Göbekli Tepe’s T-pillars Do Not Provide Evidence of Younger Dryas Comet Strike
This post looks into the evidence that GT was built to venerate a comet strike around 12,900 years ago (YDIH: Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis) as has been proposed by several authors, notably [1,2].
The GT monumental complex consists of a number of oval enclosures containing upright limestone megaliths (slabs).
Many of these slabs are decorated with low and high relief zoomorphic and anthropomorphic pictograms, and have upper T-shaped terminations (T-pillars).
The oldest and most complex enclosure, Enclosure D, has been reliably dated to 11,530 BP ± 220 years [3], indicating that the complex was founded at or after the end of the Younger Dryas period (12,900 – 11,700 BP).
This post examines evidence that GT memorialises a comet strike at the start of the Younger Dryas, 1400 years earlier.
A major assumption needs to be made before delving into pictogram interpretations, namely that some of the figures on the slabs depict asterisms (stellar constellations) that had some religious or astronomical significance.
The GT faithful likely associated these asterisms with deities who could intercede in their lives, and who could be bartered with – via a shaman – to perform acts outside of their own control, such as change seasons, regenerate the sun every day, provide food, cure illness, reincarnate the dead, or impregnate the infertile.
On the latter, the name Göbekli Tepe means “hill of the navel”, and its Kurdish name means “hill of the swollen belly”. Local women hoping to get pregnant still to this day hang ribbons in a tree on its hill.
GT’s pillar 43 (above) is a highly-decorated slab that was found embedded in the north face of Enclosure D, next to its main altar. Numerous zoomorphic figures can be tentatively identified as vultures, snakes, a scorpion, a flamingo, etc., as well as a headless stick figure with an erection (lower right, next to the vulture/eagle).
Collins [2] proposes that pillar 43 should be interpreted as summarising a death ritual, whereby the headless man represents the body that remains on Earth (and is excarnated by vultures)
while the head/soul is carried to the heavens by the large vulture, here interpreted to represent the Cygnus (swan) asterism.
Collins doesn’t see any comet symbolism on this pillar. Sweatman & Tsikritsis [1] propose that pillar 43 can be interpreted as a “time-stamp” of 10,950 BC ± 250 years, that is a date roughly coincident with the start of the Younger Dryas (YD).
Their reasoning is that the upper vulture/eagle represents the “tea-pot” asterism in Sagittarius, and that it is holding the sun. Back-calculating when the sun was above the spout of the teapot indicates this likely occurred during the Summer solstice in 10,950 BC.
The headless man at the bottom signifies death, so the whole pillar is interpreted as:
“the worst day ever in human history since the end of the ice age; the hypothetical [Younger Dryas] catastrophe”
This great difference in interpretations indicates that at least one is fanciful. Much hinges on which asterism – if any – is represented by the large vulture and what it is holding in its hand (an egg?).
However, such information – if true – is largely redundant as there is more than enough hard data on the bad-day-for-humanity catastrophes at the start of the Younger Dryas, a subject for a future post.
Collins [2] proposes that the nested ‘U’ shapes on the belt buckle of Enclosure D’s eastern central pillar (pillar 18) represent the bow shock wave that a comet creates when entering Earth’s atmosphere, though to me (and to [1] who find his arguments “limited”) this seems unlikely for a number of reasons:
- Bow shock waves are not often seen.
- Someone would have had to recall what it looked like 1400 years after the event
Only pillar 18 has this symbol. If the symbol had great importance one could reasonably expect it to be repeated in the other enclosures, especially after Enclosure D had been buried/decommissioned.
The final bit of “comet evidence” are the fox pictograms that according to my own observations:
- Occur in all large enclosures (A-D)
- When occurring on main pillars appear to be jumping upwards in a southerly direction
- When occurring on main pillars have an erect penis
Collins [2] proposes that the foxes symbolise “cosmic tricksters”, “evil twins of the true creator god, responsible only for chaos and disarray in the universe”.
But wolves usually represent comets in folklore and myth, though foxes do occasionally make an appearance. In addition, the foxes appear to be going up not coming down, that is their sharp, pointy bits (teeth, penis) are going up to heaven, not down to Earth. Most of the foxes look rather happy, as if they have an appetite for procreation , not destruction.
Sweatman & Tsikritsis [1] also link the foxes to comets. On pillar 2 (left pillar above) they interpret the crane as Pisces. They then back-calculate the route the Northern Taurid meteor showers would have taken in 9530 BC as Capricorn-Aquarius-Pisces.
They then interpret pillar 2 as the path of the Northern Taurid meteor shower from the auroch/bull (Capricorn) to the fox (Aquarius) to the crane (Pisces), thereby transmogrifying a bull into a goat, a fox into a water-carrier, and water fowl into fish. They interpret Göbekli Tepe as a comet observatory. Both interpretations [1,2] sound plausible, yet very unlikely. In fact, the whole idea of
venerating a traumatic event that happened 1400 years earlier sounds improbable, as the human brain works really, really hard to forget traumas.
Freud wrote a whole book on it. It would be as if Easter would celebrate Jesus’ crucifixion and not his resurrection. Daily hunter-gatherer worries would be far more pressing then venerating or looking out for comets: hunger, illness, death, re-birth, infertility.
Especially the last one seems to have pre-occupied GT’s builders: there are a lot of erect penises on display.
According to JJ, the ancients venerated the so-called “Silver Gate” or Gate of Man, guarded by the constellation of Orion, and the “Golden Gate” or Gate of God, exactly opposite to the Silver Gate, and guarded by the constellation of Ophiuchus.
These visually obvious “gates” are located at the intersection of the Earth’s orbital plane with the Milky Way’s galactic plane – the Golden Gate in the direction of our galactic center – and were already known to and described by the ancient Egyptians. The Silver Gate was believed to represent of the re-birth of the Sun and re-incarnation of the soul, whereby the soul resurrects as a spirit or god at the Golden Gate.
GT’s enclosures are open to the south, with their main pillars oriented in the direction of the Silver Gate/Orion during the Summer Solstice [4]: the main pillars therefore plausibly represent the portal through which GT’s faithful thought the soul must pass from the Silver Gate to the Golden Gate.
Neolithic humans very likely paid close attention to the Summer and Winter Solstices, the days when the sun sets in the same place for 3 days in a row, after which it reverses course. Hunter-gatherers (or farmers for that matter) would need to manage their food stocks for those months when supply is low, so would observe and celebrate cosmic signals that winter or summer was coming.
The picture above (courtesy of Stellarium, excellent freeware) recreates the view to the south and the east at sunrise from between the main pillars of GT Enclosure D at the Summer Solstice 11,523 years ago.
A quick comparison with pillar 2 above shows a remarkable similarity: auroch (Taurus) and crane (Monoceros) are no-brainers, but what about the fox and Orion? A redraw (below) whereby Orion’s belt is changed into an erection creates Vulpus Amorabundus, the Amorous Fox, whose erection is just visible at dawn in the picture above, and whose view direction (170°) is roughly in line with Enclosure D’s main pillar orientation (see map above).
Also note that the constellation Leo is visible due east, in the direction of the jumping lion pictograms in GT’s east-west oriented lion pillar enclosure (not on map above). Such interpretations might also explain why most (all?) fox and lion pictograms on pillars are jumping to the south /east resp., in the direction of their cosmic counterparts.
The interpretation of the main pillars as the portal between the Silver and Golden gates might also explain the T-pillars:
two-faced Janus (below, right) was the ancient Roman god who guarded gateways and portals, always looking in both directions. January, the month after the winter solstice, is named in his honour.
Fast-forwarding to 10,000 BP and the sunrise view towards the Amorous Fox/Orion has shifted – due to Earth’s axial precession (1°per 71.6 years) – roughly 20° eastwards (below), or more in line with the main pillars in Enclosure A, the youngest enclosure.
In summary, there is no credible data that GT commemorates a comet strike during the Younger Dryas: stronger evidence is needed to reject the highly-probable null hypothesis that the site does not commemorate a comet strike.
This view was also shared by Professor Klaus Schmidt, GT’s first lead archeologist [2]. An expanded and more entertaining version of this post can be found on the Think and Hammer substack (https://open.substack.com/pub/thinkandhammer/p/i-aint-no-student-of-ancient-culture?r=2t5gh5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
References:
[1] Sweatman, M.B., Tsikritsis, D., 2017, Decoding Göbekli Tepe with archaeoastronomy: what does the fox say? Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Vol. 17, No 1, 233-250. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.400780
[2] Collins, A., 2014, Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods: The Temple of the Watchers and the Discovery of Eden. Bear & Company, pp 464. ISBN: 978-1591431428
[3] Dietrich, O., Köksal-Schmidt, Ç., Notroff, J., Schmidt, K., 2013, Establishing a Radiocarbon Sequence for Göbekli Tepe. State of Research and New Data. Neo-Lithics, 1/13, 36-41. [4] Schoch, R., 2021, Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future. Inner Traditions, 2nd ed., 560 pp. ISBN: 978-1644112922
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Wisenox
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The ‘T’ represent the crossbar. The symbolism comes from the ‘antediluvian’ age, when Anu was front and center, and Enki was their ‘solution’. The Tel itself was a trading mound, and new stores would simply build on top of old ones.
Sometime around Akkadia, the symbolism took a turn, and Enki was put up front with the messiah becoming the solution. This was probably a move to put nobility more in the background.
Enki would be the reason for the crossbar, as he creates the equinoxes. The best way to highlight the crossbar is by showing the stem and the bar. Enki is the Catholic father of Jesus, who is MaryUtu/Marduk in the Enima Elis. He is remarked as ‘doubly equal’ as a notation of him being the equinox. Knowing the equinoxes gave businessmen advantages in agriculture, which was the central motif in symbolism by the time that the Enuma Elis was written.
The knowledge of the equinoxes, and the value it gave through harvest cycles, may also be the reasoning behind the double-stanza style of writing in Sumerian poetry.
That’s my opinion.
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Koen Vogel
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It’s a great point that a lot of these ideas seem to have been recycled over the ages. Robert Temple makes similar points in his book on the Sphinx about Christianity and the Egyptians. Gobekli Tepe however predates Judaism, Sumer and Christianity by several millennia. Perhaps one of the first cases of “cultural appropriation”?
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kamas716
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Quite a bit of paleolithic art in Europe shows either headless or distorted head humans. Having a missing head on a piece of artwork seems consistent. I don’t know if being headless necessarily is supposed to represent death/someone who is dead, or maybe just a person and the artist didn’t want to make the human representation whole out of respect for a soul, or something completely different. But a headless human image is common.
As for the “bow wave/shockwave” on the side? If there is another one on the other side I would posit that it represents a human arm, similar to the depictions of humans on other paleolithic art.
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