Carved T-Shaped Pillars in an Enclosure at Göbekli Tepe
One of the excavated enclosures at Göbekli Tepe near Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey. The limestone pillars, some over five metres tall and carved with animals, were raised from around 9500 BC — before pottery, before metal, and before anyone in the region farmed.
The site upends a familiar order of events. The textbook sequence ran: agriculture first, then surplus, then settlement, then monumental building and organised religion. Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers, quarried and erected by people who had to be fed for months by hunting and by gathering wild cereals, and it stands within sight of the hills where domesticated einkorn wheat first appears. Whether the building drove the farming or the other way round is still argued; that the building came first is not. See the monuments hunter-gatherers raised before farming.
CC BY-SA 3.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
