Magicians of the Gods
By Graham Hancock
Introduction
Sand
A house raised on sand will always be in danger of collapse.
The evidence is mounting, though most of the later construction is of high quality, that the edifice of our past built by historians and archaeologists stands on defective and dangerously unsound foundations. An extinction-level cataclysm occurred on our planet between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. This event was global in its consequences and it affected mankind profoundly. Because the scientific evidence that proves it happened has only emerged since 2007, and because its implications have not yet been taken into account at all by historians and archaeologists, we are obliged to contemplate the possibility that everything we have been taught about the origins of civilization could be wrong.
In particular it must be considered as a reasonable hypothesis that worldwide myths of a golden age brought to an end by flood and fire are true, and that an entire episode of the human story was rubbed out in those 1,200 cataclysmic years between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago—an episode not of unsophisticated hunter-gatherers but of advanced civilization.
Did that civilization, if it existed at all, leave any traces that we might still be able to identify today, despite the passage of so much time? And, if so, does its loss have any real significance for us? This book is an attempt to answer those questions.
Part 1
Anomalies
Chapter 1
" There is so much Mystery Here"
Göbekli Tepe is the oldest work of monumental architecture so far found anywhere in the world, or at
any rate the oldest accepted as such by archaeologists.
And it’s massive.
Awesome, magnificent, numinous and overpowering are among the adjectives that dismally fail to
do it justice. For the last couple of hours I’ve been wandering round the site with its excavator,
Professor Klaus Schmidt, and my mind is frankly boggled.
“How does it feel,” I ask him, “to be the man who discovered the temple that’s rewriting history?”
A rubicund German archaeologist with a barrel chest and a grizzled beard, Schmidt is wearing
faded jeans, a blue denim shirt with a streak of mud on the sleeve, and scuffed sandals on his bare,
dirty feet. It’s September 2013, three months before his sixtieth birthday and although neither of us
know it yet, he’ll be dead in less than a year.
As he ponders my question he wipes a bead of sweat from the glistening dome of his forehead. It’s
not yet mid-morning but the sun is high here in Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia region, the sky is
cloudless and the ridge of the Taurus mountains on which we stand is baking hot. There’s no breeze,
not even a hint or a breath of air, nor is there any shade to be had. In 2014 a roof will be erected to
cover and protect the site but in 2013 only its foundations are in place so we’re standing exposed on a
makeshift wooden walkway. Down below us in a series of semi-subterranean, more or less circular,
walled enclosures are the dozens of giant T-shaped megalithic pillars that Schmidt and his team from
the German Archaeological Institute have brought to light here. Before they began their work the
place had the appearance of a rounded hill—in fact “Göbekli Tepe” means “Hill of the Navel”
1
sometimes also translated as “Potbelly Hill”
2—but the excavations have removed most of that
original profile.
“Of course we cannot say that Göbekli Tepe is a temple exactly,” Schmidt answers eventually,
obviously choosing his words with care. “Let us call it a hill sanctuary. And I do not claim that it is
rewriting history. Rather I would say that it is adding an important chapter to existing history. We
thought that the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers was a slow, step-by-step process, but now
we realize that it was a period when exciting monuments that we didn’t expect were made.”
3
“And not just monuments,” I prompt. “At the beginning the local people were hunter-gatherers and
there was no sign of agriculture.”
“No,” Schmidt concedes, “none.” He gestures expansively at the circles of pillars. “But the people
who came to Göbekli Tepe, and who did all this work, invented agriculture! So we see a connection
between what happened here and the later emergence of Neolithic societies dependent on farming.”
Figure 2: The central group of excavated enclosures—A, B, C and D—at Gobekli Tepe. All the pillars have been numbered, for ease of
reference, by the German Archaeological Institute.
My ears prick up at that word “invented.” I want to be sure I’m getting this right. “So,” I
emphasize, “you go so far as to say that the people who made Göbekli Tepe actually invented
agriculture?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Could you elaborate on that?”
“Because in this region we have the early domesticates, both animals and plants. It’s done in this
region. So they are the same people.”
“And as far as you are concerned this is the first—the oldest—agriculture in the world?”
“The first in the world. Yes.”
I sense that Schmidt is becoming impatient at the way I’m probing this point, but I have my
reasons. The areas of Göbekli Tepe that have been excavated so far are close to 12,000 years old
which makes them (according to orthodox chronology) more than 6,000 years older than any other
megalithic sites anywhere—sites like Gigantiga and Mnajdra in Malta, Stonehenge and Avebury in
England, or the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Yet those sites all belong to that phase of the evolution of
human civilization that archaeologists call the “Neolithic” (the “New Stone Age”) when agriculture
and the organization of society along structured, hierarchical lines were already well advanced,
permitting the emergence of skilled specialists who had no need to produce their own food because
they could be supported from the surpluses generated by farmers. Göbekli Tepe, by contrast, belongs
to the very end of the “Upper Paleolithic,” the late “Old Stone Age” when our ancestors are supposed
to have been nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small, mobile bands and incapable of tasks requiring
long-term planning, complex division of labor and high-level management skills.
Schmidt and I are standing at a point on the walkway that overlooks both Enclosure C and
Enclosure D, where I’ve learned from my background research of an intriguing image carved on one
of the pillars. I intend to ask the archaeologist’s permission to climb down into Enclosure D so that I
can take a closer look at this image, but I want to get his views about the origins of agriculture, and its
relationship to the megalithic architecture, completely clear first. Enclosure C, the largest of the four
main pits so far excavated, is dominated by two huge central pillars, both of which are broken. In
their original state they would each have been more than 6 meters (20 feet) high and weighed around
20 tons. Inset into the wall around them stand a dozen other pillars. They’re slightly smaller but still
prodigious. The same goes for Enclosure D—again a ring of smaller pillars surrounding two
towering central pillars, in this case both intact. Their T-shaped tops, angled slightly down to the
front, have no features but are nonetheless eerily reminiscent of giant human heads—an impression
that is reinforced by the faint outlines of arms, crooked at the elbow, running down the flanks of the
pillars and terminating in carefully carved human hands with long fingers.
“All this,” I say, “the megaliths, the iconography, the general conception and layout of the site … to
be honest it looks to be as big a project as a place like Stonehenge in England, yet Stonehenge is much
younger. So how does what you’ve found at Göbekli Tepe fit in with your notion of a hunter-gatherer
society?”
“It’s much more organized than we expected,” Schmidt allows. “What we can see here are hunter gatherers who obviously had a division of labor because the work on the megaliths is specialist
work, not for everybody. They were also able to transport these heavy stones and erect them, which
means they must have had some engineering know-how, and again we didn’t expect that for hunter gatherers. It’s the first architecture really, and it’s architecture on a monumental scale.”
“So if I understand you correctly, Professor Schmidt, you are saying that we are standing at the
place where both monumental architecture and agriculture were invented.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And yet you don’t see anything really revolutionary in this? You see it as a process which you can
fit comfortably into the existing frame of history?”
“Yes. Into existing history. But this process is much more exciting than we expected. Especially
since what we have here at Göbekli Tepe belongs more to the world of the hunter-gatherers than to the
farming societies. It’s toward the end of the hunter-gatherers but not yet the beginning of the
Neolithic.”
“It’s a time of transition then. A cusp moment. And maybe more than that? What I’m getting from
our conversation, and from what you’ve showed me of the site this morning, is the notion that Göbekli
Tepe was a kind of prehistoric think-tank or a center of innovation, perhaps under the control of some
sort of resident elite. Are you okay with that?”
“Yes, yes. It was a place where people came together. People were gathering here and it was
undoubtedly a platform for the distribution of knowledge and innovation.”
“Including knowledge of large-scale stone working and knowledge of agriculture. Would you dare
to describe those who controlled the site and disseminated these ideas as a sort of priesthood?”
“Whoever they were, they certainly were not practicing simple shamanism. They were a bit more
like an institution. So, yes, they were on the road to becoming a priesthood.”
“And since Göbekli Tepe was in unbroken use for well over a thousand years, would this be one
continuous culture with its own institutions, with the same ideas and the same ‘priesthood’ who
continued to manage the site throughout that whole period?”
“Yes. But the strange thing is that there was a clear collapse in the effort that was made as the
centuries went by. The truly monumental structures are in the older layers; in the younger layers they
get smaller and there is a significant decline in quality.”
“So the oldest is the best?”
“Yes, the oldest is the best.”
“And you don’t find that puzzling?”
Klaus Schmidt looks almost apologetic. “Well, we hope that eventually we will discover even
older layers and that there we will see the small beginnings that we expect but haven’t yet found.
Then we have this monumental phase, and later a decline again.”
It occurs to me that “hope” is the operative word in what Professor Schmidt has just said. We are
used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing—evolving—to become ever more
complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It
upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and
develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning
and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.
Nor is it so much the process of devolution that we object to. We know that civilizations can
decay. Just look at the Roman Empire, or the British Empire for that matter.
No, the problem at Göbekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization
so accomplished that it “invents” both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent
moment of its birth.
Archaeology can no more explain that than it can explain why the earliest monuments, art,
sculptures, hieroglyphs, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture of Ancient Egypt are
perfect at the beginning without any traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated. And we might
well ask of Göbekli Tepe, as my friend John Anthony West asks of Ancient Egypt:
How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being. Look at a 1905 automobile and
compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of “development.” But in Egypt
there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start.
The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing
cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a
“development,” it was a legacy.
4
Could this be the case, also, at Göbekli Tepe?
Klaus Schmidt has no time for ideas of a lost civilization that was the progenitor of all later known
civilizations, so when I press him he reiterates his point that most of Göbekli Tepe remains
unexcavated. “As I said,” he growls, somewhat testily, “I expect when we get to the earlier levels we
will find evidence of evolution.”
He could be right. One of the stunning things about Göbekli Tepi, which had already been the
subject of eighteen years of continuous excavation when Klaus Schmidt showed me round the site in
2013, is that so much of it still remains under the ground.
But how much?
“It’s hard to say,” Schmidt tells me. “We’ve done a geophysical survey—ground-penetrating radar
—and from this we can see that at least sixteen further large enclosures remain to be excavated.”
“Large enclosures?” I ask. I point at the towering megaliths of Enclosure D. “Like this one?”
“Yes, like this one. And sixteen is the minimum. In some areas our geophysical mapping did not
give us complete results and we cannot really see inside, but we expect there are many more than
sixteen. Maybe in reality it will turn out to be double that number. Maybe even as many as fifty.”
“Fifty!”
“Yes—fifty of the big enclosures, each enclosure with fourteen or more pillars. But, you know, it’s
not our target to excavate everything. Just a little part, because excavation is destruction. We want to
keep most of the site untouched.”
It dilates the imagination to reflect on the scale of the enterprise undertaken at Göbekli Tepe by the
ancients. Not only are the circles of megalithic pillars already excavated here at least 6,000 years
older than any other known megalithic sites anywhere in the world, but also, I now realize, Göbekli
Tepe is huge—occupying an area that might eventually prove to be as much as thirty times larger than
the fullest extent of a big site like Stonehenge, for example.
We are confronted, in other words, by vast, inexplicable antiquity, immense scale, and unknown
purpose—and all of it seeming to unfold out of nowhere, with no obvious background or preparation,
shrouded utterly in mystery.
Enclosures of the giants
I’m used to archaeologists making the sign of the evil eye and turning their backs on me when I show
up at their excavations. But Professor Schmidt is refreshingly different. Although he knows very well
who I am, he permits me and my wife, the photographer Santha Faiia, to climb down into Enclosure D
and explore it. All four of the main enclosures so far excavated at Göbekli Tepe are strictly off limits
to the public and under the eye of watchful guards, but there’s an image on one of the pillars in
Enclosure D that I need to take a much closer look at than the walkway affords—indeed I can’t even
see it from the walkway—so Schmidt’s generosity of spirit is welcome.
We enter the enclosure along a plank which leads to an as yet un-excavated two-meter-high
partition of rubble and earth separating the two main central pillars, one to the east and the other to
the west. Quarried from the very hard crystalline limestone of the region, and polished to a flawlessly
smooth finish, these colossal pillars glow mellow gold in the sun. I know from Professor Schmidt that
they are about 5.5 meters (18 feet) tall and that each of them weighs more than 15 tons.
5 Scrambling
down onto the floor of the enclosure I note that they stand on stone plinths each about 20 centimeters
(8 inches) high that have been carved directly out of the living bedrock. In a row along the front edge
of the plinth under the eastern pillar, squatting back on their tails with no wings evident, seven
seemingly flightless birds have been sculpted in high relief.
Figure 3: Layout of the pillars in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe. Pillar 43 is of the greatest interest.
With their stylized anthropomorphic appearance enhanced by their angled T-shaped “heads” the
central pillars loom over me like twin giants. Though they are not my primary target, I seize the
opportunity to examine them closely.
Their front edges, representing their chests and bellies, are quite slim—only about twenty
centimeters wide—while their flanks measure a bit over a meter (about 4 feet) from front to back.
Both figures, as I’d noticed from the walkway, have arms carved in low relief at their sides, crooked
at the elbows and terminating in hands with long, thin fingers. These fingers wrap round the fronts of
the pillars, almost meeting over their “bellies.”
Above the hands, covering their “chests” are hints of an open-fronted garment. Just below the
hands, both figures also wear a broad belt—again carved in low relief—decorated with a distinctive
buckle. In both cases what appears to be part of an animal skin—thought by Schmidt to represent the
hind legs and tail of a fox pelt, 6 is shown hanging suspended from the buckle so that it covers the
genital region.
Both figures also wear necklaces. In the case of the eastern figure the necklace is decorated with a
crescent and disc motif and in the case of the western figure with a bull’s head.
In addition both pillars stand on their pedestals in exactly the same peculiar way—not securely
fixed but resting precariously in slots just 10 centimeters (4 inches) deep. Klaus Schmidt and his team
have stabilized them with wooden props and I can only imagine that they must also have been held
upright in a similar way in antiquity—unless, perhaps, there was a frame over the enclosure into
which the heads of the figures were somehow fixed. Since the builders of Göbekli Tepe were clearly
masters of fashioning, moving and positioning large megaliths, it is mysterious that they chose not to
cut deeper slots in which the pillars could have been securely mounted. There must have been some
purpose to this, but I cannot fathom it.
So much for the similarities between the two central pillars, but there are also differences. For
example, the eastern figure has an almost life-sized depiction of a fox carved in high relief on its right
flank so that it appears to be leaping forward from the crook of its elbow. And whereas the belt of the
western pillar is undecorated other than by its buckle, the belt of the eastern pillar bears a number of
intriguing adornments including a series of glyphs like the Roman letter “C” and others like the
Roman letter “H.” As I study them I reflect that we cannot possibly know what these symbols meant to
the people of Göbekli Tepi, from whom we are separated by a vast span of more than eleven thousand
years. It is far-fetched to imagine that they had any kind of writing—let alone writing in the alphabet
we use today! Nonetheless there is something strangely modern and purposive about the way these
pictograms are used and displayed and it seems to me that they are more than merely decorative.
Nothing else like them exists anywhere in the world of Upper Palaeolithic art, and the same is true of
the animal and bird figures. At this early period, such a combination of megaliths and sophisticated
sculptures is utterly unique and unprecedented.
I move on to examine the dozen pillars disposed around the edges of the Enclosure D, which forms
more of an ellipse than a strict circle, measuring approximately 20 meters (65 feet) from west to east
and just over 14 meters (46 feet) from north to south. The surrounding pillars are generally about half
the height of the central pair and for the most part are not free-standing but rather are embedded into
the enclosure wall. Most, though not all, are T-shaped and most are richly decorated with images of
birds, insects and animals as though the cargo of Noah’s Ark has been turned to stone: foxes, gazelles,
wild boars, numerous species of birds including several cranes with serpents at their feet, many more
serpents both individually and in groups, a spider, a wild ass, wild cattle, a lion with its tail curving
forward over its spine—and many more.
Making the most of our laissez-passer, I take my time but eventually, on the northwestern side of
the enclosure I come to the pillar I particularly want to see. For ease of reference Schmidt and his
colleagues have numbered all the pillars at Göbekli Tepe and this is “Pillar No. 43.” I know from my
prior research that it has a large depiction of a scorpion carved in relief on its base; some have
suggested it might be an image of the zodiacal constellation that we call Scorpio today.
7 However, to
my great disappointment the figure is no longer visible. The archaeologists have covered it with
rubble—to protect it from damage, Schmidt claims. I tell him of my interest in a possible
astronomical connection but he scoffs at this.
“There are no astronomical figures here; the zodiac
constellations were not recognized until Babylonian times, nine thousand years after Göbekli Tepe”—
and he refuses point-blank to allow me to clear the heaped-up rubble away.
I’m about to get into an argument with him—there is in fact excellent evidence that the zodiac was
codified long before Göbekli Tepe
8—when I notice a group of other figures higher up the same pillar
that have not been covered with rubble. These include a prominent depiction of a vulture with its
wing outstretched in the manner of a human arm and with a solid disc poised over that arm-like wing
as though being upheld or cradled by it. Another human characteristic of the vulture, quite dissimilar
to any examples of this bird that I have ever seen in nature, is that it is portrayed with its “knees” bent
forward and with strangely elongated flat feet—a bit like some of the cartoon representations of the
“Penguin” character in the old Batman comics. It is, in other words, a therianthrope (from the Greek
therion, meaning wild beast, and anthropos, meaning man), a hybrid creature—part human and part
vulture.
9
Above it are more of the H-shaped pictograms arranged in a row between a series of upright and
inverted “V” shapes. Again there is a sense of some message, some communication here, that is
impossible to interpret. Finally, at the top of the pillar, are depictions of what appear to be three large
handbags—rectangular containers, at any rate, with curved handles. Separating them, positioned over
the front of the handles in each case, are three figures—at the left a bird with long, human-like legs
that mark it out almost certainly as another therianthrope, a quadruped with its tail arched forward
over its body, and a salamander.
Pillar 43 in Enclosure D. The lower part of the pillar was covered by rubble at the time of my visit, but has been reconstructed
here from earlier photographs (see Plate 7).
There is something hauntingly familiar about the whole ensemble, and I feel certain that I have
seen it—or something very like it—somewhere before. The only problem is I can’t remember where
or what! I ask Santha to take detailed photographs of the pillar and when she is done Schmidt suggests
that we accompany him to a different part of the site a few hundred meters to the northwest on the
other side of the ridge where he and his team have an active excavation underway. It’s just one of the
dozens of buried enclosures with large pillars that they have identified with ground-penetrating radar,
and the first of these that they are investigating.
Paradigms
As we walk I ask the Professor how and when he became involved with Göbekli Tepe. Ironically,
given his firm views on the evolution of architecture, it turns out that he got his big break because
other archaeologists also had firm views on the same subject! In 1964 a joint team from the
University of Chicago and the University of Istanbul visited the area with a specific brief to search
out and discover Stone Age sites. However when they saw the top of a large T-shaped pillar sticking
out of the ground, and the remains of other broken limestone pillars that had been plowed up by local
farmers lying nearby, they dismissed Göbekli Tepe as irrelevant to their interests and moved on
elsewhere.
The reason?
The American and Turkish team had judged the workmanship on the pillars to be too fine—too
advanced, too sophisticated—to have been produced by Stone Age hunter-gatherers. In their opinion,
despite the presence of worked flints lying alongside the limestone fragments, Göbekli Tepe was
nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery and therefore of no prehistoric interest
whatsoever.
Their loss was to be Schmidt’s gain. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s he had
been involved in another project in Turkey—the excavation of an early Neolithic site called Nevali
Cori which was soon to be flooded by the waters of the Ataturk Dam. There he and a team of
archaeologists from the University of Heidelberg discovered, and rescued from the advancing
floodwaters, a number of finely-worked T-shaped limestone pillars that were conclusively dated to
between 8,000 and 9,000 years of age. Some had arms and hands carved in relief along their sides.
“So we recognized that this region had something about it that was different from other sites known
from this period. Nevali Cori was our first hint of the existence of large-scale limestone sculptures
during the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to early village farming communities.”
A little later, in 1994, Schmidt came across the report of the Turkish-American survey done thirty
years earlier and stumbled upon a single paragraph that mentioned the presence of worked flints
alongside fragments of limestone pillars lying on the surface at Göbekli Tepe. “I was a young
archaeologist,” he explains, “I was looking for my own project, and I immediately realized that there
could be something of significance here, perhaps even another site as important as Nevali Cori.”
“Which your predecessors had missed, because flints and architectural pillars are not normally
associated in the minds of archaeologists?”
I’m hoping he’ll get my hint that he, too, might be missing something at Göbekli Tepe because of
the established paradigm, but he seems oblivious and replies, “Yes, exactly.”
I glance ahead. For the past few moments, as we’ve been walking and talking, we’ve approached a
scene of intense activity. I hadn’t been aware of it from the four main enclosures because it had been
concealed from us by the summit of the ridge, but now we’ve hiked north over the ridge line and are
making our way down the other side into the new excavation, nominated as Enclosure H, that Schmidt
has opened at Göbekli Tepe.
10 Here five or six German archaeologists are busily at work, some
scraping away layers of soil with trowels or pouring buckets of earth and stones through sieves,
others directing the efforts of a team of thirty Turkish laborers. The focus is on a large rectangular
cavity. Perhaps half the size of a football pitch, it’s internally subdivided by knee-high walls of earth
into a dozen or so smaller segments. From the floor of these, at several points, hulking limestone
pillars protrude. Most are T-shaped but my eye is drawn to one that has a smooth curved top, marred
only by a small broken segment, and upon which is carved a particularly fine figure of a male lion.
Like the lions in Enclosure D, its long tail sweeps forward over its spine but the workmanship of this
piece is of a higher order than anything I’ve seen so far today.
“That’s a very substantial pillar,” I say to Schmidt. “Can we take a look at it?”
He agrees and we pick our way through the excavations until we’re just a couple of meters from
the lion pillar. It’s leaning at an angle against a remnant of the rubble of cobble-sized stones and earth
that had clearly filled the entire enclosure before the archaeologists began work here. Right at the
edge of this segment of the dig, the head of another pillar can be seen, while in the middle of the
segment a deeper trench has been cut—to expose what I guess is the top third of the lion pillar—and
this trench, too, is lined by the same rubble of cobbles and earth.
I ask Schmidt about the rubble. “All those cobbles,” I say. “How did they get there? They don’t
look like the result of natural sedimentation.”
“They’re not,” he replies. He’s looking, I think, a little smug. “They were put there deliberately.”
“Deliberately?”
“Yes, by the makers of Göbekli Tepe. After the megaliths were put in place, and used for a period
of unknown duration, every one of the enclosures was deliberately and rapidly buried. For example
Enclosure C is the oldest we have found so far. It appears that it was closed, filled in from top to
bottom so that all the pillars were completely covered, before ‘D,’ the next enclosure in the sequence,
was made. This practice of deliberate infilling has been a great advantage to archaeology because it
effectively sealed each of the enclosures and prevented the intrusion of later organic material thus
allowing us to be absolutely certain about the dating.”
I’m thinking rapidly as Schmidt talks. The point he makes about dating is interesting, for at least
three reasons.
First, the implication is that at megalithic sites around the world where this “sealing” process
didn’t happen, the dates archaeologists have arrived at could be falsely young as a result of the
intrusion of later organic materials (which, by the way, is the only kind of material that is subject to
carbon dating; because of course you can’t carbon date inorganic materials like stone). Theoretically
this could mean that famous megalithic sites that were not deliberately buried by their builders (the
temples of Malta, for example, or the taulas of Menorca, or the stone circles of Avebury and
Stonehenge in England) could turn out to be much older than we are presently taught.
Secondly, if the bulk of the dates at Göbekli Tepe are derived from organic materials in the fill—a
fact that I’m later able to confirm from Schmidt’s published papers
11—then this tells us only about the
age of the fill; the megalithic pillars themselves must be at least that old, but they could be older since
they stood in place before being buried, for “a period of unknown duration.”
Thirdly, and perhaps most important, why was the site infilled? What could possibly be the motive
for going to all this trouble to create a series of spectacular megalithic circles only to end up
deliberately burying them so thoroughly and so efficiently that more than 10,000 years would pass
before they were found again?
The first thought that comes to my mind is … time capsule—that Göbekli Tepe was created to
transmit a message of some kind to the future and buried so that its message could be kept intact and
hidden for millennia. It’s a thought that will return to haunt me many times as I continue my
investigation, but another full year will pass before it comes to fruition, as we’ll see in later chapters.
Meanwhile, when I put the question to Klaus Schmidt he offers a completely different explanation for
the deliberate burial of the circles of pillars.
“In my opinion this was their program,” he says. “They made the enclosures to be buried.”
“Made to be buried?” I’m intrigued. I’m waiting for him to say “as a time capsule” but instead he
replies,
“Like, for example, the megalithic cemeteries in Western Europe—huge constructions and
then a mound on top.”
“But then they’re for burial of bodies. Is there any evidence of burial of bodies here?”
“We don’t have burials yet. We have some fragments of human bones mixed in with animal bones
within the filling material but no burials at the moment. We expect we will find some soon.”
“So you believe Göbekli Tepe was a necropolis?”
“It still has to be proved. But that’s my hypothesis, yes.”
“And those fragments of human bones you’ve found mixed with animal bones in infill. What do you
make of those? Sacrifice? Cannibalism?”
“I don’t think so. My guess is that those bones are evidence of some special treatment of the human
body after death—perhaps deliberate excarnation. Such rites were practiced at a number of other
known sites in this region that are of about the same age. For me the presence of human bones in the
filling material strengthens the hypothesis that we will find primary burials somewhere at Göbekli
Tepe, burials that were opened after some time for a continuation of very specific rituals performed
with the dead.”
12
“What, then, was the function of the pillars?”
“The T-shaped pillars are certainly anthropomorphic, yet often with animals depicted on them,
perhaps telling us stories connected with the T-shaped beings. We cannot be sure, of course, but I
think they represent divine beings.”
“And even when they’re not T-shaped?” I point to the lion pillar. “Like this one? It too has an
animal depicted upon it.”
Schmidt shrugs. “We cannot know for sure. Perhaps we will never know. There is so much mystery
here. We could excavate for fifty years and still not find all the answers. We are just at the beginning.”
“But even so you do have some answers. You clearly have some ideas. This lion pillar, for
example. Are you at least able to say how old it is?”
“Honestly we don’t know. When we excavate beneath it we will hopefully find some organic
material that we can carbon date. But until we do we can’t be sure.”
“But what’s your impression from the style?”
Schmidt shrugs again before conceding, a little begrudgingly, “It looks similar to some of the
pillars in Enclosure C.”
“Which are the oldest?”
“Yes—so something of that age.”
“And that would be what exactly?”
“Exactly 9600 BC, calibrated, is the earliest date we have.”
Radiocarbon years and calendar years drift further and further apart as time goes by because the
amount of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in the atmosphere and in all living, organic, things
varies from epoch to epoch. Fortunately scientists have found ways—too complicated to go into at
this point—to correct for such fluctuations. The process is called calibration so when Schmidt says
“9600 BC calibrated” he is giving me calendar years. What “9600 BC calibrated” means in 2013 when
I’m talking to him is therefore 9600 years plus the 2013 years that have elapsed since the time of
Christ—i.e. 11,613 years ago. I am writing this sentence in December 2014 and you might not read it
until 2016, by which time that oldest date that Schmidt is referring to will work out at 11,616 years
before the present.
You get the idea.
In other words, put simply, and in round numbers, the oldest parts of Göbekli Tepe to have been
excavated so far are a little over 11,600 years old. And, despite all the cautions and qualifications he
has expressed, what Schmidt is telling me is that in his informed opinion, on stylistic grounds, the
lion-pillar we are looking at is likely to be at least as old as anything hitherto excavated at Göbekli
Tepe.
Indeed, although he hasn’t said so much—there’s very little evidence one way or the other—the
possibility has to be considered that it might even be older. After all, he’s already admitted that the
best work at Göbekli Tepe is the oldest. It’s troubling, therefore, despite the hope he’s expressed that
further excavation will reveal “the small beginnings that we expect but haven’t yet found,” that this
first piece of further excavation has in fact uncovered no such “small beginnings.” On the contrary
what it has brought to light is a massive, superbly executed megalithic pillar, with a lion rampant
carved upon it in exquisite high relief, that appears, at least on stylistic grounds, to be extremely old.
Perhaps, rather than Schmidt’s hoped-for “small beginnings,” further excavations will only
uncover more of the same?
“We know the end,” the Professor tells me firmly. “The youngest layers at Göbekli Tepe date to
8200 BC. That’s when the site is abandoned forever. But we don’t know the beginning yet.”
“Except that date of 9600 BC, 11,600 years ago, that you have from Enclosure C. That’s the
beginning—at least as far as you’ve been able to establish it up to now?”
“The beginning of the monumental phase, yes.” There’s a glint in the Professor’s eye. “And you
know, 9600 BC is an important date. It isn’t just a number. It’s the end of the Ice Age. It’s a global
phenomenon. So since this goes in parallel—”
The date Schmidt is putting such emphasis on rings a sudden bell in my mind, relating to other
research I’ve been doing, and I feel compelled to interrupt.
“9600 BC! That’s not just the end of the Ice Age. It’s the end of the Younger Dryas cold spell that
starts in, what—10,800 BC?”
“And ends in 9620 BC,” Schmidt continues, “according to the ice cores from Greenland. So how
likely is it to be an accident that the monumental phase at Göbekli Tepe starts in 9600 BC when the
climate of the whole world has taken a sudden turn for the better and there’s an explosion in nature
and in possibilities?”
I can only agree. It doesn’t seem likely that it’s an accident at all. On the contrary, I feel certain
there must be a connection. We’ll explore that connection, and the mysterious cataclysmic period that
geologists call the Younger Dryas—and what those Greenland ice cores tell us—in Part II.
Meanwhile, back in 2013, I close my interview with Klaus Schmidt with some praise. And in
December 2014, as I sit at my desk going through the transcript of the recording I made at Göbekli
Tepe, and knowing that Klaus died of a massive, unexpected heart attack on July 20, 2014, I’m glad I
did so. “You’re a very humble man,” I say. “But the fact is you’ve discovered a site that has caused us
all to rethink our ideas of the past. This is a remarkable thing and I believe that your name, as well as
the name of Göbekli Tepe, will go down in history.”
The bringers of civilization
After leaving Göbekli Tepe in mid-September 2013, I make an extensive journey throughout the length
and breadth of Turkey before I finally return home.
The lion pillar sticks in my mind, but what particularly haunts me is the scene on Pillar No. 43 in
Enclosure D—the scene showing the vulture with its bent human-like knees, and its wing that so much
resembles an arm, holding up a solid disc.
I download Santha’s photographs onto my computer and call up that scene. It has many remarkable
elements as well as the disc. Both wings of the vulture are shown, I now realize, the other stretched
out behind its body. To the right of the vulture is a serpent. It has a large triangular head, as do all
serpents depicted at Göbekli Tepe, and its body is coiled into a curve with its tail extending down
toward an “H”-shaped pictogram. The serpent is nestled close to another large bird—not a vulture
but something more like an Ibis with a long, sickle-shaped beak. Between it and the vulture is yet
another bird, again with a hooked beak, but smaller, with the look of a chick.
I turn my attention to the disc. I don’t know what to make of it, but the obvious guess from its shape
is that it’s meant to represent the sun.
There’s something else that interests me more, however, if I can just put my finger on what it is—
something evocative, something hauntingly familiar, about the imagery on this ancient pillar from
Göbekli Tepe. Santha has shot hundreds of frames of it, from every possible angle, and obsessively I
keep going through them, hoping for some clue. The vulture … the disc … and in the next register
above the vulture, that weird row of bags, with their curved handles …
Bags.
Handbags.
Suddenly I get it. I go to the shelf in my library where I keep reference copies of my own books,
pull out Fingerprints of the Gods, and start leafing through the photo sections. The first section deals
with South America and what I’m looking for isn’t there. But the second section is devoted to Mexico
and, on the fifth page, I find it. It’s image number 33 with the caption: “Man in Serpent sculpture from
the Olmec site of La Venta.” It’s Santha’s photograph, taken way back in 1992 or 1993, of an
impressive relief carved on a slab of solid granite measuring about 1.2 meters (4 feet) wide and 1.5
meters (5 feet) high. The relief features what is believed to be the earliest representation of the
Central American deity whom the Maya (a later civilization than the Olmecs) would call Kukulkan or
Gucumatz, and who was known by the even later Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl.
13 All three names mean
“Feathered Serpent” (sometimes translated as “Plumed Serpent”) and it is such a serpent, decorated
with a prominent feathered crest on its head, that we see here. Its powerful body coils sinuously
around the outer edge of the relief, cradling the figure of a man who is depicted in a seated position as
though he is reaching for pedals with his feet. In his right hand he is holding what I described at the
time as “a small, bucket-shaped object.”
14
Figure 5: “Man in Serpent” sculpture—the earliest surviving representation of the Central American deity later known as Quetzalcoatl.
I return to Santha’s images from Enclosure D at Göbekli Tepe and am immediately able to confirm
what I suspected. The three bags on the pillar closely resemble the “bucket-shaped” object from La
Venta in Mexico. The same curved handle is there in both cases and the profile of the “bags” and of
the “bucket”—slightly wider at the bottom than at the top—is also very similar.
If that were all there was to it, this would surely be a coincidence. The “Man in Serpent” relief
from La Venta is thought by archaeologists to date to the period between the tenth and the sixth
centuries BC
15—about nine thousand years younger than the imagery from Göbekli Tepe—so how
could there possibly be a connection?
That’s when I remember a second curious image I reproduced in Fingerprints of the Gods. I check
the index for the name Oannes, turn to Chapter Eleven, and find another figure of a man carrying a bag
or bucket. I hadn’t noticed the resemblance between it and “Man in Serpent” before but it’s obvious
to me now. Although not absolutely identical, both bags have the same curved handle that is also
depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar. Quickly I scan through the report I wrote twenty years earlier.
Oannes was a civilizing hero revered by all the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia. He was said to
have appeared there in the remotest antiquity and to have taught the inhabitants:
the skills necessary for writing and for doing mathematics and for all sorts of knowledge: how
to build cities, found temples … make laws … determine borders and divide land, also how to
plant seeds and then to harvest their fruits and vegetables. In short [he] taught men all those
things conducive to a civilized life.
16
The fullest account we have of Oannes is found in surviving fragments of the works of a Babylonian
priest called Berossos who wrote in the third century BC. Fortunately I have a translation of all the
Berossos fragments in one volume in my library so I dig it out along with a few other sources on
ancient Mesopotamian myths and traditions. It doesn’t take me long to discover that Oannes did not do
his work alone but was supposedly the leader of a group of beings known as the Seven Apkallu—the
“Seven Sages”—who were said to have lived “before the flood” (a cataclysmic global deluge
features prominently in many Mesopotamian traditions, including those of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and
Babylon). Alongside Oannes, these sages are portrayed as bringers of civilization who, in the most
ancient past, gave humanity a moral code, arts, crafts and agriculture and taught them architectural,
building and engineering skills.
17
Figure 6: Oannes, a civilizing hero from before the flood, revered by all the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia. The reasons for his strange
clothing or costume—he is often referred to as a “fish-garbed figure”—are given in Chapter 8.
That’s a list, I can’t help thinking, that includes all the skills supposedly “invented” at Göbekli
Tepe!
I call up a map on my computer screen and see that not only does southeastern Turkey adjoin
Mesopotamia geographically but also that the two areas are linked in an even more intimate and
direct way. Largely occupied today by the modern state of Iraq, the ancient name Mesopotamia
means, literally, “[land] between rivers”—the rivers in question being the Tigris and the Euphrates,
which reach the sea in the Persian Gulf, but which both have their headwaters in the same Taurus
mountain range of southeastern Turkey where Göbekli Tepe is situated.
Figure 7: Location of Gobekli Tepe in relation to the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia
While I’m online I run some searches for images of the Seven Sages. I don’t get many hits at first,
but the moment I change the search terms to “Apkallu” and “Seven Apkallu” I open a colossal archive
of images from all over the internet, many of them reliefs from Assyria, a culture that thrived in
Mesopotamia from approximately 2500 BC to about 600 BC. I add “Assyrian Apkallu” to the search
parameters and even more images flood my screen. Often they show bearded men holding bags or
buckets which closely resemble those depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar and the one held by the
Mexican “Man in Serpent” figure. It’s not just the curved handles of these containers, or their shape—
where the resemblance is much closer than on the original Oannes relief I reproduced in Fingerprints
of the Gods. Even more striking is the peculiar and distinctive way that the figures from both
Mesopotamia and Mexico hold these containers with the fingers of the hands turned inward and the
thumb crooked forward over the handle.
There’s something else as well. A good number of the images show not a man but a therianthrope
—a birdman with a hooked beak exactly like the hooked beak of the therianthropy on the Göbekli
Tepe pillar. What makes the resemblance even closer is that in the Mesopotamian reliefs the birdman
is holding the container in one hand and a cone-shaped object in the other. The shape is a little
different but a comparison with the disc cradled above the wing of the Göbekli Tepe birdman is hard
to resist.
I can’t prove anything yet. It could, of course, all be coincidence, or I could be imagining links that
aren’t there. But my curiosity is aroused by the similar containers on different continents and in
different epochs and so I jot down a series of questions that can form the frame of a loose hypothesis
for future testing. For instance, could these containers (whether they are bags or buckets) be the
symbols of office of an initiatic brotherhood—far traveled and deeply ancient, with roots reaching
back into the remotest prehistory? I feel that this possibility, extraordinary though it may seem on the
face of things, is worth looking into and is strengthened by the distinctive hand postures. Might these
not have served the same sort of function as Masonic handshakes today—providing an instant means
of identifying who is an “insider” and who is not?
Figure 8: Representations of Oannes and the Apkallu in Mesopotamian art and sculpture where they are frequently depicted as
composite fish-man or bird-man figures.
And what might have been the purpose of such a brotherhood?
Curiously enough, in both Mexico and Mesopotamia where myths and traditions have survived in
connection with the imagery and symbolism, we are left in no doubt as to what the purpose was.
Stated simply it was to teach, to guide and to spread the benefits of civilization.
This, after all, was the explicit function of Oannes and the Apkallu sages who taught the inhabitants
of Mesopotamia “how to plant seeds and then to harvest their fruits and vegetables”—agriculture in
other words—and who also taught them architectural and engineering skills, notably the building of
temples. If they needed to be taught these things then they must have had no knowledge of them before
the arrival of the sages. They must, in other words, have been nomadic hunter-gatherers just as the
inhabitants of southeastern Turkey were until the sudden and surprising entry onto the world stage of
Göbekli Tepe.
The same, it transpires, was believed to be the case with the ancient inhabitants of Mexico before
the arrival of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, who came to teach them the benefits of settled
agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a
serpent, he is more often shown in human form—the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego—and
is usually described as “a tall bearded white man”
18 … “a mysterious person … a white man with a
strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard.”
19
Indeed, as Sylvanus
Griswold Morley, the doyen of Mayan studies, concluded, the attributes and life history of
Quetzalcoatl:
are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character …
the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was
eventually deified.
20
The same could very well be said of Oannes—and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu
(likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own
brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico “from across the sea in a
boat that moved by itself without paddles,”
21 and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been “the
founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar.”
22 The sixteenth century Spanish
chronicler, Bernardino de Sahagun, who was fluent in the language of the Aztecs and took great care
to record their ancient traditions accurately, tells us further that:
Quetzalcoatl was a great civilizing agent who entered Mexico at the head of a band of
strangers. He imported the arts into the country and especially fostered agriculture … He built
spacious and elegant houses, and inculcated a type of religion which fostered peace.
23
So, in summary, as well as a complex pattern of shared symbols and iconography, Quetzalcoatl and
Oannes shared the same civilizing mission, which they delivered in widely separated regions of the
world in an epoch that is always described as being very far back in time—remote, antediluvian and
hoary with age.
Could it have been as far back as 9600 BC—the epoch of Göbekli Tepe where many of the same
symbols are found and where, although we have no surviving legends, the signs of a civilizing
mission in the form of the sudden appearance of agriculture and monumental architecture are
everywhere to be seen?
The implications, should I ever be able to prove this hypothesis, are stunning. At the very least it
would mean that some as yet unknown and unidentified people somewhere in the world had already
mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civilization more than twelve thousand years ago in the
depths of the last Ice Age and had sent out emissaries around the world to spread the benefits of their
knowledge. Who might these shadowy emissaries have been, these sages, these “Magicians of the
Gods” as I was already beginning to think of them? And why was there this insistent connection to the
date of 9600 BC?
For as Klaus Schmidt rightly pointed out as he showed me round Göbekli Tepe under the baking
sun of the Taurus Mountains, 9600 BC is indeed “an important date”—important not only because it
marks the end of the Ice Age but for another, rather surprising reason as well.
The Greek lawmaker Solon visited Egypt in 600 BC and there he was told a very extraordinary
story by the priests at the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta—a story that was eventually handed down
to his more famous descendant Plato, who in due course shared it with the world in his Dialogues of
Timaeus and Critias.
It is, of course, the story of the great lost civilization called Atlantis swallowed up by flood and
earthquake in a single terrible day and night nine thousand years before the time of Solon.
24
Or, in our calendar, in 9600 BC.
Chapter 2
The Mountain of Light
“Everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong,” says Danny Hilman
Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian
Institute of Sciences. “Old stories about Atlantis and other great lost civilizations of prehistory, long
dismissed as myths by archaeologists, look set to be proved true.”
It’s December 2013. We’re in Cianjur Regency, about 900 meters (2,950 feet) above sea level and
70 kilometers (43 miles) west of the city of Bandung on the island of Java, Indonesia. I’m climbing
with Dr. Natawidjaja up the steep slope of a 110 meter (360 feet) high step-pyramid set amidst a
magical landscape of volcanoes, mountains and jungles interspersed with paddy fields and tea
plantations.
Figure 9: Artist’s impression of ancient Gunung Padang. (Courtesy of Pon S. Purajatnika)
In 1914, lying scattered among the dense trees and undergrowth that then covered the summit of the
pyramid, ancient man-made structures formed from blocks of columnar basalt were first shown to
archaeologists. Local people held the site to be sacred and called it Gunung Padang, the name it still
goes by today, often mistranslated as “Mountain Field” by those unaware that the language of this area
is not Indonesian but Sundanese—in which Gunung Padang means “Mountain of Light,” or “Mountain
of Enlightenment.” The structures were found to be arranged across five terraces with a combined
area of about 150 meters (492 feet) long by 40 meters (131 feet) wide. The visiting archaeologists
were told that the terraces had been used as a place of meditation and retreat since time immemorial
—and again this remains true today.
However, neither the archaeologists, nor apparently the locals realized the pyramid was a
pyramid. It was believed to be a natural hill, somewhat modified by human activity, until Natawidjaja
and his team began a geophysical survey here in 2011 using ground-penetrating radar, electrical
resistivity and seismic tomography. By then the summit had long since been cleared and the structures
on the terraces recognized as works of megalithic architecture. But no radiocarbon dating had yet
been done and the age attributed to the site—about 1000 BC—was based on guesswork rather than on
excavations.
The first scientific radiocarbon dating was done by Natawidjaja himself on organic materials in
soils underlying the megaliths at or near the surface. The dates produced—around 500 to 1500 BC—
were close enough to the archaeological guesswork to cause no controversy. But a surprise was in
store as Natawidjaja and his team extended their investigation using tubular drills that brought up
cores of earth and stone from much deeper levels.
First, the drill cores contained evidence—fragments of worked columnar basalt—that more manmade megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly, the organic materials brought up in
the drill cores began to yield older and older dates—3000 BC to 5000 BC, then 9600 BC as the drills
bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC and finally, at depths of 27.5 meters (90 feet) and
more, an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.
“This was not at all what my colleagues in the world of archaeology expected or wanted to hear,”
says Natawidjaja, a world-renowned expert in the geology of megathrust earthquakes who earned his
PhD at Cal Tech in the United States and who, it becomes apparent, regards archaeology as a
thoroughly unscientific discipline.
A truly cataclysmic period …
The problem is that those dates going back before 9600 BC take us deep into the last Ice Age, when
Indonesia was not a series of islands as it is today but was part of a vast antediluvian Southeast Asian
continent dubbed “Sundaland” by geologists.
Sea level was 122 meters (400 feet) lower then. Huge ice caps 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) deep
covered most of Europe and North America until the ice caps began to melt. Then all the water stored
in them returned to the oceans and sea-level rose, submerging many parts of the world where humans
had previously lived. Thus Britain was joined to Europe during the Ice Age (there was no English
Channel or North Sea). Likewise there was no Red Sea, no Persian Gulf, Sri Lanka was joined to
southern India, Siberia was joined to Alaska, Australia was joined to New Guinea—and so on and so
forth. It was during this epoch of sea-level rise, sometimes slow and continuous, sometimes rapid and
cataclysmic, that the Ice Age continent of Sundaland was submerged with only the Malaysian
Peninsula and the Indonesian islands as we know them today high enough to remain above water.
As we saw in the last chapter, the established archaeological view of the state of human
civilization until the end of the last Ice Age is that our ancestors were primitive hunter-gatherers,
ignorant of agriculture and incapable of any architectural feats bigger than wigwams and bivouacs.
This is why Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey is so significant—because it breaks that
paradigm wide open and cries out for serious consideration of a possibility, previously relegated to
the lunatic fringe, that civilization might be much older and more mysterious than we thought.
1 With
the date of its foundation presently set at 9600 BC (“exactly 9600 BC” as Klaus Schmidt was at pains
to point out to me), Göbekli Tepe also requires us to reopen the cold case of Atlantis which
archaeologists have long ridiculed, pouring scorn and derision on anyone daring to utter the much
reviled “A” word. As noted at the end of the last chapter, the Greek philosopher Plato, whose
dialogues Timaeus and Critias contain the earliest surviving mention of the fabled sunken kingdom,
sets the catastrophic destruction and submergence of Atlantis by floods and earthquakes at 9,000
years before the time of Solon
2—i.e. at exactly 9600 BC. The Greeks could not have known of
Göbekli Tepe (let alone that it was mysteriously founded at the very moment Atlantis was said to have
died). Moreover they had no access to the Greenland ice cores dating the end of the Ice Age to 9620
BC, just twenty years before the foundation of Göbekli Tepe, nor to modern scientific knowledge
about the rapidly rising sea levels (often accompanied by cataclysmic earthquakes as the weight of
the melting ice caps was removed from the continental landmasses) that occurred in this period. With
all this in mind, therefore, the date Plato gives is, to say the least, an uncanny coincidence.
In Danny Natawidjaja view, however, it is no coincidence at all. His research at Gunung Padang
has convinced him that Plato was right about the existence of a high civilization in the depths of the
last Ice Age—a civilization that was indeed brought to a cataclysmic end involving floods and
earthquakes in an epoch of great global instability between 10,800 BC and 9600 BC.
This epoch, which geologists call the “Younger Dryas,” has long been recognized as mysterious
and tumultuous. In 10,800 BC, when it began, the earth had been emerging from the Ice Age for roughly
10,000 years, global temperatures were rising steadily and the ice caps were melting. Then there was
a sudden dramatic return to colder conditions—nearly as cold as at the peak of the Ice Age 21,000
years ago. This short, sharp deep freeze lasted for 1,200 years until 9600 BC when the warming trend
resumed, global temperatures shot up again and the remaining ice caps melted very suddenly, dumping
all the water they contained into the oceans.
Figure 12: All of human history as it is presently taught to us follows the Younger Dryas—the mysterious cataclysmic period between
10,800 BC (around 12,800 years ago) and 9,600 BC (around 11,600 years ago).
“It is difficult,” Natawidjaja says, “for us to imagine what life on earth must have been like during
the Younger Dryas. It was a truly cataclysmic period of immense climate instability and terrible,
indeed terrifying, global conditions. It’s not surprising that many large animal species, such as the
mammoths, went extinct during this precise time and of course it had huge effects on our ancestors—
not just those ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers the archaeologists speak of but also, I believe, a high
civilization that was wiped from the historical record by the upheavals of the Younger Dryas.”
A controversial pyramid
What has brought Natawidjaja to this radical view is the evidence he and his team have uncovered at
Gunung Padang. When their drill cores began to yield very ancient carbon dates from organic
materials embedded in clays filling the gaps between worked stones, they expanded their
investigation using geophysical equipment—ground-penetrating radar, seismic tomography and
electrical resistivity—to get a picture of what lay under the ground. The results were stunning,
showing layers of massive construction using the same megalithic elements of columnar basalt that
are found on the surface but with courses of huge basaltic rocks beneath them extending down to thirty
meters (100 feet) and more beneath the surface. At those depths the carbon dates indicate that the
megaliths were put in place more than 12,000 years ago and in some cases as far back as 24,000
years ago.
Columnar basalt does form naturally—the famous Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland is an
example—but at Gunung Padang it has been used as a building material and is laid out in a form never
found in nature.
“The geophysical evidence is unambiguous,” Natawidjaja says. “Gunung Padang is not a natural
hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go back long before the end of the
last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of
sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt, or the largest
megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we’re looking at the work of a lost civilization
and a fairly advanced one.”
“The archaeologists won’t like that,” I point out.
“They don’t!” Natawidjaja agrees with a rueful smile. “I’ve already got myself into a lot of hot
water with this. My case is a solid one, based on good scientific evidence, but it’s not an easy one.
I’m up against deeply entrenched beliefs.”
The next step will be a full-scale archaeological excavation. “We have to excavate in order to
interrogate our remote sensing data and our carbon dating sequences and either confirm or deny what
we believe we’ve found here,” says Natawidjaja, “but unfortunately there’s a lot of obstacles in our
way.”
When I ask what he means by obstacles he replies that some senior Indonesian archaeologists are
lobbying the government in Jakarta to prevent him from doing any further work at Gunung Padang on
the grounds that they “know” the site is less than three thousand years old and see no justification for
disturbing it.
“I don’t deny that the megaliths at the surface are less than three thousand years old,” Natawidjaja
hastens to add, “but I suggest they were put here because Gunung Padang has been recognized as a
sacred place since time immemorial. It’s the deepest layers of the structure at between 12,000 and
more than 20,000 years old that are the most important. They have potentially revolutionary
implications for our understanding of history and I think it’s vital that we be allowed to investigate
them properly.”
Atlantis
Happily, there was a decisive Presidential intervention during 2014 and I can now report that Danny
(I’ll use his first name henceforth as we have become friends) was given carte blanche to excavate
the site. He and his team began work in August 2014, completing a short season there between August
and October, but as the experience at Göbekli Tepe shows, painstaking, detailed archaeology is a
slow process and they do not expect to reach the deepest layers until 2017 or 2018. As the first
season neared its end, however, Danny emailed me an update:
The research progress has been great. We have excavated three more spots right on top of the
megalithic site in the past couple of weeks, which give more evidence and details about the
buried structures. We have uncovered lots more stone artifacts from the excavations. The
existence of the pyramid-like structure beneath the megalithic site is now loud and clear; even
for non-specialists, it is not too difficult to understand if they come and see for themselves. We
have found some kind of open hall buried by soil five to seven meters thick; however we have
not yet got into the main chamber. We are now drilling to the suspected location of the chamber
(based on subsurface geophysic) in the middle of the megalithic site.
3
Buried structures? Chambers? Ah, yes, I forgot to mention those. We’ll go into the implications of all
this in more detail in a later chapter, but in brief, the geophysical survey work that Danny and his team
did between 2011 and 2013, deploying the latest technologies in electrical resistivity, seismic
tomography, ground-penetrating radar and core drilling, revealed not only deeply buried massive
constructions and very ancient carbon dates at Gunung Padang but also the presence of three further
hidden and as yet un-excavated chambers, so rectilinear in form that they are most unlikely to be
natural. The largest of these lies at a depth of between 21.3 and 27.4 meters (70 to 90 feet) and
measures approximately 5.5 meters (18 feet) high, 13.7 meters (45 feet) long and 9.1 meters (30 feet)
wide.
Could it be the fabled “Hall of Records” of Atlantis? Danny has put his impeccable scientific
credentials on the line with the controversial claim that it might be. Not only does he refuse to scoff at
the idea of Atlantis but also he’s written a book arguing that Indonesia—or rather the huge areas of
ancient “Sundaland” that were drowned by rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age—might actually
be Atlantis.
4
Danny and I made an extensive research trip around the whole of the Indonesian archipelago in
June 2014 searching out megalithic sites off the beaten track that have never been properly studied by
archaeologists. In Chapter Eighteen I’ll describe our findings, and how they relate to the Gunung
Padang mystery, but meanwhile I want to report here on the opinion of Dr. Robert Schoch, Professor
of Geology at Boston University, who was with me in December 2013 when I first met Danny at
Gunung Padang.
5
The view of Professor Robert Schoch
Schoch is a renowned figure, indeed notorious, for the case he’s made, based on strict geological
evidence, that the Great Sphinx of Giza bears the unmistakable erosion patterns of thousands of years
of heavy rainfall.
6 This means it has to be much older than 2500 BC (the orthodox date, when Egypt
received no more rain than it does today) and must originally have been carved around the end of the
Ice Age when the Nile valley was subjected to a long period of intense precipitation.
A tall, rangy, scholarly man with a full beard and a mop of unruly hair, Schoch was in his element
at Gunung Padang carefully interrogating the results of the geophysical scans with Danny, collecting
samples and minutely examining the site. Afterward, when he’d returned to the US and had time to
analyze the data, he wrote:
The first important observation is that … Gunung Padang goes back to before the end of the last
Ice Age, circa 9700 BC. Based on the evidence, I believe that human use of the site began by
circa 14,700 BC. Possibly the earliest use of the site goes back to 22,000 BC, or even earlier.
In my assessment, Layer Three, some 4 to 10 meters (13.1 to 32.8 feet) or so below the
surface, includes the period of the very end of the last Ice Age, circa 10,000 to 9500 BC, when
major climatic changes took place, with dramatic global warming, rising sea levels, torrential
rains, increased earthquake and volcanic activity, widespread wildfires … and other
catastrophes occurring across the surface of earth … There is evidence of collapsed structures
in Layer Three, possibly the result of the tumultuous conditions at that time.
Visiting Gunung Padang, pondering the dates and evidence of collapse and rebuilding that
may have occurred here, I could not help but think about another major site—representing very
ancient civilization—that spans the end of the last Ice Age, namely Göbekli Tepe in
southeastern Turkey … I also think of Egypt and my own work on re-dating the Great Sphinx.
The extreme weathering and erosion seen on the proto-Sphinx (the head was re-carved and the
monument reused during dynastic times), caused by torrential rains, could have been a result of
the extreme climatic changes at the end of the last Ice Age.
Putting together the evidence of Gunung Padang with that derived from Göbekli Tepe, the
Sphinx of Egypt, and other sites and lines of data from around the world, I believe we are
coming closer to understanding the cataclysmic times and events at the end of the last Ice Age.
Genuine civilizations of a sophisticated nature existed prior to circa 9700 BCE, which were
devastated by the events that brought the last Ice Age to a close.
7
Looking for the smoking gun …
At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Göbekli
Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in
our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is
beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints
of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.
In essence what I proposed in that book was that an advanced civilization had been wiped out and
lost to history in a global cataclysm at the end of the last Ice Age. I suggested there were survivors
who settled at various locations around the world and attempted to pass on their superior knowledge,
including knowledge of agriculture and architecture, to hunter-gatherer peoples who had also
survived the cataclysm. Indeed even today we have populations of hunter-gatherers, in the Kalahari
Desert, for instance, and in the Amazon jungle, who co-exist with our advanced technological culture
—so we should not be surprised that equally disparate levels of civilization might have co-existed in
the past.
What I could not do when I wrote Fingerprints, because the data was not then available, was
identify the exact nature of the cataclysm that had wiped out my hypothetical lost civilization. Instead
I speculated on a number of possible causes, notably the radical “earth crust displacement” theory of
Professor Charles Hapgood which, though endorsed by Albert Einstein,
8 has since found little favor
among geologists. This absence of a credible “smoking gun” was one of the many aspects of my
argument that was heavily criticized by archaeologists. Since 2007, however, a cascade of scientific
evidence has come to light that has identified the smoking gun for me. It’s all the more intriguing
because it’s the work of a large group of impressively credentialed mainstream scientists, and
because it does not rule out, indeed it in some ways reinforces, the case for massive crustal instability
that I made in Fingerprints of the Gods.
We’ll explore this new evidence, and its stunning implications, in the following chapters.
next
A Wall of Green Water Destroying Everything in Its
Path …
notes
Chapter 1
1. “The Turkish word Göbek means navel or belly.” Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe, A Stone-Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern
Anatolia, Ex Oriente, Berlin, 2012, p. 88. See also http://www.ancient.eu/article/234/ and
http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html.
2. Or “Belly Mountain.” See Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe, A Stone-Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia, op. cit., p. 88.
3. Interview with Professor Dr. Klaus Schmidt conducted by Graham Hancock at Göbekli Tepe, 7 and 8 September 2013. All
subsequent statements by Dr. Schmidt quoted in this chapter are from the same interview.
4. John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky, Harper and Row, New York, 1979, p. 13.
5. Interview with Klaus Schmidt, op. cit., and see also Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries: New Results of
Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs, in Documenta Praehistorica XXXVII, 2010, p. 243.
6. Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries, op. cit., p. 245.
7. Juan Antonio Belmonte, Journal of Cosmology, Vol 9 (2010), pp. 2052–2062.
8. See Chapter Fourteen.
9. My friend Andrew Collins elaborates on
these human-like characteristics of the vulture figure on p. 99 of his Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, Bear & Co., Vermont,
2014, for which I wrote the Introduction.
10. For further details of the
excavations in Enclosure H see Göbekli Tepe Newsletter 2014, German Archaeological Institute, pp. 5–7. Available as a pdf here:
http://www.dainst.org/documents/10180/123677/Newsletter+G%C3%B6bekli+Tepe+Ausgabe+1-2014.
11. Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries, op. cit., p. 242.
12. Schmidt elaborates on these ideas in Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries, op. cit., p. 243.
13. Neil Baldwin, Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God, Public Affairs, New York, 1998, p. 17.
14. Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1995, p. 130.
15. Neil Baldwin, Legends of the Plumed Serpent, op. cit., p. 17.
16. Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (Eds.), Berossos and Manetho: Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamia and
Egypt, University of Michigan Press, 1999, p. 44.
17. Benno Lansberger, “Three Essays on the Sumerians II: The Beginnings of Civilization in Mesopotamia,” in Benno Lansberger, Three
Essays on the Sumerians, Udena Publications, Los Angeles, p. 174; Berossos and Manetho, op. cit., pp. 17 and 44; Stephanie
Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 182–3, 328; Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods,
Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, London, 1992, pp. 41, 82–3, 163–4.
18. John Biershorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, William Morrow, New York, 1990, p. 161.
19. North America of Antiquity, p. 268, cited in Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Dover Publications Inc. Reprint,
1976, p. 165.
20. Sylvanus Griswold Morley, An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1975, pp. 16–
17.
21. John Biershorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, op. cit., p. 161.
22. Sylvanus Griswold Morley, An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs, op. cit., pp. 16–17.
23. See Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, op. cit., note 16, p. 517.
24. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, London, 1977, p. 36.
Chapter 2
1. See New Scientist Magazine, cover story on Göbekli Tepe, 5 October 2013, “The True Dawn: Civilization is Older and More
Mysterious than we Thought.”
2. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., p. 36.
3. Email from Danny Hilman Natawidjaja to Graham Hancock, 2 October 2014.
4. Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, Plato Never Lied: Atlantis in Indonesia, Booknesia, Jakarta, 2013.
5. Schoch and I, who have known each other for many years, were both invited to present papers at the Gotrasawala Festival and
Cultural Conference (devoted largely to discussions of Gunung Padang) that was held in Bandung on 5, 6 and 7 December 2013. A
professional field trip to Gunung Padang, at which Dr. Natawidjaja shared his findings, was organized as part of the Conference.
6. Reported in Fingerprints of the Gods, op. cit., p. 420ff.
7. Robert M. Schoch Ph.D., “The Case for a Lost Ice Age Civilization in Indonesia,” Atlantis Rising Magazine, March–April 2014, p.
41ff.
8. “I frequently receive communications from people who wish to consult me concerning their unpublished ideas,” Einstein wrote. “It
goes without saying that these ideas are very seldom possessed of scientific validity. The very first communication, however, that I
received from Mr. Hapgood electrified me. His idea is original, of great simplicity, and—if it continues to prove itself—of great
importance to everything that is related to the history of the earth’s surface.” From the Foreword by Albert Einstein to Charles H.
Hapgood, Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science, Pantheon Books, New York, 1958, pp. 1–2.
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