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Pre-Ancient Temples in Turkey

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TheEgoist

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This is a very interesting discovery, thanks for sharing the article Ryan. It really shows the capability and intelligence of man even in those times.

I'm skeptical of Schmidt's evaluation of the site, however. Nothing there seems to necessarily point to it being a religious site: it could very well be a 13,000 year old work of art absent of religious influences. The works on the stones were of naturalistic things, nothing symbolic or "other worldly." I doubt Schmidt has really invested too much time into philosophizing about the nature of art anyhow, so I'm not going to hold anything against him.

Huge kudos to Schmidt for finding this site, impressive.

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This is a very interesting discovery, thanks for sharing the article Ryan. It really shows the capability and intelligence of man even in those times.

The humans of that time (approx 10,000 ybp) were no different from us biologically. They were us and we are them (biologically speaking). The main difference is they lived at a time when people knew a good deal less than is known now, their tools were version 1.0 of what we take for granted (lever and inclined plane). But they still exercised the kind of empirically based approach to problem solving that modern engineers do. If you could go back to the ancient building site and bring the head engineer to modern times, after he overcame the shock of time travel and picked up on the language he would comprehend what modern engineers do quite well. A shovel is still a shovel (a kind of inclined plane) and a crane is still a crane ( a lever of the second kind ). Wheels are still round.

I admire our early counterparts a great deal. They did as much with the material they had to hand, as any humans could do. We humans are a very smart (but not always very wise) species of primate.

Bob Kolker

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  • 5 months later...

Thank you. That was interesting.

It is a common fallacy that cities evolved from agricultural villages which evolved from pastoral encampments. Jane Jacobs theorized (and proved) in The Economy of Cities that cities grew out of hunting camps which became trade sites. Successful hunters brought their bounty. She named her construct "Obsidian" but here it seems that like the town in Michigan, this site should be named "Flint." The archaeologist (or perhaps Newsweek) was surprised that the site had no natural resources, that everything had to be imported. But with flint as their export, they drews to themselves what they needed. Others benefited in cross-trade. It lasted for 1000 years. Hard to top that.

Also, as for what one man can do, see Wally Wallington on YouTube.

and see his personal website here:

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

To know whether this was "religion" or something else, we would ahve to see even more than is offered from a web search on Gobekli Tepe

which would (of course) bring you to Wikipedia here, at the very least.

Edited by Hermes
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  • 2 years later...

Here's an article suggesting why the Bogekli Tepe may have been a religious temple:

 

World's oldest temple built to worship the dog star

 

Today, Sirius can be seen almost worldwide as the brightest star in the sky – excluding the sun – and the fourth brightest night-sky object after the moon, Venus and Jupiter. Sirius is so noticeable that its rising and setting was used as the basis for the ancient Egyptian calendar, says Magli. At the latitude of Göbekli Tepe, Sirius would have been below the horizon until around 9300 BC, when it would have suddenly popped into view.

 

"I propose that the temple was built to follow the 'birth' of this star," says Magli. "You can imagine that the appearance of a new object in the sky could even have triggered a new religion."

 

Of course, what such article would be complete without the obligatory disclaimer: :)

 

Ongoing excavations might rule out any astronomical significance, says Jens Notroff, also at DAI.  "We are still discussing whether the monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were open or roofed," he says. "In the latter case, any activity regarding monitoring the sky would, of course, have been rather difficult."

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  • 6 years later...

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