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The Meaning of the Twin Pillars of Göbekli Tepe The purpose of this paper is to identify the bas-relief pictograms at the necks of the paired central pillars of Enclosure D of Göbekli Tepe and explain their symbolism. To do so is to reveal the underlying meaning of the entire enterprise there. The site can be understood as an act of devotion to the divine pair, the mother and the bull, the figures that lay at the core of the religions of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean up through classical antiquity. Although these figures at Göbekli Tepe stand on their own, their significance is best understood within the context

A significant number of symbolic compositions from Neolithic Anatolia display a remarkably similar arrangement. Whether it is a female figure, an animal or a geometric sign (X, H), the central element is often depicted reach- ing out to two isomorphic symbols, respectively, with limbs, horns or lines/triangles. This general pattern, or part of it, appears to be much too common and deliberate to be random. Some thirty years ago, an original ‘archaeo-ethnological’ approach has allowed Jean-Daniel Forest to attempt a convincing decipherment of this type of depictions uncovered at the site of Çatalhöyük. To this author, the two side elements symbolize the subgroups of the community, or lineages,

Situated in the northern part of the Upper Mesopotamia, Göbekli Tepe represents one of the largest early PPN sites in the region. A reference to the disastrous inundations of the Euphrates River and its tributaries seems to have been recorded in the iconography of Göbekli Tepe’s enclosures. The bas-reliefs of Enclosure D show an event similar to the one described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, illustrating with zoomorphic images the different stages of a flood. By comparing this visual story with the Sumerian text, one can imagine the complexity of the mythology of the PPN populations of the Near East.

Tell us in Terms of Religion and Theology? Göbekli Tepe is regarded as one of the oldest temples of the humanity according to archaeologists. In this work, by going back twelve thousand years, we will attempt both to provide information about this structure and to make interpretations by highlighting the theological and philosophical associations of this structure. In our study, we will examine Göbekli Tepe not from the perspective of archaeology and history of art but from that of philosophy of religion and religious symbolism.

An Eliadean Approach Microsoft Word - Baghos, The Symbolic World of Göbekli Tepe and the First Cities.docx First noted in geographical surveys in 1964, Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site situated about 15km north-east of the Turkish city of Sanlıurfa, was made famous in the 1990s by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. From 1995 until his death in 2014, Schmidt argued for the religious significance of this site. Mircea Eliade, the great twentieth century historian of religions, passed away in 1986, many years before Schmidt published his findings on Göbekli Tepe. Nevertheless, Eliade’s heuristic devices of axis mundi (centre of the world) and imago mundi (image of the world) can help us

The megalithic enclosures of Gobekli Tepe (Urfa, Turkey) are the most ancient stone-built sacred structures known so far, dating back to the 10th millennium BC. The possible presence of astronomical targets for these structures is analysed, and it turns out that they may have been oriented – or even originally constructed - to “celebrate” and successively follow the appearance of a “new”, extremely brilliant star in the southern skies: Sirius.

Göbekli Tepe is the site of a series of stone enclosures built during the tenth and ninth millennia BC on an isolated mountaintop in southeast Anatolia (Turkish Asia Minor). Speculation has mounted regarding their orientation towards stellar objects, with Orion and Cygnus having already been proposed. Sirius is the latest star to be put forward as the primary focus of key monuments at the site. Yet such a conclusion is thwart with problems, not only in connection with the faint appearance and feeble movement of the star during the epoch in question, c. 9500-9000 BC, but also with respect to the orientation and layout of the enclosures themselves.

The paper is a continuation of a trilogy of papers by the author on the subject of dating Gobekli Tepe. In this paper, two additional sites and some of their monuments are analyzed: Tell Qaramel and Tell Es-Sultan. They provide, along with some more evidence on the c-14 readings and structure B from Gobekli Tepe and with a more detailed examination of the Temple at Nevali Cori additional documentation and evidence as to why Gobekli Tepe is a 6th millennium BC site. In doing so, the author presents a Theory of Evolution of Early Neolithic Architecture. A new view of the burial phases of Gobekli Tepe is presented,

Göbekli Tepe is regarded as one of the oldest temples of the humanity according to archaeologs. In this work, by going back twelve thousand years, we will attempt both to provide information about this structure and to make interpretations by highlighting the theological and philosophical associations of this structure. In our study, we will examine Göbekli Tepe not from the perspective of archaeology and history of art but from that of philosophy of religion and religious symbolism. In our research, we benefit from the data of archeology and historical geography. The basic aim of this search is archaeological data that is obtained in the region and to evaluate

As the Upper Paleolithic era shades into Mesolithic and Early Neolithic times, the earliest agglomerations into sedentary groupings of isolated clans, tribes, bands of hunters and itinerant handicraft traders which we can more easily recognise as organised social structures and culture, first occur in south-eastern Turkey, and the northernmost reaches of the Fertile Crescent in the upland region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It is probably no coincidence that they also happen to be societies that exemplify a propensity for creating languages of symbolism to imbue existence with meaning and identity, for the amassed efforts of a group of sites that emerged in this region around ten