Göbeklitepe: A Place Where Answers Give Rise to New Questions
That day, our journey through Şanlıurfa seemed to connect two completely different eras.
Just a few hours earlier, at TEKNOFEST Güneydoğu, we had been watching drones, artificial intelligence, aviation, robots and the technologies of the future. Then, together with our guide Ramazan, we set off for a place that takes you almost 12,000 years back in time. Göbeklitepe.
The transition was almost symbolic: from trying to imagine what the human world will become tomorrow — to trying to understand the people who lived on this land at the very beginning of a completely different era. Before the trip, of course, I had heard about Göbeklitepe. One of the oldest known monumental complexes of humanity, with enormous T-shaped stone pillars, depictions of animals, and structures that appeared thousands of years before the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge.
It might seem that the site has already been studied for several decades. Films have been made about it, books and scientific articles have been written. Archaeologists have proposed explanations of who built it, how and why.
But after seeing Göbeklitepe with my own eyes, for some reason I did not have fewer questions. Quite the opposite.
And they began even before we reached the excavations themselves. First, they showed us what the past looked like The introduction to Göbeklitepe does not begin with ancient stones. First — a screen.
The first film tells visitors the history of the site. The Fertile Crescent appears on a map, followed by Şanlıurfa. We see computer reconstructions of circular structures, T-shaped pillars, and people who supposedly quarried, shaped, transported and erected enormous stone blocks.
Particular attention is paid to two massive pillars positioned in the centre of some structures. Images of animals appear on the screen — snakes, boars, foxes and birds. There are suggestions about rituals and the spiritual world of people who lived here thousands of years ago. The film itself is sometimes careful in its wording: “possibly,” “could have meant,” “may indicate.” This is important. Even modern science does not yet have definitive answers to all the questions surrounding Göbeklitepe.
Then the second presentation begins.
And here the atmosphere changes completely.
In the darkness, silhouettes of ancient people appear — hunters holding spears and stones. Their faces are deliberately distorted. The figures appear and disappear, the images repeat, and streams of light and particles move around them.
Then abstract structures emerge, somewhat resembling molecular models. Space seems to break apart and assemble again, and after a while the viewer is taken away from the earth — toward the stars and outer space. All of this is accompanied by music and repetitive movement of the images. After a few minutes, you stop perceiving what is happening as an ordinary historical film. It becomes more like an immersive performance, designed less to convey information than to create a sensation.
I do not know exactly what emotion its creators wanted to evoke, but the flow of images had an almost hypnotic effect on me.
At one point I caught myself asking a rather strange question: why, before visiting an archaeological site, am I first being immersed in precisely this kind of state?
Then the doors open. After the darkness — the bright sun of Şanlıurfa. And we go to see the real Göbeklitepe.
When there is no longer a reconstruction in front of you
Photographs do a poor job of conveying the scale of this place. From above, the circular and oval structures uncovered by archaeologists can be seen. Massive T-shaped pillars stand around the perimeter. At the centre of some complexes are two more — considerably larger than the others.
And the first thing that struck me was that there was no sense of randomly placed stones.
There is structure. There is a perimeter. There are repeating elements. There is a centre. And there are two enormous pillars occupying precisely that central position.
Modern archaeology dates the best-known monumental structures at Göbeklitepe to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic — approximately the 10th–9th millennia BCE.
This was a world without writing, metallurgy or complex machines in our sense of the word. But that does not mean it was a world of primitive people.
We are looking at a society capable of quarrying stone, shaping multi-ton blocks, moving them, erecting them and creating a repeated architectural system.
That fact alone does not require a fantastic explanation. Stone Age people were much more capable and organized than popular culture sometimes imagines.
But the ability to build a structure does not explain why it was built in precisely this way.
Why a circle? Why a repeating system of pillars? Why are there two significantly larger elements in the centre? Why do they have this particular shape?
The answer “for rituals” may explain what people did here. But does it fully explain the structure itself?
And this is where I began looking at Göbeklitepe somewhat differently.
Not as a tourist, but as an engineer
Perhaps my own technical way of thinking played a role. I stopped looking only at the animal images and began viewing the stones themselves as components of a system. When there is a structure in front of you, you instinctively want to understand how its elements are connected.
On some surfaces I began noticing lines and grooves that looked unusual. One stone in particular caught my attention. Next to an animal depiction, two long lines run across the surface and converge at an angle. The animal figure itself ends approximately where the lines meet.
If you look at this exclusively as an image, you might assume that the lines are part of the composition.
But if, for just a few seconds, you remove the archaeological context from your mind, the geometry unexpectedly begins to resemble a guide: movement along one line, a change of direction, and then continuation along the other. Like a groove or a trajectory of movement for a component in a mechanism.
I fully understand how bold such a comparison sounds.
One photograph is not enough to declare a line part of some device. To do that, one would need to study its profile, depth, method of working, possible traces of friction and, most importantly, find repeating geometry on other stones.
But the question had already arisen: what if we are looking only at the surviving stone components of a structure whose original function we do not yet fully understand?
This is not an answer. It is a question. And from that point on, there were more and more such questions.
Which came first — the stone or the image?
Göbeklitepe is famous for its animals. Foxes, snakes, boars, birds and other creatures appear again and again on the pillars. And it is precisely through these images that researchers try to understand the worldview of the people who were here thousands of years ago.
But another question occurred to me.
If an image is found on an ancient pillar, does that automatically mean that it was created at the same time as the pillar itself?
Let us conduct a thought experiment.
Suppose that, ten thousand years from now, archaeologists discover the remains of the Buran space shuttle. Over the millennia after it ceased to be used, completely different people might have lived around it. Someone might have used the fuselage as shelter. Someone else might have considered the unusual object sacred. And someone might simply have scratched a primitive drawing onto it.
Ten thousand years later, that drawing would also be extremely ancient. It would be real. It would indeed have been made by a person in the distant past.
But if future archaeologists tried to determine the original purpose of the Buran from that drawing, they would reach a completely wrong conclusion.
Of course, this is only an analogy.
The images at Göbeklitepe have an archaeological context. Similar T-shaped pillars, sculptures and animal motifs are known from other Neolithic sites in the region. Therefore, there is no basis for assuming that someone added these images in modern times.
But a subtler question remains: must the construction of each pillar, its erection and the carving of each image necessarily have happened at the same time?
If the site existed for a long period, it may have been rebuilt. Stones may have been reused. Images may have been added or modified.
And this is no longer merely a philosophical question. Different stages of working should leave material traces that can be studied.
What if everything happened the other way around?
Here I allowed myself an even bolder thought experiment. We tend to reason like this: people created these pillars, carved images of animals on them, arranged them in circles and used the space for certain social or ritual activities.
But what if, for a moment, we reverse the sequence? Imagine that there was originally some kind of structure here whose purpose was later forgotten.
The stone elements are arranged according to a particular system. The two largest elements are in the centre. Some surfaces contain grooves or lines. Other components may once have existed between the stone parts. Then time passes. Everything that could be removed or carried away, or that simply failed to survive thousands of years, disappears. What remains is the most durable material — stone.
Later, other people arrive. They no longer know the original purpose of the structure. But before them stand enormous stones created by people who lived before them.
People begin using the site in their own way. They give it a new meaning. They carve images. They gather here. Perhaps they perform rituals. This has happened repeatedly throughout human history: later societies occupied ancient structures and reinterpreted their purpose.
Is there evidence that exactly this happened at Göbeklitepe? No. No engine, wiring, metal system or other obvious component of an unknown technological device has been found here so far.
Therefore, declaring the complex a “machine,” an “energy facility” or a “spaceport” would mean inventing an answer first and then trying to fit the stones to it.
I am more interested in something else: can we be absolutely certain that the use of the structure known to us was its original and only purpose?
And if we talk about space...
There are countless theories surrounding Göbeklitepe — from astronomical observations to contacts with unknown civilizations. After visiting the site, I at least understand why they arise. Circular structures. Two central monoliths. Unusual symbolism. An age of almost twelve thousand years. And even the museum film itself, before sending visitors out to the excavations, takes them from primitive hunters toward molecules and stars.
There is certainly plenty of room for imagination here. But there is an enormous distance between the words “unusual” and “extraterrestrial.”
If we claim that the structure was connected, for example, with observing the sky, we need measurements of the pillars' orientation, the position of the horizon, calculations of the sky at the relevant period, and a repeating pattern.
If we suggest a technological purpose, we need evidence of a technological function.
That is precisely whyI do not want to replace one ready-made story with another.
What interests me much more is understanding what fact could confirm or disprove one of these versions.
And then there is the tree
An old mulberry tree stands at the top of the archaeological mound. After everything we had seen, it looked almost too symbolic for the place: a large living tree among stone, dry earth and excavations. Ramazan told us a local belief.
People came to this tree with their wishes. In particular, women who did not have children prayed here and asked to have a child. One could decide that this was yet another legend invented after Göbeklitepe became a tourist attraction.
However, the tree itself has long been known locally as a “wish tree” and a place of pilgrimage. It stood on top of the hill even before modern excavations began.
Of course, we cannot draw a direct line between this tradition and the people who lived here twelve thousand years ago. We cannot prove continuity of the custom across such an enormous span of time. And yet, simply try to imagine this scene.
Under the ground — one of humanity's oldest known monumental complexes. Above it — a tree to which completely different generations of people came with their requests and hopes.
For thousands of years, peoples, languages, states and religions changed. Yet this hill once again became a place to which people attach special meaning.
Coincidence? Quite possibly. But at Göbeklitepe, the word “possibly” has to be used with remarkable frequency.
The farmer, the plough and the story of the discovery And then Ramazan told us another story.
According to the widespread version, a local farmer discovered an unusual stone while working the land and reported the find. The details vary in different retellings, but the basic idea is the same: the accidental discovery by a local farmer became part of the story of Göbeklitepe's discovery.
When you then look down at the enormous excavation, the first reaction is quite natural: wait, how could all this possibly have been discovered by a plough?
Later, I decided to check the story of the discovery. And it turned out that the real chronology was considerably more interesting than the beautiful legend.
Göbeklitepe was recorded as an archaeological site as early as 1963 during a joint survey by Istanbul and Chicago universities. However, the monumental architecture hidden inside the mound was not recognized at that time.
In 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt and his colleagues surveyed the site again and recognized the significance of the limestone elements found on the surface. Systematic excavations began in 1995. This reveals an important distinction.
A farmer may indeed have discovered an individual stone, fragment or part of an ancient structure lying close to the surface. But he did not “plough up” the entire monumental complex buried underground. The popular story simply compresses the rather complicated archaeological biography of Göbeklitepe into a beautiful episode. And that, perhaps, is another useful lesson.
Sometimes a mystery does not arise because someone is necessarily hiding something. Sometimes we simplify history so much that, afterward, it begins to look suspicious.
How much of Göbeklitepe do we actually see?
There is another reason not to rush to definitive conclusions. What visitors see is far from the entirety of Göbeklitepe. A significant part of the mound remains unexcavated, and research is continuing. In other words, we are trying to reconstruct the history of a large complex while seeing only part of the overall picture.
Imagine a huge building, most of whose rooms cannot yet be opened. You enter several rooms, study the objects inside them, and try to determine the purpose of the entire building.
You may be right. But the next door that is opened could change a great deal.
Perhaps future research at Göbeklitepe will only strengthen our current understanding of the site. Or perhaps it will force us to reconsider some aspects of it.
And in science, the second possibility is no less valuable than the first.
I left Göbeklitepe without an answer
Perhaps that became my main impression. I did not see evidence at Göbeklitepe of an unknown high-tech civilization. I did not see a spaceport. I did not see an ancient machine whose design could be reconstructed from the surviving components. But neither did I leave with the feeling that the story I had heard had answered everything I had seen with my own eyes.
Why do the structures have precisely this shape? Why are the two largest pillars in the centre? Why is the system repeated? Were all the images created at the same time as the stone elements? How extensively was the complex rebuilt? Were individual pillars reused? What do some of the geometric lines and grooves mean? Which parts of the structure may have failed to survive? What lies beneath the part of the mound that has not yet been investigated?
And finally, the most interesting question for me: can we always determine the original purpose of an ancient structure from the way it was used by the people whose traces have survived best?
Perhaps the answers to all these questions will turn out to be much more prosaic than my assumptions. And that, too, would be an excellent result. Because the purpose of a question is not necessarily to lead us to a sensation. Sometimes its purpose is to make us look more carefully at something we had already assumed we understood.
Only a few hours separated two completely different worlds. At TEKNOFEST we watched technologies that, until very recently, would have seemed like science fiction. Then we stood before stones shaped almost twelve thousand years ago.
The future and the deep past unexpectedly met for me on the same day. And the question we asked of both was almost the same: “How does this work?”
But the day in Şanlıurfa did not end there.
That evening, another place awaited us — Halil-ur-Rahman and the famous Balıklıgöl.
I deliberately will not tell that story here. After the technological world of TEKNOFEST and the mysteries of Göbeklitepe, we found ourselves in a completely different Şanlıurfa — among water, evening light, sacred carp and a legend that lives here not as a museum story, but as part of the city itself.
And that evening walk was so powerful that it deserves a story of its own. To be continued.
Nurmurad Yylkybaev
