The Economist May 28th 2022 75
Culture
ArchaeologyinTurkey
The rest is history
E
ven as aboy, Ismail Can, a Turkish
shepherd, knew that the large mound
outside his village, known as Karahan
Tepe, contained wonders. Flint fragments,
once used as tools, littered the mountain
ous area (about an hour’s drive from Sanli
urfa, a city in southern Turkey). Large slabs
of limestone, clearly hewed and shaped by
human hands, emerged from the earth.
Mounds like Karahan Tepe had been
largely ignored until the 1990s, when Klaus
Schmidt, a German archaeologist, began
excavating a similar site about 50km to the
west. That mound, known as Gobekli Tepe,
or Potbelly Hill, was previously assumed to
be a Byzantine graveyard. It turned out to
be a monumental complex, adorned with
reliefs of animals and containing scores of
giant Tshaped monoliths. Arranged in cir
cles, like people huddled around a fire, the
monoliths are thought to represent hu
mans or humanlike gods. Carbon dating
revealed that the site preceded the Byzan
tines by some 10,000 years and Stone
henge by 6,000. Gobekli Tepe has since
shot to fame as the world’s oldest temple.
When, for the first time in millennia, its
artefacts began to see the light, Mr Can un
derstood that the ones buried near his
home would prove no less remarkable. He
and other village boys showed foreign and
Turkish archaeologists around the sur
rounding hills. For long years, until the
official excavations began, his father pro
tected the place from treasurehunters and
looters. The digging began in 2019. The site
was opened to the public earlier this year;
Mr Can now works as a guide.
Karahan Tepe has pried open another
window into the early Neolithic era—and
what may have been the beginning of hu
man civilisation. The rectangular slabs Mr
Can saw poking out of the ground turned
out to be the tops of large Tshaped pillars,
like the ones at Gobekli Tepe, which were
used to prop up a series of round enclo
sures. The two sites are roughly contempo
raneous, both dating back to the tenth mil
lennium bc, though Karahan Tepe may be
younger by a few hundred years.
The similarities are striking, but the
differences may be more important still.
The focus at Gobekli Tepe seems to have
been on the animal world. Stone foxes,
scorpions and snakes, as well as animals
such as leopards that have long vanished
from the region—all of them male—appear
poised to pounce from the monoliths.
By contrast, at Karahan Tepe (pictured)
people begin to take centre stage. Human
eyes glare from reliefs and carvings. A
small room, reached via a narrow opening,
contains 11 statues of phalluses. Along the
walls runs a channel that delivered a
stream of liquid, possibly blood or semen,
to a receptacle in the adjacent enclosure. A
snake with a human head overlooks the
scene. The room seems to have been used
for some kind of initiation ceremony.
The finds at Gobekli Tepe were revolu
tionary. Historians had assumed farming
was a precondition for human settlement,
which in turn preceded organised religion.
Gobekli Tepe upended that theory.
Archaeologists found no traces of agri
culture or husbandry in the vicinity. The
huntergatherers who constructed the
S ANLIURFA
Mysterious temple mounds shed light on the beginning of civilisation
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