We have made it to Göbekli Tepe—which translates literally as “Potbelly Hill”—a site now vigorously promoted as the “zero point of history.” It is a colossal prehistoric megalithic complex, set among breathtaking landscapes that would be worth the journey on their own. (The solitary tree in one of my photographs, incidentally, is a pistachio.)
The Futuristic over the Neolithic
The most important part of the excavation is now covered by a futuristic canopy and encircled by a walkway for spectators. Concealed beneath it are four circular structures, between ten and thirty metres across.
- Each is enclosed by walls of undressed stone.
- Within stand eight T-shaped stelae—the signature feature of this region and no other.
- At the centre of each circle, the two tallest stelae stand frozen face to face.
- The slabs for them are thought to have been cut from limestone barely a hundred metres down the slope.
Geophysical survey holds that less than five per cent of the site has so far been excavated, so the show goes on. These stones are the oldest ever found; they remember the second half of the tenth millennium BC. Archaeologists have even identified traces of their having been repaired, more than once, after landslides and flooding.
Linguistics in Stone, and Theories of Hunger
The stelae preserve a wealth of pictograms and reliefs: one can make out ducks, a boar, a pair of human hands, and strange long-bodied mammals which scholars have identified as leopards. But while the archaeology raises no objections, the reasoning of the exhibition’s designers occasionally provokes fits of laughter. With unparalleled solemnity they advance the theory that, these being the first religious structures, nomads lingered here at length for the sake of ceremonies—and that, in order not to starve, they were obliged to invent agriculture and settle down.
In fairness, the idea is not theirs. It belongs to Klaus Schmidt, the German archaeologist who excavated Göbekli Tepe from 1995 until his death in 2014, and who proposed that the temple came first and the farm afterwards. What is striking is the enthusiasm with which the museum’s marketing people seized upon it—and here one understands them completely, because the notion fell upon the Turkish soul like rain upon dry ground.
How very Turkish that sounds! In modern Türkiye the logic is inexorable: the moment a place begins to attract people, it sprouts food outlets. “People might get hungry,” they reason, and open a business. Of course the sanctuary came first and the catering followed; how else could it possibly have happened?
I very much doubt that in the tenth millennium BC people thought along the same lines. And the one thing we may be a hundred per cent sure of is that they were not Turks. To conclude that religion (the very purpose of the megaliths being still an open question) was the primary cause of the rise of agriculture is a rather bold move—and one that later excavations have made bolder still, since the evidence increasingly suggests that people did not merely visit Göbekli Tepe but lived there, which rather undermines the premise about ceremonies and hunger.
Nevertheless, this piece of marketing nonsense goes down splendidly with the tourists and is repeated far and wide. Still, the view from up here is magnificent all the same—is it not?
