Gobekli Tepe | Mysteries of Turkey | Unknown Artifacts | Archaeological Mysteries

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• published: 14 Feb 2016
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A Conventional archaeological thought maintains that organized religion—the building of temples and the development of elaborate rituals—was a by-product of human settlement. As humans settled down into agricultural societies, they had enough leisure time to build upon folk religion and to start more ambitious construction projects. Then archaeologists discovered Gobekli Tepe. Located in the Urfa plain of southeast Turkey, near one of the most fought-over regions on Earth, is a temple whose ruins may be the oldest organized place of worship known to man. Gobekli Tepe was discovered by Klaus Schmidt in the mid-1990s and dates back to as far as 9500 B.C., about 5,000 years before Stonehenge to be exact Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological site at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, approximately 12 km northeast of the city of Şanlıurfa. The tell has a height of 15 m and is about 300 m in diameter, It is approximately 760 m above sea level. It was excavated by a German archaeological team under the direction of Klaus Schmidt from 1996 until his death in 2014. If accurate, this places it in a time before even pottery was invented in the Fertile Crescent, when people were still living in mostly nomadic cultures. The sites are mainly constructed of Stonehenge-like massive limestone slabs covered in elaborate animal carvings. Nobody knows how they were moved to their present locations. The writing in those pillars includes two phases of ritual use dating back to the 10th – 8th millennium BCE. During the first phase, pre-pottery Neolithic A (P P N A), circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected. More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known through geophysical surveys. Each pillar has a height of up to 6 m and a weight of up to 20 tons. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock. In the second phase, Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (P P N B), the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime. The site was abandoned after the PPNB-period. Younger structures date to classical times. The purpose of the structures is not yet clear. Excavator Klaus Schmidt believed that they had been early neolithic sanctuaries. They noted that the sites showed no evidence of habitation and were continuously maintained, with older sites buried and new ones constructed to take their place. The site was first noted in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1963. American archaeologist Peter Benedict identified it as being possibly neolithic and postulated that the Neolithic layers were topped by Byzantine and Islamic cemeteries. The survey noted numerous flints. Huge limestone slabs, upper parts of the T-shaped pillars, were thought to be grave markers. The hill had long been under agricultural cultivation, and generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles, possibly destroying archaeological evidence in the process. Domestic artifacts such as portable mortars and stone bowls could also indicate that people did reside there. And while the inhabitants may not have been full-time farmers yet, sickles and other items found around the site could indicate that they had begun to cultivate plants. When we notice the architecture, the design has three layers, Layer one is the uppermost part of the hill. It is the shallowest, but accounts for the longest stretch of time. It consists of loose sediments caused by erosion and the virtually uninterrupted use of the hill for agricultural purposes since it ceased to operate as a cult center. Layer 2 is the Creation of the circular enclosures in layer 3 later gave way to the construction of small rectangular rooms in layer 2. Rectangular buildings make a more efficient use of space compared with circular structures. They are often associated with the emergence of the Neolithic. But the T-shaped pillars, the main feature of the older enclosures, are also present here, indicating that the buildings of Layer 2 continued to serve as sanctuaries. Layer 2 is assigned to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (P P N B). The several adjoining rectangular, doorless and windowless rooms have floors of polished lime reminiscent of Romanterrazzo floors. The reason the complex was carefully back filled remains unexplained. Until more evidence is gathered, it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture or the site's significance.