THE MYSTERY THAT THE WORLD CANNOT SOLVE: GÖBEKLİTEPE.

THE MYSTERY THAT THE WORLD CANNOT SOLVE: GÖBEKLİTEPE

 Anatolian lands are "cradle of civilizations".  The earliest and most sophisticated structures of Göbeklitepe, located close to the ancient city of Şanlıurfa, were built in England's BC.  It stood at least seven thousand years before the famous Stonehenge, built around 3000.  Some of the T-shaped obelisks in the megalithic building complex reach 5.5 meters in height and 15 tons in weight.  The people of Göbeklitepe managed to skillfully carve strange creatures that lived in the world twelve to ten thousand years ago into these stones;  Various bird species have been stylized and sculpted together, including fox, wolf, lion, snake and bison, hyenas, mountain goats, wild boars, insects and spiders, a crane, vulture, flamingo, and even a dodo-like non-flying bird.

 The style of Göbekli Tepe's carving art is surprising.  It is an incredible achievement that these sculptures were made by simple hunter and gatherer societies before the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry.  Professor Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologists of the Neolithic Revolution "golden triangle" in which he called as constituting a part of southeastern Turkey implies that arise as a reflection of the megalithic structures of this kind.

 In addition to animal husbandry, the domestication of wild grains and the melting and processing of metal first took place in the east of our country, northern Syria and Iraq, and the upper regions of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers covering the northwest of Iran.  Genetic scientists' discovery that sixty-eight modern cereal species have been derived from a wild grain called 'einkorn', which grows even today on the slopes of the Karaca Mountain, which is an extinct volcano in the northeast of Göbeklitepe, reveals that there has been a transition from hunting and gathering to settled farming in this geography.  The oldest baked and baked figurines were produced in this geography, and even the first linear and curvilinear structures, some of which contain ornamented obelisks and steles, were built on this land.  The "Terrazzo" mortar floor also appears here for the first time.  The first evidence that beer was fermented, and perhaps even wine was obtained from grapes, was also found in these lands.

 Göbekli Tepe, which is located in the earliest man-made cult architecture ever discovered, was deliberately filled with soil and raised.  These monumental structures, which were built by hunter-gatherers in the period called the Non-Pottery Neoithic after the last Ice Age, were built even earlier than the emergence of pottery.

 Among the structures unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, the earliest and most impressive ones are the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, i.e. 10 BC.  They are circular planned structures made of T-shaped obelisks dating to the millennium BC.  These gigantic obelisks, shaped from monolithic stone, are connected to each other by walls and benches and arranged facing the two large T-shaped obelisks in the center.

 Göbekli Tepe, the world's first known monumental temple site, almost challenges our interpretation power with its extraordinary structure in terms of belief, art and sociology.  Klaus Schmidt states that, in the light of the findings, Göbekli Tepe was used as a sacred space, not an earthly place.  In this context, it is thought that the rectangular upper part that forms the 'T' form of the T-shaped obelisks is an abstract depiction representing the human head, while the short side represents the human face.  K. Schmidt emphasizes that behind the anthropomorphic structure of T-shaped stones and the symbolic meaning of the motifs, there is a conscious choice and a common belief system accordingly.

 T-shaped stones should not be considered as exclusive to Göbekli Tepe.  It can also be found in other Neolithic Period settlement areas such as Nevali Çori in Diyarbakır, Çayönü, Hamzatepe near Şanlıurfa, Sefertepe, Taşlıtepe and Karahantepe in the ruins spread over the Southeast of our country.  Göbekli Tepe, besides art and belief, triggered the beginning of cultural agriculture and thus the transition to settled life.  Circular structures were abandoned around 8000 BC for an unknown reason, but consciously and quickly.  How tons of T-shaped stones can be transported from the quarry to Göbekli Tepe has not been fully elucidated yet;  There are only different opinions on this matter.  Tens of tons of limestone is cut or chipped in the quarry, and transported to the desired location requires perfect logistics.  In addition, technical skill is required to be able to design and process relief motifs using all the surfaces of these gigantic stones.

 In addition to the animal reliefs I mentioned above, abstract symbols such as H-shape, crescent, ring motifs and contrasting lines are also seen on T-shaped stones.  Also found are two human reliefs engraved on T-stones.  It is interesting that there is no mother goddess cult and female figure in Göbekli Tepe because half of the hundreds of human shaped clay figurines found in Nevali Çori belonging to the same age, while half are male, the other half are female figures.  According to the opinion of Klaus Schmidt, these T-shaped sculptures without faces were built with the thought of belonging to another world.  On the other hand, all T-shaped pillars in the circles can be considered to represent powerful and important people.  The pair of obelisks in the center should have been much more important to the people of that period, as these two are longer than the others and their surface is decorated in different styles.