Körtik Tepe

Körtik Tepe in context

Decorated stone vessels on the Tigris

Körtik Tepe, on the upper Tigris, is an early Neolithic site occupied around the very start of the period — about 10,000 BCE, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. It is famous for hundreds of richly decorated stone vessels — bowls and cups of chlorite and limestone incised with animals, snakes, scorpions and flowing geometric designs — an extraordinary concentration of portable art from a single community.

This is symbolic stone-working of real ambition, made at the dawn of settled life.

Elaborate burials

Körtik Tepe is equally known for its burials. The dead were interred beneath house floors, often with rich grave goods — many of the decorated vessels, beads and ornaments — and in some cases with evidence of complex funerary treatment. Ornament, the dead, and symbolic art are found tightly bound together here, a pattern that recurs across the early Neolithic of the region.

Its beads and worked stone also feed the long-distance exchange networks that connected these communities across hundreds of kilometres.

A parallel art tradition

Körtik Tepe shows that symbolic stone-working was not unique to the T-pillar sites. At the very start of the Neolithic, communities across the region were already carving, decorating and burying meaning-laden objects. It is a reminder that Göbekli Tepe's monuments grew out of a wider, already-rich world of Neolithic art — one whose portable masterpieces are, in their way, as astonishing as any pillar.