Photo: Cobija · Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0
Taş Tepeler
Nevalı Çori
Before anyone had heard of Göbeklitepe, a rescue excavation on a tributary of the Euphrates found T-shaped pillars set into the walls of a sunken building. The site now lies under a reservoir. Its finds, and its lesson, survived.
Nevalı Çori is the site that made Göbeklitepe legible. Excavated between 1983 and 1991 ahead of the Atatürk Dam, it produced the first known T-shaped pillars, a sunken building with a polished terrazzo floor, and a group of limestone sculptures that remain among the most striking objects of the Neolithic. In 1992 the rising reservoir covered it. Everything portable went to the Şanlıurfa museum; everything else is under water.
Where it was
The settlement stood on the Kantara stream, a tributary of the Euphrates, in the Hilvan district north of Şanlıurfa. It belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, with its main phases in the ninth millennium BCE, a little later than the first enclosures at Göbeklitepe and broadly contemporary with its later use.
A rescue excavation
The dig was led by Harald Hauptmann of Heidelberg University, working with the Şanlıurfa Museum, and it was a race: the Atatürk Dam was under construction and the valley was going to flood. Season by season the team uncovered rectangular houses with stone foundations and, set apart from them, a building unlike the rest.
The cult building
The so-called cult building was sunk into the slope, roughly square, with a bench running round the inside of the walls. Set into the walls at intervals stood T-shaped limestone pillars, and two more stood free in the centre of the room. Its floor was terrazzo: lime plaster with embedded stone chips, burnished to a hard, smooth surface. The building was rebuilt at least twice on the same spot.
Read those elements again and you have the recipe for Göbeklitepe: pillars in the walls, a bench, a pair of central pillars. When Klaus Schmidt, who had worked at Nevalı Çori, walked the hill at Göbeklitepe in 1994 and saw broken limestone slabs on the surface, he recognised pillar tops because he had already excavated them here. The cult building has been reconstructed in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, where you can stand inside it.
The sculptures
Nevalı Çori’s limestone sculptures are its other legacy. The best known is a human head with a snake carved down the back of the skull; there is a composite figure often called the totem pole, stacked with human and animal forms, and a bird figure. They show that the people who built with T-pillars also carved the human body, at scale and with intent, decades before Urfa Man and Göbeklitepe’s carved central pillars were known.
Early farming
Nevalı Çori also matters to the story of agriculture. Plant remains from the site include some of the earliest evidence for domesticated einkorn wheat, whose wild ancestor grows on the volcanic slopes of Karacadağ nearby. The community that built the cult building was, in other words, at the threshold of farming, which is exactly the threshold Göbeklitepe’s builders stood before.
Seeing it today
The site itself cannot be visited; it lies beneath the Atatürk reservoir. Its finds, the reconstructed building and the sculptures are in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, which is the reason the museum belongs in any Göbeklitepe itinerary.
Dates for Nevalı Çori’s phases are given in rounded form; the site is usually placed in the ninth millennium BCE, within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. As elsewhere in this guide, interpretation of the cult building’s use is presented as interpretation.
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