The temple that time forget
Aziz points me to a Newsweek article, History in the Remaking, on the Göbekli Tepe temple complex. The piece is a bit breathless:
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.
A trivial point is that it was a spark at most, not the spark, as there are at least two independent sequences of the origination of agriculture leading to cities and the complex of cultural traits which we label “civilization.” A larger point is that I suspect it is incredible to us that hunter-gatherers could engage in such coordination because our model of what hunter-gatherers are capable of is constrained to Arctic peoples, the Bushmen and the Pygmies, and these populations are selection biased toward marginal lands which agriculturists were unable to exploit. In contrast, hunter-gatherers before agriculture were resident in much richer territory, and probably had more complex societies than we’re used to imagining. Probably something closer to the native populations of the North American Pacific Northwest.
On another issue, a friend who is like me a religious unbeliever wondered via email if Aziz’s jump to suggesting that Göbekli Tepe might be a glimpse into the first revelation was going a bit too far. I think the issue here is that Aziz, and many followers of the Abrahamic religions, simply start with different premises and so interpret these data through their own lens. His comment is open about his own perspective and how it colors his interpretation:
The relevance of this to faith is immense. If (as a believer, particularly of an Abrahamic faith) you accept the view that religion is a revelation from God to mankind, then the tempe at Göbekli Tepe really has potential to provide a meaningful narrative for that relationship. But the temple complex offers deep insights into human prehistory far beyond theological insights – it is a outlier in that a similar complex structure would not be built for five millenia later, in Iraq. It is such a mystery that the first archaeologist to discover it in the 60s was simply unable to process what he saw and walked away!
The bottom line is that with these temples, we see a glimpse of humanity at the cusp, not of civilization, but of understanding that there is more to existence than merely existing. The idea of the existence of the divine -the awakening from mere survival (post Ice Age) into a broader philosophical curiosity about why we are here and Who put us here – must have been like an ideological nuke to our forebears. It was literally Revelation, and perhaps it occurred there, at Göbekli Tepe , for the first time.
The idea that humanity began with a primal monotheism is not exclusive to Islam. Many conservative Christians, and I presume many Jews as well, accept this as a factual aspect of our species’ history. Adam and Noah were monotheists, and the panoply of religious traditions which were extant when Abrahamic monotheism began its meteoric rise is viewed from this perspective as degeneration from the original religion. The influence of initial framework is particularly stark when it comes to interpreting Mesopotamiam antiquities, conservative Christian friends of mine in high school saw in references to a flood in Sumerian mythology as validation of the Biblical story. That is, independent sources of confirmation of truths which they knew from revelation. In contrast, I inferred that these were in fact likely to be the source documents of the myths recorded in the Hebrew Bible.
But the second paragraph I have more issues with. I do not see in the existence of complex temples as any indication of philosophical theism. The Aztecs had complex temples, but they were manifestly barbaric, and arguably inhumane. If, for example, the excavators discovered human remains whose condition implied violent death and likely their sacrifice I assume Aziz would revise his assessment about the Göbekli Tepe complex. Or perhaps become a gnostic!
The full flower of philosophical reflection, and its synthesis with ethics and religion, is clear in the historical record, and goes by the term the Axial Age. It occurred on the order of 2,500 years ago. If it occurred at Göbekli Tepe it was lost to us in the interregnum. But I do not believe this is what happened, I suspect that the glimmers of such reflection, or at least the psychological atoms necessary to construct introspective philosophy and exploration of transcendence, has roots in behavioral modernity, on the order of 50,000 years ago (though I admit that my confidence in this is modest, and not high). In other words, I would bet that some humans were aware of their own mortality, and pondered their relation to the order of things, as they were leaving Africa. But only with the rise of complex societies which were open to sustainable rent-seeking could these humans transform their own personal reflections into the framework around which humanity ostensibly operated.
I thought the general consensus was that agriculture was discovered multiple times independently in the Old World as well. But maybe I’m confusing Jared Diamond with the general consensus.
Well, it does not seem to be an Islamic temple: there’s an animal relief in the pillar depicted in the picture accompanying the Newsweek story. Isn’t that sort of thing verboten in Islam?)
I thought the general consensus was that agriculture was discovered multiple times independently in the Old World as well.
this is the majority view from what i know. but two independence events is probably a reasonable “floor.”
i actually didnt mean to imply that the primal societies were necessarily monotheist – i was aiming to describe a primal deism, a recognition of a formal divine rather than an implicit naturalistic one. The concept of an actual God/pantheon of Gods – explicit entities – is a precursor Revelation in its own right.
i was aiming to describe a primal deism, a recognition of a formal divine rather than an implicit naturalistic one.
can you elaborate what you mean here?
The fun thing about our knowledge of the distant past is that when it changes, the changes can be enormous.
A whole new history of mankind will be built around this discovery, necessarily so, but then some day BOOM! there will be another big discovery.
not fun for textbook writers and older academics!
“Erm, according to this morning’s paper everything I’ve taught you this term is wrong. Just to be clear, the test will be based on the reading and lectures, not on so-called ‘reality’.”
Razib: I think he meant “religiosity preceded Religion”. People had to develop a “feel” for the mystery of existence, and to channel this feeling into some form of generic spirituality, before they were ready to stomach the full, detailed revelation. Of course, for us unbelievers, the final “Revelation” itself is also a product of the same inner spirituality that led those people to carve vultures on their walls.
There are much older artifacts that seem to represent some form of spirituality, so the “pre-revelations” go back a long way.
I understand that the nearby, later settlement at Catal Hoyuk is dominated by clearly female figures, which take precedence over co-existing male figures. The first “associators” ?…
i replied in more length here:
http://talkislam.info/2010/03/03/incredible-discovery-of-the-oldest-known/#comment-23646
People mostly live within a few miles of the coast, and what was coastal during the last ice age is now quite underwater. Göbekli Tepe might not have sprung full formed from nothing.
I’m quite aware that lunatics think there was an advanced, ancient civilization swallowed by the sea. Adding to space aliens and sci-fi technology to that, and it’s totally crazy. But thinking that there are probably some really interesting archeological sites from ice age cultures as advanced as Gobekli Tepe or Catal Huyuk underwater, that doesn’t seem so crazy.
Pretty amazing find. Surprised this hasn’t been widely known about until now apparently. Schmidt started exploring the site 15 years ago.
I thought the Newsweek article took a fairly appropriate take on the significance of the site to our understanding of the rise of civilization from hunter gather society, rather than an inappropriately breathless one.
As for the development of religion, it’s long been my hunch/hypothesis/belief that it, initially a belief in higher powers over humans and what they were concerned with, attributed to other manifestations of animal creatures with agency, co-evolved at least as anciently as 50k years ago with the full or nearly full modern complexity of the homo sapiens sapiens brain as an adjunct to modern or nearly modern language abilities, and probably before that with more primitive language and the neural structure developing to support it. I believe it co-evolved with our bigger and more complex brains, as a replacement for the partial loss of fixed instinct to flexibly over time direct individual humans on issues of social cohesion. In the process it also answered other questions. It made the terror of complex thought and self awareness, more bearable. It comfortingly constrained choice, but in a way that could change quickly with cultural development.
Then came the Enlightenment.