It is an area that includes Bingöl and the northern parts of the plain of Mush, making it clear that the geographical location of the terrestrial Paradise appears to be synonymous with the Mesopotamian concept of Dilmun; the two most likely deriving from the same culture that once saw the region as the location of the Abzu, the primordial water source that fed every river, lake, and sea in the ancient world.
The Dimli Kurds are a distinct ethnic community with very few connections to the Muslim Kurds of the region. They have their own language, called Zâzâ or Gurani, and belong to a very ancient religion called Alevi (also known as Kızılbaş, meaning “red heads,” a reference to their distinctive red headgear). Although considered to have been introduced to eastern Turkey from southwest Iran, Alevism probably contains religious elements deriving from the beliefs and practices of the Arevordi, or Arewordik, the “children of the sun,”31 who are classed as a type of Armenian Zoroastrian.32 They practiced exposure of the dead on rooftops (i.e., excarnation) and entered subterranean “pits” for their rites—practices reminiscent of the early Neolithic peoples who lived in this same region thousands of years earlier.33
THE FOUNTAIN OF HIZIR
More significantly, the Alevi revere Hızır (pronounced his-sheer), the Turkish form of al-Khidr, whose most sacred shrine is Hızır Çeşmesi, the Fountain of Hızır, a mountain spring with accompanying fountain that emerges from the base of a tree in the foothills northwest of Bingöl Mountain, close to the town of Varto (ancient Gimgim). Alevi come from all over Turkey to venerate Hızır at this shrine. They take water from the fountain, which is believed to have rejuvenating properties, and spend the night in a small, unassuming building next door in order to experience dreams of the saint. This practice, known as dream incubation, is an extremely ancient means of communication with supernatural forces, and to find that it still occurs at the base of Bingöl Mountain is quite extraordinary.
Whether the Fountain of Hızır is considered to be the original Ma’ul Hayat, Fountain of Life, or the Ab’i Hayat, Waters of Life, is unclear, although the connection is indisputable. Clearly, this holy spring cannot have been the actual source of the rivers of Paradise, because each river rises from a different location on the mountain’s summit. Perhaps some kind of primordial fountain, as imagined by the Reverend Marmaduke Carver, was thought to exist within the mountain itself. Perhaps this was seen to feed the glacial lakes that are the true source of the many rivers and streams that take their rise on the mountain, accounting for the name Bingöl, which, as we have seen, means “a Thousand Lakes”; that is, boundless sources of water.
Was this also the origin of the concept of the Abzu, the primordial water source of Mesopotamian mythology presided over by Enki, who lived with his wife in the paradisiacal realm of Dilmun? Was the Alevi shrine of Hızır Çeşmesi, the Fountain of Hızır, some distant echo of these beliefs, which we can only assume sprang from this very region many thousands of years ago?
The fountain’s current genius loci, certainly among the Alevi, is Hızır, a figure that can almost certainly be identified with Haya, the Armenian form of Enki or Ea, guardian of the Abzu. Might the Alevi, as the descendants of the Daylamân, or Dilamân, hold some special knowledge regarding the former existence in their midst of Dilmun? As we see next, this paradisiacal realm was synonymous with another location in Mesopotamian myth and legend, this being the Duku mound, birthplace of the Anunnaki gods.
30
RISE OF THE ANUNNAKI
Klaus Schmidt may have regretted talking to British journalist Sean Thomas, who would later write that the German archaeologist claimed that Göbekli Tepe was a “temple in Eden.” It has not, however, stopped Schmidt from speculating about the effect the site might have had on the civilizations that flourished on the Mesopotamia Plain from around 3000 BC onward.
In his book Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-eastern Anatolia, published in its English language version for the first time in 2012, Schmidt speculates that the Göbekli builders may have derived from a shamanic society and that the T-shaped pillars perhaps represent their great ancestors. Much later, the memories of these powerful individuals were transformed into stories relating to deities called the Anunna gods of heaven (an) and earth (ki), known also as the Anunnaki.
According to the myths and legends of the Sumerians and Akkadians—the peoples that thrived down on the Mesopotamian Plain during the third millennium BC—the birthplace and abode of the Anunnaki was the Duku, a Sumerian word meaning “holy mound.” Here was created the first sheep and grain, which were then given by the gods Enki and Enlil to humankind, who lived down below. This is very clearly an allusion to the origins of animal husbandry and agriculture, which, as we have seen, took place in the triangle d’or at the time of the Neolithic evolution. As Klaus Schmidt puts it himself:
Can these arguments be connected, is it possible that behind Göbekli Tepe there hides Mount Du-ku, and are the anthropomorphous pillars of Göbekli Tepe—suddenly surprisingly real—the ancient Anuna Gods?1
Incredibly, these same ideas regarding the origins of the Anunnaki being a memory of the prime movers behind the Neolithic revolution in southeast Anatolia were put forward by the current author in his book From the Ashes of Angels, published in 1996, and written as Schmidt was surveying the mountaintop sanctuary of Göbekli Tepe for the first time. That the German archaeologist now also believes the catalyzing events of the Neolithic revolution might well be preserved in the accounts of the Duku mound and the Anunnaki giving humankind the rudiments of civilization is highly significant. Consequently, it is essential to ascertain the foundation point of these mythological traditions, and to find out whether they really do relate to Göbekli Tepe and its enigmatic T-shaped pillars.
Although in the Sumerian language Duku means “holy (ku) mound (dul),” the equivalent of dul in Akkadian is tillu, cognate with the Arab tell, that is, an occupational mound, very like Göbekli Tepe itself.2 In fact, Mesopotamian scholar Jeremy Black thinks it likely that as a mythological concept the Duku was seen as a prototype of the many tells found scattered across the Mesopotamian Plain, many of which would already have been abandoned, even by the commencement of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations in the third millennium BC.3
Just a riffle through the dirt and soil of any occupational mound very quickly produces potsherds, worked flints, and even human remains, which might easily have been seen as material evidence of the former presence on earth of the gods. The existence of these tells is most likely the root behind not only the Duku mound of Sumerian mythology but also the primeval mounds featured in the myths and legends of other ancient civilizations, where they are seen as the first built structures to occupy the earth (those that feature in ancient Egyptian texts as the foundation points of pharaonic civilization being prime examples). The Duku was therefore a primeval mound, the place of origin of the earliest ancestor gods, built where earth and heaven come together. These ancestor gods were so old that when eventually superceded by later deities, they were seen to have withdrawn into a nebulous world existing within the mound itself, which thereafter acted as a conduit into this netherworld, known as the Kur.4
The holy mound thus became an entrance to the Kur, a word meaning also “foreign land” and “mountain.” Indeed, some scholars see the word kur as the origin of “kurd,” the name given to the foreign inhabitants of the north, from which we derive the term Kurds and Kurdistan.5 Yet having said this the Duku also came to be identified, like Dilmun, with the “Mountain of the Spring,” from which the sun emerged each morning.6 This association comes from the fact that, like the sun-god in ancient Egyptian tradition who was thought to pass through the Duat, or underworld, from sunset to sunrise, the sun-god in Mesopotamian tradition similarly passed through the Kur, or netherworld, to emerge from a cavelike opening in the Duku mound. Thus the Kur, as both the mountainous land of foreigners and the realm of the dead, came to be associated with the land of darkness, in other words th
e north, the only direction that the sun does not reach in the Northern Hemisphere.
Although ancient Mesopotamian cities often possessed their own representations of the Duku mound, somewhere out in the mythological world was the original one, where the genesis of the Anunnaki gods took place. So was Schmidt correct to identify the Duku with Göbekli Tepe?
MOUNTAIN OF THE GODS
Ancient texts tell us the Duku mound existed as part of a much larger hill or mountain called Kharsag (or hursagËœ), known as Kharsag-gal-kurkura, “great mountain of all lands.”7 It acted as a support on which the heavens rested and around which the stars revolved in an unerring fashion, showing it to be a cosmic mountain or world mountain.
Although Kharsag, like the Duku mound, is sometimes described as the Mountain of the East,8 an allusion to the direction of the rising sun, it is also occasionally situated in the north,9 the direction of the Eastern Taurus Mountains and the Armenian Highlands. So where exactly was Kharsag, if indeed it was a physical location?
THE NIPPUR FOUNDATION CYLINDER
One Sumero-Akkadian inscription, dating to around 2600 BC and found on a terra-cotta cylinder deposited in the foundations of the “Mountain House” (E-kur) of the god Enlil in the city of Nippur in southern Iraq, speaks of Kharsag in direct association with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers:
The holy Tigris, the holy Euphrates,
The holy scepter of Enlil
Establish Kharsag;
They give abundance.
His scepter protects (?);
[to] its lord, a prayer . . .
the sprouts of the land.10
Unless this is a reference to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, it implies that the two great rivers were seen to sprout forth from Kharsag, the Mountain of the World. That Kharsag might be an actual mountain to the north or northeast of Mesopotamia has long been realized, although most usually it is identified with Mount Ararat,11 a sacred mountain in eastern Turkey of paramount importance to Christian tradition.
It was here, we are told, that Noah’s ark came to rest after the Great Flood, although this, as we shall see, is a complete misnomer. The original Genesis account says only that the ark came to rest “on [the] mountains of Ararat (Gen. 8:4),” a reference to the kingdom of Ararat. This is the Hebrew name for Urartu, which appears in Assyrian and Babylonian literature for the first time around the thirteenth century BC. At its height Urartu stretched from the Eastern Taurus Mountains in the south all the way to the Caucasus Mountains in the north, with its main heartland being in the region of the Armenian Highlands and Lake Van. Never does the Bible allude directly to Mount Ararat. Yet this has not stopped overzealous clergy members, theologians, and scholars identifying the so-called Place of Descent, where Noah’s ark made landfall, with the tallest mountain in Armenia, which is Mount Massis, popularly known today as Mount Ararat.
MOUNT AL-JUDI
Mount Massis is unquestionably a mountain very sacred in Armenian tradition, and evidence of human activity here goes back to prehistoric times. Yet nothing before the fifth century AD associates it with the story of Noah’s ark. Indeed, the inhabitants of the region point out another mountain as the true Place of Descent. This is Mount al-Judi, the modern Cudi Dağ, close to the Turkish-Syrian border. At the foot of the mountain is the town of Cizre, which tradition asserts is the site of Thamanin, the settlement established by Noah and his family after leaving the ark.
Mount al-Judi is the Place of Descent recognized by Babylonian Jews, Christians of the Assyrian Church, Muslims (as stated in the Holy Qur’an’s Sura 11:44), Yezidis (a Kurdish angel-worshipping religion), and “Chaldeans,”12 a reference to the peoples of Northern Mesopotamia. This same mountain is asserted to be the landing place of Noah’s ark by Berossus (a Babylonian historian, ca. 250 BC) and Abydenus (a Greek historian, ca. 200 BC), who stated that inhabitants thereabouts “scraped the pitch off the planks as a rarity, and carried it about them for an amulet,” while “the wood of the vessel (was used) against many diseases with wonderful success.”13
According to English Orientalist George Sale (1697–1736), who made an English translation of the Holy Qur’an published in 1734, relics of the ark were “seen here in the time of Epiphanius [a famous church leader who lived at the end of fourth century AD], if we may believe him; and we are told the [Byzantine] emperor Heraclius [who ruled AD 610–641] went from the town of Thamanin up to the mountain al Jûdi, and saw the place of the ark.”14
Sale mentions also that there was once an ancient monastery on the summit of Mount al-Judi, which was destroyed by lightning in AD 776. After this time, belief that the mountain was the Place of Descent declined, its place taken by Mount Massis, called by the Turks Agri Dağ and by the Christians Mount Ararat.15
THE SWITCH TO MOUNT MASSIS
The Armenian Church was directly responsible for transferring the Place of Descent from Mount al-Judi to the more northerly Mount Massis,16 a holy mountain under the jurisdiction of the Mother See of Holy Echmiadzin, a church and monastery located in Vagharshapat, near the city of Erivan, or Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia (see figure 30.1). As the seat of the Catholicos, or head of the Armenian Church, Holy Echmiadzin is to the Armenians what the Vatican is to the Catholic Church. When viewed from Echmiadzin, Mount Massis seems to rise up from the surrounding plain to dominate the southern skyline.
The change in location of the Place of Descent from Mount al-Judi to Mount Massis was almost certainly political and occurred following the ruling of the Council of Ephesus in 431, which banned the ancient Assyrian Church from the Orthodox Catholic Church because of its unorthodox views on Christ’s dualist nature. At the time Mount al-Judi was under the jurisdiction of the Assyrian Church, the Armenian Church’s southern rival, so a switch of interest away from Mount al-Judi to Mount Massis was deemed appropriate, as the Armenians did not want the Assyrians to have control of this important place of pilgrimage.
Yet before this time the Armenian Church was, seemingly, happy to accept Mount al-Judi as the site of the Place of Descent. This is brought out in an Armenian chronicle known as the Epic Histories, attributed to an Armenian historian named Faustus of Byzantium, who lived in the fifth century. The book chronicles the visit of Jacob (or James), the second bishop of Nisibis in Northern Mesopotamia, to Mount al-Judi. Here the “Armenian saint,” who was born at the end of the third century, is said to have found the “wood of Noah’s Ark.”17
Today, only Christians believe that Mount Ararat is the site where Noah’s ark came to rest. Yet the sheer potency of this belief remains so strong that it has inspired a number of high-profile attempts to locate the remains of the ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat. All of these expeditions have either come to nothing or resulted in clandestine video footage of the alleged remains of a petrified boat, which becomes impossible to verify.
The reason for diverting from the main theme of the chapter to cite these facts is that the Christian belief in the power of Mount Ararat has over the past three hundred years seriously clouded scholarly judgment regarding the geographical placement of legendary locations connected with either Northern Mesopotamia or the Armenian Highlands. For instance, it was almost certainly the Christian obsession with Mount Ararat that led to its being identified with Kharsag.18 Yet no major rivers take their rise there, especially not the Tigris and Euphrates mentioned in the inscription recorded on the Nippur foundation cylinder.
Since it was anciently believed that the Tigris and Euphrates stemmed from the same source, it is more likely that Kharsag should be identified with the Bingöl massif, which is located around 150 miles (240 kilometers) west-southwest of Mount Ararat. Just as the Armenians saw Bingöl Mountain as the Place of the Gods, the Sumero-Akkadians saw Kharsag as “where the gods were born”19 or “where the gods had their seat,”20an allusion to the presence thereabouts of the Duku mound, which, as we have seen, was very likely envisaged as a tell, an abandoned occupational mound, dating back to the age of
the gods.
Figure 30.1. Old print of Mount Ararat as seen from Erivan, modern Yerevan, the Republic of Armenia’s capital and largest city.
Interestingly, some accounts of the Duku mound speak of something called the Ancient City,21 which was believed to have been built right on top of it, underneath which was the Abzu.22 Although scholars consider that this account relates to the ancient city of Eridu, which was under the patronage of Enki and had its own representation of both the Duku mound and Abzu, chances are that the concept of the Ancient City relates to a built structure existing on the original Duku—one that was seen to sink down into the hill when its ancestor gods withdrew into the mound.
THE NIPPUR FOUNDATION CYLINDER
In the 1980s British historical writer and geologist Christian O’Brien (1914–2001) made a careful study of the Nippur foundation cylinder (correctly entitled the Barton Cylinder, after George A. Barton [1859–1942], the Canadian clergyman and professor of Semitic languages who first translated its text). He concluded that its inscription alluded to some kind of settlement of the Anunnaki existing in Kharsag, which he interpreted as meaning “principal fenced enclosure” or “lofty fenced enclosure.”23 It was a conviction reinforced by the fact that the Akkadian word edin, meaning “plain,” “plateau,” or “steppe,” is twice used in connection with this highland “settlement.”24 Was this the “Ancient City” existing on top of the Duku mound?
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