Göbekli Tepe: Through a Distant Lens

Since I watched videos pertaining to my recent post, there has been sooooo much Göbekli Tepe clickbait in my YouTube feed lately.

"The world's oldest temple."

"The mysterious sanctuary that rewrites human history."

Then a thumbnail appears showing some ancient limestone pillar next to an ominous-looking guy pointing at it like he just found proof that the Neolithic had Wi-Fi.

It is mostly bullshit.

Maybe Göbekli Tepe was a temple site. No one knows. That is the first thing to say.

There is no surviving text. No named god. No prayer. No priestly rulebook. No account of what people thought they were doing there. No carved little sign saying, "Welcome to the Temple of the Great Fox. Please leave your offering at the front desk."

There are, however, enormous limestone pillars. There are animals everywhere. There are lots of animal bones. There are some human remains, though the site does not appear to be a cemetery or a place where people were routinely buried. There are built spaces that were clearly important enough for people to quarry, shape, move, carve, arrange, repair, shrink, fill in, and replace over generations.

As I mentioned previously, Göbekli Tepe was built roughly 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, before pottery, before cities, before writing, before the familiar agricultural world of fields, barns, livestock, grain gods, taxes, kings, and people complaining about the price of fertilizer. The site contains a series of large circular and oval buildings, many of them partly cut down into the ground. They were not simply stone circles standing in an open field, as they are often presented in documentaries.

The builders dug into the soil and bedrock. They set tall T-shaped pillars around the perimeter. They created walls, sometimes plastered. They built floors from worked bedrock or from a lime-based terrazzo-like material. Two especially large pillars often stood in the middle of the enclosure. The buildings were probably roofed. In some cases people may have entered from above. In others they may have walked down through an entrance corridor as the slope of the land changed around the structure.

The Giant T-pillars are especially strange. Some are clearly anthropomorphic. They have arms, hands, belts, and loincloths carved onto them. The pillars do not have ordinary faces, at least not in the later human-statue sense. But they look like beings. They were not simply holding up a roof. They were part of the visual world inside the building.

And then there are the animals. Foxes. Boars. Snakes. Vultures. Scorpions. Spiders. Birds. Aurochs. Gazelles. Wild asses. Wildcats. Predators. Creatures that were dangerous, elusive, edible, frightening, watchful, fast, poisonous, strong, or simply too strange to ignore.

Some rooms seem to have different animal emphases. Enclosure B is especially associated with foxes. Enclosure C has prominent boars. Enclosure D has a more crowded animal world, including birds, snakes, vultures, wild cattle, gazelles, foxes, and other forms. There are human figures too. Some are headless. There are sexual images. There are geometric marks and signs nobody can read.

There is no comparable public stone language of vegetation.

These people gathered and used wild grasses, nuts, fruits, and whatever else the land offered. The region was one of the places where some of the plants that later became major crops were already growing in abundance.

Still, when these people created their largest shared spaces, when they selected what would be carved into stone and repeatedly looked at, they did not choose grain stalks, berries, fruit trees, gardens, crops, or harvest scenes. They chose animals.

The usual move is to say this proves animal worship. I do not think it proves that. The word "worship" drags in later categories, gods, temples, priests, sacrifice, theology, moral rules, divine punishments, all the administrative furniture of religion. We have no evidence for that whole package at Göbekli Tepe.

But there is a discernible spirituality there. It just is not a decipherable theology. We can see the pictures. We cannot hear the stories.

A fox on a pillar was probably not merely a fox to the people who entered that room. It may have been connected to an oral tradition, a remembered event, a warning, a seasonal ritual, a group identity, a hunt, a death, an ancestor, a joke, a taboo, a story about how foxes became foxes and why human beings should take them seriously. The people who built these places probably did not need written explanations because they already knew the world being represented.

The carved animals could have been symbols. They could have been powers. They could have been beings. They could have been all three at once. They are not random and did have meaning for these people but it is now all forgotten.

The bones make the situation more concrete. Huge numbers of animal remains have been found at Göbekli Tepe. They are mostly broken, butchered, mixed into deposits, sometimes cut, burned, and cracked open for marrow. This looks like hunting, processing, eating, feasting, and disposal. It does not look like rows of intact animal sacrifices laid carefully beneath floors.

That does not mean no ritual killing occurred. It only means that the actual bone evidence does not give us a neat prehistoric altar scene. The animals were hunted, eaten, broken down, scattered, moved, perhaps deposited in certain ways, then mixed into the long and messy life of the buildings.

The bone record also does not line up perfectly with the carved animals. Some of the animals that appear most forcefully in the stone imagery were not necessarily the animals most commonly eaten. That makes the carvings harder to dismiss as hunting scenes or menu boards.

Human remains have been found too, though in much smaller and stranger form. There are hundreds of fragments, including skull fragments. Some skull pieces were deliberately modified after death. There are no known rows of intact human burials. No obvious cemetery. No normal graveyard.

So Göbekli Tepe does not seem primarily organized around the burial of people. It seems organized around the pillars, the rooms, the animals, the bones, the gatherings, the food, the repeated labor, and whatever shared oral world made all of that intelligible.

The people at Göbekli Tepe had brains exactly like ours. They could not write, but they could think, remember, imagine, joke, fear, mourn, plan, argue, organize labor, tell stories, make art, and preserve a shared world across generations. They could create symbols. They could string images together. They could make a place mean something.

They were not primitive in the sense people often mean it. They were human beings living before the later machinery of civilization had fully taken over. Instead, everything around them was harvested in the wild.

The boar was wild. The fox was wild. The aurochs was wild. The snake was wild. The vulture was wild. The weather was wild. The mountains were wild. The darkness was wild. The food was wild. The landscape was not arranged around human comfort, human schedules, human property lines, human refrigeration, human air conditioning, human medicine, or human expectations.

A storm was not weather in the modern sense. It could change everything. A mountain was not scenery. It determined where you could go, where water collected, where animals moved, what you could see, what might be hiding. A river could feed you, block you, drown you, separate you from people, or carry you somewhere else.

A wild animal had its own force. It could flee. It could injure you. It could feed you. It could outwit you. It could suddenly appear in front of you. It could disappear again into a world you did not control.

The wild thing does not exist for you. It has its own direction. Its own force. Its own refusal.

Not a primitive theory that every rock and tree had a tiny invisible person living inside it. Something older. Something more direct. The experience of a world that did not feel dead, passive, or safely beneath human control.

The world was alive because it was wild. And it is likely into this sense of “aliveness” in human experience that animism found its roots.

Göbekli Tepe may turn out to be the world’s oldest temple, but not in the sense of our temples. Not in the sense of gods, burials, scriptures, or a settled theology. It shows one specific human culture making a public symbolic world out of the animal force and wild aliveness surrounding them.

The pillars remain. The stories are gone. But I feel a little closer to them now that I can see what they thought was important enough to carve into stone. Why else put it on those pillars unless it was pretty damn important to you?