He could be right. One of the stunning things about Göbekli Tepi, which had already been the subject of eighteen years of continuous excavation when Klaus Schmidt showed me round the site in 2013, is that so much of it still remains under the ground.
But how much?
“It’s hard to say,” Schmidt tells me. “We’ve done a geophysical survey—ground-penetrating radar—and from this we can see that at least sixteen further large enclosures remain to be excavated.”
“Large enclosures?” I ask. I point at the towering megaliths of Enclosure D. “Like this one?”
“Yes, like this one. And sixteen is the minimum. In some areas our geophysical mapping did not give us complete results and we cannot really see inside, but we expect there are many more than sixteen. Maybe in reality it will turn out to be double that number. Maybe even as many as fifty.”
“Fifty!”
“Yes—fifty of the big enclosures, each enclosure with fourteen or more pillars. But, you know, it’s not our target to excavate everything. Just a little part, because excavation is destruction. We want to keep most of the site untouched.”
It dilates the imagination to reflect on the scale of the enterprise undertaken at Göbekli Tepe by the ancients. Not only are the circles of megalithic pillars already excavated here at least 6,000 years older than any other known megalithic sites anywhere in the world, but also, I now realize, Göbekli Tepe is huge—occupying an area that might eventually prove to be as much as thirty times larger than the fullest extent of a big site like Stonehenge, for example.
We are confronted, in other words, by vast, inexplicable antiquity, immense scale, and unknown purpose—and all of it seeming to unfold out of nowhere, with no obvious background or preparation, shrouded utterly in mystery.
Enclosures of the giants
I’m used to archaeologists making the sign of the evil eye and turning their backs on me when I show up at their excavations. But Professor Schmidt is refreshingly different. Although he knows very well who I am, he permits me and my wife, the photographer Santha Faiia, to climb down into Enclosure D and explore it. All four of the main enclosures so far excavated at Göbekli Tepe are strictly off limits to the public and under the eye of watchful guards, but there’s an image on one of the pillars in Enclosure D that I need to take a much closer look at than the walkway affords—indeed I can’t even see it from the walkway—so Schmidt’s generosity of spirit is welcome.
We enter the enclosure along a plank which leads to an as yet unexcavated two-meter-high partition of rubble and earth separating the two main central pillars, one to the east and the other to the west. Quarried from the very hard crystalline limestone of the region, and polished to a flawlessly smooth finish, these colossal pillars glow mellow gold in the sun. I know from Professor Schmidt that they are about 5.5 meters (18 feet) tall and that each of them weighs more than 15 tons.5 Scrambling down onto the floor of the enclosure I note that they stand on stone plinths each about 20 centimeters (8 inches) high that have been carved directly out of the living bedrock. In a row along the front edge of the plinth under the eastern pillar, squatting back on their tails with no wings evident, seven seemingly flightless birds have been sculpted in high relief.
Figure 3: Layout of the pillars in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe. Pillar 43 is of the greatest interest.
With their stylized anthropomorphic appearance enhanced by their angled T-shaped “heads” the central pillars loom over me like twin giants. Though they are not my primary target, I seize the opportunity to examine them closely.
Their front edges, representing their chests and bellies, are quite slim—only about twenty centimeters wide—while their flanks measure a bit over a meter (about 4 feet) from front to back. Both figures, as I’d noticed from the walkway, have arms carved in low relief at their sides, crooked at the elbows and terminating in hands with long, thin fingers. These fingers wrap round the fronts of the pillars, almost meeting over their “bellies.”
Above the hands, covering their “chests” are hints of an open-fronted garment. Just below the hands, both figures also wear a broad belt—again carved in low relief—decorated with a distinctive buckle. In both cases what appears to be part of an animal skin—thought by Schmidt to represent the hind legs and tail of a fox pelt6—is shown hanging suspended from the buckle so that it covers the genital region.
Both figures also wear necklaces. In the case of the eastern figure the necklace is decorated with a crescent and disc motif and in the case of the western figure with a bull’s head.
In addition both pillars stand on their pedestals in exactly the same peculiar way—not securely fixed but resting precariously in slots just 10 centimeters (4 inches) deep. Klaus Schmidt and his team have stabilized them with wooden props and I can only imagine that they must also have been held upright in a similar way in antiquity—unless, perhaps, there was a frame over the enclosure into which the heads of the figures were somehow fixed. Since the builders of Göbekli Tepe were clearly masters of fashioning, moving and positioning large megaliths, it is mysterious that they chose not to cut deeper slots in which the pillars could have been securely mounted. There must have been some purpose to this, but I cannot fathom it.
So much for the similarities between the two central pillars, but there are also differences. For example, the eastern figure has an almost life-sized depiction of a fox carved in high relief on its right flank so that it appears to be leaping forward from the crook of its elbow. And whereas the belt of the western pillar is undecorated other than by its buckle, the belt of the eastern pillar bears a number of intriguing adornments including a series of glyphs like the Roman letter “C” and others like the Roman letter “H.” As I study them I reflect that we cannot possibly know what these symbols meant to the people of Göbekli Tepi, from whom we are separated by a vast span of more than eleven thousand years. It is far-fetched to imagine that they had any kind of writing—let alone writing in the alphabet we use today! Nonetheless there is something strangely modern and purposive about the way these pictograms are used and displayed and it seems to me that they are more than merely decorative. Nothing else like them exists anywhere in the world of Upper Palaeolithic art, and the same is true of the animal and bird figures. At this early period, such a combination of megaliths and sophisticated sculptures is utterly unique and unprecedented.
I move on to examine the dozen pillars disposed around the edges of the Enclosure D, which forms more of an ellipse than a strict circle, measuring approximately 20 meters (65 feet) from west to east and just over 14 meters (46 feet) from north to south. The surrounding pillars are generally about half the height of the central pair and for the most part are not free-standing but rather are embedded into the enclosure wall. Most, though not all, are T-shaped and most are richly decorated with images of birds, insects and animals as though the cargo of Noah’s Ark has been turned to stone: foxes, gazelles, wild boars, numerous species of birds including several cranes with serpents at their feet, many more serpents both individually and in groups, a spider, a wild ass, wild cattle, a lion with its tail curving forward over its spine—and many more.
Making the most of our laissez-passer, I take my time but eventually, on the northwestern side of the enclosure I come to the pillar I particularly want to see. For ease of reference Schmidt and his colleagues have numbered all the pillars at Göbekli Tepe and this is “Pillar No. 43.” I know from my prior research that it has a large depiction of a scorpion carved in relief on its base; some have suggested it might be an image of the zodiacal constellation that we call Scorpio today.7 However, to my great disappointment the figure is no longer visible. The archaeologists have covered it with rubble—to protect it from damage, Schmidt claims. I tell him of my interest in a possible astronomical connection but he scoffs at this—“There are no astronomical figures here; the zodiac constellations were not recognized until Babylonian times, nine thousand years after Göbekli Tepe”—and he refuses point-bla
nk to allow me to clear the heaped-up rubble away.
I’m about to get into an argument with him—there is in fact excellent evidence that the zodiac was codified long before Göbekli Tepe8—when I notice a group of other figures higher up the same pillar that have not been covered with rubble. These include a prominent depiction of a vulture with its wing outstretched in the manner of a human arm and with a solid disc poised over that arm-like wing as though being upheld or cradled by it. Another human characteristic of the vulture, quite dissimilar to any examples of this bird that I have ever seen in nature, is that it is portrayed with its “knees” bent forward and with strangely elongated flat feet—a bit like some of the cartoon representations of the “Penguin” character in the old Batman comics. It is, in other words, a therianthrope (from the Greek therion, meaning wild beast, and anthropos, meaning man), a hybrid creature—part human and part vulture.9
Above it are more of the H-shaped pictograms arranged in a row between a series of upright and inverted “V” shapes. Again there is a sense of some message, some communication here, that is impossible to interpret. Finally, at the top of the pillar, are depictions of what appear to be three large handbags—rectangular containers, at any rate, with curved handles. Separating them, positioned over the front of the handles in each case, are three figures—at the left a bird with long, human-like legs that mark it out almost certainly as another therianthrope, a quadruped with its tail arched forward over its body, and a salamander.
Figure 4: Pillar 43 in Enclosure D. The lower part of the pillar was covered by rubble at the time of my visit, but has been reconstructed here from earlier photographs (see Plate 7).
There is something hauntingly familiar about the whole ensemble, and I feel certain that I have seen it—or something very like it—somewhere before. The only problem is I can’t remember where or what! I ask Santha to take detailed photographs of the pillar and when she is done Schmidt suggests that we accompany him to a different part of the site a few hundred meters to the northwest on the other side of the ridge where he and his team have an active excavation underway. It’s just one of the dozens of buried enclosures with large pillars that they have identified with ground-penetrating radar, and the first of these that they are investigating.
Paradigms
As we walk I ask the Professor how and when he became involved with Göbekli Tepe. Ironically, given his firm views on the evolution of architecture, it turns out that he got his big break because other archaeologists also had firm views on the same subject! In 1964 a joint team from the University of Chicago and the University of Istanbul visited the area with a specific brief to search out and discover Stone Age sites. However when they saw the top of a large T-shaped pillar sticking out of the ground, and the remains of other broken limestone pillars that had been plowed up by local farmers lying nearby, they dismissed Göbekli Tepe as irrelevant to their interests and moved on elsewhere.
The reason?
The American and Turkish team had judged the workmanship on the pillars to be too fine—too advanced, too sophisticated—to have been produced by Stone Age hunter-gatherers. In their opinion, despite the presence of worked flints lying alongside the limestone fragments, Göbekli Tepe was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery and therefore of no prehistoric interest whatsoever.
Their loss was to be Schmidt’s gain. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s he had been involved in another project in Turkey—the excavation of an early Neolithic site called Nevali Cori which was soon to be flooded by the waters of the Ataturk Dam. There he and a team of archaeologists from the University of Heidelberg discovered, and rescued from the advancing floodwaters, a number of finely-worked T-shaped limestone pillars that were conclusively dated to between 8,000 and 9,000 years of age. Some had arms and hands carved in relief along their sides. “So we recognized that this region had something about it that was different from other sites known from this period. Nevali Cori was our first hint of the existence of large-scale limestone sculptures during the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to early village farming communities.”
A little later, in 1994, Schmidt came across the report of the Turkish-American survey done thirty years earlier and stumbled upon a single paragraph that mentioned the presence of worked flints alongside fragments of limestone pillars lying on the surface at Göbekli Tepe. “I was a young archaeologist,” he explains, “I was looking for my own project, and I immediately realized that there could be something of significance here, perhaps even another site as important as Nevali Cori.”
“Which your predecessors had missed, because flints and architectural pillars are not normally associated in the minds of archaeologists?”
I’m hoping he’ll get my hint that he, too, might be missing something at Göbekli Tepe because of the established paradigm, but he seems oblivious and replies, “Yes, exactly.”
I glance ahead. For the past few moments, as we’ve been walking and talking, we’ve approached a scene of intense activity. I hadn’t been aware of it from the four main enclosures because it had been concealed from us by the summit of the ridge, but now we’ve hiked north over the ridge line and are making our way down the other side into the new excavation, nominated as Enclosure H, that Schmidt has opened at Göbekli Tepe.10 Here five or six German archaeologists are busily at work, some scraping away layers of soil with trowels or pouring buckets of earth and stones through sieves, others directing the efforts of a team of thirty Turkish laborers. The focus is on a large rectangular cavity. Perhaps half the size of a football pitch, it’s internally subdivided by knee-high walls of earth into a dozen or so smaller segments. From the floor of these, at several points, hulking limestone pillars protrude. Most are T-shaped but my eye is drawn to one that has a smooth curved top, marred only by a small broken segment, and upon which is carved a particularly fine figure of a male lion. Like the lions in Enclosure D, its long tail sweeps forward over its spine but the workmanship of this piece is of a higher order than anything I’ve seen so far today.
“That’s a very substantial pillar,” I say to Schmidt. “Can we take a look at it?”
He agrees and we pick our way through the excavations until we’re just a couple of meters from the lion pillar. It’s leaning at an angle against a remnant of the rubble of cobble-sized stones and earth that had clearly filled the entire enclosure before the archaeologists began work here. Right at the edge of this segment of the dig, the head of another pillar can be seen, while in the middle of the segment a deeper trench has been cut—to expose what I guess is the top third of the lion pillar—and this trench, too, is lined by the same rubble of cobbles and earth.
I ask Schmidt about the rubble. “All those cobbles,” I say. “How did they get there? They don’t look like the result of natural sedimentation.”
“They’re not,” he replies. He’s looking, I think, a little smug. “They were put there deliberately.”
“Deliberately?”
“Yes, by the makers of Göbekli Tepe. After the megaliths were put in place, and used for a period of unknown duration, every one of the enclosures was deliberately and rapidly buried. For example Enclosure C is the oldest we have found so far. It appears that it was closed, filled in from top to bottom so that all the pillars were completely covered, before ‘D,’ the next enclosure in the sequence, was made. This practice of deliberate infilling has been a great advantage to archaeology because it effectively sealed each of the enclosures and prevented the intrusion of later organic material thus allowing us to be absolutely certain about the dating.”
I’m thinking rapidly as Schmidt talks. The point he makes about dating is interesting, for at least three reasons.
First, the implication is that at megalithic sites around the world where this “sealing” process didn’t happen, the dates archaeologists have arrived at could be falsely young as a result of the intrusion of later organic materials (which, by the way, is the only kind of material th
at is subject to carbon dating; because of course you can’t carbon date inorganic materials like stone). Theoretically this could mean that famous megalithic sites that were not deliberately buried by their builders (the temples of Malta, for example, or the taulas of Menorca, or the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge in England) could turn out to be much older than we are presently taught.
Secondly, if the bulk of the dates at Göbekli Tepe are derived from organic materials in the fill—a fact that I’m later able to confirm from Schmidt’s published papers11—then this tells us only about the age of the fill; the megalithic pillars themselves must be at least that old, but they could be older since they stood in place before being buried, for “a period of unknown duration.”
Thirdly, and perhaps most important, why was the site infilled? What could possibly be the motive for going to all this trouble to create a series of spectacular megalithic circles only to end up deliberately burying them so thoroughly and so efficiently that more than 10,000 years would pass before they were found again?
The first thought that comes to my mind is … time capsule—that Göbekli Tepe was created to transmit a message of some kind to the future and buried so that its message could be kept intact and hidden for millennia. It’s a thought that will return to haunt me many times as I continue my investigation, but another full year will pass before it comes to fruition, as we’ll see in later chapters. Meanwhile, when I put the question to Klaus Schmidt he offers a completely different explanation for the deliberate burial of the circles of pillars.
“In my opinion this was their program,” he says. “They made the enclosures to be buried.”
“Made to be buried?” I’m intrigued. I’m waiting for him to say “as a time capsule” but instead he replies, “Like, for example, the megalithic cemeteries in Western Europe—huge constructions and then a mound on top.”
Magicians of the Gods Page 2