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The oldest temples Trevor Watkins describes Göbekli Tepe, the mysterious 11,000-yearold site in south-east Turkey that has turned prehistory upside down 1
Turkish archaeology 2 4 in the world 5 Göbekli Tepe draws visitors like a magnet; they arrive daily, almost like pilgrims, from all over the world. And what Professor Klaus Schmidt has found there is turning the orthodoxy of prehistoric archaeologists, especially those who specialise in the Neolithic of southwest Asia, upside down – requiring them to completely rethink their established ideas. However much they know about it in advance, Göbekli Tepe’s monumental structures and huge, elaborate sculptures 3 1. One of a pair of 5.5 metre-tall monoliths in Enclosure D. Below its ‘head’, around its ‘neck’, is a band and pendant. Its hands are on its ‘stomach’, just above a belt with an ornamental buckle and a fox pelt worn as a loincloth. Below is a frieze of birds. 2. Göbekli Tepe before it was excavated. The hill is entirely manmade; the mulberry tree on its summit gives an idea of scale. 3. A small, flat incised stone plaque. Similar examples have been found on contemporary settlement sites in north Syria. Were these signs the precursor of writing 4. A fierce creature carved on one of the tall monoliths at the edge of Enclosure D. 6. A T-shaped monolith bearing images of vulture-like birds, a giant scorpion and (bottom right), behind another large bird, a headless male corpse. never fail to amaze them. In 1993, Klaus Schmidt was looking for a Neolithic site in southeast Turkey where he could begin his own excavations. He had worked with his Heidelberg professor, Harald Hauptmann, on the rescue excavations of a Neolithic site that was due to be lost in the lake behind the massive Atatürk Dam on the River Euphrates. Now it was time for him to start his own research. He had a list of sites to check, drawn from survey work done by a joint US-Turkish team during the 1960s. But when he came to Göbekli Tepe, he says he knew within 15 minutes that this was the site where he would spend the rest of his working life. What did he see that had been missed by the earlier survey team The rescue excavations at the site of Nevalı Çori had unearthed a completely unexpected building among the houses of the village. It was built at least half underground, and had a pair of tall monolithic pillars in the centre of its terrazzo floor. Only one pillar had survived, an extraordinary sculpture, smooth and T-shaped, with human arms and hands in low relief. When Schmidt went to Göbekli Tepe, he immediately recognised that some of the large stones visible on the surface of the site were the tops of other T-shaped monoliths. The more he walked around, the more he found; and the more he looked, the more smaller stone sculptures – battered by centuries of ploughing – he saw. Excavations began in 1994, and have continued every year since. In recent years, Schmidt has tried to work two seasons of excavation each year. Because of the scale of the monuments at the site, progress is slow; because the site is unique, no one knows what to expect and the excavators must be cautious. Now, after reading about Göbekli Tepe in magazines or watching television documentaries about the site, Minerva January/February 2013 13
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