gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (43 page)

Figure 29.3. The Sumerian Anunnaki god Enki (Akkadian Ea, Armenian Haya), with the twin streams of the Euphrates and Tigris emerging from his shoulders.

In Sumero-Akkadian mythology the Tigris and Euphrates were said to take their rise from a primordial water source, a subterranean lake that was the source of all “sweet water” called the Abzu (also written Apsu), which came under the patronage of Enki.

In his Semitic form as Ea, Enki was venerated in Urartu, the ancient kingdom that thrived between the Eastern Taurus Mountains and the Armenian Highlands during the last quarter of the second millennium BC and the first half of the first millennium BC, under the name Haya or Hayya.
¹⁸
His importance at that time is preserved in Armenia’s Persian name, which is Hayastan, and also in its original Urartian name, which is Hayasa.
¹⁹
Even today the Armenian term for “Republic of Armenia” is Hayastani Hanrapetutiun
.
This indicates very strongly that this region, which includes Bingöl Mountain, was formerly associated with the cult of Haya, or Ea, the patron of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which, as we have seen, emerge as twin streams from his shoulders.

In Armenian folklore Haya was transformed into the culture hero Hayk,
²⁰
who was said to have slain Bel, a Titan and king of Babylon synonymous with the biblical character Nimrod. Tradition asserts that before the battle Hayk visited Bingöl Mountain and here immersed his sword in the icy waters of one of its glacial lakes in order to sharpen it.
²¹
After Hayk had killed Bel on the shores of Lake Van, the Titan’s body was apparently buried on the summit of nearby Nemrut Dağ, which is named in honor of Nimrod.

DILMUN—GARDEN OF THE GODS

Enki, Ea, or Haya, was associated with a mythical location called Dilmun, a kind of garden of creation, inhabited by him and his wife in an act that initiated “a sinless age of complete happiness,” where animals lived in peace and harmony, humans had no rivals, and the god Enlil “in one tongue gave praise.”
²²
It was also a pure, clean, bright “abode of the immortals,” where death, disease, and sorrow were unknown,
²³
and some mortals were given “life like a god.”
²⁴
One text describes Dilmun as a place “where the raven did not croak and wolves and lion did not devour their prey.”
²⁵

Even though Dilmun was a name given by the Sumerians to the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, originally it was a mountainous region that overlooked the Mesopotamia Basin. One text speaks of “the mountain of Dilmun. The place where the sun rises.”
²⁶

Some texts refer to Dilmun as the “land of Cedars,” and Mehrdad Izady, professor of Near East studies at New York University, has successfully shown that this is a reference not to distant Lebanon, the country normally celebrated for its cedar forests, but to the Upper Zagros Mountains as far north as Lake Van.
²⁷
Cedar forests grew here in abundance until the end of the Neolithic era, when they were cut down and used by the Sumerians and Akkadians to build their towns and cities, which thrived down on the Iraqi plain.

THE DIMLI KURDS

The Bundahishn, the holy book of the Zoroastrians, actually locates a place called Dilamân “at the headwaters of the Tigris,”
²⁸
while the archives of the Assyrian Church, located in the ancient city of Arbil in northern Iraq, refer to Beth Dailômâye, the “land of the Daylamites” as existing in the same region.
²⁹
The Daylamites were a Kurdish tribal dynasty whose original homeland was Daylamân, or Dilamân, a region of the Armenian Highlands,
³⁰
where their modern descendants, the Dimila, or Dimli, Kurds live today. Their actual territory extends from the city of Erzincan and the province of Tunceli in the west, across to the Murad Şu, or Eastern Euphrates, in the east.

It is an area that includes Bingöl and the northern parts of the plain of Mush, making it clear that the geographical location of the terrestrial Paradise appears to be synonymous with the Mesopotamian concept of Dilmun; the two most likely deriving from the same culture that once saw the region as the location of the Abzu, the primordial water source that fed every river, lake, and sea in the ancient world.

The Dimli Kurds are a distinct ethnic community with very few connections to the Muslim Kurds of the region. They have their own language, called Zâzâ or Gurani, and belong to a very ancient religion called Alevi (also known as Kızılbaş, meaning “red heads,” a reference to their distinctive red headgear). Although considered to have been introduced to eastern Turkey from southwest Iran, Alevism probably contains religious elements deriving from the beliefs and practices of the Arevordi, or Arewordik, the “children of the sun,”
³¹
who are classed as a type of Armenian Zoroastrian.
³²
They practiced exposure of the dead on rooftops (i.e., excarnation) and entered subterranean “pits” for their rites—practices reminiscent of the early Neolithic peoples who lived in this same region thousands of years earlier.
³³

THE FOUNTAIN OF HIZIR

More significantly, the Alevi revere Hızır (pronounced
his-sheer
), the Turkish form of al-Khidr, whose most sacred shrine is Hızır Çeşmesi, the Fountain of Hızır, a mountain spring with accompanying fountain that emerges from the base of a tree in the foothills northwest of Bingöl Mountain, close to the town of Varto (ancient Gimgim). Alevi come from all over Turkey to venerate Hızır at this shrine. They take water from the fountain, which is believed to have rejuvenating properties, and spend the night in a small, unassuming building next door in order to experience dreams of the saint. This practice, known as dream incubation, is an extremely ancient means of communication with supernatural forces, and to find that it still occurs at the base of Bingöl Mountain is quite extraordinary.

Whether the Fountain of Hızır is considered to be the original Ma’ul Hayat, Fountain of Life, or the Ab’i Hayat, Waters of Life, is unclear, although the connection is indisputable. Clearly, this holy spring cannot have been the actual source of the rivers of Paradise, because each river rises from a different location on the mountain’s summit. Perhaps some kind of primordial fountain, as imagined by the Reverend Marmaduke Carver, was thought to exist within the mountain itself. Perhaps this was seen to feed the glacial lakes that are the true source of the many rivers and streams that take their rise on the mountain, accounting for the name Bingöl, which, as we have seen, means “a Thousand Lakes”; that is, boundless sources of water.

Was this also the origin of the concept of the Abzu, the primordial water source of Mesopotamian mythology presided over by Enki, who lived with his wife in the paradisiacal realm of Dilmun? Was the Alevi shrine of Hızır Çeşmesi, the Fountain of Hızır, some distant echo of these beliefs, which we can only assume sprang from this very region many thousands of years ago?

The fountain’s current genius loci, certainly among the Alevi, is Hızır, a figure that can almost certainly be identified with Haya, the Armenian form of Enki or Ea, guardian of the Abzu. Might the Alevi, as the descendants of the Daylamân, or Dilamân, hold some special knowledge regarding the former existence in their midst of Dilmun? As we see next, this paradisiacal realm was synonymous with another location in Mesopotamian myth and legend, this being the Duku mound, birthplace of the Anunnaki gods.

30

RISE OF THE ANUNNAKI

K
laus Schmidt may have regretted talking to British journalist Sean Thomas, who would later write that the German archaeologist claimed that Göbekli Tepe was a “temple in Eden.” It has not, however, stopped Schmidt from speculating about the effect the site might have had on the civilizations that flourished on the Mesopotamia Plain from around 3000 BC onward.

In his book
Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-eastern Anatolia,
published in its English language version for the first time in 2012, Schmidt speculates that the Göbekli builders may have derived from a shamanic society and that the T-shaped pillars perhaps represent their great ancestors. Much later, the memories of these powerful individuals were transformed into stories relating to deities called the Anunna gods of heaven (an) and earth (ki), known also as the Anunnaki.

According to the myths and legends of the Sumerians and Akkadians—the peoples that thrived down on the Mesopotamian Plain during the third millennium BC—the birthplace and abode of the Anunnaki was the Duku, a Sumerian word meaning “holy mound.” Here was created the first sheep and grain, which were then given by the gods Enki and Enlil to humankind, who lived down below. This is very clearly an allusion to the origins of animal husbandry and agriculture, which, as we have seen, took place in the
triangle d’or
at the time of the Neolithic evolution. As Klaus Schmidt puts it himself:

Can these arguments be connected, is it possible that behind Göbekli Tepe there hides Mount Du-ku, and are the anthropomorphous pillars of Göbekli Tepe—suddenly surprisingly real—the ancient Anuna Gods?
¹

Incredibly, these same ideas regarding the origins of the Anunnaki being a memory of the prime movers behind the Neolithic revolution in southeast Anatolia were put forward by the current author in his book
From the Ashes of Angels,
published in 1996, and written as Schmidt was surveying the mountaintop sanctuary of Göbekli Tepe for the first time. That the German archaeologist now also believes the catalyzing events of the Neolithic revolution might well be preserved in the accounts of the Duku mound and the Anunnaki giving humankind the rudiments of civilization is highly significant. Consequently, it is essential to ascertain the foundation point of these mythological traditions, and to find out whether they really do relate to Göbekli Tepe and its enigmatic T-shaped pillars.

Although in the Sumerian language Duku means “holy (
ku
) mound (
dul
),” the equivalent of
dul
in Akkadian is
tillu,
cognate with the Arab
tell,
that is, an occupational mound, very like Göbekli Tepe itself.
²
In fact, Mesopotamian scholar Jeremy Black thinks it likely that as a mythological concept the Duku was seen as a prototype of the many tells found scattered across the Mesopotamian Plain, many of which would already have been abandoned, even by the commencement of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations in the third millennium BC.
³

Just a riffle through the dirt and soil of any occupational mound very quickly produces potsherds, worked flints, and even human remains, which might easily have been seen as material evidence of the former presence on earth of the gods. The existence of these tells is most likely the root behind not only the Duku mound of Sumerian mythology but also the primeval mounds featured in the myths and legends of other ancient civilizations, where they are seen as the first built structures to occupy the earth (those that feature in ancient Egyptian texts as the foundation points of pharaonic civilization being prime examples). The Duku was therefore a primeval mound, the place of origin of the earliest ancestor gods, built where earth and heaven come together. These ancestor gods were so old that when eventually superceded by later deities, they were seen to have withdrawn into a nebulous world existing within the mound itself, which thereafter acted as a conduit into this netherworld, known as the
Kur.
⁴

The holy mound thus became an entrance to the Kur, a word meaning also “foreign land” and “mountain.” Indeed, some scholars see the word
kur
as the origin of “kurd,” the name given to the foreign inhabitants of the north, from which we derive the term Kurds and Kurdistan.
⁵
Yet having said this the Duku also came to be identified, like Dilmun, with the “Mountain of the Spring,” from which the sun emerged each morning.
⁶
This association comes from the fact that, like the sun-god in ancient Egyptian tradition who was thought to pass through the
Duat,
or underworld, from sunset to sunrise, the sun-god in Mesopotamian tradition similarly passed through the Kur, or netherworld, to emerge from a cavelike opening in the Duku mound. Thus the Kur, as both the mountainous land of foreigners and the realm of the dead, came to be associated with the land of darkness, in other words the north, the only direction that the sun does not reach in the Northern Hemisphere.

Although ancient Mesopotamian cities often possessed their own representations of the Duku mound, somewhere out in the mythological world was the original one, where the genesis of the Anunnaki gods took place. So was Schmidt correct to identify the Duku with Göbekli Tepe?

MOUNTAIN OF THE GODS

Ancient texts tell us the Duku mound existed as part of a much larger hill or mountain called Kharsag (or
hursag˜
), known as Kharsag-gal-kurkura, “great mountain of all lands.”
⁷
It acted as a support on which the heavens rested and around which the stars revolved in an unerring fashion, showing it to be a cosmic mountain or world mountain.