Çatalhöyük – don’t fence me in

“The Turkish government did not stop there, either. After banning Mellaart, officials erected a huge fence around Çatalhöyük. And no one else dug there for the next thirty years. Unfortunately, they also left the site exposed to the elements. Before long, rain and heat destroyed several priceless murals. And mudbrick homes that had lasted nine thousand years crumbled into dust in months. All because of James Mellaart had gotten into a spat with the Turkish government”. ________________________________________ October 24, 2023 People & Politics If Indiana Jones Were a Swindler James Mellaart discovered one of the most important archaeological sites ever. But his lust for treasure led him to lose it all. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/if-indiana-jones-were-a-swindler/ Her name was Anna. And as soon as she entered the train car, James Mellaart was bewitched. It wasn’t because she was beautiful, although she was. It was the bracelet on her wrist, gleaming gold. His trained eye instantly recognized it as a treasure from the days of ancient Troy. It was spring 1958, and the 33-year-old Mellaart was traveling through western Turkey. He was a plump man with thick glasses, a no-name archaeologist from England. The discoveries that would make him famous were still years away. But he burned with ambition. His obsession in life was Turkey. He had moved to Turkey years earlier, and had married a Turkish archaeologist. He was especially obsessed with a region of central Turkey called Anatolia, or Asia Minor. Mellaart wanted to prove that Anatolia had a history every bit as glorious as Rome or Greece. So as soon as he saw the Anatolian bracelet on the arm of the woman in the train, he was transfixed. He screwed up his courage and introduced himself. Her name was Anna Papastrati. She spoke English well. She told him she lived in Izmir, a city on the Turkish coast. As Mellaart peppered her with questions, she revealed that she had a whole horde of similar treasures at her house. Did Mellaart want to see them? Of course he did. But, Mellaart had no place to stay in Izmir. Anna, though, offered to put him up for the night at her house. However excited, Mellaart hesitated. His wife would be furious about him sleeping at a strange woman’s home. But his lust for archaeology got the better of him. Besides, it was just one night. He said yes. He had no idea that this one night would haunt him for the rest of his life. In Izmir, Mellaart and Anna took the ferry to her home. But before they examined the artifacts, Anna insisted on cooking him dinner. They dined overlooking the water, under candlelight, with a bottle of wine. Afterward, Anna wanted to linger at the table and chat, but Mellaart insisted on seeing the artifacts. They did not disappoint. There were gold earrings, ivory combs, jeweled daggers, necklaces with turquoise and amber. Mellaart recognized them as belonging to the so-called Yortan culture, which thrived thousands of years ago near the fabled city of Troy. Anna said the treasures came from a place called Dorak, a town south of Istanbul. They’d been unearthed during a war in the 1920s. But she dodged Mellaart’s questions about how she’d come to obtain them. Mellaart did not press her. And he soon forgot such questions amid his excitement over the treasures. He spent the whole next day studying them. When night fell, Anna encouraged him to stay another night. So he did. The same thing happened the next day and the next. In all he spent a week in Anna’s home, fawning over the treasures while she fawned over him. Mellaart made detailed drawings of the artifacts, but Anna forbid him from taking photographs. Instead, she promised to mail him some photos. This seemed odd, but Mellaart agreed and gave her his address. And upon finally leaving her home, he slyly noted her address—217 Kazim Dirik Street. Then Mellaart went back home to his wife, and waited for Anna’s letter. A whole month passed, then another. Summer arrived and drifted into fall. But still no letter from Anna. Mellaart began to fret like a jilted lover. Why hadn’t she written yet? Did he do something wrong? He finally could not take it anymore, and wrote to her instead. No answer came. Meanwhile, Mellaart was busy doing other archaeology. In fact, that November, he made a discovery that would catapult him to worldwide fame. It involved a site called Çatalhöyük in south-central Turkey. It’s a 9000-year-old city, perhaps the first true city in history. And beyond its incredible age, other things made the place special, too. People in Çatalhöyük lived in mudbrick homes that stood just inches apart. There were no streets, no parks, no open spaces. People got from place to place by walking across each other’s roofs. The houses didn’t have doors, either. People entered and exited their homes on ladders through skylights. Çatalhöyük was a sky city. The insides of the homes were special, too. People painted spectacular murals on the walls—of bulls, vultures, leopards. They crafted figurines of animals and goddesses as well. Most fascinating of all, the people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead inside their homes—and did so right in the dirt beneath their beds. Every night you would tuck in to sleep with the skeletons of grandma and grandpa and your crazy uncle just inches beneath your head. When Mellaart discovered Çatalhöyük in 1958, the city was buried beneath a giant mound of dirt sixty feet tall, with weeds covering it. But even during preliminary digs, he could tell Çatalhöyük was special—the murals, the skeletons in the bedroom, the people walking on the roofs. Who wouldn’t be enchanted? Even while making these spectacular discoveries, however, Mellaart’s heart was still elsewhere—on the Dorak treasures. In between digs at Çatalhöyük, he spent many empty months pining over the treasures and writing Anna letters that she never answered. Until one day, finally, she wrote back. Mellaart tore open the letter, his heart pounding. But it was disappointingly brief. And it contained none of the promised photographs. Anna finished by saying, “You were always more interested in these old things than in me.” It was signed “Love, Anna.” Mellaart never heard from Anna again. Baffled and heartbroken, he finally gave up writing her. Then he published a short article about the treasures in a British magazine, along with his drawings. And he thought that would be that, but the article caused a big stir among archaeologists. What amazing treasures! Unfortunately, it also landed Mellaart in a world of trouble. You see, the Turkish government was quite sensitive about its ancient artifacts, for good reason. Centuries of looting and smuggling had robbed Turkey of much of its cultural history. There were strict laws there about reporting all archaeological finds. But no one had reported the Dorak artifacts. They were undocumented, and government officials were furious to find out about them in a magazine. Who was this Anna anyway? How did she get her hands on such treasures? The officials demanded that Mellaart turn Anna in. Having no other choice, he gave them her address—217 Kazim Dirik Street in Izmir. But upon arriving in Izmir, the officials noticed something strange. 217 Kazim Dirik Street was a shopping center. No one lived there. There were no houses or apartments nearby, either. Something was not adding up. And that’s when Turkish officials began to suspect that James Mellaart was not telling them everything he knew. When they could not find Anna, Turkish officials turned their investigation—and anger—toward James Mellaart. They accused him of working with smugglers. They figured the point of the magazine article was to hype the Dorak treasures and drive up their price. Then, after the smugglers sold the goods, Mellaart would take a cut of the profits. When confronted with these charges, Mellaart denied everything. In fact, privately, he was starting to suspect that Anna was the one working with smugglers. Had it really been a coincidence that he’d met her on the train? And would she really be wearing ancient treasures on vacation? Perhaps she was a plant. Perhaps she had deliberately worn the bracelet to grab his attention. Then, after he confirmed the goods as authentic, she had disappeared and handed them to smugglers to sell. Mellaart confessed his suspicions to the Turkish authorities. But they did not buy his theory. It seemed too convenient. Plus, after digging around a bit, they caught Mellaart in a few lies about Anna. One lie involved when he had met Anna. Sometimes he said 1952, sometimes 1958. Mellaart protested that he was just trying to avoid troubles with his wife. He hadn’t been married in 1952, and he sometimes gave that earlier date to avoid questions about him shacking up with another woman. However understandable, the lies undermined Mellaart’s credibility. The Turkish newspapers were soon buzzing with stories about the fat greedy foreigner who was stealing Turkey’s heritage. Now, all this while, Mellaart continued to dig at Çatalhöyük, the ancient city where people walked across the roofs and buried their family members beneath their beds. In fact, his discoveries there won him worldwide renown. But as a foreigner, Mellaart needed permits to dig in Turkey. And as the Dorak scandal grew, Turkish officials began threatening those permits. In 1964, they denied the permits completely, meaning Mellaart couldn’t excavate that year. Mellaart was furious. He threw an absolute fit. By calling in some favors, he managed to win his permits back in 1965. But it was a short-lived victory. Because another scandal soon erupted. For the excavation at Çatalhöyük, Mellaart had hired diggers from local villages in Turkey. Whenever the workers found something special—like a leopard statue, or a goddess figurine—they told Mellaart. Mellaart then reported every item to the Turkish government—or at least every item he knew about. One day in mid-summer 1965, a government official visited an antique shop twenty miles from Çatalhöyük. On the shelves there, she was shocked to see three figurines from Çatalhöyük for sale. All illegally. She seized the figurines and demanded that the shopkeeper tell her where he got them. He claimed that diggers from the site had just walked in one day and sold them. So the official grabbed the shopkeeper by the ear, and dragged him to the dig site to confront Mellaart. Upon seeing the figurines, Mellaart’s heart sank. They were undoubtedly from Çatalhöyük. But he denied all knowledge of wrongdoing. He led the shopkeeper over to his workers. The shopkeep quickly fingered four of them as the culprits. A heated argument erupted, with accusations flying back and forth. The workers denied everything. And they were so angry about being called thieves that they quit on the spot—as did all the other workers. Mellaart now faced disaster. Although innocent, his name would be sullied by this scandal, since it took place on his dig site. Equally bad, without diggers, work on the site pretty much stopped for the year. And it soon became clear that the digging would not resume anytime soon. Mellaart tried to apply for more permits the next year. The government denied them—and told Mellaart he’d be lucky to ever work in Turkey again. Meanwhile, there was a twist with the saga of the Dorak treasures. The British tabloids had been following the Mellaart scandal avidly. And in 1966, two reporters went down to Turkey to dig up some dirt. What they found shocked them. They visited Izmir, the city where Anna lived. They began searching for her at 217 Kazim Dirik street. To their bafflement, they realized that there were two streets with that name in the same city. One was indeed a shopping center. But the other was a residence. They raced right over. Had they found Anna at last? That’s when the story swerved again. The reporters learned that, a few years earlier, the government had renamed several local roads. The government was trying to bring some order to the city’s chaotic street plan. And while they were at it, officials renumbered all the houses as well. The bottom line was, between the renaming and renumbering—as well as the general turnover of people moving in and out of the neighborhood—no one quite remembered where the old 217 Kazim Dirik Street was. The journalists searched and searched, but never found a trace of Anna. The development left Mellaart in agony. It was partial vindication—proof, he said, that the Turkish government had botched its original investigation. But it fell short of the exoneration he needed. Without Anna, he could not prove his innocence. As a result, the Turkish government retained the upper hand. The government soon banned Mellaart from Çatalhöyük for life. Mellaart had discovered Çatalhöyük—one of the most important archaeological sites in history. But he never set eyes on it again. The Turkish government did not stop there, either. After banning Mellaart, officials erected a huge fence around Çatalhöyük. And no one else dug there for the next thirty years. Unfortunately, they also left the site exposed to the elements. Before long, rain and heat destroyed several priceless murals. And mudbrick homes that had lasted nine thousand years crumbled into dust in months. All because of James Mellaart had gotten into a spat with the Turkish government. In the end, the Dorak treasures never turned up. Like Anna, they vanished. And overall it’s probably impossible to say what really happened in the Dorak affair. The simplest explanation is that Mellaart just made the whole thing up. Or perhaps the treasures did exist, but Mellaart changed key details about them or about Anna, perhaps to protect her. For his part, Mellaart went to his death in 2012 claiming he had been framed. And many archaeologists who knew him still believe he’s innocent. But other clues say perhaps not. As of now, the only tangible evidence that Anna existed is the letter she sent to Mellaart saying she loved him. But there are some fishy details about that letter. For one thing, in the letter’s address line, Anna misspelled “Kazim Dirik” Street. Which seems a bit suspicious, considering she lived there. And that’s not all. Anna dated the letter as 10-dash-18, October 18th. But instead of the numeral 1, there’s a capital I in the 10 and the 18. Read literally, it says I-zero and I-eight. Which is weird. Who beyond the Romans would use an I for a 1 like that? Well, James Mellaart’s wife did. For whatever reason, when his wife wrote letters to people, she usually typed a capital I instead of a 1. And is it really a coincidence that Anna supposedly did as well? More likely, Mellaart’s wife was in on the hoax. How ironic if, after all that smoke from Mellaart about his wife getting angry over Anna, his wife was maybe helping him perpetrate a fraud the whole time. Even worse for Mellaart, after his death, his family found something disturbing. His office was full of fake, supposedly ancient artifacts from Anatolia. It’s not clear why Mellaart was making them. Perhaps to sell. Or, perhaps he was forging them for scholarly reasons. Again, he was obsessed with proving that Anatolia had a glorious past. So perhaps he invented fraudulent evidence to support that theory. Regardless, this discovery further undermined an already teetering reputation. And the worst part is, it was all so unnecessary. The incident with Anna supposedly took place in spring 1958. And later that same year, Mellaart discovered Çatalhöyük—which proved beyond all doubt that Anatolia did have a glorious past, a past every bit as grand as Rome or Greece. But because of his alleged misdeeds, Mellaart was banned from exploring that past. In the end, his invented treasures cost him the real ones.

Noachic Flood, Ark Mountain, First Writing

by Damien F. Mackey Before the Flood (antediluvian), in the Beginning, Eden (centrally located where Jerusalem now is) was the Cradle of Civilisation. While, after the Flood (postdiluvian), new beginnings were made in, as we shall find, the region of modern SE Turkey. Early Genesis eyewitness accounts Neither before, or after, the Flood, was humanity’s beginning in southern Iraq, or ancient Sumer, as it is generally thought to have been, after millions of years of painful evolution. We have also been told that writing did not begin until about 1,000 BC. But that, too, is quite false. The Book of Genesis was composed from eye-witness accounts. Humanity’s ‘Cradle of Civilisation’ definitely not to be found in Iraq The following comments by Kristoffer Uggerud would be a typical conventional view: How Did Mesopotamia Become the Cradle of Civilization? Around 4500 BCE humans settled in Mesopotamia. Within a few centuries, the Sumerians developed what we today call the cradle of civilization. Apr 9, 2024 • By Kristoffer Uggerud, MA Area studies, BA History SUMMARY • Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, became the cradle of civilization due to its fertile land and the development of irrigation, which supported the growth of city-states like Ur, Eridu, and Uruk with populations over 50,000 around 5,000 years ago. • The Sumerians innovated with the world’s first written language, cuneiform, on clay tablets, facilitating record-keeping for food supplies and trade. This advancement, alongside their development of a numerical system, laid foundational aspects of modern society. • The decline of the Sumerian civilization around 2000 BCE was attributed to agricultural productivity loss due to soil salinization from irrigation. This led to the rise of subsequent empires in Mesopotamia, such as the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires. …. [End of quote] Sadly, none of this is correct – the inflated BC dates; attribution of first writing; Sumer preceding the Akkadian and Assyrian civilisations; and so on. Southern Mesopotamia was neither the Cradle of Civilisation before or after the Flood. Before the Flood (antediluvian), in the Beginning, Eden (centrally located where Jerusalem now is) was the Cradle of Civilisation. While, after the Flood (postdiluvian), new beginnings were made in, as we shall find, the region of modern SE Turkey. Due to the after effects of the Flood, the low-lying land of southern Mesopotamia was not able to be properly settled as early as were more northerly locations. That is why so-called ‘Sumerian’ civilisation springs up fully grown, much to the amazement of evolutionary-minded antiquarians. It was a late clutch of settlements that had benefitted from the long development of civilisations elsewhere. More accurate to regard The Fertile Crescent as being, approximately, humanity’s Cradle of Civilisation: https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/fertile-crescent “The Fertile Crescent, often referred to as “the cradle of civilization,” is the crescent-shaped region in Western Asia and North Africa that spans the modern-day countries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and, for some scholars, Egypt”. Written records were kept even before the Flood The beginning of the Documentary Theory of the Book of Genesis was actually based on a correct premise. Frenchman, Jean Astruc (1684-1766), a famous professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, claimed to have found several distinct sources in early Genesis. And he was quite right regarding that at least. But it soon went all pear-shaped! Liberal scholars, most notably German Lutherans, thought themselves able to detect no end of strands and sources throughout the Book of Genesis, culminating in the famous JEDP hypothesis of the likes of professors Karl Heinrich Graf (d. 1869) and Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918). Jean Astruc had correctly speculated that Moses used existing written or oral sources in constructing Genesis. Sadly, again, those who came after him effectively slammed the door shut on any notion of Mosaïc influence by proceeding, in stages - and by the early 1800’s - to the view that the Pentateuch was written around 900-800 BC, centuries after Moses. An extremely well-educated and intelligent Dominican priest once declared to me that “Moses and Joshua wrote nothing, that writing was not invented until about the time of King David (c. 1000-900 BC)”, and this despite passages such as Exodus 34:27: “Then the Lord told Moses, ‘Write down these words, because I’m making a Covenant with you and with Israel according to these words’”, and Joshua 8:32: “There, in the presence of the Israelites, Joshua wrote on stones a copy of the Law of Moses”. Writing not invented until. c. 1000 BC, eh? What, then, I queried the Dominican - using the same inflated sort of conventional dating in which the erudite priest would have been schooled - to make of the brilliant Autobiography of Weni in Egypt, written prior to 2150 BC? What about Moses being “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians …”? (Acts 7:22) {This Weni, who was a Vizier and Chief Judge in ancient Egypt, exactly as was Moses: ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us?’ (Exodus 2:14), I have identified as Moses} The fourfold sigla, JEDP, of the Graf-Wellhausen theory has proven to be disastrous for biblical studies, “confusion confounded” as one scholar has well described it. This J-jaberwocky, E-eccentric, D-desolate, P-primitive, theory, quite lacking in archaeological awareness - pure Kantian a priorism - needs to be replaced with what might be called the PJ theory, of Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman, a wise and common-sense theory of the true structure of Genesis, based on sound archaeology and an acute awareness of ancient scribal methods. (See New discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis (1936), republished by Wiseman's son, Donald Wiseman, as Ancient records and the structure of Genesis: A case for literary unity, in 1985). Editor Moses did indeed make use of multiple sources to compile the Book of Genesis, so P. J. Wiseman would demonstrate, but these sources actually pre-dated him. Moses used the family histories (Hebrew toledôt) of his famous ancestral patriarchs, Adam; Noah; Shem, Ham and Japheth; Terah; etc; etc., some of which histories included triple repetition, as Jean Astruc had discerned - but was not able to explain correctly. The triple repetition in the second Flood account, for example, arises from the triple authorship of the document: “Shem, Ham and Japheth” (Genesis 10:1). It is as simple as that! The great Genesis Flood is an account by eye-witnesses, firstly Noah’s toledôt history, and then that of his three sons. Note that, afterwards, a separation appears to have occurred. Shem, formerly a co-author with his brothers, is now a sole recorder (Genesis 11:10). Psalm 104 on extent of the Flood The misinterpretation of the ancient texts by modern (say, Western) minds in regard to the Noachic Flood is well explained in the following piece by Rich Deem: http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/localflood.html The Genesis Flood Why the Bible Says It Must be Local Many Christians maintain that the Bible says that the flood account of Genesis requires an interpretation that states that the waters of the flood covered the entire earth. If you read our English Bibles, you will probably come to this conclusion if you don't read the text too closely and if you fail to consider the rest of your Bible. Like most other Genesis stories, the flood account is found in more places than just Genesis. If you read the sidebar, you will discover that Psalm 104 directly eliminates any possibility of the flood being global (see Psalm 104-9 - Does it refer to the Original Creation or the Flood?). In order to accept a global flood, you must reject Psalm 104 and the inerrancy of the Bible. If you like to solve mysteries on your own, you might want to read the flood account first and find the biblical basis for a local flood. The Bible's other creation passages eliminate the possibility of a global flood The concept of a global Genesis flood can be easily eliminated from a plain reading of Psalm 104 … which is known as the "creation psalm." Psalm 104 describes the creation of the earth in the same order as that seen in Genesis 1 (with a few more details added). It begins with an expanding universe model (reminiscent of the Big Bang) [sic] (verse 2 … parallel to Genesis 1:1). It next describes the formation of a stable water cycle (verses 3-5 … parallel to Genesis 1:6-8). The earth is then described as a planet completely covered with water (verse 6, parallel to Genesis 1:9). God then causes the dry land to appear (verses 7-8 … parallel to Genesis 1:9-10). The verse that eliminates a global flood follows: "You set a boundary they [the waters] cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth." (Psalm 104:9)…. Obviously, if the waters never again covered the earth, then the flood must have been local. Psalm 104 is just one of several creation passages that indicate that God prevented the seas from covering the entire earth. …. An integration of all flood and creation passages clearly indicates that the Genesis flood was local in geographic extent. The Bible says water covered the whole earth ... Really? When you read an English translation of the biblical account of the flood, you will undoubtedly notice many words and verses that seem to suggest that the waters covered all of planet earth. …. However, one should note that today we look at everything from a global perspective, whereas the Bible nearly always refers to local geography. You may not be able to determine this fact from our English translations, so we will look at the original Hebrew, which is the word of God. The Hebrew words which are translated as "whole earth" or "all the earth" are kol (Strong's number H3605), which means "all," and erets (Strong's number H776), which means "earth," "land," "country," or "ground." …. We don't need to look very far in Genesis (Genesis 2) before we find the Hebrew words kol erets. …. [End of quote] ‘Creationists’, having arrived at their completely artificial - and sometimes quite laughable, if they weren’t so serious - interpretations of the Bible, will then insist upon one’s adhering to their peculiar ‘biblical’ Weltanschauung as behoving Christians dedicated to the preservation of scriptural inerrancy. {Admittance: Since I used to share these views, I ought to be more sympathetic} Well, I would suggest that no one would have been more surprised than Noah (and his family) to learn that he had once ridden out a global Flood in a sea-going vessel the size of the Queen Mary! As to the once common view that ‘there had never been rain until the Flood’, it has no solid biblical support as far as I can tell. And even some ‘Creationists’ now seem to have dropped this idea. For example: https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/arguments-to-avoid/was-there-no-rain-before-the-flood/ Was There No Rain Before the Flood? Some Christians claim that there was no rain before the Flood; however, as Dr. Tommy Mitchell shows us, a close examination of Scripture does not bear this out. While we cannot prove that there was rain before the Flood, to insist that there was not (and even to deride those who think otherwise) stretches Scripture beyond what it actually says. …. Noah’s world Those who approach Genesis with a Fundamentalist mentality will take ancient biblical phrases such as “the whole earth”, “all flesh”, and, unhappily, re-present them in global terms. St. Peter writes of “… the world that then was being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6). Now, rather than for one instinctively here to seize upon the phrase, “the world”, and automatically take it to mean a global world, one would do better to learn from Genesis what “world”, “earth”, the Book of Genesis had so far presented to us. We find that only a few chapters before the Flood, in Genesis 2. It is a “world” that basically constitutes what would later come to be known as “the Fertile Crescent” – also regarded by some, as we read, as “the Cradle of Civilisation”. It stretches approximately from southern Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Egypt. Practically every nation today, great or small, has its Flood legends that bear greater or lesser similarities to the Genesis or Noachic Flood account. See for example: https://www.curioustaxonomy.net/home/floods.htm Mountain of the Ark This brings us to SE Turkey, as mentioned earlier, where, I believe, humanity had its second start (postdiluvian). A pair of researchers have conclusively, for mine, identified the mountain of the Ark’s landing as Karaca Dağ. Previously I wrote on this: The combined research of Ken Griffith and Darrell White has caused me (Damien Mackey) to move away from my former acceptance of Judi Dagh for the Mountain of Noah’s Ark Landing in preference for their choice of Karaca Dagh in SE Turkey. The pair have strongly argued for the validity of this latter site in their excellent new article: A Candidate Site for Noah’s Ark, Altar, and Tomb. (2) (PDF) A Candidate Site for Noah's Ark, Altar, and Tomb. | Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K White - Academia.edu My main reason for entertaining this switch is that the latter site appears to have been the place, unlikely as it may look, for the world’s first agriculture, including grapes, and for the domestication of what we know as farmland animals. For example, Ken Griffith and Darrell White write: This mountain, Karaca Dag, is where the genetic ancestor of all domesticated Einkorn wheat was found by the Max Planck Institute. …. The other seven founder crops of the Neolithic Revolution all have this mountain near the centre of their wild range. …. This was so exciting that even the LA Times remarked how unusual it is that all of the early agriculture crops appear to have been domesticated in the same location: “The researchers reported that the wheat was first cultivated near the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey, where chickpeas and bitter vetch also originated. Bread wheat—the most valuable single crop in the modern world—grapes and olives were domesticated nearby, as were sheep, pigs, goats and cattle.” …. …. Manfred Heun was the botanist who followed the DNA of domesticated wheat back to its source on Karaca Dag: “We believe that the idea is so good—the idea of cultivating wild plants—that we think it might be one tribe of people, and that is fascinating,” said Manfred Heun at the University of Norway’s department of biotechnological sciences, who led the research team. “I cannot prove it, but it is a possibility that one tribe or one family had the idea [emphasis added].” …. A 2004 DNA study of wild and cultivated grapevine genetics by McGovern and Vouillamoz found the region where grapevines were first domesticated. Vouillamoz reports: “Analysis of morphological similarities between the wild and cultivated grapes from all Eurasia generally support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East. In 2004, I collaborated with Patrick McGovern to focus on the ‘Grape’s Fertile Triangle’ and our results showed that the closest genetic relationship between local wild grapevines and traditional cultivated grape varieties from southern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia was observed in southern Anatolia. This suggests that the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Taurus Mountains is the most likely place where the grapevine was first domesticated! ... . This area also includes the Karacadağ region in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent.” …. The Göbekli Tepe Phenomenon This is fitting, because a site considered to be the world’s oldest, the now famed Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill”), is ‘just down the road’ (so to speak) from Karaca Dağ. And two most ancient sites, Ur (Sanliurfa) and Harran, relevant to Abram (Abraham), are also situated close by. It makes sense that, if Karaca Dağ was Noah’s mountain, then Göbekli Tepe (unrealistically dated to c. 12,000 BC) must have been a very early settlement - perhaps the first - after humanity’s departing from the mountain. {A tradition has Noah remaining on the Ark mountain for a century} Now the significance of Göbekli Tepe in possible connection with the Ark of Noah may be enormous. Klaus Schmidt, who first discovered the site, referred to it as “a Stone Age zoo”. It features an abundance of depictions of different animals seemingly in enclosures. Do we have here a representation of the types of animals that really were on board Noah’s Ark? Not exactly what we might have expected! No hint whatsoever of any dinosaurs – I definitely would not have expected them. No wonder scientifically-minded people laugh at this sort of desertion of common sense, that once again takes a “literalistic” approach to a global sounding phrase, “every living thing of all flesh” (Genesis 6:10). Noah simply would have taken pairs of such animals, dwelling close at hand, as he and his family would have needed for food and sacrifice, and to kick-start his new life on terra firma, until conditions began to revert back to normal. Boars, lions, bulls, foxes, gazelles, birds (cranes, vultures), snakes (cf. Genesis 7:8): “Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground …”. All of these and more are depicted at the Göbekli Tepe site. Apropos of this, we read at: https://nt.am/en/news/221107/ Gobekli Tepe, Noah’s Ark & Lost Atlantis …. Meanwhile, where else but in Noah’s Ark can we find a menagerie as eclectic as the one portrayed on the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe – a menagerie that includes spiders, scorpions and snakes (‘every creeping thing of the earth’), birds and cattle (‘fowls after their kind, and cattle after their kind’), and foxes, felines, goats, sheep, gazelles, boars, bears, etc, etc (in short – as Genesis 6: 20 has it, ‘every kind of animal and every kind of creature’)? Likewise we read in the Bible that Noah sacrificed some of the animals and birds that he had just saved from the flood as an offering to God. At Gobekli Tepe archaeologists have found the butchered bones of many of the animal species depicted on the megalithic pillars. Further highly recommended reading: https://archaeotravel.eu/noahs-beasts-released-on-the-hills-of-gobekli-tepe/ “Noah’s Beasts Released on the Hills of Göbekli Tepe”, by Joanna Pyrgies. Where did Noah build and launch the Ark? This appears to be a largely neglected question and there does not seem to be much at all in the way of legend or tradition to help one answer it. The types of animals depicted at Göbekli Tepe might provide geographical clues for some enterprising future researchers. Armadillos, for instance, are apparently not native to the Göbekli Tepe region. There is a tradition that Noah had had to flee to “Egypt” (whatever that land was like, and called, back then) to escape the violence of the age. (“Nu (/nu/ “watery one”), also called Nun (/nu:n/ “inert one”) - a name somewhat like Noah - is the deification of the primordial watery abyss in ancient Egyptian religion). Did Noah then return and, like Moses, who built the Ark of the Covenant at the Holy Mountain (Har Karkom near the Paran desert), build the great Ark there? Who knows? It is a question that still needs to be answered. I just like the symmetry of it. For Moses is clearly presented as “a new Noah” in the Book of Exodus (on this, see Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11, 1984, by Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn). But there is far more to Göbekli Tepe than just animals. Of special interest to Australians might be certain symbols that the site has in common with our aboriginals. Ancient Australians – culture going south Previously I wrote: 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 of Göbekli 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, in the space of a week, dropped to 40,000 BC. Nobody seemed to raise a Neanderthalian eyebrow. Creationist Dr. John Osgood has made an impressive start towards sorting out the Stone Ages in his excellent series: “A Better Model for the Stone Age” (pts. 1 and 2): https://creation.com/a-better-model-for-the-stone-age https://creation.com/a-better-model-for-the-stone-age-part-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, 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: http://www.hungarianhistory.com/lib/cser.pdf 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. …. [End of quotes] World Economic Forum’s interference at Göbekli Tepe “He who controls the past controls the future”. George Orwell Political and national agenda do not sit easily with such archaeological sites as Ebla and Göbekli Tepe, whose findings may support the Bible, a Hebrew (Jewish) book, anathema to the Syrian government, on the one hand, that wants to represent Ebla as a purely Syrian kingdom, and anathema to the World Economic Forum (WEF), on the other hand, that wants to control the narrative about human origins and about virtually everything else. So the WEF has put a lid on Göbekli Tepe. Shockingly, we learn at: https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNgGnUrCKM You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update …. 00:00:00 - 00:20:00 In the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker expresses shock over the slow progress of excavations at the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which is the world's oldest and largest megalithic site, dating back approximately 11,600 years. The site covers an area of approximately 22 acres and consists of over 200 T-shaped pillars, some reaching heights of nearly 20 ft and weighing up to 22,000 lbs each. Despite its size and age, little is known about who built it or when. The speaker also shares concerns over recent developments, such as a partnership between the site and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2018, which has led to the preservation of the site and the construction of tourism infrastructure, but has hindered full excavation efforts. The speaker also notes intriguing similarities between certain aspects of Gobekli Tepe and other ancient sites around the world, fueling speculation about a lost ancient global connection. The speaker encourages further investigation and excavation at the site and invites viewers to join the conversation. …. • 00:00:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker expresses his shock over new information regarding the world's oldest and largest megalithic site, Gobekli Tepe, located in Turkey. …. However, the mystery deepens as historians previously believed that something this old and sophisticated couldn't exist, and it's unclear how such a civilization could have achieved this and what motivated them to do so. Additionally, only a small percentage of the site has been excavated, with only six of the 20 known circular sections or enclosures having been fully excavated, and many more areas remain unexplored. The speaker emphasizes that only 5% of the site has been excavated, a figure first reported in 2008, and gives credit to Graham Hancock for bringing international attention to the site through his books and podcast appearances. • 00:05:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker expresses his surprise that the excavation progress at the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has not improved since 2017, despite excavations beginning nearly three decades ago. He was initially investigating if the 5% excavation figure had changed, but learned that it had not. The speaker then shares that recent visitors to the site, including author Hugh Newman, have suggested that future generations may focus on excavations at neighboring sites instead. The speaker's investigation led him to discover that the Dogus Group, a large Turkish conglomerate, has a partnership deal to oversee excavations and tourism management at Gobekli Tepe since 2016, with a generous donation of $15 million for ongoing excavations. The speaker finds it disturbing that the focus seems to be on preserving the site and establishing tourism infrastructure rather than increasing excavation efforts. …. • 00:10:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker reveals that a 20-year partnership between the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and the World Economic Forum (WEF) was announced at the WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in 2018. The CEO of the Dogus Group, Fet Sahen, who is a Turkish billionaire and a longtime WEF member, was involved in the deal. The speaker expresses surprise that such a partnership existed, as it involves the oldest and most mysterious structure in human history. The infrastructure developed for tourism and preservation, including protective roofs and walkways, has obstructed parts of the site and impeded its full excavation. The speaker also questions when the orchards located in the midst of ruins were planted and whether any ancient ruins lie underneath them. Additionally, 900 miles of walkways and roads were constructed after the partnership began, some of which destroyed ruins at the site. The speaker implies that the WEF's involvement in the management and excavations of Gobekli Tepe raises questions about their motives and goals. • 00:15:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the widow of archaeologist CLA Schmidt, who was the first to excavate at Gobekli Tepe until her husband's passing in 2014, expressed deep concern upon visiting the site in 2018. She was dismayed to find that heavy equipment, asphalt roads, and concrete sidewalks had destroyed parts of the ancient site. Mrs. Schmidt's photos of the destruction sparked worldwide outrage, leading to a statement from the ministry of culture and tourism denying the use of concrete or asphalt. However, evidence of extensive concrete walkways and the removal of wooden walkways for permanent concrete replacements contradicts their claims. The limited excavations currently taking place make it unlikely that the remaining 14 circular enclosures will be fully excavated, leaving potentially valuable information hidden in the ground. The decision-making power and resources of the World Economic Forum, which infiltrated excavation management in 2016, are believed to be hindering a full excavation of the site. …. Listen to it on the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNgGnUrCKM

Having lifted and removed some major settlements of Sumer, like a keen dentist eagerly extracting teeth, is it time now to lift and remove Sumer as well?

by Damien F. Mackey Amazingly - though not really surprisingly under the circumstances - Lagash and Girsu seem to ‘fall permanently off the political map’, according to Seth Richardson (and that is because they do not belong on this map). There is yet much to be said about the recent geographical tsunami that is changing forever the face of ancient geography. It is well exemplified, for instance, by Royce (Richard) Erickson’s shocking article (2020): A PROBLEM IN CHALDAEAN AND ELAMITE GEOGRAPHY (3) A PROBLEM IN CHALDAEAN AND ELAMITE GEOGRAPHY | Royce Erickson - Academia.edu whose Figure 6 here tells of the dramatic geographical shift for Chaldea and Elam: Figure 6 – Consensus Versus Proposed Route of Flight to Nagite I, in my article: Surreptitiously shifting sideways, southwards, some supposedly safe Sumerian sites (1) Surreptitiously shifting sideways, southwards, some supposedly safe Sumerian sites | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu told of the re-location that I envisaged for some notable sites of Sumer and its environs. Thus I wrote: Geographical Revolution When, only a few months ago, I began writing a book, History of the Fertile Crescent, I had no idea whatsoever that I would end up denuding Sumer and its environs of many of its famous, supposed sites. I had already come to accept, though - what others, too, were realising - that Sumer could not have been the biblical Shinar. Apart from the two names not being a good inter-fit, why had archaeologists failed to find Akkad? - whose associated sea-trading partners, Magan and Meluhha, I well knew to have been, respectively, Egypt and Ethiopia (presumably ports therein), and not, say, Oman and the Indus Valley. This led me to search for Akkad as a major city accessible by sea to Egypt and Ethiopia, and for the associated Dilmun, which, as I now began to realise, could have nothing to do with Bahrain, as is thought. Clearly, now, Akkad (Sumerian Agade) was Ugarit, known to the Egyptians as IKAT. Dilmun, known to the Greeks as Tylos, was another most famous Mediterranean port city, now, obviously, Tyre (Tylos = Tyros). Sargon of Akkad’s famous Inscription had to be re-interpreted: ‘The ships from Meluhha [read Ethiopia] the ships from Magan [read Egypt] the ships from Dilmun [read Tyre] he made tie-up alongside the quay of Akkad [read Ugarit]’. I then lifted it into another gear: It gets worse. I then came to the shock realisation that the often associated Eshnunna and Lagash were not locations in Sumer at all - despite detailed histories being built around that notion - but were, instead, to be located in Judea, that ‘they’, in fact, represented a name-combination that I had, quite some time ago, established from the inscriptions of Sargon II of Assyria: Ashduddu was the strong fort of Lachish; Ashdu-dimmu was the coastal Ashdod There were two strong cities, “Ashdod” (meaning ‘strong’), and one of these was Lachish, second only in importance to the fort of Jerusalem. Historians and archaeologists have for long been taking Judean history - from the time of the United Monarchy (kings Saul, David and Solomon) - and writing it into a far more ancient (though fictitious) Sumerian history – just as they had done in the case of the biblical Nimrod, by Sumerian-ising his major cities, such as Akkad and Babel, instead of locating these, as they should have done, hundreds of kilometres to the NW. This is a typical map, with all of Akkad, Eshnunna and Lagash, wrongly designated there. In light of my new geographical perspective, the Girsu (also on the map) that is regularly associated with Lagash, as its capital city and religious (Temple)-cult centre, can only be Jerusalem itself (Girsu = Jerus-). Amazingly - though not really surprisingly under the circumstances - Lagash and Girsu seem to ‘fall permanently off the political map’, according to Seth Richardson (and that is because they do not belong on this map): Ningirsu returns to his plow: Lagaš and Girsu take leave of Ur (2008) (5) Ningirsu returns to his plow: Lagaš and Girsu take leave of Ur (2008) | Seth Richardson - Academia.edu The Ur III state came to its end through a series of passive defections of individual provinces over the course of about twenty years, rather than by any single catastrophic event. This pattern of defections is nowhere better reflected than in the gradual progression of provinces abandoning the use of Ibbi-Sîn’s year names over his years 2–8. Among the cities that fell away from the control of Ur in those years were Girsu and Lagaš, where Ur III year names are not attested after Ibbi-Sîn’s sixth year.1 Like Puzriš-Dagān and Umma (but unlike Larsa, Uruk, Isin, and Nippur), these cities seemingly fell permanently off the political map of lower Mesopotamia following their departure from Ur’s control, never again the seat of significant institutional life to judge by the low number of texts and inscriptions coming from the sites. At the same time, it is difficult to assert from evidence that any hardship or conflict either precipitated or resulted from Lagaš-Girsu’s decamping from Ur’s authority; no especial difficulty marks the event. …. Considering that Puzrish-Dagan and Umma likewise fall off the map, we may need now to begin critically examining these two places as well. Happily, for Sumeriologists and the like, Larsa, Uruk, Isin, and Nippur, seem to be firmly established in Sumer. Though I would distinguish between the well-known Sumerian Uruk and the Urukku seemingly associated with Girsu (my Jerusalem) as its sanctuary. (Ur, Uruk, appear to have been very common ancient names, widely distributed). Also to be distinguished, in this context, are the Sumerian Ur and the home of Abram, “Ur of the Chaldees”, which is Urfa (Şanliurfa) in SE Turkey, far from Sumer. Finally, given my view (and that of others) that Jerusalem was the same site as the antediluvian Garden of Eden, then the Gu-Edin (Guedena) over which the king of Lagash, Eannatum … and the king of Umma, fought, could perhaps be a reference to the region of Jerusalem (or some place closely associated with it). [End of quote] With Sumer now de-nuded and gaping, like a mouth emptied of its many teeth, may it not be time to consider for it as well a new, more westerly, location? The stand-out candidate for Sumer, I think, must be the important SUMUR, a virtually identical name, which is a Syrian city situated between Byblos and Arwad. It is known under variant names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumur_(Levant) “Sumur (Biblical Hebrew: צְמָרִי‎ [collective noun denoting the city inhabitants]; Egyptian: Smr; Akkadian: Sumuru; Assyrian: Simirra) …. It was a major trade center. The city has also been referred to in English publications as Simyra,[1] Ṣimirra, Ṣumra,[2] Sumura,[3] Ṣimura,[4] Zemar,[5] and Zimyra.[6]” Sumer, for its part, was known by the standard Babylonian name of Shumeru, a name that is linguistically very close to Sumur as, say, Ṣimura. We continue to read of Sumur at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumur_(Levant) Sumur (or "Sumura") appears in the Amarna letters (mid-14th century BCE); Ahribta is named as its ruler. It was under the guardianship of Rib-Addi, king of Byblos, but was conquered by Abdi-Ashirta's expanding kingdom of Amurru. Pro-Egyptian factions may have seized the city again, but Abdi-Ashirta's son, Aziru, recaptured Sumur. Sumur became the capital of Amurru. …. It is likely, although not completely certain, that the "Sumur" of the Amarna letters is the same city later known as "Simirra."…. Simirra was claimed as part of the Assyrian empire by Tiglath-Pileser III in 738 BCE, but rebelled against Assyria in 721 at the beginning of the reign of Sargon II….. It has been linked by Maurice Dunand and N. Salisby to the archaeological site of Tell Kazel in 1957. ….

Humanity’s ‘Cradle of Civilisation’ certainly not to be found in Sumer

by Damien F. Mackey Due to the after effects of the Flood, the low-lying land of southern Mesopotamia (Sumer) was not able to be settled as early as were more northerly locations. That is why Sumerian civilisation springs up fully grown, much to the amazement of antiquarians. It was a late clutch of settlements that had benefitted from the long development of civilisations elsewhere. It is often presumed that southern Mesopotamia (Sumer) - now modern Iraq - was where human civilisation began, after millions of years of painful evolution. The following comments by Kristoffer Uggerud would, therefore, be typical: How Did Mesopotamia Become the Cradle of Civilization? Around 4500 BCE humans settled in Mesopotamia. Within a few centuries, the Sumerians developed what we today call the cradle of civilization. Apr 9, 2024 • By Kristoffer Uggerud, MA Area studies, BA History SUMMARY • Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, became the cradle of civilization due to its fertile land and the development of irrigation, which supported the growth of city-states like Ur, Eridu, and Uruk with populations over 50,000 around 5,000 years ago. • The Sumerians innovated with the world’s first written language, cuneiform, on clay tablets, facilitating record-keeping for food supplies and trade. This advancement, alongside their development of a numerical system, laid foundational aspects of modern society. • The decline of the Sumerian civilization around 2000 BCE was attributed to agricultural productivity loss due to soil salinization from irrigation. This led to the rise of subsequent empires in Mesopotamia, such as the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires. …. [End of quote] Sadly, none of this is correct – the inflated dates (BC and otherwise); first writing; Sumer preceding the Akkadian and Assyrian civilisations; and so on. This southern region was neither the Cradle of Civilisation before or after the Flood. Before the Flood (antediluvian), in the Beginning, Eden (centrally located where Jerusalem now is) was the Cradle of Civilisation. While, after the Flood (postdiluvian), new beginnings were made, as we shall find, in the region of modern SE Turkey. Due to the after effects of the Flood, the low-lying land of southern Mesopotamia (Sumer) was not able to be properly settled as early as were more northerly locations. That is why Sumerian civilisation springs up fully grown, much to the amazement of evolutionary-minded antiquarians. It was a late clutch of settlements that had benefitted from the long development of civilisations elsewhere. More accurate to regard The Fertile Crescent as being, approximately, humanity’s Cradle of Civilisation: https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/fertile-crescent “The Fertile Crescent, often referred to as “the cradle of civilization,” is the crescent-shaped region in Western Asia and North Africa that spans the modern-day countries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and, for some scholars, Egypt”. Written records were kept even before the Flood The beginning of the Documentary Theory of the Book of Genesis was actually based on a correct premise. Frenchman, Jean Astruc (1684-1766), a famous professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, claimed to have found several distinct sources in early Genesis. And he was quite right regarding that at least. But it soon went all pear-shaped! Liberal scholars, most notably German Lutherans, thought themselves able to detect no end of strands and sources throughout the Book of Genesis, culminating in the famous JEDP hypothesis of the likes of professors Karl Heinrich Graf (d. 1869) and Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918). Jean Astruc had correctly speculated that Moses used existing written or oral sources in constructing Genesis. Sadly, again, those who came after him effectively slammed the door shut on any notion of Mosaïc influence by proceeding, in stages - and by the early 1800’s - to the view that the Pentateuch was written around 900-800 BC, centuries after Moses. An extremely well-educated and intelligent Dominican priest once declared to me that “Moses and Joshua wrote nothing, that writing was not invented until about the time of King David (c. 1000-900 BC)”, and this despite passages such as Exodus 34:27: “Then the Lord told Moses, ‘Write down these words, because I’m making a Covenant with you and with Israel according to these words’”, and Joshua 8:32: “There, in the presence of the Israelites, Joshua wrote on stones a copy of the Law of Moses”. Writing not invented until. c. 1000 BC, eh? What, then, to make of the brilliant Autobiography of Weni in Egypt, written prior to 2150 BC, I queried the Dominican, using the same inflated sort of conventional dating in which the erudite priest would have been schooled? What about Moses being “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians …”? (Acts 7:22) {This Weni, who was a Vizier and Chief Judge in ancient Egypt, exactly as was Moses: ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us?’ (Exodus 2:14), I have identified as Moses} The fourfold sigla, JEDP, of the Graf-Wellhausen theory has proven to be disastrous for biblical studies, “confusion confounded” as one scholar called it. This J-jaberwocky, E-eccentric, D-desolate, P-primitive, theory, quite lacking in archaeological awareness - pure Kantian a priorism - needs to be replaced with what might be called the PJ theory, of Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman, a wise and common-sense theory of the true structure of Genesis, based on sound archaeology and an acute awareness of ancient scribal methods. (See New discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis (1936), republished by Wiseman's son, Donald Wiseman, as Ancient records and the structure of Genesis: A case for literary unity, in 1985). Editor Moses did indeed make use of multiple sources to compile the Book of Genesis, so P. J. Wiseman would demonstrate, but these sources pre-dated him. Moses used the family histories (Hebrew toledôt) of his ancestral patriarchs, Adam; Noah; Shem, Ham and Japheth; Terah; etc; etc., some of which histories included triple repetition, as Jean Astruc had discerned - but was not able to explain correctly. The triple repetition in the second Flood account, for example, simply arises from the triple authorship of the document: “Shem, Ham and Japheth” (Genesis 10:1). It is as simple as that! The great Genesis Flood is an account by eye-witnesses, firstly Noah’s toledôt history, and then that of his three sons. Note that, afterwards, a separation appears to have occurred. Shem, formerly a co-author with his brothers, is now a sole recorder (Genesis 11:10). Psalm 104 on extent of the Flood The misinterpretation of the ancient texts by modern (say, Western) minds in regard to the Noachic Flood is well explained in the following piece by Rich Deem: http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/localflood.html The Genesis Flood Why the Bible Says It Must be Local Many Christians maintain that the Bible says that the flood account of Genesis requires an interpretation that states that the waters of the flood covered the entire earth. If you read our English Bibles, you will probably come to this conclusion if you don't read the text too closely and if you fail to consider the rest of your Bible. Like most other Genesis stories, the flood account is found in more places than just Genesis. If you read the sidebar, you will discover that Psalm 104 directly eliminates any possibility of the flood being global (see Psalm 104-9 - Does it refer to the Original Creation or the Flood?). In order to accept a global flood, you must reject Psalm 104 and the inerrancy of the Bible. If you like to solve mysteries on your own, you might want to read the flood account first and find the biblical basis for a local flood. The Bible's other creation passages eliminate the possibility of a global flood The concept of a global Genesis flood can be easily eliminated from a plain reading of Psalm 104 … which is known as the "creation psalm." Psalm 104 describes the creation of the earth in the same order as that seen in Genesis 1 (with a few more details added). It begins with an expanding universe model (reminiscent of the Big Bang) [sic] (verse 2 … parallel to Genesis 1:1). It next describes the formation of a stable water cycle (verses 3-5, … parallel to Genesis 1:6-8). The earth is then described as a planet completely covered with water (verse 6, parallel to Genesis 1:9). God then causes the dry land to appear (verses 7-8, … parallel to Genesis 1:9-10). The verse that eliminates a global flood follows: "You set a boundary they [the waters] cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth." (Psalm 104:9)…. Obviously, if the waters never again covered the earth, then the flood must have been local. Psalm 104 is just one of several creation passages that indicate that God prevented the seas from covering the entire earth. …. An integration of all flood and creation passages clearly indicates that the Genesis flood was local in geographic extent. The Bible says water covered the whole earth... Really? When you read an English translation of the biblical account of the flood, you will undoubtedly notice many words and verses that seem to suggest that the waters covered all of planet earth. …. However, one should note that today we look at everything from a global perspective, whereas the Bible nearly always refers to local geography. You may not be able to determine this fact from our English translations, so we will look at the original Hebrew, which is the word of God. The Hebrew words which are translated as "whole earth" or "all the earth" are kol (Strong's number H3605), which means "all," and erets (Strong's number H776), which means "earth," "land," "country," or "ground." …. We don't need to look very far in Genesis (Genesis 2) before we find the Hebrew words kol erets. …. [End of quote] ‘Creationists’, having arrived at their completely artificial - and sometimes quite laughable, if they weren’t so serious - interpretations of the Bible, will then insist upon one’s adhering to their peculiar ‘biblical’ Weltanschauung as behoving Christians dedicated to the preservation of scriptural inerrancy. {Confession: Since I used to share these views, I ought to be more sympathetic} Well, I would suggest that no one would have been more surprised than Noah (and his family) to learn that he had once ridden out a global Flood in a sea-going vessel the size of the Queen Mary! As to the once common view that ‘there had never been rain until the Flood’, it has no solid biblical support as far as I can tell. And even some ‘Creationists’ now seem to have dropped this idea. For example: https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/arguments-to-avoid/was-there-no-rain-before-the-flood/ Was There No Rain Before the Flood? Some Christians claim that there was no rain before the Flood; however, as Dr. Tommy Mitchell shows us, a close examination of Scripture does not bear this out. While we cannot prove that there was rain before the Flood, to insist that there was not (and even to deride those who think otherwise) stretches Scripture beyond what it actually says. …. Noah’s world Those who approach Genesis with a Fundamentalist mentality will take ancient biblical phrases such as “the whole earth”, “all flesh”, and, unhappily, re-present them in global terms. St. Peter writes of “… the world that then was being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6). Now, rather than for one instinctively here to seize upon the phrase, “the world”, and automatically take it to mean global world, one would do better to learn from Genesis what “world”, “earth”, the Book of Genesis had so far presented to us. We find that only a few chapters before the Flood, in Genesis 2. It is a “world” that basically constitutes what would later come to be known as “the Fertile Crescent” – also regarded by some, as we read, as “the Cradle of Civilisation”. It stretches approximately from Iraq to Egypt. Practically every nation today, great or small, has its Flood legends that bear greater or lesser similarities to the Genesis Flood account. Mountain of the Ark This brings us to SE Turkey, as mentioned earlier, where, I believe, humanity had its second start (postdiluvian). A pair of researchers have conclusively, for mine, identified the mountain of the Ark’s landing as Karaca Dağ. Previously I wrote on this: The combined research of Ken Griffith and Darrell White has caused me (Damien Mackey) to move away from my former acceptance of Judi Dagh for the Mountain of Noah’s Ark Landing in preference for their choice of Karaca Dagh in SE Turkey. The pair have strongly argued for the validity of this latter site in their excellent new article: A Candidate Site for Noah’s Ark, Altar, and Tomb. (2) (PDF) A Candidate Site for Noah's Ark, Altar, and Tomb. | Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K White - Academia.edu My main reason for entertaining this switch is that the latter site appears to have been the place, unlikely as it may look, for the world’s first agriculture, including grapes, and for the domestication of what we know as farmland animals. For example, Ken Griffith and Darrell White write: This mountain, Karaca Dag, is where the genetic ancestor of all domesticated Einkorn wheat was found by the Max Planck Institute.1 The other seven founder crops of the Neolithic Revolution all have this mountain near the centre of their wild range.2 This was so exciting that even the LA Times remarked how unusual it is that all of the early agriculture crops appear to have been domesticated in the same location: “The researchers reported that the wheat was first cultivated near the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey, where chickpeas and bitter vetch also originated. Bread wheat—the most valuable single crop in the modern world—grapes and olives were domesticated nearby, as were sheep, pigs, goats and cattle.”3 …. Manfred Heun was the botanist who followed the DNA of domesticated wheat back to its source on Karaca Dag: “We believe that the idea is so good—the idea of cultivating wild plants—that we think it might be one tribe of people, and that is fascinating,” said Manfred Heun at the University of Norway’s department of biotechnological sciences, who led the research team. “I cannot prove it, but it is a possibility that one tribe or one family had the idea [emphasis added].”3 A 2004 DNA study of wild and cultivated grapevine genetics by McGovern and Vouillamoz found the region where grapevines were first domesticated. Vouillamoz reports: “Analysis of morphological similarities between the wild and cultivated grapes from all Eurasia generally support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East. In 2004, I collaborated with Patrick McGovern to focus on the ‘Grape’s Fertile Triangle’ and our results showed that the closest genetic relationship between local wild grapevines and traditional cultivated grape varieties from southern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia was observed in southern Anatolia. This suggests that the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Taurus Mountains is the most likely place where the grapevine was first domesticated! ... . This area also includes the Karacadağ region in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent.” …. The Göbekli Tepe Phenomenon This is fitting, because a site considered to be the world’s oldest, the now famed Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill”), is ‘just down the road’ (so to speak) from Karaca Dağ. And two most ancient sites, Ur (Sanliurfa) and Harran, relevant to Abram (Abraham), are also situated close by. It makes sense that, if Karaca Dağ was Noah’s mountain, then Göbekli Tepe (unrealistically dated to c. 12,000 BC) must have been a very early settlement - perhaps the first - after humanity’s departing from the mountain. {A tradition has Noah remaining on the Ark mountain for a century} Now the significance of Göbekli Tepe in possible connection with the Ark of Noah may be enormous. Klaus Schmidt, who first discovered the site, referred to it as “a Stone Age zoo”. It features an abundance of depictions of different animals seemingly in enclosures. Do we have here a representation of the types of animals that really were on board Noah’s Ark? Not exactly what we might have expected! No hint whatsoever of any dinosaurs – I definitely would not have expected them. No wonder scientifically-minded people laugh at this sort of desertion of common sense, that once again takes a “literalistic” approach to a global sounding phrase, “every living thing of all flesh” (Genesis 6:10). Noah simply would have taken pairs of such animals, dwelling close at hand, as he and his family would need for food and sacrifice, and to kick-start his new life on terra firma, until conditions began to revert back to normal. Boars, lions, bulls, foxes, gazelles, birds (cranes, vultures), snakes (cf. Genesis 7:8): “Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground …”. All of these and more are depicted at the Göbekli Tepe site. Apropos of this, we read at: https://nt.am/en/news/221107/ Gobekli Tepe, Noah’s Ark & Lost Atlantis …. Meanwhile, where else but in Noah’s Ark can we find a menagerie as eclectic as the one portrayed on the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe – a menagerie that includes spiders, scorpions and snakes (‘every creeping thing of the earth’), birds and cattle (‘fowls after their kind, and cattle after their kind’), and foxes, felines, goats, sheep, gazelles, boars, bears, etc, etc (in short – as Genesis 6: 20 has it, ‘every kind of animal and every kind of creature’)? Likewise we read in the Bible that Noah sacrificed some of the animals and birds that he had just saved from the flood as an offering to God. At Gobekli Tepe archaeologists have found the butchered bones of many of the animal species depicted on the megalithic pillars. Further highly recommended reading: https://archaeotravel.eu/noahs-beasts-released-on-the-hills-of-gobekli-tepe/ “Noah’s Beasts Released on the Hills of Göbekli Tepe”, by Joanna Pyrgies. Where did Noah build and launch the Ark? This appears to be a largely neglected question and there does not seem to be much at all in the way of legend or tradition to help us answer it. The types of animals depicted at Göbekli Tepe might provide geographical clues for some enterprising future researchers. Armadillos, for instance, are apparently not native to the Göbekli Tepe region. There is a tradition that Noah had to flee to “Egypt” (whatever that land was like, and called, back then) to escape the violence of the age. (“Nu (/nu/ “watery one”), also called Nun (/nu:n/ “inert one”) - a name somewhat like Noah - is the deification of the primordial watery abyss in ancient Egyptian religion). Did Noah then return from there, and, like Moses, who built the Ark of the Covenant at the Holy Mountain (Har Karkom near the Paran desert), build the great Ark there? Who knows? It is a question that still need to be answered. I just like the symmetry of it. For Moses is clearly presented as “a new Noah” in the Book of Exodus (on this, see Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11, 1984, by Isaac M. Kikawada and Arthur Quinn). But there is far more to Göbekli Tepe than just animals. Of special interest to Australians might be certain symbols that the site has in common with our aboriginals. Ancient Australians – culture going south Previously I wrote: 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 of Göbekli 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): https://creation.com/a-better-model-for-the-stone-age https://creation.com/a-better-model-for-the-stone-age-part-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: http://www.hungarianhistory.com/lib/cser.pdf 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. …. [End of quotes] World Economic Forum’s interference at Göbekli Tepe "He who controls the past controls the future". George Orwell Political and national agenda do not sit easily with such archaeological sites as Ebla and Göbekli Tepe, whose findings may support the Bible, a Hebrew (Jewish) book, anathema to the Syrian government that wants to represent Ebla as a purely Syrian kingdom, and anathema to the World Economic Forum (WEF) that wants to control the narrative about human origins and virtually everything else. So the WEF has put a lid on Göbekli Tepe. Shockingly, we read at: https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNgGnUrCKM You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update …. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNgGnUrCKM 00:00:00 - 00:20:00 In the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker expresses shock over the slow progress of excavations at the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which is the world's oldest and largest megalithic site, dating back approximately 11,600 years. The site covers an area of approximately 22 acres and consists of over 200 T-shaped pillars, some reaching heights of nearly 20 ft and weighing up to 22,000 lbs each. Despite its size and age, little is known about who built it or when. The speaker also shares concerns over recent developments, such as a partnership between the site and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2018, which has led to the preservation of the site and the construction of tourism infrastructure, but has hindered full excavation efforts. The speaker also notes intriguing similarities between certain aspects of Gobekli Tepe and other ancient sites around the world, fueling speculation about a lost ancient global connection. The speaker encourages further investigation and excavation at the site and invites viewers to join the conversation. …. • 00:00:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker expresses his shock over new information regarding the world's oldest and largest megalithic site, Gobekli Tepe, located in Turkey. Dated at approximately 11,600 years old, this site is older than Stonehenge and covers an area of approximately 22 acres, making it the largest megalithic site on Earth. Despite its size and age, little is known about who built it or even when. The site is comprised of an estimated 200 T-shaped pillars, some of which are still buried underground, and many of these pillars reach heights of nearly 20 ft and weigh up to 22,000 lbs each. The carvings on these pillars suggest a high level of planning, logistics, and ingenuity. However, the mystery deepens as historians previously believed that something this old and sophisticated couldn't exist, and it's unclear how such a civilization could have achieved this and what motivated them to do so. Additionally, only a small percentage of the site has been excavated, with only six of the 20 known circular sections or enclosures having been fully excavated, and many more areas remain unexplored. The speaker emphasizes that only 5% of the site has been excavated, a figure first reported in 2008, and gives credit to Graham Hancock for bringing international attention to the site through his books and podcast appearances. • 00:05:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker expresses his surprise that the excavation progress at the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has not improved since 2017, despite excavations beginning nearly three decades ago. He was initially investigating if the 5% excavation figure had changed, but learned that it had not. The speaker then shares that recent visitors to the site, including author Hugh Newman, have suggested that future generations may focus on excavations at neighboring sites instead. The speaker's investigation led him to discover that the Dogus Group, a large Turkish conglomerate, has a partnership deal to oversee excavations and tourism management at Gobekli Tepe since 2016, with a generous donation of $15 million for ongoing excavations. The speaker finds it disturbing that the focus seems to be on preserving the site and establishing tourism infrastructure rather than increasing excavation efforts. The speaker also takes a moment to promote a sponsor and encourage viewers to purchase emergency medical kits. • 00:10:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker reveals that a 20-year partnership between the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and the World Economic Forum (WEF) was announced at the WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in 2018. The CEO of the Dogus Group, Fet Sahen, who is a Turkish billionaire and a longtime WEF member, was involved in the deal. The speaker expresses surprise that such a partnership existed, as it involves the oldest and most mysterious structure in human history. The infrastructure developed for tourism and preservation, including protective roofs and walkways, has obstructed parts of the site and impeded its full excavation. The speaker also questions when the orchards located in the midst of ruins were planted and whether any ancient ruins lie underneath them. Additionally, 900 miles of walkways and roads were constructed after the partnership began, some of which destroyed ruins at the site. The speaker implies that the WEF's involvement in the management and excavations of Gobekli Tepe raises questions about their motives and goals. • 00:15:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the widow of archaeologist CLA Schmidt, who was the first to excavate at Gobekli Tepe until her husband's passing in 2014, expressed deep concern upon visiting the site in 2018. She was dismayed to find that heavy equipment, asphalt roads, and concrete sidewalks had destroyed parts of the ancient site. Mrs. Schmidt's photos of the destruction sparked worldwide outrage, leading to a statement from the ministry of culture and tourism denying the use of concrete or asphalt. However, evidence of extensive concrete walkways and the removal of wooden walkways for permanent concrete replacements contradicts their claims. The limited excavations currently taking place make it unlikely that the remaining 14 circular enclosures will be fully excavated, leaving potentially valuable information hidden in the ground. The decision-making power and resources of the World Economic Forum, which infiltrated excavation management in 2016, are believed to be hindering a full excavation of the site. • 00:20:00 In this section of the YouTube video titled "You Won’t Believe This Disturbing Gobekli Tepe Update," the speaker discusses intriguing similarities between certain aspects of the Gobekli Tepe site in Turkey and other ancient sites around the world. These similarities include the "handbags" or T-shaped limestone pillars, which have been compared to ones found in ancient Iraq, Mexico, Bolivia, South America, Easter Island, and Indonesia. The speaker also notes the unique placement of hands in front of the pillars at Gobekli Tepe, which is similar to statues in various other locations. While these similarities could be a coincidence, many consider them as potential evidence of a lost ancient global connection. The speaker expresses frustration with the current state of archaeology and calls for further excavation at the site. He encourages archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, skeptics, and enthusiasts to speak out and champion for further excavation. The speaker plans to host a live stream to discuss the topic further and invites viewers to follow him on various social media platforms and support him personally. ….

Karaca dağ, Göbekli Tepe, Ur, Harran

by Damien F. Mackey For Urfa, rather than the Ur in Sumer, was clearly (and also according to traditions), the biblical “Ur of the Chaldees”, the original home of Abram (Abraham). 1. Karaka Dağ This location is where, apparently, it all began after the great Noachic Flood. Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K. White have argued most persuasively in favour of the mountain, Karaka Dağ (Karacadağ), being the mountain of the Ark’s landing: JOURNAL OF CREATION 35(3) 2021 | https://dl0.creation.com/articles/p149/c14993/j35_3_50-63.pdf A Candidate Site for Noah’s Ark, Altar, and Tomb (2) (PDF) A Candidate Site for Noah's Ark, Altar, and Tomb. | Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K White - Academia.edu It was the beginning (anew) of the Neolithic Age, wheat cultivation, animal husbandry, and – importantly in the case of Noah (cf. Genesis 9:20-21) – viniculture. “Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent”. We read about the beginnings of farming early, for instance, in Kenneth and Darrell’s must-read article: https://creation.com/karaca-dag We would expect to find the landing site of the Ark near the centre of the oldest post-diluvial distribution of humans and domesticated plants. The site presented in this paper lies upon a mountain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at the centre of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) Culture. This mountain, Karaca Dag, is where the genetic ancestor of all domesticated Einkorn wheat was found by the Max Planck Institute.1 The other seven founder crops of the Neolithic Revolution all have this mountain near the centre of their wild range.2 This was so exciting that even the LA Times remarked how unusual it is that all of the early agriculture crops appear to have been domesticated in the same location: “The researchers reported that the wheat was first cultivated near the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey, where chickpeas and bitter vetch also originated. Bread wheat—the most valuable single crop in the modern world—grapes and olives were domesticated nearby, as were sheep, pigs, goats and cattle.”3 …. [End of quotes] Karaca Dağ lies apparently just 60 miles northeast of the now famous Göbekli Tepe. 2. Göbekli Tepe The extraordinary site of Göbekli Tepe must have been one of the first - if not the first - settlement for humanity after its coming away from the mountain - though I cannot accept the inflated evolutionary dates for this site of 10,000 BC, or older. We read about the site at, for instance: https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub362/entry-6007.html • Gobekli Tepe — 10 kilometers from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey — is the home of what some have described as the world’s oldest temple, one that perhaps predates villages. • Dated to 11,000 years ago, 6,000 years older than Stonehenge and and 5,000 years older than the first Egyptian pyramids, it sits on the summit of a hill and consists of megaliths carved with images. It was built by a mysterious group of hunter-gatherers millennia before metal tools or even pottery were invented. [Source: Andrew Curry, Smithsonian magazine, November 2008] • Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh) sits in the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent. Describing the main excavation site Andrew Curry wrote in Smithsonian magazine, “In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside , are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar lay out: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars towers 16 feet and...weighs between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillar’s broad side.” • The one acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. Thus far penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys have revealed 16 other megaliths rings buried over 22 acres. In addition to the megaliths archaeologists have found elaborate terrazzo floors, ceremonial buildings, stone buildings with hearths. What is unusual about the megaliths is that they were raised and buried. The images in the megaliths are difficult to interpret as they were made 6,000 years before the invention of writing, which is more time than has elapsed since the invention of writing and today. • The columns of Gobekli Tepe contain images of birds caught in a net, oxen, foxes, cats and turtles. In some cases images of people are intermixed with the animals and the animals are presented in a non threatening. But the majority of the images are of menacing creature such as snakes, lions, scorpions and spiders, Numerous animal bones have been found at Gobekli Tepe, all of them wild. Most come from gazelles. Other are from wild boars, wild sheep, red deer and a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. Evidence from other sites in the region indicate that sheep, cattle and pigs were domesticated in the area within 1,000 years after Gobekli Tepe was built. The first evidence of wheat farming, also from nearby, dates to 500 years before it was constructed. • Gobekli Tepe (meaning “Belly Hill” in Turkish) is being excavated by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute. The site was first examined in a cursory manner by University of Chicago and University of Istanbul anthropologists in the 1960s as part of a sweeping survey of the area and dismissed as nothing more than a medieval cemetery after uncovering only a few limestone slabs. In 1994, after reading the University of Chicago description, Schmidt decided to take a look himself. He was immediately impressed by what he saw and taken by the rounded, almost made-made shape of the hill itself. Schmidt returned the next year with five colleagues and uncovered the first megaliths. …. [End of quote] 3. Urfa Following what I think could well be the progression of primary cultural modern man, we come next to Urfa (Sanliurfa). We read above that Göbekli Tepe was: “… 10 kilometers from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey …”. We are now in the territory of “Shinar” (as we shall find in 4.), this particular region also being known as the land “of the Chaldees”. For Urfa, rather than the Ur in Sumer, was clearly (and also according to traditions), the biblical “Ur of the Chaldees”, the original home of Abram (Abraham). Urfa | Buildings | EMPORIS URFA, ancient EDESSA, is - according to Biblical accounts - the first city in the world that was found after the Great Flood which destroyed humanity. HARRAN, where Prophet ABRAHAM lived for several years after leaving the ancient city of Ur, is a district of Urfa. The following article by Steven Anderson grapples with the problem, whilst noting that an Islamic tradition, for example, holds Urfa to have been the home of Abraham: https://truthonlybible.com/2015/02/13/ur-of-the-chaldees-abrahams-original-home/ Ur of the Chaldees: Abraham’s original home 13FridayFEB 2015 Genesis 11:28-31 identifies Abraham’s original hometown as “Ur of the Chaldees,” or “Ur of the Chaldeans.” Sometime during Abraham’s adult life, probably while he was already about seventy years old, his father Terah moved the family clan to the city of Haran in northern Syria as the first step in a planned migration to the land of Canaan. Terah himself did not complete the journey; he died while the family was living in Haran. When Abraham was seventy-five years old, he received a personal call from God to migrate to Canaan (Gen 12:1-3). This caused a division in the family clan: Abraham’s nephew Lot went with him to Canaan, while the rest of Abraham’s family stayed in the area of Haran, where Abraham’s relatives are found living in later chapters of Genesis. There are two ancient cities called “Ur” that are known from archaeology. By far the most famous is a city in southeastern Mesopotamia that was a great center of early civilization. A second Ur, which was far less prominent, is called “Ur in Haran” by an ancient tablet from Ebla. Islamic tradition identifies Shanliurfa, which is 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Haran, as Abraham’s original home. This city was refounded in the Hellenistic period as Edessa, and later became the center of the Syriac Christian community. Although some scholars identify Ur of the Chaldees with the northern city of Ur, the arguments in favor of the southern location are compelling. In Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, he says that Abraham’s original home was in “the land of the Chaldeans” (Acts 7:4), a term which is used by other biblical writers to refer to southern Mesopotamia (e.g., Isa 23:13; Jer 25:12; Ezek 12:13) [sic]. It seems that the author of Genesis intended to specify the southern location of Ur by identifying it as the one that is in the land of the Chaldeans. Stephen says that Abraham had to leave the land of the Chaldeans in order to travel to Haran (Acts 7:4), whereas the reference to the northern Ur as “Ur in Haran” shows that it already lay within the territory of Haran. Stephen also indicates in Acts 7:2 that what he means by “Mesopotamia”—Abraham’s original home—is a different region than the region around Haran, since he says that Abraham lived in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran. Abraham’s relatives are found in later chapters of Genesis to be living near Haran in northern Syria/Aram (now part of Turkey). However, as has already been noted, this does not mean that “Ur of the Chaldees” was in northern Syria, since Genesis 11:31-32 states that Terah had moved Abraham’s extended family to Haran prior to Abraham’s journey to the land of Canaan with Lot (Gen 12:5). Since Arameans dominated the region around Haran, the Bible calls Laban “the Aramean” (Gen 25:20; 31:20, 24), and portrays Laban as a speaker of the Aramaic language in Genesis 31:47. Deuteronomy 26:5 even calls Jacob an “Aramean” because of his twenty years spent with Laban in Paddan-aram (near Haran). But Jacob and Laban could not have been of Aramean descent, since they were descended from Shem’s son Arpachshad (Gen 11:10-26), whereas the Arameans were descended from Shem’s son Aram (Gen 10:22-23). Some scholars argue that because Abraham seems to be culturally Semitic in the Genesis narratives, he must have been from the northern location of Ur, which was in Aramean territory, and not from the southern location of Ur, which was in Sumerian territory. …. [End of quote] 4. Harran (Haran) Harran, too, was closely situated to sites 1-3. For, as we read in the above article, Urfa “… is 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Haran …”. Harran must also have been in the land of the Chaldees. If Shinar were Babylonia (or Sumer), then archaeologists would long ago have discovered Nimrod’s lost city of Akkad in Shinar (Genesis 10:10). They have not discovered Akkad to this day. And I think that I have discovered Akkad as Ugarit (var. IKAT), a long, long way from Babylonia (or Sumer). See e.g. my article: My road to Akkad (5) My road to Akkad | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu According to my revision, which corrects the Chaldean list that contains duplications, Nebuchednezzar and his son, Belshazzar (cf. Baruch 1:11, 12; Daniel 5:18, 22) (Belshazzar also known as Evil-Merodach), were the same regal pair as, respectively, Nabonidus and his son, Belshazzar: Aligning Neo-Babylonia with the Book of Daniel (6) Aligning Neo-Babylonia with the Book of Daniel | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu Now, we all well know (or, if we don’t, see e.g. Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s The reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, 556-539 B.C., Yale UP, 1989) that this Nabonidus, king of Babylon, was an obsessive worshipper of the moon god, Sîn, in Harran, whose temple Nabonidus claimed to have restored. Nabonidus, a Chaldean, may even have hailed from this region, Harran – at least his mother, Adad-guppi, is thought to have.