Magicians of the Gods
By Graham Hancock
14
The Gates of the Sun
Baalbek remains very much on my mind the next day as we drive the magnificent coastline around
Jounieh Bay heading 38 kilometers (23.6 miles) north to Byblos, the ancient Phoenician port that
claims, with some justification, to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.
Archaeologists have established that it was occupied as early as 8800 BC,
1 while Göbekli Tepe still
functioned.
2 By 5000 BC, Byblos was a flourishing, stable settlement that has never since been
without human population.
3 By 3000 BC, when it was known as Gubla or Gebel, it had grown to
become the key port and city of the ancient Canaanite coast.
4
It was the Greeks who later called it
Byblos, when it served as the center of a lucrative papyrus trade with Egypt (bublos is the Greek
word for papyrus).
5 Likewise the reader will recall from Chapter Thirteen that “Phoenician” was the
Greek name for the Canaanites and that the Phoenicians referred to themselves as Canaanites. For
simplicity’s sake, I will continue to use the terms “Phoenician” and “Canaanite” interchangeably here
and continue to refer to ancient Gubla/Gebel as Byblos.
As we pull into Byblos with its street cafés and palms and the bright Mediterranean lapping at its
beautiful, crescent-shaped harbor, what’s on my mind about Baalbek is a question. Why didn’t the
Romans choose to build the greatest and most spectacular temple in their entire empire in Rome
itself? Or failing that, if for some reason they felt compelled to build the Temple of Jupiter in
Lebanon, then why didn’t they build it in a prestigious and important entrepôt like Byblos? And if not
in Byblos, then why not in another of the renowned Phoenician ports along the same coast such as
Tire or Sidon?
Why Baalbek for the Temple of Jupiter? That’s the question. But there’s no easy answer, because
archaeologists and historians admit that not a single shred of evidence exists “to tell us who
commissioned, paid for, or designed any portion of the complex.”
6 We can therefore only speculate as
to their motives. It is really rather surprising when you consider the scale of the enterprise that no
Emperor, no general and no architect ever claimed credit for it, but the fact is that the temple
remained peculiarly absent from the annals of the Romans and of all other peoples for many centuries
after it was built.
7
Not until Macrobius, who wrote in the fifth century AD (by which time Baalbek had long been
Christianized) do we even get a reference to the god who was worshipped there.
8
It is almost as
though a spell of silence was cast over the place by the magicians of a former age and that the
Romans fell under its glamor, allowing themselves to be bound by it, even as they raised up the huge
columns and pediments of their own temples. In consequence, as architectural historian Dell Upton
observes, “ancient Baalbek is a figment of our imaginations.”
9 Even the site itself, as we see it now,
is in a sense a work of fantasy, since so much of it:
was reconstructed by a German archaeological mission in the early twentieth century and by
French and Lebanese archaeologists in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s. The rest we know from
reconstruction drawings of the complex in a mythical state of completion.
10
It is a continuation of this archaeological “myth-making,” I believe, that leads Daniel Lohmann to his
paradoxical speculation that the builders of Roman Baalbek were “megalomaniacs” even though they
were, in fact, so self-effacing that they never sought to associate themselves by name with any of the
“giant strides toward monumentality” that they took there.
11 The most gigantic of all these
“megalomaniac” strides, of course, if Lohmann is right, was the unfinished attempt to give the Temple
of Jupiter a purely cosmetic, non-load-bearing podium, rising—had it ever been completed—to
around 50 feet high (dwarfing any other Roman temple podium) and made up of blocks weighing
hundreds of tons and, in the case of the Trilithon, close to a thousand tons. In Lohmann’s reference
frame, and the reference frame of every archaeologist for the past century, only megalomaniacs would
contemplate such a task.
Since we’re all speculating, however, I offer the alternative speculation that the Romans chose
Baalbek for the Temple of Jupiter—that it was such a special place to them—precisely because the
U-shaped wall that Lohmann thinks was the base of their “megalomaniac” podium was already there,
coming down from the time of the gods themselves and worthy of veneration in later ages purely in
order to honor those ancient gods, rather than to exalt the names and stoke the egos of those who
honored them.
Star worshippers
Overlooking the ruins of Phoenician and Roman temples, a castle from the Crusader period (twelfth
century AD) is the dominant landmark in Byblos today. And interestingly this Crusader castle,
reconstructed and repaired many times, has at least a dozen Roman column drums re-used as masonry
blocks in its walls—a reminder that, in this region, you can never take any piece of architecture
entirely at face value.
But the castle is a wonderful spot to get a sense of the old, indeed the truly ancient, city of Byblos,
from which Phoenician seafarers once sailed out to all points of the known world and beyond—for
the suggestion that the Phoenicians reached the Americas thousands of years before Columbus
continues to be supported by intriguing though fragmentary evidence.
12 There is also a mysterious
connection with Ancient Egypt that goes far beyond the papyrus trade between these two ancient
peoples.
This connection concerns the god Osiris, whose celestial image the Ancient Egyptians saw in the
constellation of Orion. The father of Horus and the husband of Isis, the goddess of magic, Osiris was,
according to tradition, a great king of primordial times, who offered the gifts of civilization to those
who were willing to receive them.
13 After weaning the indigenous peoples of Egypt:
from their miserable and barbarous manners, he taught them how to till the earth, and how to
sow and reap crops, he formulated a code of laws for them, and made them worship the gods
and perform service to them. He then left Egypt and traveled over the rest of the world teaching
the various nations to do what his own subjects were doing. He forced no man to carry out his
instructions, but by means of gentle persuasion and an appeal to their reason, he succeeded in
inducing them to practice what he preached.
14
The deeds of this great civilizing teacher as they are recorded in the Ancient Egyptian annals are, of
course, reminiscent of the mission of those companies of gods, magicians and sages whom the Edfu
Building Texts tell us “wandered the earth” in their great ships after the flood that destroyed their
homeland, seeking to bring about the resurrection of the antediluvian world. And the antagonist, Set,
who appears in the Edfu tradition and is eventually defeated and subdued by Horus, also plays a key
role in the Osiris cycle of myths. He plots against the god-king while he is away on his civilizing
mission and on his return he contrives to murder him with the help, significantly, of seventy-two co-conspirators.
15 There is code here for, as the reader will recall, the number 72 is the heartbeat of the
precessional cycle—the number of years required for one degree of precessional motion.
The body of Osiris, we are told, is placed in a sarcophagus by Set and the other conspirators and
thrown in the Nile, whence the current carries it north and out into the Mediterranean sea. The waves
carried the box to the coast of Lebanon:
and cast it up at Byblos, and as soon as it rested on the ground a large tree sprang up and,
growing all around the box, enclosed it on every side. The King of Byblos marveled at the size
of this tree and had it cut down and caused a pillar for his palace to be made of that portion of
the trunk which contained the box.
16
Discovering the whereabouts of her husband’s remains, Isis takes ship to Byblos, goes to the palace
and contrives to have herself appointed as nursemaid to the children of the King. When unobserved
she transforms into a swallow and flies round and round the pillar lamenting. Eventually she reveals
her true identity and persuades the monarch to give her the pillar, from which she removes the
sarcophagus containing the dead body of Osiris and returns with it to Egypt.
17
What happens next is a long story, that we needn’t go into here, but the upshot is the resurrection of
Osiris in the heavens as the constellation of Orion where, as a star god, he reigns over the afterlife
kingdom, his consort Isis by his side in the form of the bright star Sirius (called Sopdu or Sept in the
Ancient Egyptian language, often rendered in Greek as Sothis).
18
In one text, which makes these
stellar identifications particularly clear, Isis speaks of Osiris as follows:
Thy sacred image, Orion in heaven, rises and sets every day; I am Sothis following after him,
and I will not forsake him.
19
And in the Pyramid Texts we read, among many similar utterances, that “Osiris has come as Orion.”
20
Multiple other references also identify deceased pharaohs of Egypt with Osiris and with the stars of
Orion and Sirius, for example:
O flesh of the King, do not decay … You shall reach the sky as Orion, your soul shall be as
effective as Sothis …21
Likewise:
O King, the sky conceives you with Orion, the dawn light bears you with Orion. He who lives,
lives by the command of the gods, and you live. You will regularly ascend with Orion from the
eastern region of the sky, you will regularly descend with Orion into the western region of the
sky.
22
From such texts, notes Egyptologist Selim Hassan:
I think it cannot possibly be denied that, at one period in their history, the Egyptians believed
that the souls of their Kings either mingled with the stars, or became a star … and this tradition
never entirely died out. Moreover the association of the Giza Pyramids with the stellar cult was
long maintained by tradition and those of Khufu and Khafre retained the reputation of being
connected with star-worship as late as the Arab Period.
23
In the same passage, Hassan then goes on to make an observation of the greatest relevance to my
research. “In the Geographical Dictionary, Mo’gam-el-Buldan, by Yakut el-Hamawi,” he writes,
“Vol. VIII, p. 457 (Cairo Edition)”:
it is said, after giving the dimensions of the two largest of the Giza Pyramids: “To both of them
the Sabians made their pilgrimage.” Now, of course, these Sabians were star-worshippers, and
if I guess rightly they had derived their name from the Egyptian word sba, “star.” The Sabians
were followers of an ancient religion … worshippers of the hosts of Heaven, the heavenly
bodies … Whatever the origin of their name may have been, the fact remains that they fully
recognized the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre as being monuments connected with the stellar
cult, and revered them as places of pilgrimage.
24
The connection Hassan makes here is a remarkable one, because the home city of the Sabians, since
time immemorial, was Harran in southeastern Turkey,
25 within a few miles of Göbekli Tepe.
Moreover, as well as being “star-worshippers,” these Sabians of Harran were followers of the
“Books of Thoth”—see Chapter Eleven—in which the Ancient Egyptian wisdom god had set down
the “words of the Sages.” Indeed in Islamic times (for hundreds of years after the revelation of the
Koran to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century AD), the Sabians were able to win exemption
from persecution at the hands of the Muslims by claiming not to be pagans but a “people of the book,”
distinguished, like the Christians and Jews, by their possession of a divinely revealed Scripture.
26
When asked to show their “book” they produced a copy of the Hermetic texts—the Greek and Latin
writings purporting to be dialogues between Thoth (the Hermes of the Greeks, the Mercury of the
Romans) and various of his pupils.
27
It is noteworthy that Thoth, as well as being the god of wisdom,
was also “Lord of the Moon,”
28 and that the major temple of Harran was dedicated to the moon god
of their own pantheon, whose name was Sin.
29 Last but not least, Philo of Byblos tells us that
Sanchuniathon, the source of his Phoenician History:
carefully searched out the works of Taautos. He did this since he realized that Taautos was the
first person under the sun who thought of the invention of writing and who began to compose
records, thereby laying the foundation, as it were, of learning. The Egyptians call him Thouth
and the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks translated his name as Hermes.
30
We stay a few hours longer in Byblos. Excavations of the ancient city lie all around the Crusader
castle. There’s a Roman colonnade, a small theater, Phoenician ramparts, the remains, little more than
foundations, of the Temple of Baalat-Gebel, circa 2800 BC and dedicated to the Phoenician patron
goddess of Byblos, and the so-called L-shaped temple, circa 2600 BC—a sacred lake once separated
the two edifices. On top of a podium a number of small, crude obelisks still stand—the “Temple of
the Obelisks,” circa 1900 to 1600 BC. There are the remains of the royal necropolis of the Kings of
Byblos, circa eighteenth century BC down to tenth century BC, but mingled in with all this, very close
to it, is the Neolithic quarter, dating back to 5000 BC and beyond, where the inhabitants of Byblos first
started to make floors of crushed limestone around 4500 BC.
31
All these ruins and remains are jumbled together promiscuously, one on top of the other, around
one another, century upon century, millenium upon millenium, receding back into prehistory, very
comprehensively picked clean by the archaeologists and left on show as tourist attractions. The site
does not touch my heart and in the absence of Sanchuniathon original text, in the absence even of
Philo’s History, other than in the fragments that have survived, I feel there’s nothing more of use that I
can do here.
It’s time to move on.
Hill of pillars
It’s a short flight from Beirut to Istanbul and from Istanbul it’s only another short hop to the city of
ŞanlIurfa, which Santha and I will use as our base for visiting Harran, the city of the mysterious “star worshipping” Sabians, and for a return visit to Göbekli Tepe. Our first target, however, is neither of
these places. Instead we seek out an as yet un-excavated site which shows every indication of being as
old as Göbekli Tepe and which appears to have been dedicated to the same mysterious purpose. The
name of this site, I’ve learned from my background research, is Karahan Tepe, but knowing its name
is one thing; finding it is quite another.
It’s baking hot in southeastern Turkey in July. Our driver speaks English so there’s no problem communicating with him, and he in turn can communicate with others on our behalf, but nobody we
pass as we drive through a landscape of irrigated fields and barren hills seems to have the faintest
idea where Karahan Tepe is. Well, why should they, after all? It’s just another hill and by all accounts
it’s in a fairly deserted spot. We do find it in the end, however, about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) south
of the main E90 highway and 65 kilometers (40.4 miles) east of ŞanlIurfa. That’s where we spot a
little farmstead surrounded by low walls and poor fields at the end of a bumpy dirt track. The farmer
points to a hill rising a few hundred meters to our north. It’s on his land, he says, but we’re welcome
to take a look. He assigns his teenage son to show us how to drive our car as close as possible to the
site, then we step out and go the rest of the way on foot.
The tepe is a ridge of limestone running roughly north to south with steep slopes, covered in loose
crumbly soil, overgrown with yellow grass on its eastern and western flanks. The top of the ridge is
about 705 meters (2,300 feet) above sea level, but the climb from where we’ve parked is only
another 50 meters (164 feet) and almost immediately we start seeing the characteristic T-shapes of the
pillars we’re familiar with from Göbekli Tepe. They are everywhere around the sides of the ridge,
dozens of them, some organized in circles, others in what appear to be parallel rows, but all of them are quite deeply buried with only the distinctive tops of the “T” protruding above the ground.
Extraordinarily, other than confirming that Karahan Tepe is the same age as Göbekli Tepe, i.e.
between 11,000 and 12,000 years old, and that it was abandoned at around the same time, i.e. around
10,200 years ago, after which it was never resettled,
32 almost no archaeology has been done on the
site at all. Local people, on the other hand, have been busy here looking for treasure and their efforts
have exposed and broken a number of the pillars, two with serpents carved on them exactly in the
manner that serpents are depicted on the pillars of Göbekli Tepe.
Along the top of the ridge we find numerous semi-spherical depressions, like little craters, cut into
the rock. Some have very clean, sharply defined edges that are typically about 30 centimeters (1 foot)
in diameter and up to 15 centimeters (6 inches) deep—although there are also smaller and larger
couples present. In most cases they are grouped into arrays of a dozen or more, sometimes in rows,
sometimes in circular or spiral patterns—but in such a random way that it is difficult to see the logic
behind them.
As at Göbekli Tepe, it is clear that the quarrying of the pillars was done on site and we find a
number of places where parallel grooves, marking out the shape of a pillar, have been cut into the
bedrock of the ridge. There is one almost complete T-shaped pillar still in situ in the quarry that
measures 4.5 meters (14 feet 10 inches) high, 1.5 meters (5 feet) wide and 80 centimeters (2 feet 7
inches) thick.
33 Looking from that to the forest of pillars with only their heads protruding above the
flanks of the hill, I can’t help but wonder what would be found here if a proper excavation was done.
Göbekli Tepe has already rewritten the history of mankind and here is another Göbekli Tepe, pristine,
practically untouched, and no one seems in the least bit interested. Indeed there is even a broken L shaped fragment of a carefully cut block that once formed a complete square “window” or
“porthole”—similar pieces have been found intact at Göbekli Tepe—that has been used here as part
of the hearth for some shepherd’s fire and now sits blackened with smoke in a sheltered corner near
the top of the ridge.
It’s incomprehensible to me that a place as important as Karahan Tepe, with so much to teach us,
could be so ignored and so disregarded. I have often said, as I did at the end of the last chapter, that
we are a species with amnesia. I attribute our great forgetfulness of our own past, the blank pages in
our memory, to the terrible cataclysms the earth passed through at the end of the Ice Age, but here at
Karahan Tepe I’m reminded that our collective stupor is also often willfully self-inflicted—as though
we no longer care to know where we come from or who we really are.
Control of the past
The next day Santha and I go back to Göbekli Tepe. Klaus Schmidt is still alive at this point in July
2014, but he’s away in Germany for the summer and in just a few days’ time he will die of a heart
attack.
In his absence I want to take another look at the site. In particular, I’m hoping to arrange to be there
at night, so that I can experience it under the open sky and get a sense of its relationship to the stars
above as well as to the earth below. Instead, what I get is another forceful reminder of how we
humans willfully desecrate the precious gifts bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
Even in 2013 the archaeological vandalizing and defacing of the site was well advanced with a
hideous raised walkway in place, but what has happened since our last visit is almost beyond words
to describe. A massively ugly wooden roof now looms over the megalithic enclosures, entirely
covering them, and hulking platforms loaded with tons of stones have been suspended beneath it to
prevent the roof from blowing away in high winds. These platforms, together with the struts
supporting the roof and the prominent “no entry” signs scattered around, make it almost impossible to
see the megalithic pillars or to appreciate their profound, original beauty and spiritual power.
What the archaeologists have done—of course, they claim they did it to “protect” the site—is a
travesty, an abomination, a masterpiece of ugliness, and we, the global public, whose heritage
Göbekli Tepe is, are left cheated and bereft. I simply cannot understand the minds that could have
boxed in, caged and imprisoned Göbekli Tepe in this way. I cannot begin to imagine what they were
thinking. And even if the roof is “temporary” as is presently claimed—until, no doubt, a larger one is
put in place—that is no excuse. Better no roof at all (the site has managed very well without one for
nearly nineteen years since the first excavations began) than even five minutes of this vile
“temporary” horror.
Besides, I have grave doubts about how “temporary” it will be. It has taken almost a year for the
German Archaeological Institute to put the roof up (they were already working on it during our
previous visit in September 2013), a lot of money has been spent on it, and I fear we will not see it
removed and replaced with something more aesthetically appropriate to the majesty and mystery of
Göbekli Tepe for a very long while.
As to a night visit, and my plan to see the stars with the megaliths around me … What a joke! The
roof has cut Göbekli Tepe off entirely from the cosmos. It feels almost like a deliberate, calculated
act of disempowerment—as though someone among the powers that be suddenly woke up and
realized how dangerous this ancient place has become to the established order of things and how
subversive it potentially is to the system of mind control, very much including control of the past, that
keeps modern society in order.
Ancient astronomers
That night back in our hotel I’m working on my laptop, going through a pile of research papers about
Göbekli Tepe that I’ve downloaded and brought with me. Most of them are from academic journals,
but one is from my own website. Written by registered engineer and environmental geologist Paul
Burley, I published it in March 2013 and haven’t read it since. I recall at the time feeling it was
important, but I can’t immediately remember why. Göbekli Tepe wasn’t as central to my concerns then
as it is today. Now as I read through Burley’s paper in the light of everything I’ve learned since
March 2013, its central message, and exactly why it matters, hits me like a shot of adrenaline.
Klaus Schmidt’s opposition to any form of astronomical connection at Göbekli Tepe, which I
reported briefly in Chapter One, was based more on his own profound ignorance of astronomy and
distaste for the subject, than anything else. In the teeth of this hostility from the lead archaeologist,
however, a number of scientists have studied Göbekli Tepe to see if any of the enclosures, or the
groups of pillars within them, reveal any obvious astronomical alignments. It is the unanimous
testimony of all these studies that Göbekli Tepe is a profoundly astronomical site, that its builders
observed the stars closely, and that they were able to manifest these observations very successfully in
the alignments of the structures on the ground.
I’ll give a few examples here.
Dr. Giulio Magli, Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Politecnico di Milano, is a leading
Italian astrophysicist who has conducted archaeoastronomical studies of a number of ancient sites and
monuments around the world. In 2013 he published a research paper on Göbekli Tepe based on
precise computer simulations of changes in the sky brought about over long periods by precession
34—a phenomenon that we have already explored. It is Magli’s case that Sirius, the star the Ancient
Egyptians identified with the goddess Isis, was an object of particular interest to the builders of
Göbekli Tepe:
Simulating the sky in the tenth millennium BC, it is possible to see that a quite spectacular
phenomenon occurred at Göbekli Tepe in that period: the “birth” of a “new” star, and certainly
not of an ordinary one, as it is the brightest star and the fourth most brilliant object of the sky:
Sirius. Indeed precession, at the latitude of Göbekli Tepe, brought Sirius under the horizon in
the years around 15,000 BC. After reaching the minimum, Sirius started to come closer to the
horizon and it became visible again, very low and close to due south, toward 9300 BC.
35
Thereafter, Magli goes on to demonstrate, the rising points of Sirius along the horizon, which also
change very slowly as a result of precession, appear to have been “tracked” at Göbekli Tepe by
Enclosure D, Enclosure C and Enclosure B. The extrapolated mean azimuths of these enclosures,
taken as the mid-lines between the two central monoliths in each case, align with the rising azimuth of
Sirius in respectively 9100 BC, 8750 BC and 8300 BC.
36 “The structures of Göbekli Tepe,” Magli
concludes, “were conceived to celebrate, and then follow in the course of the centuries, the
appearance of a brilliant ‘guest’star in the sky: Sirius.”
37
Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University, though not an astronomer, also detected
astronomical alignments at Göbekli Tepe, and in the same region of the sky highlighted by Magli.
However, Schoch came to a different conclusion about what stellar objects might have interested the
builders. “This is a difficult question to answer,” he wrote, before going on to offer the following
hypothesis:
On the morning of the Vernal Equinox of circa 10,000 BCE, before the sun rose due east at
Göbekli Tepe, the Pleiades, Taurus, and the top of Orion were in view in the direction indicated
by the central stones of Enclosure D, with Orion’s belt not far above the horizon as dawn broke
(as seen from the best vantage points in the area). A similar scenario played out for the
orientation of the central stones of Enclosure C in circa 9500 BCE and for Enclosure B in circa
9000 BCE. Enclosure A is oriented toward the Pleiades, Taurus, and Orion on the morning of the
Vernal Equinox circa 8500 BCE, but due to precessional changes, the entire belt of Orion no
longer rose above the horizon before dawn broke. By about 8150 BCE the belt of Orion
remained below the horizon at dawn on the morning of the Vernal Equinox. These dates fit well
the timeframe established for Göbekli Tepe on the basis of radiocarbon dating.
38
Other non-astronomers, author Andrew Collins and chartered engineer Rodney Hale, looked in the
opposite direction to Schoch and Magli, i.e. north instead of south, and found strong alignments with
the setting of Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation of Cygnus. Again the alignments turn out to
track the changes in the position of the star caused by precession.
39 The growing impression that the
builders of Göbekli Tepe paid close attention to the stars and were fully aware of the effects of
precessional motion on the celestial landscape, was confirmed in January 2015 in an article in the
journal Archaeological Discovery, by Alessandro De Lorenzis and Vincenzo Orofino, both of the
Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Salento, Italy. They concluded that
Collins and Hale were correct and that, on the northern side of their orientations, “the central pillars
of the studied enclosures are in fact turned to face the setting of Deneb.”
40 Lorentis and Orofino
refined the dates given by Collins and Hale, pushing them back by about 200 years, but agreed that
subtle changes in the orientation of the enclosures were evidence of the tracking of precession.
41
Astrophysicist Juan Antonio Belmonte also looked at the astronomical characteristics of Göbekli
Tepe. He noted that among the circular enclosures, “there is one with nearly rectangular walls, which
were almost perfectly aligned to the cardinal points.”
42 Needless to say such exact alignments, as at
the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, cannot have been achieved without the use of equally exact
astronomical observations.
Belmonte also paid attention to the “profuse decoration” of the T-pillars at Göbekli Tepe,
concluding that these may represent:
yet other astronomical observations, such as the crescent and the star, so common in later
cultures of the Middle East … Then there are what could be interpreted as totemic
representations of animals, which, if we may continue to speculate, could symbolize
constellations such as Leo, Taurus and Scorpio.
This is the right moment to deal with Klaus Schmidt’s argument (see Chapter One) that there couldn’t
possibly be any “astronomical figures” at Göbekli Tepi, because “the zodiac constellations were not
recognized until Babylonian times, nine thousand years after Göbekli Tepe.” I didn’t challenge him on
this point when I interviewed him, because I was more interested in hearing his own views on
Göbekli Tepe, rather than engaging him in a possibly acrimonious debate. Clearly, however,
Belmonte, who knows his stuff, does not agree with the position taken by Schmidt.
Neither, for that matter, does the Russian astronomer and historian of science Alexander Gurshtein,
who traces the first recognition and naming of constellations—notably the Great Bear—to 20,000
BC,
43 and more detailed knowledge of the zodiac to the epoch of 5600 BC.
44
German archaeoastronomer Michael Rappengluck pushes the origins of the zodiac even further
back than that, however. He has identified an accurate depiction of the zodiacal constellation of
Taurus painted more than 17,000 years ago in the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux cave in France.
45
Rappengluck points out that there are four key moments of the year, the spring equinox, the autumn
equinox, the winter solstice and the summer solstice. We’ve seen already how the “character” of a
world age has long been thought to be governed by the zodiacal constellation that “houses” the sun on
the spring equinox, but other constellations also “house” the other three prominent “stations of the
sun” at the autumn equinox, and at the summer and winter solstices, and when a shift of age takes
place with one constellation giving way to another on the spring equinox, so the constellations
governing the other three “stations” also shift.
There is not space to go into the evidence in detail here, but the essence of Rappengluck’s
argument concerning Lascaux is that depicted there is the whole constellation of Taurus (in one of the
aurochs or “bull” figures in the Hall of Bulls) and also above its shoulder, in a distinctive pattern of
six dots, the six visible stars of the Pleiades, which form a highly recognizable element of Taurus.
Moreover a date can be put on this depiction:
The Pleiades in 15,300 BC were very near the point of the autumn equinox … The six stars in
the “Salle des Taureaux” therefore represent a striking and excellent heavenly marker for the
beginning of autumn … The epoch calculated astronomically lies extraordinarily close to the …
carbon-14 dating [for human activity in this part of the cave] corresponding to 15,300 BC.
46
In other work Rappengluck provides further compelling evidence that our ancestors, at least as early
as the epoch between 16,000 BC and 10,000 BC:
recognized single and very complex star patterns, including the Milky Way, the Northern Crown
in the cave of El Castillo (Spain), the Pleiades in the cave of Lascaux (France) and the main
constellations of the sky at the same location.
47
He also documents a rock panel in the cave of La Tete du Lion (France) that:
shows the combination of a star pattern—Aldebaran in the Bull and the Pleiades—with a
drawing of the moon’s cycle above. This picture comes from the Solutrean epoch [ca 19,000 to
20,000 BC]. It shows not only a remarkable similarity with the representation in the Lascaux
cave, but clearly connects the star pattern with part of the lunar cycle.
48
Rappengluck’s conclusion, and again I must cut a long story short, is that:
hunter-gatherers of Palaeolithic epochs looked up to the starry sky and saw the open cluster of
the Pleiades with the wandering moon and sun near or between the Golden Gate of the ecliptic,
21,000 years ago.
49
The “Golden Gate of the ecliptic” that Rappengluck refers to here was traditionally conceived of as
that area of the heavens bounded by the Hyades and the Pleiades (both of which are star groups within
the constellation of Taurus), between which, as though through a great celestial “gate,” the ecliptic
passes.
50 The “ecliptic” is the technical term for the sun’s perceived “path” through the heavens. The
implication, therefore, is that the path of the sun (and the moon
51
) against the background of the
constellations of the zodiac was observed, depicted and understood in the Palaeolithic, perhaps as
much as 10,000 years before Göbekli Tepe was built. For this reason Belmonte makes a point of
citing Rappengluck’s work, and indeed of showing a photo provided by Rappengluck of the Taurus
figure in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux,
52 when he makes his seemingly off the cuff remark that zodiacal
constellations “such as Leo, Taurus and Scorpio” might be the inspiration for the “totemic” animals
depicted at Göbekli Tepe.
For Belmonte, in summary, Göbekli Tepe offers evidence that:
a completely unknown hunter-gatherer society more than 11,000 years ago sought to create
monumental structures linked to the heavens. This series of sanctuaries, built presumably one
after the other and even one upon another, may have been used for centuries, perhaps millennia,
to chart the heavens. However, for reasons which are unknown, the constructors deliberately
buried the structures, creating conditions which contributed to their excellent state of
preservation despite their great antiquity.
53
Certainly the indigenous inhabitants of the Göbekli Tepe area were hunter-gatherers—and completely
unknown hunter-gatherers at that! But it has been my thesis throughout this book that their sudden
venture into spectacular monumental architecture, closely followed by their equally spectacular
“invention” of agriculture, is very strange. Indeed it amounts to an almost inexplicable “great leap
forward” that cries out for a coherent explanation which archaeology has yet to provide. The
hypothesis we are exploring here, and that I believe might explain these anomalies, is that the
survivors of a lost civilization, who had already mastered agriculture and knew everything there was
to know about building with megaliths, had settled among the hunter-gatherers of Göbekli Tepe
following the Younger Dryas cataclysm and transferred some of their skills to them.
Now, in addition to megalithic architecture and agriculture we must take the evidence of astronomy
into account. At first sight, while the work of Belmonte, Collins, Hale, Schoch, Magli and others
confirms that competent astronomers must have been at work at Göbekli Tepe, we cannot say that the
level of knowledge manifested in the alignments of the pillars and enclosures was necessarily that of
a sophisticated “civilization.” We’ve seen from the research done by Gurshtein and Rappengluck that
careful observations of the sky, and identification of constellations we can still recognize today, can
be traced back into the Neolithic and beyond that into the art of the painted caves of the Palaeolithic
20,000 or more years ago. So expressions of such knowledge at Göbekli Tepe need not surprise us
unduly.
But suppose there was something else—something that hunter-gatherers, no matter how savvy,
could not be expected to have known under any circumstances?
It is that elusive “something else” that Paul Burley’s work brought home to me, like a shot of
adrenaline, when I re-read his paper in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa in July 2014.
Neolithic puzzle
Burley’s paper is entitled “Göbekli Tepe: Temples Communicating an Ancient Cosmic Geography.”
He wrote it originally in June 2011, I met him at the Conference of Precession and Ancient
Knowledge in Sedona, Arizona, in September that year, we exchanged a couple of emails during
2012, and in February 2013 he asked me to read his paper, which he said concerned “evidence of a
zodiac on one of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe.” I read it, replied that I found it “very persuasive and
interesting, with significant implications” and told him I’d like to publish it on the Articles page of my
website. Paul agreed and the article went live on March 8, 2013.
54
It’s still there, accessible through
the URL provided in the note.
“Significant implications,” I now realize as I read through the paper again in my hotel room in
ŞanlIurfa, was a huge understatement. But I didn’t make my first visit to Göbekli Tepe until September
2013 and by then, clearly, I’d forgotten the gist of Burley’s argument, which focuses almost
exclusively on Enclosure D and on the very pillar, Pillar 43, that I’d been most interested in when I
was there. My interest in it had been sparked by Belmonte’s suggestion that the relief carving of a
scorpion near its base (which the reader will recall was hidden by rubble that Schmidt refused to
allow me to move) might be a representation of the zodiacal constellation of Scorpio. So it was a
lapse on my part not to have re-read Burley’s paper documenting “a zodiac” on the same pillar before
I traveled to the site. But we’re all human, we all make mistakes, we all forget things and despite
acknowledging its “significant implications” in our correspondence six months earlier, what Burley
had discovered had slipped my mind entirely on my September 2013 visit.
Here’s where he gets to his point:
One of the limestone pillars [in Enclosure D] includes a scene in bas relief on the upper portion
of one of its sides. There is a bird with outstretched wings, two smaller birds, a scorpion, a
snake, a circle, and a number of wavy lines and cord-like features. At first glance this lithified
menagerie appears to be simply a hodgepodge of animals and geometrical designs randomly
placed to fill in the broad side of the pillar.
The key to unlocking this early Neolithic puzzle is the circle situated at the center of the
scene. I am immediately reminded of the cosmic Father—the Sun. The next clues are the
scorpion facing up toward the sun, and the large bird seemingly holding the sun upon its
outstretched wing. In fact the sun figure appears to be located accurately on the ecliptic with
respect to the familiar constellation of Scorpio, although the scorpion on the pillar occupies
only the left portion, or head, of our modern conception of that constellation. As such the sun
symbol is located as close to the galactic center as it can be on the ecliptic as it crosses the
galactic plane.
Bear with me, and I’ll explain all this. Meanwhile, let’s continue with Burley’s article because it’s
his next statement that really has me sitting up and paying attention:
What’s important here is for some unknown reason the builders of Göbekli Tepe constructed a
temple apparently highlighting a time 11,600 years in their future. Yet this scene is
intentional. The symbolism is clear and in keeping with many mythologies describing this very
same event—occurring at the very time we live in today!
Burley then presents a graphic that “illustrates the crossing of the galactic plane of the Milky Way
near the center of the galaxy, with several familiar constellations nearby.” A second graphic shows
the same view with the addition of the ancient constellations represented on the pillar:
Note that the outstretched wings, sun, bird legs and snake all appear to be oriented to emphasize
the sun’s path along the ecliptic … The similarity of the bas relief to the crossing of the ecliptic
and galactic equator at the center of the Milky Way is difficult to reject, supporting the
possibility that humans recognized and documented the precession of the equinoxes thousands
of years earlier than is generally accepted by scholars … Göbekli Tepe was built as a symbolic
sphere communicating a very ancient understanding of world and cosmic geography. Why this
knowledge was intentionally buried soon afterward remains a mystery.
I don’t immediately understand everything that Burley is saying in all this, but I understand enough to
get started on it and fortunately I have astronomy software—Stellarium—on my computer that can
simulate the ancient skies taking account of precession. More importantly, the program can show me
the sky of our own time and will allow me to scroll through it day by day, month by month, going
forward or back as I wish, enlarging and inspecting any specific elements that I’m interested in. Most
often I study ancient skies, not modern ones, but tonight it’s our own time I need to take a look at.
Or, rather, not exactly our own time, July 2014 as I sit in front of my computer in ŞanlIurfa, but a
year and a half earlier, the winter solstice, December 21, 2012—the much hyped “end date” (that
passed with not so much as a whimper, let alone a bang) of the famous Mayan calendar.
Message on a pillar?
Here’s what I’m aware of already as I open Stellarium on my computer. When Paul Burley talks about
the sun depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar being located “as close to the galactic center as it can be
on the ecliptic,” and when he also makes a point of telling me that Scorpio is involved, I know he can
only be referring to one epoch—the epoch of the year 2000, give or take a maximum of about 40 years
on either side (i.e. from 1960 to 2040). The great band of stars and clouds of interstellar dust arching
across the sky that we call the Milky Way, and that is in fact our own home galaxy viewed edge on, is
crossed by the ecliptic—i.e. the sun’s apparent path through the heavens—twice a year. One of these
gigantic interchanges is in the North between the constellations of Gemini and Taurus; in our epoch
the sun stands here at the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice, i.e. around June 21. The second
interchange is in the South between the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio, and in our epoch the
sun stands here at the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice, i.e. around December 21.
The reader will recall that precession has the visual effect, as viewed from earth, of causing the
constellations that “house” the sun at the four key moments of the year—the two equinoxes and the
two solstices—to shift very slowly around the belt of the zodiac, with the sun spending 2,160 years
“in” each zodiacal constellation at each key moment, before the whole system slips round far enough
for the sun to have passed completely from one constellation into another. When this happens at the
equinox, it happens at the other three “stations” as well. Indeed, it is a good mental exercise to
imagine a circle—which represents the ecliptic, i.e. the annual path of the sun—and to mark out at
equal intervals around the circumference of this circle the twelve constellations of the zodiac. Now
place four spokes arranged in the form of a cross inside the circle. Where each of the four ends of the
cross touch the edge of the circle, you have one of the key stations of the sun—the northern
hemisphere’s spring equinox (March 21), summer solstice (June 21), autumn equinox (September 21),
and winter solstice (December 21). In our epoch, the zodiacal constellations housing the sun at these
four stations are Pisces on the March equinox, Gemini on the June solstice, Virgo on the September
equinox, and Sagittarius on the December solstice.
Figure 47: The precessional shift from the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. As the position of the sun against the background
zodiacal constellations on the spring equinox shifts from Pisces into Aquarius, so the summer solstice will shift from Gemini into Taurus,
the autumn equinox from Virgo into Leo, and the winter solstice from Sagittarius into Scorpio.
However, precession has the effect of very slowly rotating the spokes of the cross. We are nearing
the end of the “Age of Pisces” now (i.e. of the 2,160 years when Pisces houses the sun on the March
equinox) and the end of the spoke that was in Pisces will soon rotate into Aquarius (hence the song,
“this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”). But because the cross is, if you like, welded together to
form a single fixed unit, all its spokes must move together with the result that as the March equinox
shifts from Pisces into Aquarius, so the June solstice will shift from Gemini into Taurus, the
September equinox from Virgo into Leo, and the December solstice from Sagittarius into Scorpio.
I want to avoid undue complications as far as possible here, but let us now return to the Milky Way
which, as we’ve seen, is crossed by the path of the sun twice a year. Remember that at each crossing
point a pair of zodiacal constellations sits on either side of the Milky Way, effectively forming the
pillars of two celestial gates through which the “road” of the Milky Way passes—Gemini and Taurus
in the North (with the sun presently housed by Gemini at the June solstice) and Sagittarius and
Scorpio in the South (with the sun presently housed by Sagittarius at the December solstice). The
relationship of these two pairs of zodiacal constellations to the Milky Way is not affected by
precession and NEVER CHANGES. Gemini and Taurus will always mark the northern “gate” of the
Milky Way and Sagittarius and Scorpio will always mark the southern “gate” of the Milky Way.
Of the two, however, it is the Sagittarius–Scorpio gate that is the most important, because it so
happens that the part of the Milky Way seen through this gate as we look up at the night sky forms the
very center and heart of our galaxy. Not only that, but because it is the galactic center, in the midst of
which, astronomers now believe, sits an immense black hole—“a hyperdense object from which even
light cannot escape”
55—there is a notable bulge in precisely this area. Last but not least, in the midst
of this so-called “nuclear bulge” is another absolutely distinctive feature that astronomers call the
“dark rift,” which figures prominently in many ancient mythologies,
56 and which is created by a series
of overlapping, non-luminous molecular dust clouds.
As a result of precession, the December solstice sun is presently housed by Sagittarius and thus, as
viewed from earth, “targets” the galactic center like the bead on the barrel of a rifle. The last time this
grand celestial line-up of earth, December-solstice sun and the galactic center occurred was a full
precessional cycle of 25,920 years ago and the next time it will happen is a full precessional cycle of
25,920 years in the future. We live, in other words, in a very special, indeed rather unique, moment in
terms of cosmic and astronomical symbolism. I will elaborate in the next chapter on the symbolic
aspect, and why the December solstice matters in particular, but first it is important to make
something else clear.
If, hypothetically, some ancient civilization wished to deploy its knowledge of the regular
movements and changes in the heavens in order to draw attention to a particular moment in the flow of
time, a possibility that we have considered with the monuments of Giza, then the precessional world
ages, while useful, are not really precise enough to spell out an exact date. After all, the broad
configurations of each precessional age hold good for 2,160 years. If we want to be more specific
than that, then we are going to need to find a celestial event in the period we wish to draw attention to
which is (a) an artifact of precession and (b) occurs in a much narrower window than that of a full
precessional world age of 2,160 years.
Such an event occurs in our time. It is the arrival of the sun at the December solstice in the
southern gate of the Milky Way between Sagittarius and Scorpio, where it targets the galactic center.
There are certain imprecisions, mainly to do with the width of the sun’s disc and over what period we
can say it lines up exactly with the center of the Milky Way when viewed from earth, but nonetheless,
we are not talking about 2,160 years here. The exact targeting of the galactic center occurs in a
window that is no more than 80-years wide and we will continue to be in that window for
approximately another 25 years.
This creates an interesting situation with regard to the message of Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe,
because if Paul Burley is right, the reliefs on that pillar use symbolic language to depict the December
solstice sun at the southern gate of the Milky Way between Sagittarius and Scorpio.
In other words, those reliefs are speaking to our time.
They are speaking to us.
Chapter 15
The Place of Creation
As I sit in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa in July 2014 spinning the skies on my computer screen, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that Paul Burley has had a genius insight about the scene on
Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe. Burley’s language in his paper is careful—almost diffident. As we saw in
Chapter Fourteen, he says that “the sun figure appears to be located accurately on the ecliptic with
respect to the familiar constellation of Scorpio.” He speaks of other “familiar constellations” nearby.
And he draws our attention to the large bird—the vulture—“seemingly holding the sun upon an
outstretched wing.” He does not say which constellation he believes the vulture represents, but the
graphics he includes to reinforce his argument leave no room for doubt that he regards it as an ancient
representation of the constellation of Sagittarius.
1
We’ve already seen that there is evidence for the identification of constellations going far back
into the Ice Age, some of which were portrayed in those remote times in forms that are recognizable
to us today. From the last chapter the reader will recall Michael Rappengluck’s work on the zodiacal
constellation of Taurus, depicted at Lascaux some 17,000 years ago as an auroch (ancient species of
wild cattle) with the six visible stars of the Pleiades on its shoulder.
Acknowledging such surprising continuities in the ways that some constellations are depicted does
not mean that all the constellations we are familiar with now have always been depicted in the same
way by all cultures at all periods of history. This is very far from being the case. Constellations are
subject to sometimes radical change depending on which imaginary figures different cultures choose
to project upon the sky. For example, the Mesopotamian constellation of the Bull of Heaven and the
modern constellation of Taurus share the Hyades cluster as the head, but in other respects are very
different.
2 Likewise the Mesopotamian constellation of the Bow and Arrow is built from stars in the
constellations that we call Argo and Canis Major, with the star Sirius as the tip of the arrow. The
Chinese also have a Bow and Arrow constellation built from pretty much the same stars but the arrow
is shorter, with Sirius forming not the tip but the target.
3
Even when constellation boundaries remain the same from culture to culture, the ways in which
those constellations are seen can be very different. Thus the Ancient Egyptians knew the constellation
that we call the Great Bear, but represented it as the foreleg of a bull. They saw the Little Bear (Ursa
Minor) as a jackal. They depicted the zodiacal constellation of Cancer as a scarab beetle. The
constellation of Draco, which we see as a dragon, was figured by the Ancient Egyptians as a
hippopotamus with a crocodile on its back.
4
There can therefore be no objection in principle to the suggestion that the constellation we call
Sagittarius, “the Archer”—and depict as a centaur man-horse hybrid holding a bow with arrow
drawn—could have been seen by the builders of Göbekli Tepe as a vulture with outstretched wings.
I spend hours on Stellarium toggling back and forth between the sky of 9600 BC and the sky of our
own epoch, focusing on the region between Sagittarius and Scorpio—the region Burley believes is
depicted on Pillar 43—and looking at the relationship of the sun to these background constellations.
The first thing that becomes clear to me is that a vulture with outstretched wings makes a very
good figure of Sagittarius; indeed it’s a much better, more intuitive and more obvious way to
represent the central part of this constellation than the centaur/archer that we have inherited from the
Mesopotamians and the Greeks. This central part of Sagittarius (minus the centaur’s legs and tail)
happens to contain its brightest stars and forms an easily recognized asterism often called the
“Teapot” by astronomers today—because it does resemble a modern teapot with a handle, a pointed
lid and a spout. The handle and spout elements, however, could equally effectively be drawn as the
outstretched wings of a vulture, while the pointed “lid” becomes the vulture’s neck and head. It is the
outstretched wing in front of the vulture—the spout of the teapot—that Burley sees as “holding the
sun,” represented by the prominent disc in the middle of the scene on Pillar 43.
But the vulture and the sun are only two aspects of the complex imagery of the pillar. Below and
just a little to the right of the vulture is a scorpion. Above and to the right of the vulture is a second
large bird with a long sickle-shaped beak, and nestled close to this bird is a serpent with a large
triangular head and its body coiled into a curve. A third bird, again with a hooked beak, but smaller,
with the look of a chick, is placed below these two figures—again to the right of the vulture, indeed
immediately to the right of its extended front wing. Below the scorpion is the head and long neck of a
fourth bird. Beside the scorpion, rearing up, is another serpent.
Part of the reason for my growing confidence in Burley’s conclusion, though he makes little of it in
his paper, is that these figures, with only minor adjustments, compare intriguingly with other
constellations around the alleged Sagittarius/vulture figure.
First and foremost, there is the scorpion below and a little to the right of the vulture, which we’ve
seen already has an obvious resemblance to Scorpio, the next constellation along the zodiac from Sagittarius. Its posture and positioning are wrong—we’ll look more closely into the implications of
this in a moment—but it’s there and it is overlapped by the tail end of the constellation that we
recognize as Scorpio today.
Secondly, there’s the large bird above and to the right of the vulture with the curved body of a
serpent nestled close to it. These two figures are in the correct position and the correct relationship to
one another to match the constellation we call Ophiuchus, the serpent holder, and the serpent
constellation, Serpens, that Ophiuchus holds.
Thirdly, immediately to the right of the extended front wing of the vulture there’s that other bird,
smaller, like a chick, with a hooked beak. I email Burley about this, and about the different position
and orientation of the scorpion on the pillar and the modern constellation of Scorpio, and we arrive,
after some back and forth, at a solution. Constellation boundaries, as the reader will recall, are not
necessarily drawn in the same place by all cultures at all periods and it’s clear that there’s been a
shift over time in the constellation boundaries here. The chick on Pillar 43 appears to have formed a
small constellation of its own in the minds of the Göbekli Tepe astronomers—a constellation that
utilized some of the important stars today considered to be part of Scorpio. The chick’s hooked beak
is correctly positioned, and its body is the correct shape, to match the head and claws of Scorpio.
5
Fourthly, beside the scorpion on Pillar 43 is a serpent and beneath the scorpion are the head and
long neck of yet another bird, with a headless anthropomorphic figure positioned to its right. The
serpent matches the tail of Sagittarius (as we’ve seen, the vulture appears to be composed from the
central part of Sagittarius only—the Teapot—so this leaves the remainder of the constellation
available to the ancients for other uses). The best contenders for the bird, and for the peculiar little
anthropomorphic figure to its right are parts of the constellations we know today as Pavo and
Triangulum Australe. The remainder of Pavo may be involved with further figures present on the
pillar to the left of the bird.
As is the case with Sagittarius, elements of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been
redeployed in the ancient constellations depicted on Pillar 43. Only the tail of our Scorpio is in the
correct location to match the scorpion on Pillar 43 and its head faces to the right, whereas the head of
the scorpion on the pillar faces to the left. The scorpion on the pillar is also below the vulture,
whereas modern Scorpio is a very large constellation lying parallel and to the right of Sagittarius. I
suggest the solution to this problem is that the scorpion on Pillar 43 is conjured from a combination of
the tail of the modern constellation of Scorpio (right legs of the Pillar 43 scorpion), an unused part of
the “Teapot” asterism of Sagittarius (right claw of the Pillar 43 scorpion) and the constellations that
we know as Ara, Telescopium and Corona Australis (respectively the tail, left legs and left claw of
the Pillar 43 scorpion). Meanwhile, as noted above, the claws and head of the modern constellation
of Scorpio have been co-opted to form the chick with the hooked beak on Pillar 43.
This whole issue of the relationship between the modern constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius
and the scorpion and vulture figures depicted on Pillar 43 takes on a new level of significance when
we remember that in some ancient astronomical figures Sagittarius is depicted not only as a centaur—a man-horse—but also as a man-horse hybrid with the tail of a scorpion, and sometimes simply as a
man-scorpion hybrid.
6 On Babylonian Kudurru stones (often referred to as boundary stones, although
it is likely that their function has been misunderstood
7
) a figure of a man-scorpion drawing a bow
frequently appears that “is universally identified with the archer Sagittarius.”
8 What further cements
the identification of Sagittarius with the vulture on Pillar 43 is that these man-scorpion figures from the Babylonian Kudurru stones are very often depicted with the legs and feet of birds.
9 Moreover, in
some representations a second scorpion appears beneath the body—i.e. beneath the Teapot asterism—of Sagittarius,
10
reminiscent of the position of the scorpion on Pillar 43 (see Figures 50 and 51).
Figure 51: Man-scorpion Sagittarius figures from Babylonian Kudurru stones (left) are frequently depicted with the legs and feet of birds,
further strengthening the identification of the vulture figure on Pillar 43 with Sagittarius. In other Mesopotamian representations (right)
we see a second scorpion beneath the body of Sagittarius occupying a similar position to the scorpion on Pillar 43.
When all this is taken together it goes, in my opinion, far beyond anything that can be explained
away as mere “coincidence.” The implication is that ideas of how certain constellations should be
depicted that were expressed at Göbekli Tepe almost 12,000 years ago, including the notion that there
should be a scorpion in this region of the heavens, were passed down, undergoing some changes in
the process, but nonetheless surviving in recognizable form for millennia to find related expression in
much later Babylonian astronomical iconography. But given the close connections with ancient
Mesopotamia, its antediluvian cities, its Seven Sages and its flood survivors washed up in their Ark
near Göbekli Tepe, we should perhaps not be too surprised.
Last but not least, there’s the mystery of the three “bags” or “buckets” in the upper register of
Pillar 43, which caught my eye on my first visit to Göbekli Tepe and which are discussed in Chapter
One. As astronomer Giulio Magli has noticed, these:
three “bags” are pretty similar to the three “houses in the sky” occurring in the much (very
much!) later Babylonian Kudurru traditions.
11
What Magli calls the “houses in the sky” (again see accompanying illustrations) are the symbols of
Mesopotamian deities, notably Enlil, who sent the Deluge to destroy mankind, and Enki, the god of
wisdom who intervened to save us.
12 The reader will recall from Chapter Eight that it was Enki who
warned the patriarch Zisudra of the coming cataclysm and urged him to build the great Ark that would
ultimately bring the flood survivors to the region of Ararat so close to Göbekli Tepe. It’s hard to
avoid the conclusion that all these shared themes in the iconography of Mesopotamia as late as the
first millenium BC, and of Göbekli Tepe as early as the tenth millennium BC, have much older
antediluvian origins in a lost civilization that was the progenitor of both—and perhaps of many other
cultures around the world—and that took pains, through deliberately engineered myths and wisdom traditions, and through carefully structured teachings passed on from generation to generation by
initiated Sages, to ensure that its memory would not be lost forever from the earth.
The Maya
Late into the night, as I work through the whole scenario in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa, my confidence
in Burley’s case continues to grow. Once all the surrounding context is taken into account, the vulture
“holding the sun” on its front wing really does look like the figure of an ancient constellation
representing the Teapot asterism of the constellation of Sagittarius.
This then raises the next part of the puzzle: when does the vulture/Sagittarius “hold the sun?”
Burley makes clear that he believes the moment represented on Pillar 43 still lay far in the future
when Göbekli Tepe was built—indeed 11,600 years in the future, i.e. in our own time, the epoch of
2012. And he comes to this conclusion because it is only in our epoch, specifically in the 80-year
window from 1960 to 2040, that the sun on December 21, the winter solstice, not only sits over the
outstretched front wing of the bird (i.e. over the spout of the “teapot” in the modern conception of this
asterism) but also targets the “nuclear bulge” and the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
So, arguably, this is a very significant astronomical moment that is symbolized on Pillar 43.
Very significant indeed, as it turns out, because it is also this exact same 80-year window (where
the year 2012 falls just a little after the midpoint) that is signaled in the famous—or perhaps it would
now be better to say infamous—Mayan calendar. A great deal of nonsense was talked about that
calendar, and particularly about the December 21, 2012 date, which many wrongly took to be
something absolute and precise, when in reality it was always an “indication date” and nothing more.
In getting to grips with this mystery, it is only the astronomy that counts—and naked-eye astronomy
at that. We are not talking about radio telescopes or astrophysics here. With regard to the naked-eye
astronomy of the ancient Maya, the real scholars of this subject, among whom there is none more preeminent than John Major Jenkins, made valiant efforts—for a long while before 2012—to teach us
that what the end date of the Mayan calendar was based on was in fact the once-in-26,000-years
conjunction of the winter solstice sun with the center of the galaxy, i.e. with the dark rift and nuclear
bulge of the Milky Way. Because of the diameter of the sun and the limitations of naked-eye astronomy
this conjunction cannot be pinned down to an exact year but is best considered, as I’ve indicated here,
as a window 80-years wide spanning the period 1960–2040.
As an artifact of precession, the winter solstice sun was moving slowly and steadily toward its
conjunction with the center of the galaxy for thousands of years before 2012—and in his books, going
back at least as far as Maya Cosmogenesis, which he published in 1998, John Major Jenkins made
this eminently clear. Diagrams that he offered to his readers showed the journey of the winter solstice
sun from 3000 BC, when it was 70 degrees away from the dark-rift crossing point in Sagittarius,
through the time of Christ when it had halved the distance that remained for it to travel, to the epoch of
2012 (that 80-year window between 1960 and 2040) when it most closely conjuncts the dark rift, and
onward to AD 5000 when it will have moved 70 degrees past the dark rift.
13
More than this, Jenkins meticulously documented why the conjunction of the winter solstice sun
with the dark rift in the central bulge of the Milky Way was important in Mayan cosmology—because
this was the region of the heavens that the Maya thought of as “the place of creation” with the central
bulge viewed as “the womb or birthplace of the sky”:
The Maya understood this dense, bright bulge as a Cosmic Center and Creation Place, a
conclusion based solely on naked-eye observation that is, in fact, very true: the center of our
saucer-shaped galaxy lies within this bright and wide part of the Milky Way … that hyperdense
region out of which the Milky Way and everything in it, including us, has poured.
14
It is not my purpose here to go in depth into the whole enigma of the Mayan calendar, not least since I
wrote about this subject at some length in Fingerprints of the Gods.
15 However, my understanding
since the publication of Fingerprints in 1995 has moved on, and it is important to be clear that in
signaling the decades around 2012 as the end of a great cycle, the Maya were not speaking of the end
of the world, as such, but rather of the end of an age—“a time of great transformation and world
rebirth”
16—that would be followed by the beginning of a new great cycle or world age. This, in the
Mayan scheme of things, is the turbulent and dangerous time of transition we live in today. It is
therefore strange, and indeed somewhat eerie, to find the solar and astronomical coordinates of the
exact same 80-year window between 1960 and 2040 prophesied by the Maya to mark a turning point
in human history, carved in high relief on a 12,000-year-old pillar in Göbekli Tepe in far-off Turkey.
Eliminating the impossible
I want to be sure that I could be right to read some kind of prediction or prophecy for our age, some
sort of notification, some sort of message sent specifically to us, in the reliefs on Pillar 43. Before
even beginning to consider what that message might speak of, the first step is to confirm that Paul
Burley’s discovery is a solid one.
I’m already persuaded by his identification of Sagittarius with the vulture and of the disc held up
by its wing with the sun. The general context of the surrounding constellations is also an excellent fit.
Could it be, however, that the reliefs on the pillar do indeed depict the sun’s conjunction with
Sagittarius and the center of the Milky Way, but at some time other than the winter solstice in the years
between 1960 and 2040?
Of course, the winter solstice alignment recurs once every 26,000 years, so in 24,000 BC the sun
would have been seen in Sagittarius, targeting the center of the galaxy exactly as it does today, and
this rare alignment will happen again 26,000 years from now, i.e. in AD 28,000. It’s not impossible
that any hypothetical message could be to do with these remote dates.
It’s intriguing, however, that there’s another “message,” from a completely different culture—the
ancient Maya—that uses the same system of coordinates and that is indeed focused, very exactly, on
the years between 1960 and 2040.
Meanwhile at Göbekli Tepe there are also the other three key moments of the year to consider—the
summer solstice and the two equinoxes. Was there any alignment through Sagittarius with the center of
the galaxy at any of these three other “stations of the sun” in the epoch of 9600 BC when Göbekli Tepe
was built?
I know from my work on Ancient Egypt that the sun was in Leo on the spring equinox in 10,800 BC.
Now a few moments on the computer confirm that this remained the case 1,200 years later; in 9600 BC
the equinox sun was still in Leo and was thus at a point on its ecliptic path that was very far from any
alignment with the center of the galaxy. I feel quite safe, therefore, in ruling out the spring equinox, at
least in that epoch.
The same is also true for the autumn equinox in 9600 BC. Because the sun was then in the
constellation of Aquarius, and again very far from alignment with the center of the galaxy, I rule it out
too.
Moreover, after reminding myself of the orientation of all the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, it
becomes clear that the equinoxes can be ruled out in all periods. This is the case because all of the
four major enclosures, A, B, C and D—remember Pillar 43 is in Enclosure D—have a very definite
northwest to southeast orientation.
17 None of them come anywhere near to due east where the
equinox sun rises, or due west where the equinox sun sets. If the builders of Göbekli Tepe had wished
to direct our attention to either of the equinoxes in a piece of symbolic art like Pillar 43, their very
first step would have been to provide an obvious clue by aligning the site east to west. Since they did
not do so, it is safe to assume that events at the equinoxes were not what they had in mind.
This leaves us with the solstices. The sun rises south of east and sets south of west on the winter
solstice. On the summer solstice it rises north of east and sets north of west. In theory, therefore,
sunrise alignments (south of east) on the winter solstice and sunset alignments (north of west) on the
summer solstice can be considered as relevant to the northwest to southeast orientation of Göbekli
Tepe.
As we’ve seen, a winter solstice alignment involving the sun, Sagittarius, and the center of the
galaxy can be ruled out for 9600 BC, since that alignment only occurs in our own epoch, or in 24,000
BC or in AD 28,000. On the winter solstice in 9600 BC the sun was in Taurus and very far from alignment with the center of the galaxy. A summer solstice sunrise alignment north of east can also be
ruled out, not only in 9600 BC but in all epochs, given the site’s distinct southeast to northwest
orientation.
By a process of deduction, therefore, we are left with only one possible alignment that might work
in 9600 BC and this is to the summer solstice sunset, north of west, which presents no conflict to the
general southeast to northwest orientation of Göbekli Tepe. Moreover, computer simulations show
that on the summer solstice in the epoch of 9600 BC the sun was in the constellation of Scorpio and
while it did not align with the center of the galaxy (having moved past the dark rift and the nuclear
bulge), it was still reasonably close to that target. As the reader will recall, Sagittarius and Scorpio
straddle the dark rift and the nuclear bulge but it is in Sagittarius, not Scorpio, that the exact alignment
with the center of the galaxy occurs. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to accept the summer solstice
sunset, north of west, in the epoch of 9600 BC as a candidate for the scene depicted on Pillar 43. A
relatively minor error of draftsmanship by the sculptor who carved the figures would, in theory, be
enough to explain the discrepancy.
There is, however, a difficulty which Andrew Collins, his colleague Rodney Hale, and the
mathematicians Alessandro de Lorenzis and Vincenzo Orofino all seem to have missed in their focus
on possible alignments toward the northwest, specifically to the setting of the star Deneb in the
constellation of Cygnus, reviewed in the last chapter. Deneb did indeed set north of west in the epoch
of 9600 BC in alignment with the orientation of Enclosure D but this alignment, though accurate
enough, was purely theoretical and could never in fact have been observed from Enclosure D, for the
simple reason that Enclosure D is built into the side of the steep ridge of the Tepe that rises to the
north of the main group of enclosures. No observation of the setting of Deneb would have been
possible from Enclosure D and for the same reason no observation of the summer solstice sunset
would have been possible. The sun would have dropped out of sight behind the ridge for
approximately twenty minutes before it actually set and in order to observe its setting, it would have
been necessary to leave Enclosure D and climb the ridge.
For this reason, therefore, combined with the fact that the sun in Scorpio, while close, does not
target the center of the galaxy, a summer solstice sunset alignment must also be ruled out.
“When you have eliminated the impossible,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes
famously pronounced, then “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” By a process
of elimination we have seen that Göbekli Tepe cannot be inviting us to consider the equinoxes, and
nor can it be inviting us to consider the summer solstice, even at the favorable moment of sunset. This
leaves us only with the winter solstice with the sun in Sagittarius targeting the center of the Milky
Way galaxy, the definitive astronomical signature of the years between 1960 and 2040 in our own
epoch—a signature that recurs only at 26,000-year intervals. However improbable it may seem,
therefore, we are obliged to consider the possibility that in 9600 BC the builders of Göbekli Tepe
were already so advanced in their knowledge of the recondite phenomenon of precession that they
were able to calculate its effects for thousands of years backward and forward in time in order to
produce an accurate symbolic picture of the Sagittarius/winter solstice conjunction.
If this speculation is correct then it is appropriate to remind ourselves that two comparable
scientific achievements of prehistoric antiquity have also survived the ages and come down to us in
the same degree of completeness.
One is the Mayan calendar that envisaged a great cycle in the life of the world coming to an end in
exactly the same 80-year period between 1960 and 2040. Moreover, it used exactly the same
yardstick—the progress of the winter solstice sun toward alignment with the center of our galaxy—to
predict when the fateful conjunction would occur and to define the cusp between the end of the old
age and the beginning of the new.
The other is the grand astronomical geoglyph of Egypt’s Giza plateau, inscribed on the west bank
of the Nile in the forms of the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx. The reader will recall that these
masterpieces of megalithic architecture deploy a deep knowledge of precession to offer us a picture
of the sky on the spring equinox in 10,800 BC. Here, too, as we shall see in Chapter Nineteen, there
are the distinctive characteristics of a message, a message sent across the ages and directed, quite
specifically, at our time and at us.
In our search to discover what these messages might mean, perhaps the Sabians of Harran, those
“star-worshippers” whose city lies barely 25 miles from Göbekli Tepe, those followers of the
wisdom god with their mysterious pilgrimages to the Pyramids of Giza, will be able to give us a clue.
next
Written in the Stars
notes @ page 418 on the scroll of the source
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