'World's Oldest Temple' May Have Been Cosmopolitan Center

LiveScience ^ | Thursday, March 15, 2012 | Owen Jarus

[SunkenCiv]

Gobekli Tepe is located in southern Turkey near the modern-day city of Urfa. It contains at least 20 stone rings (circles within a circle) that date back more than 11,000 years. T-shaped limestone blocks line the circles and reliefs are carved on them. Long ago, people would fill in the outer circle with debris before building a new circle within... Ancient blades made of volcanic rock that were discovered at what may be the world's oldest temple suggest that the site in Turkey was the hub of a pilgrimage that attracted a cosmopolitan group of people some 11,000 years ago. The researchers matched up about 130 of the blades, which would have been used as tools, with their source volcanoes, finding people would have come from far and wide to congregate at the ancient temple site, Göbekli Tepe, in southern Turkey...

Only a tiny portion of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated so far, but what has been unearthed has been hailed by archaeologists as astounding for its great age and artistry. The site contains at least 20 stone rings, one circle built inside another, with diameters ranging from 30 to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters)...

T-shaped limestone blocks line the circles, and at their center are two massive pillars about 18 feet (5.5 m) tall. Statues and reliefs of people and animals were carved on these blocks and pillars...

Even more puzzling is what has not been found. The buildings contain no hearths and the plant and animal remains there show no signs of domestication. Also, so far there have been no buildings found that archaeologists can confirm were used for everyday living.

[SunkenCiv]

In this photo Professor Tristan Carter is shown alongside one of the rings. [CREDIT: Photo courtesy Tristan Carter]

[mylife]

I would like to see turkey and the bosphorus straits
I would also like to see Petra in jordan

I almost went to cypress but **** got in the way

[mylife]

Do they have Holoumi cheese in Turkey? I know they do

This alone would be worth the journey

BBQ Cheese? seriously!

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
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[Jack Hydrazine]

History Channel video about the site.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjJeEP8-fAQ

[ILS21R]

If somebody figures this one out, please freepmail me. I promise to keep it our little secret.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks, I think I’ll check that out right now, I’ve been working on a splitting headache.

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

Very interesting.

[UCANSEE2]

They are the first LEGOS.

[redhead]

I watched this show last night. I NEVER watch AAs, but stopped this time because the only other thing left to watch was TWC with the sound off. But these stones are magnificently mysterious. (I expected Georgios to have an accent!)

[UCANSEE2]

And these are piers for the slot car track.

There wasn't much else to do at the time, so slot car racing was pretty popular.

[UCANSEE2]

Oops, I meant GO CART TRACK, not SLOT CAR TRACK. Still attracted the same crowd.

[Daaave]

Thanks. I love this stuff.

[central_va]

IB4HT ping.

[RightOnline]

Oh hell, it was OBVIOUSLY a large, outdoor game room. See, ya knock over one of the T-shaped thingies...then it falls into the next one...then the next one....you know; like dominoes.

Then....then.....young men had to show their bravery and manhood by attempting to stop the falling stones with their penises.

On average, how successful were they? Glyphs have been deciphered that made reference to a very large number of sopranos in their choir.

[Focault's Pendulum]

Read the cover story article in National Geographic Magazine. Interesting part was there is no entrance way to the inner circle.

[numberonepal]

The hinge theory was plausible, but I still think it was a wall system of some sort. The dovetailed joints suggest something that had to be very strong - to hold something together. I’d also like to see some data on the dimensional tolerances between the individual stones.

[ThanhPhero]

Cyprus.

[JerseyHighlander]

Have you seen the most recent NatGeo program on Gobekli Tepe?

Between the British or dutch movie that won the Cannes awards, which was a bunch of hooey, (and are the source of UCANSEE2’s screencap pictures above), the History Channel special , and the NatGeo special... along with reading on this since early 2010...

I am convinced the German and Turkish team that has worked on the excavation over the last 20 years has built a invalid hypothesis , and are now pretty upset that ‘outsiders’ are reinterpreting their results.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks to the link someone gave me up there, I had the YouTube stream on during the late afternoon and into the evening, and the History Channel segment appears four or five times, along with a giant pile of inutterable BS.

There’s an audio-only one, some radio show with John Anthony West and some Dogon space alien crap guy; one thing that JAW said that makes sense (and on important stuff, he often does; on political stuff, he’s a dumbass) is that the site appears to have been built in at least two phases (and this isn’t controversial), and suggested that it had been abandoned for a time, then was given some remodeling by some also unknown group who entered the area and found it.

There are loads of animal bones which were cooked, then the meat was removed (or chewed off) and the bones discarded. I think those date from the later phase. The site was in use for 2000 years. I don’t for one second believe that the site was covered with sand once a year, then cleaned off for the next year’s rituals, then recovered with sand.