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Today I will highlight a recent-ish, popular media piece, instead of an academic paper, because it discusses a site that may prove to be very relevant for future historiography and, particularly, the study of prehistory. The piece, published in The Spectator of UK, is not great, but it’s still rather informative, as it’s one of very few about the Karahan Tepe site, near the uber-famous, uber-important Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, very close to the Syrian border. I wrote about Gobekli in several posts, notably this one:
The new elite in these tight, hierarchical groups included priests from a very early age. By around 10,000 BC, with the planet still gripped by the Younger Dryas, members of multiple tribes, or at the very least those of a particularly large group, came together to build the first phase of the world's oldest temple: Göbekli Tepe, a stone-age mountain sanctuary located on Anatolian highlands from which the Karadacag hills where wheat was domesticated, a mere thirty kilometers away, are perfectly visible.
Göbekli Tepe was built at or close to the northernmost limit of the lands where the Fertile Crescent tribes roamed looking for game, plants and valuable flint[8], as the colder centuries of the Younger Dryas left much of the Anatolian plateau extremely inhospitable for humans.
The huge scale of the monument, including shrines and buildings at the top of several hills, indicates quite a sophisticated level of organization: the constructions included T-shaped pillars of between seven and ten tons of weight[9], carefully carved with pictograms and pictures at least from the complex's heyday starting at around 9000 BC. There was a significant degree of organization in the monument too: three of the monumental round structures, the largest of which are 20 meters in diameter, were initially planned as a single project[10].
Impressively, Göbekli Tepe is the work of humans who hadn't yet domesticated animals[11] and who grew so-called “wild gardens” around the temple, not quite deserving the name of farmland for centuries. Nobody lived at the temple[12], which was entirely dedicated to religious and ancestor worship, to rituals long lost in time that at times involved the consumption of beer to get in the right frame of mind to connect with the spiritual world.
It's likely that there were no full-time priests at Göbekli Tepe[13], and that those who conducted the rituals were also farmers and/or fighters, in addition of being interpreters of the designs of the gods and spirits. But a very strong impulse toward religion is very clear in the design and implementation of a place such as this, at such an early time in human history: there was no writing, there were no armies, societies or kings, but there already was at least one temple.[14]
These temples were the product of a male-directed society: no “Venus figurines” are to be found at Göbekli Tepe and all the animals carved in the temples are male; there's also a limestone carving from the site of a human figure with an erect penis. Like those in nearby sites from slightly later dates, the emerging religious theme in the Anatolian temples is that the wild is dangerous and humans are right to be fearful, and to place their trust on divinities for protection – a theme much beloved by tribes that struggled mightily against droughts, wild beasts and illnesses for which they had no protection.
If one reads The Spectator story, one shouldn’t be impressed by the over-excited tone. Karahan Tepe may be the oldest inhabited place ever found, older than Gobekli, although that is not yet proved. And it’s freaking full of carved penises. That much is true. If you want to see some of them, you can, in this fairly recent video shot right there on the archeological site:
Moving on, to the questions sent by our paying subscribers:
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