What Did Göbekli Tepe Call It?

By Mehmet Kurtkaya

What did the people who built Göbekli Tepe call it? They had built it for ritual purposes, and it was attended by many tribes, some visiting from as far as 100 kilometers. So what did they say to each other as to where they were going?

No one asks this question because academics and amateurs alike think it is impossible to answer—because we do not have written records. The earliest written records started some 4,000 years later in Sumer and Elam.

So is it a useless exercise to try to guess what people called Göbekli Tepe? I don't think so. I think this exercise could be a multidisciplinary work that I have mentioned in my blog launch article. We should gather evidence from different fields of study.

The main characteristic of this site is stone pillars arranged in a circle. We have similar structures in the area, like Karahantepe and the broader Tas Tepeler. These stone pillars have animal pictures and a couple of symbol-like shapes, which we cannot use. What we have in our hand is a base, a temple of circularly arranged stone pillars. We have similar structures far away in England—Stonehenge, which was built by the descendants of Neolithic farmers who had migrated from Anatolia many thousands of years ago. Circular stone structures are found in Eurasia and Africa too, but Göbekli Tepe is probably the most elaborate and may be the most ancient.

It is also known that ancient people built circular ritual, solstice-observing structures from wood; one particular example is from Germany, Goseck circle, dated to 6,900 years ago. In my article The Eternal Turn, I have explored why circle is such an important concept for humanity since the dawn of civilization.

There is also the Shigir Idol—a series of totem poles found in the Ural Mountains near Yekaterinburg, which are 10,000 years old and were miraculously conserved due to being submerged in a peat bog and found over 100 years ago. I do not know if these were circular or not, but archaeologists find links in them to Göbekli Tepe, and they are contemporaneous sites.

Now, after this quick scan of ancient sites that could have some relation to Göbekli Tepe, back to our original question: What did the people who built it call it?

A fascinating discovery in historical linguistics

In 2016, researchers from major institutions in Europe Blasi et al. (2016) used mathematical methods to discover 74 words with sound-meaning links, each appearing in hundreds to thousands of the 4,000 often unrelated languages studied—minimizing academic bias through statistics.

One of these 74 words was round. It was found that across unrelated languages around the world, the word for round contained the sound 'r'. The authors made the discovery but did not speculate as to how this happened. And even though the study did not include the Sumerian language, Sumerian word for circle gur, also contains an R. This is in perfect alignment with the study because in order to have such a similarity across languages, such a connection must go deep in time. For more on this please check R for Round

Let's take a closer look at ancient Sumerian texts, even though they were written at least 5,000 years after Göbekli Tepe was abandoned. Sumer was established to the South of Gobeklitepe couple of hundred kilometers away. Let's check the word ur, which is also the name of one of its first cities. It has meanings like man, dog, hero, roof, root (plant), among others, according to Grok, which used the University of Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. Ur has also a root/base/foundation—abstract meaning referring to fundamental parts or origins—according to Kimi AI. This is conceptually related to the plant root meaning too.

We have seen that the word gur, means circle or to turn. I will add an observation of mine as a sidenote. Sumerian is an agglutinative language, meaning new words are formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to an existing word. The word may have been formed by adding g or ug to the root ur. Now, I have many other instances where this happened in other languages. It gives a meaning of relatedness: Related to ur. This is my idea, not an academic publication, but I have many examples from different languages. Even if the word for base ur and the word for round gur which contains an R were not related, we have found some interesting words in Sumerian.

Now let's go back to Göbekli Tepe and compare these dictionary entries with features of Göbekli Tepe. Base, roof, root meanings perfectly align with what Göbekli Tepe is.

Klaus Schmidt had noted that Göbekli Tepe had almost exclusively penis symbols—only one woman figure giving birth. In nearby Karahantepe, a full statue was one with a man holding his erect penis. These are near Göbekli Tepe and have a similar style. We also note that Egypt's Min city had such statues from a much later period, contemporaneous with Sumer. So the man/hero meaning of the Sumerian word perfectly matches the manly character of these stone structures, including Göbekli Tepe.

Now the key point is that these stones were arranged in a circle. And this is not limited to Gobeklitepe. It is a phenomenon observed around the world since the end of the stone age. Moreover, the existence of an r across thousands of languages perfectly matches the computational linguistics results that showed many unrelated world languages share this feature, as seen above. And it is obvious that this correspondence goes back many thousands of years, so it wouldn't be surprising that it goes back to the time of Göbekli Tepe.

Neolithic Farmers of Europe migrated from Southeast Anatolia

This connection is not just typological. Archaeogenetics has definitively shown that the Neolithic farmers who populated Europe—and who built these later circles—originated in Southeast Anatolia. This provides a tangible thread: the people who millennia later built Stonehenge and the Goseck circle were the cultural descendants of the people who inhabited the lands around Göbekli Tepe. The ritual template of the circle, therefore, may have traveled with them.

While proto-indo-european core was developed in modern Black sea region of Russia near the Caucusus, the people who were the first Indo-Europeans had some Anatolian Neolithic farmer ancestry. Moreover, Anatolian Neolithic farmers were the ancestors of Early European farmers and formed one of the ancestries of modern Europeans. Therefore, wherever you look you would see Anatolian Neolithic ancestry and considering stone or wooden circles as a ritual/cultural site, it is possible that these people inherited not only cultural aspects but words along with it, specifically words for base and circle, as these were connected, as their base was circular.

Time Gap between Sumer and Gobeklitepe

Gobeklitepe was buried around 8000BC. The first distinct Sumerian period, which is also known the Uruk period starts between 4500-4100 BC. The gap is about 3500-4000 years.

It is well within the realm of possibilities that some words especially of cultural/ritual value such as base/circle would have survived. There are two reasons for this. First of culturally and mythologically speaking Ubaid period affected Sumer. That's 2500 years after Gobeklitepe and to the south of Gobeklitepe by a few hundred kilometers at most which is close enough. Moreover some regions of Unaid period, were adjacent to where Gobeklitepe stood.

For example, Sumerian myths state that agriculture came down from the `Mountain`. Many scholars think this could be Gobeklitepe.

However, a key consideration makes this gap less daunting: the pace of civilizational change accelerates over time. Changes that take a few hundred years today would have taken millennia in the deep past. The 3,500 years between Mycenaean and Modern Greek saw remarkable continuity in core vocabulary, suggesting a similar preservation of foundational terms was possible between Pre-Pottery Neolithic Anatolia and early Sumer.

We should also consider that oral tradition was a strong preserving force of culture and languages, as proven by the Hittes and the Greeks. This is also how myths survived in ancient history. Mycenean Greek did not have written continuity, Greece entered a so called Dark period after the collapse of the Mycanean civilization.

Considering all of the above it is more than likely that some cultural terms survived from the area of Gobeklitepe, not necessarily Gobeklitepe itself but from the area that encompasses Southeastern Turkey and Northern Syria where monumental structures were found. This is also next to Ubaid area as I have stated earlier.

So both in terms of geography and timespan, this inheritance is quite possible. One should also always keep in mind that stone circular structures were a widespread phenomenon and it could explain the existence of the sound r in words that is found in words accross unrelated languages, whether due to evolutionary reasons or more likely cultural reasons.

Adding all of the above, I suggest that the people who built Göbekli Tepe called it Ur, like the Sumerians named one of their cities. It was a generic name, and I assume that the people building other circular structures used the same name or a similar r-containing word. Ur as in German Urheimat—a foundational origins sound.

If linguists can reconstruct words for 'wheel' or 'axle' for a 6,000-year-old unwritten language (Proto-Indo-European), it is not unreasonable to speculate that a foundational, ritual term for the 'Origin'—Ur—could have persisted in the cultural memory of the lands between Göbekli Tepe and Sumer.

While we will never hear the word spoken by its builders, the convergence of archaeology, computational linguistics, and the conceptual vocabulary of our earliest written records points to a profound possibility: they may have called their world's first great sanctuary by a name that meant simply, and powerfully, the Origin—Ur.

There are other connections I will not get into at the moment, like the proto-Euphratic theory, closeness of the proposed Indo-European homeland to Göbekli Tepe and Sumer, in the North Caucasus—but formed via CHG people migrating to the North Caucasus from Iran and meeting there with the EHG, per the 2025 study by Reich. Or the study of Heggarty 2023, which places it to the south of the Caucasus. And we already know how Indo-European languages have the r sound at their most basic proto level, constructed by linguists.