This is a lecture by Kenneth Harl, a specialist in the area we often call the Middle East, but he prefers to call the “Near East”. The lecture is a summary of the archaeological sites of the ancient world. It’s about the Stone Age, much earlier than the “classical” civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome.
You can see the whole video here
This section of the talk relates to the period of the “Neolithic revolution” when the human population began settling and constructing larger and larger villages and towns.
The domestication of plants and animals probably first happened in Eastern Turkey. Several thousand years later, but still in the “Stone Age”, we have the first real cities. One such place is Çatal Höyük, an archaeological site near the modern city of Konya in central Turkey.
Hasan Dağı is a nearby volcanic mountain. This is why people in the area could find obsidian, which is a kind of volcanic glass. It is easy to make into sharp objects like knives and arrows.
Some people may be interested in the story of the first archaeologist who worked on the site, James Mellaart. He is now thought to have forged some of the artefacts supposedly found there in order to support his theories.
What can we see in the fresco?
