Turkey’s temple mounds illuminate the birth of civilisation
Turkey's temple mounds illuminate the birth of civilisation
The Economist,
Even as a boy, Ismail Can, a Turkish shepherd, knew that the large mound outside his village, known as Karahan Tepe, contained wonders. Flint fragments, once used as tools, littered the mountainous area (about an hour's drive from Sanliurfa, a city in southern Turkey). Large slabs of limestone, clearly hewed and shaped by human hands, emerged from the earth.
Mounds like Karahan Tepe had been largely ignored until the 1990s, when Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, began excavating a similar site about 50km to the west. That mound, known as Gobekli Tepe, or Potbelly Hill, was previously assumed to be a Byzantine graveyard. It turned out to be a monumental complex, adorned with reliefs of animals and containing scores of giant T-shaped monoliths. Arranged in circles, like people huddled around a fire, the monoliths are thought to represent humans or human-like gods. Carbon dating revealed that the site preceded the Byzantines by some 10,000 years and Stonehenge by 6,000.
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