Located near the border with Syria in southern Turkey and six miles from the ancient city of Urfa, Gobekli Tepe is one of the most startling archaeological sites on the planet. Situated atop a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region, the megalithic stone circles of Gobekli Tepe, containing massive carved stones, which are about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery, are considered to be the oldest religious structure ever found in the world, which predate Stonehenge in England by six thousand years.
Strangely, after 13 years of prolonged excavation, the investigating team of the archaeologists have failed to recover even a single stone-cutting tool from the site. It is really an enigma, as to how those ancient people of pre-historic age perfectly sculpted those tall columns, without any proper tool.
In 1963, the site of the Gobekli Tepe was first noticed in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University, who did not give it any importance, as they found some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery.
Much later, in 1994, Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute reviewed the description of the site noted by the Chicago researchers in 1963 and began excavating in collaboration with the Snlurfa Museum, Turkey, which he continued till his death in 2014.He called it the cathedral on a hill, as he was convinced that, it was the site of the world's oldest temple, an early Neolithic sanctuary used as a holy site and not as a settlement. In fact, they found no tangible sign of a settlement, as there were no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. Though no tombs or graves were found, Schmidt believed that they remain to be discovered in niches located behind the sacred circles' walls.
Unlike the neighbouring stark plateaus, Gobekli Tepe (meaning ‘belly hill’ in Turkish) has a gently rounded top that rises 50 feet above the surrounding landscape. The mysterious temple, which consists of three circles of huge stones, was somehow buried for some unknown reason in the distant past. Each circle or ring has almost a roughly similar layout, which consists of two gigantic T-shaped stone pillars in the centre, encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and weigh between seven and ten tons.
While some of the stones are blank, others are elaborately carved with shapes of foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides. The largest circle is 17m by 25m and it is assumed that, after the completion of a circle, the ancient builders used to cover it over with dirt and eventually, they placed another ring nearby or on top of the old one. Over centuries, these layers created the hilltop.
Using radar and modern geomagnetic surveys, about 16 or more megalithic circles were detected buried across 22 acres of the site.
As one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site, it is considered that the archaeologists could continue to dig the site for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.
Gobekli Tepe might have lost its relevance and was abandoned in the 8th millennium BC, but it has strong implications for the understanding of the ancient world. Built by hunter-gatherers, before the before the discovery of agricultural, it is regarded as the world’s oldest piece of architecture and is enlisted in the UNESCO World Heritage Site.