Tag Archives: Turkey

Göbekli Tepe: The World’s Oldest Temple

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A wall in an ancient temple displays an incredibly high level of sophistication in a Stone Age culture. Photo credit: Berthold Steinhilber.

The re-discovery of an intricately built ancient temple called Göbekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill in the native Turkish), in southern Turkey, is regarded as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance.

The temple, which was built 8,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egpyt, places our roots as a modern civilization much deeper than ever guessed at by any scholar or historian who had previously believed the first modern human societies formed around 9,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent near an area encompassing Jordan, Israel, and Iraq. With the shocking discovery of Gobekli Tepe, created by a culture that had clearly mastered masonry and developed a sophisticated culture prior to that within the Fertile Crescent, it places human society’s beginnings nearer to 10,000 B.C. or 12,000 years ago in Turkey.

This discovery single-handedly and profoundly revolutionizes our understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society in the Neolithic Era by predating the Fertile Crescent by a full thousand years and originating outside of it.

The prehistoric temple of Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh) is large, intricately adorned – with sculpture and carved stone fashioned in a time when mankind was traditionally assumed to be nothing more than a handful of nomads with no great religious inclination with little to no education and no skilled trades abilities at all.

Yet, these ruins are amazing – the result of a highly sophisticated culture. The temple is made up of colossal T-shaped limestone pillars that are 10 to 20 feet tall each and weigh upwards of 40-60 tons. To put that into perspective, the largest standing stones at Stonehenge weigh in at 25 tons and are 24 feet tall – making the Göbekli Tepe’s monolithic pillars twice as heavy and nearly as tall. And, like Stonehenge, the creation of the temple is lost to history.

Two teams of archeological researchers remain hard at work at the site today uncovering this historical find and attempting to understand how the temple was built and what became of it’s builders.

Notes:
Gobekli Tepe is located in an arid, dry region 9 miles northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa, Turkey.
Video of the actual site can be found here at YouTube.

Via: FleshyBones

References:
Wikipedia,Göbekli Tepe
National Geographic, Göbekli Tepe Excavation
Göbekli Tepe, Archeological Site Info
Worlds First Temple, Movie/Gallery

WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop

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“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!” — WKRP in Cincinnati Station Manager, Arthur Carlson (played by Gordon Jump), arranged to have live turkeys dropped from a helicopter as an advertising stunt. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a serious miscalculation. The poor birds plunged to earth, never even having a chance. Their tragic “last flight” was relayed to WKRP listeners by reporter Les Nessman, played by Richard Sanders:”It’s a helicopter, and it’s coming this way. It’s flying something behind it, I can’t quite make it out, it’s a large banner and it says, uh – Happy… Thaaaaanksss… giving! … From … W … K … R… P!! No parachutes yet. Can’t be skydivers… I can’t tell just yet what they are, but – Oh my God, Johnny, they’re turkeys!! Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they’re plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Not since the Hindenburg tragedy has there been anything like this!”

Listen: Click Here for a short clip of audio highlights in RealAudio.

Watch it: Click Here to view a short video clip of the scene.

Based on Reality
Oddly enough, this famous WKRP episode was loosely based on a real event! Back in 1946 (some sources say 1945), Yellville, Arkansas inaugurated the “Turkey Trot Festival” which included a wild turkey calling contest, a turkey target shoot, a Miss Drumsticks Pageant and oh yeah: a live turkey release from the roof of the courthouse.

After a few years, someone thought it might be fun to actually toss the poor gobblers out of a low-flying airplane for the event. This repeated for a number of years until 1989 when a national animal-rights protest cast the event in a bad light and the “National Enquirer” splashed a photo of the event across the nation forcing promoters to abandon the turkey drop.