Göbekli Tepe is a Turkish archaeological site that presents several circular stone structures, each surrounded by walls, dated to around 13.500 years ago.
Just for context, this was more than 6000 years before Stonehenge.
[Göbekli Tepe’s main excavation area. Photo: German Archaeological Institute, Nico Becker]
These structures were built by hunter-gatherer communities and are present in other similar sites dating around the same time.
They're usually interpreted as communal spaces, but Göbekli Tepe is different because there's no sign of people living there.
The almost 6 meters tall t-shaped pillars representing very stylized, headless humans are definitely one of the most intriguing parts of the site.
They feature arms, hands, belts, clothing and sometimes a vast variety of wild animals.
If the top of the "T" is meant to represent the head, it still is very interesting to note that they always have no decorations, meaning no facial features.
The two central pillars in what is called "building D" have different symbols sculpted not far from where some would wear a necklace. This could possibly mean that the figures didn't need facial features to be recognized by the people of the time, because the different details of their clothing and accessories would have been enough.
This could point to an existing mythology, shared orally even before the "circles" of Göbekli Tepe were built.
To support the idea of the figures being intentionally stylized that way, life-sized sculpted heads were found on site, meaning that more naturalistic depictions of humans existed and were produced at the same time.
Even if some disagree, the main idea is that the structures of Göbekli Tepe were religious in nature, related to myths and spirituality, full of symbolic images, in other words, Göbekli Tepe was probably a temple.
With the bases of it being a temple, there are some things that may be interesting to analyse.
Star worship.
While the idea of Göbekli Tepe being built to worship stars was first introduced by Italian archaeoastronomer Magli, it's not his idea of Sirius being aligned with it that caught my attention.
For this other theory we have to look at the Harranites.
Harran was a major ancient city, just 41 kilometres away from Göbekli Tepe, and was a central point for culture, science and religion.
The first records of the city of Harran are from much later than Göbekli Tepe, in the Bronze age, but there is proof of previous continuous occupation nearby and it's worth it to look at the religious practices related to the city and its inhabitants.
We know that the Harranites venerated Babylonian and Assyrian deities, the most important for the city being Sin, God of the Moon, father of the Sun God Shamash, and Ningal, the "great lady" or "queen", his spouse.
Given the proximity it's definitely possible that some of Harranites' beliefs came from before the existence of the city and were passed down for centuries and even millennia, stemming from the people who built Göbekli Tepe or even before them.
Many medieval writers talked about the religion of Harran and how people living there worshiped personifications of the stars, the Sun and the Moon.
An evidence that could support this idea is the symbol at the neck of the figure represented in one of the central pillars in building D.
[Picture by Alistair Coombs]
The symbol is a crescent moon under a hollow circle (that may represent the full moon or the sun).
The crescent moon is repeated in several other spots in the "circles" and Sin's symbol was -along with the bull- the crescent moon depicted that way.
Interestingly enough, the other pillar has a symbol representing a horned creature, probably an aurochs, in the same spot.
Taking the whole symbol in consideration, crescent moon and circle together, it reminds of the Kün-ay (Sun-Moon) symbol sacred in Proto-Turkish culture and representing the first day of the first Month of spring, day in which there's balance between day and night.
The "star worshiping" people of Harran, well after the times of Göbekli Tepe, prayed facing North and even had a grand festival dedicated to the "Mystery of the North" [one day I'll get my hands on a copy of "The City of the Moon God" by Tamara Green, but for now I'll go by what other people say in their papers and extracts and previews of the book]. These people mostly had the North star as a reference, but it wasn't visible at the times of Göbekli Tepe.
The central pillars of buildings C, D and E were analysed by engineer Rodney Hale and he determined that they could have been directed to the brightest star in Cygnus, Deneb.
Twins.
Another interesting hypothesis about the identities of the two pillars identifies them as brothers or twins.
The figure of twins or brothers is common in many early religions, with myths in which they symbolize duality and sometimes unity.
The Syrian city closest to Göbekli Tepe is Urfa and here we see the worshiping of twins Azizos and Monimos, Arab deities representing the morning and the evening star.
In the Ugaritic texts, again from Syria and dated around 1200 b.c., we see Shachar and Shalim, Gods of dusk and dawn.
Other divinities from the north of Syria are Abgal and Ashar, brothers. With Abgal was worshiped Maan, "good and bountiful God", sometimes showed with Saar, his brother.
Amphion and Zethus were the twin sons of Zeus in Greek mythology.
Because of how common this idea is and how some scholars think most figures in the temples represent men, this could be an idea to explore and keep in mind.
Heads.
As we said before, the T-shaped pillars are not the only representation of humans in Göbekli Tepe, we also have more naturalistic statues.
Only 9 of these human representations were found complete and matching pieces were found for only one of the broken ones.
Most of these fragments are heads, there are also signs that point at them being broken intentionally and most times they were found at the base of pillars.
This may mean that human heads had a special place in the beliefs of the people of Göbekli Tepe.
In building D, a depiction of a human head surrounded by animals -a vulture and a hyena among others- was found near a pillar.
Still in the same "circle", on one of the pillars we see an headless body again surrounded by animals, like snakes, birds, and a scorpion.
In other sculptures we can see birds sitting on top of human heads, or maybe carrying them away.
No burials were found, but they did find human bones and skull fragments with cut marks.
In places with similar images to Göbekli Tepe we see burials of people with their skulls detached, pointing clearly at some connection between death and death rituals and Göbekli Tepe.
Regarding the skulls, I want to talk about three of them in particular. They're not complete but several fragments that can be identified as being from three different individuals.
There's no real evidence of the gender of the three people, but one of them could be of a woman and all of them are of adults (20-50 years old).
On them we see a drilled perforation, carvings, and the application of ochre to the one that may have been a woman, as well as cut marks.
The carvings are straight lines that run across the forehead and on one of them (the one that may have been a woman) it continues to the back of the skull and even on the mandible.
There are also signs of a possible cleaning or defleshing of the heads.
We also know that both the incisions and the perforation were made shortly after the death of the individuals.
The perforation is also in a position that would have let the skull hang vertically and face forward when suspended, but it could have also been a fixing point for decorative elements.
The meaning of the incision is unsure, but, when compared with later evidence from the same area, it's thought that the main function of them was branding, either for some sort of ancestor veneration rite or just to mark them as "different", in a positive or negative way.
Liquid.
The floor of some of the "circles" is liquid proof and has draining channels. This suggests that if rituals were performed there, they may have involved some sort of liquid, blood, water or some other kind of beverage, we don't know.
Since ceremonies involving water are commonly observed in the area, it could have been water, or, because big stone vessels that have a capacity of 160 liters had been found there with traces of a substance in them that develops with the crushing and fermentation of grain, it could have been an early kind of beer.
Animals.
As we said before, Göbekli Tepe has a great variety of animals depicted on its stone.
It looks like in each "circle"one animal is more common than others.
In building A, we see more snakes, in building B, there are more foxes, building C has more boars while in building D we see more birds, sharing some of the spotlight with snakes.
Does this show that different buildings had different uses?
A special role seems to be reserved to snakes, omnipresent regardless of the "circle" we observe.
On one of the pillars at the center of building A we also see what seems to be a net of snakes.
[Pillar 1, DAI, photo by C. Gerber]
A very similar motif was found on a stone plaquette at the site.
On pillar 20, in building D, we see a snake going towards an aurochs, the aurochs legs are flexed and the snake is considerably bigger than its apparent opponent.
This could depict the victory of a snake over a "strong and scary" aurochs.
Because of this, snakes could have had an important symbolic role, even if there's no way to really know how.
Writing.
Let's now take our attention back to the central pillars of building D, more specifically at pillar 18, who's wearing a belt with decorative symbols on them.
The decorative pattern on the side is "CCHCHƆ" and on the front we have two sides of the "buckle", on the left, top to bottom, it shows "ⅠHH" and on the right "Ⅰ Ⅰ".
Them not being symmetrical may indicate an early form of writing.
Italian art historian Cesarino in his analysis of the possibility of the symbols of Göbekli Tepe being characters used for writing talks about the later Assyrian symbol for "ki" with a symbol in it that looks symilar to the "C" that we saw and he says it surely comes from some earier form of writing.
In the same document we can read that some of the symbols of Göbekli Tepe are also very symilar to pre-hellenic symbols, but I could not find other sources.
We read that "C" meant "sky", "Ɔ" meant "sea", "H" meant "kingdom".
Another idea I find interesting about the symbols being writing, starts by taking in consideration Luwian hieroglyphic script, sister language of Hittite, surfaced around 1600 years ago.
Some Luwian symbols stood for entire words, others had phonetic values.
When they have phonetic values, they are defined by the first sound of the word for the thing the symbol is based on.
Some of those words were not Luwian words but Hittite ones. Because of that, this writing system could have been born in eastern Anatolia (in Turkey) where both languages were spoken.
Luwian symbols that I can kind of see some corrispondence with are the H symbol, meaning "gate", a symbol very similar to "0" that means "woman", a symbol similar to "︵" meaning "great", "C" symbol for "ni" (that probably comes from the word for "here", "now") and"⊚" symbol for "sa4" (very similar to the representation of the Sun in Ancient Egypt, also translated as "day").
It is clear that the mysteries surrounding Göbekli Tepe go a lot deeper than simply being amazed at how old what could be humanity's first temple is.
You can read more about it at The Tepe Telegrams or read more of my posts checking out the history category.
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