Predating all known ancient civilizations, Göbekli Tepe may be world's first architecture

2018-08-06T15:13:00-04:00

At around 12,000 years old, Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey has been billed as the world’s oldest temple. It is many millennia older than Stonehenge or Egypt’s great pyramids, built in the pre-pottery Neolithic period before writing or the wheel. But should Göbekli Tepe, which became a Unesco World Heritage Site in July, also be regarded as the world’s oldest piece of architecture?

T-shaped limestone pillars. Image: Wikipedia.

Archaeological research of the ancient Göbekli Tepe ruin site in present-day Turkey suggests that the impressive monolithic structures, believed to date back to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic era (10th–8th millennium BCE), might in fact be the first known example of architecture. "Rather than architecture being the product of organised societies, as has long been thought, there is new thinking that, in fact, it may have been the organisation needed to build on such a scale that helped usher in agriculture and settled society," The Art Newspaper writes.

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Predating all known ancient civilizations, Göbekli Tepe may be world's first architecture