On a limestone hill in south-eastern Turkey, about 15 kilometres from the city of Şanlıurfa, stand T-shaped stone pillars up to 5.5 metres high. Some have carved arms and hands. Others bear foxes, snakes, wild boar and vultures in relief. They were raised by hunter-gatherers between about 9600 and 8200 BC, according to UNESCO, thousands of years before writing, pottery and the first cities.
This post opens the series in chronological order. It belongs to the map presented in Magic and spirituality in ancient civilisations: a map to get started.
How the site was found
The place first appears in a survey carried out in 1963 by a team from the universities of Istanbul and Chicago. In the report, published in 1980, the archaeologist Peter Benedict described mounds of red earth covered with flint chips and recorded almost 3,000 pieces.
In 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt visited the hill. He had worked at Nevalı Çori, another site in the region where T-shaped pillars had already appeared, and recognised the signs. Excavations began in 1995, with the Şanlıurfa Museum and the DAI, the German Archaeological Institute. Schmidt directed the work until his death in 2014. Afterwards, the team came to be coordinated by the archaeologist Lee Clare. In 2018, Göbekli Tepe entered UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
What is there
The name, in Turkish, means “belly hill” (or navel hill), from göbek. The mound is a tell, a rise formed by the accumulation of buildings and rubble over centuries.
The earliest phase, which archaeologists call Layer III, belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), between about 9600 and 8700 BC. From it come the large circular or oval enclosures. Each has a ring of pillars linked by walls and stone benches, with two larger pillars in the centre. Researchers excavated enclosures they named with letters, from A to H, and a geophysical survey suggested that there may be at least 20 of them on the hill. In the next phase, Layer II, of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, smaller rectangular buildings appear, with lower pillars or without pillars.
Enclosure D is the largest and the best preserved. When the team reached the floor, in 2009, the two central pillars appeared intact, about 5.5 metres high. Both have folded arms and hands that meet over the belly, a decorated belt and a kind of loincloth hanging below it. Pillar 18, the eastern one, seems to carry a fox under the right arm.
The animals on the stones
The figures on the pillars are almost all wild animals. There are foxes, snakes, scorpions, wild boar, aurochs (the wild ox, now extinct), gazelles, wild asses and many birds. The list comes from the article published in 2012 in the journal Antiquity by Oliver Dietrich, Klaus Schmidt and colleagues. In Enclosure D, foxes and snakes predominate. On one of the pillars of that enclosure, Pillar 43, a vulture appears with open wings beside other figures, and Schmidt, in his 2006 book, linked it to ideas about death.
There are no cultivated plants or domestic animals in the images. In the soil, archaeology found bones from hunting and cereals that were still wild.
For Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars were stylised human figures, perhaps beings from another world, ancestors or deities. The arms, hands and belts show that they were bodies. Who these figures were, nobody knows. Lee Clare, in a post on the DAI blog, wrote that the identity of these figures must have been well known to those who carved them and that the animals form part of narratives we can no longer read.
“First temple”: Schmidt’s idea
Klaus Schmidt argued that Göbekli Tepe was a mountain sanctuary, a meeting place where groups of hunter-gatherers from across the region gathered for ceremonies. In his 2006 book, published in German as Sie bauten die ersten Tempel (“They built the first temples”), he brought the idea to a wide audience.
The 2012 article in Antiquity added a point: raising pillars weighing several tonnes required many people working together, and those people needed to eat. The team interpreted the broken animal bones and the large stone vessels as signs of feasting. The authors raised the hypothesis that some of these vessels might have served to ferment wild cereals and make a kind of beer. There is still no direct chemical proof of this.
That helped to make the site famous. The more common view held that first came agriculture and villages, and only afterwards the great temples. At Göbekli Tepe, monumental architecture appears before agriculture. In an interview with Smithsonian magazine in 2008, Schmidt summed it up thus: “first came the temple, then the city”.
The idea resonates with the work of Jacques Cauvin. In The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, the French archaeologist already argued that, in the Near East, a change in the symbolic world, which he called a “revolution of symbols”, happened before the domestication of plants and animals and helped to bring it about. Göbekli Tepe came to be cited as an example of the thesis.
What has changed in recent research
Between 2015 and 2019, the DAI team opened deep soundings and reviewed two decades of records. Lee Clare published a summary of that work in 2020, in the e-Forschungsberichte des DAI, the institute’s electronic reports. He himself says that the results lead us to revise the popular image of Göbekli Tepe as home to the “first temples of the world”.
The new data show houses, hearths, grinding stones and many everyday objects. Some of the rectangular buildings, formerly seen as small late sanctuaries, seem to have been dwellings. The team also found a large rock-cut cistern and channels for collecting rainwater. Today, the DAI itself describes the place as a settlement with a strong ritual component. UNESCO, in the inscription text, also mentions structures that appear domestic beside the monumental enclosures.
The pillar enclosures remain extraordinary and continue to have a probable ritual use. The change is in the setting: instead of an isolated sanctuary where nobody lived, researchers see a community that lived there and built these special spaces in the midst of its own settlement.
The archaeologist Ian Hodder, who studied Çatalhöyük, another great Neolithic site in Turkey, brought researchers together in Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society. The book deals with Neolithic religion mixed into daily life, houses and the dead. The new readings of Göbekli Tepe point in the same direction.
What we know and what we do not know
We know when the enclosures were raised, how they were built, which animals appear on the pillars and what people ate. We do not know what language they spoke, what they called the figures on the pillars or what stories they told about them. There is no writing. Every answer about gods or rituals is interpretation from stones, bones and seeds.
The next stage of the series moves down to Mesopotamia, where writing arose thousands of years later and magic began to be recorded on clay tablets. Anyone who wants to compare the categories used to talk about rite and magic can read the different types of magic.
Questions answered
Who built the pillars?
Communities of Pre-Pottery Neolithic hunter-gatherers, who did not yet cultivate domesticated plants or raise animals. Recent DAI research indicates that at least some of these people lived at the site itself.
So was it a temple or not?
DAI archaeologists today prefer to speak of a settlement with a strong ritual component. The word “temple” comes from Klaus Schmidt’s interpretation and still appears widely in the press.
Do the pillars represent gods?
Nobody knows. They have arms, hands and belts, which shows that they are stylised human figures. Schmidt thought of supernatural beings or ancestors, but without writing there is no way to confirm who they were.
Mini-glossary
- Tell: an artificial hill formed by layers of buildings and rubble accumulated over time.
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic: phase of the early Neolithic in the Near East, before the use of ceramic vessels, divided into A (PPNA) and B (PPNB).
- T-shaped pillar: limestone block with a horizontal top, in the shape of a T, characteristic of Göbekli Tepe and neighbouring sites.
- Enclosure: circular or oval structure formed by pillars linked by walls and benches, with two central pillars.
- Aurochs: wild ox, ancestor of domestic cattle, extinct in the seventeenth century.
Bibliography
CAUVIN, Jacques. The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Trans. Trevor Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Original: Naissance des divinités, naissance de l’agriculture. Paris: CNRS, 1994.
CLARE, Lee. Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. A brief summary of research at a new World Heritage Site (2015–2019). e-Forschungsberichte des DAI, fasc. 2, 2020, p. 1–13. DOI: 10.34780/efb.v0i2.1012.
DIETRICH, Oliver; HEUN, Manfred; NOTROFF, Jens; SCHMIDT, Klaus; ZARNKOW, Martin. The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey. Antiquity, v. 86, n. 333, 2012, p. 674–695.
HODDER, Ian (ed.). Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society: Vital Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
SCHMIDT, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey. A preliminary report on the 1995–1999 excavations. Paléorient, v. 26, n. 1, 2000, p. 45–54.
SCHMIDT, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: ex oriente, 2012. Original: Sie bauten die ersten Tempel. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006.
UNESCO. Göbekli Tepe. World Heritage List, n. 1572, 2018. Available at: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/.