Turkey's Göbekli Tepe: Discoveries at World's Oldest Temple

by Christopher Hodapp

The 10,000- to 11,500-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is the oldest place of worship on Earth ever discovered, predating the building of the first Egyptian pyramids by 6,500 years. New discoveries are emerging from the ancient site about the primitive hunter/gatherers here who developed a rudimentary understanding of geometry to create the first temples. At least fifty 15-foot-tall monolithic pillars rise out of the ground, covered with intricate carvings of animals like jaguars and reptiles, symbols of death like vultures, and wild game like the the wild boar that still roam these hills in southeastern Turkey even today.

Archeologists believe this to be a site of worship and not a residential settlement, because no evidence of residential buildings or fortifications other than the T-shaped pillars have been discovered. That said, the massive site of Göbekli Tepe, near the modern-day town of Şanlıurfa, has only been five percent excavated, so new discoveries are always possible. 

Each monolith is set within one of at least twenty concentric rings, each of which is built inside the other, with diameters ranging from 30-100 feet and weighing as much as 20 tons.

According to a new article on the Haaretz website, a discovery by Israeli archaeologists suggests the Göbekli Tepe temple complex was even more complicated than previously thought, and required an amount of planning and resources thought to be impossible for those times. A new study of the three oldest stone enclosures by archaeologists Gil Haklay and Avi Gopher of Tel Aviv University has revealed a distinct equilateral triangle that formed the overall architectural plan of these structures.

From Israeli Archaeologists Find Hidden Pattern at ‘World’s Oldest Temple’ Göbekli Tepe by Ariel David:

The finding confirms previous research by Haklay and Gopher at other sites showing that architects in the Neolithic or even in the late Paleolithic didn’t build shelters and homes haphazardly but had the ability to apply rudimentary geometric principles and create standard units of measurement.

At Göbekli Tepe, the discovery of the pattern is evidence of a complex abstract design that could not be realized without first creating a scaled floor plan, Haklay says. At a time when the invention of writing was millennia away, this could be accomplished, for example, by using reeds of equal length to create a rudimentary blueprint on the ground, he suggests.

Read the whole article HERE.