Göbeklitepe Life
06 September 2025|United States of America
Göbeklitepe, in whats Turkey is a game changer. This ancient site is a 6000 years older than Stonehenge, which makes it a huge deal in the world of archaeology. It's like a window, into the Neolithic era the time when civilization as we know it started to take shape. When you look at the structures and stuff they've found there it's clear the people who built Göbeklitepe were pretty advanced. They must have been. Possibly even had some kind of practice going on.
The pillars, at Göbeklitepe are massive. Covered in carvings. Whats really striking about them is the level of detail. The people who made these clearly knew their stuff when it came to depicting animals and humans. The combination of these carvings and the overall design of the structures is pretty mind blowing. It shows a level of skill and creativity thats surprising given how old they're.. With all the study thats been done it's still not clear what these places were actually, for. Some people think they might have been temples while others believe they could have been used to study the stars.
The animal carvings and weird symbols, on the pillars at Göbeklitepe are really something. They make you think this place was pretty important, to the people who built it. For spiritual reasons. Maybe it was a temple or a spot where people got together for ceremonies. If thats the case Göbeklitepe would have been the heart of a community showing us how people lived and what they believed in back then. It suggests that even our ancient ancestors had a sense of hierarchy and spiritual life.
The discovery of Göbeklitepe has thrown a wrench into what we thought we knew about the timeline of architecture and culture. Historians are having to rethink everything because of this site. Whats really surprising is how old it is and how sophisticated the buildings are. This challenges the idea that then people were still just wandering around hunting and gathering and hadn't yet figured out how to build big lasting structures. It seems that the people living during the period were capable of a lot more than we gave them credit, for. Their society was likely way more complicated and nuanced than we used to think. The traditional view just doesn't hold up anymore.
Lubbock/United States