Göbekli Tepe
Stone pillars carved with animals, raised by hunter-gatherers before anyone farmed.
Göbekli Tepe, near Şanlıurfa, is a hilltop of round and oval enclosures ringed with T-shaped stone pillars, some over five metres tall. Its builders started around 9500 BC, before farming, pottery or writing. It is one of the oldest known monuments on earth.
- What
- Stone enclosures with carved T-shaped pillars
- When
- From about 9500 BC
- Where
- Near Şanlıurfa, southeastern Türkiye
- Status
- UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2018
The pillars
The T-shaped pillars are stylised people. Some have arms carved down their sides, hands meeting above a belt, and fox-pelt loincloths. Around them are animals in relief: foxes, boars, snakes, cranes, vultures, scorpions. On Pillar 27 a predator, a lion or a leopard, crawls head-first down the stone above a wild boar.
Who built it
The builders were hunter-gatherers. Quarrying, carving and raising pillars of many tonnes took many people working together, and the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who excavated the site from 1995, saw it as a place where groups gathered for rituals and feasts. Later work has found houses, water channels and stone tools for grinding wild grain, so people also lived here.
That is why Göbekli Tepe changed the story of the first towns: monuments did not wait for farming. People may have started cultivating grain partly to feed the crowds such places drew.
Visiting
Göbekli Tepe has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2018. A roof now shelters the main enclosures, with walkways around them, and finds from the site are shown in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum. It is one of a group of sites in the region, the Taş Tepeler, that are being excavated now, among them Karahan Tepe.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage: Göbekli Tepe
- German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Göbekli Tepe excavation reports
- Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia (2012)
- Göbekli Tepe (Wikipedia)