Göbekli Tepe and the Zodiac

The twelve pillars of Enclosure D are often associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and many people have tried to equate the artforms with constellations. The all-round clear views would make the site a perfect observatory and the people of Göbekli Tepe, as did ancient people around the world, very likely identified star patterns and linked them to specific asterisms or pictorial images. 

My feeling is the artforms are far too detailed to at least exclusively represent constellations. If some of the images were in fact asterisms, it is unlikely they would bear any resemblance to our current star charts, which originated almost 8000 years later, a short distance away in modern Iraq. Even across the Middle East, the interpretations of specific stars and constellations varies drastically in different cultures. There are no markings on Göbekli Tepe’s pillars which can be attributed to specific stars, and therefore any interpretations as constellations can be nothing but supposition.

An old map of the skies                                                   

In Broken Skies, each pillar links to a sign of the Zodiac and a month of the year. These are loosely based on the modern constellations, but I have divided the ecliptic – the yearly path the sun takes through the constellations – into twelve 30º sections, as it almost certainly originally was. 

My interpretation is that each pillar shows animals, birds and events linking to that month: creatures that could be hunted or which were flourishing at that time. Göbekli Tepe was a sinister and dangerous place of trial, and I have linked each Zodiac sign with a deadly creature linked to that month. I’m not claiming my ideas are fact. But they do make often uncanny sense.

          The pillars of Enclosure D

In 9600BC, when Göbekli Tepe was built, the sun at the spring equinox was in Leo, the lion. This is one of the oldest asterisms, and unusually, the stars of Leo do in fact look like a lion. Some researchers have linked the Egyptian Sphinx to Leo, and suggested its true date of construction is close to the date of Göbekli Tepe, and so I have kept Leo as a lion, which was once common in Turkey.

This is Enclosure D’s Pillar 21, which has a large feline, probably a lion, carved on its side along with a Dorcas gazelle, an onager and two spiders.

 The stars of Leo (The Lion) and Virgo (The Bear). Arcturus, the 'Bear Star', forms the head of the bear.

In April, the sun in  Gobekli Tepe's time was in Virgo. The link to the harvest-maiden dates to Egyptian times – the Zodiac signs of each month shift over a 26,000-year cycle – when Virgo was linked to late summer. I have made this constellation a bear, at its most dangerous as it wakes hungry and ill-tempered from hibernation. This is represented by Pillar 22. Excavations have so far revealed a fox, a snake and a hare on this pillar. The hare is typically very active during its spring mating season, hence the saying ‘mad as a March hare’. I have interpreted this hare as representing the gift this animal gives to the hunters at the time it is especially easy to catch. This would mean only the strongest and wiliest animals would remain to breed, an illustration of the mutually beneficial balance between hunter and hunted which is one of the key philosophies of the book. 

(Tiia Monto, Wikicommons).