Click here for a photo that you may use to accompany the article. Photo caption/credit: The famous wall painting from Çatalhöyük depicts tightly clustered domestic houses beneath an erupting volcano. Photo/Illustration by Asya Denk.

The theme for an exhibition that opened on June 4, 2026, at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), World’s First City Plan/Map, as part of my Arkeopolitics initiative, was met with reservations by a group of students from the Middle East Technical University’s faculty of architecture. They questioned how the map—exhibited in the Çatalhöyük section of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations—could be called a work of art, reflecting the flawed modern perspective.

A young architect candidate objected and said: “Professor, how can this be a map? The houses are seen from above the (plan), but the mountain is seen from the profile (section). There is a serious perspective error here. Furthermore, a ‘mind’ capable of drawing a map could not have developed in that period.”

“In that case, should we also consider Picasso’s works irrational?” I responded.

Even though the hubris of the modern mind did not show at that exact moment, it was actually an “aha!” moment, the impact of which has been felt over time.

The people of Çatalhöyük depicted the world not “as it is”—in the sense we claim to understand today—but “as they felt and conceptualized it.” The truth is that the rational, perspectival gaze, or what we call “as it is,” is nothing more than a form that the modern mind “feels and conceptualizes” the world through. Therefore, the map is a work of art within its own period and context.

The Çatalhöyük Gaze

That bird’s-eye view that we see through drones today was a daily reality for the Çatalhöyük residents. In a settlement with no streets, where entry to houses was through roofs, life flowed on the rooftops. Socializing, working, and playing took place in the shared public space stretching across the roofs. Thus, the artists drawing the city depicted it from the angle they knew best—from above—and it was not a technical inadequacy or deficiency; on the contrary, it was sociological honesty. In fact, the equal stature of all the houses in the drawing also revealed the egalitarian structure of the settlement. They simply did not know (and see!) it any other way.

As for the mountain being shown from the front, besides its conformity to human vision and reality, it points to a colossal shared/natural constant that either threatened the entire city and/or held it at its skirts to give it its identity.

The claim that the “mountain” was the well-known “leopard skin” was also quite popular for a time, partly fueled by the notion that it could not be a map (so much so that Stephanie Meece wrote in her article that attributing cartography, which she deemed a Western phenomenon, skill, and invention, to Çatalhöyük was absurd). However, other studies replicating how a leopard skin is cut and splayed open have largely marginalized this view. Besides, a shape that erupts is highly likely to be a mountain. Today, we know that Mount Hasan, which looms on the horizon of Çatalhöyük, erupted while the Çatalhöyük settlement existed. We also know that obsidian, the industrial raw material that gave the settlement its character, came from it and other volcanoes in the region.

In short, nothing could be more natural than for the “mountain”—with its socioeconomic and sociopsychological significance for the settlement—to shape the art of the period, including the way it was depicted. Especially considering the importance a mountain (and a cave) held in almost all societies, from Upper Paleolithic shamanism to monotheistic religions.

The only significant complication here lies in the perspective of the depiction: the higher of the mountain’s two cones appears on the right side of the wall painting, whereas it is actually on the left when looking directly from Çatalhöyük, which is located just more than 100 kilometers away from the mountain. Crucially, this higher cone appears on the right only when viewed from Aşıklıhöyük—the pioneering settlement situated almost at the very foothills of the mountain. Given the roughly 150-year historical transition between the two sites, a direct cultural representation from Aşıklıhöyük seems unlikely. Alternatively, since geological hypotheses suggesting a later structural shift or eruption-induced alteration in the crater’s topography are highly implausible, it is far more rational to consider this specific rendering as the perspective or narrative of those who might have traveled directly to the base of the mountain for obsidian extraction.

In this sense, instead of capitulating to the modernist perspective that strips the painting of its cartographic value just because it lacks contemporary conventions, this composition should be recognized as a map in its own right—one that perfectly served the practical and existential needs of its own era. Much like the widely discussed interpretations of Upper Paleolithic cave art—where non-hunting depictions of animals are viewed as markers tracking seasonal paths, or where representations like the “Gargas hands” are interpreted as early “mapping” to signal game and demarcate secure travel routes—this rendering stands as a foundational cartographic practice: a vital transfer of a landscape’s economic and symbolic center of gravity onto a spatial plane.

After all, as we know from the enduring debates surrounding the Mercator projection, the modern era’s two-dimensional cartography is anything but an objective reflection of reality; by stretching the globe from the north, it systematically constructed a deeply Eurocentric worldview that we have long misconstrued as “normal.” Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the bewildered reaction of students seeing the Gall-Peters map on my office wall for the first time mirrors the same cognitive dissonance as the architecture student who confidently dismissed the Çatalhöyük painting for its apparent lack of “proper” perspective. It seems the modern mind simply cannot tolerate any reality that refuses to fit into its indoctrinated geometric grid.

The Relationship Between Art and Modernity

What is art? What about perspective and/or intellect? Or let us ask this way: Is the prescribed mode of thought that we call the perspective of the modern mind the only absolute way of seeing and showing reality? After all, wasn’t it the modern mind that warned us against unfalsifiable, single, and absolute truths?

Perhaps the real distortion belongs to the modern mind, which mistakes its own singular, rigid perspective for absolute objective reality. So, who is truly lacking perspective here? The Çatalhöyük artist who integrated multiple dimensions of lived experience onto a single wall, or the modern observer who looks at that wall and sees only a “technical error”?

Fortunately, we have mirrors like the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara—where this unique wall painting is housed—and countless other institutions across every corner of the globe that safeguard the monumental heritage of the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. These spaces invite us to break free from the shackles of the prescribed modern mind. That is, of course, if we are ready to accept what we so condescendingly label as “prehistory”—believing that history only begins when a society expresses itself through a script we happen to have successfully deciphered—is actually a rich history filled with sophisticated products of intellect and art. After all, Homo sapiens, who have existed for roughly 250,000 years—and the Neanderthals, who went extinct about 40,000 years ago—possessed art and engaged profoundly with their environments, both to share their narratives within, between, and beyond generations, and to survive in a symbiotic relationship with the spaces they inhabited.