Very cool find :cool:
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/dec/03-dawn-of-civilization-writing-urban-life-warfare
QuoteThe Dawn of Civilization: Writing, Urban Life, and Warfare
An extraordinary ancient Syrian settlement shines a light on one of the most important moments in human history.
by Andrew Lawler
From the December 2009 issue; published online February 3, 2010
Joan Oates's sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one of the smaller mounds ringing the ancient city of Nagar, where she has excavated for a quarter century. Oates had just arrived to begin her latest season at the site, and this blemish on her cherished landscape annoyed her. Two young men on her team volunteered to investigate the damage. They returned, shaken. Jumping into the trench, one of them had come face-to-face with a skull. "Everywhere we looked, there were human bones," one recalls. "There were an enormous number of dead people."
More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates's team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.
The dual finds make Brak a unique window into the time when humans first began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, organize warfare on a mass scale. The conventional wisdom holds that urban living began nearly 1,000 years later and nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast in the so-called cradle of civilization once known as Sumer, located in today's Iraq. When civilization arrived in this northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain, the story goes, it was bestowed by the Sumerians from fabled cities like Ur, Uruk, Eridu. But this hulking mound in a remote corner of Syria (tell means "hill") offers a radical new view of just how, where, and why our globalized lifestyle may have gotten its start.
Like hundreds of other mounds in this region, Brak was built up over millennia as homeowners knocked down their decaying mud-brick houses and erected new structures on top of the remains. This tell towers over all others in the region, rising about 130 feet above the plain. The site contains a mini–mountain range of eroded hills and valleys covering more than 120 acres, surrounded by a sprawl of smaller mounds circling the central core like satellites. People lived here for at least 3,000 years, and probably much longer. Brak was abandoned around 1200 B.C. during the chaotic time when the Hittite empire collapsed and the Bronze Age ended.
The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in the conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies' bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.
"There was a big party of people feasting," says Oates matter-of-factly, passing cookies around the table during afternoon tea in Brak's cramped mud-brick dining hall.
At first glance, Oates seems an unlikely figure to revolutionize our understanding of the ancient world. She spent most of her middle years raising three children while assisting her husband, David, who directed excavations in Iraq and Syria for several decades. A self-described "dutiful wife," Oates says she was left to draw potsherds—"the boring stuff." These bits of broken pottery are both the bane and the backbone of Middle Eastern archaeology, providing crucial data on how, when, and who lived in a particular place. They are also as ubiquitous as sand on a beach. As I approach the campsite at Brak, nestled in a small hollow within the massive hill, my taxi's tires crunch with the sound of ancient pot pieces being pulverized.
Oates quickly emerged as an expert not only in identifying the many varieties of potsherds but also in interpreting them with remarkable precision. "When it comes to a mastery of pottery, there is no equal to Joan in Syria," says New York University archaeologist Rita Wright. "She's a very powerful and informed archaeologist with enormous experience."
And as a Western woman excavating in Iraq during the 1950s, the woman then named Joan Lines was a pioneer. At the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, she dug under the direction of Max Mallowan, the British archaeologist married to mystery writer Agatha Christie. Christie, who spent much of her time writing in the quiet of the Iraq countryside, took the young Joan under her wing, and the two would troll the souks for bargains, practicing their Arabic. At Nimrud, Joan also met David Oates. "The most important things in my life have all seemed to be just a series of coincidences," she says in a rare private reflection. "Falling on my feet, as it were."
That is a vital quality in the complicated and sometimes dangerous world of Middle Eastern archaeology. When the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein took over in Iraq in 1968, "heads and bodies were displayed in the square near our home, and we had to make detours so the children wouldn't see them," Oates recalls. The family moved the next year from Baghdad to London so David could take a professorship at an archaeology institute. In the mid-1970s, David decided that he wanted to tackle Brak, which lay just across the Iraqi border in Syria but was nevertheless part of Mesopotamia—the storied lands around and between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The dramatic site of Brak had been briefly excavated by Mallowan in the 1930s, but Christie found it not to her liking, since rainfall was too sparse for the flowers she loved to grow; they split their time with another ancient mound farther north with a slightly wetter climate.
Brak was in the archaeological boondocks. Virtually all the action during previous decades had focused on southern Iraq, in the low-lying alluvial plain that merges with the Persian Gulf. Work there had uncovered enormous ancient cities dating back to 3000 B.C. and even earlier. Mallowan worked at Ur, the legendary birthplace of Abraham, where he met Christie and helped his mentor Leonard Woolley excavate royal tombs dating to 2500 B.C. German archaeologists found the fabled metropolis of Uruk, celebrated as the place where writing originated and where the famous King Gilgamesh reigned; Uruk appears to have been a bustling metropolis by 3500 B.C. Nearby were the ruins of Eridu, viewed by the Sumerians themselves as the world's oldest city. These ruins yielded evidence of a small building, possibly a temple, dating to 5500 B.C.
The silt laid down by thousands of years of floods coupled with the frequent rebuilding of these sites in ancient times made it difficult to penetrate down to their origins. So we know precious little about how Sumerian cities began to evolve. By contrast, much if not all of Brak sits above the floodplain. That makes its earlier levels more accessible, theoretically. In the course of his dig here, Mallowan had uncovered a mysterious building he called the Eye Temple, for its thousands of unique votive objects with flat, trapezoidal bodies and thick necks topped with pairs of huge eyes. He also found evidence of richly decorated copper and gold work as well as small clay cones painted on their ends to adorn walls. This was a style popular in distant Uruk in the centuries after 3500 B.C., so Mallowan assumed the edifice was a southern concoction. He did not suspect that under his feet was evidence of an urban society independent of ancient Sumer, and at least as old.
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Arriving at Brak in 1976, Joan Oates wanted to explore the period before 3500 B.C. to see if settlement there predated the influx of southern influence. But her husband vetoed the plan as too risky. A huge mound like Brak is no simple wedding cake, with early layers below and later layers above; rather, it is a mind-bogglingly complicated mass of jumbled history. Wind and rain have had their way with the site in the 3,000 years since it was completely abandoned. Broken pottery bits have drifted down slopes, mixing with earlier potsherds. Foundations have vanished in sudden flash floods. A stone throne sits overturned in a deep gully, far from where its royal occupant once sat. Try to reach an early layer, David Oates knew, and you might find yourself exhausting both your time and money before you hit pay dirt.
And money has been a perpetual source of anxiety at Brak. The British School of Archaeology in Iraq and, later, the McDonald Institute at Cambridge University have supported the dig, but the Oates team has had to be frugal. Team members live in canvas tents during the spring and fall seasons—stifling on the frequent hot days, and uncomfortable at night when temperatures can plunge to near freezing. Only this year did electricity arrive.
So Joan patiently bided her time as she and her husband excavated the rich upper layers of the high mound. Then one day in 1981, her son spotted signs of a thick-walled building just below the surface on the northeast end of Brak, and her husband began to dig along what proved to be a fortification from the second millennium B.C. But in one corner of the excavation, Joan discovered bits of pottery dating back a thousand years farther. "I said, 'This is where we can get at the fourth millennium B.C.,'" she recalls. This time her husband agreed.
It took a decade of arduous work on a steep section of the hillside to carve back through the centuries. Even the 2004 death of her husband did not halt Oates's efforts. One morning, as if we are setting out for a stroll through the English countryside, she takes me on a walk across the mound to the massive wedge-shaped hole she and a generation of archaeologists and local workers have carefully made, its back wall soaring more than 30 feet. A slight woman in an off-white windbreaker, Oates pauses in the trench and peers around. She looks annoyed. "You are seeing here only a fraction of what's going on, a little window on the economy of the past," she says. "It's terribly frustrating." But even that small fraction that she and her team—made up largely of Syrian, American, and British excavators—have found is nothing short of revolutionary.
One of the most dramatic discoveries at Tell Brak is a large building with massive redbrick walls and ovens nearly 10 feet across. The types of pottery found, along with radiocarbon analysis of ash deposits, date the building to about 3800 B.C. By contrast, few large structures have been found from a time before 3500 B.C. in southern Iraq. Scattered across the building's floor was a varied collection of objects, from large piles of raw flint and obsidian from Turkey to finished blades. All about lay an array of beautiful stones collected and stored for making beads: jasper, marble, serpentine, diorite. The site also contained a large chunk of bitumen, a valuable tarlike substance used to bind stone or wood, which had to have been imported from eastern Iraq or Turkey. Mother-of-pearl inlays lay cut and ready to be placed in jewelry. The remains of sheep and goats abounded, as did spindle whorls, probably used to make yarn, and simple looms—all clear signs of weaving activity.
Among the most notable artifacts unearthed was a lavish, black-and-white chalice, its cup made of obsidian and its base of white marble, the two held together with bitumen. The rim of the cup showed evidence that it had been overlaid with a valuable metal such as gold, long since removed. Whoever owned the chalice clearly held great power. Nearby was a piece of clay bearing a large impression of a beautifully carved striding lion, a symbol of royalty even today. Amid a pile of mass-produced bowls were potsherds with marks similar to the pictographs that show up more than half a millennium later in the first writing system, cuneiform. Those marks may be the earliest evidence of writing anywhere in the world. "The development of symbols may have a long history in southern Mesopotamia too," Oates says. "But we just don't have the evidence there."
Beneath the redbrick building, Oates and her team found a more modest one dating to about 4000 B.C. This earlier structure was a center of craft production on a large scale and was also a busy site of communal cooking, judging from its huge ovens set next to plastered basins and bins. Just outside ran a street paved with pottery shards, headed for what Oates believes was a north gate facing the resource-rich mountains of Turkey.
Next door, Oates uncovered a large edifice with a massive basalt threshold and thick walls, entered by passing through two small rooms, perhaps guardhouses. She believes this is the oldest administrative center yet known. Nearby, the excavators found bits of clay stamped with lion and snake motifs, seals that signified ownership of property, and a statuette with large eyes. At the Eye Temple, the site of an earlier dig on the southern side of the mound, Oates found signs that the earliest structure here dates back to about 3800 B.C. And nearby, in another trench, her team found traces of a brick platform and a wall built 1,000 years before that.
These excavations prove that Tell Brak was a place of impressive wealth and sophistication, an important trading center and a major (and previously unappreciated) player in the early game of civilization. It even had suburbs. Oates invited a team of American archaeologists to examine the area beyond the high mound, which covers only about one-fifth of the site's nearly 750 acres. The remainder lies within the halo of smaller mounds circling the site. By methodically sampling the area inside and outside this halo—a laborious task of mapping, examining pottery, and digging small test pits—the researchers concluded that Brak covered 320 acres in the period between 3900 and 3400 B.C. Some 20,000 people may have lived within the city limits, and dozens of smaller sites lay within a 10-mile radius. And this large population—only Uruk in southern Mesopotamia is thought to have been as large in this era—was supported without any irrigation.
So is Brak the world's earliest well-documented city? There is no accepted definition of what constitutes a city, Oates points out. But the size and elaborate nature of the site certainly put it on or near a par with its southern rivals. "I would never say Brak is larger than Uruk," she says. "But there is clearly a complex society developing in the north that is independent of the south." Jason Ur, a Harvard archaeologist who participated in the suburban survey, adds that all the evidence "surely qualifies Brak as urban, if that term is to have any meaning."
Ur (coincidentally sharing the name of the famed southern Mesopotamian city) was the first to jump into the trench made by that backhoe in 2006 at the small mound just north of Brak's central hill. But it was left to Arkadiusz Soltysiak, a Polish bioarchaeologist, to sort through the human bones. He found no infants and few elderly and determined that some of the victims had suffered traumatic injuries, as might come from a blow by club or mace, that had already healed before they were killed. The incomplete, scattered skeletons made it hard for him to establish the gender of the victims, but surviving teeth hinted at a population of adolescents and young adults. Some of them also appear to have suffered from malnutrition.
Soltysiak leans toward the theory that this event at what locals call Tell Majnuna was a massacre, noting that some of the bones are from people not of warrior age. If so, it could have been an inside job. Others think the dead might have been locals who rebelled or otherwise offended the city's elite, were put to death, and then were denied decent burial. But Augusta McMahon, who is the Brak dig's field director, argues that the scene more closely resembles an attack. "The age profile, the piles of bodies, and the rubbish context says battlefield cleanup," she tells me as we trudge through green wheat fields from the high mound to Majnuna. "And the corpse abuse—the way they were haphazardly piled up, the way femurs were made into tools—says the victims were enemies of whoever buried them." One possible scenario, she says, is that Brak's enemies attacked from the outside and managed to kill some civilians in the melee before being routed.
In either case, nabbing food or finished goods may have been a motive for the bloodshed. (Two years ago, grain shortages during a drought led to riots in this part of modern-day Syria.) Brak's obvious concentration of wealth would pose a temptation to outsiders.
Soltysiak and McMahon agree on what happened next. The victors or perpetrators left their victims on the field for weeks or even months. The rotting corpses were eventually hauled to the shallow depression at Majnuna and unceremoniously dumped. The total body count is clearly in the hundreds, though for now excavations there have ceased. About 10 yards from the mass grave, the team found another cache of bones that are probably the result of the same incident: mostly skulls and femurs, stacked in relatively neat piles. Two dozen of the femurs were whittled at one end to a point, perhaps to dig around in the skulls of the dead, but for what purpose is unknown. Soltysiak recalls being startled to discover the human bones that had been made into tools here.
Then came a massive feast. Mixed on top of the death pit were the bones of cows, sheep, and goats along with broken plates. "The animals were cut in about the same place on a large scale, in an industrialized way," says Jill Weber, the team's zooarchaeologist. "Not necessarily by the same person, but in the same way." In her mud-brick laboratory on the mound, she pulls out massive scarred cow bones. Such wholesale slaughter would have been unusual, she says, particularly the slaughter of cows, which were typically considered too valuable to kill because of milk production and plowing. "No expense was spared," Weber says. "This was an important event."
And the last part
QuoteAnd it was just the start of a series of violent acts that shook ancient Brak. Back at Majnuna, McMahon points out another mass grave, dating to a century or so later, adjacent to the first pit. One clump of bones looks as if it had been piled into a bag that decayed. Just a few yards away is another mass of human bones, dating to about 3600 B.C. The victims in both slaughters appear to be young, the skeletons are jumbled, and there are no grave goods, which would have been typical in a formal burial.
Along with the bones are all manner of refuse, such as broken pottery and flint tools. Majnuna seems to have been one of Brak's main dumps. One possibility is that the waves of enemies who threatened the city—whether rebellious locals or foreign raiders—were treated like garbage. As we step off the mound, the man who owns the area containing the mass graves pulls up in his new GM pickup. "Come for breakfast!" he insists with typical Arab hospitality. As we walk down the dusty road to his home, he pulls a gun from his holster to admire it.
Violence at the dawn of civilization was not unique to Brak. An hour's drive to the east is Hamoukar, which was a thriving settlement during the early and mid-fourth millennium B.C., around the time that Brak arose. Echoing the sophistication of its neighbor, Hamoukar had well-planned houses with courtyards, large ovens, seal impressions in the form of lions killing deer (a style seen at Brak as well). Recently a joint Syrian and American team found evidence of a battle around 3500 B.C. in which Hamoukar buildings were destroyed.
This attack may have been more than an incursion by marauders looking for food or goods. At that time, the southern city of Uruk began to expand its influence, and Uruk-style pottery appears throughout the Middle East. Possibly those southerners ran into opposition from the formidable northern settlements of Hamoukar and Brak, whose inhabitants may have resented the growing power of Uruk and its allies. Brak and Hamoukar were burned around the same time, but "evidence of both northern and southern material suggests a peaceful coexistence afterward," Oates says. "The 'destroyers' could well have come from Anatolia or anywhere else." By 3400 B.C., pottery typical of Uruk predominated, and Brak's Eye Temple had been renovated in a southern Mesopotamian style. When Brak appears in the historical record in the third millennium, it is as the important city of Nagar. Overwhelmed by superior technology, better military organization, or a persuasive new ideology, the pioneering civilization at Brak and its environs became an adjunct of the south, which went on to create even grander city-states, bureaucracies, and empires.
Violence and cultural sophistication may in fact have gone hand in hand in creating the first urban societies. "Tell Brak is not just another archaeological site but a place where new aspects of humanity emerged, and our work has the potential to explain them," Ur says. Finding answers in Iraq may not be possible for a very long time, given the political troubles there. This gives the exploratory digs in Syria a special urgency.
Brak's independent advances in the north came to an abrupt end, but perhaps not a dead end. Maybe the interaction between the two competing visions, whether through trade or warfare (or both), helped spur the innovations that changed our world. "Civilization spreads like a virus. It happens in clusters and not in isolation," says Guillermo Algaze, an archaeologist at the University of California at San Diego. In the past decade, excavators have begun to find evidence to support this idea around the globe. A thousand years after Brak lost its independence, an astonishing array of urban sites sprang up across the Iranian plateau, central Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula. In the following 1,000 years, a host of interacting cultures contributed to what emerged as Chinese civilization.
In exposing one of the world's earliest experiments in urban living, Oates and her team are illuminating both the creative and violent tendencies of humanity and painting a much richer picture of how our species left the country for life in the city, a process that is still in full swing today. "In textbooks you learn that civilization starts with Sumer, and everything else is peripheral," says Algaze, who was once an outspoken advocate of the dominance of the south. "But Brak shows a picture more complex than that. It has forced us to think differently."
Eyes peeled, Oates continues her push to dig even deeper into Brak's past. "She's brilliant—and she's changed the field," Algaze says. "And she'll get to those earlier levels." Unlike her old friend Agatha Christie, Oates is after bigger game than a single murderer. In the ultimate whodunit of civilization, the ancient people of Tell Brak were, at the very least, important accomplices.
Very cool, thanks Tim :)
It is pretty clear that early urbanism and large scale violence went hand in hand. Jericho is probably the most ancient urban site in the world, and it is notable for its huge fortifications. You don't build enormous walls unless you have a serious reason to.
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:16:44 AM
It is pretty clear that early urbanism and large scale violence went hand in hand. Jericho is probably the most ancient urban site in the world, and it is notable for its huge fortifications. You don't build enormous walls unless you have a serious reason to.
I'd think that was more trying to avoid large scale violence. But you're right, there's pretty solid evidence that violence has declined generally over time from amazing heights. I recall seeing a graph of murders in Britain from about 1400 forward, and the decrease is amazing.
Quote from: ulmont on February 11, 2010, 10:24:22 AM
I'd think that was more trying to avoid large scale violence. But you're right, there's pretty solid evidence that violence has declined generally over time from amazing heights. I recall seeing a graph of murders in Britain from about 1400 forward, and the decrease is amazing.
*Scratches head* not really the same issue ... ;)
The point being that warfare was, evidently, something that occured at the very start of urbanism (and probably before).
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:41:02 AM
The point being that warfare was, evidently, something that occured at the very start of urbanism (and probably before).
Yes. I thought urbanism was in part to avoid barbarian raids?
Quote from: ulmont on February 11, 2010, 10:46:13 AM
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:41:02 AM
The point being that warfare was, evidently, something that occured at the very start of urbanism (and probably before).
Yes. I thought urbanism was in part to avoid barbarian raids?
It's unknown. It is also possible that the concentration of wealth in one place represented by urbanism may have made large-scale raiding more attractive.
It is also unknown whether the enemies the walls were designed against were primarily nomads and other barbarians, or primarily other, rival cities.
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:52:53 AM
It is also unknown whether the enemies the walls were designed against were primarily nomads and other barbarians, or primarily other, rival cities.
Or, indeed, whether the walls were there because the city was there, or vice-versa.
Quote from: grumbler on February 11, 2010, 12:28:54 PM
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:52:53 AM
It is also unknown whether the enemies the walls were designed against were primarily nomads and other barbarians, or primarily other, rival cities.
Or, indeed, whether the walls were there because the city was there, or vice-versa.
In the same vein, I saw a very interesting pre-columbian fortress near Oaxaca that was clearly designed for a very specific purpose - it was a walled, flat-topped mesa lacking any signs of inhabitation near a very large town. There was no well or possibility of a well on the site, where the average temp was incredibly hot.
Seems to me that this must have been a refuge against immediate raiding only. People didn't live there, since there was no water and no easy access to the land - they must have lived year round down below in the town, and used the fortress as a place to retreat to when enemies threatened. Those enemies must not have been the sort capable of a lengthy siege, since without water other than waht could be stored in pots the place must have fallen if surrounded for a few days.
Point is, it was obviously a lot easier to build a fort of this sort than to fortify the town itself; most of the defences were natural, caused by the steepness of the climb up to the mesa, only improved here and there with stone. But it would do no good against an enemy willing and able to stay in the field. At some point in cultural evolution the possibility of such enemies developed, and walled towns, rather than mere refuges, became necessary.
I was recently reading a book on ancient mesopotamia, which discussed that with wild wheat it wasn't obvious the region needed irrigation and agriculture to sustain a large population. Maybe these were developed in order for a large group to stay together in one place for defense.
Executive summary or bolding, cumfart.
Quote from: ulmont on February 11, 2010, 10:46:13 AM
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:41:02 AM
The point being that warfare was, evidently, something that occured at the very start of urbanism (and probably before).
Yes. I thought urbanism was in part to avoid barbarian raids?
Before urbanism, wouldn't they all be barbarians?
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 11, 2010, 05:24:45 PM
Before urbanism, wouldn't they all be barbarians?
Well, that lasted at least until 1183.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbzcFbhPV-o
Also, seems like crops were domesticated earlier than thought.
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jan-feb/24
QuoteTop 100 Stories of 2009 #24: World's First Grain Silos Discovered
The agricultural revolution may have started earlier than we thought.
by Lindsey Konkel
From the January-February special issue; published online for subscribers only on January 25, 2010
In June archaeologist Ian Kuijt at the University of Notre Dame and colleagues reported that they had uncovered the world's earliest known granaries, located at the Dhra archaeological site on the shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes food storage structures dating back 11,000 years, a millennium before humans were thought to have domesticated crops. Analysis of grains from the site suggests that settlers there stored a mix of wild and cultivated barley, along with an early variety of wheat.
"The surprise is not only that they were storing food but that they were storing it in such a sophisticated way," Kuijt says. The granary floors at Dhra were elevated, most likely to keep out mice and to prevent spoilage from dampness; they were also slightly sloped, perhaps for drainage. By providing a buffer against famine and allowing larger groups of people to settle together, these storehouses may have fostered the cultural transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to complex, cohesive societies.
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 11, 2010, 06:45:21 PM
-snip-
They seem to be continually pushing that date back. Last I heard it was aprox. 8K BP, now it's 11K.
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233844
Quote
By Patrick Symmes | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 19, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything...It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.
The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don't move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.
Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent's northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins. Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area—perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance—a few centuries after Göbekli's founding. Animal husbandry also began near here—the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.
The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were ex-posed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial. Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt's great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.
Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. "The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique." No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.
The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.
Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest "dig house" in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.
Disputes are normal at the site—the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. ("Three groups," the archeologist says, exasperated. "Not two. Three!") So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.
Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."
© 2010
It's good that he doesn't over-interpret his finds.
Quote from: The Brain on February 21, 2010, 08:50:40 AM
It's good that he doesn't over-interpret his finds.
:lol:
When you find something this big, it's hard to resist coming up with a new overarching theory. After all, you don't becoming famous in academia for confirming the status quo.
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 11, 2010, 05:24:45 PM
Quote from: ulmont on February 11, 2010, 10:46:13 AM
Quote from: Malthus on February 11, 2010, 10:41:02 AM
The point being that warfare was, evidently, something that occured at the very start of urbanism (and probably before).
Yes. I thought urbanism was in part to avoid barbarian raids?
Before urbanism, wouldn't they all be barbarians?
Only those who actually said "bar bar bar".
Bar bar bar.
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 21, 2010, 08:39:24 AM
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
I know. It means it was built app. 5,000 years before the Earth was created. How did they transport it to the planet, then?
Quote from: Martinus on February 21, 2010, 02:32:59 PM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 21, 2010, 08:39:24 AM
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
I know. It means it was built app. 5,000 years before the Earth was created. How did they transport it to the planet, then?
What's the point of this post? We know you don't believe this, we know I don't believe that, so what's the point?
Cause Marty likes to argue with a Strawman?
It'll be a shame all these fascinating finds will be gone after Iran develops The Bomb(tm), and they're all glassed over after an exchange with The Zionist Entity(tm).
Why would anyone hit Turkey? They have fairly good relations with both states.
Quote from: Razgovory on February 21, 2010, 05:45:57 PM
Cause Marty likes to argue with a Strawman?
he liked its feet.
Quote from: Malthus on February 12, 2010, 09:36:03 AM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 11, 2010, 06:45:21 PM
-snip-
They seem to be continually pushing that date back. Last I heard it was aprox. 8K BP, now it's 11K.
Now it's 12,000 years!
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/embargo-thursday-2pm-early-humans-iran-were-growing-wheat-12-6C10536898
Quote
Early humans in Iran were growing wheat 12,000 years ago
Nidhi Subbaraman NBC News
Among stone grinding tools, clay figures shaped like humans and animals and carved bone artifacts, archaeologists have harvested ancient grains from an early human settlement that are preserved 12,000 years. The finds suggest that generations of communities were earnestly experimenting with plant cultivation since the last Ice Age, and that agriculture, which laid the foundations for later civilizations, emerged concurrently in a number of locations that archaeologists recognize as the "Fertile Crescent" of the near east.
Since the early 1960s, when the first signs of farming were discovered in parts of Israel, archeologists have uncovered scores of ancient farming communities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq dating a few thousand years older than the first evidence of farming found in Mexico and China. Whether they shared their ideas about farming or came to them independently has remained an open question.
Now, a detailed history of plant cultivation gleaned from sediments at the Chogha Golan site in Iran suggest that the eastern section of the Fertile Crescent was as active as better known sites in the west. A group of scientists present their findings of ancient lentils, wheat, barley and pea grass in the Thursday issue of Science.
The samples themselves aren't remarkable to look at. "It's very dried and cracked and looks like something you want to brush off your table unless you know it's priceless remains," Melinda Zeder, an archaeozoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who studies ancient domestication practices, told NBC News. "To look at them they're not much but the stories that they tell are remarkable."
Scientists have already found a rich collection of stone tools, clay figurines in the shapes of people and animals, and carved bone artifacts. But the researchers at this site were struck by the abundance of plant material that they found with it.
Usually, "If you get a seed or two you'd be happy," Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and one member of the research team told NBC News. But at Chogha Golan, "With one bucket we'd get a handful of material," he said. The researchers analyzed 21,500 plant samples collected from a small section of the site, which in some sections is 8 meters deep.
The new site also suggests why farming may have evolved. One line of reasoning suggests that it arose when early humans wanted to feed larger groups — when just hunting and gathering wouldn't do.
But Zeder believes the timing of the evidence from this site — in a warming phase after the Pleistocene ice age — shows "a whole other kind of image." To her, it suggests that cultivation arose during a period of abundance and bounty, and early people took this opportunity to mess around with wild varieties of barley, wheat, lentils and pea grass.
At about the same time, in pockets of the populated world, human communities were beginning to perform burial rituals and start feasting, Zeder said. "All of this is directed at sustaining communities."
Though earliest humans weren't planning for it, agriculture set them on the path to a more settled, a more social life, and eventually more innovative life.
"You do not get the cooperation and the time to make important new kinds of discoveries that require a more sedentary, more village kind of setting," Hendrik Bruins, a researcher at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev told NBC News. "I think the article is an important new piece of information from the Eastern part of the near east."
Plant samples were collected by floating small amounts of soil and burnt residue from the dig sites in water. The wheatey remnants of grains and cereals rise to the surface from which they can be scooped up.
Whether it's a single person who had one "Aha moment," or whether it evolved "democratically across the entire region," Zeder said, "Being able to parse that out gives us a better idea of human history, of how people have faced challenges in the past, and how we as a species have got where we got today."
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 21, 2010, 08:39:24 AM
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
You just now finding out about this? You are not the village reporter. :P
http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,5729.msg299298.html#msg299298
QuoteThink these cats are on to something?
Nabta Playa and Brophy's theory
http://unmyst3.blogspot.com/2009/12/nabta-playa-megalithic-stone.html
Göbekli Tepe and surrounding sites.
http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html
Great Sphinx
http://www.robertschoch.com/sphinxcontent.html
Quote from: 11B4V on July 05, 2013, 01:20:53 AM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 21, 2010, 08:39:24 AM
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
You just now finding out about this? You are not the village reporter. :P
:hmm:
Quote from: 11B4V on July 05, 2013, 01:20:53 AM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 21, 2010, 08:39:24 AM
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
You just now finding out about this? You are not the village reporter. :P
http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,5729.msg299298.html#msg299298
QuoteThink these cats are on to something?
Nabta Playa and Brophy's theory
http://unmyst3.blogspot.com/2009/12/nabta-playa-megalithic-stone.html
Göbekli Tepe and surrounding sites.
http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html
Great Sphinx
http://www.robertschoch.com/sphinxcontent.html
Check the date on his post, Sherlock. ;)
Quote from: Malthus on July 05, 2013, 08:30:04 AM
Quote from: 11B4V on July 05, 2013, 01:20:53 AM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on February 21, 2010, 08:39:24 AM
Holy shit! A temple complex that's 11,500 years old!? Mind blowing! :o
You just now finding out about this? You are not the village reporter. :P
http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,5729.msg299298.html#msg299298
QuoteThink these cats are on to something?
Nabta Playa and Brophy's theory
http://unmyst3.blogspot.com/2009/12/nabta-playa-megalithic-stone.html
Göbekli Tepe and surrounding sites.
http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html
Great Sphinx
http://www.robertschoch.com/sphinxcontent.html
Check the date on his post, Sherlock. ;)
Damn it you ruined it. :mad:
plus I quoted the wrong one.
Hey, Martinus is back!
Hey, SFC, those links were awesome.
I was aware of Robert Schoch work on the Sphinx, but I didn't know about Nabta Playa and Brophy's theory.
Quote from: Siege on July 05, 2013, 12:17:34 PM
Hey, SFC, those links were awesome.
I was aware of Robert Schoch work on the Sphinx, but I didn't know about Nabta Playa and Brophy's theory.
It makes for some interesting reading.