
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? (2008) - Petiver
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/?all?no-ist
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cr0sh
I find a couple of the comments to that article posits something interesting -
at least to think about:

This site, according to the article, was built by carving these stones,
erecting them, then covering them up - the repeating the process on top of the
covering, ultimately leading to this "hill". The carvings are of "dangerous
creatures". At the bottom of the pits, they found limestone floors (which in
the article they speculate it might be a large hunter-gather cemetery). So -
why all this effort?

In the comments, a couple of people speculate (and that's all it is - pure
speculation with no other reasoning) that this site is a large "do not
disturb, do not dig here". These speculation go on to suggest that, much like
today we are trying to come up with symbols and/or symbology to denote our
burying sites of long-lived radioactive waste - that perhaps something of this
nature was done by these ancient people.

Again - pure speculation, with no facts or other understanding to back it up -
but the idea is interesting: Is it biological in nature? Some kind of ancient
foe entombed to keep it from killing these hunters? Maybe an ancient "natural
nuclear reactor" site that killed people with radiation? Cthulhu?

Whatever the truth is (and the truth will likely be very mundane) - the above
could easily be interesting fodder for a science fiction or fantasy author!

~~~
thanksforcoming
It's been a few years, but I remember learning about Gobekli Tepe in one of my
humanities classes in college. The theory I learned is that it was a non-
permanent gathering/ceremonial site (for what reason isn't exactly known), but
this article neglects to mention one very interesting thing - there's trace
evidence of beer at the site!

Makes you wonder what grains were used for first, beer or bread... Also the
role that alcohol plays in the rise of civilization. Would these people be
warring or otherwise combatitive if they didn't gather every year to drink and
feast?

[http://www.livescience.com/25855-stone-age-beer-brewery-
disc...](http://www.livescience.com/25855-stone-age-beer-brewery-
discovered.html)

~~~
mc32
Since people can get alcohol from palm wine [which is pretty universal in
warmer clines] already maybe initially from an accidentally fermented vat,
might people use grain primarily for food and only use it for alcohol if they
had surplus that would go bad if unused?

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clock_tower
The most impressive part of Gobekli Tepe is that the site was built by hunter-
gatherers -- people with no granaries, no specialists, no taxes or central
authorities. This was a very impressive display of community will, and reveals
that hunter-gatherer societies were potentially capable of much greater
accomplishments (while remaining hunter-gatherers) than we'd previously known
of or imagined.

I'm reminded of MFAC -- the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization
hypothesis -- which argues that Peruvian/Incan civilization began with fishing
instead of agriculture: another of those things that supposedly can't happen.
Granaries are very important, but perhaps less so than we think...

~~~
injvstice
What proof is there that they were hunter and gatherers (aside from an
assumption based on timeline)? Isn't building an extensive permanent structure
a signature of settled people?

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vanderZwan
That it's the _only_ permanent structure of its kind from that period, and
that every other type of artefact from the era we have found so far is very
different.

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injvstice
But the amount of resources required to build that type of structure is not
present in a H&G society. Those societies tend to be small groups. Quarrying
large stones requires a lot of resources, which is only present in a settled
society.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
This is overly simplistic imo. We know that H&G groups periodically
congregated and cooperated in groups far larger than a single band, such as to
share in hunting the seasonal peak of herds. It's not that much of a stretch
to believe they'd periodically congregate to advance a construction.

~~~
preordained
Umm...Id say it's a stretch. Wanna hunt together? Wanna quarry some stone and
build a temple? I don't think we are talking about apples and apples here.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
I disagree. I think it's entirely likely things started along the lines of "We
gather here every year this season to share in the peak hunt festival. Let's
make a mark upon this place" and over a few centuries that grew motivating
enough for people to incrementally build more elaborate megalithic structures.
This is just my view, and I'm certainly no anthropologist. But I would point
out this narrative exactly matches what we see at Gobekli Teki: layers of
megalith construction, each covering and supplanting the previous.

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gkya
I'm so proud of this as an edessene, and as a human. The assumption was that
food civilised us, but Göbeklitepe says that civilisation came first, then we
fed it.

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dalbasal
Gobleki Tepeh is such a fascinating site. I love the way it both throws a
spanner into historical understandings and alludes to them in interesting
ways.

It's not just _before_ agriculture, it's _just before_ agriculture, almost
moments before. This is also the area where historians think it first
happened. That leaves room for curious ideas like agriculture as a byproduct
os civilization rather than the other way around.

The next oldest settlements are newer, less ornate and well.. _settlements_.
No one can even figure out what Gobleki Tepeh was. Doesn't seem to be
buildings. The next oldest sites are the likes of Ain Ghazal & Jericho. These
were proto-cities with dwellings. They come with some pretty weird ancient
art, but at least we can imagine what these people were up to. They grew
crops, lived in houses, buried dead, made statues. They fit into the narrative
mould history. Megalithic outdoor sanctuary on a bronze age scale before known
agriculture or settlements, at a time when people were supposed to be living
in small bands? Beautiful mysteries.

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netule
Amazing article, but for all that's good and your own mental health, don't
read the comments.

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throwawayIndian
"Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends
the conventional view of the rise of civilization"

Ha! It is hilarious to see west measure 'rise of civilization' against some
dumb set of stones wedged by people who probably didn't know how to write.
Plain fodder for insular minds.

Civilizations in the middle east (such as the now broken Syria) and even Indo-
Srilankan subcontinent have been known to have practiced and even have written
transcripts of things like heat sensing weaponry, a "nuclear standoff" and an
equivalent of what we call theory of atoms -- read about _brahmastra_ or
_brahmand_ , for example, in Mahabharat[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata_(disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata_\(disambiguation\))

~~~
clock_tower
If we're going to argue that the Mahabharata is an account of nuclear war, we
need to remember that it's extremely similar to the Irish _Cattle Raid of
Cooley_. It's not an account of ancient Indian greatness; it's an account of
the death of a previous civilization, which Proto-Indo-European-speaking
peoples witnessed from the periphery, recording it in forms that became the
garbled accounts surviving in India and Ireland.

~~~
throwawayIndian
> If we're going to argue that the Mahabharata is an account of nuclear war,
> we need to remember that it's extremely similar to the Irish Cattle Raid of
> Cooley.

Correct! I would rather measure up 'rise of civilization' against both texts
than a stupid set of stones with nothing written on them -- which at best
seems like a partial rise of civilization. Hence, the hilarity.

