A World Lit By Fire

Via Verum Serum, here is a very interesting story from Newsweek about an archeological dig in Turkey focused on a temple that is 11,500 years old. As we've all been previously taught that neolithic man was doing little more than digging out from the last Ice Age back then, this has caused the dreaded "reappraisal:" History In The Remaking

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.

Now, Schmidt, the archeologist, has this theory that a culture developed specifically to build this temple. As he puts it, the temple begat the city. Perhaps. What this should really teach us is that human history is a lot more complicated - and ancient - than we can possibly imagine. People don't just magically appear and start building spectacular temples or pyramids. Such achievements are only possible after hundreds, if not thousands, of years of social and intellectual development. Maybe we don't know what came before, but that doesn't mean that nothing happened.

Look at a text like The Iliad. Sure there's a lot of literary embroidery, but it nonetheless makes clear that the Trojan War Greeks already lived in a complex society, capable of gathering a fleet and sailing across the sea to fight a major war. Not only that, there are references to allies traveling from as far away as Ethiopia in order to join the fight, which suggests a highly developed level of trade and international relations (and suggests a high level of development in those societies as well).

The fact is the ones we regard as the "Ancients" were themselves aware of a world even more ancient than ours, but of which we are only dimly aware.