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| "Göbekli Tepe" | Login/Create an Account | 31 comments | ||
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| Comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content. |
| Re: Göbekli Tepe (Score: 1) by Andy B on Friday, 15 September 2006 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| Göbekli Tepe, also known as Göbekli Höyük, is one of the most important Pre-pottery Neolithic sites in the Near East. It is located in the Urfa region of Southeastern Anatolia, which is part of what is known as the fertile crescent. it has many unique features that make it stand out among other sites in the region. The many examples of sculptures, megalithic architecture, and the site's strange topographical setting on a mountaintop have led many scholars to interpret Göbekli Tepe as an important Neolithic ritual sanctuary More from Manchester University: http://www.art.man.ac.uk/ARTHIST/ay2091/sites/Gobekli/Gobekli%20Tepe.htm |
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| Gobekli Tepe - Paradise Regained? - Fortean Times (Score: 1) by Andy B on Thursday, 02 August 2007 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| One of the most important archćological digs in the world, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has revolutionised our understanding of hunter-gatherer culture. But could it also be the site of the Garden of Eden? I am in a rusty Turkish taxi. Ahead of me, the brown hills roll endlessly towards Syria; from my car I can see a little village of mud houses and open drains. It’s not the most auspicious of places. Yet, if reports are correct, I am heading for the most amazing archćological dig in the world. More: Fortean Times: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/505/niobe_rock_goddess.html |
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| Re: Ceremonial site casts ancient man in new light (Score: 1) by nickp on Tuesday, 18 March 2008 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| do you not feel that there's an inherent danger in trying to ascribe many of the things our ancestors did to religion? thats the kind of thinking that, for years, led to the nasca lines being attributed to ceremonial purposes, instead of guideing lines to water sources. certainly, religion was an important factor to the ancients, but i feel that a full belly was more important! religious ceremony, invariably involving animals, was, as much trying to think like the animal, therefore making the hunt easier, as worshipping the animal itself! perhaps Gobleki Tepe was more likely a school than a church, teaching people how to hunt said leopards, and which (poisonus) snakes and spiders to avoid?! |
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| Ceremonial site casts ancient man in new light (Score: 1) by Andy B on Tuesday, 18 March 2008 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| One of the most intriguing developments in archaeology in recent decades is the serious study of ancient ceremonial life. Previously, "ceremonial objects" were the odd bits left over after archaeologists had identified arrowheads, cooking pots and other objects with more or less obvious functions. Sometimes, these leftovers were exceptionally beautiful works of art, but it was considered unscientific speculation to attempt to reconstruct the beliefs behind their creation and use. Now, however, it's generally recognized that ceremonial objects and structures can provide key insights into many facets of ancient cultures. In fact, some archaeologists think ceremony was the key to the origins of civilization. In the Jan. 18 issue of the journal Science, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt is interviewed about his work at the 11,000-year-old site of Gobekli Tepe ("navel hill") in Turkey. According to Andrew Curry, the author of the Science article, Gobekli Tepe is situated on the most prominent hilltop for miles around. It consists of at least 20 underground rooms that contain a number of T-shaped stone pillars that are 8 feet tall and weigh about 7 tons. The pillars are engraved with images of animals, including leopards, snakes and spiders. This is not a place where people lived. It's as far away from water as you can get in this region. Instead, it's a place of ceremony. And, according to Schmidt, it's "the first manmade holy place." To find such a large ceremonial center at such an early time period suggests that it was the need for communal rituals that first brought people together. Agriculture, pottery, domesticated animals and cities all came later. Perhaps it was religion and not technology that fomented the Neolithic Revolution and led to the rise of civilization. Archaeologist Steven Mithen, in his book After the Ice, writes that it was at Gobekli Tepe "that the history of the world had turned." http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2008/03/04/sci_lepper04_ART_03-04-08_B5_PF9FMIP.html?type=rss&cat=&sid=101 |
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| 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Wednesday, 23 April 2008 |
| Circles of elaborately carved stones from about 9,500BC predate even agriculture. As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet. "This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here." Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-coloured sea, stretches south hundreds of miles. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill. Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers. "Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's best known neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time." With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it was the centre of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the centre of each circle representing a man and woman. It is a theory the tourist board in nearby Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet; see Adam and Eve. Schmidt is sceptical. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy", and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning. But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless. Read more in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/apr/23/archaeology.turkey |
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| Re: 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists (Score: 1) by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 23 April 2008 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| Now that the Google Earth view has been updated you can see this at: 37.2233°N, 38.9224°E. |
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| Re: 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, 24 July 2008 |
| are there any books on the site? |
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| Re: 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, 21 August 2008 |
| Erected by hunters and gatherers?! 7 tons? How they made it?It looks they had a little of some "gods" help in they work:). |
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| Re: 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, 09 October 2008 |
| What if the "mound", since there have been references made to the "navel" of the earth represents, literally, a pregnant females belly. My understanding is that the mound was also built by man, but was that before the ceremonial structures were assembled (so that they were up on top of the hill), or was the mound created by the intentional infill that supposedly was carried out when the site was being abandoned? It is also speculated that possibly this was the moment in our history that hunting and gathering ceased to be a main source of sustenance, and agriculture began as it was necessary to feed all of those people who had gathered to participate in the construction of Gobekli Tepe. Feedback? |
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| The World's First Temple (Score: 1) by Andy B on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| At first glance, the fox on the surface of the limestone pillar appears to be a trick of the bright sunlight. But as I move closer to the large, T-shaped megalith, I find it is carved with an improbable menagerie. A bull and a crane join the fox in an animal parade etched across the surface of the pillar, one of dozens erected by early Neolithic people at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. The press here is fond of calling the site "the Turkish Stonehenge," but the comparison hardly does justice to this 25-acre arrangement of at least seven stone circles. The first structures at Göbekli Tepe were built as early as 10,000 B.C., predating their famous British counterpart by about 7,000 years. The oldest man-made place of worship yet discovered, Göbekli Tepe is "one of the most important monuments in the world," says Hassan Karabulut, associate curator of the nearby Urfa Museum. He and archaeologist Zerrin Ekdogan of the Turkish Ministry of Culture guide me around the site. Their enthusiasm for the ancient temple is palpable. By the time of my visit in late summer, the excavation team lead by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute has wrapped up work for the season. But there is still plenty to see, including three excavated circles now protected by a large metal shelter. The megaliths, which may have once supported roofs, are about nine feet tall. Göbekli Tepe's circles range from 30 to 100 feet in diameter and are surrounded by rectangular stone walls about six feet high. Many of the pillars are carved with elaborate animal figure reliefs. In addition to bulls, foxes, and cranes, representations of lions, ducks, scorpions, ants, spiders, and snakes appear on the pillars. Freestanding sculptures depicting the animals have also been found within the circles. During the most recent excavation season, archaeologists uncovered a statue of a human and sculptures of a vulture's head and a boar. Read more at http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html |
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| Ancient Pagan Temple Site Yields New Archeological Clues On Origins Of Farming (Score: 1) by coldrum on Friday, 30 January 2009 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| It’s the last day of the excavating year at Gobekli Tepe, the hill-top neolithic site whose circles of huge decorated T-shaped stones are at least 5,000 years older than any other monumental structure ever found. Workmen have already buried the bases of the stones in rubble to protect them from the winter rain. Now they are laying raised walkways into the centre of a site that was previously off-limits to visitors. In between shouted instructions, the German archaeologist who has been excavating the site since 1994 sums up four more months of digging. "This is not like an ordinary excavation, uncovering a wall here and the corner of a house there," Klaus Schmidt says, standing at the highest point of a 15-metre high artificial mound that covers nine hectares. "In 14 years, we have uncovered barely five percent of what is here. There are decades of work ahead." Apart from a new transverse cut to the left of the main dig, and the excavation of a small, late circle that probably dates from about 8,500 B.C., little appears to have changed since March. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. But there have been striking discoveries: a U-shaped stone sculpted with leopards and a boar that Schmidt compares to the Lion Gate at Mycenae; two almost life-size sculptures of a boar and wild cat found embedded within the rubble walls surrounding one early enclosure. Schmidt and his team have also uncovered a hollowed-out stone, roughly four-foot square, lying cracked in the middle of one of the circles. "We found similar stones in other enclosures, and we assumed they are some sort of door", Schmidt says. "The position of this one makes us wonder whether the circles weren’t vaulted," like the trulli of southern Italy, or the famous bee-hive houses at Harran, just south of Gobekli Tepe. Potentially much more significant, although almost invisible to the untrained eye, archaeologists have also uncovered evidence that the builders of at least one of the oldest circles had dug roughly five meters down through the mound before erecting the standing stones on the bedrock. "For the time being this is just hypothesis, but this leaves us wondering whether the site dates back to before [c. 9500 b.c.], when the earliest circles were built," Schmidt says. "Piling up a five-meter mound is not the work of one night." Whatever the carbon-dating eventually shows, Gobekli Tepe stands at the cusp of what is arguably the biggest social revolution in human history - the transformation of semi-nomadic hunters into settled farmers. Archaeologists now know a great deal about the whens and wheres of the birth of agriculture. DNA tests on wild wheat growing on Karacadag, a mountain just east of Gobeklitepe, suggest it may have been the source of early cultivated strains. At Nevali Cori, a neolithic village 40 miles northwest of Schmidt’s site, archaeologists found seeds of domesticated einkorn wheat dating from 9000 b.c. But debate still rages - and probably always will - about what it was that led neolithic groups to transfer almost all their energies into farming. For many experts, climate change was behind the transformation. Global temperatures had been warming gradually since the last Ice Age. Between 10,800 and 9,500 b.c., they suddenly plummeted again. The Greenland ice cap cooled by roughly 15 degrees. Rain stopped falling on the Fertile Crescent. "The region where grasses could be cultivated shrank to the very upper edges of the Middle East, northern Syria and southeastern Turkey," says Ofer Bar-Yosef, MacCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Harvard and a doyen of paleolithic studies. "Even there, resources were limited - people wanted to keep them for themselves." But the location, age and sheer size of Gobekli Tepe have led some to posit a radically different explanation for the Read the rest of this post... |
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| Re: Ancient Pagan Temple Site Yields New Archeological Clues On Origins Of Farming (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Sunday, 08 February 2009 |
| That site may have nothing to do with hunter gatherers.What is being said there has nothin to do with religion.The markings have a lot to do with the stars and their positions.The T is telling us what went one way is now going the other.There are markings on the pillars that give you the paralel of the 33rd and what was once upright is now laying over on its side. |
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| Re: Ancient Pagan Temple Site Yields New Archeological Clues On Origins Of Farming (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Sunday, 01 March 2009 |
| As many will know, the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, has highlighted the story of Gobleki Tepe prominently in the last few days - a Very Good Thing! The sudden plummeting of temperatures around 10,000 BC marked a huge and very sudden change in global climate, and this DURING the final meltdown of the Ice Age (this is the time held by some scientific authorities as the time of a 2nd Global Superflood (the first being around 14,000 BC, and the 3rd around 8,000 BC). I hesitate to mention that Plato's Atlantis was allegedly destroyed at the same time as the 2nd. I've often felt that the placing of the Garden of Eden in Mesoptamia, which clearly only ever had two rivers, is not the right location, compared with the Anatolian plateau which has a large number of rivers to choose from, including Euphrates and Tigris. Interestingly, the Turks have always held that Abraham's birthplace was not Ur in what is now Iraq, but in the town now called Sanliurfa (Sanli is an honorific like the old Soviet hero-cities - the traditional Turkish name is Urfa). The Sanliurfa area of Turkey, therefore, has a strong claim to being the original Eden, whatever that was. What the original Garden of Eden was is now irretrievably lost in time, but it is not out of the question to suggest that it has an equivalent in the ancient Egyptian "Golden Age" when gods walked with men, which is a recurring theme in legends and mythologies worldwide. But, obviously, much more needs to be uncovered at Gobleki Tepe before we can draw any firm conclusions. I, for one, will watch developments with extreme interest. As a curious side thought, the images of the Gobleki Tepe monoliths reminded me a lot of the monoliths at Tiwanaku in Bolivia. They were in the same sort of location as well - apparently sunken pits. Probably just a coincidence, but you never know! |
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| Re: Ancient Pagan Temple Site Yields New Archeological Clues On Origins Of Farming (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Sunday, 01 March 2009 |
| Hey - What if the original 'temple' at Gobekli Tepe did have a roof (probably wooden logs) covered with soil and grass - after all the site is 'just below the brow of the hill' - so that it was then 'underground - inside the womb-shaped hill - for ritualistic reasons. Then - after a period of disuse and probably during an earthquake, the heavily-loaded roof fell in, burying the 'temple'. On that basis, it's not necessary to invoke the idea that the inhabitants 'buried' their temple - possibly because it wasn't 'delivering the goods' any more...! The fact that it now has to be unearthed is probably down to natural / geological events... |
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| Re: Göbekli Tepe (Score: 1) by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 27 May 2009 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| Nice video of this in the BBC's series The Incredible Human Journey, viewable on BBC iPlayer here. The bit you want is at 49:15. |
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| Göbekli Tepe: Standing stones from humanity oldest temple (Score: 1) by bat400 on Tuesday, 01 September 2009 (User Info | Send a Message) |
| Submitted by coldrum --- The massive limestone monoliths weigh between ten and twenty tons and are weirdly carved with fantastic scorpions, lions, spiders and snakes that testify to the difficult hunter’s life. Unearthed after thousands of years of deliberate forgetfulness, these silent pillars stand in a circle located only a few miles south of the ancient town of Sanliurfa, Turkey, the legendary birthplace of the prophet Abraham. Göbekli Tepe may have been accidentally rediscovered by a shepherd, but it’s provenance is no mistake. Carbon dating has estimated the site to have been built in approximately 12,000 B.C., turning prior theories about our Neolithic hunter/gatherer past upside down. Archeology Magazine reports that before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, experts believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture. Scholars thought that the earliest monumental architecture was possible only after agriculture provided Neolithic people with food surpluses, freeing them from a constant focus on day-to-day survival. A site of unbelievable artistry and intricate detail, Göbekli Tepe has turned this theory on its head. In other words, Göbekli Tepe was built before the invention of pottery, Sumerian writing tablets, the wheel, Stonehenge and the Pyramids at Giza. And why here? Scanning the immediate valley area 1,000 feet below reveals an arid climate. Summer temperatures can easily soar to over 115 degrees Fahrenheit while winters enjoy rainy deluges. However, when speaking with Smithsonian magazine, Klaus Schmidt, an archeologist at the German Archeological Institute in Istanbul, observed: “Imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today. Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. This area was like a paradise." And according to Schmidt, it was a paradise that was lost. Farming changes the landscape. Trees are cut down, constant plowing leaches away valuable minerals and rivers are dammed, drying up the filtering swamps. Eventually, the soil became overstressed and crop returns were diminished. The once lush climate became the dry, hilly plain now seen today. For more, see the Examiner. |
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