Sands Of Time Ran Out For Eden's Farmers (Gobekli Tepe)

Sands of time ran out for Eden's farmers

May 11, 2009
ArchaeologyNews.com

HUMAN history is being rewritten in the hills of southern Turkey.

The astonishing story it tells not only sheds light on how civilisation evolved, but also sounds
a warning.

Fifteen years ago a Kurdish shepherd was grazing his sheep across a well-known local landmark -
a mound that rose slowly from the otherwise almost featureless plain.

The square corner of a large, clearly sculpted, stone caught his eye.

It was mostly covered in dirt, some of which he scooped away.

Looking about he could see other similar stones.

Word of the find filtered through his village near the site known as Gobekli Tepe and, months later,
to staff at a nearby museum.

In turn, they contacted an archaeologist, Klaus Schmidt, working for the German Archaeology Insti-
tute in Istanbul who visited the Gobekli site.

He told the English writer Tom Knox: "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".

Short of turning up the stones on which were written the 10 Commandments, it is hard to think of
a greater archaeological discovery.

So far about 50 stones, weighing up to 50 tons, have been excavated, many of them bearing beauti-
fully elaborate carvings of animals - snakes, lobsters and lions; others are evidence of abstract variations on human form.

This is not dissimilar, you might think, to carvings on the pyramids, and the oblong standing stone circles at Gobekli do resemble those at Stonehenge.

But the ruins at Gobekli were built up to 13,000 years ago. Stonehenge was erected 5000 years ago, the pyramids 500 years later.

Gobekli predates the written word, pottery and the wheel. More remarkably, it is from a time when humans were hunter-gathers and when it was assumed they did not have the time to build homes,
or places of religious worship.

The hunter-gatherers were nomads who followed herds of wild animals, picked berries and dug for tubers. They could not afford to stay anywhere long. They had no villages.

What changed the fate of mankind was cultivation and farming, and it looks increasingly like Gobekli
was where this change took place, and that it might even be the Garden of Eden described by Moses
in the Book of Genesis.

AFTER the last ice age the area around central Turkey spreading to Syria was fertile and lush with stocked rivers and plains that hosted herds of gazelle numbering perhaps 100,000.

The theory evolving from Gobekli is that there was so much food easily available there that tribes gathered and stayed. They domesticated animals and cultivated plants.

With lives of pastoral indolence, the locals had time on their hands and they perfected the art of carving stone, the sophisticated pictograms evidence that they became accomplished artists.

But as they chopped down and burnt the trees, relentlessly ploughed the earth and their animals chewed away, firstly at plants and then their roots, they aggressively denuded the countryside
and altered the microclimate.

Eden lost its charm and, if local gravesites are any indication, they turned on each other with bloody force before abandoning the place, burying their once great home under hundreds of tonnes of dirt
and banishing themselves.

Geomagnetic tests indicate that there are hundreds more stones at Gobekli and its story is only partly told.

But the rock-strewn barren acres that hold its secrets today sends a pretty clear message about messing with the environment.

'The Genesis Secret',
by Tom Knox,
is published by HarperCollins.
RRP