Alors d'abord quelques photos de ce site, puis une «minute pédagogique». En fait c'est un peu plus d'une minute si vous lisez l'article et écoutez le vidéo explicatif ....mais bon, c'est fort intéressant quand même de découvrir un site qui fait de Stonehenge et des Pyramides des primes jeunesses...Je parle pour moi bien sûr; vous n'êtes pas obligés de lire et il n'y a pas de quizz plus tard
Gabi- photo de colonne Gobekli Tepe |
(liens vers des vidéos explicatifs)
Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?
By Tom Knox
Last
updated at 11:10 AM on 5th March 2009
For
the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling
plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he
passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The
bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something.
Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong
stone.
The
man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from
the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of
his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important.
They
certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer's day in
1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would
say he'd made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that
has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion -
and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.
A few
weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd's find reached museum curators
in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, ten miles south-west of the stones.
They
got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so, in
late 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe
(pronounced Go-beckly Tepp-ay) to begin his excavations.
As he
puts it: 'As soon as I got there and saw the stones, I knew that if I didn't
walk away immediately I would be here for the rest of my life.'
David
Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg,
says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.'
Some
go even further and say the site and its implications are incredible. As
Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: 'Gobekli Tepe is too
extraordinary for my mind to understand.'
So
what is it that has energised and astounded the sober world of academia?
The
site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones, unearthed
by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome, T-shaped megaliths.
Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge.
Most
of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images -
mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are another
common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.
The
stones seem to represent human forms - some have stylised 'arms', which angle
down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or ritual site,
like the stone circles of Western Europe.
To
date, 45 of these stones have been dug out - they are arranged in circles from
five to ten yards across - but there are indications that much more is to come.
Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just
waiting to be excavated.
So
far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be a
dazzling site - a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift Gobekli
Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere - and the realms of the fantastical.
The
first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least
12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.
That
means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in
3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.
Gobekli
is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so
old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing,
pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably
distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.
How
did cavemen build something so ambitious? Schmidt speculates that bands of
hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of
construction, living in animal-skin tents, slaughtering local game for food.
The
many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they also
support the dating of the site.
This
revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something like
Gobekli, is worldchanging, for it shows that the old hunter-gatherer life, in
this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived - almost
unbelievably sophisticated.
It's
as if the gods came down from heaven and built Gobekli for themselves.
This
is where we come to the biblical connection, and my own involvement in the
Gobekli Tepe story.
About
three years ago, intrigued by the first scant details of the site, I flew out
to Gobekli. It was a long, wearying journey, but more than worth it, not least as
it would later provide the backdrop for a new novel I have written.
Back
then, on the day I arrived at the dig, the archaeologists were unearthing
mind-blowing artworks. As these sculptures were revealed, I realised that I was
among the first people to see them since the end of the Ice Age.
And
that's when a tantalising possibility arose. Over glasses of black tea, served
in tents right next to the megaliths, Klaus Schmidt told me that, as he put it:
'Gobekli Tepe is not the Garden of Eden: it is a temple in Eden.'
To
understand how a respected academic like Schmidt can make such a dizzying
claim, you need to know that many scholars view the Eden story as folk-memory,
or allegory.
Seen
in this way, the Eden story, in Genesis, tells us of humanity's innocent and
leisured hunter-gatherer past, when we could pluck fruit from the trees, scoop
fish from the rivers and spend the rest of our days in pleasure.
But
then we 'fell' into the harsher life of farming, with its ceaseless toil and
daily grind. And we know primitive farming was harsh, compared to the relative
indolence of hunting, because of the archaeological evidence.
When
people make the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, their
skeletons change - they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy as the human
body adapts to a diet poorer in protein and a more wearisome lifestyle.
Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier.
This
begs the question, why adopt farming at all? Many theories have been suggested
- from tribal competition, to population pressures, to the extinction of wild
animal species. But Schmidt believes that the temple of Gobekli reveals another
possible cause.
'To
build such a place as this, the hunters must have joined together in numbers.
After they finished building, they probably congregated for worship. But then
they found that they couldn't feed so many people with regular hunting and
gathering.
'So I
think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated
people to take up farming.'
The
reason such theories have special weight is that the move to farming first
happened in this same region. These rolling Anatolian plains were the cradle of
agriculture.
The
world's first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away.
Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey.
Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat - first cultivated on the
hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals - such as rye and oats - also
started here.
But
there was a problem for these early farmers, and it wasn't just that they had
adopted a tougher, if ultimately more productive, lifestyle. They also
experienced an ecological crisis. These days the landscape surrounding the
eerie stones of Gobekli is arid and barren, but it was not always thus. As the
carvings on the stones show - and as archaeological remains reveal - this was
once a richly pastoral region.
There
were herds of game, rivers of fish, and flocks of wildfowl; lush green meadows
were ringed by woods and wild orchards. About 10,000 years ago, the Kurdish
desert was a 'paradisiacal place', as Schmidt puts it. So what destroyed the
environment? The answer is Man.
As we
began farming, we changed the landscape and the climate. When the trees were
chopped down, the soil leached away; all that ploughing and reaping left the
land eroded and bare. What was once an agreeable oasis became a land of stress,
toil and diminishing returns.
And
so, paradise was lost. Adam the hunter was forced out of his glorious Eden, 'to
till the earth from whence he was taken' - as the Bible puts it.
Of
course, these theories might be dismissed as speculations. Yet there is plenty
of historical evidence to show that the writers of the Bible, when talking of
Eden, were, indeed, describing this corner of Kurdish Turkey.
In
the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough,
this is where Gobekli is sited.
Likewise,
biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And
Gobekli lies between both of these.
In
ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a 'Beth Eden' - a house of Eden.
This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe.
Another
book in the Old Testament talks of 'the children of Eden which were in
Thelasar', a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.
The
very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the
plains of Harran.
Thus,
when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is,
indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors -
people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before
the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their
paradise.
It's
a stunning and seductive idea. Yet it has a sinister epilogue. Because the loss
of paradise seems to have had a strange and darkening effect on the human mind.
A few
years ago, archaeologists at nearby Cayonu unearthed a hoard of human skulls. They
were found under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood.
No
one is sure, but this may be the earliest evidence for human sacrifice: one of
the most inexplicable of human behaviours and one that could have evolved only
in the face of terrible societal stress.
Experts
may argue over the evidence at Cayonu. But what no one denies is that human
sacrifice took place in this region, spreading to Palestine, Canaan and Israel.
Archaeological
evidence suggests that victims were killed in huge death pits, children were
buried alive in jars, others roasted in vast bronze bowls.
These
are almost incomprehensible acts, unless you understand that the people had
learned to fear their gods, having been cast out of paradise. So they sought to
propitiate the angry heavens.
This
savagery may, indeed, hold the key to one final, bewildering mystery. The
astonishing stones and friezes of Gobekli Tepe are preserved intact for a
bizarre reason.
Long
ago, the site was deliberately and systematically buried in a feat of labour
every bit as remarkable as the stone carvings.
Around
8,000 BC, the creators of Gobekli turned on their achievement and entombed
their glorious temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial
hills on which that Kurdish shepherd walked in 1994.
No
one knows why Gobekli was buried. Maybe it was interred as a kind of penance: a
sacrifice to the angry gods, who had cast the hunters out of paradise. Perhaps
it was for shame at the violence and bloodshed that the stone-worship had
helped provoke.
Whatever
the answer, the parallels with our own era are stark. As we contemplate a new
age of ecological turbulence, maybe the silent, sombre, 12,000-year-old stones
of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us, to warn us, as they stare across the
first Eden we destroyed.
photos de la vieille ville de SanIurfa (où serait né Abraham.....)
SanIurfa- la grotte d'Abraham |
échoppe typique |
quelques photos d'Harran, un étrange petit village où les maisons sont construites comme des ruches d'abeille. Il y avait aussi à côté les ruines d'une vieille université. À part ça quoi dire sinon que j'ai juste cherché de l'ombre et bu mon reste d'eau...
Harran |
vieille université Harran |
quelques paysages au retour de notre excursion dans l'Est...
banlieue typique... |
blocs appartement pastels typiques - |