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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Martin Sweatman

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97 pages

English

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Nearly 13,000 years ago millions of people and animals were wiped out, and the world plunged abruptly into a new ice-age. It was more than a thousand years before the climate, and mankind, recovered. The people of Gobekli Tepe in present-day southern Turkey, whose ancestors witnessed this catastrophe, built a megalithic monument formed of many hammer-shaped pillars decorated with symbols as a memorial to this terrible event. Before long, they also invented agriculture, and their new farming culture spread rapidly across the continent, signalling the arrival of civilisation. Before abandoning Gobekli Tepe thousands of years later, they covered it completely with rubble to preserve the greatest and most important story ever told for future generations. Archaeological excavations began at the site in 1994, and we are now able to read their story, more amazing than any Hollywood plot, again for the first time in over 10,000 years. It is a story of survival and resurgence that allows one of the world's greatest scientific puzzles - the meaning of ancient artworks, from the 40,000 year-old Lion-man figurine of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany to the Great Sphinx of Giza - to be solved.We now know what happened to these people. It probably had happened many times before and since, and it could happen again, to us. The conventional view of prehistory is a sham; we have been duped by centuries of misguided scholarship. The world is actually a much more dangerous place than we have been led to believe. The old myths and legends, of cataclysm and conflagration, are surprisingly accurate.We know this because, at last, we can read an extremely ancient code assumed by scholars to be nothing more than depictions of wild animals. A code hiding in plain sight that reveals we have hardly changed in 40,000 years. A code that changes everything.

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Histoire

Archaeology

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	07 juin 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838599669
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	9 Mo

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Copyright © 2019 Martin Sweatman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Front cover image courtesy of Alistair Coombs.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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To Alison
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue

1 Göbekli Tepe
2 The Vulture Stone
3 The Younger Dryas Mini Ice Age
4 The End of Gradualism
5 The Great Debate
6 Comets vs Asteroids
7 Solving Göbekli Tepe
8 Decoding Çatalhöyük
9 40,000 Years of Astronomy
10 Zep Tepi and the Great Sphinx
11 The Godfather
12 The Origin of Civilisation

Appendix A:
Placement of Patterns on the Vulture Stone
Appendix B:
Latitude and Longitude
References
Acknowledgements
This work could not have been completed without the selfless contributions of several others. First, I must express my sincere gratitude to my wife and children for their patience with my most recent obsession. My wife, Alison, was also instrumental in the decoding of Göbekli Tepe, as described in Chapter 2. I must also thank Dimitrios Tsikritsis for his help and guidance in the field of archaeoastronomy. Likewise, David Asher deserves a medal for his patient tutoring in the celestial mechanics of comet Encke. I also thank Bill Napier for his invaluable support, and James Myers for bringing the ancient trident symbol to my attention. Finally, Alistair Coombs deserves a special mention for his crucial supply of images of Göbekli Tepe and Lascaux. He was also instrumental in identifying the connection between Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, and, along with Baroness Shirley Williams, in encouraging me to write this book.
Prologue
Thereupon, one of the priests, who was of very great age, said, ‘O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and there is never an old man who is an Hellene.’
Solon, hearing this, said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean to say,’ he replied, ‘that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you the reason of this: there have been, and there will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes.
‘There is a story which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father’s chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time: when this happens, those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore; and from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, saves and delivers us.
‘When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, among you herdsmen and shepherds on the mountains are the survivors, whereas those of you who live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea; but in this country neither at that time nor at any other does the water come from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below, for which reason the things preserved here are said to be the oldest.
‘The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer sun does not prevent, the human race is always increasing at times, and at other times diminishing in numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed – if any action which is noble or great, or in any other way remarkable has taken place, all that has been written down of old, and is preserved in our temples; whereas you and other nations are just being provided with letters and the other things which States require; and then, at the usual period, the stream from heaven descends like a pestilence, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and thus you have to begin all over again as children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.’

Excerpt from Timaeus by Plato, c.428–c.347 BC.
1
Göbekli Tepe
Not far from the border with troubled Syria, hidden under a huge mound of earth, animal remains and debris on top of a round hill, lay an ancient megalithic monument patiently awaiting discovery for 10,000 years. Its burial appears to have been a deliberate act of preservation, achieved in an era of prehistory so early we can hardly imagine. Whoever was responsible, they made a good job of it. Despite being the size of a grand palace, almost nothing could be seen of the enormous monument at all. Thousands of tonnes of earth and debris had been hauled over it, piled high enough to cover it completely. It was a Herculean effort, likely involving hundreds of highly motivated people. They buried it with their bare hands.
You could have walked right over it, distracted by the fantastic view to the south over the Hurran Plain towards Syria, oblivious to the treasure that lay beneath your feet; oblivious to what is undoubtedly the most stunning and important ancient monument ever discovered. It lay unremarked until its location was recorded in an archaeological survey of southern Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, by Istanbul and Chicago Universities 1 . However, all that could be seen of Göbekli Tepe then, in the 1960s, was the very top of some apparently plain limestone blocks just poking above the ground and some high-quality flint tools and artefacts. Thinking it was a much more recent Iron Age cemetery, and therefore of little interest, it was left alone.
Decades later, Professor Klaus Schmidt of the Deutsch Archaeological Institute, an expert on the prehistory of southern Anatolia, came across their report and, intrigued by their findings, decided to take a look for himself. He knew the region was rich in very ancient archaeology. Only a few years earlier he had assisted with excavations at the nearby site of Nevali Çori, itself over 10,000 years old. Perhaps, if he was lucky, this new site might turn out to be even older.
Archaeological interest in this area of southern Turkey had been growing steadily for many decades already. It seemed that wherever they looked, archaeologists uncovered yet another Stone Age settlement that challenged their views about how civilisation began. The sites they discovered were getting older and older, and yet they remained highly sophisticated, pushing back the origin of civilisation to ever earlier times.
The old pre-war view that ‘civilisation began in Mesopotamia’, in the region of southern Iraq, around 3,200 BC, had long been abandoned. That epoch was now recognised as the beginning of written history, when proper writing systems first appeared together with large city-states. Civilisation, on the other hand, began at a much earlier time in prehistory.
Modern scholarship now links the origin of civilisation to the development of agriculture, as it is thought that the invention of agriculture enabled large settled communities to develop through the intensification of food production, which could in turn support specialists, such as builders, artisans and warriors. And it is the emergence of specialist roles such as these, along with the complex hierarchical social interactions they imply, that today is used to define the origin of civilisation. Without agriculture, it was generally thought that large communities of specialists could not develop.
In fact, Klauss Schmidt’s work at Nevali Çori had already borne fruit in this regard. At that ancient site some of the earliest evidence for domesticated wheat, which differs from the wild type by bearing more plump and robust grains, was found. Today, all the evidence points towards the origin of agriculture, and therefore civilisation, occurring in the region near Nevali Çori early in the 9 th millennium BC 2 .
But it was no longer possible for Klauss to work at Nevali Çori, as it had been submerged by the dammed waters of the Euphrates. So, he was looking out for new sites to continue his studies and further his career as one of the pre-eminent experts in this region. Upon reading the account of buried limestone blocks and flint artefacts at Göbekli Tepe, he knew he had to investigate, as the flint tools suggested a Stone Age, rather than Iron Age, settlement. Perhaps he might even discover another clue to the origin of civilisation at this new site. After all, this was the ‘holy grail’ for his academic discipline; whoever could solve the riddle of the origin of civilisation would go down in history.
But at Göbekli Tepe he got far more than he bargained for. He got very lucky indeed. For at Göbekli Tepe he discovered, after many years of metic