THE GARDEN OF EDEN?
Joanie March 1st, 2009
DO THESE MYSTERIOUS STONES MARK THE SITE OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN?
By Tom Cox
Daily Mail
February 28, 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1157784/Do-mysterious-stones-mark-site-Garden-Eden.html
For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the
rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid
hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as
’sacred’. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted
something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.
The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping
from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform
someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were
important.
They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s
day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years.
Others would say he’d made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a
site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of
religion — and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.
A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd’s find reached museumcurators in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, ten miles south-west of the
stones.
They got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And
so, in late 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli
Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) to begin his excavations.
As he puts it: ‘As soon as I got there and saw the stones, I knew that if I
didn’t walk away immediately I would be here for the rest of my life.’
Schmidt stayed. And what he has uncovered is astonishing. Archaeologists
worldwide are in rare agreement on the site’s importance. ‘Gobekli Tepe
changes everything,’ says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.
David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University
in Johannesburg, says: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological
site in the world.’
Some go even further and say the site and its implications are incredible.
As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: ‘Gobekli Tepe is too
extraordinary for my mind to understand.’
So what is it that has energised and astounded the sober world of academia?
The site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones,
unearthed by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome,
T-shaped megaliths. Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of
Avebury or Stonehenge.
Most of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images
– mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are
another common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.
The stones seem to represent human forms — some have stylised ‘arms’, which angle down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or
ritual site, like the stone circles of Western Europe.
To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out — they are arranged in
circles from five to ten yards across — but there are indications that much
more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more
standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.
So far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be
a dazzling site — a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift
Gobekli Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere - and the realms of the
fantastical.
The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at
least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.
That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.
Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin.
It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.
How did cavemen build something so ambitious? Schmidt speculates that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of construction, living in animal-skin tents, slaughtering local game for food.
The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they
also support the dating of the site.
This revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something
like Gobekli, is worldchanging, for it shows that the old hunter-gatherer
life, in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived
– almost unbelievably sophisticated.
It’s as if the gods came down from heaven and built Gobekli for themselves.
This is where we come to the biblical connection, and my own involvement in the Gobekli Tepe story.
About three years ago, intrigued by the first scant details of the site, I
flew out to Gobekli. It was a long, wearying journey, but more than worth
it, not least as it would later provide the backdrop for a new novel I have
written.
Back then, on the day I arrived at the dig, the archaeologists were
unearthing mind-blowing artworks. As these sculptures were revealed, I
realised that I was among the first people to see them since the end of the
Ice Age.
And that’s when a tantalising possibility arose. Over glasses of black tea,
served in tents right next to the megaliths, Klaus Schmidt told me that, in
his opinion, this very spot was once the site of the biblical Garden of
Eden. More specifically, as he put it: ‘Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden.’
To understand how a respected academic like Schmidt can make such a dizzying claim, you need to know that many scholars view the Eden story as
folk-memory, or allegory.
Seen in this way, the Eden story, in Genesis, tells us of humanity’s
innocent and leisured hunter-gatherer past, when we could pluck fruit from
the trees, scoop fish from the rivers and spend the rest of our days in
pleasure.
But then we ‘fell’ into the harsher life of farming, with its ceaseless toil
and daily grind. And we know primitive farming was harsh, compared to the
relative indolence of hunting, because of the archaeological evidence.
To date, archaeologists have dug 45 stones out of the ruins at Gobekli.
When people make the transition from hunter-gathering to settled
agriculture, their skeletons change — they temporarily grow smaller and
less healthy as the human body adapts to a diet poorer in protein and a more
wearisome lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier.
This begs the question, why adopt farming at all? Many theories have been
suggested — from tribal competition, to population pressures, to the
extinction of wild animal species. But Schmidt believes that the temple of
Gobekli reveals another possible cause.
‘To build such a place as this, the hunters must have joined together in
numbers. After they finished building, they probably congregated for
worship. But then they found that they couldn’t feed so many people with
regular hunting and gathering.
‘So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion
motivated people to take up farming.’
The reason such theories have special weight is that the move to farming
first happened in this same region. These rolling Anatolian plains were the
cradle of agriculture.
The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles
away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern
Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat — first
cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals — such as rye
and oats — also started here.
But there was a problem for these early farmers, and it wasn’t just that
they had adopted a tougher, if ultimately more productive, lifestyle. They
also experienced an ecological crisis. These days the landscape surrounding
the eerie stones of Gobekli is arid and barren, but it was not always thus.
As the carvings on the stones show — and as archaeological remains reveal
– this was once a richly pastoral region.
There were herds of game, rivers of fish, and flocks of wildfowl; lush green
meadows were ringed by woods and wild orchards. About 10,000 years ago, the Kurdish desert was a ‘paradisiacal place’, as Schmidt puts it. So what
destroyed the environment? The answer is Man.
As we began farming, we changed the landscape and the climate. When the
trees were chopped down, the soil leached away; all that ploughing and
reaping left the land eroded and bare. What was once an agreeable oasis
became a land of stress, toil and diminishing returns.
And so, paradise was lost. Adam the hunter was forced out of his glorious
Eden, ‘to till the earth from whence he was taken’ - as the Bible puts it.
Of course, these theories might be dismissed as speculations. Yet there is
plenty of historical evidence to show that the writers of the Bible, when
talking of Eden, were, indeed, describing this corner of Kurdish Turkey.
In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure
enough, this is where Gobekli is sited.
Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these.
In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a ‘Beth Eden’ — a house of
Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe.
Another book in the Old Testament talks of ‘the children of Eden which were
in Thelasar’, a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.
The very word ‘Eden’ comes from the Sumerian for ‘plain’; Gobekli lies on
the plains of Harran.
Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe
is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors — people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.
It’s a stunning and seductive idea. Yet it has a sinister epilogue. Because
the loss of paradise seems to have had a strange and darkening effect on the
human mind.
A few years ago, archaeologists at nearby Cayonu unearthed a hoard of human skulls. They were found under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood.
No one is sure, but this may be the earliest evidence for human sacrifice:
one of the most inexplicable of human behaviours and one that could have
evolved only in the face of terrible societal stress.
Experts may argue over the evidence at Cayonu. But what no one denies is
that human sacrifice took place in this region, spreading to Palestine,
Canaan and Israel.
Archaeological evidence suggests that victims were killed in huge death
pits, children were buried alive in jars, others roasted in vast bronze
bowls.
These are almost incomprehensible acts, unless you understand that the
people had learned to fear their gods, having been cast out of paradise. So
they sought to propitiate the angry heavens.
This savagery may, indeed, hold the key to one final, bewildering mystery.
The astonishing stones and friezes of Gobekli Tepe are preserved intact for
a bizarre reason.
Long ago, the site was deliberately and systematically buried in a feat of
labour every bit as remarkable as the stone carvings.
Around 8,000 BC, the creators of Gobekli turned on their achievement and
entombed their glorious temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating
the artificial hills on which that Kurdish shepherd walked in 1994.
No one knows why Gobekli was buried. Maybe it was interred as a kind of
penance: a sacrifice to the angry gods, who had cast the hunters out of
paradise. Perhaps it was for shame at the violence and bloodshed that the
stone-worship had helped provoke.
Whatever the answer, the parallels with our own era are stark. As we
contemplate a new age of ecological turbulence, maybe the silent, sombre,
12,000-year-old stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us, to warn
us, as they stare across the first Eden we destroyed.
