This morning I happened to stumble across a link to an article on Göbekli Tepe in south east Turkey. Dunno if anyone else has heard / read anything about it. It's a fascinating site, possibly a collection of temples, dating back to the ninth millennium BCE :o that's 6000 years before Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids! It was built by people who were most probably in the main hunter-gatherers, and who would only have had basic flint tools to work with. I think it's pretty mind-blowing, and must make it one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.
The site's located on a hilltop and contains twenty round structures. Each building has a diameter of 10–30 meters, and is decorated with massive mostly T-shaped limestone pillars. In the structures, two pillars were placed in the center of each circle, and up to eight pillars were evenly positioned around the walls of the room. Most of the pillars are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract enigmatic pictograms. The reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, donkeys, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds. A few human figures have been found there too.
(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg443.imageshack.us%2Fimg443%2F5900%2Fgoblinr.jpg&hash=1479d0197dbcc11cd2137b850918e54fb30da2fe) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/443/goblinr.jpg/)
It'll be fascinating to see what they find at the site, and if they can get any ideas on what the people who built it believed. Probably won't be able to work that much out though, as they lived some 6000 years before the earliest known writing systems! Anyway, not much to debate on this one I guess. if anyone's interested they can read about it and see lots of beautiful photos here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
http://www.gobeklitepe.info/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=1
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/musi-photography
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XqfjWCUgfk
http://www.gobeklitepe.info/galery.html
I love this kind of stuff -- thanks for sharing!
Wow! That's pretty freaking old!
I had thought the temples on the island of Gozo (sp) were the oldest, but not even close to these bad boys! Thanks!
Quote from: McQ on October 19, 2011, 06:52:51 PM
Wow! That's pretty freaking old!
I had thought the temples on the island of Gozo (sp) were the oldest, but not even close to these bad boys! Thanks!
I dug on the burial site linked to the temple of Gigantija on Gozo when I was an undergraduate. It was great, beautiful temples.
I hope they look to see if these temples (if they are indeed that) had any astronomical alignments.