This Ancient Underground City Was Big Enough to House 20,000 People

Chicago, like a lot of other modern cities, has a hidden secret: It’s home to miles of passageways deep underground that allows commuters to get from one place to another without risking nasty weather.

Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas all have their own networks of underground tunnels, as well.

But there’s a place in Eastern Europe that puts those forgotten passages to shame. Welcome to Derinkuyu — the underground city.

A Subterranean Suburb

Picture this. It’s 1963, and you’re on a construction crew renovating a home. You bring your sledgehammer down on a soft stone wall, and it all crumbles away, revealing a large, snaking passageway so long that you can’t see where it ends.

This is the true story of how the undercity at Derinkuyu was (re-)discovered. While those workers knew they’d found something special, they couldn’t know just how massive their discovery had been.

Stretching 250 feet (76 meters) underground with at least 18 distinct levels, Derinkuyu was a truly massive place to live. Yes, live. There was room for 20,000 people to stay here, complete with all necessities (and a few luxuries) — fresh water, stables, places of worship, and even wineries and oil presses. It isn’t the only underground city in the area known as Cappadocia, but it’s the deepest one we know of, and for many years, it was believed to be the largest as well. (Another recently discovered location may have been home to even more people.)

Derinkuyu and the other 40-ish underground cities nearby are made possible thanks to the prevalence of tuff in the area, a kind of volcanic rock that solidifies into something soft and crumbly. That makes it relatively easy to carve enormous subterranean passages — but why would you want to? The answer lies in the cities’ origins.

Defense Against the Sword Arts

Derinkuyu isn’t exactly inhospitable on the surface level (after all, that’s where the people who found it were living). So why did ancient people decide to build their living quarters below the surface? Because they weren’t hiding from the broiling sun or annual meteor showers.

They were clearly hiding from invading forces, with massive, rolling stone doors to block off each floor should any armies breach the fortress. But who were the people of the caves, and who were they defending themselves against? The answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first.

The earliest known people to live in the area were the Hittites, who ruled the Turkish Peninsula from about the 17th to 13th centuries B.C.E. — well over three millennia ago.

Some scholars point to artefacts with Hittite cultural elements, such as a small statue of a lion, found in the underground caves. That suggests these ancient people would have been taking refuge from invading Thracians.

If they were, it didn’t work forever: A tribe of Thracians, the Phrygians, conquered the area next. It’s possible that the Hittites never lived underground, however; an alternate theory says that it was the Phrygians, not the Hittites, who spawned the subterranean city.

Since the construction of many of the immense underground complexes is dated to some time between the 10th and 7th centuries B.C.E., and the Phrygians lived there until the 6th century B.C.E., they’re generally regarded to have created the first caves. In that case, they may have been hiding from the Persian host under Cyrus the Great that eventually did take over the region.

Lost and Found

The Persians would have used those caves as well, as would all of the people to come after. Eventually, according to some sources, early Christians around the 2nd century C.E. took root in the caves as they fled Roman persecution. This pattern continued throughout the centuries and millennia to come — in fact, Greek Christians were still using the caves as late as 1923.

It’s pretty incredible, then, that the caves would have been forgotten in the 40-odd years between their last residents and their “re-discovery.”

It’s more likely, then, that it wasn’t the caves themselves, but the extent of the caves that were forgotten. While the holes burrowed into the area’s fairy chimneys would have been obvious even from a distance, it’s likely that the people living in more modern accommodations never realized that the caves in the wilderness outside of the urban area reached 18 stories down.

Iron Age Rock Art Discovered During Rescue Excavation Beneath House in Turkey

An unexpected discovery has revealed ancient artwork that was once part of an Iron Age complex beneath a house in southeastern Turkey. The unfinished work shows a procession of deities that depicts how different cultures came together.

Looters initially broke into the subterranean complex in 2017 by creating an opening on the ground floor of a two-story home in the village of Başbük. The chamber, carved into the limestone bedrock, stretches for 98 feet (30 meters) beneath the house.

When the looters were caught by authorities, a team of archaeologists did an abbreviated rescue excavation to study the significance of the underground complex and the art on the rock panel in the fall of 2018 before erosion could further damage the site. What the researchers found has been shared in a study published Tuesday by the journal Antiquity.

The artwork was created in the 9th century BC during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which began in Mesopotamia and expanded to become the largest superpower at the time.

This expansion included Anatolia, a large peninsula in Western Asia that includes much of modern-day Turkey, between 600 and 900 BC.
“When the Assyrian Empire exercised political power in south-eastern Anatolia, Assyrian governors expressed their power through art in Assyrian courtly style,” said study author Selim Ferruh Adali, associate professor of history at the Social Sciences University of Ankara in Turkey, in a statement.

An example of this style was carved monumental rock reliefs, but Neo-Assyrian examples have been rare, the study authors wrote.

Combining cultures

The artwork reflects an integration of cultures instead of outright conquest. The deities have their names written in the local Aramaic language. The imagery depicts religious themes from Syria and Anatolia and were created in the Assyrian style.

“It shows how in the early phase of Neo-Assyrian control of the region there was a local cohabitation and symbiosis of the Assyrians and the Arameans in a region,” Adali said. “The Başbük panel gives scholars studying the nature of empires a striking example of how regional traditions can remain vocal and vital in the exercise of imperial power expressed through monumental art.”

The artwork shows eight deities, all unfinished. The largest is 3.6 feet (1.1 meters) in height. The local deities in the artwork include the moon god Sîn, the storm god Hadad and the goddess Atargatis. Behind them, the researchers could identify a sun god and other divinities.

The depictions combine symbols of Syro-Anatolian religious significance with elements of Assyrian representation, Adali said.

“The inclusion of Syro-Anatolian religious themes (illustrates) an adaptation of Neo-Assyrian elements in ways that one did not expect from earlier finds,” Adali said. “They reflect an earlier phase of Assyrian presence in the region when local elements were more emphasized.”
Upon discovering this artwork, study author Mehmet Önal, a professor of archaeology at Harran University in Turkey, said, “As the dim light of the lamp revealed the deities, I trembled with awe as I realized I was confronted with the very expressive eyes and majestic face of the storm god Hadad.”

Mysteries remain

The team also identified an inscription that may show the name of Mukīn-abūa, a Neo-Assyrian official who served during the reign of Adad-nirari III between 783 and 811 BC.

The archaeologists suspect that he had been assigned to this region at the time and was using the complex as a way to win over the appeal of the local population.

But the structure is incomplete and has remained unfinished for all this time, suggesting that something caused the builders and artists to abandon it — perhaps even a revolt.

“The panel was made by local artists serving Assyrian authorities who adapted Neo-Assyrian art in a provincial context,” Adali said. “It was used to carry out rituals overseen by provincial authorities. It may have been abandoned due to a change in provincial authorities and practices or due to an arising political-military conflict.”

Adali was the epigraphist of the team who read and translated the Aramaic inscriptions in 2019 using photos captured by the research team, who had to work quickly to study the site.

“I was shocked to see Aramaic inscriptions on such artwork, and a sense of great excitement overtook me as I read the names of the deities,” Adali said.

The site was closed after the 2018 excavations because it is unstable and could collapse. It is now under the legal protection of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The archaeologists are eager to continue their work when excavations can safely resume and capture new images of the artwork and inscriptions and possibly uncover more artwork and artefacts.

Neolithic figurine, over 7,000 years old, unearthed at Turkey’s Çatalhöyük

An 8,000-year-old statuette of what could be a fertility goddess has been unearthed at a Neolithic site in Turkey, according to archaeologists.

The figurine, discovered at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, was wrought from recrystallized limestone between 6300 and 6000 B.C. That material is rare for an area where most previously discovered pieces were sculpted from clay, the researchers said.

The archaeologists think this figurine, which is conventionally associated with fertility goddesses, is also representative of an elderly woman who had risen to prominence in Çatalhöyük’s famously egalitarian society.

Goddess figurines were common in the Neolithic period, with those found at Çatalhöyük usually depicting a plump woman with her hair tied in a bun, sagging breasts and a pronounced belly, they said. 

The newfound figurine differentiates itself from similar statuettes not only in its material and quality but also in its craftsmanship, according to Ian Hodder, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University who is overseeing the Çatalhöyük site. Hodder said that he “realized immediately that it was a very special find.”

At 6.7 inches tall (17 centimetres) and 4.3 inches (11 cm) wide, the figurine has fine details such as elaborate fat rolls on the limbs and neck.

Unlike other goddess statuettes, the limestone figurine also depicts the woman with her arms separated from her torso and an undercut below the belly to separate it from the rest of the body.

These finer details would have only been possible with thin tools, like flint or obsidian, the researchers said, which suggests that the carving could only have been made by a practised artisan.

With its fine artistry and its discovery in the newer, shallower parts of the site (meaning that it was likely buried later), Hodder said that the figurine might signal a shift from a sharing economy to an exchange economy, where resources could be accumulated unevenly.

“We think society was changing at this time, becoming relatively less egalitarian, with houses being more independent and more based on agricultural production,” Hodder said in a statement.

The archaeologists think that the figurine was made after Neolithic Çatalhöyük, where resources were often pooled, and changed toward a more stratified society.

The fatness of the goddess statue could represent high status rather than an elevated place in a society of equals, Hodder said.

Whatever the shift, it did not happen overnight. Humans first settled in Çatalhöyük around 7500 B.C., with the society reaching its peak around 7000 B.C., according to archaeologists. The ancient settlement was abandoned around 5700 BC.