Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum

Some museums show you a civilisation; this one introduces you to the people who started the whole idea. You are standing in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, opened in twenty fifteen in the green Haleplibahçe quarter of the city and among the largest museum complexes in all of Türkiye. Its galleries climb through time across three floors, from the first stone tools all the way to the Ottomans, but be honest with yourself about why you are here: this is the true home of Göbeklitepe. Almost nothing carved or crafted that was lifted from the great hill remains out on the mound. It is here, together with the finds from Karahan Tepe and the wider Stone Hills, gathered under one roof in the Neolithic halls that form the beating heart of the building. Walk them slowly. Here are finely ground stone vessels with walls thin as a teacup, made by people who had never seen a potter's wheel because pottery had not yet been invented. Here are small engraved plaquettes whose scratched signs may be early steps towards symbols with fixed meanings. Here are the animals, snarling predators with bared teeth, boars, vultures and scorpions, carved with a confidence that eleven thousand years have not dimmed, and the strange stacked figure from Göbeklitepe that visitors nickname the totem pole, beings gripping beings in a single column of stone. Here too are sculptures and finds from Nevalı Çori, the pioneering site north of the city that vanished beneath a reservoir after excavation, whose discoveries first warned archaeologists that something extraordinary had happened in this region. And in a case that stops most people mid-stride are human skulls, delicately carved and marked long ago, quiet evidence of rites honouring ancestors, of a world where the departed were kept close and remembered rather than let go. Presiding over everything is Urfa Man, the oldest known life-sized statue of a human being, nearly two metres of limestone with glittering obsidian eyes; he has a chapter of this guide entirely to himself, and he has earned it. Save time, though, for the room that makes this museum unlike any other. The curators have built a full-scale, walk-through replica of Enclosure D, the grandest ring at Göbeklitepe, its towering central pair complete with carved arms, belts and fox-pelt loincloths, all reproduced at true size. At the real site you look down from a walkway, and rightly so; here you may do the one thing the hill can no longer allow, and step onto the floor of the enclosure itself. Stand between the central pillars and look up. Feel how they crowd the sky above you, how the ring of watching T-heads closes gently around the space. For a minute or two, you are inside the oldest room humanity remembers building. When you have wandered the Neolithic halls and met the beasts and the ancestors, do not head for the exit just yet. Across the museum campus a domed hall guards a very different marvel, the floors of a Roman villa and the warrior queens who ride across them, and that is where this tour goes next.

From the world's first monuments you now leap ten thousand years in a few hundred steps, because the Haleplibahçe side of this campus belongs to Rome, or more precisely to Edessa, the glittering ancient city that Şanlıurfa used to be. The story of this hall begins in two thousand and six, when work on a public park in the Haleplibahçe quarter struck ancient paving, and the excavation that followed uncovered the floors of a lavish late Roman villa. What emerged was so fine that the building you are standing in, a great modern dome, was raised over the mosaics exactly where they lay, and walkways now carry you just above the floors of vanished rooms. The villa is known as the Villa of the Amazons, and one glance at its great hall explains why. Across the central floor ride the warrior queens of legend, each helpfully named in Greek letters beside her head: Hippolyte, Melanippe, Penthesileia and Thermodosa, hunting lions and leopards on horseback and on foot, swinging spears and double axes, dressed for battle rather than the drawing room. Scholars count these portraits among the earliest and finest depictions of the Amazon queens anywhere in the art of mosaic. Crouch a little and study how they are made. The tesserae are astonishingly small, natural pebbles in dozens of subtle colours, said to have been gathered from the beds of the Euphrates, some only a few millimetres across. That fineness lets the floors shade and glow like paintings, cheeks blushing, animal coats rippling, and it is the signature of the Edessa workshops. Nearby, the childhood of Achilles unfolds panel by panel: his mother Thetis gripping the infant by the heel to dip him in the waters of the river Styx, the boy taught by Chiron the wise centaur, the hero departing for Troy. Then find the chamber of Orpheus, made late in the second century for a wealthy patron of Edessa, where the musician sits with his lyre while the wild beasts gather round, tamed by nothing but song. This floor has a modern odyssey of its own: taken from Urfa unlawfully decades ago, it surfaced in a museum collection in Dallas, and in twenty twelve it came home with honour. It now rests a short walk from where its maker set every stone, which is exactly as it should be. Take your time under the dome. Notice how the same land that carved snakes and vultures onto T-pillars was, ten millennia later, laying rivers of coloured pebbles into pictures of queens and centaurs, and how both, in their way, are neighbours' work. Few places on Earth let you walk from the Stone Age to Rome inside one campus, and you have just done it. When you step back into the daylight, the city offers a perfect next chapter within a short stroll: the sacred carp pools of Balıklıgöl, the old mosque courtyards and the covered bazaar all lie close by, where Şanlıurfa's living traditions carry this very long story into the present tense.