Gobekli Tepe: The oldest temple on the planet?

Lovers of sacred archeology, as well as countless experts from around the world, have the custom of studying mysteries related to various places on the Blue Planet, especially the Old Continent - the Great Pyramid of Egypt and the famous Stonehenge stones, for example. As a result, some unusual places are constantly being discovered in recent years, causing new puzzles to emerge with each archaeological investigation, such as Gobekli Tepe in Turkey - the region where the Sumerians predominated.

At a peak in the Taurus Mountains, located north of the Syrian border, near the ancient city of Sanliurfa, was discovered the oldest stone temple complex in the world, where some structures were dated to 9000 BC.

To give you an idea, the archaeological site is made up of a series of rings of huge T-shaped pillars that weigh on average 10 to 20 tons - some up to 50 tons - and are three meters high (one of them is nine meters, but it is unfinished), with some carved animals in high relief (not traditional in the region), bizarre and indecipherable hieroglyphics so far, as well as varied geometric shapes. All of these pillars are connected by walls - roughly constructed - forming oval structures. Check out some photos:

The mystery itself ...

Gobekli Tepe has a very sophisticated construction in some respects for its time, especially when compared to other famous places on the globe, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Easter Island statues, the unusual stones in Stonehenge, among others. buzzing ”by tourists around the world. Nowadays, the place is considered the first great architectural monument of mankind.

In addition, some research has shown that the site is in line with some constellations such as Taurus, Orion and Pleiades - how did they know exactly 11000 years ago? Another curiosity is that the builders purposely buried the circle of stones after a while and opened a similar or quite similar one a little later, burying again after a certain time and so on.

According to the specialists on duty, there are 20 to 40 circular temples around Gobekli Tepe, the oldest of which has the best architectural condition. That is, if you stop to reason about it, it seems that builders have been losing building skill over the ages, don't they?

Professor Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist responsible for excavations and surveys, said of this mystery: “Discovering that mere hunters, fishermen and fruit gatherers were able to build Gobekli Tepe is like discovering that someone had built a 747 plane with a stylus. ”- practically a MacGyver of buildings.

Religion comes into play

Although the assumption that the T-pillars that supported a roof and the small internal structures at the site refer to a kind of worship center for a large number of possible worshipers, there is a lot of mystery in the air and countless questions that still remain. no plausible answers, as only 25% of the site has been excavated so far - a real puzzle for us lowly mortals.

If you do not know, until today it was believed that religion arose only with the beginning of agriculture and consequently in the beginning of the most complex societies. However, this is not the case with Gobekli Tepe, as no one has found traces of a possible farmers' organization or some form of social organization, arousing even more the curiosity of many people in the field.

What remains for us is to embody Detective Sherlock Holmes and deduce that there was some predominance of emotional need, internal and common to the inhabitants of the place, to reverence gods and idolize certain forces that governed them.

Gobekli Tepe and Easter Island

As with the illustrious and unexplainable Moais on Easter Island (located in Eastern Polynesia about 3, 700 kilometers off the coast of Chile), some T-shaped stones in Gobekli Tepe represent beings just as they are. they are depicted on the giant statues of the famous island, with thin, elongated hands positioned above the navel.

However, the distance from one place to another is approximately 14000 km. With this, the following question arises in the mind: what relationship did these peoples have for so long?

Unanswered Questions

According to archaeologists on duty, at this time men were still nomads or hunters, and agriculture was still taking its first steps on planet Earth. So where did building technology come from? Where did the guys get skilled labor to build the whole complex? How did the workers support them and where did they shelter them? How could they have accurate and extremely advanced knowledge of astronomy, architecture and mathematics? Yeah, nobody knows yet.

Finally, it is worth remembering that, like other advanced civilizations throughout history, the inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe have mysteriously disappeared.

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And you, reader, know other mysterious places like this? Be sure to share your information with us in the comments below.