Hi I guess this is as good a thread to ask this question as any. What measuring system did the builders at Gobekli Tepe employ? I am asking because as in Ancient Egypt I grow tired of Anthropologists using the meter which totally distorts the find and make most people think it is indeed 20 meters even, as if they could have possibly known the meter and then measured 20 of them. So what measurement system might they have used? Interestingly there is not one website, as far as I know, that has even asked the question. Here is the article that has upset me.:

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Atop a limestone plateau near Urfa called Gobekli Tepe, Turkish for "Belly Hill", Schmidt discovered more than 20 circular stone enclosures. The largest was 20m across, a circle of stone with two elaborately carved pillars 5.5m tall at its centre. The carved stone pillars – eerie, stylised human figures with folded hands and fox-pelt belts – weighed up to 10 tons. Carving and erecting them must have been a tremendous technical challenge for people who hadn't yet domesticated animals or invented pottery, let alone metal tools. The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity's oldest known monumental structures, built not for shelter but for some other purpose.

Now the average layman reading this article will believe that the largest circle was exactly 20 meters across. Now forgive me, but if it was exactly 20 meters across (and it just might be) then a good argument could be made for these builders using the meter and I don't think we want to go there. So how do we determine what measurement system they might have used. What I always do when I start an exercise like this is to convert to inches and try to see if anything else fits close. 20 meters is equal to 787.402 of our inches. Next what I do is to divided all the known measurements from the past that I have dealt with to see if anything is close.

Firstly The Royal cubit @ 20.62 inches gives us 38.186303 cubits and it's claim to fame is that it is (1/Phi squared) x 100 to accuracy of 38.186303 / 38.1966 or 99.97 ... actually not half bad.

next up The Megalithic Yard @ 32.648388 divided into 787.402 inches would give us 24.118 Megalithic yards. which equals 10 x sq rt of 2 to accuracy of 99.90 (so-so accuracy)

However the problem is really unsolvable because we simply don't know what the precise measurement was or is. Given the data I have determined that the measurement that might have been used is equivalent to 72 of our inches. In other wards it could have been "the yard" or the even the ell;

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The English unit of length ell is usually 45 inches. That means 1.143 m (for the international inch). It came from the length of the arm from the shoulder (or the elbow) to the wrist, although the exact length was never defined in English law

We then have 787.402 / 45 and we get 17.498 and awfully close to 17.5 ells.

So now let's take a quick look at the height of the pillars @ 5.5 meters. This equals 216.535 inches ( / by 45 = 4.8119 ?) but divided by 20.62 is 10.50. Divided by 12 is 18.04 yards

Not too helpful but definitely not 20 meters nor 5.5 meters tall.

Anyway just my two cents worth and food for thought. What measurement system did they use ?

regards
db

" If everything is simply a coincidence what then is the point of studying or measuring or analyzing anything in the ancient world ?" db