Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe is a prehistoric archaeological site on a limestone plateau near the village of Örencik in Şanlıurfa Province, south-eastern Turkey. It lies in the Taş Tepeler, or Stone Hills, in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, and looks out over the Harran plain and the headwaters of the Balikh River, a tributary of the Euphrates.

People used the site from around 9500 BCE until at least 8000 BCE, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the period when the first permanent settlements appeared in south-west Asia. The name means Potbelly Hill in Turkish.

Klaus Schmidt's excavations from 1995

The mound was first recorded in a survey in 1963, but its importance was recognised only in 1994 by the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who began excavating the following year. After his death in 2014 the work continued as a joint project of Istanbul University, the Şanlıurfa Museum and the German Archaeological Institute.

The tell is about 15 metres high and covers about 8 hectares.

T-shaped pillars carved with animals and human features

Its best-known features are large round and oval enclosures built around T-shaped limestone pillars, some carved with arms, hands, belts and clothing, which suggest stylised human figures. Many pillars also carry reliefs of foxes, boars, snakes, vultures and other wild animals. Geophysical surveys show at least 20 large enclosures in the mound, and only around a tenth of the site had been excavated by 2021.

Temple or settlement?

Finds published in 2019 point to domestic buildings, cereal processing and water cisterns, so the older idea of a temple used only by passing hunter-gatherers is now debated.

UNESCO inscribed Göbekli Tepe on the World Heritage List in 2018, describing it as one of the first examples of monumental architecture made by humans. Similar sites in the same hills, such as Karahan Tepe, are part of ongoing research into the region.