Gobekli Tepe Read online

  NEOLITHIZATION

  For those who study the prehistory of the Near East, the transitional age between the hunter-gatherers of the late Paleolithic age and the later Neolithic farmers and herders is styled the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a term devised by British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon (1906–1978) following her extensive excavations at Jericho in the 1950s. It is a term used much in this book, although in its formative stage this era is described as the proto-Neolithic period, while in Europe this same epoch is called the Mesolithic age (see figure 1.1 on p. 22).

  The Pre-Pottery (i.e., preceramic) Neolithic age is split into two separate phases—A and B. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) is generally seen to have occurred between ca. 9500 BC and 8500 BC, with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) taking place between ca. 8700 BC and 6000 BC.7 This marked the appearance of subsistence agriculture; that is, the domestication of plants and cereals, as well as the growing of crops on a large scale. Thereafter came the Pottery Neolithic, ca. 6400–4500 BC, when “neolithization” really began. It was an age not just of fired pottery but also of the rapid spread of agriculture from Western Asia into other parts of the ancient world, such as Europe, Central Asia, and the Indus Valley of India and Pakistan.

  ARCHAEOLOGICAL MINEFIELD

  Professor Klaus Schmidt was mainly concerned with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic on his first visit to Göbekli Tepe. He understood full well why the Joint Istanbul-Chicago Prehistoric Survey Team had focused their attentions on Çayönü instead of better investigating Göbekli Tepe, for, as he said himself: “Time was not ripe to recognize the real importance of this site . . . [so] Göbekli Tepe passed into oblivion, and it seems quite clear that no archaeologist returned to the site until the author’s visit in 1994.”8

  Figure 1.1. Chart showing dates of the Near Eastern cultures, civilizations, and paleoclimatological ages mentioned in this book.

  Thankfully, Schmidt did make the decision to visit Göbekli Tepe and see for himself what the site had to offer, and it took him very little time to realize that beneath the huge artificial mound of reddish brown earth and compacted stone chippings, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic complex of immense significance awaited discovery.

  Schmidt also realized that the carved stone fragments scattered about Göbekli Tepe were more than simply funerary slabs belonging to some lost Byzantine cemetery. They closely resembled pillars unearthed at another Pre-Pottery Neolithic site, named Nevalı Çori9 (see figure 1.2), located on a hill slope overlooking a branch of the Euphrates River, halfway between Şanlıurfa and Diyarbakır, some 30 miles (48 kilometers) north-northeast of Göbekli Tepe. He knew this because he had worked at the site under the auspices of fellow German archaeologist Dr. Harald Hauptmann from 1983 through to 1992, when the rising waters of the Euphrates submerged Nevalı Çori following the construction of the Atatürk Dam.

  Figure 1.2. Map showing Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in southwest Asia mentioned in this book.

  THE CULT BUILDING

  Nevalı Çori was found to consist of a series of rectangular buildings clustered together to form a village settlement, which thrived between 8500 BC and 7600 BC; that is, from the end of the PPNA into the PPNB period. Among the structures uncovered by Hauptmann and his team was one much grander than the rest. Its rear wall backed up to the hill slope, while its interior walls, made of quarry stone, included a communal benchlike feature. This was divided into sections by equally spaced stone pillars, each with a T-shaped or inverted L-like termination. During one of its earliest building phases, designated Level II and dating to ca. 8400–8000 BC, twelve standing pillars had stood within its walls (two on each side and one in each corner), with the number increasing to thirteen during the next phase, designated Level III, ca. 8000 BC (see figure 1.3). Like its counterpart at Çayönü, Nevalı Çori’s megalithic structure possessed a terrazzo floor of burnt lime cement, beneath which was a subfloor of huge stone slabs.

  During the Level II building phase, a squared-off niche was constructed into the rear wall of the cult building. Here excavators found an elongated carved head with its face missing. Nicknamed the “skinhead,” it is roughly life size and looks like an egg with ears. On its reverse is a highly unusual sikha, a long ponytail that resembles a wriggling snake with its head shaped like a mushroom cap. The “skinhead” originated, most probably, from a full-size statue, which having become detached from its body, had been hidden away within the building’s north wall.

  THE GREAT MONOLITH

  The item placed within the building’s terrazzo floor, however, was what most compelled the excavators, for standing in the center of the room were the remains of a tall, rectangular pillar bearing an uncanny likeness to the black obsidian monolith that appeared among the apelike creatures at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (figure 1.4).

  Figure 1.3. Nevalı Çori’s cult building, showing cutaways for Levels II and III, ca. 8400–8000 BC.

  Figure 1.4. Nevalı Çori’s cult building, showing the surviving central monolith still in situ.

  Figure 1.5. One of the stone pillars from Nevalı Çori. Note the stylized arms, hands, stole, and neck pendant.

  The pillar, originally 10 feet (3 meters) high, had been carved to represent an abstract human form. In relief across its two widest faces were thin arms, bent at the elbow, with hands and fingers curling around to its front, narrow edge (see figure 1.5 schematic). Anthropomorphic shaping had previously been noted among the remains of the twelve to thirteen standing pillars that had been erected within the building’s four walls, but that displayed on the central pillar was far more accomplished. Above the figure’s hands were two parallel grooves, or chiseled vertical lines, clearly meant to represent the double hem of a woven garment, open to the waist, which some have seen as a scarflike stole, similar to that worn by a Catholic priest.

  A broken fragment of the same pillar lay nearby. Its base matched the top of the standing remnant, although its upper end was so damaged that no semblance of the individual’s head could be discerned. In spite of this, it was clear from the presence of the other stone pillars in the walls that this much larger monolith would once have had a T-shaped termination, creating a hammerlike head. As such, it constituted one of the world’s oldest known 3-D representations of the human form.

  A hole in the terrazzo floor close to the standing pillar showed that a second monolith must have stood parallel to it, although any trace of its presence had long since disappeared. Like the stone pillars in the walls, the twin pillars perhaps functioned as roof supports, although this is by no means certain. Twin sets of standing pillars had been found in the Flagstone Building and Terrazzo Building at Çayönü. Yet here it was the stone slabs’ wider faces, and not one of their narrow sides, that had greeted the entrant approaching from the south.

  A PERSONAL DIVINITY

  So who or what did the twin pillars represent? Archaeologists at the time suggested they symbolized a “personal divinity.”10 This might have been so, but it did not explain why there were two monoliths side by side or why they faced out toward the cult building’s southwesterly placed entrance (the building was found to be oriented almost exactly northeast to southwest). Perhaps the pillars were positioned to greet the entrant, like twin genii loci (spirits of the place) guarding the enclosure’s inner sanctum. Very likely this presumed liminal, or sacred, area signified an otherworldly environment that existed beyond the mundane world. Indeed, it probably reflected the presence of a parallel realm, a supernatural world, accessible either in death or through the attainment of deathlike trances and other forms of altered states of consciousness, with the aim being to communicate with power animals, great ancestors, and mythical beings.11

  EXPLORING GÖBEKLI TEPE

  Klaus Schmidt had all this in mind as he examined the various carved fragments of “large-scale sculptures”12 found scattered about Göbekli Tepe. Quickly, he realized that “the entire area had been used for the
construction of megalithic architecture, not just a specific part of it.”13 He saw its function as ritual in nature.14 Indeed, Göbekli Tepe’s building structures would, he felt, reflect the same cultic influences as those at Çayönü and Nevalı Çori.

  Having seen enough, Schmidt came to a frightening conclusion. If he did not turn around and walk away now, he would be there for the rest of his life. As fate would have it, he decided to stay and commit himself to excavating the site fully, and we can be thankful for Schmidt’s decision, as it was afterward discovered that the entire hillside was about to become an open quarry to supply rock for the construction of the new Gaziantep to Mardin highway, a decision that was reversed only when the importance of the archaeological site became known.15 So we can be pretty sure that without the intervention of this quick-thinking German archaeologist, the world might never have gazed upon the oldest stone temple in the world.

  2

  MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

  Under the joint auspices of the German Archaeological Institute and the Archaeological Museum at Şanlıurfa, Dr. Klaus Schmidt started work at Göbekli Tepe in 1995. Very soon his team, made up of undergraduates from German and Turkish universities, as well as fifty local workers of Kurdish, Turkish, and Arab ethnicity, began making remarkable discoveries. Beneath the mound’s topsoil his team came across stone pillars set vertically into the ground. Each one was found to have a T-shaped head like those uncovered at Nevalı Çori.

  Two principal structures were investigated between 1995 and 1997 at Göbekli Tepe. One—uncovered immediately west of the solitary fig-mulberry tree with its tiny walled cemetery of modern graves—was a rectangular enclosure that became known as the Lion Pillar Building because of the discovery at its eastern end of twin pillars with carved reliefs of leaping lions on their inner faces (see plate 17). The other was called the Snake Pillar Building.

  SNAKE PILLAR BUILDING

  The Snake Pillar Building was located beneath the southern slope of the occupational mound, some 50 feet (15 meters) lower in depth than the Lion Pillar Building. Designated Enclosure A, it sits on the mountain’s limestone bedrock, suggesting its extreme age. Excavators found it to contain five T-shaped pillars standing about an arm’s length apart from one another. As at Nevalı Çori, they were set within quarry stone walls with stepped benches, a thin layer of clay mortar between each block.

  Two pillars stood parallel to each other, with another two placed on the same alignment outside of them; a fifth, south of the central pillars, stood within the perimeter wall, one of its narrow edges facing toward the center of the room (a sixth pillar was found just outside the interior walls). The inner pair of stones acted as a gateway into a round apse containing a hemispherical stone bench, constructed at the rectangular structure’s northwest end; a similar apse had previously been recorded in connection with Çayönü’s Skull Building. As was the case with Nevalı Çori’s cult building and Çayönü’s Terrazzo Building, Enclosure A possessed a perfectly level terrazzo floor that covered the underlying bedrock.

  Like the pillars in the Lion Temple Building, those in Enclosure A turned out to be revelations in prehistoric art. Pillar 1, the first to be exposed, bore on its front narrow face five slithering snakes, their heads pointing downward. One of the stone’s wide surfaces displayed more snakes interwoven to form a mesh-like pattern of diamonds, collectively forming a snakeskin pattern (see figure 2.1).

  Pillar 2 bore reliefs of an auroch, a leaping fox, and a wading bird, most likely a crane (see plate 4). At the top of the pillar’s front narrow edge, just beneath the overhang of the hammer-shaped head, was a small bucranium (ox skull) in high relief. It faced outward toward the viewer, and its whereabouts on the figure made an interpretation easy. Anthropomorphic pillars found at Nevalı Çori had been found to possess a V-shaped relief, like a neck collar, in exactly the same place. In other words, the bucranium was, most likely, a carved pendant or emblem of office, worn around the “neck” of the figure.

  CULT OF THE SNAKE

  Pillars 3 and 4 were without relief, while Pillar 5 bore yet another representation of a snake. This strong presence of serpentine imagery on the carved stones at Göbekli Tepe begged the question of just what this creature might have symbolized to the peoples of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic age.

  Universally, snakes are seen as symbols of supernatural power, divine energy, otherworldly knowledge, male and female sexuality, and, because they shed their skin, metaphysical transformation. The snake also represents the active spirit of medicines, the reason it is today a universal symbol of the medical profession through its association with the cult of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing. Moreover, the snake is associated not just with beneficial medicines, but also with those that bring forth hallucinations and even death. In Christian legend, for instance, poison offered to John the Evangelist in a laced chalice of wine was made to slither away as a black snake moments before the apostle was about to drink it.

  Figure 2.1. Snakes seen on Göbekli Tepe’s Pillar 1 in Enclosure A.

  Are the snakes carved on the pillars at Göbekli Tepe meant to symbolize the visionary effects of psychotropic (mind-altering) or soporific (sleep-inducing) drugs? It seems likely, for as Schmidt writes himself, several large basalt bowls found at the site were perhaps used in the preparation of medicines or drugs.1

  Visionary snakes are the most common creatures glimpsed by shamans and initiates during ecstatic or altered states of consciousness induced by mind-altering substances, which among the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian rainforest is most commonly the sacred brew called yagé or ayahuasca, known as the “vine of the soul.”2 These serpentine creatures are seen as the active spirit of the drug and can even communicate with the shaman or initiate.

  More pertinent to the decorative art at Göbekli Tepe is that during yagé or ayahuasca sessions, visionary snakes appear in such profusion that on occasion they have been seen to wrap themselves enmass around either the experiencer or nearby houseposts,3 creating an effect that cannot be unlike the mesh or net of snakes represented on Enclosure A’s Pillar 1 and found also on other standing stones uncovered at the site (see figure 2.2). So is this what the snake imagery at Göbekli Tepe shows, rare glimpses of the visionary world experienced by the shaman? Whatever the answer, the presence of so many snakes in Enclosure A was enough to convince Schmidt to christen it the Snake Pillar Building.

  ENCLOSURE B EXPOSED

  In 1998 and 1999 a new series of trenches, 29.5 feet (9 meters) square, was opened at Göbekli Tepe. One, dug immediately north of the Snake Pillar Building, revealed the presence of a slightly larger structure, which became known as Enclosure B. This was found to be ovoid, measuring roughly 23 feet (7 meters) by 28.5 feet (8.7 meters), with no less than nine T-shaped pillars—seven placed within its temenos (that is, boundary) wall and two set parallel to each other in the center of a terrazzo floor—like those that had originally stood in Nevalı Çori’s cult building. Schmidt remarked that it was like the “T-shapes,” as he calls the anthropomorphic pillars, were gathered for “a meeting or dance.”4

  Pillar 6 displayed carved reliefs of a reptile and snake, while those set up in the center of the room (9 and 10) both bore T-shaped terminations and exquisitely carved leaping foxes on their inner faces. The creatures’ animated stance made them appear as if they were jumping across the monolith, perhaps toward the entrant who would approach from the south, exactly in keeping with the cult buildings at Çayönü, which also had entrances in the south.

  Figure 2.2. Left, poison escapes from the chalice of wine about to be drunk by John the Evangelist in the form of snakes, from a mosaic on the wall of the church of Saint John the Evangelist, New Ferry, Merseyside, England. Right, snakes on the front of Göbekli Tepe’s Pillar 31 in Enclosure D. Do they represent the active spirit of medicines and poisons, or do they refer more particularly to visionary experiences induced through the use of psychoactive substances?

  NEW TEMPLES DISC
OVERED

  Work began around the same time on another structure of much greater size, which became known as Enclosure C. Once again, T-shaped pillars were soon exposed, and these too were set radially within stone walls containing the now familiar stone benches. One monolith, designated Pillar 12, was found to bear a carved relief on its T-shaped head, the first to do so. It showed five birds, either waders or a flightless species, amid a backdrop of V-shaped lines that were perhaps meant to represent water ripples. On the same pillar’s shaft was a “threatening boar”5 shown above a leaping fox. In front of the stone a portable sculpture of a boar was uncovered. Freestanding art of this kind, including carved human heads, are often found to be fragments of much larger pieces of sculpture, such as carved stone totem poles or life-size statues.

  Soon after the discovery of Enclosure C, another massive building structure, Enclosure D, was uncovered immediately to its northwest. This would prove to be one of the oldest and most mysterious monuments ever uncovered in the ancient world. Both enclosures, C and D, are described in full within subsequent chapters.

  DELIBERATE BURIAL

  What started to become apparent to Schmidt’s team, as it removed the vast amounts of fill that covered the various building structures beneath the tell at Göbekli Tepe, is that each one had been deliberately buried beneath an ever-expanding mound.6 It was almost as if the idea of creating the bellylike tell, or tepe, was part of an original grand design, with each new enclosure playing some role in its greater purpose, a gradually evolving process that had taken some fifteen hundred years to complete. This ritual act of “killing,” or decommissioning, each enclosure before the construction of a new one to take its place would seem to have occurred in stages until around 8000 BC, when the remaining structures were covered over and the site finally abandoned.7