Göbeklitepe

You are standing on a raised wooden walkway, under a great sweeping canopy, on a hill above the Harran plain. Below you, rings of carved stone are emerging from the earth, and they are older than almost anything human hands have ever made. In this first chapter you will meet the hill itself, the hunters who raised these stones six thousand years before Stonehenge, and the man who walked up this slope in 1994 and understood, almost at once, what everyone else had missed.

This is Göbekli Tepe, Potbelly Hill in Turkish, a limestone ridge about fifteen kilometres north-east of Şanlıurfa. The soft, rounded summit you can pick out from far across the fields is not a natural hilltop. It is a tell, an artificial mound some fifteen metres deep and three hundred metres across, built up layer upon layer from structures that were raised, used and carefully filled in, beginning more than eleven and a half thousand years ago. The people who made it were hunter-gatherers. They had no pottery, no metal, no writing, no wheel and no farms; more than a hundred thousand wild animal bones found in the fill, gazelle and wild cattle and boar among them, show that everything they ate was hunted or gathered. Yet they quarried pillars weighing many tons and set them upright in great oval rings, around seven thousand years before the pyramids of Giza. This is widely called the oldest known monumental architecture in the world, and in 2018 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage list.

Now, look for four things from the walkway before you study a single carving. First, the ground itself. The canopy above you, opened in 2017, shelters the fragile diggings from sun and rain, and the boardwalk circles the heart of the dig so that not one footstep lands on ancient ground. Second, the pale limestone plateau all around, which breaks naturally along level planes; the builders prised their great pillars from this very hill, and took the flint for the tools that shaped them from the same stone. Third, the view south, where the plain runs away towards Harran and the old lands of Mesopotamia. Hunters stood on this exact height, choosing this exact view, when the Ice Age had only just loosened its grip on the world. And fourth, the unexcavated slopes beyond the shelter. Only about a tenth of the mound has been dug, and ground-penetrating surveys hint at many more enclosures still sleeping under the grass, untouched since the Stone Age.

The discovery is a story in itself. In 1963 a surface survey by Istanbul and Chicago universities, led by Peter Benedict, recorded this mound, read its broken slabs as medieval grave markers, and moved on. For thirty years the hill kept its secret. Then, in 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came here retracing that old survey, looked hard at the scatter of stones, and recognised the flat tops of T-shaped Stone Age pillars. He understood almost at once that he was standing on the discovery of a lifetime. Excavation began in 1995 with the Şanlıurfa Museum and the German Archaeological Institute, and it continues today under Turkish and international teams, with visitors now arriving from every corner of the planet.

So pause here a moment before the crowds move you along. Feel the dry wind that combs this ridge in every season, and remember that everything you are about to see is a first chapter, not a finished book. Then follow the boardwalk round towards the main viewing platforms. Below them wait the four great excavated enclosures and their carved pillars, beings with arms and hands and belts, waiting to be met face to face, and that is where the next chapter of this place begins. Tread lightly.

You are still on the walkway above Göbekli Tepe, and below you now the whole excavation opens out like a page you can read. Four great enclosures lie beneath the canopy, lettered A, B, C and D in the order they were found, and the carved beings that fill them are waiting to be met.

Each enclosure follows the same idea: an oval ring of T-shaped limestone pillars, joined by rough stone walls and low benches, with two much taller pillars standing free in the middle like a pair of figures holding court. And figures is exactly the right word. Enclosure D, the best preserved, settles any doubt about what the T-shape means. Its two central pillars stand about five and a half metres tall, and along their sides run arms bent at the elbow, ending in hands with long fingers that meet low over the belly. There is a belt carved with a buckle, and below it a loincloth of fox pelts. These are not columns holding up a roof. They are stylised beings, with the horizontal top of the T serving as an abstract head, and whether they were ancestors, spirits or something we have no word for, their builders clearly knew them by name.

Now, look for four things as you move between the platforms. First, those central pillars of Enclosure D, with the details just described: the arms, the meeting hands, the belt and its buckle. Second, the animals, because the pillars are alive with them. Snakes ripple down the broad faces in braided streams, foxes leap with tails flying, boars lower their tusked heads, cranes stride on long legs, scorpions and spiders crawl across the stone, wild ducks paddle in rows. Almost every creature is fierce, venomous or sharp-toothed, and almost none of them was a favourite meal, so this is no hunter's menu; it reads more like a book of powers, and each enclosure even seems to favour its own creature, snakes in one, foxes in another, boars and birds elsewhere, as if different groups gathered under different signs. Third, the stones pierced with large round openings, sometimes called porthole stones, which may have been entrances that people crawled through, turning every arrival into a small ceremony. And fourth, the benches running around the enclosure walls. Benches mean gathering, and gathering means shared stories, shared feasts, shared work. Whatever happened inside these rings, it happened together.

Here is the detail to carry with you as you look: every line you can see was cut without metal. Some carvings leave the surface entirely, worked in high relief, among them a snarling predator clinging to a pillar's side with bared teeth, coaxed from the living stone with nothing but flint tools. The pillars themselves were quarried from the limestone plateau just beyond the canopy, and out there an unfinished giant some seven metres long still lies attached to the bedrock, abandoned mid-task, as if the carvers had simply stepped away for lunch eleven thousand years ago and never come back. Between that quarry and these rings, people who had no wheel and no metal moved stones weighing many tons. Something up here was worth all of that effort.

Take your time moving between the viewpoints, because the enclosures change character as the light shifts under the canopy, and each platform shows you carvings the last one hid. And as you look your fill, a bigger question will already be forming, the one every visitor carries away from this rail: what was all of this for, and why did the people who built it bury it again with their own hands? That is where the next chapter of this place begins. Tread lightly.

You are still at the rail, and now comes the question no signboard can settle: what does Göbekli Tepe mean? Two figures will help you ask it well. One is the archaeologist who gave two decades of his life to this hill. The other is a bride, climbing the same slope with a strip of cloth in her hand.

Klaus Schmidt, who led the digging here until 2014, called this the world's first temple, a mountain sanctuary where scattered bands of hunters gathered for ritual and feasting. First came the temple, he liked to say, then the city; the sheer effort of raising these pillars, he argued, may have nudged people towards farming simply to feed the gatherings. The botany plays along, because the wild ancestor of einkorn wheat, one of the first crops ever domesticated, still grows on the slopes of Karacadağ, the volcanic massif that shoulders the horizon away to the north-east. But newer seasons of work have complicated the picture in the best way. Excavators have found traces of ordinary buildings, cisterns and channels for harvesting rainwater, and thousands of grinding stones for wild grain, hints that people may have lived here for at least part of the year rather than only visiting. Perhaps this was not a lonely cathedral in the wilderness but a living community with magnificent shrines at its heart. The honest answer is that the debate is still running, and you are standing in the middle of it.

Now, look for three things from where you stand. First, find Karacadağ itself on the north-east horizon, the dark volcanic mass where that first wheat still grows wild. Second, look again at the enclosures below and remember that everything you see was once hidden, every ring packed deliberately to the brim with rubble, flint and animal bone. And third, look above the diggings for a lone mulberry tree standing between two old cemeteries. Hold that tree in mind, because we will come back to it.

That filling is the one mystery beyond doubt. After generations of use, the enclosures were buried, sometimes with sculptures placed with evident care against the pillars as the fill rose. Some researchers see a ritual closing, a way of putting a sacred building to rest; others suspect slope material slid in over time as well. Whichever it was, that burial is the reason any of this survives, sealed like a letter that took eleven thousand years to open. And remember that this hill was never alone. It is one of more than a dozen related sites scattered through these hills, a network now called Taş Tepeler, the Stone Hills, with Karahan Tepe chief among them, all sharing the same T-pillars and the same carved menagerie. One sanctuary is a marvel. A whole landscape of them is a civilisation taking its first breath.

Now, that mulberry. Long before any archaeologist arrived, local tradition knew this rise as Girê Mirazan, the Hill of Wishes, and held the summit tree to be sacred. Brides-to-be would climb Potbelly Hill to tie strips of cloth to its branches and whisper wishes for children beneath it. They knew nothing of enclosures or radiocarbon dates. They simply felt that this was a place where wishes travel well, and eleven and a half thousand years after the first pillar was raised, the hill is still doing its oldest job.

When you ride back down towards Şanlıurfa, the story continues rather than ends, because the finest carvings, the vessels and the sculpted heads lifted from these enclosures now wait in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, alongside the oldest life-sized statue of a human being ever found. Take one last look at the rings below you, raised by hunters before the first farm existed, buried with care by their own people, and still gathering wishes. Tread lightly.

The road from Şanlıurfa has carried you barely fifteen kilometres, yet you have arrived further back in time than almost any place on Earth can take you. Welcome to Göbeklitepe, Potbelly Hill in Turkish, a limestone ridge above the Harran plain crowned by a soft, rounded summit you can pick out from far across the fields. That swelling is not a natural hilltop. It is a tell, an artificial mound roughly fifteen metres deep and three hundred metres across, built up layer upon layer from structures that were raised, used and carefully filled in here more than eleven and a half thousand years ago. From the visitor centre a shuttle winds you up the ridge, and the path to the summit brings you beneath a great sweeping canopy of steel and membrane, opened in twenty seventeen to shelter the fragile excavations from sun and rain. Beneath it runs a raised wooden walkway, circling the heart of the dig so that you can look straight down into the enclosures without a single footstep landing on ancient ground. What lies below you is widely called the oldest known monumental architecture in the world. The people who created it were hunter-gatherers. They had no pottery, no metal, no writing, no wheel and no farms; more than a hundred thousand wild animal bones found in the fill, gazelle and wild cattle and boar among them, show that everything they ate was hunted or gathered. Yet they quarried pillars weighing many tons, carved them with extraordinary confidence, and set them upright in great oval rings, some six thousand years before Stonehenge and around seven thousand before the pyramids of Giza. For a long while nobody grasped what was here. Surveyors crossed this ridge in the nineteen sixties, noted the broken limestone slabs, and walked on, assuming an old cemetery. Then in nineteen ninety-four the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to look for himself, recognised the flat tops of T-shaped Stone Age pillars in the scatter, and understood almost at once that he was standing on the discovery of a lifetime. Proper excavation began in nineteen ninety-five, and it continues today under Turkish and international teams. In twenty eighteen UNESCO inscribed Göbeklitepe on the World Heritage list, and the hill now welcomes visitors from every corner of the planet. Hold on to one detail as you take your first look: only about a tenth of the mound has been excavated. Ground-penetrating surveys hint at many more enclosures still sleeping beneath the slopes around you, untouched since the Stone Age. Everything you are about to see is a first chapter, not a finished book. So pause on the walkway for a moment before the crowds move you along. Feel the dry wind that combs this ridge in every season, and look south, where the plain runs away towards Harran and the old lands of Mesopotamia. Hunters stood on this exact height, choosing this exact view, when the Ice Age had only just loosened its grip on the world. When you are ready, follow the boardwalk round towards the main viewing platforms. Below them wait the four great excavated enclosures and their carved pillars, and in the next chapter we will meet them face to face.

Below the walkway now, the whole excavation opens out, and you can read it like a page. Archaeologists letter the four main enclosures A, B, C and D in the order they were found, and each follows the same idea: an oval ring of T-shaped limestone pillars, joined by rough stone walls and low benches, with two much taller pillars standing free in the middle like a pair of figures holding court. Enclosure D, the best preserved, is the one to linger over. Its two central pillars stand about five and a half metres tall, and they settle any doubt about what the T-shape means. Look closely and you can make out arms bent at the elbow along their sides, hands with long fingers meeting low over the belly, a belt carved with a buckle, and below it a loincloth of fox pelts. These are not columns holding up a roof; they are stylised beings, with the horizontal top of the T serving as an abstract head. Whether they represented ancestors, spirits or something we have no word for, nobody can say, but their builders clearly knew them by name. Now let your eyes travel across the carvings, because the pillars are alive with animals. Snakes ripple down the broad faces in braided streams. Foxes leap with tails flying. Boars lower their tusked heads, cranes stride on long legs, scorpions and spiders crawl across the stone, and wild ducks paddle in rows. Almost every creature is fierce, venomous or sharp-toothed, and almost none of them was a favourite meal, so this is no hunter's menu; it reads more like a book of powers. Each enclosure even seems to favour its own creature, snakes in one, foxes in another, boars and birds elsewhere, as if different groups gathered under different signs. Some carvings leave the surface entirely, worked in high relief, among them a snarling predator clinging to a pillar's side with bared teeth, coaxed from the living stone with nothing but flint tools. That is worth repeating: every line you see was cut without metal. The pillars themselves were quarried from the limestone plateau just beyond the canopy, where an unfinished giant some seven metres long still lies attached to the bedrock, abandoned mid-task as if the carvers had simply stepped away for lunch eleven thousand years ago. Notice, too, the stones pierced with large round openings, sometimes called porthole stones, which may have been entrances that people crawled through, turning every arrival into a small ceremony. And notice the benches running around the enclosure walls. Benches mean gathering; gathering means shared stories, shared feasts, shared work. Whatever happened inside these rings, it happened together. Take your time moving between the platforms, because each viewpoint gives the enclosures a different character as the light shifts under the canopy. When you have looked your fill at the carvings, a bigger question will already be forming, the one every visitor carries away from this rail: what was it all for, and why did the people who built it bury it again with their own hands? That is where we go next.

Stay by the rail a moment, because now comes the part no signboard can settle: what does Göbeklitepe mean? Klaus Schmidt, who excavated here for two decades, called it the world's first temple, a mountain sanctuary where scattered bands of hunters gathered for ritual and feasting. He liked to say that first came the temple, then the city; the sheer effort of raising these pillars, he argued, may have nudged people towards farming simply to feed the gatherings. It is a tempting thought, and the botany plays along: the wild ancestor of einkorn wheat, one of the first crops ever domesticated, still grows on the slopes of Karacadağ, the volcanic massif that shoulders the horizon away to the north-east. Newer seasons of work have complicated the picture in the best way. Excavators have found traces of ordinary buildings, cisterns and channels for harvesting rainwater, and thousands of grinding stones for wild grain, hints that people may have lived here for at least part of the year rather than only visiting. Perhaps this was not a lonely cathedral in the wilderness but a living community with magnificent shrines at its heart. The honest answer is that the debate is still running, and you are standing in the middle of it. One mystery, though, is beyond doubt. Every enclosure below you was deliberately filled in. After generations of use, the rings were packed to the brim with rubble, flint and animal bone, sometimes with sculptures placed with evident care against the pillars as the fill rose. Some researchers see a ritual closing, a way of putting a sacred building to rest; others suspect slope material slid in over time as well. Whichever it was, that burial is the reason any of this survives, sealed like a letter that took eleven thousand years to open. Remember, too, that this hill was never alone. Göbeklitepe is one of more than a dozen related sites scattered through these hills, a network now called Taş Tepeler, the Stone Hills, with Karahan Tepe chief among them, all sharing the same T-pillars and the same carved menagerie. One sanctuary is a marvel; a whole landscape of them is a civilisation taking its first breath. And before you leave the summit, look for the lone mulberry standing above the diggings between two old cemeteries. For generations, long before any archaeologist arrived, local people climbed this hill to tie strips of cloth to its branches and make wishes, trusting the wind to carry them upward. They knew nothing of enclosures or radiocarbon dates; they simply felt this was a place where wishes travel well. Eleven and a half thousand years after the first pillar was raised, the hill is still doing its oldest job. Holiness, it turns out, has a very long memory. When you ride back down towards Şanlıurfa, the story continues rather than ends, because almost everything lifted from these enclosures, the finest carvings, the vessels, the sculpted heads, now waits in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum in the city, alongside the oldest life-sized statue of a human being ever found. The stones stay on the hill; their treasures are down there, waiting for you.