About 15 kilometers north-east of the Turkish city of Þanlıurfa, on a mountain ridge that can be seen for miles around, lies the mound of Göbekli Tepe with its Stone Age Sanctuaries. Its enormous deposit layers, up to 15 meters high, have accumulated over several millennia on an area of about 9 hectares. Even today the place has lost nothing of its magical appeal. For example, a wishing tree, which stands on top of the ridge, is still sought by the inhabitants of the surrounding area. On this site, excavations done by the German Archaelogical Institute in cooperation with the museum of Þanlıurfa found an important piece of the puzzle represented by the early history of humanity, which contributes to a completely new understanding of the process of sedentism and the beginning of agriculture. Of course the hill, which is strewn with numberless stone implements, and with large-format, regular-shaped ashlars only revealed its secret as a result of the investigations, which have been carried on since 1995. Amazingly, no residential buildings have been discovered up to now. However, at least two phases of monumental religious architecture have been uncovered. Of these, the oldest layer, with its richly adorned monolithic pillars, is the most impressive. The buildings on this layer are circular, with a diameter of over 20 metres, and constructed from quarry stone. There are the enclosure A-D on the southern slope and enclosure E at the western plateau. Their age is impressive, having been dated to the 10th millennium BC, a time when men still lived as hunter-gatherers. This opened up a layer of the Stone Age, in which the so-called Neolithic Revolution took place. In superposition of layer III there is layer II, which has been dated to the 9th millennium BC. Now a certain reduction both in size of the structures and in numbers of the pillars can be observed. The uppermost layer I is represented by the surface debris including enormous deposits of Hangfußsedimente, accumulations of eroded sediments from layers II and III. There is no occupation from periods younger than the Pre-Pottery Neolithic at the site. Enclosure A had been discovered in 1996, but it is only partially excavated until now. Six pillars are known so far from this structure. Remarkable is the relief of a net like object, probably the interlaced bodies of several snakes. Enclosure B and C had been found in 1998 und 1999. Enclosere B includes 9 pillars. Between the central pillars the floor level had been uncovered. As expected it had been a Terrazzo floor. Remarkable is the depiction of a reptile like animal, may be a varan, on the back side of pillar 6. Enclosure C owns two circles of pillars, which are 18 in total so far. In the 2008 campagne the artificially smoothed bedrock had been unveiled representing the floor of this structure. In the centre of the enclosure two podests are visible. They had been worked out of the bedrock. These podests are the bases of the central pillars 35 and 37. Such an installation had been know allready from enclosure E, which is located outside the mound on the western plateau of Göbekli Tepe, where similar podests had been visible at the rock surface already in the first campagne 1995. The best preserved structure is enclosure D with 13 pillars. The stone pillars are the most characteristic feature of the sanctuaries at Göbekli Tepe. The pillars are without doubt abstract representations of people; they are, in other words, stone statues of anthropomorphic beings, as representations of arms and hands were discovered on several pillars. The head is represented by the cross of the T-shaped pillars. Differentiation of sex was evidently not intended. It is also clear that the minimalist form of representation was intentional, because the other statues and reliefs found at the site offer sufficient proof of the artist’s ability to produce naturalist works. If anything, the stone pillars represents ancestors, ghosts of the dead or daemons, and have therefore been given an ambiguous form. It even could be possible, that the pillars represent the first deities being visible after the long period of the Upper Palaeolithic with its famous art, but without anything, which could be understood as the depiction of a deity (not regarding the question, if the female statuettes of the Upper Paleolithic Gravettian could represent goddesses). Anyway, the stole that can be discerned on some pillars seems to represent an attribute or a garment, which could only be worn by certain persons as a ritual robe. Perhaps the stone buttons which occur in large numbers only in Göbekli Tepe belong to a robe of this type. The pairs of pillars in the centre of each space, which tower above the other pillars, must also be ascribed an important role. Twins, or pairs of brothers and sisters, are a common theme in mythology. On the other hand, they may simply present the classic duality of man and woman. However, there is no indication of sex. With few exceptions, the reliefs, adorning many of the 47 pillars discovered up to now in layer III, depict animals. So far as can be seen, the gender of the animals is also male: foxes and gazelles, lions and wild asses, bulls and boars. Beside the mammals there are ducks and cranes, vultures and ibises, and also snakes, spiders and scorpions. Some of the animals, most of which could be said to have terrifying or protective aspects, may have served as guards. It remains a mystery whether the relief pictures should be considered as attributes of the respective “pillar beings”, or whether they are part of a mythological cycle. The animal reliefs are naturalistic and correspond to the fauna of that time. However, the pictured animals need not necessarily have played a special role in the everyday lives of the people, as game animals for example. They were rather part of a mythological world, which we already encounter in cave painting. The important thing is that – with the exception of anthropomorphic beings with animal heads – fabulous or mythical creatures, such as centaurs or the sphinx, winged bulls or horses, do not yet occur in the iconography and therefore in the mythology of prehistoric times. They must be recognized as creations of the high cultures which arose later. One of the outstanding results of the last campagnes of excavations had been the discovery of enclosure F, which is located at the western slope of the southwestern peak of the mound. Its stratigraphical position is not clear yet. While the central pillars the enclosures A-E are facing to south-southeast, the central pillars of enclosure F are orientated to southwest. It seems possible, that enclosure F belongs to layer of the PPN period which had been not known so far from the excavation areas and which is chronologically between layer II and III. Several of the 8 pillars of enclosure F own reliefs, including unusual combinations of motives, e.g., a dog above a standing person, who seems to be male, as no female attributes can be observed. In Göbekli Tepe, distinctly feminine motifs are lacking from both animal and human images (except one graffiti of a nacked woman). In Nevalı Çori, by contrast, among the terracottas that have nowhere else been found in such abundance – 700 in number – over 90% of them are anthropomorphic objects, and male and female figurines are documented in equal share. The complete absence of terracottas at Göbekli Tepe is most remarkable. This surely reflects the different functions of the ritual buildings at both locations: while the buildings of Göbekli Tepe have a possible connection with burial customs, at Nevalı Çori, it is possible to examine a village settlement and everyday life. The use of clay as a material for the male and female figures found here is not insignificant. The smaller stone figures also discovered here exhibit a completely different and much richer iconographic repertoire, which repeats the stock of motifs associated with the large stone sculptures and reliefs. It has been a great advantage to modern archaeology that the circular constructions of the older layer at Göbekli Tepe were completely filled in during the Stone Age. The old surfaces that can be observed in the excavations and the processes that occurred in the sediment have been subjected to pedological analyses and allow the act of filling to be dated. What is more, the circumstance that the structure was filled in leaves some room for interpretation: Was an old religion buried along with the constructions? Was the act of filling part of some ritual? Was this ritual carried out repeatedly? We can assume that much older traces and constructions are yet to be found at Göbekli Tepe, and it may be conjectured that the place has a history going back over several thousand years, as far as the Old Stone Age. The Göbekli Tepe opens a new perspective on the Early Neolithic: specialization on particular tasks must have been possible, in order for members of the community to be able to erect these monuments and to adorn them so elaborately. The people must also have had a highly complicated mythology, including a capacity for abstraction. Further investigations will certainly give us with more detailed information.