Göbekli Tepe: The Temple That Rewrote Human History

In 1963 a survey team from the universities of Istanbul and Chicago walked over a low hill near Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey, noted the broken slabs of limestone on its surface, and recorded it as a probable medieval cemetery. Thirty-one years later, in 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt read their report, visited the hill, and realised that the slabs were the tops of carved pillars. Excavations by Schmidt and the German Archaeological Institute began the following year. Radiocarbon dates put the oldest construction at about 9500 BCE, roughly 11,500 years ago and some 6,500 years before the first stage of Stonehenge. The site, Göbekli Tepe, "potbelly hill", was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2018.

Illustration: Göbekli Tepe's carved T-shaped pillars, built about 11,600 years ago.

What is there

The best-known structures are large round and oval enclosures, between about 10 and 30 metres across, ringed by stone walls and benches into which T-shaped limestone pillars are set. Each has two taller pillars in the middle, the largest about 5.5 metres high and weighing perhaps 10 tonnes. Some of the central pillars have arms carved down their sides, with hands meeting above a belt, and loincloths of fox pelts. They are almost certainly stylised human figures, or perhaps more than human. The other pillars are carved with animals: foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions, vultures, cranes and wild cattle, many of them dangerous, along with abstract symbols.

All of this was cut with stone tools. The builders had no metal and no pottery. They lived before the domestication of plants and animals was complete in the region, and the bones found at the site are almost all of wild species, especially gazelle.

Some pillars carry carved arms, hands and belts, as if they were stylised figures. Photo: Klaus-Peter Simon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

A temple before farming?

Schmidt's interpretation made the site famous. He saw it as a sanctuary, a "temple on a hill" where groups of hunter-gatherers gathered from a wide area for rituals and feasts, with no one living there permanently. That seemed to turn the usual story of the Neolithic around. Instead of farming producing a surplus that allowed people to build monuments, the need to feed large gatherings for building and ritual might have pushed people to cultivate the wild wheat and barley that grow nearby. Genetic studies have traced one of the earliest domesticated forms of einkorn wheat to the Karacadağ mountains, about 30 kilometres away.

In a 2012 paper in Antiquity, Oliver Dietrich, Schmidt and colleagues argued that feasting was central to the site, citing huge quantities of animal bones and stone vessels big enough to hold up to 160 litres, possibly for brewing a kind of beer from wild grain. Schmidt died in 2014, and the excavations continued under the institute's team.

A settlement after all

The newer work has changed the picture. Since 2015 the excavators, led by Lee Clare, have found smaller rectangular and round buildings that look like houses, cisterns cut into the bedrock and fed by channels that collected rainwater, holding at least 150 cubic metres, and thousands of grinding stones. A 2019 study by Laura Dietrich and colleagues in PLOS ONE concluded that cereals were being processed there on a large scale. People did live at Göbekli Tepe, it seems, at least for part of the year, and the big enclosures were built within a settlement, not on an empty ritual hill.

Some of the archaeologist Edward Banning's objections from 2011, when he questioned whether the idea of a "temple" without a village made sense, now look justified. Another of Schmidt's ideas has also been revised: that each enclosure was deliberately buried once it was finished with. The current team thinks the enclosures were roofed, and that part of the fill came from landslides and slope erosion, after which some were repaired or rebuilt.

One of the enclosures; what rituals, if any, took place here is still unknown. Photo: Patrick MIGNOT / Wikimedia Commons, CC0

None of this makes Göbekli Tepe less remarkable. Building and rebuilding these enclosures took organised labour on a scale archaeologists had not expected from people who still hunted for most of their meat. And it is no longer alone. Surveys in the surrounding hills since the 2010s have found more than a dozen sites with similar T-shaped pillars, known collectively as the Taş Tepeler, "stone hills". At one of them, Karahan Tepe, excavators have uncovered a room carved into the bedrock with a row of stone heads and pillars rising from the floor. Together they point to a whole regional culture, with shared symbols, at the very start of the move to farming.

What the people who built these sites believed is still unknown. What has changed is the sense that monumental building, symbolism and settled life grew up together in northern Mesopotamia, each feeding the others, instead of following one after another in a neat sequence. Only a small part of the site has been excavated, and geophysical surveys show more enclosures still buried.

Sources

1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Göbekli Tepe". https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572
2. Oliver Dietrich, Manfred Heun, Jens Notroff, Klaus Schmidt and Martin Zarnkow, "The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities: new evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey", Antiquity 86 (2012): 674–695. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003598x00047840
3. Laura Dietrich, Julia Meister, Oliver Dietrich et al., "Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey", PLOS ONE 14 (2019): e0215214. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215214
4. E. B. Banning, "So fair a house: Göbekli Tepe and the identification of temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East", Current Anthropology 52 (2011): 619–660. https://doi.org/10.1086/661207
5. Daniel Knitter, Brian Braun, Lee Clare et al., "Göbekli Tepe: a brief description of the environmental development in the surroundings of the UNESCO World Heritage Site", Land 8 (2019): 72. https://doi.org/10.3390/land8040072
6. "Göbekli Tepe", Wikipedia (summary of the post-2015 findings on houses, cisterns and landslides, with references). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe