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 wall against wall, entered them by ladder through the roof, buried their dead under the floors and painted the walls, for more than a thousand years. Çatalhöyük was a town by size, but excavation finds no palace, no temple district, no rich quarter: broadly similar access to staple foods across houses, inequality flickering in less vital goods, and, at moments, apparently deliberately tamped down.

Why it matters

Çatalhöyük is the standing counterexample to the assumption that crowding produces hierarchy: a settlement of thousands that ran for centuries with no evidence of institutionalized, lasting inequality. Even its large millstones may have been shared between households, and many were deliberately smashed, as if passing wealth down were the thing forbidden. Cities did not have to be born unequal; that came later, and it came with a history.

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 over storage, tools and house furnishings, computed to be comparable with inequality measures 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