Gobekli Tepe

Was reading about ‘Gobekli Tepe’ the other day. Liked it so much that I put up a link on my FB page. First time I did that, and liked the way FB picked up the link and displayed a short summary too. Gobekli tepe is a paleolithic site, and is the earliest sing of human architecture and planned building known to us. The various structures have been interpreted as some sort of temples or places of ancestor worship. They date to c.10000 BC, well before we had assumed humans capable of building large common structures, and even predating the advent of farming, which is assumed to have started at a large scale some 2000 years later. It was always assumed that only after agriculture was well established and a surplus food supply assured did the population expand and people were free enough to venture into other fields, such as pottery, art, architecture etc. in short, the cultural evolution was supposed to have started after the Great Agricultural revolution. But here we see signs of culture predating farming by a couple of thousand years! There are a number of round structures made of stone and covered with lime. In these round rooms, there are free standing monoliths that some archaeologists interpret as ancestors/proto-gods. These are huge structures, some weighing many tons and have been carried here on top of this hill from some distance, in an age where the wheel was yet to be discovered.
Though a desert today, the area was lush and well irrigated 12000 years ago. What I find most interesting is that there is good evidence that wheat and grains were first cultivated in this area. some strains of wild wheat in the surrounding hills are genetic ancestors of the oldest known cultivated strains. This makes Gobekli the probable site of man’s first foray into settled agricultural life. And these people, for unknown reasons, built this astonishing structure. There are signs that some sacrifices were carried out here. Then, mysteriously, around 8000BC, the site was deliberately buried under rubble.
Interested as I’ve always been in archaeology, two things make Gobekli Tepe all the more fascinating. First, it is the precursor of the Sumerian civilization, and the unknown, unnamed ancestor figures on this hilltop temple fit in so well with the Sumerian myth that agriculture was brought down to man from the hills by unnamed Gods who existed before the Sumerian pantheon came into being. What a bewitching idea, tying up these two disparate threads into one beautiful progression!
The other idea is that this is the site of the proverbial Eden; that the Bible carries a record of folk memory going back to the time when man moved from the relaxed, easy lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer to the more rigorous life of the farmer. The story of Adam and Eve’s leisurely life in the garden and their subsequent exile to work the earth to bring forth food resembles very closely man’s move towards an agrarian lifestyle.
And both these fascinating (to me) stories are linked to one patch of earth; ancient, mysterious, massive, awe inspiring, harking back to the dawn of man.