
Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe - walterbell
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/signs-of-worlds-first-pictograph-found-in-gobeklitepe-.aspx?PageID=238&NID=85438&NewsCatID=375
======
Monkeyget
Göbekli Tepe is an amazing site that gets surprisingly little attention given
its importance.

It is the oldest building in the world. The only older constructions that we
know of is a small wall made from piled rock to protect a cave from the
weather. Not only is it the oldest but it also is large : 1000 feet across and
at least 50 feet deep with several layers covering at least two millennia. The
site was only discovered 20 years ago and only about 20% have been excavated
so far!

Cultivation first started in the Gobekli area. We know from DNA analysis that
the wheat we use today is based on a wild variety of wheat that grew miles
away from Gobekli.

It is located in the middle of the fertile crescent: the birthplace of
civilization. It is located between the Tigris and Euphrates near their source
which is the location of Eden in the bible. It also is located right next to
Şanlıurfa which is said to be the birthplace of Abraham.

The size of the monuments also are impressive given that the people who built
them were still hunter-harvesters living in small tribes without the knowledge
of the wheel or pottery. It required a large workforce working over a large
amount of time.

I am happy that the recent discovery seems to confirm my personal theory that
Gobekli is a Dakhma [0], a place where bodies were left in the open for
vulture to cleanse.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence)

~~~
contingencies
Yeah. Thank god it's not in Syria or Iraq, both of which also have a lot of
amazing but now looted/destroyed ancient sites.

~~~
CamperBob2
No shortage of irony in _that_ sentence...

~~~
contingencies
Inshallah!

------
juanre
Don't miss Harari's "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". He talks quite a
bit about Göbeklitepe, and explains some fascinating hypotheses about it and
about its possible role in sparking the agricultural revolution.

A spoiler in a nutshell: conventional wisdom has it that a time of plenty
allowed us to settle down and figure out the technology for feeding lots of
settlers, and that in turn created a surplus that made it possible to sustain
non-productive groups like religious leaders.

It might, however, have been the other way around: it may be that a shared
fiction ---possibly a set of beliefs, what today we'd call a religion---
forced people to stay in a place ---maybe Göbeklitepe--- for long enough that
new techniques for ensuring sustenance had to be developed. Anyway, do read
that book. It's the best on the subject since Guns, Germs and Steel.

------
birdsbolt
Why are archaeologists concluding that this was used for religious purposes?
Why is religion always the central theme in those old findings?

~~~
Monkeyget
Several contemporary settlements have been excavated: Nevalı Çori, Jerf el
Ahmar, Mureybet. So we know what the houses, communal buildings and granaries
looked like. Göbekli doesn't look anything like that. The location also
reveals that it wasn't used to live, gather food or trade: It's built on top
of a rocky hill without access to food or water. You don't extract 15 tons
pillars, carve them and move them atop a hill to make things prettier.

The buildings themselves are the biggest proof. No roof, inconvenient and
small entrance, holes to let the soul escape. The carvings found at Göbekli
were also found on other sites which were associated with religion and death.
One example would be the carving of vultures and headless bodies. Vultures
which are associated with death and the ritual of excarnation: the floor of
the buildings were made waterproof and sloped to allow the draining of bodily
liquids. We know that people in that area would bury bodies without their head
or even reopen the grave to remove the head. They also have been known to put
plaster on skulls and keep the heads around.

~~~
Gravityloss
How about a fortress?

~~~
dredmorbius
My thought exactly. Might not want to stay there long, but as shelter from a
raiding party, stocked with food and water, possibly with shelter for a flock,
might be worthwhile.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-
archaeology/arch...](http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-
archaeology/archaeologists-find-12000-year-old-pictograph-gobeklitepe-003441),
which points to this.

