What is Göbekli Tepe?
Göbekli Tepe, Turkish for “potbelly hill”, is a mound near Şanlıurfa in south-eastern Turkey. Between about 9600 and 8200 BCE, people raised there circular and oval enclosures of stone, each ringed by walls and by T-shaped pillars, with two especially tall pillars at the centre. Later, smaller rectangular buildings followed.
The builders were hunter-gatherers of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a phase at the very start of the New Stone Age when people did not yet make pottery and farming was only beginning in the region. That is what makes the site extraordinary: it overturns the old idea that monumental building only came after agriculture.
Pillars that are people
The pillars in the enclosure walls reach about 4 metres, and the central ones up to 5.5 metres, weighing in the region of ten tonnes each. Their T-shape is usually read as a stylised human body: the horizontal top is the head, the shaft is the body. On the central pillars of the largest enclosure, D, carved arms and hands run down the sides and meet at the front, which makes the reading hard to doubt.
The pillars also carry animals in relief: foxes, snakes, wild boars, aurochs, gazelles, cranes and, most strikingly, vultures. Many of them are predators or scavengers. What they meant to the builders is not known, and different readings, from clan symbols to myths of the dead, remain guesses.
The case for a temple
Excavations began in 1995 under Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, who directed the work until his death in 2014. Schmidt was struck by what seemed to be missing: no obvious houses, no hearths of daily life, only great carved enclosures. He concluded that Göbekli Tepe was a sanctuary where groups of hunter-gatherers from a wide area gathered for rituals, with few or no permanent inhabitants, and called it the world’s first temple.
UNESCO’s description, written when the site was listed in 2018, follows the same line: monuments probably used for rituals, perhaps of a funerary nature. Schmidt also believed the enclosures had been deliberately filled in at the end of their use, as if buried on purpose.
The case for a settlement
The picture changed as digging spread beyond the big enclosures. The current team, now led by Turkish archaeologists with the Şanlıurfa museum and Necmi Karul, has found domestic buildings, water installations and tools of everyday use. They now describe Göbekli Tepe as a settlement in which extraordinary communal buildings were embedded, much as a village can have a church at its heart.
Even the filling of the enclosures is now debated. Some studies of the layers suggest they filled up partly through slope slides and were then repaired, and houses at Göbekli Tepe and nearby sites were filled in too. So filling may simply mark the end of a building’s life, not a ritual burial.
So, temple or village?
The evidence now points to both at once: people lived on the hill, and they also built and used enclosures that were far more than houses. That makes Göbekli Tepe less of a lonely shrine and more of a community that put enormous effort into shared, carved, symbolic spaces. It sits at the start of a story that leads to towns like Çatalhöyük, where houses and ritual are tangled together in the same rooms.
Either way, Göbekli Tepe belongs among the earliest monuments in the history of prehistoric art. It is thousands of years older than the European megaliths, and its builders lived alongside some of the early houses of the region rather than apart from them.
Not alone: the other sites around Şanlıurfa
For years Göbekli Tepe looked unique. It no longer does. In 2021 the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched the Taş Tepeler project to study the Neolithic settlements of the Şanlıurfa region, and work now covers about a dozen sites with the same kind of architecture, among them Sayburç, Sefertepe, Harbetsuvan, Gürcütepe and Çakmaktepe.
The best known is Karahan Tepe, about 46 km east of Göbekli Tepe and often called its sister site, where archaeologists have also found T-shaped pillars. A seated human statue about 2.45 metres tall found there was described in 2023 as the largest known figure of its time. Houses at Karahan Tepe and Sayburç were filled in at the end of their use, just like the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe. Seen this way, Göbekli Tepe was one centre of a whole regional culture of hunter-gatherers who built in stone.
Where to see it
Göbekli Tepe lies in the countryside near Şanlıurfa and is open to visitors. Two large protective roofs, completed in 2017, cover the main excavated enclosures.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Göbekli Tepe” (inscribed 2018), as reported by AFP.
- German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Göbekli Tepe research blog; TÜBİTAK Bilim ve Teknik, “Göbekli Tepe” (2025).
- Popular Archaeology, “Is Türkiye’s megalithic archaeological site Göbeklitepe a temple?”.
- Schmidt, K., Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia (2012).
