Arkeopolitics

Illustrated 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…

Standing in the dust of Çatalhöyük—a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, yet virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law—a question haunted me: “How come no one told us about it?” My training at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye) was defined by a dominant doctrinal paradigm: that wherever households…