12 ms·

What Came First: The Village or the Temple? Or, the Mystery of Göbekli Tepe

91 points by kaycebasques 8y ago

dpeck 8y ago
Weren't quite a few major cities in Europe founded around monestaries? Seems very reasonable to me that temple sites could be precursors to villages the same way bountiful rivers and coastlines could be. To vastly oversimplify: Religious/cultural sites become a center for pilgrimage, festivals, etc. Those lead to people being around, those people bring things with them that leads to trade, and eventually some people settle in the area for various reasons and then you have a village.
- waserwill 8y ago
  The assumption, as seen in the first set of bullet points, has been: agriculture -> sedentary lifestyle -> large monuments. The discovery of Gobekli Tepe suggests that (in at least some cases), large monuments came first. This is unexpected because there was assumed to be (1) no reason for such monuments before sedentary life (anthropological, i.e. the formation of organised religions was supposed to coincide with the organisation of hierarchies in sedentary life), and (2) not enough manpower to construct such architecture (i.e. nomads wouldn't come together for months to build permanent structures).
  - posterboy 8y ago
    Gobekli Tepe may be comparable to Stone Hench in time. That was not a permanent settlement. I think this was not, as well. Seclusion and secrecy is part of religion, so it wouldn't be reasonable to build amidst a sprawling cohort anyway. If it was started as a central hub, the need was maybe not originally religious but it would have been in a good position to be cultivated religiously once the need became obvious.
    - waserwill 8y ago
      Indeed, it is not a permanent settlement. Suggestions as to its usage generally agree that is was used for several months a year for centuries or millenia, with gatherings of several groups. The monuments of Stonehenge were built by pre-Celtic agriculturalists in Great Britain, not by per-agricultural peoples. Questions remain: why would people aggregate where they did; how would they sustain themselves in a semi-permanent settlement (months at a time) without agricultural products? (Livestock had recently been domesticated by this point, but need to be moved regularly to graze.) The assumption of its being religious is simple: it isn't shelter, and it has imagery resembling later depictions of religious figures in the region. Religion here is a more general term to encompass the intersection of culture and spirituality. Was it originally non-religious? If so, why aggregate for months to build a structure, before trade was valuable or very necessary?
      - canhascodez 8y ago
        Isn't the concept of trade not being valuable sort of contradictory? Even without the concept of individual ownership, the precondition would seem to merely be that something is valued. Trade is not (remotely) unique to humans, and I don't think it's possible that human society would ever have been without it.
        waserwill 8y ago
        I mean trade as an institution, not just sporadic interpersonal bartering and sharing; more like merchants, trade routes, and the like. Exchange is not unique to man; trade, as such, is. Trade becomes more worthwhile when communities begin to specialise. When people are nomadic, they cross many lands, and can simply find what they want on the way (obsidian from the mountains, shells by the sea, berries, roots, and game in forests). When people begin to stay in one place, long distance travel for trade becomes more valuable. As soon as agriculture develops, we discover that obsidian shards from deposits in the Caucasus are found thousands of miles away in central Europe. You begin to have towns focusing on a specific resource, or serving a trade route as goods and people criss-cross the land (Jericho, among the earliest known cities, for example, was possibly involved in the trade of salt; few things can grow in the soil near it).
  - monocasa 8y ago
    I've been learning a bunch about the early/mid bronze age recently, and my understanding is that they co-developed. In a lot of ways the temples were repositories of information infrastructure to handle large groups of people. Writing for instance developed in the temples in order to keep track of agricultural stockpiles and essentially to run their economies.
    - waserwill 8y ago
      That depends a lot on which bronze age you're referring to! Different civilisations developed a little differently, particularly where writing is concerned. While in Egypt, writing developed out of central records, it likely developed (slightly earlier) in Mesopotamia as an expansion of a token system, used to ensure counts of livestock, etc. It should also be noted that Gobekli Tepe was built several millenia before the beginning of the near-eastern Bronze Age. The reason it IS so fascinating is its having been built millenia before agriculture. The systems of religion, administration, and agriculture, did co-develop, but could only do so after the agricultural revolution.
  - lumost 8y ago
    would be interesting to see this assumption contrasted against the monuments of more modern nomadic peoples such as the mongols. Nomads still need gathering points to trade etc.
- posterboy 8y ago
  Yes sure that's one way. Another way is a landlord granting a title to a monestary alotting 200 existing villages around to supply for the monestary.
pouta 8y ago
Joe Rohan Experience has an amazing podcast that talks about this. Here is the clip: https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  I did watch all the Graham Hancock stuff on JRE podcast, going back years. Really fun stuff. I did get super turned off by the last one with Hancock and the skeptic guy where Hancock can't control his temper. Randal Carson is fun to listen to also. Whether there's any scientific basis to Hancock's work, I'm not enough of an expert to tell.
Alex3917 8y ago
The fact that Gobekli Tepe potentially overturns our understanding of the invention of agriculture, or at the very least completely rewrites the timeline is very interesting. Potentially even more interesting though, what's the deal with all the handbags?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvdrkSUVn70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvdrkSUVn70
- lovemenot 8y ago
  >> what's the deal with all the handbags? What's the mystery? It wouldn't be surprising to see many representations of spears in so many ancient cultures: there were hunters / warriors right? Well there were gatherers too. Handbag is just a natural design for this function.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > Handbag is just a natural design for this function. As someone who has spent many thousands of hours foraging, I've got to disagree on there. You wouldn't be able to fit even one meal for a single person into a bag like that. Consider that a kilogram of mushrooms is only around 25 calories, and this bag probably wouldn't even fit that much. Clearly they would have gotten most of their calories from meat, but even still a bag like that wouldn't hold enough produce for even a modestly sized side of vegetables.
    - batiudrami 8y ago
      A kilogram is closer to 250Cal/1000kJ but you're right - it's not even a meal for one.
      - Alex3917 8y ago
        Ahh you're right, I think I just found a bad site for the first thing I googled. I took a rough measurement though just by holding my arm in the same position, the bag seems to be about 6 inches deep and 4 - 5 inches wide. So maybe you could comfortably fit around 110 cubic inches of stuff in there, which is around 7.5 cups. So lets be generous and call it ~125 calories, maybe a little more if the carvings aren't properly to scale. But keep in mind also that if you're hunting or foraging you're probably going to need more than just 2,000 calories or whatever.
hprotagonist 8y ago
The thing that consistently blows my mind is that by the time we were getting around to building things in the middle east, Aborigines in Australia had been going back to the same hunting camp for 40,000 years. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery-of-50000-year-old-human-settlements-in-australian-interior/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery-of-5...
- xg15 8y ago
  I remember having read something similar a while ago about a cave in France which was used a sort of natural paint supply over a time of around 10,000 years. Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time. Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers. Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers. Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers. Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.
  - irrational 8y ago
    Yet, as far as I understand, if you took an infant and brought it forward to our time it could grow up to be a theoretical physics professor. That is, they were no different than us. Why the stagnation for so long?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > Why the stagnation for so long? Exponential growth of technology. It's only in the past couple centuries that inventions started to add up and lead to further inventions within a single lifetime. Before that, the lives of people separated by 200 years were roughly identical, with maybe a single thing improving here or there.
uyhh 8y ago
Looking into the past is not straight forward. In India, the oldest temples that can be found are all stone based structures. But that doesn't mean they were the oldest temples built. There is lot of evidence that shows the original proto temples were all wood based. And the full stone temple designs came much much later. But wood doesn't last 10000 years so there is lots and lots of guess work involved in recreating how society functioned back then.
sakopov 8y ago
I'm half Armenian and I learned about Gobekli Tepe under the name Portasar from my father when i was a little kid. The only sources about the origin of the word Portasar show up online in unofficial sources. I do not read or speak Armenian so I cannot comment on the sources of Gobekli Tepe in Armenian literature. However, one thing that is peculiar to me is that Gobekli Tepe is located on the territory of ancient Armenian Mesopotamia [1]. Anybody else know anything about this? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Mesopotamia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Mesopotamia
- jballanc 8y ago
  Armenians, as an ethnogenetic group, did not arise until around 3000 BCE. Gobekli Tepe was abandoned by 7000 BCE, so there is no historical overlap.
virtualsue 8y ago
Likewise, I had a brief conversation with the fascinating Dr Lewis Dartnell where we discussed the origin of barley farming. Did our ancestors grow it for food, and accidentally discover that you can also make beer with it, or did the beer come first and bread second? I had assumed the former, but now that I think about it...
- xanthopan 8y ago
  i'd bet that proto-beer and proto-bread appeared around the same time, and techniques were developed over generations to calibrate different recipes until they resembled what we might recognize as "beer" and "bread" today.
timmytwotime 8y ago
Robert Schoch has some things to say about this too, and seems to back it up. https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html A bit of a stretch in this article but interesting.
8bitsrule 8y ago
I'm dubious about the attachment of the label 'temple' to Gobekli. Perhaps, instead, it was a school. (Common as it is, calling any ancient site a 'temple' without some pretty substantial evidence ... could be very misleading.)
- everdrive 8y ago
  Serious reply --- wouldn't the reverse be true? A school in ancient times would more closely resemble a religious institution than anything like a modern school?
- kaycebasques 8y ago
  Sorry, that was an oversight on my part. At some points in the original article you can see that I meant a "cultural center" in general, but at other times I do assign too specific of a meaning to the place by using the word "temple" and mentioning gods, which is not the argument that Harari is making. I added an edit to the article calling out this mistake.
pdfernhout 8y ago
Jane Jacobs said this decades ago -- cities (well, towns or trading places) came before agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
prehistacct123 8y ago
an upper paleolithic shakti shrine in india 11kya https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine-india https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine-ind...
hinkley 8y ago
In addition to the common theories on GT, I think this could be anything from an embodiment of a treaty to a family reunion site. If you had a particularly robust tribe, you would in a few generations outstrip the foraging capacity of your area. Nomadism helps but at some point your group may have to split in two to expand your radius. If you split on bad terms you might become rivals. But what if you split on good terms? You might never see your cousins again unless you made an effort. Let’s meet on this hilltop at the summer solstice every year. There will be too many of us to forage or hunt, so bring food and the hunters will find something else to do to fill the time. We could wrestle. Or carve rocks or something. You know like grandpa Joe used to do. Man I miss grandpa Joe. Too bad about the bear.

91 points by kaycebasques 8y ago

Weren't quite a few major cities in Europe founded around monestaries? Seems very reasonable to me that temple sites could be precursors to villages the same way bountiful rivers and coastlines could be. To vastly oversimplify: Religious/cultural sites become a center for pilgrimage, festivals, etc. Those lead to people being around, those people bring things with them that leads to trade, and eventually some people settle in the area for various reasons and then you have a village.

waserwill 8y ago
The assumption, as seen in the first set of bullet points, has been: agriculture -> sedentary lifestyle -> large monuments. The discovery of Gobekli Tepe suggests that (in at least some cases), large monuments came first. This is unexpected because there was assumed to be (1) no reason for such monuments before sedentary life (anthropological, i.e. the formation of organised religions was supposed to coincide with the organisation of hierarchies in sedentary life), and (2) not enough manpower to construct such architecture (i.e. nomads wouldn't come together for months to build permanent structures).
- posterboy 8y ago
  Gobekli Tepe may be comparable to Stone Hench in time. That was not a permanent settlement. I think this was not, as well. Seclusion and secrecy is part of religion, so it wouldn't be reasonable to build amidst a sprawling cohort anyway. If it was started as a central hub, the need was maybe not originally religious but it would have been in a good position to be cultivated religiously once the need became obvious.
  - waserwill 8y ago
    Indeed, it is not a permanent settlement. Suggestions as to its usage generally agree that is was used for several months a year for centuries or millenia, with gatherings of several groups. The monuments of Stonehenge were built by pre-Celtic agriculturalists in Great Britain, not by per-agricultural peoples. Questions remain: why would people aggregate where they did; how would they sustain themselves in a semi-permanent settlement (months at a time) without agricultural products? (Livestock had recently been domesticated by this point, but need to be moved regularly to graze.) The assumption of its being religious is simple: it isn't shelter, and it has imagery resembling later depictions of religious figures in the region. Religion here is a more general term to encompass the intersection of culture and spirituality. Was it originally non-religious? If so, why aggregate for months to build a structure, before trade was valuable or very necessary?
    - canhascodez 8y ago
      Isn't the concept of trade not being valuable sort of contradictory? Even without the concept of individual ownership, the precondition would seem to merely be that something is valued. Trade is not (remotely) unique to humans, and I don't think it's possible that human society would ever have been without it.
      - waserwill 8y ago
        I mean trade as an institution, not just sporadic interpersonal bartering and sharing; more like merchants, trade routes, and the like. Exchange is not unique to man; trade, as such, is. Trade becomes more worthwhile when communities begin to specialise. When people are nomadic, they cross many lands, and can simply find what they want on the way (obsidian from the mountains, shells by the sea, berries, roots, and game in forests). When people begin to stay in one place, long distance travel for trade becomes more valuable. As soon as agriculture develops, we discover that obsidian shards from deposits in the Caucasus are found thousands of miles away in central Europe. You begin to have towns focusing on a specific resource, or serving a trade route as goods and people criss-cross the land (Jericho, among the earliest known cities, for example, was possibly involved in the trade of salt; few things can grow in the soil near it).
- monocasa 8y ago
  I've been learning a bunch about the early/mid bronze age recently, and my understanding is that they co-developed. In a lot of ways the temples were repositories of information infrastructure to handle large groups of people. Writing for instance developed in the temples in order to keep track of agricultural stockpiles and essentially to run their economies.
  - waserwill 8y ago
    That depends a lot on which bronze age you're referring to! Different civilisations developed a little differently, particularly where writing is concerned. While in Egypt, writing developed out of central records, it likely developed (slightly earlier) in Mesopotamia as an expansion of a token system, used to ensure counts of livestock, etc. It should also be noted that Gobekli Tepe was built several millenia before the beginning of the near-eastern Bronze Age. The reason it IS so fascinating is its having been built millenia before agriculture. The systems of religion, administration, and agriculture, did co-develop, but could only do so after the agricultural revolution.
- lumost 8y ago
  would be interesting to see this assumption contrasted against the monuments of more modern nomadic peoples such as the mongols. Nomads still need gathering points to trade etc.
posterboy 8y ago
Yes sure that's one way. Another way is a landlord granting a title to a monestary alotting 200 existing villages around to supply for the monestary.

pouta 8y ago

Joe Rohan Experience has an amazing podcast that talks about this. Here is the clip: https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE

throwaway8879 8y ago
I did watch all the Graham Hancock stuff on JRE podcast, going back years. Really fun stuff. I did get super turned off by the last one with Hancock and the skeptic guy where Hancock can't control his temper. Randal Carson is fun to listen to also. Whether there's any scientific basis to Hancock's work, I'm not enough of an expert to tell.

Alex3917 8y ago

The fact that Gobekli Tepe potentially overturns our understanding of the invention of agriculture, or at the very least completely rewrites the timeline is very interesting. Potentially even more interesting though, what's the deal with all the handbags?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvdrkSUVn70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvdrkSUVn70

lovemenot 8y ago
>> what's the deal with all the handbags? What's the mystery? It wouldn't be surprising to see many representations of spears in so many ancient cultures: there were hunters / warriors right? Well there were gatherers too. Handbag is just a natural design for this function.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > Handbag is just a natural design for this function. As someone who has spent many thousands of hours foraging, I've got to disagree on there. You wouldn't be able to fit even one meal for a single person into a bag like that. Consider that a kilogram of mushrooms is only around 25 calories, and this bag probably wouldn't even fit that much. Clearly they would have gotten most of their calories from meat, but even still a bag like that wouldn't hold enough produce for even a modestly sized side of vegetables.
  - batiudrami 8y ago
    A kilogram is closer to 250Cal/1000kJ but you're right - it's not even a meal for one.
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      Ahh you're right, I think I just found a bad site for the first thing I googled. I took a rough measurement though just by holding my arm in the same position, the bag seems to be about 6 inches deep and 4 - 5 inches wide. So maybe you could comfortably fit around 110 cubic inches of stuff in there, which is around 7.5 cups. So lets be generous and call it ~125 calories, maybe a little more if the carvings aren't properly to scale. But keep in mind also that if you're hunting or foraging you're probably going to need more than just 2,000 calories or whatever.

hprotagonist 8y ago

The thing that consistently blows my mind is that by the time we were getting around to building things in the middle east, Aborigines in Australia had been going back to the same hunting camp for 40,000 years. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery-of-50000-year-old-human-settlements-in-australian-interior/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery-of-5...

xg15 8y ago
I remember having read something similar a while ago about a cave in France which was used a sort of natural paint supply over a time of around 10,000 years. Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time. Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers. Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers. Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers. Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.
- irrational 8y ago
  Yet, as far as I understand, if you took an infant and brought it forward to our time it could grow up to be a theoretical physics professor. That is, they were no different than us. Why the stagnation for so long?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > Why the stagnation for so long? Exponential growth of technology. It's only in the past couple centuries that inventions started to add up and lead to further inventions within a single lifetime. Before that, the lives of people separated by 200 years were roughly identical, with maybe a single thing improving here or there.

uyhh 8y ago

Looking into the past is not straight forward. In India, the oldest temples that can be found are all stone based structures. But that doesn't mean they were the oldest temples built. There is lot of evidence that shows the original proto temples were all wood based. And the full stone temple designs came much much later. But wood doesn't last 10000 years so there is lots and lots of guess work involved in recreating how society functioned back then.

sakopov 8y ago

I'm half Armenian and I learned about Gobekli Tepe under the name Portasar from my father when i was a little kid. The only sources about the origin of the word Portasar show up online in unofficial sources. I do not read or speak Armenian so I cannot comment on the sources of Gobekli Tepe in Armenian literature. However, one thing that is peculiar to me is that Gobekli Tepe is located on the territory of ancient Armenian Mesopotamia [1]. Anybody else know anything about this? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Mesopotamia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Mesopotamia

jballanc 8y ago
Armenians, as an ethnogenetic group, did not arise until around 3000 BCE. Gobekli Tepe was abandoned by 7000 BCE, so there is no historical overlap.

virtualsue 8y ago

Likewise, I had a brief conversation with the fascinating Dr Lewis Dartnell where we discussed the origin of barley farming. Did our ancestors grow it for food, and accidentally discover that you can also make beer with it, or did the beer come first and bread second? I had assumed the former, but now that I think about it...

xanthopan 8y ago
i'd bet that proto-beer and proto-bread appeared around the same time, and techniques were developed over generations to calibrate different recipes until they resembled what we might recognize as "beer" and "bread" today.

timmytwotime 8y ago

Robert Schoch has some things to say about this too, and seems to back it up. https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html A bit of a stretch in this article but interesting.

8bitsrule 8y ago

I'm dubious about the attachment of the label 'temple' to Gobekli. Perhaps, instead, it was a school. (Common as it is, calling any ancient site a 'temple' without some pretty substantial evidence ... could be very misleading.)

everdrive 8y ago
Serious reply --- wouldn't the reverse be true? A school in ancient times would more closely resemble a religious institution than anything like a modern school?
kaycebasques 8y ago
Sorry, that was an oversight on my part. At some points in the original article you can see that I meant a "cultural center" in general, but at other times I do assign too specific of a meaning to the place by using the word "temple" and mentioning gods, which is not the argument that Harari is making. I added an edit to the article calling out this mistake.

pdfernhout 8y ago

Jane Jacobs said this decades ago -- cities (well, towns or trading places) came before agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

prehistacct123 8y ago

an upper paleolithic shakti shrine in india 11kya https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine-india https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine-ind...

hinkley 8y ago

In addition to the common theories on GT, I think this could be anything from an embodiment of a treaty to a family reunion site. If you had a particularly robust tribe, you would in a few generations outstrip the foraging capacity of your area. Nomadism helps but at some point your group may have to split in two to expand your radius. If you split on bad terms you might become rivals. But what if you split on good terms? You might never see your cousins again unless you made an effort. Let’s meet on this hilltop at the summer solstice every year. There will be too many of us to forage or hunt, so bring food and the hunters will find something else to do to fill the time. We could wrestle. Or carve rocks or something. You know like grandpa Joe used to do. Man I miss grandpa Joe. Too bad about the bear.