Tag: Gobekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe, Turkey: a new wonder of the ancient world

Göbekli Tepe, a soon-to-be inundated archaeological site near the banks of the Euphrates, leaves Jeremy Seal awestruck.

“Göbekli Tepe is generally reckoned the most exciting and historically significant archaeological dig currently under way anywhere in the world – and there are neither queues nor tickets to get in” Photo: ALAMY

By Jeremy Seal

“Wow,” exclaims the visitor from New Zealand, a place, after all, with a human history shorter than most. For from a wooden walkway we’re gazing down at an archaeological site of giddying age. Built about 9000 BC, it’s more than twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids, predating the discovery of metals, pottery or even the wheel. This is Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, generally reckoned the most exciting and historically significant archaeological dig currently under way anywhere in the world, and there are neither queues nor tickets to get in.

Wow for a number of reasons, then, though it’s neither the access nor the staggering implications of the site’s age that has particularly impressed the man from distant Auckland. Neolithic Göbekli Tepe is also remarkably beautiful. From the partially excavated pit rise circular arrangements of huge T-shaped obelisks exquisitely carved with foxes, birds, boars and snakes or highly stylised human attributes including belts, loincloths and limbs. We’re profoundly moved by this glimpse into a radically recast prehistory, and mystified too. Even the archaeologists hard at work on this September morning can only speculate about its function, not least because the stones appear to have been deliberately buried.

“This series of sanctuaries is the oldest known monumental architecture,” explains the excavation leader and approachable on-site presence Professor Klaus Schmidt. “Maybe burial was already part of their concept from the very beginning.”

Two years ago a bare trickle of visitors found their way to this remote hilltop revelation. Now, however, visitors are building their entire itineraries around Göbekli Tepe, surest of shoo-ins for future World Heritage Status, and foundations are already in place for a protective site canopy, a nearby visitors’ centre and a ticket office. Numbers are set to explode here, the more so because the surrounding Euphrates region centred on the ancient cities of Gaziantep and Sanliurfa happens to boast an exceptional wealth of cultural draws.

It helps that another spectacular summit monument, the vast stone heads in honour of Roman-era King Antiochus on nearby Nemrut Dagi, has figured prominently on must-see lists for decades. In recent years, however, there have been further momentous discoveries such as the mosaics at Roman Zeugma, which were rescued from the rising waters of the dammed Euphrates before being installed in the magnificent new museum at Antep – the locals don’t bother with the “Gazi” prefix – in 2011.

With major restorations across Antep’s historic centre and its burgeoning reputation among foodies, not to mention another substantial mosaic find at Haleplibahce in the centre of Urfa (again, no prefix), it’s perhaps no surprise that the region’s proximity both to Turkey’s troubled border with Syria and to adjacent areas of Kurdish unrest are doing little to dampen down interest.

Antep, despite the fatalities caused by a recent car-bomb blamed on Kurdish separatists, is awash with Western visitors. I pass them in the high-walled alleys of the old city where the painted plaques above the doors announce the owners as honoured hacis, or pilgrims, to Mecca. All over a city knee-deep in development money overflowing from Euphrates dam projects, masons spectral with stone dust are restoring mosques and the gated artisans’ arcades known as hans. Not that the tarting up has leached anything of Antep’s famous atmosphere. In grimy ateliers, copper workers hammer patterns into decorative platters, and sparks fly from the spinning stones of the knife sharpeners. On Crazy Sheep Street, shawled women are buying red peppers by the sackload and hauling them off to the alleys outside their front doors where they and their neighbours squat to hull them for a spicy cooking paste called salça. The lanes are fronted with baskets of spices and nuts, especially locally grown pistachios, the symbol of the city and the star turn in its distinctive “meat and sweet” cuisine; nowhere has a higher density of baklava-style pastry shops, from huge salons to tiny deli counters, than Antep.

I dine at a cavernous institution called Imam Cagdas, a kebab and baklava diner with wipe-down menus, sweep staircase and waiters in traditional monochrome. The traditional starter, a mince-topped pizza-style flatbread called lahmacun, is followed by a superior kebab – mine is rich in garlic and pistachio – washed down with ladles of sour-yogurt ayran. I move on to a plate of baklava before being tempted into another pistachio pudding, fistik sarma. Overload. The good news is that my lodgings at Anadolu Evleri, a collection of town houses with shabby-chic rooms arranged around a high-walled courtyard, are just next door.

So next morning to the city’s new Zeugma Museum, a stunning ensemble of light and space that confirms the extent of Antep’s civic ambitions. This world-beating collection of second-century Roman mosaics, rich in geometric pattern and mythological detail, are displayed from a range of perspectives including raised walkways and mezzanines, and with other retrievals from Zeugma such as frescoes, fountains, columns and statues. It’s a collection all the more poignant for the fact that it acknowledges the considerable thefts suffered in the course of the Zeugma excavations, with projected images filling in for the illicitly lifted mosaic sections. A low-lit labyrinthine corridor leads to the standout mosaic, the so-called Gypsy Girl, whom experts have more accurately identified as a Dionysian maenad; a party girl, in short, if her eyes – which even after all this time spell nothing but trouble – are anything to go by.

We take the road east to visit what remains unsubmerged of Roman Zeugma – a fine villa, complete with frescoes and mosaics – though my eye is drawn to the shimmering lake that once was the Euphrates. The road continues through pistachio orchards to the half-drowned town of Halfeti, where the few townsfolk that remain now offer nostalgia-tinged boat trips over their submerged homes and orchards.

The new topography is beautiful though surreal, and full of bizarre adaptations like the raised duckboards that have been fitted so that the mosque may continue to function. “Worship here is permitted,” a sign on the door confirms, “but swimming in the mosque is forbidden.”

At sand-coloured Urfa we are on the edge of Arabia. To their owners’ whistles flocks of homing pigeons rise from flat-topped roofs hung with lines of drying aubergines in the early evening. Beneath the crusader castle families walk by the sacred ponds and the shaded tea gardens that mark the cave where Abraham is said to have been born.

In the grand yards of the mosques clustered in the honour of a prophet sacred to all three monotheistic religions, men in shirt sleeves and in Arab turbans gather to wash at the fountains; flocks of women from lands to the south pass in all-over black but for the gold jangling at their wrists. Beyond the gardens I wander into Urfa’s labyrinthine bazaar, an exotica of turnip juice stands, stalls serving fried liver, pigeon traders and cot makers.

In the morning Mehmet, a local archaeologist, leads me beyond the sacred ponds to the Aleppo Gardens (Haleplibahce) where the city’s own mosaics are on display in situ. The centrepiece of these recent finds is the so-called Amazon Villa. The best of these fifth-century mosaics – a pictorial life of Achilles, and a magnificent rendering of an African native and zebra – are exquisitely suggestive of another time in the rich and varied history of this frontier city. Then Mehmet points beyond the villa where a site is being cleared for a major new archaeological museum, one that no doubt means to match anything rival Antep can do.

The rush is on; in just two years’ time, little-known cultural attractions like the mosaics at Haleplibahce and the obelisks at nearby Göbekli Tepe are slated to be firmly established on the tour bus itineraries. By then, however, who can say what other treasures will have turned up in this history-rich corner on Turkey’s Kurdish and Arabian borders?

Packages

Andante Travels (01722 713800; andantetravels.com) has two-week tours in May and September from £2,875 pp.

Jon Baines Tours (020 7223 9485; jonbainestours.co.uk) has a two-week “Ancient Anatolia and the Origins of Belief” tour led by Lavinia Byrne departing September 15 at £2,580 pp.

Steppes Travel (01285 880980; steppestravel.co.uk) offers a five-day tailor-made tour from £1,250 pp.

Travel the Unknown (020 7183 6371; traveltheunknown.com) has nine-day trips departing May and September from £1,695 pp plus flights.

Getting there

Regular flights to Gaziantep and Sanliurfa via Istanbul through Turkish Airlines (0844 800 6666; thy.com, from £260 return) and Pegasus Airlines (0845 0848980; flypgs.com, from £80 one way).

Where to stay

Anadolu Evleri, Gaziantep. Delightful historic haven with characterful rooms in high-walled courtyard (0090 342 2209525; anadoluevleri.com: b & b doubles from £75).

Cevahir Konukevi, Sanliurfa. Restored mansion, with roof terrace for dining, often with live traditional music (414 2159377;cevahirkonukevi.com, doubles with breakfast from £130).

Visas

£10, payable on entry.

Reading

Eastern Turkey (Bradt, £16.99) offers the best coverage, though recent changes means major omissions including Göbekli Tepe.

Further Information

Turkish Tourist Office (0207 839 7733; gototurkey.co.uk).

Gaziantep-based Arsan (342 220 6464; arsan.com.tr) for local tours, guides and drivers.

April 24, 2013
Göbekli Tepe

The Birth of Religion

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

By Charles C. Mann
Photograph by Vincent J. Musi

Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey.

The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O’s.

Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

At the time of Göbekli Tepe’s construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple’s builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.

Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.

At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the “revolution” was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

via Göbekli Tepe – Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine.

June 6, 2011
Garden of Eden
Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?

By Tom Cox

Last updated at 9:10 PM on 28th February 2009

For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as ‘sacred’. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.

The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were mportant.

They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would say he’d made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion – and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.

The site has been described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘the most important’ site in the world

A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd’s find reached museum curators in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, ten miles south-west of the stones.

They got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so, in late 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) to begin his excavations.

As he puts it: ‘As soon as I got there and saw the stones, I knew that if I didn’t walk away immediately I would be here for the rest of my life.’

Remarkable find: A frieze from Gobekli Tepe

Schmidt stayed. And what he has uncovered is astonishing. Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site’s importance. ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything,’ says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.

David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’

Some go even further and say the site and its implications are incredible. As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: ‘Gobekli Tepe is too extraordinary for my mind to understand.’

So what is it that has energised and astounded the sober world of academia?

The site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones, unearthed by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome, T-shaped megaliths. Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge.

Most of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images – mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are another common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.

The stones seem to represent human forms – some have stylised ‘arms’, which angle down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or ritual site, like the stone circles of Western Europe.

To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out – they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across – but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.

So far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be a dazzling site – a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift Gobekli Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere – and the realms of the fantastical.

The Garden of Eden come to life: Is Gobekli Tepe where the story began?

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

How did cavemen build something so ambitious? Schmidt speculates that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of construction, living in animal-skin tents, slaughtering local game for food.

The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they also support the dating of the site.

This revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something like Gobekli, is worldchanging, for it shows that the old hunter-gatherer life, in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived – almost unbelievably sophisticated.

The shepherd who discovered Gobekli Tepe has ‘changed everything’, said one academic

It’s as if the gods came down from heaven and built Gobekli for themselves.

This is where we come to the biblical connection, and my own involvement in the Gobekli Tepe story.

About three years ago, intrigued by the first scant details of the site, I flew out to Gobekli. It was a long, wearying journey, but more than worth it, not least as it would later provide the backdrop for a new novel I have written.

Back then, on the day I arrived at the dig, the archaeologists were unearthing mind-blowing artworks. As these sculptures were revealed, I realised that I was among the first people to see them since the end of the Ice Age.

And that’s when a tantalising possibility arose. Over glasses of black tea, served in tents right next to the megaliths, Klaus Schmidt told me that, in his opinion, this very spot was once the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. More specifically, as he put it: ‘Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden.’

To understand how a respected academic like Schmidt can make such a dizzying claim, you need to know that many scholars view the Eden story as folk-memory, or allegory.

Seen in this way, the Eden story, in Genesis, tells us of humanity’s innocent and leisured hunter-gatherer past, when we could pluck fruit from the trees, scoop fish from the rivers and spend the rest of our days in pleasure.

But then we ‘fell’ into the harsher life of farming, with its ceaseless toil and daily grind. And we know primitive farming was harsh, compared to the relative indolence of hunting, because of the archaeological evidence.

To date, archaeologists have dug 45 stones out of the ruins at Gobekli

When people make the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, their skeletons change – they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy as the human body adapts to a diet poorer in protein and a more wearisome lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier.

This begs the question, why adopt farming at all? Many theories have been suggested – from tribal competition, to population pressures, to the extinction of wild animal species. But Schmidt believes that the temple of Gobekli reveals another possible cause.

‘To build such a place as this, the hunters must have joined together in numbers. After they finished building, they probably congregated for worship. But then they found that they couldn’t feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering.

‘So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.’

The reason such theories have special weight is that the move to farming first happened in this same region. These rolling Anatolian plains were the cradle of agriculture.

The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat – first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals – such as rye and oats – also started here.

The stones unearthed by the shepherd turned out to be the flat tops of T-shaped megaliths

But there was a problem for these early farmers, and it wasn’t just that they had adopted a tougher, if ultimately more productive, lifestyle. They also experienced an ecological crisis. These days the landscape surrounding the eerie stones of Gobekli is arid and barren, but it was not always thus. As the carvings on the stones show – and as archaeological remains reveal – this was once a richly pastoral region.

There were herds of game, rivers of fish, and flocks of wildfowl; lush green meadows were ringed by woods and wild orchards. About 10,000 years ago, the Kurdish desert was a ‘paradisiacal place’, as Schmidt puts it. So what destroyed the environment? The answer is Man.

As we began farming, we changed the landscape and the climate. When the trees were chopped down, the soil leached away; all that ploughing and reaping left the land eroded and bare. What was once an agreeable oasis became a land of stress, toil and diminishing returns.

And so, paradise was lost. Adam the hunter was forced out of his glorious Eden, ‘to till the earth from whence he was taken’ – as the Bible puts it.

Of course, these theories might be dismissed as speculations. Yet there is plenty of historical evidence to show that the writers of the Bible, when talking of Eden, were, indeed, describing this corner of Kurdish Turkey.

Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt poses next to some of the carvings at Gebekli

In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough, this is where Gobekli is sited.

Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these.

In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a ‘Beth Eden’ – a house of Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe.

Another book in the Old Testament talks of ‘the children of Eden which were in Thelasar’, a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.

The very word ‘Eden’ comes from the Sumerian for ‘plain’; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran.

Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors – people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.

It’s a stunning and seductive idea. Yet it has a sinister epilogue. Because the loss of paradise seems to have had a strange and darkening effect on the human mind.

Many of Gobekli’s standing stones are inscribed with ‘bizarre and delicate’ images, like this reptile

A few years ago, archaeologists at nearby Cayonu unearthed a hoard of human skulls. They were found under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood.

No one is sure, but this may be the earliest evidence for human sacrifice: one of the most inexplicable of human behaviours and one that could have evolved only in the face of terrible societal stress.

Experts may argue over the evidence at Cayonu. But what no one denies is that human sacrifice took place in this region, spreading to Palestine, Canaan and Israel.

Archaeological evidence suggests that victims were killed in huge death pits, children were buried alive in jars, others roasted in vast bronze bowls.

These are almost incomprehensible acts, unless you understand that the people had learned to fear their gods, having been cast out of paradise. So they sought to propitiate the angry heavens.

This savagery may, indeed, hold the key to one final, bewildering mystery. The astonishing stones and friezes of Gobekli Tepe are preserved intact for a bizarre reason.

Long ago, the site was deliberately and systematically buried in a feat of labour every bit as remarkable as the stone carvings.

The stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us from across the centuries – a warning we should heed

Around 8,000 BC, the creators of Gobekli turned on their achievement and entombed their glorious temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial hills on which that Kurdish shepherd walked in 1994.

No one knows why Gobekli was buried. Maybe it was interred as a kind of penance: a sacrifice to the angry gods, who had cast the hunters out of paradise. Perhaps it was for shame at the violence and bloodshed that the stone-worship had helped provoke.

Whatever the answer, the parallels with our own era are stark. As we contemplate a new age of ecological turbulence, maybe the silent, sombre, 12,000-year-old stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us, to warn us, as they stare across the first Eden we destroyed.
- The Genesis Secret by Tom Knox is published by Harper Collins on March 9, priced £6.99. To order a copy (P&P free), call 0845 155 0720.
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk, 28th February 2009
March 1, 2009