Karahan Tepe
Following up on the survey of Karahan Tepe. Parts of the site are reportedly older even than Göbekli Tepe going Bach to 11,000 BC, i.e. 13,000 years ago—which coincides chronologically with Kayin’s first substantiation as Kariru, the Farseeker. The place is considered the “earliest known human village,” located on a hill about 40 km from the better known Göbekli Tepe. The site upends the conventional notion that settled communities (as opposed to nomadic life) resulted from the discovery of agriculture. It is the other way around.
Settlers became farmers in order to subsist in the same location, rather than abandoning it when it served its purpose, or the seasonal climate required moving to a better place. Ways had to be found to overcome the harshness of winter. A village was structurally more advantageous than some random cave, or some rocky overhang for shelter. Learning to grow food created a much needed independence for the settlers. One could stay in the same place year after year. One of the side benefits was the emergence of an organized society.
But first came the spiritual aspect of life, as Karahan Tepe suggest, a place where agriculture was introduced more than a millennium after the setters found reasons to continue their life here.
What was so special about Karahan Tepe? What made it so sacred in the eyes of its people that they never wanted to leave it? Incidentally, at the end of the Karahan Tepe’s culture, it was buried as thoroughly and meticulously by its inhabitants as Göbekli Tepe’s residents buried their temples. The question remains, why were these place buried under tons of rock and earth? Why the extraordinary effort to hide them from view? Was it to protect them? Or to forget them? I have tried to tackle this difficult question and have proposed a hypothetical answer by way of a thought experiment in the chapter Dark Harvest, (Book 3, The Brotherhood of Shadows) of the Ouranian Chronicles Series.
Views on route from Göbekli Tepe to Karahan Tepe. A white marble quarry:
The Karahan Tepe site is on top of the hill:
The first temple on top. The T shaped pillars are arranged much closer than in Göbekli Tepe and there are more of them. At the back wall is the famous Karahan Tepe head. The face can be see in 3/4 profile:
I could not get close enough to it to take a frontal pictures. Perhaps this Getty image helps:
A much larger temple closeby:
A second much larger sanctuary on the way to the top:
A different view of the same sanctuary. Most of the pillars here are not free standing but are anchored in surrounding walls or directly in the side of the hill:
Above the sanctuary another temple, widely spaced and less pillars. The large pillar to the right displays a similar open triangle design as those at Göbekli Tepe:
Hope this closeup helps to recognize the figure better. The top of the “angled arm” (according to one of the on-site caretakers) turns into a “shoulder” and the “hand” at the lowest part has eight fingers. (Notify Ancient Aliens!!!) Frankly, the whole thing resembles a snake, in my view, much more than it does an arm, shoulder and hand. And the head could be that of a snake of vulture. Why else place an eye in the middle of it?
View from the very top of Karahan Tepe. Desolate but beautiful. There are numerous carvings spread out over this small plateau or mesa. Some arrangements are geometrical. The larger holes are quite deep suggesting that water rites were likely practiced here:
A triangular arrangement:
We are happy to be here—not the end of the world but its beginning. Laura and Regula handled the monumental logistics of this trip with great finesse and expertise:
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