Gobekli Tepe's Cosmic Blueprint Revealed

Report by Andrew Collins author of From the Ashes of Angels (1996), The Cygnus Mystery (2006) and Beneath the Pyramids (2009)

On a hilly ridge called Göbekli Tepe in the Taurus Mountains of southeast Turkey, near the ancient city of Sanliurfa, archaeologists have uncovered the oldest stone temple complex in the world. Constructed most probably during the second half of the tenth millennium BC, some 7,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, the site consists of a series of rings of enormous T-shaped pillars, many bearing carved reliefs of Ice Age animals, strange glyphs and geometric forms.

Gobekli Tepe - Temples Communicating Ancient Cosmic Geography

Figure 1: Floor plans of three
sub-circular buildings at Gobekli Tepe
(Line drawing by Paul D. Burley)

During the 1960s archeologists from the University of Chicago surveyed a prominent ridge in southern Turkey. They found little of interest. In 1994 archeologist Klaus Schmidt visited the same ridge after reading notes the University of Chicago prepared of their survey. What Schmidt is unearthing on a rounded crest – Gobekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) - of the ridge is stunning.

Since the early 1900s the human transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer was understood to have occurred over several thousand years, culminating in development of cities by about 6000 BCE in Sumer, the area located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in south-central Iraq. However the architecture of Gobekli Tepe is evidence of social organization and monumental construction that are far earlier than expected. Five-ton megalithic (mega: large, lithic: of rock) limestone pillars stand 18 feet above the floor of sub-circular structures, completed with stone and clay mortar walls and founded on bedrock below the surrounding ground surface. Floor plans of three of these buildings are shown in Figure 1. The pillars include bas relief of various animals – mostly predatory – such as wild boars, lions, foxes, scorpions, frogs, vultures, and other birds. The purpose of the structures remains unknown, but Schmidt interprets them as temples associated with an early organized religion in which animals were deified.