"Göbeklitepe: The Extraordinary Temple of the Secret History of Humanity"
When German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt started excavating a hill in Urfa about 29 years ago, he believed that the structures he unearthed there were unusual and exceptional.
On the limestone plateau at Göbeklitepe in Urfa, Schmidt discovered more than 20 monumental round structures.
The largest of these was 20 meters in diameter and had two carved columns 5.5 meters high. The columns, with carved figures of people and hands, weighed 10 tons.
Carving and sewing them must have required great technical difficulties. Because these structures were built at least 11 thousand years ago, and it was known that people of that period had not yet domesticated animals and did not even have pottery, let alone metal tools.
Göbeklitepe had the oldest monumental structures of humanity, and they were built not for shelter but for another purpose.
After ten years of research, Schmidt came to a very important conclusion. When I visited him in Urfa in 2007, Schmidt, who was working at the German Archaeological Institute at the time, said that Göbeklitepe could help rewrite the history of civilization by answering the question of why people started agriculture and settled down.
The stone tools and other finds Schmidt and his team found in the mound showed that the circular structures were built by hunter-gatherer communities.
The tens of thousands of animal bones found in the mound belonged to wild animals, and there was no evidence of improved grains or other plants.
Schmidt was of the opinion that these hunter-gatherers came together 11,500 years ago and processed the T-shaped columns in Göbeklitepe with stone tools. They used the limestone from the bottom of the mound for the columns.
Shaping the columns and moving them into place was perhaps not as difficult as it seemed at first glance. It was a stone soft enough to be worked with tools made of limestone, flint or even wood. The limestone bed that formed the hill consisted of layers between 0.6 and 1.5 meters thick.
Archaeologists working in the mound believed that the columns were processed here, the excess parts on their edges were carved and shaped, and they were carried to the hill by sliding them a few hundred meters over tree trunks with rope ropes.
Schmidt thought that small nomadic groups in the region, as per their beliefs, would gather on the hill, build things at regular intervals, organize feasts, and then disperse again. Schmidt argued that the hill was not a settlement but a ritual center, perhaps a tomb or altar of some kind.
This was an important claim. Archaeologists have long believed that complex rituals and organized religion were luxuries that societies developed when they began farming and domesticating animals; this transition was known as the Neolithic period. When food was produced in excess of needs through agriculture, they were assumed to be able to devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments.
Schmidt said that Göbeklitepe turns these assumptions upside down. In addition to the stone tools in the area, findings obtained through radiocarbon dating also pointed to the pre-Neolithic period. More than 25 years have passed since the first excavations here, but there is still no evidence of bred plants or animals. Believing that these structures were uninhabited, Schmidt called it "the cathedral on the hill".
If this assumption is correct, it would indicate that complex ritual and social organization actually preceded settlement and agriculture. Over the course of 1,000 years, the necessity of bringing nomadic groups together in one place to carve and move huge T-pillars and build circular structures pushed humans to take the next step: to organize regular large-scale gatherings to obtain food through the domestication of plants and animals. supply had to be secured. Thus, ritual and religion seemed to initiate the Neolithic Revolution.
Schmidt's first reports about Göbeklitepe, published in the mid-2000s, created great excitement among Neolithic archeology experts and the media. The media called it the birthplace of religion; German magazine Der Spiegel compared the pastures around the mound to the Garden of Eden.
Soon people from all over the world flocked to see Göbeklitepe. In 10 years the hill has completely changed.Until Syria's civil war disrupted tourism in the region in 2012, work at the site had slowed as busloads of curious tourists to see what was called the world's first temple crowded around the open excavation trenches, making it impossible to maneuver wheelbarrows on narrow roads.
The hill on the periphery of Urfa has been reshaped in the last five years. Today, trails, parking lots and a visitor center welcome curious travelers from around the world. While the main structures in the mound were previously protected by a hangar-shaped structure made of corrugated rough steel, in 2017 they were covered with state-of-the-art shelters. Built in 2015 in the center of Urfa and one of the largest museums in Turkey, Åžanlıurfa Archeology and Mosaic Museum houses full-scale replicas of the largest monumental structure in Göbeklitepe and its imposing T-columns, allowing visitors to closely examine the monumental columns and carvings.
In 2018, Göbeklitepe was added to the Unesco World Heritage list, and Turkish tourism officials declared 2019 the "Year of Göbeklitepe", making the ancient site the face of a global promotional campaign.
Schmidt died in 2014 and did not live to see his dusty mountaintop excavation site become a major tourist attraction. But their discoveries there sparked increased global interest in the Neolithic transition. A closer look at the results of new discoveries and previous excavations at Göbeklitepe in the last few years appears to have turned Schmidt's initial interpretations upside down.
During the excavation of the foundation of the canopy protecting the central structure, archaeologists had to go deeper than Schmidt's excavation. The German Archaeological Institute team, led by Lee Clare, who succeeded Schmidt, found houses and permanent settlements several meters below the floors of large monumental structures.
These findings meant a rewriting of the prehistoric period. Because Göbeklitepe was not just an isolated temple where people came together for special rituals, it was a growing and developing village with special buildings at its center.
The team identified a large water cistern on the hill and canals used to collect rainwater, as well as thousands of grinding tools used to process grain for making porridge and beer. "Göbeklitepe is still a unique, special place, but the new findings are more in line with information previously obtained from other excavations," says Clare. "This was a full-fledged settlement with permanent occupation. It changed our entire understanding of the area."
Meanwhile, Turkish archaeologists working in the rugged countryside around Urfa have identified 11 new mounds with similar, though slightly smaller, pillars built around the same time. "This temple is not unique," says Neolithic Age expert researcher Barbara Horejs from the Austrian Institute of Archaeology. “This makes the story much more interesting and exciting.”
Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said that this region will be the "pyramids of the southeast".
Clare and other archaeologists now see Göbeklitepe not as a centuries-long building project that ushered in agriculture, but as an attempt by hunter-gatherer communities to hold on to vanishing ways of life as the world around them changed. Evidence from surrounding areas shows that people in other regions had begun attempts to domesticate animals and plants. Göbeklitepe residents were perhaps resisting this initiative.
Clare argues that the stone carvings at the site are an important clue. The detailed carvings of foxes, leopards, snakes and vultures that cover the columns and walls of Göbeklitepe "are not animals you encounter every day," he says. “They are more than pictures; they are narratives that are crucial to keeping groups together and creating a common identity.”
When I first visited Göbeklitepe in 2007, I realized how old these structures were. The stone columns in Stonehenge, England's oldest monumental structure, were erected 4,500 years ago in the late Neolithic period. Göbeklitepe was built 6,000 years before Stonehenge, and just as it is impossible to fully understand the world of the people who once lived there, it is also impossible to understand in depth what exactly the carvings on the columns mean.
This is part of the immense charm of Göbeklitepe. While thousands of visitors marvel at a place most people had never heard of 10 years ago, researchers will continue to try to understand why it was built in the first place. Each new discovery promises to change what we currently know about this area and human civilization.
"The new study does not eliminate Klaus Schmidt's thesis; it rises on its shoulders," says Horejs. "I think it's been a huge gain in knowledge. Interpretations are changing, but that's how science progresses anyway."
