Megaliths - Early Stone Complexes in Eastern Turkey

Early Stone Complexes in Eastern Turkey

At a number of sites in eastern Turkey, large ceremonial complexes from the 9th millennium BC have been discovered. They belong to the incipient phases of agriculture and animal husbandry. Large circular structures involving carved megalithic orthostats are a typical feature, e.g. at Nevali Cori and Göbekli Tepe. Although these structures are the most ancient megalithic structures known so far, it is not clear that any of the European Megalithic traditions (see below) are actually derived from them. At Göbekli Tepe four stone circles have been excavated from an estimated 20. Some measure up to 30 metres across. The stones carry carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions.

Read more about this topic:  Megaliths

Famous quotes containing the words early, stone, eastern and/or turkey:

    Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.
    C. John Sommerville (20th century)

    Fretted shadow on stumps
    A vanishing husk
    Of light . . . grey lumps
    Of stone verge the hills with fears.
    It is quickly dusk.
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)

    But we are spirits of another sort.
    I with the morning’s love have oft made sport,
    And like a forester the groves may tread
    Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,
    Opening on Neptune with fair blessèd beams,
    Turns unto yellow gold his salt green streams.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.
    Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)