The Myths and Religion of Gobekli Tepe

in 2021 an 11,000 year old stone relief was found in saur Southeastern turkey and until now no one knew what it meant so today I will unravel this mystery and explain how a discovery in the 1960s in southe Turkey was deemed an impossible find at the time and it then resulted in the most amazing archaeological find of an ancient site the site of GLE tape a 12 ,000 year old settlement that was used by hunter gatherers gockley tee has always fascinated people and it is one of the most requested topics I've been asked to cover and so in this video I will use the latest archaeological information from the kcle teepe archaeological team including information directly from their project coordinator Dr Lee CLA and with this I will explain the site's role in the evolution of farming religion the creation of a Pantheon of New Gods and I will also reconstruct ancient stories using art and iconography found at the site which would have been told around 12,000 years ago this is a story about transition the evolution of society the creation of gods the myths of hunter gatherers and conception of modern civilization and as such it is worth enjoying with a good cup of tea so sit down relax and and welcome to kenford kcy tee is one amongst many sites in the Tas or stone Mountains region located in San Li province of Southeastern turkey here over 20 sites dating from around 12,500 years ago to 10,200 years ago have been discovered and these are known as pre Pottery Neolithic sites these sites are all linked due to their architecture and artwork being similar suggesting that the people who inhabited them had similar beliefs and probably similar language and by studying the information found across these sites I will try and reconstruct some of their beliefs and I'll do this by focusing on kcle teepe as it is one of the largest sites but before we can do this we need to clarify some misconceptions as some people believe that gockley Tee holds e of teric knowledge or was built by a now lost ancient Advanced civilization however the hill which is a large Limestone Ridge with a artificial Mound on top of it is a very common occurrence in the near East and these are often referred to as Tes or hoaks in Turkish or they're called TS in Arabic now our knowledge of this site started in the 1960s when archaeological fragments were discovered around this site including the tops of what are now the famous t key pillars however it was not until 1994 That official excavations began and these were led by the late Claire Schmidt of the University of er Langan Newberg alongside official Turkish organizations and institutions and whilst Schmidt's work was excellent some of it is now 30 years old and much more excavation has been done and his findings have been revised now and updated but we still find that many people knowledge of the site remains based on his original findings and the media continues to regurgitate his original perceptions of the site and so therefore I think it's important I provide you with the latest information from Dr Lee Clair the current project coordinator of for the archaeological work at gockley teepe so the first question is why was gockley teepe built and the thoughts of many academics 60 years ago was that hunted gatherers were nomadic and they had no desire technical ability or enough resources to build such a site as gockley tee and so such a site didn't seem possible and this is probably the key to so much Fascination about the site and the reason why it's turned our thinking on its head well that is the perception anyway but the truth is that this isn't a new piece of History being inserted into our timeline of human progress it is a find that fills a gap we had in history and so understanding that then let's clear up a few things quickly based on the latest archaological information first off there's absolutely no evidence at all of the domestication of animals or of cereal at gockley teepe and this means this is not the site of a Neolithic agricultural farming culture nor was farming developed here now whilst there is no doubt that agrarian culture was filtering into society at this point in time when this was being built the society was still very much a hunter gatherer Society now also near gck tippe is another site known as Kahan tippe which is very similar and which is commonly said to be an older side than gcle tee this is not the case there is no evidence we have confidence in any way to suggest otherwise yes there has been carbon dating of material from that is older than 12,000 years but this data is considered to be an outlier um based on material that wasn't part of the original carane site but there are slightly older sites and these do show more primitive styles of buildings and that's allow us to understand that gcle Tee wasn't just built out of nowhere but it was an evolution of buildings from hundreds if not over thousands of years before now also KC was in use for at least a couple of thousand years which means it developed and changed during its lifetime and whil kcly tee is not a temple per se the original construction which consisted of special buildings the buildings with tea pillars would have had ceremonial and ritual events happening within them on various occasions meaning that there was some religious consideration around the buildings and what they contained but alongside this we also see that there are permanent settlement buildings or what I guess we should call homes and these were built around the special buildings indicating that they were also built after the special buildings so this place was a permanent settlement but because the buildings were late it suggest that P permanent settlement was later however it is very possible that earlier settlement buildings were there but they were made from organic material such as wood rather than the ston houses and these would have been dismantled and or decayed and so we have zero trash of them at the moment so why do Hunter gathers have a permanent settlement is a good question and I'll answer that in a minute but first I also want to add that once we often see pictures of Quebec tee is being uncovered without a roof we are absolutely sure these buildings had ruths this is indicated through grooves on the top of te pillar suggesting Woods was laid on top of them but also because the walls of the rooms were made of plaster and there were dies used to color the art and this would have been washed away the art the color the plaster if there were no roofs and that would make no sense at all but perhaps the most convincing argument is the evidence we find for wooden beams now whil the environment isn't conducive to preserving organic material and so we don't find wooden beams as such what we do find in archaeological terms is the negative space a wooden beam would have been in in effect if you find the soil and then uncover it you'll find a wooden beam shaped space within a soil where a beam would have been but which has decayed over time and these are inevidence at the site so folling on from this there's also a narrative at one time at least that these sites were deliberately buried in a kind of termination ritual and we do see behavior in certain rooms of buildings at other sites such as Kahan Tee of this happening but in gockley tee this doesn't seem to be the case the reason it is buried is because of where it was built the site is built built on a hill and so slippage from the surrounding soil and subsidence as well from Higher Ground seems to play the large role in burying the site and pushing the sight inwards so that we see within the sight's lifetime walls having to be rebuilt to compensate for this slippage and we do see rooms getting smaller over time as earth falls into them and we do see therefore multiple walls to back to this a really good way to understand this further is looking at modern day Rome which is a very clear example where we see the Roman Forum uh which was in use 2,000 years ago at least a few meters below modernday Rome and the roads being used so imagine this effect after 2,000 years of a few meters but then multiply that by four which is 8,000 years the age when Quebec T would stop being used and imagine how they should be so we're very confident of that and the last thing I really want to cover and I'll talk about more in the video is Quebec tee being used as an astronomical site often there's a tea pillar represented called the vulture Stone which has a number of animals on it and these are said to represent star constellations but the fact is that Hunter gathers were certainly not using the same constellations as we know today 12 th years ago yes we do see one example of earthia being used in the cosmic hunt one of our oldest stories but that is a unique example and on top of that there's only this one volter stone this is really used in explaining this astronomical alignment there are 200 pillars at Quebec tee maybe more we haven't uncovered it all yet and if we've only using one then that's a case of taking data out of context is an outlier and so again exceptionally unlikely to represent these star constellations and with that I think that is probably a wrap up of the key issues to date and so what we really see is that quebeck Tee was a site that was a natural progression and evolution from earlier sites uh or be at a larger site than most and whil all this gives us a glimpse of what was happening there it still doesn't ask the question why was it it built so let me answer that for you within archaeology we talk about a culture called the pre potery culture which existed in the Neolithic period and so we refer to this as the PPN and this is split into two eras ppna with the older period and ppnb the younger period And this is important to us as it denotes a time before Pottery was invented and so Pottery wasn't being used and this really provides us with a really really vital clue as to why we think Ackley tee was built and that is for storage and specifically for the storage of food now research has shown and quite detailed research that a single person working very hard for three to maybe four weeks at the end of summer could Harvest enough grain to feed a family of four for a whole year and if you were a hunter gather and you came across a fertile grassland with plenty of grain would you not want to spend a month getting a Year's worth of food I mean life was hard back then I mean you may think life is hard today but back then life was much much tougher and so you gathered resources when you could the trouble is that if you harvested a Year's worth of grain then what would you do with it you know for a year you couldn't just leave it where you harvested it because people from other tribes or Pest and verine such rodents would eat it and steal it and after all the effort of harvesting the grain you really don't want it not to be protected you may have thought about carrying it with you but that was just impractical the grain HED by a single person in a month would easily be over 200 kilos or over 400 lb in weight you just wouldn't be able to hunt meet and take this much grain with you at the same time you had to have another solution and the solution was storage and because there were no small containers to store food safely away from rodents such as Pottery because this is the pre Pottery era the next best thing was to have a building or a room which could be protected to a degree at least and so we find probable reason for gockley Tey and the other SES being built and that is that it was principally a store for grain and to store a mass of grain needs a big room and this needs many people to build the room and these people need then to share the Grain and so they would have to live near it and whilst it was being stored and looked after some people could continue to go out hunting and come back with meat to supplement the grain for food and so the result of this evolution is humans not becoming agricultural Farmers per se but hunted gathers with agrarian cultural traits coming into their thoughts and behaviors and this in turn would affect their beliefs and so their gods and their rituals and I'll talk about this a bit more in a little while but first let's have a talk about the evolution of farming the evolution of farming didn't happen overnight it was the eating of wild grasses by humans that would eventually lead to it something that had been going on for for thousands of years by the time keckley Tey was built but we have no evidence wild grasses were harvested in Mass until around 12,000 years ago and this is because we considered hunter gatherers to be generally no medic with no fixed Abode and the mass harvesting of any food would require storage but this was an interesting period of time for the earth and the CL it changed a lot between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago uh and when quebeck Tey was built Earth had just recovered from the younger dest period where temperatures had lowered significantly and now the temperature has warming up there was quite a lot of rain in Southeastern turkey and this climate change seems to have brought about an abundance of wild grasses and so with the knowledge that harves in the grain at a certain time of year would allow everyone to eat until the following year then agrarian culture slowly grew and developed within the hunter gather cultures around the near East until it reaches a Tipping Point where communities see a benefit in harvesting as much grain as possible from the wild grasses and then storing it now we see this happening 12,000 years ago but it would be around another 2,000 year before grasses were being deliberately planted in the near East and a particular kind of grass to help combat what would have been harsh conditions as the earth's climate changed again and so when that happened the hunter gather cultures then could be considered neic agricultural farmers and I say this was probably bought about because grasses like Rye very Hardy grasses could grow in the well changing climate now this evolution of fulltime cultural farming happened in what we know as the Fertile crant which is a stretch of fertile land going along the path of the tigis and eaes rivers and eventually down into the Nile but the earli settlements of all that seem to developed the first stages of agrarian culture occur in what is sometimes known as The Golden Triangle which is slightly to the north of the Fertile cresant and so we can feel confident in saying that there was probably influence from the people in The Golden Triangle with those in the fertile prison there was probably some overlap either through trade um but certainly ideas possibly traveled about farming and what you may find about interesting about this map is this shows where agricultural farming started across the world and the dispersal of these start points also suggest that there was no connection between major cultural advances to start this process and so this also gives confidence that areas around kcle tee is where the very first agrarian cultures developed because there are no earlier cultures that could have influenced them and so this is where we would see the first cultural societal and belief systems be affected by these new ways and their demands on people after exploring the possible reasons for the construction of KC tee and its primary use it's now time to delve into the art and architecture to gain an insight into the beliefs and rituals of the so-called nomadic hunter gatherers who may have frequented this sacred site now while Ki wasn't a temple in the traditional sense of the word it is evident that religious beliefs at the time were practiced here you know this was a sacred place for ritual and ceremony there is red Ocha found in certain enclosures in certain places and this often indicates that a sacred ritual was taking place we see a Bard jaw near a bore figure which implies a possible animal sacrifice or killing and this is further reinforced by the depiction of dead or dying cattle or Oro on pillar 66 here the animal's knees are bent and his tongue is hanging out suggesting it is dead or dying and why is it dead or dying well probably sacrifice CH played a part this was key in the beliefs of people around this time one pillar which there's been much debate about has been pillar 43 the vulture Stone as mentioned earlier some people have Associated this with astronomical alignment to constellations which I do not think is true however if one considers that gcki tby relied on hares in grasses and particular times of year they would have to know when this time of year was when it was coming up and also considering that when they should hunt for meat and what sort of meat should be hunted when and if we consider this and look at Pillar 43 then some stand out this pillar the vulture is probably a type of calendar with animals predicting the seasons when to do things and not astronomical occurrences and the reason we can feel quite confident about this is that cranes are migratory birds and scorpions although around all year it's only the wet Seasons when they become more visible as they look to find dry shelter within the settlements we also see Wild grasses and a vulture possibly with an egg and all these things are very specific things that happening at different times of the year and so knowing when these things happened would help people ascertain when to gather certain types of food and this isn't unique there is a paper which was releas in generally 2023 which showed a form of protor riting was being used tens of thousands of years ago to keep track of animals migrations by hunter gatherers by drawing pictures of animals and marking them in ways to represent how many lunar cycles pass for particular events to happen whether migratory or gestation so we are aware that hun gathers were able to calculate this information pill 56 is an a example of a richly decorated pillar due to the number of animals on it there are 55 in all and they are so densely Cal together that identifying all of them is a challenge but we do see ducks and leopards snakes cranes and probably what is an eagle with a snake in its Talons in the center of it and what is interesting is that this bird of praise faing the opposite direction to all the other animals perhaps suggesting its importance in this scene and so perhaps it is a main character in a myth of animals however trying to understand the story of an Eagle catching its prey as other animals move away from it is really so far out of our grasp it is a story we will probably never be able to reconstruct when humans stepped away from nature I've always stated that with settlements and agricultural farming we would start to see the gods personified and and the reason is that as people lived in larger and larger settlements their connection with nature lessons their direct need for nature lessons instead humans would then rely on other humans to fix problems and so we see the spirits found in nature in the animistic nature of things slowly fade as gods are personified to look like the humans who Rule and to me one of the fascinating things we see here at gck tee is what is probably the earliest representations of this transition within their art you see before Quebec tee our evidence suggests that art focused on our natural surroundings the animals we relied on for food the animals that considered as food withe we see the first clear and significant representations of humans in art from life-sized statues that represent humans such as the Earth and man to tea pillars that are considered anthropomorphic shapes with arms with loin cloths jewelry often unique in it symbology to images we see in reliefs and to human figures in composite carvings this is the first time we see humans properly represented in art and the general consensus is that it is showing humans are starting to separate themselves from nature believing they are stronger than nature that they can control nature although these people are still under gathers they still understand nature but they also now believe that they have defeated nature and this feeds through to the narratives we see in some of the art but are these figures actually conveying any specific information about the culture and its beliefs it has been observed that many of the figures in the art not just of humans but of animals indicate that the figures are of male sex which suggests a society where males are the focus of power however a majority of the human bones discovered are female suggesting that females will give them more burial rights now while there is still much opportunity to find far more human remains at the keki tee and this position of how people seem to be or how the sexy seem to be placed may change but until then there's an interesting aspect of what could be a transition here you see in societies with social hierarchies stress increases especially amongst the lower melons of that society and as a result people would rely more on help from powerful people such as a shaman although this was a settlement with a population of around 2 to 300 people it wasn't particularly complex and was probably quite egalitarian that therefore it would indicate that such a religious figure was male as this is the norm we see in such societies and the beliefs would have the shaman going into a trance and visiting the spirit world of the ancestors and animals to find answers to problems but for completeness we see female shamans appearing in societies which are more complex with more hierarchy and therefore more stress and these female shamans tend not to visit the spirit world but instead get possessed by Spirits in a ritualistic setting often with dancing and music and So based on archaeological evidence we have so far we have to assume that this was an animistic culture with shamanistic rituals with probably male Shaman um and we can delve a little deeper into this there are many examples we see from cultures that continue to exist in a remote form from the expansion of colonialism and from the development of towns and cities and from farming and in these cultures we see nature continue to take a key role in beliefs examples of this are the Inuit who do not have Gods but do have stories about why things happen and these usually have many animals or animal human hybrids that form a key part of these stories we also see in the Siberian cultures with have forms of totemism with bears in particular having a key role in culture as it acts as the king of the animals and so is closely related to the beliefs of the Inu in some ways and for a final example we see in Australia the First Nation Australians having Spirits all around them representing animals and their ancestors there are again no formal deities as we would recognize them if for example you follow the abrahamic religion but if you are interested in these cultures then I have made videos about if you want to watch those after this now if we then look at Paleolithic and Neolithic art it is then dominated by animals cave paintings of bears and horses and lions carvings of ducks and reindeer and and more Lions Back Then it generally thought that we saw ourselves as equal to other animals or perhaps it is better to say we thought it was animals being like us but again in all the remnants of Stories We Know from these times there are no deities there are no gods in human form but then we start to settle and the first settlements start showing human forms with animals as well as human forms on their own such as the Earth or figure and the tea pillars and so we see humans believing that whoever created nature was probably humanlike because humans have conquered nature and so whatever is more powerful than a human must be a humanlike being and not a animal type B now one thing we've seen multiple times within the archaeology of kcti teepe are representations of people with no heads particularly men with no heads on the vure stone in the corner there is a man with no head the T pillars seem to represent a man with no head or at least with no face and so this leads us to consider if there is something about the head that became a sacred truth now archaeologists have found fragments of cough bones at a teison so there are some who speculate when putting these finds together that the people who spent time here belonged to a Neolithic skull cult and so a culture that embraced rituals around the heads of the dead and some of these remains uncovered during field work at gck tee include sections of skulls bearing grooves also holes and the occasional dab of OCH a red dye often used in rituals there are three adult skulls particularly that show signs of having been cared with Flint after being scalped and after they scalped they're def fleshed however the marks left from such Behavior are normally light and incidental I mean it is hard to get flesh off a skull but it could be controlled but the remarks we find on these skulls which have gone through this process are very deep and seem to have been deliberately made and so these 12,000 year old skull carvings are the oldest of their kind that we have ever found and we can then make conclusions from the carvings that they were practical as opposed to being artistic and the reason I say this is that there are a lot of carvings on Stone at quebeck teepe and the quality is reasonably good but the carvings in the skulls is rough and so archaeologists believe that these markings were used to help hang up skulls as decoration rather than the carvings themselves on the skulls used for decorations however the idea of a skull cult uh was first mentioned before we realized kbec tee was a settlement and so these skulls were thought to commemorate their ancestors when first found and once this may still be the case it may mean now we know family settles here for thousands of years that this may just be a form of ancestor worship instead especially with the rising power of humans over nature you and one should remember that your first ancestors who did this special deed of collecting grain and building these buildings and this in term of boosts the idea of group identity at the settlement something that would have been been important to build a community and this was then further enhanced through rituals and feasts but one final piece of I want to look at and which I mentioned at the very beginning of the video is this 11,000 year old relief in saber which isn't in G Becky tby but it's close by now whilst many have said it is a narrative I'm not aware of any published examples of what it could mean and so let me explain what we could have here and what it could mean especially in the context of everything I've spoken about so far so when looking at paintings or reliefs we should take note of the people within the scene as each occurrence of a person can often represent a different scene within the narrative and so here we have two scenes one with a bull or orock and a man holding something and one with two leopards either side of a man again holding something and so let me make it easier for you to see what's going on and so we can see that we are left with a man and a ball and we know it's a ball because of the horns and because of something else going on in this picture the man uh with bended legs is probably dancing whilst looking at the ball and in his hands is something that looks like the tail of a ball but the ball in the picture has a tail and so it doesn't take much imagination to realize that the man has probably castrated the ball and and he's holding the balls testes and so the dancing going on is probably his celebration in achieving such an outrageous taskers one mustn't forget that in these times balls were not domesticated were considered very large animals and you know they are wild and so to capture one and remove its testicles from it whilst it is probably still alive is quite a challenge and we believe the ball is probably be alive because the legs are straight where we see other balls depicted with bended legs at gockley tee and these seem to represent the dying animals and so the man is celebrating literally power over this great creature and so what do you do when you have done this well let's look at scene two here the man is showing how much of a man he is between two leopards and the way to look at this is that it is probably a coming of age cmy a young man castrate a ball celebrates in dance and has to ritually show he is a man capable not only of defeating nature but being sexually mature the leopards are again probably alive and may well have been restrained whilst the young man proves his manhood and so to me this is the oldest narrative we have of a young man coming of age through dominating a borner being Fearless was showing he is a sexually mature man of course there is a chance I'm wrong and if you have any ideas about what it could be I'll really be interested in hearing them in the comments below and to understand why you think those things especially considering the other art going on now whilst we see slightly older sites and archaeology supporting the evolution of buildings and sort of the formation of sites within the region across hundreds of years leading up to the building of Quebec tee it is really at the age of Quebec tee where we see the start of a transition of culture from H gather to H gather with agrarian cultural attributes but geki tee was not strictly a farming community no animals or grasses were domesticated here not that we have found anyway and we can tell that from looking at the seeds within the site and how large they are domesticated seeds tend to be larger and the animal bones as well in the archaeological record suggest wild animals rather than domesticated animals but this doesn't mean it could have influenced other cultures that did Farm in later centuries we also have the imagery of pillars which could be mistaken for symbology similar to that found let's say in Egyptian hieroglyphs or even early forms of the alphabet however we need to be clear here that whilst the images are similar there is no continuation of these figures in archaeology in the region and so this suggests to us that the art forms found in gbec tee were abandoned and then reinvented in later cultures and so this could suggest that the religion and beliefs practiced here also died out with the art when the site was appendant that's not to say other cultures didn't have similar religions but certainly the Neolithic farmers who were about to dominate the landscape here did not have their cultural beliefs significantly influenced from the culture at geke the trouble with myth and so religion has religion is myth to those who do do not consider it sacred is that not all data can be Quantified and so studied in an objective Manner and so some of the things I have mentioned here are speculative but on the most probable side of this speculation we know religion affects the social Dynamic of society and so transforms culture over time the question we must ask is why Hunter gathers decided to harvest so much food as to need to create a settlement to store it was there a member of the community who persuaded them in a in the name of an ancestor or Spirit or a god were feasts due to there being so much grain a common way to bring Community together to help build the settlement was having these feasts with all that grain the Catalyst to say hey let's build a store for this and then did that help them create these tea pillars to carve and immortalize myth and then there is the issue of conflict with the creation of settlements there would inevitably be conflict if not within the settlement itself with cultures outside who wanted access to the land and how was this managed we see many similar sites around gockley tee and perhaps all these work together were allies against other cultures but also the populations of gepe were more than likely from areas quite far away so why did so many people migrate here and how are they all accepted and so there's all sorts of questions such as why was the site built did feasts continue to attract other people were there fertility rituals would this have joined people together from various tribes to create a large community for me when people ask why did we stop the easy Hunter gather lifestyle and start farming my answer is because of food because of how affected the birth rate we see from from the start of farming a significant growth in population in humans who farm and we might say that are they eating better food but the real reason or very specific real reason is that mothers who were breastfeeding their children did so up until the children were about four years of age before farming after farming we see this reduce we can see this through the teeth of children you how they're developing by a year or two which would mean that there' be more more milk for more children meaning the higher success rate of raising a child because they'll be healthier which then in turn improved further when humans started to consume milk from domesticated animals such as goats and sheep and cows but all this was to come it doesn't answer questions about the change in the religious landscape and what we do know is that myth evolves evolves with the environment and Society these are the two of the biggest contributing factors to the evolution of myth and as we see the buildings change we see walls rebuilt with pillars moved Society is growing hierarchies emerge no doubt the religious beliefs change and myths evolve we see in gcki tee that there is much symbolism around the snake the bull headless bodies and fell and did all these help influence myths and ritual that created Divine beings and their new anthropomorphic gods and if the beliefs didn't transfer over to Future cultures perhaps the anthropomorphic gods or the idea of these God type figures in human form the large T pillars would have been memorable and then talked about certainly we see that in a society which is so different to anyone who saw it we have to ask what stands out from other cultures and if someone went to gbee and saw these te pillars it would be these and so it could be possible to conclude that the first personified Gods orbe it Gods without faces although they did have some unique features but perhaps these were the things that people considered gods at quebeck tee and the gods that presided over the spirits of the animistic COS MOS the spirits that were probably venerated by earlier hunter gatherers and so while Society at kcki tee was a self-serving function it was populated by hunter gatherers they were still connected to the land surrounding lecke and these were part of their Cosmos the cosmos of hunter gatherers where everything had a spirit and so perhaps this religion had these faceless human Gods ruling over those spirits perhaps these Gods with no name and no specific identity were an acknowledgement of humans control of nature for as much as humans were conqur in nature and reality the control of the universe in which all this happened must be by something that was similarly powerful similar in shape and so of human form and so it is from this time that humans created gods in their own image and for me it is the site of kcki tee and the similar sites that represent this transition from animism to anthropomorphic gods in the human form that controls their Universe thank you to my patrons thank you for watching please like And subscribe and watch this video if you want to hear more fascinating stories of myth take care

Channel: Crecganford

Views: 65,571

Keywords: mythology, myth, folklore, folk lore, folktale, gobekli tepe, karahan tepe, turkey, t pillar, t-pillar, tpillar, anatolia, religion, skull cult

Id: 3gpGrWWYsdA

Length: 42min 56sec (2576 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024