Centers of Progress, Pt. 31: Göbekli Tepe (Religion)
The site’s megalithic structures and intricate carvings symbolize the power of religious devotion.
Chelsea Follett —
Today marks the thirty-first installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.
Our thirty-first Center of Progress is Göbekli Tepe, the site containing the oldest known monumental structures and perhaps the earliest archeological evidence of religious practice. While there is much disagreement on the origins of religion, many scholars describe Göbekli Tepe as the world’s first man-made temple, sanctuary, or holy place. Göbekli Tepe serves as a reminder of humanity’s capacity to create impressive structures as well as the long history of systems of faith and their profound influence on the world.
Göbekli Tepe lies in the southeast of what is today Turkey, about 30 miles from the border with Syria. Today, only a small portion of the prehistoric site of worship has been excavated, and much of it likely remains buried underground. Göbekli Tepe consists of large, ringed enclosures measuring as wide as 65 feet across, as well as rectangular pillar arrangements that may have once supported roofs. Each ring is made up of over 40 T-shaped stone pillars, some as tall as 18 feet. Another 250 or so pillars may remain buried. Some of the uncovered pillars are blank, but many feature detailed totem-like carvings depicting people, abstract symbols, and a wide variety of animals such as foxes, lions, bulls, scorpions, snakes, wild boars, birds, spiders, and insects. Some carvings appear to be part human and part animal and may represent deities. The pillars are the oldest known megaliths, predating the better-known Stonehenge by millennia.
Boardwalks now encircle the main excavation site, allowing tourists to view the pillars from different angles. And a roof has been constructed over the stones to protect the carvings and archeologists from the sweltering sun. In July, the average temperature in the area is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. While the climate is only classified as semi-desert, rain almost never falls during the summer.
But if you could visit Göbekli Tepe in its heyday, you would encounter a very different world. The climate was wetter, and the surrounding environment was a vast grassland filled with wild goats and gazelles. Looking out over the endless fields, you would see tall grasses, such as einkorn, wheat, and barley, rippling in the wind. Rivers and waterfowl may have been visible as well. Your view of the surrounding plateaus would be excellent, as Göbekli Tepe stands on top of a hill. The name Göbekli Tepe, in fact, means “potbelly hill” in Turkish.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the currently exposed structures of Göbekli Tepe were built over centuries, with some parts perhaps dating to 9500 BC and others constructed as recently as 8000 BC or even 7000 BC. It was a time of significant change. Communities like the ancient Natufians of Neolithic-era Jericho, located 500 miles southwest of Göbekli Tepe, were making the momentous transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to permanent settlement and agriculture. The people who built Göbekli Tepe were still mainly hunter-gatherers, but they also likely farmed in villages for at least part of the year. Archeological evidence shows that their diets consisted largely of meat but were supplemented by cereals that they probably farmed.
Erecting and carving humanity’s earliest monuments was a painstaking undertaking that required a multigenerational investment of time, labor, and craftsmanship. It likely involved hundreds of men. The people who built Göbekli Tepe did not yet have pottery or metal tools, nor the help of domesticated animals or wheeled vehicles. Flint tools would have been sufficient to carve the pillars, made of relatively soft limestone.
There is no proof that anyone ever lived at Göbekli Tepe, although some scholars believe it was nonetheless a settlement. There is much debate about whether the site offered sufficient access to water to sustain residents, and a lack of trash pit remnants suggests that people did not sleep at the site. Perhaps only a single person (such as a priest or shaman) or a small number of people resided there, leaving no archeological footprint that has yet been discovered. But even though Göbekli Tepe’s builders may have camped elsewhere, the site was certainly alive with activity. It may have been the closest thing to an urban center that the nomadic hunter-gatherers knew.
Turning away from the magnificent grasslands toward the imposing structures of Göbekli Tepe, one would have been struck by the aroma of freshly roasted wild boar, gazelle, red deer, and duck and witnessed the local hunter-gatherers commencing a festival amid their monuments. Researchers believe the hunter-gatherers congregated at the site to dance, celebrate, drink beer made from fermented grains, and dine together. In addition to food preparation tools, archeologists have so far uncovered some 650 carved stone platters and vessels at the site, some large enough to hold over 50 gallons of liquid. Over 100,000 bone fragments from wild game animals also suggest feasting. Such ritual feasts may have originated sometime between 8,000 BC and 6,000 BC, when the transition to agriculture linked the relative scarcity or abundance of food to certain seasons of the year. Among the festivities held at Göbekli Tepe may have been “work feasts” held throughout the site’s multigenerational construction to celebrate the completion of different sections of the temple.
From the Passover seders of Judaism to the Eid al-Fitr (nicknamed “Sugar Feast”) sweets of Islam, and from the Christmas dinners of Christianity to the staple deserts of Hinduism’s Diwali, religious feasts continue to hold great importance to communities across the world.
Much remains unknown about the nature of Göbekli Tepe and the religion that may have inspired its establishment. Prominent vulture carvings at the site have led some scholars to conclude that the religion was a “funerary cult” centered on venerating the dead. However, no human remains have been uncovered to suggest that Göbekli Tepe was ever a cemetery. Others think that the site was linked to astronomy and that its carvings reference constellations and comets. Some believe that Göbekli Tepe was a temple to the brightest star in Earth’s night sky, Sirius, because the central pillars may have framed the star as it rose. However, the main archeological team excavating the site rejects claims of an astronomical link.
Some scholars also think Göbekli Tepe may have been a holy site attracting hunter-gatherer visitors from across the Levant and as far away as Africa. Knowledge of the site would have traveled by word of mouth since writing did not exist yet. According to the journalist Charles Mann,
Göbekli Tepe may have been the destination for a religious pilgrimage, a monument for spiritual travelers to be awed by a religious experience—like the travel now made by pilgrims to the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American complex near St. Louis).
Objects found at the site support this theory. Researchers have traced certain obsidian artifacts to volcanoes hundreds of miles away, and other tools found among the ruins exhibit carving styles suggesting far-flung origins such as the eastern Mediterranean. However, these objects could have also come to Göbekli Tepe via trade between different hunter-gatherer bands. Göbekli Tepe represented “a very cosmopolitan area … almost the nodal point of the Near East,” claims the historian Tristan Carter. “In theory, you could have people with different languages, very different cultures, coming together.”
At some point, the Neolithic people decided to bury Göbekli Tepe. Maybe their religion changed, and the site lost its relevance to them, or maybe the burial was itself a ritual tied to their particular spiritual beliefs. The site’s remarkable level of preservation is credited to the way in which it was buried. The hunter-gatherers then built another layer of stone pillars on top of the buried temple.
Religious faiths continue to provide a sense of meaning, structure, and inner peace to many people today—about 93 percent of people globally, to be precise. While the negative effects of violent strains of religious extremism are undeniable and religious conflict has caused much suffering, faith has also uplifted humanity in many ways.
In fact, religious inspiration is a common factor among several of the Centers of Progress. Some scholars think the religion of the ancient Indus Valley civilization may have been based around cleanliness, helping incentivize Mohenjo-Daro’s achievements in sanitation. In Baghdad, during that city’s Golden Age, the then-prevailing interpretation of Islam helped motivate scientific inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge. In Renaissance-era Florence, faith inspired many leading artists, and the Catholic Church funded groundbreaking artistic projects. During the Scottish Enlightenment that birthed modern social science, the dominant moderate branch of the Presbyterian Church embraced cutting-edge thinkers in Edinburgh. And later, prominent Anglican clergymen supported London’s trailblazing quest to end the global slave trade. In each of these cases, religion encouraged some manner of positive innovation.
That is not to downplay the harms that can arise from highly illiberal forms of religion. Examples include the restrictive interpretation of Islam that ultimately contributed to unraveling Baghdad’s status as a center of learning or the extremist Christian movement led by the radical friar Savonarola that sought to destroy Florence’s artworks.
Happily, liberty-minded thinkers can be found among the adherents of all major religions today. See, for example, the scholarship of Mustafa Akyol on the Muslim case for liberty, the writings of Stephanie Slade on the Catholic case for liberty, and the work of Aaron Ross Powell on the Buddhist case for liberty. Their writings illustrate how faith can champion the freedom needed to discover and create remarkable things.
While we may never learn why Göbekli Tepe was built, the site’s megalithic structures and intricate carvings arguably symbolize the power of religious devotion. The sophistication and artistic achievement embodied by this creation of a largely pre-agricultural society are astounding. If the site indeed served as a gathering place where prehistoric people worshiped now long-forgotten deities together, then it stands as a testament to the many ways in which humanity has sought to understand our place in the universe and express reverence. The mysterious, gigantic Stone Age site is worthy of being our thirty-first Center of Progress.
Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity.
Chelsea Follett —
Summary: Amidst the turmoil of modern times, evidence reveals significant progress across various metrics, from rising life expectancy to declining global poverty. Cities have emerged as epicenters of innovation and progress throughout history, fostering collaboration, competition, and freedom of thought. By exploring the unique environments of cities like Edinburgh and Paris, where intellectual liberty thrived, Chelsea Follett uncovers the vital role of peace, freedom, and population density in driving human achievement and societal advancement.
Has humanity made progress? With so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealized golden age.
But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.
Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.
The origin points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. Why is that?
“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”
One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labor, more specialization, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”
A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centers. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?
That brings us to the next thing that most centers of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognized this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:
Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.
Of course, not all cities were or are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable center of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.
During the Scottish Enlightenment centered in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.
Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.
And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.
Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.
That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centers of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).
That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.
Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:
Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.
The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centers of innovation. Consider Paris.
As the capital of France, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐called Age of Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.
Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐purpose encyclopedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes considered a counter‐Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticized view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.
The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.
And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.
By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.
Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.
1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023
A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
Malcolm Cochran —
Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”
So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:
Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.
Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.
A Reduction in the Proportion of Africans Living in Shanty Towns
“According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), a shanty town is a disadvantaged part of a city characterised by very unhealthy housing built by the inhabitants from salvaged materials, extreme poverty and no rights or security of tenure. According to the World Bank, over 60% of Africa’s urban population now lives in shanty towns. These almost 285 million urban dwellers represent 60% of Africa’s urban population. In 2003, Africans living in shanty towns made up 71.9% of the urban population.”
Introducing Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World
Chelsea Follett —
“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” as urban economist Edward Glaeser explains in his book The Triumph of the City.
Athens’s storied breakthroughs in philosophy are but one example of how cities have often been the sites of pivotal advances throughout history. Kyoto gave us the novel. Bologna gave us the university. Florence gave us the Renaissance. Paris gave us the Enlightenment. Manchester gave us the Industrial Revolution. Los Angeles gave us cinema. Postwar New York gave us modern finance . . . the list goes on. As Glaeser also notes, “Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.”
If you’re not able to travel to each of these extraordinary cities, perhaps the next best thing is to embark on a virtual tour from the comfort of your home. To that end, I wrote a book surveying 40 of history’s greatest urban centers, showcasing each city at a moment in time when it notably contributed to progress.
Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World offers a fact-filled yet accessible crash course in global urban history, spanning from the agricultural revolution to the digital revolution. This book affirms the importance of cities to the story of human progress and innovation by shining a spotlight on some of the places that have helped create the modern world.
The book’s chapters can guide you through the Library of Alexandria, the stock exchange of Dutch Golden Age-era Amsterdam, and the pubs of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, all in an afternoon.
Centers of Progress “takes the reader on a time-travel cruise through the great flash points of human activity to catch innovations that have transformed human lives” at their moment of invention, according to writer Matt Ridley in the insightful foreword that he kindly provided. Come explore Agra as the Taj Mahal was erected and Cambridge as Isaac Newton penned the Principia. Meet engineers in Ancient Rome, Silk Road merchants in Tang Dynasty Chang’an, music composers in 19th-century Vienna, and Space Age flight controllers in Houston.
Learning about past achievements may even hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present.
As I note in the book, “Although there are some exceptions, most cities reach their creative peak during periods of peace. Most centers of progress also thrive during times of relative social, intellectual, and economic freedom, as well as openness to intercultural exchange and trade. And centers of progress tend to be highly populated. . . . Identifying those common denominators among the places that have produced history’s greatest achievements is one way to learn what causes progress in the first place. After all, change is a constant, but progress is not.”
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Hong Kong’s transformation from a war-ravaged “barren island” into a prosperous metropolis, many of the stories featured in Centers of Progress hold valuable lessons about the importance of ideas, people, and freedom. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress.
