This symbol, which has no obvious direct referent in the natural world, appears too consistently and too specifically to be accidental decoration.

Whether it represents a specific concept, a specific social group, a specific named entity, or some other form of encoded meaning is not established.

Other geometric elements include cup marks, incised lines, and various rectilinear and curvilinear forms that appear alongside the animal imagery on certain pillars.

The relationship of these geometric elements to the figurative imagery, and whether they should be read as a unified symbolic system or as independent elements with different meanings, is a topic of ongoing research.

The proposal that some of Göbekli Tepe’s symbolic elements constitute proto-writing — a system for recording or communicating specific information in a codified way — is controversial and has not been widely accepted in the scholarly literature.