Göbekli Tepe: Duku

Göbekli Tepe, discovered in south-eastern Turkey in 1994, has been dubbed the oldest temple in the world. Its earliest phase comprises a series of oval-shaped stone buildings built on a prominent hill in the vast Harran Plain. They date to c9600BC.

There is no evidence for the worship of any deity here; rather it may be a hilltop ‘sanctuary’ linked to a shamanic tradition. Huge feastings took place here, and the buildings may have been used for initiation ceremonies or rituals to ensure the well-being of the huge number of people connected with the site.

Each enclosure contains an array of T-shaped stone pillars set into the outer wall and another pair of pillars standing side by side in the centre. These pillars, up to six metres in height and weighing 15 tonnes, are carved with lions, boars, foxes, vultures, snakes, wild cattle and many other predatory or dangerous creatures once found in the area. At least some pillars were hung with ochre-painted human skulls which looked down upon the viewers.

To enter the buildings, one had to crawl or slide through small stone portals carved with snakes, boars and other deadly creatures. The towering pillars would create a near terrifying sense of power and claustrophobia, increased by the predatory creatures creeping from the stone all around, perhaps enhanced by hallucinatory or shamanic plants. The whole feel of Göbekli Tepe is macabre and unsettling.

It seems a place which had to be endured, which would grant the successful person entrance to adulthood; initiation as a shaman; bonds with the spirit world; or bonds with the animals which gifted their prowess as hunters and their bodies as prey. A place where a person was seen, tested and potentially accepted by the spirit world and its emissaries so that their success in the physical world could become reality.

Reconstruction of Göbekli Tepe in Şanliurfa Museum

It has been suggested by both archaeologists and alternative researchers that Göbekli Tepe is the real-life inspiration for Duku, the mythical mound of creation in Middle Eastern mythology. Duku, meaning ‘holy mound’, was the home of the Gods and the place where civilisation was created, an eerie resonance with what archaeologists have discovered about the earliest known civilisation which centred on Göbekli Tepe. And Göbekli Tepe, intriguingly, translates to ‘the hill of the navel’: the place where the world linked to its creator.

The view from the site

I’ve named Göbekli Tepe as Duku in Broken Skies. As the archaeology suggests, it is the most important site for the Irin shamans, and directly links to the slow recovery of the world after its impact with a comet. The individual characteristics and nature of each building and its decorated pillars will be discussed in coming posts.

Harran

The ruins of Harran                                                                    

Harran is an ancient city of southeast Turkey. It was flourishing by 2000BC, when it was a merchant outpost for trade between the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and it is mentioned in the Old Testament as the city of Haran. Pottery finds dating to around 6000BC suggests a truly ancient origin.

The Harranians developed their own cultural beliefs centring on a reverence of the stars and planets as symbols of divine harmony, but later identified themselves as Sabians, a sect of Islam. Harran became a renowned centre of study for astronomy, science and medicine until its sacking in the 11^th century. The 33m-high Astronomical Tower was once part of the city’s mosque, but is said to have been used by the Harranians to observe the movements of the stars.

The view of Harran Plain from Göbekli Tepe

Harran Plain is a vast expanse of land, broken by Karaca Dağ or Black Mountain, where the wild ancestor of domestic wheat still grows; the ancient and sacred city of Sanliurfa; and the ridgeline where the 12,000-year-old temple of Göbekli Tepe stands. It has been the centre of spiritual and cultural development since the dawn of civilisation. 

Sanliurfa with the hilltop site of Yeni Mahalle to the left

In Broken Skies, Harran is the home of the Irin or Watchers. The hilltop village of Kharsag which, like Eden, means ‘lofty enclosure’ and was a mythical home of the Anunnaki, is based on the recently discovered site of Yeni Mahalle, a Pre-Pottery-Neolithic site dating to 9600BC found on the rocky hillside at the centre of modern Şanliurfa.

This ancient site has long been buried and almost destroyed by later building, but the sanctity of this place has never waned. The caves beneath the hillside are revered in Muslim tradition as the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham. Balikli Göl, a pool of fish at its base, is said to have been formed when Abraham was cast into a fire by his enemy Nimrod. The flames were miraculously turned to water and the burning logs into fish, which remain sacred to this day.

Balikli Göl

The city of Harran doesn’t date back to the Pre-Pottery-Neolithic, as far as anyone knows, but its foundation could well have been inspired by the enduring observations of the astronomers and sky-watchers who lived on the plain three thousand years earlier. That is the line I’ve taken with the story.

The Anunnaki

The Anunnaki are the most enigmatic and most studied beings of Middle Eastern myth. Like the Irin, they had gifts and skills far superior to the human population, and like the Irin they lived in the idyllic land of Dilmun, also known as Eden.

Hittite carvings of  magical beings perhaps linked to the Anunnaki

The later interpretations of the cuneiform tablets of the ancient Middle East suggest that the Anunnaki were the advanced inhabitants of another planet who in ancient times settled on Earth, but this is almost certainly fantasy. Most likely they were a distinct population of people who had skills in stonework, tool-making, early agriculture, and shamanic abilities for healing, spirit-flight and journeying in the spirit world, whose existence is slowly being revealed by archaeology. Stories about them became embellished as generations passed, and when the stories were written down by the Middle Eastern people over 5000 years later, they had taken on the roles of Gods, creators of humankind, and other supernatural epithets.

Ereshkigal from the Babylonian period. Her wings may have originally represented the shamanic gift of spirit flight.

Sumerian myth talks of a council of seven most powerful Anunnaki, who are a reflection of the Seven Sages or divine lawgivers of many traditions, and also the seven archangels of Biblical tradition who remained loyal during the war with the rebel angels or Watchers discussed last week. In contrast to the Irin or Watchers, the Anunnaki have a darker aspect and are associated with the underworld. The Anunnaki are also said to have set the world aflame before the great storm that almost destroyed it.

Their number include Ereshkigal, who was later known as the Queen of the Underworld; her consort Nergal; Marduk, who became the chief God of Babylon; Suen, a moon Goddess; Utu; Namtar, an emissary between Gods; Tashmet, Lady of Hearing; Ishkur, a storm-raiser; and Dumuzi, lover of Inanna, Lady of the Skies, who was killed by her on her return from the underworld.  

All of these characters have their part to play in Broken Skies.

The Irin

Archangels inspired by Middle Eastern legend. All carry lethal weapons. (Julian P Guffogg, Wikicommons).

The Irin were an advanced people of Middle Eastern legend, a tall, pale-skinned and fair or red-haired people who settled in the area among the local inhabitants who were of typical Middle-Eastern appearance. Researcher Andrew Collins suggests they may have been of the Denisovan race, who evolved in the far north near Siberia and whose DNA is found in the modern human genome. 

The Irin were also known as the Watchers, and are described in Biblical texts as angels or the ‘sons of God’. This suggests a memory of a people whose skills and technology were far beyond what the storytellers’ descendants could grasp. They had advanced skills such as agriculture, medicine, the use of bracelets and ornaments, perhaps magical and shamanic skills, and the arts of astronomy and reading the skies. The Biblical Book of Enoch describes how they studied and monitored the skies, and researcher Andrew Collins suggests their name comes not from watching humans for any moral digression, as is often suggested, but from watching the movement of the stars and planets and cycles of time. An obsession with monitoring the skies for any disorder was common in cultures worldwide into historical times, and could well have its origin in the devastation caused by the falling stars which remained very strong in folk memory.

Hittite sculptures, inspired by legends of the Irin?

The Watchers’ story takes a sinister turn when a few of them left their mountainous homeland and taught their gifts to humankind. While the humans didn’t seem to dislike the contact, the other ‘angels’ who remained aloof in their mountainous home were opposed to this education. They especially abhorred the fact that ‘daughters were born to men on Earth, and the sons of God saw that they were fair and took wives of them all that they chose’ (Genesis, Ch6.)

They may have had a valid point. Europeans over several hundred years have discovered people across the world and forced agriculture, alcohol, firearms, designer clothes, MacDonalds, Christian doctrine and a hundred other things on them in the guise of improving their lot. The damage to their culture can never be repaired. 

Kurdistan, possible home of the Watchers. (Nóra Bartóki-Gönczy, Wikicommons).

The children fathered by the sons of God were known as the Nephilim, the ‘fallen ones’, sometimes translated as ‘giants’, as they inherited the stature of their fathers, and it seems both angels and humans saw them as unnatural. The rebel Watchers, sometimes called the rebel angels, were imprisoned in the underworld after a lengthy war and all the children born of the undesirable unions were rounded up and slaughtered. 

But their bloodlines survived to some extent, for the patriarch Enoch’s own grandson Lamech had a son whose skin was white and his hair and eyes shone bright, and Lamech commented fearfully that ‘he is not like an ordinary human being, but he looks like the children of the angels of heaven.’

Enoch on his journey to Eden

The Book of Enoch describes in detail the patriarch’s visit to Eden, which as I have said before is another name for the land of Dilmun. No mortal human had been here before or since, and while there, Enoch saw a terrible place where crazed prisoners were tortured by angels with savage weapons, and later he saw the punishment of the two hundred Watchers who revealed forbidden the arts to humankind and took wives among them.

My ideas as to what Enoch witnessed, and what really happened to the Nephilim, will become clear in the story.

The Falling Star

Comet Hale-Bopp (Philipp Salzgeber, Wikicommons).

Legends of a long-ago cataclysm which almost eradicated life worldwide are told in almost every inhabited part of the Earth. Noah’s Ark is one of the most famous examples. They are all based on fact.

At the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 10,500BC, a vast comet collided with Earth. Huge chunks this long-tailed fireball smashed into the North American ice sheet and sent out a blast wave travelling at over 1000mph, carrying fragments of the comet and earth debris and scorching everything in its path.
The ice sheet blew apart and the impact triggered earthquakes and volcanic eruptions worldwide. Tidal waves a hundred metres high tore across the Atlantic and smashed into Europe and West Africa, then ricocheted back to the Americas. The aftermath of the impact spread around the world.

Wildfires spread through the scorched and dead vegetation and the smoke and debris from the impact and volcanic eruptions blocked the sunlight around the world. Rain began to fall as the atmosphere, saturated with vaporised ice and laden with dust, shed its burden. This rain, a toxic blend of chemicals including sulphuric acid, uranium and formaldehyde, lasted for months.

For those humans and animals which survived, around the world there was a desperate fight for survival in a polluted land ravaged by radioactivity, solar radiation and toxic chemicals. Global temperatures fell as vast glacial lakes were breached and flooded into the Atlantic, choking the Gulf Stream. This, coupled with the dust-choked atmosphere which blocked almost all sunlight, plunged the Earth into a cold period known as the Younger Dryas which lasted for 1200 years.

The Younger Dryas ended around 9600BC, the time when civilisation began to appear in the Middle East and the first cult buildings at Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey were built. The Fertile Crescent was sheltered from the worst of the devastation caused by the comet impact and its aftermath, and this is likely a major factor in why the first stone buildings, domesticated cereals and other technologies first appeared in this region as the world finally began to recover.

One of the buildings of Göbekli Tepe

In Broken Skies, this comet is the falling star which caused the Thousand Year Winter. Fragments of the comet and debris including small meteors remained in the Solar System long after this event, dislodged by the vast comet from their original orbits, and many would have eventually collided with Earth. The falling star which almost destroyed Dilmun and triggered the Irin’s abandonment of their homeland, as discussed last week, was one of these. And so was the next falling star, which fell further away from Dilmun and triggered the events of the story.

Dilmun

A destroyed Golden-Age homeland is a common occurrence in Middle Eastern legend. The idea grew into the Biblical story of Eden, the all-providing land from which Adam and Eve were thrown for their sins. Many scholars have tried to trace Eden, both in terms of its location and its origin in written sources, and it is commonly placed in the Kurdistan highlands in eastern Turkey. 

‘Eden’ comes from the Akkadian word ‘edin’, meaning a terrace or steppe. The associated words ‘paradise’ and ‘heaven’ derive from ‘walled enclosure’ and ‘planted highlands’ respectively. Eden is therefore likely a plateau rich in vegetation and surrounded by mountains. Four great rivers rose in Eden, the Euphrates the only one now identifiable. The Tigris is assumed to be a second, and both of these rise in the Kurdistan highlands near Lake Van. Kurdish tradition has always placed Eden in this area.

The Euphrates in Turkey

Cuneiform tablets found in the city of Nippur in modern Iraq, dating to 2200BC, long before Biblical times, add a new twist to this story. The tablets tell of a divine race called the Anunnaki, who lived in a place called edin (the steppe). Here they cultivated land, domesticated plants, built cedar houses and granaries and managed prolific orchards.

Then came a winter of bitter cold, followed by a great storm, flooding, then an even harsher winter. A period of long darkness followed and lightning destroyed most of the buildings. It was the end for this idyllic land. The God Enlil said sorrowfully, ‘my settlement is shattered, it has been destroyed.’

Burial mounds of the Dilmun era in Bahrain. 

Dilmun was another name for this paradisiacal land of peace and harmony. The name was historically given to an island state in modern Bahrain, but also referred to an older, mythical mountain land. Again, this was placed in Kurdistan. A Kurdish dynasty called the Daylamites, who flourished around 1000AD, originated in a region called Dilaman several hundred years earlier. This region is to the southwest of Lake Van, just like Eden.

Perhaps both stories refer to a memory of an unusually rich and fertile land nourished by the great rivers which rose from the mountains, where advanced and skilled people long ago lived. 
So this is where I located Dilmun in the story, the rich and vibrant home of the Anunnaki and at one time the home of the Irin, until the star fell and near destroyed it. We will come to that next week.

The Kurdistan landscape. By Nóra Bartóki-Gönczy (Wikicommons).

The Ouroboros

The ouroboros, from the Greek for ‘tail-devourer’, is an ancient symbol. The serpent circling around on itself to swallow its own tail represents the cyclical nature of existence. Birth gives way to death which leads to rebirth. Summer becomes winter, day becomes night in an endless cycle which, even though each turn of the circle is identical, paradoxically it can never be the same. Every day and every year creates a different manifestation of the rules that everything in existence has to follow. Complexity in simplicity.

Jormungand and Thor

The ouroboros symbol originated in Egypt and is found in Greek cosmology as Oceanus, the ocean-serpent which encircles the world, both physically according to the Greek world view and metaphorically as cyclical rules which govern the world’s existence. It is also found in Scandinavian mythology as Jörmungand, an ocean-serpent of the same nature as Oceanus. 

It became a common symbol in alchemy and magical philosophy until the present day, where it represents the cyclical nature of human existence both as individuals and as a population. Cultures including the Greeks, the Norse and the Mayans and Aztecs of Central America believed that a civilisation grows, flourishes, and then decays or is destroyed by cosmic influences far beyond the control of people or even of the Gods. And from the ashes, a new civilisation grows. History illustrates how often this happens. But as the past vanishes into the present as it is swallowed, in truth it is still there and will always be there and it forms the template for the present and the future.

  

The Romans were the greatest civilisation in the Known World, yet still they fell to the greater powers of time and fate. Their ruins were used as an illustration of that truth for a thousand years.

This is why I’ve chosen the ouroboros as the name of this series, which will ultimately explore the rise and fall of human civilisation from its distant origins in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago, as it gradually draws towards who we are today. We all live and we all die, and we all change the world in our own way, and perhaps ultimately everything will end as it began as the serpent swallows its tail yet again.

The ouroboros in Tutankhamun’s tomb, c1325BC.