Dept. of
Archeology. December 19 & 26, 2011 Issue
The Sanctuary. The world’s oldest temple and
the dawn of civilization.
By Elif
Batuman
Late
one October evening, I
flew into Urfa, the city believed by Turkish Muslims to be the Ur of the
Chaldeans, the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. My hotel had clearly been
designed for pilgrims. A door in the lobby led to a men-only steam bath. There was no women’s bath. In my room, a sign
indicating the direction of prayer was posted over the nonalcoholic minibar.
Directly outside the window, Vegas-style lights stretching
across the main drag spelled, in two-foot-high letters,
“welcome to the city of prophets.” **
Steam bath: A room or enclosure that can be filled with steam in which people bathe
to induce sweating and refresh or cleanse themselves.
Stretch: Something that stretches over an area or distance covers or exists in
the whole of that area or distance. A stretch of road, water, or land is a length or area
of it.
Drag: (mainly US slang) A street or road.
Urfa is in southeastern Anatolia,
about thirty miles north of the Syrian border. Tens of thousands of people come
here every year to visit a cave where Abraham may have been born and a fishpond
marking the site of the pyre where he was almost burned up by Nimrod, except
that God transformed the fire into water and the coals
into fish. According to another local legend, God sent a swarm of mosquitos to
torment Nimrod, and a mosquito flew up Nimrod’s nose and started chewing on his
brain. Nimrod ordered his men to beat his head with wooden mallets, shouting,
“Vur ha, vur ha!” (“Hit me, hit me!”), and that’s how his city came to be
called Urfa. Urfa also has a Greek name, Edessa, under which it is enshrined in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the origin of
perhaps the world’s first icon: a handkerchief on which Jesus wiped his face, preserving his image. (Known as the Image of
Edessa, the holy handkerchief was said to be a gift from Christ to King Abgar
V, who was suffering from leprosy.) In 1984, Urfa was officially renamed
Şanlıurfa—“glorious Urfa”—in honor of its resistance against the Allied Forces
during the Turkish War of Independence. Most people still call it Urfa. The
city’s religious sites also include the cave where Job is said to have suffered
through his boils.
Fishpond: A pond where fish are kept or bred.
Pond: A pond is a small area of water that is smaller than a lake. Ponds are
often made artificially. People sometimes refer to the Atlantic Ocean as the
pond.
Coals: Coal is a hard black substance that is extracted from the ground and
burned as fuel.
Enshrined in: If
something such as an idea or a right is enshrined in something such as a
constitution or law, it is protected by it. To hold as sacred (consagrada)
Wipe: If you
wipe dirt or liquid from something, you remove it, for example by using a cloth
or your hand.
Boil: A boil is a red, painful swelling on your skin, which contains a thick
yellow liquid called pus.
I, too, was in town on a pilgrimage,
visiting a site that predates Abraham and
Job and monotheism by some eight millennia: a vast complex of Stonehenge-style
megalithic circles in the Urfa countryside. For thousands of years, this Early
Neolithic structure lay buried under multiple strata of prehistoric trash, and
therefore just looked like a big hill. Its Turkish name is Göbekli Tepe: “hill with a
potbelly,” or “fat hill.”
Predate: (pre date) If you say that one thing predated another, you mean that
the first thing happened or existed some time before the second thing.
Göbekli
= fat, potbelly / Tepe = hill
There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe. It’s estimated to be eleven thousand
years old—six and a half thousand years older than the Great
Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform
texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly
believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure. The site
comprises more than sixty multi-ton T-shaped limestone
pillars, most of them engraved with bas-reliefs of dangerous animals: not the
docile, edible bison and deer featured in Paleolithic
cave paintings but ominous
configurations of lions, foxes, boars, vultures, scorpions, spiders, and
snakes. The site has yielded no traces of habitation—no trash pits,
no water source, no houses, no hearths, no roofs, no
domestic plant or animal remains—and is therefore believed to have been built
by hunter-gatherers, who used it as a religious sanctuary. Comparisons of
iconography from similar sites indicate that different groups congregated there
from up to sixty miles away. Mysteriously, the pillars appear to have been buried, deliberately and all at once, around 8200 B.C., some thirteen hundred
years after their construction.
Unsettling: If you describe something as unsettling, you mean that it makes you
feel rather worried or uncertain.
Limestone: A sedimentary rock consisting mainly of calcium carbonate, deposited
as the calcareous remains of marine animals or chemically precipitated from the
sea: used as a building stone and in the manufacture of cement, lime, etc
Edible: Eatable.
Ominous: Threatening, menacing, sinister, dark.
Trash pit: Trash is rubbish. A pit is a large hole that is dug in the ground.
Hearth: Fire home, home.
Heart: Core
Buried: Covered with earth.
The idea of a religious monument
built by hunter-gatherers contradicts most of what we thought we knew about
religious monuments and about hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers are
traditionally believed to have lacked complex symbolic systems, social
hierarchies, and the division of labor, three things you probably need before
you can build a twenty-two-acre megalithic temple. Formal religion, meanwhile, is supposed to
have appeared only after agriculture produced such hierarchical social
relations as required a cosmic backstory to keep them going and supplied a template for the power relationship between gods and
mortals. The findings at Göbekli Tepe suggest that we have the story
backward—that it was actually the need to build a sacred site that
first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend
long periods of time in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and
eventually to invent agriculture.
Template: Model
We’ve the story backward: We’ve the story on the contrary
I got a ride to Göbekli Tepe from an
overweight, truculent taxi-driver, a friend of the hotel receptionist. We left
the city via a giant traffic circle.
Drivers were entering and exiting this diabolical wheel from all directions,
switching lanes and cutting each other off, without using their turn signals or
altering their speed. Where a non-Urfa driver might speed up or slow down, it
seemed, an Urfa driver preferred simply to honk his horn. Horn-honking had
become a symbolic rite, evoking the function once filled, in the world of
physical reality, by use of the brake pedal.
Traffic circle: A traffic circle is a circular structure in the road at a place where
several roads meet.
The traffic circle eventually disgorged us onto the rural highway to Mardin, the home town
of the world’s tallest man, an eight-foot-three-inch-tall farmer with pituitary
gigantism. We drove past numerous dealers in firearms
and agricultural machinery, making visible the primeval
oscillation between hunting and farming. Exiting onto a dirt road, which wound
for several miles through the hills, we ended up in a dusty lot, where a couple
of minivans were parked next to an informational tableau. Two tethered camels gazed at the plains with droopy, self-satisfied expressions.
Disgorge: If an
animal disgorges something it has swallowed, it produces it again from its
mouth.
Firearms: Guns
Primeval: Primitive
Tethered: Chained
Droopy: Tired
I walked past the camels and up a slope,
and came to a group of graduate students crouched on boulders, hunched over a
drumlike sieve full of dirt, which was suspended by
cables from a makeshift wooden tripod. They looked as
if they were trying to invent fire. I asked what they were doing. A round-faced
young man wearing glasses and a panama hat glanced up, with a tight,
conversation-ending smile. “Sifting dirt,” he
replied, intensifying his smile and turning his back.
Slope: Gradient. A slope is the side of a mountain, hill, or valley.
Crouch: To bend
low with the limbs pulled up close together.
Boulder: Any
large rock worn smooth and round by weather and water.
Hunch: If you hunch forward, you raise your shoulders, put your head down,
and lean forwards, often because you are cold, ill, or unhappy.
Sieve: Filter.
Makeshift: Improvised.
Sifting: Filtering.
I climbed up the hill, toward the
solitary mulberry tree that stands at its summit.
Tattered strips of cloth tied to the branches testify to its former use by
local farmers as a “wishing tree.” The pillars came into view, as unfamiliar
and unexpected as an extraterrestrial settlement. One face
of the hill had been almost completely excavated, exposing four stone circles,
each made up of a dozen or so pillars with two larger pillars in the middle.
Several of these megaliths had surprisingly poor foundations, and were now
standing thanks only to wooden supports. Archeologists speculate that the weak
foundations may have had some acoustic purpose: perhaps the pillars were meant
to hum in the wind.
Mulberry: A mulberry or a mulberry tree is a tree which has small purple berries
which you can eat. (morera)
Settlement: A
settlement is a place where people have come to live and have built homes.
Hum: To make a low continuous vibrating sound like that of a prolonged m
During their centuries of use, the
pillars were periodically buried, with new pillars built on top of or alongside
the old ones. The circles thus stand at different depths in the hill, and have
been connected by various wooden scaffolds,
ladders, and walkways. Jens Notroff, the graduate student with whom I had
coördinated my visit, took me on a tour. It was an immensely destabilizing
landscape. Everywhere you looked, you saw something that wasn’t supposed to
exist. Hunter-gatherers, for example, weren’t supposed to make larger-than-life
human representations, which are a violation of a purely animistic,
nonhierarchic world view. And yet, as Notroff pointed out, the pillars are
almost certainly humanoid figures, with long narrow bodies and large oblong
heads. There are pillars depicted with clasped hands, or
wearing foxtail loincloths. One is wearing a necklace
with a bucranium, or bull’s head. If the pillars
represent specific individuals, the bull might be a form of identification, a
name, like Sitting Bull.
Scaffold: Platform
Clasped hands: Keeping hands together
Loincloth: A loincloth is a piece of cloth sometimes worn by men in order to
cover their sexual parts, especially in countries when it is too hot to wear
anything else
Bucranium = Bull head
Because the bas-reliefs of Göbekli
Tepe, unlike the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, offer no picture of
daily life—no hunting scenes, and very few of the aurochs,
gazelles, and deer that made up most of the hunter-gatherer diet—they are
believed to be symbols, a message we don’t know how to read. The animals might
be mythical characters, symbolic scapegoats, tribal
families, mnemonic devices, or perhaps totemic scarecrows,
guarding the pillars from evil. They include a scorpion the size of a small
suitcase, and a jackal-like creature with an exposed rib cage.
On one pillar, a row of lumpy, eyeless
“ducks” float above an extremely convincing boar,
with an erect penis. Another relief consists of the simple contour of a fox,
like a chalk outline at a murder scene, also with a distinct penis. So far, all
the mammals represented at Göbekli Tepe are visibly male, with the exception of
one fox, which, in place of a penis, has several snakes coming out of its
abdomen.
Auroch
(ˈɔːrɒks
): Bos
primigenius (uro)
Scapegoat: If you say that someone is made a scapegoat for something bad that has
happened, you mean that people blame them and may punish them for it although
it may not be their fault.
Scarecrow: A scarecrow is an object in the shape of a person, which is put in a
field where crops are growing in order to frighten birds away.
Rib cage: Your rib cage is the structure of ribs in your chest. It protects your
lungs and other organs.
Lump: A lump on or in someone's body is a small, hard swelling that has been
caused by an injury or an illness. (A lump of sugar is a small cube of it.)
Boar: A boar or a wild boar is a wild pig.
Sharp-eyed: A sharp-eyed person is good at noticing and observing things.
The images don’t seem to share a
unifying style, or even a standard level of draftsmanship.
Some are stylized and geometric, others remarkably lifelike. “They can do
naturalistic representations,” Notroff said. “So when they don’t do it, it’s a
choice.” He told me about a statue of a man which was believed to be eleven
thousand years old: the oldest known life-sized human sculpture. Discovered in
the nineteen-nineties in downtown Urfa, the Urfa Man now resides in a glass
case in the Şanlıurfa Museum, where I visited him that afternoon. Mouthless,
carved from pale limestone, with obsidian eyes in sunken sockets and hands
clasped to his groin, he resembled a wasted snowman.
Draftsmanship or Draughtsmanship: The ability to draw well or the art of drawing. Drawing
style.
Groin: Your groin is the front part of your body between your legs.
I spent the next few days at the
site. Over the course of several trips, the receptionist’s surly
taxi-driver friend dropped his guard a bit. We discussed Urfa traffic. When I
remarked that I had yet to see
a woman behind the wheel of a car, he assured me that the number of lady
drivers had risen “by at least seventy per cent” in recent years. Another day,
when we got to Göbekli Tepe, he offered to write me a receipt for double the
actual fare, so that I could cheat my employers.
Surly:
Someone
who is surly behaves in a rude bad-tempered way.
Excavation began at six-thirty every
morning, when there was still pink light in the sky and a chill
in the air. On the scene were forty Kurdish workers, twenty German and Turkish
archeology students, and an official from the Izmir museum of archeology, who
had been appointed by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism to keep tabs
on progress and to insure that the ruins were being made accessible to the two
hundred or so tourists who turned up every day. Many of these visitors became
angry and frustrated at not being allowed into the trench to see the pillars,
so workers were building them a boardwalk.
Chill: A moderate coldness.
Boardwalk: A walk, often made of wood and elevated.
Excavation was under way on a new
trench, on the other side of a low limestone ridge. The area had been dug up in
squares, varying in depth between three and seven feet. Seen from above, they
resembled rooms in a doll house. In one square, students were measuring the
depth of the layers of backfill; in another,
three workers, their heads swathed in purple
cloths, hoisted a boulder into a wheelbarrow. One of the center squares contained a newly
discovered pillar with the most intricate bas-reliefs to date: rows of
sinuous-necked cranes and snakes packed efficiently
together, like sardines in a can.
Backfill: To refill an excavated trench, esp (in archaeology) at the end of an
investigation
Swathe: To swathe someone or something in cloth means to wrap them in it
completely.
Hoist: If you
hoist something heavy somewhere, you lift it or pull it up there.
Boulder: A boulder is a large rounded rock.
Wheelbarrow: A
wheelbarrow is a small open cart with one wheel and handles that is used for
carrying things, for example in the garden.
Crane: Cranes are a family, the Gruidae, of large, long-legged, and
long-necked birds in the group Gruiformes. This word is also used to refer to
construction cranes.
The workers digging the trenches had learned to set aside
objects of potential archeological interest. One day, they found an irregularly
shaped stone, about the size of a tea tray, its upper surface pitted with small
hemispherical holes. “We believe it was cultic,” one graduate student told me
of this object. “That’s what we say whenever we don’t know the purpose of
something. Of course, maybe it was not cultic. Maybe it was a contest, to see who can make the most holes the fastest.
Anyway, they didn’t have sacred and profane then. It’s a young distinction.”
Contest: Challenge
In general, it was difficult to
engage the graduate students in conversation, either about Neolithic man or
about archeology. The Kurdish workers, however, loved to talk. One day, a few
of them started looking through my copy of a monograph on Göbekli Tepe. They
reminisced about the order in which the reliefs in the photographs had been
discovered, who had been there and who hadn’t. They made fun of one of their
friends who had been photographed with an enormous black beard. He had shaved
off his beard a long time ago, and they all thought he looked better now.
The workers spanned
several generations, from mustached grandfathers in baggy
pants, with cigarettes clenched in the
corners of their mouths, to jeans-wearing youths with fabulous hair. Their
village, I learned, was called Örencik. Some people called it by an older name,
Karaharabe, which means “black ruin.” Nobody seemed to know where the black
ruin was. They told me about the hazards of the job, which included having a
snake jump out at you from between the rocks. One day, a worker was bitten by a
scorpion and had to be sent to the hospital in a taxi. His friends told me that
scorpion bites hurt, but they won’t kill you. Snakes are another story. The
students found a poisonous snake once, but it was already dead. Someone put it
in a bag and took it away.
Span: Cross, cover
Baggy: If a piece of clothing is baggy, it hangs loosely on your body.
Clench: If you clench something in your hand or in your teeth, you hold it
tightly with your hand or your teeth.
I asked the workers what it felt
like to uncover ten-thousand-year-old reliefs of terrifying animals.
“It’s beautiful, actually,” one of
them said. “It’s a beautiful thing. When you first find a pillar, when the top
of the stone is just visible—first you ask yourself, What animals will be on
it? Then you dig and dig, slowly, bit by bit, because you know that by digging
you’re causing damage. Slowly, always slowly. But sometimes you can’t contain
yourself—you think, Let’s just quickly look and see what’s there.” He paused.
“Sometimes we wonder, if one of the people from back then were to sit up and
talk to us, what would the man say? What language does he speak? What is he? Is
he shorter than us or taller than us?”
“That base stone there—it was
brought here by human strength!” another worker said. “So we wonder, were the
people who carried it much stronger than us? We think the men then were two or three
metres tall, and we’re only 1.6 or 1.7 metres tall. Of course, we don’t
actually know anything about it. We’re just imagining to ourselves.”
In fact, nobody really knows how
Neolithic man managed to hew these pillars. Claudia Beuger, an archeologist at
the University of Halle, is conducting a study at a limestone quarry in Bavaria, to determine whether she and ten of her
students can build a twenty-three-foot Göbekli Tepe-style pillar, using only fire-blasting techniques and basalt “hammers” with no handles.
The early results suggest that the job can be completed in ten weeks by either
forty-four archeology students or twenty-two Neolithic people.
Quarry: A quarry is an area that is dug out from a piece of land or the side
of a mountain in order to get stone or minerals.
Fire-blasting techniques: ???
The first survey
of Göbekli Tepe was begun in 1963, by Peter Benedict, an archeologist from the
University of Chicago, who described the site as “a complex of round-topped knolls of red earth,” two of which were surmounted by “small
cemeteries,” probably dating from the Byzantine Empire. It’s possible that
Benedict, unable to imagine that Neolithic man was capable of producing giant
mounds or stone monuments, came across a fragment of carved limestone and
mistook it for a medieval tombstone. Nothing about his description made anyone
want to rush out and start digging.
Survey: Study
Knoll: Hill, mound
The ruins remained sleeping under
the earth until the arrival of someone who could recognize them. In 1994, Klaus
Schmidt, an archeologist at Heidelberg University, visited the site and
immediately understood that Benedict’s report had been wrong. He saw that the “knolls” were man-made mounds, and that the flint shards crunching underfoot had been shaped by Neolithic hands.
Schmidt had spent much of the previous decade working at Nevalı Çori, a nearby
settlement from the ninth millennium B.C., which included both domestic
habitations and a “sanctuary” with T-shaped pillars. Nevalı Çori was discovered
in 1979 and lost to science in 1992, when it was inundated by the Atatürk Dam
and became part of the floor of Lake Atatürk. This left Schmidt in the market
for a new Stone Age site. At Göbekli Tepe he saw flints nearly identical to
those at Nevalı Çori. When Schmidt saw part of a T-shaped pillar, he recognized
that as well. “Within a minute of first seeing it, I knew I had two choices,”
he has said. “Go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working
here.” He went right back to Urfa and bought a house.
Flint: Flint is a very hard greyish-black stone that was used in former times
for making tools. (silex, pedernal; Note The Flintstones
Shard: Shards are pieces of broken glass, pottery, or metal.
Crunch: If something crunches or if you crunch it, it makes a breaking or
crushing noise, for example when you step on it.
The house is a nineteenth-century
Ottoman complex, built around a courtyard with a tiled
pool. Schmidt lives there with his wife, Çiĩdem, also an archeologist, whom he
met in Urfa when she was working on another dig. Schmidt, who now works for the
German Archeological Institute, says he can’t remember a time before he wanted
to be an archeologist. As a schoolboy in Bavaria, he learned about the Greeks
and the Romans, and thought he would study them when he grew up. Then he found
out about Paleolithic cave art, and became determined to find a Bavarian cave
with paintings as old and remarkable as the ones in France. He discovered many
caves, but no paintings. Because of his interest in caves, he studied geology
as well as archeology, and this is why he could immediately identify Göbekli
Tepe as a man-made rather than a natural formation.
Tile: Tiles are flat, square pieces of baked clay, carpet, cork, or other
substance, which are fixed as a covering onto a floor or wall.
Nowadays, Schmidt usually spends the
morning at Göbekli Tepe, while Çiĩdem works at the house. Schmidt and the
students, bearing several large bags of Neolithic detritus, return to Urfa for
a late lunch—the Schmidts keep an excellent Turkish cook—and everyone spends
the rest of the afternoon at the house, processing the day’s finds, which are
sorted among various buckets and
rectangular sieves in the courtyard. The team’s
archeozoologist, Joris Peters, introduced me to the variety of animal bones
that had been retrieved from the site: leopards, goitered gazelles, wild cattle, wild boar, wild sheep, red deer, Mesopotamian fallow
deer, foxes, chukar partridges, cranes, and vultures.
Bucket: A bucket is a round metal or plastic container with a handle attached
to its sides. Buckets are often used for holding and carrying water
Sieve: A sieve is a tool used for separating solids from liquids or larger
pieces of something from smaller pieces. It consists of a metal or plastic ring
with a wire or plastic net underneath, which the liquid or smaller pieces pass
through.
Cattle: Cattle are cows and bulls.
“They were still eating the meat of
carnivores,” Peters said of the hunter-gatherers, pointing to cut marks on the
bones of the foxes. He thinks they may also have eaten the vultures. He showed
me the scapula of an aurochs, an extinct forebear of domestic cattle, weighing
more than two thousand pounds. Aurochs were eaten at Neolithic feasts, which appear to have been a feature of Göbekli Tepe
life. “They were having big parties,” Schmidt says. He thinks they might have
had beer, even “some kind of drugs.”
Feast: Banquet
This was the decadent late stage of
Neolithic life. Schmidt characterizes the people of Göbekli Tepe as “the
victims of their own success.” Their way of life had been so successful that it
found material expression in the form of a gigantic stone edifice, a
reification of a spiritual world view. The very process of construction changed
the world view, making the monument obsolete. Schmidt believes that’s why
Göbekli Tepe was abandoned: “They did not need it anymore. Now they are farmers
and they find new expressions of their religious beliefs.”
Schmidt sees no continuity between
the Neolithic hunter-gatherers and any more recent culture. At one point, I
asked about an Indian astronomer’s interpretation of the Göbekli Tepe
iconography in terms of the Vedas, which date back to the Bronze Age. Could the
bas-relief of the headless man, the vulture, and the round object represent the
bird Garuda carrying the sun across the sky? “I wouldn’t exclude this
possibility, but it’s a very, very low probability,” Schmidt said. He thinks
the scene might illustrate a specifically Neolithic myth involving vultures who
carry away the heads of dead people. “Even one thousand years later, nothing is
left of this world,” he said. “Why should there be anything left six thousand
years later?”
An extraordinary thought: The people
of Göbekli Tepe weren’t wiped out, like other
lost civilizations. They simply packed up and went somewhere else—became
someone else. It was like the witness-protection program. In a way, they were
still all around us. Lots of us were probably descended from them. The more I
thought about the headless man the more certain I felt that he was related to
me. My father’s family comes from Adana, a few hours’ drive from Urfa.
Wipe out: To wipe out something such as a place or a group of people or animals
means to destroy them completely.
The term “Neolithic revolution” was
coined in the nineteen-twenties, by the archeologist V. Gordon Childe, to
describe the transition from hunting-and-gathering—the dominant mode of
subsistence for the two hundred thousand years before the last ice age—to
domestication and agriculture. Childe ascribed the shift to climate change, to
conditions that dried up the lush forests and
plains: humans and animals were drawn together at the last remaining oases,
where proximity led to domestication, sedentism, and agriculture. Childe, a
disillusioned Stalinist, committed suicide in 1957, soon after the Hungarian
Uprising and just as radiocarbon dating was transforming the study of
archeology, but many of his ideas have survived to the present day. Until
recently, most archeologists continued to ascribe the Neolithic revolution to a
combination of climatic and demographic factors. One notable exception was the
late Jacques Cauvin, who, in the seventies, proposed that an early form of
religion—a cult of the bull and the fertility goddess—had fostered a
fertility-oriented world view that eventually engendered the shift to
agriculture.
Lush: Lush fields or gardens have a lot of very healthy grass or plants.
Schmidt believes that Göbekli Tepe
proves Cauvin right—not about the fertility goddess, which seems to be belied by all those erect penises, but about an ideological trigger. He believes that the shift from animism to
centralized religion, and from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society, was
the cause and not the effect of economic change. Unlike Cauvin, he bases his
theory less on the specific symbolic content of Göbekli Tepe, whose meaning
remains obscure, than on the simple fact of its existence. Regardless of what
the pillars are for, producing them took a lot of man-hours. The workers needed
a stable food supply, and the area was rich in wild species like aurochs and
einkorn, one of the ancestors of domesticated wheat. Building Göbekli Tepe
would also have required some division of labor among overseers, technicians,
and workers—another social development that might have precipitated, rather
than resulted from, the shift to agriculture.
Belie: Contradict
Trigger: If something acts as a trigger for another thing such as an illness,
event, or situation, the first thing causes the second thing to begin to happen
or exist.
A surprising fact about the
Neolithic revolution is that, according to most evidence, agriculture brought
about a steep decline in the standard of living. Studies of Kalahari Bushmen
and other nomadic groups show that hunter-gatherers, even in the most
inhospitable landscapes, typically spend less than twenty hours a week
obtaining food. By contrast, farmers toil from sunup to
sundown. Because agriculture relies on the mass cultivation of a handful of starchy
crops, a community’s whole livelihood can be wiped out overnight by bad
weather or pests. Paleontological evidence shows that, compared with
hunter-gatherers, early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died
younger, had worse teeth, were more prone to spinal deformity, and caught more
infectious diseases, as a result of living close to other humans and to livestock. A study of skeletons in Greece and Turkey found
that the average height of humans dropped six inches between the end of the ice
age and 3000 B.C.; modern Greeks and Turks still haven’t regained the height of
their hunter-gatherer ancestors. That Kurdish worker at Göbekli Tepe was right:
Neolithic man probably was taller than him.
Toil: When
people toil, they work very hard doing unpleasant or tiring tasks.
Starch: Starch
is a substance that is found in foods such as bread, potatoes, pasta, and rice
and gives you energy. (carbohydrat)
Livestock: Cattle
Why would anyone stick with such a
miserable way of life? Jared Diamond, the author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel,”
describes the situation as a classic bait-and-switch.
Hunter-gatherers were “seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until
population growth caught up with increased food production.” By then they were
locked in—they had to farm more and more land just to keep everyone alive.
Deriving strength from their large, poorly nourished numbers, the farmers
gradually killed off most of the hunter-gatherers and drove the rest from their
land. Diamond considers agriculture to be not just a setback but “the worst
mistake in the history of the human race,” the origin of “the gross social and
sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse
our existence.”
Bait-and-switch: Bait and switch is used to refer to a sales technique in which goods
are advertised at low prices in order to attract customers, although only a
small number of the low-priced goods are available.
Curse: Malediction
Was the Neolithic revolution really
a “curse” on our existence? The high emotional and political stakes of this
question were manifested in a cover article in Der Spiegel in 2006, which
proposed Göbekli Tepe as the historical site of the Garden of Eden. The Turkish
press enthusiastically picked up the story. Given their preëxisting claim to
Job and Abraham, some locals reasoned, it would actually have been remarkable
if Adam and Eve hadn’t been from Urfa. Evidence for the identification with
Eden included Göbekli Tepe’s position between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the
copious snake imagery, and Schmidt’s characterization of the region as “a
paradise for hunter-gatherers.” But the theory really draws its power from a
reading of the Fall as an allegory for the shift from hunting-and-gathering to
farming. In Eden, man and woman lived as companions, unashamed of their
nakedness, surrounded by friendly animals and by “trees that were pleasing to
the eye and good for food.” The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, like the first
fruits of cultivation, brought on an immediate, irrevocable curse. Man now had
to work the earth, to eat of it all the days of his life. According to
Maimonides, there are legends in which Adam, after the Fall, went on to write
“several works about agriculture.”
God’s terrible words to Eve—“I will
greatly increase your pains in childbearing; in pain you will give birth to
children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you”—may
refer to a decline in women’s health and status produced, in early agricultural
societies, by the economic need to have children who would till
and inherit the land. Women, having access to goat’s milk and cereal, may have weaned their children earlier, resulting in more frequent,
more debilitating pregnancies. The institution of private property, meanwhile,
made paternal certainty a vital concern, and monogamy, particularly for women,
was strictly enforced.
Till: to
cultivate and work (land) for the raising of crops
Wean: When a baby or baby animal is weaned, its mother stops feeding it milk
and starts giving it other food, especially solid food.
To continue the interpretation, the
story of Cain and Abel may be taken as an illustration of the zero-sum game of
primogeniture, as well as an allegory for the slaughter
of nomadic pasturage by urban agriculture. Having killed his brother, Cain goes
on to found the world’s first city and name it after his son Enoch. Read in
this spirit, large chunks of the Old
Testament—the territorial feuds, the constant threat of exile or extinction,
the sexual jealousy and sibling rivalry—begin to resemble the handbook for a grim new scarcity economy of
land and love.
Slaughter: If large numbers of people or animals are slaughtered, they are killed
in a way that is cruel or unnecessary.
Chunk: Portion
Grim: A situation or piece of information that is grim is unpleasant,
depressing, and difficult to accept.
Scarcity: If there is a scarcity of something, there is not enough of it for the
people who need it or want it.
What’s at issue
in the Garden of Eden allegory is whether agriculture was a qualitative break
in human history—“a catastrophe,” as Diamond puts it, “from which we have never
recovered.” Was the human condition ever fundamentally different from the way
it is now? Might the past three thousand years not be the last word on who we
are? Whole world views ride on the answers to these questions. Friedrich
Engels, for example, believed that prehistoric man had once lived under a
classless “primitive communism,” and that monogamy was invented by greedy men, so that their sons could get their hoarded wealth after they died. Engels needed to believe in
a time when the Communist utopia had been, and could again be, reconciled with
human nature. Darwin, by contrast, maintained that, even if humans had once
been polygamous, they had never lived in sexual freedom: male jealousy had
always led to “the inculcation of female virtue.” (Jealousy was interpreted by
later Darwinians to reflect the male’s desire to restrict paternal investment
to his own genetic offspring.) This view, implying that the premium placed on
female chastity was one of the ground rules of life on earth, accorded both
with Victorian mores and with Darwin’s view of the organism as a machine for
insuring the survival of individual traits. Freud, meanwhile, believed that the
nuclear family was universal, and that the “primeval family,” riven by the
Oedipus complex, had been even more repressive than haute-bourgeois Vienna. The
great expert on sexual unhappiness had to believe that civilization outweighed
its discontents: the alternative—that we’d made ourselves miserable for
nothing—was too terrible to contemplate.
Issue: Discussion, question.
Greedy: Avaricious.
Hoard: Save, store, collect, gather
Did humans ever live in sexual
freedom? Was work ever fun? Did we always privilege our immediate genetic
offspring over other members of the community? The debate continues in our
time. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, in their study “Sex at Dawn,” side
with Engels, citing anthropological data about numerous hunter-gatherer
societies that aren’t monogamous, don’t have nuclear families, and don’t
valorize paternal certainty. They argue that this was the norm before the
Neolithic revolution, that promiscuity had once fostered coöperation and
reduced violence among our tribal ancestors, and that a false belief in the
“naturalness” of monogamy is responsible for myriad social ills:
nineteenth-century foundling hospitals,
the stoning of women in Iran, the destruction of numerous American political
careers. Such views bring them into conflict with Steven Pinker, whose recent
book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” argues that society is at a current
all-time high in peacefulness, and that the hunter-gatherers were massacring
and barbecuing each other for hundreds of millennia before the cultivation of
wheat.
Foundling: A foundling is a baby that has been abandoned by its parents, often in
a public place, and that has then been found by someone.
Schmidt’s view is closer to
Pinker’s. “They were trained killers, nothing else,” he says of the
hunter-gatherers. He believes that Göbekli Tepe was built by a laboring class,
maybe even by slaves. In his view, the reason that agriculture stuck, even
though it meant more work and worse food, was that an élite caste had a vested
interest in the new system: “Ninety per cent had to work, and ten per cent
lived by wealth. The élite wanted to keep their advantage, and they had the
power to do it.” If Schmidt is right and a form of social exploitation was
already observable before farming, then agriculture wasn’t a disaster, or any
kind of game changer: the human condition was, as Freud implies, always at
least as bad as it is now.
“Was there any time when it wasn’t
like that?” I asked. “Like, a hundred thousand years ago?”
Schmidt shrugged.
“Humans don’t change so much,” he said. “The background of our knowledge is
getting bigger. But our daily behavior is the same. We are all Homo sapiens.”
Shrug: If you
shrug, you raise your shoulders to show that you are not interested in
something or that you do not know or care about something.
I asked Schmidt what he thought of
the allegorical reading of the Fall of Man as the shift to agriculture. He
objected that the Garden of Eden was a garden, and thus represented a
horticultural rather than a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. Schmidt’s
resistance to metaphors and speculation is, in a way, part of the job. “You’re
a scientist, you’re professional,” he told me. “What we’re looking at—it’s
material culture. We aren’t imagining things we can’t see.” Imagination is always
projection: to guess how Neolithic people might have felt about anything was to
assume, doubtless incorrectly, that they felt the way we would have felt about
it. And yet, with no imagination at all, it’s difficult to see how any
interpretation is possible. As Jens Notroff put it, “Without any imagination,
this is all a pile of rubbish.”
After my last afternoon at Göbekli
Tepe, I decided to devote
the rest of the day to the other Urfa pilgrimage—the Abraham one. I walked
along teeming sidewalks, among street venders
selling pomegranates, lottery tickets, novelty Korans,
fresh pistachio nuts, sherbet, bitter
coffee, photocopies. One man was literally selling snake oil—a thing I had
never seen before—in addition to ant-egg oil, hair tonic, and unscented soap for pilgrims. Handbills
advertised a conference called “Understanding the Prophet Abraham in the 21st
Century.” A psychiatrist with a storefront office
specialized in “ailments of the nerves and soul.” Most
restaurants had signs that said “we have a family room!”—meaning that the main
dining room was for men only. About eighty-five per cent of the pedestrians
were men. Nearly all the women were wearing head scarves,
or even burkas. I saw one woman so pious that her burka didn’t even have an
opening for her eyes. She was leaving a cell-phone store, accompanied by a
teen-age boy wearing a T-shirt that said “relax, man,” over a picture of an
ice-cream cone playing an electric guitar. You wouldn’t think an ice-cream cone
could play an electric guitar, or would want to. I was reminded of Schmidt’s
hypothesis that hybrid creatures and monsters, unknown to Neolithic man, are
particular to highly developed cultures—cultures which have achieved distance
from and fear of nature. If archeologists of the future found this T-shirt,
they would know ours had been a civilization of great refinement.
Teeming: Crowded
Pomegranates ( pɒmɪgrænɪt ): A pomegranate is a round fruit
with a thick reddish skin. It contains lots of small seeds with juicy flesh
around them. (magrana, Granada)
Sherbet: Sherbet is like ice cream but made with fruit juice, sugar, and water.
Unscented: Not
filled or impregnated with odour or fragrance.
Handbills: A handbill is a small printed
notice which is used to advertise a particular company, service, or event.
Flyers.
Storefront: A storefront is the outside part of a shop which faces the street,
including the door and windows.
Ailment: Disease.
Scarf: A scarf
is a piece of cloth that you wear round your neck or head, usually to keep
yourself warm. (Plural: scarves)
I reached a large park with manicured lawns, a rose garden, gushing
fountains, and shady tea gardens, and made my way to a rectangular stone-lined pool crammed with fat
gray carp, indicating the spot where Nimrod failed to burn up Abraham. It’s
said that anyone who eats one of these carp will go blind. All kinds of
people—tough-looking men in black leather jackets, women in shapeless
trenchcoats and head scarves, two girls dressed like Arabian princesses with
gold coins on their foreheads—were buying fish food from venders and hurling it
into the pond by the fistful. The sacred
carp accumulated in a great heap below the
surface of the water, their gaping circular mouths angled upward.
Manicured lawn: Well cut grass.
Gushing: Pouring
Fistful: A
fistful of things is the number of them that you can hold in your fist.
Fist: Your hand is referred to as your fist when you have bent your fingers
in towards the palm in order to hit someone, to make an angry gesture, or to
hold something.
Heap: Pile, mound, stack
The cave where Abraham might have
been born had been divided into two caves: one for men, one for women. I went
into the women’s entrance hall, where a low-ceilinged stone tunnel led to the
holy site. A giant, headless lump of cloth appeared in the mouth of the tunnel,
and came shuffling toward me. This turned out to be a
woman exiting the cave backward. When the passage was clear again, I stooped double and made my way inside.
Shuffle: To walk or move (the feet) with a slow dragging motion(arrastrar)
Stoop: If you stoop, you stand or walk with your shoulders bent forwards.
Greenish-yellow light shimmered on
the rough stone walls. Behind a large glass window, like an aquarium display, a
spring was burbling in a rocky cave interior. Women were gathered around a
motion-activated faucet that dispensed water from the holy spring. They waved
their hands under the tap, like people in an airport bathroom. Nobody could
predict what motion would turn on the holy water. Having taken my turn at the faucet, I proceeded to the prayer area and knelt on the silk
carpet, behind an extremely thin young woman in a black dress and head scarf.
Palms upturned, she swayed back and forth
for a minute or two, then suddenly flung her body forward and touched her
forehead to the carpet. Several times, the young woman repeated this motion of
tremendous beauty and fierceness. I thought about the power of the sacred:
originating, if the archeologists are to be believed, in the most material expediencies of the body—how and what to eat—it overtakes
the soul, making Neolithic man build Göbekli Tepe and making him bury it,
sweeping through the millennia, generating monuments, strivings, vast inner
landscapes. I thought about history, and the riddle of the Sphinx: what goes on
four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the
evening? Some people say that history is progress: isn’t this just a reflection
of how we’re born, tiny, weak, and speechless, and then go on to build
cathedrals and fly to the moon? When others say that history is a decline from
a golden age, isn’t this because youth is so brief and we regret it for so
long?
Faucet: A faucet is a device that controls the flow of a liquid or gas from a
pipe or container. Sinks and baths have faucets attached to them.
Sway: When people or things sway, they lean or swing slowly from one side to
the other.
Expediency: Expediency means doing what is convenient rather than what is morally
right. Pragmatism actions.
I thought about Abraham—Father of
Multitudes, builder of monotheism—and about the covenant,
when Abraham was unhappy because he had no children and was going to have to
leave his property to a servant, and God promised him as many offspring as
there are stars in the sky. This covenant fulfilled the two great demands of
the agricultural order: land and paternally certain offspring. If Göbekli Tepe
was the Garden of Eden, where these demands first came into being, then there
is a certain logic in the identification of Urfa with Abraham’s birthplace.
Viewed in this light, as one big story, it may seem as if the last generation
at Göbekli Tepe, when they buried their temple and embarked on a new way of
life, didn’t, after all, succeed in severing their ties
to the future. ♦
Covenant: Promise
Sever: Cut
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