The site comprises more than sixty multi-ton T-shaped limestone pillars, most of them engraved with bas-reliefs of dangerous animals: not the docile, edible bison and deer featured in Paleolithic cave paintings but ominous configurations of lions, foxes, boars, vultures, scorpions, spiders, and snakes. It’s estimated to be eleven thousand years old-six and a half thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure. There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe. Its Turkish name is Göbekli Tepe: “hill with a potbelly,” or “fat hill.” For thousands of years, this Early Neolithic structure lay buried under multiple strata of prehistoric trash, and therefore just looked like a big hill. I, too, was in town on a pilgrimage, visiting a site that predates Abraham and Job and monotheism by some eight millennia: a vast complex of Stonehenge-style megalithic circles in the Urfa countryside. The city’s religious sites also include the cave where Job is said to have suffered through his boils. (Known as the Image of Edessa, the holy handkerchief was said to be a gift from Christ to King Abgar V, who was suffering from leprosy.) In 1984, Urfa was officially renamed Şanlıurfa-“glorious Urfa”-in honor of its resistance against the Allied Forces during the Turkish War of Independence. Urfa also has a Greek name, Edessa, under which it is enshrined in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the origin of perhaps the world’s first icon: a handkerchief on which Jesus wiped his face, preserving his image. Nimrod ordered his men to beat his head with wooden mallets, shouting, “ Vur ha, vur ha!” (“Hit me, hit me!”), and that’s how his city came to be called Urfa. According to another local legend, God sent a swarm of mosquitos to torment Nimrod, and a mosquito flew up Nimrod’s nose and started chewing on his brain. Tens of thousands of people come here every year to visit a cave where Abraham may have been born and a fishpond marking the site of the pyre where he was almost burned up by Nimrod, except that God transformed the fire into water and the coals into fish. Urfa is in southeastern Anatolia, about thirty miles north of the Syrian border. Directly outside the window, Vegas-style lights stretching across the main drag spelled, in two-foot-high letters, “ WELCOME TO THE CITY OF PROPHETS.” In my room, a sign indicating the direction of prayer was posted over the nonalcoholic minibar. A door in the lobby led to a men-only steam bath. My hotel had clearly been designed for pilgrims. Late one October evening, I flew into Urfa, the city believed by Turkish Muslims to be the Ur of the Chaldeans, the birthplace of the prophet Abraham.
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