Hey, saw this cool temple which apparently may once again push back some fo the dates for when humans started building stuff and growing their own food.
*The Temple at Gobekli Tepe
In Turkey, there is an empty, uninhabited region overlooked by a ridge of mountains. On a hill at the base of those mountains is a temple unique in human history.
Gobekli Tepe is a series of temples, built on top of each other over time. The oldest of 'layer' of temples is more than 11 000 years old. Do you understand how old that is?
That's not just seven thousand years older than the Pyramids. Five thousand years older than the first cities in the fertile crescent. It's a thousand years before agriculture. The builders were nomads, living off of herds and foraging.
It's before writing. So the whole thing was built by people whose knowledge had to be learned entirely in their lifetime and committed to memory. Can you imagine building a house with a group of people, when there aren't any diagrams or written instructions on length or weight? And the project took more than just your lifetimes? (Okay, maybe there were measured lengths of rope or something, but still.)
So it existed almost alone on Earth, with no large permanent human settlements. Not in the middle of a city, or even near one, or at a time when our concept of 'cities' even existed. There are barely signs that people even lived at the site. It indicates humans who used it lived in nomadic villages nearby and it stood mostly empty. It was unimaginably unique at the time.
We only think it was a temple because it was full of larger-than-life statues of humans and dozens of different animals. The concept of a bigger-than-life statue indicates respect and reverence, when it was believed that humans weren't sophisticated enough at the time to see themselves as gods, or worthy of worship.
We know that Gobekli Tepe was in continuous use for more than three thousand years, and then buried. Not in an avalanche, not in a fire or storm. By hand. The entire ****ing complex was buried by hand. We know from the striations of earth that it was carried in from the land around and dumped. And it wasn't destroyed first, the buildings was intact. For whatever reason, after a 3 thousand year collaborative effort, someone came along and covered the whole thing in 500 cubic meters of soil.
We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and paid or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society.
Only 5% has been excavated. It's been picked at for decades because of competing claims on archeological rights. Who knows what else is in there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe
EDIT: To be clear, we refer to the Neolithic as the stone age and the paleolithic as the pre-stone age. This was built BEFORE the stone age in the pre-neolithic. That is how ****ing old this is.
EDIT 2 for tom:
This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry and weaving had been brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Du-Ku, which was inhabited by Annuna (Annunaki)—deities, very ancient gods without individual names. Klaus Schmidt identifies this story as an oriental primeval myth that preserves a partial memory of the Neolithic.[16]
*The Temple at Gobekli Tepe
In Turkey, there is an empty, uninhabited region overlooked by a ridge of mountains. On a hill at the base of those mountains is a temple unique in human history.
Gobekli Tepe is a series of temples, built on top of each other over time. The oldest of 'layer' of temples is more than 11 000 years old. Do you understand how old that is?
That's not just seven thousand years older than the Pyramids. Five thousand years older than the first cities in the fertile crescent. It's a thousand years before agriculture. The builders were nomads, living off of herds and foraging.
It's before writing. So the whole thing was built by people whose knowledge had to be learned entirely in their lifetime and committed to memory. Can you imagine building a house with a group of people, when there aren't any diagrams or written instructions on length or weight? And the project took more than just your lifetimes? (Okay, maybe there were measured lengths of rope or something, but still.)
So it existed almost alone on Earth, with no large permanent human settlements. Not in the middle of a city, or even near one, or at a time when our concept of 'cities' even existed. There are barely signs that people even lived at the site. It indicates humans who used it lived in nomadic villages nearby and it stood mostly empty. It was unimaginably unique at the time.
We only think it was a temple because it was full of larger-than-life statues of humans and dozens of different animals. The concept of a bigger-than-life statue indicates respect and reverence, when it was believed that humans weren't sophisticated enough at the time to see themselves as gods, or worthy of worship.
We know that Gobekli Tepe was in continuous use for more than three thousand years, and then buried. Not in an avalanche, not in a fire or storm. By hand. The entire ****ing complex was buried by hand. We know from the striations of earth that it was carried in from the land around and dumped. And it wasn't destroyed first, the buildings was intact. For whatever reason, after a 3 thousand year collaborative effort, someone came along and covered the whole thing in 500 cubic meters of soil.
We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and paid or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society.
Only 5% has been excavated. It's been picked at for decades because of competing claims on archeological rights. Who knows what else is in there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe
EDIT: To be clear, we refer to the Neolithic as the stone age and the paleolithic as the pre-stone age. This was built BEFORE the stone age in the pre-neolithic. That is how ****ing old this is.
EDIT 2 for tom:
This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry and weaving had been brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Du-Ku, which was inhabited by Annuna (Annunaki)—deities, very ancient gods without individual names. Klaus Schmidt identifies this story as an oriental primeval myth that preserves a partial memory of the Neolithic.[16]
. Still, the state of the world at the time makes a structure like this extremely amazing, it must have been the only structure erected in the entire land, imagine! I would love to see stonehenge in person, how was it? That has always been one of my dreams is to travel the world and see these places.
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