MONUMENTS -- An Architectural TIMELINE

ca. 11,600 years old:   The newly discovered KARAHANTEPE site is very near the better known  Göbekli Tepe site in what is now called southeastern Turkey.  It was built by the same culture but is thought to have begun a bit earlier in time. 

ca. 11,600 years old:   With Karahantepe, the world's oldest buildings  (so far as we know now) - GOBEKLI TEPE is the name of a complex of multiple circular enclosures of a clearly ritual or ceremonial nature.  The carvings and arrangement of T-shaped columns were protected all this time by being carefully buried in antiquity.  

ca. 5,800 years old:    An underground mortuary temple, the HAL SAFLIENI HYPOGEUM mirrors architectural features of today's performance spaces and has eerie acoustic properties.  It lies beneath the Mediterranean island of Malta.  

ca. 5,800 years old:     GGANTIJA is one of several surviving above-ground monuments in Malta, built by the same society.  They are called temples and are considered to be the world's oldest freestanding buildings.  Constructed on top of bedrock, they show the earliest known use of several architectural features such as corbelling and forecourts. 

ca. 5,200 years old:       A mysterious cairn in Ireland known as NEWGRANGE PASSAGE TOMB  is one of many similar prehistoric man-made caves which may, at least in part,  have served the same function as the "earth lodges" made by early native Americans.

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IN HISTORIC TIMES, iconic monuments include The Pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, the Ziggurat at Ur, Palace of Knossos, King Solomon's Temple, The Roman Colosseum, Petra, The Parthenon, Hagia Sophia.