smithsonian | Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus
Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of
our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and
arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or
even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The
place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who
has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of
the world's oldest temple.
"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up
at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a
grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot
of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel
roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars,
are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings
of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout:
in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly
smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and,
Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I
see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes,
lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the
pillars' broad sides.
Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.
From this perch 1,000 feet above the valley, we can see to the
horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asks me to imagine what
the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries
of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly
featureless brown expanse it is today.
Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds
of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which
attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling
fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and
einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says 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."
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