A trip to the Urfa Museum yesterday oriented us for our site visit today to the most extraordinary archaeological find – Gobelkli Tepe (Potbelly Hill or Hill of the Naval), a UNESCO-listed wonder of the pre-ancient world.
The site is on a hilltop 870 metres high with a view to Syria.
The site is one of several discovered in this part of Turkey dating from more than 11,000 years ago – that’s right, way before the pyramids and over 7,000 years before Stonehenge. The finds have been carbon-dated to between 10,000 BCE and 7500 BCE. This predates agriculture and it was therfore established by hunter-gatherers as some kind of religious site. We learnt a new acronym – the PPNA (pre-pottery neolithic A – as opposed to B).
The site itself has several buildings, built over a thousand years, now covered by a protective roof and surrounded by a walkway:
Each building is oval-shaped with enormous (up to 5 metres high) T-shaped monoliths embedded in the walls. In the middle stand two of the T-shapes facing each other. They are covered in animals and other designs:
Each of the buildings was full of animals embedded in the floor and we were able to see these in the museum in Urfa:
And what were these places used for? Well, the excavation continues, but one of the figures looks like a vulture taking away a body, so some assume it’s a place for sky burials because the buildings were uncovered. It’s called the world’s first temple, although there is a competitor nearby which is still being excavated.
Only one human figure – of a man holding his penis – has been found in one of the dozen neolithic sites in the area:
The point about this site is that it turns conventional theory on its head: it was believed – indeed we were told in school – that only settled societies were capable of producing monumental buildings and sophisticated art. But most of the work here was done by hunter-gatherers. Hence the need to revise your understanding of prehistory!
Gob smacking, apart from one thing that never changes
Well, yes, there is that but the rest of it – the site, the structures and the timing – are all really extraordinary!
Extraordinary and spectacular… How wonderful to be there!
It was great – and the visitor centre was really, really good ( not a sentence I say often) – excellent content and technology that was still working!
It must have been startling, and an astonishing site. It is staggering that they had such skills and equipment. What did you learn about their tools – is it suggested the monoliths were cut and smoothed with flints?
I’m completely confident that it was suggested that flints were involved – I was simply transfixed by the vividness of the animals – both on the monoliths and as small, vivid beings in their own right.
Breathtaking
Yup, that’s the word – I’ve never seen anything like it from such an incredibly early period..
This is amazing. Love the lizard on the pillar.
Me too! Am guessing the other animals – wild pigs, birds, possibly leopards – were just scattered about on the floor of the different buildings/ temples. So hard to make sense of what it was all about.
What a privilege to experience this. Many thanks for the information and photos. We learn so much from you both!!
And we learned such a lot from visiting this site – really breathtaking stuff and unsettling..