Gobeckli Tepe - The Site

The mound of G?bekli Tepe is situated a few kilometers to the northeast of the modern town of? ?anl?urfa in southeastern Turkey. The Gobeckli site is situated on the highest point of the Germus mountain range towering 750 m above the Harran plain. With a height of 15 m, the mound, which is completely artificial, is spreading on an area of about 9 ha, measuring 300 m in diameter. This immense ruin hill was formed of the debris of monumental constructions dating back to the 10th and 9th millennium BC.?

? G?bekli Tepe was first noted as an archaeological site during a combined survey by the Universities of Chicago and Istanbul in the 1960s due to its remarkable amount of flint flakes, chips, and tools, but the architecture the mound was hiding remained unrecognized until its re-discovery in 1994 by Klaus Schmidt. Excavations started the following year and are still ongoing, until his untimely death in 2014 lead by Klaus Schmidt. They revealed an monumental architecture not suspected in such an early context and illustrating the outstanding role of this site – not as a settlement, but as a place of cult and ritual.

? Three layers have been distinguished to date, at the site. The oldest Layer III (10th millennium BC) is characterized by monolithic T-shaped pillars weighing tons, which were positioned in circle-like structures. The pillars were interconnected by limestone walls and benches leaning at the inner side of the walls. In the center of these enclosures there are always two bigger pillars, with a height of over 5 m. The circles measure 10-20 m.

? The T-shape of the pillars is clearly an abstract depiction of the human body seen from the side. Evidence for this interpretation are the low relief depictions of arms, hands and items of clothing like belts and loincloths on some of the pillars. Often the pillars bear further reliefs, mostly depictions of animals, but also of numerous abstract symbols. To the spectrum of finds adds a wide range of sculptures of humans and animals.

? Layer III is superimposed by Layer II, dating to the 9th millennium BC. This layer is not characterized by big round enclosures, but by smaller, rectangular buildings. The number and the height of the pillars are also reduced. In most cases only the two central pillars remain, the biggest measuring around 1,5m. Layer I consists of big accumulations of sediments at the hill flanks, which were produced partly by natural erosion, but mainly by modern farming activities at the ruin hill. The very early date of this astonishing monumental architecture to the early and middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN), i.e. the time between 9600-8000 BC is not only confirmed by characteristic finds, but also by radiocarbon data.

The main enclosure is the largest and best preserved so far. Two huge central pillars are surrounded by a circle formed by – at current state of excavation – 11 pillars of similar T-shape. Most of these pillars are decorated with depictions of animals, foxes, birds (e.g. cranes, storks and ducks), and snakes being the most common species in this enclosure, accompanied by a wide range of figurations including the motives of boar, aurochs, gazelle, wild donkey and larger carnivores. The two pillars in the center of this enclosure, measuring about 5.5 m in height and weighing some 8 metric tons, are founded in only 20cm high pedestals, which are – like the rest of the floor level – carved out of the carefully smoothed bedrock, and, in one case, decorated with a relief frieze of ducks

.In particular these central pillars of the main enclosure allow demonstrating the anthropomorphic appearance of the T-shaped pillars. The oblong T-heads can be regarded as abstract depictions of the human head, the smaller side representing the face. Clearly visible are arms on the pillars’ shafts with hands brought together above the abdomen . The depiction of belts and loincloths in the shape of animal skins underlines the impression that these T-shaped pillars own an anthropomorphic identity and therefore should be regarded as pillar-statues more precisely. Some small bones from a foxtail found in front of one of the central pillar’s hints at the presence of a real fur here once, maybe as some kind of offering or indeed to be understood as a genuine counterpart to the loincloth depicted.

? Since this relief of a loincloth is covering the genital region of the pillar-statues, we cannot be sure about the gender of the two individuals depicted in the center. But some help may come from the clay figurines from the PPN B site of Neval? ?ori about 50 km north of G?bekli Tepe, now flooded by the Atatürk dam reservoir. Apparently, of those figurines depicting both, male and female individuals, only the male ones are wearing belts. Thus, it is highly probable to assume that the pair of pillars in Gobeckli's main enclosure should represent two male individuals, too. Indeed, it seems striking that the iconographic and symbolic world present at G?bekli Tepe is one dominated by masculinity. Whenever the gender of one of the animals depicted is indicated, it is a male specimen. Among the depictions of human beings, ithyphallic individuals are numerous. The hitherto only known clearly female depiction is a later added graffito on a stone slab in one of the buildings of Layer II, which was most likely not an original decoration of that room.

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