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Gobekli Tepe

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MVoltage said:
...And don't they also say that the head of the Sphinx is not what it originally looked like? It has been "re-carved"...?
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Yep, the theory is that this head depicts an african woman, perhaps a queen.

One thing strikes me after reading this article - nobody asks HOW these megalits were built?! My logic tells me that in order to get a fair guess and even perhaps an answer on this question you have to bring engineers, professional builders, the guys who do not care about archeology, with NO preconceived notion at all.

Anyway, I'm setting a Google Alert to follow up this story.
 
Anubis said:
Does anyone truly believe such silliness as the Garden of Eden actually existed? :rolleyes:

Great article nonetheless. :)
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Eden is one of the recurring metaphors in the bible., which describe a loss of innocence by disregarding god. Was it an actual place? Perhaps not so much a place., as a stage of our evolution., simple, nomadic foragers living in small groups.
 
Impressive work for 10,000 BC, huh?
presse2005-goeb05-4842-scan.jpg
 
Key quote, I think: "Religion motivated people to take up farming." And people think prostitution is the oldest profession!


Makes sense. You had all these patriarchal clans gathering together. Eventually, some of the chiefs got their testosterone in a wad and realized, "Here's a way to dominate other clans as well... Not only do I get to lord it over my family group, but I can take over Grog's family too!!!"


This is a little-considered motivator for science and technological development as well. "How can we fake a miracle?" So, they come up with various gimmicks and these gimmicks also prove to have practical applications.
 
There really is a resistance to any of the biblical passages to being true, no matter how many archeological digs in the past have proven the historical accuracy of biblical passages.

That is why I think they mention Eden, and do so with some reasoning behind it:

"In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough, this is where Gobekli is sited.

Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these.

In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a 'Beth Eden' - a house of Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe.

Another book in the Old Testament talks of 'the children of Eden which were in Thelasar', a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli.

The very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran.

Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors - people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise."

notice the reptile carving picture? very interesting.

oh also, there is no "talking Snake" in the garden of Eden, it's a Na'cash or Shining Serpentine entity to be exact.

MAN doesn't anyone read anymore!!!!! wow. :confused:
 
Well, I for one am not trying to say that the bible does not contain some degree of historical truth in it. Again, if you can read between the lines and squeeze it out, then fine. But that's not easy.

I am saying that, in most cases, the bible (and books like it) are not documentary statements of factual observations. They are essentially fictional works that are, in many cases, based upon some shread of reality. They are frequently woven together into polemics and myth designed for a very specific, now long dead, audience.

The wheel within a wheel in the book of ezekiel is a great example. (I'm short on time at the moment, so I'll go into this more later.) But many people read these passages and assume that it is a literal account of a documentary observation. It's not. It's an esoteric style, similar to what paul wrote many centuries later about the statue of the "unknown" god.

It's not meant to be a literal sighting report. Ezekiel is speaking to a certain audience and, basically, saying that I understand your mysteries and my god is that mystery god that moves the celestrial sphere. Ezekiel is getting in their faces.
 
UBERDOINK said:
notice the reptile carving picture? very interesting
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The carvings look too clean to me -- considering the alleged age. This suggests that either: (1) they're a forgery; or (2) the complex was buried very soon after it was constructed.

Assuming the latter, why would people bury the place so soon after it was built? That took a lot of effort. Most of the time, you bury something to dispose of it. Does this mean that their little "Eden" experiment proved disasterous? People were so reviled by the consequences that they went to great efforts to rid themselves of it and go back to hunting-gathering?
 
Anubis said:
Does anyone truly believe such silliness as the Garden of Eden actually existed? :rolleyes:
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Yeah, actually. There was a recent program--can't remember--by a skeptic who was discussing human migration out of Africa where (and DNA proves this rather well) we all came from. There were areas in the Fertile Crescent which were really very conducive to human life and expansion. There was fertile land for agriculture, mild temperatures year around, plenty of game--a place where you didn't have to work too hard to make a living.

But Climate Change happened. The last Ice Age hurtled down from the North and rendered formerly very nice habitat into a much more difficult terrain. According to this guy, 'That's where the myth of the Garden of Eden started, a rememberance of when times were a lot better for the human lot.'

Now, this is arguable, of course. Talk to any paleoanthropologist and you'll get an earful of theories about this or that. But the point is that our mythology may be based on some germs of truth. The Great Flood, for example. Lots of people dismiss this as religious nonsense. But was it? Not that 'God did it,' but there is ample evidence that an ice bridge near Hudson Bay broke about 12,000 BC as the Ice Age receded and raised the sea level about sixty feet in a day, thus inundating any coastal civilizations that may have existed, like in India. Sounds like a Great Flood to me. See Graham Hancock's "Underworld' for lots of specific data on this idea.

The point is that some of these myths people dismiss out of hand may have some interesting information in them. To ignore them entirely is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
 
jkoci said:
The Great Flood, Robert Ballard, The Black Sea.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html
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Thanks. That's compelling alright, but I fear Ballard is too narrowly focused. The flood legends are much more pervasive than in proto-western cultures. They include India and even Native Americans. This doesn't discount the Black Sea Hypothesis. but the Black Sea Hypothesis doesn't provide a sufficient explanation for flood stories elsewhere. It had to have been a much more pervasive and global event.
 
That's right, Graham Hancock has quite well summarized world wide myths about The Flood. If you rip those myths from centuries of details being added by people who retold them over and over from generation to generation and leave the core motive for their existence I think you will get an evidence which speaks to The Flood existence at the time of the latest Ice Age.

Schuyler said:
There were areas in the Fertile Crescent which were really very conducive to human life and expansion. There was fertile land for agriculture, mild temperatures year around, plenty of game--a place where you didn't have to work too hard to make a living.

But Climate Change happened. The last Ice Age hurtled down from the North and rendered formerly very nice habitat into a much more difficult terrain. According to this guy, 'That's where the myth of the Garden of Eden started, a rememberance of when times were a lot better for the human lot.'
Click to expand...

The irony is that at that time when natural phenomena took place people blamed themselves and it was one of the reasons to create religion but now when 90% of the science community proofs that we do produce green gas and we do warm up the Climate there are lots of people who still doubt that we cause this phenomena...

PS. Btw, I wouldn't mind if Ballard would check that underwater region near Cuba and Japan.
 
I wonder if perhaps the castastrophic event was much earlier in history. The supervolcanic eruption of Mt. Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia) occurred roughly 74,000 years ago. It created a kind of nuclear winter and may have accelerated a natural cooling period of the earth into an ice age (although this is still under debate). It was the most catastrophic eruption in millions of years and may have decimated most of the human population ( to less than 10,000 total), with the area of modern day India being the most impacted. In one part of India, the ash was 6 meters thick. I don't think it would be stretch for early humans to see the eruption as a deluge or flood and after generations of orally passing the story on, it makes sense to me that this might be the basis for the great deluge or flood myths found in many cultures.
See the map image. The lines indicate known human populations/migrations right after the eruption and the red dot is the location of the volcano. It would be possible for most human settlements to be affected by the eruption.
attachment.php

The map image is from: JOURNEY OF MANKIND - The Peopling of the World
480 cubic miles of lava flowed out from the eruption and another 190 cubic miles fell as ash. It may have sent as much as 10 billion metric tons of sulphuric acid into the atmosphere. The resulting acid rain would have traveled around the planet and may have cause plant die off in other areas. For comparison the Tambora eruption (the largest in recorded history) in 1816 only ejected a total of 24 cubic miles, and was the last of a series of eruptions in the last four years. The explosion was heard 1,200 miles away. It is theorized that the atmospheric dust from the series of eruptions was sufficient to create a year without summer for the northern hemisphere of the planet. The Mt. Saint Helens eruption ejected only .29 cubic miles
"This mega-bang caused a prolonged world-wide nuclear winter and released ash in a huge plume that spread to the north-west and covered India, Pakistan, and the Gulf region in a blanket 1–5 metres (3–15 feet) deep. Toba ash is also found in the Greenland ice-record and submarine cores in the Indian Ocean, allowing a precise date marker. In our story the Toba eruption is the most accurately dated, dramatic, and unambiguous event before the last ice age," from: Mt Toba Eruption 74,000 years ago
More info: The Toba mega-eruption, global cooling, and human evolution | UCAR NCAR Staff Notes
Supervolcano eruption -- in Sumatra -- deforested India 73,000 years ago


 
I think there is a lot of historical value in the ancient texts, including the Bible. However, I think there is a lot more hints as to the reality of ancient times if you incorporate ALL the books and try to read them without the preconceptions planted in the minds of society by various religious organizations throughout history. The Bible for instance, has much less value when you ignore some of the other writings from the same time period that were deemed heresy.
 
I was curious about the equivalence of the Toba explosion and it would have been equivalent to one gigaton of TNT.
The bomb detonated in the air above Nagasaki was the equivalent to a 21 kiloton TNT bomb. The bomb at Hiroshima was equavilent to 13-18 kilotons of TNT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale (I hate to quote wiki, but this particular entry seems fairly straightforward)
Something of the magnitude of the Toba eruption would have become embedded in the cultural memory. The area which would have become Sumer was definitely impacted (although not like India) and Sumer is the origin of the first recorded flood myth.

Edit: I have to wonder if ensuing floods would have then reinforced the cultural memory of the Toba explosion and incorporated into the flood myths that exist today.
 
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