A remarkable winter solstice sunrise phenomenon at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Karahan Tepe (9400 BC - 8200 BC) was discovered by the authors of this article, Hugh Newman and JJ Ainsworth in December 2021. Known as the sister site to Göbekli Tepe, and part of the Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills) project, it is located in the Tektek Mountain, some 20 miles southeast of Şanlıurfa, Turkey. Karahan Tepe was first discovered in 1997 by Bahattin Çelik with excavation beginning in 2019. Hunter-gatherers constructed large stone circular structures, sunken bedrock pits and hundreds of T-shaped pillars and intricate statues. This unique winter solstice discovery may be the oldest solstice alignment built into a megalithic site on the planet (being 7000 years older than Stonehenge’s summer solstice). However, it has recently been claimed that the ancient builders had little interest in astronomy and that a roof may have blocked any such alignment.2 The authors stand by their findings as new 3D reconstructions and astronomical data reveal how well it worked in ancient times, even with a hypothetical roof.
On December 20th 2021 at 7.37am, the sun rose over the rocky hills on the southeastern horizon at Karahan Tepe. Ten minutes later an upright blade of light appeared on one side of the oversized stone head protruding from the western wall of Structure AB (a sunken pit with 11 upright pillars, also known as the Pillars Shrine). The suns rays were beaming through a bedrock porthole to the southeast (which leads into Structure AD, a 75ft wide enclosure). The slim shard of light slowly moved across the face widening and descending to the area of the mouth and neck over a period of 45 minutes as the sun rose in the sky. This was clearly a deliberate alignment built into the structure to record this phenomenon, and we feverishly documented it to the best of our ability.
On a subsequent visit in December 2022, this time with author Andrew Collins and some Turkish colleagues, the site was investigated on three consecutive mornings to record the phenomenon in more detail, which included taking accurate orientations of the sunrise and using time-lapse photography to capture the the process in detail.
In our previous series of articles, and in the appendix of Andrew Collins’ book Karahan Tepe, we presented our analysis of the findings which utilised the astronomy software called Stellarium backdating the alignment to the time of Karahan Tepe. We chose the date of 9000 BC, as the site was in used from 9400 BC to 8200 BC and felt this was a good choice to focus our research on, yet still, even a few hundred years before or after this would not affect the results. We concluded that at this time the phenomenon would not only have still functioned effectively, but would have illuminated the stone head more completely due to the slightly different position of sunrise in 9000 BC due to the ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’.
