The circles, laid out of carefully polished stones, were created around 9500 BC, that is, even before the advent of agriculture.
As a boy, Klaus Schmidt climbed the caves in his homeland, Germany, in the hope of discovering prehistoric drawings. Thirty years later, already a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex nearly twice the age of any such find.
“It's like a supernova,” says Schmidt. We stand under a lone tree at the top of a windswept hill 35 miles north of the Turkish-Syrian border. “As soon as I saw it for the first time, I realized that I had two options: either to leave here and not tell anyone anything, or to explore this object for the rest of my life.”
Behind him you can see the first bends of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, like a sea the color of dust, the Mesopotamian Plain stretches for hundreds of miles. Directly in front of him lie the stone circles of Gobekli Tepe, partially hidden in the thickness of the hill.
Compared to Stonehenge, they are small. None of the open circles (4 objects out of the estimated 20 have been excavated so far) exceed 30 meters in diameter. T-shaped pillars lie on the same level as the rest of the finds, and two five-meter stones rise above them, at least a meter. They are remarkable for their carved images of wild boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, as well as their age: the stones date back to about 9500 BC, that is, they are 5.5 thousand years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7 thousand years older than Stonehenge.
The people who created them not only did not know wheels and letters - they did not even own pottery and did not cultivate wheat. The authors of the construction in Gobekli Tepe settled in villages, but they were not farmers, but hunters.
“It used to be thought that only complex, hierarchical civilizations that emerged only after the advent of agriculture were capable of erecting such monumental objects,” says Stanford University anthropology professor Ian Hodder, who has been leading excavations on Chatal Guyuk, the most famous on the territory of Turkey monuments of the Neolithic era. - Gobekli Tepe turns all our ideas upside down. The objects found there are skillfully processed, they are difficult to manufacture and were made before agriculture appeared. This alone makes this complex one of the most important archaeological finds in a long time."
Since only a part of the monument was discovered during ten years of excavations, the purpose of the Gobekli Tepe buildings remains unclear. Some believe that this was the place of rituals associated with the cult of fertility, and the two tall stones in the center of each circle represent a man and a woman. This theory was happily picked up by a travel agency in the nearby town of Urfa. “Visit the Garden of Eden, see Adam and Eve,” calls out the brochure.
Schmidt is skeptical about this hypothesis. He admits that Gobekli Tepe may well prove to be "evidence of the last rise of a semi-nomadic civilization that was soon supplanted by farmers." Schmidt says that these buildings have survived to this day in almost perfect condition only because those who built them soon buried their creation under tons of earth themselves, as if their world filled with wild animals suddenly lost its significance.
But this site lacks the symbols of fertility that are found on other monuments of the Neolithic era, and although the T-shaped columns symbolize a person, these figures are devoid of sexual characteristics.
Gods
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“I think we're dealing here with the earliest images of the gods,” Schmidt says, stroking one of the largest stones with his hand. “They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But there are hands and palms. These are demiurges. I think those who carved them out of stone asked the most global question: what kind of world is this? why are we in it?"
No remnants of dwellings or graves have been found near the stones, and Schmidt believes that the top of this hill was a place of pilgrimage for communities living within a radius of about a hundred miles. The tallest stones are oriented to the south-west, as if overlooking the plain, dotted with monuments from the same period, some of which are in many ways no less interesting than Gobekli Tepe.
Last year, for example, French archaeologists discovered the oldest mural in Jada al-Muhara (in northern Syria). “Two square meters of geometric patterns in red, black and white are like the paintings of Paul Klee,” says excavation chief Eric Coquenho of the University of Lyon.
Given the remarkable location of Gobekli Tepe, Coqueño calls Schmidt's hypothesis that it was a place of ritual "tempting." However, the study of this region is just beginning. "Maybe tomorrow they will find something even more amazing."
Vechihi Ozkaya, head of excavations at Kortyk-Tepe, 120 miles east of Urfa, doubts that the title can be claimed by the thousands of stone pots he found in hundreds of 11.5 burials he surveyed since 2001 thousand years. But his spartan-style office at Dikle University (Diyarbakir, Turkey) is filled with excitement.
“Look here,” he says, showing a photograph of an elaborately carved sculpture of a mythical animal - half lion, half human. - This is a sphinx, thousands of years before the advent of Egyptian civilization. Southeast Turkey, Northern Syria - our civilization was born in this region”.
Author - Nicholas Birch / Inopressa.ru