THE WORLD'S OLDEST TEMPLE:
THE MYSTERY OF GOBEKLI TEPE
How A New Understanding Of Time
Gave Birth To The Gods
Time is fundamental. Like food or shelter, it one of the critical elements of every person, every civilization, every period in history. BUT the human use and understanding of time are not the same from era to era. It is this difference that has been ignored but which is crucial.
I believe that early Homo sapiens, for example, who were hunter-gatherers and nomadic, had a present, immediate, 'now' oriented sense of time -- one which we would have a hard time understanding.
Daniel Everett who wrote How Language Began has studied the hunter-gatherer nomadic Amazonian tribe, the Piraha. It seems that their culture is very old. He believes they speak a more basic, perhaps earlier language and live a more basic existence than most people on the Earth. Everything they do is based in the here and now. Their working understanding of time involves about a day or two in the past and a day or two into the future. Time exists but within a narrow window. As a result, they do not have a religion or creation myths and they are not afraid of death. Everything is now.
If the Piraha are a model for earlier and primary concepts of time, then the next stages that followed must have been quite disturbing. Because this is when the experience of time began to change toward our modern view -- our view that time is a long continuum with a past, present, and future. This was a seismic shift. And this shift was so fundamental, I believe it may have led to the emergence of religion.
The Birth Of Gods
Came Before The Birth Of Cities
This transition to a new view of time may have been played out in southern Turkey 11,000 years ago.
The recently discovered ancient site, Gobekli Tepe, is the oldest known religious site in the world. It is located in the hills near the source of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. "Radiocarbon dating as well as comparative, stylistical analysis indicate that it is the oldest religious site yet discovered anywhere." It is twice as old as the oldest Egyptian pyramid having been built 6,000 years earlier.
Quotation from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
One of two hundred columns, weighing up to ten tons, that were made with stone tools about 10,000 years ago by nomadic hunter-gatherers. Notice the precise crafting of the column and the carved figure that is part of the column.
But the discovery of Gobekli Tepe has turned this idea on its ear. Klaus Schmidt, who spent most of his life excavating Gobekli Tepe said, "First came the temple, then the city."
An overview of the Gobekli Tepe excavation site.
Only a very small percentage has been uncovered.
Only a very small percentage has been uncovered.
"Gobekli Tepe appears to signal the beginning of new beliefs, which principal archeologist Klaus Schmidt thought were probably Shamanistic, but which also needed the structure of a religious complex to express these beliefs. It perhaps signals a transitional point between Shamanism and a later mythology of gods and goddesses." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
About Shamanism: According to most anthropologists the first religious beliefs were a shamanistic type of religion in which the Shaman could communicate with the Otherworld. The Otherworld was a spiritual timeless world or a world that existed on a very different time plane. The Shaman usually went into a trance and then acted as an intermediary between the Otherworld and the people in his tribe.Before the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, the French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin wrote a revolutionary book. He believed that the Neolithic/agricultural Revolution happened not because people needed to survive, but rather because there was a "Revolution of Symbols" which changed how human beings related to nature. He believed that the modern concept of gods and God occurred at this time. In 1994 when he proposed this in his book, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, it was a radical idea.
"French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin believed this change in consciousness was a 'revolution of symbols,' a conceptual shift that allowed humans to imagine gods—supernatural beings resembling humans—that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. Schmidt sees Gobekli Tepe as evidence for Cauvin's theory. 'The animals were guardians to the spirit world,' he says. 'The reliefs on the T-shaped pillars illustrate that other world.' "
Gobekli Tepe "suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it." Mann, Charles. The Birth of Religion. National Geographic Magazine, June 2011, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/06/gobeki-tepe/
The thought that "...humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it" highlights the idea that at this point, humans no longer believed they were part of the animal and natural world but in a new and superior realm. Humans had power because they could do a number of things which animals could not do, such as speak a language -- which distinguished humans from the natural world. But humans also acquired a concept of time along with an ability to manage time. This was an ability which animals did not have and which gave humans mastery over the natural world because humans could plan and predict and also shape their own environment. And concepts of time have always been part of every language.
Time reference is a universal property of language...
Jacqueline Lecarme, Ph.D., Linguistics
Then in the same year that Cauvin's book came out, Gobekli Tepe was found. The site had been buried for ten thousand years. But because it was buried, it was well preserved and the quality of the workmanship was superb. Nevertheless, the people who built this complex were not yet at the Neolithic point of development. They had not even started to make pottery, for example, or farm crops. The site appeared to be a religious gathering place that was used regularly by hunter-gatherers who did not live there. Klaus Schmidt said it was a "cathedral on a hill."
Looking At This Transition
From A Time Perspective
While Cauvin and Schmidt look at this from a religious perspective, I instead want to look at this huge Pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer 'cathedral' from a human-sense-of-time point of view. I believe that there was something even more fundamental than religion at play here -- that it was a changing concept of time which caused a major shift in the belief system and it was this shift that later led to myths and gods.
From the point of view of the development of the human-sense-of-time, it is probable that these hunter-gatherers had begun to acquire a new sense of time, a sense of time that was not immediate like the Amazonian Piraha but that had a past, present, and future. But they had not yet developed agriculture or a Neolithic sedentary lifestyle. This new sense of time as a continuum would have had profound spiritual implications. For one thing, it meant that people could now envision their own death which must have been frightening. And since they knew that time now had a past, they needed explanations for the creation of the world.
Known as "winged hourglasses," variations of this symbol were common in cemeteries for hundreds of years in Europe and North America. The wings come from the Roman expression "tempus fugit" or "time flies" and the hourglass is a symbol for the limited time of a person's life. So an understanding of time also resulted in a fear of death and religious warnings about the transience of life.
How do we know that these people had a sophisticated understanding of time? Simple. Although they lived in various places in the vicinity of the 'temple' (Schmidt estimates a radius of 100 miles), they were able to communicate and coordinate their activities. This required a shared and accurate method for keeping time -- otherwise, they would not have been able to work together and create this huge complex and these precisely crafted ten ton stone columns using stone tools.
"The planning and building of such a site as Göbekli Tepe would have required a degree of organization and resources hitherto unknown in hunter-gatherer societies..." "In the absence of houses or domestic buildings of any sort in the area, Schmidt sees Göbekli Tepe as akin to a pilgrimage destination which attracted worshipers from as far away as a hundred miles. " Haughton, Brian. Gobekli Tepe - the World's First Temple? https://www.ancient.eu/article/234/gobekli-tepe---the-worlds-first-temple/
My point is simple. A developing sense of continuous time would have preceded religion and then this new understanding of time would have led to religion. This new sense of time was the fundamental primary force that caused religion to come into being.
Then later, and soon after, the Neolithic culture in this part of the world could have emerged -- which it did a few hundred years later. The Neolithic way of life required and depended on a sense of time for a number of reasons. First people needed to understand the yearly solar cycle because that determined the growing season. Second farming required in-depth knowledge of when to prepare the ground, when to plant and when to harvest. In addition, tools needed to be made in anticipation of needed work, grain needed to be stored and seeds needed to be saved for the following year's crops.
"Area of the fertile crescent, circa 7500 BC, with main sites. Göbekli Tepe is one of the important sites of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. The area of Mesopotamia proper was not yet settled by humans."
"The region has been called the "cradle of civilization", because it is where settled farming first began to emerge as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation in order to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer flourished as a result. Technological advances in the region include the development of writing, glass, the wheel, agriculture, and the use of irrigation."
"Investigations of other sites surrounding Göbekli Tepe have revealed a prehistoric village just 20 miles away where evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat has been recovered. According to radio carbon dates agriculture developed in the area around 10,500 years ago, just a few hundred years after the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Other sites in the region show evidence for the domestication of sheep, cattle, pigs, and animals 1,000 years after Göbekli Tepe’s monuments were erected. All this evidence suggests that the area around Göbekli Tepe was at the forefront of the agricultural revolution." Brian Haughton, Gobekli Tepe - the World's First Temple?https://www.ancient.eu/article/234/gobekli-tepe---the-worlds-first-temple/
"Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. " Mann, Charles. The Birth of Religion. National Geographic Magazine, June 2011, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/06/gobeki-tepe/When hunter-gatherers reached the stage indicated by Gobekli Tepe, they had become fully aware of the past and fearful of their future. Humans now understood that everything had a past and came from the past. They also understood about the future -- that it was uncertain and that events which had happened in the past, such as floods, earthquakes, diseases, crop failures, and invasions, could happen again. This understanding about the past and future (a kind of linear timeline) eventually led to creation myths which explained where the world came from and a mythology of gods and goddesses who might be influenced by human rituals to assure a satisfactory future.
Then at some later point, when agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution had taken hold, time and religion became closely intertwined.
In the first book of the Bible, (a sacred text for Jews, Christians, and Muslims) in Genesis 1:14, (Common English Bible):
God said, "Let there be lights [ED: i.e., stars] in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night. They will mark events, sacred seasons, days, and years."
In Greek mythology, Prometheus, whose name in Greek means forethought and who Greek mythology considers the father of mankind, also taught mankind how to tell time from the stars.
Prometheus creating man from dirt, helped by Athena.
Prometheus said, "Listen to the miseries that beset mankind -- how they were witless before and I made them have sense and endowed them with reason... [They] managed everything without judgment, until I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings, which are difficult to distinguish." [ED: i.e., how to tell time and the timing of the seasons by the stars]
This quote is from the ancient Greek play
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, 5th Century BCE (trans. Weir Smyth)
http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanPrometheus.html
The stars, the Zodiac, and the moon were giant clocks that humans learned to read. Most groups of people also thought of the heavens as the realm of the gods, gods who were removed and distant but who controlled events on Earth. They believed this because the stars always remained the same year after year and signaled the precise time of the year's cycle. While there might be storms, floods, forest fires and earthquakes on Earth, the stars were always the same, pure and untouched. This untouchable domain that the sun, moon, and planets inhabited was considered the spirit world. And the wandering planets were often considered gods and goddesses.
This 4,000-year-old relief, known as the Burney Relief, came from the Babylonian civilization.
The figure is probably the goddess Ishtar who was associated with the planet Venus and was known as the "Queen of Heaven."
The figure is probably the goddess Ishtar who was associated with the planet Venus and was known as the "Queen of Heaven."
Telling time via the stars and believing that the spirit world and the gods were in the Heavens was common when complex civilizations developed after Gobekli Tepe.
Gobekli Tepe also foreshadowed the Neolithic obsession with megaliths. Its 200 megaliths that weigh as much as ten tons are the oldest known megaliths. Later, megaliths would be central to Neolithic cultures and their rituals.
"Experts now believe that megaliths stood at the very heart of ritual practice for the networks of communities scattered across western Europe later in the new Stone Age, or Neolithic period, that had begun around 10,000 B.C. Their function was both earthly and celestial: a focus for rites concerning the movement of the heavenly bodies across the skies, a memorial to the community’s ancestors, and an awe-inspiring site to cement local loyalty and solidarity...The incorporation of astronomical alignments suggests that neolithic ceremonies were closely bound with the changing seasons. These cycles were critical to agrarian communities, whose leaders would benefit from this essential knowledge." Gantley, Michael J. Europe’s Mighty Megaliths "Rock" the Winter Solstice. National Geographic, December 21, 2017, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2017/11-12/history-europe-megaliths-solstice/
Stonehenge is the most famous group of megaliths, but Gobekli Tepe is about twice as old and built by a much earlier people who were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Megalithic 'temples' were widespread and a common construction of Neolithic cultures for 5,000 years after Gobekli Tepe.
Conclusion
My point is simple. I believe a new understanding of time led to an increase in power for human beings just before the Neolithic Revolution. This happened when humans were still hunter-gatherers and nomadic. We know these people had an advanced sense of time because of their ability to coordinate their activities and to build the complex Gobekli Tepe site for more than 1000 years. This new sense of continuous time with a past, present, and future helped people in their struggle to survive and eventually led to agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution but it also was unsettling.
As a result, gods, goddesses, and religions emerged after this stage. Humans learned to tell time by looking at the heavens where they also believed their gods dwelled. So an understanding of time and a belief in religion were closely related from the beginning. This also led to the telling of creation myths, plus rituals, rites, prayers, and supplications that people hoped would influence the gods and assure a bountiful future.
"I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind."
Klaus Schmidt
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See My Blogs
About The Development Of The Human-Sense-Of-Time
From The Earliest Homo Sapiens To The Modern Day
Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time
Patterns & Memory
Dan Everett's How Language Began & Human Time Keeping
Toward a Comprehensive Hypothesis About the Development of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time Based in Part on Daniel Everett's 'How Language Began'
An Expanded Hypothesis About the Human-Experience-Of-Time
And Also:
The Birth Of Gods In The Neolithic
A Response to the Ideas of Jacques Cauvin
