Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Temples Before Cities?

Temples Before Cities?

Via one of Andrew Sullivan's assistants, here's an article about an archeological finding poised to change the story of the rise of Man. It about the dig at Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, where an extravagant complex of temples was constructed 11,500 years ago, centuries before the earliest know city, and with no city anywhere in sight. Klaus Schmidt, the chief archeologist, claims the need to have a temple ignited civilization rather than vice versa, the rise of civilization called forth religion.

Schmidt (55) has been digging there for 15 years, and expects to stay the rest of his life, yet he understood the full significance of the site in the first 60 seconds of his first visit.

The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.

The human mind is even more complex than its past.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Temples Before Cities?