Karahantepe — The Chamber of Statues
Forty kilometres south of Göbeklitepe, the sister sanctuary that is rewriting the human story for a second time.
If Göbeklitepe is the cathedral, Karahantepe is the crypt — intimate, figurative, and almost shockingly human for the eleventh millennium BCE.
First surveyed in 1997 and systematically excavated since 2019 under the Turkish Ministry of Culture's Taş Tepeler Project, Karahantepe sits on the same limestone ridge as Göbeklitepe, fifteen kilometres south as the crow flies. Where its more famous sibling speaks in animals carved in relief, Karahantepe speaks in the human body — fully three-dimensional, life-sized, and almost confrontational in its presence.
Eleven pillars, one watching face.
The most photographed find on the site is the rock-cut chamber — a room carved into the living bedrock from which eleven phallic pillars rise from the floor, watched from a niche by a single human head with hooded, serpent-like eyes. It is the oldest narrative sculpture yet recovered anywhere on Earth.
The oldest human figure on Earth.
Lifted from the upper terrace in 2023 and now in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, the Karahantepe seated statue is a 2.3-metre limestone figure — male, skeletal-ribbed, hands gripping his own thighs. He is roughly twelve thousand years old, and he is the oldest known life-sized human statue ever made. Meeting him face to face, after a morning at the chamber, is the moment a Şanlıurfa day clicks into place.
A single luxury day with Göbeklitepe.
- 08:00 — Göbeklitepe at opening, before the air heats and the coaches arrive.
- 10:30 — Drive south through pistachio groves to Karahantepe.
- 11:00 — Karahantepe with a private archaeologist; 90+ minutes for the chamber and upper terraces.
- 13:30 — Late lunch of çiğ köfte and Urfa kebab in a stone-vaulted courtyard.
- 16:00 — The Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum: meet the seated statue face to face.
Klaus Schmidt's legacy.
1953 — 2014
None of this — not Karahantepe, not the Taş Tepeler Project, not the rewritten first chapter of every world history book — would be on this hill without Klaus Schmidt. When the German archaeologist walked the Göbeklitepe ridge in 1994, on a shepherd's tip, he recognised in a single morning what a previous survey had missed for thirty years: that the T-shaped stones poking from the soil were the tips of monumental Pre-Pottery Neolithic pillars, seven thousand years older than Stonehenge.
"First the temple, then the city."— Klaus Schmidt, on the inversion of the Neolithic story
- 1953
Born in Forchtenberg, Baden-Württemberg. He studies prehistory and classical archaeology at Erlangen and Heidelberg, specialising in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Upper Mesopotamia.
- 1983
Begins fieldwork at Nevalı Çori on the Euphrates, directed by Harald Hauptmann. He excavates Pre-Pottery Neolithic houses and gains the hands-on experience with the cultural horizon that will define his career.
- 1994
A local shepherd, Mehmet Yıldız, mentions strange carved stones on a hill. Schmidt visits the next morning and recognises the T-shaped pillars as Neolithic in hours. Surveys since 1963 had dismissed the site as a Byzantine cemetery.
- 1995
On behalf of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Schmidt launches systematic excavations at Göbeklitepe. The project will last two decades and overturn the prevailing timeline of religion and urbanisation.
Klaus Schmidt explaining the T-pillar enclosures to his team, Göbeklitepe, 1995
- 2007
Publishes Sie bauten die ersten Tempel with C.H. Beck, translated worldwide. The book argues that hunter-gatherers built Göbeklitepe as a purely ritual centre, flipping the established "first cities, then temples" model on its head.
Klaus Schmidt brushing dust from a carved T-pillar during the Göbeklitepe excavation, 2007
- 20 July 2014
Dies suddenly of a heart attack while working in Şanlıurfa, aged 60. He is buried in Germany, but his intellectual legacy lives in every trench of the Taş Tepeler — including the chamber of statues at Karahantepe, excavated five years after his death.
References
Schmidt always suspected Göbeklitepe was not alone. The chamber of statues at Karahantepe, lifted from the bedrock five years after his death, is the direct intellectual heir of his work. On every visit we take, we pause at the southern bench he liked to sit on at the end of a dig day. There is no plaque. There does not need to be.
Read the full tribute
Walk the oldest sanctuaries on Earth — privately.
Our Genesis Expedition is built around exactly this choreography, with a resident archaeologist, private museum access after public hours, and an overnight at the dig house with the team.