Göbeklitepe & Mount Nemrut: The Birthplace of Civilisation

These are not sites on the same road. Göbeklitepe is in the hills above Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey; Mount Nemrut is in the Taurus range above Adıyaman, three hours to the west. What connects them is not geography but significance: both are places that force a reconsideration of what human beings were doing — and were capable of — far earlier than the standard histories suggest.

Göbeklitepe, excavated from 1995 onward, is currently the oldest known temple complex in the world — approximately 11,600 years old, built by hunter-gatherers before the invention of agriculture, before the wheel, before pottery. The discovery required a rewriting of the sequence by which historians had explained the development of human civilisation. The question it poses — why would people who had not yet settled in one place build a temple of this scale and sophistication? — remains open.

Mount Nemrut is a different kind of astonishment. In the 1st century BC, King Antiochus I of Commagene had a tumulus of crushed rock built on the highest accessible peak of the eastern Taurus range — and arranged colossal stone heads of himself, flanked by the gods of three civilisations, to watch the sunrise and sunset for eternity. The heads have since fallen; they sit at the base of the thrones that supported them, looking out over a landscape of extraordinary scale. At 2,150 metres, in the early morning, it is one of the most quietly overwhelming places in Turkey.