Major Discoveries at Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Sefer Tepe _ Sayburç _ Taş Tepeler _ Megalithomania

It was announced that some major discoveries took place in southeast Turkey. This is the area, this has become known as the Tas Tepeler culture, the Tas Tepeler project, Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe being the main sites, but there's actually 12 sites, there's actually more than this on this map that we're now looking at and a whole bunch of discoveries are being made. This was from Göbekli Tepe in fact, a few months ago actually when we were there this was being excavated from the wall between enclosure D and another enclosure next to it. It's now been excavated and repaired and is now on display at Karahan Tepe and this is the Tas Tepeler fifth anniversary program. So this time five years ago they were just announcing the whole Tas Tepeler project. This one was a discovery made at a site called Saberc and this was a human head which we actually saw images and video of many months ago when we were visited there and they've now found the body to it and they put it all back together and put it on display at Karahan Tepe. This is Sefir Tepe, another one of the sites and here some interesting discoveries have been made over the years. This is actually not too far from Karahan Tepe itself. While they were excavating just in the last couple of months they started finding they found these two heads kind of emerging from the soil and they realized they were attached, carved out from the same slab of stone and so it's quite remarkable. They also found this as well which is a small statue which has got a face on one side but also on the other side of it it's got an open mouthed face on the same piece of stone which I thought was really really unusual and interesting. Now the meaning of that we don't know but we know there's an open mouth motif on the main head in structure AB at Karahan Tepe which is this site here which is a reconstruction and illustration created by my friend Dan Lish with a little bit of AI help who brought it to life. So this is Karahan Tepe, this is a very important site that myself Andrew and JJ have been visiting for many years and with the winter solstice discovery that myself and JJ made in 2021 this has really kind of pushed this forward into our consciousness because there's just something profound going on here. The fact that they were witnessing the winter solstice and the sun would come through this porthole stone and illuminate the stone head over a period of 45 minutes but this is just one aspect this was a very early discovery since it began being excavated back in 2019. What's recently come to light and we were here just what two months ago and this was an excavated what you're going to see next this has now been found a giant rectangular almost like temple room which is just there all along just under the under the ground and like I can't we can't I mean me and Andrew have been trying to work out where this is because it's really hard to work out how there's such a vast space but you've got benches going around the side you've got huge walls obviously you've got t-pillars in each corner and this is quite unique there's nothing elaborate and stunning like this in Taztepla in the whole region the smaller square rooms which were later what the archaeologists called domestic structures which may not be they may be more like kind of shrines that pilgrims would stay in but this is a whole different level this is big this is like you know 30 40 feet wide by about 20 30 feet the other direction and it's much more beautifully created almost like something from Egypt or Andrew said Sumeria but also at Karahan Tepe this has just come out and again myself and Andrew knew about this months ago we heard about what they originally thought was a female statue but they since they've excavated further down they've realized you can actually see the phallus on the statue here so it's probably a bloke this is what we're thinking but the hair they probably saw and believed it was female so so this has now come to light and we heard about this like four or five months ago we even made a video about it at the site talking about it before we'd ever seen it and then realized oh nothing came out and then two days ago this happened and so this was in the main enclosure the new enclosure at the top of the hill opposite where the seven and a half foot tall statue is but this guy is clearly a guy as you can see here he's got a beautiful haircut of course it could be you know androgynous could be a hermaphrodite it could have other elements here and you can see the ribs you can see the features there doesn't show any breasts or anything like that but this hair is also very similar to some of the goddess statues you find on Malta as well there's a two or three there that look almost identical to that as well this was also found Karahan Tepe and again you've got the very interesting feature of what looks like a beard this is the same as the seven and a half foot statue or similar to the seven and a half foot statue that was discovered there this was also discovered at Karahan Tepe this I can't work out what exactly is going on but it looks like some kind of animal and other symbolism here but you see the shape of that that means that this is probably this wide it's probably three feet wide this is one section of a giant porthole stone possibly square shaped possibly curved if it's curved it'd be huge so we can't see it clearly because the glass is reflecting the light but we're going to be going back there soon and we'll get some fresh photos of that we also have some beautiful scepters were found also at Karahan Tepe many of these have already been found at Gobekli Tepe we have this dude as well again it could be do it could be a lady with again we have that similar kind of hair this is very small piece and here's some of the other items that are on display temporarily at Karahan Tepe which are part of this fifth anniversary Taztepala celebration if you like but notice down the bottom here this is the first time I've seen on display this particular one here and these two here these are from a site called Gertu Tepe this is one of the last sites of the whole Taztepala region down in the valleys below Gobekli Tepe but you can actually see Gobekli Tepe from it this goes back to about 7000 to 7500 BC this is one of the last phase of sites in that region this is the first real site where we see feminine goddess full-bodied figure statues being found and I've known I've known about this photo for a very long time and I've been aware of this I've never seen it but now finally it's actually on display so yeah I find this very interesting because as we reach the end of the Taztepala culture soon after this we have Catalhoyuk where we have lots of full-bodied goddess figurines being developed further to the west and also Malta as well we find virtually identical statues and with the dating that's coming out of Malta and Gozo thanks to the work of Leni Rijic and others we're finding that the dates could be much much earlier there so there could be a direct kind of lineage from southeast Turkey going down through Europe around the Mediterranean into Malta which would have been joined by land by a land bridge to Sicily so it would have been reachable even if they weren't sailing but the evidence now very strongly suggests thanks to discoveries on Cyprus that there were there was sailing even in the ice age before the time of Gobekli Tepe between the mainland of Turkey and what we have on Cyprus itself this is the actual statue that was found which we saw you embedded in the wall at Gobekli Tepe we only really saw it from its side so you couldn't really see the face but this was placed within a wall at Gobekli Tepe next to enclosure D and it suggested that it was placed there as an offering a votive offering according to the archaeologists anyway but at the same time it could have been just a reused piece of stone because it was an old knackered statue that no one was interested in we just don't know we just don't know the the kind of thinking about why it was placed there in this particular position there's lots of theories either way but then we have Seybert as well this is a recent scan I did of the newly excavated enclosure this goes back to around just under 9000 BC they're actually saying that this is 9400 BC now but that now I'm not sure if that's just what the newspapers are putting out or whether there's actual new carbon dating has been proven but they're they're creating it out of solid rock carving it as well and several months ago we were presented with this we were shown this image and this video this little video clip here of this head which looks like c3po from star wars to me and we were excited we wanted they gave us the video gave us the photo and then we weren't allowed to say anything about it and now we can because it got announced last couple of days this is one of the discoveries now this is quite an intriguing statue they found the body as well what is unusual about it not only the ribs the very pronounced ribs if they are ribs indeed they almost look like abstract wings like we saw what we see on the vulture statue that was found at Karahan Tepe this is from Seybert mind you but the mouth they say in the reports and the archaeologists say this that the mouth is sewn up it's like sewn up and they say that the eyes are representations of mollusk shells like you find on figures you know in the Levant which we'll look at in a moment here's another image just shows you the close-up here you can see the kind of what it could represent teeth it could represent dry lips if they've been to Peru and also the strange eyes as well but look at the shaping around here is this some kind of hood something that I know Andrew has written about that they could be wearing hoods this is where you get this extension at the back on some of the statues possibly the tea pillars as well or is it you know is the sewn up mouth and the mollusk shells a representation of death and burial because it was broken again at the neck we find many of the statues here broken deliberately you know at the end of their use and here is from the Levant you see these shells here were placed over the eyes with plaster and other such things it looks quite similar and also the the mouth as well appear to be sewn up now whether I think this is kind of what they did in the Levant further discoveries have been found at Seybert in the new excavation area including a tea pillar and at the base of it carved out of the bedrock we have a human head or a face similar in style to some of the other discoveries that have been found in the region and close to this were also human bones in a niche inside these enclosures as well as carvings found on tops of the tea pillars themselves so overall Seybert is starting to become one of the most important sites in the whole Taztepala region this is the giant slab that we looked at briefly from Sefir Tepe which is just being discovered notice the two heads almost like skulls on either side one is slightly higher than the other one now why is that there's probably some deep symbolism to this as well in very high relief I mean you've got to carve it all away the rest of the stone to reveal keep these in place and again we have the kind of almost t-shaped kind of face with the protruding eyes again the eyes look like those mollusk shells as well which I think is quite intriguing but a very similar thing was actually found at Karahan Tepe as well a few months ago Patricia Awian actually sent me this photo this was found actually in one of the walls at Karahan Tepe as well and so there's lots of little discoveries lots of intriguing things coming out of the ground and when you consider so little has been excavated there you know probably less than five percent in the whole region this is going to blow up over the next few years watch this space and again we have this also from Sefir Tepe it's just a photo showing you the two sides of the black serpentine stone a dual faced stone again make that what you will but whether that was you know some kind of symbolic kind of ritual statue would you switch it around one way to the other we really don't know so that's that's basically what has been discovered what has been um presented at Karahan Tepe they put a whole display there over the last few days there was a big media circus all the kind of dignitaries were coming in but so much more is happening obviously we mentioned just a handful of these sites showing these new discoveries but actually like a Ayan Lahoyak here Yogan Birch we haven't mentioned these uh Chakmak Tepe we've got Kurt Tepe Harbet Zuvan many of these are now being excavated and that none of those were mentioned in this new report and this new announcement so let's wait and see what happens this one here particularly interests me because myself and JJ found a tea pillar lying on the ground there before any excavation was done now they've just announced like two months ago they're going to start properly excavating they've put fences up they've got a Japanese team coming in to work that likewise there's rumors at Yogan Birch another site myself and Andrew and JJ have looked at there's nothing really there yet just a few cut marks on the ground the rest of it's buried Chakmak Tepe has proven to be older than Gobekli Tepe this is going back 500 years possibly 12,000 or so years ago Harbet Zuvan is way up on a hill in the middle of nowhere hard to get to but discoveries are being made there and they're now just announced that Gobekli Tepe the big site that they've removed the olive trees thanks to pressure from certain individuals and they've been scanning the area and now they're going to do more excavation and now all the conservation all the reconstruction all the tourism facilities are now being completed and Sefe Tepe on the far right over there is moving ahead pretty quickly as well so this is all happening this is a this is major news in my opinion just the things they've discovered this season are mind-blowing you wait until they really get going and they start uncovering all these sites so there's a lot more to come but i just wanted to share with you the latest stuff coming out of the Tash Tepe region thank you very much