Turkey’s temple mounds illuminate the birth of civilisation

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An archaeological site in southern Turkey from the 10th millennium BC has pried open another window into the early Neolithic era—and what may have been the beginning of human civilisation

Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskMounds 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 T-shaped monoliths.

Karahan Tepe has pried open another window into the early Neolithic era—and what may have been the beginning of human civilisation. The rectangular slabs Mr Can saw poking out of the ground turned out to be the tops of large T-shaped pillars, like the ones at Gobekli Tepe, which were used to prop up a series of round enclosures. The two sites are roughly contemporaneous, both dating back to the tenth millenniumThe similarities are striking, but the differences may be more important still.

The finds at Gobekli Tepe were revolutionary. Historians had assumed farming was a precondition for human settlement, which in turn preceded organised religion. Gobekli Tepe upended that theory. Karahan Tepe contains more clues about the transition. The people who built Gobekli Tepe saw themselves as part of the animal universe. Those behind Karahan Tepe already appear to have considered themselves a separate, superior species. “We see this as a turning-point,” says Necmi Karul of Istanbul University, who has led the excavations. “Here, man starts to place himself at the centre of the cosmos.

 

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