Gobekli Tepe (Gobekli:
Belly Tepe: Hill) is a site six miles outside of Urfa, Turkey that
contains megalith circles. It was uncovered in 1994 by German archaeologist
Klaus Schmidt. Since that time, Klaus and his team have uncovered at least
seven large stone circles and they suspect that there are many more left under 22
acres of land yet to be excavated. What are these stones doing in this hill
overlooking what must have once been a lush valley? Who built them? Why did
they build them and when precisely were they built? Most of these questions
have only half-answers and educated guesses. And you thought Stonehenge was mysterious.
The largest
megaliths of Gobekli Tepe are roughly 16 ft. tall and weigh as much as 10 tons.
They are T-shaped and arranged in circles with two larger versions of the outer
stones in the center of the circles. These circles were built, buried, had more
built over them and then those too were buried by the ancients who built them. Some
of the Gobekli Tepe standing stones have intricate carvings of birds, snakes,
scorpions, big cats and hoofed animals on them. Considering that the tools
found on the site indicate that the stones were carved before humans had
designed metal tools, this is quite a feat.
Judging by the
animal bones found during digging at Gobekli Tepe, the ancient people who
erected the site were nomadic hunter-gatherers. That means they were not the
type of people to settle down in large groups and build monuments, temples or
even elaborate gravesites. At least, that is what was previously thought. The
traditional line of thinking is that agriculture (the planting of crops and
herding of animals) was the catalyst for such building. If Klaus Schmidt and
his team are correct, this no longer holds true. Klaus has done some carbon
dating of items unearthed at Gobekli Tepe and he has compared some of the tools
there to others found in the general area to ascertain the age of the site. What
he found is astounding.
It appears that
Gobekli Tepe outdates ancient wonders like the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge by thousands of years. The
stone circles in Turkey are 11,000 years old (built around 9000 BCE), according to Klaus’estimations. This
age makes sense considering the tools found at the site and the lack of
evidence that people lived at Gobekli Tepe. A settlement would have been
impractical for people of that time and there are no remains of cooking fires
and other evidence of settlement apart from the fact that there may have been
roofs on top of the circles. The apparent age of Gobekli Tepe gives rise to an
even more difficult question. For what purpose was it built?
Gobekli Tepe was
built over the course of hundreds of years, possibly even longer. So, for at
least hundreds of years, an ancient nomadic people gathered here for unknown
amounts of time, built stone circles, buried them and then carried on their
work as before, eventually building the site up into the hill that exists there
today. What reason could these ancient people have possibly had for building,
preserving and continuing construction on such a site for so long? Klaus
Schmidt believes it may have been a place of religious worship. Other
postulated possibilities include an ancient gravesite for important people or a
meeting place for local nomadic tribes.
Some believe that
the age and location of Gobekli Tepe shows that it was the site of the Biblical
Garden of Eden. It is easy to see why some might jump to that conclusion, given
the fact that if it is a place of religious worship, it is the oldest discovery
of such a place to date. Of course, that only leads to more questions. If
Gobekli Tepe really is the site of the Garden of Eden, why did the ancients
bury it? Chances are that most of the answers to these questions will forever
remain a mystery. There was no written language at the time Gobekli Tepe was
built. There are no structures quite like it in the area to compare it against
and the people who built it were not settled enough to have left us more
archaeological pieces to the ancient puzzle they have left behind.
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