2,500-year-old sculpture discovered at UNESCO site in Turkey | Hacker News Reader

2,500-year-old sculpture discovered at UNESCO site in Turkey

theartnewspaper.com

99 pointsspeckx50 comments

This must have been during or near the reign of Croesus, a very interesting king who was the last to rule Lydia, as recorded by Herodotus.

> It has been exceptionally well preserved because it was reused as a Roman-era paving stone on a colonnaded street

The sculpture is very 3-dimensional. I don't get how it made a good paving stone, or how being used as a paving stone didn't end up conflicting with the "well preserved" part more.

> The statue was discovered in two parts

So maybe it was about one of those parts and the lower one looks like it could be a decent paving stone.

The back side of it looks pretty flat - perhaps it was buried face down, in two pieces. The Romans were pretty crafty about re-using things.

Besides which, ever been to/seen the streets of Pompeii? Flat, level surfaces for road construction only seemed important to the Romans as a side quest. They would fill the gaps with stone and mortar - perhaps that is the case here.

> site in Turkey

Didn’t the country rename / rebrand to Türkiye?

Yes.

They don't have authority over a language, however, so English-speakers continue to spell it as they see fit.

yea but still most people use Turkey, instead of Türkiye.

the turkish name may be now Türkiye, but not the name in other languages

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Turkey#Presidential_ci...

Türkiye has expressed the desire that their exonym be uniform. The United Nations has complied in their policies and materials. The United States switched for diplomatic contexts, but in terms of mapping and geography, decided to retain the traditional English spelling.

I guess it’s unrelated to this particular find but is Turkey now the place where civilization first started or Gobekli Tepe and the other similar sites are not considered civilizations at this point?

I think you need evidence of a system of government, agriculture, culture, laws to dispense justice predictably and a writing system to track and record aspects of the above. Hence we can have Egyptian, Indus, etc., but not prehistoric civilizations. The human organizations just didn’t have enough progress to be considered civilized. Thats not to say they were not advanced vis a vis their other contemporaries but rather didn’t meet certain milestones that mark a civilization.

A distinctly Western European perspective.

I would rate Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization, personally.

Most early civilizations arose in the East (today’s India, Egypt, China, etc., not Europe but that’s the normal take on what constitutes civilization) else we verge on saying any human organization is civilization (which I would disagree with).

Go far enough East at the right time of history and you arrive at Narwala Gabarnmang, Sahul and Sundaland. (Not too far from ancient China, incidentally... walking distance, even...)

Anyway, until the work has been done, it is of course speculation - but I do personally believe that the civilization which occupied and cultivated the Australian continent for 80,000 years deserves at least a bit of interest from European guardians of civilization…

Sorry to ask, but why shouldn’t the Chinese or Indians be interested in that question as well? This doesn’t have to rest on what Europeans think. Why not what the Chinese or Indians think?

Anthropologically those human populations are generally considered “cultures” unless they have the milestones of civilizations.

If, as has been speculated, Narwala Gabarnmang is the original T-shaped pillar school of agriculture, which was then transmitted to the Tepe cultures and beyond, then of course it is of immense interest to everyone, not just Europeans and Chinese. If this transmission has occurred - then I think that is evidence of civilization, indeed. Just because we cannot properly read the Narwala Gabarnmang materials and the similarities with the Tepe cultural works, does not yield a final conclusion.

But this line of research has been thwarted by the closure of Gobekli Tepe and a discontinuation of the work to make the link.

I would hope the Chinese or Indians would pick up this line of research - however, I feel its pretty obvious that admitting to Narwala Gabarnmangs’ role in human development would require a humility even the Chinese are incapable of, let alone Europeans. Narwala Gabarnmang and the Tepe sites are both older than all of us. The link between the two is highly fascinating but postulating the connection does require a cultural hygiene which, in the modern zeitgeist, is distinctly difficult to maintain...

> A distinctly Western European perspective.

Well, "civilisation" is a Western European word for a Western European concept.

The first European civilization was the Minoan. Millenia after the Egyptian or Indus or Chinese. Anyway, in Europe it was the Greeks who contrasted people in city-states vs people from the hinterlands; after that it was the Romans who came up with the concept of citizenship and public life --all of that in southern Europe. Sure, the word civilization was coined by a Frenchman, but the idea was there first in southern Europe --I'm almost certain ancient Chinese had similar contrasts between people from the ruling city vs people from the hinterlands and beyond.

> Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization

It is is a rock shelter with a ceiling held up by pillars that appear to have been deliberately shaped and arranged by removing supporting columns to create usable space.

It has one of the longest continuous occupation records anywhere (charcoal dates back over 45,000 years, with art possibly around 28,000 years old), and it produced the world’s oldest known ground-edge stone axe fragment, dated to roughly 35,000–65,000 years ago, predating similar technology elsewhere by tens of thousands of years.

However: no writing, no cities, no centralized state, made by mobile hunter-gatherer groups rather than settled agriculturalists.

It’s also a place of education, a community center, a court for gathered people to hold council, a religious institution and a continuously occupied (except for a stint from 1950 - 2008) seat of power.

For 10’s of thousands of years.

The pillars were engineered to make the shelter more viable over time, and some of the pillars are constructed of stacks of layered rock which contain paintings. Like a stack of books in a library, if you will ..

The paintings record animal husbandry traditions, mythology, and tribal history, also.

> settled agriculturalists.

Australias original caretakers were a level of advanced agriculturalist not seen much elsewhere around the world, and there is emerging evidence that what they learned to do on that continent was transmitted around the world, perhaps as the first widespread distribution of agricultural knowledge - see the link to Gobekli Tepe, also, which - alas - is being minimized, with some speculation that for socio-political reasons it is being suppressed as a line of research…

The T-shaped pillars, it is speculated in some archeological and anthropological circles, refer to the pillars of the school of agriculture and animal husbandry that is, Narwala Gabarnmang and which was then manifest in the Tepe cultures. There are common symbols in both the Tepe site and at Narwala Gabarnmang - which we may not recognize as ‘words’, but which may well represent an encoded language not yet fully understood by those studying them.

The research continues, this is speculation and it is of course controversial to consider that Narwala Gabarnmang is the original school of agriculture, from which knowledge was transmitted to the other Tepe cultures, but please don’t let the authoritative canonicalization of the birthplace of human civilization ceiling hit you in the head .. after all, a lot of things can happen in the span of 80,000 years of human history.

I consider it one of the holiest places in all of human history, personally, but I do have a distinct desire to not propagate the other ‘holy land’ tropes that Europeans have propagated in the rush to eradicate cultures they’ve deemed inferior over the past few hundred years.

I think you're taking this the wrong way. It is certainly amazing and shows advanced culture! However, there's no evidence of civilization. That does not mean brute, or unsophisticated.

How so? The suggestion is that Gobekli Tepe is the original T-shaped pillar school of agricultural knowledge, thousands and thousands of years old, and which was subsequently replicated in another region of the world where agricultural knowledge also rapidly expanded through human industry.

That’s pretty clear. That it has not been academically demonstrated is of course relevant - but then, the research at Gobekli Tepe came to a screeching halt around the same time this idea was first proposed, so perhaps it is important to do more than just scratch the surface of the subject ..

Maybe you'd be happier if one used the more neutral term "complex society" instead of "civilization", since the latter has baggage. I imagine we can agree that some societies are more complex than others but that societal complexity is orthogonal to inherent cultural value.

Also, it is spelled Göbekli Tepe.

>”complex society” .. “civilization” .. “baggage” ..

If Gobekli Tepe is derived from Narwala Gabarnmang, that is civilization at its absolute finest - the transmission of agricultural knowledge from one region of the world, and the replication of one site of knowledge to another site, represents actual civil-ization.

> I imagine we can agree that some societies are more complex than others but that societal complexity is orthogonal to inherent cultural value.

Well, like I said at the top of the thread, I don’t think orthogonality nor complexity should be the basis of an understanding of the nature of civilization, whatsoever. From both of these abstract notions a hierarchy is defined - whereas I see, personally, a distinct expansion of human civilization occurring, if indeed the model institution of Narwala Gabarnmang was replicated in the Tepe cultures. This would be a very distinct basis of civilization, were it found to be accurate.

I acknowledge it is speculation, but it is very tantalizing - and in my opinion, entirely feasible speculation.

>Also, it is spelled Göbekli Tepe.

Öh, ǎlrīght. Ǐ’vẽ sêẽn īt spéllẽd ìn Ēnglìsh ǎnd īn Türkísh. Sørry, Í mêänt Tûrkïyē’îsh.

It’s true, I should’ve allowed for and been more respectful of that particular transmission of T-shaped knowledge…

> Gobekli Tepe is derived from Narwala Gabarnmang,

Ok, now we're just making up stuff.

It’s called speculating, and the actual academic research on this speculation is actually still ongoing, so defunding this proposition as ‘just making stuff up’ is just a negation technique that is intended to prevent further thought about what is factually a very fascinating possibility.

You do know that pretty much all science and technology begins with a tiny pinch of speculation, right? We wouldn’t even have civilization without someone making stuff up.

And both Göbekli Tepe and Narwala Gabarnmang sites are distinct examples of humans, making stuff up.

Really, how boring can you be.

> It’s called speculating

Indeed.

> Really, how boring can you be.

Some people speculate that humans were seeded by aliens. That's even more interesting than your story.

Yeah, there’s speculative evidence of this in both the Tepe and Gabarnmang cultures, also, true that .. of course one would have to discard a bit of baggage in order to pursue the idea though ..

I think the Dogan have similar structural architecture with similar purposes but made out of the wood and they are called Togu-Na.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toguna

Thats a fascinating reference, thanks for that .. putting it in my list of interesting ancient cultures to learn about.

Yes, I have been wanting to make a digital Togu-Na but can't quite figure out the shape or form:)

Doesn't civilization just literally mean a system of living together in a city? There doesn't need to be any written record of how they did it does there, just evidence that they did?

Urbanization is one qualifier but not the only one. Plus even today we could have such chaos in a town where laws are absent and justice is that dispensed by the strongman/woman warlord and that would hardly be considered civilization.

Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes.

> Uncivilized does not mean stupid or brutes.

Yet the presence of gathering places certainly does suggest civility! A warlord could command the cooperation necessary perhaps, but would have little reason to build that structure rather than walls and towers

> strongman/woman warlord

any examples of women warlords ? I'm interested because both gendering and not gendering that sentence would upset feminists and I can't tell if this is trolling or whether more thought went into why gendering felt like the safe bet here.

Boudicca. Joan of Arc. Grace O' Malley. There are some others.

Boudica comes to mind, I'm sure there are other notables.

Why would either upset feminists? Have you ever talked to a feminist?

> any examples of women warlords

Standout for me: Ching Shih (China, 1775–1844), Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba (Angola, c. 1583–1663), Zenobia (Palmyrene Empire, 3rd century CE), Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị (Vietnam, 1st century CE), Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (England, c. 870–918).

Some honorable mentions: Boudica, Khutulun, Rani Lakshmibai, Grace O’Malley.

What counts as a city? Anyway, we're talking about a concept involving family resemblances rather than an airtight set of sufficient-and-necessary conditions.

> Doesn't civilization just literally mean a system of living together in a city?

The classic checklist definition is: cities, writing, centralized state, agriculture, social stratification with rulers.

Which is what Rome would do to any group of people they came across. Rome defined "civilizatons" and other groups ended up conforming.

There isn’t really a settled definition of “civilization” but usually one of the requirements is developing some kind of writing system without outside influence. As far as we know the people at Gobekli Tepe did not have one.

Granted you can also argue the same about Incans and to some extent Mesoamericans, so it’s kind of debatable.

One of the definitions of civilisation is the building of substantial permanent settlements. Gobekli Tepe does qualify in that sense, as does Chatal Hoyuk. Gobekli Tepe features notable sculptures too.

There are very few places on Earth that developed writing completely independently, without any external influence. Far fewer than "civilizations"

The parent is just failing to explain a more fully developed concept called the "urban revolution", which classically has 10 characteristics of which writing is one and not all of which need to be present [0].

This entire discussion stems from the fact that the word "civilization" is essentially defined to fit the societies people already consider civilizations. There are technologically, politically, and socially complex societies that aren't "civilizations". My recommendation is to avoid the word entirely. Trying to use it scientifically leads to confusion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_revolution

If Göbekli Tepe doesn't count as an indication of a civilization, I don't know what does.

Requirement for a writing system is an arbitrary condition. A lot of civilizations, especially in that region, have strong oral traditions.

We have also been oblivious to other culture’s writing systems before.

Also would a knotted thread record keeping system count as writing?

The jury is out on quipu. There are very primitive tribes which use some forms of writing, which I would not count as having a civilisation.

Probably depends on definitions but there are cave paintings in France 20,000 years older and contemporary with sites in Australia. There are also much simpler Fertile Crescent sites that are older but not much more then holes in the ground.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com