I’ve deliberately saved the most important posts for last, the posts about the most ancient high place or religious site/sanctuary yet found on earth, dating to about 9.600 B.C. and so a Neolithic site. I am referring to the dig outside of the town of Urfa at Gobeckli Tepe, which I’ve blogged about before, so this is an update on the dig there…..Here’s an orienting map.
Here’s the view from this high place…. This very area is where agriculture, the cultivation of drops, in this case seed corn, began as well. The first spot where real excavation began was at the so-called rock temple, at the lowest level of the site…. The excavation soon expanded up the hill and has been going on over twenty years now, first led by Klaus Schmidt, and then by his wife and others. This shows the sacrificial pit, and the area surrounding it is itself pitted…. Here is a little timeline to help get a sense of how old this religious site is. The most important thing to say at this juncture is that this site pre-dates organized village life, which ruins the common anthropological theory that religion came after village life as a result of the human need for more harmony and unity. Wrong…. human beings were religious, or as I would put, created in the image of God, from the outset. This religious site pre-dates the pyramids by thousands of years.