Five years of the Taş Tepeler project

In 2020, Türkiye's Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched Taş Tepeler — "the Stone Hills" — a program uniting a dozen Neolithic sites across the Şanlıurfa region under one research vision, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Necmi Karul. Five years on, the project has become one of the most important archaeological efforts in the world, steadily rewriting our understanding of the Neolithic revolution.

One landscape, many discoveries

The Stone Hills are not a single site but a network: Göbekli Tepe and its monumental enclosures, Karahan Tepe with its carved heads and rock-cut rooms, Sefertepe, Çakmaktepe, and more. Together they show the transition from mobile hunter-gatherers to settled communities — and reveal a shared symbolic language of pillars, animals and human forms that ran across the region for nearly two thousand years.

Where Sayburç fits

Among these sites, Sayburç holds a distinctive place. Its five-figure bench relief is the earliest known narrative scene — the first time we can watch people telling a story in stone. And because that scene sits inside a lived-in village, Sayburç shows belief and daily life woven together. As the project enters its next phase, Sayburç remains one of its defining discoveries. See how it connects to Göbekli Tepe.