Ten thousand year old structures easily world’s oldest, help debunk Communist narrative about “agrarian revolution” triggering civilization.
On a hilltop in Southern Turkey, researchers have found evidence that civilization is older and more subtle than we have admitted. Read the article for more information, but the find is seven thousand years older than the great pyramids. On top of a hill. With no local stone. And nobody lived there. Or even grew crops.
The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
By the way, this is not bunkum; this is a story in the National Geographic. Say what you will about their politics, but they don’t publish unfounded nonsense unless Al Gore is behind it, and he’s nowhere in view of this.
[pullquote]every human has a yearning to live a meaningful life[/pullquote]
I find this particularly interesting because I have recently come to think that religion is the only force that could accomplish the invention of civilization. Leaving theology aside, it seems to me that every human has a yearning to live a meaningful life. Religion sates this craving, as do many other things. Naturally, adherents of different solutions interpret the alternate solutions as less noble, pure, effective, substantial, what-have-you; none of which is my concern right now. As a sufficiently generic trait, however, it is something which we may assume goes back, way back, in our shared lineage, and as an un-named longing would have had no less powerful an effect.
The article mentions some old Communist archaeologist (cum paleo-anthropologist, sounds like) who developed this theory of the Neolothic Revolution, wherein after the invention of farming, we all got civilized. Then spread out from the fertile crescent.
But the archaeologist who is excavating Göbekli Tepe has a different and to me, far more plausible explanation, and not only because it dovetails with my pre-conceived notions. The major strength of his interpretation is that it admits a piecewise, parallel development of widespread and differeng combinations of things to make a society. This comports with what I feel are some of the truest and most noble things ever said of mankind, by people like Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, and completely unlike the French Kings and the degenerates of ant-like Communism.
They who built this structure were not the dog-men of a haunted forest. They were men and women exactly like us, who would have had modesty, felt outrage, enjoyed wry humor, understood a bad trade, valued honesty, and likely enforced some of the above with whatever the weapons of the day were. These behaviors in turn would necessitate some sort of guidelines for how to get along. Sets of negotiated mutual understandings, being evaluated within and between groups of various sizes. Just like today.
[pullquote]the inexorable effects of an efficient market system on human effort: succeed or die[/pullquote]
Imagine bands of hunter-gatherers forming alliances and breaking up, settling down and moving again, building things and then burying them. They would have spanned thousand of individual laboratories of civilization, uncoordinated, building the most important thing in the world–the future. They did it not by plan, and not as slaves, but through the inexorable effects of an efficient market system on human effort: succeed or die. Call it the invisible backhand, from across the millennia.
Most of course, disappeared in failure. Some must have survived long enough to leave magnificent relics. Perhaps none made it all the way, and there was a dark ages prior to the Egyptians, notable not for its being dark, but for there having been light before it.
We have just caught a glimpse of that light flashing across twelve thousand years, from a city on a hill.
p.s. What if the figures represent not Gods, but the people themselves? Each generation would want to tear down the previous works and erect their own, much like issuing new letterhead to the staff. The monuments were obviously built be large numbers of people; perhaps the arrangement of stones represents the relationships between groups of people.
