Could These Carvings in Turkey Be the World’s Oldest Lunisolar Calendar?

Thousands of years ago, the archaeological site known as Göbekli Tepe was home to a complex of temple-like structures. Located in what is now southern Turkey, the site is known for its pillars decorated with intricate carvings that still stand today.

Now, a researcher is arguing for a new interpretation of one of those pillars: The carved stone could be an early calendar—and it may mark a comet that hit Earth roughly 13,000 years ago, as Martin Sweatman, an engineer at the University of Edinburgh, writes in a recent study published in the journal Time and Mind.

“It appears the inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe were keen observers of the sky, which is to be expected given their world had been devastated by a comet strike,” says Sweatman in a statement from the university.

The pillar in question features a series of rectangles and V-shaped symbols. According to the study, these symbols may be part of the oldest known lunisolar calendar, which once tracked time using the movements of both the sun and moon.

Sweatman has been studying the markings at Göbekli Tepe for some time, but he hadn’t considered that the V-shaped symbols could represent lunar cycles until someone suggested it to him over email.

“I had not spotted that myself before,” he tells the New York Times’ Claire Moses. “I had always wondered what these box- and V-symbols might mean.”

The pillar sports 365 V-shaped symbols, including one “special” V “worn around the neck of a bird-like beast thought to represent the summer solstice constellation at the time,” according to the statement. If each V represents a single day, the pillar could have been a calendar containing 12 lunar months plus 11 extra days.

As Sweatman tells the Times, the carvings suggest that “ancient people were able to record their observations of the sun, moon and constellations in the form of a solar calendar, created to keep track of time and mark the change of seasons.”

The researcher also thinks the calendar’s carving could memorialize a comet that may have hit Earth around 10,850 B.C.E. However, the existence of the comet strike has been a subject of intense debate among scientists for years, and Sweatman has been a major player in previous research efforts related to it.

Sweatman thinks that the comet struck Earth and plunged it into a “1,200-year ice age that led to the extinction of many large animals, including mammoths, steppe bison and other large Pleistocene mammals,” reports NPR’s Rebecca Rosman.

These changes may have “triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate,” says Sweatman in the statement. “Possibly, their attempts to record what they saw are the first steps towards the development of writing millennia later.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.