So where were those terracotta animals from the last post actually found? Here, at Dilkaya Höyük.
Dilkaya is a mound on the south-eastern shore of Lake Van. Today it is the edge of the city; in the third millennium BC it was a busy settlement on a rise 1,650 metres above sea level.
What is a höyük?
The word deserves a moment, because it is not a synonym for “hill.”
A höyük is a hill that a town has made out of itself. Mudbrick does not last: walls slump, a house is levelled, and the next house goes up on the flattened remains of the last. Repeat for two thousand years and the settlement is standing on a mound of its own former selves, rising by something like a metre a century. Dig into one and you are not excavating a hill with a village on top. You are excavating the village, all the way down.
Every language of the region has its own word for the same thing, and between them they map the archaeology of the Near East:
- Turkish höyük and tepe—as in Göbekli Tepe and Tekli Tepe, both of which we have already visited;
- Arabic tell—as in Tell Brak, the Eye Temple that turned up in the eye idols post;
- Persian tappeh;
- Hebrew tel.
And that last one has had a career. Tel Aviv means “mound of spring”—tel, an ancient ruin heap, plus aviv, spring. The phrase comes from Ezekiel, who names a place of exile called Tel Abib; and behind that stands the Akkadian til abūbi, “mound of the flood”—the heap left behind when the deluge went down. A brand-new city on the Mediterranean, founded in 1909 as the very image of the future, carries a name meaning ancient ruin. Nobody minded, because by then the word had stopped meaning what it means.
The settlement itself
The Early Bronze Age village consisted of two kinds of dwelling, rectangular and round—our ancestors experimenting with space. Inside the houses there were benches, clay floors, storage pits. To the north, a wall with towers. The architecture is primitive, but the logic is already urban.
Here were found the terracotta figurines, obsidian weapons, grinding stones, beads and spindle whorls. And copper knives and needles, fragments of textile, bone awls. This was not a hunters’ camp but a proper settlement, where people lived, worked, ornamented themselves, and played with those same little bulls and goats.
All of this came thousands of years after Göbekli Tepe, where man was only learning to build. Here there is already experience, a way of life, a craft—very nearly a town.
So on the site plan those are not circles and squares. They are somebody’s houses. And so, come to that, is the hill.
