Göbekli Tepe
Big day. Spent almost all of it at Göbekli Tepe, both at the archeological site and the nearby cultural multi-media center.
The place is absolutely stunning. The experience is profoundly spiritual. I have no better word for it. It is the source of us all, the very beginning, marking the point in time when we finally transitioned from roaming aimlessly as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years—without being able to change our lot—to learning to settle down, to grow and to cultivate our own food, to domesticate animals, and above all, to live side by side in ever larger communities. It is this social aspect, the ability not only to tolerate each other and our differences, but to care for the stranger, for someone that is not our flesh and blood. This remains our greatest achievement. It is in Göbekli Tepe and its sister sites, where vocational specialization began, the learning of an art, of a profession, and then teaching it to others in kind.
Before this time our lives were governed by one thought, namely to roam about in search for food and shelter. Thus, we never got around to setting roots, never learned how to manage living together in larger groups—we gained at best a bare minimum of social skills. Göbekli Tepe taught us to develop individual aptitudes and abilities. We became farmers, cultivators, herders, breeders, domesticators, builders, settlement planners, designers, inventors, artisans, sculptors, painters, weavers, story tellers, bards, bakers, brewers, administrators, healers, stargazers, and shamans. In a strange way, Göbekli Tepe allowed us not only to have dreams but to follow them. The opportunity to develop a vocation—and with it a valued position within a flourishing society—is one of the most underrated turn of events in human history. Yet without it, there is no progress, no improvements to life and living, no civilization. Göbekli Tepe represents that unique watershed moment when everything changed and we became who we are . . . and who we are going to be.
What caused this monumental change in human development? What ever it was, it must have amounted to a spiritual event that still remains to be explained or understood. Why spiritual? What we have learned so far from the development of Göbekli Tepe culture—also confirmed by comparable pre-pottery Neolithic sites—is that the formalization of religion preceded the development of agriculture. Göbekli Tepe stands for the invention of the temple, the sanctuary, the holy space, the temenos—the place where the intellectual world intersects with the physical. It is where Heaven meets Earth. The temple was not invented to provide people with an excuse to keep farming and settling, that is, to occupy the same space by cultivating it— instead of habitually abandoning it as humans have done since their nomadic beginnings. It seems that agriculture was invented to allow people to remain in the same place, to provide them with the sustenance and wherewithal required to brave the elements, the changing of seasons, to survive the harshest winters, if only to serve a special place by becoming its custodians, as well as its benefactors.
For me Göbekli Tepe, and its sisters sites, are the holiest places on Earth, holiest because they were the first. Yet why were they deemed sacred in the first place? What made them so special that we changed our very nature so we could serve them . . . and thus each other? We do not know. We might dream of it, but not yet know it. And yet every visitor of Göbekli Tepe can sense it, sense the distinctiveness that makes it so extraordinary. I have seen grown men cry at the site, caught in the emotion, awed by what has taken place here, the miracle of so long ago.
If there ever was location on this Earth that deserved a personal pilgrimage above all other special places, it is Göbekli Tepe. She is the mother of us all.
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