In the 1990s, humanity’s earliest known monumental structures were discovered in Göbeklitepe in southeastern Turkey: circular complexes with T-shaped pillars that were built in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) around 12,000 years ago, long before Stonehenge or the pyramids.
They mark a transition: hunter-gatherer societies became settled. The “Built Community” exhibition in the James Simon Gallery shows works of art and images that were excavated in the region. A conversation with Barbara Helwing, who, as director of the Vorderasian Museum, played a key role in designing the exhibition.
Ms. Helwing, as an archaeologist you yourself dug near Göbeklitepe. Describe the place, the location, the atmosphere to us.
If you come from the west, from the Mediterranean, you cross the Euphrates and immediately enter a world that looks different. There is a climate limit there, it becomes relatively dry and no rain falls for months. It’s a bit hilly: the last foothills of the Taurus Mountains. Plains run east-west like a string of pearls; they were probably wetter and more fertile in ancient times.
One of these plains is that of Harran, which extends far south from the provincial capital of Şanlıurfa. There we find the settlement mounds from the late Early Neolithic. Sedentization has begun here, people go from 0 to 100 in a relatively short period of time and build deep, dug-in, round buildings with T-shaped pillars. They probably held a roof structure, but were also intended to represent people.
How many such sites have now been discovered?
There are now around 15, the most important being Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe. “Tepe” is the Turkish word for “hill”.
The large round structures, the so-called special buildings, probably served ritual or ceremonial purposes. But how did people live?
There are also residential buildings in these places, which is a relatively new discovery. I imagine it a bit like a pueblo: the houses were built wall to wall, the roofs merged into one another, and you could probably walk across the roofs.
We found fire pits with burned animal bones, which were certainly areas where people gathered to prepare food. Nevertheless, these people were still hunters and gatherers. We do not yet find what is considered the decisive feature of sedentariness, livestock breeding and agriculture, here.
© Yusuf Aslan
What happened in the special buildings?
To put it neutrally, people probably gathered there to do a joint activity. There are human figures with animal attributes, and so we imagine that boundaries were crossed between different worlds, such as the world inhabited by humans and the world inhabited by birds. This probably goes hand in hand with rituals, ceremonies and performances with rhythmic drums.
Isn’t this all speculation?
It is obvious because of the depiction of people with animal attributes. In the exhibition we also show several scenes in which people dance. The rhythmic movement probably served to better remember certain texts – by which I mean stories.
For these people 12,000 years ago, the environment was populated by numerous beings that could be seen or not, but were simply reality for them.
Barbara HelwingNear Eastern Museum
Nevertheless, one cannot yet speak of religion or faith here. There is no evidence of the worship of gods.
Certainly not in the sense of a book religion. It is more like inhabiting a living environment in which not only people live, but many other spiritual beings. The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins spoke of the “Enchanted Universe” in the last book before his death. Before people began to separate in religion between people on earth and the gods in heaven, the environment for them was populated by numerous beings that could be seen or not, but that were simply reality for people. It is an extremely beautiful book that is also available in a German translation.
Why do we find these traces of the transition to sedentary life here and not elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent, such as in Mesopotamia?
In the river plains, like in the south of Iraq, we have a lot of alluvial sedimentation. If such early sites had existed there, they would now lie beneath 30 meters of sediment and gravel. The likelihood of encountering such a site is extremely low. We know of no settlements from this ancient period in southern and central Mesopotamia. But of course it cannot be ruled out. This room was certainly not free of people.
However, the Şanlıurfa region has a special feature: the soft, flat limestone, which is very easy to work. I tried this out myself. You can break the stone with little technical sophistication by drilling a hole, putting wood in it and watering it, then it swells and explodes the stone. The structures built have survived for thousands of years, whereas elsewhere people may have built with organic materials such as wood that no longer survive.
Although sometimes thousands of kilometers apart, these Neolithic settlements were in contact with one another. How was that possible?
The hunter-gatherer world was mobile. These groups moved within a radius of several hundred kilometers. There was a system between them that was based on the principle of sharing: by sharing things with your neighbors, you also gained insurance against bad times. I imagine it as a wavering network of relationships that stretches and contracts.
What we also see: There are certain raw materials in demand, especially obsidian, a volcanic glass that occurs in Cappadocia in central Turkey and in eastern Turkey on Lake Van, but is widespread almost as far as Sinai. So either there were people who made this long journey, thousands of kilometers, or these materials were passed from hand to hand or group to group. It’s great for us archaeologists that we can chemically assign these obsidians to specific deposits and say where they came from. This allows us to reconstruct such networks.
“Built Community” shows many pieces from the discovery region abroad for the first time. Why is the exhibition taking place now?
There was already a very well-done show in 2007 in the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe with the title “12,000 years ago in Anatolia”, which looked at the momentum of settling down not only in Göbeklitepe, but in very different regions including Istanbul.
© Yusuf Aslan
I first had the idea for our current exhibition in 2020. At that time, Necmi Karul gave a lecture in Berlin. He is a professor in Istanbul and had just started digging in Karahantepe at the time. We have known each other since our student days. As director of the Near Eastern Museum, I wanted the future permanent exhibition to be able to bring these early periods into our museum.
After the pandemic, there was so much research going on, with a new discovery coming to light every two weeks, that we said: We’ll do it now. But what is very important to me is that Göbeklitepe was always perceived as singular.
It is now becoming clear that although it is an important place, it is still only one place in a whole network, each with its own characteristics. That changes the whole view of this culture. A lot has changed in the 3,000-year development from the first settlement to real farming. We see a much broader spectrum and can classify Göbeklitepe differently, which was not possible before. This gives us a new look at this time.