Karahan Tepe is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Şanlıurfa Province, south-east Turkey, about 46 km east of Göbekli Tepe, where people carved T-shaped stone pillars and rock-cut buildings more than 11,000 years ago. Excavated since 2019 by a team led by Necmi Karul of Istanbul University, it is the best-known sister site of Göbekli Tepe within the Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills) project, and its finds include a bedrock chamber of pillars watched over by a carved human head.
Karahan Tepe matters because it shows that Göbekli Tepe was not a one-off. The same pillar tradition, the same animal imagery and the same habit of deliberately burying buildings appear across a whole landscape of hilltop sites, all made by communities living at the very start of the transition to farming. For anyone asking how old organised ritual, monumental building and symbolic art really are, this cluster of sites is now the central evidence, and it is still mostly underground.
Where is Karahan Tepe and how old is it?
Karahan Tepe sits in the Tek Tek Mountains National Park in Şanlıurfa Province, roughly 46 km east of Göbekli Tepe and about 55 km from the centre of Şanlıurfa city. The site belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the period before people made fired pottery, spanning the late PPNA into the early PPNB.
The Taş Tepeler project dates the site's main phase to around the middle of the 10th millennium BCE, and reference summaries commonly give construction from about 9750 BCE and abandonment around 9400 BCE. Excavators describe at least three phases of occupation. That places them broadly alongside the earlier layers of Göbekli Tepe and thousands of years before the first Sumerian cities. Our ancient civilizations timeline shows where that sits against Egypt, Sumer and Rome.
The site is large. It covers almost 10 hectares, or about 15 including the surrounding quarries, and by 2023 only around 5 percent of it had been excavated. More than 250 T-shaped pillars were visible at the surface before excavation began; the figure usually quoted from the first survey is 266.
Who discovered Karahan Tepe?
Karahan Tepe was identified in 1997 by the archaeologist Bahattin Çelik of Harran University, who published it in the journal Neo-Lithics in 2000 as a new Early Neolithic settlement.
Systematic excavation began in 2019 under Necmi Karul and Istanbul University's Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, as part of the wider Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project. The legacy 4biddenknowledge article on discovering the secrets of Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe covers the early coverage of the two sites together.
What is the pillar chamber at Karahan Tepe?
The pillar chamber is a room cut directly into the bedrock, with pillars left standing from the living rock and a human head carved out of the wall above them. Karul's team announced it in October 2021, describing 11 pillars and the carved head, and Karul said that all of the pillars were erected and shaped like a phallus.
The excavators name the chamber Structure AB. According to the Taş Tepeler project's own description, it measures about 7 by 6 metres and is 3.5 metres deep, with the head carved into the bedrock and a group of pillars standing opposite it (the project page lists ten), and a serpentine channel cut into the floor surface. Structure AB connects by stairs to Structure AD, a much larger circular communal building with an internal diameter of about 23 metres, cut 4.5 metres into the bedrock and ringed by 16 wall pillars with two further pillars facing each other in the centre. Together these form a linked complex that the team interprets as a place for ritual gatherings rather than ordinary housing. Our earlier piece on the 11,000-year-old pillars found near Göbekli Tepe describes the chamber as it was first reported.
Two other details tie the site to Göbekli Tepe. Snakes and a fox are carved on other buildings at Karahan Tepe, echoing the animal repertoire at Göbekli Tepe. And the buildings were deliberately backfilled with soil and rubble once they went out of use. The project describes the communal buildings as intentionally filled in after their function was completed, which is why they survive so well.
What statues have been found at Karahan Tepe?
The most striking statue is a 2.3-metre seated male figure announced by Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism in early October 2023. He sits on a stone bench and holds his phallus in both hands, a theme that matches the phallic pillars of Structure AB. For scale, the famous Urfa Man, found in Şanlıurfa in 1993, stands about 1.8 metres.
The same October 2023 announcement included a separate find from Göbekli Tepe, not Karahan Tepe: a statue of a wild boar painted with red, white and black pigment, presented as the first painted Neolithic statue of its kind. The two are often blurred together online.
In October 2025 the Karahan Tepe team reported a T-shaped pillar about 1.4 metres tall carved with a simple human face: a prominent brow and straight nose suggesting deep-set eyes. It was found in a building that also held grinding stones, an everyday domestic tool. Karul noted that earlier pillars already carried arms, hands, animals and garments, and that the face was the only missing element. In his words, the find provides clear evidence that T-shaped pillars symbolised humans.
What is the Taş Tepeler project?
Taş Tepeler, Turkish for Stone Hills, is the umbrella name for the Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project, a programme of research at about a dozen related hilltop sites in the region. Besides Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, the sites named by the project include Gürcütepe, Sayburç, Çakmaktepe, Harbetsuvan, Sefertepe and Yeni Mahalle, with further work planned at places such as Ayanlar, Mendik, Yoğunburç, Kurttepesi and Taşlıtepe.
The point of studying them together is comparison. Instead of treating Göbekli Tepe as a mysterious isolated temple, the project treats it as one node in a network of communities that shared a visual language of T-pillars, predators, snakes and human figures.
How does Karahan Tepe compare with Göbekli Tepe?
Karahan Tepe and Göbekli Tepe share the same core features: T-shaped limestone pillars, circular and rectangular communal buildings, carved animals and human imagery, and deliberate backfilling. Göbekli Tepe, excavated from 1995 under Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, is the better studied of the two; our Göbekli Tepe explainer covers its enclosures in detail.
The differences are as interesting as the parallels. Karahan Tepe leans more heavily on carving into the bedrock itself, as in Structure AB, and its imagery puts human figures and phallic symbolism front and centre, while Göbekli Tepe's best-known pillars are crowded with foxes, boars, vultures and scorpions.
Were these sites built before farming?
Yes, in the sense that they were built before farming was fully established, but not in the sense of a sudden leap. The builders of Karahan Tepe and Göbekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers in the middle of a long transition: they were harvesting wild cereals, beginning to live in one place for longer and investing heavily in shared buildings, while domesticated crops and animals were still emerging around them.
Schmidt's famous framing at Göbekli Tepe was that the temple came first and the city second, implying that ritual gatherings helped drive the move to agriculture. Newer work across the Taş Tepeler has softened that picture. Grinding stones, domestic buildings and signs of daily life now appear alongside the monumental structures, and the 2025 face pillar was found in a building with grinding equipment. Many of the excavators now describe these as settlements with special communal buildings rather than empty sanctuaries visited by distant nomads. Either way, people without pottery, metal or writing organised quarrying and building on a large scale.
Do the pillars record a calendar or a comet strike?
This is the most debated claim around the Stone Hills, and it concerns Göbekli Tepe's Pillar 43, the so-called Vulture Stone, not Karahan Tepe's pillar chamber. Martin Sweatman of the University of Edinburgh argued in a 2024 paper in the journal Time and Mind, titled Representations of calendars and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbolism, that V-shaped marks on Pillar 43 count 365 days as a lunisolar calendar of 12 lunar months plus 11 extra days, and that the imagery commemorates a comet impact around 10,850 BCE linked to the Younger Dryas cold period.
The Göbekli Tepe excavators rejected the earlier version of this argument. In More than a vulture, published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry in 2017, Jens Notroff, Oliver Dietrich and colleagues of the German Archaeological Institute raised three main objections. First, chronology: the date proposed for Pillar 43 was 700 to 1,000 years older than the oldest radiocarbon date then available for Enclosure D, the building it stands in. Second, selection: the reading relied on a few chosen pillars out of more than 60 known at the site. Third, the assumption that Neolithic hunters in Upper Mesopotamia saw the same constellations as much later Greek, Egyptian and Arabian astronomers. The comet reading's wider debate is covered in our explainer on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. The fair summary is that the calendar reading is a published hypothesis, not an accepted result.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson's interest in sites like Karahan Tepe sits inside his larger argument that human civilisation is older and more sophisticated than textbooks allow, and that the stories of the ancient Near East preserve memories of real events. In his reading of Genesis, laid out in our explainer on the Garden of Eden and the Anunnaki, Eden is a compressed memory of a much older Mesopotamian story, the E.DIN settlement of the Anunnaki, with the serpent as Enki.
The Billy podcast network episode Karahan Tepe EXPOSES the Garden of Eden? | Andrew Collins Reveals the Truth, embedded on this page, takes that conversation north to the Stone Hills. Andrew Collins, a researcher who has written about the region in books including Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods (2014), links the Taş Tepeler landscape to the Eden tradition. The question raised in the conversation is whether this corner of south-east Turkey, near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates named in Genesis 2, could be the memory behind the Garden of Eden. That is Collins's line of inquiry rather than a settled position of Billy's, and it sits alongside, not in place of, Carson's own Mesopotamian reading of E.DIN.
The archaeology itself, in the excavators' terms, is a set of communal buildings made by late hunter-gatherers in the 10th millennium BCE; the Eden question is an interpretation laid on top of it, and readers can weigh the two side by side.
Watch, read and go deeper
For the wider story of megalithic sites from Anatolia to Egypt, watch Megalithic Mysteries on 4BK TV. Start with our Göbekli Tepe explainer for the sister site, then read the Garden of Eden and the Anunnaki for Billy Carson's reading of the Genesis story. The Andrew Collins conversation embedded above covers the Eden question directly, and the Anunnaki topic hub gathers every article, episode and book on the ancient Near East in one place.
Frequently asked questions
How old is Karahan Tepe?
Karahan Tepe dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, with its main phase around the middle of the 10th millennium BCE, more than 11,000 years ago. Commonly cited estimates put construction around 9750 BCE and abandonment around 9400 BCE.
Is Karahan Tepe older than Göbekli Tepe?
No published evidence shows Karahan Tepe is older. The two sites overlap in time and share the same building and art traditions; dates for both fall in the 10th millennium BCE, and neither can yet be shown to predate the other. With only about 5 percent of Karahan Tepe excavated by 2023, its full date range is still open.
What did archaeologists find in the Karahan Tepe pillar chamber?
In October 2021 Necmi Karul's team announced a rock-cut room, Structure AB, with pillars carved from the bedrock and a human head carved into the wall above them. Karul described the pillars as shaped like a phallus. The room connects by stairs to a larger circular building, Structure AD, and the complex was deliberately backfilled in antiquity.
Is Karahan Tepe the Garden of Eden?
There is no archaeological evidence that identifies Karahan Tepe with Eden. The idea comes from researchers such as Andrew Collins, who connect the Taş Tepeler region near the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates with the Genesis tradition. Billy Carson's own reading places Eden in the Sumerian E.DIN of southern Mesopotamia.
Sources and further reading
- Necmi Karul, Buried Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Karahantepe, Türk Arkeoloji ve Etnografya Dergisi (2021).
- Bahattin Çelik, A New Early Neolithic Settlement: Karahan Tepe, Neo-Lithics (2000).
- Taş Tepeler project, Karahantepe site description (Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project).
- Martin B. Sweatman, Representations of calendars and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbolism, Time and Mind (2024).
- Jens Notroff, Oliver Dietrich et al., More than a vulture: a response to Sweatman and Tsikritsis, Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 17.2 (2017).
- Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia (ex oriente, 2012).
- Andrew Collins, Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods (Bear & Company, 2014).
