Gobekli Tepe

by Andrew Collins

  The Tigris Tunnel, through which the river passes, was originally about a mile long (1.5 kilometers) and ran all the way through the mountain, although today it has been shortened due to landfalls at its northern end. Yet thousands of years ago this mysterious passage, which is in part a deep gorge, was seen as a symbolic gateway from the world of the living to a realm of myth and legend, a wonderland, beyond which was Paradise itself.

  THE MOUNT OF ASSEMBLY

  It would be impossible to do full justice to Lipinski’s incredible contribution to this subject (for instance, he shows that the Tigris Tunnel features in the Epic of Gilgamesh as the long tunnel through which the Mesopotamian hero, on his quest to discover the plant of immortality, passes to reach the Land of the Ever Living, situated in a region of perpetual darkness).33 However, I’ll let him give you his conclusions on the presence in Armenia of the mountain abode of the god El.

  Talking about the Old Testament’s book of Isaiah, where the king boldly proclaims: “Above the stars of El I will exalt my throne, and I will sit down upon the Mount of Assembly, in the recesses of the north (Is. 14:13),” Lipinski writes:

  The recesses of the north are here the high mountains of Urartu [the Armenian highlands], where the divine assembly, presided by El, was believed to gather. . . . In the light of these mythological allusions to the abode of the gods in the mountains of Armenia, the only explicit mention of El’s abode at the sources of the Euphrates acquires new dimensions.34

  In other words, as he says himself: “El’s abode . . . is not to be looked for near Mount Hermon [in the Levant], but midst the mountains of Armenia [current author’s emphasis],”35 near the sources of the Euphrates.

  BABYLONIAN MAP OF THE WORLD

  Strengthening the case still further for the Mountain of Assembly of the rebel Watchers existing somewhere in the vicinity of the Armenian Highlands is the oldest known map of the ancient world. Dating from the sixth century BC, it is contained on a Babylonian clay tablet found during the nineteenth century at the ancient city of Sippur in southern Iraq and is currently on display in the British Museum (BM 92687).36 (See figure 33.3.)

  The map shows a large central disk, representing the known world, beyond which is a circular band labeled mar-ra-tum, which means “ocean,” this being the primordial waters that were thought to exist beyond the world landmass. Various triangles extend from the “ocean,” like the rays of a star, each representing a nagû, or “region,” either a mythical realm or distant land. Smaller circles positioned just inside the perimeter of the disk indicate real geographical locations as observed from the perspective of Babylon, which is marked as a large rectangle just above the center of the map.

  Running through the landmass are parallel lines representing the Euphrates River, which begins at the top of the circular landmass within a semicircle labeled šá-du-ú, meaning “mountain,” a reference to the northerly placed Eastern Taurus range. This identification is confirmed by the presence just below and to the right of the semicircle labeled ur, “city,” next to which is the word Urartu, the ancient kingdom that embraced territories from the Eastern Taurus Mountains north to the Armenian Highlands (the land of Ararat of the Bible) and beyond to the Caucasus Mountains. Just below this, to the south, is another small circle labeled kuraš+šurki, “Assyria,” which, like Urartu, is correctly placed.

  Yet it is what lies outside of the semicircle marked “Mountain” that is of interest here, for the triangle extending away from the primordial ocean bears the name BÀG.GU.LA, meaning “great wall,” accompanying which is the legend “6 leagues in between where the sun is not seen.”37 Its location, in the north, corresponds perfectly to the direction of Lake Van and the plain of Mush, suggesting that the “great wall” is in fact a seemingly impenetrable wall of mountains, either the Armenian Highlands or perhaps even the more northerly Caucasus Mountains, which do indeed form a virtually impenetrable barrier stretching from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east.

  That the sun does not shine here shows it to be, as Mesopotamian scholar Wayne Horowitz surmises, a “region of perpetual darkness” in the extreme north. Like Lipinski, he thinks it likely this is the same wonderland encountered by the hero Gilgamesh on his journeys and mentioned also in literary traditions concerning the travels of the celebrated king of Akkad, Sargon the Great, who ruled ca. 2334–2279 BC.38 Almost certainly this distant nagû, or region, was thought to be accessed, as Lipinski also realized, through the fabled Tigris Tunnel, which acted as a kind of passage or gateway from the material world in the south to the otherworldly realm of darkness existing beyond the Eastern Taurus Mountains. Here was the abode or “throne” of God, the Garden of Righteousness, and the paradisiacal realm visited by Enoch in the company of angels.

  Figure 33.3. Left, Babylonian world map in the form of a clay tablet, now in the possession of the British Museum (BM 92687), and right, the translation of key terms used on this map. Note the northerly placed “Mountain,” most likely the Eastern Taurus range, beyond which is the nagû, or “region” (triangle shown in black), labeled “Great Wall,” indicating either the Armenian Highlands or the more northerly Caucasus Mountains. As the legend states, this was “where the sun is not seen”; that is, the Land of Darkness, the location of both the Mountain of Assembly of the Watchers and Kharsag, the mountain home of the Anunnaki gods.

  GOD’S PROMISED LAND

  All this compelling evidence brings us to one powerful conclusion—that the original earthly abode of the Watchers was not Mount Hermon in the Levant, but a place much farther north, in the Armenian Highlands, with Bingöl Mountain being the most obvious candidate. As the Armenian world-mountain, it bore the title Katar Erkri, “Summit of the Earth,” and was seen as the abode of the gods, who were most likely the role models for the Anunnaki of Mesopotamian myth and legend, as well as the Watchers of the book of Enoch.

  As Greek writer Jonathan Bright intimated in connection with Bingöl’s Armenian name Srmantz, or Srmanç, written in Greek Σερμάάντου (Sermantou), perhaps we have here the original form of the name Hermon, the Mountain of the Watchers. It is a surmise strengthened in the knowledge that Srmantz, or Sermantou, which can also be written Sermantz, is a place-name derived from the Armenian root serm, meaning “seed,” as in the offspring of a progenitor, and the suffix antz, which means either “place of ” or “abounding in.”

  When applied to Bingöl Mountain, Sermantz reflects its role as a place from which the “seeds” of life sprang forth. Interestingly, the Armenian word serm is connected with the word root her, or herm, used in the old Armenian language (known as Grabar) to denote the word “father,” through its association with another word, hayr, or hai’r, which means the root of a hair.*19 This word association is crucial, for it backs up Jonathan Bright’s suggestion that Sermantz reflects the name Hermon, for in Armenian, Hermontz or Hermanz means “place of the father,” or place of the progenitor of the seed of life, exactly the same as Sermantz.

  So both Sermantz and its variation Hermontz not only help explain Bingöl’s classical name of Abus Mons, which means “Mountain (Latin mons) of the Father (Aramaic and Greek abba),” but they also make better sense of the mountain’s most common Armenian name Biurakn. This, as we saw in chapter 29, means “a million (bir, byur) eyes (akn),” with “eyes” here meaning sources, most obviously the countless springs that take their rise on the mountain’s summit. However, Armenian correspondent Gagik Avagyan has informed the author that there is a much deeper meaning behind the name Biurakn that expresses the idea of the mountain being the root, source, or fount of life itself. He says that this same sentiment is conveyed in the mountain’s suspected Persian name, Mingöl, which means “heavenly waters” or the “waters of paradise,” with Paradise or Heaven being the source of all life on earth.

  Apparently, Armenians from all over the country would arrive at Bingöl Mountain every spring to give thanks to Anahita, the Armenian goddess of fertility, for the spro
uting forth of new seeds (serm) following the harsh winter months. Many of them would remain camped in its foothills until summer.

  So in the context of Bingöl’s role as the source of the four rivers of Paradise in Judeo-Christian myth and legend, we can now see that in Armenian tradition this concept related to the mountain being the place of beginning, the place of original creation, the garden of God himself. He was the “father” who brought forth the “seed” of all life, which was then, symbolically, carried toward the four directions by the rivers themselves. How exactly Bingöl gained this wondrous association is today lost. Most probably it is connected with the fact that the mountain was the center of the region’s obsidian trade during the age of Göbekli Tepe and that it was from here that the forerunners of the Göbekli builders, identified as incoming Swiderian groups, emerged as the ruling elite sometime around 10,500 BC. It was the memory of their deeds that were mythologized into the stories of the Anunnaki—who dwelt in Duku, Kharsag, or Dilmun—and the Watchers, the human angels, who descended from Mount Hermon to take mortal wives and reveal the forbidden arts of heaven. That the Armenian Highlands were also once known as Yerkir Nayiri, “Land of (the) Watchers,”39 supports this theory.

  Curiously, the name Anunnaki itself might also be of Armenian origin, for in the old Grabar language (which bears some comparisons to Akkadian) its root components break down as anun, “name”; ak, “root, beginning, river root, seed”; and e, “the,”40 which when put together makes “the name is the beginning,” an allusion most assuredly to the genesis of the gods themselves. Yet just what was the role of the Watchers at Göbekli Tepe? Could it really be said that the Watchers, or, indeed, the Anunnaki, are immortalized in the dozens of anthropomorphic pillars being uncovered there today?

  34

  WALKING WITH SERPENTS

  So exactly who were the Watchers of the book of Enoch? Their recorded appearance as being extremely tall, like “trees,” with long white hair, pale skin, ruddy complexions, eyes that seem to shine like the sun, and visages with the appearance of vipers, conjures a strange creature indeed, and one that has all the hallmarks of an albino. So were the Watchers albinos? It is a compelling theory, although there is a far easier explanation.

  Such distinctive traits might simply be exaggerated descriptions of the Swiderian population, whose suspected presence in eastern Anatolia in the aftermath of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event might well have catalyzed the creation of Göbekli Tepe and the later accounts of mythical beings such as the Watchers and Anunnaki. As we saw in chapter 20, Swiderian communities certainly included “tall . . . long-headed, [and] thin faced” individuals,1 while among the post-Swiderian groups of Central Russia and the Baltic region were people of increased height with elongated (hyper-dolichocephalic) skulls and narrow faces.2

  Additionally, Swiderians would also seem to have carried the distinctive physiognomy of the Brünn population. They too possessed heads that were long and narrow, plus they bore traits that marked them as likely Neanderthal-human hybrids, most obviously prominent brow ridges.3 Similar traits were identified in the Swiderian-linked Kebeliai skull, found in Lithuania in 1948, suggesting that among the Swiderian groups entering eastern Anatolia were strange-looking people indeed.

  In fact, the unique physiological features of the Brünn population derived, most probably, from prolonged contact with Neanderthal communities, either in Central Europe or at places like Kostenki and Sungir in Central Russia (the first settlement sites at Kostenki go back at least 40,000 years, arguably even earlier). It is even possible that cross-contact between the different human species began much further away, in the Altai region of Siberia, where anatomically modern humans shared the world with Neanderthals, as well as other types of extinct human types, before their final disappearance sometime around thirty to forty thousand years ago.

  All this tells us that when the Swiderians entered eastern Anatolia their striking physical appearance might have contrasted greatly with that of the local Epipaleolithic population. Did this lead, eventually, through consistent storytelling, to gross exaggerations that have made the Watchers into superhuman albinos the size of trees? If so, then we can understand also how the the Swiderians’ elongated heads led to their being represented not only as abstract statues with T-shaped heads at Göbekli Tepe but also as human angels with visages like vipers in myths and legends. Was it a memory that across the millennia became so abstract that eventually they became Awwim, quite literally walking “serpents”?4 It is a staggering possibility. What is more, compelling evidence now suggests that the peoples of the Near East preserved an abstract memory of the existence of a serpent-faced elite for thousands of years after the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

  THE MYSTERY OF TELL ARPACHIYAH

  Following the Pre-Pottery Neolithic age came the Pottery Neolithic, which in eastern Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia was represented by the Halaf culture, ca. 6000–5000 BC, and the Ubaid people, ca. 5000–4100 BC, both of whom probably influenced the emergence of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations down on the Mesopotamia Plain. At a Halaf and later Ubaid site known as Tell Arpachiyah, situated in the Khabur Valley, just outside the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Max Mallowan and John Cruikshank Rose of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in the company of writer Agatha Christie, made an amazing discovery. They uncovered evidence of an advanced village setting with cobbled streets, rectangular buildings, and round buildings with domed ceilings like the tholoi tombs of Mycenaean Greece.5

  Mallowan and his team also unearthed a number of burials, many in poor condition. Thirteen skulls, however, were better preserved, and these were examined by anthropologists Theya Molleson and Stuart Campbell.6 Six were found to be artificially deformed, in that they had been deliberately elongated to create an extended cranium. This must have been done when the individuals were still in their infancy using a combination of boards and linen wrappings. These findings had earlier been predicted by Max Mallowan and fellow archaeologist Hilda Linford, who in 1969 wrote:

  We appear to be confronted with long heads, and there are certain pro nounced facial and other characteristics which . . . would have made them exceptionally easy to recognize.7

  What seemed important about these deformed skulls is that some of their unique features were not artificial but natural. In other words, the deformation had merely accentuated what was already there. It was a realization that led Molleson and Campbell to conclude that “several of the individuals (including some without deformations) were related to each other,”8 in that they formed part of an extended caste, or family group. Moreover, because the site covered the transition phase from Halaf to Ubaid, ca. 5200–4500 BC, and the characteristics were present in remains belonging to both cultures, there was evidence of a direct genetic descent from one culture to the other across an extended period of time.

  SNAKELIKE HEADS

  Molleson and Campbell went on to state that this type of deliberate cranial deformation within a specific group of people “has considerable potential for elitism.”9 In conclusion, they wrote that head accentuation among the Halaf and later Ubaid peoples was done to “demarcate a particular elite group, either social or functional,” who were of “close genetic relationship” and as such were part of a hereditary group that was “closely inbred.”10

  Furthermore, Molleson and Campbell speculated that the “shapes of the head may have had some meaning,”11 adding, incredibly, that these individuals were perhaps recalled in the fired clay figurines found in various Ubaid cemeteries, which have snakelike heads (see plate 32).12 In addition to this, they wrote that a number of small ceramic heads with elongated cranial features and strange coffee-bean eyes dating from the Halaf period were also most likely representations of this elite group (see figure 34.1).13

  Figure 34.1. Heads of serpent-like statues from ancient Mesopotamia in the British Museum. Their extended heads and coffee-bean eyes indicate that they are abstract representations of the lon
g-headed elite known to have existed among the Ubaid and Halaf cultures, ca. 6000–4100 BC.

  CULT OF THE SNAKE

  So who exactly were these long-headed individuals, who would seem to have been members of a genetically related group seen as snake-headed in appearance? The greatest clue comes not from the ancient world, but from Central America. Among the Maya of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a hereditary line of priests called the chane, or “serpents,” would deliberately deform the heads of their infants to give them what was known as a polcan—an elongated serpent-like head. Doing this made the child eligible for a hereditary priesthood known as the People of the Serpent, who perpetuated the cult of the rattlesnake.14 They honored Itzamna, or Zamna, a form of Ahau Can, the “Lordly Serpent,” a great wisdom bringer and legendary founder of the chane priesthood.

  Had something similar been occurring at Tell Arpachiyah in northern Iraq—a hereditary group, arguably an elite caste, that deliberately elongated the heads of their children so that when they came of age they were demarked as special among the communities in which they moved? Was this done to honor or celebrate a divine ancestor, or a specific group of ancestors, believed to have possessed very similar serpentine features? Did they represent these divine ancestors as snake-headed figurines of the type found in Ubaid graves?

  More pertinently, were these human serpents the Watchers of the book of Enoch, who were believed to have had long, serpentlike faces—visages like vipers, as the Testament of Amram so aptly puts it? Was their memory confused with the envisaged Fall in the terrestrial Paradise, through the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve? Remember, the book of Enoch tells us that the Watcher named Gâdreêl was the serpent that “led astray Eve.”15