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  • Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?

    www.dailymail.co.uk
    28 February 2009


    Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?
    By Tom Cox

    Last updated at 9:10 PM on 28th February 2009


    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.


    The site has been described as 'extraordinary' and 'the most important'
    site in the world


    A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd's find reached
    museum curators 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.'

    Remarkable find: A frieze from Gobekli Tepe

    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 Garden of Eden come to life: Is Gobekli Tepe where the story began?

    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.

    The shepherd who discovered Gobekli Tepe has' changed
    everything', said one academic

    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.

    The stones unearthed by the shepherd turned out to be the flat
    tops of T-shaped megaliths

    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.

    Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt poses next to some of the carvings
    at Gebekli

    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.

    Many of Gobekli's standing stones are inscribed with 'bizarre
    and delicate' images, like this reptile

    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.


    The stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us from across
    the centuries - a warning we should heed

    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.

    * The Genesis Secret by Tom Knox is published by Harper Collins on
    March 9, priced £6.99. To order a copy (P&P free), call 0845 155 0720.


    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11 57784/Do-mysterious-stones-mark-site-Garden-Eden.h tml
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