Was Gobekli Tepe the World’s First Temple?

Many people may not be aware of an incredible archaeological discovery in Turkey that is turning upside down our conception of how the first cities were created. In 1994, Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist with a specialization in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods, visited a remote location in southwestern Turkey not far from the border with Syria. It was a stone-littered, gently rounded hill (locally known as Gobekli Tepe) that rose 50 feet above the surrounding flat landscape. Anthropologists from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University had toured the site in the 1960s and wrote it up it as nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. As soon as Schmidt saw the hill its shape stood in stark contrast to the rugged plateaus nearby. He immediately recognized the hill as human-made and thought it just might be a gigantic Stone Age site. Since Schmidt was in the region to do a detailed archeological survey of prehistoric sites he was determined to find out if the hill had any significance and organized an exploratory dig for the following year.

In that 1995 excavation, Schmidt and five fellow archeologists unearthed huge stone megaliths buried so close to the surface they had been nicked and scarred by the plows of farmers who had lived in the area. After digging a little deeper, with great excitement they discovered large, T-shaped stone pillars, 16 feet tall and weighing between seven and ten tons, arranged in circles or rings of slightly smaller stones facing inward. The largest ring found at this point in the excavation, early 2012, is 65 feet in diameter.

In the years since that first excavation, Schmidt has been busy supervising a team of more than a dozen German archaeologists, gangs of local laborers, and many dozens of wide-eyed graduate and undergraduate students. One of his most important achievements is the mapping of the entire summit of Gobekli Tepe using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, plotting the locations of 16 other megalith rings that are still buried on the summit’s 22 acres.

But what surprised the archeological team was what they did not find: no artifacts that would indicate permanent settlement, no middens (deposits of detritus containing shells, animal bones, and other refuse that demonstrated human occupance), no evidence of charcoal or scorched rock that would indicate cooking, no structures that could have served as dwellings. Nor did they find any clay fertility figurines that typically litter sites in the surrounding region that are about the same age. But signs of tool use, including stone hammers and blades, were nearly everywhere, especially in the form of reliefs carved into the sides of the stone pillars. Those tools closely resembled others found in nearby sites that previously had been carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C.E. Therefore, Schmidt and his colleagues estimated that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age, somewhere around 12,000 years old. The limited carbon-14 dating Schmidt had done at the site confirmed that assessment.

A 14-year analysis of more than 100,000 bone fragments found at Gobekli Tepe has determined that the bones were from native wildlife, including gazelles, boar, sheep, red deer, cranes, ducks, geese, and even vultures. Many of the bone fragments have cut marks and splintered edges, indicating the animals were butchered and probably cooked, perhaps as sacrificial offerings. The site contains no evidence of domesticated animals or grains, indicating to Schmidt that the people who built Gobekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers who had located around the site to build the “temple” and were not sedentary farmers.

Okay, so what does all that mean? First, if the dating is accurate then Gobekli Tepe pre-dates Stonehenge by about 6,000 years, which in itself is drop-jaw amazing. Second, the massive carved stones and rings-circles were created and assembled as large-scale structures with symbolic meaning by prehistoric people who had no metal tools and had not developed pottery. Third, if Schmidt has interpreted the structures correctly, the site may be the world's oldest designed and constructed place of religious worship, a “cathedral” on a hill built by a prehistoric hunter-gatherer people about whom next to nothing is known. Fourth, again if Schmidt has interpreted the structures correctly, Gobekli Tepe may indicate that the previous theories about cities being created first by sedentary farmers with the temples coming later may have it exactly backwards.

In other words, Schmidt believes Gobekli Tepe was constructed before the domestication of plants and animals, before people settled in large-scale sedentary agrarian-based communities, and before the rise of some kind of fairly widespread social stratification or differentiation. Schmidt’s argument is that the extensive effort to build places of religious worship literally laid the foundations for the development of what, for lack of a better word, we call civilization. It’s a provocative theory that historians, archeologists, and anthropologists will likely debate for decades.