Chapter 1 — The Hill That Shouldn't Be There

Southeastern Turkey, near the city of Şanlıurfa (shahn-luh-OOR-fah), is a landscape of rolling limestone hills, dry grasslands, and ancient river valleys. The region sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent -- the arc of relatively well-watered land stretching from the Persian Gulf through Mesopotamia and down the eastern Mediterranean coast, where some of the earliest experiments in agriculture took place. The modern landscape is agricultural: fields of wheat and barley, pistachio orchards, and grazing land for sheep and goats. It is productive, if not lush -- a landscape shaped by millennia of farming.

Eight kilometers northeast of Şanlıurfa, a hill rises from the plain. The locals call it Göbekli Tepe -- "Potbelly Hill," a reference to its rounded shape. The hill is roughly fifteen meters high and three hundred meters in diameter, an unremarkable mound in a landscape of gentle hills. For centuries, local farmers plowed around it, occasionally turning up fragments of carved stone that they pushed aside. The hill was known. It was not considered important.

In 1963, a joint survey by the University of Istanbul and the University of Chicago noted the hill and identified it as a possible archaeological site. Stone tools and fragments of worked limestone were visible on the surface. The surveyors classified it as a medieval cemetery and moved on. The limestone fragments were assumed to be broken gravestones. The site was set aside.

Thirty years passed.

In 1994, Klaus Schmidt (KLOWS SHMIT), a German archaeologist working at the German Archaeological Institute's research station in Heidelberg, was looking for a new excavation site in southeastern Turkey. Schmidt was interested in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture -- the Neolithic Revolution, the most fundamental transformation in human history. Southeastern Turkey was one of the regions where that transition had occurred, and Schmidt was searching for sites that might illuminate the process.

Schmidt had studied under Harald Hauptmann (HAH-rahlt HOWPT-mahn), a distinguished German archaeologist who had excavated the important early Neolithic site of Nevalı Çori (neh-vah-LUH choh-REE), located roughly sixty kilometers northeast of Göbekli Tepe. Nevalı Çori had produced T-shaped pillar fragments and carved stone sculptures -- materials that had no parallel at other Neolithic sites. When Nevalı Çori was flooded by the Atatürk Dam reservoir in 1992, Schmidt began searching for related sites in the region. He consulted the 1963 survey records, noted the unvisited mound at Göbekli Tepe, and made the trip.

He visited Göbekli Tepe and immediately recognized that the 1963 survey had been wrong. The stone fragments on the surface were not gravestones. They were pieces of carved T-shaped pillars -- large, carefully shaped blocks of limestone that had been deliberately worked and erected. Schmidt, who had years of experience excavating Neolithic sites in the region, recognized the T-shape as an architectural form, not a funerary one. He began excavating in 1995.

The mound of Göbekli Tepe rising from the southeastern Turkish plain

What Schmidt found beneath the surface of the hill was unlike anything previously known in archaeology. Massive carved stone pillars, arranged in circles, each pillar weighing between five and ten tons. The pillars were T-shaped: a broad, flat top (representing, Schmidt believed, a stylized human head) set on a tall, narrow shaft (the body). Some pillars had arms and hands carved in low relief -- arms extending from the sides of the shaft, hands meeting at the front, fingers touching at the belly. The pillars were not structural supports for a roof; they were freestanding, arranged in circles of ten to twelve around two larger central pillars.

The radiocarbon dates were staggering. The earliest layers of construction dated to approximately 9500 BCE -- the tenth millennium before the Common Era. The site was roughly twelve thousand years old.

To put this in context: Stonehenge was built around 3000-2000 BCE. The Egyptian pyramids were built around 2500 BCE. The earliest cities in Mesopotamia -- Ur, Uruk, Eridu -- date to roughly 4000-3000 BCE. The invention of writing occurred around 3200 BCE. The first pottery in the Near East appeared around 7000-6000 BCE. Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent began around 9500-8500 BCE -- the same period as Göbekli Tepe's earliest construction.

Göbekli Tepe was built at the very beginning of the agricultural revolution -- or possibly just before it. The people who quarried, carved, and erected the pillars were, by every available measure, hunter-gatherers. There is no evidence of domesticated plants or animals at the site. The food remains found at Göbekli Tepe are wild: wild wheat, wild barley, wild almonds, and the bones of wild animals -- primarily gazelle, aurochs (the wild ancestor of domestic cattle), wild boar, and wild sheep. The builders of Göbekli Tepe fed themselves by hunting and gathering, the same subsistence strategy that human beings had used for hundreds of thousands of years.

The site sits on a limestone ridge overlooking the Harran (hah-RAHN) Plain -- a broad, flat expanse that stretches south toward the Syrian border. The ridge provides a commanding view: from the hilltop, you can see for dozens of kilometers in every direction. The location was chosen deliberately. Göbekli Tepe is not in a river valley, not near a spring or a natural shelter, and not in a location with obvious subsistence advantages. It is on a high point, visible from afar, a landmark in the landscape. Whatever the builders intended, they intended it to be seen.

The landscape around Göbekli Tepe was, twelve thousand years ago, richer than it is today. The early Holocene climate of southeastern Turkey was wetter and more productive than the modern semi-arid environment. Oak and pistachio woodlands covered the hills. Grasslands supported herds of gazelle and wild cattle. Wild cereals -- wheat, barley, rye -- grew in natural stands dense enough to harvest. The region was not a marginal environment in which people struggled to survive; it was a productive landscape that supported a substantial hunter-gatherer population. The people who built Göbekli Tepe were well fed.

And yet they built a monumental stone complex that required organized labor on a scale previously associated only with agricultural societies. The quarrying of a single pillar -- cutting a multi-ton block of limestone from the bedrock, shaping it into a T-form, and transporting it several hundred meters from the quarry to the construction site -- would have required dozens of workers over a period of days or weeks. Erecting the pillar in its socket, aligning it with the other pillars in the circle, and stabilizing it with fill and rubble would have required still more labor. The construction of an entire enclosure -- a circle of ten to twelve pillars plus two central pillars, all set in a prepared floor with stone benches between them -- represents hundreds of person-days of skilled labor.

Organizing that labor required feeding the workers. Feeding dozens of people for weeks or months at a construction site, without the benefit of stored agricultural surplus, required either an exceptionally productive local environment or the coordination of food supplies from a wide area -- or both. The implication was revolutionary: the desire to build this monumental structure may have created the social and economic conditions that led to the development of agriculture. The temple came first. The farms came after.

The scale of the site became clearer with each season of excavation. Schmidt and his team -- working with the Şanlıurfa Museum and the German Archaeological Institute -- gradually exposed four major enclosures (A, B, C, and D), along with portions of several smaller structures. They found thousands of animal bones, stone tools, and carved stone objects. They found the quarry where the pillars had been cut from the bedrock. They found evidence of deliberate burial -- the careful filling of completed enclosures with soil and rubble. And they found, through geophysical survey, that the exposed enclosures were only a fraction of the total: ground-penetrating radar revealed the outlines of at least sixteen additional enclosures, still buried, waiting beneath the hilltop.

The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018 -- a recognition of its extraordinary importance to the understanding of human history. A permanent shelter now protects the excavated enclosures from weathering, and the site has become one of Turkey's most visited archaeological attractions. The modern visitor walks along raised platforms above the enclosures, looking down at the T-shaped pillars and their carved animals across a gap of twelve thousand years -- one of the longest temporal distances between a human creation and its modern audience anywhere in the world.