“From the last chapter the reader will recall Michael Rappengluck’s work
on the zodiacal constellation of Taurus, depicted at Lascaux some 17,000 years
ago as an auroch (ancient species of wild cattle) with the
six visible stars of the Pleiades on its shoulder”.
Graham Hancock
Already I (Damien
Mackey) touched upon some of Michael Rappengluck’s archaeoastronomical insights
about the Lascaux cave depictions in the first of my multi-part series:
The date for Lascaux
as given here by Graham Hancock in his book Magicians
of the Gods (2015), I personally would consider to be thousands of years too
early.
That same book I
was reading - and generally enjoying - last night and came upon this section
most relevant to my series and to the findings of Michael Rappengluck:
Neolithic
puzzle
[Paul]
Burley’s paper is entitled “Göbekli Tepe: Temples Communicating an Ancient
Cosmic Geography.” He wrote it originally in June 2011
… in February 2013 he asked me to read his paper, which he said concerned
“evidence of a zodiac on one of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe.” I read it,
replied that I found it “very persuasive and interesting, with significant
implications” ….
“Significant
implications,” I now realize as I read through the paper again in my hotel room
in ŞanlIurfa, was a huge understatement. But I didn’t make my first
visit to Göbekli Tepe until September 2013 and by then, clearly, I’d forgotten
the gist of Burley’s argument, which focuses almost exclusively on Enclosure D
and on the very pillar, Pillar 43, that I’d been most interested in when I was
there.
My
interest in it had been sparked by Belmonte’s suggestion that the relief
carving of a scorpion near its base (which the reader will recall was hidden by
rubble that Schmidt refused to allow me to move) might be a representation of
the zodiacal constellation of Scorpio. ….
Here’s
where he gets to his point:
One
of the limestone pillars [in Enclosure D] includes a scene in bas relief on the
upper portion of one of its sides. There is a bird with outstretched wings, two
smaller birds, a scorpion, a snake, a circle, and a number of wavy lines and
cord-like features. At first glance this lithified menagerie appears to be
simply a hodgepodge of animals and geometrical designs randomly placed to fill
in the broad side of the pillar.
The
key to unlocking this early Neolithic puzzle is the circle situated at the center
of the scene. I am immediately reminded of the cosmic Father—the Sun. The next
clues are the scorpion facing up toward the sun, and the large bird seemingly
holding the sun upon its outstretched wing. In fact the sun figure appears to
be located accurately on the ecliptic with respect to the familiar
constellation of Scorpio, although the scorpion on the pillar occupies only the
left portion, or head, of our modern conception of that constellation. As such
the sun symbol is located as close to the galactic center as it can be on the
ecliptic as it crosses the galactic plane.
….
Burley
then presents a graphic that “illustrates the crossing of the galactic plane of
the Milky Way near the center of the galaxy, with several familiar
constellations nearby.” A second graphic shows the same view with the addition
of the ancient constellations represented on the pillar:
Note
that the outstretched wings, sun, bird legs and snake all appear to be oriented
to emphasize the sun’s
path along the ecliptic … The similarity of the bas relief to the
crossing of the ecliptic and galactic equator at the center of the Milky Way is
difficult to reject, supporting the possibility that humans recognized and
documented the precession of the equinoxes thousands of years earlier than is
generally accepted by scholars … Göbekli Tepe was
built as a symbolic sphere communicating a very ancient understanding of world
and cosmic geography. Why this knowledge was intentionally buried soon
afterward remains a mystery.
….
As I sit in my hotel room in ŞanlIurfa in July
2014 spinning the skies on my computer screen, I’m coming more and more to the
conclusion that Paul Burley has had a genius insight about the scene on Pillar
43 at Göbekli Tepe. Burley’s language in his paper is careful—almost diffident.
As we saw in Chapter Fourteen, he says that “the sun figure appears to be
located accurately on the ecliptic with respect to the familiar constellation
of Scorpio.” He speaks of other “familiar constellations” nearby.
And he draws our attention to the
large bird—the vulture—“seemingly holding the sun upon an outstretched wing.”
He does not say which constellation
he believes the vulture represents, but the graphics he includes to reinforce
his argument leave no room for doubt that he regards it as an ancient
representation of the constellation of Sagittarius. ….
We’ve already seen that there is
evidence for the identification of constellations going far back into the Ice
Age, some of which were portrayed in those remote times in forms that are
recognizable to us today.
From the last chapter the reader will
recall Michael Rappengluck’s work on the zodiacal constellation of Taurus,
depicted at Lascaux some 17,000 years ago as an auroch (ancient species of wild
cattle) with the six visible stars of the Pleiades on its shoulder.
Acknowledging such surprising
continuities in the ways that some constellations are depicted does not mean
that all the constellations we are familiar with now have always been depicted
in the same way by all cultures at all periods of history. This is very far
from being the case. Constellations are subject to sometimes radical change
depending on which imaginary figures different cultures choose to project upon
the sky. For example, the Mesopotamian constellation of the Bull of Heaven and
the modern constellation of Taurus share the Hyades cluster as the head, but in
other respects are very different. …. Likewise the
Mesopotamian constellation of the Bow and Arrow is built from stars in the
constellations that we call Argo and Canis Major, with the star Sirius as the
tip of the arrow. The Chinese also have a Bow and Arrow constellation built
from pretty much the same stars but the arrow is shorter, with Sirius forming
not the tip but the target. ….
Even when constellation boundaries
remain the same from culture to culture, the ways in which those constellations
are seen can be very different.
Thus the Ancient Egyptians knew the
constellation that we call the Great Bear, but represented it as the foreleg of
a bull. They saw the Little Bear (Ursa Minor) as a jackal. They depicted the
zodiacal constellation of Cancer as a scarab beetle. The constellation of
Draco, which we see as a dragon, was figured by the Ancient Egyptians as a
hippopotamus with a crocodile on its back. ….
There can therefore be no objection
in principle to the suggestion that the constellation we call Sagittarius, “the
Archer”—and depict as a centaur man-horse hybrid holding a bow with arrow
drawn—could have been seen by the builders of Göbekli Tepe as a vulture with
outstretched wings.
I spend hours on Stellarium toggling
back and forth between the sky of 9600 BC and the sky of our own
epoch, focusing on the region between Sagittarius and Scorpio—the region Burley
believes is depicted on Pillar 43—and looking at the relationship of the sun to
these background constellations.
The first thing that becomes clear to
me is that a vulture with outstretched wings makes a very good figure of
Sagittarius; indeed it’s a much better, more intuitive and more obvious way to
represent the central part of this constellation than the centaur/archer that
we have inherited from the Mesopotamians and the Greeks. This central part of
Sagittarius (minus the centaur’s legs and tail) happens to contain its
brightest stars and forms an easily recognized asterism often called the
“Teapot” by astronomers today—because it does resemble a modern teapot with a
handle, a pointed lid and a spout. The handle and spout elements, however,
could equally effectively be drawn as the outstretched wings of a vulture,
while the pointed “lid” becomes the vulture’s neck and head.
It is the outstretched wing in front
of the vulture—the spout of the teapot—that Burley sees as “holding the sun,”
represented by the prominent disc in the middle of the scene on Pillar 43.
….
Figure
49: A vulture with outstretched wings makes a much better, more intuitive and
more obvious way than an archer to represent the bright, central “Teapot”
asterism within the constellation of Sagittarius.
….
….
But the vulture and the sun are only
two aspects of the complex imagery of the pillar. Below and just a little to the
right of the vulture is a scorpion.
Above and to the right of the vulture
is a second large bird with a long sickle-shaped beak, and nestled close to
this bird is a serpent with a large triangular head and its body coiled into a
curve. A third bird, again with a hooked beak, but smaller, with the look of a
chick, is placed below these two figures—again to the right of the vulture,
indeed immediately to the right of its extended front wing. Below the scorpion
is the head and long neck of a fourth bird. Beside the scorpion, rearing up, is
another serpent.
Part of the reason for my growing
confidence in Burley’s conclusion, though he makes little of it in his paper,
is that these figures, with only minor adjustments, compare intriguingly with
other constellations around the alleged Sagittarius/vulture figure.
First and foremost, there is the
scorpion below and a little to the right of the vulture, which we’ve seen
already has an obvious resemblance to Scorpio, the next constellation along the
zodiac from Sagittarius. Its posture and positioning are wrong—we’ll look more
closely into the implications of this in a moment—but it’s there and it is
overlapped by the tail end of the constellation that we recognize as Scorpio
today.
Secondly,
there’s the large bird above and to the right of the vulture with the curved
body of a serpent nestled close to it. These two figures are in the correct
position and the correct relationship to one another to match the constellation
we call Ophiuchus, the serpent holder, and the serpent constellation, Serpens,
that Ophiuchus holds.
Thirdly, immediately to the right of
the extended front wing of the vulture there’s that other bird, smaller, like a
chick, with a hooked beak. I email Burley about this, and about the different
position and orientation of the scorpion on the pillar and the modern
constellation of Scorpio, and we arrive, after some back and forth, at a
solution. Constellation boundaries, as the reader will recall, are not
necessarily drawn in the same place by all cultures at all periods and it’s
clear that there’s been a shift over time in the constellation boundaries here.
The chick on Pillar 43 appears to have formed a small constellation of its own
in the minds of the Göbekli Tepe astronomers—a constellation that utilized some
of the important stars today considered to be part of Scorpio. The chick’s
hooked beak is correctly positioned, and its body is the correct shape, to
match the head and claws of Scorpio. ….
Fourthly, beside the scorpion on
Pillar 43 is a serpent and beneath the scorpion are the head and long neck of
yet another bird, with a headless anthropomorphic figure positioned to its
right. The serpent matches the tail of Sagittarius (as we’ve seen, the vulture
appears to be composed from the central part of Sagittarius only—the Teapot—so
this leaves the remainder of the constellation available to the ancients for
other uses). The best contenders for the bird, and for the peculiar little
anthropomorphic figure to its right are parts of the constellations we know
today as Pavo and Triangulum Australe. The remainder of Pavo may be involved
with further figures present on the pillar to the left of the bird.
As is the case with Sagittarius,
elements of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been redeployed in the
ancient constellations depicted on Pillar 43. Only the tail of our Scorpio is
in the correct location to match the scorpion on Pillar 43 and its head faces
to the right, whereas the head of the scorpion on the pillar faces to the left.
The scorpion on the pillar is also
below the vulture, whereas modern Scorpio is a very large constellation lying
parallel and to the right of Sagittarius.
I suggest the solution to this
problem is that the scorpion on Pillar 43 is conjured from a combination of the
tail of the modern constellation of Scorpio (right legs of the Pillar 43
scorpion), an unused part of the “Teapot” asterism of Sagittarius (right claw
of the Pillar 43 scorpion) and the constellations that we know as Ara,
Telescopium and Corona Australis (respectively the tail, left legs and left
claw of the Pillar 43 scorpion). Meanwhile, as noted above, the claws and head
of the modern constellation of Scorpio have been co-opted to form the chick
with the hooked beak on Pillar 43.
This whole issue of the relationship
between the modern constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius and the scorpion
and vulture figures depicted on Pillar 43 takes on a new level of significance
when we remember that in some ancient astronomical figures Sagittarius is
depicted not only as a centaur—a man-horse—but also as a man-horse hybrid with
the tail of a scorpion, and sometimes simply as a man-scorpion hybrid. …. On
Babylonian Kudurru stones (often referred to as boundary stones,
although it is likely that their function has been misunderstood …) a figure of a man-scorpion drawing a bow frequently
appears that “is universally identified with the archer Sagittarius.” …. What further
cements the identification of Sagittarius with the vulture on Pillar 43 is that
these man-scorpion figures from the Babylonian Kudurru stones are very
often depicted with the legs and feet of birds. …. Moreover, in some representations a second scorpion appears
beneath the body—i.e. beneath the Teapot asterism—of Sagittarius … reminiscent
of the position of the scorpion on Pillar 43 (see Figures 50 and 51).
Figure 51: Man-scorpion
Sagittarius figures from Bablylonian Kudurru stones (left) are frequently
depicted with the legs and feet of birds, further strengthening the
identification of the vulture figure on Pillar 43 with Sagittarius. In other
Mesopotamian representations (right) we see a second scorpion beneath the body
of Sagittarius occupying a similar position to the scorpion on Pillar 43.
….
When
all this is taken together
it goes, in my opinion,
far beyond anything
that can be explained away as mere “coincidence.”
The implication is that ideas of how certain constellations should be depicted
that were expressed at Göbekli Tepe almost 12,000 years ago [sic], including
the notion that there should be a scorpion in this region of the heavens, were
passed down, undergoing some changes in the process, but nonetheless surviving
in recognizable form for millennia to find related expression in much later
Babylonian astronomical iconography. But given the close connections with
ancient Mesopotamia, its antediluvian cities, its Seven Sages and its flood
survivors washed up in their Ark near Göbekli Tepe, we should perhaps not be
too surprised.
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