Inside The Oldest Temple In The World - Gobekli Tepe, Built 6,000 Years Before Stonehenge

"Gobekli changes everything" - Says Ian Hodder, an anthropologist at Stanford University.

Stone T shaped pillars, at Gobekli Tepe excavation site.

It's not far fetched to say, the excavation of Gobekli Tepe has drastically changed everything we thought we knew about human history.

Gobekli Tepe is a gigantic, ancient temple located in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey approximately 12 km (7 mi) northeast of the city of Şanlıurfa. These T-shaped pillars - some weighing more than 10 tons - are situated into great stone rings. Each pillar is beautifully decorated with sculptures, some consisting of lions, vultures, and scorpions twisting around the side of the pillars, but they're more than just amazing works of art. Just as impressive, are their towering height, some reaching around 20 feet tall.

The skillful artwork and engineering that was required is nothing more than outstanding. That anyone could have lifted up 10-ton stones and placed them atop a foundation strong enough to hold them in place is an incredible achievement at any time.

But what makes Gobekli Tepe so unbelievable is that it was built in 10th millennia BC – more than 11,500 years ago – making it the oldest temple in the world.

The Gobekli Tepe dig site. May 13, 2012.

 "Potbelly Hill"

Gobekli Tepe; translating to potbelly hill, in the native language in Tukey. believed to be of a social or ritual nature by site discoverer and excavator Klaus Schmidt, dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE.
During the first phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected—the world's oldest known megaliths.

1960 was the year the first archaeologists found Gobekli Tepe, but it wasn't thought to of been anything more than a medieval graveyard. They had found a hill with some broken slabs of limestone and wasn't interested in looking any further, thinking they would only find a few bones from a few centuries before.

1994 is the year the true discovery was made. Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, visited the site and realized immediately that there was something massive hidden underneath that hill. “Within a minute of first seeing it, I knew I had two choices,” Schmidt would later say: “go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here.”

So, of course, he decided to stay, and he’s been working on the site ever since. Radiocarbon dating has also confirmed that this temple really was built 11,500 years ago, making it one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in recent history.

Close up of one of the pillars. June 12, 2011.

How Long Ago Was 9,500 BC?

So let's put it all into perspective. Stonehenge was built in 3000 BC, and the oldest signs of human writing were created in Sumer in 3,300 BC. That means that Gobekli Tepe isn’t just older than written language. More time passed from the construction of Gobekli Tepe to the invention of the written word than from Sumer to today.

Schmidt believes Gobekli Tepe was established by hunter-gatherers as a sacred place and was formed before ancient man settled into villages and started farming and even domesticating animals. He told Smithsonian magazine, “This is the first human-built holy place."

He came to this conclusion based on the fact many images may have symbolic meaning” the presence of vulture in the carvings, for example, hint at spirituality in that some culture revere vultures for carrying the flesh of the dead into the heavens, and no settlements have been found in the area.

Agriculture didn’t exist yet – or, at least, certainly not in that area. There are, admittedly, some small signs of people growing crops before 9,500 BC, but it’s doubtful that there were any full-fledged communities with farms.

The people who built Gobekli Tepe were what we’d call cavemen. They were hunters and gatherers working with tools made out of stone. And they managed to build something that should have been impossible.

Schmidt thinks if he digs deep enough he will find human remains and suggests the site might have been a ceremonial center for a death cult.

Sculptures on display in a museum in Urfa, Turkey. May 13, 2012.

Is Gobekli Tepe The Worlds First Temple?

The conventional theory has also been that ancient people learned to farm and live in settled communities and over time developed the organization and expertise to build temples and support complicated social structures.

Schmidt argues it is the other way around - that ancient people first came together to construct ceremonial monuments like Gobekli Tepe, and the organization skills required to complete that task paved the way for organizing people into communities that could develop agriculture and large settled communities.

The megaliths and other structures at Gobekli Tepe are made of limestone, which is plentiful at the site and maybe why the site was chosen. Limestone can be cut and carved even with Stone Age flint tools. Schmidt thinks the megaliths were shaped and carved where the limestone was found and then carried to the summit of the hill and lifted upright. He said once the stone rings were finished the ancient builders covered them over with dirt.

Later they placed another ring on top of the buried one, and over centuries a large hill was created. To do all this Schmidt said would have required hundreds of workers to carve and move the stone. Making sure all of them were housed and fed would have required a high degree of organization.