Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 9500–8000 BCE)
Pillar 43, the Vulture Stone
Overview
Set into the wall of Enclosure D at Göbeklitepe is the single best-known image from the site: Pillar 43, the so-called Vulture Stone. Where most pillars carry one or two carved creatures, this one is densely worked across its broad face — a large vulture with outstretched wings, other long-legged birds, a snake, rows of abstract H-shaped symbols, a large scorpion and, beside it, a small headless human figure. The excavators have cautiously connected the imagery to Early Neolithic death-cult practices and a wider concern with the human head after death, while stressing that its precise meaning remains uncertain.
Read the full guide to Pillar 43, the Vulture Stone on gobeklitepe.co.uk →
Highlights
- The great vulture with outstretched wings beside a carved disc
- A small headless human figure beneath a magnificent scorpion
- Rows of abstract H-shaped symbols repeated across the region
- The most densely carved and most debated pillar of the Neolithic
- Griffon and Egyptian vultures still ranging the gorges nearby
History & Discovery
Pillar 43 came to light during Klaus Schmidt's excavation of Enclosure D, the best preserved of the great circles opened after digging began in 1995. In 2017 Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis argued that its carvings encode the sky of 10,950 BCE and record a comet strike, a claim that drew enormous press coverage. The Göbeklitepe excavation team published a rebuttal the same year, reading the imagery within the site's own symbolic world, and the pillar remains the most debated single stone of the Neolithic.
Nature & Wildlife
The birds carved on this pillar have not left the region: griffon and Egyptian vultures still range the gorges of south-east Türkiye, and long-legged buzzards and kestrels ride the thermals over the ridge itself. Around the shelter, crested larks and Isabelline wheatears hold the open steppe.
Geology
Pillar 43 was cut as a single slab of the plateau's finely bedded limestone, a stone even-grained enough to take shallow relief without splintering, which is why the vulture, scorpion and other figures survive so crisply. Quarry scars and part-cut pillars on the surrounding bedrock show where such slabs were prised free.
Mythology & Legend
The great vulture of Pillar 43 is cautiously read as more than a bird: some researchers interpret the scene — a wing raised towards a disc, a headless figure below — as rites for the departed, with vultures carrying souls skyward. The excavators stress that a final reading remains out of reach.
The landscape
The view
Set into the wall of Enclosure D beneath the great canopy, the pillar's crowded face — vulture, wading birds, scorpion, snake and the small headless figure — reads like a page of carved stone.
Photography
You view it from the raised boardwalk at a distance, so bring a zoom lens; the canopy gives soft, even light for detail work, and a steady elbow serves far better than flash ever would.
Practical information
When to visit
Viewing conditions follow the hill: spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons, and in summer an early visit means cooler air and fewer shoulders between you and the railing.
Getting there
Reach it as you would Göbeklitepe — taxi or tour out from Şanlıurfa, then the visitor-centre shuttle up to the hilltop; the pillar sits on the boardwalk circuit around Enclosure D.
Where to stay
Şanlıurfa is the base, with old-town konak guesthouses and city hotels both an easy half-hour from the site; there is no lodging at Göbeklitepe itself.
Food & water
Carry water up from the visitor centre, where the refreshments end; the boardwalk circuit is exposed beyond the canopy and there is nothing to drink up on the mound.
Safety
The pillar is viewed from the site walkway — keep to it, and never step onto the excavation surface. Shade is scarce; bring water up the hill.
Accessibility
Seen from the raised timber boardwalk reached by shuttle, so no climbing is required, though boards can be uneven and the best viewing spot may need patient waiting at busy times.
Visitor tips
Find the vulture's spread wings first, then work down to the scorpion and the tiny headless figure; binoculars help with the H-shaped symbols, and the museum replica lets you study a twin at arm's length.
Take care
- Keep to the walkway — never step onto the excavation surface
- Shade is scarce — bring water up the hill
Location
37.2233000, 38.9226000 · Open in OpenStreetMap
Audio Guides
Pillar 43, the Vulture Stone · 3 min 36 s
Among the hundreds of carved stones at Göbeklitepe, one has become the signature of the entire site, and from the walkway above Enclosure D you can pick it out, set into the ring wall on the enclosure's north-western side. Archaeologists list it drily as Pillar Forty-Three; everyone else calls it the Vulture Stone, and it is the most densely carved pillar the hill has yet revealed. Where most pillars carry one or two creatures, this broad face teems from edge to edge, and the best way to meet it is to read it slowly, from the top down. Begin along the upper edge, where three curious shapes sit in a row, each like a basket or a bag with a curved handle, each attended by a small creature. Below them the main scene opens with the great vulture itself, wings spread wide, one wing raised in a gesture so deliberate it looks almost like an offering, and just above that wingtip floats a plain carved disc. Sun, full moon, or something else entirely, nobody can say, but the bird seems to balance it with intent, and that single pairing has launched a thousand theories. Around the vulture crowd more birds on long wading legs, one bending its neck low, along with a snake and other creatures half-lost to time. Beside them stand pairs of that mysterious H-shaped sign you may have spotted elsewhere on the hill, one turned on its side, symbols repeated across the whole region as if they carried a fixed meaning, a word we can no longer pronounce. Then drop your gaze to the lower register, where a magnificent scorpion dominates, claws spread and sting curled, carved with unmistakable care. And beside the scorpion, easy to miss and impossible to forget, is a small human figure shown without its head. The excavators connect this scene, cautiously, with the rites the early Neolithic world devoted to the departed. Across this region human skulls were kept, carved and honoured, and the vulture appears again and again alongside such practices, at later sites too, most famously in the painted shrines of Çatalhöyük centuries afterwards. In many traditions since, the great birds that ride the thermals are imagined carrying souls skyward, and many researchers suspect something like that idea is at work here: the headless figure standing for a person whose journey has begun, the vulture as companion or ferryman, the disc perhaps a destination. Others read the whole face as a sky map, finding constellations in the animals, even records of events in the heavens; the archaeologists who work the hill urge caution about every such decoding, and honesty asks that we pass their caution on to you. What nobody disputes is this: the composition is deliberate. Someone planned this arrangement, symbol by symbol, in a fixed order that others could evidently read, more than eleven thousand years ago and some six millennia before the first writing. You are looking at one of humanity's oldest surviving attempts to say something complicated and have it remembered. So look for as long as the light allows. Whatever the Vulture Stone once said aloud, it was meant to outlast its makers, and standing here today, you are the proof that it has.