Before reading this article, please read “More Than One Eden!” and “What Was the Tower of Babel?“
The legend of Atlantis is just that – a legend. We can’t definitively prove that it happened, although there are some very interesting and very significant pieces of archaeological evidence to suggest that it did. Rather than delve into those however, let’s instead look at what we know of the time period immediately after the cometary impact of 9,600 BC.
It’s important to note that any survivors would have had to either flee to the high mountains (such as those in South America) or flee literally halfway around the globe, to a place that the cometary debris field didn’t reach. Interestingly enough, we find an incredibly ancient site, halfway around the globe, which dates to almost precisely 9,600 BC – Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey. We know that this is how old the site is, not only from organic remains at the site which have been radiocarbon dated, but because the megalithic structures there are aligned in specific ways to the constellations. Over time, the stars and the constellations change their positions, and the alignments no longer line up the same way. Because we can use software programs such as Stellarium which can display a view of the stars at any time, past, present or future, we can check the alignments of the megalithic structures of Gobekli Tepe, and see when they would align.
To date, only about 2% of the megalithic structures of Gobekli Tepe have been excavated. The site is absolutely massive, covering 20 acres, and consists of many gigantic standing megaliths with a “T” beam atop two megaliths, making a “door” shape. Many of the megaliths are carved and inscribed with pictures of various animals.
There are a number of absolutely mind-boggling facts about Gobekli Tepe:
- It doesn’t appear to be a town, because there are no residential buildings. Instead, it appears to be some kind of gigantic outdoor temple or communal center.
- No other structures that are older than roughly 9,600 BC have been excavated at the site. In other words, Gobekli Tepe simply “appears” overnight, as it were, on a virgin spot of earth.
- 9,600 BC is in the middle of a time period when most people were generally “hunter-gatherers” – that is, nomadic, roaming from place to place and hunting animals or harvesting wild grains, roots, fruit, etc. It’s completely unexpected to find such a massive structure built by people who didn’t live in one particular spot, such as a nearby town.
- There is evidence that crops first began to be domesticated around the site of Gobekli Tepe. Crop domestication did happen in other places in the world even earlier than this, but in this particular region of the world, this is the very first place where it happened.
Because of the astronomical alignments, one scholar named Martin Sweatman theorized that perhaps the carvings and inscriptions of animals represented constellations in the sky. Constellations that appear to have remained mostly the same since that very early date, in fact. Based on that hypothesis, Sweatman was able to determine the date that such an alignment of constellations would have happened – in approximately 10,800 BC.
In other words, the site itself was built in about 9,600 BC, but it commemorated something that happened in about 10,800 BC. That sounds a lot like it was commemorating the first cometary impact, but it was built after the second cometary impact and the ensuing global cataclysm, doesn’t it?
Since we’ve been able to uncover some of the meanings of the various constellations from our studies thus far, what exactly did the constellations inscribed on the megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe, intend to depict?
We have a hint about the intended purpose, because of the discovery of small rings that would have originally been part of overhead ceilings built across the standing megaliths. Too small to pass through, and not intended for smoke or fires, the archaeologist excavating the site (Klaus Schmidt) theorized that they were soul holes – intended to allow the soul of a deceased individual to depart their body and ascend to heaven after death.
In addition to that, there were small holes set into the tops of many of the upright megaliths, aligned north-northwest so that a person standing between the megaliths could look through the hole and spot the star Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation of Cygnus.
Inscribed on the pillar numbered “43” by Klaus Schmidt, the excavator of the site, is a funny-looking vulture whose shape matches the stars of the constellation Cygnus. Below that and to the left is a close-up of the vulture holding a round ball – representing the soul of the deceased. Below that is a scorpion – representing the constellation Scorpio. Scorpio represented the danger of transitioning to the “path of the dead” (the Milky Way). Only after the constellation of Scorpio set, would it be time for the deceased’s soul to ascend to heaven.
There was an ancient funerary practice of “excarnation” which involved leaving the body of the deceased in the open air, where it would be devoured by birds (usually vultures). Afterwards, the bones would be gathered and interred. The association of Cygnus with a vulture seems to represent freeing the soul of the deceased from its body through excarnation, so it could ascend to heaven.
Given this symbolism, here are the all-important questions. Why was Gobekli Tepe so important to build right after the second cometary impact in 9,600 BC? And, why does it commemorate the first cometary impact in 10,800 BC?
Evidence appears to suggest that the comet’s trajectory in 10,800 BC was coming low over the horizon, from the direction of north-northwest. Possibly from the direction of Scorpio, before it set.
Based on later symbolism associated with other megalithic monuments, as well as funerary literature from ancient Egypt, it appears that the ancient belief being depicted here was that the comet knocked a “hole” in the heavens, as it were, for the deceased’s soul to pass through, and thereby ascend to heaven and achieve eternal life. This “hole” in the heavens was pictured by the soul holes in the ceilings that were originally built atop the standing megaliths.
Just like the Tower of Babel, we have a pagan belief system in operation at the Gobekli Tepe temple complex that involves a “gate of heaven” and a way of achieving eternal life apart from the ethical ways of God. Given how massive the Gobekli Tepe complex was, it most certainly took a very large group of (albeit nomadic) people to build – a group of people who all shared the same beliefs concerning death.
Notably, the people who erected the megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe, had to erect many different pillars at successively later dates, all the way to approximately 8,000 BC, because the alignment with Deneb in Cygnus continued to drift over time. After about 8,000 BC, the people buried the entire site and abandoned it. From there, they scattered into different parts of the ancient Near East, including into Egypt and Mesopotamia, taking their beliefs about ascending to heaven after death, with them.
References:
Collins, Andrew. The Cygnus Key
Sweatman, Martin. Prehistory Decoded