While shooting a documentary
at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different
historical interpretations of the site. An international
group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for
extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out
that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast
the T-shaped pillars as traces of humanity’s mystical
past. Representatives of an NGO working with conservative
Turkish people in Germany likened the pillars’ posture to
movements in Islamic prayer. A retired pharmacist insisted
that ancient kings had used the site enclosures for
astronomical divination. Even the visitor center offered a
strongly mystical welcome. Amid this profusion of
viewpoints, the material evidence received remarkably little
attention.
This intense engagement invites an
ambivalent response: should we welcome the considerable
public interest, or question the frameworks through which
the site is perceived? Much of Göbeklitepe’s popularity
can be traced to German news magazine Der
Spiegel’s 2006 cover story, which advanced
archaeologist Klaus Schmidt’s description of the site as
the “world’s
first temple,” alongside speculation linking it to the
Garden of
Eden and Adam and Eve. Meanwhile, the claims by
pseudoscientists linking the site to extraterrestrials—as
Swiss author Erich
von Däniken and his present-day successors remind
us—have always found a substantial audience.
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But
was Göbeklitepe really a temple? More importantly, does it
show that religion was the primary force driving humanity
toward settled life? Expecting definitive answers about
societies without written records may be impossible, but
does that make every interpretation equally valid? How did
the “temple” interpretation gain factual authority while
those questioning it were left to shoulder the burden of
proof?
Through this article, I examine five possible
arguments for why Göbeklitepe is considered a religious
site, with condensed formulations of ideas that have
circulated through archaeological scholarship, popular
media, and the site’s public presentation:
1. Its
monumental structures stood alone in the middle of nowhere,
without a nearby water source or surrounding domestic
buildings, and were periodically visited by people traveling
up to 200 kilometers; they must therefore have been temples
forming a pilgrimage center.
The evidence,
however, suggests otherwise.
For decades,
excavations at Göbeklitepe concentrated on the large
circular structures, guided by the assertion that they
lacked domestic context for their existence. Karahantepe
and Sayburç,
excavated more holistically as settlements, instead revealed
large circular structures embedded within inhabited spaces.
As research at Göbeklitepe
has expanded and previously excavated areas have been
reassessed, a similar pattern has emerged: monumental
structures were embedded within a broader inhabited
settlement.
Dwellings do not, of course, exclude
ritual activity. But ritual served many purposes in deep
prehistory. They could accompany initiation, birth, death,
and burial, communal consumption, dispute resolution, social
transitions, and the renewal of collective identity. Ritual
is therefore not synonymous with religion, and such activity
hardly proves that the space was devoted exclusively to
worship.
Nor did the circles simply stand above an
empty landscape as monuments designed to impress distant
onlookers. They were carved directly into the bedrock below
ground level, and the growing evidence that they were roofed
would have further limited their external visibility. Their
“monumentality” was therefore experienced largely from
within, weakening the image of conspicuous landmarks built
to dominate the landscape and draw pilgrims from
afar.
The surrounding structures have yielded food
remains, grinding stones, mortars, pestles, and other traces
of everyday life. Although fragmentary and scattered, human
remains are consistent with sustained occupation of the
site, while water management features indicate the
deliberate exploitation of local water resources. In October
2025, georadar, geomagnetic, and lidar surveys
conducted across previously unexplored parts of the mound
identified numerous structures interpreted as possible
dwellings—despite decades of confident claims to the
contrary, they had been lying there all along.
In
short, even if people traveled considerable distances to
Göbeklitepe, they were not approaching a solitary monument
rising from an empty landscape. The large circular
structures formed part of an inhabited settlement
landscape.
2. With their T-shaped pillars,
elaborate reliefs, wall niches, and polished terrazzo
floors, the large circular structures were architecturally
unique and distinct from ordinary domestic buildings. They
must therefore have been sacred spaces.
Not
necessarily.
The central circles are certainly
impressive in scale—but unique? Not quite. Excavations at
Karahantepe, Sayburç, and Göbeklitepe increasingly show
that T-shaped pillars and large circular architecture were
part of a shared regional vocabulary and not an isolated
anomaly.
Smaller T-shaped pillars also appear in
structures interpreted as dwellings, where they seem to have
served practical architectural purposes, including roof
support. In the circular structures, this functional form
was enlarged and transformed into a richly symbolic one,
particularly through animal imagery. This indicates symbolic
meanings and collective functions extending beyond those
associated with an individual dwelling; however, these
functions cannot be identified as religious on their
own.
Although generally less elaborate and lacking the
carefully finished floors of the central circles, dwellings
share features such as wall niches, stone-building
techniques, and spatial arrangements. The difference lies in
scale, investment, ornamentation, and social importance, and
not in a wholly distinct architectural vocabulary. The
argument therefore fails twice: uniqueness would not by
itself prove that these structures were temples—and their
architecture was not unique in the first place.
3.
The large circular structures were deliberately buried at
regular intervals and replaced by new ones. Because
backfilling required immense effort, it could only be driven
by a sacred taboo—a ritual requirement to conceal and
protect the holy.
Not
necessarily.
Although erosion and other natural
processes contributed to the fills— whether they were
intentional is debatable—deliberate filling occurred in
varied contexts across the region. Crucially, it was not
confined to large circular structures: dwellings at
Göbeklitepe, Karahantepe, and Sayburç were also
backfilled. Beyond Taş Tepeler—a group of Neolithic
archaeological sites in Türkiye of which Göbeklitepe is
the most famous—filling was accompanied by the renewal of
communal and domestic structures at other sites such as Aşıklı
Höyük and the later farming and herding settlement of
Çatalhöyük,
with comparable examples recurring as late as the Bronze Age
at Küllüoba.
A practice crossing architectural, economic, and
chronological boundaries cannot be treated as exclusively
religious.
Filling may instead have marked the end of
a structure’s active life. While food remains in some
deposits may reflect collective acts of closure or
renewal—not necessarily the sacred burial of holy
architecture. Backfilling may also have removed structures
from material circulation and prevented them from becoming
inherited spaces, allowing successive generations to
establish their own spatial and social order rather than
inheriting it from their predecessors.
The large
circular structures appear to have remained in use longer
than many dwellings, perhaps reflecting their greater
communal importance. Repairs, alterations, and size
reductions of these structures show that they were
maintained and adapted across generations before being
decommissioned.
Backfilling may therefore have carried
symbolic meaning without proving the existence of a temple
or specialized religious institution. The practice
demonstrates that these structures mattered socially without
revealing their true importance.
4. The prominence
of male bodies, phallic imagery, and anthropomorphic
T-shaped pillars reveals an emerging patriarchal religion,
possibly centered on a male or paternal
deity.
Not necessarily.
This
interpretation turns a chain of possibilities into a
conclusion: that phallic imagery signifies male dominance,
male dominance establishes patriarchy, and patriarchy
implies a religion centered on a paternal deity. Yet each
step requires its own evidence.
As I have argued previously,
even the identification of this imagery as straightforwardly
male is not as well-established as it appears. Figures
routinely classified as male—including the so-called human
statues and “totems” from Balıklıgöl,
Kilisik,
and Karahantepe—combine
features that may be seen as female, male, androgynous or
hermaphroditic; infant or adult; human or animal. Rather
than representing specific categories, these figures
repeatedly blur boundaries of sex, age, and
species.
The phallic-pillared chamber of Structure AB
and Karahantepe’s large human
statue—with its apparently circumcised
penis—certainly foreground the male body. The first small
statue
found at Göbeklitepe likewise plainly depicts a circumcised
penis, with the same feature also appearing in the Sayburç relief.
Yet these markings may signify not only masculinity but also
self-wounding, sacrifice, or bodily transformation, possibly
within practices of initiation. Female figures have also
been found at Karahantepe, even if they remain curiously
marginally displayed at museums and are rarely mentioned in
popular accounts. Meanwhile, the surviving stone record
cannot establish the original balance of representation:
female figures made from wood, fiber, or other perishable
materials could have disappeared without a trace.
More
importantly, symbolic prominence is not the same as social
power. The material record does not clearly depart from the
relatively egalitarian character attributed to these
communities. If coordinating regional hunts and
inter-settlement gatherings elevated particular men, their
roles may have been temporary, protocol-bound, or
status-based—not evidence of permanent patriarchal or
religious authority.
And even prominent male symbolism
would not, by itself, establish religion. A phallus does
represent a father god, any more than a female figurine
depicts a mother goddess. Such an inference assumes a
distinct religious sphere populated by separate metaphysical
deities.
Long before institutional temple economies
emerged in Sumerian Mesopotamia, however, symbolic life may
have been part of relational cosmologies—often described
as animistic or shamanic—in which humans, animals,
ancestors, landscapes, and other forces were entwined within
an interconnected whole rather than divided into separate
realms. Ceremonial representations such as the snake-bodied
bust
from Structure AB at Karahantepe and the Balıklıgöl
statue may be better understood within this relational
framework. Their composite imagery evokes an interwoven
world more readily than a patriarchal pantheon.
5.
Structures of this scale—with pillars up to 5 meters
high and weighing 10 to 15 tons—could only have been built
through coercion, whether physical or spiritual. Since no
institutionalized coercive authority existed yet, only
religion could have mobilized such “primitive”
people.
Is this assumption
correct?
This argument projects a distinctly
modern hierarchical assumption onto early societies: that
large-scale collective labor must have been commanded
through either physical force or religious compulsion. Since
organized physical coercion clearly did not yet exist, the
argument leaves only religious compulsion. The asymmetry is
striking: the absence of material evidence for physical
coercion is treated as decisive, while the comparable
absence of a clergy, temple economy or institutional
religious authority is bypassed by treating the ambiguous
evidence examined above—from architecture and backfilling
to imagery, scale and collective labor—as religious by
default. Since these “primitive” people had supposedly
not yet been illuminated by modern rationality, what else
but mystical belief could have moved them? Cooperation among
non-state communities is thus not recognized as a social
capacity in its own right, with these communities rendered
intelligible only when coercive authority is used on
them.
Voluntary and reciprocal communal labor—known
as imece in Türkiye—is hardly exceptional. It
remains visible to varying degrees in rural communities
across much of the world, wherever modern institutions have
left room for it, in practices such as harvesting fields,
preparing seasonal provisions, bringing water from distant
sources and constructing local infrastructure. Such
practices are not recent social inventions, however:
large-scale cooperation long predates Göbeklitepe.
Paleolithic lifeways—particularly communal hunting and the
gathering, processing and distribution of food—required
planning, division of labor and the collective management of
resources. The large circular structures may therefore
embody an expansion of long-established cooperative
capacities, not a form of organization invented by Neolithic
communities.
The scale of such cooperation was
recognized surprisingly early. In 1998, Der
Spiegel, drawing on Schmidt’s theory, described
kilometer-long V-shaped walls used during the Neolithic to
funnel entire herds of gazelle into mega structures, arguing
that constructing the traps, conducting hunts, and
preserving the meat required hundreds or even thousands of
people. Although the article did not connect these
structures directly to Göbeklitepe, subsequent fieldwork
has documented
extensive animal-trapping
systems in the region. These “desert
kites” apparently exceeded both the labor capacity and
consumption needs of any single village: constructing and
operating them—and slaughtering, processing, preserving,
and distributing their yield—required coordination between
settlements. This material basis for supra-local cooperation
was already visible in Schmidt’s account but was later
overshadowed by the claim that “religion” had mobilized
“monumental” labor.
Göbeklitepe points in the
same direction: large quantities of gazelle bones indicate
intensive and possibly seasonal consumption, while heavy
grinding stones and wild-cereal processing
installations—possibly used for brewing—suggest
collectively organized gathering, processing, and
consumption. These communities did not merely happen to
assemble; their subsistence depended on working
together.
Communities that built and operated together
and shared hunting landscapes had practical reasons to
construct places where cooperation was possible. The large
circular structures may therefore have served as
multifunctional gathering spaces: places for assemblies,
resource allocation, exchanges, dispute resolution, mating
and alliance networks, communal consumption, and rituals.
They may have combined functions that were only much later
divided among councils, courts, marketplaces, ceremonial
spaces, and temples.
Shared beliefs may have bound
these communities together and given their cooperation
symbolic form—but, to adapt an old Turkish saying, not
every bearded man is a sage; likewise, not every ritual is
religious, nor every symbolic space a temple. Ritual could
accompany exchange, negotiation, and collective consumption
as a means of enacting, remembering, and renewing
cooperation without constituting a separate religious
sphere. These structures served communities whose survival
depended on collective labor. To turn that achievement into
evidence of priestly command is not an archaeological
conclusion but a projection of modern hierarchy onto a
potentially far more cooperative past.
Beyond the
Temple Story
As we have seen, the available evidence
not only fails to confirm the temple interpretation but also
increasingly undermines the interpretation’s original
premises. The site can no longer plausibly be described as
an isolated complex without water or dwellings. Its
architecture is not unique, backfilling was not confined to
its large circular structures, and neither its imagery nor
the labor invested in its construction necessarily
establishes a religious institution. The question, then, is
why the temple story became—and remains—so dominant.
Part of the answer may lie in the intellectual and political
climate in which archaeological interpretations gain
authority and popular appeal.
It is precisely here
that Çatalhöyük offers a useful precedent. Archaeologist
and author James
Mellaart interpreted seated female figurines as evidence
of a “(mother) goddess,” an understanding later
amplified through anthropologist Marija
Gimbutas’s theories and their adoption within feminist
goddess movements. Decades later, archaeologist Ian Hodder
described
Çatalhöyük as a society with “no boss” or specialized
elites, yet characterized its death-related imagery as
“religious iconography” and in 2010 edited Religion
in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case
Study, generating debate
about the relationship between archaeological narratives,
contemporary interests and project sponsorship. At
Göbeklitepe, a comparable transformation unfolded between
Der Spiegel’s reports of 1998
and 2006,
alongside changing emphasis in Schmidt’s interpretation
that culminated in his 2006 book Sie
bauten die ersten Tempel: Das rätselhafte Heiligtum der
Steinzeitjäger (They Built the First Temples:
The Mysterious Sanctuary of the Stone Age
Hunters).
Although its title already invoked the
Garden of Eden, Der
Spiegel’s 1998 report was more firmly grounded in
material finds and subsistence. Its subtitle foregrounded
doorless buildings, burials, gazelle meat, and the origins
of settled life, while the article described the site and
its discoveries through materially grounded terms such as
“megalithic houses,” “megalithic pillars,” and a
“megalithic mound.” The article reported Schmidt’s
proposal that people had built windowless stone depots to
protect gazelle meat preserved by drying, roasting, and
salting. Schmidt imagined larders at the edges and temples
at the center. But the causal logic of his model remained
unmistakably subsistence-based: mass hunting and stored
surplus made settled life possible, after which people
experimented with cultivation and herding almost as a hobby.
Temples were already present in the interpretation, but
religion was not yet the driving force. No intervening
discovery established a clergy, temple economy, or
institution devoted exclusively to worship.
Yet
by 2006, the emphasis had shifted decisively. The temple
had moved from the center of a subsistence-based settlement
model to becoming the explanation for what led to the
settlements. The famous cover story brought this shift in
Schmidt’s interpretation fully into public view. Der
Spiegel now presented Göbeklitepe through an explicitly
biblical framework, staging a rapprochement between
scientific authority and biblical revelation. It announced
a remarkable debate in which geologists and climate
experts, not deterred by the revelatory character of
God’s document, believed that paradise had
coordinates, that it was a real place, and that the Old
Testament contained the signposts leading to it.
Archaeological and environmental evidence was used to
provide this narrative with a landscape, chronology, and
material record—from the rivers and sacred mountain of
Eden to Abraham’s connection with Urfa, Türkiye, to the
tree of the knowledge and snake to agricultural labor and
the emergence of property to violence and patriarchy; they
were all linked.
“Megalithic houses” became
“mighty snake temples.” Meanwhile, the possibility that
Adam really existed and the biblical story of the Fall could
have a historical basis became the main crux of the story.
The magazine had not discovered Eden between 1998 and 2006;
thereafter, it transformed Eden from an evocative framework
for looking at the material evidence into the main
explanation of that evidence.
This convergence suited
a particular historical moment. Rigid modernist and
Western-centered histories were losing authority, while
neoliberal globalization and postmodern civilizational
discourse encouraged the search for new global narratives to
replace them. A religious origin story rooted in the
“East,” in which scientific authority and biblical
memory appeared to confirm one another, offered both a safe
intellectual framework and a highly marketable story. It
especially found fertile ground in Türkiye, where the
political and bureaucratic elite who placed religion before,
and above all, other forces in human history were rising
within the wider climate of the “Alliance
of Civilizations.”
This interpretation wasn’t
just confined to religious conservatives. In a 2024
broadcast, even Evrim
Ağacı (“Tree of Evolution”)—a popular
science platform reaching millions and placing evolutionary
biology at the center of its mission—argued that
Göbeklitepe could not have been permanently inhabited
because, apart from tools for quarrying and shaping stone,
no domestic material had supposedly been found; its
architecture did not indicate permanent habitation; and
agriculture was absent from the region. The roofs of the
newly excavated surrounding structures were accordingly
recast as seating platforms for spectators—even though the
central, semi-subterranean buildings were themselves roofed,
leaving no line of sight into the interior. Grinding stones
and other traces of domestic activity were discounted, while
the absence of agriculture was treated as evidence against
settled hunter-gatherer life. This interpretation clings to
a linear, progressivist account of human development in
which Neolithic communities are presumed incapable of
complex organization and are governed instead by primitive
impulses, emotions and mystical thought; even contrary
material evidence is absorbed into this religious
explanation rather than used to challenge it.
Yet
there is a broader condition that encompasses and exceeds
the postmodernist and neomodernist approaches exemplified
above. As I have argued in previous
articles, the pan-crisis we are living through has
deepened a vacuum of grand narratives: the rational
modernist consensus has fractured, while traditional
religious accounts have likewise failed to provide adequate
answers. Populist spiritualisms and hybrid ideologies that
mix science, religion, mysticism and civilizational identity
have flourished in that space.
As I witnessed during
the documentary shoot, the temple story attracts people from
strikingly different backgrounds precisely because it is
flexible enough to accommodate mystical, religious,
rationalist and civilizational expectations all at once.
This may explain the story’s persistence but does not
establish its archaeological validity. To consider a more
archaeologically grounded interpretation of Taş Tepeler
would require us to turn from the narrative needs of the
present to the historical realities and everyday lives of
the people who built these places.
Seen within that
context, what emerged at Taş Tepeler is better understood
not as the sudden invention of belief, ritual, symbolic
thought, or collective architecture, but as a means of
adapting older practices to the changing times. During the
Paleolithic, some painted caves already appear to have
served as recurring places of gathering and symbolic
practice, while mammoth
bone structures demonstrate that communities could
create substantial spaces long before the Neolithic. Groups
also assembled across wide territories to exchange materials
and knowledge, sustain social and mating networks, share
labor, and renew collective memory. With the climatic
changes of the early Holocene and the transition toward
settled life, the ecology and limestone geology of the Taş
Tepeler region in Upper Mesopotamia made space for these
much older practices to secure a permanent and locally
distinctive architectural form.
Ritual undoubtedly
formed part of life in these spaces. But calling them
temples—and treating them as evidence that religion drove
the transition to settled life—assumes that religion
already existed as a distinct institutional sphere, separate
from subsistence, exchange, politics and social memory.
Neither a specialized clergy nor a temple economy or
institution devoted exclusively to worship has been
discovered. Nor did “religion” simply come first: the
effort to locate oneself within the universe and give
meaning to life evolved with the material and social
dimensions of human existence, assuming different forms as
life changed—neither preceding nor following
them.
The evidence points instead to multifunctional
places of assembly embedded within permanent settlement
landscapes, serving as the central hubs for everyday
socioeconomic cooperation, alliance building, and shared
ritual practice. Göbeklitepe’s significance lies not in
proving that religion built civilization, but in showing how
material cooperation, symbolic life and social memory became
embodied in permanent architecture. The large circular
structures were not separate from everyday existence; they
gave a collective form to the relationships through which
these communities sustained life.
By Erdem
Denk
Author Bio: Erdem Denk is a
professor of international law and international relations
at Ankara University and the founder of the
transdisciplinary research initiative Arkeopolitics, which
integrates archaeology, history, political theory, and legal
history to reinterpret the long-term dynamics of human
societies. His research focuses on the evolution of law and
social order since the Paleolithic. He is the author of
The 50,000-Year World Order: Societies and Their Laws
(2021, in Turkish) and is currently working on three books,
in Turkish and English, titled When There Was No
State, The Invention of the State, and The
Story of the State.
This article was produced
by Human
Bridges.
