Göbekli Tepe

About a month ago I found a book, “Rätselhafte Religionen der Vorzeit” ("Mysterious religions of prehistory") by theologian Ina Mahlsted, which I found immensely interesting and devoured in one gulp in two consecutive days.
It seems in several ways to corroborate the view that humans were in many ways worse off after the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to sedentariness and farming (not necessarily that we go back to the former ;) ).
The following blog post, a commentary on the book, is more a general text about prehistory and early farmers, than one about the Middle East. The general introduction to religions of prehistory of the first part may provide a good key though to understanding Mahlsted's description of Göbekli Tepe in South-Eastern Turkey afterwards, where the basic keywords and keynotions pop up again.

Human beings are 'biologically free', that is genetically open to various behaviours, lifestyles and social structures. Before monotheistic religions with their divine commandments and demands of service and obedience arose, pre-historic peoples were forced to use their cognitive capabilities to understand the world they lived in in a way as to create focal points and patterns of order out of an infinity of possibilities around them, the 'truths' they needed to find a sense of security in their world. These religions did not oppose an unfathomable God of creation to the humans down below, but formulated the relationship of the human being to life, nature and earth.

Hunter-gatherers lived in a world in which animals and human beings, and often also plants or spirits, were of equal value. Life and death were seen as an endless, organic, self-recreating cycle, 'the rising and setting of the sun a daily heartbeat, […] life and death a protracted breathing rhythm'. Death was seen as an organic part of the whole; indeed, as a necessary precondition for life to recreate itself. There could be no healing without total annihilation first. Death was not the opposite of life, but contained the dynamic that carried life on. The analogy of sleep is an obvious one. As such death did not carry a true emotional shock for the hunter.

Grasping the creative power ancient people saw invested in death helps to understand the human sacrifices we today see as barbarian, or even the animal sacrifices, which live forth in Islam. Death was seen as a period to be passed through by some in order to re-new life-bringing powers for the community left behind.
This thought is also contained in the symbol of the holy stone. Stone is not only fascinating for its infinite oldness, but it is also the only really lifeless matter on earth through which no life pulses. Think of all the menhirs and megaliths we have in Europe, and that even Allah reveals himself in the qibla, a blackened meteorite. In that death holds within itself the impulse for life, the cairns of Brittany or the Hypogeum of Malta are the opposite of graves, Mahlstedt writes. These dark, inner sanctums made the spiritual world touchable, created a space where humans could participate in the re-creation of life.

When the huge cataclysm of farming came about, there was henceforth only one source of food – the earth. Instead of trying to make sense of the entire world around them, humans started to focus on the earth alone. This was the beginning of dichotomies that finally led to monotheism. The first, fundamental dichotomy was that of earth, which yielded the foodstuffs that nourished humans, and the sky, nourishing the earth through its sun and rain. This eventually lead in many cultures to a sky-god, as or for example the ancient Turks had, and to which Judaism, Christianity and Islam are still attached in this day. From the primeval dichotomy of earth and sky sprang other dichotomies such as concepts of 'good' and 'bad', 'life' and 'death', 'the spiritual' and 'the material'. Maybe this influenced also an exacerbation in the division of people into 'male' and 'female'. For other reasons, gender relations certainly changed with the onset of agriculture. And as we will later see, the earth was often associated with feminity, heaven with masculinity.
As a hunter-gatherer, the human being had been part of a living, breathing world complete in itself, with the onset of agriculture, the human being with its needs and interests started to be at the centre of a world, incomplete without the redeeming here-after. The road to monotheism with its duality of promise and punishment, and concept of obedience, was open. The moral notions of 'good' and 'evil' are intrinsically monotheistic representations.

A friend of mine once said “Sowing something and watching it grow is one of the most powerful things there are.” Indeed it must have been fascinating to early farmers that life that disappeared and returned so mysteriously in its steady rhythm. Who or what caused the return of life, what exactly happened during death? So they found representations for how life renewed itself. In the Neolithic the first farmers created a world of spirits and demons, which on the one hand are immanent in all living things (which is a remnant of hunter-gatherer thinking), but on the other necessitate human beings' participation. Just as the earth needed the humans' physical participation to yield, the spiritual world needed human participation in form of holy rites. Negligence of these rites was seen as cause the cause of disease, drought or epidemics.
Monotheistic thinking finally centres all power to create 'good' and 'evil' on the human being. It promises deliverance after death from the dull, material world beneath. All circular thinking is gone. This is linear thinking also ultimately led to the pathological obsession with 'progress' we live in in the capitalist societies of today, by the way.

The writer of the book travelled to Urfa in South-Eastern Turkey to visit the 12,000 year old sanctuary of Göbekli Tepe. She described the area around it like this: “The dry land is only animated by rain from November to March, and in the seasonal death of summer stiffens under a cover of dust of which the Sumerians said it lay down paralysing the earth like a pall. [..]The barren plain, on which between the lime stone and under the constant rough wind and brutal sun grass grows only sparsely, is no place of this world.”
Research has shown that in Eastern Anatolia people were already in 10,000 BC cultivating wheat from which they could nourish themselves sufficiently. This hill rising abruptly out of the total flatness, with four springs being located at its ridges may have been seen as the centre of their world by already partly sedentary farmers who created there a holy microcosm of how they saw the world at whole. Still today, Göbekli Tepe actually means 'Hill of the Navel' in translation.
The strong symbolic of the four life-giving rivers as an image of paradise maintained itself until it was formulated in the Torah, and thus made its way into the major monotheistic religions of today.
On top of the hill, stelae with animal depictions stood, on which fertile earth was heaved until they were entirely covered, swelling the holy 'belly'. All over the hill in the rock tiny basins are found. They are thought to have come about by farmers ritually touching and circularly rubbing the rock. Water and stone dust were spilt or blown over the earth, symbolically fertilising it. Any kind of vegetable or cereal the locals had down on the fertile plain was let to grow wildly here.

On the stelae hidden under the earth, among other animals cranes, wild boars and snakes were depicted. The animals carved into the stones were not entirely congruous with the fauna present around. They seem to have had ritualistic character. Since here water seems to have been associated with male fertilising potency and the earth with the female power to give life, snakes are interesting in the sense that they were seen as hermaphrodites, representing both male and female together, and as such symbolising self-regenerating power. Their strange shedding of skin was seen as a symbol of renewal. They belonged to the earth, but were brought into connection with water: “Winding their way across parched earth like small waterways” snakes were fascinating and “mysterious, because soundless, and at the same time dangerous creatures” all of which brought them closer to the 'other-world' of death that was so important in the circle of life.