Interesting pictures from Göbekli Tepe

Here are some interesting pictures from an archeological digging site in Turkey:

__http://www.laif.de/en/article/23607.html?viewtype=list&batch=0

clerck de bonk said:

Here are some interesting pictures from an archeological digging site in Turkey:

__http://www.laif.de/en/article/23607.html?viewtype=list&batch=0

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Hi, can you explain why you think they are interesting or relevant? That would help the discussion along. Also, why did you start this thread in "baked noodles"?

The "explanation" offered on the site("9,000 BC: Man's First Temples Buried for millennia, layer by layer the monuments and walls on the Anatolian hilltop plateau known as Göbekli Tepe are slowly being exposed to the light of day. A stone complex, twice the height of a person, has now been excavated and has raised an intriguing question: what caused the Stone-Age hunters and gatherers to become craftsmen, builders and architects and construct monumental temples out of huge stone pillars? A German archaeologist may have come up with the answer: he has uncovered evidence to suggest that the origin of all architecture is religion.") didn't "satisfy" me and had none(explanation) of my own but I felt an urge to put it up on the forum... And because it was as dim as a simple urge, it went straight into "baked noodles".

I'll be back though...

more text and pictures concerning same...

__http://www.newsweek.com/id/233844/page/1

"But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. "The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique." No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq."

Now we are getting somewhere. Even if I find the stonework most intriguing it is the reliefs(pictures) on the stones that baffles me, they "go outside the frame"... A common thing in contemporary art for example, but this long ago?! I guess those "cavemen" weren't so narrowminded afterall.

I've moved the thread to History. Those are truly amazing images!

The comments of the archaeologist in the article are totally absurd! They built this amazing temple before villages, pottery, etc...

Right.

I have found this video on youtube which contains a part of BBC documentary where they show Göbekli Tepe. According to their description, those T-shaped stones form a circle and there is two bigger T-shaped stones facing each other. Do you guys think it is the work of "circle people" and if so, would the stones carry some energetic ability like Stonehenge does, or are they just for artistic purposes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFgcmXRHcLU

Also Urfa, the city where Gobekli Tepe is in, is supposedly where Abraham was thrown to fire by Nimrod:

According to Turkish Muslim traditions Urfa (its name since Byzantine days) is the biblical city of Ur, due to its proximity to the biblical village of Harran. However, some historians and archaeologists claim the city of Ur in southern Iraq. Urfa is also known as the birthplace of Job.

...

The legendary Pool of Sacred Fish (Balikligöl) where Abraham was thrown into the fire by Nimrod. The pool is in the courtyard of the mosque of Halil-ur-Rahman, built by the Ayyubids in 1211 and now surrounded by attractive gardens designed by architect Merih Karaaslan. The fish are not a pretty sight as they thrash about frantically devouring bread thrown by visitors. But the courtyard is very peaceful and it is said that if you see a white fish you will go to heaven.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eanl%C4%B1urfa

I realize all those biblical stories are not reliable when it comes to place and time, yet I wanted to mention this, maybe it helps.

Just my two cents, fwiw

Amazing. You can save the images on the desktop and use an image viewer
to zoom in closely. There are some amazing features in those pics!

The "support columns" are peculiar because they are angled as if to
support something of a lense-shaped "dome"? Speculating of course
- but it is unusual. Compared to stonehedge, it is unique and with
added "animals" features to it's structures!

Looks like it will take some time to complete the excavations
and to get a bigger picture as to what it was or represents...

Thanks for sharing!
Dan

Thanks for posting these clerck de bonk. Fascinating.
Like Dan, I was immediately drawn to the animal carvings. Seems there are some similarities to the European cave paintings of that time.

Interestingly enough, besides going on about the site being some type of 'temple' and 'place of worship' etc, etc, Wiki also had this to say:

wiki said:

The site was deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BC: the buildings are covered with settlement refuse that must have been brought from elsewhere. These deposits include flint tools like scrapers and arrowheads and animal bones.

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wiki said:

Schmidt speculates that the site played a key function in the transition to agriculture; he assumes that the necessary social organization needed for the creation of these structures went hand-in-hand with the organized exploitation of wild crops. For sustenance, wild cereals may have been used more intensively than before; perhaps they were even deliberately cultivated. Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in structure to wild wheat found on Mount Karaca Dağ 20 miles away from the site, leading one to believe that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.[8]

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Linda Moulton Howe have an article on it now with more amazing pictures and renderings

__http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1769&category=Science

Edit 1:

What baffles me most now, when you can see the sheer height of the main pillars, is that this is no ordinary way of building with stone. As you can see from the pictures the stones are secured, for a reason! The stones evidently stops at the base or rather they aren't dug into the ground!!! Which is what could be expected especially with stones formed and placed like that... I really can't get my head around it.

Edit 2:

the main (twin)pillars somehow resembles the megaron(Greek name for a space with four(sometimes only two) pillars in the center__http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaron) and they(the pillars) most probably were secured with an overstructure(roof)... But still, it would've been much easier to make it like a true megaron, that is four(or two) woodtrunks standing... Well perhaps they had no wood you say or it was in very scarce supply... then how did they move the big stones? Or with what did they cover the structure? Was it covered at all? If not what is the purpose of the big stones if they don't serve as pillars also?

Edit 3:

Wikipedia on the architecture(__http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe):

"The houses or temples are round megalithic buildings. The walls are made of unworked dry stone and include numerous T-shaped monolithic pillars of limestone that are up to 3 m high. Another, bigger pair of pillars is placed in the centre of the structures. There is evidence that the structures were roofed; the central pair of pillars may have supported the roof. The floors are made of terrazzo (burnt lime), and there is a low bench running along the whole of the exterior wall.

The reliefs on the pillars include foxes, lions, cattle, wild boars, wild asses, herons, ducks, scorpions, ants, spiders, many snakes, and a very few anthropomorphic figures. Some of the reliefs have been deliberately erased, maybe in preparation for new designs. There are freestanding sculptures as well that may represent wild boars or foxes. As they are heavily encrusted with lime, it is sometimes difficult to tell. Comparable statues have been discovered at Nevalı Çori and Nahal Hemar.

The quarries for the statues are located on the plateau itself; some unfinished pillars have been found there in situ. The biggest unfinished pillar is still 6.9 m long; a length of 9m has been reconstructed. This is much larger than any of the finished pillars found so far. The stone was quarried with stone picks. Bowl-like depressions in the limestone rocks may already have served as mortars or fire-starting bowls in the epipalaeolithic. There are some phalloi and geometric patterns cut into the rock as well; their dating is uncertain.

While the structures are primarily temples, more recently smaller domestic buildings have been uncovered. Despite this, it is clear that the primary use of the site was cultic and not domestic. Schmidt believes this "cathedral on a hill" was a pilgrimage destination attracting worshipers up to a hundred miles distant. Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese suggest that ritual feasting (and perhaps sacrifice) were regularly practiced here.[7]

The site was deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BC: the buildings are covered with settlement refuse that must have been brought from elsewhere. These deposits include flint tools like scrapers and arrowheads and animal bones. The lithic inventory is characterised by Byblos points and numerous Nemrik-points. There are Helwan-points and Aswad-points as well."

New article, National Geographics this time:

__http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text/1

This one made me really mad... again

"I asked German architect and civil engineer Eduard Knoll, who works with Schmidt to preserve the site, how well designed the mounting system was for the central pillars. "Not," he said, shaking his head. "They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts."

So, if you can't explain a 'difficult' way of approaching a constructional problem you then explain it away with them makers being slightly daft(to put it mildly) in certain aspects, even when everything points to the opposite and the implemented constructional solution was preferred for a reason!

And this quote underscores it, IMO:

"Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building. The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise."

Edit: spelling

When I looked at image P1010404JPG in the Gobekli Tepe they reminded me of the picture from Pisco Valley photos in an earlier thread.(It was something to do with a discovery channel post). The same sort of uniform cup-like indentations. Now I'm really curious as to what they are/were.

Andrew Collins has a new book out on Gobekli Tepe. I know Laura has cited his work a few times, but I've only read his book on Atlantis. Here's the description:

_http://store.innertraditions.com/isbn/978-1-59143-142-8

An exploration of the megalithic complex at Göbekli Tepe, who built it, and how it gave rise to legends regarding the foundations of civilization

• Details the layout, architecture, and exquisite carvings at Göbekli Tepe

• Explores how it was built as a reaction to a global cataclysm

• Explains that it was the Watchers of the Book of Enoch and the Anunnaki gods of Sumerian tradition who created it

• Reveals the location of the remains of the Garden of Eden in the same region

Built at the end of the last ice age, the mysterious stone temple complex of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is one of the greatest challenges to 21st century archaeology. As much as 7,000 years older than the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge, its strange buildings and rings of T-shaped monoliths--built with stones weighing from 10 to 15 tons--show a level of sophistication and artistic achievement unmatched until the rise of the great civilizations of the ancient world, Sumer, Egypt, and Babylon.

Chronicling his travels to Göbekli Tepe and surrounding sites, Andrew Collins details the layout, architecture, and exquisite relief carvings of ice age animals and human forms found at this 12,000-year-old megalithic complex, now recognized as the oldest stone architecture in the world. He explores how it was built as a reaction to a global cataclysm--the Great Flood in the Bible--and explains how it served as a gateway and map to the sky-world, the place of first creation, reached via a bright star in the constellation of Cygnus. He reveals those behind its construction as the Watchers of the Book of Enoch and the Anunnaki gods of Sumerian tradition.

Unveiling Göbekli Tepe’s foundational role in the rise of civilization, Collins shows how it is connected to humanity’s creation in the Garden of Eden and the secrets Adam passed to his son Seth, the founder of an angelic race called the Sethites. In his search for Adam’s legendary Cave of Treasures, the author discovers the Garden of Eden and the remains of the Tree of Life--in the same sacred region where Göbekli Tepe is being uncovered today.

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Thanks for sharing this information.

I just picked up a book by Frank Joseph titled: Before Atlantis - 20 Million Years of Human and Pre-Human Cultures (2013). Haven't read it, just leafed through it a bit and there's detailed info on Goblecki Tepe, as well. He references Andrew Collins in regards to the dynastic Egyptian pyramids. Also noticed he referenced Clube & Napier as well as Firestone & Topper.
Should be a good read.

Approaching Infinity said:

Andrew Collins has a new book out on Gobekli Tepe. I know Laura has cited his work a few times, but I've only read his book on Atlantis. Here's the description:

_http://store.innertraditions.com/isbn/978-1-59143-142-8

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thank you for this link to the book! My 10 year old son just found it on youtube and was asking me about that ... :)

New discoveries at Gobeklitepe.