Monday, July 15, 2019

Zodiac depicted at Göbekli Tepe?


Vulture-Stone

 
“From the last chapter the reader will recall Michael Rappengluck’s work on the zodiacal constellation of Taurus, depicted at Lascaux some 17,000 years ago as an auroch (ancient species of wild cattle) with the six visible stars of the Pleiades on its shoulder”.
 
Graham Hancock
 
 
 
 
Already I (Damien Mackey) touched upon some of Michael Rappengluck’s archaeoastronomical insights about the Lascaux cave depictions in the first of my multi-part series:
 
 
 
 

The date for Lascaux as given here by Graham Hancock in his book Magicians of the Gods (2015), I personally would consider to be thousands of years too early.
That same book I was reading - and generally enjoying - last night and came upon this section most relevant to my series and to the findings of Michael Rappengluck:
 
Neolithic puzzle
 
[Paul] Burley’s paper is entitled “Göbekli Tepe: Temples Communicating an Ancient Cosmic Geography.” He wrote it originally in June 2011 … in February 2013 he asked me to read his paper, which he said concerned “evidence of a zodiac on one of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe.” I read it, replied that I found it “very persuasive and interesting, with significant implications” ….
 
“Significant implications,” I now realize as I read through the paper again in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa, was a huge understatement. But I didn’t make my first visit to Göbekli Tepe until September 2013 and by then, clearly, I’d forgotten the gist of Burley’s argument, which focuses almost exclusively on Enclosure D and on the very pillar, Pillar 43, that I’d been most interested in when I was there.
My interest in it had been sparked by Belmonte’s suggestion that the relief carving of a scorpion near its base (which the reader will recall was hidden by rubble that Schmidt refused to allow me to move) might be a representation of the zodiacal constellation of Scorpio. ….
Here’s where he gets to his point:
 
One of the limestone pillars [in Enclosure D] includes a scene in bas relief on the upper portion of one of its sides. There is a bird with outstretched wings, two smaller birds, a scorpion, a snake, a circle, and a number of wavy lines and cord-like features. At first glance this lithified menagerie appears to be simply a hodgepodge of animals and geometrical designs randomly placed to fill in the broad side of the pillar.
 
The key to unlocking this early Neolithic puzzle is the circle situated at the center of the scene. I am immediately reminded of the cosmic Father—the Sun. The next clues are the scorpion facing up toward the sun, and the large bird seemingly holding the sun upon its outstretched wing. In fact the sun figure appears to be located accurately on the ecliptic with respect to the familiar constellation of Scorpio, although the scorpion on the pillar occupies only the left portion, or head, of our modern conception of that constellation. As such the sun symbol is located as close to the galactic center as it can be on the ecliptic as it crosses the galactic plane.
 
….
 
Burley then presents a graphic that “illustrates the crossing of the galactic plane of the Milky Way near the center of the galaxy, with several familiar constellations nearby.” A second graphic shows the same view with the addition of the ancient constellations represented on the pillar:
 
Note that the outstretched wings, sun, bird legs and snake all appear to be oriented to emphasize the sun’s path along the ecliptic The similarity of the bas relief to the crossing of the ecliptic and galactic equator at the center of the Milky Way is difficult to reject, supporting the possibility that humans recognized and documented the precession of the equinoxes thousands of years earlier than is generally accepted by scholars … Göbekli Tepe was built as a symbolic sphere communicating a very ancient understanding of world and cosmic geography. Why this knowledge was intentionally buried soon afterward remains a mystery.
 
….
 
As I sit in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa in July 2014 spinning the skies on my computer screen, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that Paul Burley has had a genius insight about the scene on Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe. Burley’s language in his paper is careful—almost diffident. As we saw in Chapter Fourteen, he says that “the sun figure appears to be located accurately on the ecliptic with respect to the familiar constellation of Scorpio.” He speaks of other “familiar constellations” nearby.
And he draws our attention to the large bird—the vulture—“seemingly holding the sun upon an outstretched wing.”
He does not say which constellation he believes the vulture represents, but the graphics he includes to reinforce his argument leave no room for doubt that he regards it as an ancient representation of the constellation of Sagittarius. ….
 
We’ve already seen that there is evidence for the identification of constellations going far back into the Ice Age, some of which were portrayed in those remote times in forms that are recognizable to us today.
From the last chapter the reader will recall Michael Rappengluck’s work on the zodiacal constellation of Taurus, depicted at Lascaux some 17,000 years ago as an auroch (ancient species of wild cattle) with the six visible stars of the Pleiades on its shoulder.
 
Acknowledging such surprising continuities in the ways that some constellations are depicted does not mean that all the constellations we are familiar with now have always been depicted in the same way by all cultures at all periods of history. This is very far from being the case. Constellations are subject to sometimes radical change depending on which imaginary figures different cultures choose to project upon the sky. For example, the Mesopotamian constellation of the Bull of Heaven and the modern constellation of Taurus share the Hyades cluster as the head, but in other respects are very different. …. Likewise the Mesopotamian constellation of the Bow and Arrow is built from stars in the constellations that we call Argo and Canis Major, with the star Sirius as the tip of the arrow. The Chinese also have a Bow and Arrow constellation built from pretty much the same stars but the arrow is shorter, with Sirius forming not the tip but the target. ….
 
Even when constellation boundaries remain the same from culture to culture, the ways in which those constellations are seen can be very different.
Thus the Ancient Egyptians knew the constellation that we call the Great Bear, but represented it as the foreleg of a bull. They saw the Little Bear (Ursa Minor) as a jackal. They depicted the zodiacal constellation of Cancer as a scarab beetle. The constellation of Draco, which we see as a dragon, was figured by the Ancient Egyptians as a hippopotamus with a crocodile on its back. ….
 
There can therefore be no objection in principle to the suggestion that the constellation we call Sagittarius, “the Archer”—and depict as a centaur man-horse hybrid holding a bow with arrow drawn—could have been seen by the builders of Göbekli Tepe as a vulture with outstretched wings.
 
I spend hours on Stellarium toggling back and forth between the sky of 9600 BC and the sky of our own epoch, focusing on the region between Sagittarius and Scorpio—the region Burley believes is depicted on Pillar 43—and looking at the relationship of the sun to these background constellations.
 
The first thing that becomes clear to me is that a vulture with outstretched wings makes a very good figure of Sagittarius; indeed it’s a much better, more intuitive and more obvious way to represent the central part of this constellation than the centaur/archer that we have inherited from the Mesopotamians and the Greeks. This central part of Sagittarius (minus the centaur’s legs and tail) happens to contain its brightest stars and forms an easily recognized asterism often called the “Teapot” by astronomers today—because it does resemble a modern teapot with a handle, a pointed lid and a spout. The handle and spout elements, however, could equally effectively be drawn as the outstretched wings of a vulture, while the pointed “lid” becomes the vulture’s neck and head.
 
It is the outstretched wing in front of the vulture—the spout of the teapot—that Burley sees as “holding the sun,” represented by the prominent disc in the middle of the scene on Pillar 43.
 

…. 
Figure 49: A vulture with outstretched wings makes a much better, more intuitive and more obvious way than an archer to represent the bright, central “Teapot” asterism within the constellation of Sagittarius.
….
  
Figure 50: Sagittarius and neighboring constellations as interpreted on Pillar 43.
 ….

But the vulture and the sun are only two aspects of the complex imagery of the pillar. Below and just a little to the right of the vulture is a scorpion.
Above and to the right of the vulture is a second large bird with a long sickle-shaped beak, and nestled close to this bird is a serpent with a large triangular head and its body coiled into a curve. A third bird, again with a hooked beak, but smaller, with the look of a chick, is placed below these two figures—again to the right of the vulture, indeed immediately to the right of its extended front wing. Below the scorpion is the head and long neck of a fourth bird. Beside the scorpion, rearing up, is another serpent.
 
Part of the reason for my growing confidence in Burley’s conclusion, though he makes little of it in his paper, is that these figures, with only minor adjustments, compare intriguingly with other constellations around the alleged Sagittarius/vulture figure.
 
First and foremost, there is the scorpion below and a little to the right of the vulture, which we’ve seen already has an obvious resemblance to Scorpio, the next constellation along the zodiac from Sagittarius. Its posture and positioning are wrong—we’ll look more closely into the implications of this in a moment—but it’s there and it is overlapped by the tail end of the constellation that we recognize as Scorpio today.
Secondly, there’s the large bird above and to the right of the vulture with the curved body of a serpent nestled close to it. These two figures are in the correct position and the correct relationship to one another to match the constellation we call Ophiuchus, the serpent holder, and the serpent constellation, Serpens, that Ophiuchus holds.
 
Thirdly, immediately to the right of the extended front wing of the vulture there’s that other bird, smaller, like a chick, with a hooked beak. I email Burley about this, and about the different position and orientation of the scorpion on the pillar and the modern constellation of Scorpio, and we arrive, after some back and forth, at a solution. Constellation boundaries, as the reader will recall, are not necessarily drawn in the same place by all cultures at all periods and it’s clear that there’s been a shift over time in the constellation boundaries here. The chick on Pillar 43 appears to have formed a small constellation of its own in the minds of the Göbekli Tepe astronomers—a constellation that utilized some of the important stars today considered to be part of Scorpio. The chick’s hooked beak is correctly positioned, and its body is the correct shape, to match the head and claws of Scorpio. ….
 
Fourthly, beside the scorpion on Pillar 43 is a serpent and beneath the scorpion are the head and long neck of yet another bird, with a headless anthropomorphic figure positioned to its right. The serpent matches the tail of Sagittarius (as we’ve seen, the vulture appears to be composed from the central part of Sagittarius only—the Teapot—so this leaves the remainder of the constellation available to the ancients for other uses). The best contenders for the bird, and for the peculiar little anthropomorphic figure to its right are parts of the constellations we know today as Pavo and Triangulum Australe. The remainder of Pavo may be involved with further figures present on the pillar to the left of the bird.
 
As is the case with Sagittarius, elements of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been redeployed in the ancient constellations depicted on Pillar 43. Only the tail of our Scorpio is in the correct location to match the scorpion on Pillar 43 and its head faces to the right, whereas the head of the scorpion on the pillar faces to the left.
The scorpion on the pillar is also below the vulture, whereas modern Scorpio is a very large constellation lying parallel and to the right of Sagittarius.
I suggest the solution to this problem is that the scorpion on Pillar 43 is conjured from a combination of the tail of the modern constellation of Scorpio (right legs of the Pillar 43 scorpion), an unused part of the “Teapot” asterism of Sagittarius (right claw of the Pillar 43 scorpion) and the constellations that we know as Ara, Telescopium and Corona Australis (respectively the tail, left legs and left claw of the Pillar 43 scorpion). Meanwhile, as noted above, the claws and head of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been co-opted to form the chick with the hooked beak on Pillar 43.
 
This whole issue of the relationship between the modern constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius and the scorpion and vulture figures depicted on Pillar 43 takes on a new level of significance when we remember that in some ancient astronomical figures Sagittarius is depicted not only as a centaur—a man-horse—but also as a man-horse hybrid with the tail of a scorpion, and sometimes simply as a man-scorpion hybrid. …. On Babylonian Kudurru stones (often referred to as boundary stones, although it is likely that their function has been misunderstood …) a figure of a man-scorpion drawing a bow frequently appears that “is universally identified with the archer Sagittarius.” …. What further cements the identification of Sagittarius with the vulture on Pillar 43 is that these man-scorpion figures from the Babylonian Kudurru stones are very often depicted with the legs and feet of birds. …. Moreover, in some representations a second scorpion appears beneath the body—i.e. beneath the Teapot asterism—of Sagittarius reminiscent of the position of the scorpion on Pillar 43 (see Figures 50 and 51).
 

Figure 51: Man-scorpion Sagittarius figures from Bablylonian Kudurru stones (left) are frequently depicted with the legs and feet of birds, further strengthening the identification of the vulture figure on Pillar 43 with Sagittarius. In other Mesopotamian representations (right) we see a second scorpion beneath the body of Sagittarius occupying a similar position to the scorpion on Pillar 43.
….
 
When all this is taken together it goes, in my opinion, far beyond anything that can be explained away as mere “coincidence.” The implication is that ideas of how certain constellations should be depicted that were expressed at Göbekli Tepe almost 12,000 years ago [sic], including the notion that there should be a scorpion in this region of the heavens, were passed down, undergoing some changes in the process, but nonetheless surviving in recognizable form for millennia to find related expression in much later Babylonian astronomical iconography. But given the close connections with ancient Mesopotamia, its antediluvian cities, its Seven Sages and its flood survivors washed up in their Ark near Göbekli Tepe, we should perhaps not be too surprised.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Ancient Australians – culture going south



by

Damien F. Mackey




Following the typical evolutionary view of things, which requires much time for
the human development from ape-man, Bruce Fenton must locate the origins of the
Göbekli Tepe culture down south in Australia, before its having arrived at the degree
of sophistication enabling for the spread of that culture in the far north (e.g. Turkey).




Great Gobbling Turkeys!
There’s an archaeological site in Turkey, at Göbekli Tepe, that has palaeontologists scratching their collective heads.
Dated to as early as 12,000 – 10,000 BC, the site exhibits cultural and technological advances that ought not to have occurred during a phase in human evolution (supposedly) when man was still just a primitive hunter-gatherer.

“History is Wrong” declares one site regarding “The Mystery of Gobekli Tepe” (2018): https://coolinterestingstuff.com/the-mystery-of-gobekli-tepe

…. many have proposed that Gobekli Tepe can even be a temple inside the Biblical Eden of Genesis. Is it possible that what we know about the ‘uncivilized and primitive’ prehistoric men is not at all true? Is it possible that advanced civilizations existed before 6000 BCE and their tracks are simply lost in time? Or is it possible that extra-terrestrials interfered and helped men to build monuments throughout the history of humanity? The questions are certainly compelling.

Man was supposed to have been a primitive hunter-gatherer at the time of the sites’ construction.
Gobekli Tepe’s presence currently predates what science has taught would be essential in building something on the scale such as those structures. For instance, the site appears before the agreed upon dates for the inventions of art and engravings; it even predates man working with metals and pottery but features evidence of all of these. ….

[End of quote]


This site finds it all so incomprehensible as to have to resort to the extreme suggestion of ancient aliens.  

But forget those large palaeontological numbers (12,000, 10,000) variously suggested for the BC age ofGöbekli Tepe. These people play with, and throw away, 100’s and 1,000’s like reckless gamblers. Australia’s Mungo Man, for instance, was dated to 60,000 BC and then dropped to 40,000 BC in the space of a week.
Nobody seemed to raise a Neanderthalian eyebrow.
Creationist Dr. John Osgood has made an impressive start in sorting out the Stone Ages in his most helpful series: “A Better Model for the Stone Age” (pts. 1 and 2):
The Acheulean era, which according to Pierto Gaietto, impacted upon the Göbekli Tepe masonry: “Regarding the topic of evolution in general I am of the opinion that the strong tendency towards the dressing of large stones at Göbekli Tepe had its origin in the Acheulean tradition of the Mousterian culture”, has been placed by Dr. Osgood during the dispersal after the Noachic Flood.

Acheulean


The characteristic feature of this culture was, of course, the large hand axe prominent in it. Comment has already been made about the possible relationship between the virgin forests, an early spreading people, and the necessity to use hand-axes in much of their culture. The widespread common relationship of these tools in Europe, Asia and Northern Africa certainly is not inconsistent with the biblical model of the recent origin of the spread of people from the Middle East into diverse places having initially similar cultures.

There does seem to be a definite stratigraphic relationship between the so-called Paleolithic strata - Acheulian, Mousterian and Aurignacian in ascending order. This, however, does not indicate that they were cultures that succeeded one another all over the country, but the principle of mushrooming may legitimately be investigated here as in the Mesopotamian Chalcolithic. In other words, the superposition of one stratum on the other may only be a measurement of the cultures in one dimension. It fails to come to terms with the possible horizontal contemporaneity of at least the last two of these cultures, the Mousterian and the Aurignacian. ….
[End of quote]

Most striking of all are the art-works and symbols common to far-away Australian Aboriginals, so much so that author Bruce Fenton has been prompted to query whether Göbekli Tepe may actually have been an Australian Aboriginal site

Following the typical evolutionary view of things, though, which requires much time for the human development from ape-man, Bruce Fenton must locate the origins of the Göbekli Tepe culture down south in Australia, before its having arrived at the degree of sophistication enabling for the spread of that culture in the far north (e.g. Turkey).
A biblical view, instead, would have cultures like Göbekli Tepe emanating at a stage after the Flood from an already fairly sophisticated antediluvian world (Genesis 4:20-22) – Tubal-Cain, for instance, forged implements of copper and iron. Those who later became the Australian Aboriginals - who were not just one people, but many tribes/nations with different languages - would have absorbed this, and other northern cultures (e.g. Aboriginal art connects also with the ‘Ubaid culture in Mesopotamia), and carried the vestiges of these in their long journeys southwards, inevitably losing much of that knowledge over time and distance. Contrary to Bruce Fenton, then, Australian aboriginality is a cultural devolution, rather than an evolution.

Ian Wilson, exploring the Lost World of the Kimberley (2006), the northernmost of the nine regions of Western Australia, has pointed out striking similarities between art figures of the Mesopotamian ‘Ubaid culture and the Kimberley’s aboriginal art figures.  

The Australian Aboriginal languages apparently have some affinity with ancient Sumerian:

Hungarian language belongs to the family of agglutinative languages. Officially it is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family. Structurally similar – although in a very distant relationship with it – are the Turkish, the Dravidian groups of languages, the Japanese and the Korean in the Far-East and the Basque in Europe. A large portion of ancient languages were agglutinative in their nature, such like the Sumerian, Pelagic, Etruscan, as well as aboriginal languages on the American and Australian continents. ….









Thursday, July 4, 2019

‘Handbag’ carriers from Göbekli Tepe to Mexico



 What did Gods carry in their “handbags”?
 
by
 
Damien F. Mackey
 
 
 
 
“I add “Assyrian Apkallu” to the search parameters and even more images flood my screen. Often they show bearded men holding bags or buckets which closely resemble those depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar and the one held by the Mexican “Man in Serpent” figure”.
 
Graham Hancock
 
  
 
Knowing that Graham Hancock is never dull reading, and also that his recent (2015) book, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilisation, has quite a lot to say about Göbekli Tepe, a site whose findings I think are devastating for the evolutionary explanation of origins:
 
Göbekli Tepe dating plain wrong
 
 
then it was inevitable that I should, when I saw the book in a library, take it home to read.
A few things struck me early. Most especially, those ubiquitous ‘handbags’ of the gods.
What did they mean?
That question has been posed, too, by dmatherly at the colourful Graham Hancock site
 

What function do ancient depictions of so-called hand bags have?...From the Olmec to Sumerian/Assyrian and even on a stela at Gobekli Tepe are these found..
 
 
Graham Hancock himself, when in situ at Göbekli Tepe, had speculated about these objects.
He writes about it in his book:
 
While I’m online I run some searches for images of the Seven Sages. I don’t get many hits at first, but the moment I change the search terms to “Apkallu” and “Seven Apkallu” I open a colossal archive of images from all over the internet, many of them reliefs from Assyria, a culture that thrived in Mesopotamia from approximately 2500 BC to about 600 BC. I add “Assyrian Apkallu” to the search parameters and even more images flood my screen. Often they show bearded men holding bags or buckets which closely resemble those depicted on the Göbekli Tepe pillar and the one held by the Mexican “Man in Serpent” figure. It’s not just the curved handles of these containers, or their shape—where the resemblance is much closer than on the original Oannes relief I reproduced in Fingerprints of the Gods. Even more striking is the peculiar and distinctive way that the figures from both Mesopotamia and Mexico hold these containers with the fingers of the hands turned inward and the thumb crooked forward over the handle.
There’s something else as well. A good number of the images show not a man but a therianthrope —a birdman with a hooked beak exactly like the hooked beak of the therianthrope on the Göbekli Tepe pillar. What makes the resemblance even closer is that in the Mesopotamian reliefs the birdman is holding the container in one hand and a cone-shaped object in the other. The shape is a little different but a comparison with the disc cradled above the wing of the Göbekli Tepe birdman is hard to resist.
I can’t prove anything yet. It could, of course, all be coincidence, or I could be imagining links that aren’t there. But my curiosity is aroused by the similar containers on different continents and in different epochs and so I jot down a series of questions that can form the frame of a loose hypothesis for future testing. For instance, could these containers (whether they are bags or buckets) be the symbols of office of an initiatic brotherhood—far traveled and deeply ancient, with roots reaching back into the remotest prehistory? I feel that this possibility, extraordinary though it may seem on the face of things, is worth looking into and is strengthened by the distinctive hand postures. Might these not have served the same sort of function as Masonic handshakes today—providing an instant means of identifying who is an “insider” and who is not?
 
[End of quote]
 
Striking cultural, architectural, and many other similarities amongst cultures spread as far and wide as Mesopotamia, Armenia (modern Turkey), Africa and the New World (e.g. Mexico), and significantly differing as to their eras, do not favour the evolutionary view of origins in isolation. How to explain this Göbekli Tepe–Australian Aboriginal connection, for instance?:
 

Also grabbing my attention in Hancock’s book were the ancient references to the Flood by Nebuchednezzar I and Ashurbanipal, especially given my identification of both of these names with Nebuchednezzar ‘the Great’ (so-called II) - three name for the one king. See e.g. my article:
 
Nebuchednezzar - mad, bad, then great
 
 
From these ancient quotes we learn that (also not favouring the evolutionary view) there was “the flood”, despite Mesopotamia often experiencing floods; that a “seed [was] preserved” from this flood, and that “writings” existed before the flood. Hancock writes:
 
In due course, later kings would speak of their link to the antediluvian world. In the late first millenium BC, Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon described himself as a “seed preserved from before the flood”88 while Ashurbanipal, who ruled the central Mesopotamian empire of Assyria in the seventh century BC, boasted: “I learned the craft of Adapa, the sage, which is the secret knowledge … I am well acquainted with the signs of heaven and earth … I am enjoying the writings on stones from before the flood.”89