Gobekli Tepe

[VoxRat]

Anyone here follow this story (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=1)?

"There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today,"

[SteveF]

Cool.

A good vaguely related book is The Goddess and the Bull, about Çatalhöyük.

http://www.michaelbalter.com/aboutbook.php

[FreezBee]

Anyone here follow this story (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=1)?

"There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today,"

Wow -- interesting.

And near Urfa, which isn't far from ancient Harran, where Abraham's family settled after they left Ur in Chaldea (except that according to the Qur'an, that was Urfa, not the Babylonian Ur).

Urfa is a the spring of a tributary to Euphrates and marks the north end of Beth Eden, which makes the following quote from the article quite funny:

"This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant.
(My bolding)

Now, what'll the YECs say? (Not we listen to them anyway :D)


- FreezBee

[ravenscape]

I wonder why there's an assumption it might be the first human-built temple.

[premjan]

I doubt it is the absolute first. Humans had already been around for 40,000 years at this point.

[VoxRat]

I doubt it is the absolute first. Humans had already been around for 40,000 years at this point.

Yes, well. I always interpret statements like that to mean "first (earliest) that we yet know of"

[Fenris_Wulf]

I'll have to see if I can find it, but years ago I read an article suggesting that the Garden of Eden stories were a parable of the switch from hunter-gatherer to agrarian contexts. iirc it also made use of the Beth Eden/Urfa connection.


ETA It may have been this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)#Ishmael.27s_interpretation_of_Gene sis_2.4

I seem to remember getting partway through this before giving up.

[SteveF]

I doubt it is the absolute first. Humans had already been around for 40,000 years at this point.

Depends on how you define temple. There may well be a different type of place of worship coming on the scene once we became sedentary and began to develop larger settlements.

Plus humans had been around for way longer than 40,000 years.

[borealis]

I've been reading brief articles about this place, this one is the most informative. No real extra info, but a nice photo of one of the fox carvings.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,452365,00.html

[ravenscape]

I doubt it is the absolute first. Humans had already been around for 40,000 years at this point.

Depends on how you define temple. There may well be a different type of place of worship coming on the scene once we became sedentary and began to develop larger settlements.

Plus humans had been around for way longer than 40,000 years.
True. Calling it "the first", though seems a bit presumptuous, as though only one group of hunter-gatherers became sedentary and made the jump.

[Lugubert]

I wonder why there's an assumption it might be the first human-built temple.
SOP. Anything (buildings, figures, implements) that archaeologists can't explain is religious. They know no older similar unidentified structures; so this must be a temple, and the oldest one.

[ravenscape]

I wonder why there's an assumption it might be the first human-built temple.
SOP. Anything (buildings, figures, implements) that archaeologists can't explain is religious. They know no older similar unidentified structures; so this must be a temple, and the oldest one.
I can follow the logic, but I can't buy it.

[SteveF]

SOP. Anything (buildings, figures, implements) that archaeologists can't explain is religious.

I believe the word you are looking for is "ritual"! The great archaeological explanator.

[borealis]

Maybe it will turn out to have been the site for annual competitions, and the various tribal teams used fox, vulture, spider, etc. symbols as identifiers.

It's the first summer Olympics complex.

It is pretty spectacular, given the number of structures and the size of the site. I'd love to visit it.

[borealis]

More pictures, interesting text:

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/the-worlds-oldest-stone-temple-gobekli-tepe/

[Ray Moscow]

Can I play sceptic and question the dating here? Is it really so much older than similar sites found elsewhere?