City of Glass — Noel-Anne Brennan

About ten thousand years ago the very first city may have existed. The City of Glass was a real place. No one knows now what its name was, but its archaeological remains are found in what is today the Anatolian province of Turkey, where its ruins go by the name of Çatal Huyuk (pronounced Shatal Hooyook), the forked mound in the road. The people did not have writing, but they had many of the advantages and disadvantages of an urban lifestyle, or at least I imagine they did. We know some things about how they lived, similar to us in some ways and very different in others. Obsidian (black glass), which they collected and mined, was very important to them. I have focused here on the imagined story of a family who lived then.