Archaeologists say a temple being excavated in Urfa, southeastern Turkey is 12,000 years old and is likely the oldest temple ever uncovered.
The site was first identified in 1986 when a farmer tilling his field in Sanliurfa found a statuette in the soil. Since then, archaeologists have uncovered the foundation of the temple built in the Neolithic Age along with carvings of pigs, foxes, snakes, fawns and headless humans. Officials with the Harran University Archaeology Department have yet to identify the culture that built the temple or their belief system.
German teams were the first to excavate beginning in 1995, but the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry placed the site on its first-degree protection list in 2005, taking control of the research.
Prior to its discovery, the world’s oldest known temple was in Malta, dating from 5,000 B.C., UPI reported.
Sanliurfa (often simply known as Urfa) is a city with 482,323 inhabitants (2009 estimate in south-eastern Turkey, and the capital of Sanliurfa Province. Urfa is situated on a plain under big open skies, about eighty kilometers east of the Euphrates River. The history of Urfa is recorded from the 4th century BC, but may date back to the 9,000 BC. In 1914 Urfa was estimated to have 75,000 inhabitants: 45,000 Kurds and Turks, 25,000 Armenians and 5,000 Syrian Christians.
