Contents Updated: Wednesday, March 24, 1999
Çatal Hütük is a Neolithic site in Turkey. It is considered to have been the first city. The people of Çatal Hütük grew grain and kept domesticated sheep, cows, goats, and dogs, but not pigs. The site was occupied from about 7000 to 6000 BC.
James Mellaart, who was responsible for unearthing the site, wrote in 1964, that he thought the neolithic religion of the city "was created by women" because it "lacks the element of sexual vulgarity and eroticism that is almost automatically associated with fertility and probably is the male’s contribution."
A plaster relief, dating from about 6200 BC, shows a woman giving birth, her legs spread apart. Underneath her is a row of plaster breasts, moulded over animal skulls, with nipples painted red. Goddess statuettes were found in the grain bins. Women are buried under the platforms in the shrines, sometimes with children. Men have never been found under the platforms. Mellaart guessed the shrines were burial places for their priestesses and the priestesses’s families.
Gimbutas says neolithic "Old Europe" was peaceful because there were "no depictions of arms" or artefactual weapons "used by man against man". Mellaart reports otherwise from Çatal Hütük. Graves of males contained weapons, stone maceheads, obsidian arrowheads and javelin heads, and daggers. There was no evidence of animal sacrifice, though it is not clear why the bones found in the shrines could not have been sacrificed women and children.
The Anatolian Neolithic was a Goddess civlization characterized by the dominance of the worship of the Goddess imbued with mysterious generative power.
But this Goddess of fertility and reproduction is also the archetype for virgin goddesses and semi-divine virgin figures:
The Goddess of the Paleolithic and Neolithic [creates]... life out of herself. She is the primeval, self-fertilizing "Virgin Goddess" who has survived in numerous culture forms to the present day. The Christian Virgin Mary is a demoted version of this original deity.