Transcription
I spent much of the '90s and the late 1980s investigating this issue of A Lost Civilization. I wrote a series of books about it, but by 2002, when I published a book called *Underworld*, which was the result's most massive and most heavy book that I've ever written because I was writing very defensively at the time, um, by the time I finished that book, my wife Santa and I spent seven years scuba diving all around the world looking for structures underwater, often led by local fishermen or local divers to anomalies that they had seen underwater.
By the time that book was finished, I I thought, actually, I've done this story. I've walked the walk. I I really don't have much more to say about it, and I I I turned in another direction and I I wrote a book called *Supernatural Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind*, recently retitled *Visionary*, and that was about the role of fundamentally about the role of psychedelics in in the evolution of human human culture. And I didn't think that I would go back to the Lost Civilization issue, but Göbekli Tepe in Turkey kept on forcing itself upon me. The more and more discoveries there, the 11,600 Year date from Enclosure D, which has the two largest megalithic pillars, and I I reached a point where I I realized I have to get back in. I have to get back in the water and I have to investigate this again.
And and Göbekli Tepe was a game-changer, but I think it's a game-changer for everything because Göbekli Tepe, the uh extraordinary nature of it. We're looking at a major megalithic site which is at least 5 and a half thousand years older than say, Gigantia in Malta, which is was previously considered to be the oldest megalithic site in the world. And uh this led of course to a huge amount of interest and attention, both from uh the Turkish government, who see the potential tourism potential of of having the world's oldest megalithic site, and and from archaeologists. And this in turn has led to exploration and excavation throughout the region.
And what they're finding throughout that whole region around Göbekli, uh and going down into Syria and further down into the Jordan Valley as far as Jericho, uh and even across a bit of the Mediterranean into Cyprus, uh is what Turkish archaeologists are now calling the Taşlıca civilization. They're calling it a civilization, the Stone Hills civilization, uh with uh very definite identifying characteristics: semi-subterranean circular structures, the use of T-shaped uh megalithic pillars, sometimes not anywhere near as big as those at Göbekli Tepe. It's clear that Göbekli Tepe now was not the beginning of this process. It was actually, in a way, the end of this process. It was the summation of everything that that Stone Hills civilization had had achieved.
But what what is becoming clear is that this is a period between before the foundation of Göbekli, as far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Göbekli Tepe, but of course, there's a lot of Göbekli Tepe still underground, so we we can't say for sure that that's the oldest, but it's the oldest so far uh excavated. What we're what we're seeing uh is that in that whole region around there, there was something was in motion, and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And and this is where these two dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I'll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago and it ends around 11,600 years ago. So Göbekli Tepe's construction date, if it is 11,600 years ago, if they don't find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas.
Um, but the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form uh at Göbekli uh and and after the construction of Göbekli. In fact, even during the construction of Göbekli Tepe, uh we see agriculture beginning to be adopted. The the people who created Göbekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down deliberately, buried, covered with Earth, covered with rubble, uh and then topped off with a hill, which is which is why Göbekli Tepe is called U what it is. Göbekli Tepe means potbelly hill or the hill of the navel. For a long time, Göbekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a potbelly.
Can you say how it was discovered? I think I think this is one of the most fascinating things on Earth, period. So maybe can you say what it is and how it was discovered? Well, Göbekli Tepe is, first of all, the the oldest fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn't mean the older ones won't be found, but it is the oldest so far found. Um, the part of the site that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site, we do know. My first visit to Göbekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt, who was who who died a year later, uh was very generous to me and showed me around the site over a period of three days. And he he explained to me that they've already used ground-penetrating radar on the site and they know that there's much more Göbekli Tepe still underground.
Um, so anything is anything is possible in terms of the in terms of the dating of Göbekli Tepe, but what we have at the moment is a series of almost circular, but not quite circular, enclosures, which are which are walled with relatively small stones, and then inside them, you have pairs of megalithic pillars. And the the archetypal part of that site is Enclosure D, uh, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 ft tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, uh, if I have my my memory correct. They're they're substantial, hefty pieces of stone. It isn't it isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20ft tall or 20 ton megalith, uh, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. Uh, there's nothing there, nothing magical or or really weird about that. Human beings can do that and always have. Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It's within 200 meters of the of of the main enclosure, so that's not a mystery.
But the mystery is the mystery is why suddenly this this new form of architecture, these massive massive um megalithic pillars, appear. And the the pillars, what one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment. And there is good work that's been done which suggests that Enclosure D uh aligns to the rising of the star Sirius, and the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions. It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, uh, agriculture was being introduced and and was was taking place there.
Now, you asked how Göbekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey of that potbellied hill in the 1960s by um some American archaeologists, and they were looking, absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic. Um, and they had found some Paleolithic flints, upper Paleolithic flints around there, so it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed sticking out of the side of the hill some very finely cut uh stone bits of very large and and very finely cut stone. And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archaeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age, and they thought they were looking at some Byzantine uh remains, and they abandoned the site and and never looked at it further.
And it wasn't until the German Archaeological Institute got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius, had real insight into this, uh, and and started to dig at Göbekli Tepe, that they realized what they'd found, that they that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world. Uh, and they'd found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that's where agriculture, at any rate in in Europe and Western Asia, begins. It begins in Anatolia in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there. And yet, the understanding is it was created by hunter-gatherers. It was created by hunter-gatherers. Yeah, they were there. There was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Göbekli Tepe, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down, uh, and and buried, agriculture was all around it, uh, and and and this was agriculture of of people who knew how to cultivate cultivate plants.
Do we have an understanding when it was turned into a, if I could say, a time capsule, so protected by forming a mound around it? Is it around that similar time? It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago, to about 8,400 BC. So around 12,200 years it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site. And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture, I'm going to use the word, being introduced. Uh, it had there had been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there. And to me, that's another of the mysteries about Göbekli Tepe.
And then with the new work that that's being done, we realize that it's part of a much wider phenomenon, uh, which spreads across an enormous distance, um, and and um, the puzzling thing is that after Göbekli Tepe, there almost seems to be a decline. Things things fall down again, and and then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, uh, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and and and Mesopotamia. But agriculture has taken a firm a firm root by then. Actually, one of the things I'll just say this in passing, when when I talk about A Lost Civilization, introducing ideas to people, I'm often accused of stealing credit from the indigenous people who had those ideas in the first first place. So I do find it slightly hypocritical that archaeology fully accepts that the idea of agriculture was introduced to Western Europe from Turkey, uh, and that that the Western Europeans didn't invent agriculture. It was absolutely introduced by Anatolian farmers who who who traveled west. So the the notion of dissemination of ideas perhaps shouldn't be so um annoying to archaeologists as it is for