It’s incomprehensible to me that a place as important as Karahan Tepe, with so much to teach us, could be so ignored and so disregarded. I have often said, as I did at the end of the last chapter, that we are a species with amnesia. I attribute our great forgetfulness of our own past, the blank pages in our memory, to the terrible cataclysms the earth passed through at the end of the Ice Age, but here at Karahan Tepe I’m reminded that our collective stupor is also often willfully self-inflicted—as though we no longer care to know where we come from or who we really are.
Control of the past
The next day Santha and I go back to Göbekli Tepe. Klaus Schmidt is still alive at this point in July 2014, but he’s away in Germany for the summer and in just a few days’ time he will die of a heart attack.
In his absence I want to take another look at the site. In particular, I’m hoping to arrange to be there at night, so that I can experience it under the open sky and get a sense of its relationship to the stars above as well as to the earth below. Instead, what I get is another forceful reminder of how we humans willfully desecrate the precious gifts bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
Even in 2013 the archaeological vandalizing and defacing of the site was well advanced with a hideous raised walkway in place, but what has happened since our last visit is almost beyond words to describe. A massively ugly wooden roof now looms over the megalithic enclosures, entirely covering them, and hulking platforms loaded with tons of stones have been suspended beneath it to prevent the roof from blowing away in high winds. These platforms, together with the struts supporting the roof and the prominent “no entry” signs scattered around, make it almost impossible to see the megalithic pillars or to appreciate their profound, original beauty and spiritual power.
What the archaeologists have done—of course, they claim they did it to “protect” the site—is a travesty, an abomination, a masterpiece of ugliness, and we, the global public, whose heritage Göbekli Tepe is, are left cheated and bereft. I simply cannot understand the minds that could have boxed in, caged and imprisoned Göbekli Tepe in this way. I cannot begin to imagine what they were thinking. And even if the roof is “temporary” as is presently claimed—until, no doubt, a larger one is put in place—that is no excuse. Better no roof at all (the site has managed very well without one for nearly nineteen years since the first excavations began) than even five minutes of this vile “temporary” horror.
Besides, I have grave doubts about how “temporary” it will be. It has taken almost a year for the German Archaeological Institute to put the roof up (they were already working on it during our previous visit in September 2013), a lot of money has been spent on it, and I fear we will not see it removed and replaced with something more aesthetically appropriate to the majesty and mystery of Göbekli Tepe for a very long while.
As to a night visit, and my plan to see the stars with the megaliths around me … What a joke! The roof has cut Göbekli Tepe off entirely from the cosmos. It feels almost like a deliberate, calculated act of disempowerment—as though someone among the powers that be suddenly woke up and realized how dangerous this ancient place has become to the established order of things and how subversive it potentially is to the system of mind control, very much including control of the past, that keeps modern society in order.
Ancient astronomers
That night back in our hotel I’m working on my laptop, going through a pile of research papers about Göbekli Tepe that I’ve downloaded and brought with me. Most of them are from academic journals, but one is from my own website. Written by registered engineer and environmental geologist Paul Burley, I published it in March 2013 and haven’t read it since. I recall at the time feeling it was important, but I can’t immediately remember why. Göbekli Tepe wasn’t as central to my concerns then as it is today. Now as I read through Burley’s paper in the light of everything I’ve learned since March 2013, its central message, and exactly why it matters, hits me like a shot of adrenaline.
Klaus Schmidt’s opposition to any form of astronomical connection at Göbekli Tepe, which I reported briefly in Chapter One, was based more on his own profound ignorance of astronomy and distaste for the subject, than anything else. In the teeth of this hostility from the lead archaeologist, however, a number of scientists have studied Göbekli Tepe to see if any of the enclosures, or the groups of pillars within them, reveal any obvious astronomical alignments. It is the unanimous testimony of all these studies that Göbekli Tepe is a profoundly astronomical site, that its builders observed the stars closely, and that they were able to manifest these observations very successfully in the alignments of the structures on the ground.
I’ll give a few examples here.
Dr. Giulio Magli, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Politecnico di Milano, is a leading Italian astrophysicist who has conducted archaeoastronomical studies of a number of ancient sites and monuments around the world. In 2013 he published a research paper on Göbekli Tepe based on precise computer simulations of changes in the sky brought about over long periods by precession34—a phenomenon that we have already explored. It is Magli’s case that Sirius, the star the Ancient Egyptians identified with the goddess Isis, was an object of particular interest to the builders of Göbekli Tepe:
Simulating the sky in the tenth millenium BC, it is possible to see that a quite spectacular phenomenon occurred at Göbekli Tepe in that period: the “birth” of a “new” star, and certainly not of an ordinary one, as it is the brightest star and the fourth most brilliant object of the sky: Sirius. Indeed precession, at the latitude of Göbekli Tepe, brought Sirius under the horizon in the years around 15,000 BC. After reaching the minimum, Sirius started to come closer to the horizon and it became visible again, very low and close to due south, toward 9300 BC.35
Thereafter, Magli goes on to demonstrate, the rising points of Sirius along the horizon, which also change very slowly as a result of precession, appear to have been “tracked” at Göbekli Tepe by Enclosure D, Enclosure C and Enclosure B. The extrapolated mean azimuths of these enclosures, taken as the mid-lines between the two central monoliths in each case, align with the rising azimuth of Sirius in respectively 9100 BC, 8750 BC and 8300 BC.36 “The structures of Göbekli Tepe,” Magli concludes, “were conceived to celebrate, and then follow in the course of the centuries, the appearance of a brilliant ‘guest’ star in the sky: Sirius.”37
Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University, though not an astronomer, also detected astronomical alignments at Göbekli Tepe, and in the same region of the sky highlighted by Magli. However, Schoch came to a different conclusion about what stellar objects might have interested the builders. “This is a difficult question to answer,” he wrote, before going on to offer the following hypothesis:
On the morning of the Vernal Equinox of circa 10,000 BCE, before the sun rose due east at Göbekli Tepe, the Pleiades, Taurus, and the top of Orion were in view in the direction indicated by the central stones of Enclosure D, with Orion’s belt not far above the horizon as dawn broke (as seen from the best vantage points in the area). A similar scenario played out for the orientation of the central stones of Enclosure C in circa 9500 BCE and for Enclosure B in circa 9000 BCE. Enclosure A is oriented toward the Pleiades, Taurus, and Orion on the morning of the Vernal Equinox circa 8500 BCE, but due to precessional changes, the entire belt of Orion no longer rose above the horizon before dawn broke. By about 8150 BCE the belt of Orion remained below the horizon at dawn on the morning of the Vernal Equinox. These dates fit well the timeframe established for Göbekli Tepe on the basis of radiocarbon dating.38
Other non-astronomers, author Andrew Collins and chartered engineer Rodney Hale, looked in the opposite direction to Schoch and Magli, i.e. north instead of south, and found strong alignments with the setting of Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation of Cygnus. Again the alignments turn out to track the changes in the position of the star caused by precession.39 The growing impression that the builders of Göbekli
Tepe paid close attention to the stars and were fully aware of the effects of precessional motion on the celestial landscape, was confirmed in January 2015 in an article in the journal Archaeological Discovery, by Alessandro De Lorenzis and Vincenzo Orofino, both of the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Salento, Italy. They concluded that Collins and Hale were correct and that, on the northern side of their orientations, “the central pillars of the studied enclosures are in fact turned to face the setting of Deneb.”40 Lorentis and Orofino refined the dates given by Collins and Hale, pushing them back by about 200 years, but agreed that subtle changes in the orientation of the enclosures were evidence of the tracking of pre-cession.41
Astrophysicist Juan Antonio Belmonte also looked at the astronomical characteristics of Göbekli Tepe. He noted that among the circular enclosures, “there is one with nearly rectangular walls, which were almost perfectly aligned to the cardinal points.”42 Needless to say such exact alignments, as at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, cannot have been achieved without the use of equally exact astronomical observations.
Belmonte also paid attention to the “profuse decoration” of the T-pillars at Göbekli Tepe, concluding that these may represent:
yet other astronomical observations, such as the crescent and the star, so common in later cultures of the Middle East … Then there are what could be interpreted as totemic representations of animals, which, if we may continue to speculate, could symbolize constellations such as Leo, Taurus and Scorpio.
This is the right moment to deal with Klaus Schmidt’s argument (see Chapter One) that there couldn’t possibly be any “astronomical figures” at Göbekli Tepi, because “the zodiac constellations were not recognized until Babylonian times, nine thousand years after Göbekli Tepe.” I didn’t challenge him on this point when I interviewed him, because I was more interested in hearing his own views on Göbekli Tepe, rather than engaging him in a possibly acrimonious debate. Clearly, however, Belmonte, who knows his stuff, does not agree with the position taken by Schmidt.
Neither, for that matter, does the Russian astronomer and historian of science Alexander Gurshtein, who traces the first recognition and naming of constellations—notably the Great Bear—to 20,000 BC,43 and more detailed knowledge of the zodiac to the epoch of 5600 BC.44
German archaeoastronomer Michael Rappengluck pushes the origins of the zodiac even further back than that, however. He has identified an accurate depiction of the zodiacal constellation of Taurus painted more than 17,000 years ago in the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux cave in France.45
Rappengluck points out that there are four key moments of the year, the spring equinox, the autumn equinox, the winter solstice and the summer solstice. We’ve seen already how the “character” of a world age has long been thought to be governed by the zodiacal constellation that “houses” the sun on the spring equinox, but other constellations also “house” the other three prominent “stations of the sun” at the autumn equinox, and at the summer and winter solstices, and when a shift of age takes place with one constellation giving way to another on the spring equinox, so the constellations governing the other three “stations” also shift.
There is not space to go into the evidence in detail here, but the essence of Rappengluck’s argument concerning Lascaux is that depicted there is the whole constellation of Taurus (in one of the aurochs or “bull” figures in the Hall of Bulls) and also above its shoulder, in a distinctive pattern of six dots, the six visible stars of the Pleiades, which form a highly recognizable element of Taurus. Moreover a date can be put on this depiction:
The Pleiades in 15,300 BC were very near the point of the autumn equinox … The six stars in the “Salle des Taureaux” therefore represent a striking and excellent heavenly marker for the beginning of autumn … The epoch calculated astronomically lies extraordinarily close to the … carbon-14 dating [for human activity in this part of the cave] corresponding to 15,300 BC.46
In other work Rappengluck provides further compelling evidence that our ancestors, at least as early as the epoch between 16,000 BC and 10,000 BC:
recognized single and very complex star patterns, including the Milky Way, the Northern Crown in the cave of El Castillo (Spain), the Pleiades in the cave of Lascaux (France) and the main constellations of the sky at the same location.47
He also documents a rock panel in the cave of La Tete du Lion (France) that:
shows the combination of a star pattern—Aldebaran in the Bull and the Pleiades—with a drawing of the moon’s cycle above. This picture comes from the Solutrean epoch [ca 19,000 to 20,000 BC]. It shows not only a remarkable similarity with the representation in the Lascaux cave, but clearly connects the star pattern with part of the lunar cycle.48
Rappengluck’s conclusion, and again I must cut a long story short, is that:
hunter-gatherers of Palaeolithic epochs looked up to the starry sky and saw the open cluster of the Pleiades with the wandering moon and sun near or between the Golden Gate of the ecliptic, 21,000 years ago.49
The “Golden Gate of the ecliptic” that Rappengluck refers to here was traditionally conceived of as that area of the heavens bounded by the Hyades and the Pleiades (both of which are star groups within the constellation of Taurus), between which, as though through a great celestial “gate,” the ecliptic passes.50 The “ecliptic” is the technical term for the sun’s perceived “path” through the heavens. The implication, therefore, is that the path of the sun (and the moon51) against the background of the constellations of the zodiac was observed, depicted and understood in the Palaeolithic, perhaps as much as 10,000 years before Göbekli Tepe was built. For this reason Belmonte makes a point of citing Rappengluck’s work, and indeed of showing a photo provided by Rappengluck of the Taurus figure in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux,52 when he makes his seemingly off the cuff remark that zodiacal constellations “such as Leo, Taurus and Scorpio” might be the inspiration for the “totemic” animals depicted at Göbekli Tepe.
For Belmonte, in summary, Göbekli Tepe offers evidence that:
a completely unknown hunter-gatherer society more than 11,000 years ago sought to create monumental structures linked to the heavens. This series of sanctuaries, built presumably one after the other and even one upon another, may have been used for centuries, perhaps millennia, to chart the heavens. However, for reasons which are unknown, the constructors deliberately buried the structures, creating conditions which contributed to their excellent state of preservation despite their great antiquity.53
Certainly the indigenous inhabitants of the Göbekli Tepe area were hunter-gatherers—and completely unknown hunter-gatherers at that! But it has been my thesis throughout this book that their sudden venture into spectacular monumental architecture, closely followed by their equally spectacular “invention” of agriculture, is very strange. Indeed it amounts to an almost inexplicable “great leap forward” that cries out for a coherent explanation which archaeology has yet to provide. The hypothesis we are exploring here, and that I believe might explain these anomalies, is that the survivors of a lost civilization, who had already mastered agriculture and knew everything there was to know about building with megaliths, had settled among the hunter-gatherers of Göbekli Tepe following the Younger Dryas cataclysm and transferred some of their skills to them.
Now, in addition to megalithic architecture and agriculture we must take the evidence of astronomy into account. At first sight, while the work of Belmonte, Collins, Hale, Schoch, Magli and others confirms that competent astronomers must have been at work at Göbekli Tepe, we cannot say that the level of knowledge manifested in the alignments of the pillars and enclosures was necessarily that of a sophisticated “civilization.” We’ve seen from the research done by Gurshtein and Rappengluck that careful observations of the sky, and identification of constellations we can still recognize today, can be traced back into the Neolithic and beyond that into the art of the painted caves of the Palaeolithic 20,000 or more years ag
o. So expressions of such knowledge at Göbekli Tepe need not surprise us unduly.
But suppose there was something else—something that hunter-gatherers, no matter how savvy, could not be expected to have known under any circumstances?
It is that elusive “something else” that Paul Burley’s work brought home to me, like a shot of adrenaline, when I re-read his paper in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa in July 2014.
Neolithic puzzle
Burley’s paper is entitled “Göbekli Tepe: Temples Communicating an Ancient Cosmic Geography.” He wrote it originally in June 2011, I met him at the Conference of Precession and Ancient Knowledge in Sedona, Arizona, in September that year, we exchanged a couple of emails during 2012, and in February 2013 he asked me to read his paper, which he said concerned “evidence of a zodiac on one of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe.” I read it, replied that I found it “very persuasive and interesting, with significant implications” and told him I’d like to publish it on the Articles page of my website. Paul agreed and the article went live on March 8, 2013.54 It’s still there, accessible through the URL provided in the note.
“Significant implications,” I now realize as I read through the paper again in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa, was a huge understatement. But I didn’t make my first visit to Göbekli Tepe until September 2013 and by then, clearly, I’d forgotten the gist of Burley’s argument, which focuses almost exclusively on Enclosure D and on the very pillar, Pillar 43, that I’d been most interested in when I was there. My interest in it had been sparked by Belmonte’s suggestion that the relief carving of a scorpion near its base (which the reader will recall was hidden by rubble that Schmidt refused to allow me to move) might be a representation of the zodiacal constellation of Scorpio. So it was a lapse on my part not to have re-read Burley’s paper documenting “a zodiac” on the same pillar before I traveled to the site. But we’re all human, we all make mistakes, we all forget things and despite acknowledging its “significant implications” in our correspondence six months earlier, what Burley had discovered had slipped my mind entirely on my September 2013 visit.
Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization Page 30
