Just caught news of this temple from Newsweek and thought I’d share. I don’t know much about it, in fact this is the first time I read about it. But I am asking my friend and colleague in Turkey about it… so I’ll fill you in with any additional details as they come. The Newsweek article portrays this as a newly discovered finding but in fact research and excavations started in 1994. 
Bottom line, it is 11,500 years old. g That’s 7,000 years before the Pyramids of Giza and 6,000 years before Stonehenge. I’ve posted before how some of the first evidence of animal domestication and pottery occurred in Turkey, but these sophisticated pillars were assembled before those prehistorical landmarks… in fact they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture.
Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt comments on the significance of the site,
“definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island…
…Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city….
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion.”
Check out the site on Google Maps if you wanna poke around and do some exploring on your own. Have you ever heard of the site before? If so tell me what you know, I’m curious to find out more…
10 Comments
February 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
This is fascinating material. I think it reinforces many previous findings that man developed far earlier than the majority of scientists are still contending to this day.
February 23, 2010 at 1:09 am
Hi, Kambiz.
We discussed extensively Göbekli Tepe at Stonepage’s forum in 2008 and I have been re-reading that discussion now in order to recall the details and give an informed opinion.
Most important is that the dates are consistent with the earliest Neolithic: the end of the first construction phase is dated to c. 9000 BCE (9550 BP uncalibrated) and that is approximately the same as the dates for the earliest domesticates in the region (c. 11,000 years ago).
So, yes, it’s extremely old, without doubt the oldest such monumental structure known, but it’s probably already Neolithic.
I even suspect that one of the engravings represents a plough, though guess these are from the later construction period, dated to c. 8000 BCE, i.e. 1000 years after the first works.
And, btw, Urfa is part of Kurdistan. ;-)
February 23, 2010 at 5:01 am
Smithsonian Magazine ran a story on Gobekli Tepe in November 2008:
http://anthropology.net/2010/02/22/gobekli-tepe-temple-in-turkey-predates-the-pyramids-of-giza/#comment-16517
They put it’s age at 11,000 years old – comparable to 11,500. Fascinating site and subject. It is interesting that, as we view humanity and homo evolution and disbursement patterns, our concepts of ritual centers, monuments and temples change. The recent discovery that an enclosing ring of shrubbery once secluded Stonehenge presents us with another consideration: vegetation as well as earth, timber and stone was in use to mark ceremonial sites. I am looking forward to news of a mammoth tusk temple find!
February 23, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Some other links :
http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html
German TV :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBfxUq6Z1KM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU2qwoMfq-U z
February 26, 2010 at 1:50 am
There’s great footage of Gobekli Tepe in the BBC series the Incredible Human Journey…..
February 27, 2010 at 7:01 am
That Newsweek article is not exactly great; it has mistakes starting from the fact that this temple complex has nothing to do with human biological evolution, but with cultural evolution; and there’s nothing strange in a temple complex that is older than the Pyramids (Eridu’s earliest temple dates from almost 3000 years before the Pyramids), but the age of this is still staggering, even if the very oldest dates for Göbekli Tepe are assumptions and not yet based on dating.
February 28, 2010 at 6:16 am
An excellent post from Reddit commenter xenofon,
February 28, 2010 at 6:47 am
He makes some interesting comments but also says stuff that I would discuss. For example: sure that Europeans of earlier times left widespread evidences of art but that (1) has no comparison with the huge cooperative effort needed to build GT and (2) Australians Aborigines or Bushmen are counter-examples of modern peoples who had lots of artistic expressions and are still considered “backwards” or at least (more objectively) lived all the time on hunter-gathering, some still do.
So art and “civilization” are not strictly related (I’d say they are not related at all). It’s monumentalism what is related with “civilization” in the not too precise sense of being able to gather lots of people to do collaborative work, such as the one expressed at GT, the pyramids or Stonehenge.
Also I have said above that the REAL dates for GT are coincident with the earliest dates of domestication (not of dogs, which were domesticated in the UP, but of plants and livestock). So for me it’s no hunter-gatherer phenomenon nor it could ever be, because HGs can’t muster the numbers for such a feat.
I do agree that farming and herding did not begin overnight but still there was a relatively short transitional period which certainly had its heart at that area of the Zagros-Taurus mountains. When we admire GT we are probably admiring the first cooperative monument of the first farmers, after the economy already allowed them to muster large numbers of people seasonally, as can only happen in Neolithic societies.
March 25, 2010 at 9:54 am
Check out this book I recently discovered called Catastrophobia by Barbara Hand Clow- she makes the case that “Civilization” is actually wayyy older than our modern scholars will have you believe, and her arguement is pretty lucid and convincing…worth a look if you find this latest discovery interesting.
May 14, 2010 at 9:31 am
Göbekli Tepe appears to be the earliest known megalithic site. The interesting question to me is whether the culture that produced this site is in cultural continue with the megalithic tradition that continues until Bronze Age collapse (3200 years BP) in the Atlantic area, with the Minoan palace culture, or with the Sumerian ziggarat cultures, for example.
It wouldn’t have to be. We’ve seen these kind of structures arise independently in Central America, for example. But, if it were, that would suggest that there may be only a single pre-Indo-European cultural layer in the Neolithic.