The Great Pyramid is a piker. Stonehenge? A newcomer. Before writing, metal tools, cities and towns, or even the development of agriculture there was the temple at Göbekli Tepe:
The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. “You don’t move 10-ton stones for no reason,” Schmidt observes. “Temples like to be on high sites,” he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. “Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world.”
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities.
The temple appears to be about 11,000 years old, 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. There is little evidence at the site that people actually lived there. It appears to have been constructed purely for religious purposes. Even the animals pictured in the carvings on the ancient stone pillars weren’t game animals but more frightening images: spiders, vultures, scorpions, headless bodies. It has been suggested that the place was a site for “sky burials”, in which decapitated corpses were exposed to the elements for excarnation by vultures, presumably the reason they’re pictured in the carvings.
It is the oldest temple discovered to date and, fascinatingly, there is reason to believe that wheat was first domesticated nearby:
Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in structure to wild wheat found on Mount Karaca DaÄŸ 20 miles away from the site, leading one to believe that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.
