Farmers have been here for as long as anyone can remember, thousands of years in fact. As a local farmer near Urfa, southeastern Turkey, you've dragged your plow across this hill hundreds of times. Each time you do, you hit a large rock right beneath the surface. With each bump you straighten your plow and continue on. There is a job to be done, your family to be fed. This land is thought to have been a Byzantine-turned-Islamic cemetery. People have always found chunks of rock here, but they must only be gravestones.
This view turned out to be wrong...spectacularly wrong. In 1994 Klaus Schimdt, an archeologist working on a nearby Neolithic settlement of Nevali Cori ( Nevalı Çori), saw some of the stones found at Gobekli Tepe (Göbekli Tepe) and thought there might be a connection. The next year he started excavations, and what his team found has radically overturned our understanding of the Neolithic era.
A map showing the location of Gobekli Tepe within Turkey
Now that phrase sounds quite boring...why would anyone alive today care about the Neolithic period? This time was already ancient history to the first Pharaoh of Egypt, how is it relevant to us at all? It is extremely relevant – these people are us. They are the first farmers, the first house builders. Their story of farming and architecture culminates with our story. The civilization we inherited by birth began with these people – so the questions of how and why they started such a thing are of great importance. If us moderns want to know more about what constitutes a civilization, then our first step is to look back at its birth – the Neolithic era.
An illustration by Zdenek Burian from 1958, "Prehistoric Man"
That stone, once marked by the edge of a plow, was slowly uncovered. It quickly became obvious that it was not put there by nature, but by man. It was carved with precision and craftsmanship. It was huge – a megalith – and it was a central pillar of a larger structure. This central pillar was a centerpiece, surrounded by a ring of smaller pillars. Stones fitted between these smaller pillars formed a wall. The central pillars and the surrounding wall of smaller pillars together form a large megalithic enclosure. Klaus Schmidt continued digging, and found more of these structures. This was not one building, but a series of buildings. Klaus Schmidt then conducted a geophysical survey of the whole site, and what he found astounded him – there are over 20 of these giant structures, and in total about 200 pillars. These structures were built on top of each other, forming a site with thousands of years of human construction and activity.
Detail of a central T pillar, showing its hands and a loincloth
The history of the site can be classified into two phases. The first phase of buildings consisted of circular structures. At the center of these large rooms, were two giant T shaped pillars. The top bar of the T shape was left unmarked, but the body of the T pillar was carved to resemble the human form. Stretching from the top of the pillar are arms, coming to the hips of the pillar, ending in fingers. Around the waist of the pillar is a loin cloth made of a fox pelt. Surrounding the central pillars in a circle are the smaller T shaped pillars, which are built into the wall of the structure. The smaller T pillars have intricate carvings of local animals on them. The floor of these structures are made of either limestone terrazzo or of the natural bedrock flatted to make a smooth surface. It is still up in the air whether these structures had roofs or not.
This was a huge undertaking – the tallest of the central pillars reach up to about 20 feet, and the heaviest up to about 20 tons. While difficult, prehistoric peoples have done this before. What makes this site different from the rest of those prehistoric sites is its date. When dated, Klaus Schmidt found that the first phase of construction took place during the PPNA (pre-pottery Neolithic A) period – about 9500 BCE to 8800 BCE!
A reconstruction of Phase 1 Gobekli Tepe
The second phase of buildings showed a changed attitude towards the hilltop site. This was during the PPNB (pre-pottery Neolithic B) period, from about 8800 BCE to 8000 BCE. The structures became rectangular shaped instead of circular, and instead of two central pillars they started only erecting one. The size of the buildings and pillars themselves grew smaller. Every couple of decades people would come together and bury the structure, then building a smaller version on top of it. Eventually, between 8000 BCE and 7500 BCE the last structure was filled in and a new one was never rebuilt. The site was abandoned.
Every detail about this site raises questions which have never been asked. How did people