On the Turkish side of the Turkish-Syrian border, now the site of the escalating conflict taking place in Syria, where refugees, rebels and foreign intelligence agencies are gathering, there is a little known archeological site that holds the key to humankind's past and the emergence of complex societies. Göbekli Tepe is the world's oldest temple - predating Stone Henge - and writing - by at least 6000 years. Moreover, the startling carvings in stone are far more sophisticated than those at Stone Henge and the site much, much larger. The archeological site covers about 22 acres and is made up of at least 20 great stone rings, one of which is 65 feet across. Exact numbers are uncertain because much of the site is still underground, but some 50 huge pillars have already been uncovered. The tallest pillars are 18 feet in height and weigh approximately 16 tons. Most are carved into the shape of a capital T and almost all of them are covered in a bas-relief menagerie of animals.
Excavations will take many years as they only began in earnest a few years ago. This mysterious site was deliberately covered over with flint, as if somebody wanted to preserve it for posterity. The archeologists working there, led by Klaus Schmidt, who first visited the site in 1994, are convinced it shows that its socio-religious purpose predates the settled agriculture that grew up nearby hundreds of years later. This has profound significance - it means the people who built Göbekli Tepe first built this remarkable complex because of their religious or spiritual beliefs, and only then developed agriculture to support their work as temple builders. The area was extremely fertile, like a garden of Eden.
It was always assumed that the workforce required to construct a megalithic stone circle could not be organized until human society had reached the village stage of development in the early Neolithic. Gobekli Tepi confounds this view. Most stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe weigh 10 to 20 tons, the largest are 50 tons and the most distant quarry was 500m distant. The stone T-shaped monoliths are 3m high, although the one in the center of each circle is taller.
Read more at http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/mystery-deliberate-burial-ancient-megalithic-stone-circles/9949#vUfL4cVj9mMkGAyC.99
As
The Smithsonian wrote:
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"This area was like a paradise," says Klaus Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."
...In rapid-fire German he explains that he has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.
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Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.
To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies."
Read more:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html#ixzz23RQhzF7u
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
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