Decoding the Pyramids of Giza Part 1

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Introduction
Our ancestors, however long ago they may have lived and whatever part of the globe they may have occupied, were no idiots. Sad to say, over the last thirty years there have been many books on ancient technology that are not only ill researched but that also have an ax to grind. Most commonly this has been a desire to attribute the wonders of the ancient world to the efforts of ancient astronauts. While we should not dismiss the possibility of past extraterrestrial contact out of hand , we should firmly reject the assumption that the technological advances of the ancient world were only achieved because of some kind of outside help. To us this seems like a kind of racism, in which our ancestors are looked down on simply because they lived in the past. The ancient-astronaut theories are only plausible if we denigrate the intelligence and abilities of ancient civilizations. A popular misconception exists that the builders of the pyramids or the cave painters of prehistory were somehow less intelligent than we are. This simply isnt true there is no evidence that the human brain has evolved at all in the last fifty thousand years at least. Modern people are merely benefiting from thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and experimentation, not from increased intellect. The relationship between number, proportion, astronomy and music must have been well known to the ancient people well before Greeks and Romans. Plato himself attested to the longevity of the Egyptian harmonic canon of proportion (sacred geometry), when he stated: That the pictures and statues made ten thousand years ago, are in no one particular better or worse than what they now make.

The Ancient Egyptian works, large or small, are admired by all, because they are proportionally harmonious. This harmonic design concept is popularly known as sacred geometry and used in the design of sacred architecture and sacred art. Proportions of any object are always independent of the units of length (meters, feet, cubits etc) we use to measure the object. Once specific unit of measuring length is introduced, dimensions of an object can be expressed by different numbers, however its proportions will remain the same. Although objects with identical proportions can be built to different scale, the base to height ratio will stay the same. For example:

for any circle, the circumference divided by its diameter is always equal pi (3.14159) for any square, the perimeter divided by the diagonal is always 2 x sqrt(2) = 2.8284. for any equilateral triangle, the perimeter divided by the height is always 2 x sqrt(3) = 3.4641 and the ratio height to base is (1/2)x sqrt(3) =0.866

If we consider proportions of a pyramid expressed by the height divided by the base, values of the base to height ratio will be independent of units of measure we use! (see example of the GP below)

Proportions of the Giza Pyramids

Here are official dimensions of 3 pyramids at Giza:

1.

The Great Pyramid: Base =440 Royal Egyptian Cubits, Height = 280 Royal Egyptian Cubits, Base to Height ratio = 11/7 (440/280 = 11/7 exactly)

2.

The Second Pyramid: Base =411 Royal Egyptian Cubits, Height = 274 Royal Egyptian Cubits, Base to Height ratio = 3/2 (411/274 = 3/2 exactly)

3.

The Third Pyramid: Base =200 Royal Egyptian Cubits, Height = 125 Royal Egyptian Cubits, Base to Height ratio = 8/5 (200/125 = 8/5 exactly)

We can notice the following numerological relationships between 3 pyramids:

11 / 7 = (3 + 8) / (2 + 5)
( we are adding to top value of 2nd and 3rd pyramid ratio to the bottom value of each ratio) If we add this way all 3 ratios we will get:

(11 + 8 + 3) / (7 + 5 +2) = 22/14 = 11/7

(the ratio of the Great Pyramid and the approximation of pi ). So ratios of all 3 pyramids added this way are equal the ratio of the 1st pyramid.

Sir Petrie has noticed that the relation between the height and the base (ratio 3/2 = 6/4) conceal the Pythagorean Triangle (the first Pythagorean Triplet): 32 + 42 = 52

The 3rd Pyramid with its base = 200 has diagonal = 282.84 = 100*2*sqrt(2).

Radius of a circle circumscribed on 200*200 square is 141.4215 = 100* sqrt(2) and the circles circumference = 888. For this pyramid: base * height = 200 * 125 = 1000 * 25 (1000 is the scale of the Giza pyramids layout and 25 is the scale of the 3rd pyramid).
Circle with radius=250 is very special since its circumference = 1570.8 = 1000* (1/2) * Pi

Base1+Base2+Base3+Height1+Height2+Height3= 440+411+200+280+274+125 = 1051 + 679 = 1730

Interesting numerological connections: 1. Proportions connection (purely numerological) : Design proportions for the 1st Pyramid 7:11; 7=5+2 and 11= 8+3; 7/11 = (5+2) / (8+3) from this proportion we generate these ratios: for the 2nd pyramid 5/8 and for the 3rd pyramid 2/3 Also 100x 11/7 = 157.1 which is scale factor for the layout ( 11/9 ) of 3 pyramids. 8 and 5 give scale factor for the 1st Pyramid (58=40=523=40) 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11 give scale factor for the 2nd Pyramid: 118+7x(5+2)=137 or 117+75+55= 137 2. For the Fist Pyramid the scale factor is 40 and the ratio is 11:7 11 x 22 22 = 40 Connection with the Second Pyarmid: (11+7) x 32 - 52 = 137 7x 42 + 52 =137 and 11 x 23 + 72 = 137 and 11.72 is approximately 137 (scale for the Second Pyramid), also 25 component is the same as the scale factor for the Third Pyramid 3. For the Second Pyramid the scale factor is 137 and the ratio is 3:2 (9:6 or 6:4) (3+2)x 33 +2 = 137 also (9+6)x 32 +2 = 137 and (6+4)x7x2 3 = 137, Interestingly, (3+2)x 23 = 40 (scale factor for the First Pyramid) also, square Root of 137 is approximately 11.7 (11 and 7 are ratio numbers describing the First pyramid) The Third Pyramids scale factor is 25 and the ratio is 8:5 (same as 40:25) 52=25,

The Pyramids of Giza Layout

Another interesting relationship is uncovered when we investigate the layout of the Giza pyramids.

Measured dimensions of the layout rectangle are 1732 Royal Egyptian Cubits by 1414 Royal Egyptian Cubits. This dimensions are equivalent of sqrt(3) x 1,000 by sqrt(2) x 1,000. We can say that 3 pyramids are inside the rectangle with proportions (side to side ratio) equal: sqrt(3) / sqrt(2) = sqrt(3/2) = 1.224745 In other words, the sqrt of the ratio describing the 2nd pyramid (3/2) generates proportions of the Giza pyramids layout rectangle. Note: The area of the rectangle is sqrt(3) x sqrt(2) = sqrt(6) = 2.4495 Perimeter of the Giza layout = 6,292 (RC) [= 2* 1000* sqrt(2) + 2*1000*sqrt(3)] Circle with the same perimeter would have Radius = 1,001 RC [ 6292 = 2*pi*R so R=1,001 ] Another amazing design feature:

Scale of the Giza layout:

1,000

Scale of the 1st pyramid: 40 (btw, it generates base to height ratio 8/5 for the 3rd pyramid: 85 = 40) Scale of the 3rd pyramid: 25 - the scales of the 1st and the 3rd pyramid generate also the ratio for the 3rdpyramid: 40/25 = 8/5 - 25 = 1000/40 (this number is generated by the scale of the layout/scale of the Great Pyramid)

Scale of the 2nd pyramid is 137 (see the paragraph below about 137) It generates 11, the key number for the 1st pyramid (1+3+7 = 11). Ratio 3/2 of the 2nd pyramid describes triangle [31/2 ]2+ [21/2 ]2= [51/2]2 which generates sides of the pyramids layout and its diagonal 51/2 in scale 1:1000

Such rectangle (representing the layout of the pyramids of Giza) can be generated in many ways:

1. From the Flower of Life:

The Flower of Life set in stone at the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, Egypt.

2. From arcs generating sqrt(2) and sqrt(3) (scaled 1000 times)

3. From diagonals of a cube 1000 x 1000 x

1000:

137
Number 137 is the scale factor for the 2nd pyramid (which base to height ratio is 3/2)

137 is the 33rd prime number; Using two radii to divide a circle according to the golden ratio yields sectors of approximately 137 (the golden angle) and 222. The fifth harmonic number is 137/60 The fine structure constant, a dimensionless physical constant, approximates 1/137, and the astronomer Arthur Eddington conjectured in 1929 that its reciprocal was in fact precisely the integer 137

The fine structure constant of physics continues to convince esoterists that the universe has numerological fine tuning: for example the age of the universe could be considered as roughly 137 times the square of a myriad of years.

The atomic number of the highest allowed element on the periodic table allowed by the Bohr Model and the Dirac equation( Caesium-137 )

Source: Wikipedia On autumn equinox the distance of the Sun from Earth is approximately 150.336 million km, about 108 times that of the Suns diameter (or 216 times of the Suns Radius) 216=63 , also 216=23 x 33 108 x 2= 216 = 6 x 6 x 6 , 666 is the number of the Sun (and also number of the Beast) 108 has 12 divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 27, 36, 54, 108 Interesting, multiples of 3 multiplied by 37 = repeating digits

(13) or 1+1+1=3 x 37 = 111 (23) or 2+2+2=6 x 37 = 222

(33) or 3+3+3=9 x 37 = 333 (43) or 4+4+4=12 x 37 = 444 (53) or 5+5+5=15 x 37 = 555 (63) or 6+6+6=18 x 37 = 666 (73) or 7+7+7=21 x 37 = 777 (83) or 8+8+8=24 x 37 = 888 (93) or 9+9+9=27 x 37 = 999 Divisors: 108 has 12 divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 27, 36, 54, 108 216 has 16 divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, 27, 36, 54, 72, 108, 216 360 has 24 divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360 666 has 12 divisors: 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 18, 37, 74, 111, 222, 333, 666.

666 and the Magickal Seal of the Sun

The Seals of the Planets, popular before the time of Christ according to Budge (Amulets and Superstitions), are interesting because the seal containing the Grand Number of the Sun contains the very sacred number 36 laid out in a 66 square with the numbers from 1 to 36 so arranged that they add up the same in all directions,with the total of the whole seal 666. Though popular also in Eastern lands, the Greek and Roman, or Latin, inscriptions on these seals show also their popularity in the West.. Since the sun-god was considered as the ruler over the 36 constellations of the sky and the 36 rooms of the circle of the zodiac, it was inevitable that the summary number of the numbers from 1 to 36, the number 666 should have been assigned to the sun as the ruler over all the gods of heaven and earth. Babylonian astrologers divided the starry heavens into 36 constellations (ten days each). These were represented by different amulets called Sigilla Solis, or theSun Seal. These amulets were worn by the pagan priests and they contained all the numbers from 1 to 36. By these figures they claimed to be able to foretell future events. These amulets were usually made of gold, yellow being the sun color.While being carried, these amulets were wrapped in yellow silk, as it was thought that the bearer would thus receive the beneficent powers believed to emanate from that jewel. The 66 Magic Square of the Sun contains the first 36 numbers arranged in such a fashion so that each line of numbers, weather added horizontally, vertically or diagonally from corner to corner, will yield the solar number 111. The entire magic square therefore equals 666, a number which was significant to early Christian mystics. In Hebrew Kabbalah, the names of the intelligence of the Sun and Spirit of the Sun were designed to equal 111 and 666 respectively. Like 888, 666 is an important musical number, for 0.666 is the ratio of the perfect fifth, the most powerful harmonic interval. From Jesus Christ, Sun of God (Fidler) By the way:

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20+21+22+ + 23+24+25+26+27+28+29+30+31+32+33+34+35+36= 666 Check it out with calculator or use this formula: the sum of the first n numbers = n(n+1)/2

Number 144

144=12 x 12 144=32 x 42 1 day = 24 hours = 1440 minutes 100 days = 144,000 min

Sacred Tetractys
The Pythagoreans adored numbers. Aristotle, in his Metaphysica, sums up the Pythagoreans attitude towards numbers. The (Pythagoreans were) the first to take up mathematics (and) thought its principles were the principles of all things. Since, of these principles, numbers are the first, in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to things that exist more than [just] air, fire and earth and water, (but things such as) justice, soul, reason, opportunity

One of fascinating ancient discoveries is Tetractys. It is a symbol composed of ten dots in an upward-pointing triangular formation. It was a sacred pattern for the school of philosophers who followed the teachings of the Greek sage Pythagoras. Tetractys itself can be interpreted as the symbolic blueprint of creation. Its image is an equilateral triangle based on the essential numbers 1 (top), 2, 3 and 4 (base), whose sum is the perfect number 10 ( 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10). These numbers were considered by the Pythagoreans to be holy and at the origins of the universe. They believed that a four-fold pattern permeated the natural world, examples of which are the point, line, surface and solid and the four elements Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Musically they represent the perfect consonants: the unison, the octave, the fifth and the fourth.

The importance of the tetractys to the Pythagoreans is illustrated by their oath of fellowship:

I swear by the discoverer of the Tetractys, Which is the spring of all our wisdom, The perennial fount and root of Nature.

Tetractys generates hexagon which is 2-D projection of 3-D cube

he Great Pyramid and the Speed of Light

The Great Pyramid encodes enormous amount of numerical coincidences ( pi, Phi, dimensions and movement of our planet, axial tilt, precession, speed of light, and more) We can only wonder if the ancient architects were fully aware of these special numbers encoded in their design or are these numbers simply the result of selecting 2 numbers (7 and 11) for proportions for the Great Pyramid??? The design of the Great Pyramid is based on the ratio 11:7. This ratio (equal 1.571) is perfect approximation of the squaring the circle principle.

For the Great Pyramid, Base to Height Ratio 440/280 is exactly 11/7 Most pyramidologists appear to be chasing their tails uncovering huge amount of numerical coincidences embedded in the Great Pyramid

It is simply unbelievable, however ALL of these numerical coincidences are result of selecting just 4 numbers for the pyramid design: 7, 11(height to base ratio), 40 (the scale factor), and the 4th key number is the value of the measuring unit: Royal Cubit = 20.62 = 0.524 m.
This single, fundamental design principle: 11 : 7 Base to Height Ratio generates ALL amazing mathematical properties of the Great Pyramid:

the Golden Ratio Phi=1.618 (the Great Pyramid is a Golden Pyramid: length of the slope side (356) divided by half of the side (440/2 = 220) height is equal to 1.6181818 which is the Golden Ratio Phi squaring the circle ratio 1.571 (base/height = 44/28 = 1.571) pi=3.14159 (2 x base/height = 2 x 44/28 = 3.14286 which is very close approximation of pi = 3.14159) Perimeter of the square base, 4440=1760, is the same as circumference of the circle with radius = height: 2x pi x height (2x 22/7 x 280=1760) The ratio of the perimeter to height of 1760/280 cubits equates to 2x pi to an accuracy of better than 0.05% Side of the base (440) plus double height (2x 280=560) = 1,000 Perimeter of the square base is equal 4440=1760 RC = 0.5 nautical mile =1/7,200th of the radius length of the earth the slop angle 51.843 The Pyramid exhibits in the design both pi and by Phi, given the similarity of 2/ sqrt(phi) (2 divided by the square root of Phi) with pi/2 : 11/ 7 equal 1.5714 2/ sqrt(89/55) equal 1.5722 2/ sqrt(Phi) equal 1.5723 pi/ 2 equal 1.5708 Royal Cubit = 0.5236 m, pi Phi2 = 0.5231

and more

Does Great Pyramid encode fractal value of the speed of light?

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299, 792, 458 meters per second or 983,571,056.43045 feet per second or 186,282.397 miles per second. Base of the Great Pyramid is a square with side B = 44o Royal Egyptian Cubits. Lets draw two circles: one inscribed and one superscribed on the square of the base of the Great Pyramid.

Circumference of superscribed circle: 2x pi x R Circumference of the inscribed circle: 2x pi x r The difference of the circumference of both circles (lets call it C) is:

C = 2 x pi x (R r) = 2 x pi x [ B/sqrt(2) - B/2 ] = 2x pi x B x [ 1/sqrt(2) - 1/2 ] = 1.301290285 x B

The length of the Egyptian Royal Cubit

Based on The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh by W.M. Flinders Petrie. 1883. The unit of measuring length used by the ancient architects in the construction of the Great Pyramid was the Royal Cubit.

Petrie estimated the value of the Royal Cubit using some key dimensions of the Great Pyramid: By the base length of the Pyramid, if 440 cubits (section 43): 20.611 .002 By the base of Kings Chamber, corrected for opening of joints: 20.632 .004 inches By the Queens Chamber, if dimensions squared are in square cubits: 20.61 .020 By the antechamber: 20.58 .020 By the ascending and Queens Chamber passage lengths (section 149): 20.622 .002 By the gallery width: 20.605 .032
The Average value of the RC (based on above numbers) is 20.61 inches.

Its almost universally accepted that archaeologist Flinders Petries determination of the royal cubit length at 20.632 inches, from his measurements of the Kings Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza, was the likely measure to survey the dimensions of that pyramid, 440 royal cubits per base side, but the experts stop there, not then letting you know that those 1,760 royal cubits which total the Great Pyramids base perimeter length, when multiplied by 20.632 inches, equals half a modern nautical mile, or 1/7,200th of the radius length of the earth, so there certainly is a connection. By most accurate series of measurements Petrie concluded that the royal cubit standard for the Great Pyramid was 20.620 .005 inches ( 523.7 mm). Lets use the lower value 20.615 for the Royal Cubit (allowed by the 0.005 accuracy): the Royal Egyptian Cubit (RC) is 20.615 = 0.523621 m

B = 440RC = 9070.6 = 755.883 feet = 230.393 m Therefore C = 1.301290285 x B = 983.6 feet = 299.8 m The value of C x 106 is surprisingly very close to the speed of light in m/s The speed of light in a vacuum is 983, 571, 056.43 feet per second = 299, 792, 458 meters per second.
Another very strange Great Pyramid coincidence related to the speed of light was discovered by John Charles Webb Jr. : Precise latitude of the centre of the Grand Gallery (inside GP) is 29 58 45.28 N = 29.9792458 N The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics ( 299,792,458 metres /s ). --

Another interesting coincidence encoded in the Royal Cubit:

2x (0.957 / 0.524 ) = 2x 1.8263 = 3.6526 = 365.26 x 10-2 Number of days in a year: 365.25
Another interpretation of the above: circumference of a a circle with diameter equal 100 feet is 2 x pi x 100 feet = 2 x pi x 1200 =7539.8 = 365.74 RC (or 356.25 RC measured in Kings Chamber) --

Royal Egyptian Cubit = 0.524 m pi = 3.1416 3.1416 feet = 0.957 m = 1.8263 RC

The Missing Capstone Theory

The pyramidion (capstone) found near the Red Pyramid is nearly 96 cm from the top, measured along the edge. This (and other capstones found in Egypt) suggests thatEgyptians were not making huge capstones for their pyramids. Therefore assumption that missing capstone of the Great Pyramid was huge (30 feet at the base) is wrong. It is very likely that in addition to the missing pyramidion there is a layer of stones missing as well. Therefore the capstone was much smaller than the missing part of the pyramid. To maintain perfect slope angle such a capstone would have to have identical proportions as the whole pyramid: 7:11. If we use the Red Pyramid capstone to estimate possible size of the capstone from the

Great Pyramid, it seems reasonable to select 2 Royal Cubits (140th of the pyramids height) for its height. The capstones base in this case would be 3.14286 RC (as the result of keeping the same scale and proportions as the GP) . This is very close approximation of pi. The missing capstone of the Great Pyramid was very likely 2 Royal Cubits in height (3.4267 feet = 1.0475 m ) with square base of 3.1428 Royal Cubits (5.4 feet = 1.646 m).

Hebrew Genesis Contains Mathematically Encoded Pictures Sacred or Secret?

by Andreas G. Szab

The Discovery
In Hebrew all letters are also a number, so that one can obtain the value of a word by adding these numbers. This procedure is called Gematria. Originally I wanted to analyze the distributions of such gematric values in the Hebrew biblical book of Genesis and found therefore a computer-based graphical method to display them. That method should provide round eye-shaped views through using a polar coordinate system and so I named the method Hitomi which is Japanese for the pupil of the eye.

The Hitomi-method worked because I quickly realized that by this method certain numbers form real pictures:Planetary positions and cycles, star constellations, astronomical and geometric connections, and mystical symbols. They represent the Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

Among these things I found the depiction of a heliocentric system, in which the heavenly bodies Jupiter, Saturn and Sun are positioned like they were at the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction on September 30th in the year 7 BC. In addition there is also a picture of the Big Dipper as it stood on that day at 20:30 oclock over Bethlehem.

The Method
All words of the Hebrew Genesis get arranged like this: The Genesis has thrice 511 verses, which are put onto three concentric wheels with 511 spokes (less spokes in the picture below, cannot draw all). The first 511 verses are put on the spokes of the innermost wheel, the next 511 verses on the same spokes but of

the second wheel, and the last 511 verses on the same spokes of the outer wheel.

While the verse number assigns the spoke, the word number in the verse assigns the radius relative to the wheel on which the verse is (innermost, mid, outer). Each of thethree wheels is 26 units wide along the radius, because there is a maximum of 26 words (gray fields) in a verse (less units in the picture below, cannot draw all 26). In the mathematic trade language today the whole can be called a polar coordinate

system. As we said, in Hebrew every letter is also a number. And when we add the numbers of the letters of a word, we get the word value. Per picture, one key value is defined, and every word whose value matches the key value, is marked with a dot.

The Result
Apparently the picture formed from the key number 231 (see below) seemed like a compass to me.

But with a compass one can make circles, and so I did: Starting from the angular point of the pretended compass I drew circles through the other dots in that picture and also one through its center. I immediately realized that these circles (red) should be planetary orbits, and the angular point of the compass should be the Sun. Well, the orbits do not relate to each other like in reality, but they do relate in the measure of the golden ratio. This is remarkable though.

By assuming that the dot in the center of the picture should be the Earth we can count that the two outermost orbits must be those of Jupiter and Saturn. And obviously there these two planets are in a conjunction when spotted from Earth. I grabbed some astronomical data and found out that this depicted conjunction was the one on September 30. in the year 7 BC. And this picture clearly shows knowledge or at least the theory of the heliocentric solar system, that must have been familiar to the creators of the Hitomi-pictures.

Now another one of the pictures shows the Big Dipper as it stood on the mentioned day at 20:30 oclock over Bethlehem just above the horizon directly in the north. This is exactly the time that is given by the astronomical data for the mentioned conjunction.

The conjunction and the Dipper were just two examples. There are many more results.

The Book
This book is about my totally new and original method to mathematically decode pictures from the Hebrew Biblical book of Genesis: Planetary positions and cycles, star constellations, astronomical and mathematical connections, magical artifacts and mystical symbols. It leads the reader on a spectacular tightrope walk between religion, esoterism and science, and opens to him a fascinating new view on the Bible. On 72 pages and with 27 illustrations I describe all my findings and techniques in detail. I give explanations for the meanings of the pictures and their purpose, and answers on related important questions.

More information can be found at www.torakosmos.de/book.php

Gobekli Tepe: Oldest Monumental Architecture of Planet Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkeys stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization Located 35 miles north of Turkeys border with Syria, Gobekli Tepe consists of 20 T-shaped stone towers, carved with drawings of snakes, scorpions, lions, boars, foxes and other animals. The amazing thing about them is they date back to 9,500 BC, 5,500 years before the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years before the circle of Stonehenge. Scientists say that back then humans hadnt even discovered pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages, had no agriculture and only relied on hunting to survive.

Gbekli Tepe had already been located in a survey in 1964, when the American archaeologist Peter Benedict mentioned the site as a possible location of stone age activity, but its importance was not recognised at that time. Excavations have been conducted since 1994 by the German Archaeological Institute (Istanbul branch) and Sanliurfa Museum, under the direction of the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt (University of Heidelberg). The title isnt actually doing Gobekli Tepe justice since the Turkish archaeological site is 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Gobekli Tepe changes everything archaeologists discovered so far and it is considered the most important archaeological find in recent history. Klaus Schmidt, the man who first discovered Gobekli Tepe says the carvings might be the first human representation of gods.

Source: http://forum.xcitefun.net Gbekli Tepe Evidence for the existence of extra-terrestrial life? Unexplained 12,000 year old underground city, in southeastern Turkey, is made of massive carved stones, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who apparently had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. Gbekli Tepe (Turkish for Potbelly hill) is a hilltop sanctuary erected on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some 15 km northeast of the town of Sanliurfa (formerly Urfa / Edessa) in southeastern Turkey. The site is currently undergoing excavation by German and Turkish archaeologists.

Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient. The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (stratum III) contains monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. Gbekli Tepe has revealed several adjacent rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime, reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors. Thus, the structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writingor the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BC. But the construction of Gbekli Tepe implies organisation of an order of complexity not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies. At present, Gbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and paid or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society. We cannot read the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site; the variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic.

The reason the complex was eventually buried remains unexplained. Until more evidence is gathered, it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture. Source: http://grasptheuniverse.com/ancient-artifacts/gobekli-tepe/ Andrew Collins Finding Eden: Mystery of Gobekli Tepe & Gizas Cave Underworld Description: In southeast Turkey stands the oldest temple in the world. At nearly 12,000 years old, Gobekli Tepe is an enigma to archaeology. Consisting of a series of stone circles, made up of T-shaped pillars bearing exquisite carvings of animals, birds, insects and abstract human figures, this ritual complex was constructed at the end of the last Ice Age by faceless individuals, who rose far beyond the conventional understanding of the hunter-gatherers who occupied the Eurasian continent at this time. Why were these amazing stone circles buried overnight, sometime around 10,000 year ago? It is an enigma that seems to start in Africa some 17,000 years ago, and ends with not only the creation of civilization down in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, but also in the sudden emergence of the ancient Egyptian civilization, where the story continues with the discovery in 2008 of a cave underworld beneath the plateau at Giza. Powerful evidence suggests that this underground complex existed ever before even the Pyramid Age, and might well reflect an African origin to the roots ofancient Egyptian religion. It might also hold the key to answering claims that in the vicinity of the Sphinx is a lost Hall of Records.

PS1 Gobekli Tepe: The Worlds First Temple?

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkeys stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization

Now seen as early evidence of prehistoric worship, the hilltop site was previously shunned by researchers as nothing more than a medieval cemetery. Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced its the site of the worlds oldest temple. Guten Morgen, he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roofthe main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavatedpillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh 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 pillars broad sides.

Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. This is the first human-built holy place, he says. From this perch 1,000 feet above the valley, we can see to the horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asks me to imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today. Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. This area was like a paradise, says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescentan arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egyptand would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scalehumanitys first cathedral on a hill. With the sun higher in the sky, Schmidt ties a white scarf around his balding head, turban-style, and deftly picks his way down the hill among the relics. In rapid-fire German he explains that he has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting

where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface. Gobekli Tepe was first examinedand dismissedby University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. In 1994, Schmidt was working on his own survey of prehistoric sites in the region. After reading a brief mention of the stone-littered hilltop in the University of Chicago researchers report, he decided to go there himself. From the moment he first saw it, he knew the place was extraordinary. Unlike the stark plateaus nearby, Gobekli Tepe (the name means belly hill in Turkish) has a gently rounded top that rises 50 feet above the surrounding landscape. To Schmidts eye, the shape stood out. Only man could have created something like this, he says. It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site. The broken pieces of limestone that earlier surveyors had mistaken for gravestones suddenly took on a different meaning. Schmidt returned a year later with five colleagues and they uncovered the first megaliths, a few buried so close to the surface they were scarred by plows. As the archaeologists dug deeper, they unearthed pillars arranged in circles. Schmidts team, however, found none of the telltale signs of a settlement: no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. The archaeologists did find evidence of tool use, including stone hammers and blades. And because those artifacts closely resemble others from nearby sites previously carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C., Schmidt and co-workers estimate that Gobekli Tepes stone structures are the same age. Limited carbon dating undertaken by Schmidt at the site confirms this assessment. The way Schmidt sees it, Gobekli Tepes sloping, rocky ground is a stonecutters dream. Even without metal chisels or hammers, prehistoric masons wielding flint tools could have chipped away at softer limestone outcrops, shaping them into pillars on the spot before carrying them a few hundred yards to the summit and lifting them upright. Then, Schmidt says, once the stone rings were finished, the ancient builders covered them over with dirt. Eventually, they placed another ring nearby or on top of the old one. Over centuries, these layers created the hilltop. Today, Schmidt oversees a team of more than a dozen German archaeologists, 50 local laborers and a steady stream of enthusiastic students. He typically excavates at the site for two months in the spring and two in the fall. (Summer temperatures reach 115 degrees, too hot to dig; in the winter the area is deluged by rain.) In 1995, he bought a traditional Ottoman house with a courtyard in Urfa, a city of nearly a half-million people, to use as a base of operations. On the day I visit, a bespectacled Belgian man sits at one end of a long table in front of a pile of bones. Joris Peters, an archaeozoologist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, specializes in the analysis of animal remains. Since 1998, he has examined more than 100,000 bone fragments from Gobekli Tepe. Peters has often found cut marks and splintered edges on themsigns that the animals from which they came were butchered and cooked. The bones,

stored in dozens of plastic crates stacked in a storeroom at the house, are the best clue to how people who created Gobekli Tepe lived. Peters has identified tens of thousands of gazelle bones, which make up more than 60 percent of the total, plus those of other wild game such as boar, sheep and red deer. Hes also found bones of a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site, Peters says. Its been the same every year since. The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed. But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepes builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticatedand the people with the potential to do it, Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepes construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the worlds oldest do mesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepes construction. To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies. The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later, says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies. What was so important to these early people that they gathered to build (and bury) the stone rings? The gulf that separates us from Gobekli Tepes builders is almost unimaginable. Indeed, though I stood among the looming megaliths eager to take in their meaning, they didnt speak to me. They were utterly foreign, placed there by people who saw the world in a way I will never comprehend. There are no sources to explain what the symbols might mean. Schmidt agrees. Were 6,000 years before the invention of writing here, he says. Theres more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today, says Gary Rollefson, an archaeologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, who is familiar with Schmidts work. Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility.

Still, archaeologists have their theoriesevidence, perhaps, of the irresistible human urge to explain the unexplainable. The surprising lack of evidence that people lived right there, researchers say, argues against its use as a settlement or even a place where, for instance, clan leaders gathered. Hodder is fascinated that Gobekli Tepes pillar carvings are dominated not by edible prey like deer and cattle but by menacing creatures such as lions, spiders, snakes and scorpions. Its a scary, fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts, he muses. While later cultures were more concerned with farming and fertility, he suggests, perhaps these hunters were trying to master their fears by building this complex, which is a good distance from where they lived. Danielle Stordeur, an archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, emphasizes the significance of the vulture carvings. Some cultures have long believed the highflying carrion birds transported the flesh of the dead up to the heavens. Stordeur has found similar symbols at sites from the same era as Gobekli Tepe just 50 miles away in Syria. You can really see its the same culture, she says. All the most important symbols are the same. For his part, Schmidt is certain the secret is right beneath his feet. Over the years, his team has found fragments of human bone in the layers of dirt that filled the complex. Deep test pits have shown that the floors of the rings are made of hardened limestone. Schmidt is betting that beneath the floors hell find the structures true purpose: a final resting place for a society of hunters. Perhaps, Schmidt says, the site was a burial ground or the center of a death cult, the dead laid out on the hillside among the stylized gods and spirits of the afterlife. If so, Gobekli Tepes location was no accident. From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view, Schmidt says as the sun casts long shadows over the half-buried pillars. Theyre looking out over a hunters dream.

PS2 The lunisolar calendar of Gbekli Tepe

The lunisolar calendar of Gbekli Tepe, versions from Nevali Cori, Halaf, Safadi, Ghassoul, Egypt, Knossos, Tiryns, and China Lunisolar calendar of Gbekli Tepe: a year has 12 months of 30 days, plus 5 and occasionally 6 days, while 63 continuous periods of 30 days yield 1,890 days and correspond to 64 lunations

The begin of the calendar walk was marked by a stone phallus. The calendar walk forms two loops, while the additional days at the end of the year are represented as space between the pair of central pillars. The calendar walk is at the same time a representation of the life of a supreme leader: the first pillars mark youth, the central pillars his apointment as ruler and supreme ruler, the following pillars his adult life, the final space between the pillars his death, the leaping foxes on the central pillars the guides of his soul through the Underworld back to daylight A charming Celtic coin shows the sun horse on the early morning of the summer solstice, under it the snout of a fox peeping out of a hole in the ground the fox that guided the sun horse through the Underworld and back to daylight

Cult building II of Nevali Cori shows 12 pillars along the walls, each representing 30 days, plus a pair of central pillars for the 5 and occasionally 6 additional days. Cult building III shows thirteen pillars along the wall, each representing 28 days, while the space between the central pillars represents one and occasionally two additional days, and this time 135 continuous periods of 28 days yielding 3780 days corresponding to 128 lunations

The lunisolar calendar in the version of Halaf required 6 leap days in 25 years.

Sooner or later the calendar of Gbekli Tepe was combined with an astronomical observatory in a river plain with a flat horizon, somewhere in Upper Mesopotamia. Imagine a pole or a tree of life in the center of a circle, on the circumference a dozen poles in the positions of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 oclock, the poles of 3 6 9 12 oclock marking the cardinal directions east south west north. Sighting lines provided by the poles allow indicate where the sun will raise and set on the mornings and evenings of the equinoxes and solstices

Click to Enlarge This calendar observatory became the Asherah sanctuary, from AS AAR RAA meaning upward (as) toward the one composed of air (aar) and light (raa).

On the lid of a curved ivory box from Beersheba I recognize a schematic representation of the Asherah sanctuary, twelve poles around a tree of life in the center, flanked by two geometric representations of AC CA, while a pendant from Ghassoul, left upper part chipped off, shows a more realistic Asherah sanctuary, with a schematic tree, branches pointing upward, and an altar in the form of a cross. A small ivory disk from Safadi shows a variant of the lunisolar calendar from Gbekli Tepe: nine perforations around a pair of central ones, each of the nine perforations representing a period of fourty days. Nine periods are 360 days, add 5 and occasionally 6 days for a year. The ratios of lunations (l) to periods of fourty days (p) yield very good additive values l/p: 4/3, 19/14, 23/17, 42/31, 65/48, 107/79 * 65/48, 42/31, 107/79, 149/110, 256/189. (All three objects mentioned in this paragraph are from the fourth millennium BC

An Egyptian month counted 30 days, a year 12 months plus 5 days. Horus was the Celestial Falcon. His right eye was the sun, his left eye was the moon. Seth destroyed the moon eye, whereupon wise Thoth healed it. The healed eye, the famous Horus Eye or wedjat (referring to the color green, the color of new life) was called The Whole One. The six elements of the Horus Eye were associated with numbers, namely the fractions 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, or, in my simple notation, 2 4 8 16 32 64. These numbers add up to 63/64, not really to 1. Why then, The Whole One? The Horus Eye or wedjat, I believe, represented a lunation, from one to the next new moon, or from one to the next full moon. Multiply a month of 30 days by the Horus Eye series 2 4 8 16 32 64 and you obtain 29 2 32 days, or 29 days 12 hours 45 minutes not even a minute longer

than the actual value from 1989 AD, namely 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes 2.9 seconds. With a little fantasy you can even see the wedjat eye in the moon:

The Minoan double axe may be a graphic rendering of the solstices derived from the Asherah sanctuary, as shown in this drawing, inspired by the carvings on a block at Knossos (see also the chapters on Mallia and Knossos below)

The rosette in the center of the Tiryns disk, Middle Helladic, around 1650 BC, represents another variation of the Gbekli Tepe lunisolar calendar: each petal stays for 45 days, and the small circle in the center for 5 and occasionally 6 days, while 21 continuous periods of 45 days yield 945 days and correspond to 32 lunations disc.htm The Azilian calendar may also have been used in the Neolithic Yangshao culture, and in Banshan. Later on, the legendary first Chinese emperor Fu-hi divided the zodiac into 28 animals and mansions. This suggests a modification of the Azilian calendar: a profane week of 7 days, a profane month of 28 days, a profane year of 12 months plus 1 and occasionally 2 leap days, while 135 continual weeks of 7 days, yielding 945 days, equal 32 lunations; a sacred week of 13 days, perhaps 1-5-1-5-1 days, a sacred year of 28 weeks plus 1 and occasionally 2 leap days, while 184 continual weeks, yielding 2392 days, equal 81 lunations.

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?

By TOM KNOX
UPDATED: 11:10 GMT, 5 March 2009

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For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry

tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone. The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important. They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer's day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would say he'd made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion - and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden.

The site has been described as 'extraordinary' and 'the most important' site in the world

A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd's find reached museum curators in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, ten miles south-west of the stones. They got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. And so, in late 1994, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe (pronounced Gobeckly Tepp-ay) to begin his excavations. As he puts it: 'As soon as I got there and saw the stones, I knew that if I didn't walk away immediately I would be here for the rest of my life.'

Remarkable find: A frieze from Gobekli Tepe

Schmidt stayed. And what he has uncovered is astonishing. Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site's importance. 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University. David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.' Some go even further and say the site and its implications are incredible. As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: 'Gobekli Tepe is too extraordinary for my mind to understand.' So what is it that has energised and astounded the sober world of academia? The site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones, unearthed by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome, T-shaped megaliths. Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Most of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images - mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are another common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.

The stones seem to represent human forms - some have stylised 'arms', which angle down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or ritual site, like the stone circles of Western Europe. To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out - they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across - but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated. So far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be a dazzling site - a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift Gobekli Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere - and the realms of the fantastical.

The Garden of Eden come to life: Is Gobekli Tepe where the story began?

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old. That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC. Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our huntergatherer past. How did cavemen build something so ambitious? Schmidt speculates that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of construction, living in animal-skin tents, slaughtering local game for food.

The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they also support the dating of the site. This revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something like Gobekli, is worldchanging, for it shows that the old hunter-gatherer life, in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived - almost unbelievably sophisticated.

The shepherd who discovered Gobekli Tepe has 'changed everything', said one academic

It's as if the gods came down from heaven and built Gobekli for themselves. This is where we come to the biblical connection, and my own involvement in the Gobekli Tepe story. About three years ago, intrigued by the first scant details of the site, I flew out to Gobekli. It was a long, wearying journey, but more than worth it, not least as it would later provide the backdrop for a new novel I have written. Back then, on the day I arrived at the dig, the archaeologists were unearthing mindblowing artworks. As these sculptures were revealed, I realised that I was among the first people to see them since the end of the Ice Age. And that's when a tantalising possibility arose. Over glasses of black tea, served in tents right next to the megaliths, Klaus Schmidt told me that, as he put it: 'Gobekli Tepe is not the Garden of Eden: it is a temple in Eden.' To understand how a respected academic like Schmidt can make such a dizzying claim, you need to know that many scholars view the Eden story as folk-memory, or allegory. Seen in this way, the Eden story, in Genesis, tells us of humanity's innocent and leisured hunter-gatherer past, when we could pluck fruit from the trees, scoop fish from the rivers and spend the rest of our days in pleasure.

But then we 'fell' into the harsher life of farming, with its ceaseless toil and daily grind. And we know primitive farming was harsh, compared to the relative indolence of hunting, because of the archaeological evidence.

To date, archaeologists have dug 45 stones out of the ruins at Gobekli

When people make the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, their skeletons change - they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy as the human body adapts to a diet poorer in protein and a more wearisome lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier. This begs the question, why adopt farming at all? Many theories have been suggested from tribal competition, to population pressures, to the extinction of wild animal species. But Schmidt believes that the temple of Gobekli reveals another possible cause. 'To build such a place as this, the hunters must have joined together in numbers. After they finished building, they probably congregated for worship. But then they found that they couldn't feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering. 'So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.' The reason such theories have special weight is that the move to farming first happened in this same region. These rolling Anatolian plains were the cradle of agriculture. The world's first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide

wheat species descend from einkorn wheat - first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals - such as rye and oats - also started here.

The stones unearthed by the shepherd turned out to be the flat tops of T-shaped megaliths

But there was a problem for these early farmers, and it wasn't just that they had adopted a tougher, if ultimately more productive, lifestyle. They also experienced an ecological crisis. These days the landscape surrounding the eerie stones of Gobekli is arid and barren, but it was not always thus. As the carvings on the stones show - and as archaeological remains reveal - this was once a richly pastoral region. There were herds of game, rivers of fish, and flocks of wildfowl; lush green meadows were ringed by woods and wild orchards. About 10,000 years ago, the Kurdish desert was a 'paradisiacal place', as Schmidt puts it. So what destroyed the environment? The answer is Man. As we began farming, we changed the landscape and the climate. When the trees were chopped down, the soil leached away; all that ploughing and reaping left the land eroded and bare. What was once an agreeable oasis became a land of stress, toil and diminishing returns. And so, paradise was lost. Adam the hunter was forced out of his glorious Eden, 'to till the earth from whence he was taken' - as the Bible puts it.

Of course, these theories might be dismissed as speculations. Yet there is plenty of historical evidence to show that the writers of the Bible, when talking of Eden, were, indeed, describing this corner of Kurdish Turkey.

Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt poses next to some of the carvings at Gebekli

In the Book of Genesis, it is indicated that Eden is west of Assyria. Sure enough, this is where Gobekli is sited. Likewise, biblical Eden is by four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. And Gobekli lies between both of these. In ancient Assyrian texts, there is mention of a 'Beth Eden' - a house of Eden. This minor kingdom was 50 miles from Gobekli Tepe. Another book in the Old Testament talks of 'the children of Eden which were in Thelasar', a town in northern Syria, near Gobekli. The very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran. Thus, when you put it all together, the evidence is persuasive. Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors - people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise. It's a stunning and seductive idea. Yet it has a sinister epilogue. Because the loss of paradise seems to have had a strange and darkening effect on the human mind.

Many of Gobekli's standing stones are inscribed with 'bizarre and delicate' images, like this reptile

A few years ago, archaeologists at nearby Cayonu unearthed a hoard of human skulls. They were found under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood. No one is sure, but this may be the earliest evidence for human sacrifice: one of the most inexplicable of human behaviours and one that could have evolved only in the face of terrible societal stress. Experts may argue over the evidence at Cayonu. But what no one denies is that human sacrifice took place in this region, spreading to Palestine, Canaan and Israel. Archaeological evidence suggests that victims were killed in huge death pits, children were buried alive in jars, others roasted in vast bronze bowls. These are almost incomprehensible acts, unless you understand that the people had learned to fear their gods, having been cast out of paradise. So they sought to propitiate the angry heavens. This savagery may, indeed, hold the key to one final, bewildering mystery. The astonishing stones and friezes of Gobekli Tepe are preserved intact for a bizarre reason. Long ago, the site was deliberately and systematically buried in a feat of labour every bit as remarkable as the stone carvings.

The stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us from across the centuries - a warning we should heed

Around 8,000 BC, the creators of Gobekli turned on their achievement and entombed their glorious temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial hills on which that Kurdish shepherd walked in 1994. No one knows why Gobekli was buried. Maybe it was interred as a kind of penance: a sacrifice to the angry gods, who had cast the hunters out of paradise. Perhaps it was for shame at the violence and bloodshed that the stone-worship had helped provoke. Whatever the answer, the parallels with our own era are stark. As we contemplate a new age of ecological turbulence, maybe the silent, sombre, 12,000-year-old stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us, to warn us, as they stare across the first Eden we destroyed.
What is the Study of Edenics?

In the Beginning, Before There Was The Word Note: In the several years since this document was written, continuing research has led us to the use of the term Edenic as the earliest language and Edenics as the study of that language. The term Edenic is less cumbersome than proto-Hebrew, pre-Hebrew or proto-Semitic. Many people seem defensive about terms such as Proto-Semitic, or Proto-Hebrew and especially that B wordBiblical. If use of Edenic can allow readers to examine the evidence calmly and

thoughtfully we believe the scholarship and preponderance of evidence will become clear. The use of the term Edenic is also more accurate, since the language long predates connection with anything Semitic or Hebrew. And, of course, it predates any connection with the J wordJewish. Edenics is everyones proto-language, including yours! The Tower of Babel scenario of the Biblical account in Genesis 11 posits that all people spoke the same language before the Lord confused human tongues. Up until the nineteenth century it was common knowledge that the pre-Babel tongue was the language of the Bible, Ancient Hebrew and the language of Adam and Eve. Even in colonial America, Hebrew was so revered that the first dissertation in the New World, at Harvard College, was on Hebrew as The Mother Tongue. The Continental Congress nearly made Hebrew the language of the new republic, as much to break away from England as to reaffirm Americas status as the new Promised Land. Post-Darwinian thinking dealt harshly with the lexicography of Noah Webster, whose dictionary offered Shemitic (Semitic) origins for many English and European terms from Germanic, Greek or Latin initial sources. It was thought that Asians, Africans and Semites evolved from separate monkeys than did the Aryans, and so these foreign tongues could have no extensive relationship to that of the different (thus superior) Indo-Europeans who dominated from Ireland in the West to India in the East. Silent challenges to the racist and anti-biblical status quo were made by Englishman Arthur Hall in 1894 and American Simon Perlman in 1947. Their privately issued books linking English back to ancient Hebrew were too small and too flawed to make a dent in the academic linguistic community. After a decade of research came Mozesons The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English (first published by Shapolsky, NY in 1989) offering 22,000 English words linked back to Hebrew. Unlike previous attempts, only accepted linguistic methods were used, and all the etymological steps leading back to Hebrew were cited. While hailed by many religious thinkers and secular hard scientists (not involved in historical linguistics), The Word was the object of obsessive attacks by philologists like Noam Chomsky (the MIT professor and champion of anti-Israel causes). Not long after this book documented the unity of all world languages, secular linguists began publishing articles that suggested the same, but without Hebrew or Semitic as the unifying force. In April of 1991 Scientific American, Atlantic Monthly, and U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT all came out with the work of (largely Soviet) linguists who were placing all the thousands of world languages into comprehensive superfamilies that ultimately did come from some theoretical proto-world language. One superfamily, named Nostratic, included Semitic and European languages and even Korean. Japanese, Etruscan and Eskimo-Aleut, however, were still seen as incomparably different. Via Hebrew as their common ancestor, though, one can see clear relationships between Japanese and Slavic terms or between Eskimo and Celtic words. But such links would require an examination

of Hebrew. And no secular linguist dares to investigate the veracity of linguistic claims made by that jumble of myths called the Bible. Even as linguistics slouches painfully toward the Tower of Babel (and most do place the geographical motherland of Proto-world language in the Near East, the location of the Tower of Babel), geneticists have been on the trail of Adam and Eve. Newsweek of Jan. 11, 1988 and Discover Magazine of August, 1990 had cover stories on the discovery of Eve in mitochondrial DNA. DNA research indicated that all the diversity within the human family came from one original common ancestor. (Finding an Adam is not presently possible.) The majority of scientists still uphold the racist monkey business of Darwin, and so the work of avant garde linguists and geneticists continues to be debated. Like those who condemned the heresy of Copernicus, these religious fanatics of scientific atheism will soon be objects of derision. In 1992 the oldest human skeletons ever found with the hyoid (throat) bone for speech were excavated in the Mt. Carmel caves near Haifa in northern Israel. Until older remains are found elsewhere, the burden of proof is on the scientific community to demonstrate that the first human speakers were NOT Proto-Semitic or Hebrew speakers. In Mozesons research on Hebrew, however, it is the physics and chemistry of Hebrew that speaks for its primacy rather than any anthropological artifacts. In The Word, only the most current etymological research is employed to link English words with their Hebrew counterparts. For example, the Indo-European root for SPARROW is sper (a generic term for birds). The non-borrowed counterpart in Hebrew is TSiPoR (the generic term for birds). It is argued that two unrelated languages can have a word with similar sounds in similar sequence purely by coincidence. The fallacy with this point is that the odds are millions to one against the two words meaning the exact same thing. Once several hundred common terms are arrayed, the odds of coincidence soar to the billions to one, and the denial must be equated to a leap of faith. Most word links do not involve pairs as obvious as TsiPoR and SPARROW. Only the most conservative rules of linguistic change are used, such as metathesis (root letters changing sequence), Grimms Laws shifts (such as German V becoming English B) and nasalization (adding N or M to a root), to link the two vocabularies. Essays documenting these common changes of the Hebrew/Edenic root are elsewhere at this site. Fairly obvious parallels between English and Hebrew do not number in the dozens, but in the hundreds. Aside from dramatic history or theology, this research allows for easier foreign language acquisition. It is far more effective to teach Hebrew to English speakers when LaBHaN (white) is paired with ALBINO or HaLaL (space) is positioned near HOLE and HOLLOW. The bulk of the research does not involve word pairs with fairly exact correspondence of sound and sense. The work is literally radical in that one has to first isolate the roots of the proposed twin words separated at birth since Babel. Edenic (Proto-Semitic or Ancient Hebrew roots plus

non-Biblical roots recovered from other Semitic languages) demonstrates that language in its uncorrupted state is a natural science, much like physics or chemistry and created by the same Mind. Despite what we learned in school, language is NOT the result of the evolved grunting of cavemen who evolved from separate herds of apes. On the contrary, understood correctly, word roots are as perfect a value as are numbers. Just as there is a positive and negative number in math or matter and antimatter in physics, Edenic roots can also be charged with negative ions or carry the meaning of their antonyms. (Another proof of non-human engineering.) Let us quickly observe an example of Edenics organic, modular 2-letter root system where sound-alike synonym and antonyms are observable. There is a HL/Het-Lamed root letters of health words. On the positive side there is HeLooTS, vigor, (source of HEALTH, HALE, German heil, HEALTHY and HELLO). On the negative side there is HaLaSH , weak, (source of ILL, AILment, melanCHOLY,etc.). To note the modular structure of 2-letter roots, see, for instance, that PR/Pey-Resh + RK/Resh-Het combine to make up the PeRaKH or flower. The PR sub-root is found in PeRi or PeRoT , fruit, singular or plural (source of words like FRuiT, aPRIcot, PeaR, BeRRy, etc.). In botany we know that every fruit is a flower first. The second sub-root within the term for flower is RK. RayaKH means smell, fragrance, and is the source of English ReeK (once a positive smell). There is no better system in the universe to indicate a flower than by combing the botanical fruit element with that of fragrance. In other terms, PR +RK = PeRaKH (flower). Heres an example of two-letter roots taking on a stronger prefix letter to offer three similar words that go up the piano scale of intensity. BL, Bet-Lamed means intertwined, balled up like the words of the world being BaLaL (confused) since Babel. Loosely folding over two strands makes a braid or pleat called a GaBHeL. Five letters up is Het, and a HeBHeL is a string. The intertwining got tighter and stronger. Going up from letter #8 to #20 is KHaf. The strands are so strongly intertwined that KHaBHeL means CABLE. Yes, CABLE does come from KheBHeL. Exposing the sub-roots in the architectonics of Edenics is one of many aspects of this field that is too vast to be completed in our generation.