The pillar room of Structure AB

A room of shafts left standing in the rock

The most recognisable feature of Structure AB is a group of upright shafts rising from the floor of the sunken chamber. There are about ten of them, sometimes counted as eleven depending on how the smaller and more eroded examples are read. Their rounded, tapering form has led them to be described widely as phallic pillars, and their scale and repetition give the room its striking, almost forest-like character.

What makes them extraordinary is not only their shape but their making. These are not free-standing monoliths that were quarried, moved, and erected. They were produced by subtraction: the builders cut the whole chamber down into the living rock and left the shafts standing where they wanted them, so that pillars, floor, and walls are all one continuous piece of bedrock.

Carved down, not built up

This reverses the logic of the better-known enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, where great T-shaped pillars were raised into built rooms. At Karahan, in this chamber, the architecture is negative — defined by what was removed. The result is a space that feels sculpted rather than constructed, and it is one of the reasons Karahan Tepe is treated as a distinct achievement rather than simply a copy of its neighbour.

The pillar room does not stand alone. It is watched over by a human head carved from the wall, and it connects through a narrow porthole-like opening to an adjoining chamber, so that the shafts are part of a designed sequence of spaces rather than a single isolated display.

What the pillars might mean

The phallic reading is the most common interpretation, and it sits naturally alongside Karahan's wider imagery of the human body — the carved heads and the anatomically explicit human statues found elsewhere on the site. On that view the room belongs to a Neolithic symbolic world concerned with the body, fertility, potency, and perhaps ancestry.

It is worth being careful here. That the shafts stand in the bedrock is confirmed; that they were understood by their makers specifically as phalluses, and what such symbolism meant, is interpretation. The excavators have generally described the imagery while staying cautious about pinning down its meaning — a caution this archive follows. Detailed phasing and the room's full context are still being worked out and published season by season.