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7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists
Posted on Thursday, April 24, 2008 (CDT) by Isis
 As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet. "This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."
Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-coloured sea, stretches south hundreds of miles. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.
Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.
Never mind
wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have
pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were
hunters, not farmers.
"Everybody used to think
only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental
sites, and that they only came about with the invention of
agriculture", said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of
anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's best known
neolithic site, since 1993. "Gobekli changes everything. It's
elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes
the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long
time."
With only a fraction of the
site opened up after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe's
significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it
was the centre of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the
centre of each circle representing a man and woman. It is a theory the
tourist board in nearby Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the
Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet; see Adam and Eve.
Schmidt is sceptical. He
agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic
world that farming was just about to destroy", and points out that if
it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it
buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich
world had lost all meaning.
But the site is devoid of
the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped
columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless.
Gods
"I think here we are face
to face with the earliest representation of gods," said Schmidt,
patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no
faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers.
"In my opinion, the people
who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all.
What is this universe? Why are we here?"
With no evidence of houses
or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hilltop was a site of
pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles.
The tallest stones all face south-east, as if scanning plains that are
scattered with contemporary sites in many ways no less remarkable than
Gobekli Tepe.
Last year, for instance,
French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria
uncovered the oldest mural ever found. "Two square metres of geometric
shapes, in red, black and white - like a Paul Klee painting", said Eric
Coqueugniot, of the University of Lyon, who is leading the excavation.
Coqueugniot describes
Schmidt's hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was a meeting point for rituals
as "tempting", given its spectacular position. But surveys of the
region were still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find
somewhere even more dramatic."
Vecihi Ozkaya, the director
of a dig at Kortiktepe, 120 miles east of Urfa, doubts the thousands of
stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500-year-old
graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere
office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.
"Look at this", he said,
pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an
animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years
before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw
the wedding night of our civilisation."
Copyright: The Guardian
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Re: 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists
by Cryscat on Thursday, April 24, 2008 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | Everyone, please feel free to join the discussion on this topic
http://www.thothweb.com/ftopict-5483.html
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Re: 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists
by broger on Monday, May 05, 2008 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | I am very much reminded of the writings of Zechariah Sitchin on the existence of ancient alien races in Mesopotamia.
My gut-feel says that the Gobekli Tepe "temples structures" existed even before the arrival of the hunters in that area. Realizing its immensity and importance, they may have claimed the site and used it to worship an unknown god. I say unknown because according to Klaus Schmidt "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands."
Not wanting to share their gods with other races, those hunters could've been over-protective of that temple, guarded it zealously and kept it secret from outsiders. That may explain the lack of houses and graves near the structures.
Something significantly tremendous could've happened way back then forcing the hunters to leave the area. The hunters, wanting to preserve their temple and return to it later, buried it under tons of soil. But they may have been overtaken by events and so the temple remained buried until its discovery.
The carved animals there may be representations of the temple-makers' rulers. Their purpose may be to better illustrate to the lower races who couldn't speak their language.
Yet these are all conjectures at this point, until further studies are made of the structures. Still I strongly believe they were not made by humans but, rather, by races not of this earth. |
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