Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 9500–8000 BCE)
Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills Landscape)
Overview
Göbeklitepe was never alone. Taş Tepeler — the 'Stone Hills' — is the name given to a network of more than a dozen related Neolithic sites scattered across the Şanlıurfa region, all sharing a common world of T-shaped pillars, monumental enclosures, animal reliefs and human figures created in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Better-known members include Göbeklitepe, Karahan Tepe, Sayburç (noted for a narrative relief of humans and animals), Sefer Tepe and Nevalı Çori. 'Taş Tepeler' is also the name of the coordinated research programme investigating these hills as a single connected landscape rather than in isolation — a whole lost world only now coming into view.
Read the full guide to Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills Landscape) on gobeklitepe.co.uk →
Highlights
- More than a dozen Neolithic sites sharing one carved world of T-pillars
- Sayburç's narrative frieze of humans confronting leopards and a bull
- Girê Mirazan, the Hill of Wishes, sacred long before archaeology
- Nevalı Çori, the pioneering site now beneath the Atatürk reservoir
- Goitered gazelle and the northern bald ibis colony at Birecik
History & Discovery
Recognition of a connected Neolithic landscape came slowly: a 1963 survey flagged several mounds, Nevalı Çori was dug ahead of dam waters in 1983–91, and Göbeklitepe's excavation from 1995 revealed the tradition's scale. In 2021 Türkiye's Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched the Taş Tepeler programme, coordinated by Necmi Karul, running parallel excavations at a dozen sites including Karahan Tepe, Sayburç, Sefer Tepe and Çakmaktepe. Its results helped bring the first World Neolithic Congress to Şanlıurfa in November 2024.
Nature & Wildlife
The Stone Hills are strung across open Şanlıurfa steppe of thin soils, limestone slabs and wild grasses that green and flower in spring, then bleach to gold by June. Larks, wheatears and see-see partridge hold the ridges, and the wider region still keeps goitered gazelle and the northern bald ibis colony at Birecik.
Geology
The Taş Tepeler, the Stone Hills, share one foundation: the Şanlıurfa plateau's workable, evenly bedded limestone, seamed with flint and lying within sight of the dark basalt of Karacadağ. Few landscapes offered early builders carving stone, tool stone and fertile volcanic soils so close together, which helps explain this dense cluster of monuments.
Mythology & Legend
Taş Tepeler simply means 'Stone Hills', yet these mounds carried older names and quiet reverence long before archaeologists arrived: Göbeklitepe was known in Kurdish as Girê Mirazan, the 'Hill of Wishes', a place local tradition already held to be sacred ground.
The landscape
The view
A whole horizon of low limestone tells scattered across the Şanlıurfa plateau — wheat steppe, bare hills and mounded stone hilltops that reveal themselves slowly as you drive between them.
Photography
Golden hour flatters the steppe enormously, with long shadows lifting the tells out of flat midday glare; drone flights over protected archaeological sites need special permission, so plan ground-level panoramas.
Practical information
When to visit
The landscape is at its best in April and May, briefly green with wheat and flowers, and again in the clear air of September and October; midsummer heat above 40°C makes multi-site days gruelling.
Getting there
Only Göbeklitepe and Karahan Tepe have visitor infrastructure; the wider network is reached by hire car, taxi day-hire or guided tour from Şanlıurfa, as no public transport links the sites.
Where to stay
Şanlıurfa is the only practical base for exploring the network, with old-town konak guesthouses and city hotels; distances mean day trips out and a return to the city each evening.
Food & water
Beyond the Göbeklitepe visitor centre there are effectively no facilities across the network, so load the car with more water than feels necessary before leaving Şanlıurfa.
Safety
Travelling between the Stone Hills means open country: rough tracks, full sun and no facilities for long stretches — fuel, water and a hat before you set out. Keep clear of active excavation areas except on marked visitor routes.
Accessibility
Provision varies hugely: Göbeklitepe has a shuttle and boardwalk, Karahan Tepe rough paths, and the remaining tells are working excavations or open steppe without prepared visitor routes.
Visitor tips
Start at the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, then take the two flagship tepes in one day; ask locally or through a guide which of the other excavations is receiving visitors that season.
Take care
- Rough tracks, full sun and no facilities for long stretches
- Load fuel, water and a hat before setting out
- Keep clear of active excavations except on marked visitor routes
Location
37.1500000, 39.1000000 · Open in OpenStreetMap
Audio Guides
Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills Landscape) · 3 min 29 s
Stop almost anywhere on the roads east of Şanlıurfa, let the engine tick into silence, and look around you. Rolling limestone country runs to every horizon, wheat and lentil fields, pistachio orchards, flocks drifting across thin pasture, and everywhere low, rounded hills, tepe after tepe after tepe. Now hold this thought as you look: an unknown number of those hills have monuments sleeping inside them. This is Taş Tepeler, the Stone Hills, and the name carries two meanings at once. It is the name of a landscape, a stretch of the Şanlıurfa region where more than a dozen related Neolithic sites lie scattered among the fields and plateaus. And since twenty twenty-one it is also the name of a coordinated research programme, launched by Türkiye's Ministry of Culture and Tourism with universities from home and abroad, which treats these hills not as isolated curiosities but as a single connected world, excavated to one plan and one great question: how did we settle down? You may already know the two famous siblings, Göbeklitepe with its grand enclosures and Karahan Tepe with its rock-cut chambers. But listen to the rest of the family. There is Sayburç, where a carved frieze runs along the wall of a communal building, showing human figures confronting wild beasts, leopards and a great bull, a scene many researchers call one of the oldest narrative pictures ever found, a story frozen mid-telling. There is Sefer Tepe, another hill of T-pillars, still being examined. There is Çakmaktepe, which may reach back earlier still, and Nevalı Çori away to the north, excavated in the nineteen eighties before the waters of the Atatürk Dam reservoir closed over it, whose cult building and carved figures gave archaeology its first warning of what this region was hiding. A dozen more names wait in the survey lists. What binds them all is a shared grammar you will recognise instantly by now: T-shaped pillars standing for stylised people, benches for gathering, enclosures for ceremony, and a carved bestiary of snakes, foxes, boars, vultures and scorpions repeated from hill to hill. Communities separated by long walks over hard country were carving the same beings and honouring the same ideas, over spans of centuries, between roughly twelve and nine thousand years ago. That consistency is the real revelation. One spectacular site could be a fluke, the work of a single village of geniuses. A whole landscape of them is a culture, with shared beliefs, gatherings, exchanges of ideas and probably of feasts, flourishing at the exact hinge of human history when hunters were becoming householders. The first experiments in living together at scale, in belief made architecture, happened not at one address but across an entire region, and you are travelling through the middle of it. So as you move between the sites on your route, spare a glance for every unremarkable mound beside the road. Some are just hills. Some are almost certainly not. Archaeologists here like to say that the ground of Şanlıurfa has only begun to speak, and out among these fields, with the wind moving over the stones, you can feel the truth of it underfoot.