Two recent news stories give us an evocative look back at human societies in Turkey thousands of years ago. This article from Smithsonian.com describes the ongoing excavation of a site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. The site, which features a series of stone circles made of megaliths erected around 11,000 years ago (roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge!), may be one of the first places on earth that humans thought of and treated as holy. Intriguing features of the site include the fact that there’s no evidence so far that anyone lived there, and it looks like the mound upon which it rests was built by human effort. Some of the pillars are carved with images of living things that you’d generally want to avoid: scorpions, lions, vultures.
There’s some speculation that we may need to rethink our ideas of the way civilization developed, based on findings about this place. Rather than a group of people learning to farm and slowly acquiring the wealth that served as the basis of cultural treasures such as temples, maybe people first began huge projects like this one, and the pressure to feed and otherwise support those working on them accelerated the development of farming and all the things that came with it.
Was it a cemetery, maybe? Were all the scary things kept together there, where people perhaps visited but never lived? We don’t know, and may never know. It’s an enigmatic site; it was built before the written record begins, and perhaps the most memorable moment in the Smithsonian story is when the author reflects on the impossibility of reaching back into the minds of its creators and understanding their motivation. I’ve long been impressed by the vast amounts of energy that societies will pour into efforts to grapple with concepts like death and eternity (e.g., the work that went into providing for dead Egyptian rulers in a hypothetical afterlife). This is perhaps one of the more staggering examples.
The other story is much more recent; the 8th century BCE seems almost recent by comparison. This press release on EurekAlert describes an Iron Age stone memorial inscribed with both words and pictures that tell us a lot more about what was going on in the mind of its creator. The inscription reveals a fascinating intersection of Semitic and Indo-European beliefs at the time, including the suggestion that the stone memorial was seen as a resting place for the soul of the man it commemorated.
I love that explanation…on the surface at least, it makes a lot of sense. Every animal develops the abilities to achieve the goals that god (creation) sets for it.
In nature you see a bunch of varied solutions to the problems that are presented. For example, consider mammals as a food source. The creature must be large enough that it can kill and consume another animal. But it must be small enough to be efficient with regards to several laws relating to surface area and volume and maturation rate and so on. Thus nature fills this void with animals like the wolf which will hunt together in a pack. Nature is full of complex relationships like this where a certain efficiency is found through a combination of physical attributes and instinctive behavior.
So what problem could possibly be so difficult that nature would find it necessary to solve it with something greater than instinctive behavior?
Worship.
I guess it gets sticky because it’s hard to see which resource worship allows you to take advantage of that simple pack-level behavior wouldn’t. I guess it is obvious, but circular: intellect is the resource.