Marked Göbekli Tepe, Turkey

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Göbekli Tepe

On a hill in south-east Turkey, people who still hunted and gathered built rings of carved stone pillars, some over five metres tall. It is older than farming in the region, and changed ideas about which came first.

Date
About 9500 to 8000 BCIII · Farming and the New Stone Age
Place
Göbekli Tepe, Turkey · Karahan Tepe, TurkeyThe Middle East
Laid out as
A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IPillars before farming
  2. IIAnimals in stone
  3. IIIWho built it, and why?
  4. IVTemple or houses?
  5. VFeasts and beer

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Klaus Schmidt
  • Necmi Karul

Objects

  • The T-shaped pillars
  • The “vulture stone”

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

9500 BC to 8000 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?