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Göbekli Tepe, mankind’s first step towards civilization

by | Dec 14, 2011 | Fav, Uncategorized

At first it seems like the perfect name for an ancient temple complex.  Göbekli Tepe.  It rolls off the tongue like the fading echoes of a chanted ritual, repetitive and exotic.

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Then you find out that those seemingly mystical syllables translate to something as prosaic as “Potbelly Hill” which, to be fair, the jutting mass atop the mountain ridge in southeastern Turkey strongly resembles.  But while its name may be mundane its archeological significance is surely not.

 

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Before we explain why, though, it might be useful to offer a refresher course in middle school world history.  The way that kids these days learn it, nomadic people developed agriculture which gave them enough of a surplus of food that they were able to turn their energies to other things.  As soon as they realized the benefit of that they started dividing their labor, which taught them to corporate with others.  Soon they developed organized government and religion, and with those two came the idea of writing.  Thus culture was developed.
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Göbekli Tepe turns that traditional order on its head.  The problem is that here is an expansive temple complex that clearly dates back approximately 12,000 years ago- a time period in which humans were not farming or raising domesticated animals.  This means that maybe it wasn’t agriculture which gave man the extra time necessary to develop religion, but rather religion which gave man the push he needed to develop agriculture.
This isn’t a lone shrine either.  When we say expansive we mean truly large, the modern archeological site covers about 22 acres and is made up of at least 20 great stone rings, one of which is 65 feet across. Exact numbers are uncertain because much of the site is still underground, but some 50 huge pillars have already been uncovered.  The tallest pillars are 18 feet in height and weigh approximately 16 tons.  Most are carved into the shape of a capital T and almost all of them are covered in a bas-relief menagerie of animals.

 

Possible reconstruction of the site,
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But the animals represented aren’t the prey animals you might expect from a hunter/gatherer society, rather they seem to exclusively belong to the opposite category.  As  Ian Hodder, a Stanford University archaeologist who excavated a nearby site explained, the carven scenes of Göbekli Tepe are “a scary fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts” including swarms of spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and vultures.

Why such a focus on the scary beasties of the wild? No one is entirely sure.  Klaus Schmidt, the German archaeologist who discovered Göbekli Tepe and leads the excavation, believes that the site was used by a death cult.  He came to this conclusion mostly because of the number of carvings of vultures and a large carving of a vulture looming over a headless human which reminds him of the Tibetan sky burial, where the dead are laid out to be consumed by carrion birds who transport the flesh up to the Heavens.
Close up of human hands on one of the pillars, implying that they represent spirits.
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But even if sky burial wasn’t the purpose of this temple Schmidt argues vehemently that this was indeed a temple.  “There are no traces of daily life,” he explains. “No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here.”

In fact the nearest water source was about three miles away.  And if there are no domestic buildings on site or any residences, then the site may well be purely a ceremonial location.  The only evidence of food at all are the thousands of gazelle and aurochs bones found at there, which seems to imply that those who worked at the temple were fed by shipments of game from far-off hunts.

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This means that this huge complex, which predates any known settlement anywhere in the entire world (as well as pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel), was the first building that mankind created. If this is true then the order that we currently have things: first agriculture, then villages, then religion and government, might be turned on its head.  Schmidt thinks that this location itself was the catalyst for the development of agriculture.

DNA analysis of domesticated and wild wheat seems to support his conclusion.  It seems that the wild wheat with the closest DNA sequence to modern domesticated wheat grows on Mount Karaca Dağ, approximately 20 miles away from the dig site, which implies that this is where wheat was first domesticated

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Strangely enough, unlike Stonehenge which remained a single stone circle for most of its existence, Göbekli Tepe’s stones were replaced and rebuilt many times.  Every dozen of years or so the outer ring of pillars was filled in with dirt and another, inner ring was built inside of them.  Sometimes this process was repeated once more, before the entirety of the stone circle was buried in dirt and another ring was created nearby or, sometimes, right on top of the old filled-in ring.

Were the stones believed to have lost their power?  Or was there something else at play here?

Even stranger, around about 8,000 BC the complex was entombed.  Not abandoned, that wouldn’t be strange, but carefully, intentionally buried by hundreds of cubic feet of soil, stones, and animal bones.  It was this very burial which preserved the site so wonderfully for modern archeologists.  But what happened?

 

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It’s possible that it was a result of their discovery of agriculture.  The archaeological evidence of the area shows that at the time the site was first active the surrounding area wasn’t the dry, barren desert that it is today.  It was lushly green, filled with prey animals and plants.

But as the people of the area discovered farming and chopped down the surrounding trees the soil began to erode away and weaken.  Eventually the soil was too depleted to support any further growth and, in the face of Dust Bowl-like conditions, the area was abandoned.

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Perhaps the stones were entombed because the people of the area, having found religion, feared that they had angered the spirits.  Perhaps they wished to abandon the area, but didn’t want to leave a sacred place open to the elements.  Or perhaps they just wanted to give the mountain a more interesting top.

But however it happened, those people left us with a wealth of information about their lives and more mysteries to solve.