Çatalhöyük

You are walking across a rooftop. Not beside a rooftop, not toward one — across it, because there are no streets here. The city is a honeycomb of mud-brick rooms pressed so tightly together that the roof is the road. You descend into your home through a hole in the ceiling, down a wooden ladder, into a room where the walls are plastered white and painted with headless vultures and red handprints. And under the floor, directly beneath where you sleep, is your grandmother. She has been there for three years. So has her mother. So has someone else you cannot name anymore, someone from before memory, whose skull has been dug up, painted with red ochre, and placed on a shelf where she can still watch the room.

Çatalhöyük is not a ruin. For a thousand years — longer than Rome ever lasted — eight thousand people lived here, shoulder to shoulder, with their dead directly underfoot. No streets. No temples that we can find. No obvious rulers, no palace, no king's house larger than any other. Just rooms, and rooftops, and floors full of ancestors.

The question nobody has answered is the one that matters: why? Why bring the dead inside? Why keep the skull? Why paint the walls and bury another body and plaster over it and live there still?

Something was being held here that we don't have a word for anymore.