Lost Atlantis, Noah’s Ark and Gobekli Tepe:
A Curious Thread of Evidence That
Connects Them All
A curious thread of clues and evidence connects the
world’s oldest stone circles at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, the Biblical story of
Noah’s Ark, and Plato’s account of the lost civilization of Atlantis. In this
exclusive extract from his new book Magicians of the Gods (the sequel
to Fingerprints of the Gods), Graham
Hancock investigates.
The
Biblical story of the Deluge can be summarised as follows:
- A life-destroying global flood, sent by God to punish human wickedness.[i]
- A man (Noah) selected by God and given advance warning of the coming cataclysm so that he can build a survival ship (the Ark).[ii]
- The preservation in the Ark of the seeds, or breeding pairs, of all forms of life, with a particular emphasis on human life (Noah and his wife together with their sons and their wives) and animal life (‘of fowls after their kind and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive’).[iii]
- The Ark rides out the flood until the waters subside.[iv]
- The Ark comes to rest ‘on the mountains of Ararat.’[v]
- When the waters have ‘dried up from the earth’ God instructs Noah to leave the Ark with his family and to ‘bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.’[vi]
- Noah builds an altar on which he sacrifices some of the animals and birds that he has just saved from the flood. The smell of the burnt offerings is pleasing to God.[vii]
- The surviving humans and animals go forth and multiply ‘and fill the earth’ as they have been commanded.[viii]
We released a podcast about this subject that we did with
Graham, check it out below.
Mount
Ararat rises to 5,137 meters (16,853 feet) and geologists assure us, on the
basis of excellent science, that no part of it has ever been covered by oceanic
flood waters since it began to take shape as a mountain near the end of the
early Miocene some sixteen million years ago. The presence of anatomically
modern humans in the world has not yet been traced back further than two
hundred thousand years, and even the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee –
a creature that was very far from being in any sense ‘human’ – takes us back
barely six million years, so the notion of a boat with humans on board being
washed up on Mount Ararat would appear to be a chronological impossibility.
Mount Ararat viewed over the ruins of Zvarnots Cathedral,
Armenia. – Photo by Santha Faiia
Nonetheless,
it is intriguing that the story of the Deluge as given in the Old Testament
makes specific and deliberate mention of ‘the mountains of Ararat’ (the ‘Mount’
does in fact have twin peaks) which, in Biblical times, were understood as
being part of the ‘Kingdom of Ararat,’[ix] which in turn cannot be separated from
the historic land of Urartu, conquered by the Assyrian King Shalmaneser in the
late second millennium BC.[x]
Due to the limited archaeology that has
been undertaken in the region, historians confess that ‘the origins of Urartu’
must remain obscure’[xi] but the earliest known settlements and
the beginnings of agriculture in the region have been traced back to
‘approximately 10,000 to 9000 BC’[xii] – in other words precisely to the period
that a mysterious, highly sophisticated megalithic site, at least 6,000 years
older than any other megalithic site so far discovered anywhere on earth, was
created at a place now known as Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Used for
unknown purposes for just over a thousand years, Gobekli Tepe was then
carefully, deliberately, and meticulously buried beneath an artificial hill
where it remained untouched and unseen by any subsequent culture until the late
Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute began his now world-famous
excavations there in the second half of the 1990’s.
Overview of the main excavation area at Gobekli Tepe –
Overview: Photo by Nick Becker, German Archaeological Institute
Moreover
this whole area, Mount Ararat and Gobekli Tepe very much included, formed the
heartland of historic Armenia, the direct descendant of the Biblical Kingdom of
Ararat whose inhabitants saw – and still today see – themselves as ‘the Peoples
of Ararat.’[xiii] Written in the fifth century AD, Moses
Khorenatsi’s influential History
of the Armenians attributed the founding of the nation to the
patriarch Haik, who, it was said, was the great-great-great-grandson of Noah
himself and thus in the close lineage of the flood survivors who emerged from
the Ark.[xiv] Indeed it is because of Haik that even
in the twenty-first century Armenians still refer to themselves as Hai, and to
their land as Haiastan.[xv] They see it simply as a tragedy of
history that so much of this land, again including Gobekli Tepe and Mount
Ararat, is now in the possession of the Republic of Turkey following the
Armenian genocide of 1915-1923 in which more than one million ethnic Armenians
are believed to have been killed by Turkish forces.[xvi]
Nationalistic
feelings still run high in the communities of the Armenian diaspora scattered
around the world and in the tiny rump of historic Armenia that forms the
Armenian Republic today. These tensions have not left the world-famous
11,600-year old megalithic site of Gobekli Tepe untouched, and many Armenians
are outraged that Turkey claims this uniquely important place as its own
heritage as though the ancient Armenian connection did not even exist. A few
minutes search on the internet using the keyword ‘Portasar,’ the former Armenian name of
Gobekli Tepe, will confirm this. I’ll give a single example here, a Youtube
video titled ‘Turkey Presents Armenian Portasar as Turkish Gobekli Tepe.’[xvii] Amongst the comments, fairly typical of
the remarks made by many viewers, we read:
This
is the way I look at Portasar (Gobekli Tepe). These people deliberately buried
a sacred temple. They did this in the anticipation of having it discovered many
years in the future. They believed in reincarnation. Those people who built
Portasar (Gobekli Tepe) are here among the Armenians. Their spirits have
transcended into the Armenian people of today. When you pass on something in
your family you want to make sure that it goes to only that family member and
no one else. Portasar and those lands will be returned back to the Armenians in
accordance with the laws of nature…[xviii]
Eastern central pillar in Enclosure D at Gobekli Tepi –
Photo by Santha Faiia
Salamander figure, Gobekli Tepe – Photo by Santha Faiia
More than human scale of the T-shaped pillars at Gobekli
Tepe. – Photo by Santha Faiia
In
the same vein, though now entirely within the borders of Turkey, Mount Ararat
remains a potent symbol of Armenian nationalism. A landscape of Mount Ararat,
with the flood waters receding and Noah’s Ark at the summit, dominates the coat
of arms of the Republic of Armenia while the mountain itself – so near and yet
so far – looms over the Armenian capital city Yerevan, a haunting and ever
present reminder that:
‘The
past is never dead. It’s not even past.’[xix]
Thus
there are many ways in which the story of Noah’s Ark bearing the survivors of a
terrible global flood – and of a world made anew after a cataclysm – is still a
living force in the region of Gobekli Tepe where the great stone circles began
to be put in place in 9600 BC. This date, scientists agree, marks the end of
the Ice Age. As Professor Klaus Schmidt, the discoverer of Gobekli Tepe, asked
me rhetorically when I interviewed him at the site in 2013:
How
likely is it to be an accident that the monumental phase at Gobekli Tepe starts
in exactly 9600 BC when the climate of the whole world has taken a sudden turn
for the better and there’s an explosion in nature and in possibilities?
There’s
something else about that date too. A global flood, nominated by geologists as
“Meltwater Pulse 1 B,” occurred around 9600 BC as the remnant ice caps in North
America and northern Europe collapsed simultaneously amidst worldwide global
warming. Cesare Emiliani, Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at
the University of Miami, carried out isotopic analysis of deep-sea sediments[xx] that produced striking evidence of
cataclysmic global flooding ‘between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago.’[xxi]
So
although the floods at the end of the Ice Age could never have carried Noah and
his Ark thousands of feet above present sea level to the slopes of Mount
Ararat, they were indeed global in their extent and would have had devastating
consequences for humans living at that time. Mountainous regions such as the
Ararat range would have been natural places of refuge – natural places to bring
‘the seeds of all life’ and to start again. Therefore while the Noah story
cannot be literally true in every detail we must consider the possibility that
it is true in its essence, i.e. that it does record the construction of an
‘Ark,’ in which seeds of useful plants and breeding pairs of animals were perhaps
preserved by people who already knew agriculture and who possessed
architectural skills, who survived the terminal Ice Age floods, who migrated to
the lands between Mount Ararat and Gobekli Tepe and who subsequently
disseminated agricultural and architectural knowledge to the indigenous
hunter-gatherers of that region.
The
sudden and indeed completely unprecedented appearance of giant stone circles at
Gobekli Tepe, which surely could only have been conceived and implemented by
people with extensive prior experience of megalithic architecture, and the
simultaneous ‘invention’ of agriculture in the exact same locale, are, in my
view, highly suggestive of this possibility. Then, too, there is the haunting
sense that Gobekli Tepe itself constitutes a kind of ‘Ark’ frozen and
memorialized in stone, for the iconography of its reliefs and sculptures is not
only all about animals but also – in a number of intriguing images that show
women with exposed genitalia[xxii] and males with erect penises[xxiii] – about human fertility. Imagery of the
latter sort, including a figure that Karl Luckert, Professor of the History of
Religions at Missouri State University, interprets as a classic ‘Earth Mother,’[xxiv] call to mind God’s command to Moses and
his family to ‘be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.’[xxv]
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.[xxvi]
Gobekli Tepe “Earth Goddess” – Photo by Santha Faiia
Gobekli Tepe Serpent – Photo by Santha Faiia
Gobekli Tepe Lion – Photo by Santha Faiia
A
final touch. With the date of its foundation set at 9600 BC (‘exactly 9600 BC as Klaus
Schmidt was at pains to point out to me), Gobekli Tepe also invites us to
reopen the cold case of Atlantis which archaeologists have long ridiculed,
pouring scorn and derision on anyone daring to utter the much reviled ‘A’ word.
It is a fact, however, that the Greek philosopher Plato, whose dialogues Timaeus and Critias
contain the earliest surviving mention of the fabled sunken kingdom, gives us a
very definite date for the the deluge that submerged Atlantis. Plato’s source
for the story was an oral tradition that had been passed down in his family
line from his ancestor, the Greek lawmaker Solon (638 BC to 558 BC). Solon
visited Egypt around the year 600 BC where priests at the Temple of Neith at
Sais in the Delta told him the story of Atlantis, and informed him that its destruction
had occurred “nine thousand years ago.”[xxvii]
Needless
to say, nine thousand years before 600 BC is “exactly 9600 BC”!
The
Greeks could not have known of Gobekli Tepe (let alone that it was mysteriously
founded at the very moment Atlantis was said to have died). Moreover they had
no access to the Greenland ice cores dating the end of the Ice Age to 9620 BC,
just twenty years before the foundation of Gobekli Tepe, nor to modern
scientific knowledge about the rapidly rising sea levels that occurred in this
period, notably Meltwater Pulse 1 B. With all this in mind, therefore, the date
Plato gives can no longer be dismissed as just something he “made up” (as
archaeologists like to claim) but deserves to be considered seriously as a
truthful report that has the power to sweep back the veils that hide our past.
Listen to our first podcast episode featuring Graham
Hancock where we ask him all about Magicians of the Gods and more…
RESOURCES
[xi] Charles Burney and
David Marshall Lang, The
Peoples of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and the Caucasus, Phoenix
Press, London, 1971, p. 127. See also Amelie Kurht, The Ancient Near East, Routledge, London and
New York,, 1995, Vol II, p. 550: ‘Archaeologically, the second millennium of
the region is something of a blank at present.’
[xiv] Moses Khorenatsi, History of the Armenians,
Caravan Books, Ann Arbor, 2006, p.p, 72 and 82ff. Haik, also spelled Hayk, is
said to be the son of Torgomah [T’orgom], who was the son of Tiras [T’iras],
who was the son of Gomer [Gamer], who was the son of Noah’s son Japheth
[Yapeth].
[xv] Arra S. Avakian and
Ara John Movsesian, Armenia:
A Journey Through History, The Electric Press, California,
1998-2008, p. 47. See also Armen Asher and Teryl Minasian Asher, The Peoples of Ararat,
op.cit., p. 284-285
[xx] Cesare Emiliani held
a Ph.D from the University of Chicago where he pioneered the isotopic analysis
of deep-sea sediments as a way to study the Earth’s past climates. He then
moved to the University of Miami where he continued his isotopic studies and
led several expeditions at sea. He was the recipient of the Vega Medal from
Sweden and the Agassiz medal from the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States.
[xxi] Emiliani, Earth and Planetary Science Letters,
41 (1978), p.159, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam
[xxiii] Joris Peters and
Klaus Schmidt, ‘Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Gobekli
Tepe, south-eastern Turkey: a preliminary assessment,’ Anthropozoologica, 2004,
39 (1), pp. 204-205
[xxvi] Joris Peters and
Klaus Schmidt, ‘Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Gobekli
Tepe’, op.cit., pp 206-208
——————————-
Graham
Hancock’s multi-million bestseller Fingerprints
of the Gods remains an astonishing, deeply controversial,
wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for
Earth’s lost civilization. Twenty years on, Hancock returns with Magicians of the Gods,
the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new, scientific and
archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light…
The
evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced
civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global
cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. But there were survivors –
known to later cultures by names such as ‘the Sages’, ‘the Magicians’, ‘the
Shining Ones’, and ‘the Mystery Teachers of Heaven’. They travelled the world
in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization
burning. They settled at key locations – Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the
Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific
where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they
went these ‘Magicians
of the Gods‘ brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen
out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price. A memory and a warning
to the future…
For
the comet that wrought such destruction between 12,800 and 11,600 years may not
be done with us yet. Astronomers believe that a 20-mile wide ‘dark’ fragment of
the original giant comet remains hidden within its debris stream and threatens
the Earth. An astronomical message encoded at Gobekli Tepe, and in the Sphinx
and the pyramids of Egypt, warns that the ‘Great Return’ will occur in our time…
More
here in the book: http://grahamhancock.com/magicians/
From Collective
Evolution @ http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/10/06/lost-atlantis-noahs-ark-gobekli-tepe-a-curious-thread-of-evidence-that-connects-them-all/
For more information about the antediluvian world of
Gobekli Tepe and Atlantis see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/antediluvian%20world
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