8,000 years before Stonehenge and the PyramidsThe rocks of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) are a curiosity, and curiosity rocks.
Travel with me to that ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southeastern Turkey.
A shepherd wandering on the hillside where grows a solitary Mulberry tree, spies the top of an oblong rock that appears to have been shaped by human hands. He notices others like it in a pattern. He returns to the village and tells what he has seen. The digging begins. The year is 1994.
“Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.”
– David Lewis-Williams, Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg
“Gobekli Tepe changes everything.”
– Ian Hodder, Stanford University.
Stonehenge was built 5000 years ago in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC. Carbon dating of organic matter adhering to the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe reveal it to be 12,000 years old, meaning it was built around 10,000–9,000 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-wheel, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant.” – Tom Cox
Perhaps the strangest part of the Gobekli story is that around 8,000 BC, its inhabitants entombed their temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial hills on which the unnamed shepherd walked in 1994. It was a task of unspeakable labor.
No one knows why Gobekli was buried.
“The modern history of Gobekli Tepe begins in 1964, when a team of American archaeologists combed this remote province of southeast Turkey. The archaeologists noted that several odd-looking hills were blanketed with thousands of broken flints, a sure sign of ancient human activity. Despite this, the US scientists drifted away and did no excavating. Today, they must feel like the publisher who rejected the first Harry Potter manuscript.” – Sean Thomas
Thirty years later, a shepherd saw a pattern of rocks peeking through the soil and said, “I wonder…”
Google Gobekli Tepe and you’ll find that everyone mentions the shepherd but none can name him.
I want to locate that shepherd and bring him to Wizard Academy. For it’s people like him – men and women without credentials, funding or permission – who notice the daily miracles that surround us and point them out for all to see.
Galileo,
Da Vinci,
Buckminster Fuller,
and the shepherd of Gobekli Tepe;
to these servants of Curiosity,
I give my highest Salute.
Roy H. Williams