Every now and then a single person re-draws the map of what we thought we knew. Klaus Schmidt was one of those people. When he died suddenly in the summer of 2014, he left behind a stony hill outside Şanlıurfa that had quietly become the most important archaeological site of the twenty-first century — and a question that has not stopped echoing through the discipline since: what if everything we believed about the dawn of civilisation was the wrong way round?
A quiet beginning
Klaus Schmidt was born in 1953 in Feuchtwangen, Bavaria. He studied prehistory at Erlangen and Heidelberg, wrote a doctorate on the Neolithic of Anatolia, and joined the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). For two decades he worked the dust of digs across Turkey and Iran with the patient, undramatic temperament of a man who preferred field notebooks to press conferences. Colleagues remember a soft-spoken scholar who could spend an hour explaining the typology of a flint blade without once looking up.
1994: the shepherd's story
In 1963 an Istanbul–Chicago survey team had passed over a low hill south-east of Şanlıurfa called Göbekli Tepe — "potbelly hill" — and noted it as a probable medieval cemetery. Thirty years later, Schmidt was leading a survey of the Urfa plain for the DAI. A local shepherd mentioned that strange T-shaped stones kept surfacing every time he ploughed. Schmidt drove out the next morning, walked the ridge, and within hours understood that what the 1963 team had dismissed as gravestones were in fact the tips of monumental Neolithic pillars buried in the slope.
“Within a minute of arriving I knew I had two choices: walk away and say nothing, or spend the rest of my life here.”— Klaus Schmidt, recalling his first visit to Göbeklitepe
1995–2014: the excavation
Formal excavations began in 1995, jointly led by the DAI and Şanlıurfa Museum. Year after year, Schmidt and his team uncovered something the textbooks said could not exist: monumental, decorated ritual architecture built by hunter-gatherers seven thousand years before Stonehenge and Egypt's first pyramids. Enclosure A, then B, then C, then D — circular sanctuaries up to twenty metres across, ringed with carved T-pillars five metres tall, populated by a bestiary of foxes, vultures, scorpions and serpents.
The implications were vertiginous. Until Göbeklitepe, the consensus was that agriculture came first, then sedentary villages, then surplus, then — much later — religion and monumental architecture. Schmidt's site suggested the opposite sequence: that the impulse to gather and build something sacred may have come first, and that farming arose around the need to feed the people who came to worship. "First the temple, then the city," as he put it in a single sentence that would launch a thousand seminar papers.
The ideas
Schmidt was careful never to overreach. He resisted New Age readings of the site as a star map or alien construction. What he did argue, in his 2006 book Sie bauten die ersten Tempel (They Built the First Temples), was disciplined and quietly revolutionary:
- The T-pillars are stylised anthropomorphic figures — abstracted ancestors or supernatural beings, not just architectural supports.
- The site was a regional gathering place: people came from a wide catchment to build, feast and bury — long before they lived in settled villages.
- Monumental religion did not follow agriculture; it may have helped trigger it.
- At the end of its use, around 8000 BCE, the entire complex was deliberately and carefully buried — a final, communal act that has preserved it for us.
20 July 2014
Schmidt died of a heart attack while swimming on holiday in Germany. He was sixty. He had been preparing the field season that would, two years later, see Göbeklitepe inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and four years later, opened to the public under the tensile-fabric canopy that today shelters the great enclosures. He did not live to see either moment.
The legacy at Karahantepe
Schmidt always suspected that Göbeklitepe was not unique. He spoke, in lectures and letters, of a wider "family" of sanctuaries scattered across the limestone hills of the Urfa plain — what the Turkish team would later formalise as the Taş Tepeler Project. Karahantepe, Sayburç, Sefertepe, Kurttepesi, Harbetsuvan — each new site excavated since 2019 has confirmed his intuition. The chamber of statues at Karahantepe, in particular, is the direct intellectual heir of his work: another monumental Pre-Pottery Neolithic sanctuary that no theory of human prehistory had room for, until he made room.
“Klaus opened the door. The rest of us are still walking through it.”— A Taş Tepeler Project field archaeologist, Şanlıurfa 2024
Walking in his footsteps
On every Sumera expedition to the Taş Tepeler, we pause for a moment at the southern edge of the Göbeklitepe enclosures — the bench Schmidt liked to sit on at the end of a dig day, looking out over the Harran plain. There is no plaque. There does not need to be. What he saw on that hill in 1994 has rewritten the first chapter of every world history book published since, and continues, with every new pillar lifted at Karahantepe, to write the next.
If you would like the story of Schmidt's discovery told properly on site — by an archaeologist who worked with the DAI team — we can build that into your Şanlıurfa day. It is, we think, the right way to meet these stones.
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