Göbekli Tepe: A Subtle Admonition from the Gods

Written by Aetius Romulous

Göbekli Tepe: A Subtle Admonition from the Gods

Göbekli Tepe sits a million miles and worlds below our complex globe of crisis and introspection. On the highest peak of the highest mountain range of Southern Anatolia, "Pot Belly Hill" has yet to break upon the superficial consciousness of our peak civilization, engaged as we are with the sensible pursuit of protecting all we have accumulated and ever will. You have never heard of Göbekli Tepe and yet, the earthbound remains of what happened there will rock the foundations of science, sociology, economics, and religion for generations to come. Göbekli Tepe is more than astonishing; it may be a subtle admonition from the Gods that we are sadly mistaken in our arrogance of us.

ar_logo1 Science and its institutions could not have been more sure, as sure as science is about anything. Civilization and modern man began at the dawn of the agricultural age, in the Euphrates valleys of Iran and Iraq, no more than 8,000 years before the present. The issue closed when the Holocene Calendar established the precise start of everything we are at exactly 10,000 BC, or 12,000 years before the present day (Bp)...literally year 1.

Year 1 coincides with the end of the ice ages, and a period of warming that provided the conditions for humans to thrive and prosper. Small scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers roamed the Levant (roughly modern Syria/Lebanon/Palestine) rarely settling down, leaving behind primitive stone encampments and temporary waypoints. Sharpened bones and crude stone tools were evidence of primordial brains and technology, roughly formed human effigies rare and extraordinary in their own right. Social organization did not survive beyond the extended tribal family, numbering perhaps by the hundreds at most.

In short, only the thinnest of societies, captured at their most embryonic state, could possibly exist at year 1, 12,000Bp. Göbekli Tepe makes all of this - and everything that flows from it - impossible. Göbekli Tepe, it seems, is a massive, complex, art covered, precision engineered and intelligently laid out monumental set of buildings that accurately date to at least 13,000Bp - a full ten centuries before year 1. Even the biblical town of Jericho, our former earliest building site, is 4,000 years younger. Twenty thousand generations prior to the birth of Christ. This is no grocery store tabloid headline; this is the real thing, and the implications of this are stunning for us all.

Göbekli Tepe is Turkish for "Hill with a pot belly". The name is as old as the dirt that forms it, and no doubt refers to the fact that it is the sole "rounded" crest in a region of jagged peaks and sharp, stone strewn valleys. It went unnoticed by occasional scientific wanderers, the sheer size and scope of it a clear nonconforming use to western minds who had already settled the archaeological issues of the area. To the folks who lived and worked and were born and died within its long afternoon shadows, Pot Belly Hill was nothing more than a pain in the ass to cultivate, its dusty slopes jutted with ancient rocks and crazy constructed forms. That kind of stuff makes for great fences and building material, and the locals happily pillaged the site in the fashion locals do on occasions like these around the world.

Finally, in 1995, a German team under the direction of Klaus Schmidt began to slowly scrape away the surface of the hill, and recover the bits and pieces from around the neighbourhood that might provide a quick and dirty explanation for the site. No answers were forthcoming - only questions that perplexed and astonished. A serious dig was commenced. Working nonstop with small German and Turkish teams, Göbekli Tepe slowly became a project of international importance, and vast, thin layers of earth were painstakingly peeled back over a wider and wider area. Before too long Schmidt and his team hit the noses of massive, finely cut stonework rhythmically projecting from the earth, forming the outline of a large array of circular structures that would at first glance resemble a family of dust-encrusted Stonehenge's - but a full 8,000 years before. Impossible. Schmidt kept things quiet while he searched for an explanation that would not make him a laughing stock, and resigned himself to digging for the rest of his natural life.

But the more they dug the worse it became. With a scant 5% or less of the site exposed, in 2008 Schmidt decided to call it what it clearly was, the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. The proof was overwhelming civilization had existed in far more advanced and complex social forms than had ever been imagined, and in places and times that were previously thought beyond belief. As the first cut blocks rolled into place at Göbekli Tepe, the first Asian wanderers were crossing the Bearing Strait into the Americas, and Neanderthals competed for space in Europe. The earliest chronology of humans would have to be awkwardly rewritten.

Colossal stone pillars, some in excess of 25 feet long, were deftly cut from quarries some distance from the site. They were carried, set in place erect, and then topped with similar cuts of stone weighing many tons, forming a series of "T", or perhaps cross like structures. Conjecture has a roof of wood long since gone and cut terrazzo floors surrounded by more cut stone as sitting benches. Like the Olympic rings, these round enclaves spiral out like high school portables, added on over millennia as the project grew.

There is no mystery as to how this was accomplished. The stone was laid out into measured symmetrical units on wide stone faces on the ground or cliff sides. Lines were chiselled around each as deep as hand held tools would allow, and either fire or ice was used to crack the rock. The process was laboriously repeated until the column broke free, at which point it was ground and formed into the final, rectangular shape. Weighing many tons, these rocks were then rolled into place on prepared ramps, and tipped into holes dug for the purpose to hold them upright. Fill was added to cover the longitudinal stone, and the "T" stone was similarly cut and dragged into place atop the other, now at ground level. Then the whole thing was excavated down to the floor level again, leaving a towering monument above the finished ground. It was then on to the next one until a completed enclosed space emerged. Stout beams of wood were hewn as roof joists, and then covered with brush enough for shade and relief from the hostile elements. Finely sourced stone of marble was cut for a polished terrazzo floor. Few people today could accomplish the same thing.

These stone "monuments" raise a hornets' nest of problems with our current understanding of the period. The most obvious is the amount of labour it would take to accomplish such a feat. This era of time is known as the Geologic Holocene Epoch that stretches from 12,000Bp to the present. The early Holocene featured the "Neolithic Revolution" when small, scattered groups of family units began to coalesce into "Bands" and then "Tribes". The word Neolithic means "New Stone Age" and tells you everything you need to know about the state of man prior to civil society.

The Tribes of this area of the world are known as "Cultures", and the nearest tribal culture to Göbekli Tepe is the Natufian Culture, which it was supposed did not reach that deep into Anatolia. Natufian cultures are recognizable as small bands of happy wanderers scouring the earth as hunter-gatherers. They by necessity would have been nomadic, and would have rotated around the area following the herds and the weather. Nomadic hunter-gatherers do not possess the technologies necessary to stay put, and eventually died out in place of agriculture that was better suited to the task once planting and harvesting became the norm.

This Natufian culture could not have built Göbekli Tepe. There was no incentive to do so, and the Natufian tribal unit was far too small for the work. As nomads, they would have had no technologies to cut rock and move it, no idea how to measure or invent, and no way to feed the massive crowds it would have taken to complete a project of that size. They would have starved to death in the attempt, squabbling amongst themselves with nothing but a small pile of garden rocks to show for it. However, as incredible as it may seem, the dates of Göbekli Tepe presuppose a host of technologies, motivations, and social orders that would be necessary not just for the Natufian people (who existed towards the end of the building years), but by necessity must stretch deep into the preceding Kebaran culture when the site was first conceived and begun.

There simply had to be an advanced civilization that could bring thousands to bear on the project, and do so over many millennia. Furthermore, the technological and motivational factors must have been fully formed prior to the ceremonial groundbreaking, and must have evolved from civil units that were earlier still. This could (in theory at least) bring the birth of civilized man right back to the even earlier Auregnacian culture - a culture that features all that famous cave art, Stone Age tools, and horror of horrors - Neanderthals. Not the Flintstones by any means...but close.

Clearly, Göbekli Tepe was a massive engineering project by any standard. Thousands may have been organized, directed and employed. All had to eat, and it is beyond the scope of reason that a permanent assemblage of humans of that scale and length of time could be fed entirely by hunting and gathering. They had to have cultivated land and planted the earliest of grain crops, or at least have constantly nurtured and renewed massive fields' natural occurring grains. This alone is a thermonuclear factoid that forever alters our history of agriculture, trade, commerce, social order and economics. Far from wandering savages, the people of Göbekli Tepe had a fully functional advanced economy hundreds of generations before the Sumerians or Egyptians. Mind blowing.

But wait...there's more!

gobeklitepe_nov08_3 On the sides of many of these pillars and monuments there are fabulous images in relief; wild boars, gazelles, and yet unidentified flora, fauna, and beasts artistically drawn onto the rock face with the surrounding rock expertly chiselled away. This was a reasonably common ancient art form, but it had not been scene too far before the Egyptian era to any degree. However, the work on the stone of Göbekli Tepe is both subtle and delicate, carved by an expert hand steeped in tradition, laid out in a singsong of geometry and harmony. It may be that this work was added later to the site, however even if it appeared just before the end of the Göbekli Tepe period, it still represents a stunning rewrite of what we understand of human emotion, creative spirit and psyche. Other artwork at the site depicts men with outstretched arms above their heads, waiting for some kind of manna from the sky. Rain perhaps...or Gods.

Thousands of tons of earth has been removed with millions to go, but already the upper strata of the site has given up carved stone and clay figures of exquisite detail and haunting beauty. Fertility symbols for the most part, but all predate anything of their like found before. In addition to their complex economics and ordered social structure, the Göbekli Tepe people valued beauty and understood symbols enough to display a highly advanced and wondering mind. Hundreds of generations would pass before we today can see that in the historical record again.

Göbekli Tepe was conceived in the Pleistocene era that began about 2.6 million years ago and ended in the Tarantian Stage, about 10,000Bp. The Tarantian stage was characterized by the great retreat of ice and snow that we know as the ice age, and featured mass extinctions and the end of every humanoid life form but one, Archaic Homo Sapiens...us. As the ice sheets retreated, humans spread out from Africa in 70,000Bp, reaching Eurasia in 40,000Bp and the Americas in 14,500Bp.

Only 25,000 years after arriving in Turkey, the Göbekli Tepe people had acquired the "civitas" necessary to begin their monumental site. The snow would have left the mountaintops leaving lush woodlands behind, and the ice from the valleys leaving abundant rivers of fresh water. Wild game began to multiply and spread, rich soils raised up and maintained a plethora of fruits, legumes, tubers, and grains. All the conditions necessary for the pitre dish of civilization enabled the Göbekli Tepe folks to thrive.

Then inexplicably nature did its thing, and the Younger Dryas fell upon them unannounced. The Younger Dryas is a climactic event known also as "The Big Freeze" amongst the climatological cocktail crowd. Suddenly, within a decade, the great Ice Age reappeared, burying northern Europe and the Americas in sheets of snow and paralysing ice. At Göbekli Tepe and the wider Levant, droughts arrived drying up herds and killing wild vegetation. Speculation exists about what effect this had on the folks of Göbekli Tepe, but it was generally understood that the Younger Dryas forced hunter-gatherers into sedentary lifestyles in order to survive. Or not.

Whatever the effect, the return of the ice coincides exactly with the early years of Göbekli Tepe, who well may have had a lifestyle change forced upon them in orders of magnitude beyond what they would have ever known. An environmental event that was singular, spectacular, without precedent, and well beyond their earthly ability to comprehend. Much like us today, who may well be in the same position, with the same insignificant trust in the future, and the same inability to do a damn thing about it.

Faced with knowledge we can't quite compute, the modern mind used to scientific certainty suddenly finds itself adrift. We struggle with economic and environmental conditions that the Göbekli Tepe folks may have faced themselves. We, however, depend on science and the automatic certainty of spreadsheets and algorithms for our eventual salvation. We are arrogant and believe we know all the answers and if we don't, science will show us the way. Our religion, our economics, our dogmas and ~isms of all kinds triumph over nature. In fact, we know nothing, and the sudden appearance of Göbekli Tepe proves it outright. Perhaps our blind obedience to empiricism will one day lead us to the end, as it did for the good kind folks of Göbekli Tepe.

The Göbekli Tepe complex defies any normal scientific description. It simply does not fit. Anywhere. Attempts will be made no doubt to force Göbekli Tepe into the traditional narrative somehow but consider this: At some point around the year 9500Bp, after thousands of years of construction and habitation Göbekli Tepe was abandoned. Abandoned all at once and buried forever by human hands, hundreds of acres of buildings 12 meters tall, all at the same time, in one last, inconceivable, mortal communal project.

Then the great people of Göbekli Tepe turned their backs on time, and walked together off the deep dark edge of history.

Aetius Romulous

Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO.

Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation - too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess.

Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution.

It's a living.

http://screambucket.com/

aetiusromulous (at) rogers.com

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