SOCIETY

A Town Before Kings

~9,100 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

On the Konya plain of Anatolia, thousands of people packed their houses one against another, entered them by ladder through the roof, buried their dead under the floors and painted the walls, for more than a thousand years. Catalhoyuk was a town by size, but excavation finds no palace, no temple district, no rich quarter: access to staple foods looks broadly similar from house to house, inequality shows only in goods less tied to survival, and the gap that widened in the middle stretch of the town's life looks to have been deliberately tamped down.

Why it matters

Catalhoyuk stands against the assumption that crowding produces hierarchy: a settlement of thousands that ran for centuries with no evidence of institutionalized, lasting inequality. Its large millstones were expensive to obtain and may have been shared between households, and most were destroyed on purpose, as if passing wealth down were the thing forbidden. Cities did not have to be born unequal. Whatever made later ones so, it was not the simple fact of living close together.

Dating & uncertainty

The mound was occupied for well over a millennium; the anchor marks the settlement's establishment. The claims about equality are quantitative: Gini coefficients computed over storage, tools and house furnishings, and chosen so that the figures can be set beside measures of inequality elsewhere, ancient and modern.

Sources

1. Twiss et al. (2024), PLOS ONE · 'But some were more equal than others': exploring inequality at Neolithic Çatalhöyükdoi:10.1371/journal.pone.0307067
2. Wright (2014), Journal of Anthropological Archaeology · Domestication and inequality? Households, corporate groups and food processing tools at Neolithic Çatalhöyükdoi:10.1016/j.jaa.2013.09.007
3. Mazzucato (2019), Frontiers in Digital Humanities · Socio-material archaeological networks at Çatalhöyük: a community detection approachdoi:10.3389/fdigh.2019.00008

Our species’ history as one day

23:18:2441 min 36 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day