How and why was the ancient megalith Göbekli Tepe built?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Göbekli Tepe is the most ancient temple on Earth. According to scientists, it was built by nomads 12 thousand years ago, and only later settlements of sedentary tribes appeared near it. But is it? The ancient megalith is fraught with many mysteries that have not yet been solved.

This place is a supernova

Located in southeastern Turkey, eight kilometers northeast of the city of anlıurfa, this rounded, 15-meter-high hill was nothing remarkable.

True, the peasants from the nearby village of Orendzhik, plowing its slopes for sowing wheat, sometimes stumbled upon some stone blocks, but considered them as an annoying obstacle, dragging them away and dumping them into heaps outside the field, or used them for household needs …

In the 1960s, American archaeologists, led by Peter Benedict, appeared on Puzat Hill (as it is translated from Turkish Göbekli Tepe). They found some ancient artifacts (flint knives, scrapers, etc.).

Based on the fact that a Muslim cemetery is located nearby, Benedict suggested that this area has served as the last refuge for the dead for a long time and it is quite possible that the hill hides more ancient, Byzantine burials. However, local authorities forbade archaeologists to continue excavations.

In 1994, Klaus Schmidt, a professor at the German Archaeological Institute, climbed the Puzaty Hill. His attention was drawn to the flint boulders piled up at the top of the hill. Most likely, they were dragged there from their plowed fields by the peasants, but the professor suggested that these were blanks for the production of stone tools in a large workshop located here, which satisfied the needs of not only the local population.

There were also finished products in these heaps. Schmidt was somewhat embarrassed by the fact that the workshop was located on the top of a hill - it was inconvenient to carry raw materials up and down the finished products. But there was some special attractive force in Göbekli Tepe.

“This place is a supernova,” Schmidt said in an interview. - Already in the first minute after its discovery, I knew that I had two ways: either to leave here without saying a word to anyone, or to spend the rest of my life here, at these excavations.

With the support of the director of the Sanliurfa Museum, the professor received permission to excavate. He bought a house in this city, making it a base for archaeological research, and hired a team of local residents. Since then, Schmidt spent two spring and two autumn months annually at Göbekli Tepe.

Reliefs of faceless gods

Already at the very beginning of the excavations, several T-shaped limestone columns covered with images of animals were revealed to the eyes of archaeologists. Research has determined that they were erected about 12 thousand years ago, that is, in the Mesolithic era. Thus, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest megalithic structure known on Earth. It is older than Stonehenge and the first cities of Mesopotamia.

Further excavations made it possible to determine the configuration of this archaeological complex. With the help of local Kurdish workers, four round rooms with a diameter of 15-20 meters were cleared.

They were monolithic columns with a height of three to five meters, connected by walls of raw stone. The same columns are installed in the center of these rooms. The floors are made of burnt limestone with low stone benches along the walls.

The skillful carving that adorns the columns is unique. They depict foxes, wild boars, cranes, lions, kites, snakes, spiders … There are also images of creatures similar to people, only faceless.

- I think that here we are faced with the earliest images of the gods, - said Klaus Schmidt. “They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have hands and they have palms. These are the creators.

Most of the images are made in the form of reliefs, but there are also three-dimensional sculptures. Among them, the figure of a lion descending down a column is especially distinguished by the level of artistic skill. On some steles there are pictogram icons, which have not yet been deciphered.

It was established that the stone for this structure was mined in quarries located nearby. Several unfinished columns were found here, the height of which reached nine meters.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to say exactly what these structures looked like as a whole, since the upper part of them was destroyed by weathering and local residents breaking out stone blocks during soil cultivation.

Currently, only 5% of the total area of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated. According to geophysical studies, 16 more similar structures are hidden in the bowels of the hill.

The legacy of a highly developed civilization

A natural question arises: who built this megalithic complex and what functions did it perform? After all, if the dating is correct, then it was created in the Stone Age. According to academic science, at that time primitive people gathered wild fruits, hunted animals, made quite skillful tools from flint, and used fire.

They buried their fellow tribesmen, in the burials there are decorations - beads and pendants, which suggests that they had free time, not busy looking for and getting food. But at the same time, they still did not know how to make products from metal and ceramics, build stone dwellings and protective walls, did not know agriculture. Even the wheel has not yet been invented.

How, then, could the people of the Mesolithic, not having metal tools, carve these multi-ton columns out of stone and decorate them with intricate carvings? In addition, just to bring them out of the quarry and set them upright, in the absence of draft animals, requires the efforts of at least 500 people.

Such work required a systematic effort and a social hierarchy in which many people would be subordinate to one religious or military leader. For communities of gatherers and hunters, such a high level of social organization is not at all typical.

It remains to assume that the Göbekli-Tepe complex was inherited by the people of the Stone Age from some highly developed civilization. Perhaps they were aliens, or representatives of parallel worlds, or our distant descendants, who traveled into the past in a time machine to create a research base.

Perhaps it was a highly developed terrestrial civilization that perished as a result of a planetary cataclysm. Their descendants, who survived this disaster, but lost their knowledge and skills, slipping into the Stone Age, began to use the building as a temple - a place of worship for the gods who personified the forces of nature.

Here animals and captured enemies were sacrificed to them. That is, Göbekli Tepe was most likely used only for religious rituals, people have never lived here.

Over time, with the development of agriculture, the nomadic way of life was replaced by a sedentary one, villages and cities appeared in this area. But people still came to the ancient temple complex to pray and make sacrifices to their gods, only more and more often grain became these gifts.

Ancient messages

But one day everything changed. The structures of Göbekli Tepe were partially destroyed, many relief images were cut down, and the entire complex was buried under a multi-meter layer of earth. Who did it and why? This mystery has haunted scientists for many years.

Researchers have established that the temple complex was covered with earth at the beginning of the VIII millennium BC. Again, based on the official theory of evolution, primitive people did not have the opportunity to do such a colossal job.

And why did they need it? After all, how many sanctuaries and temples were abandoned in later eras, and the wind of time destroyed them to the ground, leaving only heaps of stones.

It can be assumed that the temple was covered by its true creators - then, in order to convey some important information to humanity, which has reached a level of development sufficient to adequately perceive it. Obviously, this information is contained in mysterious pictograms. It is likely that someone will someday read the ancient epistles of Göbekli Tepe.

But first you need to dig up the whole complex. Meanwhile, after the death of Klaus Schmidt in 2014, excavations were suspended. And even after their resumption, according to the calculations of specialists, it will take half a century to clear the entire Göbekli Tepe.