April 9 Ankara

Our first morning in Ankara, after visiting a place to do laundry, we hike up the hill to the Byzantine citadel. A gaggle of school kids raced up the last steps past us, then sat puffing as we turtled past, then as Jim went to the battlement wall, they were already on a tear for the Anatolian Culture Museum. The gray arrow points to Gail, waiting for her errant hubby - the pink to the Ataturk Mausoleum, the final resting place of the founding hero of modern Turkey. At the museum we met the 'Venus of Catalhayuk', discovered in the mid sixties, of whom Gail had learned in a HDS seminar taught by Carol Christ on Goddess herstory in the early eighties.
The majority of figures from this 9,000 year old site, the earliest know neolithic city (of 5-7,000 people), are female. More of this site later!
Later civilization in Turkey (Hittite, 5,000 B.C.) invented writing, here a cuneiform clay tablet is coming out of its envelope. Some of these tablets were bills of lading, land contracts and bills of debt. The Turkish for envelope is zarf, a legitimate scrabble word Jim has known for 50 years and played once. Sorry, here's another Jim thing – stone molds from the bronze age. This mold casts the head around a missing 'core' to make the shaft opening. Jim carved soapstone molds for casting pewter when active in that field.
The Goddess theme carried right through to A.D. (Mary is venerated in Turkey, appearing in the Koran near as much as in the Bible). Here is Cybele, a rather grand-motherly figure, yet still flanked either side - by children rather than leopards - after 5 or six thousand years. Once again, the Museum has a much bigger tale to tell than this short space.