{"it":{"id":"LEV-SAY","kind":"site","sub":"Middle East","name":"Sayburç","place":"Turkey","lat":37.111,"lon":38.621,"date":"see measurements","mat":"limestone bedrock","nfacts":15,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"A 3.7 m relief at Sayburç, in southeastern Türkiye, shows five figures in one scene, including people facing leopards and a bull. Narrative scenes like this are rare for the 9th millennium BCE.","src":[421],"nsrc":5,"why":"A 3.7 m relief, some 11,000 years old, may be the oldest story ever carved in stone.","yt":"Why give the second man six fingers?","rel":["GOB-TEP","LEV-004"],"hook":"A 3.7 m relief at Sayburç may be the oldest carved story yet found."},"S":{"421":["Wikipedia: Sayburç","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saybur%C3%A7"]},"rec":{"id":"LEV-SAY","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"relief","a":"length","v":"3.7","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saybur%C3%A7","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2984"},{"f":"relief","a":"figures","v":"5","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saybur%C3%A7","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2985"},{"f":"site","a":"dating","v":"PPNA, 9th millennium BCE","u":"","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","yr":"2022","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saybur%C3%A7","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"INTERPRETATION","id":"M2986"},{"f":"site point","a":"elevation (DEM SRTM 30 m)","v":"675","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"NASA SRTM via OpenTopoData","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"NASA SRTM via OpenTopoData","pg":"","url":"https://api.opentopodata.org/v1/srtm30m","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3041"},{"f":"site point","a":"elevation (DEM ASTER 30 m)","v":"668","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"NASA/METI ASTER GDEM via OpenTopoData","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"NASA/METI ASTER GDEM via OpenTopoData","pg":"","url":"https://api.opentopodata.org/v1/aster30m","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3042"},{"f":"communal building","a":"diameter","v":"11","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","pg":"","url":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/sayburc-reliefs-a-narrative-scene-from-the-neolithic/3A35B54B3265C7224CB225FE70EBDD02","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"rock-cut into limestone bedrock","id":"M3230"},{"f":"bench","a":"height","v":"0.6-0.8","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","pg":"","url":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/sayburc-reliefs-a-narrative-scene-from-the-neolithic/3A35B54B3265C7224CB225FE70EBDD02","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3231"},{"f":"bench","a":"width","v":"0.6","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","pg":"","url":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/sayburc-reliefs-a-narrative-scene-from-the-neolithic/3A35B54B3265C7224CB225FE70EBDD02","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"~0.4 m cavities = pillar sockets","id":"M3232"},{"f":"relief panel","a":"height x length","v":"0.7-0.9 x 3.7","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","pg":"","url":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/sayburc-reliefs-a-narrative-scene-from-the-neolithic/3A35B54B3265C7224CB225FE70EBDD02","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"5 figures: man with phallus, 2 leopards, man with rattle?, bull","id":"M3233"},{"f":"site","a":"excavation history","v":"excavation began 2021; two PPN areas 70 m apart; modern houses over building","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","yr":"2022","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","pg":"","url":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/sayburc-reliefs-a-narrative-scene-from-the-neolithic/3A35B54B3265C7224CB225FE70EBDD02","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3234"},{"f":"structure AA","a":"width","v":"~14","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","yr":"2024","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","pg":"","url":"https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.51.23","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"disagrees with 11 m diameter in Antiquity 2022","id":"M3235"},{"f":"settlement","a":"area","v":"~3000","u":"m2","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","yr":"2024","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","pg":"","url":"https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.51.23","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3236"},{"f":"floor","a":"levelness","v":"bedrock floor meticulously smoothed and levelled","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","yr":"2024","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","pg":"","url":"https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.51.23","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"qualitative","id":"M3237"},{"f":"southern buildings","a":"radiocarbon (summary)","v":"11 dates, mid-9th millennium BC, ~300 yr span","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","yr":"2024","m":"derived","c":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","pg":"","url":"https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.51.23","b":"S","bb":"","t":"LAB_RESULT","n":"early PPNB; values not tabulated in text reached","id":"M3238"},{"f":"site","a":"construction phases","v":"single period, no vertical stratification","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","yr":"2024","m":"as stated","c":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","pg":"","url":"https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.51.23","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3239"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA039","a":"Göbekli sister-site reliefs","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"PPNA settlement art","ms":"","st":"unresolved","n":"3 rows; no lab dates in db","nl":3}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"see measurements","dm":"","lab":"NO","weak":"","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"37.11124","lon":"38.62070","src":"Wikidata P625 (Q115679382)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Wikidata vs OSM delta 0.0006 deg (~0.07 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8020830329"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia (Sayburç; Özdoğan 2022)","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saybur%C3%A7"},{"id":null,"t":"NASA SRTM via OpenTopoData","u":"https://api.opentopodata.org/v1/srtm30m"},{"id":null,"t":"NASA/METI ASTER GDEM via OpenTopoData","u":"https://api.opentopodata.org/v1/aster30m"},{"id":null,"t":"Özdoğan 2022, Antiquity","u":"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/sayburc-reliefs-a-narrative-scene-from-the-neolithic/3A35B54B3265C7224CB225FE70EBDD02"},{"id":null,"t":"Özdoğan et al., Documenta Praehistorica 51","u":"https://doi.org/10.4312/dp.51.23"},{"id":"VLEV-SAY-6","t":"Nature (2022): Prehistoric carvings are oldest known story sequence","u":"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04338-4"},{"id":null,"t":"Eylem Özdoğan, “The Sayburç reliefs: a narrative scene from the Neolithic”, Antiquity 96:390 (December 2022), 1599–1605 (open access).","u":"https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.125"},{"id":null,"t":"Graham Hancock, “Could the Epic of Gilgamesh, previously attributed to the Sumerians around 4,000 years ago, date back more than 10,000 years?”, grahamhancock.com (23 June 2025).","u":"https://grahamhancock.com/hancockg25/"},{"id":null,"t":"“Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven”, translation, Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) 1.8.1.2, University of Oxford.","u":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr1812.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Jens Notroff, “Weapons of choice: A Pre-Pottery Neolithic hunting scene (?) from Sayburç, SE Turkey”, Trowel & Pen (14 December 2022).","u":"https://trowelandpen.com/2022/12/14/weapons-of-choice-a-pre-pottery-neolithic-hunting-scene-from-sayburc-se-turkey-and-some-thoughts-on-prehistoric-hunting-equipment/"}],"sum":"In 1949 a village was built over a low mound in the foothills of the Eastern Taurus, in south-eastern Türkiye, and it gave the place its name: Sayburç. Two of its houses, one of stone and one of concrete, stood over a particular patch of ground, and people lived, cooked and slept in them for the next seventy years. Under their floors lay a story carved in stone some ten thousand years before the first of those houses was built. It was the oldest story picture yet found anywhere in the Near East, and nobody living above it knew.\n\nExcavation began in 2021. Sayburç lies about 20 km south-east of the city of Şanlıurfa, roughly 60 km east of the Euphrates, at about 670 m above sea level. The team, led by the archaeologist Eylem Özdoğan of Istanbul University, found two Neolithic areas about 70 m apart: communal buildings to the north and ordinary houses to the south. The settlement covers about 3,000 square metres, smaller than a football pitch, and it belongs to a single period with no stack of later rebuilding, which makes it unusually clean to read. Eleven radiocarbon dates from the southern buildings fall in the mid-9th millennium BC and span about three centuries. Some summaries put the carving at around 11,000 years old and assign the site to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A; Özdoğan's 2024 report in Documenta Praehistorica places it in the mid-9th millennium BC. Either way, this is the world before pottery and before metal, among some of the first people anywhere to settle in one place.\n\nSayburç is not alone. It belongs to the same cluster of early settled communities on the Şanlıurfa plateau as Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe, the region's famous sites, with their monumental buildings, T-shaped pillars and crowded symbols. Özdoğan notes that Sayburç is smaller than both, and that it shows how varied these places were. One of its special buildings has a central pillar and seven T-pillars set against its wall, and, like the others, it stands among ordinary houses. She reads that closeness as the sacred woven into everyday life rather than walled off from it.\n\nThe building that made headlines is round, about 11 m across, cut down into the limestone bedrock. A bench runs around its wall, 0.6 to 0.8 m high and about 0.6 m deep, with sockets that probably once held pillars. On the inner face of that bench, in a panel about 3.7 m long and 0.7 to 0.9 m high, are five figures. At the centre a man is carved in high relief, facing out into the room, holding his phallus in his right hand. Two leopards face him from either side, mouths open, teeth bared. To the west is a second scene. Another man, shown in a slight crouch, faces a bull. His raised left hand has six fingers, and his right holds what Özdoğan calls \"a snake, or a rattle.\" The bull's body is shown in profile, but its head is turned to the viewer from above, so that both horns can be seen at once.\n\nIn Antiquity in 2022, Özdoğan called it \"the earliest known depiction of a narrative 'scene'.\" Nature's news pages put it more simply: an 11,000-year-old carving that is the earliest known portrayal of a narrative scene. What makes it new is the layout. At Göbeklitepe and Nevali Çori, humans and animals are stacked one above another. Here they stand side by side, on the same level, interacting, as if something is happening between them. Danger is the mood. Özdoğan stresses the teeth and the horns, the \"predatory and aggressive aspects of the animal world,\" and reads the panel as a picture of the tense bond between people and dangerous animals at the moment humans were settling into village life.\n\nThe archaeologist Jens Notroff, who has worked on Göbekli Tepe, looks hard at the bull. He compares it with the bull on Göbekli Tepe's Pillar 2 and finds the two \"almost created from the same template,\" both with lowered horns that evoke \"charging (i.e. dangerous) bulls.\" Dead aurochs elsewhere are shown with bent legs and lolling tongue. At Sayburç, he writes, \"we see a still living animal, a still dangerous bull,\" and the man's legs suggest someone trying to dodge. Was it a hunt? Others have suggested the man holds a lasso, and Notroff weighs bows, slings and other gear. He does not make much of the six fingers, which may be nothing more than rough carving. Özdoğan's own 2024 view keeps the options open: the figures are caught in \"a moment of an event\" that may recount \"a story or myth.\"\n\nThat is the mainstream position, and it is careful. A shared visual language across the plateau; a community that gathered on a bench in a sunken round room; a set of images about power, danger and the animal world that its members would have recognised at a glance. The debate is about meaning, not about who made it.\n\nThe meaning is where the ground opens up. In 2025 the writer Graham Hancock asked whether the reliefs could be visual aids for \"an earlier unwritten incarnation\" of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a possible \"Neolithic version of PowerPoint slides.\" His case rests on long memory, on studies suggesting oral knowledge can survive thousands of years, and he concludes that a connection \"can't be ruled out.\" The obvious hook is the bull: in the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, the goddess Inana sends \"the great bull\" against the hero. The rebuttal is plain, and Hancock supplies part of it himself: more than 6,000 years separate Sayburç from the earliest written versions of the epic, and no text from Sayburç bridges them. The scenes do not match closely either; the poem has no pair of leopards flanking a man. Notroff writes that \"we are still lacking an understanding of the actual narrative.\"\n\nWhat can be said is stranger than any single identification. Somewhere around ten and a half thousand years ago, people who had no writing decided that a story was important enough to cut permanently into the rock of a room where they met. They chose figures, a sequence, a moment of tension. They gave one man an extra finger, deliberately or not, and turned a bull's head so both horns showed. Özdoğan closes her Antiquity paper with a thought borrowed from Göbeklitepe: the reliefs may reflect \"a collective memory that kept the values of its community alive.\" Memory that a community works to keep alive is memory of something that mattered enormously, and the people who controlled its telling, on that bench, in that room, would have held a kind of authority over everyone who listened.\n\nAnd only half of the building has been dug. The two modern houses still stand over the rest, due to come down so the remainder can be exposed. Somewhere under a kitchen floor in a village founded in 1949, the other half of the oldest story in stone is waiting in the dark: more figures, perhaps, facing the leopards and the bull across a bench where people once sat, listening to an account whose words were lost long before anyone learned to write them down.","qs":["Why give the second man six fingers?","Is this one story in two scenes, or two separate scenes side by side?","Half the building is still unexcavated. What would you hope the other half holds?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Detail.Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.P1067769.jpg/1280px-Detail.Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.P1067769.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail.Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.P1067769.jpg","title":"Detail.Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.P1067769.jpg","lic":"CC0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en","by":"Bautsch","cap":"Detail, Sayburc Reliefszenen, Replik"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009.jpg/1280px-Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009.jpg","title":"Dolmen in Johfiyeh Irbid north of Jordan Dec2009.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Telfah ahmed","cap":"Dolmen_in_Johfiyeh_Irbid_north_of_Jordan_Dec2009"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.jpg/1280px-Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.jpg","title":"Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.jpg","lic":"CC0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en","by":"Bautsch","cap":"Sayburc Reliefszenen, Replik"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20221201181421541-0856_S0003598X22001259_S0003598X22001259_fig4.png/1280px-Urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20221201181421541-0856_S0003598X22001259_S0003598X22001259_fig4.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20221201181421541-0856_S0003598X22001259_S0003598X22001259_fig4.png","title":"Urn cambridge.org id binary 20221201181421541-0856 S0003598X22001259 S0003598X22001259 fig4.png","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"B. Köşker","cap":"The Sayburç relief"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20221201181421541-0856_S0003598X22001259_S0003598X22001259_fig5.png/1280px-Urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20221201181421541-0856_S0003598X22001259_S0003598X22001259_fig5.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20221201181421541-0856_S0003598X22001259_S0003598X22001259_fig5.png","title":"Urn cambridge.org id binary 20221201181421541-0856 S0003598X22001259 S0003598X22001259 fig5.png","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"K. Akdemir","cap":"The male figure in high relief"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Limestone bedrock","h":"Made of","s":[156]}],"hs":{"156":["Wikipedia: Sayburç (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saybur%C3%A7"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/LEV-SAY.webp","w":1280,"h":1941,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Detail.Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.P1067769.jpg/1280px-Detail.Sayburc.Reliefszenen.Replik.P1067769.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}