Gobekli Tepe Read online

  For Schmidt and his team the burial of the enclosures was an immense bugbear, as it meant they were not easily able to determine the construction dates of the various monuments uncovered. Despite this problem, Schmidt was able to ascertain from the different types of flint tool found within the fill that the earliest phases of building activity uncovered at Göbekli Tepe belonged to the epoch known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, which began around 9500 BC.8

  THE YOUNGER DRYAS MINI ICE AGE

  It is a date that coincides pretty well with the culmination of a mini ice age, or prolonged cold spell, known as the Younger Dryas. This had enveloped much of the Northern Hemisphere for around thirteen hundred hundred years, ca. 10,900–9600 BC, bringing with it a pronounced dip in temperature as well as a sustained drought that severely altered the plant and animal life throughout what is known as the Fertile Crescent. This is the arclike region of verdant river valleys, steppes, and plains that stretches clockwise from Palestine and Israel, through the Levantine corridor of Lebanon, into the Middle Euphrates Basin of northern Syria, then across into what is known as Northern Mesopotamia, a region that embraces southeast Anatolia, before entering the Mesopotamian Plain, or what is today the country of Iraq.

  The Younger Dryas period followed a two-thousand-year episode of global warming known as the Allerød interstadial. This in turn had brought to a close the last ice age proper, which had been with us for approximately ninety-five thousand years, reaching its last glacial maximum around twenty to twenty-two thousand years ago (an interstadial is a period when temperatures rise and glaciers go on the retreat).

  With the cessation of the mini ice age, or big chill, ca. 9600 BC, the temperatures rose, bringing about a blossoming of new flora and fauna (in geological terms this point in history marks the transition from the Pleistocene age to the Holocene, which we are still in today). It was an ideal environment for new growth that led to the emergence of agriculture on the Middle Euphrates and farther south within the Levantine corridor. It was also around this time, Schmidt believes, that hunter-gatherers from across the region came together to create the extraordinary stone structures being uncovered today at Göbekli Tepe, which he is sure were not domestic in nature.

  No evidence of fires, hearths, cooking areas, or any other signs of habitation have been found in or around the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe that might indicate the permanent presence here of a large community. Human remains have been found, plenty of them, although these are either retrieved from the fill covering the enclosures or are found concealed in walls or benches. Exactly what they are doing here remains unclear.

  A LIFE OF BEER

  One more anomaly at Göbekli Tepe is that the nearest water source is 3 miles (5 kilometers) away, meaning that any drinking water has to be carried to the site. This lack of a constant water supply seems illogical, especially given that the construction of the monuments would have required the presence of a labor force involving hundreds of workers and their families, all of whom would have needed to be fed on a daily basis. The only explanation is that the workers lived in settlements nearby and climbed the mountain with sufficient supplies to last them for the duration of their stay.

  This said, there is a strong possibility that a form of beer made from wild wheat was on the menu at Göbekli Tepe. Large stone vats unearthed by Schmidt’s team have been linked with beer production (see figure 2.3).9 Whether the beer was brewed for reasons of necessity or for some ritual function remains to be seen, although as an intoxicating beverage it is likely to have possessed an otherworldly significance. The term ale, used today for beer, originally meant any kind of alcoholic drink made using wheat grain. The word could well derive from the Indo-European root alu, which has definite connotations of shifting realities and altered states of consciousness through its presence in key words such as hallucinate and hallucination.10

  CUP MARKS FOR CARRION BIRDS

  Another peculiar mystery at Göbekli Tepe is the presence on the exposed bedrock to the southwest of the main enclosures of large cuplike holes, up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) in width and depth (see figure 2.4). There are dozens of them everywhere. Similar cup marks are to be seen on top of some of the standing pillars, while clusters of them are found also at other Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites across the region.

  On asking Klaus Schmidt what he thought these cup marks represented in September 2012, he shrugged his shoulders and said they are found everywhere, often in the company of carved rings marks, like those in Britain. Yet clearly they did once have a function, and the most obvious solution is that they were receptacles for something, either liquid—blood, beer, milk, or water perhaps—or, more likely, some type of food such as meat. Because they almost always seem to be carved in elevated positions, it appears possible that whatever they contained were offerings to carrion birds such as vultures, crows, or ravens, which might well have played some kind of symbolic function in the rituals taking place inside the sanctuaries (a large number of bones belonging to both the crow and raven have been found within the fill at Göbekli Tepe11).

  Figure 2.3. Minor enclosure at Göbekli Tepe, dating to ca. 8500–8000 BC, showing a stone container thought to have held beer.

  Figure 2.4. Examples of the incised cup marks found on exposed bedrock in the vicinity of Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure E.

  Scavenger birds such as vultures play an important role in the Neolithic cult of the dead (see chapter 9), and so gaining their favor in a divinatory manner might well have been important to the success of a ritual. In other words, if the birds came down and took away the meat, it was a good omen, and if they didn’t, then the opposite would be the case.

  Interestingly enough, divination has been proposed as an explanation for the presence of similar cup marks found on exposed rock surfaces in the area of Mount Ararat in eastern Anatolia. Armenian prehistorians speculate that although the true purpose of the cup marks has now been lost, they were probably “used by oracles during fortune telling,” a very credible explanation indeed, which sits well with their possible function at Göbekli Tepe.12

  ENGINEERING CONUNDRUM

  The standing pillars found in the various enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are regularly between 6.5 and 10 feet (2 and 3 meters) in size and are thought to weigh between 5.5 and 16.5 U.S. tons apiece (5 and 15 metric tonnes). Even more of an enigma is that sitting in a quarry a quarter of a mile (400 meters) away from the occupational mound is an unfinished T-shaped monolith some 22.9 feet (7 meters) in length and 9.8 feet (3 meters) broad, with an estimated weight of approximately 55 U.S. tons (50 metric tonnes).13 As Schmidt asked back in 2001:

  How could the manpower be amassed at the mound to move such pillars? It seems obvious that only organized meetings of several groups of hunter-gatherers from the territories around Göbekli Tepe would be able to provide the capabilities for such an undertaking, meetings rooted in a ritual background.14

  As Schmidt admits, the construction of huge megalithic architecture is not thought to have begun until many thousand years later at places such as Egypt and Stonehenge in England. Never before had the archaeological community conceived of such feats of monumental engineering going on even before the wide-scale appearance of agriculture. From the faunal (animal) remains retrieved from the fill covering Göbekli Tepe’s occupational mound, it would seem that the main food source was wild game such as gazelles, red deer, wild boar, aurochs, and wild sheep,15 supplemented with copious amounts of almonds and pistachios.

  NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION

  In Schmidt’s opinion: “Hunter-gatherers living at Göbekli Tepe for an extended time would have caused a serious over-exploitation of the local natural resources.”16 For him the coming together of so many people led to the domestication of wild species of cereals and other plants in order to feed those present both here and at other similar sites across southeast Anatolia, causing what Australian archaeologist and philologist V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) long ago christened the Neolithic revolution.

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bsp; Yet Childe saw it the other way around—the rapid spread of agriculture at the beginning of the Neolithic, and the more settled lifestyle it brought with it—gave people time to invent new technologies and to think about the mysteries of life, leading to the construction of the first temples, an act that led to the creation of cities and civilizations. Now we know Childe was wrong. It was the temples that came first, with agriculture created in their wake to satisfy the needs of so many people engaged in the construction and maintenance of such mammoth building projects.

  THE ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE

  Such a theory makes sense of another puzzling enigma that prehistorians are still trying to fully understand. Genetic research into the origins of cereal production has determined that no less than sixty-eight modern strains of wheat, used by us today to make bread, beer, pasta, and other products, can be traced back to a variety of wild einkorn that grows on the slopes of Karaca Dağ (pronounced ka-rag-a dar), a volcanic mountain just 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Göbekli Tepe.17 This means that wheat might well have been domesticated for the first time only a short distance away from the site of humanity’s earliest known example of monumental architecture.

  Over an extensive period of time einkorn was gradually domesticated through selective cultivation to create a much stronger variety whereby the kernels remained on the plants, instead of falling to the ground. This enabled a higher wheat yield through the heads being able to ripen better before harvesting took place.

  Was it possible that the domestication of wheat occurred in southeast Anatolia in response to the sheer need to feed so many groups of hunter-gatherers either laboring away on site or visiting Göbekli Tepe as part of some huge sociomagical gathering? “Their idea, to meet again and again at a specific place,” Schmidt argues, “seems to be a basic factor of the origins of neolithization.”18 Here then, really, is where the revolution began—the revolution in becoming Neolithic, in becoming farmers tilling the fields, herding animals, and living more communal lifestyles. It was a turning point in human existence that quite literally paved the way for the rise of civilization, which had its beginnings in what was happening at Göbekli Tepe some 11,500 years ago.

  3

  FROZEN IN STONE

  A large number of the T-shaped pillars seen in the various enclosures at Göbekli Tepe show beautiful carvings of strange, eerie, and often terrifying creatures of the natural world. Those most frequently represented are, in order, snakes, leaping foxes, wild boars, and cranes. Others seen include aurochs, gazelles, lions, wild sheep, lizards, scorpions, spiders, and ants (with at least one bear and a hyena identified as well). Various species of bird are also found, including flamingos, vultures, ibises, and flightless birds. In addition to this, excavators have found a number of 3-D statues that include boars, aurochs, and at least three teeth-bearing predators, most likely wolves. These can be seen today in Şanlıurfa’s museum of archaeology.

  Too many species are represented by the carved art to easily assess what exactly they all mean or why there are so many creatures portrayed together, and perhaps this is a clue to their greater purpose. It is almost as if they constitute a snapshot of the abundance of life that existed when the monuments were constructed shortly after the end of the last Ice Age. Yet for the most part these are not friendly creatures by any stretch of the imagination: they bite, gore, claw, sting, tear apart, and generally kill whatever gets in their way. They are not the kind of animals you would want to be locked inside a claustrophobic room with, without any means of escape.

  None of the animals shown on the stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe are nice cuddly creatures, even though some of them, such as the auroch, wild boar, wild sheep, and even the wolf, would afterward become domesticated. Clearly, this was meant to be the case, suggesting that someone, an entrant or initiate, finding him- or herself inside an enclosure, would immediately be presented with a terrifying visual spectacle illuminated either by natural light or by torches of some kind. It was an assault on the senses that would have induced not a state of peace and calmness, but one of fear and alertness, something that must have been all too familiar to the hunter-gatherer, whose whole life was centered around the struggle for survival on a day-to-day basis.

  Yet such mental assaults were perhaps not simply for focusing the mind on the dangers of the hunt, especially as by this time people were beginning to settle into more communal lifestyles away from the immediate concerns of the chase. There was clearly something else going on here, something that plunges us into the realm of deep-seated, instinctual psychological states.

  For example, when we look at the magnificent accomplishment of the Paleolithic artists that entered the deepest caves of northern Spain and southern France to execute their work toward the end of the last ice age, ca. 30,000–9500 BC, a sense of immense beauty and tranquility is conveyed. This is in complete contrast to the overall sense of fear and anxiety that exudes from the more chilling art of Göbekli Tepe. This, simply from its manner of execution, has more in common with the visual art of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Central and South America than it does the majestic cave paintings of southwest Europe. It is an impression that only deepens the more we examine the various enclosures at Göbekli Tepe.

  ENCLOSURE C

  Of all the structures so far uncovered at Göbekli Tepe, by far the most complex is Enclosure C, which, like Enclosure B, is ovoid in appearance, being roughly 75 feet (23 meters) by 60 feet (18 meters) in size. It consists of two concentric walls of stone (the inner one being built after the structure’s original construction1), each containing various pillars, most of them T-shaped.

  At the center of the enclosure two enormous twin monoliths once stood. Only their stumps remain in situ, with a large fragment of the western monolith (Pillar 37) being reerected in 2009 under the leadership of German architect and engineering consultant Eduard Knoll. Similar to the central pillars in Enclosure B, a leaping fox appears on its inner face, the animal’s gaze once again directed southward. Estimates suggest that originally Enclosure C’s twin pillars would have stood around 16 feet (5 meters) in height. Yet unlike those of Enclosure B, these examples have not been set within a terrazzo floor. Instead, they are slotted into rectangular grooves cut into raised, steplike pedestals sculpted out of the bedrock.

  A large area of smoothed bedrock, elliptical in shape, complete with a pair of rock-cut pedestals that also contain rectangular slots, had earlier been found on level ground 160 yards (146 meters) west-southwest of Göbekli Tepe’s main group of structures. Yet here, in what has become known as Enclosure E, or the Felsentempel (German for “rock temple”), no clear evidence of any standing pillars or surrounding structure survives today. This said, it is clear that Enclosure E is of the same general age as Enclosure C.

  Adjacent to Enclosure C’s western central monolith is one of the most remarkable T-shaped stones discovered so far at the site. Running down the front narrow edge of Pillar 27 is a 3-D predator, a famished quadruped, with a long bushy tail and emaciated body. Its snarling jaws, complete with carved lines signifying whiskers, reveal a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. That such a feat of artistic expression was carried out eleven thousand years ago by simple hunter-gatherers seems almost alien, although achieve it they did. As to the identity of this predator, Schmidt believes it is a feline, a lion most probably. Yet the shape of its body, the large incised teeth, and the long bushy tail make a case for its being a canine of some description.

  A DOUBLE RING OF STONES

  The exact number of standing pillars Enclosure C’s outer ring once possessed is now lost, with just eight remaining in place. Its inner ring probably contained twelve T-shaped pillars, with eleven surviving today. The area between the two concentric walls into which the stones were set created a circular walkway, although there was no direct means of access from here into the central enclosure where the twin monoliths were located. So how might entry have been achieved? The answer is that either a porthole stone once exi
sted within the wall of the inner ring (several such stones, some decorated with carved figures, have been found at the site), or the entrant had to quite literally climb inside, perhaps using ropes or a ladder. This is suggested by the presence of a steplike feature on the south side of the enclosure between two pillars, forming what appears to be an entranceway of some kind (see plate 7).

  Another possibility is that there was once an overhead entry point within a covered roof. Certainly, there are angled slots and grooves on the upper surfaces of some of the stones making up Enclosure C’s inner circle, which could easily have been cut to help support an overhead structure. Yet whether a roof of this sort was an original feature or one added at some later point remains unclear. Archaeologist Ted Banning of the University of Toronto has proposed that the T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe were primarily roof supports and the enclosures themselves domestic houses,2 a view not shared by Schmidt and his colleagues.

  THE DROMOS

  Enclosure C’s circular walkway, between the outer and inner temenos walls, was entered from the south through a north-south-aligned stone passage measuring 25 feet (7.5 meters) in length. Schmidt calls it the dromos, after an ancient Greek word meaning avenue or entranceway, because of its likeness to the passageways attached to the beehive-shaped tholoi tombs of Mycenaean Greece.