The Guardian view on world heritage: in the beginning was the dream | Editorial

An astonishing neolithic ruin shows the incomprehensible variety and power of religionUnesco has just added to its list of world heritage sitesone of the most remarkable archaeological locations in the world, one which raises huge questions about the development of civilisation and offers no answers at all.G öbekli Tepe appears to be no more than a hill of dirt in the bare, brown landscape of south-eastern Turkey, but excavations starting in the 1990s revealed something extraordinary: beneath the surface were rings of megaliths, carved stones weighing up to 20 tonnes, which had been first placed there 11,000 years ago, before the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metal. No one seems actually to have lived on the site. This was, so far as we can tell, the first temple complex built anywhere on earth. It far predates cities. Its builders knew how to plant stones and carve them, but not to plant crops for food. Yet somehow they must have had the social organisation to come together in groups larger than any hunter-gatherer band and coordinate their labours over months or years.What they believed, and why they did this, remains a mystery, and one which opens a profound question. Did cities make gods or did gods make cities?One theory holds that the development of elaborate religions and belief systems followed the development of complicated societies, in which agriculture provided a surplus of food. There wererelatively large settlements in other parts of th...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Unesco Religion Archaeology Science Turkey World news United Nations Source Type: news