Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe rewrote the chronology of civilisation. The circular enclosures on this hilltop were raised around 9600 BC by people who had not yet invented pottery, agriculture or the wheel, and they predate Stonehenge by roughly seven thousand years.

At the centre of each enclosure stand pairs of T-shaped limestone pillars up to five and a half metres tall, carved with foxes, boars, cranes, scorpions and snakes, some with arms and hands rendered in low relief along their sides — abstracted human figures rather than mere posts.

The discovery upended a long-held assumption. Monumental architecture was supposed to follow settled farming; here it clearly came first, which suggests the impulse to build sanctuaries may have driven people to settle rather than the other way round. The site was inscribed by UNESCO in 2018.