Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderArchaeology fact

Göbekli Tepe, in south-eastern Turkey, has monumental stone enclosures built about 11,500 years ago, thousands of years before the first cities, writing or states.

Ikigai Daily

HistoryArchaeology

The story behind the card

The site, near Şanlıurfa, has round and oval enclosures ringed by large T-shaped limestone pillars, the tallest more than 5 metres high. They are carved with foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions and vultures, and some bear human arms and hands, which suggests the pillars stand for stylised people. German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt recognised the site's importance in 1994 and began excavating in 1995. The oldest structures date to about 9500 BCE, when people in the region still lived by hunting and gathering wild plants. Schmidt saw it as a place where scattered groups met for rituals; later excavations also found houses, cisterns and heavy processing of wild cereals, so it was probably a settlement too. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 2018.

Türkçe oku
Güneydoğu Türkiye'deki Göbeklitepe'nin anıtsal taş yapıları yaklaşık 11.500 yıl önce, ilk kentlerden, yazıdan ve devletlerden binlerce yıl önce inşa edildi.

Şanlıurfa yakınlarındaki alanda, büyük T biçimli kireçtaşı dikilitaşlarla çevrili yuvarlak ve oval yapılar bulunur; en uzun dikilitaşlar 5 metreyi aşar. Taşlarda tilki, yaban domuzu, yılan, akrep ve akbaba kabartmaları vardır; bazılarında insan kolları ve elleri de oyulmuştur, bu da dikilitaşların birer insanı simgelediğini düşündürür. Alman arkeolog Klaus Schmidt alanın önemini 1994'te fark etti ve 1995'te kazıya başladı. En eski yapılar MÖ 9500 dolaylarına tarihlenir; o sırada bölgedeki insanlar hâlâ avcılık ve yabani bitki toplayıcılığıyla geçiniyordu. Schmidt burayı dağınık toplulukların tören için bir araya geldiği bir yer olarak görmüştü; sonraki kazılarda evler, su sarnıçları ve yoğun biçimde işlenmiş yabani tahıl izleri de bulundu. Yani Göbeklitepe büyük olasılıkla aynı zamanda bir yerleşim yeriydi. UNESCO alanı 2018'de Dünya Mirası Listesi'ne aldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Göbekli Tepe
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Çatalhöyük, a town in central Turkey lived in from about 7500 to 5600 BCE, had almost no streets: people entered their houses through holes in the roof and walked across the rooftops.

The settlement stands on the Konya Plain in south-central Anatolia and was one of the largest farming communities of its time, home to several thousand people. Its mud-brick houses were built wall to wall and entered by ladder through an opening in the roof, so the rooftops served as streets. British archaeologist James Mellaart first excavated it in 1961–65, and Ian Hodder led a long new project from 1993 to 2018. People buried their dead in pits beneath the floors of their own houses, often under platforms and hearths, and some skulls were plastered and painted with red ochre to recreate faces. Walls carried paintings and bulls' horns set in plaster. UNESCO listed the site as a World Heritage Site in 2012.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Newgrange, a great stone tomb built in Ireland around 3100 BC, is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Around each winter solstice, the rising sun still shines down its passage into the inner chamber.

Newgrange is a passage tomb: a burial chamber reached by a long stone corridor and covered by a mound of earth and stone, here 85 metres across and 12 metres high. Neolithic farmers built it on a ridge above the River Boyne. Over the entrance they left a slot, now called the roof-box, placed so that around the winter solstice the dawn light runs down the passage and lights the chamber floor for about 17 minutes. Farm workers digging for stone reopened the entrance in 1699. Archaeologist Michael O'Kelly excavated the site from 1962 to 1975, and on 21 December 1967 he became the first person in modern times to watch the light come in. Newgrange is part of the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site, with the tombs of Knowth and Dowth.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Uluburun ship sank off Kaş in southern Turkey around 1300 BC, carrying copper, tin, glass and ivory gathered from across the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

In 1982 Mehmed Çakır, a sponge diver from Yalıkavak near Bodrum, reported strange metal 'biscuits with ears' on the seabed; they were copper ingots. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology, led by George Bass and then Cemal Pulak, excavated the wreck in 11 seasons from 1984 to 1994, with more than 22,000 dives. The cargo held about ten tonnes of copper and one tonne of tin, the right mix for bronze, along with glass ingots, elephant and hippopotamus ivory, ostrich eggshells, Baltic amber and a gold scarab bearing the name of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti. Its goods came from Cyprus, the Syrian and Canaanite coast, Egypt, the Aegean and beyond, about a century before that connected world collapsed. The finds are shown at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

A flute carved from a vulture's wing bone about 40,000 years ago, found in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany, is one of the oldest musical instruments known.

A University of Tübingen team led by the archaeologist Nicholas Conard recovered the flute in pieces in the Swabian Alb of south-west Germany and announced it in 2009. It is about 22 cm long, made from a wing bone of a griffon vulture, with five finger holes and notches cut at the end where the player blew. It comes from Aurignacian layers, left by the first modern humans to settle in Europe, and is at least 35,000 and probably close to 40,000 years old. Pieces of flutes made from mammoth ivory, a much harder material to hollow out, have been found in the same cave and in nearby Geißenklösterle. Hohle Fels also yielded a small ivory figure of a woman, one of the oldest known carvings of a human.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Nebra Sky Disc, a bronze disc inlaid with a gold sun or full moon, a crescent moon and stars, was buried in Germany about 3,600 years ago and is one of the oldest known pictures of the sky.

Two treasure hunters with a metal detector dug the disc up illegally in 1999 on a hill near Nebra, in eastern Germany. It passed through the black market until police seized it in a sting operation in Basel, Switzerland, in 2002. Swords and axes buried with it, and birch bark from the sword hilts, date the burial to about 1600 BC, in the Early Bronze Age. A cluster of seven gold dots is usually read as the Pleiades, a star group that early farmers watched to time the seasons. Gold arcs added later along the edges span the angle between sunrise at midsummer and midwinter, and a curved shape at the bottom is often read as a sun boat. The disc is kept at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle and is on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveÇatalhöyük, a town in central Turkey lived in from about 7500 to 5600 BCE, had almost no streets: people entered their houses through holes in the roof and walked across the rooftops.Read next →