Gobekli Tepe: early man’s temple

For more than 10 years, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has been working to excavate a site called Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey. Schmidt and other scholars are sure that this ancient monument, which predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years, is the world's oldest temple.

The site was briefly reviewed by the University of Chicago and Istanbul University in the 1960s, but the pillars that comprise Gobekli Tepe were dismissed as medieval grave markers. Thirty years later, Schmidt was conducting a survey of nearby prehistoric sites in the region of Urfa, about six miles from the Gobekli Tepe site. He recognized the hillside that covered the megaliths as too rounded to be natural and knew immediately that the area was important.

One year later, Schmidt returned with some colleagues and began excavation. Some of the standing stones were buried so shallowly that they bear marks from plows.

The pillars of Gobekli Tepe are about 16 feet tall and weigh between seven and 10 tons. These stones are placed in a series of five circles that span the hillsides, each ring with two large T-shaped pillars in the center and surrounded by slightly smaller stones that face inwards. The largest of the rings so far uncovered is 65 feet across. Schmidt has, with geomagnetic surveys and radar methods, charted at least 16 other pillar circles over 22 acres of the surrounding hills.

Many of the pillars are marked with elaborate carvings of bulls, ducks, scorpions, foxes and lions that are remarkably well-preserved. Some are three dimensional, rising from the limestone to wind from one side of a pillar to another; most are remarkably delicate and complex.

Gobekli Tepe is in a strip of land called the "Fertile Crescent" that once stretched from the Persian Gulf to present-day Egypt, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.

The site is in exactly the geographical location that is described in the Bible as the Garden of Eden, just between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Whether or not the site has any actual association with a historical or mythological Garden of Eden is unsubstantiated, though many scholars hold to that theory. It can be viewed as a kind of Eden either way as it was built just as man began to transition from a state of what is generally considered innocence – hunting and gathering – to agricultural living.

When the pillars were raised 11,000 years ago, the land around Gobekli Tepe that is now arid desert would have been a paradise, inhabited by many varieties of animal and plant life. Analysis of the hundreds of thousands of bone fragments of wild animals found at the site suggest that Gobekli Tepe was built by ancient hunters and gatherers. Many of the bones bear cut marks, suggesting that the animals were butchered and eaten.

However, Gobekli Tepe bears none of the usual signs of human settlement: There are no trash pits or cooking hearths. Schmidt postulated that the pillars were carved with flint tools several hundred yards away from the site itself, then hauled to the proper location and raised upright. After the pillars were erected, the site was intentionally buried. In a feat at least as difficult as carving the pillars themselves, Gobekli Tepe was made a part of the landscape by ancient man.

Gobekli Tepe has begun to alter previous conceptions about the birth of civilization and early man. It was generally accepted that hunters and gatherers did not come together in groups large enough to build a monument like Gobekli Tepe, an undertaking which would have required hundreds of workers over an extended period of time. The site appeared on the prehistoric scene just at the fringe of agricultural living, which was thought to be the foundation of complex social groups. Villages began to appear in the area approximately 10,000 years ago, but agriculture was not developed until 500 years after Gobekli Tepe was raised. Schmidt postulates that it is the other way around – that socio-cultural change came before agricultural progress.

Because the site is so ancient, its original purpose is unclear. Many scholars are baffled by the evidence that no one lived at or even near to Gobekli Tepe and at the carvings, which are not of prey animals but rather odd combinations of scorpions, vultures and lions, among other things.

Some claim the images of vultures suggest Gobekli Tepe was a site where cultish death rituals were performed. The site holds a blood-stained altar beside which a cache of human skulls was discovered, suggesting the site may have been one of the first places where human sacrifice occurred. Fragments of other human bones suggest a burial ground for hunters, boasting a view from the hillside across the valley.

Today, Schmidt oversees more than a dozen archaeologists, 50 laborers and a rapidly overturning slew of students. Excavation occurs two months in the spring and two months in the fall, leaving the site inactive during the winter's rainy season and the summer's 115 degree heat. The base of operations, where many artifacts are stored, is an Ottoman house in Urfa that Schmidt purchased in 1995.