FACING the PAST

South-east Turkey is home to some of the most important archaeological discoveries ever, so why aren’t there more visitors? We explore the spectacularly historic region to investigate why...

- DAMIEN GABET

The Fertile Crescent. Back at last. I was first here in south-eastern Turkey around 12,000 years ago and now I have returned. By “I”, of course, I humbly mean humanity. It’s a strange thing, but it did feel like I was somehow coming full circle. Here in erstwhile Mesopotamia, between the legendary Euphrates and Tigris rivers, is where civilisation began.

But the spot I was standing on, an unassuming archaeological site on a man-made hill near Sanliurfa, puts our existing account of the origins of settled life in the shredder. Göbekli Tepe’s been described as ‘the most important archaeological site in the world.’ It asks big questions about mankind, but I had another inquiry on my mind: why was I the only visitor here? And over the next three days, as I travelled around southeastern Turkey’s ‘cradle of civilization’, I found myself asking that same question again and again.

Ancient & alone

Identified in 1994 by the late German archaeologist Klaus Schmit, Göbekli Tepe (“Belly Hill”) is estimated by some to be around 12,000 years old. It is the oldest discovered man-made religious structure in the world, more than twice the age of box-fresh Stonehenge. But this arrangement of 10,000kg sculptures pre-dates the domestication of plants and animals by a cool millennium, potential proof that people first gathered not to farm, but to pray. The hows and whys have scripted the narratives of several interesting documentaries. To some theorists, aliens are not out of the question. However, I found that the details of this mightiest of history lessons were best related when actually looking down at the humanoid T-shaped megaliths themselves.