First Pictorial Representation of Gobekli Tepe Found

A tiny bone plaque in Sanliurfa museum holds the key to the orientation of the 11,500 year-old temple complex.

It was found during routine excavations at the 11,500-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey, but no one had recognised exactly what the carved lines on the small bone plaque showed. That was until Matthew Smith, a British telecommunications consultant living in Qatar, visited Sanliurfa’s new archaeology museum, just 8 miles (13 kilometres) away from Göbekli Tepe itself. He saw something that everyone else had missed, and this was that the little plaque – just 6 cm by 2.5 cm in size, and no more than 3-4 mm in thickness – bore on its upper surface two T-shaped features like the T-shaped pillars found in profusion at the site.

That the two T-shaped pillars shown on the plaque are side by side, their heads clearly visible (see fig. 1), implies they signify the twin pillars found at the centre of all the major enclosures investigated so far at Göbekli Tepe. Some, like those seen in Enclosures C and D, were originally 5 to 6 metres in height and weighed as much as 15 to 20 tonnes a piece (see fig. 2).