When tourists enter the visitors centre at Göbekli Tepe, there are two prominent slogans on display, marketing messages used by authorities, and repeated by the media time and time again, those being “Zero Point of History” and the “First Temple in the World”.
The first slogan is referring to the site roughly marking the transition between hunter-gatherer societies and sedentary farmers and the second comes from the site’s interpretation by the late, great archaeologist Klaus Schmidt.
Slogans are used by authorities, the media, authors, youtubers and more, because they are the hooks to generate interest – marketing messages. Göbekli Tepe is called a ‘smoking gun’ site – the trigger for the onset of Neolithisation, but the problem is that such phrases, which are still being used in 2023, are now becoming out of date.
Therefore, in this video, I'm going to look at the changing story of Göbekli Tepe, to try and understand why old slogans are still being used when new data has already changed the site's interpretation.