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Post by coolplanet on May 22, 2013 20:49:50 GMT -5
Göbekli Tepe was erected in the 10th millennium BC (about 11,500 years ago). Located in Southern Turkey it is believed to be the oldest human-made place of worship. It's even been called the Garden of Eden. Only about 5% of the site has been excavated so far, which has unveiled several stone circle rooms, only one of which has been dug down to the floor. As many as 20 such structures are thought to exist under the ground at the site, these having been detected by radar scans. The stone circles have large T-shaped pillars, some of the heaviest stones weight up to 50 tons. The monoliths are decorated with carved reliefs of animals, abstract pictograms, sacred symbols and similarities to Neolithic cave paintings have been pointed out. The carefully carved figurative reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, donkeys, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and water fowl. Göbekli Tepe means "Hill with a potbelly" although there already exists other interpretations of the name, connected to the word "Zep Tepi" or "The First Time." www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8DOjnZu8H4
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Post by ThirdSection on May 23, 2013 8:33:23 GMT -5
I remember hearing about this. Apparently, nobody actually lived there and when the people who built it moved on, they buried it in sand to preserve it.
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Post by artemis6 on May 24, 2013 7:47:29 GMT -5
This was very interesting ... except it was VERY unscientific of them to keep referring to these people as "The first" , just because they MAY be the first to eat bread ..... Wheat grows wild there now , 12000 years ago ... who knows ? It MAY have been transported ... The stonework was VERY sophisticated , like that of a culture already a thousand years old .....
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Post by coolplanet on May 26, 2013 17:24:40 GMT -5
This was very interesting ... except it was VERY unscientific of them to keep referring to these people as "The first" , just because they MAY be the first to eat bread ..... Wheat grows wild there now , 12000 years ago ... who knows ? It MAY have been transported ... The stonework was VERY sophisticated , like that of a culture already a thousand years old ..... The Big Question to me is: How did remote cultures in the Middle East, China and America suddenly cultivate grass into wheat, rice and maize all around the same time?
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Post by Vierotchka on May 27, 2013 9:30:35 GMT -5
Published on 24 Feb 2013
Göbekli Tepe Turkish: [ɡøbe̞kli te̞pɛ] ("Potbelly Hill") is a Neolithic hilltop sanctuary erected at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, some 15 kilometers (9 mi) northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa (formerly Urfa / Edessa). It is the oldest known human-made religious structure. The site was most likely erected in the 10th millennium BCE and has been under excavation since 1994 by German and Turkish archaeologists. Together with Nevalı Çori, it has revolutionized understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.
Göbekli Tepe is located in southeastern Turkey. It was first noted in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1964, which recognized that the hill could not entirely be a natural feature and postulated that a Byzantine cemetery lay beneath. The survey noted a large number of flints and the presence of limestone slabs thought to be Byzantine grave markers. This work was first mentioned in print in Peter Benedict's article "Survey Work in Southeastern Anatolia" (1980). In 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute of Istanbul noted Benedict's article and visited the site, recognizing that it was in fact a much older Neolithic site. Since 1995 excavations have been conducted by the German Archaeological Institute of Istanbul and the Şanlıurfa Museum, under the direction of Schmidt (University of Heidelberg 1995--2000, German Archaeological Institute 2001--present). The hill had been under agricultural cultivation before being excavated. Generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles and much archaeological evidence may have been destroyed in the process. Scholars from the Hochschule Karlsruhe began documenting the architectural remains and soon discovered T-shaped pillars facing south-east. Some of these pillars had apparently undergone attempts at destruction, probably by farmers who mistook them for ordinary large rocks.
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