I ain’t no student of ancient culture. Before I talk, I should read a book
(B-52s)
I recently visited Göbekli Tepe (GT), a Neolithic temple complex in southeastern Turkey, as part of an excellent Megalithomania tour organised by Hugh Newman, JJ Ainsworth, and Andrew Collins. One of my main interests was to learn if Turkey’s Taş Tepeler sites document the unusual or catastrophic events that occurred during the end of the last ice age. This post looks into the evidence that GT was built to venerate a comet strike around 12,900 years ago (YDIH: Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis) as has been proposed by several authors, notably [1,2].
The GT monumental complex consists of a number of oval enclosures containing upright limestone megaliths (slabs). Many of these slabs are decorated with low and high relief zoomorphic and anthropomorphic pictograms, and have upper T-shaped terminations (T-pillars). The oldest and most complex enclosure, Enclosure D, has been reliably dated to 11,530 BP ± 220 years [3], indicating that the complex was founded at or after the end of the Younger Dryas period (12,900 – 11,700 BP). This post examines evidence that GT memorialises a comet strike at the start of the Younger Dryas, 1400 years earlier.
Only the most disciplined and dull can resist interpreting GT’s pictograms, and I of course succumbed to temptation. I told my theories to a tour group member, a trained archeologist, who informed me that I was over-interpreting. A chef who over-seasons, a Thespian who over-acts, a glutton who over-eats, a geologist who over-dresses, … Telling a scientist he’s over-interpreting is a gut blow. But she was entirely correct: I needed to be reminded that I was a Tourist, one who is untrained in archeology, symbology or any other relevant ology, and whose opinion on pictogram meanings is only as good as the next idiot’s. So I’ll defer to more seasoned veterans in this post, though I do reserve a scientist’s right of judging whether they [1,2] present a convincing story. Before we peek at the pictograms consider this Murrinh-patha religious art:
The work’s main elements are easily deciphered as a large serpent, a planet, and an egg with excited (sad? happy?) stick figure humans inside. Consider the following possible interpretations:
The serpent is an angry god who is punishing “evil” people by taking them to a “hell” away from Earth
The serpent is a benign god, who is populating Earth with people
The serpent is a transmogrified babysitter who has eaten some howling brats
The third is – obviously - the correct one. This story is locally re-enacted in northern Australia as a coming-of-age ritual [4].
A woman, Mutjinga (the 'Old Woman'), was in charge of young children, but instead of watching out for them during their parents' absence, she swallowed them and tried to escape as a giant snake. The people followed her, spearing her and removing the undigested children from the body.
After I was told the meaning of the painting I waited for the rest of the story, but that’s all there is. My main take away is that nobody likes to babysit howling kids, especially if they’re not your own, but that eating them is generally frowned upon by their parents, who may give you payback in lieu of pay. There really is no moral or lesson to the story that I can relate to, which leaves me to doubt whether we’ll ever decipher all or even most of GT’s 11,000+ year old pictograms by guessing at their meaning. But let’s give it a shot.
As a warmup, consider the Göbekli Tepe totem pole [5], a 2 m statue featuring what appears to be a were-bear head, a short neck, and arms that are holding a figure that is holding another figure. The last is holding an object that appears to be either a baby’s head or an erect penis. To me, the statue’s message (re-incarnation? creation myth?) is nebulous. Perhaps it has no meaning. Maybe its creator was just a terrible artist whose heads all look like Winnie the Pooh or a penis. Who’s to say that its creator wasn’t using this as a practice pole? Or was acting on instructions from a hopped-up flipped-out shaman? Or was some artistic sicko who wants to eat your liver with fava beans? The point is that interpreting pictograms is often a highly-speculative art, and that any entertainers or scientists who claim to have “nailed it” should probably lower their happy pill dosage.
A major assumption needs to be made before delving into pictogram interpretations, namely that some of the figures on the slabs depict asterisms (constellations) that had some religious or astronomical significance. The GT faithful likely associated these asterisms with deities who could intercede in their lives, and who could be bartered with – via a shaman – to perform acts outside of their own control, such as change seasons, regenerate the sun every day, provide food, cure illness, reincarnate Uncle Bob, or impregnate the infertile. On the latter, the name Göbekli Tepe means “hill of the navel”, and its Kurdish name means “hill of the swollen belly”. Local women hoping to get pregnant still to this day hang ribbons in a tree on its hill [2].
GT’s pillar 43 (above) is a highly-decorated slab that was found embedded in the north face of Enclosure D, next to its main altar. Numerous zoomorphic figures can be tentatively identified as vultures, snakes, a scorpion, a flamingo, etc., as well as a headless stick figure with an erection (lower right, next to the vulture/eagle). The artist may have run out of room near the “handbags” on top as the animals between the bags are less identifiable: is the center one a diving rat or a climbing ibex?
Collins [2] proposes that pillar 43 should be interpreted as summarising a death ritual, whereby the headless man represents the body that remains on Earth (and is excarnated by vultures) while the head/soul is carried to the heavens by the large vulture, here interpreted to represent the Cygnus (swan) asterism. Collins doesn’t see any comet symbolism on this pillar.
Sweatman & Tsikritsis [1] propose that pillar 43 can be interpreted as a “time-stamp” of 10,950 BC ± 250 years, that is a date roughly coincident with the start of the Younger Dryas (YD). Their reasoning is that the upper vulture/eagle represents the “tea-pot” asterism in Sagittarius, and that it is holding the sun. Back-calculating when the sun was above the spout of the teapot indicates this likely occurred during the Summer solstice in 10,950 BC. The headless man at the bottom signifies death, so the whole pillar is interpreted as:
the worst day ever in human history since the end of the ice age; the hypothetical [Younger Dryas] catastrophe
These completely different interpretations indicate that at least one is fanciful. Much hinges on which asterism – if any - is represented by the large vulture and what it is holding in its hand, which to me (Danger! over-interpretation ahead!) looks oval, and therefore possibly an egg. Irrespective of which interpretation is more probable, neither interpretation directly indicates a comet impact was relevant to the GT builders, though the Sweatman & Tsikritsis [1] interpretation suggests they might have been commemorating some sort of Younger Dryas catastrophe. However, such information - if true - is largely redundant as there is more than enough hard data on the bad-day-for-humanity catastrophes at the start of the Younger Dryas (see future posts).
Collins [2] proposes that the nested ‘U’ shapes on the belt buckle of Enclosure D’s eastern central pillar (pillar 18) represent the bow shock wave that a comet creates when entering Earth’s atmosphere, though to me (and to [1] who find his arguments “limited”) this seems unlikely for a number of reasons:
Bow shock waves are not often seen, especially when fleeing for your life in your newly-wetted loincloth. I think any survivors of the proposed massive comet strike would not have sat around thinking “Ooh, pretty!”, but rather have looked around for their loved ones in a frantic attempt to shelter them under the largest locally available rock.
And someone would have had to recall what it looked like 1400 years later
Only pillar 18 has this symbol. If the symbol had great importance one could reasonably expect it to be repeated in the other enclosures, especially after Enclosure D had been buried/decommissioned.
The final bit of “comet evidence” are the fox pictograms that according to my own observations:
Occur in all large enclosures (A-D)
When occurring on main pillars appear to be jumping upwards in a southerly direction
When occurring on main pillars have an erect penis
Collins [2] proposes that the foxes symbolise “cosmic tricksters”,
evil twins of the true creator god, responsible only for chaos and disarray in the universe.
But wolves usually represent comets in folklore and myth, though foxes do occasionally make an appearance. In addition, the foxes appear to be going up not coming down, that is their sharp, pointy bits (teeth, penis) are going up to heaven, not down to Earth. Most of the foxes look rather happy, like they have an appetite for some good lovin’, not destruction.
Sweatman & Tsikritsis [1] also link the foxes to comets. On pillar 2 (left pillar above) they interpret the crane as Pisces. They then back-calculate the route the Northern Taurid meteor showers would have taken in 9530 BC as Capricorn-Aquarius-Pisces. They then interpret pillar 2 as the path of the Northern Taurid meteor shower from the auroch/bull (Capricorn) to the fox (Aquarius) to the crane (Pisces), thereby transmogrifying a bull into a goat, a fox into a water-carrier, and water fowl into fish. They interpret Göbekli Tepe as a comet observatory.
To me both interpretations sound plausible, yet very unlikely. In fact, the whole idea of venerating a traumatic event that happened 1400 years earlier sounds improbable, as the human brain works really, really hard to forget traumas. Freud wrote a whole book on it. I would imagine that the daily hunter-gatherer worries would be more pressing then venerating or looking out for comets: hunger, illness, death, re-birth, infertility. Especially the last one seems to have pre-occupied GT’s builders: there are a lot of erect penises on display.
I don’t think a comet religion wouldn’t convert many stone age worshippers. Suppose you’re childless
“Shaman! I want to talk to you”
“S: Beware the Comet, m’boy!”
“Yeah, yeah. Look, Betty’s not getting pregnant. Can you have a word with the fox-with-a-stiffy?”
“S: Woe betide those who forget the lessons of the Comet!”
You’d probably move to another parish. And even if the Shaman was more copacetic
“Yo, Shaman!”
“S: ‘Sup, dude?”
“It’s my old lady, man. I can’t knock her up and her mom’s on my case”
“S: I feel you, bro.”
“Can you do me a solid and have a word with the fox-with-a-stiffy?”
“S: No can do. He’s the cosmic trickster, man. He’d probably impregnate me and your mother-in-law”
“We need some new gods”
An alternative fox interpretation seems more probable. JJ Ainsworth gave our group an excellent presentation on the commonalities of ancient religions, and her take – to me – makes more sense for GT. According to JJ, the ancients venerated the so-called “Silver Gate” or Gate of Man, guarded by the constellation of Orion, and the “Golden Gate” or Gate of God, exactly opposite to the Silver Gate, and guarded by the constellation of Ophiuchus. These “gates” are located at the intersection of the Earth’s orbital plane with the Milky Way’s galactic plane - the Golden Gate in the direction of our galactic center - and were already described by the ancient Egyptians. The Silver Gate is believed to represent of the re-birth of the Sun and re-incarnation of the soul, whereby the soul resurrects as a spirit or god at the Golden Gate. GT’s enclosures are open to the south, with their main pillars oriented in the direction of the Silver Gate/Orion during the Summer Solstice [6]: the main pillars therefore plausibly represent the portal through which the soul must pass from the Silver Gate to the Golden Gate.
Neolithic humans very likely paid close attention to the Summer and Winter Solstices, the days when the sun sets in the same place for 3 days in a row, after which it reverses course. Hunter-gatherers (or farmers for that matter) would need to manage their food stocks for those months when supply is low, so would observe and celebrate cosmic signals that winter or summer was coming.
The picture above (courtesy of Stellarium, excellent freeware) recreates the view to the South at sunrise from between the main pillars of GT Enclosure D at the Summer Solstice 11,523 years ago. A quick comparison with pillar 2 above shows a remarkable similarity: auroch (Taurus) and crane (Monoceros) are no-brainers, but what about the fox and Orion? An immature redraw (below) whereby Orion’s belt is turned into a love missile et voilà! Vulpus Amorabundus, the Amorous Fox, whose tumescent protrusion is just penetrating (sorry) the surface at dawn in the picture above, and whose view direction (170°) is roughly in line with Enclosure D’s main pillar orientation (see map above). Such an interpretation might also explain why most (all?) fox pictograms on pillars are jumping to the south, in the direction of their cosmic buddy. The interpretation of the main pillars as the portal between the Golden and Silver gates might also explain the T-pillars: Janus (below, right) was the ancient Roman god who guarded gateways and portals, always looking in both directions. January, the month after the winter solstice, is named in his honour.
Fast-forwarding to 10,000 BP and the sunrise view towards the Amorous Fox/Orion has shifted - due to Earth’s axial precession - roughly 20° eastwards (below), or more in line with the main pillars in Enclosure A, the youngest enclosure [3].
The main reason for this post was to determine if Göbekli Tepe provides any evidence of the unusual or catastrophic events that occurred during the end of the last ice age. There is no credible evidence that GT commemorates a comet strike during the Younger Dryas. Remember that for us to accept such a theory we need some strong evidence to reject the highly-probable null hypothesis that the site does not commemorate a comet strike, and I just don’t see any, let alone enough, hard evidence to do so. This view was also shared by Professor Klaus Schmidt, GT’s first lead archeologist [2].
There is evidence that circumstances were relatively benign in GT around 11,500 BP: there was enough food and spare time to commence the construction of an impressive and beautiful GT Enclosure D. The later, smaller, less complex Enclosure A seems to indicate that at the time of abandonment around 10,000 BP the situation had changed, possibly due to a decrease in population, another subject for a future post. Next up: how to build a megalithic slab temple of your very own.
References:
[1] Sweatman, M.B., Tsikritsis, D., 2017, Decoding Göbekli Tepe with archaeoastronomy: what does the fox say? Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Vol. 17, No 1, 233-250. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.400780
[2] Collins, A., 2014, Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods: The Temple of the Watchers and the Discovery of Eden. Bear & Company, pp 464. ISBN: 978-1591431428
[3] Dietrich, O., Köksal-Schmidt, Ç., Notroff, J., Schmidt, K., 2013, Establishing a Radiocarbon Sequence for Göbekli Tepe. State of Research and New Data. Neo-Lithics, 1/13, 36-41.
[4] Koepping, Klaus-Peter, 1981, Religion in Aboriginal Australia. Religion, v. 11. pp. 367–391.
[5] https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/the-gobekli-tepe-totem-pole/
[6] Schoch, R., 2021, Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future. Inner Traditions, 2nd ed., 560 pp. ISBN: 978-1644112922