Even though Mexico lies thousands of miles away from the Carpathian Mountains, can we envisage the existence of similar beliefs in the magical potency of obsidian among the Upper Paleolithic peoples of Central and Eastern Europe? Did the Swiderians see obsidian as a magical weapon, linked integrally with their role as reindeer hunters?
THE SEARCH FOR NEW SOURCES
In all likelihood, the Swiderians’ fascination with obsidian could suggest they had some kind of control over its collection and distribution in the Carpathian Mountains, the “land of obsidian,” prior to any kind of forced migration to north and northeast Europe caused either by the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event, ca. 10,900 BC, or the thirteen-hundred-year mini ice age that followed it. Not only was obsidian to be found in the Caucasus Mountains, which the Swiderians reached as early as the eleventh millennium BC, but as we see next, it was the sources in and around the Armenian Highlands that become crucial to making the connection between the Swiderians and the power elite thought to be behind the construction of Göbekli Tepe.
23
THE BINGÖL MASTERS
In 2008 it was determined that obsidian tools found at Göbekli Tepe derive from three primary sources—one of them being Göllü Dağ in central Anatolia, where there are several major sources of obsidian, with the other two coming from locations near Bingöl Mountain.1 This is a north-south aligned massif with twin peaks located some 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of the city of Erzurum in the Armenian Highlands of eastern Anatolia.
A separate survey completed in 2012 determined that another source of the raw material used to fashion many of the obsidian tools and blades found at Göbekli Tepe was Nemrut Dağ, an extinct volcano close to Lake Van, Turkey’s largest inland sea, which lies to the southeast of the Armenian Highlands.2 This latest discovery has led to speculation that Göbekli Tepe might have been a cosmopolitan center, a kind of Neolithic Mecca or Jerusalem for people coming from central Anatolia, some 280 miles (450 kilometers) away, and from the Bingöl/Lake Van area, which lies around 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the northeast.3
Supporting evidence for the cosmopolitan center theory includes the countless flint tools found scattered about Göbekli Tepe’s artificial mound, which are hardly likely to have been dropped by the builders. They are everywhere; you cannot help but tread on them. The sheer quantity suggests they are offerings left by visitors across an extended period of time.
Clearly, Göbekli Tepe was a center of pilgrimage. However, the presence here of obsidian tools from central Anatolia and the Bingöl/Lake Van area might well have other implications. As we have seen in Mexico, Central Europe, and Greece, obsidian was a prestige item, one endowed with great magical properties, including the ability to produce fire. Its presence at Göbekli Tepe tells us two things: first, that it might have been employed in rituals due to its special qualities, and, second, there must have been lines of communication between Göbekli Tepe and the obsidian sources in the Bingöl/Lake Van area. This connection with Bingöl Mountain in particular was most obviously through proto-Neolithic centers such as Hallan Çemi in the foothills of the eastern Taurus Mountains, which dates to ca. 10,250–9600 BC, and Çayönü, ca. 8650–7350 BC, both of which acted as clearinghouses for obsidian reaching southeast Anatolia from the Armenian Highlands.
THE EMERGENCE OF HALLAN ÇEMI
Hallan Çemi exhibited a level of cultural sophistication that easily matched anything going on in the Levant at this time. Although the people here were hunters and foragers, eating wild game (mostly sheep, goats, red deer, foxes, and turtles), they would appear to have domesticated the pig, the earliest evidence of this form of animal husbandry anywhere in the world.
The discovery of a substantial number of stone querns, used to grind seeds, has led some prehistorians to suggest that the inhabitants of Hallan Çemi were engaged in protoagriculture, or certainly the exploitation of wild cereals. However, very few cereal seeds have been found at the site, casting doubts on this theory. In fact, all the indications are that the main food here, in addition to game meat, consisted of wild lentils, bitter vetch (a type of pea), and nuts. These included pistachios and wild almonds, which had first to be roasted before consumption to remove their toxicity. Evidence of pistachio and almond consumption has also been found at Göbekli Tepe.
Excavators at Hallan Çemi worked frantically to explore the site from 1991 to 1994 in advance of its disappearance beneath the rising waters of the nearby Batman River, following the construction of a nearby dam. Before its final submergence they were able to uncover two semisubterranean, circular structures of great significance. Each one was around 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter, with walls faced with sandstone ashlars, as well as stone benches, plastered floors, and central hearths. Archaeologists found inside them a large number of prestige items, including pieces of copper ore and obsidian tools, along with evidence of food preparation, most likely for ceremonial feasts cooked on the hearths.
One of the structures contained a massive auroch’s skull, which had hung at its northern end, indicating that the building was almost certainly used for cultic purposes. The discovery of this bucranium supports the theory that the north was the preferred direction of orientation of proto-Neolithic cult buildings even before the construction of much more complex structures at both Göbekli Tepe and Çayönü.
Indeed, there is a good case for Hallan Çemi having some direct bearing on what came later at Göbekli Tepe, as does the basic design and carved art of other cult centers in the region, such as Jerf el-Ahmar in North Syria and Qermez Dere in the Jezirah Desert of northern Iraq (see chapter 1).
Hallan Çemi, where almost half the stone tools found were made of obsidian, is 75 miles (120 kilometers) south-southwest of Bingöl Mountain and just under 140 miles (225 kilometers) away from Göbekli Tepe. To date, Hallan Çemi is the closest known proto-Neolithic site to Bingöl, and the sheer amount of obsidian found here has prompted prehistorians to suggest that trade networks must have existed across the region. If so, then Hallan Çemi was very likely a main distribution center, the raw obsidian arriving here from workshops much closer to the mountain.
EUROPEAN TAKEOVER
These realizations take us into interesting territories, for if the trade in obsidian was indeed regulated by some kind of elite group, is it possible that Swiderian peoples entered eastern Anatolia from the north during the Younger Dryas period and assumed control of the regional obsidian trade, introducing new forms of tool manufacture, such as the pressure flaking technique? Curiously, this is the exact same time that the local culture, the Zarzian, vanish from the scene, having thrived in the region for as much as nine thousand years.
The Zarzians are a very compelling group. Not only were they the founders of Hallan Çemi, but evidence suggests they also domesticated dogs.4 In addition to this, they were one of the first cultures in the Middle East to employ the use of bows and arrows, which they utilized to hunt red deer, onager (or wild ass), cattle, sheep, and wild goats. They kept on the move, living mainly in temporary campsites, and most important of all, they had access to major obsidian sources in the Armenian Highlands.
Obsidian from the Bingöl sources has been found at various Zarzian camps as far south as the Zagros Mountains, including the cave of Zarzi (the culture’s type site), near Sulaymaniah in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Zawi Chemi Shanidar settlement site, which overlooks the Greater Zab River in northern Iraq. It was here during the 1950s that American archaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki discovered the wings of seventeen large predatory birds, mostly vultures, along with the skulls of at least fifteen goats and wild sheep (see chapter 9). Although this ritual deposit is assigned to the proto-Neolithic community that occupied the site, chances are it represents a continuation of beliefs and practices that had been prevalent among the Zarzian peoples, whose legacy lived on among the proto-Neolithic populations of southeast Anatolia and northern Iraq. In other words, the Zarzians were most likely carriers of the tradition that included
the utilization of the vulture in shamanic practices, something that later appears at cult centers such as Göbekli Tepe and Nevalı Çori. This is despite the fact that the Swiderians held specific knowledge regarding bird-and canine-related shamanism derived, at least in part, from both their suspected Solutrean background and their likely contact with the descendants of the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture of the Russian steppes and plain, whom they would have encountered on their journey to eastern Anatolia. Yet their beliefs and practices do not appear to have included the use of the vulture as a primary symbol of birth, death, and rebirth. That seems to have come from the Zarzian peoples, who occupied the region before their arrival.
As to their origin, British archaeologist James Mellaart felt that the Zarzians had started their journey on the Russian steppes, then moved gradually southward into the Caucasian Mountains and Armenian Highlands, before eventually reaching the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq and northwest Iran.5 Yet this was a migration that had started as early as 19,000 BC, as much as nine thousand years before the Swiderians would appear to have traveled exactly the same route to reach eastern Anatolia during the Younger Dryas period.
So did the Swiderian hunters overrun Zarzian camps, decimating the inhabitants? Certainly, there is compelling evidence that some kind of power struggle occurred around this time in the Zarzian territories of Gobustan in Azerbaijan, right where the eastern termination of the Caucasus Mountains meets the Caspian Sea.
THE GOBUSTAN WARRIORS
Rock art in the Gobustan (or Kobystan) National Park, located 40 miles (64 kilometers) southwest of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, shows warriors with bows and arrows slung across their backs (see figure 23.1). Some figures appear to be wearing fringed waistbands and even animal loincloths with the tails hanging between their legs, similar to those seen on the anthropomorphic twin pillars in Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D.
Figure 23.1. Rock art from Gobustan, Azerbaijan, close to the west coast of the Caspian Sea, showing warriors wielding bows and arrows. Mesolithic period, ca. eleventh to tenth millennium BC. The boat in the upper register is thought to have been added at a later date.
The lifelike manner in which the warriors are drawn, with smaller figures behind them, gives the impression of arrival—as if they are arriving from somewhere else in the ancient world. This seems emphasized by the fact that in the background of some of the engraved panels are high-prowed boats of a type common to the Neolithic rock art of Egypt’s Eastern Desert and the Bronze Age rock art of Scandinavia. So much do these vessels resemble those of later cultures that prehistorians suggest that, whereas the Gobustan warriors are “early Mesolithic age at the latest,”6 thus ca. 9600–9000 BC, the vessels were added later, most probably during the Bronze Age.
Mary Settegast, the author of Plato Prehistorian, argues that the Gobustan rock art shows the arrival of incoming warriors, most likely bow-and-arrow-wielding reindeer hunters from Europe.7 So are we looking at Swiderians seizing control of Zarzian territories? Whoever these warriors represent, their presence would not seem to have been greeted cordially, for some of the engraved panels show open conflict between two separate groups of individuals.
Even if the Gobustan rock art does show Swiderian hunters coming up against their Zarzian counterparts, there is no reason to assume that one decimated the other. Perhaps after some initial skirmishes, the two factions came to some kind of understanding regarding the exploitation of the region’s rich mineral resources, including the all-important obsidian. In doing so, it is possible that the Zarzians amalgamated with the incoming European hunters to become the driving force behind the emergence of the proto-Neolithic world at key settlements like Hallan Çemi in the Eastern Taurus Mountains. As mentioned earlier, Hallan Çemi acted as a workshop and clearinghouse for obsidian coming from Bingöl Mountain and Lake Van, and so its Zarzian vulture shamans might well have had some hand in the rise of early Neolithic cult centers in the triangle d’or such as Göbekli Tepe, Çayönü, and Nevalı Çori.
DISTANT COUSINS
If the Zarzians did come originally from the Russian steppes, as James Mellaart suspected, sometime around ca. 19,000 BC, the chances are they were related to the highly advanced Kostenki-Streletskaya culture, which disappears around exactly the same time. So if the Solutreans and their proposed successors, the Swiderians, really were related to the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture (as was proposed by V. Gordon Childe, see chapter 21), then it means that the Zarzians were in fact distant cousins of the Swiderians, a factor that might just have allowed them to find some common ground. Both used bows and arrows, and both might well have domesticated dogs and/or wolves, while the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture is thought to have held a special interest in the fox, one of the primary totemic animals seen at Göbekli Tepe.
For example, a male burial uncovered at Sungir in Russia in 1956 (designated Sungir 1) had a number of perforated arctic fox teeth on his cranium when uncovered, suggesting they were sewn into a cap of some sort. Another burial of a boy aged around thirteen (Sungir 2), interred in a shallow grave head-to-head with an adolescent female (Sungir 3), was found to have around 250 drilled arctic fox teeth around his waist. These probably came from a decorated belt, similar to those seen on the central pillars in Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D.
Burials at Kostenki itself have also been found to contain unusual amounts of teeth and bones of the arctic fox. This includes the 150 fox teeth found wrapped around the head of a child, aged about six to seven years old, uncovered at a site known as Kostenki 15. Covering the burial was a huge mammoth scapula (shoulder blade), a feature common also among the contemporary, and unquestionably related, Pavlovian culture of Moravia. Today Moravia is part of the Czech Republic, which includes the sites of Brünn (modern Brno) and PÅ™edmost, where evidence of the Brünn-type human population was reported in the nineteenth century.
Among the Pavlovians—their name deriving from Pavlov, a village situated in the Pavlov Hills, around 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the city of Brno—the arctic fox also features heavily among burials. At a site named Dolní VÄ›stonice one child burial contained twenty-seven arctic fox teeth, while a triple burial made up of two men, with a woman in between them, revealed that both males had been wearing headdresses of arctic fox teeth when interred. Within the mass grave uncovered at PÅ™edmost in 1894 (see chapter 20), excavators came across large amounts of wolf and fox remains, which seemed to line the perimeter of the pit. Among the remains were a number of unperforated arctic fox canines as well as various wolf skulls. Most pertinently, a woman, aged around forty, discovered at Dolní VÄ›stonice site 1, and known popularly as “the shamaness,” was found to be holding five unperforated fox incisors in her right hand and various fox bones in her left hand.
Although the use of wolf and arctic fox remains as items of personal adornment among the Eastern Gravettians, ca. thirty-two thousand to twenty-one thousand years ago, might easily be attributed to the large-scale capture of these carnivores for their meat and pelts, the presence in the graves of unperforated fox teeth hints at the importance of this animal on a cosmological level. Arguably the arctic fox, and the wolf also, was seen as an otherworldly creature that needed to be appeased by the newly dead on their journey into the afterlife. Such ideas, if realistic, might easily have been inherited by the descendants of the Eastern Gravettians, including the Swiderians, who came to occupy the same territories during the Younger Dryas period.
Should this quite fantastic scenario prove realistic, then it seems likely that incoming Swiderian groups entered eastern Anatolia and assumed control of the obsidian trade, giving them direct access to settlement sites not just in the Eastern Taurus range and Zagros Mountains, but also in southeast Anatolia, much closer to Göbekli Tepe. Now they were in a position to introduce their own religious ideologies to the local inhabitants, which would seem to have included new ways to counter the baleful actions of the cosmic trickster in its guise as the sky wolf or sky fox.
Because the center of the Armenian obsidian trade was Bingöl Mountain, there is every chance that this is one of the locations the Swiderian hunters settled so that they could exploit their newly acquired sources of exotic materials, including the all-important obsidian find sites. If this is correct, then we should find evidence of their presence in this region, and this, as we see next, is exactly what we do find.
24
WOLF STONE MOUNTAIN
In the religion of Zoroastrianism, a native form of which flourished in historical Armenia before the spread of Christianity in the fourth century, the wolf was an animal of Ahriman, the evil principle, who engages in a constant struggle with Ohrmazd (also known as Ahura Mazda), the creator of the universe. The Bundahishn, one of the holy books of the Zoroastrian faith, speaks of how Ahriman planned to create the wolf species as “disembodied, unseen evil spirits.” Yet Ohrmazd got wind of Ahriman’s plan and created the wolf himself, along with the elephant and the lion, which were all made creatures of the evil principle.
Ormuzd showed what he had done to Ahriman, who being pleased, “attached the evil spirits to these forms saying, ‘Ohrmazd did what I was going to do.’”1 Elsewhere, Ahriman is cited as the progenitor of the “wolf species,” the leader of whom is the lion,2 a predator interchangeable with the wolf in the Zoroastrian tradition.
There is a reason for citing these facts, for in historical Armenia, the region we know today as eastern Turkey (the modern Republic of Armenia lies immediately north of here), there once existed a mountain called Gaylaxaz-ut, which means “abounding in gaylaxaz,” or “wolf ’s stone” (from gayl, “wolf ”).3 Usually this refers to flint, the principal material used during the Stone Age to make tools and weapons. Yet gaylaxaz can also mean obsidian,4 even though in Armenian tradition this black volcanic glass is known also as satani elung, “Satan’s nail,”5 or perhaps “Satan’s claw.”*13
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