How old do you think the oldest religious building we know of in the world is? What age could he be from? Believe it or not, this temple, located in Southeastern Anatolia near the cities of Adiyaman and Urfa, was built a full 12,000 years ago, and is the oldest religious building on the planet! You heard right, 12,000 years of history are in this place, of which as many as 800 years of work, as much as it took at that time to do something like this.
To understand how old it actually is, perhaps it is best to say that it is as much as seven millennia older than the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt and twice as old as Stonehenge in the UK!
Gobekli beats - how was it actually built?
It is believed that the Gobekli tepe was most likely erected by hunter-gatherers who lived in nearby Urfa, in order to have a place to pray. During their prayers, they often used water and blood, although perhaps more interesting than that is that at that time, they managed to make reliefs of as many as 26 animals on these amazing pillars, as well as the first 3D drawing ever painted, a lion hunting pig. Along with it, there are reliefs of 25 other animals on the pillars, among which are scorpions, snakes, gazelles, pigs, as well as many birds.
And apart from these really picturesque reliefs of animals, on some pillars we can see the inscribed Latin letters C and H. If we know that the people who lived in this area at that time did not have their own letter, it is a complete mystery where those letters on the pillars written correctly like this.
By the way, all the pillars are three to six meters in size and are made in the shape of the letter T, and 1500 years after they were made, they were covered with desert sand, and waited for millennia for someone to discover them. It happened quite by accident in 1988 when a local farmer known as "Uncle Shavak" digging something in this area, accidentally hit an object with a shovel, and trying to dig it deeper, he saw that he found a few pieces of quartz for which he did not know what they represented.
He then takes them to the museum to show them to the people there, hoping that they will tell him if there is any value related to what he found, and they told him not to, and put them in his warehouse, along with another pile. not very valuable things. For a full six years, these pieces, and also parts of the oldest religious building in our world, stood so completely unnoticed in one small warehouse, gathering even more dust on themselves than they had had in all these years before.
But in 1994, an archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt came to this area, and in a conversation with people in the local museum, asked them if they might have found an object of importance over the years, to which they replied that they had not. However, he decides to peek into the warehouse and, inspecting the things he finds there, the objects from Gobekli Tepa, attract a lot of attention. He then decides to further investigate them using radioactive carbon C-14 which has shown that the pieces in front of him are almost 12,000 years old,
It was seemingly a very ordinary day, but a day that changed the history of our world and annulled many things we knew before and believed in. What is even more incredible is that it will take another 100 years for the entire site to be excavated and explored, in order to discover all that it is currently hiding somewhere deep inside. For a full 100 years, let's get a little clearer picture of many of the obscure things we currently have, looking at these pillars.
What makes me especially happy is that people from all over the world are slowly but surely discovering Gobekli Tepe, and after it took many 14 years, from 2000 when the complex opened, to 2014 when a travel agency started doing tours here , the fact that 700,000 visitors from all over the world were here during 2019, speaks volumes about how many Gobekli beats will only become a popular destination.
This whole region of the Turkish part of Mesopotamia is full of sites of importance, and if you find yourself in this region, it is a warm recommendation to explore them.