I’m a great one for rootling about in junk shops and the less fastidiously curated museums, not least in the hope of happening across objects whose functions escape me. I love the lessons in what we don’t know – the discovery, for example, that the stack of glass cylinders open at one end which I once found at the little museum at Corfe Castle were for ensuring a crop of straight cucumbers.
While cucumber straighteners may be about nothing more than the Victorian tidying tendency – personally, I prefer mine bendy as Cumberland sausages – other unfamiliar objects can inspire awe at the human achievement, especially when subsequent scratches of the head leave us none the wiser. I mention this in relation to a tour we are running this May to southeastern Turkey, specifically to amazing neolithic Göbekli Tepe, where even after several visits the whole archaeological site invites the same enthralling question; what on Earth – if it is indeed Earth that we are still on – are we looking at here?
Göbekli Tepe, or Belly Hill, is probably the most significant archaeological site currently under excavation anywhere in the world; to my mind, it’s certainly the most intriguing. Foot for foot – the exposed site is barely the size of a tennis court – there’s nowhere to compare.
This is EARLY; no man-made structure, with the possible exception of the walls at Jericho, is anything like the age of the megaliths at Göbekli Tepe; they have been dated to 9,000BC, which makes them more than twice as old as the Pyramids or Stonehenge. Göbekli Tepe predates pottery, written language or agriculture; it takes us back to pre-settlement humankind. Whatever it is, that is.
This hill-top arrangement of stone circles draws initial comparisons with Stonehenge. The major difference is that these megaliths are shaped like capitalised Ts and some are carved with humanising details like loincloths, belts and stylised arms. Others bear etched reliefs of creatures. But where dwellers in caves like Lascaux tended to paint the animals they liked to eat, antelope and wild cattle among them, the people at Göbekli Tepe instead went for creatures liable to eat, bite or otherwise disquiet them: wolves and reptiles, spiders and scorpions. Something dark and atavistic stalks this place.
They have installed a protective timber roof at Göbekli Tepe and a visitors’ centre; a newly laid path of sleepers leads to the site where a raised walkway winds among the stones. Looking down at the partially excavated site, one realises with a start that the circles were built on top of each other, and that the entire hill is therefore an edifice created out of these buried structures, buried perhaps because of some hazy limitation on their use. The initial presumption, that this must be some kind of temple site, now shifts towards highly ritualised entombment, though the archaeologists are yet to find human remains on the site.
What seems clear is that people did not live here but visited for unspecified purposes; at that time, as far as we know, they were hunter gatherers who were yet to settle. The technical and organisational skills which were previously presumed to have been developed in the course of settlement are clearly evidenced here; men, that is, learned to build for their gods, or in the service of their superstitions, before learning to build for themselves; the religious instinct apparently predated the civic one.
Similar sites, several now lost under the dam waters of the nearby River Euphrates, have been uncovered in the region; the same T-shaped stones, and of varying sizes, as if perhaps to denote status. Göbekli Tepe is a thrilling site, and part of the six-day tour which we are running between 3rd and 9th May. We still have spaces, and would love you to join us.