A temple complex in Turkey—older than both Stonehenge and the Pyramids—may overturn many of the assumptions of modern archeology and anthropology:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist [Klaus Schmidt] waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
[ . . . ]
Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
February 22nd, 2010 | 2:57 pm
“Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations.”
Followers of the Abrahamic religions, especially those who read First Things, may be willingly moved by this thesis. Neo-conservative and religious sentiments may lead them to see it as evidence of purer days they wish were upon us now, when the high culture they so value was supposedly in harmony with devotion to God.
They should refer to their scriptures regarding cities, building and human motivations:
- Abel was a shepherd, a figure of submission and responsibility, hearkening to eternity. His worship is to remember and to return to God what God provided.
- Cain was a farmer, succumbed to the contentious and fearful in his nature (got it from his mother?) was unable to accept communion with God, was focused on himself and strove to prove his worth.
- Cain built the first cities.
- Nimrod took this to a well-known extreme.
- Because of his history of violence, David was forbidden to build the first temple.
- As for high culture, despite his wisdom, Solomon’s civilization-building began in righteousness, ended in decadence and left little by way of righteous example for his successors except an implicit admonition, “do as I say, not as I did”.
- Most of the prophets, and Jesus Christ, approached the human city from out of the wilderness.
- The “New Jerusalem” will be built by God, not humans.
“…the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.”
This temple complex may be beautiful, but according to dogma for Jews, Christians and Muslims the likely context in which it was built was a time of willful spiritual darkness and ignorance.
The city of man is always, at best, a well-intentioned falsification of what God has promised, at worst, an enterprise of outright defiance. “…and all that followed”, oh boy.
February 23rd, 2010 | 2:15 am
Joe: Thanks for posting this. I’ve been following this story for a while now, after being told about the site by friends in archeology. It’s great to have the FT gang clued in here. At least to me, what makes it so deeply curious are all the carvings. They just aren’t carved into the stone, the stone around them has been cut away, and this, apparently by people who didn’t even have pottery yet.
Here are some sites with some great pictures. They are worth looking at and thinking about. We’re going to be thinking about this place for a very long time I expect.
http://www.urgeschichte.org/DieBeweise/GobekliTepe/gobeklitepe.htm
http://www.gomanweb.com/2009_HABERLERI/HABERLER-2009/Niisan/05Nisan/gobeklitepe.htm
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?utm_source=photogalleries&utm_medium=internallink&utm_campaign=SmithMag&utm_content=Gobekli%20Tepe:%20The%20World%E2%80%99s%20First%20Temple?
February 23rd, 2010 | 2:11 pm
“…the carvings…just aren’t carved into the stone, the stone around them has been cut away”
What exactly does this mean? There are what look like bas-relief on the pillars in most of the pictures. Of course stone has to be cut way from around a figure in bas-relief or high-relief (there was one, http://www.gomanweb.com/2009_HABERLERI/HABERLER-2009/Niisan/05Nisan/gobeklitepe_nov08_3.jpg). There didn’t seem to be any intaglio carvings, where stone would have been carved out to make, as opposed to cut away from around, an emerging figure. Is it that the pillars themselves rather than being shaped and placed, were carved in place out of larger boulders in the ground?
February 24th, 2010 | 3:18 am
I wonder if this might comport with some of the other findings surrounding the transition to agriculture from hunter-gatherer life that I’ve read about: that the average lifespan and stability of food resources actually decreased in the transitional period. Economically speaking, farming was a loss compared to hunter-gathering for the folks who first started it.
Maybe the willingness of people to accept this loss becomes more understandable if they made the change for non-economic reasons, such as the desire to support a temple.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact