The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

West of Eden: Turkey’s Archaeological Treasures

early stone tools. He had come to Turkey as part of a German team that was doing salvage archaeology on one of the Neolithic sites threatened by the new dam. When their time was up and their job done, the team headed home. All except Schmidt, who thought there was more to be uncovered in the region. Not far from the site where he had been working, he heard that a shepherd had found some flints. The place in question had already been studied by American archaeologists, who had described the site as Byzantine. Schmidt knew that flints were not native to the area and he had a hunch that they would turn out to be tools that had been brought to cut softer stone. He was soon proved correct: The site he discovered was a cult center of large decorated limestone pillars that had been erected long before humans began to settle. Gobekli Tepe, as the place is called, is now one of the world’s most important archaeological sites. Its huge limestone blocks were cut nearby and carried to the site, where they were shaped, smoothed, and arranged in circles of a dozen or so pillars, with a couple of taller pillars in the center. The larger ones weigh sixteen tons, some are 18 feet high, and many are decorated with images of humans with erect penises and of recognizable and threatening boar, foxes, scorpions, and jackal. This is all fascinating enough, but the truly extraordinary thing is that these monuments at Gobekli Tepe were erected around 9,500 BCE, some seven thousand years before Egyptians built their pyramids. Even more remarkable than its age is what the site represents. This—and other sites in the area, such as Karahan Tepe, which have been discovered in the past few years—appears to be the beginning of monumental architecture, the first places on earth where humans cut stone and reshaped the landscape according to something in their imagination. If that is true—and no one disputes the date, although older

again in turmoil. My stay in Istanbul had coincided with riots in the city’s central Gezi Park. The streets I had known to be buzzing with the sound of laughter and large groups out for fun were now filled with sirens and flashing lights as security forces broke up any possible gatherings of dissenters. It was quieter in southwest Anatolia because, as one old man explained to me in a café, “We can’t afford the time or money to go protesting…not like those people in the city.” But there was serious trouble beyond Turkey’s border in Syria and I was unable to get into Karkemis, the site where Lawrence had worked and fallen in love in his early 20s. The ancient Hittite ruins he, his colleagues, and their two hundred local workers had slowly revealed sit beside the railway bridge over the Euphrates River and straddle the border between Syria and Turkey. The ancient acropolis was the high point on the landscape and the Turkish military had turned it into a fortified lookout. It was there that I discovered I needed more than charm to get past a heavy machine gun. But nearby I found somewhere even more extraordinary. ~~ Not long ago, this whole area of Anatolia had so little water that it risked turning to desert. To save local farmers from ruin, the Turkish government began building dams across both the Euphrates and Tigris. The project outraged archaeologists: Not only were these two of the four rivers that were said to have flowed out of the biblical Garden of Eden, but also several important neolithic sites would be lost beneath the rising waters. Despite their protests, the dams were built. And although there was a high cost, two good things came out of this: One is that the area now has thriving plantations of pistachios, cotton, tobacco, and olive. Another, more unexpected, relates to archaeology. Klaus Schmidt was a German academic with a specialty in

84

85