The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

West of Eden: Turkey’s Archaeological Treasures

Gobekli Tepe was being used. He has obsidian eyes and his hands cover or hold his genitals. Beyond that, we do not know. You would expect a discovery of this significance to be followed by more excavations and research, but here again the patriarch exerts influence: Since the area is so close to a site sacred to Muslims, no further digging has been allowed. The lack of fuss about Urfa Man and of further excavation at the site goes some way to explain why Urfa, Gobekli Tepe, and this part of Turkey west of Eden is not overwhelmed by the people who crowd into the Acropolis in Athens and the Colosseum in Rome. Unrest in the region has also played its part, both between Turks and Kurds and across the border in Syria. But as I stood in the museum in Urfa, looking at that remarkable figure of a man carved eleven or twelve thousand years ago, I realized that we will all come, eventually, and for the same reason that we go to see the treasures in Egypt. We will come because the monuments and statues are both beautiful and mysterious, and because the stories of their discovery are compelling. But above all we will come because of the thought that occurred to me as I stood in the dark with this beyond-ancient figure: He is a precious witness to the earliest of times, to the beginning of that long line stretching from ourselves back before we learned to farm, to a time when we all lived as hunters and gatherers on the hills west of Eden.

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Anthony Sattin is the author of numerous books, including Lifting the Veil , The Pharoah’s Shadow , The Gates of Africa , Young Lawrence , and A Winter on the Nile . His most recent book is Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World . For more about him and his work, visit his website.

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