Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum (The Urfa Man) and Haleplibahçe Amazon Mosaics

Spanning 60,000 square metres of indoor galleries at Haleplibahçe right on the northern edge of the Balıklıgöl park belt, the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum and Haleplibahçe Mosaic Museum form the largest museum complex in Turkey and the indispensable companion to Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe.

1. The Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum: Three Masterpieces on the Ground Floor

Because the monumental museum walks you chronologically from the Palaeolithic era through the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age (Harran), Babylonian (Nabonidus stelae), Hittite and Roman periods, spend your first hour in the extraordinary Neolithic Galleries:

1. The Balıklıgöl Statue ("The Urfa Man", c. 9000 BC): displayed inside its own dedicated darkened room is the oldest known naturalistic, life-size sculpture of a human being in world history. Unearthed in 1993 during construction work at Yeni Mahalle right beside the Balıklıgöl pools, the 1.80-metre-tall limestone figure has deep eye sockets inlaid with shiny black obsidian stones, a V-shaped double collar carved around his neck, and hands clasped over his lower abdomen, carved 11,000 years ago.
2. The Full-Scale Walk-Inside Replica of Göbeklitepe Enclosure D: at the actual site of Göbeklitepe, you look down at the pillars from an elevated boardwalk; inside the museum, you can walk right between full-scale 5.5-metre casts of Enclosure D's T-pillars to inspect every fox, crane and scorpion at eye level, surrounded by the actual original limestone wild boar, predator and totem-pole sculptures excavated from Göbeklitepe, Nevalı Çori, Karahantepe and Sayburç.

2. The Haleplibahçe Mosaic Museum (Under the Giant Column-Free Dome Next Door)

In 2006, while workers were excavating the foundations for a municipal park on this exact spot, they uncovered a luxurious 5th/6th-century AD Eastern Roman (Byzantine) palace villa. Rather than moving the mosaics, architects built an 82-metre-wide column-free steel dome directly over the villa so you view the floors in situ:

• The Hunting Amazon Queens Mosaic (Unique in the World): the only Roman mosaic ever discovered depicting the mythical warrior women of the Amazons (labelled in Greek as Hippolyte, Melanippe, Antiope and Penthesilea) hunting leopards and ostriches on horseback using four-square-millimetre river stones.
• The Life of Achilles & The Orpheus Mosaic: trace the entire childhood of Achilles (from being dipped by his heel into the River Styx to training with the centaur Chiron), and see the famous 194 AD Edessa Orpheus Mosaic (returned to Şanlıurfa from the Dallas Museum of Art in 2012).