Day 229: Göbekli Tepe

Nov 18 - Walk to the museum for the 9:45 bus to the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site. It is a very convenient system: the same bus passes by a number of other stops in town after the museum, and its only destination is the site. Passengers pay 20 TL each and get a card that validates the return trip. This is much cheaper than a tour or organizing a taxi. It is about 30 minutes to the east.

It is raining and fog hangs low over the countryside. There is a lot of arguing and standing around at the entrance gate to the site, since there is no electricity in the ticket booth and therefore no tickets can be sold. After a while it becomes clear there is another place for tickets, so head down there. The wooden walkways are wet and slippery, slowing everything down to a crawl.

Finally get tickets at the cafe down the hill, and go back up. The site itself is small, a few acres in size, and the most important excavations are covered by a large roof. It must be fairly recent, as all the photos I’ve seen of this site show it outdoors.

Göbekli Tepe, discovered during a survey in 1963, is considered to be one of the oldest, if not THE oldest, temple complex yet found. It dates from the early part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (9500-8000 BCE). Human settlements have been found dating much earlier than this, but the appearance of a temple, especially one of this size, is virtually unknown.

A general view, showing portions of several buildings within the main complex. The fuzziness in the distance is due to heavy fog.

Building D, with an oval floorplan. There are three concentric walls walls around it.

I think this is Building B. This has a much better preservation on the raised stones. These are shaped like fat “T”s, and normally two of them occupy the center of the room. This “T” shape for upright stones in the Neolithic is unique to temples in the Urfa region. A number of others are set into the surrounding walls. They are covered in in geometric shapes and images of animals, with a definite emphasis on an “H” form and a pointed “C”. It is almost impossible to see this on the site, but the recreations in the museum show it clearly.

Here, a few vague animal shapes can be made out.

This is what it looked like outside all morning today.

This upright stone was on site, but to really see what is carved on it, one needs to see the reconstruction placed in the resident museum. Shown are some birds, a scorpion, and parts of other animals.

From the Göbekli Tepe site, it is possible to see the two mountain ranges to the north, the Euphrates Valley, and the Harran plains that extend south to Syria. It is thought that this place was selected because it could see and be seen by travelers from many directions. It also appears to have decent limestone for construction nearby.

A large controversy began with this site, regarding the advent of agriculture. Building houses is one thing, but a large temple complex requires hundreds of people, who would normally be out finding food for themselves as hunter-gatherers. Furthermore, the temple would not actually solve anyone’s personal need for shelter. It must have taken a lot of time to build each one of these temples, so how could those people be fed? The suggestion has been that this temple forced people to solve the feeding problem, hence invention of agriculture. This would have led to the food storage problem, bringing about the invention of pottery. It is an interesting idea, which is impossible for the Göbekli Tepe site itself to answer. At any rate, the advent of agriculture was almost certainly spread out over hundreds or thousands of years, as trial and error experimentation took place.

Odette did point out, all by herself, that it didn’t make much sense to spend all the time and effort to built the temples, since these people could not live there. It is a good question of basic practicality, and hard to explain to a nine-year old why people built huge structures to gods they cannot see. We’ve been looking at things like that ad-nauseum since the beginning of our trip, but for some reason it struck her just now. Perhaps because the people of the early Neolithic had so little fixed resources at their disposal compared with later ages.

Back in Urfa, we go get some lunch then stop at the Sanliurfa Museum (for me, second time).

The museum recreation of one of the Göbekli Tepe temples, with clear artwork on the sides of the upright stones.

Some graffiti in the park by the museum. “For those on May 1, SEP”. May 1 refers to Labor Day, and the SEP is the Socialist Laborers Party. This is party in opposition to the current party in power in Türkiye, and obviously has an anti-capitalistic stance.

When I go to find out what happened with our laundry today, I end up getting in a long conversation with the manager of the hotel we are staying in, mostly by phone translator. I really don’t know enough words in Turkish to form sentences. I tell him it is a pity I can’t really talk about anything, and he responds that rather it is he who needs to learn English, since more foreign tourists are starting to show up here (in the summer). At the moment, it is really just Turkish tourists. This part of Türkiye has lagged behind the rest of the country due to its history as an on-off conflict zone between the Turkish government and the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party). Now, though that has quieted down a bit (despite the bomb blast last week in Istanbul), the war to the south and subsequent influx of Syrian refugees has placed the region under stress.

Türkiye III