Blogetty Blog 10: Visiting Ancient Turkey

My family laughs at my interest in the TV series ‘Ancient Aliens’, shown regularly on the History Channel in my area. It has national US and some European distribution.  A recent episode included a segment on Gobekli Tepe, an archeological site in eastern Turkey, which I found quite fascinating, so I hope this will explain and excuse a diversion from my normal range of subjects in this blog.

The online magazine ‘Cracked’ described Ancient Aliens as the very definition of pseudohistory and science. It is certainly a weird mixture of material ranging from preposterous to plain silly to utterly fascinating. My own interest lies in its accounts of the puzzling questions arising from megalithic sites and structures around the world. Much of AA is hypothesis, but the evidence of astonishing megalithic achievement can be seen and touched and is indisputably real.

Gobekli Tepe is a stone-age sanctuary first excavated in 1994 by the German scientist Klaus Schmidt who called it ‘a cathedral on a hill’ and suggested it was a pilgrimage destination possibly attracting worshippers from a wide distance.

Radio-carbon dating at 11,000-10,000 BC indicates that it is the oldest known stone circle temple yet discovered anywhere. The huge T-shaped pillars are decorated with skillfully carved boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions.

No tombs or graves have been found but Schmidt believed that they exist beyond the walls of the sacred precincts. At some point for reasons as yet unexplained the entire complex was carefully backfilled remains unexplained, but is the reason for its preservation. Based on current evidence it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture.   

Ian Hodder, a Stanford University expert, said, “Gobekli changes everything. It’s elaborate, it’s complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time.” Why? Because the ability to erect monumental complexes at so remote a date overturns all previous assumptions about the organizational capacity of our earliest ancestral social groups.

A few data are required for understanding Hodder’s astonishment. Earth’s last glaciation lasted approximately 13,000 – 11,000 BC. It was generally accepted that Homo Sapiens (modern man after all his numerous evolutions) had survived the last Ice Age in small bands of ‘hunter-gatherers’ without any sedentary social organization, pottery or the wheel. So how was such construction – requiring hundreds of laborers and many advanced skills – possible for primitive scavengers dressed in animal skins?

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts say it was achieved with the help of advanced extra-terrestrial technology, for which of course there is no evidence whatever. Perhaps a more likely explanation – though equally amazing itself – is that the Gobekli community were rare survivors of an advanced culture predating the glaciation. Are the orthodox accounts of the origin of our society through the first settled agriculture in the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia, after say 5.000 BC, all entirely wrong? If so, will we ever know what truly happened before all that well-studied development? It’s an intriguing major puzzle. 

Construction of Gobekli Tepe continued for centuries. During the first phase circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected in 20 circles. Each has a height of up to 6 meters (20 ft) and weighs up to 10 tons. They are fitted into sockets hewn out of the bedrock. In the second phase the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with polished stone floors.

The site was abandoned around 3,500 BC. Clearly the practice of whatever system of beliefs were held by the stone circle worshippers endured for perhaps ten thousand years – a very long time indeed. I bet you didn’t know there are 1,303 known stone circles in Western Europe or that the greatest number, over 500, are in…Scotland! (Thanks Wiki!) So the Turkish site raises major questions for prehistorians. That’s the fascination of these ancient puzzles.

The Patriach of Ancient Aliens is a Swiss author named Erich Von Daniken and I first came across his work in 1968 when I bought a copy of his book “Chariot of the Gods” at W.H. Smith’s bookstall on Waterloo station. I was making regular trips to London at that time for work related committee meetings and usually scanned the latest paperbacks.

It was the height of Science Fiction’s popularity – E.E.Doc Smith’s pioneer ‘Lensman’ series; Isaac Asimov; Larry Niven’s superb ‘Ringworld’; Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Sirens of Titan” where an extraterrestrial messenger travels the galaxy bearing a message which reads simply ‘Greetings’ – all of which I read avidly not because I believed these novels truly represented future pioneers and their adventures, but in delight and awe of their authors’ imagination.

In ‘Chariot of the Gods’ von Daniken writes about the megalithic construction in South America of enormous stone walls and the Nazca lines – a group of colossal geoglyphs formed by depressions or shallow incisions made in the soil of the high altitude desert in Peru and dating from 500BC-500AD – and proposes that these sites were built on instructions from extraterrestrial beings.

The Nazca lines, for example, were constructed as airfields for Alien spaceships.  A suggestion that is as outlandish as the Science Fiction of the period, but the walls constructed of gigantic stone blocks and the lines are real enough and I was immediately perplexed and intrigued by them.

Wiki’s entry on von Daniken is not flattering. It records a difficult past including incarceration in a penitentiary and castigates his archaeological claims as mistaken and often fraudulent. None the less his books have sold over 60 million copies and today he is the adored leader of the thriving worldwide community of AA theorists and disciples – so there is no doubt who is having the last laugh.

A constant Ancient Aliens theme is its concept that every established religious system refers to a God or gods who came down from above – extra-terrestrials with mixed motives ranging from gold mining to genetic engineering of our species – as if this commonality confirms distant past history.

To my simple mind it seems such elaborate explanation is superfluous. If you are bent on deciding where souls go after death where would you look but to a celestial location? Normal experience suggests it is not located on or under terra firma or the sea, so it must be in the sky: isn’t that a natural assumption whatever your ethnic or cultural persuasions? Right?

Especially when the night sky was populated by the majestic processions of billions of stars before they were screened from our sight by the glow of civilization’s artificial light. Heaven has to be up there in the wild blue yonder. Has to be, mates. Certain sure.

So despite its crackpot shortcomings – I have difficulty with the Moon as a hollow artificial alien construct – I am grateful to Ancient Aliens for presenting the enduring puzzles prehistory provides. In the Aswan quarry the largest obelisk ever carved lies ‘unfinished’ because it split on a natural fault.

The obelisk measures 130 feet in height and is estimated to weigh 1,200 tons. A modern mobile crane can lift 300 tons. Exactly how did the Egyptians intend to raise their monster memorial from the bedrock and transport it to a temple faraway down the Nile? The puzzles are endless… And I find them fun – whatever my children think.  

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