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Zilch5 Vogon Poet
Great Old One Joined: 08 Nov 2007 Total posts: 1527 Location: Western Sydney, Australia Gender: Male |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
 Posted: 24-04-2013 09:54 Post subject: |
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Göbekli Tepe, Turkey: a new wonder of the ancient world
Göbekli Tepe, a soon-to-be inundated archaeological site near the banks of the Euphrates, leaves Jeremy Seal awestruck.
By Jeremy Seal
2:26PM BST 23 Apr 2013
"Wow," exclaims the visitor from New Zealand, a place, after all, with a human history shorter than most. For from a wooden walkway we’re gazing down at an archaeological site of giddying age. Built about 9000 BC, it’s more than twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids, predating the discovery of metals, pottery or even the wheel. This is Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, generally reckoned the most exciting and historically significant archaeological dig currently under way anywhere in the world, and there are neither queues nor tickets to get in.
Wow for a number of reasons, then, though it’s neither the access nor the staggering implications of the site’s age that has particularly impressed the man from distant Auckland. Neolithic Göbekli Tepe is also remarkably beautiful. From the partially excavated pit rise circular arrangements of huge T-shaped obelisks exquisitely carved with foxes, birds, boars and snakes or highly stylised human attributes including belts, loincloths and limbs. We’re profoundly moved by this glimpse into a radically recast prehistory, and mystified too. Even the archaeologists hard at work on this September morning can only speculate about its function, not least because the stones appear to have been deliberately buried.
“This series of sanctuaries is the oldest known monumental architecture,” explains the excavation leader and approachable on-site presence Professor Klaus Schmidt. “Maybe burial was already part of their concept from the very beginning.”
Two years ago a bare trickle of visitors found their way to this remote hilltop revelation. Now, however, visitors are building their entire itineraries around Göbekli Tepe, surest of shoo-ins for future World Heritage Status, and foundations are already in place for a protective site canopy, a nearby visitors’ centre and a ticket office. Numbers are set to explode here, the more so because the surrounding Euphrates region centred on the ancient cities of Gaziantep and Sanliurfa happens to boast an exceptional wealth of cultural draws.
It helps that another spectacular summit monument, the vast stone heads in honour of Roman-era King Antiochus on nearby Nemrut Dagi, has figured prominently on must-see lists for decades. In recent years, however, there have been further momentous discoveries such as the mosaics at Roman Zeugma, which were rescued from the rising waters of the dammed Euphrates before being installed in the magnificent new museum at Antep – the locals don’t bother with the “Gazi” prefix – in 2011.
etc [mostly general tourist stuff]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activityandadventure/10013002/Gobekli-Tepe-Turkey-a-new-wonder-of-the-ancient-world.html
I'll repeat what I said on page 1: there's an earlier thread on this site:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28978
Also a wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
(Last modified yesterday!) |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-08-2013 13:39 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | World's oldest temple built to worship the dog star
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929303.400-worlds-oldest-temple-built-to-worship-the-dog-star.html#.UhC_6JJ4JBw
16 August 2013 by Anil Ananthaswamy
Magazine issue 2930.
THE world's oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, may have been built to worship the dog star, Sirius.
The 11,000-year-old site consists of a series of at least 20 circular enclosures, although only a few have been uncovered since excavations began in the mid-1990s. Each one is surrounded by a ring of huge, T-shaped stone pillars, some of which are decorated with carvings of fierce animals. Two more megaliths stand parallel to each other at the centre of each ring (see illustration).
Göbekli Tepe put a dent in the idea of the Neolithic revolution, which said that the invention of agriculture spurred humans to build settlements and develop civilisation, art and religion. There is no evidence of agriculture near the temple, hinting that religion came first in this instance.
"We have a lot of contemporaneous sites which are settlements of hunter-gatherers. Göbekli Tepe was a sanctuary site for people living in these settlements," says Klaus Schmidt, chief archaeologist for the project at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin.
But it is still anybody's guess what type of religion the temple served. Giulio Magli, an archaeoastronomer at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, looked to the night sky for an answer. After all, the arrangement of the pillars at Stonehenge in the UK suggests it could have been built as an astronomical observatory, maybe even to worship the moon.
Magli simulated what the sky would have looked like from Turkey when Göbekli Tepe was built. Over millennia, the positions of the stars change due to Earth wobbling as it spins on its axis. Stars that are near the horizon will rise and set at different points, and they can even disappear completely, only to reappear thousands of years later.
Today, Sirius can be seen almost worldwide as the brightest star in the sky – excluding the sun – and the fourth brightest night-sky object after the moon, Venus and Jupiter. Sirius is so noticeable that its rising and setting was used as the basis for the ancient Egyptian calendar, says Magli. At the latitude of Göbekli Tepe, Sirius would have been below the horizon until around 9300 BC, when it would have suddenly popped into view.
"I propose that the temple was built to follow the 'birth' of this star," says Magli. "You can imagine that the appearance of a new object in the sky could even have triggered a new religion."
Using existing maps of Göbekli Tepe and satellite images of the region, Magli drew an imaginary line running between and parallel to the two megaliths inside each enclosure. Three of the excavated rings seem to be aligned with the points on the horizon where Sirius would have risen in 9100 BC, 8750 BC and 8300 BC, respectively (arxiv.org/abs/1307.8397).
The results are preliminary, Magli stresses. More accurate calculations will need a full survey using instruments such as a theodolite, a device for measuring horizontal and vertical angles. Also, the sequence in which the structures were built is unclear, so it is hard to say if rings were built to follow Sirius as it rose at different points along the horizon.
Ongoing excavations might rule out any astronomical significance, says Jens Notroff, also at DAI. "We are still discussing whether the monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were open or roofed," he says. "In the latter case, any activity regarding monitoring the sky would, of course, have been rather difficult."
This article appeared in print under the headline "Stone Age temple tracked the dog star" |
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