Another 10,000-year-old Neolithic settlement in Turkey
Posted On: Aug 27th, 2015 at 12:08
Turkey
Not content with the two oldest sites in the world – the 12,000-year-old (10,000 BC) Göbekli Tepe and the 9,500-year-old (7500 BC) Çatalhöyük – Turkey has now added a third.
Gracefully moving into second place is Aşıklı Höyük, not far from its sister Çatalhöyük, but 500 years older. Dating to 10,000 years ago (8000 BC), Aşıklı Höyük is much smaller than Çatalhöyük but is no less significant.
Although first found in 1964 full excavations didn’t start until 1989. Now the site can be seen in its full glory and the layout is astonishingly complex and compact.
Another common feature is burials within houses, and this was a practise that was passed all the way along into Mesopotamia and beyond. In Aşıklı Höyük 70 burials have been found under the floors of 400 rooms, and could account for at least one per ‘house’. Obviously a common act, the practise may have been carried out so that the living could ‘protect’ the soul of the dead relative, or maybe they simply didn’t want animals digging the bodies up if buried outside. In those days six-feet graves were not thought of, but any theory of the idea behind these burial practices can only be guess work. It is thought, however, that graves could be ‘maintained’ if buried within the home, and if not properly looked after the soul of the dead person could come back to haunt the living. Also it was thought the souls of the dead went into the underworld which in those days, unlike heaven, was below the ground and not above it. But will we ever really know? Don’t you just love a weird mystery?
