A monumental site, not a city
Gobekli Tepe lies on a limestone ridge northeast of the city of Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey. Despite titles that call it a “forgotten city”, it is not a city in any usual sense. The main excavated remains are a group of large circular and oval enclosures with massive carved stone pillars, built by people who, as far as current evidence shows, did not yet farm or herd animals. The site dates to roughly 9500 BCE and was in use for well over a thousand years. Nothing in the evidence suggests an urban population, streets or administration of the kind found in later Mesopotamian civilization.
The site’s importance is that it shows organised, large-scale construction before farming villages. The older assumption that monumental building came after agriculture and settlement now has to be qualified. It may be that the two developed together in this region, but the exact relationship is still debated.
Where and when
The hill, whose Turkish name means roughly “Potbelly Hill”, rises about 15 metres above the surrounding plain, and much of it is the accumulated debris of the building and rebuilding over several centuries. Radiocarbon dating of material from the fills and deposits places the earliest large enclosures in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, in the tenth and ninth millennia BCE. The commonly cited range is roughly 9500 to 8000 BCE, with the oldest well-known enclosures at the beginning of that range, although the dates of individual structures are subject to ongoing refinement.
Excavators distinguish two main building phases:
- Layer III, the older phase, with large round or oval enclosures bounded by rough stone walls and benches, and by tall T-shaped pillars set in the centre and around the walls.
- Layer II, a later phase with smaller, rectangular rooms, and smaller, less elaborately decorated pillars.
By about 8000 BCE, the large enclosures were no longer being built or used for their original purpose, and at least some were deliberately filled with rubble and debris.
Discovery
The hill was recorded in a survey by archaeologists from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University in the 1960s. They noticed flint tools on the surface and what looked like a mound with limestone slabs, and at the time those were thought to be remains of a medieval cemetery or ordinary later activity. The site was largely overlooked.
In 1994, Klaus Schmidt, a German prehistorian working for the German Archaeological Institute, visited the hill after reading the survey, and recognised that the stone slabs were parts of buried T-shaped pillars. Excavations began in 1995 in cooperation with the Sanliurfa museum and Turkish authorities. Schmidt directed the project until his death in 2014. Work has continued under later directors, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2018.
What the excavations found
Four main enclosures were uncovered first, often referred to as A to D, with more labelled later (up to H), and geophysical survey suggests that the hill may hide additional enclosures. In total, estimates in the literature run to around twenty, though the figure is an extrapolation rather than an excavated count.
Each large enclosure has a pair of tall central pillars, surrounded by a ring of shorter pillars set into a stone wall with a bench. The tallest pillars stand around 5 to 5.5 metres and weigh several tonnes. They are described in a separate article on the T-shaped pillars, and the animal carvings on them are described in another article about the carved animal reliefs.
Excavators also found:
- huge quantities of flint tools and stone grinding equipment;
- animal bones, mostly wild species such as gazelle, aurochs and wild boar;
- human bone fragments, some with deliberate marks;
- stone vessels and basins;
- small carved objects and sculptures.
Who built it, and why?
The builders appear to have been hunter-gatherer groups from the surrounding region, perhaps assembling from many places. Their quarrying, shaping and moving of multi-tonne blocks required planning and labour, which implies some form of cooperation, even without evidence of a ruling class. A few large unfinished pillars remain in the nearby quarries.
Schmidt interpreted Gobekli Tepe as a ritual or ceremonial centre, even a kind of early sanctuary, and the idea that it was a gathering place for ceremonies is widely discussed. Other researchers see more everyday activity, including food preparation and living areas, and argue that the evidence for ritual alone is less clear than early publicity suggested. The question is examined in a companion article on the ritual centre debate and is still open.
Farming and the wider region
Gobekli Tepe sits in a region where early cultivation and animal management developed. Genetic studies of wild and domesticated einkorn wheat have pointed to the nearby Karacadag hills as a possible area of early domestication, and several related sites with similar stone architecture have been identified in the same part of southeastern Turkey, such as Karahan Tepe and Nevali Cori. This has led to discussion of a regional Neolithic culture, sometimes called the Taş Tepeler (“stone hills”). How far Gobekli Tepe contributed to the shift to farming, or whether a growing need to feed workers and gatherers encouraged it, is a theory, not a proven fact.
Comparison with other early monumental traditions is useful, but it should be careful. Later megalithic monuments such as the Ggantija temples of Malta and the Carnac stone alignments of Brittany were built thousands of years afterwards by farming societies, with no known direct link. Gobekli Tepe is better compared with the other early settled and semi-settled communities of the Near East, which came thousands of years before the earliest urban societies of southern Mesopotamia.
How we know
Understanding the site depends on careful archaeological methods, including stratigraphic excavation, radiocarbon dating, geomagnetic and ground-penetrating survey, and the study of animal and plant remains. Much of the hill is still unexcavated, and the interpretation continues to change as new results are published. For that reason, statements about “what Gobekli Tepe was” are best read as current hypotheses.