Göbekli Tepe and Derinkuyu: The History of Ancient Anatolia's Most Unique Sites by Charles River Editors
English | October 24, 2024 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B0DKY7Z4CC | 95 pages | EPUB | 6.01 Mb
The Neolithic period came before the Bronze Age and is generally regarded as the final subdivision of the Stone Age. During this time, communities domesticated plants and certain animals but still relied on hunting and gathering to a considerable extent, and beginning sometime around 7000 BCE, handmade pottery was developed, along with more advanced stone axes that enabled people to clear vast forests. Thanks to tools like that, the sizes of these Neolithic communities ranged from thousands to as few as a hundred, and they spread across the world with a variety of cultures and languages. One aspect these cultures had in common was that they relied on similar tools made of stone, wood, and bone.
Despite the fact some Neolithic communities grew to considerable sizes, they're typically not considered when people think of the first ancient civilizations or the first major cities, so when German archaeologists discovered the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s, it created an academic firestorm that is still raging. Far from being just another settlement, Göbekli Tepe has been described as the world's first temple and perhaps one of the locations where human civilization began. Subsequent archaeological work at Göbekli Tepe has revealed that the site was a spiritual center for the local population during a time when humans were undergoing a transition as hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic Period to a more sedentary lifestyle in the Neolithic Period, more than 10,000 years ago. Further research in the disciplines of anthropology, religion, and history indicate that the activity at Göbekli Tepe subsequently set the tone for elements of Neolithic and Bronze Age religion and ideology in the Near East, especially in Anatolia (roughly equivalent with modern Turkey).
Although many elements of Göbekli Tepe's history remain an enigma, and probably will in the future due to the nature of the source material, the relatively recent work at the site has helped historians speculate about how Near Eastern people lived in the Mesolithic Period, how those lifestyles evolved, and how they contributed to the history of the era.
The lost city of Derinkuyu descends to depths of nearly 300 feet under the wind-swept cliffs and rock formations of the otherwise desolate region known as Cappadocia. Cappadocia's landscape looks otherworldly, windswept, and unlivable in places, and if not for modern technologies, including electricity, sanitation, and irrigation, it surely would be considered inhabitable by many people.
However, despite the unforgiving nature of the region and climate, Derinkuyu, which started with a series of cave constructions in the 7th century BCE, managed to become a somewhat bustling location when the Byzantine Empire controlled the area in the Early Middle Ages, alive with a combination of peasants, pilgrims, merchants, and warriors. As is the case with many archaeological sites, it was surpassed and forgotten with the advent of the modern world, so when Derinkuyu was serendipitously discovered in the mid-20th century, it remained a curiosity for quite some time and did not elicit much scholarly attention beyond the initial archaeological work and subsequent reports.
More recently, Derinkuyu has caught the attention of tourists, while academics have started to ask serious questions about this important site. Recent studies of Derinkuyu have helped illuminate how a city able to house 20,000 or more people could exist in antiquity, particularly with regard to logistics. How the administrators of Derinkuyu were able to provide its people with food, water, and even air has, for the most part, been answered, even though the site has not been fully excavated.
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