Gobekli Tepe

by Andrew Collins

  Plate 13. Pillar 18’s belt buckle, with its three-tailed comet design, surrounded by a group of H-shaped ideograms. Note also the fox-pelt loincloth hanging directly beneath the belt buckle.

  Plate 14. The twin pillars at the center of Enclosure D. Note the holed stone centrally positioned behind the monoliths, which might well have targeted the bright star Deneb in Cygnus as it set on the horizon around 9400 BC.

  Plate 15. The holed sighting stone at the rear of Enclosure D. Note the lines suggestive of the legs and buttocks of the female form, which if correct makes the hole a representation of the vulva.

  Plate 16. The seven flightless birds, identified as dodos, carved into the southern face of the bedrock pedestal holding up Enclosure D’s Pillar 18.

  Plate 17. One of the roaring lions carved on the inner faces of the twin pillars marking the eastern end of Göbekli Tepe’s Lion Pillar Building. Built ca. 8500–8000 BC and aligned east-west, its advancing felines could well represent both the might of the sun and the constellation of Leo, the celestial lion.

  Plate 18. Göbekli Tepe’s Lion Pillar Building, located at the summit of the occupational mound some 50 feet (15 meters) higher than the site’s main enclosures, suggesting that it was constructed as much as 1,000 to 1,500 years after these earlier structures.

  Plate 19. The author, left, with Professor Klaus Schmidt, who has been excavating Göbekli Tepe on behalf of the Museum of S̨anlıurfa and the German Archaeological Institute since 1995.

  Plate 20. One of the most recent pillars to be uncovered at Göbekli Tepe. It was discovered during excavations in the northwest section of the occupational mound and could well be eleven thousand years old. It shows a south-facing lion on what is presumably the inner face of a central pillar in a previously unexplored enclosure.

  Plate 21. Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure F, built probably ca. 8500–8000 BC. Notice how reduced in size the sanctuaries have become by this time. Some of them are no bigger than a bathroom, with stones no more than 5 feet (1.5 meters) in height.

  Plate 22. Strange carved head found among the fill that covered the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, now in the Museum of S̨anlıurfa. Its teeth show it to be a predator, most likely a wolf.

  Plate 23. Life-size human statue dating to around 9000 BC. It was discovered in 1993 within the Balıklıgöl district of S̨anlıurfa, the oldest part of the city, and is now in the archaeological museum. Tradition asserts that S̨anlıurfa, ancient Edessa or Orhay, was founded either by the prophet Enoch or by “Orhay son of Hewya”; that is, the “Serpent,” a clear allusion to the Watchers of the book of Enoch.

  Plate 24. Carved stone totem pole discovered in one of the minor structures at Göbekli Tepe, and now in the Museum of S̨anlıurfa. Its damaged head is that of an animal, while its body is of a human. A smaller human figure emerges from its stomach, and from the womb area of the second figure comes a child that holds in its hands a vessel of some sort. Twin snakes rise up on either side, possibly as guardians of the child. This is one of the strangest pieces found so far and shows the virtually alien mindset of the Göbekli builders.

  Plate 25. Left, a Solutrean laurel-leaf spearhead, 13 inches (33 centimeters) long and around twenty thousand years old, on display at the British Museum. Right, Swiderian tanged point made of chocolate flint, eleven thousand to twelve thousand years old. Not to scale. Were the Swiderian hunters of Central and Eastern Europe, as successors of the Solutrean tradition, instrumental in the rise of Göbekli Tepe around the end of the Younger Dryas period, ca. 9600 BC?

  Plate 26. Medieval painted wooden panel in All Saints Church, Kempston, Bedfordshire, UK. It shows the removal of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and the angel who wields the flaming sword. Note the serpent crawling on the ground and the Mountain of God behind Adam, both in the left-hand scene.

  Plate 27. Tenth-century encaustic painting from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, showing, left, the disciple Thaddeus, and, right, the disciple curing Abgar, king of Edessa, using a handkerchief that Jesus wiped across his face. Thaddeus continued his journey, reaching Armenia in AD 43/45. At Yeghrdut, near Mush in historical Armenia (eastern Turkey), he is said to have deposited a piece of the Tree of Life, as well as other important holy relics.

  Plate 28. The remains of the Yeghrdut monastery, now known as Dera Sor (the Red Church), on the northern slopes of the Eastern Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey. It was here that Thaddeus apparently deposited his precious cache of holy relics.

  Plate 29. The west wall of Dera Sor, the ruins of the Yeghrdut monastery, said to have been located in the Garden of Eden itself. Muslims and Christians alike came here to sit beneath its holy tree and partake of its sacred waters to rejuvenate their bodies by as much as twenty years.

  Plate 30. The view from Dera Sor, the ruins of the Yeghrdut monastery in eastern Turkey, looking out over the plain of Mush, through which flows the Euphrates River. Is this the true site of the Garden of Eden as described in the book of Genesis?

  Plate 31. Bingöl Mountain in the Armenian Highlands of eastern Turkey, the source of the Araxes and Euphrates rivers. Evidence suggests it is the true site of the Mountain of Assembly of the Watchers, as well as Kharsag, the home of the Anunnaki in Sumerian tradition. It can be identified also with Charaxio, the mountain in which Seth concealed the secrets of Adam, according to Sethian Gnostic tradition.

  Plate 32. Two examples of snake-headed statues, found in graves belonging to the Ubaid culture, which thrived in Mesopotamia ca. 5000–4100 BC. They are now thought to be representations of a long-headed elite group that controlled the Bingöl/Lake Van obsidian trade during the earlier Halaf period, ca. 6000–5000 BC. Did this elite group model itself on a memory of those responsible for the construction of Göbekli Tepe?

  Plate 33. The Alevi holy site of Hızır Çes̨mesi (the Fountain of Hızır), at Muska (modern Bes̨ikkaya Köyü) in the northern foothills of the Bingöl massif in eastern Turkey. Is this the original Ab’i Hayat, the Waters of Life, where Alexander the Great is said to have gained immortality upon reaching Bingöl? The building on the right is a dream incubation house, where people come to spend the night and dream of Hızır, the Turkish form of al-Khidr, the Green One.

  Plate 34. View from Muska looking south toward the western foothills of the Bingöl massif. Is this the original location of Dilmun, the paradisiacal realm of the Anunnaki gods of ancient Sumer, as well as the site of the terrestrial Paradise in Judeo-Christian tradition?

  21

  THE SOLUTREAN CONNECTION

  The Solutreans are the key to the emergence of high culture across Central and Western Europe during the Upper Paleolithic age. Their campsites, work stations, and cave sites date to between 25,000 and 16,500 years ago and span from England (especially East Anglia) in the north, to northern Spain, Portugal, and France in the south. Like the Swiderians much later, the Solutreans mastered the use of surface pressure flaking to create highly unique willow-leaf-shaped projectile points and much larger, laurel-leaf-shaped lance heads, which share similarities to the Swiderians’ own leaflike points. Moreover, like the Swiderians, the Solutreans—who were themselves reindeer hunters—fashioned shouldered (i.e., tanged) points, with either one or two shoulders (see figure 21.1 on p. 178) and thus almost certainly used bows and arrows.

  So thin and so finely worked are the Solutreans’ laurel-leaf lance heads, which can be up to 14 inches (36 centimeters) in length, translucent, and just a quarter of an inch (0.6 centimeter) thick (see plate 25), that Sharon McKern, an anthropological consultant, writing with her husband, Dr. Thomas McKern, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, was moved to observe: “This delicately flaked tool technique is the most aesthetic—and the most mysterious—known from prehistoric times.”1 The fact that a number of these unique blades have been found in groups within caches and are regularly made of nonlocal, exotic materials (including chalcedony, jasper, and quartz crystal) has led to speculation that they were not used for
any practical purpose but instead served some ritual or symbolic function.

  Figure 21.1. A selection of finely worked Solutrean points, ca. 20,000– 14,500 BC, many finished using the pressure flaking technique.

  RIMUTÈ RIMANTIENÈ’S COMMENTS

  So what exactly is the connection between the Solutreans and the later Swiderians? In 1996 Lithuanian archaeologist Rimutè Rimantienè proposed grouping together the various North European cultures that thrived in the Upper Paleolithic under a single umbrella term—the Baltic Magdalenian, or the “Group of Baltic Magdalenian cultures,” because they all display signs of having a common origin.2 Just one culture was to be excluded from the list, and this was the Swiderian, “where the relations with the Solutrean are outstanding, though also indirect.”3

  Rimantienè recognized the remarkable similarities between the stone tool technologies of the two cultures and felt the need to put this in writing, even though making such a connection was clearly anathema in the scholarly community in which she moved.*8 The problem is simple—the Swiderian culture does not enter the scene until the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, ca. 10,900 BC. This is thirty-five hundred years after the Solutreans disappear from the pages of European history to make way for the Magdalenians, an altogether different culture whose principal legacy is the beautiful Ice Age cave art of southwest Europe.

  As to the fate of the Solutreans, no one really knows, although some prehistorians propose that they departed for the North European Plain when the reindeer herds migrated northward at the end of the last ice age. If so, then they might easily have formed the core of much later reindeer-hunting traditions, in particular the Brommian-Lyngby cultures of Denmark and the Scandinavian Peninsula. Certainly, laurel-leaf points and shouldered points, identical to those of the Solutreans, have been found in the south and west of Sweden and Norway,4 suggesting strongly that this is where the Solutreans came looking for the reindeer herds. Here their descendants would have remained until the onset of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, when with the worsening climate they were forced southward into Central Europe, paving the way for the emergence of the Swiderian tradition in places such as Poland, Slovakia, and the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.

  ANCIENT MARINERS

  All this is quite plausible, although there is now mounting evidence to suggest that the Solutreans also took to the high seas and ended up in North America, having navigated the southern limits of the sea ice that clogged large areas of the North Atlantic Ocean some twenty thousand years ago.5

  In North America, beyond the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which reached as far south as Missouri and the Ohio River Basin, the Solutrean hunters became the forerunners of the Clovis culture, producing laurel-leaf-shaped blades very similar to those manufactured in Western Europe. It was a tradition continued in the production of the exquisite Clovis points, manufactured using the pressure flaking technique by the Clovis people, who thrived in many parts of North America around the same time as the emergence of the Swiderian culture some thirteen thousand years ago. Yet unlike the Clovis culture that flourished for just five hundred to seven hundred years before disappearing during the Younger Dryas period, the Swiderians continued to thrive, creating all manner of post-Swiderian cultures, which, as we have seen, went on to occupy large areas of north and northeast Europe during Mesolithic times.

  THE BRÜNN CONTROVERSY

  Strengthening the connection between the Solutrean and Swiderian traditions still further is the fact that the two cultures might once have shared the same territories and the same physiognomy. It has long been known that a stone tool industry identical to that of the early Solutrean existed in Germany and the modern Czech Republic, and even further east in Hungary and Poland.6

  Anthropologists of the early twentieth century became convinced that the Solutreans derived not from Cro-Magnons but from the Brünn peoples, who emerged onto the scene in places such as Hungary and the Czech Republic around twenty-five thousand years ago, where they formed part of the much larger, and far older, Eastern Gravettian culture. This connection was no idle speculation either, for quite distinctive Solutrean tools and laurel-leaf blades were found in association with human remains of the Brünn type at two separate sites, one of them being PÅ™edmost in the Czech Republic, leading Princeton paleontologist and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) to observe: “There is no question that the human remains [found at PÅ™edmost] belong to the middle Solutrean stage.”7 It was a link that seemed confirmed with the discovery in the late nineteenth century of skulls similar to those of the Brünn type at Solutré, west of Mâcon in France’s Saône-et-Loire region,8 which, as the name suggests, was the original “type-site” of the Solutrean tradition.

  Yet when, in the second half of the twentieth century, typological thinking regarding the racial origins of humankind became unfashionable, if not downright distasteful, any proposed connections between the Brünn type and the Solutrean tradition were dropped. Not only did this leave the Solutreans without any definitive physical characteristics, but any notion that the Solutreans of Western Europe were related to the Solutreans of Central Europe was abandoned. Indeed, those of Central Europe were stripped completely of their Solutrean status and reclassified as a separate culture that evolved quite independently of the Solutreans of Western Europe.

  Despite this awkward and somewhat strange reclassification process, it remains possible that the Solutrean tradition really is tied in with the sudden appearance in Central Europe of the Brünn population around twenty-five thousand years ago. Having said this, modern anthropological thinking has the Solutreans enter southwest Europe from Africa where, it has been suggested, they formed part of a Saharan culture known as the Aterian, which employed the use of strikingly similar toolmaking techniques. Yet equally likely is that the Solutreans and the human population of Central Europe categorized as the Brünn type came from the east, not the south.

  Paleolithic stone tool expert Bruce Bradley, Ph.D., of the University of Exeter, and his colleagues have proposed that the Solutreans’ highly sophisticated stone technology originated among the peoples who occupied a region stretching from the cold forest steppes north and northeast of the Black Sea as far north as the central Russian Plain. Here between ca. 30,000 BC and 19,000 BC thrived an advanced culture known as the Kostenki-Streletskaya, which formed part of the much larger Eastern Gravettian tradition and produced stone tools and projectile points with close parallels to those manufactured by the Solutreans in both central and southwest Europe.9

  These Ice Age peoples of the Russian steppes and plain inhabited a series of settlement sites, including Kostenki, the culture’s principal type-site, on the west bank of the Don River, and Sungir on the Klyazma River. At this last site, located on the outskirts of the city of Vladimir, some 110 miles (177 kilometers) east-northeast of Moscow, three extraordinary human burials were uncovered in 1956. Each was adorned with thousands of ivory beads, which had been attached to tailored garments of immense sophistication. Radiocarbon evidence shows that the burials took place as early as 30,000 BC.10 One of the skulls, Sungir 1,11 bears similarities to some of the skulls found at the PÅ™edmost site in the Czech Republic, in particular an example known as PÅ™edmost 3. With its prominent brow ridge and pronounced jaw, it bears distinct characteristics of not only the Brünn population that entered Central Europe around twenty-five thousand years ago and perhaps kickstarted the Solutrean culture, but also the Neanderthal-human hybrid skulls found in Russia and Lithuania (see chapter 20), which might well have belonged to individuals stemming from the Swiderian culture. It is a supposition supported by the observations of one of the twentieth century’s greatest prehistorians, V. Gordon Childe. In his book The Prehistory of European Society, published in 1958, he writes:

  In Western and Central Europe the “Solutrean” seems a brief episode that exercised no recognizable influence on subsequent developments. In Eastern Europe on the contrary Solutrean techniques were applied at t
imes to the later East Gravettian (Kostienki) flint-work and survived locally even in the Mesolithic Swiderian industry.”12

  Childe recognized the close similarity between the “flint-work” of all three traditions and believed that the Swiderians and Solutreans derived their characteristic toolmaking capabilities from the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture of Central Russia. In other words, their true point of origin was not to be looked for in Central Europe, but much further east, on the Russian Plain, where highly advanced peoples, almost certainly related to the Brünn population, existed at places like Kostenki and Sungir as much as thirty-two thousand years ago.

  Thus it is exciting to think that the legacy of these technologically advanced societies of the Upper Paleolithic might have had some influence on the events that led eventually to the construction of Göbekli Tepe during the tenth millennium BC. It is a surmise strengthened in the knowledge that one of the only known uses of carved stone blocks prior to the Neolithic age was among the Solutrean cave artists of southwest Europe.

  SOLUTREAN STONE FRIEZES

  In the collapsed rock shelter of Roc-de-Sers, located in France’s Poitou-Charente region, in the southwest of the country, archaeologists in the 1920s uncovered a series of huge limestone blocks, their front faces covered with deeply carved bas-reliefs of Ice Age animals and human forms. Ibexes, deer, bison, and boars are represented, as are reindeer and horses. All come together to form part of a multipiece rock frieze originally positioned in a semicircle on a natural ledge located at the rear of the shelter. In addition to this, lumps of manganese used to create a black pigment for painting were also found at Roc-de-Sers, suggesting that its elaborate rock frieze was originally painted in some manner. This incredible stone art, thought to be around nineteen thousand years old, has been firmly identified as belonging to the Solutrean occupation of the shelter, even though it would not look out of place among the gothic architecture of Chartres Cathedral or Notre Dame de Paris (see figure 21.2).