Gobekli Tepe - Was this the Garden of Eden?

[Alpha]

Interesting archaeological find that is not discussed much.

No surprise here as it carbon dating indicates that it is between 12,000 to 13,000 years old!!

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?


For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone.



The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.

They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer's day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would say he'd made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion - and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.

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Schmidt stayed. And what he has uncovered is astonishing. Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site's importance. 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.


David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.'
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To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out - they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across - but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.

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The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.



That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.


Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.
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Around 8,000 BC, the creators of Gobekli turned on their achievement and entombed their glorious temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial hills on which that Kurdish shepherd walked in 1994.



No one knows why Gobekli was buried. Maybe it was interred as a kind of penance: a sacrifice to the angry gods, who had cast the hunters out of paradise. Perhaps it was for shame at the violence and bloodshed that the stone-worship had helped provoke.



Whatever the answer, the parallels with our own era are stark. As we contemplate a new age of ecological turbulence, maybe the silent, sombre, 12,000-year-old stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us, to warn us, as they stare across the first Eden we destroyed.



Full Articles and great photos here

[Divinorumus]

What an interesting find, Alpha. Thanks for sharing this, I am highly intrigued. Guess what I'll be reading about for the rest of the day, ha. Ya see, you just altered my previous plans for today. I was gonna go for a walk at the zoo this afternoon .. but now I MUST FIND MORE INFORMATION about this. Thanks!

Wow. Why would anyone bury all this? And, are they sure the creators buried it? It could be possible that it was buried to hide truth .. that is usually why humons hid and destroyed things throughout history (particularly those christian crusaders, they sure hate the truth, ha).

I'm gonna go brew a pot of coffee and dig into this. Again, thanks, this is like those old days when the latest copy of the Omni magazine would show up in the mail .. yippy ..

[SquidInk]

I read about this the other day...

Imagine - at the time of the Neolithic Revolution, a gang of technologically advanced agriculturalists emerges. They (somehow, incredibly) build an advanced temple, from which they begin "Watching" over the less sophisticated hunters in the area. All the while exploiting the hunters' hyper-superstitious tendencies.

What has changed?

[Divinorumus]

Man, this is just a mind boggling find. I've been pulling up pages of info and videos on this and I really want to learn more about this whole site. I'm gonna add this find to my list of things to continually follow up on from now until we learn the truth.

I would love to go over there and scan that whole entire area with some kind of ground penetrating imaging hardware to see everything that is buried over there.

Man, I would die a happy person tomorrow if I suddenly had all the answers to all my questions handed to me by some higher intelligence within this universe today. Yup, I really would trade the rest of my life just to KNOW THE WHOLE TRUTH - I am THAT curious about all this!

This is just so fascinating and brings up so many other questions. It makes me wonder if maybe a million years ago there was a highly evolved society living here on Earth of which all traces of their existence has now disappeared. It is quite possible that numerous highly evolved societies could have existed within Earths past, and, with each cycle through the galactic plane, everything gets wiped out and destroyed and life has to start out all over again from the beginning. Dozens of civilizations such as ours could have existed within Earths past. Maybe one day we'll get lucky and find some evidence to prove this possibility, such as finding out that humans (or some other Earth originated intelligent species) had visited the moon 50 million years before we did. Wouldn't that be something .. to discover some artifact on the moon that would prove it had been visited by Earthlings millions of years ago. It's quite possible ya know.

[Judee]

I read about this the other day...

Imagine - at the time of the Neolithic Revolution, a gang of technologically advanced agriculturalists emerges. They (somehow, incredibly) build an advanced temple, from which they begin "Watching" over the less sophisticated hunters in the area. All the while exploiting the hunters' hyper-superstitious tendencies.

What has changed?

Well put Squid.

[Alpha]

Here's a Newsweek story that some of you may find of interest.

A pillar at the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, the oldest known temple in the world


History in the Remaking

A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

[Judee]

Wonderful and fascinating Alpha! I love these quotes:

"Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."

I wonder what Sitchin has to say about this?

[maryals]

Wow, just when you think you know everything

Mary and Bessie

[Alpha]

Interesting article on this fascinating site:

9 Steps to Understanding Gobekli Tepe


1. Gobekli Tepe is The Missing Link

A subject I find fascinating is the evidence of possible ‘missing civilizations’ in our history, which would bring back the origins of human civilization back several millenia.


However, many of these locations (such as the Gulf of Cambay, and off the coast of Cuba) are difficult to investigate. Therefore, even if they were proven to be more than oddly-shaped natural rock formations, they would offer little insight into the ancient cultures that built them.


This is what makes Gobekli Tepe so interesting: People armed with arrows and flint knives built a series of temples in the middle of the fertile crescent thousands of years before the earliest civilization, and then deliberately buried them under thousands of tons of earth.


This archeological site offers insight into early human cultures, and is the missing link that provides many clues on the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer that created the modern world.


2. What we Know About Gobekli Tepe

a. Gobekli Tepe is located in the northern end of the fertile crescent. During the time the structures were built, the climate was very mild and wildlife was abundant.


b. The site is huge. There are around 20 groups of pillars, each group ranging from 30 to 90 feet across. The largest of the stone pillars are 16 feet tall, weighing nearly 10 tons. The site was constructed over several hundred, perhaps several thousand years.


c. Radiocarbon dating places the age of these buildings at around 12,000 years old, which is several thousand years older than any previously discovered complex structures (the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge are around 5,000 years old).


d. The symbols on the pillars “are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract pictograms … very carefully carved reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, asses, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and water fowl.” [Source]


e. It was buried under 15,000 cubic feet of soil, which is the area displaced by the Big Ben clock tower. Clearly, the burial of these structures was as much of a ‘team effort’ as their construction.


Article Continues

[Alpha]

LMH is doing a segment about this site tonight on C2C ( Sept 30, 2010)

Here's her latest report:

Gobekli Tepe: 12,000 Years Old and Rewriting Human History

[DarkoMarco]

Good stuff,,,,I'm of the opinion that the pyramids are a lot older than science admits to,,,but,,,this is awesome that science is acknoledging an advanced culture that is prehistoric,,,,pre-summer.

I've heard that the religious temples on Malta were the oldest in the world. I guess I was wrong,,,here's a short video about it, kinda spooky.

[Alpha]

Filmed at the Megalithomania Conference in Glastonbury on 9th May 2010 by Nautilus AV Productions.


Description: In southeast Turkey stands the oldest temple in the world. At nearly 12,000 years old, Gobekli Tepe is an enigma to archaeology. Consisting of a series of stone circles, made up of T-shaped pillars bearing exquisite carvings of animals, birds, insects and abstract human figures, this ritual complex was constructed at the end of the last Ice Age by faceless individuals, who rose far beyond the conventional understanding of the hunter-gatherers who occupied the Eurasian continent at this time. Why were these amazing stone circles buried overnight, sometime around 10,000 year ago? It is an enigma that seems to start in Africa some 17,000 years ago, and ends with not only the creation of civilization down in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, but also in the sudden emergence of the ancient Egyptian civilization, where the story continues with the discovery in 2008 of a cave underworld beneath the plateau at Giza. Powerful evidence suggests that this underground complex existed ever before even the Pyramid Age, and might well reflect an African origin to the roots of ancient Egyptian religion. It might also hold the key to answering claims that in the vicinity of the Sphinx is a lost Hall of Records.
Biog: History and science writer Andrew Collins is a leading expert on Gobekli Tepe, and provides a powerful insight into the strange worlds both at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and beneath the Pyramids at Giza. His books include From the Ashes of Angels (1996), Gods of Eden (1998), The Cygnus Mystery (2006), and Beneath the Pyramids (2009), in which he discovers and explores the lost underworld that exists beneath the Pyramids of Giza. Andrew, born in 1957, lives with his wife Sue in Marlborough, UK.

[Alpha]

for tonight's show:

June 28- 29, 2012 - Gobekli & Baltic Sea Mysteries, Linda Moulton Howe