It’s hard to get one’s 21st century head around the Catalhöyük settlement, which existed from approximately 7500 – 5700 BC.

The Seated Woman of Catalhöyük (6000 BC)

Its early inhabitants lived at the dawn of agriculture. They had semi-domesticated animals and were learning to sow crops. Not only did women have the same diets as men and inhabit the same physical space, but there were no wider hierarchies in the community.

Professor Ian Hodder explains, ‘there is no evidence of a big ceremonial centre or a chiefly house. We see these houses that look like they could produce more and could become quite dominant but there seems to be a cap that stops them doing it.’

The Mother Goddess

Catalhöyük has a special significance for anyone interested in women’s history. It is the lynch pin in the Mother Goddess argument. According to this theory Stone Age society was matriarchal, peaceful, spiritual and sexually uninhibited. Women were respected for their life-giving powers, and the feminine mysteries were worshipped.

In the 1960s, the swashbuckling archaeologist James Mellaart found at Catalhöyük one of the most powerful representations ever made of female divinity. Known as the ‘Seated Woman of Catalhöyük’, or more popularly the ‘Mother Goddess’, it is a clay figurine of a corpulent woman sitting on a throne, flanked by two large leopards, who appears to be giving birth. As he continued his excavations Mellaart unearthed a treasury of female imagery and figurines.

For Mellaart, and many others, this was the confirmation they sought for the Mother Goddess theory. Catalhöyük was proof that patriarchy was no more ‘natural’ than the pyramids.

When Professor Hodder took over the site, it wasn’t his intention to be controversial. Nevertheless, his findings have been revolutionary. His team dug through 18 levels, covering about 1,200 years of uninterrupted habitation. They found no evidence to support the claim that Catalhöyük was a matriarchy or that female fertility was worshipped over and above that of phallic or animal spiritualism.

But, Hodder insists, the question should never have been posed as an either-or issue. He argues that his team’s discoveries are so much more significant than anything previously imagined. Catalhöyük was a place were true gender equality flourished.

Read more: Dr Amanda Foreman discusses what we can learn from Catalhöyük