I haven’t posted about the buried temple Gobekli Tepe in a while, so let me remedy that:

“A Monumental Cover-Up?“

For those in the back seats, Gobekli Tepe is an archaeological site in Turkey that I love for many reasons. It clearly partakes of the ancient megalithic culture that seems to have been worldwide (why? and how???). It has been dated to about 9000 B.C., which we must take with the usual grain of salt, but according to the people dating it, this was before the discovery of agriculture, the wheel, etc. Yet it employs circles, equilateral triangles, and other such evidence of having been built by mathematically capable people. For those new to Out of Babel Books, we frequently post about how wrong conventional archaeology appears to be about when and how civilization arose among human beings. If you click through to this article, you will see them struggling with that a bit.

The article also has some entertaining turns of phrase, for example: “In the end, searching for answers concerning motives and reasons from such an ancient time involves a great deal of speculation, since we cannot go back in time and probe the perpetrators.” Yes, that does sound like an unpleasant process for everyone involved.

The main reason I’ve included this link is the new-to-me information that Gobekli Tepe means “potbelly hill,” which I find charming. And it turns out the hill had a “belly button,” which was actually a sign that the hill was not natural, but had this temple buried below. Which I find creepy, like the whole site is creepy.

Besides “have we been completely wrong about the history of agriculture?,” the other question this article raises is “Why was Gobekli Tepe apparently deliberately buried?”

Why does one bury a thing? Particularly, why does one bury a statue, an idol, a god?

While acknowledging that we don’t know, the article references other instances of “de-sacralizing,” such as when an altar is no longer in use and we don’t want to pose a danger to anyone who might blunder upon it. They also reference the defaced and buried giant heads found in the Olmec region. If a statue is defaced, such as those heads are, we can reasonably guess that it, or its people, got conquered or overthrown by someone else, who wanted to humiliate the statue and rob it of its power. There are cases in the Old Testament where a king or someone else leading a reform not only defaces the pagan altars but defiles them (e.g., turning them into public toilets), so that no more honor may go to that god or goddess.

I don’t know whether the large stones at Gobekli Tepe were defaced. In every photograph I’ve seen of them, they appear to be not only intact, but still standing, as if they were buried so as to preserve them. But it’s possible that the archaeologists are the ones who set them upright again. Still, it’s customary when destroying an enemy’s temple to “leave no stone upon another.” So, unless a lot more reconstruction than I realized has been done under Potbelly Hill, I’m thinking the temple was buried for some other reason. I’m with the authors of the article on this one: We can’t tell what went down, but we can infer that it was probably not good.