Home of the World’s Oldest Temple: Gobekli Tepe

Home of the World’s Oldest Temple: Gobekli Tepe


Some of the world’s great archaeological sites have been known about for thousands of years. This is particularly the case if they are still largely intact and are above ground in places where lots of people live. No one had to ‘discover’ the Pyramids of Giza or the Colosseum of Rome. They were simply there for people to see, though archaeologists are still trying to unravel the mysteries of the pyramids thousands of years later. Other sites were only rediscovered hundreds of years ago. For instance, the first rudimentary archaeological excavations of the ruins of Pompeii in southern Italy were undertaken in the middle of the eighteenth century, though there was more than enough evidence of the fact there was something underneath the ash there by then, not least the writings of Roman observers of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. A great many archaeological sites in Egypt, Iraq and the other early centres of civilization were uncovered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But some major archaeological discoveries have only been made in recent decades. Such is the case with Gobekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, a site which has fundamentally altered our understanding of the development of Neolithic society in the Fertile Crescent and Southwest Asia.

0:00 A Discovery in 1963
3:00 Further Excavations
5:31 First Settlement
7:50 The World’s Oldest Temple
12:17 Religious Rituals
14:19 Life at Gobekli Tepe
16:10 The Abandonment of the Site
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Sources:

Andrew Curry, ‘Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?’, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008.

Andrew Curry, ‘Last Stand of the Hunter-Gatherers?’, in Archaeology, Vol. 74, No. 3 (May/June 2021), pp. 24–31.

Laura Dietrich, Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Gobekli Tepe (Oxford, 2021).

Clive Gamble, ‘The Death of Prehistory’, in Quaderni Storici, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 151 (April, 2016), pp. 284–289.

Caroline Lang, Joris Peters, Nadja Pöllath, Klaus Schmidt and Gisela Grupe, ‘Gazelle behaviour and human presence at early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, south-east Anatolia’, in World Archaeology, Vol. 45, No. 3 (August, 2013), pp. 410–429.

Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 – 5,000 BC (London, 2004).

Klaus Schmidt, ‘Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey: A Preliminary Report on the 1995–1999 Excavations’, in Paléorient, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2000), pp. 45–54.