truly unique item. However, it has remained largely unreported because work on the site was halted in 1965, and only resumed in 1993. During this interval, the Turkish government protected the site from vandalism, but no further work was allowed. The latest dig has been undertaken by both the Institute and the Turkish General Directorate of Monuments and Museums.
Artefacts unearthed from the site previously were stored at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. The resumption of the dig has brought many of those artefacts back to light, and caused experts to review their significance. As a result, much interest has been shown in the Catalhoyuk map.
According to current research, the earliest drawings that can be considered maps date from the middle Stone Age. These drawings depict, typically, a few natural physical features, such as rivers, mountains and roads. They are drawn either on stable surfaces such as walls, caves and rocks, or on portable material such as earthenware, leather or hide.
During recent studies, some 57 such maps have been registered - 37 in France, seven in Italy, two in Malta, two in Denmark and one each in Bulgaria, Germany, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Georgia and Turkey. In short, from all around the Fertile Crescent where civilisation began.
These early maps appear to come in two types: pictographs or petroglyphs. Pictographs typically have some sort of religious or spiritual symbolism and are little different from other forms of cave art. The earliest cave art in Europe dates from about 30,000 years ago. (The earliest Aboriginal rock painting in Australia is probably very much older, so humans all over the world may have understood the idea of a pictorial representation of the world by 50,000 years ago.)
But it was a long time before people cottoned on to the idea of making a pictorial representation that showed spatial relationships in their environment.
A silver vase found at Maiskop, in the northern Caucasian region, for instance, contains a depiction of the sun over the horizon, with animals important to hunting people underneath. The image shows a river, and animals drinking at a waterhole. It is dated around 3500 bc.
Figure 3: An image on the Masikop Vase. It is thought to have been made around 3500 bc. Click on the image below to view it in more detail.
Such an image undeniably contains a spatial representation of the world, but it only just qualifies as a map. An image on a rock wall at Seradina is much closer to our modern idea of how to represent spatial relationships. This petroglyph seems to show buildings, courtyards and fields, connected by roads. It dates from about 2000 bc, and when first uncovered, was thought to be the oldest topographical map.
Figure 4: A drawing of the central portion of the Catalhoyuk map. The twin peaked volcano is a reasonable representation of the way Hasan Dagi looked 8000 years ago. It has been extinct since the second millennium before Christ. Click on the images above and below to view them in more detail.
It is evident that the Catalhoyuk map throws this neat chronology into a spin. On the evidence so far, it seems that cartography preceded writing by some 3000 years. Furthermore, it seems that the art of spatial representation was at least as advanced as other art forms.
So what does the map show? The first point to make is that it is not complete; there is some evidence that it once enclosed all four walls of the room where it was found. All that remains is a well-preserved segment on the north wall. A segment on the east wall had been heavily damaged and has not been preserved. The map that once adorned the other two walls is missing completely.
However, the section that is left shows a very clear representation of the town in plan view, with a volcano in relief looming above the village. The volcano is shown erupting. It is shown as a twin-peaked mountain, and indeed there is such a mountain within sight of Catalhoyuk: Hasan Dagi.
The mountain is drawn as it would appear on the horizon, which is probably where the residents felt comfortable with the view. The surprise, however, is that the houses are all shown in planimetric view - a view that none of them could ever have seen. The map doesn't appear to have been based on a scale, but the houses depicted in the map have a remarkable resemblance to the originals, and appear to be shown in their correct orientation to one another.
This shows that the cartographers had at least a rudimentary idea of length and of how to represent distance. They also must have understood the idea of angle and direction. The fact that they had no tools with which to measure makes the map all the more remarkable.
Another curious fact is that the map employs distinct symbology - the cartographers have consistently used the same symbols to represent houses of different types, and the rooms and openings in them. This is remarkable, given that people would not get the idea of associating sounds with symbols for another 3000 years.
The map clearly had spiritual significance for the people of Catalhoyuk. The way the volcano looms over the scene is evidence of that. The volcano is now extinct, but 8000 years ago it was a major source of obsidian - black glass. This was highly prized throughout the region, so the volcano was probably a source of much wealth, as well as much danger, for the residents. Its dual aspects - giver of life, bringer of death - probably resonated as much with them as they do with us.
The Catalhoyuk map is now the subject of considerable research by scholars, not only at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, but all round the world. It was the subject of a paper at the 1999 Symposium of the International Map Collectors Society last year in Istanbul. Pasha Cevat Ulkekul, who has recently retired from the Cartographic Corps of the Turkish Army, gave a memorable treatise on the subject, translated by Husseyn Katirciolglu. During that presentation, Ulkekul invited cartographers, archaeologists and historians to analyse and contribute to what promises to become the greatest find in cartographic history.
John Brock is a Sydney-based surveyor. He can be contacted at Rose Atkins and Associates on +61-2-9671-3800. Jon Fairall is the editor of Measure & Map. This article is based on notes by John Brock made during his visit to the 1999 Symposium of the International Map Collectors Society, as well as on a book by Cevat Ulkekul, The Town Plan of Catalhoyuk (Donence, Istanbul, 1999).
