Göbekli Tepe's Pillars: Stone Beings Before Farming

On a limestone ridge above the Harran plain in south-eastern Turkey, excavators have uncovered circles of great stone pillars, each shaped like a T, standing inside rough stone walls. The largest are over 5 metres tall. On their sides are carved foxes, boars, snakes, vultures, scorpions and cranes, and on two central pillars, arms that reach around from the back and hands that meet above a belt: the pillars are people, or beings. They were raised some 11,500 years ago, by people who hunted and gathered, before pottery, before metal and, it seemed at first, before farming.

Discovery and excavation

• The mound was recorded in a survey in 1963, but its broken slabs were taken for a medieval cemetery.
• From 1995 Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) excavated it with the Şanlıurfa Museum, until his death in 2014. Excavation continues.
• Four large enclosures (A–D) belong to the oldest layer, dated to about 9500–8000 BCE, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Geophysical survey shows many more still buried.
• It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018.

A temple? The debate

Schmidt argued that Göbekli Tepe was a sanctuary, "the first temple", visited by hunter-gatherers who gathered there for feasts and ritual, and that the need to feed these gatherings helped drive the invention of farming. He also held that the enclosures were deliberately buried.

More recent work by the excavation team has revised this picture. They have found cisterns, huge numbers of grinding stones, and domestic buildings, which suggest that people lived at the site. The enclosures may have been filled by slope slides rather than deliberate burial. Similar sites nearby, such as Karahan Tepe, show that Göbekli Tepe was part of a wider regional culture. Most archaeologists still see the enclosures as special, probably ritual buildings, but "temple" is now used with more caution.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Pillars as persons. The T-shaped top is a head seen from the side; carved arms, hands, belts and loincloths make the pillars stylised human or superhuman beings. The two great central pillars of each enclosure may have been ancestors, spirits or gods. Nobody knows.

Dangerous animals. The animals carved are overwhelmingly wild and often dangerous: predators, venomous creatures and carrion birds. Many readings link them to death or to the spirit world, especially the vultures.

Carved skulls. Fragments of human skulls with carved grooves were found at the site (Gresky and colleagues, 2017), suggesting a skull cult, as known from other Neolithic sites in the region.

The "Vulture Stone" and the comet. In 2017 two engineers, Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis, read Pillar 43 as a star map recording a comet impact around 10,950 BCE. The excavators rejected this, pointing out that the carvings do not match the proposed constellations and that the pillar is later than the supposed event. Claims that Göbekli Tepe was built by a lost advanced civilisation have no archaeological support.

The interactive plan above shows the layout of an enclosure. Touch a pillar to read about it.

Connections

Neolithic Prehistory (ch42) and Palaeolithic Prehistory (ch41). Compare the Lion Man (V58) for much older carved beings, and the Nebra Sky Disc (V45) for a later prehistoric object at the centre of astronomical claims.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/gobekli-tepe.html