The tumultuous changes that took place around the Mediterranean c. 6300 BC are seen here through the eyes of a boy who was born into a family of hunter-foragers in northern Turkey. While still young, Tulirane is taken from his family and forced to live as a slave among the obsidian masters of Çatalhöyük (Bhelsakros), a “town” of some 8,000 people that has only become more baffling as archaeological technologies have become more precise.
As Tuli moves from one world into another – from the open wilderness that shelters the foragers into the closed, white-plastered chambers that shelter the townsfolk of Çatalhöyük – he becomes acutely aware of the differences in how the people in each of these two worlds live and die, and what they hold dear.
It is my hope that The Bear, the Bull, and the Child of Light will be discovered by not only young adults, but by all ages of readers who are interested in Old World prehistory and the ultimate origins of agriculture.
“A long-ago world comes fully alive in this richly imagined tale.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Plausible and true to the facts . . . the story is great and very absorbing.”
— Ian Hodder, Stanford professor and excavator of Çatalhöyük
. . . beautifully told and ethnologically accurate.”
— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD, author of The Way of the Human Being