Catal Huyuk

May 17 - We left Goreme this morning and headed west toward Konya.  This was the Iconium of Paul and Barnabas' day.  Just south of Konya, not all that far from the village of Lystra which the two apostles Paul also visited, lies the archaeological mound of Catal Huyuk.

Catal Huyuk is one of the oldest and largest Neolithic cities ever unearthed.  It is roughly the same age as the lower levels of Jericho.  It captures the time when man was just transitioning from hunting and gathering to farming with livestock.  These people planted wheat and barley for sustenance, but they also hunted wild game.  The city is estimated to contain in its heyday about 5,000 people living in 1,000 houses.  Back then, the town lie on the banks of a vast marsh populated with ducks and other wild life.

The city must have looked a bit like the Zuni pueblos of the American southwest.  The square mud-brick houses were built hard up against each other.  Curiously, the houses had no doors, with only small windows place high on the walls.  They all take access from a hole in the rooftop.  Each house in Catal Huyuk has its own oven for baking bread, placed just underneath the ladders leading to the rooftop, allowing the smoke to escape.  The walls and the floors were covered in plaster, and the walls decorated with panels of red.  Rush mats were used on the floors.   The furniture was built-in, with brick platforms for sitting on, working on and sleeping on.  They buried their dead under these platforms.

Many houses have religious shrines, and it is clear that bulls were sacred.  Bulls' heads and horns project from the walls and altars of their temples.  I have always wondered if the bull worship of early man didn't derive from the zodiac.  The earth moved through the constellation Taurus from about BC 4100 to BC 2200, and the ancients believed the planets and stars were gods.  Catal Huyuk has been carbon dated from roughly BC 7400 to BC 6200, so this theory would greatly compress the conventional C14 dating.

The Catal Huyukians were a fierce and bloodthirsty lot, as you can see. The oven to bake bread lie just below the ladder, and the smoke exited through the same hole in the roof.

This picture shows the excavations at the southern part of the mound

This picture shows the northern excavations.

This wall shows some of the artwork found at the settlement.

This beautifully worked flint knife reminded me of Abraham and his son.

Colossae

May 19 - We drove from Egirdir, in the Turkish Lake District, to Pamukkale, the gleaming white cliffs with the blue pools of water cascading down.  Last August, when we were here, we visited the newly excavated ruins of Laodicea, which are located near the freeway interchange.  This time, we decided to hunt up what remained of Colossae.

The ancient city of Colossae is located just east of the modern town of Honaz, about 10 miles south of Laodicea.  It rests at the foot of 8,000' Mt. Cadmus, the highest mountain in western Turkey.  The Lycus River, little more than a creek by our standards, runs to the north.  The old Greek city has never been excavated, so all we see today is a huge 100' high mound with a dirt road along one side and small vineyards and cherry orchards on the other.  It is a very fertile nook of this valley due to the abundant water.  We bought a kilo of cherries from a roadside farmer for 6 Turkish lira, or about $2.00 US.

Colossae was the preeminent city in the upper Lycus Valley throughout the Persian era, 600 BC to 350 BC.  Xerxes stopped here for several days in BC 480 on his way to the Greek settlements along the Aegean coast.  After Alexander the Great conquered the region around BC 330, the Greeks started constructing cities further up the river valleys of western Anatolia, including the cities of Laodicea and Hierapolis.  They soon eclipsed Colossae, and by the time Paul was preaching in Ephesus, Colossae was a cultural backwater.  

Paul wrote to the Colossian saints from his imprisonment in Rome shortly after AD 60.  Tacitus records in the Annals that Laodicea had been destroyed by an earthquake in the 7th year of Nero, who reigned from AD 54 to AD 68 (Chapter 14).  This would be approximately AD 61 by our reckoning.  It appears that the neighboring city of Colossae was also toppled by the same earthquake but, unlike Laodicea, it was never rebuilt.  When John received his revelation in the later years of the 60's, he lists Laodicea among the seven Christian churches in Roman Asia but he did not mention Colossae, which no longer existed.

We read about a church in Colossae, which met in the home of Philemon, and another in nearby Laodicea (Col. 2:1, 4:16, Phil. 1). There were also a few believers in Hieropolis, the holy city that lies directly above the travertine pools of Pamukkale (Col. 4:13).  These Christians had been exposed to the Judaizing of the Galatians who lived less than 100 miles to the east.  "Let no man therefore judge you in meat , or in drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath day ........." (Col. 2:16).  They also had been influenced by the angelology of Jewish mysticism. "Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind ....." (Col. 2:18).

Denita photographed the only ancient artifact to be found on the surface

The ruins of Colossae lie under the green mound in center right. 

Mt. Cadmus is the snowy mountain in the background.

The mound of Colossae as viewed from the vineyard directly east.

The top of the mound with Mt. Cadmus in the background.

The town of Honaz can be seen at the base just above my hat.

This picture views north and west from the top of the mound.